Jean Echenoz: The Queen's Caprice: Stories

Louise de Savoie, regent of France, points toward the ground with the broken index finger of her right hand, which holds an equally damaged oblong object, and with her left hand slightly raises a fold of her gown. Coiffure: hair pulled back beneath a long head scarf. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: imperious.

Marguerite d’Anjou, queen of England, also points the index finger — intact — of her right hand toward the ground, her left arm holding close a child who hugs her, standing on his tiptoes. Coiffure: invisible beneath a complicated headdress. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: proud but careworn.

Laure de Noves, whose forearms are crossed over her abdomen, holds a folded paper in her right hand and the left side of her mantle in her left. Coiffure: short, frizzy curls. Jewelry: a necklace. Expression: resigned.

Marie de Médicis, queen of France, holds a scepter in her left hand and dangles a handkerchief from her right. Coiffure: curly hair puffing out at the temples. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: less than amiable.

Marguerite d’Angoulême, queen of Navarre, her left forearm slanting up across her bust, tips her left index finger back just beyond the point of her chin, while the right arm resting along her waist droops at the hand holding a daisy bouquet of four marguerites. Coiffure: short, frizzy curls. Jewelry: a two-strand necklace. Expression: pleasant but affected.

Valentine de Milan, duchess of Orléans, grasps a fold of her gown with her right hand while the left one holds a hefty volume bound with metal fittings, the title of which is partly hidden by her wrist. Coiffure: medium-length hair. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: dubitative.

Anne de Beaujeu, regent of France, crosses her arms at her waist, her left hand supporting her right forearm, her right hand prone. Coiffure: invisible beneath the small cap under her crown. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: aloof without arrogance.

Blanche de Castille, queen of France, holds in her right hand a long baton leaning against her shoulder; pressed against her waist, her left hand contains a damaged and therefore unidentifiable small object. Coiffure: invisible beneath a crown and head scarf. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: distant but dignified.

Anne d’Autriche, queen of France, lets her arms hang by her sides, holding a scepter in her left hand and, partly unrolled in the right one, a parchment bearing the drawing of a building. Coiffure: shoulder-length curly hair gathered into a chignon. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: good-natured, a touch bewildered. Presence of large breasts.

Anne de Bretagne, queen of France, holds up both sides of her mantle with her left hand and in her right holds a set of tasseled cords at shoulder height. Coiffure: invisible beneath the small cap under her crown. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: stubborn.

Marguerite de Provence, queen of France, whose arms hang slackly over her abdomen, grasps large folds of her mantle in her crossed hands. Coiffure: hair parted down the middle framing her face. Jewelry: a cross pendant. Expression: patient.

Saint Clothilde, queen of France, leaning an elbow on a column, crosses her hands one atop the other at chest height. Coiffure: two very long double braids. Jewelry: nothing to report. Expression: faraway. 1

RIGHT AWAY, IN THE ongoing storm, Gluck volunteered to help with the rescue but was given to understand that he might hinder the professional emergency personnel. He soon saw their point and, no longer bothering to wear his hat or use his logo umbrella, he returned to his car in the parking lot near a foundation block at the entrance to the disaster scene. He set out again going north on U.S. Highway 41, where police barriers and diversion signs in the form of enormous blinking arrows were already going up in the opposite direction; he preferred to follow the shore road to the turnoff toward Orlando rather than go more directly to that city via Interstate 75. This would take longer but now he had all the time in the world. To dry his clothes and thinning hair he turned the heat way up, which made the inside of the windshield increasingly foggy until he reached the little town of Ruskin.

Driving along U.S. 41, which supposedly hugs the water but from which one cannot contemplate the bay as one would wish to, Gluck did not try to peer out at beaches, waves, or boats but simply wiped the windshield with a rag from time to time to clear his view of the highway. His staring eyes and contracted features might have indicated an intense effort at reflection, unless they meant a flood of some extreme emotion. Be that as it may, one or the other must have disturbed his proper concentration on driving and he probably realized this, because he stopped for a coffee in the waterfront community of Apollo Beach, at an empty diner called As the Crow Flies, where the rain kept beating, relentlessly, against the windows. After that, when he sat down again behind the wheel, Gluck must not have been any better able to focus on driving the car, a lime-green Chevrolet Caprice Classic convertible a touch too young for him that he’d rented, two days earlier, at the Budget concession at the Orlando Airport. So he simply set the cruise control to take over that decision for him and rested his hands on the wheel, looking vacantly out at the suburban setting cluttered with tourist facilities and blurred by the swishing windshield wipers in this spring of 1980.

Although this scene takes place in the southern United States and there are plenty of people named Gluck scattered around the globe, this particular one pursued university studies in France all the way to the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, where he earned a degree in mechanical engineering. Then he got married and took an interest in construction rather than in mines, which were also opening their doors invitingly to him. Quickly joining an agency as a chief engineer, after rising to supervisor he left to establish his own firm where, for twenty-two years, he kept many people working on various civil engineering projects. Most of these involved building bridges, or sometimes dams (which are certainly related to bridges), and at other times tunnels (which are perhaps the opposite of bridges), but anyway mainly bridges, and when his wife died in the winter of 1974, for the next five years Gluck never considered looking for another one.

After the death of Jacqueline Gluck, he sold his agency for a fine price. He no longer had the heart for building, still less for seducing, so here he is alone now, rich enough and jobless, at leisure for the rest of his days if he likes. A widower no longer attached to anyone or anything, he swiftly realized that basically nothing interested him anymore but bridges. Even though he’d given up building them, he still had to admit that he’d known nothing but them, having devoted all his time, all his attention, and all his thoughts and talents to them. Since abandoning his profession had not changed his taste for bridges, Gluck resolved from then on to devote himself to them alone, to continue and — why not — finish up his life exclusively in their company, without ever needing to leave home. That is how he resolved to tell their life story, a project that at first took the form of “An Abridged General History of Bridges.”

Chronologically, it’s rather simple. Tired of swinging like a gibbon from tree to tree on a vine, someone had the idea of using this vine for a different purpose and braided those climbing lianas into ropes with which, in order to cross gorges and torrents, we devised the first bridges, properly speaking.

Very quickly, however, experience determined this model to be too fragile and precarious, liable to early wear, and of short life expectancy. So the next inspiration was to bridge such natural obstacles by throwing chopped-down trees across them, simple trunks at first, pruned of their branches, so that one could walk across a chasm without getting too dizzy. (The appearance of vertigo in the history of mankind, by the way, offers much food for thought.) Once all wonder at this tree-trunk inspiration had passed, but taking the trial and error method into account and given the numerous accidents that necessarily ensued, standing balanced on such a bridge was still a major undertaking. Above all it did not allow — as had been promptly anticipated — the transportation of heavy loads, mainly of foodstuffs. So these tree trunks were soon laid in parallel pairs to turn them into a substructure across which smaller logs could be laid, thus giving some breadth to the enterprise: an enrapturing innovation rapidly perfected by using earth and branches to make the logs level.