Pure (39 page)

Of the rest of them – Block’s brethren – they have been gone some two weeks now, though where is uncertain. There was a last interview between Jean-Baptiste and the violet-eyed miner in the gardens behind Saint-Sepulcre, where the men had re-established their camp after the fire. It was dusk, a fine mist over the last of the summer flowers, the dahlias and geraniums. Jean-Baptiste had come with the men’s money. The money was accepted – the pouch briefly weighed in the palm of the miner’s hand – and then, with a slight softening of his habitual formality, the miner informed the engineer that they would be gone by the following morning.

To Valenciennes?

Not there.

But you will remain together?

We will.

Then I wish you . . . I am grateful to you. To you all.

A nod.

You are Hoornweder?

Lampsins.

Lampsins, then.

Moemus.

Moemus?

Sack, Tant, Oste, Slabbart . . .

The next morning, the gardens were empty. Nothing but some flattened grass to say anyone had been there at all. An odd, unsettling feeling not to have them there any more, there or anywhere. Héloïse accuses him of missing them, and though he laughs at her – how can one miss such people! – there is truth in what she says. He depended on them, depended heavily. Without their specific mix of steadiness and riot, would les Innocents not still be throwing its shadow over the rue Saint-Denis?

And who did he
not
depend upon? Who did he not burden in that way? The very report could not have been written without Héloïse sitting beside him, page by page, at the table in his old room. When a word he needed was a word still lost, she found it for him and, if necessary, wrote it out for him to copy (her hand taught to her by a lascivious cleric, his thrashed into him by the brothers of the Oratorian Order). Three days it took them, late September heat rolling through the open window, dry thunder over the city. Then, when it was done, they separated and packed their possessions. His own took a bare hour to put into his trunk. Héloïse, with her books and hats, her pins, slippers and ribbons, took an hour longer, though she might have done it more quickly if Marie had not been sitting on the bed in tears and needing every quarter-hour to be soothed with the prospect of Ziguette’s return.

He does not intend to see Ziguette Monnard, not if it can be avoided. Unlikely, of course, she will want to see him – what could they possibly say to each other? – but she is not expected at the house until the end of the month and by then he will be with Héloïse in Bellême, and after that at their new apartment on the rue des Ecouffes.

And after that? What? The cemetery has stolen something out of him, some vitality he will need to restore before he is ready to go on. He should imitate the dead a while; or better still those seeds that lay so long asleep and undisturbed in the earth of the cemetery. Then, when he is ready – and when those ministerial livres and golden louis he has tucked away run dry – he might visit his old teacher, Perronet, ask for something decent, something small, something that does not place him at the disposal of men he does not respect, who do not respect him . . .

He looks at the door of the minister’s office. Odd thing how all shut doors are not alike, how in their way they are expressive as human backs. This one tells him that were he to sit there until the end of time, it will not be opened, not unless he does it himself. He gets to his feet, pushes a lock of hair behind an ear, puts his hat under one arm, the report under the other, goes to the door, knocks twice, listens, then reaches for the cold, curved brass of the handles. The room is empty. Of course it is empty. The desk is there, the great desk, but there are no papers on it, no macaroon crumbs, no minister. Has anyone been here in weeks? Months? He lays the report, tidily, at the centre of the desk, shuts the door, goes through the anteroom into the corridor, turns, goes down a flight of stairs, walks the length of a second corridor, descends more stairs, and is stepping into the mouth of yet another broad, door-lined and feebly lit passage when he realises he is following the exact route he took the previous autumn, that he has retraced all his former confusions, has in some manner remembered how to be lost in precisely the same way. Behind
this
door the Polish gentlemen were playing at cards. Through
this
he saw the woman carried as if she were a type of boat. And here are the tightly winding service stairs down to where, a year ago, he found soldiers and laundry girls and boys in blue uniforms. Today, apart from a pair of small dogs asleep on a bench, he is alone.

He opens the door to the hall of lemon trees. The trees too are somewhere else. A few empty terracotta pots (each big enough for a man to hide in), some rolled lagging, a row of rakes and hoes and spades dangling from pegs along one wall . . . He crosses to the window, forces the damp frame, climbs onto the sill, onto the water barrel, drops down.

No clocks chime in the palace behind him – it is not quite the hour – but the path offers itself just as it did a year before, leads him to the arbour, the bench, the stone cupid above it. He sits. Why not? The afternoon is nearly warm and he does not expect to be a frequent visitor to the Palace of Versailles. The cupid’s shadow falls across his knees. He closes his eyes, breathes, is briefly touched by a sense – utterly convincing – of the moment’s eternity. Is he asleep? Small birds come to wake him. They gather round his feet, but he has nothing to give them. They come closer and closer, seem as if they might hop onto his hands; then, at the thud of heavy boots running on the path, they scatter into the air. A man appears, pauses by the arbour, regards Jean-Baptiste over the top of the scarf wrapped round his nose and mouth, speaks a few muffled, incomprehensible words and runs on. Some seconds later, another man is there, also masked, also running. Then a third, this one in the kind of leather hood with pointed snout house-searchers used to wear in times of plague. After a fourth has run by, Jean-Baptiste gets up to follow them. It is like following bees to their hive. Every time he comes to a fork in the path and is unsure which direction to choose, he has only to wait a moment for another man to run past him. For twenty minutes he plays this game, moves stop-start through a maze of high hedges until he comes to a gate in a brick wall and beyond it to a sanded courtyard. On the far side of the yard is a large stone shed, the sort of building one might imagine being used to house carriages of the better sort, the sort there are a great many of in Versailles.

He stands with his back to the bricks, watching. It is through the shed’s open double doors that the masked men are disappearing. Some of them reappear, run out of the doors and lean panting against a wall before trudging back inside. One, a boy in blue, staggers to a horse trough, tears down his mask and vomits.

Clearly, it is the moment to leave. Clearly too, it will be impossible to leave without knowing what is in the shed. He goes closer, makes a circling, sidling approach to the doors, then passes into the gloom beyond them. In the centre of the shed, the shadowy tumult at its centre, masked men are hauling on ropes. Four gangs of men, four thick ropes. And attached to the end of the ropes something grey and vast and lonely. Each time the men pull and the grey mass is rocked, there is a chiming like the playing of a hundred small bells. Overseeing it all, this hauling, is a man on an upturned pail. He does not notice Jean-Baptiste, not until the engineer has crept close enough to finally understand what it is the men are trying to shift, the great death-swollen bulk of it in its nest of empty wine bottles, one dull eye big as a soup plate, the delicate veined edge of an ear, a curving yellow tusk . . . Then the overseer is raging at him, his breath puffing out the cloth over his mouth. He points to the dangling end of the nearest rope. He flails his arms: despair as fury. For several seconds Jean-Baptiste looks up at him, feels for him a terrible brotherly pity, a terrible brotherly disgust. Then he turns away from him, wipes the flies from his face and hurries back to that soft line at the edge of the shed where the light begins.

Author’s Note

This is a work of the imagination, a work that combines the actual with the invented, though the church and cemetery of les Innocents certainly existed, much as they are described in the story. Today, of course, there is nothing to be seen of the cemetery except for a small square surrounded by restaurants and fast-food outlets near the underground shopping complex of les Halles. The old fountain, the Italian fountain, was moved in the nineteenth century to the middle of the square, where it serves as a meeting place, a place for weary shoppers to sit and rest. The bones from les Innocents may be viewed in the Catacombs of Paris, where later they were joined by the bones from other cemeteries: countless human remains arranged along thousands of metres of dripping walkways deep below the city traffic. Victims of the Terror that followed the destruction of les Innocents by a few years are also said to be hidden in the old workings of the quarry. Above the entrance to the catacombs, a carved inscription reads, ‘
Arrête! C’est ici l’Empire de la Mort
.’

The market established on the site of the cemetery, the Marché des Innocents, was closed for the last time in 1858.