CHAPTER FOUR
"Why don't you move to the United States?" she asked Maurice one day. There were reasons of ancestry, associations, habits, he told her. "I still have my mother," he said. "She is elderly, but I still have her, and two sisters who live nearby. Our roots in Troyes go back eight hundred years, more or less, with a few interruptions, plagues and exiles, but we always go back I am like an old tree. Pull me out, I will leave a hole in the ground, where my seeds will fall. Someday my grandson will be old enough to visit me by himself. I look forward to that. I want to show him my world. I would not want him to come and find a hole where I once lived." The homeless remained on the steps of the library like broken branches. As the temperature dropped, they climbed up the steps higher
