A Very Bold Leap (45 page)

Towards the end of that afternoon, in the editorial office of
Artist’s Life
, Bernard Délicieux stood by Charles’s desk for a half an hour deploying every trick in his book to make Charles admit that he was, indeed, the Charles referred to on the banner. But the latter was having none of it, and eluded his questions with a laugh.

“Buzz off, Bernard! You should go into the espionage business. You’d be a natural at it, I swear… Come on, do you honestly think I have time to waste climbing up clock towers?”

“It’s too much like you not to be you.”

“All right, all right, I confess, Father, I confess on my knees. Give me absolution, I beg of you… It was also me who knocked the Parthenon over and sank the
Titanic
. Do you think God will ever forgive me?”

Délicieux heaved a sigh of frustration and walked away shaking his head.

Charles went back to his article. The banner was still fluttering joyously in his head, a triumph of boldness and imagination. To make the front page of the two biggest newspapers in Montreal! What a coup! What revenge!

Half an hour went by. He banged away at his computer with alacrity. Suddenly his lips tightened and his fingers fell from the keyboard. A dark thought had just insinuated itself into his satisfaction and had brought the whole house of cards tumbling down around him.

“Yes,” he said to himself. “It’s all very well to plaster your ambitions across the top of a tower … But now, my friend, you have to do something about them.”

END OF VOLUME THREE

Original title: Charles le téméraire: Un saut dans le vide
Copyright 2005 by Éditions Fides
Published under arrangement with Éditions Fides, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
English translation copyright © 2009 by McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

Translated from the French by Wayne Grady
Translation of volume 2 in the Charles the Bold trilogy:
Un saut dans le vide
.

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Beauchemin, Yves, 1941–
[Saut dans le vide. English]
    A very bold leap / Yves Beauchemin ; translated by Wayne Grady.

Translation of volume 2 of the trilogy Charles le téméraire.
Originally published as v. 2, Un saut dans le vide, of Charles le téméraire.
“Volume 3 in the Charles the Bold series”.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-302-7

    I. Grady, Wayne II. Beauchemin, Yves, 1941- . Charles the bold.
III. Title. IV. Title: Saut dans le vide. English.

PS
8553.
E
172
S
3813 2008        
C
843′.54        
C
2008-900774-3

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

A Douglas Gibson Book

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