Little: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  “Ah,” I said, imitating his sigh.

  “Here we are. Up on the roof.”

  “Up on the roof,” I said, “and no one else anywhere near. We could pretend it was just us, that there’s no one else downstairs. Only us and the night.”

  “What an idea! I think I could do well indeed, if there weren’t any other people. I’m a very practical sort of fellow. Not at all bad with my hands. I think, on the whole, if I found myself on a deserted island I’d manage excellently. I might even be happy with no other people. I’d know what to do then. But there are always people. Never an end to them. There’s a wonderful book about life on a deserted island, I’ve read it countless times. Do you know it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner; who lived eight and twenty years, all alone in an un-inhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself. With an account of how he was at last as strangely delivered by pirates. Written by himself.”

  “That’s a long title.”

  “That’s a wonderful book.”

  “Let us pretend it is just us up here,” I ventured, “and the rest of the world is flooded.”

  “How marvelous.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “No laws, no battles, no meetings, no etiquette.”

  “Noah could not have done better.”

  “Of course, pastry might help, mightn’t it?”

  And so we sat, the pair of us, up there on the roof, quite alone, talking of empty islands, and of flour and butter and eggs combined and heated, and also of locks and springs, until a blue-liveried servant marred our peace a little by coming out with an umbrella. I thought at first that he had come to take me inside, but it was a different servant who did not talk to us at all or even make eye contact but only held the umbrella over us both. I thought this unusual but soon enough I forgot he was there, and the locksmith and I chatted on. We were on the roof together for perhaps two hours before Elisabeth’s servant appeared. I had missed her coach returning. I said good night to the locksmith and left him there upon the bench upon the roof, with the liveried servant and the umbrella. And I thought, with the exception of missing the coach, what a very pleasant evening it had turned out to be.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Concerning women, horizontal and perpendicular.

  More people noticed that Madame Elisabeth was showing improvement in society. At the same time, old lady Mackau was increasingly retreating to her bed, where she affected many noisy maladies while eating her favorite almond biscuits. One day, Elisabeth and I visited her in her musty third-floor apartment. She greeted Elisabeth as her “wonderful loyal child,” thanked her for coming to see her “old friend,” but to me she said not a word. When Elisabeth asked her where she hurt exactly, she was confused and could not exactly explain. “All over,” was all she could manage, and that furiously. So Elisabeth entered those words into her book and we made an entire miniature wax woman and placed this beside the other objects in the chapel. We returned to her so that Elisabeth could inform her of this progress, but she only groaned and turned over in bed, showing us her back.

  “Illness,” she said, “knows no manners.”

  That was the summer of Elisabeth’s great freedom. Mackau’s reign was coming to an end; she sniffed and sweated through the last weeks of her office, always promising to return, but soon her bed became too persuasive to her. The heavy mattress cupped itself around the old lady and became her bones and support, until she could not be solid without it. It sucked her in, sucked her dry—it sucked, I do believe it, all the fatness from the old form—and as the woman began to ail in earnest, so the mattress grew in health, becoming greater and puffier. What a beastly mattress that was, expanding and inflating, leaching the old lady of her life.

  In Mackau’s absence, as the old lady was slowly surrendering to her mattress, we had continued our visits beyond the palace, and afterward made many more organs for the church. Once, when we asked if we might be allowed to enter a poor home, the wretched young man who lived there refused.

  “He is ashamed,” Elisabeth said. “That must be it.”

  “Or perhaps,” I said, “he simply does not want us inside.”

  “Doesn’t want? Why ever not? What’s wrong with us?”

  “It’s his home. He’s in charge of it.”

  “It belongs to my brother.”

  “Does it?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then your brother should have it fixed.”

  “My brother has the whole country to worry over. I go to the village. You know nothing about it. It is not your business.”

  She was very put out. She was always struggling over what was the best way to react. There were so many contradictions between what she was told and what she saw that she could only hesitatingly move forward, lacking, as she did, power and knowledge. She was a girl trying to make her way. We both were.

  In our great work of seeking out all the ill, we found, besides Madame Mackau, another patient inside the palace. One afternoon, Elisabeth herself opened my cupboard door. “De Lamballe! Come quickly, my heart! De Lamballe has fainted again!”

  “Yes, I’m coming! But who is de Lamballe?”

  “Oh, you know nobody, do you! She is a lovely lady, but so delicate. Her husband died young and she’s been a terrible fainter ever since. She once fainted because she happened to smell some violets. And once also for no greater reason than she saw a lobster in a painting. And when Antoinette complained she had a headache she fainted then too—in sympathy, it is supposed, for Antoinette. Simply everything makes her faint. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Will the queen be with her, do you think?”

  “She’s sure to be. Lamballe’s her favorite. Poor thing.”

  The collapsed fainter we discovered lay stretched out in some Versailles salon, still far gone. Her fellow women of court stood around her pale, limp form, whispering distractedly. I looked about.

  “Where’s the queen, Madame Elisabeth? Which one is the queen?”

  “The queen, dear heart? Oh, I do not see the queen anywhere.”

  A team of doctors milled around the slumped body, bleeding it. Elisabeth and I moved forward until one of the doctors stepped aside and we could get a better view. She was certainly still alive, her flat bosom was moving up and down. I leaned forward to have a good look. Here was the queen’s person. I saw the blood of Marie Thérèse, Princesse de Lamballe, in a little porcelain bowl that a doctor was staring into.

  “Where does it hurt her?” Elisabeth asked.

  “The nerves, madame. Her nerves are too easily alerted.”

  “Thank you,” Elisabeth said, trotting off. “That’s all we need for now.”

  “Excuse me,” I whispered to the doctors, “shall the queen be coming soon?”

  “The queen? What business is it of yours?”

  “I am with Madame Elisabeth,” I said. “It is Her young Majesty who wondered,” I lied.

  “The queen had wanted to stay,” said the doctor, “but I could not permit it. This unfortunate lady was seen to convulse, and convulsions bring about miscarriages, and so the queen, in her delicate state, was instantly removed.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Some five minutes.”

  “But five minutes!”

  “Come along, my heart!” called Elisabeth.

  We made a wax brain for de Lamballe, who recovered very shortly thereafter.

  In our private times, Elisabeth asked me about men and their bodies. I told her everything I knew, and made models so that she might understand better, and there were books brought up for consultation. I thought of Edmond again, though his body seemed so far away and as lifeless as cloth. I must be sensible, I told myself; I was brought up to be sensible; I must try to let th
e pain go. We went once to see a dog and bitch put in a pen together, but Elisabeth did not like that at all and it just made me feel ill and irritable. Still, she said, she was to be prepared for marriage, which she always insisted would be very soon.

  “Will you marry, my heart?” she asked.

  “No, madame, I doubt it very much.”

  “No, I didn’t think you would. I asked anyway, out of politeness. When I am married, I shall send for you. You’ll always be near.”

  She had me draw her a pair of male lips to practice kissing on.

  “No,” I said, “no, that is not right at all. You are pecking, madame. Have you never kissed a person before?”

  “Of course! Certainly! No, well, not in that way. Have you?”

  “Yes, I may say that I have.”

  “Oh, my heart, have you truly? Someone such as you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I will teach you.”

  {Lips for Practicing}

  I kissed her.

  “You kissed me!”

  “In instruction.”

  “Very well.”

  I kissed her again, more fully.

  {Lips of Madame Elisabeth}

  “Yes, that is how it is done,” I said.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Most certain.”

  “Horrid.”

  “Not really, no, it isn’t.”

  “Well, then, let us try once more.”

  And we did. And every now and then we tried again and kept our practice up behind closed doors. And sometimes too we should gently point and stroke the place about us where we kept our fellow organs.

  “Show me, madame, where I keep my heart. Touch there.”

  “Show me, my heart, where are my lungs, my womb.”

  What a royal body it was, and I, her twin almost, joyed in it. Our hearts, little women’s hearts, playing the same music to each other all alone.

  One morning, at long last, Madame Mackau was found quite suffocated upon the bloated mattress.

  Even after Mackau herself was taken away, a heartbeat seemed to linger in the mattress for a time, until it finally shrank from its obesity back into the modesty of its former days and was burned outside in a yard. And so, from the summer of Mackau’s illness, we entered the ghastly autumn of Madame de Guéméné.

  Guéméné the Rod, Guéméné the stickler, Guéméné matron of misery, her chin barely there at all—a lack of chin that must have made her furious all the time, for her scowl was perpetual, her attention continuous, her stare indelible. Pleasures were left behind then; Elisabeth was to be made into a woman, and this process, it was instantly clear, would hurt. Playthings: thrown out. Skipping ropes, balls, little dogs, miniature horses: all banished. “Sit up! Sit up!” was the call of those autumn days. Silly Bombe was forbidden access; when Elisabeth was caught whispering to her behind a door, what lecturing her misdemeanor caused. Simpering Rage could be seen but once a week. Insipid Démon could remain, if she was quiet, and she was; that was her role, always the silent one. My rival, plaster Jesus Christ, was out of his cupboard almost all the time. When Elisabeth lost her temper, and at first she did so a great deal, Guéméné allowed her to pound floors and kick furniture, but the chinless lady would not be beaten. A cane in female form, she opened wide the windows and invited my princess to bellow out, but no help ever came. Elisabeth, swollen-faced and miserable, had no choice but to quiet down. Once, when she bit Guéméné’s hand, she was slapped.

  “I am a princess!” she screamed.

  “Then be seen to behave like one.”

  Guéméné tugged out what joy there was inside the girl and replaced it with sitting upright, with quietness; before long Elisabeth could hardly join a conversation, terrified of being contradicted. Stowed away in my cupboard, called upon less frequently, I adapted to this new strict autumn, keeping my dress clean and curtsying at Guéméné whenever I could—and so I was allowed to remain, though the princess and I both feared that I would be sent away. In those autumn days of her last rebellions, and into the winter of her acquiescence, Elisabeth was never left alone. Someone was always sitting beside her, finding fault with the way she held a cup, or how much she ate, or how she carried herself. But at times, if I was careful, I still held her hand, or sneaked a hurried kiss in the modeling room. I told her often that I was her person, her body, that I should not be going away. As if in proof of this, I found my name printed in the new Almanach, the lowest member of her teaching faculty:

  M. le Roux, Bibliothécaire de Mad. Elisabeth

  Mlle. Payan, Lectrice

  M. Simon, Maître de Clavecin

  M. Boilly, Maître de la Harpe

  Mlle. Grosholtz, Maîtresse de Cire

  I studied this page a great deal. In solitary moments, I read it out loud to myself. And soon, not long after it appeared, I found myself at last in the presence of the queen.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Small incidents connected to a National Event.

  It began in the early hours of the morning with the ringing of the bells of the Chapel Royal, of Saint Cyr, of all the churches of Versailles, followed by the arrival of the Princesse de Lamballe in our corridor. I opened my cupboard a little and peeked out from my mound of blankets. It was December, we were under the weather of Guéméné, and I was very cold. With my bedding wrapped about me, I saw the astonished princess arrive with a great deal of fuss, trailed by servants and women, all looking alarmed.

  “Madame Elisabeth!” she cried, knocking on her bedchamber door. “The queen! The queen is in labor!”

  In our own small way, Elisabeth and I had already been preparing for the coming expansion of the royal family. We had made some twelve small wax babies, laying them out in a perfect line—a dormitory of them—in Saint Cyr. We set all other requests aside for a while; the birth of the royal child was all we could possibly consider. “Everyone in the palace,” Elisabeth said, “is quite desperate with expectation.” And now at last the moment had arrived, and the bells were sounding, and so was the Princesse de Lamballe.

  As Lamballe scurried off in a state of high agitation (something like a bony chicken shrieking through a farmyard), our corridor bustled with activity. Sitting in my open cupboard, still in my nightdress and sleeping bonnet, I dangled my legs off my shelf, pulled my blankets about me, and peered off to my left and then my right. The cracked windows along the corridor had been sealed off from the winter cold, but this was only partially successful; when I breathed, I could see the results.

  At length Elisabeth appeared, fully dressed and trailed by three of her ladies. As she made her way toward the place for royal births, the servants on either side of the corridor bowed as she passed. I bowed too, but Elisabeth stopped.

  “Oh, my body, my heart, what are you doing? I shall need you today more than any other. You must dress yourself and quickly too. Should the queen need our prayers, you must hurry to our workroom and quickly assemble in wax a little baby to be rushed to Saint Cyr. Do stir yourself, my heart, my person!”

  And so, on the day of the birth of the first child of Marie-Antoinette of Austria and Louis XVI of France, I dressed myself in public, in that chilly corridor, with many looking upon me and urging me to hurry. When I was ready—and not a moment too soon, they made quite clear—little Elisabeth marched on, intent on being an aunt. I brought up the rear of her procession, just behind the Marquise des Monstiers-Mérinville. The farther we traveled, the harder we must push, for the whole palace was desperate to be as close as possible to the birth of the new Bourbon. Elisabeth, being the king’s sister, caused a parting in the sea of people, and Moses-like we pressed on, the waves of people crashing back behind us as soon as we passed. I felt the palace, not without pleasure at first, growing warmer and warmer as we journeyed toward its center. The population had been moving in since the bells sounded, people growing thicker and thicker and louder and louder and hotter and hotter the closer to the birth room we progressed.

  The hottest locatio
n of all—a baker’s oven of a place—was the queen’s bedchamber that very early morning, and the hottest part of that boiling address, the very red burning coal of the Palace of Versailles, was the swollen belly of Queen Marie-Antoinette. French law mandated that various selected people must sit in on the queen’s birth to ensure that the child born was genuinely from the queen’s womb.

  We were in time. The child had not yet arrived. Elisabeth took a seat near the front, with other important personages upon chairs with armrests; only benches had been provided for lesser attendees. I was left to fend for myself. I could not yet see Elisabeth’s eldest brother, the prospective father, the king himself, but he must be somewhere in the room. I squeezed around, pushing a little against some very noble sightseers, until I had a tolerable view. There—at last—I saw before me Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna, or Marie-Antoinette, or the Queen of France.

  The royal head was sweating under the strains of the moment. It was a long head with pale blue eyes, rather far apart: I lost sight of it, then by maneuvering a little found it again. A sizable prominence of aquiline nose, a lower lip that stuck out rather more than the upper, a nicely rounded chin: once more I lost sight, then found it again. Above all else, a great expanse of forehead, covered at this moment with many beads of sweat. In that hot bedchamber, I had quite forgotten my chill of the morning, or that this was December.

  The queen sat up, causing a good stirring from all around, as we all strained to see her better. What a creature! What a long white neck. What sloping shoulders. But then she took a gulp of air and lay back down—to another stirring from the populace—and I lost her entirely from sight.

  I looked around for a place where I might be guaranteed a good view. There were no windowsills, and the few benches in front of the windows had already been taken. In that busy room with all its objects—mostly people by now—there seemed to me only one place where I could be guaranteed a truly unrestricted view. In one corner sat a mahogany chest rising five feet from the ground, an object with a top, which I might term a roof, and I thought I might happily sit myself there and observe all without fear of visual interruption. I tried to climb up its marquetry walls, but they were highly varnished and I didn’t get far up before slipping down. I tried to open the drawers, thinking I might climb them like steps, but they were locked, the object holding its five jaws firmly shut. And yet I was certain this was the place for me. I waited anxiously, and all the while still more people came in, and I could see less and less of the queen, gathering only that I had not missed anything very much; she had not yet said more than a few muffled sentences, and the royal people nearest her had made only a few muffled replies, but there was no yelling nor any screaming of baby, so I was certain I still had time.