Little: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  “I am Marie Grosholtz,” I said.

  “Are you?” he replied. “And so what?”

  “I made the royal family.”

  “And there was I thinking it was God what done that.” He looked, one eye on each of us, before sneering away.

  “That’s André Valentin. He’s a ticket-taker. We have nothing to do with him generally.”

  “So much the better.”

  “Here it is then.”

  He showed me a hole that had been drilled in a wall. Through it could be seen the colossal business—people of wax!—and the people of flesh here to see them. What a populace!

  “I think,” I said, “that the rest of Paris must be empty now.”

  “I think it must be.”

  The old theater props were gone. Everything was very dark and poorly lit. The walls seemed to drip; great black shadows crept across the hall; all the murderers and their murdered were grimly about their business. This was the Salon of Great Thieves. Here were all the most horrible accommodated. Figures everywhere, standing proud in their mischief. And living people moved about these stillborn souls and screamed and laughed at them. Benches were distributed here and there, where a person might sit down and rest from all the infamy.

  “Do you see,” said Georges, “a person sleeping at a bench?”

  There in the hall was a middle-aged man, his head slumped on his shoulder. Two or three people approached him, pointing and smiling; finally, one stepped forward and tapped the man upon his knee. When he failed to move, he was jogged a little more. Then the little gathering gave a shriek, and I heard the announcement: “He’s wax!”

  “A waxman pretending to be the public!” I exclaimed.

  “That sleeping fellow,” said Georges, laughing, “is a wax replica of Cyprien Bouchard, painter of porcelain. He won the lottery.”

  The lottery, Georges told me, was drawn every six months. A very public occasion: names in a sack, and the name pulled out became a waxwork. There had been three lottery winners so far: a scullery maid, a coiffeur, and a painter of porcelain. They were placed among the exhibits, to mingle with the celebrated and infamous. Scullery maid with assassin, coiffeur near a thief, porcelain painter by drowned bride.

  “What an idea!” I said.

  All the sounds and humming of the expanded Monkey House, all its chattering and hammering, its odd knocks and reverberations, were so new to me. I lay alone on my pallet in my own workshop that night, after the public departed, and listened to the building breathing, making so many odd sounds—how the house talked, it always had, but in different sounds now, a new complaining, so that just when I thought I might drift into sleep at last, some new noise would waken me. And sitting up, I was certain I heard footsteps nearby.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  A visit.

  The sounds came back night after night as I lay upon my pallet, thumping, scratching. Sometimes, half-awake, I thought someone had come into my room; I would sit up in fright and look at the door, and sometimes it would be open, though I always closed it before going to sleep. My master, I said to myself, must have been up in the night.

  One early morning when I awoke, daylight just coming in, I was suddenly aware that I was not alone. Someone was sitting at the bench before me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  There was no answer.

  “Who are you there?”

  The person kept very still.

  “Is it you, Georges? Don’t fool around now, what are you doing?”

  But the person only looked on. As more light came I saw the slightest outline of a bonnet. It was a small woman sitting there.

  “Is it?” I said in a rush. “Elisabeth! You have come for me!”

  But she said nothing.

  “Cuckoo?” I ventured.

  And there was no response. The daylight rose and slowly I saw the person with more clarity. She was wearing a black dress and a white bonnet; upon her chest was a red cockade with the letter C in the middle, such as all the workers wore now. Slowly, slowly, I saw a little more. The woman was staring at me with shining dark eyes.

  “Who are you? Why have you come?”

  But she sat still and stared hard.

  “Please talk. Speak to me. Why are you here?”

  But she just stared.

  So I leaned forward and pushed her, and she tumbled forward and fell to the ground and lay there, very still.

  I leaned over and touched her hair. The hair came off.

  I screamed.

  By then I could see: the strange bald woman was not of the living, no she was indeed very dead, and had never been alive, for she was a doll. A doll of an undersized human, made of not wax but wood, wearing a cloth dress, with glass eyes set in her head. I sat her upright; how heavy she was, and awkward, her limbs falling this way and that. Someone had put her in my room to frighten me.

  What a horrible, mean-looking face. How it stared at me with its lifeless eyes. I put back her hair, though I hated to touch it. As I righted the wretched doll, the door moved and someone, some shadowy form that had been there all along, darted out through my master’s workroom and along the corridor. I rushed after it, following the creaking of the floor, as if the house itself wanted me to find the culprit. I stopped at the foot of the attic stairs in the old house, at the very edge of the forbidden territory. I didn’t care if the attic did kill me then; nothing would stop me.

  I creaked up, very careful, very slow. As I stood upon the top step, looking into the darkness, I saw no one. But then, after a long time, after my breath grew quieter, I saw a small patch grow a little lighter in the gloom, and that patch came drifting toward me. And its name, oh its name, yes its name was Edmond Henri Picot.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Stick no bills.

  Edmond Henri Picot. With a mustache and gray in his hair and haunted eyes. My hands over my mouth to stop the screaming. The figure came right up to me, so soft in motion that it might have been the wind stirred by a spider, and whispered:

  “Catarrh? This powerful treatment makes cure certain. Nazalia. Cleanses and purifies all the breathing organs; penetrating to the innermost crevices of the mucus membrane of the throat and nose, dissolves and removes all crusts and phlegm, disperses the catarrh, stops buzzing in the ears and cures partial deafness.”

  “Oh, Edmond!” I cried. “What has happened to you, my very dear Edmond?”

  “Do you suffer from skin sickness,” he continued, “in the form of skin shine, pimples, spots, and redness, that may lead to eczema with its terrible burning and itching? For an absolute cure for eczema, is two livres too much?”

  “Edmond, what has happened? Do you live up here all alone?”

  “A laxative and refreshing fruit lozenge. Most agreeable to take. Tamar Amar Indien Grillon for constipation, hemorrhoids, bile, headache, loss of appetite, gastric and intestinal troubles. Tamar Amar Indien Grillon.”

  “Oh, Edmond, what have they done to you?”

  “Mouse traps!” he said. “Rat traps! No more vermin!”

  Think, Marie Grosholtz.

  “We won’t talk about it. We’ll just sit here awhile. Let me catch my breath.”

  “An Oriental dessert in Paris—pistachio nuts.”

  “Yes, Edmond, yes of course.”

  I could see about the attic rooms now. They were . . . populated. Edmond had placed a shop doll in each lonely space. There were plates and cups, a small table, even a tablecloth. So then I supposed something else.

  “They know you’re here? Everyone below, I mean. You’re not really in hiding, are you, Edmond?”

  I held his hand. Every one of his fingers was stained black with ink.

  “Stick no bills,” he whispered.

  “They do know, don’t they?”

  “Bill posters will be prosecuted.”

  “Yes. They know.” Someone had been bringing him food. “It won’t do, Edmond.”

  I touched his face. His ears were pale and cold. I touc
hed his timid mustache.

  “Wait here, Edmond. I will be back in just a moment.”

  I took a sharp knife from my workshop, and some soft soap, and with a bowl and water I removed Edmond’s mustache. “There,” I said, “that’s better. You look more yourself already.” But in truth he looked like very little without the mustache there. “You do know me, Edmond. I know you know me. You left something in my workshop this morning. I do not know what has happened to you, but you shall be well again.”

  “Stick no bills,” he said.

  “Quite right,” I said.

  A bell sounded downstairs.

  “I must go now, Edmond, but I shall be back later. I have people to talk to down below. Yes, I do. But I’ll return!”

  Downstairs in my workroom, Georges had arrived.

  “Edmond Picot,” I declared, “is in the attic.”

  He said nothing, but looked uncomfortable.

  “Where is the widow?” I called.

  “Please, miss, she went out early today.”

  “Then where is Curtius?”

  “He is likewise gone out, very recently. You’ve just missed him.”

  “I believe you. He heard me up there no doubt and left to avoid any mischief.”

  “It is possible.”

  “Then Jacques?”

  “Has not come in yet.”

  “Tell me, Georges, does the widow know about the person in the attic?”

  “Yes indeed, miss. It was she what put him there.”

  “Oh, the wretched woman!”

  “He would not stop crying.”

  “The poor dear man! Georges, tell me what has happened.”

  “He went down with a brain fever, miss, total nervous exhaustion, and when the fever was done with, his brain had left him.”

  “No one told me!”

  “Forgive me, miss, but was there a reason they should?”

  “He is kept on his own in the attic?”

  “He is less panicky there, on his own. Have you seen this wooden doll, miss?”

  “Yes, I have. It gave me quite the shock.”

  “He made it. Do you know who it is of?”

  “Edmond made it? Did he? No, I do not know.”

  “Truly, you cannot tell who?”

  “It is a horrible-faced woman and it makes me shudder.”

  “Honestly, you don’t know?”

  “No, Georges, I don’t. I’m certain I’ve never seen anyone who looks like that.”

  “Why, it’s you, miss.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “I look like that?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Oh.”

  It seemed to me the very worst news.

  “You’re very quiet, miss.”

  I was.

  “I thought it would be flattering,” he said, “you know, to have a portrait done of yourself.”

  “That is how he sees me.”

  “Done from memory.”

  “I’m not a vain person. I never was.”

  “How he toiled over it.”

  “It has my old clothes, I see that now, and my measurements, I suppose.”

  “Indeed it is unmistakable.”

  “Is it?”

  “He took a deal of trouble over it.”

  “Did he? Did he?”

  “Shall I tell you a story?”

  “Yes, Georges, do.”

  “There then. I shall tell you about this doll. Perhaps it will help. Now, here I go. Whenever Monsieur Edmond came to visit here, he would sit with his mother awhile, or with his father’s dummy-shape, but later he started climbing up to the attic. There, after a time, visit by visit, he carved. He made you, by himself, up in the topmost rooms, when he was away from his wife. He carved your head out of one of the joists in the attic, though the attic complained of it so. He tugged the joist away, and since then I believe it’s slumped a bit, the attic. Afterward, whenever he came to visit, he would sit upstairs beside you.

  “When the widow at last found the doll, there was great noise. The doll was smashed about a good deal. He came less often afterward—his wife would not allow it—and there was some shouting, I recall, between Madame Cornélie and the widow. But the widow found her own uses for the doll. She put it in the windows—I’m sorry, miss—to scare the boulevard children when they came spying. And sometimes it was used as a weight, to press things down. It has propped doors open also. Jacques sometimes lugged it out onto the steps to sit beside him. The doll was let stay. And that’s the story, madame, of the doll, if you don’t mind.”

  Tears, tears for Edmond then and for me, snot and sobs.

  “Is he very broken?” I asked. “Do tell me, Georges.”

  “I believe so.”

  “And Cornélie threw him out?”

  “We don’t see her anymore. The Ticres brought him back. Madame Cornélie would not own him in such a state. She broke the marriage. In court, she did it proper. She protested how unhusbandly Monsieur Edmond was. And when the judge asked Monsieur Edmond to speak he just muttered his nonsense, and so the judge broke the marriage and he came back here.”

  “With a mustache and with his fingers dyed with ink.”

  “The widow cannot have him around the public. He is an unhappy sight. He disturbs people.”

  “She hides him.”

  “The wax people terrify him. He is happier in the top rooms. Food is taken up to him, and when he tries to come downstairs one of us boys will guide him back up. Those rooms are his; they are always spoken of as dangerous, but only so that he will be left alone. He is quite happy by himself. Much happier than he was. It was thought that you might distress him, so you were told never to go upstairs.”

  “But he found me out.”

  “Yes, he found you out, miss.”

  “He talks such nonsense.”

  “They’re advertisements, miss. Bills they did at the Ticre printworks. He learned them all. It’s all he ever says these days. He just repeats them, so many different ones, over and over. He is good for only light duties, and not really those. Sometimes he is given a little needlework, but he does prick himself.”

  “Does the widow go to him?”

  “Sometimes. But she is such a proud lady, she does not like to show her softer side.”

  “She leaves him alone up there?”

  “I think he is quite content.”

  “We shall see,” I said.

  I went up and down to him all that day and brought him his food. He kept very still there, muttering words from the printers.

  When at last she came home, I was waiting. I went upstairs, took Edmond’s hand, and led him back down. Into her office, without a knock.

  “It’s Edmond,” I said to her. “This is Edmond!”

  With trembling, furious face, with clenched jaw, she hissed: “Get him away! Back up to the top! Visitors are expected any minute!”

  “Stay, Edmond!”

  “GET HIM OUT!”

  A boy came.

  “This is your own son,” I said. “Will you not own him?”

  “NOW! OUT!”

  “Polite notice,” Edmond said, louder than usual, “no trespassing.”

  He went of his own accord, silently, from the room. The boy followed. I was left alone with her.

  “Do not presume to know me,” she said. “Get in my way again and I shall smother you. With these own hands I will do it. I’ll throttle the life out of you, I’ll extinguish you and be the happier for it. I could do it now. Who are you, a speck, and who am I? Get out!”

  I got out, but that was only the beginning of it.

  I washed Edmond’s fingers every day. I fed him. I went up and down the stairs for him. I lured him back to the workshop. I would find him again, I resolved, if Edmond was in there I’d find him.

  “Edmond, you know me,” I said. “You do. I’m back now. I’m here again.”

  “Ship’s chandler.”

  “I won’t leave you i
n the attic.”

  “We buy teeth.”

  “I’ll have you downstairs with me.”

  “Very convenient premises, apply within.”

  “I’ll have you about me, you’ll be my society again.”

  “Containing an area of about six thousand feet.”

  “And somewhere in all those words . . .”

  “Frontage about one hundred thirty-one.”

  “ . . . some genuine Edmond will fall out.”

  “To be let on lease.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Everyone is inside.

  Louis-Sébastien Mercier came to visit. He sought me out in my workshop where I made hands with Georges. Edmond sat mute in the corner.

  “There you are again, Little! Back on the real stage!”

  “Not too loud, sir, if you please. It isn’t good for Edmond. See him there. See what has become of him.”

  “Ah yes, I had heard. But, Marie,” he said, brightening, “I’ve seen your royal ones!”

  “Have you? How is Elisabeth?”

  “I mean, of course, the waxes. So bold. To show them so!”

  “Thank you. And how are you, dear Monsieur Mercier? How are your shoes?”

  “We are kept at it. How we are kept at it!”

  As Georges and I worked on, Mercier told us how the times kept him running from place to place, as if all of Paris were in continual earthquake. Sometimes, he said, he saw the widow rushing about too, breathless, gathering information. He took off his shoes and passed them around. They were indeed worn very thin. He showed us a little booklet he had recently finished, its subject the Celebrated Salons of Wax, and read to us a passage from it:

  In these new and fast-paced days, the Cabinet of Doctor Curtius is the essential sight at the Palais-Royal and on the whole of the boulevard. Some go so far as to say that nothing can beat it in the entire capital. Curtius’ is an excellent entertainment for men of any profession, for children, for women, for the aged, for the curious, for the uninformed, for the brave, for the uninspired, for the tired of life, for the understimulated, for the overdressed, for the ragged, for weaklings, for the powerful, for masters and for their servants, for the daring and for the proper, for the natives to understand quite how their capital works in these shifting times and for the foreigners to understand an unfamiliar city.