Little
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“Yes, Mother.”
“You seek comfort? Come to me, I’ll comfort you.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And you, Little, scum, boil, dropping, touch my son and you shall find yourself in the gutter!”
“Yes, madame. Certainly, madame.”
I long for you to die in agonies, I thought, and I could almost picture it. Why was she always so cruel, I wondered, even after I had worked so hard for her? Perhaps she needed someone beneath her to know for certain that she was not on the bottom rung. Perhaps being cruel was proof of her success.
I was certain that with this latest proclamation there would be no more creak upon the stairs. That I should remain alone in the kitchen, and be taken over by that place.
“It disgusts me!” she concluded. “Just because this vagrant makes a little row on our steps, it is no cause for all society to be overturned. We must hope that that breathing rubbish shall tire of us very soon and then all shall be returned as it was before.”
But that was not what happened.
Once the wild boy had conquered the Monkey House steps, neither he nor my master could be stopped. Not only did the boy spend his nights upon the steps, but he remained during the day, and soon he began to serve my master’s Cabinet on various small errands.
The rough boy did not merely attach himself to Curtius. He sent out messengers of his personality in the form of fleas. There were small pimples on Edmond’s forearms; I saw him though the kitchen door, scratching them. The widow discovered a tick upon the back of her neck. How Curtius respected that tick, made its removal into a great drama. I was summoned—such was the trauma—to bring a basin of hot water.
“Why must you see my shoulders?” the widow squawked. “The creature is on my neck. No, I shall not loosen my jacket!”
These medical attentions of Curtius must also be put down to the advent of the rough boy, for my master should never have dared touch the widow’s neck without the help of the rough boy’s tick, and here he was pinching and squeezing it. Curtius would keep that dead tick in a little box, resting on red velvet, upon the mantelpiece in his bedroom. I saw it when I came to empty the chamber pots.
Some people will leave their dogs outside in the cold; others will have them indoors on their laps or on their beds. You can tell a person’s character by how he treats his dogs. Here is an indication of my master’s character: Curtius not only insisted on letting the boy sleep on the steps, as if he could stop him, he even gave him a rug from his own bed.
Finally, Curtius asked the boy his name. In response, the boy forced a sound out from deep within, more a bark than a name.
“What was that?” Curtius asked. “Try again. Once more.”
This time, I seemed to hear words: Jacques, that much I felt confident about. Of the second word, I could make nothing.
“Visage? Oh—Beauvisage!” exclaimed the widow.
Beauvisage? Pretty face?
“Jacques Beauvisage,” he growled, and nodded.
And Curtius, those syllables splattered upon his face, was enraptured. Such a name for such a creature! Rather than laugh at the beast, Curtius just smiled. “Indeed, so you are, Beauvisage.”
With the coming of bad weather, Curtius’ character showed itself again. After much behind-doors negotiation with the stunned widow, he invited Jacques to sleep inside, curled up by the door. Now I was certain Edmond would never come down again. In desperation, I passed him a note. It said only:
HALLO, EDMOND! From Marie.
He looked shocked to receive such a thing, and scrunched it up very quickly, but his ears, I noted, had gone their reddest.
Jacques Beauvisage was instructed to remain by the front door and ordered never to touch the wax heads. But it was already too late by then: Once you let a dog sleep inside, you cannot expect to turn it out again. You must never bring a wild thing into your home. His old friends, the boulevard’s stray dogs, came to the steps, whining for him, but in the end they slunk off confused. And the wild child was left friendless in the Monkey House.
I was to look after him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I become a teacher.
I, the kitchen thing, creature of grease and soot, spirit of steam and flame; I, dirty drudge with the black, stained fingers: I was the one. I was to look after this new person. There were rules to be learned. He must not be in the great hall during business hours. He, like me, belonged to the back rooms. And so my days became occupied with a wonderful parenthood. My child, my difficult charge, took all my patience and care and love. I spoiled him perhaps, fed him sweetmeats, but I was stern with him also. I raised my voice, I wagged my finger. He lashed out, but I took breath and went straight back into the battle. How Edmond fussed over my scratches! I saw him once in the distant hall, looking into the kitchen, putting his hand to his mouth in horror.
I was domesticating a wild thing, and it kept me busy. Jacques must urinate and defecate in the chamber pot; it took him months to learn. There’d be a smell, I’d find a puddle and a stool, and howling Jacques would rush out of doors.
Perhaps I overdid it a little. Perhaps, overflowing with parenthood, I could not see clearly; perhaps I made him out more feral than he really was. He knew how to talk, of course; he did not have to be taught words, though I sometimes forgot this, and in his misery as I groomed him and broke him in, he would call out names of people. He might howl Yves Sicre, for example; he might lessen his discomfiture by snapping Jean-Paul Clémonçon; he might thump the ground repeating the name Anne-Jerome de Marciac-Lanville. And just uttering these names—names he’d heard upon the boulevard, I presumed—did seem to hush him a little. He learned not to whine and grow quite so agitated whenever a female customer entered the Monkey House. But he must, the widow instructed, he must protect everything that belonged to the Monkey House.
Jacques’ face perfectly described his thoughts: sad, angry, frightened, happy, all would show openly upon his face. He was, unlike wax, the poorest of actors; he could be no one but himself, he was stuck with himself, and that was at times a very desperate and troubling state to inhabit.
After Jacques began to sleep inside, I think he came to be frightened of the outside. It didn’t happen immediately; it crept up upon him. He grew a little fatter, grew accustomed to the warmth of indoors. As we sat together in the kitchen, I told him of my mother and father, of my life before I came to Paris; if I didn’t tell him, I had begun to wonder, how could I ever be sure it had all happened? If I didn’t tell the story it might dry up and I would be left short and grimy of the kitchen. Slowly he breathed it all in. And one afternoon, his mouth opened and the words came out.
Jacques Beauvisage had stories of his own.
“Bernard Balliac cut his wife. Into pieces. Fed them to a dog!”
I heard these words, these clear signs of intelligence. I leaned forward, listening attentively. After a long while he spoke again.
“Butcher Olivier axed up his family. His wife. His children, two. Sold them for pig food. Pig food was too rich for pigs, pigs took sick. Law called.”
I kept very quiet. He went on. Small blurted words, his messages of thanks to me.
“Isabelle Torisset and Pascal Fissot lay together in bed. But someone was with them there already. Her husband, Maurice! Maurice was a cripple. Three’s a crowd, so they do say. They took him to the top of the house where there were birds on the flat roof in a big cage, a building downriver, nearby the granaries. They put the husband in the cage. And the husband was pecked apart by birds but found, months after. Alive! Bony! Unlike the lovers! They were soon dead! Hanged on Place de Grève! Public! I saw it!”
What a breakthrough that was! How my teaching and instincts were confirmed that night! For then, as if all victories had come at once, he started to share with me his own passion, which before he had kept only to himself. Jacques, I discovered, w
as a great memorizer of Parisian crimes and murders. We sat in the kitchen together and Jacques in his growl let out small, bloody, miserable tales of unfortunate people leaving life in a hurry. One after the other I heard them, deep into the night, delivered with increasing confidence. Tell us another story, Jacques, tell us another. I couldn’t go to sleep without one. Under his tutelage I became very knowledgeable of appalling acts.
He told me of his life too. I begged it out of him: “Jacques, tell me. Do!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jacques Beauvisage, an account of himself.
I seen hangings, but not murders. I should like to grow up one day to see a good murder. A bloody one. I missed a throat cutting on the boulevard by only a few minutes. Saw the blood, even the bleeding, but not the cutting itself.”
“How old are you, Jacques?” I asked.
“I don’t know. What d’you think?”
“I think perhaps something like twenty? I don’t know. More than fifteen? I can’t say.”
“Nor can I. Well and what then?”
“Where were you born?”
“Here. Paris.”
“Who was your father?”
“Don’t know.”
“Your mother?”
“No, don’t know.”
“What do you know then, my pet?” I gently persisted.
“You sound like an old granny.”
“Tell me, what happened to you?”
“I was left at the foundling hospital, Rue Saint-Honoré. That’s sure. There they named me, nuns did. I was never pretty, so they say. I am big of face, and been made bigger no doubt by my living. Called me Jacques, which I go by, and Beauvisage on account of my good looks.”
“What was it like? At the foundling.”
“I lived. I ate. There wasn’t much food, so I took some from others who weren’t strong enough to fight for it. So then maybe they starved; that’s how it was. I was loud and did hit and was not always to be ordered. I hit one nun, and I hurt another with my shouting; she went deaf they say. Children died, ’specially in winter. I didn’t. Couldn’t kill me. Haven’t yet, least is. Was ill one winter, thought I’d gone, lay in the ditch by the wall day after day, buried in filth. Came back, though, sat up, ate some, shat some, up again. Better and better.”
“And after the orphanage?”
“I was taken. Audinot, the theater manager, he always comes and takes some, four or five a year, to be on the stage in his Ambigu-Comique.”
“Yes, I know him. We have his head here!”
Jacques spat. “All the performers there are children and are took from orphanages because they’re cheap, he doesn’t have to pay for them—he’s paid to take them away. I played there, mostly wild animals. I was well known, people came just to see me, but they didn’t like to come in the front seats when I was on, on account of I might come down off the stage and hit them. I have a temper, better now a bit, but then I’d hit a person just because I could, and Audinot would scream at me, and he feared very much I might have at him too. I had a good girl at the Ambigu, that was Henriette Peret, and we knew each other a lot and she was the first for me. But she got ill on me, and then she died on me, and I got so angry I hit about everything and threatened to kill Audinot and so he got his heavy men on me and then broke me all over and shoved me out. That was when I was in the ditch and thought that was my last resting. But at last I got up again. So then. I hung around with dogs mainly and they kept by me and were company, but we fight so. And do frighten. Been with them can’t say how long, seasons on seasons. I nearly become a dog, I think. But then comes Curtius and you, who is an old woman and a child both at once, who makes me talk again. And so here I am again. Among the people, or a single person, small and busy. I’m every day on the boulevard except when there’s a hanging; then I do go to the Place de Grève. Those are the good days. I like me a good hanging, very good for me.”
After he had begun telling me his own tale, I cleaned Jacques with a kinder touch. I convinced him to sit in the tin bath, and there I made him look more and more like a person every day. There was a man under that grime, a rough-looking one with appalling teeth, who laughed at the most inappropriate things; a clumsy youth, a thuggish one, but one who, in the midst of his miserable tales, had a certain beauty about him. There were so many scars upon his skin from burns, from rips, from being cut, from self-scratching. I asked about the marks, one after another, and sitting in the bathtub, he nonchalantly told me one by one. “That from the theater, Master Audinot with a spike. I was littler—he shouldn’t try it later. That one from Black Dog. That one I did to test a knife, I stole it, very good knife. Very.” Under the widow’s instruction, Edmond made him a woolen suit of double weave so that it might last longer, each seam stitched four times, but Jacques tore it soon enough and so a new tougher outfit was made for him of leather.
Jacques’ tales were so good that they could not be kept in the kitchen; they very soon spread themselves about the house. Like those monkey phantasms, they began to make their presence known in the upstairs room. Though the widow and my master had not listened to them exactly, still those stories began to enter them, finding a way through their nostrils in their sleep. Why else could my master be heard in the night walking back and forth in his room? Why else did the widow always wake in such black moods?
He was such a very different creature from me, Jacques was, that I was like some innocent learning the world. The pupil became the teacher, telling me, in his way, what it was to be alive and how many ways there were to die. It was as if I had had almost no real contact with life before he came along to me, as if I’d heard only rumors, small whisperings of what human beings could do. I was a toy doll from a nursery, being instructed by a rat. Afterward, when Jacques dozed after a telling, I would visit the wax populace in the hall, still a child no matter what he called me, but shedding that childhood as I walked among the counterfeit humans.
One early evening, I was clearing away the plates in the dining room before the visitors were let in when I observed Edmond sitting there, avoiding my looks. He’d been so distant since Jacques’ coming.
“Jacques knows such stories,” I spouted at him.
“What?” asked the widow. “Did you speak?”
“Jacques Beauvisage knows such wonderful stories. You should hear them.”
“Get out,” said the widow.
“Stories?” my master said. “What stories?”
“They are Paris stories, sir, all of them.” I cleared my throat. “Of murders, of killings. He knows them all. They are very extraordinary, sir. They must belong to heads we don’t know. Certainly I’ve never seen the faces of men and women that have done such things.”
To my delight, Curtius asked me to send him up. My master and the widow would listen to these stories. I expected to hear my master clapping very soon, but what I heard was shouting from the widow. She boxed his ears; Jacques came down miserable.
When I went upstairs, the widow scolded me. “You bring such ugliness into my house. This is a place of fine faces, of beauty and accomplishment, not the dirt you know. You’d have us in the gutter. Don’t get too comfortable here.” She glanced down at the floor, spotted a speck of dirt. “Look out there—mud!”
Later, my master tried to scold Jacques. “Bad boy, a very bad boy.” But his face did not seem to fit his words. To me he said only, “What wonderful work, Marie, how he thrives! What excellent care you take of him. I do thank you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Which contains an outing of great significance.
What news, what news I have, Curtius, dear Widow,” said Mercier to my master and the widow as he burst into the Monkey House, full of joy.
“News, no doubt,” said the widow, “that shall involve the drinking of our wine to ease its telling.”
“I shall not say no!” cooed Mercier.
I brought the wine as fast as I could.
“Well, then,” said the widow, “if you are sufficiently primed.”
“The year 1774 began with headaches,” Mercier began.
“God save us,” groaned the lady, “we know the date.”
“As January progressed,” continued Mercier, undeterred, “so came body pains and fever. February arrived with a rash. In March the red spots called and wouldn’t leave; they began to spread themselves everywhere about. By April the smell was undeniable; by mid-April the spots became lesions that soon filled with watery pus; by the end of April the lesions had crusty scabs. On the eighth May the lesions began to hemorrhage, on the ninth the holy men were crammed in, on the tenth May 1774, Louis XV, King of France by the Grace of God, has died of smallpox. Better times are here, Doctor Curtius, Widow Picot! Little too! Even your new hound! France is great again. Long live the new king, and long live the new queen! In Versailles, parliament has been recalled! Now may Paris be saved!”
“The king is dead,” said the widow, clearly shocked.
“Dead and rotting,” replied Mercier. “It is younger bodies that concern us now.”
But after all the talk of newness came restlessness. Soon Mercier came back, rushing around the Monkey House in agony, shaking his head. The city had changed its ruler, but his presence was impossible to detect. When nothing new was apparent, when all was business as usual, spirits broke; there was rioting on the streets; people were killed. Shrieking crowds passed by outside, shaking the Monkey House. Jacques wanted to go out, but the widow would not let him, so he spent his days whining at the door. The riot was contained, arrests were made, punishments decided. Jacques screamed hideously that he needed to watch the punishments, and kept screaming until Curtius promised to take him early next morning. The widow refused to let my master out alone, so would accompany him, and Edmond, she instructed, would accompany her. To a hanging. I was to stay behind and watch the house.