He puts his hand on her shoulder as they walk into the brown building—the great library of Mazarin, who, he announces, was “the default ruler of France after Richelieu’s demise.” Only Felon, she believes, would use the word “demise” so unconsciously, this man with barely an education before the age of sixteen. The word from a secondary vocabulary he memorized, just as he re-trained his own handwriting away from the coarse script she’d seen in his childhood notebooks beside those precisely sketched molluscs and lizards he would draw from the natural world. A self-made man. An arriviste.
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