Free Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan

early bird hanging about in the room.
    Since he’d been canoeing, Louis had become a dawn riser, and it took every bit of discipline he could command not to launch into cheery banter with his mates. It wasn’t a terrible sacrifice. He took his volume of
Don Quixote
and wandered into the woods, where he could read in the presence of pines.
    By eleven, when he returned, he saw that the guests of the inn had divided into tribes. The painters were strung along the banks of the Loing, eyeing the old stone bridge that spanned the river. Close to the small pier where the inn’s wide canoes were tied up among the bulrushes, Bob, Fanny, Belle, and others sat beneath white umbrellas, a few feet apart, dabbing at their canvases. If he strolled too close, he could find himself a motive of some painter’s work. “Motive” was the word the painter types used to describe that day’s subject. A motive could be a boat or a bridge or the river, or him, if he weren’t careful. Louis walked up the long, narrow lawn toward the ragtag little group of writers and poets gathered on the inn’s terrace.
    What a merry mess the whole lot of them were, dressed in wooden sabots, blue fisherman shirts, waistcoats, scarves, berets, fezes, tam-o’-shanters, and wide-awake hats. They smoked cheroots, cigarettes, meerschaums. Men, mostly, they were—a mélange of English speakers from Britain and America, mixed with some French and Scandinavians, plus a Spanish fellow, a German and an Italian. Two colorful women, mistresses, lounged with the writers while their lovers painted. A woman journalist from America scribbled in her notebook. Many of the artists were fashionably cynical, yet he could see the truth: They were giddy as little children to be here, playing with one another.
    Louis suspected each of them, in his or her own way, was an exile—from bourgeois values, family crests, unhappy love affairs, childhoods too long spent in church pews. He wondered if they had started as social outcasts who found the artist’s life an acceptable way to be in the world; or if their passions for painting or sculpting or writing had shaped them into outsiders. He had never been quite sure how the chicken-versus-egg question played out in his own life.
    It seemed he had spent half his childhood in bed with a hacking cough. It was the stories read to him, and those that he eventually read himself, that had saved him from the worst of the loneliness.
God, how pale and thin I was—a glasshouse seedling
.
Just different
. His illnesses had cut him off from the society of other children. But the stories had made him different, too. They had shaped his appetite, his moral prejudices, who he was. Those sick days when he had listened to the joyful sounds of football on the street below, he’d longed to be an ordinary kid. But at eleven or twelve, when he went out into the neighborhood dressed in pants too short and hair too long, his appearance set off taunts among other children—oh, he could hear them now,
Hauf a laddie, hauf a lassie, hauf a yellow yite!
—Louis knew he might as well be tattooed all over. The question of how he got that way was moot. It was around then that he began using his tongue as his sword, as small, fragile boys tend to do.
    He waded among the wooden tables where the writers leaned on their elbows, immersed in conversation. “
There
he is,” William Henley declared, pulling up a chair next to him. “Sit down, my good man, and tell us if Zola is taking us all to the dogs.”
    Louis drew on his cigarette and grinned at the Londoner, whose disheveled, bearded head was as large and friendly as an otterhound’s. “He don’t find much to like in humanity,” he said in a wry tone.
    â€œAll that ugly realism not to your taste?” Henley asked, shifting his stump to get a better purchase on his seat.
    â€œGive me a rousing romance. Entertain