Free Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy Page B

had the means to send her baby to such a place. But to avail herself of the usual recourses, this would have presumed that Mme. Rimbaud herself had the usual power to leave—that she was able to seek the help of other mortals, to change direction, even to hope.
    Pas question
. Home was the best cure. Open windows, cold air, camphor rubs, mustard plasters, and of course long bouts of prayer. This was the way, God’s way, even as the girl, hacking and wheezing, began to expel leechlike spots, then bubbly white spots of lung foam, small caterpillars at which she would placidly stare, as if then they might move.
    Vitalie knew, of course: the dead-to-be always know. Her body was in insurrection and she was leaving for heaven, and with an odd thrill she knew, devout girl that she was, that her mother knew that she knew. No secrets now. Why, everybody in Charleville knew. Pathetic, horrifying, to see Mme. Rimbaud firing one doctor, then another, helpless before the inevitable. And Arthur? As a male, naturally, he was absent for this part,though Mme. Rimbaud wrote to him her usual long, prayerfully disconnected letters. She wrote to him repeatedly, but at this point the two so-called roommates were in London, self-exiled and successively evicted, such that almost nothing reached him, not even through the normally reliable school chum channels.
    But then late one night while praying, Mme. Rimbaud had a vision. It was a vision of Chartres, of a family pilgrimage to the great cathedral, a place of miracles built during the feverish outpouring of Mary worship that swept France in the late twelfth century.
    The passion in those days, the fear. Death had ears and sickness had wings, and yet, miracle of miracles, in an ornate golden box the town of Chartres had—and don’t ask how—Mary’s tunic, her actual tunic seen by the actual eyes of Christ. And so from all across Europe, pilgrims and cripples and the blind and the dying, they all came to bask in its holy radiance. A wooden cathedral was built around it. The cathedral burned down, then a second, and when the tunic didn’t perish in either fire, its survival was declared a miracle. And so on that blessed site, over fifty years amid ever-rising tides of darkness and evil, stone upon stone, the great cathedral rose, until it could be seen like a great Ark itself, beached on those vast level plains of hay and barley and oats. Fortunate thing, too, for the devils were so thick, the witches were so crafty, and sickness was so rampant that the poor, fleeing this plague, actually took to living in the church, they and their animals, all taking shelter in Mary’s vast stone barn. In similar fashion, some six hundred years later, the Rimbaud women also sought shelter in the great cathedral of Chartres.
    And so on the train two days later, after passing through Paris, when Mme. Rimbaud and her two daughters saw the great spires rising over the fields and trees, truly, as they gazed upon that massif of time-begrimed stone, for the first time in months Mme. Rimbaud felt unburdened, certain, even vindicated. Later, entering the church, the three women anointed themselves with holy water, then humbly entered the towering nave, frankly frightened at first even to look up, as if they might see the face of God.
    Vast-echoing Goliath. Smelling of snuffed tapers and old hopes, thegreat cathedral was a hollowed-out man-made cave of light, a veritable mountain of gray limestone laboriously sawed into pieces, then reassembled into arches and domes and tall shields of stained glass, intricate jewels of red and clear and of a blue found, in all the world, only here.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
.
    Long dresses gliding over the massive, foot-polished stones, through forests of columns, the three Rimbaud women thrilled to feel so small, to be
specks
! To add their voices to this ceaseless, surflike echolalia