On what he calls to himself an impulse but which is perhaps a desire to confess something, he tells Héloïse about his word blindness. It is a Sunday afternoon, the pair of them kneeling on the bed, a little raw about the loins, the gleam of his seed on her belly, their bodies in shadow from the two-thirds-shut shutters. It is, anyway, hard to keep hiding it from her, from everybody, hard and wearying, so he explains to her how he cannot get through a page of print without stumbling, that he still finds himself suddenly dumb in the face of the most ordinary objects. He tells her about his notebook with its list of recaptured words.
She kisses his brow, drops her shift over her head, adjusts the shutters and fetches a book. It is a book by an English writer with a French name. The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. Holding the book in front of them both, she reads a page aloud, slowly. The next page is his, the third hers again. After an hour, he asks, ‘Is this true?’
She laughs. ‘You like it?’
He nods. He does. The castaway. His loneliness and ingenuity. It speaks to him.
‘As payment,’ he says, ‘I shall build you a bookshelf. It could go by the wall there.’
She thanks him, then adds, ‘Not so big we cannot get it out of the door.’
‘The door?’
‘We will not be here always,’ she says. ‘Will we?’
An extra grog ration, a few extra coins in the men’s hands. (He has what he would have given Lecoeur to spread around.) It will not do. It cannot. It is not enough. And Guillotin warns him that digging in the heat is unhealthy, decidedly so. Vapours, contagion. The place’s sour breath excited by the sun’s heat. Already four of the men — occupants of the same tent — have been struck by some low fever that has left them listless, weak, drooping like cut flowers. The doctor recommends the work be carried on entirely at night, or better still, suspended until the cooler weather in the autumn.
‘Suspended!’
‘Might it not be the wisest course?’
‘And come the autumn,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘I would be working here on my own.’
‘You think they would not return?’
‘Are you not amazed they have stayed at all?’
They are walking together in the late afternoon while the men are being fed. Having reached the cemetery’s western limit, they turn and start back, walking by the shadow-line of the wall.
‘What about the church?’ asks the engineer.
‘Mmm?’
‘We can work in there. It will be cool.’
‘Begin the destruction of the church?’
‘I would need more men. Specialists. Not many.’
‘It looks,’ says Guillotin, pausing to regard it, the streaked black cliff of the church’s west face, ‘horribly solid.’
‘Buildings are mostly air,’ says the engineer, quoting the great Perronet. ‘Air and empty space. And there is nothing in the world that cannot be reduced to its parts. With enough men you could turn the Palace of Versailles into rubble inside of a week.’
The more he thinks of it, the more convinced he is he has been thinking of it for a long time. He tries the idea on Armand.
‘Oh, my beautiful church,’ wails Armand, grinning broadly.
‘It will mean the organ too,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘Naturally.’
‘You don’t object?’
‘It is what I said to you before. The night we went painting. One does not resent the future or its agents.’
‘And the future is good whatever it brings?’
‘Yes,’ says Armand, without a moment’s hesitation.
‘I do not believe that,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘Think of the light,’ says Armand.
‘The light?’
‘The church of les Innocents has been hoarding shadows for five hundred years. You will free them. You will let in light and air. You will let in the sky. That is the future!’
‘That,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘is a metaphor.’
‘A metaphor? Where did you go to school?’
‘Nogent-le-Rotrou.’
Dawn: he lies in bed frowning into the indeterminate space above him, trying to work out the best way to destroy a church. What exactly did Maître Perronet say on the subject? Did they cover demolition while Jean-Baptiste was at home in Bellême, helping to care for his father? If it stood out in a field somewhere, he would simply blow it up. God knows he could make enough black powder from all the potassium in the soil of the cemetery. But a church halfway up the rue Saint-Denis? In theory, of course, a building could be imploded: mined and brought down upon itself in a tidy cloud of dust and tumbling stone. In practice — well, he has never heard of a single successful instance. There was that case in Rome five, six years ago, some old basilica they wanted rid of in a hurry. Filled the crypts with barrels of gunpowder, laid the fuses, lit them, obliterated the basilica and most of the neighbouring tenement. Two hundred men, women and children blown to rags. Shook the windows of the Vatican. He cannot remember what became of the engineer. Does he work still? Did they hang him?
For les Innocents, he will need a more methodical, a more prosaic approach. Get the lead off, the tiles, cut rafters, purlins, drop them in. Make the church disappear like a slow forgetting. Are the pillars solid or cored with rubble? And the foundations? This close to the river, the whole thing could be floating on mud.
He will need to speak to Manetti. And Jeanne. If the church is coming down, so is the house. And if the house is coming down, then he must, as he once promised, find them something new. The lead and tiles, carefully traded, should raise more than enough to provide for an old man and his granddaughter, provide for years.
And how is she, this girl whose rapist he put into her house to live with her? Guillotin tells him she has lost some of the sight in her left eye but is otherwise healing well. For himself, though it is almost two months now, he has been careful not to be alone with her. He remembers how she shrank from his touch the night she lay on the kitchen table. And he wants to leave it long enough so that when they are alone, Lecoeur will not sit bloody and leering at the side of them. Leave it much longer, however, and there may be another subject, equally difficult to ignore. Lisa Saget says Jeanne is with child, has said as much to Héloïse. It is not yet certain. There are some technical proofs to be established, and Jeanne herself has offered no confidences. Hard to think, however, that a woman like Lisa Saget could be mistaken. Does a child have any sense of the circumstances of its conception? There are plenty who think so.
He tilts his head to look at Héloïse, her softly piled hair on the bolster. At some hour of the night, she made little noises, uttered a dozen half-words out of a dream, a hurt, reproachful tone to them, but now she is in that pure last sleep before waking, her breathing no louder than if someone brushed a fingertip, to and fro, slowly on the linen.
Are the pillars solid or cored with rubble? And the foundations? Does the whole thing float on mud?