Ivan de Monbrison
The Men of the Bronze Age
In the memory of Jean-Luc and Jean-Claude Amaury

The night is made of ashes we won’t go any further there is a cemetery on the other side of the city sometimes you  walk there still even though twenty years have passed since then the graves look like houses you pass between the houses you greet the dead they've got to know you quite well with time you know many of them almost personally you go there to visit them and you can feel that they love you those dead more than the living and you love them back behind the walls of the very old cemetery on the other side there is the city people go through their lives doing nothing of any real value spend their time wasting it next to the cemetery once there was the last bronze foundry of the city it was a century old two old founders there were still working almost twenty years ago and every dawn you would  walk up through the cemetery located on a hill carrying a plaster sculpture on your back in a torn bag as you brought it this way to the foundry located rue Ramus a small street adjoining the cemetery there the old founders looked at it silent I don’t know what they thought we spoke about the price to melt it in bronze in a sort bronze used for the poor in brass to be precise they were going to take the imprint of the sculpture with black clay coming from river banks placed in steel molds and with their fingers took days to make the imprint of the plaster skeleton these molds were then sealed and hung up to harden and to dry the clay over a huge wood fire all night long finally back at dawn the clay had become hard in these steel boxes then they had to melt the brass at nearly two thousand degrees in a furnace located in the ground and once the metal had melted in a crucible held up with the sole force of their arms they poured the molten metal through an orifice  inside the box containing the hollow imprint of clay the liquid metal thus would take the imprint of the void left by the plaster sculpture after this bronze age process completed by the end of the week you went back through the graveyard to fetch the blackened bronze the bronze sometimes still burning hot and the old plaster all blackened by clay the late Jean-Claude and Jean-Luc were waiting for you all covered with black soot they looked both exhausted you gave them money then you had to bring back the plaster in a bag and the bronze on your back through the cemetery and the dead in their graves watched you intensely and hailed at your passage  through the old decayed cemetery with your two statues representing always a dead man or woman then you got in your old workshop to your old art studio further away downhill which was already falling apart and there you had to polish the bronze remove some excess pieces of metal by hand with a chisel it was exhausting work very noisy you woke up the whole neighborhood people cursed you the dead cursed you and at the end in the studio there was the corpse of a plaster sculpture all blackened with clay sometimes broken like an old skeleton and living body of bronze.