"Sarah A. Hoyt - The Blood Like Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoyt Sarah A)

No reminders of lost dawns moved me; no memories of past noons disturbed me. No sharp, aching
mementos of Francois’s golden hair glimmering in the sunlight.

There was nothing in the world, nothing, except the shiny black highway unrolling in the headlights of my
black sports car like a lazy snake, and the loud music drowning out my thoughts.

Here and there, clusters of distant, twinkling lights looked like stars fallen to Earth, like a Christmas tree
in a cemetery.

I lit a cigarette from the end of the other, threw the spent butt out the window, my nails flourishing briefly
in my field of vision, looking like claws dipped into fresh blood.

Smoke enough of these and they would kill you. That’s what the surgeon general said. But his promises
failed me.

What would he know? I’d died in November 1793, when terror reigned on the streets of Paris and
blood flowed like wine over the stained boards of Madame la Guillotine.

My face in the mirror looked back at me, triangular, small, pink. Too pale. My grey eyes showed dark
circles all around, the circles of those who hadn’t slept for too long. The circles of the damned.

I looked twenty, as I had over two centuries ago. Twenty and still as pretty, still as slim, still as delectable
as I’d been when the revolution had washed over Paris like a madness and drowned me in its waves.

Then, as now, my beauty bought luxuries: travel and fine clothes, a beautiful house, transportation.

But transportation now was a sleek new Viper, a horseless carriage that sped silently through the night,
devouring the never-ending snaking road, and yet still incapable of taking me away from my guilt, from
my fear, away from Francois’s accusing violet eyes, his eyes that found me every time.

==========

I caught Francois as one caught a fever. And fevers in those days came at a galloping speed, carried by
the impetuous horses of madness.

At seventeen, I had left my miserable origins far behind.

I was beautiful, admired, the mistress of a member of the representative assembly, the hostess of a
fashionable philosophical salon.

I’d clawed my way out of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, climbing over the backs of rejected lovers, over the
proffered purses of eager new ones.

In my salon, with its satin-covered walls, its velvet-covered couches, gathered the fine flower of thinkers
in France.

Not the fire-breathing revolutionaries, not the scabby sans culottes.

No. To my nightly assemblies came younger sons of nobility, well-dressed young lawyers, the heirs to
bourgeois purses.