Hotteterre’s prelude! When I’m tired like this and lying down, I can hear every note of its tender fallibility, its spaces, its unassuming shape. It meanders like a small country stream of no importance to anyone but young walkers, long-legged spiders, dragonflies and slender ducks. Its emotion is an innocent happiness, though not a witless flight of childish primary colour—it remembers all the cleareyed queries I made, as a serious child, of the river and fields. It suggests botanical exactitude, painterly adherence to precise ochres, chlorophylls and butterfly dyes. The prelude travels—I ride it now—takes modest flight, alights on an ear of wild grass, stays in one place and listens. It paces itself then runs ahead, serious and merry yet never frivolous, weightless yet not sweet. Its rhythms are contained as time contains a line that has no end.

Its line wanders with the unpredictable harmony of a conversation between open minds. Oh Sophie, if only you and I could talk in that way….Its beauty is original and a little bit strange. It lasts only three minutes, yet is not easy to follow, and has taken me forever to memorize, if in fact I have ever truly known it at all.

3 Madame Blanchard

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.

MORNING.

Montreal, Quebec

EVERY SEPTEMBER IT TAKES ME a while to reacquaint myself with Montreal’s city smells, its colours, the subway lines, its mélange of English and French. Eggs tournés or miroir or brouillés? On Saint Catherine Street this Monday morning, as I slip my letter to Mrs. Waugh in the mailbox outside Ogilvy’s, I hear a man hail a taxi shouting old French slang for a chariot—Montrealers mangle quaint, backwoods French with chopped American, yet wield baguettes and bottles of Bordeaux like Parisians. At Casse-Croûte Diane, where we eat breakfast, Sophie critiques my list:

Bread

Figs

Available veg

Pop-up tins tuna or etc. (Not Flaked)

Arm-and-Hammer toothpaste (Not Gel)

The Gazette

Maudite Lager

Madame Blanchard

“Why,” she asks, “did you write the Gazette instead of L’Itinéraire?”

“Isn’t L’Itinéraire the one homeless people sell on corners?”

“Exactly.”

“Won’t the Gazette have more pertinent news?”

“Are you serious? And how come you crossed out Madame Bee?”

“I don’t know, I—she—”

“You know you fucking well need to go see her.”

“You’re more profane than my brigadiers! You do all you can to make me feel even worse than they did. And this bacon’s horrible.”

“You’ve demolished five pieces.”

“It’s acrid. Tasteless. If only it were a bit of Wiltshire peameal….”

“Quit comparing everything with good old England and stop exaggerating that stupid accent.”

“I’m not!”

“You sound like someone drunk at a party translating the Queen’s Christmas message. Quit complaining about everything. The bacon, the money.”

“But the money feels strange, fuses together…what’s it made of?”