Andrew Miller - Pure

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

‘Yes, my lord.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I am afraid not.’

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

Out? They look at him and laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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