by Edward Carey
“And here? Here?” I asked.
“The Incorruptible himself.”
There upon the table was the particular sphere of Maximilien Robespierre. That’s when I met Robespierre, never before. The mess upon the head was not merely from the trauma of the neck stump. This history of mine began, a country ago, with a jaw, a family property that had gone missing, misplaced by a backfiring cannon. Here, toward its end, was another shattered jaw. This one was not absent, it was still connected, this lower jaw hanging down from the upper, ripped by a bullet. Robespierre had tried to shoot himself and had missed, a suicide botched.
I had not been released from prison as a special privilege to observe the day’s basketfuls. I must work. Plenty of plaster was ready. There was wax—ordinary candle wax, of the worst quality, but it was all they had—from hundreds of gathered-up candle stubs. I must make casts to be placed in the Convention. I did it.
It took me two days.
“Many people,” I said, “shall wish to see these heads. Many people will come to be sure he is dead. Don’t you think so? I think so. I’m certain of it. People will come for decades to see such things.”
When my work was done, I asked them what would happen now.
They told me I was free to go.
Free to go where? I asked.
Go home, they said. Why don’t you go home?
“Home,” I whispered. “I hadn’t quite thought of that.”
I took the long way, through circuitous streets. I didn’t want to hurry. I couldn’t be sure what was waiting for me there.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Little black list.
I wish I were hollow. But I’m filled up. I wish I were hollow. Someone should tip me out. I must make a list. Set it all down. Bodies come and bodies go; you should not get too attached. While I was in prison, people went away. I must make a list.
Picot, Charlotte, age sixty, an old, lost woman.
It’s not finished, my list. I’m small. I’m a snail. No, I’m made of leather. I’m black and broken. I’m very small and very robust. I was making my list; I haven’t finished. There’s a man in the Bible called Job. He loses his family, and when that doesn’t crush him he’s covered in boils and beaten and smashed, but still he goes on. He probably doesn’t know why. I was writing down my list. It doesn’t always hurt so much anymore. My list. Do it then.
I came home to half a house. Half had tumbled to the ground, the crutches had given way or been tugged free, bricks and timber in the dirt toppled like a house of playing cards. The Great Monkey House, ambition fallen. Two whole walls of bricks had collapsed, revealing the old rumpled wooden structure underneath. The flagstones had been pulled up and taken away; there was no longer any fencing, nor any bell that had belonged to Henri Picot. Once there was hope around this place; so many people had labored here; so many had attended. Once the greatest show on the boulevard, the greatest in Paris.
I stood silent before it.
“Edmond,” I whispered, “I’m home.”
No, no answer.
“Edmond.”
None.
What had happened while I was away? I learned it all later, from a record at the Préfecture du Département de la Seine. Fill in the pieces. Get it over.
Those of our district, section leaders, National Guardsmen, old natives—André Valentin, I presume but can never prove—came upon the Great Monkey House. They had hated it for so long. They surrounded the house and they began to pull it down. It did not need much help. The crutches came away easily enough; the whole house yelped and moaned, as if all the monkeys were inside again. Section leaders wrecked high and low, every cupboard, every trunk, every drawer, every room, upstairs, downstairs, in and out, up and down. They went about our dolls’ house, breaking it, for they wanted to hurt our wax people. They hauled some out, danced drunkenly down the street with wax partners, then left them broken upon the ground. They pulled and upturned everything. But the plaster room was still safe. They did not know it existed. And higher yet?
At the foot of the stairs I discovered the doll Edmond had made of me, collapsed in doll-hopelessness, legs bent impossibly back, skirt pulled up, a crack to one side of the head, a hand twisted behind as if for protection, as if it couldn’t bear to look.
On I went. The attic, or what was left of it. Much of the roof had collapsed.
As they searched on, drunk and furious, as they rummaged through the Great Monkey House, upstairs were still the many brothers and sisters Picot. Quiet, gentle folk. Suddenly bleak and bitter men were among them, knocking them down, pulling them about, laughing, such fun. Tugging on the beams. They started to throw the Picots out through the windows. Mannequins broken on the ground, toppling one after the other, the upstairs walls groaning, the timbers failing. And then a warm mannequin.
“Shhh,” he said to the section leader. “I’m a shop doll.”
The section leader stared at him.
“Shhh,” he said. “I keep very quiet.”
The section leader took a handful of sackcloth. The attic called out.
“I’m made of wood and canvas and stitching. My head’s painted papier-mâché. I’m cloth. I’ve sawdust for guts.”
The timbers were giving way.
“Then this shan’t hurt you, shall it?”
Did it happen like that? Was it, I wonder, his ears that gave him away? He could have been the pattern for a thousand more. He didn’t call out, I’m sure he didn’t. No, perhaps he did. Perhaps he called to them when they were downstairs: “My name is Edmond Henri Picot! Edmond Henri Picot! I do not forget!” Or perhaps in the end, by dint of concentration, he had turned completely into a shop doll. Broken brothers and broken sisters. And among all those bits and pieces, shattered limbs and heads, collapsed torsos, one that was heavier than the rest. Perhaps he never said a word, and they never knew it was a living person they were throwing from a high window—not until he struck the ground and they saw the red. My life spilled out of the house. And he could not be fixed again. I fill in the gaps. Was that how it happened? Or was it only that the attic, long distressed, had begun to fall apart, and Edmond, traumatized, had leaped?
I was given the record at the Préfecture du Département de la Seine: Man fallen out of building, five foot five inches, one eighth. Name unknown. Edmond had practiced for disappearance all his life. Here it was, and here ended my private life.
Picot, Edmond Henri, age thirty-nine, master of mannequins.
The house was left a fraction of its size. All the property built upon the grounds of the chess café had collapsed. And my list. I haven’t finished my list. I have to do it.
I went to the Salpêtrière Hospital. There, among crowded beds, my baby was born. But she did not make a sound. There was a rush inside me and I suddenly knew that I’d fallen in love. I’ve an object, I said, what a miracle. Little hands, and little legs, and little belly. The lips so thin and red. She had the Grosholtz chin, there it was again, but not the Waltner conk. In its place she had Edmond’s insubstantial nose. My dear daughter. She never had a chance. A little creature I made. Born without life. Stillborn. She didn’t move and they took her away from me.
Marie Charlotte Grosholtz, baby.
The world is broken, I said, cracked. Some things are missing from the world and they will never be replaced. They can never be. Only then did I truly understand, as the widow had always understood, that the world is full of gaps, and these were mine. Perhaps I couldn’t make anything living. I’m sure it’s my fault I can only ever create lifelike and lifesize. What do you expect from a father who was more mannequin than man? What do you expect from a mother who spent more time with imitation people than real ones?
I went back home.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
There’s not a bone.
I stayed deep inside. All angles, all crooked. There was a knock on the door. I thought it was the local children come to taunt me again, so I didn’t answer, but the knock kept on. It
wasn’t a loud knock like the children gave; it was a little gentle knock, an apologetic knock. It wasn’t like the little knocks of industry that Louis the locksmith made at his forge; it was a knock, I began to understand, of sympathy. A loving knock. I went to the door. I opened it a crack.
My master Curtius.
Doctor Curtius and his pupil together again. We stood there, at opposite ends of the wooden plank I’d laid down after the steps had come away. Looking at each other, just looking, he by the broken stones of the old courtyard, me on the threshold of the ruin I lived in. Perhaps only for a few seconds, perhaps longer, perhaps minutes, tens of them. Such food for eyes! He’d been at the hospital of the Hôtel-Dieu, a place that Mercier had told me of during our kitchen walks of Paris; that was why it had taken him so long. He’d been so ill they’d taken him away from the prison for fear he should infect the other prisoners, lest they should die before they could be guillotined. He was removed to the Hôtel-Dieu, where he rotted with other starving men, but, contrary to all expectations, he did not die. Day after day he did not die. At last, very slowly, as others died beside him, he began to recover. And when he was well enough to walk a little he was sent home, a free citizen. My dear old man, very thin of course, not well at all, but living; a shriveled, stretched root, juiceless, but able to make movement and sound.
“Hello, sir,” I said.
“Can it be . . . my Little? I so hoped it would be.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s she. Surely.”
“Here we are then: you and I.”
“Will you come in, sir?”
“Yes, yes, I think I will.”
He came in. I closed the door. It did not shut properly.
“It’s very dark, Marie,” he said.
“I’ll fetch a candle.”
“Ah, light! Light in the darkness.”
Something else was on his mind; I saw the panic upon his face; but he did not ask it then. We sat down together, and we talked of nothing much to stop the silence. After half an hour, he had courage enough to ask, very quietly, the important thing:
“Little, Marie, where’s everybody else? Have they gone out? When will they be coming back?”
I shook my head.
We were silent a very long time.
“Where is Edmond, surely . . . upstairs?”
“No, I wish that he was. That would be something indeed.”
“Oh dear,” he said, and sighed. “An excellent mannequin maker.”
“Yes, sir.”
“My poor girl.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you, Marie? What about you? There was to be . . . a new life.”
I shook my head.
“There’s no bone,” he said, his expressive fingers moving on their own, “not a bone that can be comfort enough.”
There was a silence. Then:
“Not her then too?” he said very, very quickly. “At least not her. Tell me, not the widow, tell me.”
“Yes. Yes, even the widow.”
He closed his eyes.
“But she was cracked, she was broken.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I thought she might have. I didn’t like to wonder . . . I thought she might not . . . What a thing, oh what a thing it is.”
He sat hunched over in his chair. There was a slight tremor in his face, a wave of nervous reaction, a twitching of an eye, his lips pursed. And then what followed I can only describe as the noise of a whole building collapsing, floors falling in upon floors, a great heaving of rubble, a crashing, a sliding of heavy material, tumbling in a heap, only these sounds were coming from inside my master. But he stayed sitting, and though there was sweat on his forehead and a little black liquid coming from one of his ears and though one eye seemed to lose its sight, still the ruin breathed on. It may have been the cold in that room, but when his mouth opened it seemed to me a strange cloud of dusty air came out.
There we were, in the wretched Monkey House.
“Was it good for us, in the end, Little? The body bits, I mean. Not our models, not our wax, the human bits. Did we live with them too long? Perhaps they’re calling to us.”
But that is not the end. Not quite. We went on, Curtius and I, just a little farther. We kept very close to each other. We didn’t like to move alone, lest singly we come across some ghost of our lost people, here in this house where they had all been. We went on, and we stumbled, but we went on. We tidied, we swept up, buttons there among the rubbish. Where there were holes in the house, we made canvas walls. After a while, we felt brave enough even to open some of the shutters. We started work upon the plaster room, which being so solid had survived well enough; we chipped into it until we reached the tarred canvas, all those molds safe and sound. Even then, the king’s head, taken from death, would remain uncast.
It had begun with Curtius and me; it continued that way. Two months after my master returned, we opened again for business with a handful of mangy wax likenesses. We were given permission to use the molds of the heads of Robespierre and his followers. Doctor Curtius had a hunger for people; he had always had it; it kept him going.
“You have been with me all this way,” he told me. “What companions we are. You do the widow’s work, and almost as capably as she. It is not right that you call me sir, not anymore. I’m ashamed of it. And so perhaps, if it suits, Little, if it doesn’t repel, Marie, if it wouldn’t stick in the throat, since after all you’ve no mother but a doll of pegs, nor any father but a metal jaw piece—perhaps you might come to consider me an uncle. And even address me as such.”
“Uncle?”
“Yes.”
“No, sir, I don’t think I could.”
“No, well, perhaps in time.”
“Sir, shall I be paid now?”
“Well, I should like that.”
The busts of Marat were smashed; people were ashamed to have them in their homes. Marat’s body itself was disinterred from the Pantheon and thrown upon a dung heap. We still exhibited our waxman, murdered in the bath; Edmond and I had made him. We painted a large sign:
YOUR MONSTERS WITHIN
Not so many people came. We could not blame them. Everyone had had enough of monsters. We invented a new name for ourselves:
JUSTICE HOUSE
Still, only a few came every day. “Why,” they asked, “should we pay to see the head of Robespierre, when it was Robespierre who had our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters put to death?” We were not certain how to answer that, so my master let many people in without charge, a gesture the widow would never have allowed. We no longer had a guard dog, so we had no shield when people jeered at us on the street; all we could do was keep going; children threw stones at me, Curtius was tripped up. It seemed that some people considered us not without guilt.
Yet my master never lost his faith in his work. “Only mirrors, Marie,” he said. “Only mirrors. That’s what we do. That’s what the shop has ever been. They do not like the look of themselves. They are ashamed of what’s in the looking-glass.”
Our business crawled on until the last hours of September twenty-fifth. In the first hours of the twenty-sixth, I heard Curtius clapping in the night; otherwise the event should have been as quiet as Father’s. He didn’t come down in the morning. I sat on the steps for a while, just as I had when Mother died. Finally I went to him.
“Up you get, sir, up you get. Don’t you know the time?”
He wasn’t listening.
“Open your eyes at least. You could do that, couldn’t you? It’s not so much to ask. Let me see your eyes again. They’re blue I know.”
Stubborn man.
“A sound. A little noise, sir. That’s all I require, then I’ll tiptoe out and leave you till later. Did you say something? Try again. I think you moved. Didn’t you? Don’t leave me alone, sir. You must not leave me alone. It’s not a kind thing to do. What if I shook you a little? Oh, sir, sir! To be so still! What am I going to do?”
But all along I kn
ew. I washed his face, combed back his remaining hair, put on the soft soap, mixed the plaster, no need for straws. How odd it was, the head still connected, the body rather in the way, I’d forgotten that. Death mask of Philip Wilhelm Mathias Curtius, born in Berne in 1749, died in Paris in 1794, greatest of Parisian showmen, chronicler of history, maker of people, lover of a widow, who knew the human body better than almost any other, but never shared his own with anyone. Great Curtius.
“I shall call you uncle after all,” I said. “Uncle.”
The funeral, under revolutionary law, was held at midnight, without any religious ceremony. It wasn’t well populated. Just a few sodden mourners. One man came pushed in a wheelbarrow; it was Louis-Sébastien Mercier. After Robespierre’s death, Mercier, like so many others, had been released from prison. The light of Paris shone on him, but the poor man was blind to it. His eyes worked well enough, but they could see only the past; he could no longer make sense of Paris. This new place, he said, was not known to him.
Throughout his long imprisonment, Mercier had never removed his beloved shoes. At first he had walked them around his cell floor every day, but after a while he took to sitting in corners, and neither he nor his shoes had any exercise. The room was damp, it dripped, his straw was never properly cleaned out. And over his long indolence, when his past walks grew increasingly confused in his mind, and he got lost in his thoughts, his shoes began to fester. The skin of their leather grew into the skin of his feet. His swollen ankles spread over the tops of his shoes, and over time shoes and feet became one. The pain he felt when they touched the floor of Paris was excruciating. He had to be carried from his prison cell.
The doctors had called for surgery to remove his shoes from his feet, he told me, but he wouldn’t allow it. He had come to see Curtius off. He invited me to live with him, to be his shoes, tell him what I saw walking about the new Paris. I thanked him but declined.
