A day’s difficulty can be measured by the amount of strong liquor necessary to endure it. Today is a three-bottle day. A bottle per metre dug. A tenth of a bottle per man per metre dug. Is that the equation? It is not one the engineer was taught at the Ecole des Ponts. When they have finished and the miners have dispersed to their tents or to the warmth of the big fire by the preaching cross, Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur wash their hands in the bucket outside the door of the sexton’s house.
‘What is it they will do in there?’ asks Lecoeur, shaking the water from his fingers and nodding towards the doctors’ new workshop, a little, windowless structure of draped canvas propped against the wall of the church.
‘God knows,’ says Jean-Baptiste, who earlier in the day witnessed a pair of trestle tables being carried inside, along with a heavy leather pouch that jangled as it was carried.
In the kitchen, there is only the old sexton, asleep in his chair, but after a few moments, Jeanne appears at the bottom of the stairs, her face softly radiant as though she had just bathed it in fresh cold water. ‘He is resting,’ she says, ‘and has taken all his medicines.’
‘Block?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.
She nods. ‘The doctor says he will look at him again tomorrow, if he is able to.’
‘Good. Thank you, Jeanne. I am grateful to you.’
‘And your medicine is on the mantelpiece,’ she says. ‘There.’
‘Yours?’ asks Lecoeur.
‘Dr Guillotin seemed to think I might need some help with my sleep.’
‘Ah, sleep,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Yes. Morpheus has proved no friend to me recently. I am restless at night as a jackrabbit.’
‘Then you shall have half of this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, examining the thick, brown glass, corked, unlabelled. ‘There must be enough for both of us in here.’
He leaves Lecoeur with Jeanne and her grandfather, returns to the rue de la Lingerie, the half-decanted flask in his coat pocket. He should try to do some accounts before bed, and tomorrow he must draw some more money at the goldsmith’s on the rue Saint-Honoré. There are tradesmen to pay, and the men of course, and something handsome for Lecoeur, for Jeanne and her grandfather, for Armand and Lisa Saget. He owes a month’s rent to Monsieur Monnard. He does not like to be behind with it, to give Monsieur Monnard any further cause to find fault with him. On the stairs to the drawing room, he meets Marie coming down with a tray of plates. The plates are littered with small bones. She makes a face at him, a little grimace that might have some specific meaning in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. He asks, keeping his voice low, how Ziguette is today.
‘Oh, poor Ziggi!’ says Marie, in a very passable imitation of Madame Monnard. Then she brushes past him, shoulder and thigh against his own.
He goes up to his room, sits in candlelight, puts on the table his bottle of medicine, folds his arms, looks at it. How many drops is he supposed to take? Did Guillotin say? He remembers his father towards the end having such a remedy. What was it they spooned into his mouth? Ten drops? Twenty? He decides, simply, that he will take some. He will not trouble himself with counting; he is tired of counting. He will take some and see how he does, then make his adjustments accordingly.
It is late, late or early. Jeanne, woken by something she has heard in her sleep, leaves the room she shares with her grandfather and looks down at Jan Block, his face lit by the moonlight that slides through the narrow arched window at the end of the landing. It takes a few moments — she has been sleeping deeply — to realise that his eyes are open. She smiles at him, then kneels beside him so that he can see her more certainly. He lifts a hand to her and she catches it before it falls, holds it a moment, then lays it on the shallow panting of his chest. Slowly he shuts his eyes, and there is something so resigned, so final in that shutting she cannot believe he will ever open them again. His breathing suspends a moment, a long moment, a moment that will perhaps extend into eternity. Then, with a little spasm in his chest, a kind of hiccup, it starts again, somewhat easier.
On the stairs, the wood creaks. A head appears, rising out of the darkness of the stairwell into the silver light of the corridor. A shaved nude head, eyes that glitter.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ says the head, very softly. ‘It is only Lecoeur.’
‘He woke,’ she says, ‘but he is sleeping now.’
‘You are a good girl,’ says Lecoeur. ‘I believe I was dreaming of you.’
‘Is it morning?’ she asks.
‘No,’ he says, uncertainly. ‘I do not think so.’
7
Héloïse Godard, reader, woman for sale, daughter of innkeepers on the Orléans — Paris road, a young person recently entered into her twenty-fifth year though not yet quite finished with her long project of debasement, rises with the six o’clock bell from Saint-Eustache, dresses by touch (from white stockings to the green ribbon round her throat), lights her candle for a final brief inspection of herself, blows it out and descends the winding wooden staircase into the public world of the rue du Jour.
Always that small shock of being outside again, that small hardening of whatever, as she lay alone in her bed through the hours of night, had softened, opened. . She pulls her cloak about herself, pulls up her hood, breathes the cold air.
She has an appointment with Boubon the basket-maker in his workshop on the far side of the market. Boubon is a widower, and a man who, like Ysbeau the bookseller and Thibault the tailor — like herself — does not fit easily among his neighbours. This will be her eighth visit to him. Those whom she sees — there are not many — she sees regularly, on their appointed days, their appointed hours. She does no casual trade. All that talk about her going with anyone who waves a coin under her nose, all that is lies. In most cases she has to approach the gentlemen herself, and even then nothing explicit is discussed. She has learnt to be very businesslike while never speaking to the point. This, she thinks, is a good part of what they like about her: her willingness never to confront them with what they are doing, what they are paying for, what they need. And what they need is not quite what the quarter’s vulgar imagination excites itself with. With Boubon, for example, she will sit on his knee among the sheaves and rods of willow. He will tell her about trade, complain of the aches in his back, his thighs. She will listen, all sweet attentiveness, then offer a little wifely advice, a little wifely encouragement. Later, he will observe the tops of her stockings and run a blunt and calloused finger along the garment’s woollen hems while she asks again for the difference between slyping and slewing and how exactly slewing is distinguished from randing or waling. None of it is particularly unpleasant. Certainly it is bearable, usually bearable. Then, when her dress and petticoats and shift are down and patted into good order, they will drink coffee brewed on the workshop fire and she will pick up the money left for her in a screw of paper in the niche by the door (she is not one of those Palais Royal hussies who will do or say nothing without money given first), and she will depart, quickly and quietly, both of them relieved to have it over again for another week.