Sébastien's Letters

Sébastien addressed each letter carefully, since he could never be entirely certain where his father was by the time it arrived: Paris, Versailles, wherever the Revolution's shifting demands had carried Dr. Gilbert next. He'd learned to write in a register he privately called timeless: nothing tied too tightly to a single week, in case the letter took a month to catch up with the man it was chasing.

Father — my Latin has finally overtaken my Greek, which you predicted would happen and which I resisted believing for two years out of pure stubbornness. I've been reading the pamphlets circulating about the Assembly's latest debate, and I find myself unconvinced by both sides for reasons I'd like your opinion on, when you have an hour to spare one of these months. The garden is doing poorly this year, too much rain in spring, not enough since. I hope wherever this finds you, it finds you eating properly, which I doubt, knowing you.

He never knew, sending a letter like this, whether it would reach his father in the middle of some consequential crisis or in a rare quiet evening with time to actually read it properly. He wrote it the same way regardless: substantial enough to be worth a busy man's attention, modest enough not to demand more of that attention than a son's ordinary concerns could reasonably claim against the fate of the entire kingdom.

What came back, weeks or sometimes months later, never read like the perfunctory reply of a distracted parent managing an obligation. Dr. Gilbert answered the Latin question with real substance. He took the pamphlet disagreement seriously enough to argue with it properly, point by point, rather than simply praising his son for having opinions at all. He asked, in return, exactly the kind of question that told Sébastien his last letter had been read rather than merely acknowledged.

Sébastien — your objection to the second pamphlet is sounder than the pamphlet's own author managed. I'd push back on one point: you're assuming the Assembly's motives are unified when they plainly aren't, which changes the whole shape of your critique. Fix the garden's drainage before you fix its rain problem; there's nothing to be done about the second. I am eating adequately. Do not ask me to define adequately.

Sébastien kept every one of these letters, in a growing bundle he never fully explained to anyone who asked about it. He understood, rereading them across the years, that his father's absence had cost him a great deal in the ordinary daily sense: no one to sit across from at supper most nights, no one present for the countless small events that fathers were conventionally supposed to witness. But he understood, too, holding the whole bundle at once, that he had something rarer than daily presence: a father who took his actual thoughts seriously enough to argue with them properly, letter after letter, across a correspondence built entirely on substance rather than dutiful habit.

It was not the father other boys his age described having. He came, across the years of that growing bundle of letters, to understand it as the better bargain anyway.