Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 4

He was a haberdasher from the Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, and as fanatical an angler as Morissot himself.

On spring mornings at about ten o’clock, when the rejuvenated sun sent floating over the river that light mist which moves along with the current, warming the backs of the two enthusiastic fishermen with the welcome glow of a new season, Morissot would say to his neighbor: “Ah! It’s grand here, isn’t it?”

They started to walk on together side by side, pensive and melancholy.

The Prussians! They had never so much as set eyes on them, but for four months now they had been aware of their presence on the outskirts of Paris, occupying part of France, looting, committing atrocities, reducing people to starvation…the invisible yet all-powerful Prussians.

Morissot, who was anxiously watching the feather on his float as it bobbed up and down, was suddenly filled with the anger of a peace-loving man for these maniacs who indulge in fighting.

And as they talked, Mont Valérien went thundering on without respite, demolishing French homes with its cannonades, pounding lives to dust, crushing human beings to pulp, putting an end to so many dreams, to so many long-awaited joys, so much long-expected happiness, tearing into the hearts of all those wives and daughters and mothers with pain and suffering that would never be eased.

The officer, still quite unperturbed, said, half aloud:
“Well, now it’s the fishes’ turn.

In the town square a replica tent pole, cracked and splintered, now stands cast in concrete.

It was while the two were in midair, their hands about to meet, that lightning struck the main pole and sizzled down the guy wires, filling the air with a blue radiance that Harry Avalon must certainly have seen through the cloth of his blindfold as the tent buckled and the edifice toppled him forward, the swing continuing and not returning in its sweep, and Harry going down, down into the crowd with his last thought, perhaps, just a prickle of surprise at his empty hands.

Three people died, but except for her hands my mother was not seriously harmed until an overeager rescuer broke her arm in extricating her and also, in the process, collapsed a portion of the tent bearing a huge buckle that knocked her unconscious.

I suppose you could call it the egocentrism of a child, of all young children, but I considered her a less finished version of myself.

And it also seems to me, although this is probably an idle fantasy, that the statue is growing more sharply etched, as if, instead of weathering itself into a porous mass, it is hardening on the hillside with each snowfall, perfecting itself.

It still seems odd to me, when they could have gone anywhere else, that they chose to stay in the town where the disaster had occurred, and which my father in the first place had found so constricting.

The fire could have started from a flaming box, or perhaps a buildup of creosote inside the chimney was the culprit.

I remember how she did it, too. It was the friendliest tap, a bit tentative, as if she was afraid she had arrived too early at a friend’s house.

Curled as I was, against her stomach, I was not startled by the cries of the crowd or the looming faces.