They sit at table. Marie, coming in with the tray, serves Héloïse first, already looks to have some crush on her. They start with a radish soup. For the main course, along with some boiled greens and boiled onions, there are tubular sections of a grey meat in a sauce of the same colour.
‘Is this eel, madame?’ asks Héloïse, and when Madame Monnard confirms that it is, Héloïse manages to say half-a-dozen clever, pertinent things about eels. ‘And they are mysterious, madame. I am told no one knows where they raise their young.’
‘When I was a child,’ says Madame, ‘I liked to look at them in their buckets at the market. I used to wonder what would happen if I put my hand in the water. Whether they would eat it.’
‘Damn them,’ growls Monsieur Monnard.
‘Monsieur?’ asks Héloïse.
‘I do not think I said anything, mademoiselle.’
‘My husband,’ begins Madame Monnard, ‘has a large establishment on the rue Trois Mores. Blades from plain to fancy. Père Poupart of Saint-Eustache cuts his meat with one of my husband’s knives.’
‘I have seen it, madame. The establishment. Everyone speaks of its excellence.’
‘You know Père Poupart?’ asks Madame, who seems to have performed in her head the trick of entirely forgetting who she is talking to.
‘We have passed in the street, madame.’
‘He has a lovely speaking voice. My daughter, I think, delighted in it.’
‘One needs a strong voice in so large a church.’
‘Oh, one does, mademoiselle. Yes, I think that is very true.’
‘Rogue!’ shouts Monsieur Monnard, springing from his seat. Ragoût, infected by the room’s atmosphere of feebly suppressed anarchy, has leapt onto the table and seized a gob of Monsieur Monnard’s eel. He escapes with it beneath the pianoforte. Monsieur Monnard, released at last to express himself, hurls his plate at the cat, but too wildly. The plate hits the side of the instrument and disintegrates in a rain of porcelain and grey sauce. In the silence that follows, Jean-Baptiste gets to his feet. A moment later, Héloïse stands too.
‘You must be fatigued after your journey, mademoiselle,’ says Madame Monnard, airily.
‘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. .