Jean-Pierre was the youngest son of the last Vicomte du Chateauneuf du Pré, the beloved child of the nobleman's old age. One day in his early childhood he was exploring a remote part of the family castle when he came across eight pair of very old crutches lined up along the back wall of an apparently forgotten storeroom. Each was sculpted from a single piece of finely grained oak, the curves and angles at the top of the staff meticulously carved and finished not only to let the crutch slide easily yet securely under the arm, but to spread the weight of the body over several square inches of the top of the rib cage. Each pair was a few inches longer than the one next to it. Nicks and scratches showed hard use by some disabled child of a previous generation through his growing years, but no one then alive seemed to know who that might have been.

Jean-Pierre fitted the smallest pair under his arms. He felt that a part of his body had just developed, like wings on a butterfly. The previous Christmas his father the Vicomte had presented Jean-Pierre with a little spyglass through which he daily scanned the village far beneath his castle window. Always his eye sought the crippled boy he had first spied out on that Christmas Day as he swung himself along on crutches through the streets. Whenever Jean-Pierre saw the boy with his eye or in his memory he thought without words, "That boy is me. That is the way I am supposed to be." Now, he believed, God had led him to the storeroom and had shown him that this was true.

Jean-Pierre felt and looked like he was born to the crutches as he went through the palace halls and courtyards to his quarters swinging his legs in tandem in the way he had studied so often through the spyglass and in his mind. He had the first servant he saw bring the other seven pair and stack them in the back of his huge armoire. From the day he took the first pair as his own Jean-Pierre kept them by his bed as he slept. He used them from the moment he got out of bed in the morning, and when the effort tired him he found something sedentary to do. Over time his upper body gained enough strength and endurance that he could walk on the crutches, making minimal use of his legs, nearly as far without resting as he had formerly been able to go unaided.

The family and servants tended to spoil Jean-Pierre, whose mother had died giving him birth, so they indulged his crutchwalking as a passing childhood fancy even as weeks of this strange behavior turned to months. In the village, though, they began to wonder what had crippled the Vicomte's little son. The castle household kept its counsel, and no one outside it dreamed that Jean-Pierre's condition had no physical cause.

One day Jean-Pierre's tutor took one of the crutches from Jean-Pierre's armoire to old Marie-Bertrande, born into the service of the household ninety-six years before, now bedfast five years and blind. She had lived in the castle twenty years before anyone then alive was born. The next in age was the old Vicomte himself. "Ancienne," the tutor said, putting the crutch into her frail, wrinkled hands, "In the old northwest tower we found eight pair of crutches like these, from the size for a small child to that for an adult. Do you know whose they were?" Marie-Bertrande ran her aged fingers over the crutch for a long time, then said, "No, no," in a way which made those who heard her wonder if she truly did not.

Several weeks later word went around the castle that Marie-Bertrande was at last on the point of death. As always when one of the household was about to go to God, every member of the noble family gathered with the servants around her bed to pray for the easy and safe passage of her soul. The Vicomte, like his fathers before him, was firm on the point that whatever one's lot in this life, all are equal before the throne of Judgement.

The "ta-tap" of Jean-Pierre's crutches alternating with a soft "scrape-thump" as first the soles, then the heels of his shoes met stone flooring, was by now a familiar sound in the castle. Filtering into the sickroom from the courtyard of the servants' quarters as the boy approached, the sound roused the dying woman to consciousness for the first time in two days. "Roland?" she asked. "Roland?" "No, no, ancienne, it is little Jean-Pierre," one of the women said. "Ah, Jean-Pierre," she whispered, and relapsed into sleep. The prayers resumed and within half an hour Marie-Bertrande's long life was over. For months afterward idle conversation around the palace centered on the question, "Who was Roland?" No answer was ever found.

Jean-Pierre had been walking with crutches for over a year when his tutor and his nanny went to the Vicomte with their fears that the child's legs would atrophy beyond the possibility of recovery. The Vicomte was getting into his dotage but his word was still law in the manor so when he declared, "Let him be, he will outgrow it," there was nothing else to be done. Four years later came the Terror which followed upon the French Revolution. The old Vicomte, once a counselor to the King, was among the first to go to the guillotine. Hoping the clergy would be spared the Terror, the Vicomte's three older sons left their ten year old half-brother Jean-Pierre with the village priest as they fled to America. They loved their little brother but feared the unwelcome attention a child unable to stand or walk unaided might attract, as well as the hindrance he would create as they made their escape.

The priest's blood, alas, soon mixed with that of the old Vicomte at the guillotine. The revolutionaries spared Jean-Pierre however, for they deemed the presence of the crippled, abandoned son of the last Vicomte du Chateauneuf du Pré a lasting mockery of that once noble name. They left him to be looked after by the priest's aged mother, who had lived with her son the priest in the parish house. The old woman and the crippled boy survived on the produce of their kitchen garden and the few sous the old woman brought in with her sewing and mending. Jean-Pierre quickly learned to till and weed while sitting on his haunches, and to ply a needle well enough to sew a decent patch or seam.

People feared association with anyone connected with the ancien regime, so the pair had a lonely life in the village. For her part the old woman practiced and counseled reticence. In the street Jean-Pierre now saw nearly every day the boy he had spied out from his castle window, but the boy was no more inclined than anyone else to speak with him. Through his spyglass Jean-Pierre had never made out the cause of the boy's disability but now it was plain to see. The boy's feet twisted in and under at the ankles and when he stood they fell one in front of the other. His legs could bear his weight but he was utterly unable to balance himself while standing on the cruelly deformed feet, much less to take a single step.

That first winter the boy, who was a few months older than Jean-Pierre and like him the youngest of his family by several years, lost his parents to a sickness that took several villagers. In former days the priest would bring the case of such an orphan to the Viscomte's attention and a place would be found for him in the service of the palace. Now everything had to be done through Paris, there was no one to plead the boy's case to the authorities anyhow, and social displacement in the wake of the Revolution left no one in a position to take him in. The boy was reduced to begging in the street and sleeping under the town bridge.

Late one September afternoon Jean-Pierre, out on an errand for the old woman, saw the boy struggling down the other side of the village street. Through the summer he had observed how the boy's knees seemed to bend more and more, until now his gait was more nearly creeping along on his crutches than anything that could be called walking. It became too much for Jean-Pierre to bear in silence. Casting aside old woman's counsel, he skillfully braved the rough cobbles of the street to intercept the boy.

"Garçon," Jean Pierre addressed him, "what is your name?"

"Michel, p'tit sieur," the boy replied. In the new political arrangements everyone was obliged to address everyone else as "citoyen," but the ancient habits of deference died hard in remote provincial villages. Eyes sad beyond redemption and shadowed with anxiety betrayed the boy's smile.

"Can you no longer straighten your legs?" asked Jean-Pierre, recalling the day more than four years before when his nanny discovered he himself could no longer extend his legs fully, the day she persuaded his tutor to go with her to express their concern to the old Viscomte.

"Mais oui, p'tit sieur," the older boy replied, "I certainly can." The boy maintained his balance as he stood up by sliding his hands up the shafts of his crudely fashioned crutches. They were really no more than round staves three centimeters in diameter with a piece cut from the same wood nailed across the top. As the boy stood straight the crosspieces were nine or ten centimeters below his armpits. "These were already becoming short for me when my parents left me last winter. I stopped wearing my sabots in the spring to take a little from my height and so make my crutches serve me a while longer. Soon I will have to start walking on my knees." Remorse pierced Jean-Pierre. Like everyone else in the village he had assumed that the boy had doffed his footwear to let his contorted feet with their grotesquely webbed toes excite pity as he begged.

"My brothers left a whole set of crutches with me like these I'm using," said Jean-Pierre. "Come to my house and I will lend you the ones that fit you until I grow enough to need them." Once arrived at the house, though, Jean-Pierre insisted to the old woman that Michel make his home with them. She wept as she asked, "How will we eat?"

"We will eat less," Jean-Pierre replied. "When my father the Viscomte was alive we always ate less when others were in need. Noblesse oblige."

"But, p'tit sieur, we are not of the nobility," she pleaded. "There is no more nobility."

"Nonetheless, Madame, God will help us," retorted Jean-Pierre. The evening twilight found Michel swinging along confidently on better crutches than he had ever dreamed of using, as he went with Jean-Pierre to retrieve his meager belongings from under the bridge. Jean-Pierre wore the canvas knapsack the old woman had made for him to carry things on his back as he walked. Once they had filled it, though, Michel loaded it onto his own back, insisting that it was not seemly for the p'tit sieur to carry his belongings. He pulled on the sabots his father had finished carving for him no more than a week before the onset of his fatal illness, with the special leather straps that held them to his feet. The "clop-clop" of Michel's wooden shoes rang once again against the cobbles of the street grown silent in the face of approaching nightfall, causing Jean-Pierre to say, "You sound like some damned horse."

"Ah," Michel replied, "but I feel like a king. Merci, p'tit sieur."

"If we are going to share the same room, we'd better be brothers. Please call me Jean-Pierre. The old ways are not coming back, anyhow."

"As you wish, p'tit sieur."

Not long after that Jean-Pierre's American cousins, now making their fortune as the Meadows family, somehow got word of his plight and began sending a small stipend to support the little household. Michel meanwhile demonstrated a knack with needle and thread that quickly surpassed everything the old woman could show him. He was soon bringing notably more into the little household than it cost to keep him. The three began to find themselves in decidedly modest but reasonably secure circumstances.

Some forty years after his father had fled France, Jean-Pierre's nephew Jack Meadows, Brian's great-great-grandfather, returned to Chateauneuf-du-Pré, the first of the family to find the courage to do so. "Jack" was what he had styled himself from childhood, though his birth certificate read "Jacques." He found Jean-Pierre still living in the parish house, still using the next-to-last pair of the ancient crutches he had found in the castle, for he had never grown tall enough that the last would fit him. Those had been on loan to Michel for decades. The old woman, with whom Jean-Pierre had within a few years exchanged roles as caregiver, was long dead. A new priest had come many years before. He had Jean-Pierre continue to till his garden and serve as his cook and handyman.

Jack offered to bring Jean-Pierre to America to rejoin the family but Jean-Pierre preferred to stay, saying that in the village he had a life however little, and what would an old unschooled cripple like him find to do in America? And who would meet Michel, for decades now the village tailor, for the dose of brandy that helped him bear for another day his shrewish wife, his ungrateful children, and his twisted feet? Jean-Pierre du Chateauneuf du Pré lived twenty more years and was buried not in the graveyard of the village church but among the dozen or more generations of his noble clan who rested in the cemetery of the ruined castle, the next to last person to be interred there.