My mother once worked at the most celebrated mirror factory in all of the world, founded by Colbert all way back in 1666 after he smuggled the secret of making mirrors out of Italy and evaded poisoning by Venetian death squads.
It began as just a tiny workshop hidden in the valley just inside the French border. For centuries this place supplied mirrors to royalty, to presidents, and as my mother often claimed, to all the mermaids that ever combed their hair, to beauty and the beast, and to Snow White's evil queen.
She proudly told me that the last thing that [?] saw before he put a bullet in his head was his reflection in one of her mirrors, and maybe the fact that he saw himself truly for the first time is what gave him the strength to pull the trigger, and wasn’t that a favor to the world.
Eventually, such as the way with these kind of things, the workshop grew into a factory. Generations of workers lived right there, in small apartments in a three-story building with a tiny communal room in the attic that they decorated with all the mirrors rejected by the factory. Any slight distortion, the slightest haze, and the mirrors were supposed to be shattered and buried, but the workers who loved every one of their mirrors so much couldn't bring themselves to destroy them.
Instead, they constructed their own impoverished palace of Versailles. This room was like a funhouse, an infinite ballroom, and it was here they spent their nights. A gramophone played, and they danced in rippling flames until their feet ached. A slow waltz, a tango, la tarantella, and they laughed until dawn, or at least it was time to begin another shift.
And then the factory burnt down. Collateral damage sometime in 1944, the secret of the magical mirrors lost forever. The friends departed, spread out across Europe, homeless, jobless, wandering. From Vienna to Valderrama, from Prague to Paris, lost and lonely. Nothing could recapture those nights.
In a cafe on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Sartre once told my mother, "people who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends," but she simply replied that it was impossible to really see yourself unless you've looked in the right kind of mirror and that sadly, they don’t make those kind of mirrors anymore.
It began as just a tiny workshop hidden in the valley just inside the French border. For centuries this place supplied mirrors to royalty, to presidents, and as my mother often claimed, to all the mermaids that ever combed their hair, to beauty and the beast, and to Snow White's evil queen.
She proudly told me that the last thing that [?] saw before he put a bullet in his head was his reflection in one of her mirrors, and maybe the fact that he saw himself truly for the first time is what gave him the strength to pull the trigger, and wasn’t that a favor to the world.
Eventually, such as the way with these kind of things, the workshop grew into a factory. Generations of workers lived right there, in small apartments in a three-story building with a tiny communal room in the attic that they decorated with all the mirrors rejected by the factory. Any slight distortion, the slightest haze, and the mirrors were supposed to be shattered and buried, but the workers who loved every one of their mirrors so much couldn't bring themselves to destroy them.
Instead, they constructed their own impoverished palace of Versailles. This room was like a funhouse, an infinite ballroom, and it was here they spent their nights. A gramophone played, and they danced in rippling flames until their feet ached. A slow waltz, a tango, la tarantella, and they laughed until dawn, or at least it was time to begin another shift.
And then the factory burnt down. Collateral damage sometime in 1944, the secret of the magical mirrors lost forever. The friends departed, spread out across Europe, homeless, jobless, wandering. From Vienna to Valderrama, from Prague to Paris, lost and lonely. Nothing could recapture those nights.
In a cafe on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Sartre once told my mother, "people who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends," but she simply replied that it was impossible to really see yourself unless you've looked in the right kind of mirror and that sadly, they don’t make those kind of mirrors anymore.
![CHETTA - Talking For A Reward 2 [Prod. $crim]](https://img.youlistener.com/upl2/public/663/002/644/TWbRfY22N1U.jpg)
![Krusze Sake - Bierz to [Kruszec Solo] (prod. Nożyg)](https://img.youlistener.com/upl2/public/662/ef4/d77/4awT9VrDfYA.jpg)
Comments