Pure Page 3

  ‘What Ragoût don’t get,’ says Madame Monnard, ‘my husband traps with his little machines.’

  ‘Machines?’ asks Jean-Baptiste, for whom the word has always produced a certain thrill.

  ‘I make ’em and sell them at the shop,’ begins Monsieur Monnard. ‘A cage, a spring, a little door . . .’ He makes a movement with his hand. ‘The creature is imprisoned. Then you need only drop the trap into a pail of water.’

  ‘Marie cuts their throats,’ says Ziguette.

  ‘I’m sure she does no such thing,’ says her mother. To her guest she says, ‘My husband has an establishment on the rue des Trois Mores.’

  ‘Selling traps, monsieur?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

  ‘Blades, monsieur, from plain to fancy. We finish and sharpen and polish. We are quite favoured by the Quality. Père Poupart of Saint-Eustache cuts his meat with one of my knives.’

  ‘When it gets cold,’ says Ziguette, ‘rats come inside. Into the house.’

  ‘It was the same at home,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘on the coldest nights.’

  ‘In Normandy?’ asks Madame Monnard, as though amazed to hear rats had discovered so remote a spot.

  ‘You must miss it,’ says Ziguette.

  ‘Home?’ For a moment, in his weariness, he sees crows, black rags, lifting off a field at dusk, sees the lonely spire of a country church. ‘I suppose I am content to be where my work takes me.’

  ‘Very manly,’ says Madame Monnard, probing the cat’s fur.

  ‘And what is your work here?’ asks Ziguette. She looks so pretty when she asks this, so pert in her creamy gown, he is tempted to tell her exactly what he has come to do. He wonders what Lafosse has said, what story, if any, he has told them.

  ‘I am here,’ he says, aware that all three are suddenly listening to him intently, ‘to make a survey of les Innocents.’

  ‘Les Innocents?’ repeats Madame Monnard, after a pause during which nothing could be heard except the purring of the cat, the crackle of the fire.

  ‘I am an engineer,’ he says. ‘You were not told?’

  ‘Who would tell us?’ asks Monsieur Monnard.

  ‘The same as made the arrangement for my lodging here.’

  ‘We were informed of nothing but that a gentleman from Normandy would have need of a room.’

  ‘With meals,’ adds his wife.

  ‘Indeed,’ confirms Monsieur Monnard. ‘A morning and an evening meal.’

  Ziguette says, ‘We had a musician stay with us once.’

  ‘A rather particular gentleman,’ says Monsieur Monnard.

  ‘With red hair,’ says Madame.

  Ziguette opens her mouth as though to add something; then, after a beat, a quarter-note of hesitation, she closes it again.

  ‘Yours,’ says Madame, smiling complacently, ‘is a very practical vocation. One must congratulate you.’

  ‘My teacher,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘at the Ecole des Ponts, was Maître Perronet. He is the greatest engineer in France.’

  Above the cat’s head, Madame Monnard applauds him with her fingertips.

  ‘And did you ever build a bridge?’ asks Ziguette.

  ‘One. In Normandy.’

  ‘And what did it cross?’

  ‘The corner of a lake.’

  ‘One does not think of lakes having corners,’ says Ziguette.

  ‘You had better tell Marie, monsieur,’ says Madame Monnard, ‘if you prefer coffee in the morning or chocolate.’

  ‘The musician liked chocolate,’ says Ziguette.

  ‘Marie will bring it to your room if you wish it,’ says Madame. ‘And water for your toilette. You have only to name the hour.’

  ‘He has not seen his room yet,’ says Ziguette.

  ‘No, indeed,’ says her mother. ‘I believe he has not.’

  ‘Then I shall help you up the stairs with your trunk,’ says Monsieur Monnard, rising. ‘It will be too heavy, even for Marie.’

  The room is at the back of the house, the floor below the attic. The two men, puffing a little, carry the trunk up the four flights of stairs from the hallway. Marie goes ahead of them with a candle.

  ‘I think you’ll have everything you need up here,’ says Monsieur Monnard.

  ‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste, looking from the narrow bed to the table and chair, the tripod stand with its glazed tin bowl, the narrow fireplace, the shuttered window above the bed.

  ‘Ziguette has her room across the corridor. Madame Monnard and I sleep in the room below. Marie, of course, is in the attic. Your predecessor was in the habit of asking her to remove her sabots when she was above him. An acute sensitivity to noise.’

  ‘You wish me, monsieur, to pay the rent in advance?’

  ‘Very businesslike of you. I admire that in a young fellow. Now then, let us see. Six livres a week, I think. Candles and firewood not included.’

  Jean-Baptiste, turning his back a little on the master of the house, shakes a few coins from the purse onto the table, picks out a half-louis. ‘For two weeks,’ he says.

  Monsieur Monnard accepts the coin, pinches it and tucks it into a pocket of his waistcoat. ‘You are welcome here,’ he says, his expression that of a man who has just sold a rack of good knives to a priest. ‘Be sure to tell Marie all your needs.’

  For a second or two the lodger and the servant lock eyes; then she lights the candle stub on the table with the candle she has carried upstairs.

  ‘If you bring your candle down in the morning,’ she says, ‘you may leave it on the shelf by the street door. There’s flint and steel there.’

  ‘You’ll hardly need to leave here,’ says Monsieur Monnard, nodding to the shutters, ‘to do that survey of yours.’

  ‘I may see it from here?’

  ‘You have not had a chance yet to walk in the quarter?’

  ‘No, monsieur.’

  ‘Well, daylight will make it plain enough.’

  With a little flurry of nods and smiles, the men take their leave of each other. Monsieur Monnard and Marie quit the room, pull the door shut behind them. Quite suddenly Jean-Baptiste is alone in a strange house in a city where he knows almost no one. He reaches over the bed to the shutters, folds them back on the stiffness of their hinges then, seeing only himself and the candle flame in the glass, he leans again, turns the oval handle and gives the window frame a little shove. There is nothing now between him and the night sky, nothing between him and the church of les Innocents, for surely that black hulk, just discernible against the eastern sky, is les Innocents. And below it, the span of blackness between the church and the street, that, evidently – for what else can it be? – is the burying ground. If he were to climb over the bed and leap from the window, he would be in it, this place that is poisoning Paris! Certainly it is poisoning the rue de la Lingerie. The stink that creeps through the open window he has already smelt something of in the breath of all the Monnards, in the taste of their food. He will have to get used to it, get used to it quickly or get out, take the coach home, wait on the Comte de S—, beg for another bridge . . .

  He shuts the window, puts the shutters over. The candle on the table will not last much longer. He undoes the straps on his trunk, rummages, pulls out a copy of the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle Volume II, pulls out a long brass ruler, a little box of writing implements, a small rosewood box containing a pair of brass dividers. Wrapped in a woollen shirt is his engraving of Canaletto’s view of the Rialto Bridge. He looks for a nail in the wall, finds one above the empty fireplace, hangs the picture and stands a while to study it.

  He lays his watch on the table next to Buffon, puts the purse under the bolster, suspends his wig from the back of the chair and undresses to his shirt and stockings, both of which he will keep on for warmth. There is no water, nothing to wash with. He gets under the covers, thinks briefly, uneasily, of the red-haired musician who slept there before him, then blows out the guttering candle and lies in a darkness so complete his sight, utterly baulked, draws on it odd sha
pes, odd fancies. He shuts his eyes – darkness either side! – and after a pause begins to speak quietly not a prayer but a catechism of selfhood.

  ‘Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in Normandy. What are you? An engineer, trained at the Ecole des Ponts. What do you believe in? In the power of reason . . .’

  It is a habit begun in the weeks following his father’s death, and had about it at first something defiant, almost jubilant. He was alive, young and alive. Ecce homo! But later – perhaps when he started at the mines in Valenciennes – the questions seemed more, truly, to be questions, and ones whose very simplicity gave rise to instants of confusion, momentary vertigos that made the practice – the putting of the questions – more necessary than ever. He should give it up, of course. It was childish. A source of private embarrassment, almost a vice. But for now, for tonight, in this place . . .

  ‘Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in—’

  Someone or something is raking the wood of the door. He holds his breath, listens. The cat with the questionable morals? Had his predecessor let the creature sleep on the end of the bed? Well, he has no objection, would in truth be glad of the company, but the moment he sits up, the scratching ceases. Below his door, the soft movement of a light. Then nothing.

  6

  In the church of les Innocents, the light of a Paris morning falls in thin grey ropes from high windows, but does little to disturb the building’s permanent twilight. Pillars, black or nearly so, rise like the remnants of a petrified forest, their tops lost in canopies of shadow. In the side-chapels, where no candle has been lit in five years, the darkness has gathered in drifts. Saints, madonnas, infant saviours, all the large, second-rate paintings of martyrdom, of doves alighting on coiffured, vaguely Italian heads, the locked treasure boxes with their knucklebones or splinters of holy wood, all these might simply have never existed, so thoroughly are they now hidden.

  The organ (three manuals, forty speaking stops), German-built and very old, is found off the north aisle, that side of the church that lies along the rue aux Fers as the rue aux Fers wanders onto the rue Saint-Denis. The door of the loft – about a third the height of a normal house door – is open, and from it, preceded by some coughing and throat-clearing, comes a man’s head. He pauses there, exactly as a dog might hesitate before crossing some uncertain open space, then disappears back into the loft to be replaced a moment later by a pair of long, bootless legs, a large, tightly breeched arse, then the trunk and finally the tousled head again.

  There is no ladder – someone has used it for firewood – and he slithers down, pours himself from the loft door until his toes touch a makeshift step built from missals, crack-faced Bibles, lives of saints (he has already made many weak jokes to his friends about climbing the ladder of religion to the heaven of music). When he reaches the slabs of the aisle – his feet on the tomb of a Baron somebody, the baron’s wife and several extinguished children – he brushes himself down, spits soot into a handkerchief, puts on his coat and settles himself at the keyboards. He cracks his knuckles; some pale bird is startled into flight under the roof. Even in this light the man’s hair has a faint coppery glow. He pulls out stops. Trompette, tierce, cromorne, voix humaine. On the music stand, he has Gigault’s Livre de Musique and, next to it, a book of cantatas by Clérambault, but to read music he would need candles and he cannot be bothered to light them. He has a candle in his head, all the light he needs, and he begins to play a Couperin trio from memory, his spine and neck arched slightly backwards as though the organ was a coach-and-six and he was hurtling through the centre of les Halles, scattering geese and cabbages and old women.

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

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

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

  ‘You need some assistance, monsieur?’

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

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

  ‘An organist? Here?’

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

  ‘I did not mean to . . .’

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

  ‘Baratte.’

  ‘Baratte?’

  ‘I am the engineer.’

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

  ‘Mend it?’

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

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

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

  ‘The bishop? No.’

  ‘Then?’

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

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

  ‘I am here to make a—’

  ‘Shhh!’

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

  ‘A priest?’

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

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

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

  ‘They still speak of you.’

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

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are lodging there?’

  ‘Yes.’

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

  ‘It is.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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