expected it to be bigger.’
‘Big enough,’ the man said sourly. ‘You wouldn’t like to be in there, would you? Men have gone in there and never come out.’
‘You a local?’
‘Oh yes,’ the man said. ‘We know all about it. There are cells under the ground, running with water, alive with rats.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard about the rats.’
‘And then the cells up under the roof – that’s no joke either. Boil in summer, freeze in winter. Still, that’s only the unlucky ones. Some get treated quite decent, depends who you are. They have beds with proper bed-curtains and they can take their own cat in to keep the vermin down.’
‘What do they get to eat?’
‘Varies, I suppose. Again, it’s according to who you are. You do see the odd side of beef going in. Neighbour of mine a few years back, he swears he saw them taking in a billiard table. It’s like anything else in life, I suppose,’ the man said. ‘Winners and losers, that’s all about it.’
Georges-Jacques looks up, and his eye is offended; it is impregnable, there is no doubt. These people go about their lives and work – brewing by the look of it, and upholstery – and they live under its walls, and they see it every day, and finally they stop seeing it, it’s there and not there. What really matters isn’t the height of the towers, it’s the pictures in your head: the victims gone mad with solitude, the flagstones slippery with blood, the children birthed on straw. You can’t have your whole inner world rearranged by a man you meet in the street. Is nothing sacred? Stained from the dye-works, the river ran yellow, ran blue.
And when evening came the civil servants hurried home; the jewellers of the Place Dauphine came clank, clank with their keys to lock away their diamonds for the night. No homeward cattle, no dusk over the fields; shrug away the sentimentality. In the rue Saint-Jacques a confraternity of shoemakers settled in for a night’s hard drinking. In a third-floor apartment in the rue de la Tixanderie, a young woman let in her new lover and removed her clothes. On the Île Saint-Louis, in an empty office, Maître Desmoulins’s son faced, dry-mouthed, the heavy charm of his new employer. Milliners who worked fifteen hours in a bad light rubbed their red-rimmed eyes and prayed for their families in the country. Bolts were drawn; lamps were lit. Actors painted their faces for the performance.
PART TWO
WE make great progress only at those times when we become melancholy – at those times when, discontented with the real world, we are forced to make for ourselves one more bearable.
‘The Theory of Ambition’, an essay:
Jean-Marie Hérault de Séchelles
I. The Theory of Ambition (1784–1787)
THE CAFÉ DU PARNASSE was known to its clients as the Café de l’École, because it overlooked the Quai of that name. From its windows you could see the river and the Pont-Neuf, and further in the distance the towers of the Law Courts. The café was owned by M. Charpentier, an inspector of taxes; it was his hobby, his second string. When the courts had adjourned for the day, and business was brisk, he would arrange a napkin over his arm and wait at table himself; when business slackened, he would pour a glass of wine and sit down with his regular customers, exchanging legal gossip. Much of the small-talk at the Café de l’École was of a dry and legalistic nature, yet the ambience was not wholly masculine. A lady might be seen there; compliments leavened with a discreet wit skimmed the marble-topped tables.
Monsieur’s wife Angélique had been, before her marriage, Angelica Soldini. It would be pleasant to say that the Italian bride still enjoyed a secret life under the matron’s cool Parisienne exterior. In fact, however, Angélique had kept her rapid and flamboyant speech, her dark dresses which were indefinably foreign, her seasonal outbursts of piety and carnality; under cover of these prepossessing traits flourished her real self, a prudent, economic woman as durable as granite. She was in the café every day – perfectly married, plump, velvet-eyed; occasionally someone would write her a sonnet, and present it to her with a courtly bow. ‘I will read it later,’ she would say, and fold it carefully, and allow her eyes to flash.
Her daughter, Antoinette Gabrielle, was seventeen years old when she first appeared in the café. Taller than her mother, she had a fine forehead and brown eyes of great gravity. Her smiles were sudden decisions, a flash of white teeth before she turned her head or twisted her whole body away, as if her merriment had secret objects. Her brown hair, shiny from long brushing, tumbled down her back like a fur cape, exotic and half-alive: on cold days, a private warmth.
Gabrielle was not neat, like her mother. When she pinned her hair up, the weight dragged the pins out. Inside a room, she walked as if she were out in the street. She took great breaths, blushed easily; her conversation was inconsequential, and her learning was patchy, Catholic and picturesque. She had the brute energies of a washerwoman, and a skin – everybody said – like silk.
Mme Charpentier had brought Gabrielle into the café so that she could be seen by the men who would offer her marriage. Of her two sons, Antoine was studying law; Victor was married and doing well, employed as a notary public; there was only the girl to settle. It seemed clear that Gabrielle would marry a lawyer customer. She bowed gracefully to her fate, regretting only a little the years of trespass, probate and mortgage that lay ahead. Her husband would perhaps be several years older than herself. She hoped he would be a handsome man, with an established position; that he would be generous, attentive; that he would be, in a word, distinguished. So when the door opened one day on Maître d’Anton, another obscure attorney from the provinces, she did not recognize her future husband – not at all.
SOON AFTER Georges-Jacques came to the capital, France had been rejoicing in a new Comptroller-General, M. Joly de Fleury, celebrated for having increased taxation on foodstuffs by 10 per cent. Georges-Jacques’s own circumstances were not easy, but if there had not been some financial struggle he would have been disappointed; he would have had nothing to look back on in his days of intended prosperity.
Maître Vinot had worked him hard but kept his promises. ‘Call yourself d’Anton,’ he advised. ‘It makes a better impression.’ On whom? Well, not on the real nobility; but so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure. ‘So what if they all know it’s spurious?’ Maître Vinot said. ‘It shows the right kind of urges. Have comprehensible ambitions, dear boy. Keep us comfortable.’
When it was time to take his degree, Maître Vinot recommended the University of Rheims. Seven days’ residence and a swift reading list; the examiners were known to be accommodating. Maître Vinot searched his memory for an example of someone whom Rheims had failed, and couldn’t come up with one. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘with your abilities, you could take your exams here in Paris, but…’ His sentence trailed off. He waved a paw. He made it sound like some effete intellectual pursuit, the kind of thing they went in for in Perrin’s chambers. D’Anton went to Rheims, qualified, was received as an advocate of the Parlement of Paris. He joined the lowest rank of barristers; this is where one begins. Elevation from here is not so much a matter of merit, as of money.
After that he left the Île Saint-Louis, for lodgings and offices of varying degrees of comfort, for briefs of varying number and quality. He pursued a certain type of case – involving the minor nobility, proof of title, property rights. One social climber, getting his patents in order, would recommend him to his friends. The mass of detail, intricate but not demanding, did not wholly absorb
