Pure (3 page)

‘I am afraid not.’

They sigh; each turns over a card. At the back of the room, a pair of cats are testing their claws on the silk upholstery of a divan. Jean-Baptiste bows, excuses himself. But won’t he stay to play a while? Piquet passes the time as well as anything. He tells them he is trying to find his way out.

Out?
They look at him and laugh.

In the corridor once more, he stops to watch a woman with heaped purple hair being carried horizontally through a doorway. Her head turns; her black eyes study him. She is not the sort of person you ask directions of. He descends to the floor below on a narrow stone screw of service stairs. Here, soldiers lounge on benches, while boys in blue uniforms drowse curled on tables, under tables, on window seats, anywhere there is space for them. Towards him come a dozen girls running half blind behind their bundles of dirty linen. To avoid being trampled, he steps (neither knocking nor scratching) through the nearest door and arrives in a space, a large, spreading room where little trees, perhaps a hundred of them, are stood in great terracotta pots. Though he is a northerner, a true northerner, he knows from his time waiting on the Comte de S— that these are lemon trees. They have been lagged with straw and sacking against the coming winter. The air is scented, softly green, the light slanting through rows of arched windows. One of these he forces open, and climbing onto a water-barrel, he jumps down into the outside world.

Behind him, in the palace, countless clocks sing the hour. He takes out his own watch. It is, like the suit, a gift, this one from Maître Perronet upon the occasion of his graduation. The lid is painted with the masonic all-seeing eye, though he is not a mason and does not know if Maître Perronet is one. As the hands touch the hour of two, the watch gently vibrates on his palm. He shuts its case, pockets it.

Ahead of him, a path of pale gravel leads between walls of clipped hedge too tall to see over. He follows the path; there is nothing else to guide him. He passes a fountain, its basin waterless and already full of autumn leaves. He is cold, suddenly tired. He pulls on his riding coat. The path divides. Which way now? Between the paths is a little arbour with a semicircular bench and above the bench a stone cupid mottled with lichens, his arrow aimed at whoever sits below him. Jean-Baptiste sits. He unseals the paper Lafosse gave to him. It contains the address of a house where he is to take up his lodging. He opens the mouth of the purse, pours some of the heavy coins into his hand. A hundred livres? Perhaps a little more. He is glad of it – relieved – for he has been living on his meagre savings for months, owes money to his mother, to Cousin André. At the same time he can see that the amount is not intended to flatter him. It feels closely calculated. The going rate for whatever he is now, a contractor, a state hireling, a destroyer of cemeteries . . .

A
cemetery
! Still he cannot quite take it in. A cemetery in the centre of Paris! A notorious boneyard! God knows, whatever it was he had expected on his journey here, whatever project he imagined might be offered to him – perhaps some work on the palace itself – this he had never dreamt of. Could he have refused it? The possibility had not occurred to him, had not, in all likelihood, existed. As to whether digging up bones was compatible with his status, his
dignity
as a graduate of the Ecole Royale des Ponts et Chaussées, he must try to find some way of thinking of it more . . . abstractly. He is, after all, a young man of ideas, of ideals. It cannot be impossible to conceive of this work as something worthy, serious. Something for the greater good. Something the authors of the Encyclopedie would approve of.

In front of the bench, a dozen sparrows have gathered, their feathers puffed against the cold. He watches them, their ragged hopping over the stones. In one of the pockets of his coat – a pocket deep enough to put all the sparrows inside – he has some bread from the breakfast he took in darkness, on horseback. He bites into it, chews, then pulls off a corner of the bread and crumbles it between thumb and finger. In their feeding, the little birds appear to dance between his feet.

4

On the rue de la Lingerie, her chair positioned at the right-hand side of the window in the drawing room on the first floor, Emilie Monnard – known to everyone as Ziguette – is gently sucking her lower lip and watching the day close over the rue Saint-Denis, the rue aux Fers, the market of les Halles. The market, of course, has long since been packed away, its edible litter carried off by those who live on it. What remains, that trash of soiled straw, fish guts, blood-dark feathers, the green trimmings of flowers brought up from the south, all this will blow away in the night or be scattered by brooms and flung water in tomorrow’s dawn. She has watched it all her life and has never wearied of it, the market and – more directly in her view – the old church of les Innocents with its cemetery, though in the cemetery nothing has happened for years, just the sexton and his granddaughter crossing to one of the gates, or more rarely, the old priest in his blue spectacles, who seems simply to have been forgotten about. How she misses it all. The shuffling processions winding from the church doors, the mourners tilted against each other’s shoulders, the tolling of the bell, the swaying coffins, then the muttering of the office and finally – the climax of it all – the moment the dead man or woman or child was lowered into the ground as though being fed to it. And when the others had left and the place was quiet again,
she
was still there, her face close to the window, keeping watch like a sister or an angel.

She sighs, looks back to the street, to the rue aux Fers, sees Madame Desproux, the baker’s wife, coming past the Italian fountain and pausing to talk to the widow Aries. And there, up by the market cross, is Merda the drunk. And that is Boubon the basket-maker, who lives alone behind his shop on the rue Saint-Denis . . . And
there
, coming from the end of the rue de la Fromagerie, is that woman in her red cloak. Did Merda just call something to her? It must relieve him to insult a creature lower even than himself, but the woman does not pause or turn. She is too used to the likes of Merda. How tall she is! And how absurdly straight she holds herself! Now someone, some man, is talking to her, though he keeps himself at a distance. Who is he? Surely not Armand (or should one say, it is all too likely to be Armand)? But now they part and each is soon lost to view. When darkness falls, some among those men who, in the light, tease her or insult her, will pursue her, make an arrangement, a rendezvous in a room somewhere. Is that how it works? And once they are in the room . . . Ah, she has imagined it, pictured it in great detail, has even, in the privacy and firelight of her bedroom, made herself blush furiously with such thoughts, sins of the mind she should confess to Père Poupart at Saint-Eustache, and perhaps would if Père Poupart did not look so like a scalded pig. Why are there no handsome priests in Paris? One has no inclination to confess anything to an ugly man.

‘Anyone interesting in the street, my dear?’ asks her mother, coming into the room behind her, a candle in her dimpled hand.

‘Not really.’

‘No?’

Madame Monnard stands behind her daughter, strokes the girl’s hair, absently winds a finger in its beloved thickness. On the rue aux Fers, a lamp-lighter is propping his ladder against the lamp opposite the church. In silence they watch him, his neat ascent, his reaching into the glass head with his taper, the blossoming of yellow light, his swift descent. When Madame and Monsieur Monnard first came to the house, there were no lamps at all on the rue aux Fers and hardly any on the rue Saint-Denis. Paris was darker then, though everyone was accustomed to it, inured.

‘I am afraid,’ says Madame, ‘that our new lodger has become lost. As he is from the country, I very much doubt he will be able to find his way among so many streets.’

‘He can ask people,’ says Ziguette. ‘I suppose he can speak French.’

‘Of course he can speak French,’ says Madame, uncertainly.

‘I think,’ says Ziguette, ‘he is going to be very small and very hairy.’

Her mother laughs, covers her mouth, her little brown teeth, with her hand. ‘What silly notions you have,’ she says.

‘And he eats,’ continues Ziguette, who since earliest girlhood has been given to flights of this kind, sometimes amusing, sometimes alarming, ‘only apples and pig’s feet. And he wipes his fingers on his beard. Like this.’

She is miming it, clawing her fingers through the air beneath her shapely pink chin, when, with a clatter of wooden sabots, the servant girl comes in.

‘You have not seen anyone, have you, Marie?’ asks Madame.

‘No,’ says Marie, stopping in the gloom by the door, her young and sturdy figure braced as if for some accusation.

‘Your father assured me he would be home early,’ says Madame to her daughter. ‘It would be most unfortunate if we had to receive him ourselves. Marie, Monsieur Monnard has not sent some message, has he?’

The girl shakes her head. She has been the servant there for eighteen months. Her own father was a tanner in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, dead of the typhoid when she was too young to remember him. Like everyone else in the house, she suffers from dreams.

Dusk gives way to the first of the night. Madame Monnard lights more candles. She pokes the fire, carefully. They burn wood, and wood is expensive. A little log no longer or thicker than a man’s arm costs twelve sous and one needs twenty such to keep a fire burning all day. She sits, picks up the edition of the
Journal des Dames Modernes
she and Ziguette were so entertained by yesterday and turns again to the illustration of the savages, noble savages – great lords in their own savage kingdoms – whose faces were fantastically printed from chin to eyes with blue tattoos, swirls and spirals like plans for formal gardens. Just imagine if their lodger should arrive with such a face! What a coup! Better even than the pianoforte (and what a triumph that had been, the instrument raised up on a pulley like a cow being rescued from a quarry, then swung through the window, half the neighbourhood looking on). A pity it cannot be kept in tune. It drove Ziguette’s poor tutor almost to tears, though it must be admitted Signor Bancolari was the sort of gentleman never far from tears.

On the floor below, the street door thuds. A draught, finding its way up the stairs, ripples the candle flames in the drawing room and a few moments later Monsieur Monnard appears. He is still wearing his leather apron from the shop, the leather dark with use, with age, though why it should be necessary for him to wear an apron at all given that he has no fewer than three perfectly competent apprentices to do all the polishing and sharpening is quite beyond Madame Monnard’s understanding, quite beyond. Her husband, however, must be master in his own house.

They greet each other. He greets his daughter, who is now at the piano stool picking out notes that may or may not be part of some melody she knows. He takes off his wig and scratches hard at his scalp.

‘Still no sign of our guest?’ he asks.

‘Ziguette,’ says Madame Monnard, ‘has been saying the most ridiculous things about him. She thinks that because he is from Normandy, he will not speak French.’

‘In Brittany,’ says Monsieur Monnard, ‘they speak something quite impenetrable. It’s thought they learnt it from the gulls.’

‘Why is he coming, anyway?’ asks Ziguette. ‘Wasn’t he content at home?’

‘I assume,’ says her father, ‘that he intends to make his fortune. Isn’t it why anyone comes to Paris?’

Marie asks if she should bring in the soup. Monsieur wishes to know what kind of soup they have today.

‘Bones,’ says Marie.

‘She means from Tuesday’s veal,’ says Madame Monnard. ‘To which we have added any number of pleasant things.’

‘Like pig’s feet,’ says Ziguette, which sends her mother into trills of delighted laughter.

5

He arrives between the soup and the serving of a little stew, also made with the remains of Tuesday’s veal. He had not intended to arrive so late, nor in darkness. His luggage, a large, ribbed trunk (one rib cracked when it was unloaded from the top of the coach), is carried between himself and an enormous mute boy, some relation of the people he lodged with last night by the coaching offices.

‘We were afraid you had become lost!’ calls Monsieur Monnard, affably, from the top of the first flight of stairs. ‘Lost entirely.’

‘I was at Versailles, monsieur, and then the horse was lame . . .’

‘Versailles!’ echoes Monsieur Monnard, watching the young man ascend towards him, then ushering him into the half-warmth of the upstairs room. ‘Monsieur Babette has been at Versailles today.’

‘Baratte, monsieur.’

‘Eh?’

‘I am Baratte. My name, monsieur. Baratte.’

He is given a place opposite Ziguette. There is some debate as to whether the stew should go back to the kitchen while the new arrival has his soup. Will the soup be hot enough? Does Monsieur Baratte
care
for soup?

‘And how was Versailles today?’ asks Monsieur Monnard, as if Versailles were a place he frequented.

Jean-Baptiste takes a spoonful of the tepid soup and discovers in himself a violent hunger. Had he been alone, he might have drunk it straight from the bowl and immediately found somewhere to fall asleep. Still, he must make some effort to ingratiate himself. These people will constitute his most intimate society, at least for a while. He does not want them to think he is dull or rude, a boorish provincial. Does not want them to think he is any of the things that in moments of weakness he believes himself to be. He looks up from his bowl. What a large, red mouth that girl has! It must be the grease from the soup that makes her lips shine so. ‘Versailles,’ he says, turning to her father, ‘is the strangest place I’ve ever seen.’