Pure (4 page)

‘A very good answer,’ says Madame Monnard with a decisive nod of her head. She tells Marie to pour their guest some wine. ‘And another stick on the fire, Marie. I’ve never known it this cold in October.’

He learns that the Monnards like to talk – a quite different sort of talking to the more deliberate rhythms he grew up with in Bellême. They also like to eat – soup, stew, fried dabs, beetroot salad, cheese, a little cake. Everything, as far as he can tell, properly cooked, but everything having at the back of it some odd taint, a flavour he does not think should live in food.

After dinner, they sit by the fire. In the cold seasons the room is both drawing room and dining room and serves well enough, though the presence of the pianoforte means that when crossing the room, one must always make a little detour. Monsieur Monnard relieves some tension in his face with a series of grimaces. The female Monnards pretend to sew. There’s a scratching at the door. A cat is admitted, a cat quite as big as the dog Jean-Baptiste watched piss on the floor outside the minister’s office, a black tom with a ragged half-moon missing from one of its ears. It is called Ragoût. No one can remember why or agree on who named it. It comes straight towards Jean-Baptiste, sniffs at the soles of his shoes.

‘What have you been up to, you naughty fellow?’ says Madame Monnard, scooping the animal with some effort into her lap. ‘I won’t answer for his morals,’ she says, laughing gaily, then adds, ‘Ragoût and Ziguette are inseparable.’

Jean-Baptiste glances at the girl. It seems to him she looks at the cat with some distaste.

‘The little gentlemen who like cheese,’ says Monsieur Monnard, ‘do not last long in this house.’

‘What Ragoût don’t get,’ says Madame Monnard, ‘my husband traps with his little machines.’

‘Machines?’ asks Jean-Baptiste, for whom the word has always produced a certain thrill.

‘I make ’em and sell them at the shop,’ begins Monsieur Monnard. ‘A cage, a spring, a little door . . .’ He makes a movement with his hand. ‘The creature is imprisoned. Then you need only drop the trap into a pail of water.’

‘Marie cuts their throats,’ says Ziguette.

‘I’m sure she does no such thing,’ says her mother. To her guest she says, ‘My husband has an establishment on the rue des Trois Mores.’

‘Selling traps, monsieur?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Blades, monsieur, from plain to fancy. We finish and sharpen and polish. We are quite favoured by the Quality. Père Poupart of Saint-Eustache cuts his meat with one of my knives.’

‘When it gets cold,’ says Ziguette, ‘rats come inside. Into the house.’

‘It was the same at home,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘on the coldest nights.’

‘In Normandy?’ asks Madame Monnard, as though amazed to hear rats had discovered so remote a spot.

‘You must miss it,’ says Ziguette.

‘Home?’ For a moment, in his weariness, he sees crows, black rags, lifting off a field at dusk, sees the lonely spire of a country church. ‘I suppose I am content to be where my work takes me.’

‘Very manly,’ says Madame Monnard, probing the cat’s fur.

‘And what is your work here?’ asks Ziguette. She looks so pretty when she asks this, so pert in her creamy gown, he is tempted to tell her exactly what he has come to do. He wonders what Lafosse has said, what story, if any, he has told them.

‘I am here,’ he says, aware that all three are suddenly listening to him intently, ‘to make a survey of les Innocents.’

‘Les Innocents?’ repeats Madame Monnard, after a pause during which nothing could be heard except the purring of the cat, the crackle of the fire.

‘I am an engineer,’ he says. ‘You were not told?’

‘Who would tell us?’ asks Monsieur Monnard.

‘The same as made the arrangement for my lodging here.’

‘We were informed of nothing but that a gentleman from Normandy would have need of a room.’

‘With meals,’ adds his wife.

‘Indeed,’ confirms Monsieur Monnard. ‘A morning and an evening meal.’

Ziguette says, ‘We had a musician stay with us once.’

‘A rather particular gentleman,’ says Monsieur Monnard.

‘With red hair,’ says Madame.

Ziguette opens her mouth as though to add something; then, after a beat, a quarter-note of hesitation, she closes it again.

‘Yours,’ says Madame, smiling complacently, ‘is a very practical vocation. One must congratulate you.’

‘My teacher,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘at the Ecole des Ponts, was Maître Perronet. He is the greatest engineer in France.’

Above the cat’s head, Madame Monnard applauds him with her fingertips.

‘And did you ever build a bridge?’ asks Ziguette.

‘One. In Normandy.’

‘And what did it cross?’

‘The corner of a lake.’

‘One does not think of lakes having corners,’ says Ziguette.

‘You had better tell Marie, monsieur,’ says Madame Monnard, ‘if you prefer coffee in the morning or chocolate.’

‘The musician liked chocolate,’ says Ziguette.

‘Marie will bring it to your room if you wish it,’ says Madame. ‘And water for your toilette. You have only to name the hour.’

‘He has not seen his room yet,’ says Ziguette.

‘No, indeed,’ says her mother. ‘I believe he has not.’

‘Then I shall help you up the stairs with your trunk,’ says Monsieur Monnard, rising. ‘It will be too heavy, even for Marie.’

The room is at the back of the house, the floor below the attic. The two men, puffing a little, carry the trunk up the four flights of stairs from the hallway. Marie goes ahead of them with a candle.

‘I think you’ll have everything you need up here,’ says Monsieur Monnard.

‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste, looking from the narrow bed to the table and chair, the tripod stand with its glazed tin bowl, the narrow fireplace, the shuttered window above the bed.

‘Ziguette has her room across the corridor. Madame Monnard and I sleep in the room below. Marie, of course, is in the attic. Your predecessor was in the habit of asking her to remove her sabots when she was above him. An acute sensitivity to noise.’

‘You wish me, monsieur, to pay the rent in advance?’

‘Very businesslike of you. I admire that in a young fellow. Now then, let us see. Six livres a week, I think. Candles and firewood not included.’

Jean-Baptiste, turning his back a little on the master of the house, shakes a few coins from the purse onto the table, picks out a half-louis. ‘For two weeks,’ he says.

Monsieur Monnard accepts the coin, pinches it and tucks it into a pocket of his waistcoat. ‘You are welcome here,’ he says, his expression that of a man who has just sold a rack of good knives to a priest. ‘Be sure to tell Marie all your needs.’

For a second or two the lodger and the servant lock eyes; then she lights the candle stub on the table with the candle she has carried upstairs.

‘If you bring your candle down in the morning,’ she says, ‘you may leave it on the shelf by the street door. There’s flint and steel there.’

‘You’ll hardly need to leave here,’ says Monsieur Monnard, nodding to the shutters, ‘to do that survey of yours.’

‘I may see it from here?’

‘You have not had a chance yet to walk in the quarter?’

‘No, monsieur.’

‘Well, daylight will make it plain enough.’

With a little flurry of nods and smiles, the men take their leave of each other. Monsieur Monnard and Marie quit the room, pull the door shut behind them. Quite suddenly Jean-Baptiste is alone in a strange house in a city where he knows almost no one. He reaches over the bed to the shutters, folds them back on the stiffness of their hinges then, seeing only himself and the candle flame in the glass, he leans again, turns the oval handle and gives the window frame a little shove. There is nothing now between him and the night sky, nothing between him and the church of les Innocents, for surely that black hulk, just discernible against the eastern sky, is les Innocents. And below it, the span of blackness between the church and the street, that, evidently – for what else can it be? – is the burying ground. If he were to climb over the bed and leap from the window, he would be in it, this place that is poisoning Paris! Certainly it is poisoning the rue de la Lingerie. The stink that creeps through the open window he has already smelt something of in the breath of all the Monnards, in the taste of their food. He will have to get used to it, get used to it quickly or get out, take the coach home, wait on the Comte de S—, beg for another bridge . . .

He shuts the window, puts the shutters over. The candle on the table will not last much longer. He undoes the straps on his trunk, rummages, pulls out a copy of the Comte de Buffon’s
Histoire Naturelle Volume II
, pulls out a long brass ruler, a little box of writing implements, a small rosewood box containing a pair of brass dividers. Wrapped in a woollen shirt is his engraving of Canaletto’s view of the Rialto Bridge. He looks for a nail in the wall, finds one above the empty fireplace, hangs the picture and stands a while to study it.

He lays his watch on the table next to Buffon, puts the purse under the bolster, suspends his wig from the back of the chair and undresses to his shirt and stockings, both of which he will keep on for warmth. There is no water, nothing to wash with. He gets under the covers, thinks briefly, uneasily, of the red-haired musician who slept there before him, then blows out the guttering candle and lies in a darkness so complete his sight, utterly baulked, draws on it odd shapes, odd fancies. He shuts his eyes – darkness either side! – and after a pause begins to speak quietly not a prayer but a catechism of selfhood.

‘Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in Normandy. What are you? An engineer, trained at the Ecole des Ponts. What do you believe in? In the power of reason . . .’

It is a habit begun in the weeks following his father’s death, and had about it at first something defiant, almost jubilant.
He
was alive, young and alive.
Ecce homo!
But later – perhaps when he started at the mines in Valenciennes – the questions seemed more, truly, to be questions, and ones whose very simplicity gave rise to instants of confusion, momentary vertigos that made the practice – the putting of the questions – more necessary than ever. He should give it up, of course. It was childish. A source of private embarrassment, almost a vice. But for now, for tonight, in this place . . .

‘Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in—’

Someone or something is raking the wood of the door. He holds his breath, listens. The cat with the questionable morals? Had his predecessor let the creature sleep on the end of the bed? Well, he has no objection, would in truth be glad of the company, but the moment he sits up, the scratching ceases. Below his door, the soft movement of a light. Then nothing.

6

In the church of les Innocents, the light of a Paris morning falls in thin grey ropes from high windows, but does little to disturb the building’s permanent twilight. Pillars, black or nearly so, rise like the remnants of a petrified forest, their tops lost in canopies of shadow. In the side-chapels, where no candle has been lit in five years, the darkness has gathered in drifts. Saints, madonnas, infant saviours, all the large, second-rate paintings of martyrdom, of doves alighting on coiffured, vaguely Italian heads, the locked treasure boxes with their knucklebones or splinters of holy wood, all these might simply have never existed, so thoroughly are they now hidden.

The organ (three manuals, forty speaking stops), German-built and very old, is found off the north aisle, that side of the church that lies along the rue aux Fers as the rue aux Fers wanders onto the rue Saint-Denis. The door of the loft – about a third the height of a normal house door – is open, and from it, preceded by some coughing and throat-clearing, comes a man’s head. He pauses there, exactly as a dog might hesitate before crossing some uncertain open space, then disappears back into the loft to be replaced a moment later by a pair of long, bootless legs, a large, tightly breeched arse, then the trunk and finally the tousled head again.

There is no ladder – someone has used it for firewood – and he slithers down, pours himself from the loft door until his toes touch a makeshift step built from missals, crack-faced Bibles, lives of saints (he has already made many weak jokes to his friends about climbing the ladder of religion to the heaven of music). When he reaches the slabs of the aisle – his feet on the tomb of a Baron somebody, the baron’s wife and several extinguished children – he brushes himself down, spits soot into a handkerchief, puts on his coat and settles himself at the keyboards. He cracks his knuckles; some pale bird is startled into flight under the roof. Even in this light the man’s hair has a faint coppery glow. He pulls out stops. Trompette, tierce, cromorne, voix humaine. On the music stand, he has Gigault’s
Livre de Musique
and, next to it, a book of cantatas by Clérambault, but to read music he would need candles and he cannot be bothered to light them. He has a candle in his head, all the light he needs, and he begins to play a Couperin trio from memory, his spine and neck arched slightly backwards as though the organ was a coach-and-six and he was hurtling through the centre of les Halles, scattering geese and cabbages and old women.