At a candle lit table on the night of the earthquake, to his wife, Anne-Merry, Nico St. Denis was translating a letter from Father Rene-Marie Robichau, a Priest in a small town in the Italian Apennine mountains.
"It is a good night for a fantastic story," Anne-Merry said. "There is a book of hours that I secreted in a music box on which I painted icons of its provenance. We set this object adrift, as if it was a boat in a French song. A distinguished collector purchased it; a University archivist calls it the Music Box Book of Hours. And, we learn, that in the late 15th century this beautiful book, made in a French Court, might have been lost by the French Army in the Italian mountains. We also learn that a map in that book indicates early Breton knowledge of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland."
On this everywhere candle-lit earthquake evening, the room was quiet except for the sound of Anne-Merry Lafitte St. Dennis' voice. "My Father won that book in a card game on the eve of a battle on the World War II Italian front. He never cheated at cards; he had learned to play expertly on Mississippi River summer vacations with his riverboat gambler Grandfather, Hughie Lafitte. Histories of the breaking of Acadian families were on my mind, a French children's song spoke to me, and so the Music Box Book of Hours was launched on a fortuitous journey."
"Just so," Nico St. Denis responded. It made sense to him.
"Sido plans to sell the Music Box Book of Hours to a library or a museum and use the proceeds to open an exhibition space for her collection of contemporary San Francisco Bay Area art. My mother and I are happy that the manuscript will finally be in in a place where it can be seen. And, at the same time, that book of hours will support a new art space. But it will be helpful for Sidonie Frazier if we can prove that it was not Nazi loot when it arrived at the Italian shop where a soldier bought it. Nowadays, this is an issue. What else does Father Robichau say?"
