Hutton, Shirley:Pay Yourself What You're Worth: How to Make Terrific Money in Direct Sales
- Paperback 2006, ISBN: 9780553052497
Hardcover
Vintage Books. Good. 5.08 x 1.62 x 7.79 inches. Paperback. 2006. 618 pages. Cover worn <br>What is it to be human? This question, as in Birdsong, is at the heart of Human Traces. … More...
Vintage Books. Good. 5.08 x 1.62 x 7.79 inches. Paperback. 2006. 618 pages. Cover worn <br>What is it to be human? This question, as in Birdsong, is at the heart of Human Traces. The story begin s in Brittany where a young, poor boy somehow passes his medical exams and goes to Paris, where he attends the lectures of Charcot , the Parisian neurologist who set the world on its head in the 1 870s. With a friend, he sets up a clinic in the mysterious mounta in district of Carinthia in south-east Austria. If The Girl at t he Lion d'Or was a simple three-movement symphony, Birdsong an op era, Charlotte Gray a complex four-movement symphony and On Green Dolphin Street a concerto, then Human Traces is a Wagnerian gran d opera. From the Hardcover edition. Editorial Reviews Review Faulks is beyond doubt a master. -Financial Times One of the mos t impressive novelists of his generation. -Sunday Telegraph From the Hardcover edition. About the Author Sebastian Faulks is bes t known for his French trilogy, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdso ng and Charlotte Gray. He has also worked extensively as a journa list. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permi ssion. All rights reserved. I An evening mist, salted by the wes tern sea, was gathering on the low hills - reed-spattered rises r unning up from the rocks then back into the gorse- and bracken-co vered country - and on to the roads that joined the villages, whe re lamps and candles flickered behind the shutters of the grey st one houses. It was poor country - so poor, remarked the Curé, who had recently arrived from Angers, that the stones of the shore c alled out for God's mercy. With the mist came sputtering rain, ma de invisible by the extinguished light, as it exploded like flung gravel at the windows, while stronger gusts made the shivering p ine trees shed their needles on the dark, sanded earth. Jacques Rebière listened to the sounds from outside as he looked through the window of his bedroom; for a moment, a dim moon allowed him t o see clouds foaming in the darkness. The weather reminded him, o ften, that it was not just he, at sixteen years old, who was youn g, but all mankind: a species that took infant steps on the drift s and faults of the earth. Between the ends of his dirtied finge rs, Jacques held a small blade which, over the course of several days, he had whetted to surgical sharpness. He pulled a candle cl oser. From downstairs he could hear the sound of his father's voi ce in reluctant negotiation. The house was at the top of a narro w street that ran off the main square of Sainte Agnès. Behind it, the village ended and there were thick woods - Monsieur Rebière' s own property - where Jacques was meant to trap birds and rabbit s and prevent other villagers doing likewise. The garden had an o rchard of pear and apple trees whose fruits were collected and se t to keep in one of the outbuildings. Rebière's was a house of ma ny stores: of sheds with beaten earth underfoot and slatted woode n shelves; of brick-floored cellars with stone bins on which the cobwebs closed the access to the bottles; of barred pantry and la tched larder with shelves of nuts and preserved fruits. The keys were on a ring in the pocket of Rebière's waistcoat. Although bor n no more than sixty years earlier, he was known as 'old Rebière' , perhaps for the arthritic movement of his knees, when he heaved himself up from his chair and straightened the joints beneath hi s breeches. He preferred to do business standing up; it gave the transaction a temporary air, helping to convince the other party that bargaining time was short. Old Rebière was a forester who w orked as the agent for a landowner from Lorient. Over the years h e had done some business on his own account, acquiring some parce ls of land, three cottages that the heirs did not want to keep, s ome fields and woodland. Most of his work was no more than that o f bailiff or rent collector, but he liked to try to negotiate pri vate deals with a view to becoming a businessman in his own right . Born in the year after Waterloo, he had lived under a republic, three kings and an emperor; twice mayor of the local town, he ha d found it made little difference which government was in Paris, since so few edicts devolved from the distant centre to his own B reton world. The parlour of the house had smoke-stained wooden p anelling and a white stone chimneypiece decorated with the carved head of a wild boar. A small fire was smouldering in the grate a s Rebière attempted to conclude his meeting with the notary who h ad come to see him. He never invited guests into his study but pr eferred to speak to them in this public room, as though he might later need witnesses to what had passed between them. His second wife sat in her accustomed chair by the door, sewing and listenin g. Rebière's tactic was to say as little as possible; he had foun d that silence, accompanied by pained inhalation, often induced n ervousness in the other side. His contributions, when they were u navoidable, were delivered in a reluctant murmur, melancholy, ful l of a weariness at a world that had obliged him to agree terms s o self-wounding. 'I am not a peasant,' he told his son. 'I am no t one of those men you see portrayed at the theatre in Paris, who buries his gold in a sock and never buys a bonnet for his wife. I am a businessman who understands the modern world.' From upsta irs, Jacques could still hear his father's business murmur. It wa s true that he was not a peasant, though his parents had been; tr ue too, that he was not the miser of the popular imagination, tho ugh partly because the amount of gold he had to hoard was not gre at enough: forty years of dealing had brought him a modest return , and perhaps, thought Jacques, this was why his father had forbi dden him to study any further. From the age of thirteen, he had b een set to work, looking after the properties, mending roofs and fences, clearing trees while his father travelled to Quimper and Vannes to cultivate new acquaintances. Jacques looked back to hi s table, not wanting to waste the light of the wax candle he had begged from Tante Mathilde in place of the dingy ox-tallow which was all his father would allow him. He took the blade and began, very carefully, to make a shallow incision in the neck of a frog he had pinned, through its splayed feet, to the untreated wood. H e had never attempted the operation before and was anxious not to damage what lay beneath the green skin, moist from the saline in which he had kept it. The frog was on its front, and Jacques's b lade travelled smoothly up over the top of its head and stopped b etween the bulging eyes. He then cut two semicircular flaps to jo in at the nape of the neck and pushed back the pouches of peeled skin, with their pearls of eyes. Beneath his delicate touch he co uld see now that there was little in the way of protection for th e exposed brain. He took out a magnifying glass. What is a frog' s fury? he thought, as he gazed at the tiny thinking organ his kn ife had exposed. It was beautiful. What does it feel for its spaw n or its mate or the flash of water over its skin? The brain of a n amphibian is a poor thing, the Curé had warned him; he promised that soon he would acquire the head of a cow from the slaughterh ouse, and then they would have a more instructive time. Yet Jacqu es was happy with his frog's brain. From the side of the table he took two copper wires attached at the other end to a brass rod t hat ran through a cork which was in turn used to seal a glass bot tle coated inside and out with foil. 'Jacques! Jacques! It's tim e for dinner. Come to the table!' It was Tante Mathilde's voice; clearly Jacques had not heard the notary depart. He set down the electrodes and blew out the candle, then crossed the landing to the top of the almost-vertical wooden staircase and groped his wa y down by the familiar indentations of the plaster wall. His gran dmother came into the parlour carrying a tureen of soup, which sh e placed on the table. Rebière and his wife, known to Jacques as Tante Mathilde, were already sitting down. Rebière drummed his kn ife impatiently on the wood while Grandmère ladled the soup out w ith her shaking hand. 'Take a bowl out to . . .' Rebière jerked his head in the direction of the door. 'Wait,' said Grand-mère. 'There's some rabbit, too.' Rebière rolled his eyes with impatie nce as the old woman went out to the scullery again and returned with a second bowl that she handed to Jacques. He carried both di shes carefully to the door and took a lantern to light his way ou t into the darkness, watching his feet on the shiny cobbles of th e yard. At the stable, he set down the food and pulled back the t op half of the door; he peered in by the light of the flame and f elt his nostrils fill with a familiar sensation. 'Olivier? Are y ou there? I've brought dinner. There's no bread again, but there' s soup and some rabbit. Olivier?' There was a sudden noise from the horse, like the rumbling clatter of a laden table being overt urned, as she shifted in the stall. 'Olivier? Please. It's raini ng. Where are you?' Wary of the horse, who lashed out with her h ind legs if frightened, Jacques freed the bolt of the door himsel f and made his way into the ripe darkness of the stable. Sitting with his back to the wall, his legs spread wide apart on the dun g-strewn ground, was his brother. 'I've brought your dinner. How are you?' Jacques squatted down next to him. Olivier stared st raight ahead, as though unaware that anyone was there. Jacques to ok his brother's hand and wrapped the fingers round the edge of t he soup bowl, noticing what could be smears of excrement on the n ails. Olivier moved his head from side to side, thrusting it back hard against the stable wall. He muttered something Jacques coul d not make out and began to scrape at his inner forearm as if try ing to rid himself of a bothersome insect. Jacques took a spoonf ul of the soup and held it up to Olivier's face. Gently, he prise d open his lips and pushed the metal inwards. It was too dark to see how much went into his mouth and how much trickled down his t angled beard. 'They want me to come, they keep telling me. But w hy should I go, when they know everything already?' 'Who, Olivie r? Who does?' Their eyes met. Jacques felt himself summed up and dismissed from Olivier's mental presence. 'Are you cold? Do you want more blankets?' Olivier became earnest.'Yes, yes, that's i t, you've got to keep warm, you've to wrap up now the winter's co ming. Look. Look at this.' He held up the frayed horse blanket be neath which he slept and examined it closely, as though he had no t seen it before or had suddenly been struck by its workmanship. Then his vigour was quenched again and his gaze became still. J acques took his hand. 'Listen, Olivier. It's nearly a year now th at you've been in here. Do you think you could try again? Why don 't you come out for a few minutes? I could help.' 'They don't wa nt me.' 'You always say that. But perhaps they'd be happy to hav e you back in the house.' 'They won't let me go.' Jacques nodde d. Olivier was clearly talking of a different 'they', and he was too frightened to contradict or to press him. He had been a child when Olivier, four years the older, started to drift away from h is family; it began when, previously a lively and sociable youth, he took to passing the evenings alone in his room studying the B ible and drawing up a chart of 'astral influences'. Jacques was f ascinated by the diagrams, which Olivier had done in his clever d raughtsman's hand, using pens he had taken from the hôtel de vill e, where he worked as a clerk. Jacques's experiences had usually come to him first through the descriptions of Olivier, who natur ally anticipated all of them. Mathematics at school were a jumble of pointless signs, he said, that made you want to cry out; bein g beaten by the master's ruler on the knuckles hurt more than bei ng kicked on the shin by the broody mare. Olivier had never been to Paris, but Vannes, he told Jacques, was so huge that you got l ost the moment you let your concentration go; and it was full of women who looked at you in a strange way. When changes came to yo ur body, Olivier said, you noticed nothing, no hairs bursting the skin, no wrench in your voice; the only difference was that you felt urgent, tense, all the time, as though about to leap a strea m or jump from a high rock. Olivier's chart of astral influences therefore looked to Jacques like another early glimpse of a univ ersal human experience granted to him by his elder brother. Olivi er had been right about everything else: in Vannes, Jacques kept himself orientated at all times, like a dog sniffing the wind; he liked mathematics, though he saw what Oliver had meant. He avoid ed the master's beatings. 'Where is God in this plan?' he had sa id, pointing with his finger. 'I see the planets and their influe nce and this character, here, whatever his name is. But in the Bi ble, it says that-' 'God is here, in your head.And here.' Olivie r pointed to the chart. 'But it's a secret.' 'I don't understand ,' said Jacques. 'If this is Earth here, this is Saturn, and here are the rings of Jupiter and this is the body you've discovered, the one that regulates the movements of people, then what are th ese lines here? Are these the souls of the dead going up to Heave n?' 'Those are the rays of influence. They emanate from space, f ar beyond anything we can see. These are what control you.' 'Ray s?' 'Of course. Like rays of light, or invisible waves of sound. The universe is bombarded with them.You can't hear them.You can' t see them.' 'Does everyone know about them? All grown-ups?' 'N o.' 'How do you know about them? Who told you?' 'I have been to ld.' Jacques looked away. Over the weeks, he discovered that Oli vier's system of cosmic laws and influences was invulnerably coge nt; there was in fact something of the weary sage in his manner w hen he answered yet another of Jacques's immature questions about it, while its ability to adapt made it i, Vintage Books, 2006, 2.5, Bantam, 1988-02-01. Hardcover. Good. 8x5x0., Bantam, 1988-02-01, 2.5<
