cash, according to the accepted tariff for arms, legs, and fatalities, and under the indifferent eyes of the police.
On the Pont-Neuf the public letter writers had their booths, and traders set out their goods on the ground and on ramshackle stalls. He sorted through some baskets of books, secondhand: a sentimental romance, some Ariosto, a crisp and unread book published in Edinburgh,
Every second person he met, it seemed, was a builder’s laborer, covered in plaster dust. The city was tearing itself up by the roots. In some districts they were leveling whole streets and starting again. Small crowds gathered to watch the more tricky and spectacular operations. The laborers were seasonal workers, and poor. There was a bonus if they finished ahead of schedule, and so they worked at a dangerous pace, the air heavy with their curses and the sweat rolling down their scrawny backs. What would Maitre Vinot say? “Build slowly.”
There was a busker, a man with a strained, once-powerful baritone. He had a hideously destroyed face, one empty eye socket overgrown with livid scar tissue. He had a placard that read HERO OF THE AMERICAN LIBERATION. He sang songs about the court; they described the Queen indulging in vices which no one had discovered in Arcis-sur-Aube. In the Luxembourg Gardens a beautiful blonde woman looked him up and down and dismissed him from her mind.
He went to Saint-Antoine. He stood below the Bastille, looked up at its eight towers. He had expected walls like sea cliffs. The highest must be—what? Seventy-five, eighty feet?
“The walls are eight feet thick, you know,” a passerby said to him.
“I expected it to be bigger.”
“Big enough,” the man said sourly. “You wouldn’t like to be in there, would you? Men have gone in there and never come out.”
“You a local?”
“Oh yes,” the man said. “We know all about it. There are cells under the ground, running with water, alive with rats.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about the rats.”
“And then the cells up under the roof—that’s no joke either. Boil in summer, freeze in winter. Still, that’s only the unlucky ones. Some get treated quite decent, depends who you are. They have beds with proper bed-curtains and they can take their own cat in to keep the vermin down.”
“What do they get to eat?”
“Varies, I suppose. Again, it’s according to who you are. You do see the odd side of beef going in. Neighbor of mine a few years back, he swears he saw them taking in a billiard table. It’s like anything else in life, I suppose,” the man said. “Winners and losers, that’s all about it.”
Georges-Jacques looks up, and his eye is offended; it is impregnable, there is no doubt. These people go about their lives and work—brewing by the look of it, and upholstery—and they live under its walls, and they see it every day, and finally they stop seeing it, it’s there and not there. What really matters isn’t the height of the towers, it’s the pictures in your head: the victims gone mad with solitude, the flagstones slippery with blood, the children birthed on straw. You can’t have your whole inner world rearranged by a man you meet in the street. Is nothing sacred? Stained from the dye works, the river ran yellow, ran blue.
And when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewelers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night’s hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Ile Saint-Louis, in an empty office, Maitre Desmoulins’s son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn; lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.
PART TWO
We make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy—at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable.
“The Theory of Ambition,” an essay:
JEAN-MARIE HERAULT DE SECHELLES
CHAPTER 1
The Cafe du Parnasse was known to its clients as the Cafe de l’Ecole, because it overlooked the Quai of that name. From its windows you could see the river and the Pont-Neuf, and further in the distance the towers of the Law Courts. The cafe was owned by M. Charpentier, an inspector of taxes; it was his hobby, his second string. When the courts had adjourned for the day, and business was brisk, he would arrange a napkin over his arm and wait at table himself; when business slackened, he would pour a glass of wine and sit down with his regular customers, exchanging legal gossip. Much of the small talk at the Cafe de l’Ecole was of a dry and legalistic nature, yet the ambience was not wholly masculine. A lady might be seen there; compliments leavened with a discreet wit skimmed the marble-topped tables.
Monsieur’s wife Angelique had been, before her marriage, Angelica Soldini. It would be pleasant to say that the Italian bride still enjoyed a secret life under the matron’s cool Parisienne exterior. In fact, however, Angelique had kept her rapid and flamboyant speech, her dark dresses which were indefinably foreign, her seasonal outbursts of piety and carnality; under cover of these prepossessing traits flourished her real self, a prudent, economic woman as durable as granite. She was in the cafe every day—perfectly married, plump, velvet-eyed; occasionally someone would write her a sonnet, and present it to her with a courtly bow. “I will read it later,” she would say, and fold it carefully, and allow her eyes to flash.
Her daughter, Antoinette-Gabrielle, was seventeen years old when she first appeared in the cafe. Taller than her mother, she had a fine forehead and brown eyes of great gravity. Her smiles were sudden decisions, a flash of white teeth before she turned her head or twisted her whole body away, as if her merriment had secret objects. Her brown hair, shiny from long brushing, tumbled down her back like a fur cape, exotic and half-alive: on cold days, a private warmth.
