Un petit texte pour la Nouvelle-Orléans, par la romancière Caroline Stevermer (que les Moutons électriques publient en septembre prochain):
« Relic of a lost city
At Little Mardi Gras, I bought a mask as a souvenir. It was black and gold leather, chosen with care and as carefully stored away when I unpacked back here in the frozen north. (Stored away so thoroughly, I confess I don’t remember precisely where I put it.) If I thought of the mask at all in recent years, it was with chagrin, not nostalgia. What a touristy thing to do, I told myself, what a walking cliché I was. They saw me coming and parted me from my cash with that fabled New Orleans charm.
When the city drowned, I remembered my Mardi Gras mask. I think I’m glad I have it. I hope that someday it will become a tacky souvenir again. I hope someday to complain about how like Epcot the new French Quarter seems compared with the colors and the scents and the sounds (Oh, most of all, the sounds!) of the New Orleans I visited long ago.
It’s a relic now, flotsam from a lost city. What kind of a city? How lost? »
