Not a bad ending to the Three Little Piglettes’ tale.
H.L.
On the evening of 14th July, we watched the fireworks from the Trocadéro esplanade, overlooking the Eiffel Tower. When the last, monumental plume of blue, white and red flames dissolved in the night air, leaving just a cloud of a sparkly snow, we joined in with the rest of the crowd, applauding and kissing our neighbours on the cheeks.
Then we went back to our hotel. Astrid couldn’t stop stroking her signed Indochine T-shirt. Kader and Hakima talked to their parents on the phone—mostly about Kader’s potential Legion of Honour.
I was just tired, so I slept.
I dreamt I was pedalling.
The next day, we took a train back to Bourg-en-Bresse. The whole time, we discussed destinations for the next bike trip. Maybe to Bordeaux. But not selling sausages this time.
When we were back, when it was time to say goodbye, Hakima cried (even though we were going to see each other again the next day). Astrid was welling up too. What a pair of saps! I gave them my biggest smile and kept my own emotions tucked away inside, which is their rightful place.
Then Kader hugged me, kissed my cheek and whispered a thank you that spiralled down the circumvolutions of my tiny, weirdly shaped ear, and I had to go home quickly because all those bells ringing inside my skull were beginning to make me feel a bit tipsy.
We’ll be going back to Paris.
We’ll be going back to Paris for Kader’s Legion of Honour ceremony. He accepted the medal, mostly to please Sassin, his parents and the nation. But to me, what matters is that, afterwards, he might finally buy himself some prostheses, go clubbing, dance, kiss girls. Be happy.
We’ll go back to Paris for the next Indochine concert at the Stade de France—Astrid wrangled us four invites, of course.
We’ll go back to Paris for the launch of Being and Bewilderment: Towards a Philosophy of the Unexpected, by Patricia Laplanche. There’s going to be an evening of readings and nerdy talks in some stuck-up bookshop in the Latin Quarter.
(And guess WHO will have to give Julius-Aurelian his baby bottle while the intellectual lady and her husband swirl around drinking champagne and signing books? That’s right, Mireille “Free Babysitter” Laplanche. Life lesson: have children fifteen years apart—it’ll save you a lot of cash on the second one.)
Epilogue
At the end of the summer, Hakima, Astrid and I climbed up the Rock of Solutré. Easy-peasy for our muscular calves! We fearlessly crunched pebbles under our feet; we didn’t blink when weedy blocks of earth tumbled down as we walked past; we laughed at other walkers huffing and puffing like steam engines. We took in the warm, heavy air, charged with dust, that the land breathes out every August evening.
At the top, we sat down on a flat rock and unwrapped our picnic. The whole countryside around was liquid black and orange in the light of the setting sun. We ate cold chicken thighs and cherry tomatoes, Crottin de Chavignol and grapes, fougasses studded with puffed-up olives, pistachio fondants as smooth as lava stone, and we drank apple juice straight from the bottle.
Eating and chatting, we watched the world solidify, grey-blue, as night fell, and then we lay down on the hard ground to count the stars.
“It was right here,” said Hakima. “It was right here that the horses would gather when the cavemen chased them, all that time ago. They had to jump, because they were under so much pressure.”
“Just imagine the pile of bones there must have been down there!” Astrid sighed.
“There’s still some,” Hakima said. “There’s lots of horse bones, down there. Fossilified.”
“Fossilized,” I said. “Look, Ursa Major!”
I traced Ursa Major with my finger. A nice big frying pan, in which you could toss, for instance, a handful of duck livers with some raspberry vinegar, and then pop them into a salad.
(No sausages, please. We’ll never eat another sausage as long as we live.)
Hakima: “How about the other constellations?”
“No idea. I only know Ursa Major. The others aren’t shaped like cooking utensils.”
“You’re so uncultured,” Astrid grumbles. “You can tell you weren’t brought up in the mountains. That’s Orion, with its belt. And that’s Pegasus.”
“Pegasus?”
“Yeah, you know, the flying horse, with the wings.”
“The flying horse?”
Hakima sits up, as if to stare at the constellation closer up.
“That’s the most horrible thing in the story, when you think about it,” she says. “The horses would run all the way up here, and the men were egging them on, and they must have thought, Shit, why haven’t we got any wings? Why can’t we just fly away, instead of falling down?”
“Because that’s My Little Pony, not prehistory,” I said.
Astrid yawned. “Maybe some of them did have wings. How would we know? It’s a bit like mythology, prehistory! People couldn’t write at the time—they didn’t spend their days telling their friends about what was happening in their lives. They couldn’t have sent a message around, going, ‘Hey, guys, listen to this, there’s a horse that flew away instead of falling down, what a jerk!’ It wouldn’t have been front-page news.”
Hakima lay down again, a smile on her lips. “Great, then let’s say that’s what happened. Let’s say some of them got to the top, with men chasing them behind, and they flew away instead of falling down. The hunters would’ve been so pissed off.”
I yawned too, beginning to fall asleep. But tall clumsy daddy-long-legs were landing awkwardly on my face, like tiny Pegasuses made from wire and string.
“I can picture them in my head,” Hakima murmured. “I can see the ones who’d reached the edge and had to jump…”
I closed my eyes so I could see them too.
“…and among all the falling ones,” Hakima continued in a voice that was barely more than a whisper, “I can see those that were pedalling, pedalling, pedalling, beating the air with their big hooves—until they realized that they’d grown wings, and they could fly away…”
About the Author
CLÉMENTINE BEAUVAIS (born 1989) is a French author living in the UK. She writes books in both French and English, for a variety of ages, and is a lecturer at the University of York. Piglettes won four prizes in France, including the biggest book prize for young adult fiction, the Prix Sorcières. Film and stage versions are also in production. Now Clémentine has translated her book into English!
Copyright
Pushkin Press
71–75 Shelton Street
London, WC2H 9JQ
Original text © Éditions Sarbacane 2014
English translation © Clémentine Beauvais 2017
Piglettes was first published as Les Petites Reines by Éditions Sarbacane, Paris, 2014
First published by Pushkin Press in 2017
ISBN 978 1 782691 38 9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
Quotations from ‘Elsa’s Eyes’ translated by the author from ‘Les Yeux d’Elsa’ by Louis Aragon © Louis Aragon, Paris, 1942 © Seghers, Paris, 1942; 2004
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