‘You mean I do not smell as sweet as I did?’
‘We wondered if it was the air in Paris, Jean. That it is not as good as here.’
‘It is not,’ he says. ‘Not at all.’
‘Then when you return here, you will recover,’ she says. ‘Already I think it is somewhat improved.’
He thanks her, drolly.
‘When do you go back?’ she asks.
2
Armand and his mistress must have been busy, Jeanne too perhaps. When Jean-Baptiste returns to Paris he is pointed out in the street, or simply stared at as if he might reveal a fringe of angel wing above the collar of his coat, or a nub of horn on his brow. In the marketplace, the morning before the Feast of Epiphany, an old man, one of the ragged, grimacing sort who haunt any public space, waves a withered arm at him and warns him to leave alone ‘the field of our fathers lest the wrath of the Almighty. .’ Two days later, a stall-holder on the rue de la Fromagerie makes him a gift of honeycomb, wishes him luck. He starts to hear a new word at his back. ‘Engineer.’ He wonders how many of them have any clear notion of what an engineer is.
But of all the reactions he encounters in the first cold days of the New Year, none is more perplexing than that of the Monnards. Coming back to the house, he had felt almost pleased to see them, had been most particular in his thanks to Monsieur Monnard for the loan of his suit, assiduous in his enquiries as to how Madame and Mademoiselle Monnard had enjoyed the festivities, but by dinner on the second evening, it was clear that all was not well with them. It was Madame Monnard (having first ejected a piece of gristle from her mouth to the top of her fist) who raised the matter that was evidently the source of their disquiet.
‘Monsieur,’ she began, ‘is it the case what we hear about the cemetery?’
‘Madame?’
‘That it is. . to go?’
He set down his knife and fork. ‘In a manner of speaking, madame, yes. It is to be removed, the land made clean. The church too, in time, will be removed.’
‘It comes as a shock to us,’ said Monsieur Monnard. ‘We had not suspected it.’
‘I am sorry for it, monsieur. But the church and cemetery have been closed these last five years. They could not be left to. .’
‘It is hard for us to think of it,’ said Madame, a strange shrill voice.
‘I hope it is for the public good, madame,’ said Jean-Baptiste. ‘And this house will no longer overlook a place of public interment. Will no longer have to suffer the consequences of that.’
‘What consequences?’ asked Monsieur Monnard.
Jean-Baptiste glanced down at his plate, where, in the coolness of the room, his food was already starting to congeal. ‘Can it be entirely healthy, monsieur?’
‘Do we seem unhealthy to you?’
‘No. Of course. I did not mean to suggest. .’
‘Well then?’
And Ziguette began to cry. A thin whining followed by a gulp, then a sob rising out of her bosom, all of it accompanied by a vigorous working of her face so that she looked to Jean-Baptiste like someone he had never seen before. She fled the room. Madame and Monsieur exchanged glances.
‘If I have. .’ began Jean-Baptiste, half rising from his chair.
‘Poor Ziggi so dislikes any commotion,’ said Madame, and then made certain remarks, incomprehensible at first, but which Jean-Baptiste finally understood to mean that Ziguette had started her monthly bleeding and was, as a result, unusually sensitive.
The sequel to this uneasy scene took place later the same night. Jean-Baptiste was in his room, wrapped in the red damask of his banyan. He was reading a few lines out of Buffon, something about the manner in which certain non-poisonous creatures mimic the markings of their poisonous cousins, when he heard the familiar scratching at the door and, opening it, expected to greet the muscular Ragoût but found instead Ziguette, white as death, and dressed in her nightclothes. That she was uncorseted was apparent each time she sighed.
She wanted to explain, or to apologise or both or neither. After some whispering at the door, he invited her inside, and as there was only one chair, he offered it to her and sat on the bed. She did not seem startled by the banyan, did not comment on it. He put another stick on the fire. He tried to reassure her.
‘When it is done, think how nice it will be. In place of what you have now, a pleasant square. Gardens perhaps.’
She nodded. She seemed to be attempting to follow his reasoning, but her eyes had filled with tears again. ‘It is,’ she said, after a pause, ‘as though you wished to dig up my childhood.’
‘Childhood?’
‘Innocent, girlish days.’
‘I shall be digging only the cemetery. Earth and old bones. Many old bones.’
‘You did not grow up here,’ she said softly. ‘If so, you would feel differently.’
Sitting a little lower than her, his gaze had somehow settled on her lap. He imagined a slow effusion of blood, a blood-rose blooming in the pale stuff of her nightgown, spreading across her thighs then, perhaps, starting audibly to drip onto the floorboards. .
‘When it is done,’ he said, raising his eyes to hers, ‘when it is over, it will be you who feels differently. The initial discomfort will quickly pass. You will be pleased.’
She did not argue against him. She began, discreetly, to look around his room, the bed, the trunk, the table with its books, the brass ruler. Then she stifled a yawn, apologised for disturbing him, and with a sweet, watery smile, the kind one bestows on a person who, through no fault of his own, is unable to understand what ought to be plain as day, she excused herself.
As she pulled the door shut behind her, he glanced at the ceiling, at the little hole over the bed, for once or twice during their interview he had heard the boards above them creaking.
He got onto the bed, stood on it. From such a perch, the ceiling was comfortably within his reach. He peered into the hole — nothing, no light, nothing at all. Then slowly, tentatively, he inserted the first finger of his left hand, much as the Comte de Buffon might have investigated the nest of some dubious insect, one that may or may not be merely mimicking its venomous nature. . He could not swear to what he felt then, yet it seemed to him someone had softly blown on his finger, and for a while, balanced on the bed, he examined it.
3
He meets with Lafosse. January is burning low; nothing has started; not a bone has been shifted. He explains himself, endeavours to show himself a victim of circumstances which, in truth, he believes himself to be. He cannot begin without the miners and the miners have not arrived. They are coming, coming very soon, but they have not yet arrived. Halfway through his explanation, his somewhat hot-faced justification of himself, he realises that Lafosse does not really care about a few weeks here or there, will not remove him from his post or even threaten it. Who else, at short notice, would take on work like this? He presents his accounts. He is not unhappy to see that Lafosse is suffering with a cold.
What he can do alone, he does. From Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson he obtains canvas, wooden poles, rope, ship’s chain. He arranges with a toothless man called Dejour the supply of firewood, and works beside him and his sons when the first consignment is delivered. He cannot set foot in the market without tradesmen approaching him with offers and promises, sometimes with whispered warnings about a fellow tradesman who is nothing but a thief. Straw for bedding comes from the stables behind the coaching office on the rue aux Ours. It is dry and tolerably clean. Thirty spades, thirty picks arrive, also from Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson. At Valenciennes, the miners are not permitted to own their own tools. A man with his own spade may start to think of himself as independent.