Andrew Miller - Pure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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