When Marie remembers to bring them anything, they breakfast together in the room. On the mornings she forgets, Héloïse stays in bed and he eats at the cemetery with Jeanne and Manetti and Lecoeur. As to how she spends her days when he is gone, it is a source of continual fascination to him. No detail is too trivial. It is not enough that she informs him Madame Monnard cheats at backgammon; he wants to know exactly how she does it. The dice? The counters? And when the two women spend an afternoon sitting by the window embroidering, he wants to be told what, and what patterns they stitched. Rosebuds? Zigzags? Peacock tails?
‘What do you talk about?’
‘You, of course.’
‘Me?’
‘No. Never you.’
‘Ziguette?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And Monsieur Monnard?’
‘Sometimes of him too. And the price of bread, the probability of rain, whether senna or buckthorn is best for a constipation.’
‘You have made her happy again.’
‘No, Jean. I have not. You know I have not.’
A month after Héloïse arrived at the house on the rue de la Lingerie, she sits up in the bed drinking a little dish of coffee from a bowl painted with roses, and says that she wishes to visit the theatre. Did he not promise her? He nods. He goes to see Armand. Armand will know about theatres.
‘The Odéon,’ says Armand, as they stand together in a green lozenge of sunlight beside the preaching cross. ‘They are performing a play by Beaumarchais. Beaumarchais is of the party.’
‘The party of the future?’
‘Of course. And I shall come with you. Lisa too. You will not know how to behave otherwise.’
‘I don’t object to your company.’
‘Mademoiselle Godard is not well enough acquainted with you. She has not studied you as I have.’
‘Tell me this, Armand. You think Héloïse belongs to the party of the future?’
‘Héloïse? She and Lisa will be among its queens.’
‘And my own membership?’
‘Ah, you will be informed, dear savage.’
‘Informed? By whom?’
‘By circumstances. By what you will and will not do. We shall all be found out in time.’
‘When you speak like this you remind me of the pastor. My mother’s pastor.’
‘And what does he say?’
‘Desolation alone is left in the city and the gate is broken into pieces. If a man runs from the rattle of the snake he will fall into the pit. If he climbs out of the pit he will be caught in the trap. .’
Four days later, Jean-Baptiste and Héloïse dress for an evening at the theatre. He has nothing brighter than black. She teases him. Where is that coat of his the colour of pea soup? Pistachio, he says, peeled pistachio. And back where it came from. Good, she says. Green was not your colour.
They cross the river in a cab. Armand and Lisa have their backs to the horses; Jean-Baptiste and Héloïse are facing. The two women, having met for the first time in the hall of the Monnards’ house, having observed each other carefully among the woody shadows of that place, have, apparently, decided to like each other, a great relief to Jean-Baptiste, who has developed a powerful faith in the rightness of Lisa Saget’s judgements.
The cab’s two windows are hard down. The evening sun is on the river. On the Pont Neuf, the crowd flows through itself, slowly. Each time the cab is forced to stop, strangers peer in for a moment. A girl in a straw hat climbs onto the cab step and reaches in with posies. Armand insists Jean-Baptiste purchase the two largest, the two prettiest. The cemetery is a thousand miles away, its pits, its walls of bone, like things imagined, some old trouble they are finally getting free of. And could they not keep going like this? A bare week and they would be in Provence letting the sun’s heat scour them. Or cross the Alps to Venice! The four of them in a gondolier sliding under the Rialto Bridge. .
The cab sways to a halt by the theatre steps. The two couples join the throng filtering between the white pillars. Jean-Baptiste has never been to the Odéon (it has only been completed four years). Nor has he been to the Comédie-Française or any other grand theatre. The last time he saw a play it was one of those rough affairs put on twice a year in Bellême by companies of travelling actors who arrive noisily (bellowing, blowing hunting horns) and leave quietly (with stolen chickens, scrumped apples, the honour of certain local girls).
This, well, it is more like Versailles, though of course less theatrical. They are shown to their box by a flunky in a tight lavender coat who, though graceless and offensively casual, will not leave without his tip. Their box is cramped and does not have a good view of the stage. The chamberpot at the back of the box has not been emptied. The candle wicks are untrimmed and one of the chairs looks as if, during a recent performance, it was briefly on fire. None of it matters; their mood is impregnable. The flunky is made happy with the size of his tip, then sent to fetch wine and. .
‘What do you have?’ asks Armand.
‘What do you wish for? Oranges? Roast chicken? Oysters?’
‘Yes,’ says Armand, ‘we’ll have those.’
The place is filling up. It starts to roar. People call across to each other, signal with their hats and fans. Some of the women shriek like peacocks. A scuffle breaks out by the spikes at the front of the stage. ‘Author’s friends,’ says Armand, knowledgeably. ‘Author’s enemies.’
The lavender coats move in. A man is carried out, arms and legs waving like a beetle on its back.
‘The minister is here,’ says Jean-Baptiste quietly. ‘Box opposite the stage.’
‘The one with a face like an axe?’ asks Armand.
‘That’s him,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘But do not stare. I do not wish to be sent for.’
‘You’ve as much right to be here as he does,’ says Héloïse.
‘Even so,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I do not want him in my head tonight.’
They sit back in their seats. Behind the curtain, the musicians are tuning their instruments. The engineer does not mention the other man in the minister’s box, the young man in the shimmering coat. The name of Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson would mean nothing to them.
First, there is a short, frantic mime, then a lengthy interval, then, finally, the play. The audience sits in the light of five hundred candles, charmed, restless, a little bored. The engineer, Armand, Héloïse and Lisa Saget suck oranges, chew on the bones of high-flavoured chicken, drop the bones under their seats. Jean-Baptiste finds the play elusive, sometimes baffling. Who exactly is Marceline? Why can Suzanne not marry Figaro? And who is hiding in that closet? Héloïse, her lips beside his ear, patiently explains. He nods. He watches the audience, watches them watching. Dead, stripped of their feathers and fans, their swords, canes, ribbons, jewels, stripped bare and piled like bacon, could he not fit them all into a single pit? He has the thought; feels the disturbance of it; lets it go.
Another chicken is delivered, and more wine, and almonds tasting like scented sawdust. The engineer is tipsy. He kneels to piss in the pot at the back of the box, pisses into another’s cold piss and returns to his chair to discover that Suzanne will, after all, marry Figaro.
‘So they will have what they wished for?’ he asks, though his question is lost in the noise of applause and renewed skirmishing. Cautiously, he leans forward to see how the minister has liked the play. The minister is standing. Next to him, Boyer-Duboisson is whispering in his ear. The minister laughs. Boyer-Duboisson steps away from him, also laughing. Below them, the theatre-goers are fighting their way through the doors like scummed water draining out of a sink. The minister, still laughing, rests a hand on his chest as if to settle himself, and glances over, casually, to the box where Jean-Baptiste is watching. Does he see the engineer? His engineer? Would he even remember his face? And still he cannot stop laughing. It is as if nothing short of death could bring such a flow of amusement to an end.