Little: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  Head. By head. By head. Mouth by mouth. Swallow by swallow. I caught them. I moved the clay, went back each Sunday and checked and changed and started again, stopped and gave up and started again. And slowly the eaters came to me. Back again the king’s chin; back again the queen’s earlobes; back again the comte’s forehead. Back again, back again. Look, look harder, that’s not right, not yet, scrape it back, pull it all down again, look harder, concentrate. I’d never do it. I’d do it. I’d never do it.

  It took me months. No, it took me years. I worked when Elisabeth was away with her aunts and often while the palace slept. Only four at first: king, queen, king’s brothers. Four heads with armatures nailed into planks, damp cloths over them, hidden in my cupboard after my night’s work; after they grew too numerous, secreted in cupboards in our workroom. Just the heads. The bodies could be supplied later.

  The shape of each head came quickly enough, but then followed months of adjustments. Toward the end I might stare at the clay head for hours and make only a single small change, add only a single moist crumb of clay the size of a rice grain over two hours, then repair to bed to dream of clay heads. But their skin was clay skin, and clay skin smoothed down and finished is poreless, and human skin is pitted and pored: my spectacles insisted upon it. In order to make my royal family more real, then, I asked Elisabeth if I might eat some oranges in my cupboard and she had them sent up for me. Orange skin, like ours, has pores. By making a cast of an orange’s skin, I discovered, you may imprint the negative of that cast upon the clay flesh of royal heads, giving their skin all the detail, all the small dents, of a truthful real head. I stood back. I clapped.

  In this way, I cast them. I covered those clay faces with the deadening plaster, as if I were murdering my own work, and ruined the clay heads taking the plaster away. I mixed the wax, poured it in the mold, and opened the mold—and there, there!, what had been clay was now wax flesh. Is that the queen? High forehead, pronounced lower lip? Close my eyes, open them again. Is that the queen, not cast from life but sculpted from observation? Close your eyes. Open them again. Yes, I thought it was. The very queen.

  These were my marks. On my own. These hands, these thoughts. There’s the queen, but not only she: there’s Marie Grosholtz too, both alive in that head. The moment I understood this, I couldn’t stop. It was all I wanted to do.

  I danced around the queen’s head. I made you. I did. Welcome.

  “What’s the noise? You’ll wake everyone!” There was Pallier. “What’s going on? What are you do— Why, that is the queen, isn’t it!”

  “Say it again.”

  “That is the queen!”

  “Once more, beautiful Pallier!”

  “That’s the queen!”

  It was, and then followed the king (once more), the Comte d’Artois, the Comte de Provence. My royal family. At night, or when Elisabeth was away, I sat with the royal heads and talked to them, as if I were a part of that family. I would rather spend time with my heads than with real people. For a while I kept them; they were so dear, my first heads. They would be greeted as a triumph at the Cabinet, my royal family, so I told myself in my cupboard. Once they had the heads, I thought, I would be allowed to stay here. I would ask my master again if I could be let go. That was what I told myself. I lied, of course. I wanted to be appreciated. Who does not? We all do.

  And so I betrayed myself.

  I sent the heads away.

  I wrote a letter explaining who each head was and enclosing my many sketches. Each wax head was placed inside its own mold, the halves of the mold were tied together with rope for protection, and they were crated up and sent to the boulevard. I closed my eyes, trying to imagine them opening up those heads. I was almost sad that I could not be there to witness it, but here was my home, here was where I belonged, in a cupboard, in the workshop with Elisabeth. I must forget about those royal heads now, I told myself, and concentrate upon the other human pieces I had so loved before. But how I missed them, how dull life was without them.

  A week later came a letter from my master:

  Dear Little Marie Grosholtz,

  The Widow Picot and I shall be at Versailles Sunday next to observe the Grand Couvert ourselves and to judge the likenesses. We expect you to meet us at the gate and to show us the subject of your long exile.

  I remind you that I am your master,

  Curtius

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  My family at Versailles.

  The coach discharged its passengers. There was no mistaking them. Versailles people obeyed rules and were very strict and though they wore many colors they were not necessarily colorful. Monkey House people were loud and triumphant and were noticed a good deal off. They didn’t suit Versailles; they weren’t made for palaces; it wasn’t the sort of architecture that should contain them. Before me were two worlds colliding.

  There was Doctor Curtius looking very stretched and strained, an old heron in a gleaming new suit, quite out of place for the palace, and with a large black spot on his left cheek.

  “Sir!” I cried. “Here I am!”

  “Is that you?” he said, a dear grin cracking his face apart. “It is! It is indeed! How old you are!”

  “Sir! Doctor Curtius!”

  “Marie, Little Marie.”

  “Little! Just Little it is,” came the booming voice.

  The widow, red-faced and agitated, striking out with a stick, awkward in a large hooped dress. She was smoking a cigar.

  “Madame!” I said.

  “What trouble you have put us to.”

  “Little!” came a bark.

  There was Jacques, hobbling, struggling in a waistcoat. “Yellow nankeen,” he said. “From Japan!”

  “Oh, Jacques,” I said. “Dear Jacques. What murders have there been since I last saw you? What hangings?”

  “Such! Many!”

  The whole family had come, except Edmond of course; he was neither present nor talked of. And there were other new people, boys all dressed identically in suits, all with a red rosette upon their jackets with a C embroidered in its center. Jacques had one who served under him, a rough-looking lout with a shaved head.

  “Who are these?” I asked.

  “Who indeed!” said the widow. “We have grown much since you left us and there are many more in our employ. We couldn’t wait for you to come back to us.”

  “Of course not, madame.”

  “We have another four and twenty, and not just the Monkey House either. We’ve grown buildings!”

  “Buildings! Good heavens!” I cried. And it seemed to me that the widow had kept up with this extraordinary growth of architecture herself, that her body had likewise developed real estate. “I never thought of it.”

  “You think of very little, as I recall. Isn’t that why you’re called Little?”

  Two of the boys were carrying heavy card boxes.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Never you mind,” huffed the widow. “Come along, show us in, let us see it all. We have not come all this way to look at you. I should think not indeed!”

  I showed her which windows I had looked through, pointed up to the roof. Before long, the bells of the royal chapel sounded, and it was time to go inside. The widow’s eyes darted all around. My master was wearing a hired sword, and with it he looked like a greyhound with an excited tail.

  “Did you like my heads?” I asked.

  “It’s actually quite dirty,” she said.

  “It is so big, you see,” I said, “so very big that it’s hard to keep it all clean. There are wild cats. In my cupboard there was a mouse. My heads?”

  “Do they let just anyone in?” asked the widow, observing the crowd forming for the Grand Couvert. “Of course, we’re different,” she said in a loud voice, “our girl is artist in residence to the Princesse Elisabeth. What’s through this door?”

  “It is time,” I said, “for the Grand Couvert. We must hurry now.”

  “No one hurries
me. Do they, Curtius?”

  “Oh no, Little, she will not be hurried.”

  In the guardroom where everyone else was waiting, the boys with boxes began to hurriedly unpack them. They contained, I saw, my wax heads of the king and the queen.

  “No, please!” I cried. “You should not take them in with you. You must not!”

  “We must,” the widow said, “to judge their accuracy.”

  I could not stop them. I never could. In they went. First the widow, then Curtius, then the boys with the wax heads, then Jacques and his boy. I did not press toward the Swiss Guards as usual, but kept close to the windows and so avoided most of the commotion that followed.

  Unlike my previous visits to the Grand Couvert, there was no timely passing of people from one room into the other; instead, a major block had formed before the horseshoe-shaped table. Now the talking was only on the public side of the Swiss Guards. On the other side, the royal side, there was only staring, not at the food but out at the common people.

  I saw the heads then, my heads, but I was not holding them. There they were, king and queen, and before them King and Queen. Likenesses doubled! Where first I had admitted happiness and ownership, however, now a sudden doubt crept in, spreading and infecting. The heads held up had no bodies to them; worse than that was their baldness, for they wore no wigs and so appeared scalped. They were terribly naked and unadorned. And where their eyes should have been, there was nothing, just empty sockets. It was as if these heads had come straight from the dissection room, as if the king and queen were seeing their very own deaths. I hadn’t meant that. That wasn’t right. A terrible mistake. They should never have come together, my king and queen and the originals.

  Only then I heard a very definite clapping. It was from Curtius for certain. And I thought, How wonderful! How wonderful it was after all! But then there came a wail, a woman’s wailing, and then a bark, like a dog, and then cries and shrieks and screams.

  I ran away.

  I fled.

  I hid.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Closing the cupboard doors.

  Polignac’s bit-maids found me out at last, hiding in a courtyard where they kept the dogs. I was hurried back inside to Elisabeth’s rooms, pushed into my cupboard, the doors locked behind me. Perhaps an hour later, the doors were opened and Polignac herself pulled me out. Two servants tugged up my dress and Polignac lofted a cane and gave me twenty hard strikes. To be treated so like a child, though I was not so many years from thirty! When she was done I was put back in the cupboard, panting and stinging and pulsing.

  There in my cupboard, locked away with no candles, I lay in the darkness peering through the keyhole. No one ever stopped. Elisabeth came by once, running to the cupboard, but one of Polignac’s people was following her, and she was moved on before she could speak to me.

  Through the keyhole I saw the workroom of Madame Elisabeth being emptied out. All the wax and paint, the jars of turpentine and oil, all the tools, they were taken away. I called out and banged my feet against the cupboard door, but no one came.

  When the doors were unlocked at last, Pallier was there, telling me kindly not to speak. How strange that was coming from her. Then I noticed something hanging from my cupboard door: a wax object, suspended from a string. Elisabeth had come not to talk to me, as I had thought, but to pin something to my door. It was a single, well-modeled object.

  “I am a fine teacher,” I said. “There is no doubting it.”

  The sign beneath the wax organ said:

  INSIDE THIS CUPBOARD

  IS THE SPLEEN

  OF PRINCESSE ELISABETH

  DO NOT DISTURB

  Pallier whispered that Elisabeth would see me now.

  In I went. The room, disapproving at best, seemed especially vehement now.

  “You’re going home,” Elisabeth said.

  “This is my home,” I said.

  “I was only lent you, for a time, and now that time is over.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your master has need of you.”

  “But I don’t want to go.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “I should stay here with you.”

  “You’re not mine.”

  “I have much more to teach. There’s so much more.”

  “All done.”

  “But I can come back once a week? I can visit you?”

  “Grosholtz, listen, my body, listen. I will never see you again.”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “Those terrible heads, bald and eyeless. The queen was deeply upset. Faces with mouths agape, cheeks stuffed. Like people in a common tavern.”

  “It was not my intention—”

  “It was not yours indeed, it was never yours. You never asked. You took. Your employer has been fined. It was only because I intervened that they were not locked up. One of your people was quite violent and had to be suppressed. We looked after you, we fed you, we were ever-loving and attentive. And in return you showed us as pigs in a sty.”

  “No, just as you were. Just exactly as you were.”

  “It is not for you to judge us.”

  “I did not.”

  “You must not look at us. A servant may not look upon a king and a queen. What a thing to have done, Marie. How could you have made those heads?”

  “Please, Elisabeth, please believe me. I could not stop myself. I am sorry for it now, very sorry, but when I was working, I had such a need for it that I could not stop myself. I shall not do it again.”

  “No, you shall not.”

  “I do promise.”

  “It is too late.”

  “My place is with you.”

  “No, no longer.”

  “Madame Elisabeth, you are not throwing me out?”

  “Marie Grosholtz, it is not just your master who insists you leave. I have to be grown-up now. I have to put you away. I’m not going to see you anymore. I’ve done with playing. They are saying I have been left too long to myself.”

  “To yourself? I was with you!”

  “It does no good to be alone so long. I am to spend more time with my aunts now. Good-bye, Marie Grosholtz. Think of me. No, no, you must not touch. You must not.”

  “It’s me, your heart speaking. Listen to me, I beg you. I want to be with you.”

  “No, I won’t cry today, I’ve lost the trick of it.”

  “I’m crying.”

  “Servants should not have feelings. It is a cold you have. I’ll pray it improves. Whatever you feel, master it, keep it inside. It mustn’t be seen. How odd-looking you are. Were you always this uncomely? Perhaps you were. I must have become used to it.”

  “How shall you manage? What will become of you?”

  “To think you once thought we looked alike. No one should say that now.”

  “You’ll be an old aunt by the end of the week.”

  “Good-bye, Marie.”

  “You’ll call for me. You always said you’d call for me. I shall be waiting.”

  “Good-bye. Good-bye.”

  “Can’t I say sorry? Can’t you see I’m so, so sorry?”

  Her final gift to me was the wax spleen.

  “Elisabeth!”

  So I learned not only that your loved one may be forbidden you, given away to someone else, but also that though you love someone they may run from you, and you may open your arms but they shall not come in. The Elisabeth I loved was no longer. What was left was a shell, a plaster personage. Hollow. Inside was nothing but stale air unable to get out. How I wished to crack her open.

  I was allowed to empty my shelves.

  I am tucked in the world, into the smaller parts of it. I do not impose myself in any grandiose way. I find the gaps and inhabit them. Now another gap had closed.

  I put my things neatly in my trunk. The trunk was taken down. I opened the door to her bedroom and saw the home of the cupboard Jesus.

  “You’re coming with me,” I said. �
��Be careful not to fall from a high window.” But when I opened his velvet-lined cupboard, he was not inside, he was out with her. He had beaten me. An hour later, when I went to say good-bye to Elisabeth, there were footmen guarding the room where all her furious objects were kept, and I was not permitted entrance. I needed one last head; I could not leave without it.

  “Madame Elisabeth! Madame Elisabeth!” I called out. “Please, Madame Elisabeth, I never took your likeness. I must have your likeness—not for anyone else, only for myself. Oh, please. Madame Elisabeth, it’s your heart calling for you! Your spleen if you must. Do but answer me!”

  A lady-in-waiting came.

  “Démon! Démon! Thank heavens it’s you. Let me in, will you?”

  “My name, please to note, is the Marquise des Monstiers-Mérinville,” she said. “We do not know you. Was there ever such a person in Versailles?”

  “Please, Démon . . .”

  “Do not address me.”

  “Please, I must say good-bye to Madame Elisabeth.”

  “You are no longer required.”

  “Can I see her face? Just for a moment.”

  “You must go now. This was not the place for you.”

  She turned away, Démon did. So solid, as I had not seen her before, quite an adult. The final favorites, Démon and the painted plasterman. Servants took me downstairs, one at each arm, escorting me out in a rush.

  As I was hastened along the corridors, I saw that I was not the only person packing up and leaving. The corridors were littered with trunks and servants running here and there with objects wrapped in linen. “Where are they all going?” I asked. “Why are they all leaving?” But I was not answered.