Little

by Edward Carey

  On my second morning at the palace, I was ushered into the same disapproving room. The old lady soon returned, and then at last Elisabeth, accompanied this time by a man in religious robes.

  “Well, my person, we shall pray now.”

  We prayed as instructed by her confessor, the Abbé Madier. I thought him rather a greasy piece of humanity; had God made him so? “Oh divine heart of Jesus! I love you, I adore you, I invoke you, for all the days of my life, but especially for the hour of my death. O vere adorator et unice amator Dei, misere nobis. Amen.”

  Afterward she said to me, “You pray wonderfully well.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  “There’s someone I want you to meet, someone very dear to me.”

  The person she fetched now likewise lived in a cupboard, but this cupboard had velvet lining and was portable, and in fairness should probably be called a box. This person was made of painted plaster. Not very big—about a foot in fact—and not particularly accurate, this was an idealized human, simplified and sentimentalized. He was made to represent the Savior of mankind. I’d met him before of course, this fellow, or hundreds like him; he was very popular and very common, an old favorite of my mother’s.

  “You cannot hold him,” Elisabeth said, “but you may look upon him.”

  “I have a doll,” I said. “She’s called Marta. Would you—”

  “I sometimes spend hours with him. I feel he’s alive and is listening to me.”

  “No,” I said. “He’s plaster. He’s only painted plaster. He can’t hear a thing.”

  “I shall put him away now.” Jesus was returned to his box, but only after being kissed. I thought I should like her to kiss me like that.

  “It is wonderful that you have called me here,” I said. “I thank you very much.”

  “That is not necessary.”

  “I think we will do very well together. We are like twins, you and I.”

  “I do not think that we look so very alike,” she said. “There may be a passing resemblance, perhaps, I have heard some comment upon it. But you have, forgive me, rather a nose, don’t you? And a chin, upon my word! They rather peek out and are, all in all, a little alarming. But you must not worry; I don’t mind how you look. No, though there may be a similarity, I don’t think we can look so very alike, can we? I’m the king’s sister. Oh, don’t look so sad. What a silly creature you are. How can one feel sorry for something with such a face? I like you much better when you don’t look so glum. Come now, I have something else to show you.”

  She took me to a room decorated with many very amateur drawings, particularly of crucifixes and saints. “Oh, but look at all these drawings!” she said with enthusiasm.

  I looked at them and turned to Elisabeth.

  “They’re mine!” she said. “I drew them.”

  I said nothing.

  “What do you think of them?” she asked.

  “I think, Your Majesty, please forgive me,” I said, “I think we must begin our studies right away.”

  “My person?”

  I paused, but I felt I had no choice. “You do not . . . look, really, do you? Not yet. I’m sure you shall. My master taught me to look, and it took a great deal of bread before I could see anything at all.” Her face was exceedingly red. “I should not lie to you, Your Majesty,” I said. “If we are to progress together, if I am to be useful, there ought not to be lies.”

  “I am Princesse Elisabeth of France.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Well!” She stamped her foot.

  I could not tell what she would do. There was a long silence. At last she said, “I’ve had enough for today.” I was sent back to my cupboard.

  When I was not needed, I had been instructed that I should spend as much time in my cupboard as possible. It was understood that on occasion I might need to venture out, but I should never go farther than the bucket in the side room. It was a large cupboard and the shelf was not so very much smaller than my bed at the Monkey House. A person can get used to nearly anything.

  It was comfortable enough in there, and I had so much time to think, more than I’d had before, and some of that thinking was inevitably about Edmond and how there would be no room for him to lie with me in that coffin-cupboard, and that that was perhaps how it should be, since he’d been stolen from me. I wished that I had one of the heads I had sculpted of him, I felt that might have helped me a great deal, but the widow had destroyed them all. I was not to think of Edmond anymore. I was to put him away. He was not my business.

  I did try very hard not to think of Edmond, but they left me alone such a lot that Edmond was the place I most liked to visit, though he was so married. I wondered if he ever thought of me. How strange he would find it to learn that I was in Versailles, employed royally. I’d tell him that royal employment was not half so splendid as he might suppose.

  If I stayed too long in there, however, I started wanting Edmond too much, until it felt like the ghost of him was growing around me, eating at my brain and slowing my heart. If I lay there alone too long, I might be haunted to death by that shop mannequin whose shape I so longed for. So I forced myself to look forward, to try to vanquish the ghost, to busy it away.

  In Versailles, I could have candles whenever I asked; there was always an abundant supply. Lying there, I could listen to the noise of the palace, to the soldiers marching outside, and in the night, to the rats running along the corridors, and, outside, to the screeches of the feral cats who lived off the waste created by the great building.

  And I could learn. I was given a card-covered booklet, the Almanach de Versailles, containing a vast list of the people who worked in the palace, from the House of the King to the Department of Palace Couriers. I read this dull little tome again and again in an attempt to stop the Edmond spirit from coming. I tried to picture against each name a person. I tried to understand the king’s two surgeon-dentists, Bourdet and Dubois-Foucou, supposing that Bourdet might be a heavy gentleman, and Dubois-Foucou a trifle fond of himself. I passed through a list of fifty equerries to the king. I moved beyond to the section listed as Bouche du Roi, “the king’s mouth,” which pertained to the king’s eating, and marveled at the list of four men responsible solely for washing the king’s plates. (I remember their names even now: Cheval, Colonne, Mulochor, and de Rollepot. I thought I might have liked Monsieur de Rollepot.) My finger traced long lines of worthies in the King’s Household, pages and pages of people, until I reached the House of the Queen. (Among the thousands in that great army, I can still recall four: Collas, Mora, Carré, and Le Kin, the minor flank of sixteen of the queen’s Fruiterie.)

  At last, I reached the Maison de Madame Elisabeth de France, two hundred and twenty-six pages into the tightly printed Almanach. I counted the people of Madame Elisabeth’s household, the seventh house listed and by far the littlest. Seventy-three people for one fourteen-year-old girl. From her chaplain to her confessor to Madame Mackau, named there as the Lady of Honor. Beyond that followed a gaggle of ladies-in-waiting (fifteen), a single Chevalier d’Honneur, four primary equerries. Under the heading Chambre there were the principal women of the bedchamber (two), the secondary women of the bedchamber (sixteen), the valets of the bedchamber (four), the valet of the upholstery (one), the boys of the bedchamber (four), and the valets of the dressing room (four). Then out of the chamber there was listed Madame Elisabeth’s doctor (le Monnier), her surgeon (Loustoneau), and her surgeon-dentist (Bourdet, who also troubled himself over the king’s teeth—a speck of insight into the great whole). Also listed were Madame Elisabeth’s librarian, her reader, her secretary, her harpsichord teacher, her harp instructor, her painting teacher, and a host of other servants: her tapestry makers (two), wardrobe valets (two), porters (four), porte-chaise d’affaires (two), silver cleaner (one), and finally her bit-maid (one), the lowest of the household, used for sundry
unmentionable tasks, name given as Pallier, Lucie. I closed the book, blew out the candle, sat dizzy in the dark. And I summoned the Edmond ghost again because I was so lonely.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Concerning my employment as Person to Her Majesty Princesse Elisabeth.

  On my third day, Elisabeth sent for me again—not for drawing, but for a game of hide-and-seek, the princess’s particular passion. I was to close my eyes and count to one hundred and then try to find Elisabeth and her ladies-in-waiting. When I opened my eyes there was no one in sight, only the furniture, but it took only a moment to find them hiding in a nearby room, a throng of official ladies enjoying their wonderful joke. A few of the tallest demoiselles were gathered in the doorway; I pushed through them—indecorously, I was later scolded—to find Elisabeth eating from a plate of small cakes. They looked rather nice. I was not offered one.

  “Cuckoo,” I said. “There you are.” I touched her arm.

  “No!” shrieked Mackau. “No! Never! You do not touch.”

  The old woman dragged me down the hall, to a plain parlor I’d never seen before.

  “Put out your hands,” she instructed.

  And I did.

  I heard wind, and a cane bit into me. It was withdrawn, then came down again. The third time, I moved my hands.

  “No! No!” the old woman snapped. “It must be three!”

  In tears, I put my hands out once more and the cane instantly delivered its message. I was not too old to be beaten. Perhaps it was my height that confused them.

  “Next time it shall be ten. You do not touch. Repeat after me: I do not touch.”

  “I do not touch.”

  I turned around. Elisabeth was behind me. She had been there all along.

  “It is I who say ‘cuckoo,’ not you at all,” she said. “And the game of hide-and-seek should last at least a half hour. You do not do it right at all.”

  “Well,” said Mackau, “we must grow up. We must all grow up.”

  The following day, we set down to work. I put paper in front of Elisabeth. She held a pencil; I could tell the two were not intimate. The first thing I discovered was that Madame Elisabeth was not clear on the subject of anatomy. The heart, for example, that most noisy of organs and thus the easiest to detect, was to her mind—doubtless inspired by many inaccurate religious paintings—found precisely in the center of the chest. She wondered why two kidneys, why two lungs, and supposed that this doubling of organs might somehow be connected to the bearing of twins. She was amazed to discover that the insides of a person were generally placed in the same position from human being to human being. She absolutely insisted that the insides of a man were completely different from those of a woman, and would not be contradicted on this. I drew the outline of the human form and tried to show her the contents, but it was very hard to make her believe. She could comprehend the notion that some intestines are large and others small, but found it quite ridiculous that everyone, no matter their size, should have both. I decided the best course would be to find a human model to aid my instructions. I asked Elisabeth for assistance, and soon Pallier the bit-maid appeared.

  “Hello, Pallier,” I said.

  Pallier said nothing. The poor girl was not allowed to.

  “Who’s this?” asked Elisabeth.

  “This is Pallier,” I said, “one of your servants.”

  “I’ve never seen her before.”

  “Even so, here is Pallier.”

  Pallier had been in Elisabeth’s service for six years, but she did her work so quietly and anonymously that she had made no more impression than a ghost. The palace was filled with such people, I think, perhaps hundreds of them, who lived so quietly and usefully alongside the royal family that they had not yet been spotted.

  “Pallier,” I asked, “could you please stand in the middle of the room with your arms outstretched like so?” She obliged.

  “This is Pallier,” I said to Elisabeth. “We know what she looks like from the outside, but what is she like inside? What is kept inside the cupboard of Pallier? Let us pretend that her ribs are like cupboard doors, as if we might open them at the sternum, from the center outward. What do we see? What does she keep on her shelves?”

  “Bed linen, I should say,” Elisabeth uttered.

  I let this pass.

  As I signaled hither and yon with my pointer, Pallier learned of many things she harbored within her, none of which she had known of before. Elisabeth learned too. Determined to stay away from my own cupboard as long as possible, I stretched our time together longer and longer, insisting that our lesson would not be complete until I had finished explaining the kidney, then the liver, then the heart.

  “It’s so hard,” said Elisabeth.

  “But we make progress,” I said.

  “Why must I worry over what a servant has inside her?”

  “It is the same with all people, madame. They have the same innards.”

  “I hardly think so.”

  “And yet it is true.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “How horrid.”

  She seemed to look at Pallier with a great resentment then. We walked around Pallier, who blushed and even jolted slightly as I touched. “It’s just your body,” I told her, “just a human body like any other. There’s nothing to be concerned over. Do keep still, we’re trying to learn.”

  And it did help, seeing a real body: it always does. As Elisabeth began to understand how a body worked, her drawing improved. I taught her how to leave off thinking about the rules and laws and passageways of the palace, and to concern herself with those inside the body. Now, there was a palace to wander in. We burrowed, in our imagination, beneath the skin of Lucie Pallier, down among the organs and bones. Once we had finished the tour of Pallier, I had Elisabeth point to the appropriate places as I called out: “Kidney! Bladder! Esophagus! Small intestine! Lungs! Rectum! Heart! Spinal cord! Diaphragm! Pancreas! Spleen! Palma fascia! Anastomotica magna! Tuber omentale!” And progress was made. Later, in the corridor, Pallier touched her abdomen and whispered to me with great wonder: “Here, within, is my duodenum, which is short for intestinum duodenum digitorum.”

  “Which means?”

  “Intestine of twelve fingers’ width!”

  “Yes, Pallier, that is very well remembered!”

  “Thank you, madame.”

  “Thank you, Marie,” I corrected.

  “Thank you, madame.”

  At the end of our drawing lesson, Elisabeth would be greeted by her favorite ladies-in-waiting, girls she addressed as Bombe, Rage, and Démon, and I would be taken back to my cupboard. I lay there in the darkness thinking about Elisabeth, murmuring her name to the shelf above, until the ghost of Edmond came to lie beside me.

  In those first weeks I had seen little more of the vast building than my cupboard, her salon, and our workroom, and I wanted to see more. I had seen so little in my life, but I’d heard many things and had glimpses of others, and the palace was really too much temptation altogether. I wondered what else there was beyond our small rooms. I had been told I must never leave Elisabeth’s apartment, but I wanted to—if only because I thought it might help me to keep the troubling ghost of Edmond away.

  One afternoon a great opportunity arose in the form of a reprise of hide-and-seek. With Mackau occupied elsewhere in conference with the aunts, Elisabeth announced that she and her ladies-in-waiting should rush away and I should have the pleasure of finding them about her apartment. Off they giggled. I closed my eyes and I counted to one hundred, until I heard them bustle into one particular room—and I took a deep breath and set off in the opposite direction. I went out into the palace; I found new geography, and my feet made noise upon it.

  I ran this way and that through the royal maze, down unfamiliar corridors, into large and gilded ro
oms. Before almost every door in the palace were people waiting, people sitting down or standing up, all of them without exception holding papers in their hands. When I asked one man how long he had been waiting, he said, “On and off, three years in November.” Another man was gray of complexion, as if by long exposure he’d absorbed the color of the stone walls around him. I climbed stairways and opened doors, and many of these waiting people told me I shouldn’t be where I was. When thunderous Versailles foot traffic came near, I grew uneasy. I began to wonder if the game of hide-and-seek was even still in process, or if it had taken a strange turn in which the hiders were forced to go in search of the lost seeker. I would have been happy to find Elisabeth, just then, for I was utterly lost.

  When a group of men in blue livery rushed past, I hid myself behind a screen in an unlit fireplace to catch my breath and steady myself. As my heart becalmed itself, I became aware of a quiet knocking, and wondered if someone else like me was knocking his or her way about the doors of Versailles. Summoning some store of bravery inside myself, I decided that two lost people might be more comforting than one, and opened the door. The knocking ceased.

  “Who’s there?” said a man’s voice on the other side.

  “Please,” was all I could muster.

  “You mustn’t come in, you mustn’t come in at all. It’s not allowed.”

  “Please, sir,” I managed.

  “Private. Private. And not to be disturbed.”

  “I’m not certain, exactly—”

  “Who is out there? Who is it?”

  I was stuttering now—not least because of the alarming, unnatural heat coming from the room. I began to wonder if I had disturbed some devil resident in the palace.

  “Who are you there? Explain yourself.”

  I tried to explain that I was the sculpture tutor to Her Majesty Madame Elisabeth. I’m not sure how much of my mumbling was intelligible, but at last the voice in the heat replied.