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There was the story of the Huguenot who died in the massacre, strangled by his own necklace made from the ears of priests. Petra told the children how Queen Marguerite retired from the sounds and terrors of the massacre behind the curtains of her four-poster bed, only to be startled by a wounded man pursued by four archers. The wounded man dived into bed with her, and to escape from him she slipped into the space between the bed and the wall, her snow-white linen nightgown drenched in the man's blood. Petra made it clear that this became a sexual encounter and was the beginning of a passionate affair. She enjoyed telling the girls about love, romance, sex.
There was the noble Huguenot woman who tried to escape disguised as a peasant in coarse woollen clothing, and who was recognised when her fashionable coloured silk petticoat showed beneath her skirt. The button maker and the king's dealer in feathers were hacked to pieces along with their wives and children, Petra revelling in her own descriptions of all the different kinds of buttons in a soup of blood and excrement, of all the bundles of wonderful and shimmering feathers splashed scarlet and floating down the Seine like grotesque, misshapen swans.
A man, covered in the blood of his victims up to his dark and bushy beard, carried to the river a laughing baby. Then on the bridge the man plunged a dagger into the baby's heart and tossed the body into the water. Children themselves tied belts around the necks of babies and dragged them screaming round the streets like dolls, until they fell silent in death.
One of Petra's favourite characters was the Maker of Gold Thread, whose house was built on a bridge. He kept some of his victims prisoner and then cut their throats and dropped them into the Seine through a trapdoor in his kitchen. He took delight in the months after the massacre in drawing back his sleeve to display the arm that had killed, he said, more than four hundred Huguenots.
The children at the table listened in silence, drinking their soup, as the spellbinding voice of Petra wove the stories deep into their hearts. She liked to end with the Miracle of the Mayflower. The day after the massacre, Paris was a silent city. But at noon in the churchyard of the Holy Innocents a dead and withered hawthorn bush burst into white blossoms and green leaves. Although the red book pointed out that the miracle was organised by the Franciscan who looked after the graves, Petra never said so.
She told the children about the hysterical joy of the people who saw the miracle as a vindication of the massacre, as a sign of God's pleasure, and as a licence to go out killing again. And more miracles followed as a statue of the Virgin Mary wept and a new star appeared in the heavens. A little boy, who would grow up to be the Marshal of France, had lain motionless for hours beneath the bleeding, writhing, dying bodies of his father and brother. He was found by the umpire of a nearby tennis-court who had come to rob the bodies, and his life was spared. Petra might add this story as an exemplary and moral lesson in fortitude.
And sometimes, if the fancy took her, after telling one of these stories, Petra would select a child who had transgressed in some way, who had perhaps folded her dinner napkin wrongly, and she would summon one of the women from the kitchen and order the woman to hold the child by the ankles, naked over the pit of excrement in the cellar. This pit was where they emptied the chamber pots, and it was known as The Truth, in a gesture towards Aldous Huxley who said that truth lies at the bottom of a very dirty well.
I should tell you that Petra, the great and glorious and shining Petra, is fascinated to the point of obsession by shit. I mean that literally. Shit. This is a little-known fact about her, and I hope I am not putting you off by mentioning it so soon. Perhaps it is natural for a woman whose life is dedicated to things of the spirit to be deeply interested in her own bowels and those of other people, and the products thereof. The great Carl Gustav Jung, after all, had a vision of God depositing a great heap of shit onto the roof of the cathedral in Basle. I think that was how it went. Wrecked the roof. These people and their visions! And on the subject of shit-Petra, who is obsessed by ballet, delights in the way the dancers call cheerfully to each other before a performance, 'Merde!'
That idea rather appeals to me, as many French ideas do. There you have the whitest, airiest, most virginal, pure creatures in satin and tulle, looking as if they are about to take off into the ether, nothing further from a piece of shit was ever seen. And as the orchestra tunes up, what are they saying to each other? Shit, shit, shit. Petra was only a mediocre dancer herself, but she employed a Russian ballet master to teach the children in her care, and saw to it that everyone regularly greeted each other with 'Merde!' It was as if she wanted to reinforce to the girls that they might give the appearance of beauty and goodness on the outside, but inwardly they were corrupt little bags of tripe and shit. This gave her control over them, but she also believed it to be true. Petra believed wholeheartedly in her own teachings, and this belief, added to the natural light in her lovely eyes, was part of her fascination.
I was appointed Petra's guardian when she was born, and I know her inside out. She is dead now, but because she made such an impression on me I am inclined to think of her as living, and this false belief can play havoc with my tenses, which are, as I have explained, unstable at the best of times. Bear with me. I was, in a strange way, afraid of Petra. She died by her own hand at the age of fifty-five. (By some curious and swift trick, somewhere along the way, she added ten years to her age, officially dying at sixty-five or sixty-six. Consequently, she appeared to be miraculously younger-looking than her age.) And don't ask me where she has gone, because it is not my business to know that kind of thing. You may be surprised to learn that it was also none of my business to save her from herself; if there is one thing a guardian angel can't do, it's intervene in the event of suicide. We hover round saving our charges from accidents and so forth, but if they get into their heads the idea that they want to kill themselves, there's nothing we can do.
She caught on very early to the fact that I was there, and was able to use me to make her way in the world. I recall the first incident.

 
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