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The Table
On the trottoir at Le Consul as was, ten years ago, not the gen-trified one there now, on the Avenue Friedland, a round sidewalk table with a glass of red wine and plate of Gruyere, bread and butter, and a book, Henry de Montherlant's Les Olympiques in which you can read that on an autumn afternoon in 1938 the fifteen-year-old soccer player Jacques Peyrony endosse son sweater. La sueur couvre le visage du jeune capitaine, noir de la terre qu'y laisserent ses mains en s'y portant, y dessine des rouflaquettes humides; et ses traits sont tires par-dessous cette patine ruisselante, et ses joues brulent au point qu'il cligne des paupieres, et il s'essuie le front avec son avant-bras. Son visage est lisse comme un galet poli, mais le front, meme dans le repos, est laboure de trois rides ondoyantes, sem-blables aux ailes d'un caducee, ou a ces frisons hirsutes sur le frontal d'un taurillon: elles lui donnent un air a la fois gosse et sauvage, qui est Voir meme des taurillons. De fatigue, sa bouche reste entrouverte, son regard est devenu terne et ses prunelles ont etrangement pdli, after a game played, as the Dutch philosopher Adriaan van Hovendaal observed in his Het Erewhonisch Schetsboek, on an afternoon when the eighty-year-old Lucien Levy-Bruhl and Pastor Maurice Leenhardt were taking one of their habitual walks through the Bois, Leenhardt who said that in the Western world movement is dead, that theology has forgotten it, but that in the bible movement is everything, no manifestation of God without it: a column of fire in the desert, a prophet convulsing the people, the Son descending to the world, His spirit flowing out, the gospels are a lively coming and going of people, and that God is love, which moves, and that it is beauty by which the idea of coherence comes together in the mind, and has not Cocteau drawn an
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THE TABLE
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Annonciation Football, rhyming the Messenger with Peyrony and his equipe, for Calixte Delmas was an angel of grace at a time when the angel of death was hammering his black sword at the forge.
And did not Esdras say: Like as the field is, so is also the seed: as the flowers be, such are the colors also: such as the workman is, such also is the work: and as the husbandman is himself, so is his husbandry also: for it was the time of the world.