Illumination (24 page)

The life of a
plein-air
painter – carrying easels up hills and across large sections of the city – had made Hannah strong and fast. The guardsmen couldn’t catch her; she was even extending her lead as she reached the Ile de la Cité. This island, Jean-Jacques had once said, was the oldest part of Paris, the bud from which the rest had flowered. In recent years Louis Napoleon’s planners had razed its winding medieval streets, setting down an ordered grid in their place, as they had done to so much of the city; the cathedral of Notre-Dame, its jagged profile jutting up ahead, was almost all that remained. Hannah headed for the nearest building – the Hôtel Dieu. Four storeys high and plain, there was a bright light on its river-facing side that threw a deep shadow over the rest. She slipped around a corner into absolute darkness. Her pursuers, losing sight of her, soon turned back.

She leaned against a wall and put her face in her hands. Everything was in ruins. The red coup had been a disaster. What was going to happen to Jean-Jacques now – to her brother? Where could she possibly go where the provisional government’s men wouldn’t find her?

What was she going to do?

The door opened inwards, pressing Hannah against a framed print of a famous locomotive. Monsieur Besson walked through, reading that morning’s copy of the
Gazette Officielle
. The
aérostier
noticed her at once; the room, tucked beneath a girder at the top of the Gare du Nord, was so tiny that he could hardly do otherwise. He stood still for a few moments, the folded newspaper lowering slowly in his hand. Like many men in Paris he had put away his razor, allowing a thin dark beard to form around his moustache. He tossed the
Gazette
onto his cluttered desk and removed his hat. Hannah noticed that he was only an inch or two taller than she was.

‘The riot,’ he said. ‘The occupation of the Hôtel de Ville. You were involved. They’re after you.’

‘It was not a
riot
, Monsieur. We had to act before the new Prussian army arrives from Metz. We—’ Hannah stopped herself. This was not the way to secure the
aérostier
’s help. ‘I apologise for creeping in like this.’

‘How did you do it, exactly?’

‘I forced the window of the lost property office and found my way up.’ She paused. ‘Your name is chalked on the door.’

‘You’re quite the housebreaker, Mademoiselle Pardy, I must say.’

‘I need to hide. I can’t go home, or to my mother. I thought of you – of this place. Nobody knows that we are acquainted.’

Monsieur Besson closed the door behind him, hanging his hat on a peg. ‘We are acquainted, Mademoiselle?’

‘We’ve spoken a couple of times. In the lanes, back in Montmartre. And I’ve seen you at the launches of your balloons.’

He didn’t react. The devotion to Hannah identified by Jean-Jacques was nowhere to be seen. Right then, in fact, it seemed entirely possible that he might eject her – even alert the authorities.

‘You came to the Club Rue Rébeval that night.’

‘I remember. I still have bruises.’

Hannah’s cautious smile disappeared. ‘I halted it as soon as I could. Please believe me, Monsieur. If I—’

‘Do you imagine that I went to that meeting for you?’

This question was a touch too abrupt. There is Monsieur Besson’s love for me, Hannah thought: an awkward, burdensome thing that keeps starting into view despite his best efforts to hide it. He’d obviously been worrying that he’d revealed himself with his foolhardy behaviour in Belleville. A pained look crossed his face; he knew that he’d just made it worse.

‘The notion never entered my mind,’ she said.

The
aérostier
went to the office’s single, rounded window, staring out at the early morning sky. ‘I was there, Mademoiselle, to hear what the radicals were debating. To get an idea of their intentions. I was curious.’

‘Yet you did not simply listen, Monsieur Besson, did you? You made a rather prominent contribution.’

He bowed his head, bringing it close to the glass. ‘I didn’t plan to do that. My anger got the better of me. I couldn’t stand in that hall and be accused of spying. Those people speak of Paris as if everyone within the wall was a socialist. As if—’

Monsieur Besson was growing angry again now. Hannah had wanted to ask him about what had happened afterwards, what he’d said to her in that alley, but decided to return the conversation to more immediate matters. ‘They arrested my brother last night,’ she interrupted. ‘He was caught on the Pont d’Arcole, just outside the Hôtel de Ville.’

The
aérostier
was taken aback; some sort of attachment had plainly formed between him and Clement over the past six weeks. ‘But he is no
radical
. He has no political sense at all that I have seen. How on earth could this have happened?’

‘An accident, of course – a mistake. Typical of Clem. Something to do with that damned cocotte.’ Hannah drew in a breath. ‘It’s being said that any foreigners apprehended by the government are to be shot.’

‘Dear God.’ Monsieur Besson ran a hand through his thick, short hair. ‘You must not worry about this,’ he said, trying to be reassuring. ‘There is much talk of shooting, of summary executions for minor crimes. It is heavily exaggerated. When this war finally ends we will no doubt discover that very few were actually put to death – that hardly any of the grand, bloody deeds laid claim to by the men of Paris were actually performed.’

There was a veiled reference here; Hannah regarded Monsieur Besson tentatively as he gestured for her to sit at his desk. He turned to his small fireplace, crouching down to scrabble beneath the grate, picking out crumbs of unburned coal and arranging them in a pyramid. This modest pile was supplemented with just two fresh lumps from the scuttle. The
aérostier
was rationing himself. Fuel was set to become scarce – which could lead to a terrible crisis indeed if the coming winter was as harsh as predicted. He twisted a piece of blotting paper, pushed it into the pyramid and lit it with a match. The glow of the fire spread over him, over the green rug beneath his knees, colouring the chilly, monochrome office.

Monsieur Besson rose from the hearth, edged around to the other side of the desk and opened a large entry book. ‘Are you quite sure that no one saw you come in?’

Hannah nodded; he was going to let her stay, for Clem’s sake if nothing else. ‘The street was quiet.’

‘Then tell me, Mademoiselle Pardy,’ he asked next, sliding a pen from between two piles of papers, ‘can you work a sewing machine?’

Monsieur Besson, it turned out, had his contacts; by the end of the day he’d learned that Clement was being held in the infamous Mazas prison in the 12th arrondissement, a short distance upriver from the Hôtel de Ville. Reliable information was hard to come by, but it didn’t seem that he was in any immediate danger of execution. Furthermore, the stand-off on the grand staircase had somehow been resolved without bloodshed. The subsequent negotiations between the provisional government and the rebels had carried on until the early hours of the morning. All hostages had been released, and Flourens’s declaration of a commune retracted, on the understanding that elections would be held within a week – and no reprisals would be made. After the pandemonium of the day everyone simply went their separate ways.

This news left Hannah dazed with relief. ‘I can go, then,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to hide.’

Monsieur Besson begged to differ. ‘There are men in the government who won’t accept these terms, and the lack of arrests in particular. Edmond Adam, who brokered the truce with Blanqui and Delescluze, resigned this afternoon as the chief of police. Nobody knows why. His replacement, though, is a Monsieur Cresson, who is said to lack Adam’s conciliatory attitude. I would advise you to stay out of sight a while longer.’

Reluctantly, Hannah admitted the sense of this and agreed to remain for a few more days. They established a routine, fitted around that of the balloon factory. A bed was made beneath his desk from coats brought up from the lost property office that had first granted her access to the station. Besson would come in with a lantern at around half-past five, bringing her food for the day – rice, cabbage, coarse brown bread, sometimes a few scraps of boiled meat. She’d change into the work gown he’d found her while he waited outside; he’d unlock the station bathrooms for her to use; then they’d go down together through the empty tiled stairwells to the concourse.

The lampposts were dark, the ticket barriers gone and the tracks beyond obscured by swathes of calico that hung from the rafters like waterfalls of hardened wax. The two of them would head across the weaving area, between rolls of netting and the wild stalks of half-spun baskets, to the sewing benches that lined the far wall. Hannah would take her place at one of these, Besson walking off to begin his endless round of checks and inspections. It was carefully timed; within five minutes the other workers would start to arrive, the seamstresses, sailors and other
aérostiers
, complaining about the cold and swapping the latest rumours. For the next twelve hours or so – with a half-hour for lunch – she would do her part in fashioning the balloon envelopes, stitching and double-stitching under the direction of Madame Vuillard, the overseer.

There was an unexpected peace in this noisy, repetitive labour. Hannah’s thoughts would wander far into the past, to places and people she hadn’t seen for a decade or more. In particular, she found herself returning to a train journey she’d once made with her father – to Guildford or Reading or somewhere like that, where he was due to give a lecture on his poems – when she’d been eight years old. As she worked her machine’s foot-pedal, running cloth beneath the stuttering needle, she recalled the way the countryside had unfolded around them; and the great wash of contentment she’d felt as he’d taken hold of her hand.

The other women on the sewing benches were told that Hannah’s name was Jane Ashford and that she was the daughter of a coachman employed at the British embassy, but they clearly had their suspicions. It was not lost on them that this
Anglaise
had appeared the morning after that business at the Hôtel de Ville. Wages in the balloon factory were good, though, and had never been needed more; Émile Besson’s standing there was strong; and Nadar, who wielded ultimate authority, was said to be a communist sympathiser who’d once had Félix Pyat over for supper. The seamstresses decided that he must be in on it, whatever it was, and that they’d better stay quiet. They kept Hannah at a distance, eyeing her warily, making their excuses if she ever tried to strike up a conversation – leaving her well alone.

Monsieur Besson himself behaved with perfect honour. Hannah hadn’t known quite what to expect from the
aérostier
, but he never so much as hinted at the precariousness of her situation, or her dependence upon his goodwill. There were no lunges for a kiss; no lingering sadly in doorways; no excruciating attempts to enquire whether romance between them was truly beyond hope. His conduct was so restrained, in fact, that it made her wonder if she’d been mistaken. Perhaps this man was not so smitten by her after all.

Each morning, along with her food, her host would hand her a small sheaf of newspapers. It was in his office, therefore, only two days after the occupation of the Hôtel de Ville, that she learned of the arrest of several dozen prominent reds and the dismissal of sixteen battalion commanders of the National Guard for their radical activities. Monsieur Besson had been right. This was a barefaced betrayal, showing total contempt for those betrayed. Hannah’s sole consolation was that Jean-Jacques hadn’t been among those taken. Along with Flourens, he’d escaped Cresson’s policemen, disappearing, the moderate papers claimed, into the lawless ultra underground that spread across the northern arrondissements.

Then came the miserable sham of the elections. Rather than a proper municipal vote that could deliver a commune, the city was granted a plebiscite. They were asked merely to answer the question:
Do you support the continuance of the authority of the provisional government?
A ‘yes’ was widely viewed as a vote against unrest and disorder, against the red insurgency – and a vote for peace, as a story was going around that negotiations were again underway with the Prussians. Hungry bourgeois longing for normality turned up at the ballots in droves, whilst left-leaning Paris stayed away in protest. Trochu’s government won by a staggering majority; Jules Favre made a public declaration that this meant the negation of the commune.

After reading this Hannah stood up at Besson’s desk and threw her newspaper at the wall. In the Gare du Nord, however, her fury could not be bolstered or magnified by that of like-minded comrades; it felt disconnected, uprooted somehow, and soon subsided into brooding. No one here cared. They were concerned instead with the confirmation that armistice talks had indeed been conducted with Chancellor Bismarck – and had already collapsed for a second time. The siege was to grind on. This brought dejection to the sewing benches; the women employed there, like so many in the central districts of Paris, were ready to give up.

Hannah grew convinced that Jean-Jacques must be trying to find her – to get word to her about what was to happen next. She took to sitting at the office window long into the night, watching for a signal or a figure on the tracks below. There was a store of candles and matches in the desk, meaning she could read or draw after dark. She’d get out her sketching materials, thinking to ease her tormenting sense of impotence with work, but more often than not she’d just stare at the studies she’d made of her lover in the last days before the march on the Hôtel de Ville, in preparation for Elizabeth’s portrait. There was Jean-Jacques seated with his arms crossed; leaning forward, reading a pamphlet; standing with his head lifted, as if about to speak.

Having had the task forced upon her, Hannah was now determined to make this portrait the best thing she’d ever done. She wanted to shame Elizabeth – to have her admit how wrong she’d been to treat her daughter like a ten-a-penny illustrator. She could picture the end result very clearly: a half-length likeness on a five-foot canvas, an interior in natural light that would present Jean-Jacques in such a way that no one who saw it could possibly doubt his conviction or his visionary intelligence. This was rather more ambitious than any of her previous portraits. The prospect was daunting, and a part of her was relieved that circumstances had denied her the means to begin.