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But he’d come to agree with Sister Prejean that no one was as bad as the worst thing they’d done.
I can put this no other way. Everything I gave was to get rid of you As one gives to a beggar: There. Go away.
Gamache opened, then shut, his mouth. He knew what the right answer was. But he also knew the truthful answer. He wasn’t sure the two aligned.
“Maybe she just wanted you to listen.” Reine-Marie placed her hand on his knee and got up. “Not your body and soul, mon vieux. Just an ear.”
“I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray you find a way to be useful.”
Armand Gamache did not want to have to be brave. Not anymore. Now all he wanted was to be at peace. But, like Clara, he knew he could not have one without the other.
Whether or not it was art was open for debate.
This was a form of murder. Peter Morrow had tried to kill not his wife, but her creation. He’d clearly recognized a work of genius and had tried to ruin it.
“I think he looked at The Three Graces and saw the Visigoths on the seventh hill. He knew his world was about to change.”
smile on his handsome face. And a stone in his heart. That’s what the end so often looked like, Gamache knew. Not the smile, not even the stone, but the crevice in between.
He smiled, the sort of grin that wide-eyed children imagined beneath their beds at night.
courtesy should not be mistaken for genuine kindness. One was nurture, a polite upbringing. The other was nature.
“Ahh, well, that explains it.” The Chief stopped himself from asking what it explained. That was the first step into the cave. And he had no desire to enter this woman’s lair any further than he already had.
No fact escaped this woman, and the truth interested her not at all. She’d have made, Gamache thought, a great inquisitor. Except that she wasn’t at all inquisitive. She had no curiosity, simply a sharp mind and an instinct for the soft spot.
They seemed imprisoned. Hung until dead.
Begging to be appreciated, and not valued simply for their appreciation.
He was like a monarch, surrounding himself with the symbols of power, hoping to disguise his own weakness.
None of Dominique’s horses could be considered show-worthy. Abused and neglected and finally sent to the slaughterhouse, Dominique had saved them. They had that look in their eyes, as though they knew. How close they’d come. As Henri sometimes looked, in his quiet moments. As Rosa looked. The same expression she sometimes caught in Jean-Guy’s eyes. And Armand’s. They knew. That they’d almost died. But they also knew that they’d been saved.
Her own ego, showing some ankle.
A grain-fed, free-range artist.
“But I have a nose for love.” “Like a truffle pig,” said Beauvoir, then regretted it when he saw the asshole saint’s reaction. Then, unexpectedly, Gilbert smiled. “Exactly. I can smell it. Love has an aroma all its own, you know.” Beauvoir looked at Gilbert, amazed by what he’d just heard. Maybe, he thought, this man was— “Smells like compost,” said Gilbert. —an asshole after all.
Reine-Marie recognized that gleam. And heard, again, the beating of the moth’s wings.
He now knew that happiness and kindness went together. There was not one without the other.
But the wounds that seemed to hurt him the most weren’t even his own.
And finally, when the alarms were dulled and his heart stopped pounding, pounding, he thought he could hear the forest itself. The leaves not rustling, but murmuring to him. Telling him he’d made it. Home. He was safe.
He was surprised by joy.
All the best comfort food looked like someone had dropped the plate.
Rosa had hatched on her own but her sister, Lillium, had fought to get out. So Ruth had helped. Peeling back the shell. Cracking it further. And there, inside, was Lillium. Looking up into those weary, wary old eyes. Lillium and Rosa had bonded with Ruth. And Ruth had bonded with them. They followed her everywhere. But while Rosa thrived, Lillium grew frail. Because of Ruth. Lillium was meant to fight her way out of her shell. The struggle would make her strong. Ruth’s helping hand had weakened her. Until, late one night, Lillium had died in that same helping hand. It had confirmed all Ruth’s
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He too had an archway, and a secret courtyard. And views he kept hidden.
Jean-Guy ordered the Voyageur Special. Two eggs and every meat they could find and fry.
“I think,” said Myrna slowly, “that Peter could afford to lose some of his mind. It wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.”
“Power,” he said. “Maybe the tenth muse was too powerful. Maybe she was banished because she was a threat. And what could be more threatening than freedom? Isn’t that what inspiration is? It can’t be locked up, or even channeled. It can’t be contained or controlled. And that’s what the tenth muse was offering.”
“What’s the difference between a commune and a cult?” asked Beauvoir. “Both have a sort of guiding philosophy,” said Myrna. “But a commune is open—members can come and go. A cult is closed. Rigid. Demands conformity and absolute loyalty to the leader and the beliefs. It shuts people off from the greater society.”
Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.”
Where pots sat on woodstoves all day, and arthritic hands added more hot water and dropped more bags in, until it was like stew.
Clara had her sketchbook and pencil case on her lap, but kept them unopened. “Were you planning to do a drawing?” Gamache asked. “No. I just feel safe, holding them.” She brushed the metal pencil holder with her finger, like a rosary. And held on to her sketch pad like a bible.
“My grandmother raised me on tales of voyageurs condemned forever to paddle their canoe through the skies,” said Gamache. “They’d swoop down and pick up naughty children and bring them here.”
Armand Gamache had long suspected that far from being one of the passengers on the bewitched canoe, he was one of the voyageurs. Forever paddling, never stopping. Taking the souls of the wicked away. Endlessly.
