Andrew Miller - Pure

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.

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.’