The Life and Times of René Giraud

René

Paris, 1835.

After days upon days spent on the road the crowded stagecoach was drawing close to its destination. A young man - more of a boy, really - pressed into one of the corners, anxiously peered out the window.

A half an hour more, and he would be tossed out into the wild unknown, cut from everything and everyone he cared about. His father encouraged him to think of it as an adventure. Then again, he was a cheerful, popular man, well-loved among his old friends and quick to make new ones. The boy was not.

His agitation mounted with each rattling mile. Finally, inevitably, the coach jerked to a halt and the boy was swept out of it on a tidal wave of passengers. Shakily he gathered his belongings and fished out an address from his pocket.

With one last heavy sigh René Giraud stepped out onto the crowded streets of Paris.

***

Settling in went about as well as René expected it would – it did not.

Finding his new lodgings and moving in was a challenge in and of itself, but getting started at the University was the worst. Dealing with paperwork – finding the relevant places and people to deal with the paperwork! Having his classes and timetable sorted out, finding the buildings and rooms where the lectures took place – it seemed he was expected to know how everything worked, who all the important people were, everything, magically all by himself.

The worst part was that all the other first-year students seemed to actually do know all that. They walked with purpose, discussing professors and classes – and assignments René did not even realise existed – among themselves, and whenever René asked for help they laughed and gave barely helpful half-answers. Still, after a week of excruciating running around, panicking and crying into an unfamiliar pillow every night René managed to sort himself out.

Now he was laying on a bed that was not his, in a room half a country away from home, staring at a crack in the ceiling. After only one week, he already missed his father terribly and was quite ready to go home. Despite the roaring fire in the hearth the room was cold, uncomfortably so.

From the corner of his eyes, he could see something move.

He did not have to turn and look to know what it was. A monk. A tall, grey, transparent figure he only knew to be a monk because of his habit. He was the first feature of the flat René remarked upon moving in. Now he loomed beside René's bed, sucking the sound out of the air, covering the room in a deathly silence.

René shrugged and turned towards the wall. Dealing with the living was exhausting enough, he had no time for the dead.

***

The end of his first week spent with actual lectures found him in one of the University's libraries, trying to find a book he was required to read. Unfortunately it seemed his classmates were faster as the place on the shelf that – going by the labelling – was supposed to house the volume was empty. Frowning he contemplated asking the librarian to put him on a waiting list for it when he heard a sudden, loud clatter from the other side of the room. A boy around his age was struggling with a heap of heavy-looking books. He stacked them first in one column, then as this structure proved too rickety, in two smaller, but still impressive heaps. He managed to haul one stack under his arm, but was utterly stumped by the task of picking up the other. He tried to coax it to the edge of the table and scoop it up like that, but it only resulted in him dropping the other pile too. René waited for someone nearer to him to help, but the only reaction the boy got was some laughter from the nearby tables. The youth laughed with them, scratched the back of his neck and began to pile the books up again.