13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [57]
This one is so light it feels like nothing, and quite dented, though it was in circulation only briefly. It is to be expected, after all, at a time when metal was so short. The coin was struck in the year 1944, and expresses values different from the usual LIBERTE•EGALITE•FRATERNITE. This one advocates TRAVAIL•FAMILLE•PATRIE, which are safer things to aspire to for a populace under the boot of an occupant. The man who died with this coin in his pocket cared only about the first two; over the course of his life, he had become utterly exhausted with the third.
Louise found the coin when she was folding up her father’s clothes to give them away a few months after he had died. It made a sonorous ping when it dropped on the floor, out of the pocket of his gray suit jacket. The sound startled her, and when she found its source she slipped it into her own pocket and decided to keep it. After all, the Americans had just landed on the beach in Normandy, so perhaps the currency would look different in a few months. Perhaps this little occupation artifact would become something like a collector’s item.
He had died with half a franc in his pocket, change from buying a cup of chicory in a bistro only an hour before his fatal heart attack. Soon the Germans would be gone and there would be real coffee again. If only he’d lived another year to be granted that last flicker of happiness.
Another half franc, this one heavier and in better shape, struck in better times: in the year 1922. The values displayed on this coin are reflective of the decade’s economic drive: COMMERCE•INDUSTRIE. Why were Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity so neglected? It seems un-French.
The coin slipped out of another pocket on a surprising day in the late spring of 1922. This day a new student had come to Louise, a nine-year-old girl who told her straight out that she had grown bored with her previous piano teacher. She was named Garance Saccard and had eyes as green as a tender young plant. Her fine hair unraveled from her braid as if faintly electrified, and her fingers were long and narrow, strangely unchildlike. She utterly astonished Louise with her ease at the piano, as if she and the instrument were two animals that had a symbiotic relationship with each other. She and music were of one will.
Louise was happy that day: it was such a rare pleasure to have a pupil who understood her instructions so immediately, and who pulled music seemingly whole out of the thrumming piano, with no pain and no labor. She could see right away that the child possessed the sort of talent that could take her to a conservatory if she was so inclined. Louise hoped the child was so inclined, and would not become bored with her new instructor.
After Garance had left, Louise found a half-franc coin at the foot of the piano stool. Probably the girl’s candy money had dropped out of her pocket while she played. It would have been kind of Louise to give the money back, but she kept it instead, to mark this day and the appearance of this startling young girl with a mischievous smile into her own slow, dull life. She still had many students at that time, to save up money for the financial burden of all the children she still thought she might have with Henri—her faith in this eventuality was just beginning to waver.
This worn coin displays more of the characteristics you are used to in French currency. It declares itself struck by the French Republic and features the icon Marianne. The other side proclaims LIBERTE•EGALITE•FRATERNITE, as it ought to. You squint at this coin in order to make out its denomination and the year it was struck. It has been so smoothed by time and handling that you can make out this information only when you hold it under a loupe. Even then, you cannot be entirely certain that you are reading it right. Nevertheless, you think you can see 10 centimes. You think you can read 1871.
We are reaching back into the prehistory of this record. This coin is twenty-five years older than Louise. Who else is twenty-five years