Pure

1

The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping. How much has changed in two hundred years? Did the people not live much like this in the days of Henri IV? They may have lived better, with fewer of them and the land less tired and the lords, with their just glimpsable chateaux, less numerous.

He is going home! Home for the first time in eleven weeks, though in his heart it might as easily be eleven years, himself a grizzled Ulysses straining his eyes for the blue shadow of Ithaca.

The roads, thank God, are passable. Last week’s snow has thawed and the new weather — a low, icy sun, the air cracking at night — has turned the mud to stone.

He has changed coach twice. The driver of this one is worryingly drunk, but the horses know their way. He looks out at the wall of a forest, frets when they are held up by a flock of geese being herded on the road ahead by some dreaming girl with a stick. Then a final hill, a church tower purple in the afternoon light and the coachman’s voice bellowing, ‘Bellême! Bellême!’

He climbs down in the market square. His bag is unlashed, dropped into his arms. As ever, a small group of townsfolk are stood nearby, arms folded, watching. In Bellême, curiosity will never go out of fashion. One of these watchers, a widow who deals in cures for the toothache, for palsy, wet ulcers, recognises him and he speaks to her and hears of the deaths of two or three whose names he knows, of the wedding of a local girl to a cloth-shearer in Mamers, of a man caught poaching on the cardinal’s estate and sent for trial at Nogent. Nobody, it seems, is making any money. The soil grows only stones. And yet somehow everyone is managing and the church clock is being repaired and God will grant them a better year next year, for they are not bad people and their sins are only small ones.

‘And what of you?’ she asks, finally drawing breath. ‘You have been somewhere?’

He has some distance still to go. He shoulders his bag, marches down the hill, crosses the stream on the stepping stones, walks warily through the corner of a field where once he was pursued by a white bull. From the woods at the side of him, he smells the smoke of the charcoal-burners’ fires, those mysterious people who belong only to themselves; then he passes the holly tree — thick this year with berries — crosses Farfield, hears the dogs begin their clamour, and there is the house, the yard, the patched outbuildings, all the stone and mud of home exactly where it should be, must be, and yet, at the same time, all of it somehow surprising. He quickens his pace; a figure appears in the doorway. He raises an arm; she raises hers. For the last minutes of the walk he is watched by her. It is as if her gaze was the path he was walking up, as if at the end of it he might walk clean into her grey eyes.

When they have greeted, he sits by the fire, holds his hands to the heat. There is a moment, a little span of seconds, in which he is simply and passionately happy and nothing in the world is any more complicated than a picture in a child’s book. He is home! Home at last! And then the moment passes.

His mother is making things for him, bringing things to him, asking him questions, thanking him for the money he has sent. She looks, he thinks, a little pinched about the eyes and mouth. And is there not more grey to be seen under the linen scallops of her cap? He would like to ask if she has been quite well, but she would only smile and say she has been well enough. Suffering is a gift from God. It is not a matter to complain of.

His sister comes in, Henriette, cold hands tucked under her arms. She has been in the dairy and smells like a wet-nurse. She wants, she says, to know everything. Her interest flatters him and he listens to himself with some astonishment, his fluent refashioning of the recent past. To hear him, anyone might imagine he and the minister spent their mornings together strolling between the fountains in the gardens of Versailles. The Monnards become a simple bourgeois family, amiable, irreproachable, while Armand is exactly the sort of companion his mother — who has always fretted that he will be lonely — would wish for him, and one who could never be suspected of living conjugally with his landlady or having a taste for preserved princesses. About his work at les Innocents he repeats only what he has already said in his letters, that he is charged with improving the health of a populous quarter, and with some structural alterations to an ancient church there. There is no good reason not to tell them everything, nothing forbids it, the work is not indecent, yet when it comes to it, he is afraid he will see something in their faces, will glimpse some imperfectly concealed reflex of disgust.

His sister wants to know if he has seen the queen. ‘Yes,’ he says, the bluntest of his lies so far. Naturally, he is required to describe her, in detail.

‘She was at some distance from me,’ he says, ‘and surrounded by her ladies.’

‘But you must have seen something?’

He describes Héloïse. Mother and sister are delighted, his sister especially.

‘She cannot have been so far away,’ she says, ‘for you have made a perfect portrait of her.’

An hour later, amid the banging of doors, the reckless jollity of dogs, his brother, Jean-Jacques, bursts in on them, as alike in his looks to their dead father as Jean-Baptiste is to their living mother. He leans his gun — father’s old Charleville musket — against a side of the dresser and greets his brother with an undisguised and manly affection that has the immediate effect of strengthening in Jean-Baptiste that sense of strangerhood that has been growing in him almost from the moment he sat down.

‘I hit a rabbit,’ says Jean-Jacques. ‘Just a small one, up by the hollow. Blew the poor thing to pieces. Let the dogs have it.’

‘To have hit anything. .’ says Jean-Baptiste, nodding to the musket.

‘The secret is to aim half a metre to the left. You could calculate it for me, brother. A bit of your Euclid.’

‘It’d be easier to buy a new gun. Something with rifling.’

‘But I’d miss the old one,’ says Jean-Jacques, settling himself on the opposite side of the fire, stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘So what’s the news in Paris, eh?’

‘This and that.’

‘You’ve got skinny.’

‘And you’ve grown a belly. That waistcoat will need letting out.’

‘A belly suits him,’ says Henriette. ‘Don’t you think?’

It does. It suits him perfectly. How well he fits into this Norman world! Big shoulders from working the farm. A good high colour in his cheeks, his dark hair tied with a length of old blue ribbon. A country beau. A man adapted, a man in his rightful place. No wonder he has never shown much envy of his older brother’s success, his education, his being taken up by powerful men. His ambitions were always of a different order — less fancy, more easily grasped. And which of them now is the freer? Which has more pleasure in life? Which, to some clear-eyed judge of such things, would seem like the man arrived, the one whose wheel has risen?

That night the brothers share their old room, are carried into sleep by the calling of owls and wake together in the light of a late-setting moon. In the kitchen — that scrubbed and orderly world where even the light seems to lie like lengths of rinsed muslin — their mother is rousing the fire, dropping small wood onto small flames. She scalds cider. They drink it hot enough to make their teeth ache, put bread and apples in their pockets and set off with the mare to saw a fallen tree, an old elm uprooted in the autumn storms.

It is lovely work, sane work, though not easy for Jean-Baptiste to keep up with his brother. They sweat, laugh at nothing, compete with the saw, hint in their stories at sex, come home, the mare loaded with aromatic timber, their throats parched.

A week of this and he starts to forget about the Monnards, Lecoeur, les Innocents. He discovers in himself a great appetite for forgetting. He lets his accent thicken, rediscovers his country trudge, that considered slowness of movement and gesture that was the mark of the men he grew up among.

On Christmas Eve, they go to mass at Bellême. They put on their best things, compliment each other, though Jean-Baptiste is not wearing his pistachio suit, having, at the last moment in Paris, not quite had the nerve to face his family in Monsieur Charvet’s vision of the future. He had considered, briefly, going back to the place des Victoires and seeing if his old suit was still there (his mother has already asked after it), but let himself be unnerved by the anticipation of Charvet’s scorn, the unvoiced judgement that the young engineer was one of those timorous creatures who leap forward one day only to scurry back the next. Instead, he has on a suit borrowed from Monsieur Monnard, something pigeon-coloured and respectable, the sort of costume that might be worn to the annual Guild of Cutlers dinner. It fits him well; better perhaps than he would have wished it to.

In church, they sit in their usual pew, opposite the chapel of Sainte-Anne. Everyone, except the dying and those who have already drunk themselves into oblivion, is present. The priest, Père Bricard, is popular in the town for the shortness of his masses, his fathomless indifference as to how the members of his flock choose to damn themselves. When it’s done and neighbours have lingered in the cold by the church door and the children can find no more ice to crack with the heels of their boots and the town’s dogs have grown hoarse from barking, the Barattes go home across stream and fields. At the farm, the brothers look to the animals, peer into stable and byre with light held high, make out the shifting of cattle, the stillness of the horses, then come inside and sit and drink and join in the gossiping. (Who was that gentleman with the Vadier family? Did he not show a most particular attention to Camille Vadier? And what a curious little hat Lucile Robin was wearing! Surely she never meant it to look like that?)

At last the fire is smoored, the table cleared, and the house retires. In their room, the brothers lie speaking into the darkness above them, exchanging stories of their father. It is a ritual between them, a thing they must always do, the dead man’s life and character in a dozen worn anecdotes picked from a shared hoard, like that time in the middle of the market he told old Tissot what he thought of him, and the night he dragged the pedlar half drowned from the river and carried him home over his shoulder, and how, at his workbench, with his needles and grommets and waxed thread, he looked like a bull making a daisy chain. .

Such tales comfort the brothers. Such stories make it possible not to tell other stories, like those in which their father is making free with his fists or his belt, his ashplant, his boots, with strips of hide or a pair of newly stitched gauntlets, thrashing the brothers or Henriette or his wife until he fell back, spent and shuddering. Nor do they speak of the last year of his life, though it is this Jean-Baptiste thinks of when they have fallen quiet and Jean-Jacques begins to snore. How their father became lost inside his own head, forgot the names of his tools, then forgot how to use them. How he took to addressing his wife as though speaking to his mother, called Henriette by the name of a long-dead sister. When the crisis was close, Jean-Baptiste was summoned home from the Ecole des Ponts and sat for hours on the stool by the sickbed talking of Maître Perronet, of roads and the grey wings of bridges, while his father lay with his head motionless on the bolster, eyes open, mouth slightly agape. The white lilac was in bloom. Bees and butterflies drifted through the narrow window and, having circled the room’s shade, found their way out again. Twice a week the doctor came from Eperrais, fussed uselessly over his patient. In the family they took turns attending to the glover’s needs, spooning soup into his mouth, propping him on the side of the bed to piss into the pot, wetting his lips, calming his fidgeting. All summer it went on — a whole summer viewed through the green diamonds of the sickroom window — until one afternoon, the air thickening for the last big storm of the season, the stricken man suddenly sat up in bed, grappled Jean-Baptiste’s hands into his own, stared into his face and with a voice hauled from the ice within him said, ‘I do love you.’

Love? Nothing of the kind had ever been said between them before. None of the children would have expected to hear such words from their father. So who, in that little resurrection, did he imagine he was speaking to? Did he know it was his eldest son? Did he think it was Jean-Jacques? Or perhaps his own brother, Simon, with whose absence he had several times held long, muttered conversations? There was no sequel, nothing that might have made anything clearer. Two days later the glover was gathered into an immense and private silence. Two weeks after that, he was dead, a man who, to all appearances, no longer knew his own name.

On Christmas morning — and early even for the country — Jean-Baptiste goes with his mother to the house-on-the-hill, the Protestant house, where she and a clutch of others will pray in the way they prefer. The few who see them on the road pretend not to know where they are headed. Madame Baratte is a decent woman, and there are plenty in Normandy for whom the gospel of Jesus Christ means nothing at all. Let her have her little heresies.

They pass through a well-swept yard, are admitted to the house the moment their faces are seen. To the left of the door is a broad flight of stairs, the stones so well trodden they are like the cast of an ancient riverbed. At the stair’s turning is a pillar, a plain cross scored into the stone, and here there is space enough for six or eight to gather together. A small window gives a view of the road — a view that must once have been more necessary. The pastor is a Dutchman. He speaks French with an accent Jean-Baptiste has always found faintly comical. He is smooth-shaven, has eyes like a child’s. He opens his Bible. The pages are worn to a grey nothing, but he does not need to read from them. He recites.

‘ “Beware the Lord will empty the earth and turn it upside down and scatter its inhabitants. .” ’

No infants? No stables? No shepherds or journeying kings?

‘ “The earth dries up and withers, the whole world withers and grows sick, the earth’s high places sicken, and the earth itself is desecrated by the feet of those who live in it. .” ’

Ezekiel? Isaiah? The others will know.

‘ “Desolation alone is left in the city and the gate is broken into pieces. . If a man runs from the rattle of the snare, he will fall into the pit; if he climbs out of the pit, he will be caught in the trap. .” ’

He does not spare them. He would not consider it kind to spare them. At length — great length — he shuts the book and the little congregation is left to pick through their consciences in silence, while Jean-Baptiste, hat in hand but head unbowed, looks out at the sky and is lost for a time in the beauty and mystery of what is most ordinary. When it is over, the company embrace one another, stiffly, solemnly, then quit the house in pairs, melt into the brightening day.

At the farm, the kitchen is already strewn with relatives. Children — a boy and girl Jean-Baptiste only vaguely recognises — clamber onto his back the moment he sits down. Cousin André is there, of course, looking prosperous, masonic, entertaining the women with tales of small-town scandal. And there too the poorest of the relatives, old Dudo and his wife — pure Baratte peasantry — their eyes untellable from those of the beasts they husband on their scrap of Norman mud. They speak only old Norman, understand no French, and sit at the end of the table smuggling slices of white sausage under their smocks. A plate of it is always left near them for this purpose. Even the children know better than to notice what they do.

In the midst of this, this amiable hubbub, Jean-Baptiste works at his cider. The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes? Having longed to escape Paris, he is anxious now to return. Whatever his life will be, whatever fate it is he is pressed against, it will be lived out somewhere else, not here among the still-loved fields and woods of his boyhood. He drains his mug, chews at something in the bottom of it, and stretches for the jug. His sister settles on the bench beside him. When they were younger they used to fight, and she had seemed to him spiteful, proud, yet now — plain and twenty-three — she is all kindness, and with a wisdom she has pulled down from who knows where, an enviable wisdom. She asks him more questions about Paris, about the fashions, about those Monnards he lives with. He knows she knows he has not told her the half of it. She asks more particularly if he has been in good health. A little fatigued, he says, shrugging. He has not been sleeping as he used to. And then it occurs to him what she might be referring to.

‘You mean I do not smell as sweet as I did?’

‘We wondered if it was the air in Paris, Jean. That it is not as good as here.’

‘It is not,’ he says. ‘Not at all.’

‘Then when you return here, you will recover,’ she says. ‘Already I think it is somewhat improved.’

He thanks her, drolly.

‘When do you go back?’ she asks.

2

Armand and his mistress must have been busy, Jeanne too perhaps. When Jean-Baptiste returns to Paris he is pointed out in the street, or simply stared at as if he might reveal a fringe of angel wing above the collar of his coat, or a nub of horn on his brow. In the marketplace, the morning before the Feast of Epiphany, an old man, one of the ragged, grimacing sort who haunt any public space, waves a withered arm at him and warns him to leave alone ‘the field of our fathers lest the wrath of the Almighty. .’ Two days later, a stall-holder on the rue de la Fromagerie makes him a gift of honeycomb, wishes him luck. He starts to hear a new word at his back. ‘Engineer.’ He wonders how many of them have any clear notion of what an engineer is.

But of all the reactions he encounters in the first cold days of the New Year, none is more perplexing than that of the Monnards. Coming back to the house, he had felt almost pleased to see them, had been most particular in his thanks to Monsieur Monnard for the loan of his suit, assiduous in his enquiries as to how Madame and Mademoiselle Monnard had enjoyed the festivities, but by dinner on the second evening, it was clear that all was not well with them. It was Madame Monnard (having first ejected a piece of gristle from her mouth to the top of her fist) who raised the matter that was evidently the source of their disquiet.

‘Monsieur,’ she began, ‘is it the case what we hear about the cemetery?’

‘Madame?’

‘That it is. . to go?’

He set down his knife and fork. ‘In a manner of speaking, madame, yes. It is to be removed, the land made clean. The church too, in time, will be removed.’

‘It comes as a shock to us,’ said Monsieur Monnard. ‘We had not suspected it.’

‘I am sorry for it, monsieur. But the church and cemetery have been closed these last five years. They could not be left to. .’

‘It is hard for us to think of it,’ said Madame, a strange shrill voice.

‘I hope it is for the public good, madame,’ said Jean-Baptiste. ‘And this house will no longer overlook a place of public interment. Will no longer have to suffer the consequences of that.’

‘What consequences?’ asked Monsieur Monnard.

Jean-Baptiste glanced down at his plate, where, in the coolness of the room, his food was already starting to congeal. ‘Can it be entirely healthy, monsieur?’

‘Do we seem unhealthy to you?’

‘No. Of course. I did not mean to suggest. .’

‘Well then?’

And Ziguette began to cry. A thin whining followed by a gulp, then a sob rising out of her bosom, all of it accompanied by a vigorous working of her face so that she looked to Jean-Baptiste like someone he had never seen before. She fled the room. Madame and Monsieur exchanged glances.

‘If I have. .’ began Jean-Baptiste, half rising from his chair.

‘Poor Ziggi so dislikes any commotion,’ said Madame, and then made certain remarks, incomprehensible at first, but which Jean-Baptiste finally understood to mean that Ziguette had started her monthly bleeding and was, as a result, unusually sensitive.

The sequel to this uneasy scene took place later the same night. Jean-Baptiste was in his room, wrapped in the red damask of his banyan. He was reading a few lines out of Buffon, something about the manner in which certain non-poisonous creatures mimic the markings of their poisonous cousins, when he heard the familiar scratching at the door and, opening it, expected to greet the muscular Ragoût but found instead Ziguette, white as death, and dressed in her nightclothes. That she was uncorseted was apparent each time she sighed.

She wanted to explain, or to apologise or both or neither. After some whispering at the door, he invited her inside, and as there was only one chair, he offered it to her and sat on the bed. She did not seem startled by the banyan, did not comment on it. He put another stick on the fire. He tried to reassure her.

‘When it is done, think how nice it will be. In place of what you have now, a pleasant square. Gardens perhaps.’

She nodded. She seemed to be attempting to follow his reasoning, but her eyes had filled with tears again. ‘It is,’ she said, after a pause, ‘as though you wished to dig up my childhood.’

‘Childhood?’

‘Innocent, girlish days.’

‘I shall be digging only the cemetery. Earth and old bones. Many old bones.’

‘You did not grow up here,’ she said softly. ‘If so, you would feel differently.’

Sitting a little lower than her, his gaze had somehow settled on her lap. He imagined a slow effusion of blood, a blood-rose blooming in the pale stuff of her nightgown, spreading across her thighs then, perhaps, starting audibly to drip onto the floorboards. .

‘When it is done,’ he said, raising his eyes to hers, ‘when it is over, it will be you who feels differently. The initial discomfort will quickly pass. You will be pleased.’

She did not argue against him. She began, discreetly, to look around his room, the bed, the trunk, the table with its books, the brass ruler. Then she stifled a yawn, apologised for disturbing him, and with a sweet, watery smile, the kind one bestows on a person who, through no fault of his own, is unable to understand what ought to be plain as day, she excused herself.

As she pulled the door shut behind her, he glanced at the ceiling, at the little hole over the bed, for once or twice during their interview he had heard the boards above them creaking.

He got onto the bed, stood on it. From such a perch, the ceiling was comfortably within his reach. He peered into the hole — nothing, no light, nothing at all. Then slowly, tentatively, he inserted the first finger of his left hand, much as the Comte de Buffon might have investigated the nest of some dubious insect, one that may or may not be merely mimicking its venomous nature. . He could not swear to what he felt then, yet it seemed to him someone had softly blown on his finger, and for a while, balanced on the bed, he examined it.

3

He meets with Lafosse. January is burning low; nothing has started; not a bone has been shifted. He explains himself, endeavours to show himself a victim of circumstances which, in truth, he believes himself to be. He cannot begin without the miners and the miners have not arrived. They are coming, coming very soon, but they have not yet arrived. Halfway through his explanation, his somewhat hot-faced justification of himself, he realises that Lafosse does not really care about a few weeks here or there, will not remove him from his post or even threaten it. Who else, at short notice, would take on work like this? He presents his accounts. He is not unhappy to see that Lafosse is suffering with a cold.

What he can do alone, he does. From Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson he obtains canvas, wooden poles, rope, ship’s chain. He arranges with a toothless man called Dejour the supply of firewood, and works beside him and his sons when the first consignment is delivered. He cannot set foot in the market without tradesmen approaching him with offers and promises, sometimes with whispered warnings about a fellow tradesman who is nothing but a thief. Straw for bedding comes from the stables behind the coaching office on the rue aux Ours. It is dry and tolerably clean. Thirty spades, thirty picks arrive, also from Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson. At Valenciennes, the miners are not permitted to own their own tools. A man with his own spade may start to think of himself as independent.

On the fifth day of February, he receives a message from Lecoeur informing him that all is at last ready, that he is on the point of proceeding to Paris with the men and that he hopes to be there within a week. As the letter has taken two days to reach him, Jean-Baptiste starts his vigil two days later, standing hour after hour by the junction of the rue Saint-Denis and the rue aux Fers, though not so close to the Italian fountain as to make himself a target for the ribaldry of the laundry women.

The weather is cold but bright, thick frosts in the morning but then in the middle of the day almost warm. He sees the same faces again and again, sees how the streets have their currents, their little tides. He has a glimpse of Héloïse walking away from him towards the faubourg Saint-Denis. He sees Père Colbert — it can be no one else — the blue glasses, the greeny-black of his soutane stretched across the big, hunched back. He sees Armand, who tells him to hire a boy, but Jean-Baptiste does not wish to rely on a boy, a boy’s powers of concentration, nor does he want to sit idly in the Monnards’ house, waiting for something he sometimes thinks will never happen.

And then, at about two in the afternoon, precisely a week from the day the letter from Valenciennes was dated, Lecoeur is suddenly, improbably there, riding a wagon from the direction of the river and lifting his hat in elegant salute as he catches sight of Jean-Baptiste.

There are three vehicles in all, uncovered, and with large, mud-encrusted wheels. When the wagons stop, knots of locals, including the laundry women, gather to look up at the strangers, who look back, some of them with the wide and frightened eyes of driven cattle, others simply wonderstruck, their faces, perhaps, like those of Hernán Cortés’s men entering the golden city of Tenochtitlan. All traffic on the rue Saint-Denis comes to a halt. The horses droop their heads. One voids itself, noisily and greenly, onto the cobbles. Lecoeur clambers down from his bench at the front of the first wagon and strides over to Jean-Baptiste. In a flood of mutual relief, they clasp each other’s hands, firmly.

‘We have had several adventures on our way,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Not quite Circe or the Cyclops but enough to contend with. Yet here we are, ready to do your bidding.’

For a man who has been on the road in the company of thirty miners through all the inclemencies of deep winter, Lecoeur appears marvellously neat and fresh. A little brown wig on his head, his face decently shaved, a handsome red cloth round his throat, and on his breath just a whiff of the strong drink any man travelling in the cold might take, prophylactically.

‘You have them all?’ asks Jean-Baptiste, nodding to the wagons.

‘Thirty men and hand-picked. I believe you will find no fault with them.’

‘I am grateful to you,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘most grateful, but we must move the wagons into the street here.’ He points into the rue aux Fers. ‘We shall be shouted at otherwise. People here are not slow to make their feelings known.’

It is done in four minutes, the wagons and horses lined up along the north wall of the church. The men get down, stand in clumps, looking from Lecoeur to Jean-Baptiste as if silently weighing the authority of each, silently reaching their conclusions.

Jean-Baptiste unlocks the door into the cemetery. Here, then, is the first test. The men must be got into the cemetery, a place disturbing even to a mind as well-lit as his own. Will they baulk? And what then? Force them in? How? With the point of a sword? He does not have a sword.

‘If you would lead them,’ he says quietly to Lecoeur. ‘They are used to you.’

‘Very well,’ says Lecoeur. He goes through the door without hesitation. The miners shuffle in behind him. When the last is inside, Jean-Baptiste follows them, pulls the doors shut, joins Lecoeur.

‘It is as you promised,’ says Lecoeur, ‘a somewhat powerful impression.’

‘You become used to it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘At least a little.’

‘It will inspire us to do our work more swiftly,’ says Lecoeur, attempting a smile.

Wood for a large fire has for days been piled in readiness between the church and the preaching cross. Now, with embers from the sexton’s kitchen, they light it. Smoke spirals into the still air; there is a sound of snapping in the fire’s heart; the smoke thickens; a dozen flames leap out from between the timbers. The miners make a circle round it, holding their hands to its warmth.

Jeanne comes out. Jean-Baptiste introduces her to Lecoeur. Are the men hungry? she asks. Oh, undoubtedly, yes. Very hungry. Then she will go to the market and fetch soup and bread for them. There is a stall that sells wholesome soup by the pail. It will not take her long.

Her offer — the good, practical sense of it — is quickly accepted. Lecoeur picks out three men from the circle to assist her. Jean-Baptiste counts money into her hand.

‘They are quite tame,’ says Lecoeur, indicating her helpers. ‘Tell them what you want of them and they will do it.’

They watch her go, the men plodding behind her.

‘She will be a great asset,’ says Lecoeur. ‘I foresee she will become their little virgin mother.’

‘When the men have eaten,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘they must put up their tents. Here, I think, in two rows of five. You, if you have no objection, will have your billet in the sexton’s house. It is only the old man and Jeanne there. I think you will be quite comfortable.’

‘I am here as a tool,’ says Lecoeur. ‘It matters very little where I am laid down at night.’

Jean-Baptiste nods. He is listening to the low voices of the men and remembering what, unaccountably, he had forgotten. At least half of the miners at Valenciennes speak only Flemish. When he worked at the mines, he learnt two dozen words of it but has long since lost them all.

‘You have their tongue?’ he asks Lecoeur.

‘I do not think I could court a lady with it,’ says Lecoeur, ‘but for our needs I believe I have what is necessary.’

After half an hour, Jeanne returns with the miners. Two of them carry steaming pails of soup. Jeanne and the third miner have their arms loaded with bread. Behind this party comes Armand, who strides towards Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur and, while still some way off, calls, ‘I saw your smoke. I had begun to believe that you were merely an amiable dreamer. I shall always take you at your word now.’

‘Allow me to present,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘Monsieur Saint-Méard.’

‘Are you of our number, monsieur?’ asks Lecoeur.

‘I think I may be called so,’ says Armand, looking at Jean-Baptiste.

‘Monsieur Saint-Méard is the organist at the church,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Former organist,’ says Armand, ‘once these gentlemen have started their work. But I intend to participate in my own destruction. Is that not the right of us all?’

‘The ancients believed that, monsieur,’ says Lecoeur.

‘And we are the new ancients, are we not?’

‘We are the men,’ says Lecoeur, ‘who will purify Paris. I said as much to my friend here when last we met. It will be a type of example.’

‘We will dispose of the past,’ says Armand, a voice pitched between earnestness and comedy. ‘History has been choking us long enough.’

‘I much approve of these sentiments,’ says Lecoeur, lowering his voice.

‘Then let’s approve of them over a bottle,’ says Armand.

‘It will be dark in two hours,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The bottle must wait.’

‘Already he has turned tyrant on us,’ says Armand.

Lecoeur looks uncomfortable. ‘But he is right, monsieur. Quite right. There is much to attend to here. We will need our wits about us. Later, perhaps?’

The soup and bread are consumed without ceremony. The miners lick their spoons, wipe clean their beards with the side of a hand, spit, scratch, yawn.

Seeing them done, Jean-Baptiste climbs the winding steps to the narrow, railed pulpit on the pediment of the preaching cross. He is followed by Lecoeur, then, entirely at his own invitation, by Armand. With three of them in the pulpit, they have to stand with their shoulders pressed hard against each other. With his free arm Jean-Baptiste gestures to the miners. They stand and slowly approach the cross. Something else he had forgotten about these men: years of stooping in the tunnels means that many are permanently hunched. They gather below him and tilt their heads awkwardly to look up. To Lecoeur he says, ‘I shall speak to them a little. Then you, if you will be so kind, can repeat the gist of it in Flemish.’

He clears his throat. He does not have a strong speaking voice, wants to be heard but does not wish to shout at them. ‘You are welcome here,’ he begins. ‘It may be that I knew some of you in Valenciennes. Our work here will be very different. All this ancient cemetery and the church behind you is to be destroyed. The whole surface of the cemetery will be dug out. All the bones, all those you can see in the charnels, all those underground and in the crypts, will be removed and taken to another place. You must handle the bones as you would those of your own ancestors. We will start tomorrow on the first of the big pits. We will, at all times, have fires burning to purify and circulate the air. The doctors are agreed that fire is the best defence against any vapours our digging may release. Your pay will be twenty-five sous for a day’s work. There will be one hot meal a day plus a litre of wine. You must not leave the cemetery without permission from myself or Monsieur Lecoeur. Your first task is to put up your shelters and dig the latrines. You must not foul the ground. We will work every day. You will each be responsible for the care and maintenance of your tools.’ Then, an afterthought, ‘I am Baratte. The engineer.’

‘Excellent,’ whispers Lecoeur.

‘Functional,’ says Armand.

Lecoeur begins his translation. He is evidently much more fluent than he has admitted. As he speaks, Jean-Baptiste scans the broken ranks of the miners. There is one who stands out; taller than most of the others, bare-headed, his gaze seems to move coolly across the faces of the triumvirate on the preaching cross. One might almost guess that he was amused, as if he had seen such sights, witnessed such moments too often not to find in them some hint of the absurd. For a few seconds he settles a hand on the shoulder of a much older miner in front of him, and though it is hard to see clearly across twenty metres of air, the hand is evidently not quite as it should be, is, in some way, deformed.

When Lecoeur has finished, the three of them, at some risk of tumbling over each other, descend the winding steps. Boyer-Duboisson’s poles and canvas are carried to the level ground in the middle of the cemetery. Once the first tent is erected, its construction understood, the others go up swiftly enough.

The wood merchant arrives with fresh timber. He peers in at the miners, sucks his gums, nods approvingly. Supplying les Innocents will be the best work of his life: once the fires are lit, they’ll stay that way for months. The new wood is stacked close beside the tents. It is both valuable and stealable. Already a sizeable quantity has found its way over the walls at night.

Jean-Baptiste inspects the work on the latrines, approves it. Inspects each tent, tugs at their ropes. Several times he is called away to the cemetery doors to deal with a tradesman, work he eventually gives to Armand, who seems to want it.

Even in digging the latrines and the fire pits they have unearthed some hundred or more large bones and countless fragments, some of them chalk-white, others grey or black, or yellow as a chanterelle. Jeanne collects one of the smaller skulls, dislodges with her thumb a gob of earth from its brow and settles it in the grass again as though returning a fledgling to its nest. There is in these actions of hers something faintly repellent, yet it is obvious to Jean-Baptiste that her example will impress the men far more than any words of his own.

As he passes them in the deepening gloom of early evening, he tries to fix their faces in memory. Not many will look him in the eyes. Those who do he stops and asks their names. Jacques Everbout, Joos Slabbart, Jan Biloo, Pieter Molendino, Jan Block. He does not find the man he noticed from the preaching cross, the one who looked up so coolly. Whoever he is, he seems to have the knack of making himself invisible when he chooses to.

When Jean-Baptiste built the bridge on the estate of the Comte de S—, he had some twelve men under him — servants from the house and gardens, together with a pair of journeymen masons and a master mason from Troyes. The master in particular made no effort to hide his impatience with the ‘boy’ who commanded the project. The journeymen were not much kinder, and even the house-servants would come and go as they pleased and missed no opportunity to humiliate him, in that way servants in great houses become adept at. It is not good to be humiliated. It is not good to be the master in word only. Here, at les Innocents, he must somehow impose his will, must do it even if in the privacy of his own heart he is as uncertain of himself as he was then. And yet he would like them to like him. Or at least, not to despise him.

Once it has become too dark for any useful activity, the men sit by the openings of their tents. They have been fed a second time, have been given drink. Jean-Baptiste — who has eaten only because Jeanne insisted on it, standing beside him with bread and bowl — makes a last round with Lecoeur, the pair of them bidding the men a good night and receiving in reply a few guttural responses. Impossible to know what they are thinking, whether half of them intend to run away in the night. Can they be trusted? There were, on occasions, incidents at the mines, violent incidents. Imagine the minister’s face when he is told that the men have absconded and are ravaging Paris!

Away from the tents, Lecoeur reassures him.

‘You are paying them considerably more than they received at Valenciennes. And they are decent sorts in their way. One might raise a very creditable company from them.’

‘With you as their captain,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘You, dear Baratte, are our captain. I think you should look quite dashing atop a white horse.’

‘I would need to improve my Flemish.’

‘Advance, attack. Ten sous for every enemy head. That would be enough, I think.’

They are crossing the corner of the cemetery towards the sexton’s house. Lecoeur has a burning torch, though they hardly need it. There is lamplight from the windows of the house and a broad, red light from the big fire.

‘My first view of this place,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘was from the window of my room, up there. I looked down at night and it was a region of the most impenetrable dark. Now it is almost festive.’

‘Festive? Forgive me, but I do not think such a place could ever be festive.’

‘How do you find the stink now?’

‘Tolerable, just. I have no large sense of stinks. Some effect of the mines. My skull is packed with coal dust.’

‘There is said to be an animal,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘part dog, part wolf, that has its lair in the charnels on this side.’ He gestures ahead of them to the south wall, the archways leading into the galleries.

‘I would not allow such a story to get among the men.’

‘No, you are right,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘But should it prove more than an old story, I have come prepared.’ Lecoeur stops and pulls a shape from the pocket of his coat. ‘You see?’

‘Is it loaded?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I have powder and balls among my things. And I have practised with it. I can hit a coal scuttle at thirty paces.’

‘Lecoeur’s wolf-destroyer,’ says Jean-Baptiste. They laugh, softly. Lecoeur extinguishes the torch with the side of his boot and they enter the sexton’s house.

The old man is asleep by the grate, the silver curls of his beard crushed against his chest. Armand is at the table with Jeanne. Jeanne stands as soon as the others enter. ‘We have been waiting for you,’ she says.

‘We have been making our rounds of the camp,’ says Lecoeur. He is looking at the brandy bottle on the table by Armand’s elbow.

‘How is your grandfather?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Weary,’ says Jeanne, smiling at the top of the old man’s head. ‘Yet glad, I think, that it has begun. And he sees that I am content.’ To Lecoeur she says, ‘Your men are very nice.’

Lecoeur makes a little bow. ‘You have become a favourite of theirs already, mademoiselle.’

‘Now,’ says Armand, yawning, ‘perhaps we will be permitted to have that drink. Jeanne, we will need two more glasses.’

The glasses are fetched, filled, raised. Even Jeanne takes a little; the heat of it makes her cheeks burn. Armand tops them up. Jean-Baptiste puts his glass aside.

‘We start to dig tomorrow,’ he says. ‘It would be best we do not sit up with the bottle. I shall be here very early, Jeanne. And I believe Madame Saget will be coming?’

‘Lisa will be here,’ says Armand. ‘It seems she is quite reconciled to you.’

‘I will go to the market for bread as soon as it is light,’ says Jeanne. ‘Grandfather will come, and perhaps Madame Saget.’

‘And I have arranged for fifteen nice old hens to join us for dinner,’ says Armand. ‘A sack of potatoes, a sack of carrots, a man’s weight in green lentils. Onions. And I took the liberty of ordering a hundred and twenty litres of Burgundy wine. Chateau Nothing-in-Particular. I suggest we keep the wine locked in one of the church offices. I doubt Père Colbert will drink it.’

‘Good,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Thank you.’

‘We are a machine!’ exults Lecoeur, whose glass, emptied twice, is somehow full again. ‘We have been wound and now we are running!’

‘Tick, tock, tick, tock,’ says Armand. Jeanne giggles.

‘Are you coming?’ Jean-Baptiste asks Armand.

‘I think perhaps I shall stay a while,’ says Armand.

A pause.

‘Very well. Then I wish you all a good night.’

He goes out, irritably tugging at the collar of his coat. Is Armand trying to make a fool of him? Is he up to something with Jeanne? He can only hope that Lisa Saget keeps him on a tight rein.

At the door to the rue aux Fers, he turns back to look at the strange, flickering stage he has created. From one of the tents comes the sound of singing, something muted and repetitive, a ballad, perhaps a lament. He listens a few moments, then goes out onto the empty street, shuts and locks the door. If Armand intends to leave at all, let him fumble his way out through the church.

At the house on the rue de la Lingerie, he avoids the Monnards, goes with his candle as quietly as he can past the drawing-room door. They, like everyone else, will have seen the fires — they could hardly have a better view of them — and given their inexplicable opposition to his work, the sight is unlikely to have occasioned any celebration. If he sits with them, they will rebuke him with silences, batter him with sighs. He has no idea any longer what to tell them.

In his room, he tugs off his boots. The brandy sits in a little stinging pool in his chest. He belches, then leans over the bed to look out of the window. A light rain has started to fall. There is nothing to see but the points of fire, the darkness close around them.

He closes the shutters and sits at the table, draws his notebook towards himself. He has had, this last week, some thoughts of starting a journal, a record of the destruction of the cemetery, something technical but also philosophical, witty even, that he could one day present to Maître Perronet at a small ceremony at the school. He toys with the pen, turning it round in his fingers. He should have stayed with the others, drunk more brandy, laughed a little. It would have done him good, would have been better than sitting up here on his own, oscillating.

He takes the cork from the ink bottle, dips his nib, writes at the top of a new page the date, writes below it, ‘They came today, thirty poor men led by one whose presence I may have cause to regret. Already the work disgusts me and we have not even begun it. I wish to God I had never heard of Les Innocents.’

He closes the book, pushes it away, sits there blankly like a man under sentence. Then he draws the book to him again, opens it, reads through what he has written, dips his nib and, working methodically across the page, scratches a glistening X over each letter until the lines are hidden, unreadable, buried.

One of them speaks; the others listen. It is raining still but not heavily enough to douse the fires. A dull red light finds its way through the open flap of the tent. It illuminates their lower bodies but leaves their faces in shadow. The one who speaks is dressed all in pale clothing, sits upon a throne of logs; the rest squat or kneel in the straw. A sermon? A story? Anyone unfamiliar with that language, which even spoken softly is like the rubbing and tapping of shale on shale, might guess at some manner of law-giving, the soft issuing of orders. Now and then the listeners offer a response, a hummed assenting. The speaker moves his hands, joins them, parts them. The third finger of his left hand is absent above the middle joint, ends in a blunt nub of bone and wrapped skin.

He pauses, then stretches for something by his boots, lifts it like a living thing, something that might wake and fly. It is a length of cut wood, or the hollow stem of a plant perhaps — fennel, hogweed. He tilts back his head and blows gently at the base of it. At its tip, a glow becomes a spark becomes a flame, a tongue of flame, its light settling over the man’s upturned features, his narrowed eyes. The others sit, watch. Something is absorbed. Then words again, three or four weighty words, which his listeners repeat in voices no louder than the rain. And then it is done; it is over. They rise from the straw, file out of the tent, some of them glancing at the old church, some at the charnels. Quiet as ghosts they go into their own tents. Night, in the blue hulls of rain clouds, passes softly above them. The cemetery settles.

4

In the morning when he opens his eyes, there is already light around the shutters. He fumbles for his watch, flicks up its lid (the all-seeing eye) and holds it beside one of the fragile lines of daylight. A quarter past eight! He wrestles open the shutters and looks down. The tents are still there, the big fire burning briskly, figures moving between the latrines and the tents. That patch of colour crossing the wet grass is Jeanne, and the big-shouldered woman beside her surely Lisa Saget. There is Lecoeur, talking to one of the men. And there is Armand! Armand making himself useful while he, the engineer, the captain, is still in his bed!

There is not much dressing to be done; there was not much undressing the night before. He buttons his waistcoat, pulls on his boots, his hat, and clumps down the stairs three at a time, passes the cellar door, a door that always seems to find itself behind a fine curtain of shadow. .

At the cemetery, he is grinned at; grinned at particularly by Armand, but no one is so unkind as to make a remark. Everyone is busy, calmly busy. He is pleased, relieved, more grateful to them than he dares to express. Jeanne puts a bowl of coffee into his hands, and before he can thank her, she has gone out of the house to help her grandfather and Lisa Saget with the construction of a little kitchen annexe — a firebox, a grate, some irons for hanging the pots, a canvas awning to keep off the rain. He should himself have foreseen the need of it: you cannot cook for thirty-five souls in a kitchen sized like the sexton’s. What else has he failed to anticipate? He drinks the coffee, lets the heat of it almost scald his tongue and throat.

The office next to the kitchen has become Lecoeur’s quarters. Jean-Baptiste leans in, sees that the bed is already neatly made, either by Lecoeur or Jeanne. There is a bag at the end of the bed, not large, some books visible inside. The air of the room, along with the damp-plaster smell of the cemetery records, has an unmistakable whiff of brandy sweat.

He looks for Lecoeur and finds him by one of the old tombs, one of those blocks of weathered masonry eccentrically sunk into the earth like the petrified wreck of a little boat.

‘An entire noble family may be found beneath here,’ says Lecoeur, patting the damp stone, ‘but the lettering is so worn I can hardly make out the name. Can you read it?’

Jean-Baptiste looks. Rohan. Rohring. Roche. ‘No,’ he says. Then, ‘We should begin now.’

‘To dig?’

‘Yes.’

‘Our Alexander has spoken,’ says Lecoeur, who is possibly still not quite sober.

‘If you will bring the men to where the ground is marked,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘I shall meet you there.’

It is, as far as Jean-Baptiste knows — as far as Jeanne and her grandfather have been able to inform him — the oldest of the extant pits, a square some seven metres by seven that he has marked out with rope and pegs in the northwest corner near to where, beyond the wall, the rue aux Fers meets the rue de la Lingerie. The surface, pale grass, tussocky, gives nothing away. If this is the place, then there was no lasting memorial for those who went into it.

He stands by the rope, watching the men approach. He greets them, hopes they have passed a peaceful night; then, with Lecoeur’s assistance, he separates them into three groups. Those who will dig, those who will collect the bones, those who will stack them. When it is done, those marked for digging are sent across the rope.

‘Earth,’ says the engineer, ‘will be piled upon this side, here. When the pit is empty, the earth will be mixed with quicklime and returned to the pit. As for the bones, they will, in time, be carted across the city to their new resting place.’ He pauses. A few of the men move their heads. The others just look at him.

The day is very still, a wintry stillness. Jeanne and her grandfather stand together quietly a little distance from the rope. Jean-Baptiste looks over to them. He smiles at them or tries to, but his face is cold, and anyway, what would such a smile mean? He turns to the miner nearest him. Joos Slabbart or Jan Biloo. Jan Block, perhaps. He nods. The man nods back, lifts the handle of his spade. The ground is opened.

They dig for three hours before Jean-Baptiste asks Lecoeur to call the first break. There has not, in these first hours, been much to see. The dead appear to have been reduced to shards, fragments, as if the pit had churned them like dry bread in an old man’s mouth. Are they digging in the right place? Was the sexton mistaken? He and Jeanne have gone back to the house, but after the break, the pit starts to give up its treasures and every second thrust of the spade levers out some recognisable structure. A jaw with a row of teeth that look as if they might still have a bite to them. All the delicate apparatus of a foot, ribs like the staves of an old barrel. The bone mound becomes a low bone wall. There is no wood, not a splinter, nothing to suggest the men and women who went into the pit had anything more than the shelter of their own winding sheets.

The midday meal is announced by Lisa Saget beating a ladle against the base of a saucepan. Whatever discomfort the men may have felt in their work it does not appear to have affected their appetites. Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur linger by the edge of the pit. Lecoeur does not look well. He has pulled his neckcloth over his mouth and nose.

‘We will light a fire after lunch,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘It may help a little.’

Lecoeur nods.

‘Will you eat anything?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I should take something to settle my stomach first,’ says Lecoeur, the voice muffled, odd and muffled.

‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I shall ask Armand to fetch more brandy. We can all take a mouthful before we begin again.’

For the afternoon shift, three of the diggers are transferred to the bone-collectors. Almost all those inside the rope find themselves at some point standing on bones. Besides bones, other things start to be found and passed up. A deformed metal cross, greenish. A brooch, mostly destroyed, in the form of a rose. Part of a child’s toy horse cut from tin. Buttons. An antique-looking buckle. Nothing yet of any value. And if something valuable should be found? Who is the legal owner? The man who uncovered it? The sexton? The engineer? Perhaps it is the minister.

At moments, the men — all of them — seem swept by waves of disgust. Their eyes shut, they tremble, they hesitate, then one spits in his fist and a boot or clog drives more resolutely at the edge of a spade, and the rhythm is restored.

By the time the city bells sound four, the light is going and the men, whose bent heads are now below the level of the ground, look, from above, to be excavating shadows. Torches are driven into the walls of the pit. Now, truly, it is a spectacle: a gang of men in a red hole, prising bones from under their feet. The bone wall runs all the length of one side of the pit and is as high as a man’s shoulders. The last hour feels like a day in itself. Jean-Baptiste keeps the brandy bottle in the grass beside him. At intervals — intervals that grow shorter — he passes it down, watches it go between them, takes it back, the lighter bottle. At a quarter to six, he stops it. Later, he knows he will have to insist on them working at night, but not now. He could not do it himself; he cannot ask it of them.

He finds Lecoeur and they walk in silence to the sexton’s house. They stand by the kitchen fire.

After a minute or two, Lecoeur, speaking to the fire, says softly, ‘Sweet Christ.’

‘Tomorrow will be easier,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

Lecoeur turns, suddenly grins at him. ‘Tomorrow will break our hearts,’ he says.

5

The second day: they have been hard at it for an hour when the engineer’s concentration is broken by a shrill whistle and he turns to see Armand waving him towards the church. He goes. Armand informs him that there are three men to see him.

‘In the church?’

‘In the church.’

‘You know them?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Not one,’ says Armand, falling into step beside him.

The men are standing in the nave beside a pillar from which the remnants of a broad-brimmed cardinal’s hat hang suspended like a glorified soup plate. One of the men is Lafosse. The other two are strangers.

‘Monsieur,’ says Jean-Baptiste to Lafosse. The other men simply stand there, faintly smiling. Jean-Baptiste introduces Armand.

‘An organist?’ says one of the strangers. ‘You play Couperin, of course?’

‘I play them all,’ says Armand.

‘I should like to hear some,’ says the stranger, ‘before the organ is broken up. The Parnassus, perhaps.’

‘Only music is immortal,’ says Armand.

‘These men,’ says Lafosse, fixing his gaze on Jean-Baptiste ‘are doctors. They will be conducting certain investigations. You are to afford them every assistance.’

‘Disinterment on such a scale,’ says the admirer of Couperin, a prosperous-looking, well-padded gentleman of about fifty, ‘is quite unique. Every stage of decomposition will be apparent, even to the final handful of dust.’

‘Man’s journey,’ begins his colleague, a more angular, more slightly built man, ‘has, historically, been measured from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. From first breath to last. Yet thanks to the sharp blades of our anatomists, we now know much of those months when we lie invisibly inside our mothers. Your work here, monsieur, will offer us a most complete view of our fate after that event we call death.’

‘Our physical fate,’ says his colleague in an amused tone, gesturing to where, in the half-dark, the altar crouches.

‘Indeed, indeed,’ says the other. ‘The rest we must leave to the wisdom of Mother Church.’

‘Set up a place for them,’ says Lafosse. ‘Somewhere they may work undisturbed.’

From high over their heads, there comes certain small but distinctly carried sounds that might be nothing but the shifting of those birds that roost there, but Jean-Baptiste catches Armand’s eye and quickly offers whatever assistance the doctors may require. He does not care to have Père Colbert’s voice fall on him again, to have it made plain how little he holds sway here.

‘Then our business is concluded,’ says Lafosse. He turns, uncertainly, as if in search of the way out.

‘I am Dr Thouret,’ says the slighter of the two strangers, realising at last that he will receive no introduction from the minister’s emissary. ‘My colleague here —’ the colleague smiles graciously — ‘is Dr Guillotin.’

After the midday meal, the men, under Jean-Baptiste’s instruction, build a pulley from three stout poles lashed together, a wheel, a length of chain. They make a canvas cradle to attach to the end of the chain. They make two ladders with broad and strongly fixed rungs. They stoke the fire. They set to work again.

With his plumb line, Jean-Baptiste measures the depth of the floor of the pit at a little over thirteen metres. The bone wall will soon be too high for the men to reach to the top of it. Such a profusion would be less troubling if he had not, the previous evening received a communication from the Porte d’Enfer informing him that they had suffered flooding from an uncharted spring and that it would be some time before they were ready to accept any material from les Innocents. There was no indication as to whether they meant days, weeks or months. Even a few weeks, at this rate, and the cemetery would become a labyrinth. They would lose each other in corridors of bone.

The gangs — diggers, collectors, stackers — are rotated at hourly intervals. It is evident that no one must be left more than two hours at the bottom of the pit. Near the end of the afternoon — it has been one of those days when the light struggles to impose itself, to convince — one of the men, coming up the ladder at the end of his shift, pauses, lets go of the rung and tumbles backwards. Fortunately, he does not break his fall on the heads of his fellows. He is raised to the surface in the canvas cradle.

‘It is Block,’ says Lecoeur, kneeling by the man’s side. ‘Jan Block.’

In the surface air, Block stirs, looks about himself and, ashen still, gets to his feet.

‘Let him go to his tent if he wishes,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He has already heard someone mutter the words ‘choke-damp’. All of them know it, and at Valenciennes, all will have seen or heard of a man drowning in some undetectable element. Absurd, of course, to imagine that it could exist in the pit, but he calls a break and lets them pass the bottle. They look at him. He sees in their gazes nothing he can put a name to. After fifteen minutes, he sends a new party down the ladders.

Among the items found in the pit today: a green coin from the reign of Charles IX; a rusted but recognisable gorget; a ring with a cross on it — not valuable; more buttons; the blade of a knife — why? For use in the next world? A curious small piece of coloured glass, heart-shaped, quite pretty.

This last the engineer rinses when he washes his hands in the evening, and on some whim, or simply not knowing what else to do with it, he presents it to Jeanne, who accepts it, a strange solemn smile on her face.

6

A man runs away, runs away with his pack in the middle of the night. No one saw him go; no one heard him. Even the men in his own tent look surprised, uneasy, as if he might have been spirited away, perhaps by something they have disturbed in the pit. Lecoeur offers to lead a party in pursuit of him. He cannot have got far and will surely find it hard to conceal himself in a city he knows nothing of.

‘They are not prisoners,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘They are not bonded labour.’

‘The men expect a firm hand,’ says Lecoeur, who has this morning cut his neck shaving. ‘After all, have we not rescued them from the mines?’

‘I do not know,’ says Jean-Baptiste, more to himself than Lecoeur, ‘who we have rescued.’

Of the others, all are accounted for, though the man who fell from the ladder, Jan Block, is not fit to work and Jean-Baptiste visits him in his tent, where he lies on his bed of straw like Holbein’s Christ. His eyes follow the engineer’s dark form as it crosses the entrance of the tent and stands above him in the tent’s light.

‘You have pain? You are suffering?’

Block wets his lips with the tip of a pale tongue, says something, says it twice more before Jean-Baptiste understands.

‘You are cold?’

‘Yes.’

‘We will bring you more blankets. We will bring something hot for you to drink.’

Block blinks. The engineer leaves. When he finds Jeanne, he asks her if she could visit the sick man, take him some coffee or broth. And is there a blanket somewhere? He complains of the cold.

In the pit, under Lecoeur’s direction, the men are already at work. Fire, pulley, ladders. The hollow sound of bones laid on bones. A simple call from the men below warns those above that the canvas cradle is filled and ready for hoisting. They are deep enough now to need lights even in the morning, four torches protruding from the walls and burning fitfully. Jean-Baptiste crouches, tries to see the condition of the walls. Does the earth fray? Is there risk of collapse? Could the men be got out quickly if a side of the pit did collapse?

He decides that he must go down and see for himself (it is time he went down), and with no announcement he swings himself onto the nearest ladder and begins to descend. He is aware that both below and above him all work has ceased, that they are watching him. His feet feel for the rungs. The sky recedes. The air thickens.

Stepping off the bottom of the ladder, he suffers a momentary loss of balance and has to grip the elbow of the man nearest him. Now that he is down here, he should tell them to continue with their work, but there is so little room. He looks at them, their long faces lit from above by fire and the feeble light of morning. He looks at the black walls, looks at what he is standing on, looks up to where Lecoeur’s head and shoulders are bent over the pit’s edge. He takes a spade from the hands of the man he stumbled against, presses its blade into the earth wall, twists the blade and watches a piece of the wall come away in a damp slab. He tests the opposite wall in the same manner and with the same result. He returns the tool, gets a boot on the bottom rung of the ladder, is swept by a wave of nausea that, thank God, he is able to control, to let pass. He climbs, reaches the top, steadies himself on the grass.

To Lecoeur, who has come up close beside him, he says huskily, ‘We will build frames. Box-cribs to secure the walls. Bring the men out.’

There is no shortage of suitable lumber: Monsieur Dejour must have hoarded half the saleable wood in Paris. They shape posts and struts, improvise puncheons and cleats. It is nice to work with the wood, and when the men go down after the midday meal, they go, it seems, in slightly better heart. By mid-afternoon the plumb line measures a depth of nearly seventeen metres. The cradle carries more earth than bone now. By dark they will have done it! Emptied one of the pits of les Innocents!

The last shift of diggers surfaces at half past six. A winter moon shines in their faces, shines on the bone wall that looks now less what it is, the macabre and pitiful residue of countless lives, and more like a good harvest, hard won. Jean-Baptiste takes off his hat, rubs at his hair, his own hair, which he’s grown to an almost respectable length, just as Charvet suggested. The miners file away from him, some with their spades over their shoulders like muskets. A good day. A little victory for stubborn hard work, for keeping one’s nerve. Quietly, by the side of the pit, he and Lecoeur congratulate each other. They reach out and touch hands.

He is less pleased with the world the next morning. He has slept badly again, waking in some useless quarter of the night, heart racing, and then lying for hours mentally digging pit after pit until he sickened of it and climbed from his bed and dressed in the dark.

At the cemetery, examined by lamplight, Jan Block is obviously worse. There is a sheen on his skin like that on rotten cheese. His breathing is laboured, unprofitable. He may be dying, may conceivably, all too conceivably, be dying of some infection the others could contract, the whole place shut down within the week, the last man living rolling the last man dead into the emptied pit. .

An hour later, he finds one of the doctors, Dr Guillotin, inspecting the bone wall. He sees him prise out some fragment from the wall and slip it into his coat pocket.

‘You don’t object, I hope?’ asks the doctor, seeing the engineer approach. ‘An intriguingly deformed vertebra. Thought I should have it before Thouret beat me to it.’

Jean-Baptiste speaks to him of the sick man, describes the accident and asks if the doctor would be kind enough to examine him. ‘If there is an infection. . something that might. .’

The doctor is agreeable. The man is nearby? He is. They walk together to the tent, duck inside it. There is someone else in there. The miner with the damaged hand. For a moment the newcomers are kept at bay by the miner’s calm regard of them. Then he leaves, silent and unhurried.

‘A curious-looking character,’ says the doctor. ‘Violet eyes. Did you notice? Most unusual.’ He turns to the man on the straw. ‘What is his name?’ he asks.

‘This is Block,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Block? Good morning to you, Block. You have had a fall? You are unwell?’

Jan Block looks startled.

The doctor smiles. ‘You need not be afraid of me.’ To Jean-Baptiste he says, ‘If you would turn him? It is easier to examine a man’s back when he is not lying on it.’

Jean-Baptiste takes hold of the miner’s shoulders, starts to shift him. The sick man makes no protest, though his flesh trembles. It is not easy to turn him. When it is done, the doctor says, ‘Lift up his shirt.’

The skin of Jan Block’s upper back has been pierced either side of his spine, and though the puncture marks are small, they are surrounded by angry haloes of inflammation.

Guillotin steps closer. He looks, but like most of his profession is reluctant to touch. He nods. ‘You may pull down his shirt. Thank you, Monsieur Block. We will find something to help you, yes?’

When they have walked a few steps from the tent, the doctor says, ‘He is poisoned by whatever matter entered him in the fall. The wounds must be cleaned immediately with a solution of brimstone. As for the fever, he should take a dust of Peruvian bark, dispersed in a little brandy. I am not, however, in favour of suppressing fever entirely. Fever is not the enemy. It is the fire in which disease is combusted.’ He stops, then looks closely at Jean-Baptiste. ‘Even in perfect health,’ he says, ‘we are remade continuously in a heat of our own generation. You are familiar with the theory of phlogiston?’

‘I know something of it.’

‘Phlogiston, from the Greek, to set on fire. The combustible element within all things. The latent fire. The potential fire. Passive until roused.’

‘Roused by a spark?’

‘Or by some shock or friction. Or simply the gradual accretion of heat.’

‘Is it possible,’ asks Jean-Baptiste, ‘that Block’s infection is caused by a disease that has continued in the bones? That the bones carry still a residue of the sicknesses that once afflicted them? I mean, afflicted those to whom they once belonged?’

‘How quaintly you put it,’ says Guillotin. ‘You speak as if our bones were mere possessions, like a horse or a watch. But to answer your question, I think it unlikely any disease could so long outlive its victim. I do not suggest, however, that you or your men allow the bones to touch any open sore or wound. I recommend vinegar as a general disinfectant. And purified alcohol. Ethanol. Very effective. Though be careful where you store it. A powerful intoxicant. Also highly inflammable. Even the vapour. Particularly the vapour.’

‘And where would I find it? Ethanol?’

‘Shall I procure you some?’

‘I would be indebted to you. And for the brimstone? The bark?’

‘I will write you a note for the apothecary,’ says Guillotin, patting the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Now, let us go into the house together and see if that nice girl will make us some coffee, eh?’

At the kitchen table, Jeanne, Lisa Saget and both of Lisa’s children are busy paring vegetables. A chair is brought for the doctor but he prefers to stand by the fire. He is vigorous and good-humoured. He says pleasant, admiring things to the women and children. Jean-Baptiste explains that they have been to see the sick miner. That he is certainly worse today but that the doctor has prescribed some remedies.

‘Natalie,’ says Lisa, tilting her head towards the girl, ‘will fetch them. Wipe your hands, Natalie, and put on your coat.’

‘We can make room for him in the house,’ says Jeanne. ‘I can make a bed on the landing upstairs. He will be better here.’

‘You have the cooking,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘and many other duties.’

‘Good nursing,’ says Guillotin, ‘is often the difference between a patient living or dying.’

‘Then we must do it,’ says Jeanne, turning wide-eyed to Jean-Baptiste.

‘Could he not go to a hospital?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

The doctor flares his nostrils. ‘Hospitals are very dangerous places. Particularly to one already weakened by illness.’

Natalie, her coat buttoned, is ready for her errand. There are writing materials in the office where Lecoeur sleeps. The doctor writes a little list, squints at it, signs it, folds it, gives it to the child.

‘I have added something for you,’ he says to Jean-Baptiste. ‘Lachryma papaveris. Tears of the poppy. It will help you with your rest. Have I judged the matter rightly?’

‘You go to Monsieur Boustanquoi,’ says Lisa to the girl. ‘Straight there and straight back.’

The girl nods, grins coquettishly at the doctor, takes her leave.

‘Children,’ purrs the doctor. He taps a finger on the lid of the coffee pot. ‘May we impose, mademoiselle?’

The emptied pit is filled, the black earth leavened with sacks of quicklime. The wind has got up, skirling and gusting between the cemetery walls. The men’s clothes, hands and faces are all finely dusted with the lime. Eyes sting, noses run, but filling a pit is better work than emptying one. Quicker work too. By early afternoon, pit one can have a neat line run through it in Jean-Baptiste’s notebook. The fire burns down. The pulley and cradle, the timber for the frames, the tools, the men themselves are all moved fifteen strides to the south. Lecoeur and Jean-Baptiste measure out the mouth of a new pit with the pegs and rope. Jeanne and the sexton are brought out to confirm the position. The sexton, after walking about somewhat in the manner of a dog looking for somewhere to sleep, eventually decides the rope square should begin another five strides in the direction of the south wall. The pegs are pulled and driven in again. The sexton nods. A new fire is built, lit. The gang who are to dig step across the rope; those who are to stack stand ready. It starts again, that dull music of blade on earth, then the noise of the bones, the way, when knocked together, they ring like clay pots.

A day’s difficulty can be measured by the amount of strong liquor necessary to endure it. Today is a three-bottle day. A bottle per metre dug. A tenth of a bottle per man per metre dug. Is that the equation? It is not one the engineer was taught at the Ecole des Ponts. When they have finished and the miners have dispersed to their tents or to the warmth of the big fire by the preaching cross, Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur wash their hands in the bucket outside the door of the sexton’s house.

‘What is it they will do in there?’ asks Lecoeur, shaking the water from his fingers and nodding towards the doctors’ new workshop, a little, windowless structure of draped canvas propped against the wall of the church.

‘God knows,’ says Jean-Baptiste, who earlier in the day witnessed a pair of trestle tables being carried inside, along with a heavy leather pouch that jangled as it was carried.

In the kitchen, there is only the old sexton, asleep in his chair, but after a few moments, Jeanne appears at the bottom of the stairs, her face softly radiant as though she had just bathed it in fresh cold water. ‘He is resting,’ she says, ‘and has taken all his medicines.’

‘Block?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

She nods. ‘The doctor says he will look at him again tomorrow, if he is able to.’

‘Good. Thank you, Jeanne. I am grateful to you.’

‘And your medicine is on the mantelpiece,’ she says. ‘There.’

‘Yours?’ asks Lecoeur.

‘Dr Guillotin seemed to think I might need some help with my sleep.’

‘Ah, sleep,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Yes. Morpheus has proved no friend to me recently. I am restless at night as a jackrabbit.’

‘Then you shall have half of this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, examining the thick, brown glass, corked, unlabelled. ‘There must be enough for both of us in here.’

He leaves Lecoeur with Jeanne and her grandfather, returns to the rue de la Lingerie, the half-decanted flask in his coat pocket. He should try to do some accounts before bed, and tomorrow he must draw some more money at the goldsmith’s on the rue Saint-Honoré. There are tradesmen to pay, and the men of course, and something handsome for Lecoeur, for Jeanne and her grandfather, for Armand and Lisa Saget. He owes a month’s rent to Monsieur Monnard. He does not like to be behind with it, to give Monsieur Monnard any further cause to find fault with him. On the stairs to the drawing room, he meets Marie coming down with a tray of plates. The plates are littered with small bones. She makes a face at him, a little grimace that might have some specific meaning in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. He asks, keeping his voice low, how Ziguette is today.

‘Oh, poor Ziggi!’ says Marie, in a very passable imitation of Madame Monnard. Then she brushes past him, shoulder and thigh against his own.

He goes up to his room, sits in candlelight, puts on the table his bottle of medicine, folds his arms, looks at it. How many drops is he supposed to take? Did Guillotin say? He remembers his father towards the end having such a remedy. What was it they spooned into his mouth? Ten drops? Twenty? He decides, simply, that he will take some. He will not trouble himself with counting; he is tired of counting. He will take some and see how he does, then make his adjustments accordingly.

It is late, late or early. Jeanne, woken by something she has heard in her sleep, leaves the room she shares with her grandfather and looks down at Jan Block, his face lit by the moonlight that slides through the narrow arched window at the end of the landing. It takes a few moments — she has been sleeping deeply — to realise that his eyes are open. She smiles at him, then kneels beside him so that he can see her more certainly. He lifts a hand to her and she catches it before it falls, holds it a moment, then lays it on the shallow panting of his chest. Slowly he shuts his eyes, and there is something so resigned, so final in that shutting she cannot believe he will ever open them again. His breathing suspends a moment, a long moment, a moment that will perhaps extend into eternity. Then, with a little spasm in his chest, a kind of hiccup, it starts again, somewhat easier.

On the stairs, the wood creaks. A head appears, rising out of the darkness of the stairwell into the silver light of the corridor. A shaved nude head, eyes that glitter.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ says the head, very softly. ‘It is only Lecoeur.’

‘He woke,’ she says, ‘but he is sleeping now.’

‘You are a good girl,’ says Lecoeur. ‘I believe I was dreaming of you.’

‘Is it morning?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says, uncertainly. ‘I do not think so.’

7

Héloïse Godard, reader, woman for sale, daughter of innkeepers on the Orléans — Paris road, a young person recently entered into her twenty-fifth year though not yet quite finished with her long project of debasement, rises with the six o’clock bell from Saint-Eustache, dresses by touch (from white stockings to the green ribbon round her throat), lights her candle for a final brief inspection of herself, blows it out and descends the winding wooden staircase into the public world of the rue du Jour.

Always that small shock of being outside again, that small hardening of whatever, as she lay alone in her bed through the hours of night, had softened, opened. . She pulls her cloak about herself, pulls up her hood, breathes the cold air.

She has an appointment with Boubon the basket-maker in his workshop on the far side of the market. Boubon is a widower, and a man who, like Ysbeau the bookseller and Thibault the tailor — like herself — does not fit easily among his neighbours. This will be her eighth visit to him. Those whom she sees — there are not many — she sees regularly, on their appointed days, their appointed hours. She does no casual trade. All that talk about her going with anyone who waves a coin under her nose, all that is lies. In most cases she has to approach the gentlemen herself, and even then nothing explicit is discussed. She has learnt to be very businesslike while never speaking to the point. This, she thinks, is a good part of what they like about her: her willingness never to confront them with what they are doing, what they are paying for, what they need. And what they need is not quite what the quarter’s vulgar imagination excites itself with. With Boubon, for example, she will sit on his knee among the sheaves and rods of willow. He will tell her about trade, complain of the aches in his back, his thighs. She will listen, all sweet attentiveness, then offer a little wifely advice, a little wifely encouragement. Later, he will observe the tops of her stockings and run a blunt and calloused finger along the garment’s woollen hems while she asks again for the difference between slyping and slewing and how exactly slewing is distinguished from randing or waling. None of it is particularly unpleasant. Certainly it is bearable, usually bearable. Then, when her dress and petticoats and shift are down and patted into good order, they will drink coffee brewed on the workshop fire and she will pick up the money left for her in a screw of paper in the niche by the door (she is not one of those Palais Royal hussies who will do or say nothing without money given first), and she will depart, quickly and quietly, both of them relieved to have it over again for another week.

But before Boubon, she needs to eat. You cannot walk through the market in the morning and not pause to break your fast. The air alone — the air despite everything — compels it. So she stops at Madame Forges’s stall (that Madame Forges who dyes her hair the colour of a butcher’s rag), buys a small, blood-warm loaf and picks off the crust as she goes. At this hour in the morning, she is barely noticed, rarely insulted. Even Merda the drunk, smudge-eyed on a step eating an onion, does no more than glance up at her, mildly. To save herself a few minutes of walking, she cuts through one of the fish sheds and sees the old priest in his blue glasses haggling with a fish-girl over the price of a cod’s head. The girl’s mother might have offered the head for free to a poor priest, her grandmother certainly, but times have altered. One does not need to be awed by priests any more. Heaven and Hell, angels and devils, there are plenty of people ready to scoff at such things now. And not just the savants at the Café de Foy or the Procope. Plenty of ordinary people who say as much. People like the fish-girl perhaps. People like herself.

She follows the priest out of the shed, loses him in the day’s first crowd, makes her way to the rue de la Fromagerie, crosses the market’s southern fringe and arrives at the corner of the rue aux Fers. Above the walls of the cemetery — as ever these days, days and nights — the twisting plumes of smoke from the fires. But this morning there is something else to see, something new. Black letters on the cemetery wall. Tall, ragged, unignorable letters extending from the cemetery door almost as far as the rue de la Lingerie: ‘FAT KING SLUT QUEEN BEWARE! BECHE IS DIGGING A HOLE BIG ENOUGH TO BURY ALL VERSAILLES!’

In the middle of the street, a half-dozen men and women are looking, discussing, trying to agree on what is written there. They have ‘king’ and ‘queen’, ‘slut’ and ‘Versailles’. The rest is less sure. She could tell them, of course, but they would not want it from her, a woman, that woman.

They leave (still arguing), and she is about to go herself (she does not wish to make Boubon anxious; Boubon will be anxious enough) when she sees, turning out of the rue de la Lingerie, the young engineer, the one who in the mist called himself by that name now scrawled on the wall. The one who touched her face. He sees her and then, a second later, sees the black letters, reads, visibly stiffens and, with his face flushed, steps up to her and says, ‘I know nothing of this.’

She nods, then breaks off a piece of her bread and holds it out to him. He takes it, almost snatching it from her, pushes it quickly into one of the pockets of his coat and hurries away.

8

When he has Armand on his own, the two of them squared off just inside one of the arched entrances to the south charnel, a roof of bones over their heads, the organist splays his fingers to show how they are without the slightest stain.

‘Fleur or Renard,’ he says. ‘De Bergerac at a push. Excess of zeal. I will speak to them. But I think you should be flattered.’

‘Flattered?’

‘You must have made a considerable impression on them. I can assure you they have never written a word about me and I have known them since the hospital.’

‘They were foundlings?’

‘Were and are.’

‘I did not know.’

‘No. You preferred simply to dislike them. To feel contemptuous of them.’

‘But I must work here! Does that mean nothing to them?’

‘Who would make the connection? I assume you have not mentioned your nom de guerre to anyone?’

‘No. Of course. No.’

‘No?’

‘No!’

‘Then?’

‘I will not. . I do not. .’ The engineer falters, then casts around himself as if, among the memorial slabs, the stone flummery, he might discover what it is he will not or does not. Evidently he should have taken much more of Guillotin’s syrup. Another night of sleeplessness has rendered him stupid, his thoughts separated from each other by patches of mental wasteland. Reason, coherence, these seem suddenly finite assets he might, this morning, tonight, next week, abruptly come to the end of. And then that odd, that startling encounter with the Austrian! Was she waiting for him? Waiting there to give him a piece of her bread? Why should she do that?

‘Yours,’ says Armand, who may have been speaking for some time, ‘are the politics of undrawn conclusions. It is pitifully common.’

‘What?’

‘You see how things are. You have read, you have considered, yet you refuse to reach the obvious conclusions.’

‘And they are?’

‘They are what men of much meaner capacities have understood perfectly. Men like Fleur and Renard and de Bergerac.’

‘Then perhaps my difficulty is that I know the names of my parents.’

‘All that has offended you is that the paint on the wall may reflect upon your professional character. You are entirely self-regarding. You think yourself a man of elevated thoughts, of liberal sentiment, but your only true ideal is your own ambition.’

‘You have given up on yours? The organ at Saint-Eustache?’

‘I can see past my ambitions. I am not contained by them. That is the difference.’

Peevishly, they turn away from each other. Jean-Baptiste, his arms crossed tightly over his chest, peers past the blackened stones of the archway to where Lecoeur is crossing the grass towards them. An agitated, stiff-legged gait, body bent forwards, face shadowed by his hat. .

‘A mutiny,’ he says, hopping through the archway, not troubling himself with any pleasantries. ‘The men have mutinied!’ He looks at them, appears hugely satisfied to see their startled faces, then says, ‘It may not be correct to say they have mutinied, not yet. But they are unhappy. Most unhappy. They will not work.’

‘And the reason?’

‘They wish for pipes.’

‘Pipes?’

‘Tobacco pipes. They will not work without them. They have convinced themselves that tobacco is a specific against infection.’

‘Infection from what?’

‘The pits, of course.’

‘They wish to smoke?’

‘They insist on it. All of them. And you need not trouble yourself seeking the origin of such an idea. They wake up with them in their heads one morning. Such notions may even be autogenous.’

Armand chuckles. ‘This is more good than bad. It is a demand very cheaply satisfied. And they will think well of you for doing so. They will be comforted.’

While speaking, the three of them have stepped out of the charnel. The miners are bunched by the big fire, watching.

‘There is a shop on the rue aux Ours,’ continues Armand, ‘opposite the coaching office. Several hundred pipes in stock. Enough tobacco to supply the navy. I recommend it.’

‘Then,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘then perhaps you would fetch what is necessary?’

‘Should I open an account?’ asks Armand, reverting with no obvious effort to his role as Scaramouche, Harlequin, Puck. ‘Preferential rates? Monthly billing?’

‘And if Monsieur Saint-Méard has no objection,’ says Lecoeur quickly, ‘I could accompany him.’

Armand makes a bow of invitation. Lecoeur replies with a bow of his own.

‘How is the sick man this morning?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Block? Ah, a ministering angel attends him,’ says Lecoeur.

‘He is dead?’ asks Jean-Baptiste, his concentration still on the men, the wildness of their thinking.

‘I mean Jeanne,’ says Lecoeur. ‘She looks after him. We should not worry about Block. Block will outlive us all.’

It is, by the bells of Saint-Eustache and the restless hands of Jean-Baptiste’s own watch, almost two hours before Armand and Lecoeur return to the cemetery. He has already cursed himself for his folly in allowing them to go together, though whether he could have stopped them, whether he has the authority, the right, the necessary force of character, he does not quite know.

That they are both drunk is obvious at a distance of many metres, but they seem to be able to walk without staggering and the parcel in Lecoeur’s arms suggests they did not forget the original purpose of their errand.

‘You have seen the wall?’ hisses Lecoeur, his mouth swaying so close to the engineer’s cheek it is almost a kiss. ‘Saint-Méard says he knows him. This Bêche. Apparently a man you would never suspect of radicalism. Quite unassuming to meet, yet beneath it, beneath it, cold as ice. Kill without a blink. Saint-Méard calls him the people’s avenger. Does that not have a type of beauty to it?’

‘Those are the pipes?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I bought every pipe in the shop. Quite cleaned him out. There are several spare. Perhaps you would like one for yourself? Shall I choose one for you?’ He laughs, starts to rummage in the parcel and looks happy, simply happy, for the first time in days.

When at last the men are gathered and they start back in the pit, there is not a single miner without a clay stem between his teeth. It does not seem to inhibit their ability to dig, collect, stack. Lecoeur stands dangerously near the edge of the pit. He seems to be drifting in and out of sleep. The doctors arrive. Guillotin stations himself beside Jean-Baptiste and, after watching the work for a while, says, ‘You have seen what is written on the wall?’

Jean-Baptiste nods.

‘There are forces at work,’ says Guillotin, ‘that our masters ignore at their peril.’

Jean-Baptiste glances round at him, the mild, brown eyes in that large, florid face. Was Guillotin of the party of the future? Did he, along with Renard and Fleur, de Bergerac and Armand, know the conclusions to be drawn? They hold each other’s gaze a moment until the noise of a spade striking wood, splitting it, draws both men’s attention back into the pit.

The engineer crouches. ‘A coffin?’ he calls. The miner looks up and, by way of answer, of assent, takes the pipe from his mouth.

They dig it out, lay it in the cradle, hoist it, lay it on the ground.

‘I suppose we must open it,’ says Jean-Baptiste quietly, as if to himself. He looks at the man nearest him. Guido Brun, or if not Brun, then the one who looks much like Brun. Someone Agast. Englebert Agast? The man drives the edge of his spade under the lid of the coffin, levers it, then levers it more forcefully until the wood, with a small detonation, gives itself up, and much of the coffin, on the instant, disintegrates. Inside is a skeleton, the residue of a man, his bones connected by patches of leathery sinew. Strands of coarse, black hair, like black grass, sprout from the sides of his skull. Several large, brown teeth are on show.

Lecoeur, awake now, very sober, crosses himself, as do several of the men.

‘To get the bones,’ says Dr Thouret, ‘to separate them and have them as you wish, you will need to boil them.’

‘Boil the corpse?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘It is a perfectly normal procedure,’ says Guillotin, soothingly. ‘There is nothing indecent. You should speak with the sexton. Those gentlemen have their arts.’

The next coffin raised to the surface has inside only a clean litter of bones, so that picked up and shaken it would rattle like a child’s toy. The next, but for a little dust, is empty.

‘At least,’ says Guillotin, looking round at the company, ‘one has escaped. There is hope for us all.’

The remark is presumably intended to lighten the atmosphere, but the men look at him stonily, and only Lecoeur, with a kind of courage of good manners, manages a smile in return.

A new system emerges, a new routine. Coffin wood is burnt on the fire, where it provokes brief displays of weirdly coloured flames. Those corpses still stubbornly strung together with ligament and tendon are left inside the charnel, where, from the middle of the afternoon onwards, Manetti, assisted by one of the miners, collects them on a handcart and wheels them away to where he has established his boiling vessel, a copper tub used for a hundred years to finish off what the earth of les Innocents had started, and that now has been dragged from its long retirement in a corner of the cemetery.

For the men in the pit, and the men above charged with the task of opening the coffins, there is at first a palpable tension, all of them seemingly braced for some horror, something abruptly unhidden that might, from its box, regard them. Along with the brandy bottle, the tobacco jar is circulated. It is, mercifully, enough to keep them at it. And by the end of the day, as the last coffin is lifted by firelight, it all seems queerly bearable, as if work, whatever its particulars, was in the end just work. Something you bent to for probable reward. Something you did because human restlessness must be harnessed to some purpose if it is not to feed on itself.

He has supper with the Monnards. He cannot avoid them for ever. He sits with them — with Madame and Monsieur — chewing mouthfuls of meat and brown beans. The little fire is livelier than usual: Jean-Baptiste has arranged a delivery from the cemetery of his plentiful wood. The flames ripple in the polished hip of the pianoforte. Ziguette’s absence is not commented upon, though now and then her mother glances at the unoccupied seat, the laid but unused utensils on the table.

They have, in fitful conversation, exhausted the weather, the merits of the meat, the rising price of beans, and have, each of them, fallen back upon their private thoughts, their relentless chewing, when Madame Monnard, clearing her throat, asks, ‘Is it true, monsieur, what Marie tells us about the scandalous thing written on the cemetery wall?’

‘Marie, madame? I did not know she could read.’

‘She could not read her own name, monsieur,’ says Monsieur Monnard, ‘but she has ears. She can hear better than an owl.’

Instantly — unbidden and perfect — an image of Marie with tufted ears, perched on a bough in moonlight, enters the engineer’s imagination.

‘It was said to her, monsieur,’ explains Madame. ‘She learnt it.’

‘And it is not the only such,’ says Monsieur Monnard. ‘I had Monsieur Gobel in the shop this afternoon, who informed me he had seen something of a very similar character on a wall opposite the Bourse.’

‘There may be hundreds of them,’ says Madame. ‘Could there be hundreds?’

‘That other,’ asks Jean-Baptiste, fork in the air, ‘the one by the Bourse. It made use of the same name?’

‘Bêche,’ says Monsieur Monnard, stabbing at a last square of beef on his plate. ‘And all manner of threats to the king and his ministers. My wife has been very affected, monsieur.’

‘I fear,’ says Madame, who does, suddenly, look very affected, ‘we shall be murdered in our beds. We shall have our throats slit.’

‘I am sure it is all idle,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Nothing but. . a type of game.’

‘A game? You may say so, monsieur. Yes, you wish to comfort me. You are a very considerate young man. But I shall dream tonight of this Bêche climbing in at our bedroom window. Would you come, monsieur, if we called you? Do you have a sword, monsieur?’

‘I do not, madame.’

‘I thought you would have a sword.’

‘I am an engineer, madame. I have a brass ruler.’

‘I dare say it might serve,’ says Madame, thoughtfully. ‘If it is a large one.’

Marie comes in to clear the plates. All conversation stops. The plates are gathered, piled. She has strong red hands like a man, a working man. And that black hair of hers! That slick female moustache that is, surely, no defect. To Jean-Baptiste she seems to possess a vigour no one else in the room can match, as if her roots were sunk into some richer, blacker soil they cannot reach.

When she goes, pulling the door shut with her trailing foot, Madame and Monsieur exchange glances, then turn their gaze on their lodger, as if some explanation — an explanation for every ill and unsettling thing that has occurred since his arrival on the rue de la Lingerie — was now required of him.

‘I wished to ask you,’ begins Jean-Baptiste, ‘to enquire that is, how your daughter does, madame.’

‘Ziggi? Oh, it is very trying to have children, monsieur. She seems quite to have melted. You should call on her, monsieur. My husband and myself are at our wits’ ends. Ever since — and I pray you excuse us — ever since your work began she will not be comforted. It is as if she felt the shovels on her own skin.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Truly. But the work cannot be avoided. I am trying, madame. . we are trying, to do what is good, what is. .’

The fire snaps; a spark flies out. Jean-Baptiste, rising swiftly, extinguishes it with the toe of his boot.

‘The wood is green,’ growls Monsieur Monnard, and he frowns at the fire as though green wood was the green heart of all that vexed him.

Upstairs, shielding his candle from the dozen draughts that live in the air at the top of the house like so many secret, invisible streams, the engineer stops outside Ziguette’s room and looks down at the line of light at the bottom of her door. It is late, but he is curious to see her, this melting girl. And he would, if he is able, like to give her some reassurance. As a guest, a type of guest in this place, it surely behoves him to offer her his sympathy, and he is about to tap softly on the door when it is opened and Marie is there, the hint of a smile on her face. For a few seconds they stand, blatantly regarding each other; then she steps back to admit him.

Two candles (in addition to his own) illuminate the room: one on the dressing table, the other in a little holder of painted porcelain on the cabinet beside the bed. The room is spacious, at least three times the size of his own, and with a large shuttered window over the quiet street. Put into good order, it would be a pleasant room, the nicest in the house perhaps, but nothing here is in good order. The place appears to have been subject to a private storm, one that has whirled every dress and petticoat, every linen pocket, embroidered apron and set of stays, every mob cap and straw hat, every frill, stocking and furbelow that a cutler’s paternal love can bestow upon an only daughter, whirled it all into the air and then, suddenly ceasing, left everything to rain down in confusion. In the centre of it all, partly covered by it, is Ziguette herself, her body loosely sculpted by a linen sheet, her face flushed with a heat whose source is surely internal. (The room has only a modest fire.) She stares up at the engineer with swollen eyes, her hair — unpinned, uncovered, uncombed — spread over the bolster in a heavy blond tangle. Her mouth has a punched look, and in the stretched white of her neck he can clearly see the pulsing of her blood.

‘It is not too late, I hope, to pay a call?’

She does not answer him. He looks round at Marie, who is standing directly behind him, hands clasped at the front of her thighs, her expression now perfectly blank.

‘Your mother,’ he says, turning back to Ziguette, ‘thought you would not object. I have just come from having supper with her. Your father too, of course.’ He gestures outwards and downwards towards the sitting room. ‘I am sorry to find you unwell. Sorry if I, in any way, unwittingly. .’

She makes a frantic gesture. Marie drags a large pot from under the bed. Ziguette retches. She does not produce much — presumably her belly is near empty — but the noise, amplified by the pot, is impressive. Marie holds the girl’s head, red fingers sunk into the yellow hair, tugging it.

The engineer gets out onto the landing, eases the door shut and crosses quickly to his own room. He sits on the end of the bed, listening for more noises from the sickroom, receives a few faint reports; then the house is quiet, free for a moment even of its habitual small crackings and creakings.

Light a fire? Why bother.

He drags the banyan across his lap like a blanket, looks at the bottle of tincture on the cover of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle Volume II, wonders if he should offer some of it, a generous brown spoonful, to Ziguette, then suddenly stands and goes to his coat, the riding coat he was wearing this morning, delves into a pocket, delves into the other pocket and pulls out the piece of bread Héloïse gave to him beside the cemetery wall. It has dried out, has almost the consistency of a biscuit, but he bites it, carefully, lets it soften on his tongue, and is smiling at the memory of that gesture of hers, so graceful, so spontaneous, so simple, when he hears from outside, from below, from — unmistakably — the cemetery, the thrill of a woman’s laughter. He unlatches his window, pushes it open, thrusts out his head. There is nothing to see, nothing obvious. Perhaps the fire by the preaching cross is burning more brilliantly than it should at such an hour, but otherwise. . He leans out further, almost to his waist, focuses his stare. Across the fire’s red light shadows flit. Then it comes again, that wild laughter, rising above the walls, ringing clear as a pedlar’s bell in the cold, stinking silence of the night.

9

Seven in the morning. Frost on the charnel tiles, a white sun wedged between two houses on the rue Saint-Denis. ‘I heard women,’ he says to Lecoeur. ‘At least, I heard one.’

‘Mmm,’ says Lecoeur, who today has on the heavy, knitted waistcoat. ‘Yes. We must not forget our master has a clear view of us and can spy on us at his leisure.’

‘I was not spying,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I am not in the habit of spying.’

‘No? What would you prefer that we call it when you peer down at us from your eyrie?’

‘What I would prefer is not to find you drunk in the morning.’

‘Drunk? Oh good. Yes. Now you choose to defame me. And what if I was. . if I was as you say? Would I not have justification? You escape here each night while I must remain surrounded by pits, bones. It is intolerable!’

‘You would prefer Valenciennes?’

‘I have burnt my ships there, monsieur. And all for your benefit. All so you can feed the swans at Versailles and keep the company of grandees!’

‘I feed no swans! Nor do I ever go to Versailles. I go to that house, there. There and no further. I keep the company of people I can make no sense of.’

Their voices have risen to something close to shouting. Each is dimly aware of being looked at, listened to.

‘But I am sorry,’ says Jean-Baptiste, alarmed to find himself suddenly on the brink of childish tears. ‘Sorry that you find it. . intolerable. You have always been free to come and go. You know there are keys in the sexton’s house to all the doors. If it pleased you, you could go this morning. Walk about the city. I can manage well enough here. And. . and you should come and have supper at the house. I had meant to invite you before. I am certain my landlord would be happy to make your acquaintance. You could come tonight if you wished it.’

‘Tonight?’ Lecoeur steps forward, muttering something about forgiveness, about the sweet balm of friendship. He tries to pull Jean-Baptiste into an embrace, but Jean-Baptiste, who has no wish to be folded in Lecoeur’s arms, steps back, and for a few moments, as the one advances and the other seeks to avoid him, they appear to be dancing.

‘You have not yet told me about the women,’ says Jean-Baptiste, bringing them both to a halt by the edge of the second pit.

‘The women? Half a dozen of the hardier local moppets. They climbed onto the wall with a ladder. Our men provided the means of their descent. I did not interfere. As a result you will find their morale much improved this morning. Cemeteries, of course, were once notorious for such women.’

‘You saw them?’

‘Their forms. At a distance.’

‘And none. . none seemed remarkable in any way?’

‘I would say they were all of a type. Assiduous. Immemorial.’

‘Jeanne saw them?’

‘We saw them together. The spectacle seemed quite to animate her.’

‘Perhaps she knew them.’

‘By reputation you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘It cannot be a nightly occurrence,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘There must be some. . regulation. They could come on a particular night. Saturday, for example. We would admit them by the door. They would have no need of ladders.’

‘But how are we to communicate this arrangement? By town crier?’

‘Monsieur Saint-Méard. He will know at least one of them. One will be enough.’

‘This will be a new part for us,’ says Lecoeur.

‘Part?’

‘There is a name for it, is there not? For those who arrange such matters?’

With a quick handshake they separate — Lecoeur towards the latrines, Jean-Baptiste to the sexton’s house, where Jeanne, Lisa Saget and the girl Natalie are about their business at the kitchen table. They will, from the window, have seen his awkward encounter with Lecoeur, but they say nothing. He is longing to ask Jeanne about the women, the moppets, their height, their hair, though he has already tested in his imagination a picture of Héloïse climbing a ladder propped against the cemetery wall, and dismissed it as being no more probable than her spreading her cloak and flying over the wall.

By the kitchen fire, there are now two chairs. The sexton’s is unoccupied; in the other is Jan Block, his shoulders hunched under a blanket, his eyes sunk and shadowed, yet he is clearly a man at the beginning of his convalescence. Jean-Baptiste congratulates him. Block nods, glances towards Jeanne, then back to the bobbling flames.

‘Good,’ says the engineer, talking to himself, to the air, to whoever cares to listen. ‘So now we go on.’

That evening — though in his heart it is the last thing he wishes — Jean-Baptiste returns to the rue de la Lingerie with Lecoeur and introduces him to the Monnards. Another place is set at the table. Lecoeur sits opposite Madame. Jean-Baptiste has warned him on their walk over not to speak of the work at the cemetery, that the Monnards were people peculiarly sensitive to change, commotion. Lecoeur promised he would not and remains true to his word, though he talks of everything else, fluently, restlessly, as if words had been massing inside him for weeks and needed only some genteel surroundings, the presence of a pianoforte, to start flying out of his throat.

Monsieur Monnard, however, seems genuinely interested in the mines at Valenciennes, the technicalities of pumps and gear, while Madame seems touched by Lecoeur’s description of his mother’s demise, extinct from the dropsy some years past and nursed in her last agony by Lecoeur and his sister, Violette.

‘Then you and Monsieur Baratte understand each other perfectly,’ says Madame. ‘For Monsieur Baratte was so unfortunate as to lose his father at an age when he might have hoped still to have one. And who is to say which loss is the greater, a father or a mother? And you are both very feeling young men, are you not?’

‘I believe we are, madame,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Ours is a friendship based on the twin pillars of sensibility and philosophy. We know each other’s thoughts, madame.’

‘I would say I am so with my daughter, monsieur. Just as you express it.’

‘You have a daughter, madame? I had assumed you were the daughter of the house.’ He makes a little flourish with his hand. The doubled cuff of his coat flicks the lip of his glass. Marie is called for. She kneels, collects the broken glass in her apron.

After supper, the friends climb to Jean-Baptiste’s room. Jean-Baptiste lights the fire. He offers Lecoeur the chair, sits on the bed. He is glad Lecoeur can see the simplicity of his circumstances, that his room, in size and furnishings, is not unlike the one Lecoeur sleeps in at the sexton’s house. He alludes to the fact. The allusion is missed.

‘I have not come empty-handed,’ says Lecoeur, reaching under his shirt and tugging out a crumpled package. He lays it on the table between them, smooths it. The package is tied with a red ribbon. He teases it apart, lifts away the plain top sheet of paper. Below is a picture of some sort, a complicated diagram drawn in faded ink and much annotated. He smiles at it and passes it across to Jean-Baptiste, who takes it, looks at it and nods. ‘Valenciana,’ he says.

‘Valenciana indeed,’ says Lecoeur.

‘Our old plans. You have kept them all.’

‘Did you imagine I would throw them on the fire? Now that we are older, better versed in the ways of the world, we should review them. Distil them.’

‘We should?’

‘Behold!’ says Lecoeur, taking the brass ruler off the desk, holding it horizontally and raising it over his head in the manner of a priest celebrating the Eucharist. ‘Valenciana rises from the ashes!’

For an hour and a half — until the candle, burning low, threatens to leave them sitting together in the dark — they pass between them sheets and scraps of paper on which the very handwriting, sometimes Jean-Baptiste’s, sometimes Lecoeur’s, evokes the excitement of those winter evenings at the mines six years before. There are headings such as ‘On the Education of Women’, ‘Plans for a Modern Sewerage System’, ‘Sparta and Valenciana’, ‘On Combustion’, ‘The Ideal Wife’, ‘An Investigation into Rational Religion’, ‘Some Costumes for Women’, ‘The Purity of Forms’, ‘A Conveyance for Women’, ‘Plans for a Bridge’.

‘And look,’ says Lecoeur, ‘we even had a little paper on the disposal of bodies.’

‘I had forgotten it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I had forgotten much of it.’

‘The very reason I brought it with me,’ says Lecoeur. ‘First ambitions are best. We are less brave later. Don’t you think?’

‘Or we simply change?’

‘Grow older, you mean?’

‘Older. Other.’

‘But tonight, everything is as it was. Mind speaking to mind, heart speaking to heart. The fountain of youth in our breasts. . bubbling! You know what it is distinguishes one man from the next? His willingness to remain unspotted while the other, out of a kind of idleness, lets his mouth fill up with soil. Grave-dirt.’

Jean-Baptiste nods to the candle. ‘I will walk you down,’ he says.

‘Or I could stay here?’ says Lecoeur.

‘I think,’ says Jean-Baptiste, getting to his feet, ‘we would not be comfortable.’

They part at the front door. There is a clasping of hands. Lecoeur, standing in the street like the shade of himself, a spirit required by the hour to return to the Underworld, lingers and sighs and at last turns away with a reluctance painful to see.

Jean-Baptiste shuts the door, locks it, then stands in the hall awhile, in the dark between the street door and the kitchen door. He has done his duty, has he not? He has offered the hand of companionship, has revisited a past, an enthusiasm that seemed even more remote than he might have anticipated. What more could be expected of him? And yet, as he feels his way to the bottom of the stairs, what sits in his chest is unmistakably a sense of betrayal. He does not investigate it. He gives himself up to the darkness around him, cautiously ascends.

By lunchtime the following day the second pit, emptied and filled, can be crossed from the list, and though it is no easy matter to measure morale in a place like les Innocents, it does seem to Jean-Baptiste that the men have recovered something, have, in the company of the laughing women, been transfused with new vigour. The third pit is marked out to the west of the second, and at one in the afternoon, in steady drizzle that soon turns to steady rain, the men (some of whom have the knack of smoking their pipes with the bowls turned downwards) break open the ground.

The doctors are present again. They raise stout umbrellas against the rain. They are quite comfortable, like a pair of gentlemen anglers at a pond hoping to lift a pike for their dinner, though in truth there has been little at the cemetery to excite their professional interest. They have picked among the bones, have spent the occasional hour with the sexton and his boiling vessel, have sketched and measured and peered cautiously into the charnels, but they might have done as much in any ancient cemetery — Saint-Séverin or Saint-Gervais for example. Then, shortly after three o’clock, two coffins are raised and laid side by side on the wet grass. To look at, there is nothing obvious to set them apart from the forty others they have raised since lunch. The wood, perhaps, is a little less rotten, but there is really no time to waste on close inspection. Two of the miners apply their spades to the lids. Nearly all the men are proficient at this now, prying coffins open like oysters. Then they stagger back. One drops his spade, which falls, soundlessly, onto the damp ground. Inside the coffins are young women. Skin, hair, lips, fingernails, eyelashes. All of it, even the woollen shrouds they are wrapped in, looking only in need of some washing, some buffing, a little thread to restore them.

For several seconds no one moves. Rain falls on the dead girls’ faces. Then the doctors kneel and with their umbrellas shelter them, anglers who have suddenly become suitors. They make their preliminary examinations. Thouret touches the hay-coloured hair of one; Guillotin gently shifts the lips of the other with the tip of a metal spike he has, a silver toothpick perhaps. They confer. Guillotin orders the coffins closed up and carried immediately to the workshop.

‘A form of mummification,’ he says to Jean-Baptiste. ‘A remarkable instance. Remarkable! Like a pair of dried flowers. .’

Manetti’s handcart is employed. The doctors, walking either side of the cart, escort the coffins on their journey towards the church, the workshop. All labouring has ceased. The men are priming their pipes. The afternoon is still and rain-hushed. Now that death has looked so like life, should there not be some ceremony to make the moment decent? Should Père Colbert not be led out of the church to say a prayer, sprinkle holy water? But Colbert, even if they could find him, would come among them like John the Baptist with a raging toothache. He would be quite likely to throw someone into the pit — the young engineer, for example.

Lecoeur, with the rain dripping from the brim of his hat, looks at Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste nods. Lecoeur gives the order to go on, fairly barks it. Without a murmur, the men obey.

After dark, Armand, Lecoeur and Jean-Baptiste are invited by Guillotin to view the preserved women or, rather, to view one of them, for the other has already been investigated by the doctors and is, as a result, less viewable. Lecoeur has a candle, Dr Guillotin a lamp of smokeless whale oil. The coffin is on a trestle table in the canvas workshop. They remove the lid and gaze at her.

‘I have named her Charlotte,’ says Dr Guillotin, ‘after a niece of mine in Lyon who I think in life she might have resembled.’

‘She is young,’ says Armand, his voice, like the doctor’s, subdued almost to a whisper.

‘Young and old together,’ says the doctor. ‘I estimate she died about her twentieth year and was committed to the ground some fifty years ago. Our good sexton claims to have a memory of burying two young women about the time he was first employed here. A pair of local beauties, unwed. The occasion, apparently, of much public lamentation.’

‘Then they died virgins,’ says Lecoeur, something like reverence in his voice.

‘Few local beauties die virgins,’ says Armand.

‘Perhaps it is true,’ says the doctor. ‘I have not yet ascertained if Charlotte is intacta. But for the other, Dr Thouret and I believe there was some evidence of her having conceived.’

‘There was a child in her?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I cannot say for certain. The internal organs have taken on the consistency of wood pulp or papier-mâché. There were, however, indications.’

‘What will you do with her?’ asks Armand. ‘Your Charlotte? Cut her up like the other?’

‘I think,’ says Dr Guillotin, ‘I would rather endeavour to preserve her as she is. We might construct a glass cabinet for her. Present her at the academy.’

‘And she will keep,’ asks Jean-Baptiste, ‘now she is in the air again?’

The doctor shrugs, then looks past Jean-Baptiste’s shoulder and smiles. ‘Were you curious to see her too?’ he asks.

The others look round. Jeanne is standing at the entrance of the workshop. With the exception of Dr Guillotin, the men look momentarily uneasy, as if surprised in the strong flow of some improper enthusiasm.

‘I wondered if you wished for anything,’ she says. She does not step inside, does not approach the box. After a few moments, Guillotin and Lecoeur carefully replace the lid.

10

The new pit offers no more local beauties. As they reach its depths (it is the deepest yet: twenty-two metres at the last drop of the plumb line), the coffins are mostly broken, their occupants muddled with their neighbours, shuffled. All through the middle of the week they stay at it until eight or nine at night, digging and hauling and stacking by the illumination of pitch torches, lamps and bonfires. Then, on Saturday — the serene light of some planet shining in the fading glow of the western sky — they come to the end of it. The men below look up; those above peer down. The engineer gives the order to suspend work. He asks Lecoeur to gather the men by the preaching cross, then goes up the spiral steps with Lecoeur and announces his decision that each time a pit is emptied, each time one is finished, every man will receive a bonus of thirty sous. He did the calculations the previous night, moving figures between carefully blotted columns until he found the money he needed.

‘And something else,’ he says, feeling for the appropriate register, a voice that might combine paternal indulgence with something bluff and worldly. ‘Tomorrow, the cemetery doors will be open and you will be free to go out until sunset, when the doors will be locked again. As for tonight, the doors may find themselves open for an hour in case any of our friends should wish to visit us.’

Lecoeur claps. He intends, perhaps, the men should join him in a show of appreciation, but there is nothing but some muttered talk, some shifting from boot to boot. Have they understood him? He looks at Lecoeur, but before he can ask his advice, ask him perhaps to put the whole thing into a growl of Flemish, Lisa Saget is beating the saucepan and the men file off to their tents to fetch knives and tins.

‘It is very good to let them out,’ says Lecoeur, once they have descended the steps. ‘Their hearts lifted.’

‘You think so?’

‘I saw it plainly.’

Jean-Baptiste nods. What he has seen plainly is himself on Monday morning without a single miner, or with a ragged half-dozen blind from drinking and fleeced of everything but their shirts. They may be tough as janissaries, these men, but they will be no match for the patter, the quick hands of the locals. Yet if he tries to confine them any longer, he will have a revolt, and one that will not be remedied with clay pipes and tobacco. At Valenciennes — though he did not see it in person — there were stories of the men running amuck, smashing machinery, torching company buildings, even laying siege to the managers’ compound until the militia arrived. Most of them are northerners, like himself. Slow to rouse, but when the spirit takes them. .

An hour after the men have eaten, the women arrive, cautious at first, the face of the boldest peeping round the half-open door from the rue aux Fers; then the door is thrown wide and in they march, calling as they come, cooing, waving their arms.

Lecoeur, Armand, Jeanne, Lisa Saget and Jean-Baptiste watch them from a moat of night-shadow at the foot of the church’s western wall. It is not easy to count them. Lecoeur makes it twelve. Armand tells him he has missed one, then names a few — Simone, Marie-Anne, and that skinny one at the back who is called La Pouce. The youngest looks no older than Jeanne, while the oldest — a big, brassy creature with a voice like a colour-sergeant — is almost grandmotherly, and moves over the rough ground with a grim and purposeful hobbling.

The miners wait like the crew of an enchanted vessel. The women wash over them, through them. A party starts in the light of the fire. The men pass round their bottles, their tin mugs primed with brandy. The women drink, grow professionally wild, choose their mates, price themselves. The first couples steer into the darkness, arm in arm, like lovers anywhere. The watchers by the church, who have been standing quietly (and something in the manner of explorers observing the ceremonies of primitives on a beach beneath the Southern Cross), now retreat to the sexton’s house. Block and Manetti are sitting either side of the kitchen fire, the sexton asleep, his head against the wing of his chair, Jan Block drowsily awake, flinching a little at the others’ arrival and returning the engineer’s nod with some awkward deferential movement of his own head.

They sit at the kitchen table. There’s brandy here too. (Brandy everywhere, thinks Jean-Baptiste. I shall end up floating the bones to the Porte d’Enfer on a tide of the stuff.) They talk, but their conversation is pierced by the whoops and laughter of the revelry outside. Thoughts are diverted. A carnal magnetism creeps around the edges of the house like wisps of blue fog.

‘We must have music,’ says Lisa Saget, and immediately she starts to sing in a plain but pleasant voice, light, girlish, quite different to her speaking voice. Armand joins her. Lecoeur enthusiastically mistaps the beat on the tabletop. The sexton wakes, looks, in his own house, briefly lost. Jeanne settles him, rubs the wrinkled brown backs of his hands.

Armand reaches for his coat. ‘We shall have music after all,’ he says. ‘We shall raid old Colbert’s candle store. You two —’ he points to Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur — ‘will man the bellows. The ladies will prettily sit, and I, the director of music, will play for your delight.’

While Jean-Baptiste is searching for some objection to this ridiculous plan (go into the church now? Play music?), the others are buttoning their coats. They look at him: it is hard to resist such looks. He shrugs, stands. If he cannot stop them, he can at least ensure there is no excessive behaviour, though the sudden prospect of it — excess! — wakes in him a kind of lively thirst, and he follows them out of the house willingly enough, eagerly perhaps.

They take the door into the south transept. Armand is at the front, holding high a lantern that throws a feathery light across walls dense with Latin couplets, dates, good works, blazonry. They shuffle, one behind the other. Their whispers fly about their heads. Things lean towards them from the dark, briefly loom. The gilt-flecked wing of an archangel ripples as they pass. A Virgin, her yellow face full of secret amusement, importunes them from a pillar. .

In one of the chapels, Armand loots candles from an iron box, passes them back. They huddle to light them from each other’s flames. As the light grows, Jean-Baptiste sees, lined up on the other side of the chapel, a half-dozen large containers, jars of thick greenish glass in snug wicker baskets, some clear liquor inside them. Around the glass necks, labels hang from twists of wire. He leans with his candle to read one.

Ethanol.

He steps back so rapidly his candle goes out.

‘You put these here?’ he hisses to Armand.

‘These? They came last week. Something for our friends the doctors.’

‘It is ethanol! Pure spirit. Put a flame near it and the whole church could burn down.’

‘Peace,’ says Armand. ‘The tops are in tight, see? Sealed with wax. There’s nothing to fear. And would it matter if the church burnt down? Would it not save us all a great deal of trouble?’

The engineer ushers them out of the chapel, is easier only once they have crossed the nave and gathered around the organ. On either side of the instrument’s keyboards are brass rings in the form of delicate wreaths, and into these go four of the candles. Armand settles himself. Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur go round to the pump, a metre of priapic oakwood, thick as an oar.

‘I shall be glad of the exercise,’ whispers Lecoeur, his breath emerging in a silvery gas. ‘This place is cold as the moon.’

‘Colder,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

The women sit thigh to thigh on the nearest pew, holding their candles in front of them like penitents.

‘Begin!’ calls Armand.

They begin. Down, up. Down, up. Down, up. In its depths on the far side of the panelling, the instrument starts to click and wheeze. For Jean-Baptiste, it feels as if they are having to crank the whole machine into the air, to physically raise it. Or else it is as though they are resuscitating some collapsed leviathan, something like the elephant the minister said so frightened the dogs at Versailles. Then, from the thing’s attic, comes a long sigh, the last breath of the world, and upon it, delicate as drops of rain, the music begins. Voix céleste, voix humaine, trompette, cromorne, tierce — the sounds building in layers, breaking in waves. Lecoeur is shouting something to him. Jean-Baptiste grimaces in reply, but he cannot understand him, cannot hear his words. The low notes are feeling out all the architecture of his chest; the high notes are doing something similar to his soul. Sweet Christ! They may as well be inside it. And this pumping! Up, down. Up, down. Beauty, it seems, has hard work at its root, and he begins to imagine a device, an automatic bellows, steam-driven, perfectly doable, and almost has it, the whole mechanism laid out in oiled parts in his head, when the music breaks off, mid-scale.

He lets go of the pump and walks to the front of the organ. In the pews behind Jeanne and Lisa Saget, in the wash of thin light from their candles, a scatter of ghostly figures are sitting, while others are quietly taking their places beside them. The miners and their whores. The whores with their miners. Men and women under a spell.

‘You have your audience at last,’ says Jean-Baptiste. Armand is watching them in the little mirror he has above the music stand. He turns a page of manuscript, smooths it, orders Jean-Baptiste back to his station.

It begins again: an opening just as delicate as the last (think of seamstresses, watch springs) and then, with no gradation, recklessly huge (think of mail coaches, cannonades), and then. . then something very like a brawl, a riot. The engineer and Lecoeur abandon their oar. A voice — one Jean-Baptiste has been assaulted with before — is booming from the dark directly above them, and missiles, little black books — missals? — are flying down on their heads, now hitting a miner, now hitting a whore, now — stupendous shot! — slapping the flushed cheek of the organist himself.

Among those gathered in the pews there is a moment of pure panic; then the women, young and old, form up and return fire, the priest’s basso damning of them met by a shrill taunting, a mockery, a contempt so well fuelled by historical indignation it is hard to believe the priest will not soon start to shit his own entrails. If they catch hold of him, if they can drag him down from his high place, the night will end with bloodshed. With murder, perhaps.

His arms spread, Jean-Baptiste attempts to herd the women out, but some are fixed like those stout posts sunk into the sides of busy streets for the protection of pedestrians. It is Jeanne who saves the priest’s skin. She takes the hand of the biggest whore, their general, and leads her gently away. The others follow her, their shouts unanswered now, or answered only by their own echoes. By the time they are stepping into the air of the cemetery, the mood has become one of general hilarity. The women press around Armand, petting him until Lisa Saget warns them off in terms they all understand.

The party revives: the teasing, the draped arms, the pairing off. The engineer watches for a while, then, trembling with a sudden fatigue (and wondering how many candles have been left burning inside the church, what alarms might be sounded in the middle of the night), he exchanges discreet nods with Lecoeur, peels himself away from the edge of the group and goes quietly towards the door to the rue aux Fers. He is alone — believes he is alone — but on reaching the door sees that Jeanne is walking with him. They stop. He speaks her name. She smiles. His heart sinks.

‘You will not be troubled by them?’ he asks, gesturing to where, by the fire, the company is growing raucous.

‘They would not hurt me,’ she says.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I cannot believe anyone would hurt you.’

‘I’m not a saint,’ she says.

‘A saint? Of course not.’

‘I wouldn’t even tell anyone if you kissed me,’ she says, and rests a hand very lightly on the sleeve of his coat. Light as a sparrow.

‘I am twice your age,’ he says. ‘Am I not?’

‘No,’ she says, ‘for you are twenty-eight and I am fourteen.’

‘Then I am twice your age exactly.’

‘Do you have a girl?’ she asks, removing her hand. ‘Are you sweet on Ziguette Monnard?’

‘Ziguette?’

‘She is very pretty.’

‘I am not. . I have no interest in Ziguette Monnard.’

‘Good night,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ he says, and she waits as if to see if ‘yes’ is all there is, if ‘yes’ might still lead to something.

He looks across the top of her head. The night is colder than it was, clearer. The stars shine blue over blue roofs. In the cemetery, the walls of heaped bones glint like the armour of some old, defeated army.

‘Will you ask Lecoeur,’ he says, ‘to ensure the door is locked when the women leave? They should not stay much longer.’

She says nothing; she walks away from him. He nods at her back, unable at first to stir himself; then he gets the door open and goes onto the street, throws out his legs in long strides as if he hoped to outpace his own embarrassment. Sweet God, would it have killed him to have kissed her? To have dropped his head a little until their lips touched? Armand would have done it in an instant and she would have gone home happy instead of angry and hurt. And what was it stopped him? Some ludicrous attachment to a woman whose favours he could already have purchased for the price of a new hat? Can he not, once and for all, put his life on some proper, rational footing? Tomorrow — tomorrow without fail! — he must draw something up, a scheme, on paper, such as he has often done in the past. A plan of action to guide himself with, a rational scheme drawn out of the best part of himself, the highest. Do this, but not that. This will lead to success, this to the life of an idiot. . Is he to be nothing but a body? A briefly animated example of what they dig up every day at les Innocents? Is that how Voltaire lived? How the great Perronet has spent his years, sitting among models and machines in his office at the Ecole des Ponts, a room — in memory at least — always packed with rich morning light?

By the time he opens the door to the Monnards’ house he is starting to feel calmer, more compact, more himself as he can bear himself. On the hall table he fumbles for candle and tinderbox, makes sparks, makes flame. The cat writhes past the kitchen door, follows him up the stairs, seems briefly tempted by Ziguette’s room, then follows the engineer into his own. He puts the candle on the table, takes off his coat and boots, wraps himself with the banyan. Is it midnight yet? Later? His watch is in one of his pockets, but he cannot quite be bothered to fish for it. He prepares his medicine — thirty drops or so in a mouthful of sour wine cold as the room — then undresses under the banyan and, when all is ready, blows out the candle, opens the window, peers down.

Have the women gone? He cannot see or hear them. Gone to the tents perhaps to finish their business. At least the church is not ablaze, and the cemetery appears in good order, though a light still shows in the kitchen window of the sexton’s house. If he owned a sailor’s spyglass, he might be able to see a little way inside, see Jeanne at the table. See her tears? He closes the window, puts the shutters across, worms his way into the bed, feet tucked beside the warmth of the cat. Darkness, darkness and nothing to listen to but the roar of his blood. The drug is working fast. In a minute or two it will sketch the first of the night’s grotesques on the backs of his eyes, but before that, before he descends, before sleep and poppy juice atomise him entirely, he sends out his breath in a fading whisper.

‘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? What do you. . What do. . What. . you. . What. . I. . I. . I. .’

11

When the assault took place, when precisely, no one could ever say with any certainty. Somewhere between very late and very early, some deep, velvet-lined pocket of a winter’s night. He was dreaming, pressed under the weight of the drug, and then his eyes were open and there was light in the room, a wavering silver light. Behind the light, the figure of a woman standing by the little writing table, candle in one hand, something else in the other. She was perfectly naked, the light restless over her skin, glistening in her hair, glistening in the tight blond curls over her sex. She did not speak. His own voice was travelling towards him but much too slowly. She stepped to the side of the bed and looked down at him. Her face, tilted over the light of the candle, seemed calm and almost tender, a chiaroscuro angel bent over the bed of some ailing hermit. They may even, for an instant, have smiled at each other. Then her arm swung up, swung down and the whole world broke against his skull in a surge of exterminating pain. Briefly, he was aware of a noise, a sort of gasping, that might have been her or might have been him. Then, mercifully, nothing more.

12

But for Marie and her peeping, he would have bled to death. She had watched him blow out his candle, had got into her own bed, rattled off a Hail Mary, rubbed herself a little between her legs and dozed off for a minute, or for an hour or two, before opening her eyes and seeing a spot of light on the floor. Wide awake in an instant, she lowered herself to the boards, crawled over the cold floor and settled an eye over the hole. What was he doing lighting his candle again in the middle of the night? She was sure it had never happened before. And then — stranger still, thrillingly strange — she saw that he was asleep, quite obviously asleep, and the light came from a candle held by someone else, someone she could not yet see. For what felt like an age, though may in truth have been less than half a minute, nothing happened — nothing! — and she was almost beside herself with the frustration of it. What if whoever-it-was simply left and she never knew, never saw them at all? Never saw her, for she was convinced the secret watcher — the other secret watcher — was a woman. But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what could have prepared her for the shock of seeing Ziguette, dog-naked, step quietly into view! Had there been more than just a mouthful or two of stolen wine in her bladder, she might have puddled the floorboards. Ziguette, with her big, rosy bubs! The big, rosy curve of her arse! In one hand she held a candle, and with the other hand she took something off the lodger’s table, something that caught the light and made, knocking against something else on the table, a little chiming sound that he must have heard in his sleep for he started to stir. It was that thing of his, the metal thing for measuring. Was she going to measure him? Measure what? His neck, his feet, his cock-a-doodle-doo?

For the last scene, a very short one, he was, she would swear, awake and looking at Ziguette, though neither of them said even the smallest word. In her imagination, Marie seemed already to be watching what must follow — the covers thrown back, the lovers snugly wrapped in each other’s arms, the kissing and cuddling, the oohing and ahing, and she above it all, squirming on the boards. But it didn’t happen like that. The metal thing, the ruler, cut through the air and came down on his head and killed him. She must have made some noise herself, a little squeal, for Ziguette suddenly looked up, her face all dark, a dark mask, and at that, the sight of that, she had at last lost a few drops of Monnard’s wine.

Quiet as a cat, she stole away from the hole, crouched by her bed listening for feet on the stairs. Then, when none came, when there was no creak of the door, no naked mistress with a length of bloody metal in her hand, she wanted to crawl into bed and sleep, thinking that if she did so, she would wake in the morning and none of it would have happened. And this she might have done had she not heard him, his noise, a kind of snoring, a terrible sound, like someone in a nightmare they cannot wake from. She listened and listened. Her fear grew less. If silly Ziguette came in she would just crack her over the head with one of her sabots. That would settle her. Girls from the warrens of Saint-Antoine had no cause to tremble at lily-skinned girls from les Halles.

She pulled on her clothes. Everything was dark but she was perfectly used to dressing in the dark. She felt her way in stockinged feet down the narrow stairs and onto the landing. Under Ziguette’s door a light but no sound of her moving or weeping or whatever a girl does after trying to split a man’s head in two. On closer inspection she could see the door was not quite shut and needed only a very gentle push to open it wide enough for her to put her head round. There was her mistress, all tucked up in bed, innocent as a lamb, the ruler on the end of the bed, the candle on the bedside cabinet. She leant in, lifted the candle and crossed to the lodger’s room. When she opened the door, Ragoût bolted past her feet and plunged headlong down the stairs. The candle shook in her hand but she did not drop it, not quite. She found her breath again, went on, went in, went right up to the bed and stood over him, as Ziguette had done. And what a mess he was! It reminded her of something seen in childhood, an uncle of hers, a sort of uncle, who had put a lead ball through his temple one boiling Sunday afternoon. Blood, blood, blood. Puddles of it. The lodger, however, unlike her uncle, was still breathing, and not as he had before, noisily, but in shallow gasps, little dips of air like a child after a long cry. To stop a wound from bleeding, bind it with cobwebs. She had picked that up from somewhere. But where would she find cobwebs? Had she herself — good maid that she was — not swept them all away? She went to his trunk, opened it. At the top was the suit of green silk that when she first saw it seemed so funny and so beautiful. She reached below it, dragged out a handful of linen and went back to the bed. She held the candle over his head, touched the gash, its pulpy lips. He moaned, shuddered as if he might be starting a fit. ‘I only touched it,’ she whispered, then quickly, neatly, pressed a square of folded linen over the wound (some rag for drying himself after washing) and bound it in place with a neckcloth. Then, to be sure of it, she took off one of her own blood-warm stockings, wound it under his chin and knotted it over the already darkening pad of linen. She sat on the bed and looked at him. Now and then his eyes would flicker, but they did not open. She patted his hand, unwilling to give up ownership of this marvellous disaster, but then the thought of announcing to the half-asleep Monnards what their daughter had just done was too tempting, and taking the candle, she went down to their room (one leg bare, one dressed) and told them everything in the plainest speech imaginable, adding at the end — she really could not stop herself — ‘Why, madame, I suppose they might even hang her.’

13

In the cemetery of les Innocents, in the pearly light of eight in the morning, the miners have congregated near the door onto the rue aux Fers. Most, perhaps encouraged by their whores, have made some effort to smarten themselves, to look more like regular subjects of Louis XVI and less like men who pull bones, coffins, miraculously preserved girls out of the ground. Jackets have been brushed down, mud kicked off boots. There has even been some washing, some untangling of beards. Three of the younger men — they stand together nearest to the door — have plaited grasses into crowns to wear round the brims of their hats. Others, looked at closely, can be seen to wear items once used to decorate the dead, trinkets picked out of the sticky earth or traded for at night in the privacy of the tents. One fellow, clear-eyed, calm-eyed, his back straighter than the others, sports a pair of memorial rings, Respice finem on one hand, Mens videt astra on the other, its greenish metal wrapping the hilt of a finger lost at the middle joint.

They have long since eaten their bread and drunk their coffee. They have piled wood beside the preaching-cross bonfire, which in their absence will be fed by others. They are ready now. They are restless.

Outside the sexton’s house, Lecoeur studies his watch, makes faces, mutters under his breath. Of all the mornings Baratte should choose to oversleep, this one is peculiarly inconvenient. Of course, in the comfort of his lodgings, he must find it all too easy to forget them, those who live below. The men, however, will take it very amiss if they are kept dawdling. He will take it amiss himself for that matter. Fifty drops of the tincture last night! At least fifty, and heaven knows how much drink to wash it down, but far from procuring a night of restful slumber, it served only to make him an utter stranger to himself. It was — how to express it? — as if he, Lecoeur, was Lecoeur’s body only, the ticking flesh, and something, some invasive intelligence, was roosting in him, animating him, directing his actions. Had the true Lecoeur made a decision to go outside in the middle of the night? Had he? He did not believe so and yet he went, in nothing but his nightshirt, to the doctors’ workshop, and there lifted the lid of the coffin and looked at her, Charlotte, with the light of a glowing stick from the fire that seemed almost to be magically in his hand. A horrible excitement! A great strain on the heart. On the teeth too, for he must, by the pains in his jaws, have been grinding them furiously for hours. .

Behind him, soft footsteps. He turns, sees Jeanne, a shawl round her shoulders, coming from the house to join him. She smiles at him, prettily as ever, but does not today have quite her usual good colour, her usual bounce.

‘It is strange he has not come,’ she says.

‘It might be he took more than was good for him last night,’ says Lecoeur.

‘I do not think that is right,’ she says, smartly.

‘No, no,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Probably he is engaged upon some unexpected business matter. A meeting with that man Lafosse, perhaps. The minister’s man.’

She nods. ‘Will you go out today also?’

‘I believe I will,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Monsieur Saint-Méard has invited me to join him and a few of his friends on something of an excursion. He did not say exactly what he intended.’

‘It will be pleasant, I am sure,’ she says. ‘You have the key?’

He shows it to her, an old key in his hand.

‘I think Monsieur Baratte would wish you to let them go,’ she says.

‘You think?’

‘Do you not?’

‘You are probably right.’ He looks at the men, bares his teeth a moment, then looks down at the girl. ‘Shall we do it together?’ he asks.