Paris, 1870
W
HEN
L
UCIEN WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, WAR CAME TO
M
ONTMARTRE.
Because of the war Lucien became the Rat Catcher and had his first encounter with the Colorman.
Of course war had come to the butte before. In the first century BC the Romans had built a temple to Mars, the god of war, on the mount, and from that point forward, you couldn’t catapult a cow at Paris without someone setting up for siege on Montmartre. With her seven freshwater wells, her windmills, her vegetable gardens, and her commanding view of the entire city, everyone agreed that there was no better butte on which to be besieged.
And so it came to pass that Louis-Napoléon, feeling pressured by Chancellor Bismarck’s proposing a Prussian
derrière
be put on the throne of Spain (thus putting hostile forces on borders to both the north and south of France) and buoyed by his successful campaigns against Russia and Austria, plus the reputation of his illustrious uncle as the greatest military strategist since Alexander, declared war on the Prussians in July of 1870. By September, the Prussian army had kicked nine shades of umber out of the French and Paris was under siege.
The boulevards were barricaded and the Prussian army surrounded the city. The great Krupp guns fired sporadically, which did little more than keep the city’s national guard running from neighborhood to neighborhood to put out fires. Hot-air balloons were lined down the middle of the Champs-Élysées, prepared to try to smuggle out letters as soon as night fell, and most would actually make it.
An early frost had dusted the cobbles of Place du Tertre that morning, as Lucien and Père Lessard stood at the edge of the butte, behind the iron fence that crowned the square, waiting for the loaves to be done, and watched French soldiers making their way up rue des Abbesses, pulling a hundred cannons with horses.
“They will store them in the Church of Saint-Pierre,” said Père Lessard. “And use them as a last resort if the Prussians try to take the city.”
“Maman says that the Prussians will rape and kill us,” said Lucien.
“Really, she told you that?”
“Oui.
If the steps are not swept perfectly clean, they will rape and kill us all. Twice.”
“Ah, I see. Well, yes, the Prussians are a thorough people, but I don’t think you need to worry about it.”
“Papa, what is raping?”
Père Lessard pretended that his pipe had gone out and fumbled with a match against one of the iron fence bars as he tried to formulate a way to answer without actually having to answer. Had it been one of his daughters, he might have sent her back to her mother, but Madame had a way of implying to the boy that all the evils and plagues of man could be blamed, more or less, on the hapless baker of Montmartre, and he was in no mood to try to explain to his only son how he had invented rape.
And damn the match, it had burned all the way to his fingertips.
“Lucien, you have heard the term ‘making love’?”
“Yes, Papa, like when you and Maman are kissing and tickling and laughing. Régine said that is what you were doing.”
Père Lessard swallowed hard. It was a small apartment, but he always thought the children were asleep when—That spiteful woman and her giggling. “Yes, that’s right. Well, rape is the opposite. It is
making hate.”
“I see,” said Lucien, mercifully satisfied with the answer. “Do you think we will get to shoot the cannons before the Prussians rape and kill us?”
“There will be no cannons for us. Our part of the fight will be feeding the hungry people of the butte.”
“We always do that. Perhaps Monsieur Renoir will come and fire the cannons, now that he is a soldier.”
“Perhaps,” said the baker. Renoir had been drafted into the cavalry, despite having been raised in the city and having never ridden a horse. A training officer who saw Renoir trying to handle horses took pity on the painter and hired him to teach his daughter how to paint, thus keeping him out of action. Monet and Pissarro had escaped to England. Bazille was training with the army in Algiers. Cézanne, the roughest of the lot, had gone into hiding in his beloved Provence.
“With all your pets gone, perhaps a suffering wife will at last be taken dancing?” said Madame Lessard. “In a new dress of white and black stripes, as was ordained by the Holy Father.”
“The Pope did not decree that you should have a striped dress to go dancing in, woman.”
“Well, perhaps now that your pets are gone, you’ll go to mass instead of drinking coffee all morning and talking about art, and you’ll know what the Holy Father said.” Madame Lessard turned then to her daughters, Marie and Régine, who stood by, pretending to mend stockings. “Have no fear, my ducklings, Maman won’t let you marry a heretic.”
“So I am a heretic now?”
“Who would say such a thing?” said Madame. “I will have their ears boxed by that sturdy doorman, Monsieur Robelard. I believe his price is two
francs
.” Madame held out her hand for the coins.
“S’il vous plaît.”
Père Lessard dug into his pocket. Somehow, it seemed perfectly acceptable that he should pay Monsieur Robelard, the doorman at the Moulin de la Galette, to defend his honor against the accusation of being a heretic that no one had leveled. If nothing else, Père Lessard had the business sense of an artist.
Despite a siege on the city, Madame Lessard was saving for a black and white striped dress in which to be taken dancing. But there would be no dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, or any of the other dance halls in the city. The men who stayed in the city, even those who had been able to afford to send their families away before the Prussians arrived, spent their evenings and Sunday afternoons defending the barricades, and the women, when not hiding in the cellars, went about the business of feeding and caring for their children. The grocers, butchers, and bakers went about trying to provide for the Parisians when there was nothing left to provide.
The chickens and ducks pinned in the backyards of Montmartre disappeared first. The ducks and most tender yard hens in the beginning, but once the feed grain was gone, even the laying hens were short for the pot, until not even a single time-toughened rooster remained unstewed to announce the dawn. With no trains to bring livestock from the country, the butchers for Paris’s great Les Halles marketplace spent their days in cafés with their ham-sized fists wrapped around delicate cordial glasses of Pernod, until that, too, was gone. Montmartre’s two milk cows, belonging to Madame Jacob of the
crémerie,
were spared for a while because they could graze on the back slope of the butte and in the fencerows of the Maquis, the shantytown by the cemetery, but when the grass was nibbled to nubs and the National Guard’s horses were being slaughtered for meat, then even the sad-eyed Sylvie and Astrid found their way into the
pot-au-feu,
which Madame Jacob salted with her tears.
As the siege had fallen in the autumn, every vegetable garden in Montmartre and the Maquis was brimming with maize and snail-scarred squash, but two weeks after the Prussians arrived, with nothing coming into the city from the countryside, only the root vegetables remained, and those so rare that a gentleman in possession of a turnip might find himself in the company of a brace of Pigalle harlots, eager to exchange a full evening of lubricious charms for the promise of a demi-tuber.
When the Prussian guns first thundered in the distance, Père Lessard knew what was coming, so he bought all the flour he could find, then gathered a dozen empty flour sacks from the storeroom and led Lucien down the butte to a cooper’s shop tucked among the factories of Saint-Denis. There, for the price of asking, they were able to fill their flour sacks with the fine oak sawdust.
“You will use it to fire your ovens, no?” said the barrel maker. “Very smart. Burns very hot. But be careful. It can be explosive if the air is filled with it.”
“Yes, like flour,” said Père Lessard. “I will be careful.” He hadn’t thought of using the sawdust to fire the ovens. He shook the cooper’s hand, then hired a ragpicker with a donkey cart to haul the bags of sawdust up the butte.
“If strong French oak is good enough for our wine, it will be good for our bread, too,” he said to Lucien as they wound their way up Montmartre behind the cart. “The trick is to use no more than a quarter sawdust or the dough will not rise. But for piecrust, you can go as much as half.”
“How did you know to use sawdust, Papa?”
“Ours is a very old profession, and no one wants to hear excuses why the baker does not have wares, so we learn tricks. Why, once there was a pair of bakers on the Île de la Cité that were killing and baking foreign students from the Sorbonne into pies. And no one who bought the pies ever complained. Only a German father who missed his son and came to investigate his disappearance finally found them out. Cannibalism, right there on the doorstep of Notre-Dame.”
Lucien’s eyes had grown as big as his fists at the horrific prospect of what Father was proposing. “But, Papa, I don’t think I’m big enough to make students into pies. Perhaps you should have Marie and Régine do it. They are taller.”
“Oh, we won’t start you out on students, Lucien. They are quick and hard to knock on the head. We’ll start you out with something easier, a grandmother, I think.”
Lucien was having a hard time catching his breath. Why was the ragpicker smiling? Maybe he was going to be in on it. Maybe he would haul the grandmother to the bakery. Which was good. Lucien knew that unless he picked a grandmother who lived on Montmartre, he’d never get her up the hill without help.
“Maybe I can just ask a grandmother to come to the bakery. I could make up a story of how Maman needs help, and—”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary, Lucien. You’ll just conk her on the head. That is the proper way.”
The ragpicker nodded, as if it was well-known that conking a grandmother on the head was the accepted method.
Tears began to well in Lucien’s eyes. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to conk a grandmother. I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
“Eh, war is hell,” said the ragpicker.
Père Lessard tousled Lucien’s hair, then pulled the boy’s head against his hip in a hug. “Shhhh, son, stop crying. I’m just fucking with you.”
Now the ragpicker threw his head back and laughed in the way only a Frenchman with seven teeth and a conscience soaked in wine can laugh, the sound his donkey might make if he were a heavier smoker and had just licked the devil’s ass to chase all taste of goodness from his tongue. The ragpicker wasn’t a scoundrel, but scoundrels envied his laugh.
Humiliated, horrified, and not a little out of breath, Lucien flailed at Father with his fists; the first bounced harmlessly off the baker’s bottom, the second plowed solidly and with great force into Père Lessard’s testicles, and in that instant, time stopped for the baker, and even before the breath left his body and he crumpled to the ground in pain, he thought,
The boy has his mother’s sense of humor.
As Lucien ran up the hill toward home, Père Lessard said to the ragpicker, “He’s a sensitive boy. I think he should be an artist.”
Madame Lessard met him at the top of the stairs, her hands on her hips, her chin jutting like the prow of a warship. “So, you will have my son bake my mother into a pie, will you?”
“Just
a
grandmother, not
his
grandmother. I was teasing him.” Although it then crossed Lessard’s mind that if one were choosing a grandmother from which to make pies, Madame’s mother, who, upon a sunny day, when the twin locomotives of her bosom towed her cumulus skirts through the market at Louveciennes, was followed by children and dogs seeking shade, would indeed make for a rich and prodigious filling. He would atone for the thought, he knew, whether he chose to or not.
“I adore your mother, my love. I was simply preparing Lucien to help find new sources of filling for our pastries.”
“Like his grandmother?”
“Like rats,” said Père Lessard.
“No…” said Mère Lessard, for once not feigning shock.
“You know, the rabbit is a rodent also, and delicious.”
“Now you will feed me rat. Mother warned me about you.”
“No,
ma chère,
the rats will be for the customers only.”
But your mother should thank the saints she lives in Louveciennes or there would be fat bitch pie for everyone on the butte,
he thought.
L
UCIEN DID NOT TAKE IMMEDIATELY TO THE DUTIES OF RAT CATCHER; IN FACT,
for the first two days, he spent his morning chasing his quarry into the dark corners of Montmartre, only to find himself chased right back out of those same corners by a rat that had tripled in size and, if he was not mistaken, was carrying a knife.