Трейси Шевалье - The Virgin Blue

The departmental archives were in a brand-new building made of salmon and white stone, and metal painted blue, green and red. The research room was large and airy, the tables three-quarters full of people scrutinizing documents. Everyone looked as if they knew exactly what they were doing. I felt the way I often did in Lisle: as a foreigner my place was on the edge, where I could watch and admire the natives but never take part myself.

A tall woman standing at the main desk looked over and smiled at me. She was about my age, with short blond hair and yellow glasses. I thought, Ah, thank God, not another Madame. I went up to the desk and set down my bag. ‘I don't know what I'm doing here,’ I said. ‘Please can you help me?’

Her laugh was the most unlikely shriek for such a quiet place.

‘ Alors , what are you looking for?’ she asked, still laughing, her blue eyes magnified through thick lenses. I'd never seen someone wear thick glasses so stylishly.

‘I have an ancestor named Etienne Tournier who may have lived in the Cévennes in the sixteenth century. I want to find out more about him.’

‘Do you know when he was born or died?’

‘No. I know that the family moved to Switzerland at some point but I don't know when exactly. It would have been before 1576.’

‘You know no birth or death dates? What about for his children? Or grandchildren, even?’

‘Well, he had a son, Jean, who had a child in 1590.’

She nodded. ‘So the son Jean was born between, let's say, 1550 and 1575, and the father Etienne twenty to forty years before that, say, from 1510. So you're searching between 1510 and 1575, something like that, yes?’

She spoke French so fast that I couldn't answer right away: I was wading through her calculations. ‘I guess so,’ I replied finally, wondering if I should mention the painter Tourniers as well, Nicolas and André and Claude.

She didn't give me the chance. ‘You want to look for records of baptism and marriage and death,’ she declared. ‘And maybe compoix also, tax records. Now, what village did they come from?’

‘I don't know.’

‘Ah, that's a problem. The Cévennes is big, you know. Of course there are not so many records from that time. Back then they were kept by the church, but many were burned or lost during the religious wars. So maybe you will not have too much to look through. If you knew the village I could tell you immediately what we have, but never mind, we'll see what we can find.’

She ran through an inventory of documents held there and in other records offices in the département . She was right: for the whole region there were only a handful of documents from the sixteenth century. The few records left must have survived arbitrarily. It was clear that the likelihood of a Tournier turning up in the books would be entirely down to luck.

I ordered the relevant sets of records held in the building that fell between the dates she mentioned. I wasn't sure what would appear: I'd been using the term ‘record’ loosely, expecting some sixteenth-century equivalent to my own neatly typed birth certificate or marriage licence. Five minutes later the woman brought over a few boxes of microfiche, a book covered with protective brown paper, and a huge box. She smiled encouragingly and left me to it. I glanced at her as she went back to the desk and grinned to myself at her platform shoes and short leather skirt.

I began with the book. It was bound in greasy off-white calfskin, its cover painted with ancient music and Latin text. The first letter of each line was enlarged and coloured red and blue. I opened it to the first page and smoothed it out; it was thrilling to touch something so old. The handwriting was in brown ink, and though it was very neat, it seemed to have been written to be admired rather than read: I couldn't read a word. Several letters were virtually identical, and when I finally began to make out a few words here and there, I realized it didn't make any difference – it was all in a foreign language.

Then I began to sneeze.

The woman came over twenty minutes later to see how I was doing. I had gotten through ten pages, finding dates and little by little picking out what seemed to be names.

I looked up at her. ‘Is this document in French?’

‘Old French.’

‘Oh.’ I hadn't thought of that.

She glanced down at the page and ran a pink fingernail over a few lines. ‘A pregnant woman drowned in the River Lot, May 1574. Une inconnue, la pauvre ,’ she murmured. ‘These deaths are not so useful to you, are they?’

‘I suppose not,’ I said, and sneezed on the book.

The woman laughed as I apologized. ‘Everyone sneezes. Look around you, handkerchiefs everywhere!’ We heard a tiny sneeze from an old man on the other side of the room and giggled.

‘Take a break from the dust,’ she said, ‘Come for a coffee with me. My name is Mathilde.’ She held out her hand and grinned. ‘This is what Americans do, yes? Shake hands when they meet?’

We sat in a café around the corner and were soon chatting like old friends. Despite her rapid-fire delivery, Mathilde was easy to talk to. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed female company. She asked me a million questions about the States, California in particular.

‘What are you doing here?’ she sighed at last. ‘I'd go to California in an instant!’

I tensed, trying to think of an answer that would make it clear I hadn't simply followed Rick to France, as Jean-Paul had implied. But Mathilde went on before I could answer and I realized she wasn't expecting me to explain myself.

She wasn't at all surprised that I was interested in distant ancestors. ‘People look into family history all the time,’ she said.

‘I feel a little silly doing it,’ I confessed. ‘It's so unlikely I'll find anything.’

‘True,’ she admitted. ‘To be honest, most people don't when they're searching that far back. But don't be discouraged. Anyway the records are interesting, aren't they?’

‘Yes, but it takes me so long to understand what they say! All I can really find are dates and sometimes names.’

Mathilde smiled. ‘If you think that book is hard to read, wait till you see the microfiche!’ She laughed when she saw my face. ‘I'm not so busy today,’ she continued. ‘You keep reading your book and I'll look through the microfiche for you. I'm used to that old handwriting!’

I was grateful for her offer. While she sat at the microfiche machine I tackled the box, which Mathilde explained was a book of compoix , records of taxes on crops. It was all in the same handwriting and almost incomprehensible. It took the rest of the day to look through. By the end I was exhausted, but Mathilde seemed disappointed that there wasn't anything else to look at.

‘Is that really all?’ she asked, flicking through the inventory once more. ‘ Attends , there's a book of compoix from 1570 at the mairie in Le Pont de Montvert. Of course, Monsieur Jourdain! I helped him take inventory of those records a year ago.’

‘Who's Monsieur Jourdain?’

‘The secretary of the mairie .’

‘You think it's worth the trouble?’

‘ Bien sûr . Even if you don't find anything, Le Pont de Montvert is a beautiful place. It's a little village at the bottom of Mont Lozère.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘ Mon Dieu -I must pick up Sylvie!’ She grabbed her bag and pushed me out, chuckling as she locked the door behind me. ‘You'll have fun with Monsieur Jourdain. If he doesn't eat you alive, of course!’

The next morning I started early and took the picturesque route to Le Pont de Montvert. As I began to climb the road up Mont Lozère the landscape opened out and brightened while also growing more barren. I passed through tiny, dusty villages where the buildings were made entirely of granite, even down to the tiles on the roofs, with hardly a touch of paint to distinguish them from the surrounding land. Many houses were abandoned, roofs gone, chimneys crumbling, shutters askew. I saw few people, and once I got above a certain point, no cars. Soon there were just granite boulders, broom and heather, and the occasional clump of pines.