Andrew Miller - Pure

‘And look,’ says Lecoeur, ‘we even had a little paper on the disposal of bodies.’

‘I had forgotten it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I had forgotten much of it.’

‘The very reason I brought it with me,’ says Lecoeur. ‘First ambitions are best. We are less brave later. Don’t you think?’

‘Or we simply change?’

‘Grow older, you mean?’

‘Older. Other.’

‘But tonight, everything is as it was. Mind speaking to mind, heart speaking to heart. The fountain of youth in our breasts. . bubbling! You know what it is distinguishes one man from the next? His willingness to remain unspotted while the other, out of a kind of idleness, lets his mouth fill up with soil. Grave-dirt.’

Jean-Baptiste nods to the candle. ‘I will walk you down,’ he says.

‘Or I could stay here?’ says Lecoeur.

‘I think,’ says Jean-Baptiste, getting to his feet, ‘we would not be comfortable.’

They part at the front door. There is a clasping of hands. Lecoeur, standing in the street like the shade of himself, a spirit required by the hour to return to the Underworld, lingers and sighs and at last turns away with a reluctance painful to see.

Jean-Baptiste shuts the door, locks it, then stands in the hall awhile, in the dark between the street door and the kitchen door. He has done his duty, has he not? He has offered the hand of companionship, has revisited a past, an enthusiasm that seemed even more remote than he might have anticipated. What more could be expected of him? And yet, as he feels his way to the bottom of the stairs, what sits in his chest is unmistakably a sense of betrayal. He does not investigate it. He gives himself up to the darkness around him, cautiously ascends.

By lunchtime the following day the second pit, emptied and filled, can be crossed from the list, and though it is no easy matter to measure morale in a place like les Innocents, it does seem to Jean-Baptiste that the men have recovered something, have, in the company of the laughing women, been transfused with new vigour. The third pit is marked out to the west of the second, and at one in the afternoon, in steady drizzle that soon turns to steady rain, the men (some of whom have the knack of smoking their pipes with the bowls turned downwards) break open the ground.

The doctors are present again. They raise stout umbrellas against the rain. They are quite comfortable, like a pair of gentlemen anglers at a pond hoping to lift a pike for their dinner, though in truth there has been little at the cemetery to excite their professional interest. They have picked among the bones, have spent the occasional hour with the sexton and his boiling vessel, have sketched and measured and peered cautiously into the charnels, but they might have done as much in any ancient cemetery — Saint-Séverin or Saint-Gervais for example. Then, shortly after three o’clock, two coffins are raised and laid side by side on the wet grass. To look at, there is nothing obvious to set them apart from the forty others they have raised since lunch. The wood, perhaps, is a little less rotten, but there is really no time to waste on close inspection. Two of the miners apply their spades to the lids. Nearly all the men are proficient at this now, prying coffins open like oysters. Then they stagger back. One drops his spade, which falls, soundlessly, onto the damp ground. Inside the coffins are young women. Skin, hair, lips, fingernails, eyelashes . All of it, even the woollen shrouds they are wrapped in, looking only in need of some washing, some buffing, a little thread to restore them.

For several seconds no one moves. Rain falls on the dead girls’ faces. Then the doctors kneel and with their umbrellas shelter them, anglers who have suddenly become suitors. They make their preliminary examinations. Thouret touches the hay-coloured hair of one; Guillotin gently shifts the lips of the other with the tip of a metal spike he has, a silver toothpick perhaps. They confer. Guillotin orders the coffins closed up and carried immediately to the workshop.

‘A form of mummification,’ he says to Jean-Baptiste. ‘A remarkable instance. Remarkable! Like a pair of dried flowers. .’

Manetti’s handcart is employed. The doctors, walking either side of the cart, escort the coffins on their journey towards the church, the workshop. All labouring has ceased. The men are priming their pipes. The afternoon is still and rain-hushed. Now that death has looked so like life, should there not be some ceremony to make the moment decent? Should Père Colbert not be led out of the church to say a prayer, sprinkle holy water? But Colbert, even if they could find him, would come among them like John the Baptist with a raging toothache. He would be quite likely to throw someone into the pit — the young engineer, for example.

Lecoeur, with the rain dripping from the brim of his hat, looks at Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste nods. Lecoeur gives the order to go on, fairly barks it. Without a murmur, the men obey.

After dark, Armand, Lecoeur and Jean-Baptiste are invited by Guillotin to view the preserved women or, rather, to view one of them, for the other has already been investigated by the doctors and is, as a result, less viewable. Lecoeur has a candle, Dr Guillotin a lamp of smokeless whale oil. The coffin is on a trestle table in the canvas workshop. They remove the lid and gaze at her.

‘I have named her Charlotte,’ says Dr Guillotin, ‘after a niece of mine in Lyon who I think in life she might have resembled.’

‘She is young,’ says Armand, his voice, like the doctor’s, subdued almost to a whisper.

‘Young and old together,’ says the doctor. ‘I estimate she died about her twentieth year and was committed to the ground some fifty years ago. Our good sexton claims to have a memory of burying two young women about the time he was first employed here. A pair of local beauties, unwed. The occasion, apparently, of much public lamentation.’

‘Then they died virgins,’ says Lecoeur, something like reverence in his voice.

‘Few local beauties die virgins,’ says Armand.

‘Perhaps it is true,’ says the doctor. ‘I have not yet ascertained if Charlotte is intacta . But for the other, Dr Thouret and I believe there was some evidence of her having conceived.’

‘There was a child in her?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I cannot say for certain. The internal organs have taken on the consistency of wood pulp or papier-mâché. There were, however, indications.’

‘What will you do with her?’ asks Armand. ‘Your Charlotte? Cut her up like the other?’

‘I think,’ says Dr Guillotin, ‘I would rather endeavour to preserve her as she is. We might construct a glass cabinet for her. Present her at the academy.’

‘And she will keep,’ asks Jean-Baptiste, ‘now she is in the air again?’

The doctor shrugs, then looks past Jean-Baptiste’s shoulder and smiles. ‘Were you curious to see her too?’ he asks.

The others look round. Jeanne is standing at the entrance of the workshop. With the exception of Dr Guillotin, the men look momentarily uneasy, as if surprised in the strong flow of some improper enthusiasm.

‘I wondered if you wished for anything,’ she says. She does not step inside, does not approach the box. After a few moments, Guillotin and Lecoeur carefully replace the lid.

The new pit offers no more local beauties. As they reach its depths (it is the deepest yet: twenty-two metres at the last drop of the plumb line), the coffins are mostly broken, their occupants muddled with their neighbours, shuffled. All through the middle of the week they stay at it until eight or nine at night, digging and hauling and stacking by the illumination of pitch torches, lamps and bonfires. Then, on Saturday — the serene light of some planet shining in the fading glow of the western sky — they come to the end of it. The men below look up; those above peer down. The engineer gives the order to suspend work. He asks Lecoeur to gather the men by the preaching cross, then goes up the spiral steps with Lecoeur and announces his decision that each time a pit is emptied, each time one is finished, every man will receive a bonus of thirty sous. He did the calculations the previous night, moving figures between carefully blotted columns until he found the money he needed.