Little Saint: The Hours of Saint Foy - Hannah Green - Hardcover - 1 ED

CHAPTER 1 MORNING: DESCENT INTO THE TREASURE On the far side of the cloister in the long, chapel-like room called the Treasure, she sits on her throne--a small stiff gold figure robed in gold and covered with jewels and crowned with a golden diadem. Up the hill from there, Jack stands tall beside the fountain behind the little house we have rented for the summer. Here we are once again after several returns, here we are in the month of June, not yet St. John's Day. Jack is about to mend his bicycle tire. This afternoon we arc going to Lunel. The springwater flows forth through the mouth of a mask deep in a niche in the stone embankment of the hillside and splashes into the round basin below. Sunlight quivers on the surface of the water, and dapples of watery sunshine fly like lunar moths on the stones of the niche above, and across the mottled face of the mask, which resembles the grimacing head that guards the church from the outer wall of the tribune on the north, high above the western entrance. The bells ring for eleven o'clock. Sunbrowned and strong, Jack takes the inner tube in his competent hands, good hands, and plunges it into the water. "Ah, mais il est beau! Il est fin! Il est un bon garcon!" old Madame Benoit was saying this morning, smiling her smile of infinite sweetness, her eyes as blue as the sky, her face and her hair as white as the clouds. I was in her tiny apartment in the old convent for a few minutes to pick up a book she wanted to lend me. "I am not afraid of death," she said quietly. "I have my faith." And she lifted her right hand in a gesture like a bird flying off, a gesture so perfect that I could see as she did it how her soul would fly out of the window and up, and she would go down there--la bas--to the cemetery below the church. She waved her hand in that direction. "I have my reservation," she said with a mixture of pride and humor. Sometimes she speaks triumphantly: "I will go on the cloak of the Virgin," she says. Just now I remember to tell Jack. "Oh, Madame Benoit was saying earlier this morning, 'Oh, but he is handsome, he is fine, he is a good boy. Everyone agrees!'" Jack laughs, pleased. He will be fifty in November. But Madame Benoit is ninety-one. Ninety-one! "Quatre-vingt-onze!" "Quatre-vingt-onze et un demi," said my friend Rosalie, correcting me, nodding her head tenderly up and down. (Not in Madame Benoit's presence.) La Rosalie de bon matin S'en va t'au jardin Pour y culir la brioulete La belle fleur ... One fine morning Rosalie Goes out to her garden To cut the brioulete, That pretty flower So sings Madame Benoit, who sings, who sings, who has a song for every occasion, and who, ninety-one and a half, and tiny and plump and limber as a rag doll in her soft clothes, her soft shoes, goes with her cane up and down the steep streets of Conques with a swiftness and agility so remarkable that someone--I could not make out who she was talking about, but someone, another woman--had gotten very excited and somewhat angry, declaring she was on this account "Pas normale." "Pas normale!" she repeated, echoing her friend's anger, and laughing. The other day when Madame Benoit was walking with her cousin Madame Fabre (from whom we rent our house), out the Rue du Chateau, beyond the old Porte du Foumouze with its Romanesque fountain and, a little farther on, the lacy iron cross that rises above an ancient stone Virgin, now beheaded, there, Madame Fabre told us, Madame Benoit tripped and fell down on her knees in a mud puddle. Madame Fabre lifted her hands to her face to show us how aghast she'd been. But in that very moment, Madame Benoit turned her head and looked up. I am doing the Stations of the Cross,Green, Hannah is the author of 'Little Saint: The Hours of Saint Foy - Hannah Green - Hardcover - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780394565958 and ISBN 0394565959.