Andrew Miller - Pure

‘You are kind to think of it,’ says Héloïse, though she has travelled no more than a length of a half-dozen streets. ‘Good night to you, monsieur,’ she says.

Monsieur Monnard nods, grunts, but does not — cannot perhaps — lift his gaze from the floor where Ragoût, having bolted his morsel of eel, is carefully cleaning sauce from the larger fragments of plate.

They go up to the room — their room, if that’s what it is. The evening, the room, are not particularly cold (a few weeks back, they could have watched their breath leave their mouths), but Jean-Baptiste kneels on the hearth rug and busies himself building a fire. When it takes, he stands back to watch it and, still looking at the fire, tells Héloïse that he must return to the cemetery.

‘Now?’

‘They will be loading the carts.’

‘Will you be long?’

‘As long as is necessary.’

‘And there is no one else who could do it?’

‘That is not the point.’

He leaves, quickly. She looks at the back of the door, hears his feet on the stairs. Shortly, she hears the noise of the street door. For several minutes she stays as she is, her face expressionless. Then she raises a hand, clears her eyes of two tears she does not wish to let fall and goes to the dressing table. She loosens and reties the Madras ribbon in her hair, pushes off her shoes, rubs the outside of her right foot where the shoe pinches, then starts to unhook herself, unlace herself, fiddle with eyelets and bows and pins until she is down to her under-petticoat, shift and stockings. She opens a tapestry bag — one of three large bags in which she has brought all her things — and takes out a quilted bed-gown and a pair of leather mules, a bottle of orange water, a cloth. She cleans her face with the orange water, wipes her throat, wipes under arms and between her breasts. The commode is in the corner of the room. It has a little screen of pleated cotton on a wooden frame. She sits and, when she is done, uses the orange water to clean around the creases of her thighs. She is due to come on in a few days, can feel it building in her, the slight heaviness, slight bloating. She has known men who were disgusted by a woman’s bleeding, others who — more troublingly — were attracted to it. The engineer, she suspects, will be among that mass of men who take care not to think of it at all.

She buttons the gown, stirs the fire with the poker, starts to examine the room. It is, very obviously, not the room he is used to occupying, for there are none of his things here. The wardrobe is empty (she will not, just yet, put up her dresses). There is no manly clutter. She would like to have had a look at that suit she once spied him in, that thing the colour of wild lettuce, but there is nothing, not even a shirt. So whose room was it, if not his? She could guess — guess correctly in all likelihood — but tomorrow she will get that odd little maid to tell her things. The maid will know everything.

At least the window looks over the street rather than the cemetery. And she had no clients on the rue de la Lingerie, no one she need be embarrassed to walk into. Not that she intends to be embarrassed by anything. She has left her old life — old by a day or two — but will not lower herself to the indignity of pretending. She has lived publicly, has been a public woman almost four years, has lived out in the full light of public regard that career her parents, by their actions if not their words, apprenticed her to at the inn on the Paris — Orléans road. But four years is long enough. The point is made. Grief and rage have made their passage; she has pulled them like a thorn-bush through her own entrails, and they have scoured her, have left a thousand little scars, but have not killed her. And now this. A new life. A new life with an awkward, grey-eyed stranger who, nonetheless, she seems to know rather well. A stranger who wants her — she has no serious doubt of that — and not just on the first Tuesday of the month like old Ysbeau. .

At the thought of the bookseller, she goes back to her tapestry bag and takes out two books, carries them to the dressing table, sits and draws the candle close. What will it be? Cazotte’s Le Diable Amoureux ? Or Algarotti’s Newtonism for Ladies ? Tonight, perhaps, she should stay with Algarotti and Newton. Then, when he comes back, she can calm him by asking him to explain things to her. (He will like that; they all like it.) She settles herself, finds her page, and is about to begin a chapter on optics when she hears, low on the door, the sound of scratching.

He does not go to the cemetery, never intended to. He goes in the opposite direction, towards the Palais Royal. He needs to walk, to think, to stop thinking. Is he getting one of his headaches? Surprisingly, he is not.

How bitterly she must regret her arrival! That supper! Grotesque! And worst of all, his own behaviour — the dullness, the rudeness of it. As if he resented her! She who he has longed for all winter! Why can nothing ever be simply wanted, simply desired, with no contradiction, no inexplicable ‘no’ in some unexamined fold of the heart? And now he has run away when he should be doing what any proper man would be doing in the company of a woman like Héloïse Godard. Armand would be on the second go by now. The windows would be spilling out of their frames. A nasty thought, of course, Armand with Héloïse. If he ever lays a finger on her. .

At the Palais, the night air shimmers with superfluous light. Flambeaux, chandeliers, strings of Chinese lanterns. If he could illuminate the cemetery like this they could dig all night. Another thirty men, one gang sleeping, one digging, then a change of shift at dawn and dusk. At Valenciennes, there were seams worked like that, men and women, pumps and horses, working round the clock. God knows he will need to think of something, some innovation if they are not still to be digging up the dead when the new century arrives.

He fights his way forward, his black coat brushing against green and reds, silvers and golds. Faces swim out of the crush. A man, heavily powdered, pokes out the tip of his tongue at the engineer. Two women, who may or may not be courtesans with apartments on the first floor, glance up at him from their game of teasing a monkey, the creature tethered by a length of silver chain to a spike. .

Outside the Café Correzza, a young man with yellow hair stands precariously on a chair making a speech. What is it? The usual stuff. The hearts of men, the requirements of Nature, the promise of philosophy, the destiny of mankind, indomitable justice, virtue. . And did he mention Bêche? Bêche the Avenger? Impossible to hear over the din the others are making, the gossip, the laughter, the broken marching of harlots and gentry, the half-dozen little bands playing in the courtyard.

He goes into l’Italien, gets a seat near the porcelain stove, orders brandy. He is, he fancies, served more quickly these days. It is the black coat? A black severity that makes him appear half priest, half functionary, the wielder of ambiguous powers? Or is it something Ziguette Monnard unearthed? A newfound willingness to press a key to a man’s throat? Violence is respected; he has learnt that much about the world. It may even be one of those virtues the young man on the chair was preaching about. Gentlemen with blood up to their shoe buckles, bowing and making to each other un beau geste . Virtuous violence. The virtuous necessity of it. Violence as a duty. It is, very likely, the coming thing.

When he reaches into his pocket to pay for the brandy, he pulls out Ziguette’s satin shoe-thing. The waiter treats him to a waiter’s almost invisible grin. Outside, he steps through a family of female mandolin players, abandons the satin thing on the windowsill of Salon No. 7 and regains the dark, the sudden hush of the streets behind the Bourse. A little brandy has sobered him up. He knows what he’s about now. When he reaches the buttresses of Saint-Eustache, he starts to run.