Pure (27 page)

The engineer gives the signal to the carter. The carter whistles to the horses. There is a jangling of tack, the crushing sound of iron rims turning on stone and, from the backs of the carts, a muffled tapping and grating as the bones settle beneath their covers.

The priests begin to chant a psalm –
Miserere Mei, Deus
– but the rhythm of their step, of their singing is confused by the tread of Colbert’s boots marching to a rhythm of their own. He leads them towards the river, red face thrust grimly forwards as though on his way to harrow Hell.

5

The pit by the cemetery wall is emptied, filled. Two more are opened. The engineer is refining his methods. He pushes the men harder, adds time to the working day as night slowly retreats before the season. A second miner absconds, returns three days later, silent and hungry. As for the others, who knows? To look at, they seem reconciled to the work, the character of the work, hardened to it. He would like very much to know what they speak of when they are alone. He admires them, their courage, that air of independence they have. Do they not seem less owned than he does? Do they not seem more free? There is one in particular who catches his eye, his imagination. The miner with the clipped finger, the violet eyes, who comes and goes like an apparition. The others, it seems, discreetly defer to him, move about him in some shifting constellation of respect. Lecoeur – a sure source of information on the rest – has little to say about him, only that he attached himself to the party shortly before they left Valenciennes, a replacement for a miner who declared himself unfit to travel. Name of Hoornweder. Probably Hoornweder. Hoornweder or Tant, or perhaps Moemus. They often simply invent names for themselves. Does the engineer have any cause to be dissatisfied with him? No, no, says Jean-Baptiste. There is no cause. It was nothing but his own curiosity.

By the middle of the month they are sending five processions a week to the Porte d’Enfer and for a while these processions – the droning priests, the tapers, the carts with their mournful cargo – are added to the list of the city’s entertainments. The
Mercure de France
prints a little guide giving the times of the processions and where they may be seen to best advantage (crossing the river is highly recommended). Young couples, particularly those from the idle classes, allow themselves to be roused by the sight. Moralists, grimly amused, look on with folded arms. Foreign visitors write letters home, strain for metaphor, to see all France in this winding caravan of bones. Then the city offers a collective shrug. It looks around for other ways to amuse itself. The cafés. Politics. Another riot, perhaps.

6

Armand invites himself to the Monnards’ house to play Ziguette’s pianoforte. He employs, at the Monnards’ expense, a man immaculately blind with tools like a tooth-puller, who tut-tuts and grimaces and climbs half inside the instrument, and at last renders it tuneful.

When Armand sits to play, he seems to throw sounds into the keys from the ends of his fingers. At the first big crash of chords, Ragoût cowers under the settle, then comes out and digs his claws frenziedly into the weave of the rug.

‘You are killing my organ,’ shouts Armand over the sound of himself, ‘but you have given me this and so I forgive you.’

‘I have not given it to you,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Ownership,’ says Armand, ‘will soon be a much more flexible concept.’

Jean-Baptiste suffers with headaches. He will suffer with them for the rest of his life. During the worst of them, the world is covered with a livid purple membrane, as if he looked out of the crack in his own head. He has to sit, perfectly still. The pain builds until it is released through copious vomiting. Other attacks are less severe and can be controlled – it was Guillotin’s suggestion – by drinking three or four cups of strong coffee.

Of the lost words some, like pigeons back to their loft, return to him. He writes them down, pen and black ink in the back of his journal:

Razor

Hoop

Ruler

Box-crib

Hat
. . .

He still cannot read through a page of Buffon, cannot remember when or why he bought it. He wonders how much of a man’s life is the story he tells himself about himself. He wonders how much of his story he has lost. Wonders if it matters.

In the credit column, he is no longer troubled by dreams. He sleeps soundly. The bottle of medicine, the glutinous
lachryma papaveris
, is on the mantelpiece in his room, but he has not touched it since the attack, not even on those nights he lies down thinking of the hundred things he might have said to her, the Austrian, that dusk on the rue Saint-Denis.

At the bottom of the tenth pit, the remains of some thirty or forty children. There really isn’t time to arrive at a more exact figure. Guillotin and Thouret age the children at between four and ten years of age at the time of their demise. Manetti, consulted, nods. An epidemic in the orphanage at Plessy – 1740? Perhaps 1741. He couldn’t swear. In the pit the children have been laid head to toe, much as they might have slept together in the orphanage. The men are affected; they puff on their pipes, finger their charms. The doctors collect some of the skulls, pile them like cabbages or turnips into one of Jeanne’s wicker baskets and take them to the workshop.

The last days of March, there is snowfall. It sticks like melted wax to the black walls of the church, lies crisp and glittering over the piled bones. Then it freezes. Digging is more like scraping. Their tools ring on the earth. To open the eleventh pit, they have to keep a fire burning above it all night. It is winter’s last throw.

Through all the next week the ground thaws, turns to mud, molasses. When a coffin is pulled out, a skull, the sound is amphibious, oddly sexual. Coats are unbuttoned, hats pushed back. Even at les Innocents – and even to one whose sense of smell is as withered as the engineer’s – the air is altered and has, at unpredictable intervals, an unnerving purity to it that makes them all, men and women, miners and their masters, imagine themselves somewhere else, setting out perhaps on a long walk into the country, a stroll to some river fringed with willows.

Jeanne one morning, just after the engineer has arrived at the cemetery, summons him, her face lit with excitement. She leads him to the northwest corner of the cemetery, close to where they emptied the first of the common pits.

‘You see?’ she says, pointing to a patch of little yellow flowers, the leaves shaped like mottled green spades, and close by, a clump of taller plants with crimson flowers.

‘The seeds were buried,’ she says. ‘Your digging has brought them to life again.’

He stares at them, the yellow, the crimson flowers. He says nothing. He is utterly disconcerted.

7

He does not see her, does not hear her until she is standing beside him. It is dusk and he is about to enter the Monnards’ house. A large wagon – M. Hulot et Fils, Déménageurs à la Noblesse – is rattling down the street towards the rue Saint-Honoré. Startled, he stares at her in a way he imagines must be quite comical.

‘You wanted to speak with me?’ she says.

‘That was weeks ago,’ he says.

‘So you no longer wish to speak with me?’

‘I do. Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘Very well.’ She waits, looks directly into his eyes. She is not wearing the red cloak today but has a shawl or scarf of some light stuff covering her hair. Her face is stiff, her lips pressed hard together.

‘I have thought of you,’ he says, opening his mouth and letting the words come as they will. It is too late for anything circumspect, for the careful measuring of effects. ‘I have thought of you. Often.’

She nods. The gesture does not help him.

‘We could go inside,’ he says. ‘Talk inside.’

‘In the Monnards’ house?’

‘They would not object. They are in no position to object to my wishes.’

‘On account of the daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of what she did?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was your friend?’

‘Not as you mean it.’

‘And how do I mean it?’

‘You know how you mean it.’

‘It would not have mattered.’

‘No?’

‘Why should it have mattered?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t know.’

They pause, as though the mind of each was briefly dazzled by the sheer strangeness of such a conversation, of it happening at all. It is Héloïse who recovers first. ‘And that is what you wished to say? That you have thought of me?’

‘It is not everything.’

‘And the rest?’

‘I wondered if you might . . . come here.’

‘Visit you?’

‘If you might stay here. Might care to.’

‘In the house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let us be clear,’ she says.

‘I thought I was,’ he says.

‘You wish to take me as your mistress?’

‘I want you to stay with me.’

‘What is this
stay
? You mean to live with you?’

‘Yes.’

Now, he thinks, now she will throw back her head and laugh. She will accuse him, in a voice full of scorn, of not knowing what he is saying. And it is true. He does not. Was this his message? Live with me? Or has he simply said the most extravagant thing he can think of ? He readies himself to say some harsh, dismissive thing to her, something to cover his humiliation, but when she speaks again, her voice is quiet, serious. Not unfriendly.

‘You have lived with a woman before?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says. Then, ‘Is your question practical? Are you afraid I will not know how to behave?’

‘We do not know each other,’ she says.

‘We do not know each other well,’ he says.

‘On better acquaintance, you might find me disagreeable. I might find you so.’

‘You do not wish to live with me?’

‘I have not said that. Only I do not believe you have thought of . . . all that you need to. Not properly.’

‘You are wrong,’ he says.

‘Or you are wrong.’

‘I am not wrong.’

‘Ha! You do not care to be contradicted.’

She makes a shape with her mouth, forms her lips as she might in the market when dealing with some canny, persistent stall-holder. Then she looks down and slowly grinds the toe of one of her shoes on the cobbles.

‘You like me,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘
Why?
’

‘You must know,’ she says.

‘Of course,’ he says, though in fact it has never occurred to him that he needed a reason for liking her. ‘You looked at me,’ he says.

‘I noticed you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is true,’ she says. ‘I did notice you.’

‘You were buying cheese,’ he says.

She nods. ‘You looked lost.’

‘You also.’

‘Lost?’

‘Out of place.’

‘Were I to agree to this,’ she says, after another of those pauses in which she seemed carefully to weigh each of his words, ‘I must be free to come and go as I choose. I am too old to take orders from you or anyone else.’

‘You would be free.’

‘And if you ever struck me . . .’

‘I would not.’

‘I heard you held a knife to a man’s throat. That night on Saint-Denis.’

‘It was a key, not a knife.’

‘A key?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because he insulted me?’

‘Yes.’

‘He will not be the last.’

‘Then I will fight them.’

‘With a key?’

‘You could come soon,’ he says. ‘Do you have many things?’

‘Some clothes,’ she says. ‘Some books.’

‘Books?’

‘You imagined I could not read?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I did not think that.’

‘I would like more books. The good editions. Not those for fifteen sous that come apart in your hands when you open them.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not those.’

‘And the theatre,’ she says. ‘It is a long while since I have been there.’

‘The theatre,’ he says. ‘I would like that too.’

For a while they are quiet together, peaceable. Even the street has entered one of its periods of occasional hush, barely a soul abroad. It is likely, thinks Jean-Baptiste, that from one of these windows they are being watched by someone who knows who they both are. He could not care less.

‘Is that you?’ she asks, turning to look diagonally across the street to where, on the shutters of the haberdasher’s, black paint proclaims another of Monsieur Bêche’s threats to the mighty. This one concerns the fate awaiting the governor of the Bastille. It went up a week ago and has still not been painted out.