Illumination (25 page)

Hannah usually had no difficulty with solitude; before Jean-Jacques, she’d painted alone in Madame Lantier’s shed for days on end. Here in the balloon factory, however, she found that she had a keen desire for company. She began to look forward to the short conversations she had with Monsieur Besson as they paced through the station corridors or tried to warm themselves by his meagre fire. At first he simply updated her about Clement – who was well, as far as he could ascertain; safe from firing squads, at any rate.

‘Elizabeth will be attending to this,’ Hannah said, to convince herself as much as Besson. ‘She won’t let them keep him locked up in there.’

Gradually, though, they moved onto other topics. Hannah discovered that the
aérostier
possessed a sceptical wit; she came to enjoy dispelling his habitual terseness and drawing it out. Judging her work to be an uncontroversial area, she showed him the couple of sketches she’d managed to set down since her arrival – views from the office window, depicting the twelve sets of empty rails running into the station and the tall weeds growing around them.

‘I depict what I see, Monsieur,’ Hannah explained, ‘what is before me, shorn of contrivance. We naturalist painters want to bring about an age of
freedom
, in which a sincere art can be nourished – a true art. No more nonsense from the Bible, or Ovid, or French history, or anywhere else. Nature without invention or manipulation is the goal – thrown raw upon the canvas.’

‘So it is a scientific approach, in essence,’ Besson said. ‘You make yourself like a photographic plate, devoid of preconception, merely setting yourself before your image – awaiting the impression the light will make upon you.’

Hannah conceded that there might be something in this, but her brow was furrowed; she’d always considered photographs to be dull, mechanical things, lacking any real creative power. She decided to steer them away from artistic theory from then on.

They spoke of their lives. Besson made his revelations in plain, compact sentences; this was not a man comfortable with talking about himself. Hannah learned that he’d been born in the Marais, the son of a cabinet-maker, and had trained as an engineer in the Imperial schools before devoting himself to aeronautics. During the Exposition Universelle of 1867 he’d worked as a pilot for the gigantic balloon
Captive
, taking visitors up fifteen times the height of the exhibition hall, over the green and golden sprawl of Napoleon III’s Paris. Strangely enough, on one ascent he had stood but four feet from Crown-Prince Frederick of Prussia – who now directed the besieging armies from a state room at Versailles.

‘Several among his party were terrified, but the Crown prince surveyed the city without a tremor.’ Besson shook his head. ‘Many times since have I wondered what he was thinking.’

In return, Hannah told him about her last years in London – about her mother’s attempts to direct her life, to interfere at every stage and in every area. Hannah wanted to paint; so Elizabeth immediately produced these artist friends of hers, stolid old Royal Academicians stuck firmly in the thirties and forties, to whom she could be apprenticed. She’d barely turned fourteen when various eccentric gentlemen – poets, musicians, radical philosophers – began to call at the Pardy home for no obvious reason. She came to realise that these were suitors, of a sort, candidates for the first of her public affairs; a vital component, apparently, of a Pardy woman’s renown.

Besson gave her his uneven smile. ‘So instead you choose to live in Montmartre – in a shed, your brother tells me.’

‘I do,’ Hannah answered proudly. ‘Every year I submit my work to the Salon, and every year I am rejected. I live on vermicelli and day-old bread. I fail, Monsieur Besson, but on my own terms. I wouldn’t go back to England for anything.’

Their connection could only ever be a fragile one, though, no matter how many private recollections they shared. Both of them felt it: a great subject sat unmentioned between them. Hannah was careful to conceal her sketches of Jean-Jacques when Besson was in the office, but she knew that he couldn’t stay hidden for long.

One painfully cold morning, almost three weeks after Hannah first sought refuge at the station, Besson strode straight into the office without his customary knock. He dumped the day’s newspapers on the desk and went to the window. At the top of the pile was the
Figaro
. Emblazoned across its front page was the headline
Le Léopard Est En Retour.
Hannah sat down; she glanced at Besson’s back and read on.

‘This true hero of Paris is once again spilling the blood of the enemy that so cruelly confines her. This newspaper can reveal that only last night he was out stalking his prey in the forest of Bondy – snaking between the trees, eyes fixed on the lights of a Prussian outpost glimmering up ahead. Gunpowder is tipped from a cartridge at the base of an oak; a match is touched to it and it fizzes furiously, sending a white flash across the canopy of branches above. The sentries are sent out to investigate. Our Leopard strikes with all the grace and savagery that Paris has come to expect. It is
knife-work, requiring an expert hand; and the second man dies before the first has fully collapsed among the fallen leaves. The unlucky third has seen nothing, but he senses that danger is near; the trees around
him seem to be moving, closing in around him. He offers a last prayer to his German God, firming up his grip on his rifle, and he advances to his end. Later, the Leopard slinks back to Aubervilliers, and then to the wall, seen by no one, three brass helmets stowed in his haversack
.’

There was more, several paragraphs in fact. The only reference to the recent red ructions and the role the Leopard might have played in them was Jean-Jacques’s drop from ‘Major Allix’ to a mere ‘Monsieur’; he’d evidently been stripped of his rank along with so many of his Montmartre comrades. Numerous allusions were made to a sortie, Elizabeth stressing that it was the patriotic duty of all Frenchmen to follow the Leopard’s bold example. Prussian morale, she claimed, was desperately low due to the coming winter and their fear of Parisian might. There was no better time to strike.

‘The invaders are like beaters standing fearfully around a thicket heaving with wild beasts,’
the article concluded, ‘
of which our Leopard is just one. They know that at any second thousands of ferocious fighters could pour out through those gates, their bloodlust sharpened by their deep and abiding love for their land. They know, in short, that they would be massacred – lashed back to Prussia with their brave Kaiser leading the retreat!’

‘It’s going to happen,’ said Besson. ‘There will be a sortie now. You reds made Trochu look weak, holding him hostage for half a day in his own inner chamber. Our hesitant general has been embarrassed into action. Gambetta has managed to assemble an army, out in the countryside somewhere to the south-east, and is reputed to be doing great things. Trochu imagines that a coordinated action is possible – that the forces of Paris will be able to break through the Prussian line and link up with this other army.’

‘You
know this
, Monsieur?’

‘Men close to the cabinet have all but confirmed it.’

The
Figaro
was shivering in Hannah’s hands. One of their aims, at least, would be met. ‘It will turn the war,’ she said. ‘It will give us our chance.’

‘You cannot think that.’ Besson looked over at her. ‘Mademoiselle Pardy, you are a clever woman. You cannot honestly think that a sortie is the best course.’

Hannah put down the newspaper, stung by the trace of condescension in his manner. ‘What would
you
do, then?’

‘Surrender,’ the
aérostier
replied, ‘at once, on any terms. They have won. We are beaten. Can you really not see it? All a sortie will achieve is more dead men. If the government and the generals honestly think that the Prussians won’t work out this plan of theirs – won’t see it coming a hundred miles away – then they are fools who deserve their doom. The tragedy is that so many will be made to follow them.’

Disagreement surged through Hannah so strongly that it propelled her from her chair. ‘A sortie can succeed, of course it can!’ she cried. ‘There are millions of us, far more than there are of the Prussians. How can it possibly fail?’

‘It is
too late
. Our enemy is dug in. They have been adding to their forces for two months now. Perfecting their strategies. How many sieges have they won so far, in this poisonous, pointless war? Three, four? And they have the men from Metz, don’t forget – two hundred thousand experienced troops.’

They faced each other over the desk. Hannah knew then that it would be bad – a collision between immoveable objects.

‘You talk like a bourgeois defeatist,’ she told him. ‘A man who just wants to get back to his damned shop.’

‘Perhaps I am. What is so wrong with that? And why do you care so much, anyway? You are
English
. Why have you adopted the cause of France with such passion?’

‘Christ Almighty, I am so very tired of hearing that! The question, Monsieur Besson, is why
you
have abandoned it!’

Besson stopped for a second; this had struck home. ‘Life would be hard for a while if we surrendered,’ he admitted, ‘and our pride would suffer a grave blow. But we would go on. We would rebuild.’ He nodded at her drawing folder. ‘You could resume your work – properly, I mean, without all this distraction.’

Hannah glared at him. He doesn’t believe that I mean any of it, she thought; he thinks that my politics are an affectation that I will shrug off, as one might an obsessive interest in Italian opera or the modern novel. ‘You underestimate the people of Paris. You don’t realise what they are capable of.’

‘I am a
Parisian
, Mademoiselle Pardy, and I realise it very well. It is one thing to proclaim a wish to die for your country – and quite another to actually risk doing it. Your Leopard should know all about that.’

Silence filled the tiny office, like that which follows the smashing of something valuable. Hannah blinked. ‘What – what do you mean?’

The
aérostier
appeared momentarily regretful, as if impatience had led him to speak out of turn; then he pressed on. ‘These heroics – this prodigious murder of Prussians. Does it not seem improbable to you?’

Hannah controlled her anger; she wanted to hear what he had to say. ‘Elizabeth dramatises,’ she replied. ‘She exaggerates. That is her style. The Prussians are definitely dying, though, if that’s what you are implying. Jean-Jacques brings back the helmets of the men he has killed – and their weapons, letters, anything he can carry. I’ve seen them.’

This did not persuade him. He crossed to the mantelpiece; then he was at the desk again, trying to frame a difficult question, unable to phrase it to his satisfaction. Hannah remembered the alley outside the Club Rue Rébeval – what he’d whispered when she went to assist him.

‘Do you still think I should leave Paris?’

Besson misunderstood her; he paled a little. ‘You have been talking to your brother,’ he said. ‘I did not write that letter. I would never do such a thing.’

So this was Clem’s Montmartre suspect. It certainly made sense. The
aérostier
was resourceful enough, and headstrong as well – utterly set on doing what he thought was right. Five minutes previously Hannah would have been convinced by his denial. Now she wasn’t so sure.

‘What on earth do you think Jean-Jacques is up to, Monsieur Besson?’

The only reply he’d give her was another question. ‘Have you ever wondered exactly how well you know him – this man on whom you have staked your entire existence?’

‘How well I
know
him?’

‘I am an
aérostier
, Mademoiselle Pardy. I design and fly balloons. You draw and paint – your work, even the quickest sketch, shows a lifetime’s training. These are facts about us. What facts are there about your Monsieur Allix?’

‘He is from Alsace,’ Hannah answered, as if talking to an idiot, ‘a village near Strasbourg. He fought in America, and was injured there. He killed many Prussians in the Vosges Mountains and now he has come to defend Paris – to help lead her people to freedom.’

Besson’s expression hardened. ‘That is his account, Mademoiselle. There’s no evidence to support it. I grant you that he seems to be a soldier of some kind, but have you ever met anyone who served with him? Any old friends from before the war – any family?’

Hannah could think of no one. ‘Many revolutionaries are like this,’ she said. ‘They move constantly from place to place. It is how they must live in order to spread their ideas and avoid imprisonment. They deliberately sever their attachments to the ordinary world.’

The
aérostier
leaned forward, his blue eyes looking intently into hers. ‘Then why,’ he asked, ‘has Allix attached himself to you?’

Hannah balked; she felt sick, hollowed out, giddy with rage. She edged around the desk, knocking against a stack of ledgers. ‘Now we get to it, Monsieur Besson, don’t we!’ she shouted. ‘You are
jealous
, here in your cupboard of an office, surrounded by your plans, with seamstresses who laugh at you behind your back and call you names, and balloons that vanish into the clouds never to be heard from again!’

Besson stepped from her path. There was resignation on his face; he’d known it would come to this. ‘That is not true. I wanted to—’

‘I thought you were a friend. I was wrong. A friend would never say these things – would never even
think
them.’ Hannah set about gathering her things. It didn’t take long. ‘What am I even doing here?’ she asked herself, snatching up her
vivandière
’s uniform from beneath the desk. ‘They’ll hardly be looking for me now, after all this time. You’ve kept me with you, haven’t you Monsieur Besson, on false pretences. You’ve been biding your time, weaselling your way into my confidence, waiting to deliver this speech about Jean-Jacques – a more decent and brave and principled man than you could ever hope to be!’