YD6-107(Cradle) Aetheria’s Glimpse Behind the Stone-of-Light, into the Artistry of the Belle Époque at Heart

 

Aetheria is the pulse behind the renovation—the unseen architect shaping how consciousness settles into form.

In this chapter, she flickers behind the Belle Époque façade, threads the sanded floorboards, stirs the kitchen into existence, and reveals how a house becomes a vessel for awakening.

Step through the Crystal Portal and watch her work unfold.

— Read the chapter — it’s free. Your reflections are always welcome.

YD6-107(Cradle) Aetheria’s Glimpse Behind the Stone-of-Light, into the Artistry of the Belle Époque at Heart

I pull up beside the bluestone French-door balconet sill, level with the basement window lintel. Before my next move, I slip into a reconnaissance ritual—thinking of the sanding machine wedged in the trunk of the Audi. I step out, and between the taillight fenders the gap shadows the walk-machine silhouette. I move away from the random-stone plinth that shoulders the basement window and cross the promenade sidewalk toward the Stone-of-Light—Tuffeau, the same white limestone that built the castles of the Loire—its ashlar jambs and sculpted transom headfigure, her hair in the wind, framing the glaze entrance. 

My gaze enters the hush beyond the thresholds before I breach the glaze, crossing into the white-marble vestibule rising in its split-level cascade of light. I search for a workman to spread the word—”Gather a crew, meet me outside”—for a ritual unloading of the trunk, while the machine stirs a memory of impatience—a gnawing eagerness tightening its grip until this morning I all but exclaim now.  

Without farewell—other than workers set into their task—amid the grand crystal portals, fumbling keys from my hip pocket, I reluctantly leave my craft for the glazed threshold to the street and breach the entrance to reach the Audi. By the contours and hip swings, I slip behind the wheel, tweak the ignition, and cast a glance over my shoulder—reassured!—I pull off in the deserted avenue, spooling up the rise, sweeping along the asphalt bridging the flow of lawns—the artery toward Altitude One Hundred’s perch against the sky, a hedgerow of eloquent, fenestrated apartment blocks overseeing the park. 

Into the back streets—vista through hedgerows of vis-á-vis fenestrated brick façades—the gaping end of the street unveils a single apparition: swelling austere in the shadow of board-formed concrete, shape rugged fused a Greek-cross church encased in a circle. I enter and veer in reverence before the traffic-soot-darkened edifice, circling its monumental cubism and counting fate’s tying a string’s knot from a memory’s divergent ray of streets. 

Drawn in the launching street, I veer—at a guess—and sink in my seat as the reflective glass at the widespread corner comes on, bowing the lone contemporary five-tier apartment block’s peculiar posture perched at the roundabout. I gyrate past a branching street and, at the first free bay, maneuver the Audi alongside the storefront with wood-flooring paraphernalia on display. 

Alighting, weaving past the rear fender, I step to the curb, cross the sidewalk, and enter—before the trailing door’s jingling bell. An attendant behind a low counter lifts his eyes, echoing. “What can I do for you?”

I draw him into a greeting, laying out floorboards hidden beneath the linoleum flowing through the enfilade of rooms. I hear him out—his fairness drifting toward exaggeration, wrapping me in spending—but I stop him short, pluck his thoughts with a few professional expressions, and, after a brief tenor exchange, he lays out what I need and turns from the counter toward a nearby motorcycle—a guest before a row of parked sanders.

The storekeeper steps to a machine behind me, tilts the handlebar back to expose the black band of sandpaper, flips the lever, and pulls the band free—the undercarriage left gleaming its tandem drums. A nimble motion I barely register, trailing my words: “I’ll find my way of changing sandpaper.”

He moves through the garage-ish floor and returns with handfuls of coarse grain, explaining the shift from coarse to medium to fine before treating the wood. Back behind the counter, he fills out a form, spins the pad toward me; I read my details at the top, then date and sign the lower corners. With the retrieved form, I follow the youthful storekeeper heaving the machine and wiggling his way through the door. 

Along the sidewalk, I near the trunk, pick the key, and with a tweak the lid lifts—its gaping lips on watch as the sander sinks into its shadows—I ask for rope, waiting between the taillights as he disappears behind the store’s glass door and no sooner returns, handing me a ball of string, which as I wind through the lid’s tumbler latch and tie it off beneath the bumper - thump, thump, thump - the metallic lid lips protesting, ‘I’m not a pickup truck;’ I return his ball of string, and the attendant's patient watch, dissolves, as I swing a hip around the taillight fender, his ghost reflecting in the door, and I slip behind the steering wheel, tweak the ignition, and drive away, circling the roundabout toward the distant blackened cuboid church absorbing sunlight.

In the street’s waking reflected glaze, vague figures stir in the shadows—faces and hands waxing into light, unlatching the sashes, emerging behind the wrought-iron grill. They press, the grills swing—pivoting on their ancient lead-caulk hinges set into the bluestone ashlar jambs—freeing the men. 

Meanwhile, I untie the string from the latch beneath the lid. Adam approaches, and under his gaze I unwind the threads through the eye of the tow-hook protruding from the chassis. Valdek trails him, reaching in with Adam as I lift the lid, their hands bracing to heave the cumbersome machine out of the trunk. Teddy trails after them and plunges his hands into the shadowed depth, bringing to light the bands of sandpaper that come along with the machine. 

I - slap - the lid close behind the men, and the other half of the crew, waxing low into the hollow shadows of the basement, wait at the ingress for the machine. The men left on the sidewalk jump down into the dark—one by one, the last two behind the swinging across grills, vanishing behind the reflective street glaze that shuts the hollow of the window’s hush.

Beside the basement window, I breach the glazed door threshold into the white-marble vestibule and ascend its split-level cascade toward the grand crystal portal—offside, the flank portal waiting for the return of its stained-glass panes, its gaping doorway baring the old dark cupping floorboards. Through the enfilade of grand crystal portals, under the skylight at the far end, Adam and Valdek bustle and bend, their hands stripping the last streaks of linoleum to roll up and carry bundles away to the -1 basement stack, debris in wait for the container. 

With the jigsaw - Tzu-r-r-r... - I crosscut the tongue-and-groove boards. The claw hammer strikes the chisel—wedge, crack, waste out. I shave the tongue off new boards and slot them in, covering Radek’s feeder runs—cables, Son-Father plumber’s water supply, waste pipes—threaded through the joists to the technical shaft, the kitchen area, and repair the abolished former shower room under the master-bedroom window. 

The sander heaved from the stairwell’s gaping floor onto the ±0 Belle Époque bare wooden floor, Teddy out of sight, his voice in the rough continuous scraping sandpaper - Tzurrr... - shifting over the next few days through the enfilade of rooms to the nighthall upstairs - Tzurrr… - from raw grating the cupping floorboards to softening under the medium belt-sanding, a smooth passage up and down through the mezzanine room, until the hush of the sander—a call for its return to the hire flooring store.

Hunched over the floorboards, Teddy backtracks along the yellow grain runs and floorboard joints, treating them with a paint roller and brush, trailing a gleam—absorbed beneath the second coat, a film revealed in his shadow, from the interleading portal march to the front-door exit, then rests at the threshold before the white-marble landing to the hush of a weekend. 

Across the park’s flocculent canopy, sunlight peeks—a sunbeam chasing Nyx along the yellow grain of the floorboard runs into twilight depths. We return, and stepping into the ±0 Belle Époque, the morning gleam creeps a 1912-proud wash with reverence through the rooms in enfilade.  

Behind me, the stairwell echoes—revealing the workmen—rising to me as I figure out their struggle around -1’s newel post, then onto the flight of stairs, the chaotic stomping emanating through the gaping floor as they wrestle around +/-0’s newel post, with Basha’s husband wangling along the landing a 4-foot by 8-foot plywood board. Dithering, and followed by Valdek’s awkward grips on the board, they enter the dining room, straightening themselves past the brown marble mantelpiece. Coming up as I squat—after Adam holds the tape’s end at No. 17’s party wall projecting a cross-grain into the room—I square out by the rule of 3, 4, and tick off with a pencil the oblique 5, I screw a skirting to the floor. The men stand the plywood boards on the 8-foot landscape edge across the floorboards—falling to the squared line, the second aligning with the running grain—completing the L-shape that will back and tailor the kitchen.

My feet on the cross-grain, and under the foxy eyes of Basha’s husband’s hold, while Valdek props with fingers curling the top edge of the other plywood board, they fetch the boards from where they had been temporarily staked earlier against the room’s narrow white marble mantelpiece. I pull the carpenter pencil from my overall breast pocket and tick the plywood face 9 millimeters inland from the upright edge. With a middle finger as a guide, I run the pencil tip, trailing a line from the bottom to the top. I press the plywood face with my shoe toe, the end of Valdek’s board wedging Basha’s husband’s board to No. 17’s party wall, niche along the fireplace. Resting an elbow on the edges at the outer corner of the two landscape plywood boards—fast instead of joinery clamps—I grab the electric drill with a Phillips bit, and from Adam’s fingers I pick a screw; among others, the pinpoint sits on the line - Whirr… - as the self-tapping shaft threads from my pinched fingers and traverses blindly into the narrow edge of the other board—to my delight. A foot apart  - Whirr… - I punctuated three more screws, the head sinking flush. 

I step away, passing behind Valdek. Leaving the workmen behind, I swing my hips around the plywood board’s leg and slip into the cuisine enclave. I bend - Whirr.. whirr… whirr… - screws punctuating the earlier plinth cleat to secure the landscape plywood boards for their  futuristic lit backsplash. I pace away from the sweating of it all, in hesitation: ‘And now, what’s next?’ In turn, the workmen draw back their hands, as if from a farce they can’t imagine—a visitor’s elbow bar-counter before a bustling cook. 

After I couldn’t have the heart to demolish the narrow white marble mantelpiece and flush the wall—the hearth becoming a wine-rack feature in the kitchen—Vitoria and I stood over the plan, my mind an echo of Jean years earlier—her criteria of fridge, stove, around the worktop, and in view of a maid the sink shy by the backyard door—I felt again outside the culinary domain. So Victoria and I, set on an errand, descend the split-level vestibule aura—Helios behind the shimmering translucent kaleidoscopic stained-glass bull’s-eye rose, atop the peacock fan-tail transom. We breach the glazed oak entrance to the Audi curb-parked outside in the street. I swing my hips around the fender taillights into the street, leaving Victoria standing behind the undulated rooftop as I slip to my seat, topple—stretch an arm over the central console, pull up the sill button, roll back behind the wheel, tweak the ignition - smack - she shuts the door behind her, and we pull off. 

Weaving out of the city through tunneling troughs and surging asphaltic waves along the shadow of the medieval moat, the Little Beltway behind us, we emerge into the western outskirts where hedgerows of fenestrated brick façades slip away, conceding to cows grazing in the fields, while we converge onto a highway tricking traffic. Short of a hypnotic launching toward the sea, we exit into the countryside, only to duck amidst industrial sheds camouflaged behind flashy brand names, pools of asphalt, and park. We step out, without illusion toward the promise of an entrée, and enter the park of furnished stalls—weaving the snaking lanes, pausing by the kitchen furniture. Victoria's intrigue falls back; she shies from the soullessness of the flush and angles deprived of ancient life, while I perceive in the cuboid the bottom cabinets and their panels of doors. 

We move on behind a trolley, trundle up to the tellers, and out across a vast parking lot. “Audi,” I sigh, “you’ll have to make do—hire a panel van and consume my day returning to base!” I lift the trunk and slip the square cartons into the shadows, tying the lid down with yards of string. I slip into my seat, meet Victoria waiting, tweak the ignition. We pull from the midst of sleek, undulated, gleaming parking lot, weaving toward the highway—on course back home, eager to assemble.

As Victoria walks away, I stay behind, overseeing the Poles—shaken from their lull by my absence—slip the cartons through the -1 basement window to storage. I catch up with Valdek as his cutter knife slices the carton open and flips the flaps. I pull out the folded sheet, turn it upright, glance over cartoons, and grasp the plastic bag clinging with metallic fittings. Returning to the caricatures, Adam’s hands pass a panel into my sight; I point, flip, and tumble it until the perforations speak—the edge for oversight, the back lap-joint to rest, the others free for the order of assembly. 

I insert a pair of guide-dowels into the off-edge line of the panel Valdek holds by its face, and with Adam guiding the butt edge of the mating panels. The next panels, at the hands of the men, find themselves until the casing stands. My hand dips into the box’s open top; I reach into the void, sleeve the barrel nut, finger the cam-bolt screw, and tighten with the Allen-key—then jump to the far rear for the second cam bolt, working along until the eightfold are secure. I yield for their hands to walk the corners; they flip the enormous box, and I proceed to lay the Masonite backing, landing into the lap-joint - tap, tap, tap… - hammering the few pin-nails sinking into the chipboard. 

The casing livens under their hands, seeming to sprout limbs walking it into the kitchen enclave—lowering, shifting, and settling onto the boxed-out plinth skirt above the floorboards—before Adam and Valdek in flesh withdraw. 

They hand me the drill - whirr, whirr, whirr - screws between my fingers, the head locking the wall-mount brackets against the Masonite, echoing a plywood grip. One after another, the module casings walk and maneuver to settle in place, stretching into a by-directional horseshoe run that shapes the culinary enclave within the broader kitchen, broken only by the fireplace. 

The Facq deep-brown truck boxes out against the flocculent green hedgerow of the park, and tucks the slight driver, who stands before the glazed threshold of the entrance door—a call for the delivery. His figure stirs a faint chemistry I brush off as we backtrack our path; I leave him to cross the asphalt field toward unloading. 

From inside the ±0 Belles Époque enfilade, amid the Polish crew’s bustle, I’m called back to that weaseling eye of mistrust. Before a stacked and wrapped pallet, he wavers the delivery note for signature. A flea to my ear whispers, ‘Check the goods.’ But I’m up for time. The goods are warehouse-wrapped; I trust the  entity apart from the driver. 

I sign. His dithering turn trails an invisible chemistry, and I'm left to abandon the feeling of it. 

While Adam brings up the tools and accessories to the free-leg of the U-worktop in the culinary enclave. Valdek trails behind, carrying the carton box, scootching along the shy bathroom’s wall through the grand interleading portal, to lay it on the skylight drenched floor. He strips the package, where I find the sink's template. I spread the paper on the worktop that finishes topping off the Ikea bottom cabinets. 

Before the plywood backsplash, I drill  - Whirr - a hole through. I sleeve the jigsaw blade - Gr-gr-gr… - following the line through rounded corners, dropping the waste into Adam’s hands. The composite granite sink—white, and Victoria’s choice from Facq’s showroom—incases, the rim set to sit, and, screwing a few claw-brackets to the underside of the worktop, I walk away with another spur of relief, seeing the kitchen coming together. I leave Adam to gather the tools, and Valdek to clean up the sawdust and take away the debris. The crew’s traffic staggers to the hollow wood stairs and down through the stairwell into a hush, only to resurface in dissipating footsteps sighs along from the marble landing, down the split-level fall, then silent as the entrance closes to the street for the night.

Another day ends as I turn my back from the nighthall’s offside doorway, gaping into the bathroom; I’ve screeded over the snaking hydraulic tubes meant to warm the two-foot-square, inch-thick black granite slabs I laid to finish the floor—yet the weight of stalled progress clings to me. 

Ghostly César and André—the son and father weasels–wrench at patience. They slip out of sight,  leaving hot and cold water flexible blue and red sleeved tubes run through toward the shy technical shaft service behind the wall, their progress invisible for days, behind the fiberglass vessel of a bathtub abandoned in the middle of the room. 

Beyond the threshold of patience, I ask Adam to call Radek, he returns with the approaching electrician. When he stands by the abandoned plumbing, I say—“Radek! [Vas-y, aide-les !]—Move in! Help them out!” In the blind spot of out-of-sight activity, at a next glimpse, the angled bathtub is wedged into the far corner, shining white; the trio slip into the shadow, metallic legs propped and peeking their work—while days and weeks trail on, with unfinished plumbing.

I count the mezzanine landing, my passage by the +1 sentinel of a door, the next backswing flight to the +2 door, and onto the fight to the +3 niche of doors, to the apartment, my ego refuses the call; weeks mount into the third, a despise for the phone conceding to the joiner—wavering in a vessel at sea—when that morning - ring - Victoria leaps and swipes the handset, her receptionist’s alert voice answers, “Victoria.” Before passing the handset onto me, my cold knuckles sticking against my cheek, I say, “Hello?” As the speaker’s cup delivers, to my surprise, the overdue and abandoned joiner—my despise born of abandonment and the ideal I once held—yet I thrill as he says, “The baldachin bedstead is ready for you to collect.” 

I return from an errand up to Altitude Hundred, to bustling men stampeding the floorboards around the nighthall door leaf, sparing me an envious glance—while I stand baffled by the puzzling spread of the bedstead: two H-assembled pieces, loose top rails, base rails, and short spindled posters strewn across the floorboards without instruction. 

In the puzzling layout, I initiate a logic, screwing the upper short-spindle onto the H-footboard, the two rising into full-height posters, diminishing the parts on the floor. Adam and Valdek, each at the assembled H-headboard, lift the extended posters, their grip holding the H-frame upright before No. 13’s party wall, centered between the light switches. 

Two oak-heavy, foot-wide rails, inch-thick, fine-sanded, their ends scribbled with long, rushed pencil strokes, wait to be discovered; from the mere lines, giant primitive Roman numbers emerge, matching the tenons to the mortices in the poster-blocks of the assembled H-head- and H-footboards. 

I slot one rail into the poster-block’s mortice and discover the black steel bolt, its pin-wrench head set to run a raceway toward a blind embedded nut; I finger-screw to stop, then insert a nail into the ball bolt-head and wrench until tight—the old-fashioned challenge beaten—before tackling Valdek’s corner post. 

Adam and Valdek shift alongside the tilted flank rail tipped on the floorboards, as I step to the lying-down H-footboard. Bent, I spread my arms in an outreach grip of both top-posters, lifting them upright. Freeing one hand from the far poster, I draw my grip inward and step offside in a spine-torque bend, guiding Valdek’s rail tenon slot into the mortice; the heel of my hand hammers the rail into the poster-block, and from the inside corner I bolt-screw, nail wrenching tight, before shifting onto Adam’s side to finish tightening the mattress framework. 

The ghosts: Basha’s husband everywhere and nowhere; César and André flickering about the kitchen cabinet, the black gas pipe seeming to thread itself, leaving a shining ball valve in the fireplace, a flexible hose discreetly joined to the four-burner cooking plate. 

Radek’s underfloor cables—drawn from the technical-shaft’s distribution panel—surface with him as he wrings himself under the worktop; a pliers’ tweak skins the insulation, wires the igniter. 

The plumbers remain an out-of-place glimpse, their presence revealed as they leave shining in the shadow of a deep base cabinet—a thick accordion tube surgically fitted into the smokestack for kitchen-fume evacuation.

In the offside hatch light, I move on from the shadows of the loft’s mansard room, as the women unhook a kaleidoscopic wardrobe of hangers, stacking Alexandre’s bed—vacant, the boy kept from living it rough during the house renovations. Victoria’s clothes pile on, emptying the doorless Ikea wardrobe, its boxy void intransigent—wrenched through the doorjambs and out of the room toward the +3 niche, before the flight of stairs. 

The floating casing drifts amid rubber-limbed men in orbit, down the steep barn flight of stairs, wavering like a barrel descend, jabbing the jags of the dogleg staircase, maneuvering around the +2 landing, the +1 descent, and onto the ±0 Belle Époque landing, hustling into the interior. 

From beside the nighthall doorway, Teddy enters with his clan from the shadow of my peripheral eyesight—the herd rising into the room under his shepherding, bringing in her box-base. With a helping hand, his sinks into the bedstead, the pair settled, amazingly classic and lofty—after our squatting on these box-mattresses on the +3 loft floor through the ±0 Belle-Époque renovation. 

When the last man leaves the master bedroom, positioning the pair of Ikea wardrobes, Victoria appears in the doorway, stepping up, spreading a mattress cover, sleek over the seam. Basha, in her steps, embracing draping hangers of bright clothes, enters the room, followed by her sister Christina; together they approach the skeleton baldaquin bed. Their arms shake and flap as they unfold Victoria’s wardrobe with a forward dive, freeing their hands, turning, they step away—fetching up the swingback flights of stairs, at the sigh of ascending past the +1 landing, the +2, and on the +3 unfolding into the mansard room, toward the waiting kitchen and its shared shower.

I step into the nighthall and turn toward the No. 13 party-wall, thread the first two stairs, then climb the dancing treads spiraling around the newel post, straightening beneath the slit window pierced by Helios’ golden rays. I breach the golden beam through the doorway into the mezzanine room. The clan trails Adam and Valdek with the dismantled inverted loft, once nestled within the high-ceilinged street-front room on Dr. Decroly Avenue. 

I reassemble the headboard’s three-by-three-foot laminated pine pillars, slot the box-mattress base. In the shadow, men figure, and walk away to a hush, before Victoria emerges, peeking over arms stacked with bedding, eyes on the ladder we wore out every night for nine months at Dr. Decroly, her private sanctuary. She sighs at ghostly little feet, climb in turn to the overhead deck—in soft dialogue with her existentially estranged husband—‘André Daniel! We’re in equality with you at home, and with Pipo’s grandparents. He has his room, and more. He can invite his friend Lorenzo for a stay.’ 

I turn away, descend the spiraling stairs, and emerge from the nighthall doorway—shying from a glow on the panels of Victoria’s antique black Duco wardrobe that stack upright against the wall—and flick my eyesight through the study’s grand crystal portal. Christina—still carrying the echo of her earlier crouch beneath the +3’s mansard’s hatch, sunlight shafting across her shoulder—spurs herself on, emptying the kitchen base cabinets, doors square open.

Teddy, and his clan, eyes shifting and nowhere to eclipse, surge and fade in waves—stomping, crossing voices—through the stairwell and reaching me from across the ±0 landing doorway, effusing the genie of their thoughts: ’We’re working—sweating it out!’ With intermittent bashing, carrying more crates in their arms, they stack the dining room, before turning away, leaving the kitchen crystal portal behind them, the women’s bustling figures there—hands rummaging, emptying crates and stacking shelves. 

In the hush of the men, out of the shadows of the -1 basement storage, Victoria directs the spots as her yellow upholstered sofa and chesterfields emerge into the street’s peeling light, slipping before the French-door floor rug, sketching a gleam that etches the black Duco dining chair huddling the table by the shadowing elaborate mantelpiece. 

Christina vanished from the culinary enclave, closing cabinet doors on echo-packed pots, pans, the culinary utensils - clang - dropping into the depths of the shelves. Basha’s overbearing, skittering tempo, clears crates, stuffing the top shelves with opened coffee, muesli, flour, and food wraps - cling - aligning ceramics on the higher ledges she can barely reach.

In the hush of the master bedroom, Victoria figures forward, cradling clean bedding and pillowcases, stacking the Victorian chair; its oval yellow backrest and seat vanish beneath the swell. She stands in the window’s framing dusk, beyond the backyards’ row of jagged rooftops, and flips the linen—billowing into an unfurling swell. I reach for the fluttering sheet, sleek; each of us tucks our side in, She flip-flops the duvet, spreading the edges over the oak railing. Victoria flips my pillow across: I peel away, landing it down.

But tracking back to the night-hall, César and his father André’s incompetence lingers in plain sight: the white bathtub, its front skirt open, shadows a workshop’s intrigue—a chassis raised on jacks amid scattered tools and wrappings. 

The tiler in me had long weighed in—ceramic tiles flipped and pressed onto the bathroom’s glue-striated walls, then walked away from the grid of tinted, sprawling marble veins—but the thermostatic mixer lies open to the cause, in shambles before the white granite slab to the vanity cabinet, mirrors reflecting the wicked gap left my call for the plumbers. It only regurgitates Radek, who stands by, soft-voiced, smiling off in his foreign accent: “César and André! [Ils ne savent pas comment installer le système]—They can’t figure out how to install the mixer.” I’m left to find time—Victoria’s Facq showroom selection: faucet in place, water-pressure regulator, hot and cold mixer—water spout and flow through the drain away.