The Maid’s Request by Michele Desbordes

He took the pen and trimmed it, tried it out on a corner of the page; sitting on the terrace he wrote in notebooks, drew, annotated drawings, went on doing what he had always done, he had always written in notebooks; in the evening he lined them up in a cupboard in his room, twenty-five small books and two bigger books and sixteen even bigger than that, six books bound in vellum, another covered in green chamois leather…

Beautifully written and translated from the French title, La Demande, this short novel tracks an elderly Italian painter’s journey across the Alps to a commission in the Loire Valley. Although unspoken, this is a fictitious story of Leonardo da Vinci and his close friendship with a French maid who cares for him. As they approach the twilight of their lives their proximity allows her to make an unusual request…

When he leaves a notebook in his bedroom or his studio, he asks her to go and get it. She rises to her feet and hurries, brings it back at arm’s length like the priest at the offertory handing the host to the faithful. In the corner of a page he adds an angel, curly hair, pale eyes.

In Italy they had talked about the angel, about the delicacy of the bruised and budding flower, the hollow of the shadow on the cheek, that sense of heat, of burning skin, emotion, pleasure; how one could tell, sometimes everything had been so magnificent.

The Maid’s Request is a slow, lingering tale to be read on a winter’s night, savouring one beautiful description after another.