Little: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  “Yes, I think you must.”

  “I do not mind the work.”

  The staff, all those new people, how they looked up to me! They nodded when I came near and kept their distance, such was their respect. I asked them to do things and they did. I’d never before had that experience. Georges was very busy working alongside me; he was not so talkative as before, but that was because there was so much to be done. And we were doing such important work, getting the heads down, putting them in the hall so people could come and see.

  Even if the widow did not let me see Edmond, she began to show me new respect. She stopped ordering me around, and soon withdrew from the Monkey House altogether during the day, spending her time with Edmond at the Palais-Royal. She left me alone.

  With all the incomings, there was also one outgoing. The young fellow of sixteen called André Valentin, the one with the wide-set eyes. It was not his eyes that got him thrown out but his character, for Martin discovered that Valentin was stealing from the cash box. The poor boy was terrified. The widow summoned us all into the great hall and asked Valentin if it was true. He tearfully nodded and begged to be given another chance. The widow stood before him for a moment, then she leaned forward and ripped the C rosette from his breast.

  “No! No!” the boy cried. “Sir, please!”

  Curtius only shook his head sadly.

  “Put him out,” the widow said.

  “Please! Another chance!” he cried, looking both this way and that.

  Jacques’ boy, Emile, marched him to the gates, shoved him to the other side.

  “This is not the end of André Valentin!” he screamed. “One day I shall return, and then I shall pull this house down!”

  I felt for him, poor boy, headed now toward the ditch. But I had no time to wonder over his poor fate. We had wax people to show. We had never been so popular. Men and women every day, hundreds of them, paying three sous each—reduced price for vainqueurs de la Bastille.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Some love stories.

  This is the story of a shop. The story of a business, of its high and its lows, of its staff coming and going, of profit and loss, and sometimes of the outside world and the people who came knocking on our doors. So then. Let me explain.

  The royal family, including Princesse Elisabeth—most especially my Elisabeth—were moved from Versailles to Paris. A vast mob of women from the markets had come to the palace demanding bread, and the king, surrounded, fearing for his life, was bullied by a great gathering of common folk. The palace was shut up. I would have been frightened for Elisabeth, but I knew nothing of the bloody upheaval until it was over. A head was brought to me—that was how I knew.

  A cloud of fishwives from Les Halles arrived on our doorstep with a parcel wrapped in an apron. They spilled it onto the table. One head, inexpertly severed.

  “Here,” a woman said. “I brought this specially.”

  “Well,” I said, “who is it, then?”

  “A guard from Versailles.”

  “A Swiss Guard?”

  “Yes, one of them.”

  “I don’t recognize this face. I doubt that his own mother would.”

  “Make it over in wax.”

  “It has been kicked, I think.”

  “Ddddd, ddddd.”

  That was Florence, the cook. Florence, among them!

  “Florence, have you been there? Did you go?”

  “Ddddd. Did. I did.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do it,” Florence said. “Make the head.”

  “I wish you had brought it to me before it was so tossed about.”

  “Do it.” No smile about her now, none at all.

  It was Florence who told me that Elisabeth had been moved. They were so proud of their work, those women.

  “Your old home has been shut up,” she said.

  What emptiness then. Has there ever been such emptiness as Versailles abandoned? And then: Where to put all the people who had lived there?

  “I am sorry to hear it.”

  “Sorry, are you?” asked Florence.

  “Well, for Elisabeth’s sake.”

  “Sorry? She says she is sorry?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t be, can I? I’m just a servant. I only do what I’m told.”

  “Then do that head there.”

  “Yes, Florence.”

  “And later I’ll bake you something nice.”

  The next morning I went to the Tuileries Palace, where the royals had been taken. How my heart thumped as I walked through the gardens. There were Swiss Guards and soldiers in formation before the palace and a great thronging of Parisians hoping for an eyeful. I pushed my way to the front—children are allowed to do this, and I was still as small as a child—and confronted the guards. “I am a former servant of Madame Elisabeth,” I said, “a special servant.” A friend, even. Would they let me in? “Tell her that Marie Grosholtz,” I said, “her heart and her spleen, is waiting just outside.”

  “Go away, miss.”

  “Just tell her. My name. She’ll want to see me.”

  “No visitors. Get away!”

  Someone in the crowd spat at me then, and another shoved me, and then Georges was beside me, picking me up, come to fetch me because a new head had arrived. And so I hurried home, telling myself I’d be back later. Such unlikely things happened these days, after all: The people had challenged the royal family. I had challenged the Widow Picot. And this: Edmond was out of the attic. Elisabeth was closer. We lived in Paris, all three of us: he and she and I.

  “I shall go soon,” I told my master. “Make use of me now, while you still can. Once I’m gone, you shall have to take the heads and make them. I’ll have no more of it.”

  But Elisabeth was not quite ready for me yet. I returned to the Tuileries, but the guards would not even speak to me.

  Parisians spent money at the Cabinet of Doctor Curtius. They came to see the latest heads; they talked of citizens and liberty; they looked at each other and at the heads. So many people viewed the new displays of Parisian life; some wept at a distance, others couldn’t get close enough. Their money was taken upstairs to Martin Millot, entered in the book, and then into the strongbox. I saw it all, for I could walk into the great hall whenever I wished. When the widow went out into it, she came back a little redder of face, once or twice shaking her head, once even in tears, shouting at everyone.

  Beyond the Great Monkey House, there was to be a huge festival.

  “What men are these new Parisians, Little!” Mercier said. “A tableau of concord, of work, of peace. This is the greatest spectacle ever seen. All divisions of citizens are there, preparing for the Fête de la Fédération. The multitude of the city has come out to work selflessly in common cause, readying the Champ-de-Mars for the celebration. All are brothers and sisters, fishwives and aristocrats. Little, we have lived to see it: the perfectibility of man! All will come! All will cheer!”

  “Will Princesse Elisabeth be there?”

  “Everyone! Everyone!”

  “How I should like to see her.”

  The rain fell in torrents on the Fête de la Fédération, but it did not matter. Thousands of people swarmed into the city, and many of these visited Curtius’ wax populace, marveling at the times they lived in. In that brief moment at the festival, people loved one another and shook hands and kissed their neighbors. A great lightness marked the city; these were miracle days when everyone was beautiful and young, when this city of Paris was briefly utopia. Even Jacques Beauvisage and his Emile thrived within it, roaming the streets, finding and feeding stray dogs, Great Danes and poodles, spaniels limping the thoroughfares, elegant dogs hastily abandoned by aristocratic owners. Curtius sat with the widow in her office, making her small wax ornaments of fruit or flowers. She did not display them, she kept them in a drawer, but she did not throw them out.

  On one of those strange days, in her wax distraction, she left Edmond alone in the yard of the Great Monkey H
ouse, and I quietly went to him. In the sunlight I saw his blue veins but also a chipped tooth, the mole on the back of his neck. I knew these spots of his: if he was in the sun for any time, freckles would appear on his lower eyelids and on the bridge of his nose, above his dear, uneven nostrils. And then I saw it: his ears began to redden.

  “Edmond?”

  “Marie.”

  “Edmond! Are you there?”

  “Marie . . . Here.”

  “Are you back? You are!”

  And then, so soon: “Edmond!” called the woman. “Edmond, where are you? Come at once!” His mother was alert, hollered for him once more, and to her he went. But he turned and waved.

  It was during that brief season that Curtius summoned me across into his workshop, almost blushing, some semblance of health upon him. “Do you know about such things, Little?” he said shyly. “Do you have any notion on this topic? Any thoughts? Any advice to give me?”

  “What is the subject, sir? You haven’t said.”

  “I haven’t? I thought I had. Well, love, Marie. Do you know anything about it?”

  “I do, sir, I do. It is my greatest subject.”

  “But do you think, Marie, as a person, you are a person, do you suppose it might be possible that such as I might love?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “But do you think that it might happen that such as I might be loved?”

  “I do think it possible, sir.”

  “You see, since the recent great changes in business, there has come likewise a change over her. I have noted it. Charlotte, dear Charlotte. Before she needed me only for business, but now I think there is a different need. I do not imagine it. No. Love,” he whispered, “love. What is it? To see that on a face. To capture that in wax. It would be something.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Reductions in the family.

  She did a very stupid thing, Elisabeth did. She tried to get away. I was so angry with her. To think she’d have left without saying good-bye. To think she’d have risked her life.

  On the night of the twentieth of June, the king, the queen, their two surviving children, and my Elisabeth—all dressed as assorted servants and footmen and governesses, roles they could never convincingly play—fled Paris in a burdensome carriage. At eleven o’clock the following night, the longest day of the year, the fugitives were apprehended in the countryside and brought back to the capital. The whole affronted city came out to watch: the people clogged the streets, filled the windows, climbed the roofs, all watching the impossible sight of the clumsy royal carriage returning at footpace to the Tuileries. The Assembly had mounted signs of warning:

  ANYONE WHO APPLAUDS THE KING WILL BE BEATEN

  ANYONE WHO INSULTS THE KING WILL BE HANGED

  The crowds kept their hats on as the king passed by. They peered in the windows of the carriage; they stared so close. I was there in that crowd; I tried to see her, but I couldn’t get close enough. For just a moment I thought I saw the back of her head, her cap, a little of her blond hair. My Elisabeth. She nearly went away, I told myself, but she’s come back, and I shall see her again one day soon, when she calls for me. She’s sure to call now.

  The other royal family, my family of wax, were trundled in a cart in the opposite direction, moved from the Palais-Royal to the Great Monkey House. I was so happy to have them, but they had been sent now to be exhibited with all the sawn-off heads, with the felons and the guilty. They were no longer displayed in a re-creation of the Grand Couvert, but rather placed around a simple table with a man in National Guard uniform rushing in upon them as if reenacting the moment when they were apprehended, at a place called Varennes. There was no time to make a fresh head for the guard, so they found that of a lesser-known poisoner, withdrawn from exhibition long ago, and disguised him with a new black wig. The only royal countenance missing was that of Elisabeth, because I had never modeled her. As if I’d saved her from the scene.

  On the seventeenth of July, the National Guard, under the command of Lafayette, fired on a massing of demonstrators, killing fifty. And so the wax Lafayette was brought in to join the criminals on the boulevard, leaving the widow ever lonelier in her dwindling Palais-Royal. The former mayor Monsieur Bailly took the same journey, as did Calonne and Mirabeau; all the waxworks were coming home. On the first of April, the widow herself finally abandoned the Palais-Royal. It was almost empty by then, just a smattering of worthies: Voltaire and Rousseau, Gluck and Franklin and the Montgolfier brothers. Edmond was returned to the Monkey House, though kept upstairs.

  On the twentieth of April, fearing invasion, France declared war against Austria and Prussia. On the twenty-fifth, the highwayman Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier was executed in a very new way, using a machine designed by Monsieur Louis. The louisette, as it was called, involved a tall wooden frame and a large angled blade; when a lever was released, the blade was dropped from a height directly onto Monsieur Pelletier’s neck, causing his head to leap away from his body. Jacques and Emile were there to see it. They came back very disappointed.

  “Couldn’t see anything,” said Jacques. “Too fast. Off before you knew it.”

  And the shop went about its business, busier than ever. What industry was found within this factory, what a machine for reproducing recent history! None of us had a large understanding of the tides of man; each knew only his little portion. For some it was hair, for others teeth; one concentrated on eyes, another on paint; one mixed the wax, another prepared the plaster. No one could see beyond his own individual station. Only together did we make the anatomy of a city in change; only together did we render things legible to all.

  The widow in her office smoked cigars and sucked at quills, wondering if she had missed this or that, fretting over decisions, no longer quite sure which way to turn. She stitched a red Phrygian cap for the head of Louis XVI; when that was over, she worked on the new uniforms for the Cabinet’s front-of-house staff. Once these had been dressed as National Guardsmen, but the Guardsmen had lost their popularity after they fired upon citizens in July, so now the boys were to be dressed as sans-culottes, the clothing of the working class: striped trousers and loose shirts and simple jackets. They still wore the Curtius rosette, but to this was added a tricolor cockade: red and blue, the old colors of Paris, and white, the color of the royal family.

  Farther down the corridor, I toiled away in the main workshop, opening the molds and freeing wax heads. With me was Georges Offroy, ready with a palette of pinks and reds. In my old workshop next door was the business of hair implantations and teeth and eyes. On the public floor at the cash box was Martin Millot. We lowered our entrance fees, but the public made up the difference, flocking to us in greater multitudes. Children came quoting loudly from the Rights of Man and Citizen. Young maids spat at our wax Lafayette, calling him Corrupter. Old men came, speaking only of the fatherland. To visit Curtius’ in those days was to be patriotic.

  On the night of August first, no great national event but one of significance in our home: I heard Curtius and the widow upon the landing. My master had hold of Henri.

  “It’s time to put him away, Charlotte. He’s dead! He’s dead! Come out with me.”

  “I can’t!” she said, and there were tears in her voice. “Be gentle! A little at a time. I’ll take away his clothes, but no more. He’s my prop. I could have done none of it without him. You never knew him. He’s a greater man than you’ll ever be.”

  “But I am alive!”

  “Please, Philippe. I am learning.”

  The next morning, Henri was naked upon the landing.

  On August tenth, there was an enormous gathering of citizens demanding the abdication of the king. From the Great Monkey House we heard the shot and cannon of the Swiss Guards defending the Tuileries. Elisabeth! I thought. She is inside there. I went to my workroom and took out the heart and the spleen. “Be safe, be safe, be safe.”

  The Monkey House was locked and shuttered up, like all the other houses around
the city. We could not go out; people who did were shot. In the great hall, the hollow people shook a little to the loud report of the guns, Bailly trembled, the members of the royal family tableau jostled in their seats. We lay some of the wax people down upon the ground so that they might not damage themselves should they fall. Everything trembled to the noise of the cannon.

  “Please be safe, be safe, please be safe.”

  Henri Picot’s bell rang out. When the bolts were pulled back and the doors opened we saw Jacques Beauvisage at the gates and with him his Emile. Emile was very slouched, his face very gray, his eyes closed. He was not standing up by himself. And then Jacques Beauvisage, chronicler of the very best murderers, lifted his crop-headed child over the threshold and it was certain that Emile Melin was no longer living. Jacques had at last seen a murder at firsthand.

  “Jacques, what has happened?” called my master.

  “Murder! Murder, murder, murder! Killed my boy. My little boy!”

  “Oh, Jacques!” I cried. “Poor dear Jacques!”

  “BOY!” roared Jacques.

  By now, the whole city was shut down. Men rode from street to street announcing a penalty of death for harboring any Swiss Guard from the Tuileries Palace. Searches went on through the night. The whole city was shaken upside down in the hunt. If the Swiss Guards were gone, then the barrier between the common and the royal was dissolved, and all must spill together in a general confusion of flesh. I did not know if Elisabeth was alive or dead.

  “Help,” wept Jacques. “Oh, help!”

  In the hot late morning afterward, in my workroom, it suddenly grew very dark. I went to the window, pushed it open, and there came a horrible buzzing. It was flies on the window glass blocking the light. Thick black clouds of flies moved along the boulevard. There were so many bodies then, all over the city.

  Officers wearing tricolor sashes banged on the door and demanded to know my master’s nationality. “He is Curtius!” the widow yelled. “Curtius himself.” But the men did not seem to listen. They asked my master again, and he responded that he had been born in Switzerland. Then they asked if anyone else in the building was Swiss, and my master said that yes, his longest-serving assistant, a woman, happened also to be Swiss.