Parrot and Olivier in America

Now on these endless stairs I feel the slow drag of my breath like a rat-tail file inside my throat.

my body being always too thin-walled a container for the passions coursing through its veins

As for her maternal passions, these were not conventionally expressed, although I relished those occasions, by no means infrequent, when she feared that I would die. It is recorded that, in the year of 1809, she called the doctor on fifty-three occasions. Twenty years later she would still be taking the most outlandish steps to save my life.

My mother would wish me to address him as vous and l'Abbe, but such was his character that he would be Bebe until the day he died.

He never learned I was shortsighted. I so wished to please him I shot things I could not see.

my body being always too thin-walled a container for the passions coursing through its veins

I HAD NO DOUBT that something cruel and catastrophic had happened before I was even born, yet the comte and comtesse, my parents, would not tell me what it was. As a result my organ of curiosity was made irritable and I grew into the most restless and unhealthy creature imaginable--slight, pale, always climbing, prying into every drain and attic of the Chateau de Barfleur.