still squeezed into the same lightless corner. One of the legs has gone

missing, and the current tenant has taken the unorthodox step of

replacing it with a molasses barrel, which turns out to have a door,

carved rather artfully along the barrel's own grains, releasing with a

single pulse.

"Here we are," murmurs Father Time.

Not even pausing for a candle, he plunges his hands into that dark

cavity. And draws out . . .

We will call them history's tendons.

A Chinese fan, that's the first item in the inventory. It unfurls to

reveal Liberty's rouged face. Then comes a tricolor snuff box. Inkwells made from the rubble of barrieres. Tickets (unused) to a Beaumarchais farce. A pewter mug of the Bastille, straddled by an enormous

rooster.

Father Time is rich, it turns out, in precisely the sorts of relics that

France no longer has use for. Ceramic renderings of the Tennis Court

Oath. Saucers of patriotic children declaring their allegiance to the

Convention. Sheet music for . . .

"ca Ira!" cries Father Time. "That was quite the rouser, wasn't it?

'All the aristocrats will hang la-la. . . .' "

Even the wrappings prove to be relics: old issues of Annales Patriotiques, Feuille Villageoise, L'Orateur du Peuple. . . .

" Le Courrier Universel! Why, do you know I used to write for them? Ver y-ver y febrile essays under the pseudonym of Junius. And here's, oh my, Lequinio's Patriotic Prayer, wasn't that on everyone's lips for a . . . for a . . . now here. . . ." He drags out a mass of icicle blue yarn. "I am pleased to tell you this is an old mitten of Rousseau's. He left it behind on a hike. Usual great-man reverie, I expect. Hand must have been quite chapped by day's end."

"Monsieur, please." I give him a propitiatory smile. "You were going to tell me about my father."

"Yes . . ." He peers into the barrel's vault as though his old friend's face might come blazing forth from the darkness. "So I was. . . ."

"Maybe you could tell me how you met him."

"Ah! " His face brightens instantly. "The College d'Arcourt, that's where. I was a professor, of course; he was a student. Not one of my students, no. I was all about botany in those days. I was very busy refuting Reynier's findings on the-the amputation of sexual organs in hollyhocks. Work which was quite favorably mentioned, I don't mind saying, in-in Jussieu's Genera Plantarum. . . ."

"What was he like?" I ask, more loudly. "My father."

"Well, he was-he was quiet, yes. Not so quiet as he became later, but he had-I would call it a natural gravity. A way of being still, I mean. He was unfailingly polite, he was-very dogged, as if he mistrusted his own gifts. I used to give him advice about, oh, courses to take, professors to avoid, that sort of thing. Unsolicited advice, goes without-he rarely took it, but I think he appreciated someone giving it. He'd never had much of that.

"Well, one thing and another, we began meeting for coffee. Thursday mornings at the Wise Athenian. I paid, of course, at the beginning, he didn't have the means. And do you know, for years, we never missed a single one of those coffees? Not even when he was in the worst throes of medical school. Not even when the world was falling apart. We used to-we used to joke about it. Because we were much more regular about the Athenian than mass."

"What did you talk about?"

"Oh, girls, of course," says Father Time, raking his beard. "Your father was always-ha! -more marriage-minded than I. I remember the day he told me about your mother. Yes, he was-he was blushing almost as much as you are right now."

Something unexpectedly cunning in his eye. If I weren't blushing before, I am now.

"And, of course, we talked politics. That's what people did then."

"Was Father a true republican? A believer?"

"Weellll . . . depends on how you define believer. He wasn't your sans-culotte type. Didn't wear the clogs, didn't carry the pike-kept his hair powdered-but he believed, yes, in his own way. What I mean is there was always, how to put this, a core of skepticism behind everything he affirmed. If I was the Rousseau man, he was Voltaire through and through. And of course, he never aligned himself with the Girondins or the Montagnards. Never had to. He was too busy-ha! - patching them up. Doctors had more work than they could handle in those days."

I jam my hands in my pockets. I f lex the toe of my boots.