Andrew Miller - Pure

The priests begin to chant a psalm — Miserere Mei, Deus — but the rhythm of their step, of their singing is confused by the tread of Colbert’s boots marching to a rhythm of their own. He leads them towards the river, red face thrust grimly forwards as though on his way to harrow Hell.

The pit by the cemetery wall is emptied, filled. Two more are opened. The engineer is refining his methods. He pushes the men harder, adds time to the working day as night slowly retreats before the season. A second miner absconds, returns three days later, silent and hungry. As for the others, who knows? To look at, they seem reconciled to the work, the character of the work, hardened to it. He would like very much to know what they speak of when they are alone. He admires them, their courage, that air of independence they have. Do they not seem less owned than he does? Do they not seem more free? There is one in particular who catches his eye, his imagination. The miner with the clipped finger, the violet eyes, who comes and goes like an apparition. The others, it seems, discreetly defer to him, move about him in some shifting constellation of respect. Lecoeur — a sure source of information on the rest — has little to say about him, only that he attached himself to the party shortly before they left Valenciennes, a replacement for a miner who declared himself unfit to travel. Name of Hoornweder. Probably Hoornweder. Hoornweder or Tant, or perhaps Moemus. They often simply invent names for themselves. Does the engineer have any cause to be dissatisfied with him? No, no, says Jean-Baptiste. There is no cause. It was nothing but his own curiosity.

By the middle of the month they are sending five processions a week to the Porte d’Enfer and for a while these processions — the droning priests, the tapers, the carts with their mournful cargo — are added to the list of the city’s entertainments. The Mercure de France prints a little guide giving the times of the processions and where they may be seen to best advantage (crossing the river is highly recommended). Young couples, particularly those from the idle classes, allow themselves to be roused by the sight. Moralists, grimly amused, look on with folded arms. Foreign visitors write letters home, strain for metaphor, to see all France in this winding caravan of bones. Then the city offers a collective shrug. It looks around for other ways to amuse itself. The cafés. Politics. Another riot, perhaps.

Armand invites himself to the Monnards’ house to play Ziguette’s pianoforte. He employs, at the Monnards’ expense, a man immaculately blind with tools like a tooth-puller, who tut-tuts and grimaces and climbs half inside the instrument, and at last renders it tuneful.

When Armand sits to play, he seems to throw sounds into the keys from the ends of his fingers. At the first big crash of chords, Ragoût cowers under the settle, then comes out and digs his claws frenziedly into the weave of the rug.

‘You are killing my organ,’ shouts Armand over the sound of himself, ‘but you have given me this and so I forgive you.’

‘I have not given it to you,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Ownership,’ says Armand, ‘will soon be a much more flexible concept.’

Jean-Baptiste suffers with headaches. He will suffer with them for the rest of his life. During the worst of them, the world is covered with a livid purple membrane, as if he looked out of the crack in his own head. He has to sit, perfectly still. The pain builds until it is released through copious vomiting. Other attacks are less severe and can be controlled — it was Guillotin’s suggestion — by drinking three or four cups of strong coffee.

Of the lost words some, like pigeons back to their loft, return to him. He writes them down, pen and black ink in the back of his journal:

Razor

Hoop

Ruler

Box-crib

Hat

. .

He still cannot read through a page of Buffon, cannot remember when or why he bought it. He wonders how much of a man’s life is the story he tells himself about himself. He wonders how much of his story he has lost. Wonders if it matters.

In the credit column, he is no longer troubled by dreams. He sleeps soundly. The bottle of medicine, the glutinous lachryma papaveris , is on the mantelpiece in his room, but he has not touched it since the attack, not even on those nights he lies down thinking of the hundred things he might have said to her, the Austrian, that dusk on the rue Saint-Denis.

At the bottom of the tenth pit, the remains of some thirty or forty children. There really isn’t time to arrive at a more exact figure. Guillotin and Thouret age the children at between four and ten years of age at the time of their demise. Manetti, consulted, nods. An epidemic in the orphanage at Plessy — 1740? Perhaps 1741. He couldn’t swear. In the pit the children have been laid head to toe, much as they might have slept together in the orphanage. The men are affected; they puff on their pipes, finger their charms. The doctors collect some of the skulls, pile them like cabbages or turnips into one of Jeanne’s wicker baskets and take them to the workshop.

The last days of March, there is snowfall. It sticks like melted wax to the black walls of the church, lies crisp and glittering over the piled bones. Then it freezes. Digging is more like scraping. Their tools ring on the earth. To open the eleventh pit, they have to keep a fire burning above it all night. It is winter’s last throw.

Through all the next week the ground thaws, turns to mud, molasses. When a coffin is pulled out, a skull, the sound is amphibious, oddly sexual. Coats are unbuttoned, hats pushed back. Even at les Innocents — and even to one whose sense of smell is as withered as the engineer’s — the air is altered and has, at unpredictable intervals, an unnerving purity to it that makes them all, men and women, miners and their masters, imagine themselves somewhere else, setting out perhaps on a long walk into the country, a stroll to some river fringed with willows.

Jeanne one morning, just after the engineer has arrived at the cemetery, summons him, her face lit with excitement. She leads him to the northwest corner of the cemetery, close to where they emptied the first of the common pits.

‘You see?’ she says, pointing to a patch of little yellow flowers, the leaves shaped like mottled green spades, and close by, a clump of taller plants with crimson flowers.

‘The seeds were buried,’ she says. ‘Your digging has brought them to life again.’

He stares at them, the yellow, the crimson flowers. He says nothing. He is utterly disconcerted.

He does not see her, does not hear her until she is standing beside him. It is dusk and he is about to enter the Monnards’ house. A large wagon — M. Hulot et Fils, Déménageurs à la Noblesse — is rattling down the street towards the rue Saint-Honoré. Startled, he stares at her in a way he imagines must be quite comical.

‘You wanted to speak with me?’ she says.

‘That was weeks ago,’ he says.

‘So you no longer wish to speak with me?’

‘I do. Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘Very well.’ She waits, looks directly into his eyes. She is not wearing the red cloak today but has a shawl or scarf of some light stuff covering her hair. Her face is stiff, her lips pressed hard together.

‘I have thought of you,’ he says, opening his mouth and letting the words come as they will. It is too late for anything circumspect, for the careful measuring of effects. ‘I have thought of you. Often.’

She nods. The gesture does not help him.