by Edward Carey
She bit him.
He stood in front of her aghast. And then he clapped. “How you come on, Charlotte, how you come on! Bite again. Bite now!”
She had indeed come back. But she was not her former self. She suffered Curtius to pick at her hair, sometimes let him trim it; he carefully, lovingly, pruned her. Edmond showed her the old account books; she, using her working hand, ripped some pages out. We carried her down into the great hall, but it was so broken now, full of empty seats where wax people had once sat, empty plinths. We passed her in front of the remaining wax people, but she gave no sign of caring. I showed her the new work, the many shelves of Marat in plaster, but she couldn’t be made to understand. I showed her the money we had made, but it was the new money, the assignat, and each time we placed it in her hand she let it fall. Then Edmond grasped her under her armpits, my master and I each cradled a leg, and we carried her back upstairs. She preferred, I think, to be in her room.
It was Edmond who brought up the dummy of Henri Picot, very drab now, bottomed out after Martin Millot—and any fellow thieves—had had at him, a very shrunken chest.
“I want you, Mother, to remember Father and to remember me. I am Edmond, your son. It may be that I look different from how I once was, that may well be, and you might struggle to recognize me. But I want you to know me as I truly am. Your son, grown strong at last.”
Curtius chewed on his knuckle, doubled up, looking away. Edmond set his deflated father in front of his mother, and she looked at it, and she looked at it, and she looked at it, but she saw nothing there.
“Father,” remembered Edmond, “spoke in a very quiet voice, a whisper almost.”
Curtius ducked, terrified of the widow remembering her husband.
The widow looked at the ceiling.
“Father,” remembered Edmond, “sometimes nodded when he talked.”
Curtius nodded repeatedly, furious at himself. He had got so used to mimicking the faces he modeled—trying so hard to understand them—that it had become a habit with him. And now, as Edmond recalled his father, my master involuntarily imitated him.
The widow looked at the ceiling.
“Father,” remembered Edmond in triumph, “would sing hymns as he worked.”
“No! He didn’t!” whispered Curtius, but he hummed a very little.
The widow looked at the ceiling.
“Father,” shouted Edmond, my Edmond so strong, “was pigeon-toed!”
“Oh, God!” said Curtius, turning his toes inward.
And the widow looked at the ceiling, but frowned.
“Father . . .” yelled Edmond. “Father’s ears stuck out.”
“Help! Help! Help!” screamed Curtius, cupping his own ears.
But the widow had fallen asleep.
Back at our small business, each time I opened the mold, I wondered if it would be someone else this time, if someone different might be lurking within, but it was only ever Marat. Sometimes, when I opened the mold, I could not help myself: I was sick.
“It’s the head,” I said. “It’s only the head. I feel better when I look away.”
So far had we come along in this domestic life that the following mundane, everyday conversation could be had, containing the sort of information that might occur in other houses where ordinary people went about their lives.
“No,” said Edmond, looking very serious. “I do believe I’ve worked it out. It’s not the head, Marie.”
“Is it not?”
“No. No. You’re pregnant.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Edmond keeps company.
On August twenty-third, a declaration called the Levée en Masse was made. The male population was required for military duty. Men were rounded up and marched off. Young men about their daily business were seized in the streets.
In the Monkey House, Edmond began to exist only behind closed shutters. Then even that was not enough. He must return to the attic.
“No, Marie. I’ll not go back up there again.”
“For your safety you must.”
“I hate it there.”
“But it is safest.”
“Is it? How can you say that? Have you stayed up there? That place has a terrible hold on a person. It dominates so.”
“No,” I said. “Not anymore, not now. Not who you are now.”
I went up to see him whenever I could, but he must stay hidden. If anyone should catch a glimpse of him, if anyone should hear him, he would be taken away and all would be lost. Edmond stayed upstairs, and downstairs no one called for him yet. In the meantime, the visitors purchasing Marats told me everything.
“Mercier has been arrested—did you not hear?”
“Poor Monsieur Mercier! I hadn’t heard,” I said.
“Then you don’t know who it was that arrested him?”
“No,” I said.
“It was Jacques Beauvisage.”
“Have you seen Jacques? Do you know where he is?”
“It’s what I was told. I was only told it was him.”
Edmond resigned himself to the top, with the wooden doll of me and his cloth people. He put all the shop dolls in one room, all in a grouping. Sometimes he would stand himself among them, as if they had all been convened for a meeting of a guild of mannequins. We stored dried food up there, just in case we were taken away. So that in our absence he could ration himself.
With Edmond upstairs, Doctor Curtius hastened the disintegration of Henri Picot. When no one was looking, he nonchalantly tugged upon the seams; he snipped off pieces; he used little patches of Henri Picot to block a hole in a wall. One day I saw that the former tailor’s dummy had now shrunk to no more than a pitiful rag which he kept in his pocket and occasionally used to wipe the widow’s brow. “Who’s this, who’s this now?” he asked her, holding up the rag, but she could not say and he nodded at that.
Another time, Curtius said to me, “I know anatomy. I’m acquainted with the human form. There were parts of mothers brought to me with puerperal exhaustion. I have seen heavy torsos come in. One I remember very well, she had not been so busied with as the others. I opened it up”—his voice now a whisper—“little person inside. What, Little, what, Marie, have you got there?”
“Baby,” I said.
“A real one?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “I hope so.”
“How did it get in there?”
“The usual way.”
He looked very confused. I pointed up at the ceiling.
“Oh!” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s very dangerous,” he said. “It’s not safe.”
“People have babies.”
“You’re old. You’re too old! You’ll die!”
“Perhaps, sir,” I said, “perhaps I won’t.”
“No, oh no. You will.”
Now my master had two women he must look after. He would listen to my chest and belly several times a day, demand that I lie down. He would wash my face, and shake his head. He even came to help me with the Marats. By then our own wax Marat had been returned to us; in its place at the Convention hung the painting by David. That began the decline in demand for Marat casts; though ours was taken from Marat’s own face, it was ugly next to David’s. He had made Marat beautiful and holy, as if he’d come out of the Bible, but he hadn’t really been like that at all. The painting was a lie.
Edmond stitched himself a simple sackcloth suit, one very like a shop doll’s.
“If anyone comes up here,” he said, “they won’t know me for one of them.”
“It is not forever, Edmond,” I said. “Remember who you are. You must not forget. Look out of the window, at Doctor Graham’s. I shall come to you tonight.”
“We shall have a child.”
“I hope so, Edmond, if we are lucky.”
“There’s one there, inside you, growing.”
“Yes, but that does not mean it shan’t suddenly stop.”
He started crying.
“But we shall do our best for it.”
“Yes, our very best.”
It was in those shadowy half-lived days when we moved so slowly in the darkness of our home, making such little noise, that news from outside came to us. Someone from another life. I hadn’t thought of her. I’d forgotten to think of her. If I’d been thinking of her, then perhaps she’d have been safe, she’d still be alive, she’d still be breathing.
I was going out for bread, but the back door was locked. Doctor Curtius was standing by, as if to block it. “Best not go out today,” he said. “We don’t need bread today.”
“We do,” I said. “We do need bread.”
“It is better,” he said, “that we don’t go out today.”
And at first I didn’t think of it.
Doctor Curtius insisted I sit with the widow for a while. Then Edmond showed me a papier-mâché mask he had made himself: it covered his face, with just holes for nostrils. The mask even had crudely painted eyes to cover his own.
“Don’t do it, Edmond, it’s too much.”
“No, no, I feel much better now. Much safer.”
He would put it on whenever he heard someone creaking up the attic stairs. Curtius wanted me to tell him all over again about our days in Berne. That day Curtius said, “Let us talk of our first heads. Put that blanket around you.” And so, wrapped in blankets, we sat by the fire and remembered all that old wax of no consequence.
I worked it out in the end.
My thoughts went like this: The shutters are all shut up, just as they were when the king died and the queen, so perhaps someone of great significance was killed off today. I wonder who. But when I cracked open one shutter and looked across at the remaining occupied houses, I saw that ours was the only house bolted and shuttered, and then the panic began to start. Perhaps it’s her, I thought. Maybe it’s her. Perhaps it is. Why else would they all be looking at me that way? Why would they be stroking and patting and petting so?
“Mmmmmmm,” said the widow.
“Elisabeth?” I asked.
“Marie?” said Edmond. “Let me stroke your belly.”
“Elisabeth?” I asked.
“Marie,” said my master, “sit by the fire with me.”
“Elisabeth?” I asked.
“Tell me of those Berne heads.”
“Elisabeth?” I asked. “Elisabeth? Elisabeth?”
At last he nodded. “Elisabeth.” And then, “Come sit by the fire.”
And I, so help me, I did.
Twenty-seventh May 1794, or Eighth Prairial, Year II, in the language of their new calendars. Perhaps she had her plaster Jesus with her, the wretched thing. I should have been there. All stuffed in the tumbrel, so many of them. Praying, no doubt, all the way. She went on that journey bareheaded, so they say, after the wind blew her kerchief away. She was number twenty-four. There were twenty-three before her that session. My Elisabeth. My Elisabeth, off to death without heart or spleen. My Elisabeth. She never called for me.
Why did you not call?
The next morning I went out to buy the bread.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Gone away.
On the tenth of June, 1794, the Law of Twenty-Second Prairial was passed: The Tribunal must be as active as the crime and conclude every case within twenty-four hours. And so people, ordinary everyday people, were herded from their gaol places to the courtroom sometime in the morning, their verdict was given by two o’clock in the afternoon, and by three they were in the tumbrel on their way to the guillotine. The public prosecutor pointed and declared: “You are guilty by dint of your dress. You are guilty because of your name. You for your mustache. You for your hair. You shall be killed because you were born with more money than others. You because you have less. You because you once whispered an opinion. You because you went out without your cockade. You because your neighbor was heard speaking about you. You because you have not been heard shouting loudly enough. You shall be killed, for we do not like your countenance. You shall be killed to make up the numbers. You shall be killed because we say so. We know you inside your head; you threaten our liberty; you are not safe.”
We stood in the mold room, Curtius and I, shelves on shelves of heads in negative.
“We must break them all up,” I said. “We must, sir. These molds will be our execution if they are found. Every day André Valentin is upon the boulevard. He’ll never leave us in peace. We must break them, sir. They’ll kill us otherwise.”
He looked bleak.
“Here is my life built with the widow,” he said. “To throw it all away!”
“It must be done, sir.”
“Only wait! Wait! Perhaps there is a chance. What if, Marie, we should fill the whole mold room, from floor to ceiling, with plaster? Fill it all in until there’s no room at all, only plaster. All plaster, right through plaster. And later—if there is a later—we come very carefully with hammer and chisel and chip it out. We put the molds in first, at the back of the room, cover them with a tarred canvas, then fill the rest with plaster. Whoever frees this room will know when they come to the canvas that they have reached the molds, safe and sound.”
And so we did. The molds were all stacked and covered over. Bucket on bucket of plaster was poured, and planks were secured against the doorway to keep the rising level in, until there was no room left in the room. A room has space in it; here there was no space, only a few head-size gaps, waiting for another time. I even put in the king’s head. No one had ever called for it, and those who had ordered it were no longer alive. We ripped away the lintels and put in a skirting board where the door once was. A no-longer door to that no-longer room.
We kept to the Great Monkey House, listening quietly as the people marched outside. Sometimes André Valentin appeared at our broken gates, smiling. Once he came in, pushing things over, even rapping his knuckles against the widow’s head. He demanded to know where Edmond was. We told him he had gone away, back to his wife. He did not believe us and set his eyes looking all over the Great Monkey House, even in the attic, especially in the attic, but even though he must have looked directly at Edmond among all those shop dolls there, his squinty eyes did not see him. He came back again, and he looked again, and he left again. And perhaps, we dared wonder, perhaps André Valentin shall just bully us in this way, perhaps he enjoys the game, and it shall only be that, just a game. But then Valentin was downstairs once more, kicking up the dust, upturning the chairs. Florence Biblot, former cook, was with him, a tricolor sash across her big body.
“Well, Citizen Biblot, are these the people?”
“Ddddd,” she said.
“And they are loyal to the overthrown king?”
“Ddddd,” she said.
“And they are Swiss?”
“Ddddd,” she said. “Rosti. Fleischkäse.”
“Anything else?”
“Ddddd,” she said. “They are sorry for the king. I heard her. Dddd. Heard them over the years, trying to get a portrait of the queen. Loved them. They all did. That one even lived at Versailles.”
She spat.
“Thank you, citizen,” said Valentin.
“Ddddd.”
He blew his brass whistle.
“You are arrested under the Law of Twenty-Second Prairial,” he said, unable to look at us exactly. “You will follow these men. Shut up this house.”
We were taken away.
All except for Edmond. He stayed in the attic, in his sackcloth suit and his mask. If they came for us, we’d agreed, he’d hide himself away with his brothers and sisters.
I never had a chance to say good-bye. And I dared not look back.
BOOK SEVEN
1794–1802
THE WAITING ROOM AND THE CARDBOARD PROPERTY
From thirty-three years to forty-one.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Life and death in a room.
We were taken first to the prison of La Force, where we were formally charged. There the widow an
d I were separated from Doctor Curtius, dispatched to different prisons until we were called for our trials, though neither of us understood that this was the parting moment until my master was pulled away. Then another journey, watching the streets and houses through the carriage slats as if seeing them for the first time, finding beauty everywhere, then to the monastery of the Carmelite friars and to darkness. Here, on one of those September nights, it was said that Jacques Beauvisage had done some murdering of priests. That night we had been free, with Edmond beside me; now I was with his failing mother in a room with twenty other women, cattle like us, waiting and weeping on old straw.
Carmes, they called that prison. It sounds so peaceful.
