A small gesture. "It's been rebuilt, not exactly to the same plan. It's not the Corinthe any more. Mme Galopin was out on her stoop, I asked about the old café as if from curiosity, she told me Mother Hucheloup sold it and moved away, she thought to a cousin's. She said some of the old staff stayed, but I couldn't find out who exactly. I did go in. It was very different. I recognized some of the clientele, but no one we knew well."
To see it was surreal. To see the Corinthe no longer a ruin of blood and splinters and acid, but no longer either the old familiar café with Matelote laughing back and forth with drinkers, Gibelotte benevolently half-dozing over plates, Mother Hucheloup coming and going, Courfeyrac's irreverently scrawled advice over the door -- to see instead a new building, all changed, all new, that was deeply and disorientingly strange.
And himself in Fauchelevent's body, with Fauchelevent's face, and an old man's aches and a convict's hidden scars, only added to the disorientation. He hadn't stayed long.
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A small gesture. "It's been rebuilt, not exactly to the same plan. It's not the Corinthe any more. Mme Galopin was out on her stoop, I asked about the old café as if from curiosity, she told me Mother Hucheloup sold it and moved away, she thought to a cousin's. She said some of the old staff stayed, but I couldn't find out who exactly. I did go in. It was very different. I recognized some of the clientele, but no one we knew well."
To see it was surreal. To see the Corinthe no longer a ruin of blood and splinters and acid, but no longer either the old familiar café with Matelote laughing back and forth with drinkers, Gibelotte benevolently half-dozing over plates, Mother Hucheloup coming and going, Courfeyrac's irreverently scrawled advice over the door -- to see instead a new building, all changed, all new, that was deeply and disorientingly strange.
And himself in Fauchelevent's body, with Fauchelevent's face, and an old man's aches and a convict's hidden scars, only added to the disorientation. He hadn't stayed long.