Pure

1

A young man, young but not very young, sits in an anteroom somewhere, some wing or other, in the Palace of Versailles. He is waiting. He has been waiting a long time.

There is no fire in the room, though it is the third week in October and cold as Candlemas. His legs and back are stiffening from it — the cold and three days of travelling through it, first with Cousin André from Bellême to Nogent, then the coach, overfull with raw-faced people in winter coats, baskets on their laps, parcels under their feet, some travelling with dogs, one old man with a cockerel under his coat. Thirty hours to Paris and the rue aux Ours, where they climbed down onto cobbles and horseshit, and shifted about outside the haulier’s office as if unsure of their legs. Then this morning, coming from the lodgings he had taken on the rue — the rue what? — an early start on a hired nag to reach Versailles and this, a day that may be the most important of his life, or may be nothing.

He is not alone in the room. A man of about forty is sitting opposite him in a narrow armchair, his surtout buttoned to his chin, his eyes shut, his hands crossed in his lap, a large and rather antique-looking ring on one finger. Now and then he sighs, but is otherwise perfectly silent.

Behind this sleeper, and to either side of him, there are mirrors rising from the parquet to the cobwebbed mouldings of the ceiling. The palace is full of mirrors. Living here, it must be impossible not to meet yourself a hundred times a day, every corridor a source of vanity and doubt. The mirrors ahead of him, their surfaces hazed with dust (some idle finger has sketched a man’s bulbous cock and next to it a flower that may be a rose), give out a greenish light as if the whole building were sunk, drowned. And there, part of the wreck, his own brown-garbed form, his face in the mottled glass insufficiently carried to be descriptive or particular. A pale oval on a folded body, a body in a brown suit, the suit a gift from his father, its cloth cut by Gontaut, who people like to say is the best tailor in Bellême but who, in truth, is the only tailor, Bellême being the sort of place where a good suit is passed down among a man’s valuables along with the brass bed-warmer, the plough and harrow, the riding tack. It’s a little tight across his shoulders, a little full in the skirts, a little heavy at the cuffs, but all of it honestly done and after its fashion perfectly correct.

He presses his thighs, presses the bones of his knees, then reaches down to rub something off the ankle of his left stocking. He has been careful to keep them as clean as possible, but leaving in the dark, moving through streets he did not know, no lamps burning at such an hour, who can say what he might have stepped in? He scrapes at it with the edge of his thumb. Mud? Hopefully. He does not sniff his thumb to enquire.

A small dog makes its entrance. Its claws skitter on the floor. It looks at him, briefly, through large occluded eyes, then goes to the vase, the tall, gilded amphora displayed or abandoned in one of the room’s mirrored angles. It sniffs, cocks its leg. A voice — elderly, female — coos to it from the corridor. A shadow passes the open door; the sound of silk hems brushing over the floor is like the onset of rain. The dog bustles after her, its water snaking from the vase towards the crossed heels of the sleeping man. The younger man watches it, the way it navigates across the uneven surface of the parquet, the way even a dog’s piss is subject to unalterable physical laws. .

He is still watching it (on this day that may be the most important of his life, or nothing at all) when the door of the minister’s office opens with a snap like the breaking of those seals they put on the doors of infected houses. A figure, a servant or secretary, angular, yellow-eyed, signals to him with a slight raising of his chin. He gets to his feet. The older man has opened his eyes. They have not spoken, do not know each other’s names, have merely shared three cold hours of an October morning. The older man smiles. It is the most resigned, most elegant expression in the world; a smile that appears like the flower of vast, profitless learning. The younger man nods to him, then slips, quickly, through the half-open door of the office for fear it might shut on him again, suddenly and for ever.

2

‘St Augustine,’ says the minister, holding between two fingers a part-devoured macaroon, ‘informs us that the honours due to the dead were intended, principally, to console the living. Only prayer was effective. Where the corpse was buried was irrelevant.’ He returns to the macaroon, dips it in a glass of white wine, sucks at it. Some crumbs fall onto the papers piled on his immense desk. The servant, standing behind his master’s chair, looks at the crumbs with a kind of professional sorrow but makes no attempt to remove them.

‘He was an African,’ says the minister. ‘St Augustine. He must have seen lions, elephants. Have you seen an elephant?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘There is one here. Somewhere. A great, melancholy beast that lives on Burgundy wine. A gift from the king of Siam. When it arrived in the time of His Majesty’s grandfather, every dog in the palace hid for a month. Then they grew used to it, began to bark at it, to bait it. Had it not been hidden away, perhaps they would have killed it. Fifty of them might have managed.’ He glances across the desk at the young man, pauses a moment as though the elephant and the dogs might also be figures in a parable. ‘Where was I?’ he asks.

‘St Augustine?’ says the young man.

The minister nods. ‘It was the medieval Church that began the practice of burying inside churches, in order, of course, to be near the relics of the saints. When a church was full, they buried them in the ground about. Honorius of Autun calls the cemetery a holy dormitory, the bosom of the Church, the ecclesiae gremium. At what point do you think they started to outnumber us?’

‘Who, my lord?’

‘The dead.’

‘I don’t know, my lord.’

‘Early, I think. Early.’ The minister finishes his macaroon. The servant passes him a cloth. The minister wipes his fingers, puts on a pair of round-rimmed spectacles and reads the sheet of manuscript on the top of the pile in front of him. The room is warmer than the anteroom, but only by a very little. A small fire crackles and occasionally leans a feather of smoke into the room. Other than the desk there is not much in the way of furniture. A small portrait of the king. Another painting that seems to depict the last moments of a boar hunt. A table with a decanter and glasses on it. A heavy porcelain chamber pot by the fireplace. An umbrella of oiled silk propped under the window. Through the window itself, nothing but the ruffled grey belly of the sky.

‘Lestingois,’ says the minister, reading from the paper. ‘You are Jean-Marie Lestingois.’

‘No, my lord.’

‘No?’ The minister looks back at the pile, draws out a second sheet of paper. ‘Baratte, then. Jean-Baptiste Baratte?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘An old family?’

‘My father’s family have been in the town, in Bellême, for several generations.’

‘And your father is a glover.’

‘A master glover, my lord. And we have some land. A little over four hectares.’

‘Four?’ The minister allows himself a smile. Some powder from his wig has whitened the silk on his shoulders. His face, thinks Jean-Baptiste, if it were continued outwards a little, would come to an edge, like the blade of an axe. ‘The Comte de S— says you are hard-working, diligent, of clean habits. Also that your mother is a Protestant.’

‘Just my mother, my lord. My father. .’

The minister waves him to silence. ‘How your parents say their prayers is of no interest. You are not being considered for the post of royal chaplain.’ He looks down at the paper again. ‘Schooled by the brothers of the Oratorian Order in Nogent, after which, thanks to the generosity of the comte, you were able to enter the Ecole Royale des Ponts et Chaussées.’

‘In time, my lord, yes. I had the honour of being instructed there by Maître Perronet.’

‘Who?’

‘The great Perronet, my lord.’

‘You know geometry, algebra. Hydraulics. It says here that you have built a bridge.’

‘A small bridge, my lord, on the comte’s estate.’

‘A decoration?’

‘There was. . It had some aspect of that, my lord.’

‘And you possess some experience of mining?’

‘I was for almost two years at the mines by Valenciennes. The comte has an interest in the mines.’

‘He has many interests, Baratte. One does not dress one’s wife in diamonds without having interests.’ The minister has perhaps made a joke and something witty though respectful should be said in return, but Jean-Baptiste is not thinking of the comte’s wife and her jewels, nor of his mistress and her jewels, but of the miners at Valenciennes. A special kind of poverty, unrelieved, under those palls of smoke, by any grace of nature.

‘You yourself are one of his interests, are you not?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Your father made gloves for the comte?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘I might have him make some for me.’

‘My father is dead, my lord.’

‘Oh?’

‘Some years past.’

‘Dead of what?’

‘An affliction, my lord. A slow affliction.’

‘Then no doubt you wish to honour his memory.’

‘I do, my lord.’

‘You are ready to serve?’

‘I am.’

‘I have something for you, Baratte. An enterprise that handled with the necessary flair, the necessary discretion, will ensure this progress of yours does not falter. It will give you a name.’

‘I am grateful for your lordship’s trust.’

‘Let us not speak of trust just yet. You are familiar with the cemetery of les Innocents?’

‘A cemetery?’

‘By the market of les Halles.’

‘I have heard of it, my lord.’

‘It has been swallowing the corpses of Paris for longer than anyone can remember. Since the days of antiquity even, when the city barely extended beyond the islands. It must have been quite tolerable then. A patch of ground with little or nothing around it. But the city grew. The city embraced it. A church was built. Walls built around the burying ground. And around the walls, houses, shops, taverns. All of life. The cemetery became famous, celebrated, a place of pilgrimage. Mother Church made a fortune from burial fees. So much to go inside the church. A little less to go in the galleries outside. The pits of course were free. One cannot ask a man to pay to have his remains piled on top of others like a slice of bacon.

‘They tell me that during a single outbreak of the plague fifty thousand corpses were buried at les Innocents in less than a month. And so it continued, corpse upon corpse, the death-carts queuing along the rue Saint-Denis. There were even burials at night, by torchlight. Corpse upon corpse. A number beyond any computation. Vast legions packed into a smudge of earth no bigger than a potato field. Yet no one seemed troubled by it. There were no protests, no expressions of disgust. It may even have seemed normal. And then, perhaps it was a generation ago, we began to receive complaints. Some of those who lived beside the cemetery had started to find the proximity an unpleasant one. Food would not keep. Candles were extinguished as if by the pinch of unseen fingers. People descending their stairs in the morning fell into a swoon. And there were moral disturbances, particularly among the young. Young men and women of hitherto blemishless existences. .

‘A commission was established to investigate the matter. A great many expert gentlemen wrote a great many words on the subject. Recommendations were made, plans drawn for new, hygienic cemeteries that would once again be outside the city limits. But recommendations were ignored; plans were rolled and put away. The dead continued to arrive at the doors of les Innocents. Somehow room was found for them. And so it would have continued, Baratte. We need not doubt it. Continued until the Last Trump, had it not been for a spring of unusually heavy rainfall, five years past now. A subterranean wall separating the cemetery from the cellar of a house on one of the streets overlooking it collapsed. Into the cellar tumbled the contents of a common pit. You may, perhaps, imagine the disquiet felt by those who lived above that cellar, by their neighbours, their neighbours’ neighbours, by all those who, on going to their beds at night, must lie down with the thought of the cemetery pressing like the esurient sea against the walls of their homes. It could no longer hold on to its dead. One might bury one’s father there and not in a month’s time know where he was. The king himself was disturbed. The order was given for les Innocents to be shut. Church and cemetery. Shut without delay, the doors locked. And so, despite the petitioning of His Grace the Bishop, it has remained ever since. Shut, empty, silent. What is your opinion?’

‘Of what, my lord?’

‘Could such a place simply be left?’

‘It is hard to say, my lord. Perhaps not.’

‘It stinks.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Some days I believe I can smell it from here.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘It is poisoning the city. Left long enough, it may poison not just local shopkeepers but the king himself. The king and his ministers.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘It is to be removed.’

‘Removed?’

‘Destroyed. Church and cemetery. The place is to be made sweet again. Use fire, use brimstone. Use whatever you need to get rid of it.’

‘And the. . the occupants, my lord?’

‘What occupants?’

‘The dead?’

‘Disposed of. Every last knucklebone. It will require a man unafraid of a little unpleasantness. Someone not intimidated by the barking of priests. Not given to superstitions.’

‘Superstitions, my lord?’

‘You cannot imagine a place like les Innocents does not have its legends? It is even claimed there is a creature in the charnels, something sired by a wolf in those days — nights we should say — when wolves still came into the city in winter. Would you be scared of such a creature, Baratte?’

‘Only if I believed in it, my lord.’

‘You are a sceptic, no doubt. A disciple of Voltaire. I understand he particularly appeals to young men of your class.’

‘I am. . I have heard, of course. .’

‘Yes, of course. And he is read here too. More widely than you might guess. When it comes to wit, we are perfect democrats. And a man who had as much money as Voltaire cannot have been entirely bad.’

‘No, my lord.’

‘So you do not jump at shadows?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘The work will be both delicate and gross. You will have the authority of this office. You will have money. You will report to me through my agent, Monsieur Lafosse.’ The minister glances over Jean-Baptiste’s shoulder. Jean-Baptiste turns. On a stool behind the door a man is sitting. There is time only to notice the long, white fingers, the long limbs dressed in black. The eyes also, of course. Two black nails hammered into a skull.

‘You will tell Lafosse everything. He has offices in Paris. He will visit you at your work.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘And you will keep the nature of your business to yourself for as long as is practicably possible. The people’s affections are unpredictable. They may hold dear even a place like les Innocents.’

‘My lord, when am I to begin this work?’

But the minister is suddenly deaf. The minister has lost interest in him. He is turning over papers and reaching for his little glass, which the servant, moving around the desk, guides into his outstretched fingers.

Lafosse rises from his stool. From the depths of his coat, he takes a sheet of folded and sealed paper, then a purse. He gives both to Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste bows to him, bows more deeply to the minister, steps backwards towards the door, turns and exits. The man who was waiting with him has gone. Was he an engineer too? That Jean-Marie Lestingois the minister mentioned? And if the yellow-eyed servant had looked at him first, would he be the one now charged with the destruction of a cemetery?

He gathers up his riding coat from where he left it draped across the chair. On the floor, the dog’s urine, having exhausted its momentum, is slowly seeping into the wood.

3

For a corridor or two, a wing, he is sure he is retracing his steps. He passes windows big enough to ride a horse through, even, perhaps, an elephant. He descends flights of curving steps past enormous allegorical tapestries that shiver in the autumn draughts and must have exhausted the sight of scores of women, every detail detailed, stitch-perfect, the flowers at the foot of Parnassus, French country flowers — poppies, cornflowers, larkspur, chamomile. .

The palace is a game, but he is growing tired of playing it. Some corridors are dark as evening; others are lit by branches of dripping candles. In these he finds jostling knots of servants, though when he asks for directions they ignore him or point in four different directions. One calls after him, ‘Follow your nose!’ but his nose tells him only that the dung of the mighty is much like the dung of the poor.

And everywhere, on every corridor, there are doors. Should he go through one? Is that how you escape the Palace of Versailles? Yet doors in such a place are as much subject to the laws of etiquette as everything else. Some you knock upon; others must be scratched with a fingernail. Cousin André explained this to him on the ride to Nogent, Cousin André the lawyer who, though three years younger, is already possessed of a sly worldliness, an enviable knowledge of things.

He stops in front of a door that seems to him somehow more promising than its neighbours. And can he not feel an eddy of cool air under its foot? He looks for scratch marks on the wood, sees none and gently knocks. No one answers. He turns the handle and goes in. There are two men sitting at a small, round table playing cards. They have large, blue eyes and silver coats. They tell him they are Polish, that they have been in the palace for months and hardly remember why they first came. ‘You know Madame de M—?’ asks one.

‘I am afraid not.’

They sigh; each turns over a card. At the back of the room, a pair of cats are testing their claws on the silk upholstery of a divan. Jean-Baptiste bows, excuses himself. But won’t he stay to play a while? Piquet passes the time as well as anything. He tells them he is trying to find his way out.

Out? They look at him and laugh.

In the corridor once more, he stops to watch a woman with heaped purple hair being carried horizontally through a doorway. Her head turns; her black eyes study him. She is not the sort of person you ask directions of. He descends to the floor below on a narrow stone screw of service stairs. Here, soldiers lounge on benches, while boys in blue uniforms drowse curled on tables, under tables, on window seats, anywhere there is space for them. Towards him come a dozen girls running half blind behind their bundles of dirty linen. To avoid being trampled, he steps (neither knocking nor scratching) through the nearest door and arrives in a space, a large, spreading room where little trees, perhaps a hundred of them, are stood in great terracotta pots. Though he is a northerner, a true northerner, he knows from his time waiting on the Comte de S— that these are lemon trees. They have been lagged with straw and sacking against the coming winter. The air is scented, softly green, the light slanting through rows of arched windows. One of these he forces open, and climbing onto a water-barrel, he jumps down into the outside world.

Behind him, in the palace, countless clocks sing the hour. He takes out his own watch. It is, like the suit, a gift, this one from Maître Perronet upon the occasion of his graduation. The lid is painted with the masonic all-seeing eye, though he is not a mason and does not know if Maître Perronet is one. As the hands touch the hour of two, the watch gently vibrates on his palm. He shuts its case, pockets it.

Ahead of him, a path of pale gravel leads between walls of clipped hedge too tall to see over. He follows the path; there is nothing else to guide him. He passes a fountain, its basin waterless and already full of autumn leaves. He is cold, suddenly tired. He pulls on his riding coat. The path divides. Which way now? Between the paths is a little arbour with a semicircular bench and above the bench a stone cupid mottled with lichens, his arrow aimed at whoever sits below him. Jean-Baptiste sits. He unseals the paper Lafosse gave to him. It contains the address of a house where he is to take up his lodging. He opens the mouth of the purse, pours some of the heavy coins into his hand. A hundred livres? Perhaps a little more. He is glad of it — relieved — for he has been living on his meagre savings for months, owes money to his mother, to Cousin André. At the same time he can see that the amount is not intended to flatter him. It feels closely calculated. The going rate for whatever he is now, a contractor, a state hireling, a destroyer of cemeteries. .

A cemetery! Still he cannot quite take it in. A cemetery in the centre of Paris! A notorious boneyard! God knows, whatever it was he had expected on his journey here, whatever project he imagined might be offered to him — perhaps some work on the palace itself — this he had never dreamt of. Could he have refused it? The possibility had not occurred to him, had not, in all likelihood, existed. As to whether digging up bones was compatible with his status, his dignity as a graduate of the Ecole Royale des Ponts et Chaussées, he must try to find some way of thinking of it more. . abstractly. He is, after all, a young man of ideas, of ideals. It cannot be impossible to conceive of this work as something worthy, serious. Something for the greater good. Something the authors of the Encyclopedie would approve of.

In front of the bench, a dozen sparrows have gathered, their feathers puffed against the cold. He watches them, their ragged hopping over the stones. In one of the pockets of his coat — a pocket deep enough to put all the sparrows inside — he has some bread from the breakfast he took in darkness, on horseback. He bites into it, chews, then pulls off a corner of the bread and crumbles it between thumb and finger. In their feeding, the little birds appear to dance between his feet.

4

On the rue de la Lingerie, her chair positioned at the right-hand side of the window in the drawing room on the first floor, Emilie Monnard — known to everyone as Ziguette — is gently sucking her lower lip and watching the day close over the rue Saint-Denis, the rue aux Fers, the market of les Halles. The market, of course, has long since been packed away, its edible litter carried off by those who live on it. What remains, that trash of soiled straw, fish guts, blood-dark feathers, the green trimmings of flowers brought up from the south, all this will blow away in the night or be scattered by brooms and flung water in tomorrow’s dawn. She has watched it all her life and has never wearied of it, the market and — more directly in her view — the old church of les Innocents with its cemetery, though in the cemetery nothing has happened for years, just the sexton and his granddaughter crossing to one of the gates, or more rarely, the old priest in his blue spectacles, who seems simply to have been forgotten about. How she misses it all. The shuffling processions winding from the church doors, the mourners tilted against each other’s shoulders, the tolling of the bell, the swaying coffins, then the muttering of the office and finally — the climax of it all — the moment the dead man or woman or child was lowered into the ground as though being fed to it. And when the others had left and the place was quiet again, she was still there, her face close to the window, keeping watch like a sister or an angel.

She sighs, looks back to the street, to the rue aux Fers, sees Madame Desproux, the baker’s wife, coming past the Italian fountain and pausing to talk to the widow Aries. And there, up by the market cross, is Merda the drunk. And that is Boubon the basket-maker, who lives alone behind his shop on the rue Saint-Denis. . And there, coming from the end of the rue de la Fromagerie, is that woman in her red cloak. Did Merda just call something to her? It must relieve him to insult a creature lower even than himself, but the woman does not pause or turn. She is too used to the likes of Merda. How tall she is! And how absurdly straight she holds herself! Now someone, some man, is talking to her, though he keeps himself at a distance. Who is he? Surely not Armand (or should one say, it is all too likely to be Armand)? But now they part and each is soon lost to view. When darkness falls, some among those men who, in the light, tease her or insult her, will pursue her, make an arrangement, a rendezvous in a room somewhere. Is that how it works? And once they are in the room. . Ah, she has imagined it, pictured it in great detail, has even, in the privacy and firelight of her bedroom, made herself blush furiously with such thoughts, sins of the mind she should confess to Père Poupart at Saint-Eustache, and perhaps would if Père Poupart did not look so like a scalded pig. Why are there no handsome priests in Paris? One has no inclination to confess anything to an ugly man.

‘Anyone interesting in the street, my dear?’ asks her mother, coming into the room behind her, a candle in her dimpled hand.

‘Not really.’

‘No?’

Madame Monnard stands behind her daughter, strokes the girl’s hair, absently winds a finger in its beloved thickness. On the rue aux Fers, a lamp-lighter is propping his ladder against the lamp opposite the church. In silence they watch him, his neat ascent, his reaching into the glass head with his taper, the blossoming of yellow light, his swift descent. When Madame and Monsieur Monnard first came to the house, there were no lamps at all on the rue aux Fers and hardly any on the rue Saint-Denis. Paris was darker then, though everyone was accustomed to it, inured.

‘I am afraid,’ says Madame, ‘that our new lodger has become lost. As he is from the country, I very much doubt he will be able to find his way among so many streets.’

‘He can ask people,’ says Ziguette. ‘I suppose he can speak French.’

‘Of course he can speak French,’ says Madame, uncertainly.

‘I think,’ says Ziguette, ‘he is going to be very small and very hairy.’

Her mother laughs, covers her mouth, her little brown teeth, with her hand. ‘What silly notions you have,’ she says.

‘And he eats,’ continues Ziguette, who since earliest girlhood has been given to flights of this kind, sometimes amusing, sometimes alarming, ‘only apples and pig’s feet. And he wipes his fingers on his beard. Like this.’

She is miming it, clawing her fingers through the air beneath her shapely pink chin, when, with a clatter of wooden sabots, the servant girl comes in.

‘You have not seen anyone, have you, Marie?’ asks Madame.

‘No,’ says Marie, stopping in the gloom by the door, her young and sturdy figure braced as if for some accusation.

‘Your father assured me he would be home early,’ says Madame to her daughter. ‘It would be most unfortunate if we had to receive him ourselves. Marie, Monsieur Monnard has not sent some message, has he?’

The girl shakes her head. She has been the servant there for eighteen months. Her own father was a tanner in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, dead of the typhoid when she was too young to remember him. Like everyone else in the house, she suffers from dreams.

Dusk gives way to the first of the night. Madame Monnard lights more candles. She pokes the fire, carefully. They burn wood, and wood is expensive. A little log no longer or thicker than a man’s arm costs twelve sous and one needs twenty such to keep a fire burning all day. She sits, picks up the edition of the Journal des Dames Modernes she and Ziguette were so entertained by yesterday and turns again to the illustration of the savages, noble savages — great lords in their own savage kingdoms — whose faces were fantastically printed from chin to eyes with blue tattoos, swirls and spirals like plans for formal gardens. Just imagine if their lodger should arrive with such a face! What a coup! Better even than the pianoforte (and what a triumph that had been, the instrument raised up on a pulley like a cow being rescued from a quarry, then swung through the window, half the neighbourhood looking on). A pity it cannot be kept in tune. It drove Ziguette’s poor tutor almost to tears, though it must be admitted Signor Bancolari was the sort of gentleman never far from tears.

On the floor below, the street door thuds. A draught, finding its way up the stairs, ripples the candle flames in the drawing room and a few moments later Monsieur Monnard appears. He is still wearing his leather apron from the shop, the leather dark with use, with age, though why it should be necessary for him to wear an apron at all given that he has no fewer than three perfectly competent apprentices to do all the polishing and sharpening is quite beyond Madame Monnard’s understanding, quite beyond. Her husband, however, must be master in his own house.

They greet each other. He greets his daughter, who is now at the piano stool picking out notes that may or may not be part of some melody she knows. He takes off his wig and scratches hard at his scalp.

‘Still no sign of our guest?’ he asks.

‘Ziguette,’ says Madame Monnard, ‘has been saying the most ridiculous things about him. She thinks that because he is from Normandy, he will not speak French.’

‘In Brittany,’ says Monsieur Monnard, ‘they speak something quite impenetrable. It’s thought they learnt it from the gulls.’

‘Why is he coming, anyway?’ asks Ziguette. ‘Wasn’t he content at home?’

‘I assume,’ says her father, ‘that he intends to make his fortune. Isn’t it why anyone comes to Paris?’

Marie asks if she should bring in the soup. Monsieur wishes to know what kind of soup they have today.

‘Bones,’ says Marie.

‘She means from Tuesday’s veal,’ says Madame Monnard. ‘To which we have added any number of pleasant things.’

‘Like pig’s feet,’ says Ziguette, which sends her mother into trills of delighted laughter.

5

He arrives between the soup and the serving of a little stew, also made with the remains of Tuesday’s veal. He had not intended to arrive so late, nor in darkness. His luggage, a large, ribbed trunk (one rib cracked when it was unloaded from the top of the coach), is carried between himself and an enormous mute boy, some relation of the people he lodged with last night by the coaching offices.

‘We were afraid you had become lost!’ calls Monsieur Monnard, affably, from the top of the first flight of stairs. ‘Lost entirely.’

‘I was at Versailles, monsieur, and then the horse was lame. .’

‘Versailles!’ echoes Monsieur Monnard, watching the young man ascend towards him, then ushering him into the half-warmth of the upstairs room. ‘Monsieur Babette has been at Versailles today.’

‘Baratte, monsieur.’

‘Eh?’

‘I am Baratte. My name, monsieur. Baratte.’

He is given a place opposite Ziguette. There is some debate as to whether the stew should go back to the kitchen while the new arrival has his soup. Will the soup be hot enough? Does Monsieur Baratte care for soup?

‘And how was Versailles today?’ asks Monsieur Monnard, as if Versailles were a place he frequented.

Jean-Baptiste takes a spoonful of the tepid soup and discovers in himself a violent hunger. Had he been alone, he might have drunk it straight from the bowl and immediately found somewhere to fall asleep. Still, he must make some effort to ingratiate himself. These people will constitute his most intimate society, at least for a while. He does not want them to think he is dull or rude, a boorish provincial. Does not want them to think he is any of the things that in moments of weakness he believes himself to be. He looks up from his bowl. What a large, red mouth that girl has! It must be the grease from the soup that makes her lips shine so. ‘Versailles,’ he says, turning to her father, ‘is the strangest place I’ve ever seen.’

‘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.

There is no sound, nothing but the dull clacking of the keys, the clumping of the pedals. He has no air, though for Couperin it would take more than air — the old organ really isn’t up to it any more. For other pieces, less demanding on warped metal and old leather, he now and then hires a market porter to work the pump, or that big mute boy who hangs around on the rue Saint-Denis. Then les Innocents is driven almost mad, the brass eagles, the tattered banners, the million bones in the crypts, all of it forced back for a few minutes towards something like life. That is his job — there is no other reason to play: no congregation comes, no masses are said, no weddings celebrated, and certainly there are no funerals. But while he plays, and while the priest, that haggard old soldier of Christ, is allowed to haunt the place, then the Church retains an interest in les Innocents, one which, like interests anywhere, it may trade for hard advantage.

He is leaping octaves, modulating furiously, his very white fingers dancing across the keyboards in pursuit of Couperin’s fawn, when he hears — surely not! — the door in the north wall being opened. The priest, when he leaves the place at all, has other ways of coming and going, but if not Père Colbert, who?

He twists on the bench, squints down the aisle to where, in the open doorway to the rue aux Fers, a man is standing. A man, yes, a young man, but the organist, who knows most of the faces in the quarter, does not recognise him.

‘You need some assistance, monsieur?’

The intruder stops mid-stride. He turns his head, seeking the origin of the voice.

‘You see the pipes? Walk towards them. You will soon see me. . A little more. . A little more. . There! A being of flesh and blood like yourself. I am Armand de Saint-Méard. Organist at the church of les Saints-Innocents.’

‘An organist? Here?’

‘Here is the organ. Here is the organist. There is really no cause for astonishment.’

‘I did not mean to. .’

‘And you, monsieur? Whom do I have the honour of addressing?’

‘Baratte.’

‘Baratte?’

‘I am the engineer.’

‘Ah! You have come to mend the organ.’

‘Mend it?’

‘It limps, musically speaking. I do what I can, but. .’

‘I regret, monsieur. . I do not know organs.’

‘No? And yet it is the only machine we have. I would suggest that you have come to the wrong place except that I see you have a key in your hand. The bishop has sent you?’

‘The bishop? No.’

‘Then?’

In a quiet voice, and after a moment of hesitation, Jean-Baptiste speaks the minister’s name.

‘So they have something in mind for us at last,’ says the organist.

‘I am here to make a—’

‘Shhh!’

High above them, on the narrow gangway of the triforium, a noise of shuffling feet. The organist draws Jean-Baptiste to the shelter of a pillar. They wait. After a minute, the sound fades. ‘Père Colbert,’ whispers the organist. ‘Unlikely to look kindly on an engineer sent by the minister. Unlikely, really, to look kindly on anyone.’

‘A priest?’

‘Old but strong as an ox. A missionary in China before either of us was born. I have even heard he was tortured there. Did something to his eyes. The light pains him now. Wears tinted spectacles. Sees through a glass darkly. Murderous temper on him. .’

Jean-Baptiste nods, and glancing at the red of the other’s hair, says, ‘It was you who lived at the Monnards’ house?’

‘The Monnards? And how would you, monsieur, know about such a thing?’

‘They still speak of you.’

‘You are there now? The little room above the cemetery?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are lodging there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, well. Ha! I’d say it was cold up there now.’

‘It is.’

‘A word of advice. When you lie in bed, look up at the ceiling. You will notice a small— Oh, oh. Careful my friend. You are unwell?’

It occurs to Jean-Baptiste, listening to the drumming of his heart, that since coming inside the church he has been trying not to breathe. He allows the organist to guide him to the organ bench, hears him, as though from the far side of a wall, say how he too, in the beginning, was similarly affected, how he could only enter the church with a cloth soaked in cologne pressed to his face.

‘I marvelled anyone could live within a half-day’s ride of the place. And yet you see, they do. Numerous as bees. You get used to it. Try to breathe through your mouth. The taste is easier to support than the smell.’

‘I am supposed to find Manetti,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘The grave-digger? You really are up to something. But don’t worry. Manetti is the easiest man to find in Paris. Let’s get you into the air. You can buy us both a glass of something restorative.’

Leaning — there is really no help for it — on the organist’s arm, Jean-Baptiste returns to the door in the north wall. Not that he can blame the church entirely. It was a disturbed night, the whole house restless as though a gale was blowing, though none was. He imagined he heard more scratching at the door, even, at some unearthly hour, scratching on the window. And then, in the early morning, Lafosse standing in the Monnards’ drawing room with the keys of les Innocents in his hand. No comfort to be found in that face. .

When they are out in the street and the church door is closed and locked and Jean-Baptiste can trust his own feet again, his own strength, they turn left towards the rue de la Lingerie, then right towards the market. Every ten paces or so, the organist is greeted by someone, usually a woman. At each encounter, their eyes flicker over the young man beside him, the new companion.

‘Over there,’ says the organist, waving an arm, ‘you can eat well and cheaply. There on the corner, they’ll mend your clothes without stealing them. And that’s Gaudet’s place. Gives a good shave, knows everyone. And here. . Here is the rue de la Fromagerie, where you come when you need to breathe in something other than the perfume of graves. Go ahead. Fill your lungs.’

They have entered one end of a curious clogged vein of a street, more alley than street, more gutter than alley. The top stories of the buildings tilt towards each other, just a narrow line of white sky between them. On both sides of the street, every second house is a shop and every shop sells cheese. Sometimes eggs, sometimes milk and butter, but always cheese. Cheese in the windows, cheese laid out on tables and handcarts, cheese piled on straw, cheese hanging on strings or floating in tubs of brine. Cheeses that must be sliced with a knife big enough to slaughter a bull, cheeses scooped with carved wooden spoons. Red, green, grey, pink, purest white. Jean-Baptiste has no idea what most of them are or where they have come from, but one he immediately recognises and his heart lifts as if he had caught sight of some dear old face from home. Pont-l’Evêque! Norman grass! Norman air!

‘Want to try some?’ asks the girl, but his interest has moved to the stall next door, where a woman in a red cloak is buying a little cake of goat’s cheese, the rind rolled in ashes.

‘That,’ says the organist, leaning across Jean-Baptiste’s shoulder, ‘is the Austrian. So called on account of her likeness to our beloved queen. And not just the blond hair. Hey, Héloïse! Meet my friend here, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, and who has come from God-knows-where to turn our lives upside down.’

She is counting out little coins for the cheese. She glances over, first at Armand, then at Jean-Baptiste. Does he blush? He thinks perhaps he has frowned at her. Then she looks away, takes her purchase, starts to move through the crowd.

‘The women here,’ says Armand, ‘despise her, in part because their husbands can buy her for an hour, but mostly because she doesn’t fit, doesn’t belong. If she was over in the Palais Royal, no one would blink an eye. You’ve seen the Palais, I suppose?’

‘I have heard of it. I have never—’

‘What a study you are, man! You are like one of Montesquieu’s Persians. I shall write about you in the newspaper. A weekly column.’ He strides ahead and, as they pass below the buttresses of Saint-Eustache, he launches into a loud, airy, impromptu lecture on the history of the Palais, how it was once the garden of Cardinal Richelieu and how the Duc d’Orléans had given it to his son, who filled it with cafés and theatres and shops, and how it was always crowded and unspeakably elegant and the biggest bordello in Europe. .

He is still describing it when they come to the thing itself, one of its several entrances, a passage no wider than the rue de la Fromagerie, and through this they are jostled into an arcaded courtyard, in the middle of which a marionette show is coming to an end amid hoots of laughter. To Jean-Baptiste, it appears that the puppets are being made to fornicate. When he looks more closely, he sees that they are.

‘The police patrols never come here,’ says the organist. ‘The duke makes them little presents and they find something else to do. Lewd puppetry is the least of it.’

Who are these people? Do none of them have trades, occupations? Their movement, their costumes, the sheer noise of it, suggests carnival, and yet there is no obvious centre to any of it, no sense of structure. It is, seemingly, all spontaneous, the moment’s continual self-invention.

‘Come,’ says the organist, tugging at the elbow of Jean-Baptiste’s coat, urging him towards the door of a café halfway down one of the galleries. ‘We’ll try our luck in here.’

Inside is as crowded as outside, but the organist, with a well-aimed greeting to one of the waiters, is soon provided with a little table, a pair of battered cane chairs. He orders coffee, a bowl of sweet cream, two glasses of brandy. The clientele is exclusively male, mostly young. Everyone speaks at the top of his voice. Now and then someone reads aloud from a newspaper or raps on the window to draw the attention of a passing acquaintance, perhaps some woman he wishes to grin at. The waiters — small, concentrated men — navigate tightly winding paths between the backs of the chairs. An order is shouted, acknowledged with the barest nod. Two dogs leap at each other’s throats, are thrashed by their owners, caged under the tables again. Jean-Baptiste pulls off his coat (hard enough to do in such a space). The café is the warmest place he has been in for weeks. Hot, smoky, slightly damp. When his brandy arrives, he drinks it out of pure thirst.

‘Better?’ asks the organist. His glass is also empty. He orders two more. ‘You may call me Armand,’ he says. ‘Though I’ll leave it up to you.’

Now that they are sitting opposite each other, and now that he does indeed feel better, Jean-Baptiste can start to take him in, this Armand, especially as the organist has the restless habit of looking past him at all the other faces in the café. He wears no wig, nor is his hair powdered: powder in such hair would serve little purpose. His clothes — expensive-looking, though more so from a distance than close to — belong to no fashion Jean-Baptiste can recognise. Trousers, striped and worn tight as a second skin. A waistcoat half the length of his own, a coat with lapels so large the points extend almost past his shoulders. A cravat of green muslin, metres of it. When he drinks, he has to hold it clear of his mouth, his big, purplish lips.

‘You did not expect to find an organist at the church,’ says Armand, returning his gaze to Jean-Baptiste. ‘In fact I am the director of music.’

‘You have been there long?’

‘Eighteen months.’

‘Then you were appointed when the church was already closed.’

‘Can a church be closed like a baker’s shop?’

‘If the order is given, I suppose.’

‘You suppose, eh? Well, no doubt you are right. My predecessor drank himself to death. I dare say he found the situation. . unsettling.’

‘And you do not?’

‘Positions, as perhaps you know yourself, are never easy to come by.’

‘But there is no one to play for.’

Armand shrugs, picks up his second brandy. ‘There’s myself, Père Colbert, God. Now you. Quite a good audience really.’

Jean-Baptiste grins. Though it troubles him that he is sitting in a café drinking brandy rather than making a survey of the cemetery, troubles him that he could barely breathe inside the church, he is not sorry to have discovered this flame-haired musician. And after all, he may learn something to the purpose. The work that has been entrusted to him will not be a simple matter of digging up bones and carting them away. He has understood that much. It will be the living as much as the dead he will have to contend with.

‘If I can stay in with the bishop,’ says Armand, ‘then one day I’ll get something better. Saint-Eustache, perhaps.’

‘Even there,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘you will be able to smell it.’

‘The cemetery? It is as I said. You get used to it. Which is to say you never really get used to it, but it becomes bearable. One adjusts. Tell me, what did you notice about the Monnards?’

‘That they are. . respectable people?’

‘Oh, yes. Very respectable. And what else?’

‘That they like to talk?’

‘The only way to silence them would be to put a tax on words. Something our masters may be considering. But come now. Be open. What else?’

‘Their breath?’

‘Exactly. And you have probably noticed that mine is not much sweeter. No, there’s no need for politeness. Anyone who spends time at les Innocents gets to be the same way.’

‘Is that what I have to look forward to?’

‘You are thinking of staying so long?’

‘I do not know how long I shall stay.’

‘You do not care to speak of your work.’

‘I am sure it would not interest you.’

‘No? I suspect it would interest me greatly, though I shall not press you on it now. We will speak of something else. Ziguette Monnard, for example. You had a good look at her?’

‘I sat across from her when we ate.’

‘You were not impressed? She’s one of the prettiest girls in the quarter.’

‘I’ll admit she’s pretty.’

‘Oh, you’ll admit it? How grand! You have someone at home, perhaps? Wherever home is.’

‘Bellême. Normandy.’

‘In Bellême, then. No, I can see you do not. Well, watch out, my friend. If you stay, they will certainly try to marry you to her.’

‘To Ziguette?’

‘Why not? A young engineer. A confidant of the minister.’

‘I have never claimed to be his confidant.’

At the next table, a man with a network of silvery scars about his throat glances up from the backgammon board, looks at the young men, looks slowly back to his game.

‘And what of you?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘They tried with you?’

‘Musicians are less eligible. People like the Monnards consider a musician little better than an actor.’

‘Her father runs a cutler’s shop. Can they afford to look down at musicians?’

‘It costs very little to look down on people. And yes, they considered me.’

‘You liked her?’

‘As one likes the company of any attractive woman. But with Ziguette, one must be careful.’

‘How so?’

Armand scoops a gob of sweet cream from the bowl, sucks his finger, wipes his lips. ‘Ziguette grew up in that house. She has lived there all her life. In that air.’

‘That should make me wary of her?’

‘To marry Ziguette,’ says Armand, ‘would be like marrying the cemetery. It is more than simply a matter of breath. Now, little Marie. .’

‘The servant?’

‘I’m not talking about marriage, of course.’

‘You? And Marie?’

‘Poor girls from the faubourg Saint-Antoine are freethinkers. Her mind might be as empty as the Saviour’s tomb, but she’s more modern than the Monnards will ever be. More than you too, perhaps. Don’t be offended. Anyway, I’ve half a mind to modernise you myself. The project has just occurred to me.’

‘And if I do not think I need instruction?’

‘From a church organist? It is exactly such an attitude we will need to root out if we are to secure you for the future. The party of the future.’

‘Such a party exists?’

‘It has no meeting place, no subscriptions, and yet it exists as surely as you or I. The party of the future. The party of the past. There may not be much time left to decide what side you are on. I think we should start by changing your costume. You feel a particular affinity with brown?’

‘You find some fault with my suit?’

‘Nothing. If you belong to the party of the past. I shall introduce you to Charvet. He will know what to do with you. Charvet is modern.’

‘And what is Charvet? A writer?’

‘A tailor.’

Vexed, intrigued, tipsy, Jean-Baptiste makes what he hopes is a face expressive of scorn, but the organist has gone back to his study of the other faces in the café. When he has finished, he says, ‘I hope you don’t object to paying for this. And then we must find somewhere to eat. Nothing is more damaging to incipient friendship than brandy on an empty stomach.’

In the galleries, in the courtyard, the shoving, the shouting, the lifting of hats, the cocking of eyebrows, the tireless pursuing of something, anything, goes on with no sign that it will ever lose its momentum. Is this modern? And these people, are they the party of the future or of the past? Does one always know to which party one belongs? Can one be sure? Or is it, thinks the engineer, like his mother’s religion — some destined to be saved, others damned, and no sure sign either way?

They are burrowing through the crowd (occasionally having to advance sideways, occasionally having to stop or even retreat a little) when Armand clutches Jean-Baptiste’s coat again and steers him through the portal of Salon No. 7. In the lobby, a tightly stayed woman is perched on a stool behind a table on which there is nothing but a small tin and a bell.

‘You have to give her four sous,’ says Armand. Jean-Baptiste gives her four sous. She rings the bell. A man in a rose-tinted wig appears, holds back a rose-coloured curtain. Clearly, he is already well acquainted with Armand. They bow to each other like courtiers, though it is all mockery.

‘Just Zulima today,’ says Armand.

‘As you wish,’ says the man.

‘This gentleman,’ says Armand, gesturing to Jean-Baptiste with his thumb, ‘is from somewhere in Normandy. One day he’ll be the greatest engineer in France.’

‘Naturally,’ purrs the man. He leads them along a softly lit corridor. On either side, heavy drapes conceal what are, presumably, the entrances to rooms, but the last drapes have been imperfectly drawn and Jean-Baptiste, pausing, has a glimpse of a man, part of a man, a naked arm and naked leg lashed to a cartwheel, a face, heavily bearded, one large eye wide in a wild stare. Who was it meant to be? Damiens? Damiens who they spent half a day killing in the place de Grève for grazing the king with a penknife? Racked him, cut him, poured lead into his wounds, flogged horses to rip his limbs from their sockets, though the horses could not do it — poor innocent beasts — until the executioner cut through some of the dying man’s muscle. Thousands, it was said, looking on that day from the buildings around the square. .

At the end of the corridor, the guide is waiting for him. He lifts another curtain. Jean-Baptiste stoops, passes under his arm.

‘Zulima,’ begins the man, breaking into speech as if he was some manner of automaton, ‘was a Persian princess who died, like Cleopatra, from the bite of a viper. She was but seventeen years of age and unhappy in love. Her purity —’ another, finer curtain is drawn back — ‘and the arts of the Persian priests have preserved her perfectly for more than two hundred years.’

She is lying on a platform that is half catafalque, half daybed. There are two candles by her feet, two more by her head. Her body is wrapped in a shroud, a winding-sheet of some diaphanous stuff — tulle, organza, who knows. She is nubile. She is perfect. The young men stand either side of her and gaze. The older man waits by her feet, head bowed as though in prayer.

‘Remind you of anyone?’ whispers Armand.

‘No one,’ says Jean-Baptiste, but he knows who the organist has in mind. There is indeed, in the wax face, the ample figure, a marked resemblance to Ziguette Monnard.

From the Palais they go to an inn near the Bourse to eat. They are seated at a common table and fed the ten-sous dinner of bread soup and boiled beef. A brisk fire burns at the back of the room. They are drinking wine, red wine that is neither good nor bad. They are drinking and talking, their cheeks growing red. Armand, with no sense of shame or awkwardness, confesses to having been abandoned in the baby-wheel outside the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés. There, his talent brought him to the notice of the intendants who, in turn, brought him to the notice of the commissioners, those charitable men and women who liked to go fishing among the scabby, shaven-headed children who lived and died in those halls, for one worth saving.

‘There are no youthful illusions in such a place. You do not mistake the world’s character. By the age of seven we were all as cynical as abbots.’

Together they agree that the losing of illusions is an indispensable preparation for those who hope to rise in the world. On a third bottle, they confide to each other that they are ambitious, madly ambitious, and that through luck and hard work they intend to die famous men.

‘And wealthy,’ says Armand, picking a shred of beef from between his teeth. ‘I do not intend to die famous only for my poverty.’

Jean-Baptiste speaks of his former patron, the Comte de S—, of his two years at the Ecole des Ponts, of Maître Perronet, of the bridges he dreams of building, structures light as thought spanning the Seine, the Orne, the Loire. .

Wine and unsuspected depths of loneliness have produced in him an effusiveness he would not, sober, trust or like in another. Nearly, very nearly, he tells Armand what he is in Paris to do, for surely Armand would be impressed, would see what he himself (in the ruby light of tavern wine) has come to see — that destroying the cemetery of les Innocents is to sweep away in fact, not in rhetoric, the poisonous influence of the past! And would Armand then not have to admit that he, Jean-Baptiste Baratte, engineer, belonged, beyond any quibbling, to the party of the future, indeed, to its vanguard? Or would he be alarmed? Horrified? Furious? What exactly is Armand Saint-Méard’s relationship with the bishop? What has His Grace been told of the minister’s plans?

Outside, they piss against a wall, button themselves and sail on through what is left of the afternoon. They are still talking, still gabbling about politics, Paris, the irreducible dignity of the peasants (But I know about the peasants, Jean-Baptiste wants to say, I’m related to dozens of them), but neither is really listening to the other any more, and anyway, he is being urged inside again — immediately feeling more drunk inside than out — and presented to a man, a kind of exquisite monkey, who is, it transpires, Charvet the tailor.

The shop, if such a space could be called by so modest a name, is fitted out with dainty furniture and oil paintings and is not remotely akin to the pungent atelier where Jean-Baptiste’s father sewed his gloves. No obvious sign of work here at all, other than the table by the window where a pair of young men are dreamily cutting lengths of some material that glitters and shivers like spring water.

Charvet wastes no time. A few words from Armand, a shrug from Jean-Baptiste, are all he needs to begin. He circles the engineer, touching, tugging, stepping back to better assess the length of a leg, the slight roundness of the shoulders, the slender waist. It is not unpleasant to be the focus of such intense professional surveillance. Jean-Baptiste does not even notice when Armand slips away. The whole day has had some strange impetus of its own. He is past trying to wrestle it. He will think about it later.

‘I believe, monsieur,’ says Charvet, ‘I believe that we shall be able to do something very interesting with you. You have, if you will allow me, the figure necessary for the new styles. You are not one of those portly gentlemen I am forced to disguise more than dress. You, monsieur, we may dress. Yes. Something that will flow with the natural movements of the body. Something a little more informal, though, of course, in its way, perfectly correct. . We must tell a story, monsieur. We must tell it clearly and beautifully. I will dress you not for 1785 but for 1795. Cédric! Bring the gentleman a glass of the Lafitte. Bring the bottle. And now, monsieur, if you will do me the honour of following me. .’

Two hours later, Jean-Baptiste is examining himself — examining someone — in a large, brilliantly polished oval mirror. He is wearing a suit of pistachio silk, a silk lining of green and saffron stripes. The waistcoat, cut at the top of the thigh, is also pistachio, with modest gold-thread embroidery. The cuffs of the coat are small, the collar high. The cravat — saffron again — is almost as large as Armand’s. For a long time, Charvet and Cédric have been pulling pins from between their lips, have been snipping and sewing and handling him with that freedom reserved to their trade, to that of body servants, surgeons and executioners. They are almost done. They stand back, careful to exclude themselves from the mirror’s scope. They look at him looking at himself. It is, Jean-Baptiste is perfectly aware, far too late to refuse the suit or even to criticise it. To do so would be to denounce not just Charvet but the future itself. Impossible! He will take it and he will pay whatever Charvet wants. It turns out to be a lot. He blushes. He does not have such an amount on him. The tailor spreads his hands. Of course, of course. Tomorrow will be quite soon enough. But there is something else. Is the young gentleman a young gentleman of an intellectual persuasion? Aha! He had thought it all along, but one does not wish to appear impertinent.

He glides to the gleaming walnut of the escritoire, removes from one of its drawers a little picture in a frame and brings it to Jean-Baptiste. ‘Voltaire,’ he says, and smiles at the picture as if, alone, he might address fond words to it. ‘You see what he is wearing? The robe? It is known as a banyan. Intellectual gentlemen find it something they can barely do without. I have one here in red damask. I would not mention it to most of my customers; it would not be understood. But in your case. .’

‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Yes?’

‘I will take it.’

‘And, monsieur, you must wear your own hair. In five years the wig will be perfectly extinct. In the meantime, I have an excellent bag wig, all human hair, and rentable by the week. .’

‘That too,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘And shall I keep your old suit as a deposit, monsieur? I have a smaller establishment on the rue du Bac catering to my. . hmm, more conservative customers. I could perhaps sell it for you there?’

‘As you wish.’

‘As you wish, monsieur.’

‘Then yes.’ He shrugs. ‘Yes.’

Released from Charvet and his shop, the engineer crosses the place des Victoires, turns down the rue de la Feuillade towards the market and the Monnards’ house. The wind has got up. It blows the dust into his face and makes him sneeze. The new suit is not as warm as the old. Neither is the new suit a gift from his dead father. He hugs the packaged banyan to his chest. At each step the stink of the cemetery grows stronger, but in spite of this he is several times forced to hesitate, peer forwards, look over his shoulder, take his bearings from a gate, a pillar, a bare tree, a stone trough. Has he seen them before? Then he finds himself standing at the end of the rue de la Fromagerie. The little shops are shuttered, the carts resting on their handles, the cobbles damp with slops. There is a beggar kneeling at the corner, but otherwise the street is deserted. The beggar looks up, slips back a hood to show his sores, but in the coolness of his new pockets Jean-Baptiste has no change for him. They mutter to each other (an apology, a curse).

He has his supper with the Monnards. Can they see he has been drinking, that he has spent the day drinking? Perhaps they are too dazzled by his appearance to notice. Pistachio silk, it seems, can provoke something near astonishment. The women want to touch it but do not quite dare to. Monsieur Monnard looks perplexed. He pulls, ruminatively, at the lobes of his ears as though he were milking a pair of tiny udders.

They sit at the table. Jean-Baptiste has no appetite. He drinks some glasses of Monsieur Monnard’s wine, but after the Lafitte at Charvet’s, it tastes of what it is, mostly water.

After supper, Madame invites him to stay and hear Ziguette play the pianoforte. ‘Getting it in, monsieur, I swear it gave me a nosebleed just watching them! And such a crowd outside. They all cheered when it was swung through the window. I said to my husband, I said, “You’d think they was at a hanging!” ’

He stays, bathed in his own pale green light, while Ziguette picks her way through a melody he does not recognise. Can the instrument be in tune? Can a sound like that really be intended? She is wearing a low-cut dress of lemon wool and studies the movement of her hands with a pout of concentration, one blond ringlet dangling over her brow and bobbing like a spring each time she raises her head to squint at the music. He thinks of Zulima, dead two hundred years, nipples like peach stones. The music stops. He applauds with the others, is required to sit through a second piece, a third. Madame Monnard beams at him and nods. Before the commencement of a fourth piece, he gets clumsily to his feet, claims he is feeling indisposed, begs to be excused.

‘It is nothing serious, I hope?’ asks Madame.

He assures her it is not.

In his room, it is as cold as on the previous evening, which is to say, a degree or two colder than the world outside. He still has no wood. He will speak with Marie when she passes on her way to the attic, ask her to make the necessary arrangements, though from what he has seen of her, he thinks it quite likely she will do nothing about it. A symptom of her freethinking? He is not sure — though the thought immediately embarrasses him — how much he cares for modernity when it leaves his fireplace and his washbasin empty.

He unwraps the parcel, spreads the banyan over the bed, takes off his pistachio coat, carefully folds it and draws on the banyan. There is a lot of it. It swathes him. It might, he thinks, swathe two of him. And there is a cap too — compliments of Monsieur Charvet — a tarboosh, made from the same red material. He takes off his wig, puts on the cap. In the mirror, in candle dark, he looks like a Venetian senator. Also, somehow, like a child who has stolen into his parents’ room and put on his father’s clothes. Not that his father would ever have possessed a garment like this. He would not have approved of it, would not in the least have been pleased to see his oldest son wearing it, might, indeed, have been moved to ridicule, to anger.

He turns from the image of his face to the print of the Rialto Bridge on the nail above the mantelpiece. If he is going to wear this thing, then he must inhabit it with high thoughts. It will not do simply to act the philosopher. He must read, work, think. He hauls up the banyan’s skirts, much as he has seen women do on a mired street, and sits at his table, pulls close the candle and opens his copy of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle Volume II. A piece of pale straw is his bookmark. He frowns over the page. The taxonomy of fish. Good. Excellent. He manages an entire paragraph before the words swim away from him in black, flickering shoals, leaving behind bare images of the day he has just passed, that shameful, that inexcusable waste of time and money. He sees the interior of Les Innocents, sees Armand as a great imp perched on the organ bench, sees the pair of them hiding from the priest, sees the woman, the Austrian, buying her little piece of cheese and looking at them, looking for a moment straight at him, this woman out of her place, who does not belong. Then the Palais, the puppets thrusting their wooden hips at each other, the wax princess. And Charvet, his smile bright with pins. .

He replaces the straw, shuts the book, turns the brass ruler in his hands. Heaven knows where Marie has got to. He will speak to her in the morning. He cannot wait any longer.

He takes off his shoes, his pistachio breeches. He is interested, slightly disconcerted, to discover that he has an erection. Some strange after-effect of the drinking, the libidinous wine. He grips his cock through the material of his shirt. Is the life of the body the true life? The mind nothing but a freakish light, like the St Elmo’s fire sailors see circling the tips of their masts in mid-Atlantic? He is savouring this little pensée (in which he does not believe at all), holding his cock like a pen he might use to note it down with, when he is startled by a noise from the passage, the slow dragging of claws across wood, a sound he is starting to be familiar with. He waits. It comes again. He goes to the door. When he opens it, Ragoût looks up at him with yellow, unreadable eyes, eyes that seem to possess their own luminescence, as certain flowers do at dusk. He crouches, strokes the creature’s head, the mangled ear. ‘Very well, my friend. But mind you don’t stick those claws in my throat in the middle of the night.’

From the other side of the unlit passage a movement silences him. He squints. It is Ziguette Monnard. She is in her nightclothes. Her hair is unpinned, brushed free.

‘The cat,’ he says.

‘Ragoût,’ she says.

‘Yes.’ He cannot stand up; he is still hard. Even in this light it would be impossible to disguise the fact. ‘It must be late,’ he says.

‘I hope you are happy here,’ she says.

‘I am sure I shall be.’

‘You have begun your work?’

‘Some. . preliminaries.’

She nods. ‘Then good night, monsieur.’

‘Good night, mademoiselle.’

She turns away, slips into her room. Jean-Baptiste stands, rubs his back, looks down at the absurd puppet now, at last, making its slow bow between his thighs. On the end of the bed, Ragoût is licking his paws. Jean-Baptiste shrugs off the banyan, folds it over the back of the chair, puffs out the candle, feels his way between the slight dampness of the sheets. Then. .

‘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. .’

Some nights more convincing than others.

7

A girl is crossing the burying ground of les Innocents. In one hand, from a length of twine knotted about its feet, she carries a hen; in the other a wicker basket full of vegetables, some fruit, a dark loaf. She was, as usual, one of the first at the market, her slight figure, the thick auburn hair, a familiar sight among the servants who make up the greater part of the early trade. Where she stops, the stall-holder never tries to cheat her. Nor does she need to squeeze and plump the produce, to sniff or haggle like the cook’s maids with their chapped fingers, or those bony matriarchs of pared-down households who live a peg or two above destitution. She is served quickly, respectfully. Perhaps she will be asked about her grandfather’s health, his stiffening joints, but no one will detain her long. It is not that they dislike her. What is there to dislike about Jeanne? But she comes from the other side of the cemetery wall, a place, in this last quarter of the eighteenth century, many people would prefer not to be reminded of. She is sweet, pretty, well mannered. She is also the little auburn-haired emissary of death.

The morning is cold, beautifully bright. Her shadow and the hen’s glide over the stiff grass as she follows the path — a path unmarked by anything other than her own feet — from the door onto the rue aux Fers to the sexton’s house by the corner of the church. In places the ground she passes is uneven, the grass lying in shallow hollows where a grave has subsided. A careless visitor, one who did not know his way, might plunge into one of these, plunge in up to waist or shoulders, even vanish entirely. But not Jeanne.

She stops by the preaching cross, that pillar of stone and iron where once wild-eyed men must have leaned to harangue the crowd. By the bottom of its steps is a clump of honesty, the seedpods bright as money in the sunlight. She bends to pick some, to snap the dry stalks, and puts them in her basket. Not much grows in les Innocents any more. The earth is exhausted from its work, though her grandfather, sexton for fifty years, has told her that when he first came there the cemetery in spring was like a country meadow and that in his predecessor’s time the priest and the locals had grazed their animals in it and the grass was cut for hay.

She picks up her hen. Upside down again, it immediately returns to its stupor. She takes a line that keeps her just beyond the heavy shadow of the church. She dawdles, listens to the city beyond the walls, to Paris going about its morning business, hears the geese in their pens at the market, the shrimp-girl singing her wares, the babies crying in the wet-nurse’s house on the rue de la Ferronnerie. .

As a young girl — she was nine when the last interment took place — the cemetery made its own sounds. The tap-tap of the mason, the rhythm of a spade, the tolling of the bell. Now — for how much noise can a girl and an old man make? — the place is silent unless its peace is disturbed by some visitor, the sort who slides uninvited over the walls at night. A winter dawn two years ago, a duel was fought in the corner by the rue de la Lingerie. From the house, she and her grandfather could hear it plainly enough, the brief clash of weapons, the shouting that ended it. Grandfather waited until it was full day before going out. All they had left behind them was trampled grass and a piece of cloth torn from a shirt, bloody.

And then there are the lovers: there is little she has not seen in that way. Just this last August, under a hazy yellow moon, she watched a boy — one of the porters, from the way he was built — with a girl pretty as an elf queen and no older than herself. When he did it to her, she mewed like a cat. And they did not do it once but three or four times, only stopping to look a little at the moon and drink from the bottle they brought with them and which she found the next day leaning against the Peyron tomb they had used as their bed. There was a spit of wine still in it and she had tasted it, felt it run down her throat, then hidden the bottle in a hole under the tomb.

Sometimes — rarely — she sees the old priest in his glasses, a big wingless bat in the dusk. And sometimes the red-haired musician, who comes out to relieve himself and always waves when he sees her. She would like to look at his hands. His hands must be special because only special hands could make the sounds he makes, that music that once or twice a month seeps through the black walls of the church and makes her heart race.

Outside the house, she looks up to let the autumn sun rest its warmth on her face, then, revived, comforted by its touch, she goes inside. Grandfather is in the kitchen. She brings the bird to him, holds it up for him to put his fingers into its feathers. He makes a little grunt of approval, then tilts his chin towards the room off the kitchen, the sexton’s office, a whitewashed room with a narrow, arched window where who knows how many volumes of records with their dust, their mouse droppings, their crazy marblings of damp, are lined up on sagging shelves. A man is standing at the desk with one of the volumes open in front of him. He stares at it, turns a page, presses a cloth to his face, shuts his eyes, inhales deeply, then pushes the cloth back into the pocket of his coat. The coat is unbuttoned and beneath it she can see a line of his suit, green like the heart of a lettuce.

The hen clucks; the man turns towards the kitchen. He nods to her, and when she says nothing, he tells her his name. ‘I am looking at the records,’ he says.

‘I can see it,’ she says.

He nods again, returns to the book.

‘We can offer you wine, monsieur,’ she says. ‘And we have a little coffee too.’

He has put the cloth to his face again and shakes his head. There is a perfume in the cloth she finds almost offensively strong. Grandfather takes the hen outside.

‘Are you a foreigner?’ she asks.

‘I am from Normandy,’ he says. He is running a finger down a meticulously inked column. Seven Flaselles expired, one after the other, in the autumn of 1610. Seven in less than a month.

‘I thought so,’ she says.

‘Why?’

‘I have not seen you before.’

‘You know everyone in Paris?’

‘In the quarter,’ she says.

‘You know a family called Flaselle?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘There are no Flaselles here.’

‘There were once,’ he says. He closes the volume and walks towards her. From outside comes a frenzied clucking, an abrupt silence.

‘You are Jeanne?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ she says, grinning at the lilt of his voice.

‘Your grandfather said you would show me the cemetery. That you know where the pits are.’

‘The pits?’

‘The common graves.’

‘They are everywhere,’ she says.

‘But you can show me?’

She shrugs. ‘If you wish.’

The old man comes in, the bird’s head in one hand, the softly kicking body in the other. Drops of blood fall like seeds onto the stone of the kitchen floor.

They start with the south charnel, a gallery of blackened stone adjacent to the rue de la Ferronnerie. Of the arches into the gallery, some are barred with man-high gates of rusted iron; others are open. Above the arches — and immediately visible to anyone coming into the cemetery — are garrets where bones, some black as the stones, have been packed behind iron grilles.

After a second of hesitation, Jean-Baptiste steps through one of the arches. On the stone beneath his feet is an inscription. He crouches, touches the lettering with a fingertip. Henri something, struck down, and his son also, beloved something, wife to, late of, devout, fleeting, merciful, the flesh, eternity, 14 something.

He stands and walks a little way along the gallery. Light falls oddly, shows some things clearly, others not at all. He sees the delicate tracery of stone flowers, sees a stone woman holding a stone veil across her face. Narrow steps presumably lead up to the garrets. His shoe kicks a fragment of masonry, the sound of it followed immediately by the sudden scuttling of live things, invisible but close. He turns, hurries back into the open.

He has a notebook with him, a roll of linen tape. When he takes measurements, he asks Jeanne to hold one end of the tape; then, with a steel-tipped pen, a portable inkwell, he writes and sketches in the notebook. He has many questions. She answers them all, and he scratches her replies onto the paper. Sometimes he shuts his eyes and takes out the cloth. He asks if she can read.

‘A little,’ she says, and points to the inscription on a stone. ‘ “Hic Jacet,” ’ she says. ‘And there, “Hic Requiescit.” And there, “Hic est Sepultura.” ’

He nods, almost smiles.

She says, ‘You can read.’

‘I’m an engineer,’ he says. ‘You know what that is?’

‘A kind of priest?’

‘We build things. Structures.’

‘Like a wall?’

‘Like a bridge.’

He asks her the location of the most recent of the common graves. She leads him to it. He looks down, looks around. There is nothing obvious to distinguish it from the patch beside it.

‘You are sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it was closed, sealed, five years ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were a child then.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you remember?’

‘Yes.’

They go on. (He needs to keep moving.) Pit after pit.

‘And this? It is older than the last?’

‘Yes.’

‘And this one?’

‘Older still.’

He makes a map. She watches how he can make a line thinner or thicker with a little adjustment of the angle of the nib. And the figures and the little words. There’s a beauty to it.

‘What’s that?’ she asks, pointing to a squiggle, one of several she has seen him make, a shape like a half-skull.

‘A question mark,’ he says. ‘For when there is some uncertainty.’

Her face falls. ‘Then you have not believed me,’ she says.

He tells her that he has, but that what is under the ground is hidden. What is hidden cannot accurately be known.

‘Not by you,’ she says. There is no pertness in her reply. He seems to consider it a moment, then shuts the book, the inkwell, wipes the nib of the pen.

‘We are finished for today,’ he says. As they walk back to the sexton’s house, he asks, ‘Wouldn’t you like to leave here? Live somewhere else?’

‘I don’t know anywhere else,’ she says. ‘And who would look after them?’

‘Them?’

She gestures to the ground around them. ‘The dead,’ she says.

When he has parted from the girl, from the old sexton, he goes into the church. The girl has pointed out a door he can use, not the big door the corpses and the mourners must have come through, but a smaller one to the side of it, its lintel low enough to make him bow his head. For a few strides he is in a vestibule, black as Hell, then a second door lets him into the body of the church. He is at the back of the south aisle. Ahead, he can see part of the rose window above the altar. There is no sound or sign of any presence other than his own. He starts to navigate, right to left, passes behind the backs of pews, passes dreaming pillars, crosses the nave, passes a large, railed tomb on the top of which an armoured man lies beside his metal wife, their slim hands gathered in prayer. He reaches the north wall, walks down to the organ. There is no Armand Saint-Méard today. He is a little disappointed, a little relieved. It might have been reassuring to have heard the organist’s admiration of the new suit. It might also, of course, simply have been the prelude to another wasted day of drinking and rambling.

He sits on the organ bench, lets his fingers move above the keyboards. To the right and left are rows of stops, knobs of elegantly turned wood, some seemingly of ivory. He slides one out, leans to try and read what is painted there, but the script is too elaborately Gothic and is, anyway, abbreviated after the manner of chemical compounds. He slides it back in. The instrument is the only thing in the entire church he feels any interest in, any liking for. Could it be saved? Dismantled, wrapped, stored, reassembled?

He gets off the bench, steps down into the aisle and is trying, among the masonry and plaques, the substantial and insubstantial shadows, to see the door to the rue aux Fers when a voice, one that almost crushes him, falls from some impenetrable part of the darkness above.

‘You! Who are you?’

Horrible to be seen like this, seen but unable to see back. He stares upwards, grimacing, as if in expectation of the thudding of leathery wings.

‘You are not the musician! I know his footfall. Who are you?’

Echoes, black flocks of them under the vaulting. Impossible to locate the origin.

‘Answer me, rogue!’

He sees the door now, gets his key into it on the third attempt, finds it is the key to the Monnards’ house, fits another key, turns it, pulls at the door. .

‘Who are you? Who!’

And then he is out; out on the rue aux Fers. The street is not consumed with fire. There are no abominations out of Hieronymous Bosch, no pale women consorting with demons, or stranded whales spewing tormented souls. A half-dozen laundry wives are at work by the Italian fountain. The ground about them glitters. A pair of them glance over, perhaps surprised to see anyone coming out of the church, a man, one they haven’t seen before, but soon they look back to their work, cold arms plunged into cold water. Linen will not wash itself.

8

He sits in his room, wrapped in damask, and looking through the unshuttered window to the church. The sun is setting, but the stones of les Innocents give back little of its light. The windows are briefly livid with a fire that seems more the show of some holocaust inside the church than anything as distant, as benign, as a red late-October sun. Then the light flares, ebbs, and the whole façade is joined in uniform darkness.

He rises from the chair to see if he can spy the glimmer of the evening’s first candle in the sexton’s house, but there is nothing, not yet. Perhaps they retire like Norman peasants, like the beasts of those peasants, as soon as it is too dark to work.

Was the girl simple-minded? He does not think so. But can he depend on her description of what, under the rough grass, he will find when he starts to dig? He supposes he must, for he has little else to guide him. The memories of an aged sexton, records that have made a dinner for generations of mice. .

He turns the chair, sits facing the table. He fusses with his tinderbox, lights his own candle and slides it close to the edge of the book in which, in the morning, he made his notes. He studies his sketches, runs a finger by the figures, tries to see it all as a problem of pure engineering such as, at the school, Maître Perronet might have thrown among them as he passed on his way to his office. So many square metres of ground, so many cart loads of. . of debris. So many men, so many hours. A calculation. An equation. Voilà! He must not forget, of course, to leave a little room for the unexpected. Perronet always insisted on it, some give, some slack in the rope for that quantum of uncertainty that bedevils every project and which the naïve practitioner always ignores until it is too late.

From the back of the notebook he carefully tears out a sheet of plain paper, opens his inkwell, dips his nib and begins to write.

My lord,

I have made an initial examination of both the church and cemetery and see no reason to delay the work that Your Lordship has entrusted to me. It will be necessary to recruit at least thirty able-bodied men for the cemetery and as many more for the church, some of whom should have experience in the art of wrecking. In addition, I shall need horses, wagons, a good supply of timber.

In the matter of the cemetery, beyond the removing of the remains from the crypts, charnels and common graves, I recommend that the entire surface of the cemetery be excavated to a depth of two metres and sent out of the city to some unpopulated place or even taken as far as the coast and cast into the sea.

May I ask if somewhere suitable has been prepared for the reception of the human material? And what in the church other than those objects of a sacred character, relics, etc., is to be preserved? There is, for example, an organ of German origin that might, if Your Lordship wished it, be dismantled in such a way as to preserve it.

I am, my lord, your obedient servant,

J-B Baratte, engineer

He has no sand to sprinkle on the wet ink. He blows on it, cleans the nib of the pen. From below there comes the flat ringing of the supper gong. More dead men’s food. He shrugs off the banyan, reaches for the pistachio coat, then, before going down, halts a moment at the window with the candle in his hand. It is just a piece of fancy, of course, an impulse entirely whimsical and one he should not much like to try and explain to anyone, but he moves the candle, side to side, as if signalling. To whom? Who or what could possibly be down in that dark field, watching? Jeanne? Armand? The priest? Some hollow-eyed watchmen of the million dead? Or some future edition of himself, standing in the time to come and seeing in a window high above him the flickering of a light? What baroques even a mind like his is capable of! He must not give play to them. It will end with him believing in that creature the minister spoke of, the dog-wolf in the charnels.

Over Paris, the stars are fragments of a glass ball flung at the sky. The temperature is falling. In an hour or two the first frost flowers will bloom on the grass of parade grounds, parks, royal gardens, cemeteries. The streetlamps are guttering. For their last half-hour they burn a smoky orange and illuminate nothing but themselves.

In the faubourgs of the rich, watchmen call the hour. In the rookeries of the poor, blunt figures try to hide in each other’s warmth.

At the Monnards’, in the box room under the slates, the servant Marie is kneeling in the dark. She has rolled up the rug and has her eye to the knothole above the lodger’s room, the lodger’s bed. She watched the musician like this too, but she did not make the hole. She found it with her toe a week after she was taken on.

The air from the lodger’s room rises in a warm, slightly smoky column that makes her eye itch. He has had a fire tonight, and it still burns, enough at least for her to see him by, his figure under the covers, his pale mouth, the softness around his shut eyes. On the table by the bed is an open book, a length of brass for measuring. Implements for writing.

What she likes to see is the moment, the precise moment when they fall asleep. She is, in her way, a collector, and while more fortunate, more moneyed girls may collect thimbles or fancy buttons, she must collect what is free. She has to be careful, of course. The little hole must not betray her. They must not look up and see above them the liquorice shimmer of a human eye.

This one, the new one, the grey-eyed foreigner, is lying on his back, his body twisted a little to the right, right arm and hand extended downwards, outwards, above the covers. The hand is palm up, the fingers loosely flexed. Do they tremble, or is that a trick of the embers? She wipes her eye, looks again. It is, she thinks, as if from that open hand he has let himself go, his mind like a ball of black wool rolling over the floor, unwinding, unwinding. .

Ten quiet streets to the east, a second-floor apartment on the rue des Ecouffes, Armand Saint-Méard is sprawled in a large bed with a large woman, his landlady and paramour, Lisa Saget, widowed mother of two living children and two who went into the ground before their fifth year. More asleep than awake, she slips from the bed, squats over a bucket, pisses, dabs herself with the rag, gets back into bed. When she lies down again, the organist’s hand strolls drowsily up her thigh, plays a single slow arpeggio on the heat of her skin, then settles, rests.

To the west — west of the cemetery and the silent market, and close enough to the church of Saint-Eustache for normal speech to be unintelligible when the bells are swung — Héloïse Godard, the Austrian, is sitting fully dressed on the edge of her bed reading The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The book, like others in her collection, was part-payment from Monsieur Ysbeau, a pleasant, scholarly sort of gentleman who runs two large bookstalls beside the river. On the first Tuesday of the month, she selects a book from the boxes while he sits on the stool behind her, his breeches round his ankles. When she turns to him, she is required to feign scandal, to rebuke him in choice language, after which he apologises, pulls up his breeches and, with a half-dozen neat movements, wraps the book.

She learnt to read courtesy of her parents, innkeepers on the Orléans — Paris road. They intended her for the catering business and had her instructed in her letters by a certain curé who, leaning over the primer with her, made himself familiar with the underside of her petticoats. Later, she received the same treatment from several other of the inn’s more regular, more free-spending customers, often under the very gaze of her parents, who seemed to consider such handling an acceptable consequence of their trade, and chose to ignore her tears, her glances of mute appeal, until at last she learnt to expect nothing of them, to hide from them and from all the world any show of what she felt.

Candles are her great luxury. She reads only at night, in the hush and privacy of the night. She burns two, even three at a time. She cannot appear in the morning with bloodshot eyes. In the cold seasons, she keeps her cloak on against the room’s chill. Poor Werther is in love. (‘ “I shall see her today!” I exclaim when I wake with gladness of heart.’) Will it end badly? Ysbeau would not tell her, only smiled as if he found it surprising a woman like her should have a taste for love stories. Certainly she is no dreaming girl, no innocent. She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world’s character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard.

She licks a finger, turns the page.

Inside the church of les Innocents, in the vestry, Père Colbert is also awake. He has a bed of sorts, a truckle bed with a mattress of rags, but mostly he sleeps sitting in the wooden armchair, his big head dawdling on his chest. He drools when he sleeps. The black cloth on his chest is damp with it when he wakes. It does not signify. There is no one to see him and he should not care if there was. On the table he keeps a small lamp burning, a wick floating in oil, a small flame (blue through his glasses) that once flickered in the chapel of Saint-Sebastian. At night, in this very city, the Devil and his servants are abroad, and Père Colbert does not wish to meet them in the utter, unrelieved dark that would exist without the lamp. That he will meet them, that he must, this he is reconciled to. It may even be that he surprised one of their scouts creeping about by the organ this morning. Did the whole church not grow uneasy? Did he not hear the sleepers in the crypt let go a soft moan of fear? As for any help, anyone to share the burden of vigilance, he cannot hope for it (they say the bishop has a mistress, has fathered children). He is alone at his post, as alone as when he spent his days in the dust of Hunan Province and where one morning they dragged him to the public square and he saw, perfectly clearly among the faces in the crowd, the eyes of the Adversary, and afterwards could see nothing clearly again. .

He watches the doors, the one leading out to the street, the other to the apse behind the altar. They are shapes, barely shapes, but he shall know if they are tried, if they are opened.

Jeanne’s bed — where she is sleeping soundly — lies along the heavy, carved foot of her grandfather’s bed. On her last birthday, her fourteenth, he carried the new bed up the stairs and told her she was too old, too womanly, to decently share a mattress with any man other than a husband. It made her weep when he said it, shake with grief, for she had slept beside him since her infancy when, between one Sunday and the next, both parents and two sisters died of a sweating fever. To be made to lie alone brought back to her a sudden blind memory of that loss, and for many nights she waited for the old man to relent, but he did not, and she has grown used to it, the new arrangement, her new status as a woman.

She is dreaming now of the cemetery carpeted with flowers, white and pink and yellow and crimson. It was a lovely dream, rich with promise, and she is smiling at it, while above her, above cracked, smoke-black beams as old as the church, the cat Ragoût sits beside the warmth of a chimneypot wiping a licked forepaw, meditatively, across his damaged ear. In the cemetery, in an archway of the south charnel, something catches his attention. He stares, grows perfectly still, then flattens himself to the tiles.

9

‘The minister,’ says Monsieur Lafosse, ‘accepts your proposals. You may obtain the men you need. Likewise the horses, the timber. This purse — you will sign for it, here and here — contains five hundred livres. And these are bills of exchange. You may draw on them at the house of Kellerman the goldsmith on the rue Saint-Honoré. We expect every sou to be accounted for. I assure you the minister will not be amused if, for example, he were to discover you have spent fifty livres on a new coat.’

Jean-Baptiste reddens. He has a mind to defend himself but cannot immediately think what the defence is. That he was drunk and wished to be modern? To be thought modern?

‘As for your enquiry about what is to be saved in the church, the answer is the same as you were given before. Nothing.’

‘And the old priest?’

‘We are not suggesting you demolish a priest.’

‘I mean, will he not protest?’

‘Why? It is not his church.’

‘But he will not take kindly. .’

‘You cannot manage an old priest?’

‘I can. . of course.’

‘Then there is no difficulty.’

‘And there is a musician. The church organist.’

‘What of him?’

‘When the church is gone, he must lose his position.’

‘One imagines so.’

‘I am told he is very skilled. Perhaps the minister. .’

‘You are asking for the minister to concern himself with the fate of a church organist? You will be pleading next for the sexton.’

‘I had thought—’

‘You seem confused, Baratte, as to what you are here to do. You will begin your work as expeditiously as possible. You will allow no petty obstacle to impede you. If you have not commenced your work by the New Year, you will be replaced with someone more effective. Is that clear?’

‘Perfectly, monsieur. May I speak of what I am to do? My presence here gives rise to suspicions, rumours.’

‘Rumours will not be stopped by explanations.’

‘And the disposal of the remains?’

‘The bones? You will hear on the matter shortly.’

There is a moment of inhospitable quiet between them. Lafosse’s small eyes take in the room and briefly settle on the pianoforte. The contemplation of it seems to afford him some private amusement.

‘You find your new lodgings to your taste?’ he asks.

10

How hard to find thirty men? Not hard, in such times. But thirty good men, men who will be able to bear the work?

He has already decided where he will look for them: the mines at Valenciennes. There, in receipt of their pittances, are men inured to the type of labour that would kill others inside of a month.

He writes to Lecoeur. Lecoeur is — or was — one of the managers at the north seam. When Jean-Baptiste worked at the mines, the two of them, isolated from all society, half hidden in that damp, remote pocket of northern France, their nerves wound tight by the smoke, the noise of the gear, the occasional savagery of the place, made a sort of compact, an intimacy, though one that entirely ceased upon Jean-Baptiste’s departure.

It was their habit, particularly during that first interminable winter, to invent utopias where all that offended them, their ears, eyes, their young hearts, was made good in the imagination. Their favourite creation, the most detailed and satisfactory, was Valenciana. In Valenciana, economics and morality, virtue and industry were threaded together to the benefit and improvement of all. There were squares of small, neat houses for the families, dormitory blocks for the single men, parks where the air was clean and the children could play as others do, play and perhaps grow up less misshapen than their fathers. In Valenciana, no child under twelve would be sent down a shaft. None younger than ten would be employed on the surface as carriage-pushers, gug-winders or the like. There would be schools run by benign and educated men — men like Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur. There would be no churches in Valenciana (an evening of especially passionate debate), though in the open spaces there would be statues of the relevant classical deities, an Athene, an Apollo, a Prometheus, though no Dionysus, no Aphrodite. Nor, at Lecoeur’s insistence, would there be anywhere men could gather to consume strong liquor. It was more than a game. They even discussed the possibility of presenting Valenciana in the form of a book and, for one night at least, shared a vivid dream of themselves making their way, shy yet assured, through the salons of the capital.

Was Lecoeur still at the mines? Would he be interested in les Innocents? The letter goes off by the midday coach to Lille, 7 November 1785.

When he enquires after horses, he is, by small degrees, directed to a young officer, who meets him in an inn by the Sèvres porcelain works on the road to Versailles. The young officer will, apparently, provide everything. It does not have to stop at horses.

In his blue coat and cream leggings (and what long, long legs he has!), the young man, who goes by the name Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson, seems very at home in the world. There is passing mention of a father, an estate in Burgundy. He seems to know more about Jean-Baptiste’s work than Jean-Baptiste can remember telling him. Is he connected to the minister? To Lafosse? Some neat, circular arrangement by which state funds are channelled back to the state, or at least, to its representatives? They agree to meet again in a week’s time for Jean-Baptiste to view a sample of the animals. They bow to each other, and though the engineer does not like or trust the soldier, who reminds him of a young Comte de S—, he cannot keep himself from wishing a little that he was the soldier, that he wore life like a good shirt and might, if the weather picks up, ride down to the woods and rivers of his father’s estate in Burgundy.

The weather does not pick up. Clouds tangle in the Paris chimneys. The wind is from the east. By the middle of most afternoons, it is too dark inside to read comfortably.

Every day Jean-Baptiste forces himself to go into the cemetery, to walk inside the walls, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of the girl, who speaks of the dead beneath their feet as if of some vast extended family. She even pretends to be able to identify many of the bones that litter the ground — that jawbone belonging to a Madame Charcot, that femur from a Monsieur Mericourt, a farrier who died of a cold.

For his part, Jean-Baptiste prefers not to think of bones as having owners, names. If he has to start treating them as former people, farriers, mothers, former engineers perhaps, how will he ever dare sink a spade into the earth and part for all eternity a foot from a leg, a head from its rightful neck?

On the rue de la Lingerie, his evenings with the Monnards turn out not to be quite as devoid of pleasure as he at first had anticipated. With Monsieur Monnard, he talks a vague, guarded politics. Taxes, shortages, the national finances. Monsieur is, unsurprisingly, no liberal. He speaks slightingly of Voltaire, of Rousseau, of head-in-the-cloud ideas, the salons, the agitating. He is, it seems, in favour of order, firmly imposed if necessary. Of trade too, the busyness and respectability of shopkeepers. In reply, Jean-Baptiste confines himself to general remarks about the desirability of reform, the sort of comments nobody but the most reactionary aristocrat could be troubled by. Things somehow getting better and fairer, though how, practically, it can be done, other than by some form of intellectual radiation, he does not know. Does anyone? He nearly mentions, one evening, his old utopia, Valenciana, but bites it back. A man like Monnard who reads only the newspaper could not be expected to understand, and anyway, the recollection of those nights beside the never-quite-adequate coal fire in Lecoeur’s parlour is not without a certain awkwardness. That younger, more garrulous version of himself, their two heads hung close in the room’s shadows, the strange urgency of it all. .

With Madame, he discusses the intricacies of the weather. Did the wind blow somewhat harder today? Was it colder in the morning or in the afternoon? What is Monsieur Baratte’s opinion of the likelihood of snow? Does he care for snow? All kinds of snow?

And then there is Ziguette. Conversations with Ziguette — sometimes at the table, sometimes on the settle by the fire or sitting by the window overlooking the cemetery — require greater effort. He tries music, but she knows even less of it than he does, has not heard of Clérambault or any of the Couperin family. Theatre is equally hopeless — neither of them knows much — and as for books, it is evident she makes no more use of them than her parents. He asks about her own history; the subject seems to bore her. She asks about his work and he is forced to obfuscate. He wonders if she is in love, not with him, of course, but with someone. He wonders if he desires her. He is not quite sure. His interest in her seems no more marked than his interest in the little hairy-armed servant who brings in the supper plates. As for marriage. . could he? The daughter — the very pretty daughter — of a well-set-up Paris shop owner, most people would think it a fair match, one that offered advantage to both parties. He conducts little thought-experiments, sometimes while speaking to her, in which the two of them are together in a room, a cabriolet, a canopied bed, her breath made sweet by his eradication of the cemetery, a parcel of her father’s money in a locked box underneath the bed. . Such thoughts are not disagreeable and yet the images are thin as tissue. None of it persuades.

As for the Monnards’ food, it goes on as mysteriously unpalatable as ever. Even an apple tart manages to put him in mind of those little silvery mushrooms that grow in the dampest corners of a cellar, and yet he always clears his plate. It is, in part, a practice instilled in him in earliest childhood by the back of his father’s hand, and later confirmed by the sticks and sanctions of the brothers of the Oratorian Order in Nogent, but in part, after nearly five weeks in the house, he is simply getting used to it, used to it all. And when supper is over, he retires to his room, the banyan, a page or two of Buffon. Then into bed, candle out, the catechism. He does not ask himself if he is happy or unhappy. The question is postponed. On the roof of his mouth, he has a pair of ulcers, which, lying in the dark, he probes with the tip of his tongue. Has his breath turned? Would he know if it had? He cannot, for the life of him, think who he might count upon to tell him.

On the 15th, he meets again with Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson. It’s almost dusk and they are in a field behind the inn where they met before. The horses, five of them, stand in light rain, their halters held by two soldiers, neither of whom, in their ill-fitting uniforms, look more than children.

Jean-Baptiste walks round the horses, then asks that they be walked round him. His father had a good eye for horses. Perhaps the knack has been passed on in the blood, but standing there in the drizzle, he feels he is doing nothing more than imitating his father’s posture, those little movements of the eye and mouth that tokened judgement.

‘I will not pay for any that are lame or sick.’

‘Naturally,’ says the officer. ‘Who would?’

‘And you will stable them until I need them?’

‘They will be waiting for you.’

The young soldiers are left in the rain while Jean-Baptiste and Boyer-Duboisson retire to the inn to finish their business. They ask for a private room and are shown one. Jean-Baptiste makes a down payment of a hundred livres. He asks for a note of receipt. The officer cocks an eyebrow, then smiles as though remembering who he is dealing with, what rank of man. They drink a glass of indifferent wine, then walk out to where, in the field, the horses and the boy soldiers stand together like a single complicated creature dressed in a coat of dull rain.

Two letters arrive. They are handed to Jean-Baptiste on the stairs by Marie. She has a small but effective range of facial expressions, all of them faintly unsettling.

He thanks her, takes the letters to his room. On the corner of the first, there is a soot-black thumbprint. He breaks the seal. It is from Lecoeur. The handwriting, scattered with ink blots and looking as though it had been set down at great speed while riding on a horse, is, in parts, illegible, but its drift is plain enough. How delighted he was to hear from his old friend! Life at the mines is quite as disagreeable as it ever was, though now without the solace of intelligent company. The new managers — no one seems to last much longer than a year — are feebly educated, narrowly commercial, while the miners and their terrifying wives continue to live like half-tamed dogs. As for hiring them, there is the usual surplus of labour and much hardship attending upon it. Thirty men, or sixty, should present no difficulty. What is this project so tantalisingly dangled? In Paris too! Might there be need of someone who knows the men, who can direct them about their tasks efficiently? Someone conscientious, discreet? A fellow philosopher no less?

The other letter, on good paper and written in an irreproachable script, comes from someone called de Verteuil at the Academy of Sciences. The matter concerns certain preparations being made at a quarry near the Porte d’Enfer, south of the river, for the reception of the remains removed from the church and cemetery of les Saints-Innocents. A house has been acquired, its cellar steps extended to reach the old workings, and in the garden there is a well with a circumference above three metres that empties into the same workings, which are tolerably dry and quite suitable for the purpose. When everything is made ready, the bishop will consecrate the relevant passages and chambers. Once this is done, Monsieur l’Ingénieur will be free to commence the first transports. Would Monsieur l’Ingénieur like to give his estimate to the number of bones that may be expected?

Jean-Baptiste folds the letter, places it inside his notebook. The number of bones? He has not the faintest idea.

11

Before he leaves for Valenciennes, he finds Armand and tells him everything. He is not used to carrying secrets, and the undisclosed truth sits in his gut like one of the Monnards’ savoury jellies. It is, he knows, the inescapable influence of his mother’s religion, that deadly emphasis on conscience, on tireless moral book-keeping. It is also the desire to offer something to the one person in Paris he has any reason to think of as a friend, for they have met together three or four times since that first day, have confirmed their interests in each other, their pleasure in the other’s difference. And anyway, all of it must come out soon enough. Better now than when thirty wild-eyed miners troop through the church with picks and hammers.

He finds Armand (the middle of a cold morning) on the rue Saint-Denis, the organist bantering with a shrimp-girl, and now and then — without taking his eyes from the girl’s — reaching up to help himself to one of the little pink bodies on the tray on her head. He greets Jean-Baptiste, takes his arm, walks him up and down the street, listens to his clumsy preface, then interrupts him to point out a pair of mournful dogs copulating in the gutter outside a hatter’s shop and, before Jean-Baptiste can continue his confession, invites him to come and eat that night at his lodgings.

‘Lisa’s brats will be there, but the food is always decent. Certainly it does not taste of cemeteries. And there will be some company later.’

They arrange to meet by the Italian fountain at seven sharp. Jean-Baptiste is there ten minutes before the hour but has to wait another forty before Armand appears. There is no apology, no excuse. They set off together, striding from one little bay of light to the next, while the organist, waving his long, white fingers, delivers a panegyric in rags of Greek and ecclesiastical Latin on the beauty, the sheer scale, of his landlady’s breasts.

The rue des Ecouffes is a twenty-minute march in the direction of the place Royale and the Bastille. On the ground floor of the house is a shop specialising in the manufacture and repair of mirrors, and the two men pause a moment in front of one of these in the window, though it is too dark to see more than the briefly arrested suggestion of themselves. They grope their way up three flights of steep wooden steps to the door of the apartment. Lisa Saget and the children are in the kitchen. Here there is light, a fire, the smell of food. Armand greets his landlady with a loud kiss on her brow, ruffles the children’s hair. There is a chicken roasting on a spit; the girl has the work of turning it. She glances at Jean-Baptiste, smiles at Armand. Other than for the flatness of her chest, she is the perfect miniature of her powerful-looking mother.

‘Monsieur Baratte,’ says Armand, speaking into the cupboard in which he is searching for glasses, a bottle, ‘who has my old billet at the Monnards’.’

It is evident the woman has heard of him. She is sitting at the end of the kitchen table doing something with the consumable part of the chicken’s innards. She looks up and looks him over, this grey-eyed man lost in a green coat. ‘Is he eating with us?’ she asks.

‘Of course,’ says Armand. ‘He hasn’t had a decent meal since coming to Paris.’

Jean-Baptiste takes a stool at the table. He is facing the fire, the little girl. Her brother, scratching his backside, watches her from behind Armand’s shoulder, her envious work by the food.

‘So what of the Monnards?’ asks the woman, busy with her knife.

‘I believe they are quite well,’ says Jean-Baptiste, aware that is not really what he has been asked.

‘We shall need to find him somewhere else,’ says Armand, ‘if he’s planning to stick around.’

‘And is he?’ asks the woman.

‘Who knows,’ says Armand. ‘He doesn’t say much.’

Jean-Baptiste studies his pistachio cuffs, wonders if the table is quite clean, if it would be wise to take off his coat.

‘I shall stay for a time,’ he says. ‘I cannot tell yet how long.’

‘I could not live on a cemetery like that,’ says the woman. ‘I cannot think what kind of people do it, year after year. Bad enough having Armand coming back with the smell of the place on him.’

‘She washes me with lemons,’ says Armand. ‘With a soap made of sage leaves and ashes. Smokes me with rosemary. .’

‘Would it not be good,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘if the place was removed?’

‘Removed?’ The woman snorts. ‘And how do you remove a cemetery like les Innocents? You might as easily remove the river.’

‘It could be done,’ says Jean-Baptiste quietly. ‘Either could be done.’

Armand, who has been examining the boy’s scalp, parting the brown curls in search of vermin, pauses and looks across.

‘Is that what you are up to? The cemetery?’

‘It will not be easy, of course,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘It will take many months.’

‘He’s like the rest of your friends,’ says Lisa. ‘Tell you the moon’s a bowl of soup if they think anyone could be made to believe it.’

‘Yet to me,’ says Armand slowly, ‘he looks perfectly serious.’

‘It can be done,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘It will be done.’

‘The whole cemetery?’ asks Armand.

‘The cemetery. The church.’

‘The church?’

‘It will not be touched for a while yet. Perhaps for as long as a year.’

‘So,’ says Armand softly, ‘the moment has come.’

‘I would have preferred to tell you sooner. I was instructed to keep the matter to myself.’

The woman has stopped her work now. ‘And his position?’ she asks. ‘Is that to be removed?’

‘I have. . spoken of it,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘To the minister?’ asks Armand.

‘To one who represents him.’

‘And may I hope for something?’

‘I will speak of it again.’

There is a silence between them, broken at last by a sharp word from Lisa to her daughter, who, caught up in this interesting business between the adults, has stopped rotating the chicken.

‘I think,’ says Armand, ‘I think that I should thank you.’

‘Thank him?’ asks the woman. ‘For what?’

‘The church, my gentle one, has been shut for five years. I cannot continue indefinitely playing Bach to bats.’

‘It’s all wind anyway,’ says the woman, snatching up her knife again. ‘You must have stopped at Djeco’s place on the way here.’

‘If it was not me,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘they would have sent another. Though I cannot blame you for. . resenting it.’

‘Who said anything about resenting?’ asks Armand, stretching for the bottle. ‘One does not resent the future. Nor its agents.’ He fills their glasses. ‘Come now, we will drink to that shadowy country we are all travelling towards, some on their feet, some on their backsides, squealing.’

The little girl laughs. A moment later, the boy joins her. Lisa ignores them.

They eat. The food is indeed the best Jean-Baptiste has tasted since coming to the city, though his enjoyment of it would be greater still if he could find some way of winning over the woman, who served him his chicken as if she would rather have chased him through the door with the spit. The subject of the cemetery does not come up again. Armand is thoughtful, somewhat distant, somewhat distracted, but good-humoured.

When they have finished eating, Armand teaches the children a song, which they sing back to him, sweetly. He asked Jean-Baptiste to teach them something, a little arithmetic perhaps, and for half an hour he endeavours to do so. They listen; they understand nothing. He draws geometries for them on a slate, triangles within circles, circles within squares. These are immediately admired. The children stand either side of him, watching to see what new cleverness will appear from under his fingers. The girl rests her hand comfortably on his shoulder.

The spell is broken by the tap of some small thing thrown up at the window. Lisa — whose manner towards the guest has been slowly thawing — gets up with a tut of irritation. She takes one of the candles and goes with the children into a back room. Armand exits through the other door and returns a minute later with three men. They look like students, though all are much too old to be students. One has a tattered silk rose pinned to his lapel, the next has his thin neck wrapped in a collar of ginger fur, while the last wears a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on a nose intended for comedy.

‘Messieurs Fleur, Renard and de Bergerac,’ says Armand. The men bow, mockingly. ‘I am now Monsieur Orgue and you. . well, let’s see. You are. . hmm. Monsieur Triangle? Monsieur Normand? Or Bêche? Yes. Bêche is better. You shall be named after one of the spades you will use to dig up the dead.’

‘I see you sent him to Charvet,’ says Monsieur Fleur.

‘Naturally,’ says Armand, returning the other’s grin.

Their conversation is not easy to follow. It appears to consist of gossip about men and women who also possess names like characters in a farce. When the wine is gone, something stronger is found. No one seems quite sure of what it is. It tastes faintly of almonds and burns agreeably in the chest. There is some giggling. De Bergerac dabs at his nose; Renard fingers a hole in the bottom of his shoe, tenderly, as though fingering a hole in his foot.

Has Lisa Saget gone to bed with the children? Jean-Baptiste has been waiting for her in the hope he might then be able to excuse himself and find his way back to his lodgings. It is pleasant enough to sit by the fire sipping liquor, the taste of chicken grease on his lips, but he has done what he set out to do and tomorrow he must begin his journey to Valenciennes. He does not want to travel with a thick head.

Catching him peering round at the door, Armand settles a hand on his arm. ‘Do not think you can escape us, Monsieur Bêche. We have not finished yet.’

They drain the last drops of the liquor and fall silent, staring into the embers of the fire. The room is growing colder. Nothing happens. Is it midnight? Later? Then, with no warning, Armand gets to his feet. He goes out but comes back almost immediately with two large glass pots wrapped in plaited straw.

‘I assume, gentlemen,’ he whispers, ‘you are all armed?’

From the depths of their coats, Renard, Fleur and de Bergerac, produce paintbrushes. They show them, then quickly stow them again.

They descend to the street. It’s raw now. Raw and damp, a true winter’s night, no romance to it. Jean-Baptiste has his horsecoat buttoned to the chin but wishes, once again, he had his old suit below it.

Following Armand, they pass into the small streets behind the rue Saint-Antoine. The city is theirs — they see no one, hear no one. It is that brief hour, the turning of the city’s tide, when the last of the wine shops have thrown out their rabble but before the market carts appear, the big six-wheelers with their lanterns swinging from their sides, or the strings of packhorses, miserable beasts that have walked all night from farms and country gardens, their panniers creaking.

On through the rue Neuve, the rue de l’Echarpe, into the colonnades of the place Royale. . Whatever it is they are doing, drunkenly doing, hurrying across the square with their pots of paint, it will not be easy to explain should they meet a patrol. And if he — the newly appointed engineer — had to explain himself to Lafosse? To the minister? (I felt constrained, my lord. I did not, under the circumstances, think I could refuse what appeared merely an excursion. Had I known what these men, whose acquaintance I had so recently made, intended. .)

They drop onto the rue Saint-Antoine, cross to the far side, pass the church of Sainte-Marie, where a dozen indigents are curled on the steps waiting for first mass at five o’clock, the hope of a coin from the hand of some pious widow.

Ahead of them now — a distance of some hundred and fifty metres — is the fortress of the Bastille, its walls and turrets black shapes cut clumsily out of the night. It looms over everything, yet somehow gives the impression of being cornered, trapped, the last of the basilisks, rearing, fearful, full of useless strength. And behind those walls? What? Scores of wretched men chained in underground cells, buried alive? Or just more stone, stone and volumes of dank air, with a few locked rooms occupied by bored though not greatly discommoded inmates, gentlemen scribblers who, having penned some satire on a royal favourite, found themselves removed from their studies by a lettre de cachet.

They pause in the doorway of a workshop. The street ahead is scoured, hats are pulled lower, then a quick word from Armand and they flit, a hunched running, across the front of the fortress to the three-arched gate beside it, the Porte Saint-Antoine. It is here, on the stone of the gate, that the government posts its notices and decrees. A rise in the salt tax, a new penalty for illegal fishing in the Seine, for emptying pots of human ordure into the street between six in the morning and six at night. The date of a sermon to be preached by the royal chaplain at Sainte-Chapelle. The date, the hour, of a branding, a hanging.

Defacing such notices is part of the trade between government and people. Occasionally, a persistent offender is pounced on by the watch, but for the most part the scrawling of an obscenity about the queen — La pute Austrienne! — or some notoriously gouging tax-farmer, attracts little official attention.

Tonight, on freshly posted notices, it is the turn of Renard, Fleur, de Bergerac, Orgue and Bêche. It is all done in less than a minute. Jean-Baptiste holds one of the pots for the furiously swishing Renard and feels his cheeks being spattered with paint. He cannot even see what they are writing, or only the single word — ‘PEOPLE!’ Then, with their brushes and pots, they are scurrying away like mice from a larder.

Breathless, back on the rue des Ecouffes, Armand invites them upstairs to celebrate the night’s action. He thinks there may be another bottle of that almond liquor somewhere, perhaps under the bed. Jean-Baptiste makes his excuses. The lateness of the hour, his journey in the morning. . He nods to them, politely, friendly even, but they are already turning away from him, offended perhaps by his lack of solidarity, of party spirit.

Holding his coat at his throat, he crosses the street. A mist is rising off the cobbles, has already swallowed the thigh-high street-posts and the ground-floor windows, and is soon sucking at the shop signs, those wood and iron exemplars — a giant glove, a pistol like a small cannon, a quill big as a sword — that dangle over the street from gibbets. He is not perturbed. He knows his way well enough, has learnt to navigate the quarter, though it may be he has forgotten that a city at night is not quite the same place as a city by day. And he is distracted by his efforts to decide what he thinks about running through the streets with a paint pot. Was it exciting? Now that it is over, he can admit that it was, a little. Exciting, but also tiresome and absurd and childish, for what will ever be changed by men flying about the town painting slogans on the walls? And such odd men too! Something freakish about them, something he does not think he should associate himself with, some quality of desperation. Surprising that Armand should trouble himself with such people, though for Armand, it is perhaps nothing but an excuse to spend the night drinking. The woman was interesting, likeable in spite of her brusqueness. And the children too. He enjoyed their company, the sweet attentiveness with which they watched him draw calm shapes on the slate.

He stops and frowns into the mist. He should by now have come out onto the rue Saint-Denis, a little above the rue aux Fers. Instead he is. . where? A street he does not recognise at all. Has he come too far north? He looks for a left-hand turning, walks what seems a good half-kilometre before he finds one that appears serviceable, sets off along its length, becomes with each step a little less confident of where he is, has the fantasy that he is walking not through the heart of Paris but through the rutted alleys of Bellême, then sees, rearing in the air above him, the buttresses of a church, a big one. Saint-Eustache? The mist is thick as wood smoke now. He goes on slowly, cautiously. If the church is indeed Saint-Eustache, then — in theory — he knows exactly where he is, but he is afraid of being fooled again, of spending what is left of the night trailing through unreadable streets, past buildings like moored shipping.

Ahead of him, the sudden sound of footsteps. Someone else is out here, someone who, from the quick, light clip of his feet, is very sure of his way. There is nothing sinister in it, nothing obviously so, yet the fear grows in him quickly. What manner of man is about at such an hour on such a night? Could he have been followed? Followed all the way from the Porte Saint-Antoine? He digs in his pockets for something he might defend himself with but finds nothing more dangerous than one of the cemetery keys. Too late anyway. The weave of the mist is unravelling. A shape, a shadow, a cloaked shadow. . A woman! A woman deep in reverie, for she is a bare metre from him when she comes to a halt. For three, four seconds they are fixed in some primitive watchfulness; then the stance of each softens a little. He knows her. There can be no mistake. The cloak, the height, that steady gaze lit by the mist’s own odd lucency, a faint blue-like light radiating from everywhere and nowhere. Does she remember him? He cannot think why she should.

‘I was walking home,’ he says quietly, almost a whisper. She nods, waits. She does remember him! He believes she does. ‘I became lost.’

‘What is your street?’ she asks, her voice as soft as his.

‘The rue de la Lingerie.’

‘By the cemetery.’

‘Yes.’

‘It is not far,’ she says. ‘You can walk through the market.’ She looks past his shoulder towards the turning he must take.

‘I have seen you before,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘You remember?’

‘You were with the musician.’

‘You are Héloïse,’ he says.

‘I was not told your name.’

‘Bêche.’

‘Bêche?’

‘Jean-Baptiste.’

He takes a step towards her. Then, after a heartbeat, takes another step. They stand there, quite private in the mist. He lifts a hand and touches her cheek. She does not flinch.

‘You are not frightened of me?’ he asks.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Should I be?’

‘No. There is no reason.’

His fingers rest on her skin. He could not say what he is doing, what he is guided by, he whose experience with women is so little. Is it her being a whore that lets him do it? But in this unlooked-for hour, words like whore, like engineer, like Héloïse or Jean-Baptiste, are empty as blown eggs.

‘So I turn there?’ he asks, suddenly waking to himself, his hand falling to his side.

‘At the corner there,’ she says.

He mutters his thanks, walks away from her. He finds the market easily enough. It is already a city within a city, bantering, spotted with lanterns and rush-lights, though it will be another two hours before any customers arrive. On the other side of it, the corner of the rue aux Fers, the black wall of the cemetery, the fog-damp cobbles of the rue de la Lingerie. .

When he opens the door of the Monnards’ house, something darts in ahead of him. He fumbles with the matches on the hall table, eventually gets a candle to light. Ragoût is by the door to the cellar, his blunt face pressed to the crevice at the bottom of the door. He looks up at Jean-Baptiste as if in hope of some assistance. Jean-Baptiste reaches down, feels the air flowing through the crevice, cold air, cold like the breath of a man in the last stages of a fever. He sets his candle on the board next to the door. Immediately the flame sickens and, before he can raise it again, goes out.

12

In what is left of the night he lies awake, the inside of his head shiny with the clarity of sleeplessness and unlabelled liquor. Again and again he recalls his meeting with the woman, with Héloïse, until the whole scene becomes impenetrable and he enters some other state, vaguely hypnogogic, in which he is watching the cellar door swing slowly open and himself move, as if compelled, to the top of the cellar steps, steps he has never even seen. .

He dresses in the first of the dawn. Twice he wipes the mirror with his hand before realising the black spots are on his face, not on the glass, his reward for holding Monsieur Renard’s paint pot. He has no washing water. He curses and creeps out of the house.

He is the last to board the coach on the rue aux Ours. He climbs up and sits opposite a silver-haired priest. Beside the priest (who, under his black cape, is gently palpating some discomfort in his belly) is a foreign couple, English it turns out, the woman neat, solidly dressed, comfortable as a hen; the man red-faced, big as an old prizefighter. The remaining passenger is a woman, one of those elegant, mysteriously sad women of a certain age, who travel unaccompanied on the public stages and who immediately become the focus of all manner of speculation for the other passengers. She gazes from the window as if in lingering hope of some figure, someone like Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson, riding out of the rags of last night’s mist to beg her to stay. No one comes.

In the doorway of the coaching office, the coachman is taking his morning dram. The English couple share a boiled egg. The priest reads a little book, the pages almost touching the end of his nose. The elegant woman sighs. Jean-Baptiste — who has eaten nothing since last night’s chicken — shuts his eyes and falls so profoundly asleep he is dead to everything until, abruptly waking three hours later, he sees, through mud-spattered windows, the winter countryside passing by, Paris already leagues behind them. The Englishwoman smiles at him, bobs her head. Her husband and the priest are side by side, snoring, each to his own rhythm.

They come to a hill. The horses struggle. The coachman, peering down through his hatch in the carriage roof, asks if the gentlemen would object to walking to the top. The gentlemen oblige, pick their way through the mud while making observations on the character of the mud-coloured country either side of them. They join the coach again at the crest, spread their mud over the floor, then cling to the straps as the horses make their long, slithering descent into the next village where, to everyone’s relief, they stop for lunch.

In the afternoon, all of them having drunk a good deal of white wine with the food, there is an hour of harmless conversation followed by an hour of napping, the coach rocking like a boat, the world outside the windows passing by, unconsidered and nameless.

They get to Amiens two hours after dark, riding in through one of the old city gates and craning their necks to get a glimpse of the shadow of the cathedral. There is a party of pilgrims staying at the inn. The newcomers must make the best of what space remains. Jean-Baptiste shares a bed in the attic with the priest and is invited, before the candle is put out, to join him in a prayer. He does not wish to pray, would prefer to announce that he is a philosopher, a rationalist, a freethinker, but he politely adds his amens to the priest’s and feels the old comfort of it. They shake hands and snuff the light. The priest’s guts rumble. He apologises. Jean-Baptiste assures him he is not troubled by it.

In the morning, he wakes with his head rolled against the priest’s shoulder. They sit up in the bed, shake hands again. This is life; this is travelling.

A new coach, a new coachman, fresh horses. They reach Douai by early afternoon. Here, the company divides. The old priest is met by young priests from the seminary, the English couple cross the yard to the waiting Calais coach, the sad and elegant woman makes hushed enquiries about the next conveyance to Brussels. Jean-Baptiste, clutching a small valise, is hurried into a crowded box aimed at Valenciennes. Two hours later, he climbs down, stiff with cold, onto the rue de Paris. There is always traffic between the town and the mines. For ten sous, he buys a ride on a cart delivering barrels of high-smelling butter, and they come to the edge of the miners’ colony just as the daylight gutters behind them.

Even in the gloom, it is evident that Lecoeur was right and that nothing important has changed since Jean-Baptiste was last here. The same thick rind of shacks and hovels, like the encampment of a besieging army, one that clings on grimly without the slightest faith in victory. Scores of small fires burn, each attended by its gang of silhouetted men and women. On the verges of the road, children play laboriously, some pausing to look up, wan and incurious, at the passing wagon. The roads were built by the company. The first were given names such as avenue de Charbon, avenue de l’Avenir, even avenue de Richesse. Later roads were simply given numbers: rue 1, rue 2. In the centre of it all, discernible as a darker, denser zone of smoke and muffled din, are the works themselves.

The managers have a compound of their own a little to the east of the works. The prevailing wind brings a steady drift of soot and rock dust. The style of the compound is that of a provincial barracks, each block divided into six, each sixth the home of a manager, most of them single men. It is not a place to bring a wife; it is certainly not a place you might hope to find one. The senior managers live in Valenciennes. The owners and shareholders are in Paris, where the mines might feature in their thoughts as marvellous holes in the ground from which one can simply scoop money.

Snow has been threatening for hours. Now, just as the engineer enters the compound, it begins to fall. He remembers Lecoeur’s place; his own was next to it for nigh on a year, the second and third divisions respectively of the second block. Outside his front window, Lecoeur used to have a small garden, a patch of worked ground in which, in summer, he grew onions and lettuces, some marigolds. There is no trace of it now.

He raps at the door, waits, knocks again. Snow is settling on his shoulders, the brim of his hat. He is about to knock for a third time when the door is dragged open and there is Lecoeur, candle in hand, the flame streaming, flickering.

‘Comrade!’ he cries. ‘Oh, dear comrade! I am almost deranged with waiting!’

The candle blows out. They go down the little passage in the dark. They come to the parlour. The candle, after some searching for the necessary materials, is lit again. Lecoeur stands in the middle of the room, triumphant, fumy, a little unsteady.

‘You remember it?’ he asks. ‘Mmm? Can you not see your old self in that very armchair?’

‘I can,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He takes in the room — the chair with its blooms of human grease, the mean little fire, the silhouette portraits of mother and sister. . A constancy, a changelessness that, like that of the miners’ colony, is not of a good type.

On the table, a meal has been set out. Some slices of a soused calf’s head, potatoes undressed, bread spread thinly with a previous consignment of the high-smelling butter. At the centre of the table is a bottle containing some clear liquid that Lecoeur now pours into two glasses, draining his own immediately, then passing the other to Jean-Baptiste. They sit opposite each other. Jean-Baptiste saws at the slice of head on his plate (it tastes, poor thing, as though pickled in its own tears). He sips at the stuff from the bottle, sees black flakes of snow collide soundlessly with the window glass.

Three years since they last met — a hurried embrace in the drizzle by the coach-stop in Valenciennes. What rigours have those years imposed that this man should be so hollowed out? He is no more than thirty-five, possibly younger, yet looks fifty and ill. Most of his teeth have gone. His nose is swollen, pitted, strung with swollen vessels. He is pitifully thin and nervous. Once he has started talking, he cannot stop, and what began breezily enough becomes, by degrees, a lament, then a bitter complaint, that has at its heart the mine, that leviathan, that grinder of men’s bones.

Is this how he passes his nights? Alone with a bottle, indicting the air? He has on a waistcoat of clotted brown wool, a garment knitted perhaps by a circle of unmarried female relatives for whom the young Lecoeur, the Lecoeur with teeth, once represented the family’s last great hope. By the time he falls silent and reaches, with a lover’s sigh, for the bottle again, Jean-Baptiste has already decided he must take him to Paris if he can. Here he will not last another winter. And can he really have lost all his former ability? All that good activity of mind he once possessed? With the minister’s money, the minister’s authority, it should not be impossible to extricate him. There is a risk, of course. How far gone is he? But in good conscience, he cannot be left in Valenciennes.

He is thinking it through, trying to construct in his imagination a credible picture of the first day of excavations at les Innocents — himself on some kind of dais or scaffolding, the men below in neat rows with their tools — when Lecoeur suddenly asks, ‘Have you married?’

‘No,’ says Jean-Baptiste, into whose mind — absurdly! — comes the shadow of Héloïse, the whore Héloïse.

‘I thought not,’ says Lecoeur. ‘A married man does not wear a suit such as that.’

‘And you?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘There is some. . involvement?’

Lecoeur smiles, shakes his head, glances into the fire. ‘I have had nothing to do with women for a long time now.’

In the morning, the tocsin rings at three thirty. First shift, first descent, is at four. Jean-Baptiste wakes in the upstairs room. He is looking towards the window, but there is no hint of any light. He swings his legs from the bed. The room is laughably cold. He remembers it all, perfectly.

In the parlour, he finds Lecoeur fully dressed, his face a mask of concentration as he uses both hands to pour himself a glass from the now almost empty bottle. He sets the bottle down, then leans his mouth to the rim of the glass and sucks in the first mouthful while the glass is still on the table.

‘Shall I pour one for you?’ he asks.

‘Later, perhaps,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

They have, the previous evening, talked a little about the scheme for les Innocents, about the men who will be needed. Lecoeur was reassuringly businesslike. He had prepared a list of names and, going down the list (Everbout, Slabbart, Block, Rape, Cent, Wyntère. .), gave Jean-Baptiste a quick assessment of each of them, the approximate age, length of service, moral character so far as it was known, could be known. Nothing was said about adding his own name to the list, but now, in the snow-cold parlour, Jean-Baptiste asks if he might consider it.

‘Consider it!’

In his rush to clutch his friend’s hands, Lecoeur strikes the corner of the table with his thigh, almost upsetting the precious bottle.

‘They will name squares after us!’ he cries. ‘The men who purified Paris!’

He breaks into a jig; he cannot help himself. Jean-Baptiste laughs, claps time. He has saved a life today and has not even had his breakfast.

For almost an hour, having rediscovered their old intensity of speaking, the thrust and parry of the Valenciana days, the two of them discuss the preparations they must make. The transportation of the men, their lodging in Paris. Hygiene, discipline, pay. All imaginable difficulties, from inclement weather to a terror of ghosts.

‘And this place,’ asks Lecoeur, ‘where the remains will be taken. .?’

‘An old quarry.’

‘The arrangements are complete?’

‘They will be soon enough.’

‘And it is dry? We have been using a new pump here after the English model. Much faster than anything we have used before.’

‘My responsibility is the cemetery. Once the carts have left les Innocents. .’

‘How deep must we go?’

‘They say some of the common graves are thirty metres.’

‘So deep?’

‘Most, hopefully, are less so, but for the men, it will not be very pretty work.’

‘It cannot,’ says Lecoeur, ‘be any worse than slithering into the earth with a pick and not knowing when you might crawl into choke-damp or when the tunnel behind you will fall. We lost three this last week. Buried alive. They will not shore up the tunnels properly, for they know they will not be paid for it. Only for coal.’

Beyond the window, the day does not seem to be getting any lighter. Thin gusts of snow are striking the glass again. Jean-Baptiste bestirs himself. He does not intend to be trapped here.

‘I will leave you money. Use what you need. And you may use the minister’s name where it is necessary. But everything must be done without delay. If we drag our feet, I am assured that none of us will be needed. They have been most particular on that point.’

‘Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur,’ says Lecoeur, grinning and rubbing his palms together. ‘Now, will you take a mouthful of food? A few slices of the head perhaps?’ He reaches it down from the meat safe on the wall, holds it like a darling. The poor, hacked-about head.

13

There is snow in Paris too. Snow churned with ash, soot, mud, dung. On the better streets, outside the better houses, it has been swept into grey pyramids. Elsewhere, cartwheels, hooves, sabots have cleared their own paths. In the cemetery, the snow lies along the arms of the preaching cross, sits discreetly on the stone heads of the lanternes des morts, lines the tops of the walls, the sloping roofs of the charnels.

With a spade borrowed from the sexton’s house, Jean-Baptiste prods at the ground, feels its resistance, hears it, the dull ringing, as if he had struck iron. At least the stink of the place is much reduced. He feels no nausea. No active disgust.

Armand appears from the church, ducking under the low door, then crossing the cemetery, his hair like the one thing of vivid colour left in the world.

‘I see,’ he says, nodding to the spade, ‘you are staying true to your name, Monsieur Bêche.’

‘On ground like this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘I would do better with an axe.’

‘You know it could stay frozen for months,’ says Armand, cheerfully.

‘It will not.’

‘Because the minister won’t permit it? Very well. But I do not think you will be digging up any bones this side of Christmas. You should go home. Remind yourself of who you are.’

Jean-Baptiste nods, taps around his toes with the edge of the spade. Home. He would like nothing better. He aches for it.

‘And you?’ he asks.

‘Christmas? I shall stay drunk for three days. Lisa will berate me for the dog I am. Then I will grow sober, make love to her for hours, go with her and the children to Saint-Eustache for mass. Have ungodly thoughts about the young wife in the pew ahead of me. Perhaps find a way to press against her at the communion rail.’

‘And your friends? Renard? Fleur, de Bergerac?’

‘Ah, you did not like them much, did you? In fact, there is not much to like about them. By the way, that paint on your cheek will wash off eventually. In the meantime, you can pretend they are beauty spots. Now, talking of beauty. .’

The girl Jeanne, a heavy shawl over her shoulders, is walking towards them from the sexton’s house. She raises a pink hand in greeting.

‘You are back,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘I wondered where you had gone.’

‘I had some business,’ he says, ‘in another place. I travelled.’

‘That’s nice,’ she says. ‘Was it nice?’

‘It served its purpose,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘And does she know,’ asks Armand, ‘what its purpose was? Does she know what you have in mind for us?’

Jeanne looks at Armand, then at Jean-Baptiste. ‘You have something in mind for us?’ she asks.

‘Others do,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Important people.’

‘Oh,’ she says.

‘Oh, indeed,’ says Armand.

‘You must have wondered, Jeanne, what I was doing here. When you were helping me, you must have wondered.’

‘I enjoyed helping you,’ she says. ‘I will help you today if you wish.’

‘I will not need it today,’ he says.

‘The cemetery,’ says Armand, ‘for I shall tell her if you won’t. The cemetery is to be got rid of, Jeanne. The cemetery and the church.’

‘The matter was settled long ago,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The place is to be made new. Pure. It is what the king himself wishes.’

‘The king?’

‘You have nothing to fear. The remains, the bones, will all be taken to a place, a consecrated place, where they may be kept safely.’

‘All of them?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘And you can do this?’ She looks at the spade.

‘I will have others to help me,’ he says.

She nods several times. ‘If it is what you want,’ she says quietly.

‘You and your grandfather, you will be provided for. You have my word on it.’

‘You want to be careful what you promise,’ says Armand.

‘The cemetery,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ignoring him, ‘cannot just be forgotten about, can it?’

‘Oh, no,’ she says, ‘it cannot.’

‘And you know how the people complain of it.’

She frowns. ‘Grandfather says they used to be proud to live by such a famous place. They boasted of it.’

‘People’s noses,’ says Armand, ‘have grown more delicate.’

She nods again, more emphatically, as if the matter was entirely proved.

‘And the house?’ she asks.

‘You will have a new one. Perhaps even here when the land has been cleared.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Grandfather will be well if I am with him,’ she says.

‘Of course. You must be with him.’

For a quarter-minute they stand without speaking. They look about themselves. They can see nothing to suggest that anything will ever be other than the way it is now.

An hour later, warming themselves with brandy and hot water in a mirrored booth at the Café de Foy, Armand says, ‘She agrees only because it is you. You have used some Norman enchantment on her. But have you not misled her? Once your miners get to work, they will fling the bones around like firewood. And this house you have promised her. Did you not invent it on the spot? You have no more power to give her a house than you have to give me the organ at Saint-Eustache.’

‘I will do what I can,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘You will do what you are told,’ says Armand. ‘Isn’t that more like it?’

‘The minister. .’

‘Your great friend the minister.’

‘I do not believe he is. . unfeeling.’

‘And you think he will feel something for Jeanne? Or is it you who feels something for her? I can see that it might be nice to curl up with a girl like that on a cold night.’

‘She is barely more than a child.’

‘Barely will do. Our beloved queen was wed at fourteen. And she’d go with you. You could smuggle her up to your room at the Monnards’. Though no doubt it would put Ziguette’s nose out of joint.’

‘It is you, I think, who is interested in Ziguette.’

‘If you mean would I do it with her if the opportunity presented itself, the answer is yes. So, I assume, would you. Which makes me think we should go and ogle our Persian princess. What do you say?’

‘Not today.’

‘No? You are being very dull, Monsieur Bêche. You want to beware of dullness. It is not modern. But it shall be as you wish. When you’ve paid for the brandy, I will do you the honour of escorting you to your lodgings.’

At the edge of the market, as they are crossing the top of the rue des Prêcheurs, they encounter the Austrian. She is carrying a small parcel of books, wrapped and neatly tied with black twine. She gives the impression of being only a very little disturbed by the cold, the slush on the cobbles, the eddying wind others scowl into. Armand salutes her, then catches something of the glance, the second’s worth of to-and-fro between the whore and the engineer.

‘Oh, no. Not her as well?’ he asks. And starts to laugh.