Combayne Fallstoward agreed to meet us here
in the porch of her house. So we waited...
Combayne Fallstoward was immortally
nineteen. It was she who wrote the "Boulders of Flight". It was
published about the time she celebrated her nineteenth birthday
for the thirtieth time. After its publication, she wore black and lived with her
dog at Merle in attempted isolation. The house at Merle had been owned in the
nineteenth century by the American historian Austin Carter Scops. Scops had two
galleries, or wings, built onto the original and rather prosaic farmhouse that
he had inherited from his grandmother, and here he displayed the badly scarred
and fractured statues of Hermes and Eros, that he had acquired from various
European collections. It was suggested that he stole most of them from public
gardens, and the scarring and fracturing had been caused by his unceremonious
haste in removing them from their niches and pedestals after dark.
After his building improvements, Scops had
grandly called his house 'The Winged Samothrace' in emulation of that statue now
in the Louvre. This name was perhaps not unnaturally accredited to Combayne
Fallstoward, the house's new occupant, apparently much to her annoyance, but it
did not go unnoticed that she signed her letters and manuscripts on more than
one occasion with the initials WS.
The Directory classified Combayne as a young female
woman speaking Untowards
and suffering from timidity.
