Little

by Edward Carey

  “Oh, very well then, step in, step in.”

  And in I went.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The locksmith of Versailles.

  Inside was rather a large man in his twenties, dressed in a leather apron, with his shirtsleeves rolled up, leaning over a forge, a small hammer in his hand.

  “Well, close the door, or we’ll have all and sundry within.”

  I did as I was bidden. He went immediately back to his business, tapping on a small piece of metal. It was this, not a knocking on the door, that I’d heard through the walls. Engrossed in his work, he did not look up at me for several minutes. The Palace of Versailles was such an expansive place, I considered, that a great variety of craftsmen must be situated inside. I had stumbled across the locksmith; had I opened a different door I might have found the rat catcher making traps, the clockman busy with his ticking, even the candle maker molding wax.

  I stood in the corner by the door and watched the craftsman before me, hoping that when he had finished his particular piece of business he might be willing to furnish me with directions back to Madame Elisabeth’s apartment. The man had an almost comically high forehead, a sizable Roman nose, full lips, and remarkable large blue eyes, which he often scrunched up and brought quite close to the red-hot objects he was working with—from which I gathered that he too might benefit from spectacles. He had a fleshy underchin and womanly breasts, all of which he stroked from time to time with his pudgy, knuckle-less hands. He seemed not to breathe through his nose, but to use his mouth for the capturing of oxygen. With metal tongs, the man picked up the object he had been bothering and dipped it into a deep basin of water, upon which the object hissed in complaint, a noise the locksmith greeted with a smile. He turned to me, squinted, nodded, delved into one of his apron pockets, pulled out a handkerchief, and carefully laid it upon a nearby table. Then he delved into another pocket, pulled out a crushed-looking piece of cold custard and pastry, placed this upon the handkerchief, and stood back to admire it. Finally, from a third pocket, he took out a handsome penknife, unhinged its blade, and bisected the custard pie, rather unequally. Taking up the major part in his tubby hands, he spoke at last:

  “Don’t tell a soul, and here’s your reward.”

  I stepped forward to take it.

  “Do you really need all of that?” he asked, with crumbs on his lips, his portion already safe inside. “There’s a good deal there, and you are rather small. Come, what do you say I cut it in half again?”

  Once more the piece of cake was fractioned, again not entirely evenly. I leaned forward to take the smaller portion.

  “I say, you do hesitate so,” said the locksmith, interrupting me before I had reached it. “I don’t mean to force you to it. If you’d prefer, I could keep that for you till later,” he said, lifting up the last piece of cake, “or shall I just pop it in here instead?” He brought my morsel very close to his mouth. “Shall I?” Then, without waiting for my say-so, he dropped the cake in between the fleshy lips, chewed, swallowed, and kissed the air in satisfaction.

  “Perhaps now,” I said, “you shall be sick.”

  “But I like it! I like it,” he said, stroking his stomach very earnestly. “And I’m forbidden it. ‘One piece a day,’ she says. ‘Only one and no more.’” Then, in whispers, “So I cheat. Of course I cheat. I’ve grown very cunning.” For a while he was quietly content, locking and unlocking his work, admiring it, making sure the lock was thoroughly dry, then applying a little oil and polish. At last he bowed down, close to me, and I saw those great blue eyes scanning me thoroughly.

  “Well then, old thing, shall we install it together?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “I would like that.”

  Taking my hand with one of his, and with the other picking up his new lock, he led me out of the little workshop into a long corridor. We progressed around the corner and stopped at a door missing its lock. Through the door I could see a fraction of what lay beyond: a great room, well lit, with an enormous painted ceiling and vast plates of mirror on one side, echoing the windows of the other and peopled with various elaborate ladies and gentlemen, very engaged with one another. There never was a place so shiny as that one; it sparkled so much you were blinded by it.

  “Is the queen there?” I asked the locksmith. “Which one is she?”

  I was to try to cast the queen—I hadn’t forgotten my instructions, to bring a piece of this impossible shininess back to the dirt of the boulevard. The locksmith jumped a little at my question, looked into the hall, squinted, shook his head. “No,” he said, “no queen. Only decorations.”

  The decorations—he meant the ladies—paid us no attention. The locksmith laid his handkerchief on the floor, then got down onto his knees. I knelt beside him and took out various nails and bits of business from his apron pocket, which I held for him until they were required. He proceeded to place the lock into the door. It fitted snugly, and looked, I told him, very fine.

  “Think so? I designed it myself. Yes, I like it rather.”

  I heard people moving behind us, and turned to see several footmen and in between them the old lady Mackau. She motioned for me to come to her, and by the force of the gesture I understood her to be very, very unhappy. I bade good-bye to the locksmith, kneeling there on his handkerchief peering into his keyhole.

  “You’re off, then, are you?” he said. “Please yourself.”

  “I’ll come again, I promise,” I whispered.

  Seeing myself reflected over and over in those looking-glasses, so out of place and far from home, I thought I might fall into that glass and drown. I walked slowly toward Madame Mackau, who pushed me from the chamber and marched me down the hall. She insisted that she was quite speechless at my impudence—though she was far from speechless, lecturing me all the way back to Madame Elisabeth’s rooms on how I must learn my place. Many guards had been sent out in search of me, she said, and had been told that a dwarfish stranger had been seen opening doors she had no right to open. “This place was not built for your entertainment,” she hissed, her bony hand clamped upon the back of my neck. And then I saw the intimidating room—though it could no longer intimidate, now that I had seen that far grander chamber—and there was Elisabeth herself. “Cuckoo,” she said, though without enthusiasm. Then, turning to the old lady: “This is my person, Madame Mackau, not yours.”

  “She was found—”

  “Let her go immediately,” ordered Elisabeth, with such confidence.

  My neck was unclamped.

  “Shall I have you beaten again?” Elisabeth mused.

  I put my hands out.

  “Send her away,” said Mackau. “Beat her first.”

  “You shall not go back to your home,” Elisabeth said, “until you have taught me everything.”

  “She has broken the rules!” cried Mackau.

  “I should like very much—” said Elisabeth, with a wonderful new firmness, “I should like us to resume the game of hide-and-seek.”

  “We must grow up,” said the old woman.

  “And this time, dear Mackau,’” said Elisabeth, “I have decided that you shall have the pleasure of hiding. We shall count to one hundred.”

  “But I never do the hiding.”

  “It has long been your turn, then. One . . . two . . . three. You must run, Mackau, and hide. You know the rules, do run along. We shall come and find you. Go and hide, and nowhere easy or close, or I shall be very cross.”

  Mackau, uncertain, left the room.

  “Sit down,” said Elisabeth. “I have something to say to you.”

  “That was very well done,” I said.

  “Thank you, I quite surprised myself. It’s you that inspired me to it. To run off like that! Only don’t do it again, my person, my body.”

  “No, I promise you.”

  So we sat, two similar-looking under
sized young women, upon a sofa designed for bigger people, and we talked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Poor Suffering Bodies of Madame Elisabeth, by Herself.

  I am going to tell you about my people,” Elisabeth told me. “The people I collect and put in here.” She held a beautiful leather-bound tome in her lap.

  It was her brother, the king, who had inspired her to assemble people all in a book. He was always writing everything down, she said; he so loved lists; he knew the Almanach almost by heart. He had written down how many steps there were to the Queen’s Staircase, how many windows there were in the entire palace, the number of times their grandfather sent for him. (Not very many, she recalled.) He knew the precise number of seconds, hours, days, and years that their brother the Duc de Bourgogne had lived before he succumbed to tuberculosis of the bones, and the exact number of years, days, hours, and minutes after his birth that their mother had died. The king counted everything, it seemed, and wrote it all down. He had books and books of lists.

  “I thought, in my small way, I might do like the king,” she told me. “So I collect up my people. There are so many buildings beyond the palace, horrid, mean places, and there do I see such people. Oh, how awfully sad they make me feel. And I make a note of it, and I give a little money, and then I tell them that I, Elisabeth of France, shall pray for them. That’s why I keep the notes, you see here. Read.”

  She handed me a long list of people and their distress. Barse, Renaud: broken leg. Grulier, Madeleine: pains in the stomach. Gibier, Agnes: headaches. Billinger, Jean: his little finger, his daughter’s nose. Enderlin, Odile: kidney. Roger, Roland: his mother shrieks. Pynson, Rose: discolored skin on back. Parlant, Alphonse: hungry. Moulin, Dominique: pregnant again. Levesque, Pierre: son has died. Salvia, Huguette: corns, toothache, cannot see. Vincent, François, and his wife, Olivia: cannot conceive. Cutard, Adeline: spots.

  “I pray for them all,” she said.

  Then I had the idea.

  “You might do better yet,” I said.

  “Have a care, my body, take warning.”

  “You could sculpt the maladies.”

  “Sculpt?”

  “Yes! Think of it—the people’s most grievous problems, captured in wax!”

  “Miniature models? In wax?” She fidgeted a bit, as if imagining holding one in her hand. “Oh—could we take them to the church? Good heavens! Might we? We could make them votive objects, couldn’t we? Votive objects that are different? That are very accurate? Then God would be sure to listen. Then He would see how much good we’re doing. Oh, my body, despite your unhappy face you are indeed a very clever one. Yes! Oh yes!”

  Unsure what to say, I reached to take her hand.

  “No! Stay back! No closer! But what a lovely idea!”

  We never did search for Madame Mackau that afternoon. She was found some hours later behind a tapestry by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. When she explained that she was hiding from little Elisabeth, the lady asked why—was she frightened of the princess? The story spread about, so widely that when the imperious lady appeared, people smiled at her. Her authority slipped, and she slowly began protecting herself by summoning great blankets of imaginary maladies.

  The next morning, I was awakened by a hammering on my cupboard doors before the sun was up. In the darkness I dressed and was escorted to that room where all Madame Elisabeth’s drawings had been, though they were no longer there. A table had been set in the middle of the room, covered with tools and wax and clay. I ran my fingers over the tools, touched the clay. And last of all lifted the wax to my nose.

  “I shall call you,” Elisabeth told me as her hands molded soft clay, “I shall call you my heart.” And after a week she presented me with that object made in wax, crudely modeled but there it was. And I asked her if I might hold her, and she said I must certainly never consider it. But I was so happy I could not stop myself and asked again. And she said no again but quieter. So that I felt I might try once more. This time, I didn’t ask permission. I put my hands around her and I felt her head resting upon my shoulder. And her smell, deep and warm, a tiny, perfectly grown cabbage. Only when Madame Mackau’s voice came from outside did Elisabeth quickly break away and return to her work. I slipped the heart into my pinafore pocket and have kept it among my possessions ever since.

  At my suggestion various animal organs were brought up from the kitchens, so that we might examine them, cut them open, and draw them to help us get a better understanding of their place and function. A cow’s heart, a sheep’s lungs, a pig’s bladder. Initially reluctant, Elisabeth was soon happy to sink her fingers in. Great heavy books were brought also from the libraries, huge wonderful volumes with prints that folded out and showed just how the human is. Here was good instruction; we studied closely, and then we set to work.

  As we modeled, we opened up to each other. I showed her Marta and she told me her secrets. Elisabeth’s greatest hope was to be married; her profoundest fear was to end up a spinster like her aunts. She told me that her hand had once been promised to the Infant of Portugal, but that somehow the proposed union had been broken off. The Infant of Portugal had been proclaimed “not becoming.” The king said that someone else would certainly be found, that Elisabeth must just be patient, and so she went on being patient, and though she saw her brother often enough, her marriage had never been discussed again.

  “Let me not be like my aunts Adélaïde and Victoire,” Elisabeth said. “All they do is complain all day and eat and drink and talk of things that don’t matter at all. They’re just filling their days, it seems to me, one after the other, always the same, again and again, until one day they will just lie down and die. That’s all they have to look forward to. Oh, my heart, I feel so much stronger since you’ve been here. I don’t want my aunts’ future. God in Heaven, do anything to me, but save me from that!”

  Madame Elisabeth had devised her own regimen of visits beyond the estate, in search of her needy, and each time she returned we made new anatomical votives. One day, I asked if I could join her. She frowned a moment but then happily agreed. Her poor and suffering lived very near the palace, she told me, but out of sight of it. Tucked away behind woods in miserable cottages in states of advanced dilapidation. We made the trip by carriage, accompanied by two guards. I asked why.

  “For protection,” Elisabeth said. “Sometimes the people are very unhappy and do not always hide it.”

  At the sound of our carriage, people began to come out of their homes. The first thought I had was that their faces and bodies seemed of a piece with the distressed architecture. They approached the carriage. Elisabeth asked me to pull down the window.

  “Hello, good morning to you,” she said.

  They bowed, their hats removed from their heads.

  “How are you? How do you do?”

  And then, one by one, they came up to her and gave small details of their misfortunes, in some cases showing the maladies they carried with them. Only when they had spoken, revealed their agony, would Elisabeth pass them a coin.

  “Do you find them fascinating, my heart?” she asked me.

  “Are they starving?”

  “I’m not certain. What do you think?”

  “How did they come to be like this, so close to the palace?”

  “Food is delivered to them.”

  “But not enough.”

  “And I make my visits.”

  “What, I wonder, can it be like inside their houses?”

  At this she stopped. “Inside? I have never thought of it.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “Then let us.”

  I opened the carriage door; how the people hurried back to let me by. Elisabeth followed. We walked up to one exhausted building, and I asked the derelict woman before it if we might go in. She said something
I could not fully grasp. I pushed at the door. So dark it was inside that it took a while to comprehend the place, despite its small size. Dirt floor. A bed propped up on bricks, stained blankets lying in a state of rigor mortis on top of it. Walls black with mold. A couple of dented pots. A stool much repaired. The whole place smelled like the inside of some very rancid animal, long given over to despair. Nothing else save a tied-up dog, the woman’s sole companion, who clearly followed her diet. Looking at the creature, you understood precisely how its skeleton was articulated. It raised its hackles, and with a look of profound outrage it showed its rotten teeth, and once it started barking at us it would not cease. Elisabeth clung to me. If the dog were loosed from its fetters, I was convinced that we might have become the first decent meal it had ever had.

  “How horrid,” Elisabeth gasped.

  The woman began to speak to us then, though the language was no tongue I had ever heard. Strange guttural noises, grunts, and gnashes—but all the while, and this was the crucial thing, her mouth, that jagged slit, remained quite still. It wasn’t exactly her who was calling out in gulps and spurts: it was her body talking. Her neglected and failing corpus, making noise, involuntarily berating us. It was the muffled voice of some helpless spirit coming from within this poor creature’s forsaken pelt. Then there came a tumbling from her, a sudden lurch forward, a bending in two, and we left in haste.

  We had been inside perhaps half a minute before we were out again, inhaling the cleaner air. I would never forget that place, the miserable room and dog and lady.

  Look away from the hovel; look anywhere else. Behind the village houses were a small chapel and a large graveyard with many fresh-dug graves.

  We retreated to the carriage.

  “How does a woman come to be like that?” Elisabeth panted.

  “Not overnight, that’s certain.”

  “Can she be helped, do you think?”