The shop, if such a space could be called by so modest a name, is fitted out with dainty furniture and oil paintings and is not remotely akin to the pungent atelier where Jean-Baptiste’s father sewed his gloves. No obvious sign of work here at all, other than the table by the window where a pair of young men are dreamily cutting lengths of some material that glitters and shivers like spring water.
Charvet wastes no time. A few words from Armand, a shrug from Jean-Baptiste, are all he needs to begin. He circles the engineer, touching, tugging, stepping back to better assess the length of a leg, the slight roundness of the shoulders, the slender waist. It is not unpleasant to be the focus of such intense professional surveillance. Jean-Baptiste does not even notice when Armand slips away. The whole day has had some strange impetus of its own. He is past trying to wrestle it. He will think about it later.
‘I believe, monsieur,’ says Charvet, ‘I believe that we shall be able to do something very interesting with you. You have, if you will allow me, the figure necessary for the new styles. You are not one of those portly gentlemen I am forced to disguise more than dress. You, monsieur, we may dress. Yes. Something that will flow with the natural movements of the body. Something a little more informal, though, of course, in its way, perfectly correct. . We must tell a story, monsieur. We must tell it clearly and beautifully. I will dress you not for 1785 but for 1795. Cédric! Bring the gentleman a glass of the Lafitte. Bring the bottle. And now, monsieur, if you will do me the honour of following me. .’
Two hours later, Jean-Baptiste is examining himself — examining someone — in a large, brilliantly polished oval mirror. He is wearing a suit of pistachio silk, a silk lining of green and saffron stripes. The waistcoat, cut at the top of the thigh, is also pistachio, with modest gold-thread embroidery. The cuffs of the coat are small, the collar high. The cravat — saffron again — is almost as large as Armand’s. For a long time, Charvet and Cédric have been pulling pins from between their lips, have been snipping and sewing and handling him with that freedom reserved to their trade, to that of body servants, surgeons and executioners. They are almost done. They stand back, careful to exclude themselves from the mirror’s scope. They look at him looking at himself. It is, Jean-Baptiste is perfectly aware, far too late to refuse the suit or even to criticise it. To do so would be to denounce not just Charvet but the future itself. Impossible! He will take it and he will pay whatever Charvet wants. It turns out to be a lot. He blushes. He does not have such an amount on him. The tailor spreads his hands. Of course, of course. Tomorrow will be quite soon enough. But there is something else. Is the young gentleman a young gentleman of an intellectual persuasion? Aha! He had thought it all along, but one does not wish to appear impertinent.
He glides to the gleaming walnut of the escritoire, removes from one of its drawers a little picture in a frame and brings it to Jean-Baptiste. ‘Voltaire,’ he says, and smiles at the picture as if, alone, he might address fond words to it. ‘You see what he is wearing? The robe? It is known as a banyan. Intellectual gentlemen find it something they can barely do without. I have one here in red damask. I would not mention it to most of my customers; it would not be understood. But in your case. .’
‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘Yes?’
‘I will take it.’
‘And, monsieur, you must wear your own hair. In five years the wig will be perfectly extinct. In the meantime, I have an excellent bag wig, all human hair, and rentable by the week. .’
‘That too,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘And shall I keep your old suit as a deposit, monsieur? I have a smaller establishment on the rue du Bac catering to my. . hmm, more conservative customers. I could perhaps sell it for you there?’
‘As you wish.’
‘As you wish, monsieur.’
‘Then yes.’ He shrugs. ‘Yes.’
Released from Charvet and his shop, the engineer crosses the place des Victoires, turns down the rue de la Feuillade towards the market and the Monnards’ house. The wind has got up. It blows the dust into his face and makes him sneeze. The new suit is not as warm as the old. Neither is the new suit a gift from his dead father. He hugs the packaged banyan to his chest. At each step the stink of the cemetery grows stronger, but in spite of this he is several times forced to hesitate, peer forwards, look over his shoulder, take his bearings from a gate, a pillar, a bare tree, a stone trough. Has he seen them before? Then he finds himself standing at the end of the rue de la Fromagerie. The little shops are shuttered, the carts resting on their handles, the cobbles damp with slops. There is a beggar kneeling at the corner, but otherwise the street is deserted. The beggar looks up, slips back a hood to show his sores, but in the coolness of his new pockets Jean-Baptiste has no change for him. They mutter to each other (an apology, a curse).
He has his supper with the Monnards. Can they see he has been drinking, that he has spent the day drinking? Perhaps they are too dazzled by his appearance to notice. Pistachio silk, it seems, can provoke something near astonishment. The women want to touch it but do not quite dare to. Monsieur Monnard looks perplexed. He pulls, ruminatively, at the lobes of his ears as though he were milking a pair of tiny udders.
They sit at the table. Jean-Baptiste has no appetite. He drinks some glasses of Monsieur Monnard’s wine, but after the Lafitte at Charvet’s, it tastes of what it is, mostly water.
After supper, Madame invites him to stay and hear Ziguette play the pianoforte. ‘Getting it in, monsieur, I swear it gave me a nosebleed just watching them! And such a crowd outside. They all cheered when it was swung through the window. I said to my husband, I said, “You’d think they was at a hanging!” ’
He stays, bathed in his own pale green light, while Ziguette picks her way through a melody he does not recognise. Can the instrument be in tune? Can a sound like that really be intended? She is wearing a low-cut dress of lemon wool and studies the movement of her hands with a pout of concentration, one blond ringlet dangling over her brow and bobbing like a spring each time she raises her head to squint at the music. He thinks of Zulima, dead two hundred years, nipples like peach stones. The music stops. He applauds with the others, is required to sit through a second piece, a third. Madame Monnard beams at him and nods. Before the commencement of a fourth piece, he gets clumsily to his feet, claims he is feeling indisposed, begs to be excused.
‘It is nothing serious, I hope?’ asks Madame.
He assures her it is not.
In his room, it is as cold as on the previous evening, which is to say, a degree or two colder than the world outside. He still has no wood. He will speak with Marie when she passes on her way to the attic, ask her to make the necessary arrangements, though from what he has seen of her, he thinks it quite likely she will do nothing about it. A symptom of her freethinking? He is not sure — though the thought immediately embarrasses him — how much he cares for modernity when it leaves his fireplace and his washbasin empty.
He unwraps the parcel, spreads the banyan over the bed, takes off his pistachio coat, carefully folds it and draws on the banyan. There is a lot of it. It swathes him. It might, he thinks, swathe two of him. And there is a cap too — compliments of Monsieur Charvet — a tarboosh, made from the same red material. He takes off his wig, puts on the cap. In the mirror, in candle dark, he looks like a Venetian senator. Also, somehow, like a child who has stolen into his parents’ room and put on his father’s clothes. Not that his father would ever have possessed a garment like this. He would not have approved of it, would not in the least have been pleased to see his oldest son wearing it, might, indeed, have been moved to ridicule, to anger.