‘This was just the time when the troops were beginning to pour through the streets. They were searching for the ring-leaders of the rebellion, but in truth anyone not obviously bourgeois who had remained in the city was regarded as guilty. A patrol approached him when he was in sight of the place where he had agreed to meet Gravot, and in a desperate attempt to conceal his crime and protect his plunder, he swallowed the stones. The patrol was not put off. Perhaps they had taken fire from that building. No doubt Prideux looked guilty and afraid, perhaps his hands were dirty and they took him for an arsonist. For whatever reason they shot him where he stood. Many others met the same fate. Often the bodies were buried in the roadways where they fell. There was no trial, no arrest and examination in those days.’
Maud remembered her history lessons. The bodies stacked in piles like wood ready for the fire. The stories of the burning of Paris when the Tuileries Palace was reduced to rubble and Notre Dame itself was threatened by the mob. She tried to imagine Paris in chaos: the fresh-washed streets she walked along every morning pooled with blood, the sound of soldiers marching, of men and women trying to build barricades across the wide streets, and gunfire, a man hauled off to be shot with a group of strangers against the shop windows where now rich women bought their silk gloves. The bodies rotting to nothingness under their satin slippers.
‘How horrible,’ she said.
‘Oh, just wait,’ Sylvie said, blowing out another smooth flow of smoke. ‘It gets a great deal worse.’
‘Oh!’
‘What is it, Miss Heighton?’
‘Only the old lady, Madame Prideux, said she wanted her diamonds. She asked if you’d swallowed them.’
Sylvie made a noise of disgust in her throat, and Morel’s skin became a little grey. Maud tried to imagine that angry old woman, young and caught among the gunfire and flames.
‘So the diamonds were lost?’ she asked.
‘I wish they had been. This is where, as Sylvie says, it gets worse. Madame Prideux was waiting for her husband nearby. He did not come at the appointed time and she could hear shots being fired so she went to find him at the place where he was supposed to meet his accomplice, Gravot. His plan too must have been to leave Paris at once as he had his pretty wife and their bundles with him. Madame Prideux saw them bent over a body in the street and ran towards them. She was just in time to see her husband’s corpse being gutted for the diamonds he had swallowed. She threw herself on them, but Gravot’s wife held her back. All she could do was watch.’ Horror made Maud’s skin crawl. ‘It is terrible what people will do for a little wealth, Miss Heighton, terrible.’
Maud felt a touch on her arm. Sylvie had put out her cigarette and now drawn her chair close. She lowered her head onto Maud’s shoulder. Without thinking, Maud put out her hand and Sylvie took it. Their hands lay loosely entwined on Maud’s lap. Morel stubbed his cigarette out fiercely on the edge of his plate.
‘Tell her what happened next,’ Sylvie said.
‘She went home, borrowed enough money from her family to open a grocery shop. Ran it for more than thirty years and told that story to her child every night for his bedtime story. I fear he did not turn out well.’
‘Did she want revenge?’
His mouth twitched – a sad quick smile. ‘No, Miss Heighton, she wanted the diamonds that they had cheated her of. She believed her husband’s sacrifice should have made her a rich woman. Instead she spent her life scrimping for the basic necessities of existence while watching richer women come and go in her shop, and sacrificing any ounce of comfort to pay back the money she had borrowed. She was always a bitter woman with a sharp tongue. She would flatter her customers and spit acid when their backs were turned. Her son was no better. He was sent to the prison camps in Guiana in the end after he was caught stealing.’
‘A harsh punishment,’ Maud said quietly.
‘He was caught stealing diamonds. A lot of them. I suspect he meant to give them to her.’
Maud squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, trying to think. ‘But why does she believe you are Gravot, sir?’
‘She is mad,’ Sylvie said without lifting her head. ‘It came on her slowly. I remember she was found once or twice on the street apparently unaware of where she was. Christian was away on business at that time, but when he returned, her mania fixed on him. There was some resemblance perhaps. I am not sure she understood that it all happened forty years ago. She began to call at our house. I tried to be kind, but it was a terrible strain.’
Maud looked down at her profile; the young woman’s skin was golden in the lamplight. ‘Is that why you came to Paris?’
Sylvie shook her head. ‘No. Her son came home, claiming to be a reformed character. He took over the shop and kept her off the streets. She must have escaped him.’
Maud was silent for a while. Her father used to rant about Quakers, claiming that the fact he was losing business to an auctioneer in Darlington who was of that faith was proof of a conspiracy against a good Methodist like himself. The conviction would grow on him as he talked, and when Maud and her step-mother could take no more and left the table to go to their separate pursuits, he could be heard continuing his monologue with only the walls for audience. Outside, a drunk was singing to his ladyfriend, his slurred swooping songs punctuated by her laughter. ‘What a terrible story.’
‘I am sorry to tell it, sorry that Madame Rémy did not do a better job of protecting your peace, but perhaps Sylvie was right and it is best you know, having seen her.’
Sylvie moved and stretched; the fabric of her gown slipped down her arms, showing them smooth and glowing.
‘You will take the proper steps, Christian?’
He stood, tucked his chair under the table and brushed down the sleeves of his coat. ‘I will, at once. I shall telegraph. Her son must come and retrieve her. She shall not spoil Paris for us, Sylvie. I promise.’ She kissed her fingertips to him. He came round the table to kiss his sister on her white forehead. Maud noticed there was more blue in his skin than usual. She looked up at him.
‘I know it is a difficult story to tell,’ she said, ‘but you tell it beautifully. It almost reminds me to be sorry for her and her son again.’
‘Then I suppose it is worthwhile. And now, dear ladies, I must leave you. I may be late back.’
CHAPTER 11
Maud did not enjoy her walk to the Académie as much as usual the following morning. The story haunted her and she found herself examining the smooth classical façades of the buildings for bullet-holes, or waiting for the dead to reach up through the pavement and grab her ankles. The sounds of the street seemed a little jangled and out of tune and she felt watched, persecuted. She was afraid of meeting Madame Prideux on the street, afraid of her withered hands and the acrid bite of her breath.
Sylvie showed no sign of nerves when they met at lunch. She chattered about how much her sketching and her English was improving under Maud’s care and made a great show of serving Maud with the best pieces of meat from the stewpot and piling her plate with thick greens. Then, as soon as Maud had put down her fork, she was itching to be away, drumming her long fingers on the cover of her sketchbook while she waited for Maud to change. She did not lead Maud in the direction of one of their usual sketching spots in the Jardin du Luxembourg, however, but instead turned in the opposite direction towards the river. She wanted to walk along the Quai de la Tournelle and then cross the Seine at the Pont Sully. It was no hardship to Maud. Sylvie’s mood, the sun and the clear cold breeze drove all the demons away. Paris became a romance again and the life of the riverside always pleased her eye, such was its variety. Barges loaded and unloaded gravel onto the lower embankment where young boys climbed the piles like conquerers then slid down their flanks in giggling heaps. The little steam-boats carrying the curious travellers for a penny an hour chugged between the piers, each papered in advertisements with letters two feet high and backed with burnt sienna orange or Prussian blue, while the floating white buildings o
f the public swimming baths looked down on them like duchesses watching a lively toddler at play.
Sylvie chattered while they walked, pointing out the men washing and trimming the poodles of the rich by the water and exclaiming on the brightness of the day. Three times Maud suggested finding a place where they might stop and sketch the broad views in front of them, the river heavy and placid rolling through all the noise and activity of the city, the houses on the Île St-Louis seeming to hang over and watch it as it passed, but Sylvie would not stop as yet.
‘Have you visited Père Lachaise, Maud?’ she said over her shoulder as they crossed the river a second time on to the right bank. Then when Maud shook her head, Sylvie took her arm and pulled her close to her side. ‘Then we must go at once. Christian took me there before you came and I think you shall like it.’
‘I have heard of it, of course,’ Maud said. ‘But are you sure you would like to go there now? Are you not tired?’ She did not know the precise time, but she was sure that Sylvie would wish to return to her room in a little while.
Sylvie waved her hand. ‘Not at all. I do not wish to go home at all. Shall we take the omnibus? It is only right to go there when the weather is good. Who knows when it might be so pretty again, and there are many nice places to sit and we can rest and draw there.’ She was wearing a long winter coat that Maud had not seen before. It was fawn in colour but there was something darker mixed into the weave so it looked to Maud like the pelt of a lioness. Its collar was of some glossy black fur.
‘If you are sure, Sylvie.’
‘Oh, quite sure,’ she said, all but dragging Maud up Boulevard Henri IV past the sudden stalls on the pavement selling children’s toys and bundles of mistletoe.
When they reached Père Lachaise Sylvie chose to rest on a bench on Chemin Denon opposite the tomb of Chopin. She did not, she said, feel any great sympathy for the man’s music, but she remembered liking the kneeling angel that guarded the tomb. Maud wondered if she realised it looked quite like her. She had lost the strange vivacity with which she had begun the trip but made no complaint when Maud handed her her sketchbook and suggested she try and copy the musician’s profile, stamped on his tomb. Maud herself, however, did not begin to draw at once. Her eyes were still too full of the place, its peculiar gothic beauty. The cemetery where they had buried Rose had been a flat and dreary sort of a place. Rows of square low tombs without greenery or flowers to cheer it. Père Lachaise was quite different. The hill on which the cemetery was built was covered with a city of its own, complete with avenues and squares, poor quarters and rich. There were rows upon rows of tiny mausoleums about the height of a man and with pitched roofs like sentry boxes, but their designs were not uniform. Every one was marked out by some individual feature – iron grilles, gothic touches at the roof-edge, a medallion or carved quotation, and dotted among them were weeping angels, busts of generals, carved drapery.
On the Avenue des Acacias were a number of larger establishments, mausoleums built like Grecian temples with broad staircases leading from their porticoes to the damp cobbles of the avenue. The jumbled edges of the crowded monuments tricked the eye. The contrast of the stone with the trees that grew between them, the dank mossy shadows, the distances of the city below offered a puzzle for Maud to work out in her sketches. There was too much to take in; she had to select the details to find the peculiar mood of the place without making the viewer drunk. People walked along the paths in twos or threes with their guide books in their hands, visiting the tombs of the illustrious dead. They peered at the names, giving a sharp nod if they recognised it, as if the sight confirmed something they had always thought, then moving on to the next.
A young woman had followed them up the path, and as they sat down she stood in front of the composer’s tomb with her head lowered as if she were waiting to perform. She had a white rose in her hand. Maud began to sketch her, then stopped. It was a storybook picture being offered to her: the beautiful girl with a rose in front of a tomb would be a classic Victorian memento mori. She might as well paint a faithful hound. She could imagine her father sneering at it at some house sale – the sentimentality of it. Instead she shifted her position on the bench so she could look past the tomb and down the path. Sylvie’s silhouette, her chin tucked into her collar, became the edge of the picture, the path that reached away from them; that way, the eye could understand the confusion of statuary around them.
‘What will you do when you have finished in Paris?’ Sylvie said quietly, looking between the tomb and her page. ‘Will you go and paint portraits of your town dignitaries and give drawing lessons?’
Maud smiled slightly but the idea seemed a good one. She pictured herself in rooms of her own where there was good light to work by. She had been seeing it through a haze of desperation in the past year. Now it reappeared in her mind’s eye quite clearly. There were not many artists trained in Paris living in Darlington, but there was money there. James’s business was flourishing and his occasional stiff letters were full of the names of influential people whom he had met. It would appeal to the vanity of the local officials to have someone trained on the continent to immortalise them, and the surrounding countryside was beautiful. She would then be able to spend time working for her own pleasure as well as theirs.
‘Something of that sort,’ she said.
‘That does not sound like a good life. Stuck in some provincial backwater where there is nothing to see and nothing to do,’ Sylvie said. Maud said nothing, only thought how Sylvie’s English was improving. It was quite possible that tomorrow Sylvie would demand to know all about her home town, the landscape, the people, and sigh at how much she wanted to visit. There was a pause, and Maud noticed her companion had stopped in her work, and was simply staring at the angel and the girl with the rose.
‘Madame Prideux is dead,’ Sylvie said suddenly.
At first Maud did not quite understand her. ‘Did you say dead, Sylvie?’
‘I did. A traffic accident on the Champs Elysées last night. I suppose she was too distracted to see where she was going. My brother had not managed to send his telegram to her son before he heard. The porters were discussing it at the club. He told me to tell you. I am sorry she is dead, though I cannot think her life did anyone much good.’
Sylvie did not seem to feel that any more needed to be said and turned back to her sketch. Maud did not know what to feel; she should be sorry, shocked. Perhaps she was shocked at the suddenness of the news, but she was not sure she was sorry. Perhaps it was better to die quickly like that, rather than be confined in an asylum, or rotting away behind the walls of your home – and to her, Madame Prideux had seemed unimaginably old. However, even surrounded by tombs, the idea that a person could be in the world one moment, then disappear from it the next felt extraordinary. The glass eyes of Madame Prideux’s fox fur seemed to glimmer at her for a moment from the shadows in the path. Again she wondered what she should have done the previous day, whether she could have found words to calm the old woman.
‘Her family will be informed?’
‘I imagine so. Christian will write to them perhaps. Are you sorry for her, Maud? She was a wicked old woman.’ Sylvie was looking at her over her thick fur collar.
‘I am sorry for anyone who is so lost. Her life seems tragic to me.’
Sylvie smiled. ‘If it was tragic, perhaps it is better her life is now over.’
Maud could not think how to reply so returned thoughtfully to her work. The ghost of the old woman retreated and the world became once more a series of visual problems to be solved. She made her notes, ideas for the tints she might use to recreate this scene on canvas, the variegated greys and greens. At last she felt the familiar ache between her shoulderblades and sighed, placing her pencil on the pad and spreading her fingers wide. Sylvie was still sitting very quietly beside her, but there was some tension in her shoulders. Her right hand still held her pencil but it did not move. Her breathing was a little shallow.
‘
Sylvie? What is it? Have you been getting cold? You need only tell me.’
The girl started as if she had been sleeping, but didn’t look at her. Instead she took out her cigarette-case, shook one free then lit it. Maud watched her, frowning. Her fingers were shaking.
‘Maud, I think I’ve done something stupid.’ Maud waited. ‘I threw away my chandu last night. The opium.’ Maud closed her sketchbook and slipped the pencil she had been using into the hollow of the spine. ‘I was thinking of America. How nice it would be to be free of France, how much better it would be to go there with clear eyes. I thought . . . I felt I did not need it at the time. Now, I am afraid.’
Tears appeared in her eyes and she tried to blink them back, tilting her head so she looked into the empty grey sky above them.
Maud felt her heart go out to her, poor strange Sylvie who had tried to break free of her chains. Yesterday she had failed the Morels, today she would not. Maud began to think in small, practical steps. ‘Are you in pain?’ A quick nod. ‘We must go home.’
Maud put away her book, helped Sylvie to her feet and threaded her arm through hers. Sylvie leaned on her as they walked quickly down the slope to the main gate, her head lowered. Her grip on Maud’s arm spasmed. As they walked down the Avenue Principale, a gentleman with a face like a bulldog turned to stare at them, ignoring his companion who was trying to point out Rossini’s empty tomb. Maud thought of how she might look with Sylvie’s thin pale form hanging on her arm. As if she was stealing one of the ghosts away from the place, no doubt.
If the cab driver they found at the stand by the gates noticed that Sylvie was unwell, he said nothing. Sylvie lowered the blind and leaned into the corner of the carriage as they drove. Her breathing was quick and harsh and she pressed her hand to her stomach. It had come on her very quickly. Maud’s first thought had been to telegram to Morel in his club as soon as they were safely back in Rue de Seine, but he might not be there – and even if he were, what could she say in such a message? She could hardly mention opium openly, and if she said Sylvie was ill he would certainly hurry back to Rue de Seine, but then he would have to go out again to buy whatever Sylvie needed. She was suffering so greatly now, Maud was very afraid of what her condition would be in a few hours. She felt she had not the authority to summon in a doctor, since that too would surely bring scandal, would be a betrayal of trust. A panicked English miss might call a doctor, but an experienced woman who could take care of herself in the world would be more circumspect.
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