by Edward Carey
“I don’t know if anyone does, except the widow perhaps, she studies that world so. No one understands it better than she. Everything’s in chaos, Marie, haven’t you heard? People are being very argumentative. I wish they wouldn’t be, but they are. It upsets her so. Monsieur Mercier runs around as if he has the worms. Nothing is certain.”
“Was it for my own good, then, that I was sent away?”
Curtius didn’t seem to hear me. But then he asked: “Did she love you, your Elisabeth? How nice to be loved. Come along.”
Versailles, packed up? Could such a thing be possible?
I wondered if anything would ever be certain again.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
A new beginning.
There are heads, new heads to be thought about every day,” said my master. “The Monkey House has grown so big, we can’t stop it now, even should we want to. Through there, Marie, is your workshop.”
“My own workshop?”
“And with you, every day, will work Georges Offroy.”
A boy stepped forward.
“Hello, miss,” he said, bowing.
He was addressing me.
“Hello, Georges. I am very pleased to meet you.”
What a cheerful, healthy face, what crooked teeth. I liked him instantly. An ordinary thirteen-year-old boy. Since when did I know such creatures?
“I’m to do what you say,” he said. “I am at your service.”
“I’m very glad of it,” I said. “I didn’t know I was to have an assistant. I’ve never had one before.”
“I mean to do well by you, miss.”
“And I’m sure you shall.”
“I saw your royal heads before they went off to the Palais!” he exclaimed. “They’re famous, they are! What heads!”
“Thank you, Georges!” I cried. “And that’s where they are? At the Palais-Royal! My heads! May I see them?”
“You must get on, Little,” my master said. “You must be busy. So much to do!”
My workshop was a small room connected to my master’s on the ground floor of the new extension. A store cupboard that had been cleared and outfitted with a table and two chairs. It had no access of its own; it could be reached only by going through my master’s workspace. There was one window, high enough that I should have to get a chair to look through it. But it was my room, my workshop.
That first afternoon, my fingers touched all those tools and jars, even wax. Georges and I were to make some wax hands for a figure my master was finishing, while the heavy body was being assembled in a different workshop. Great spades of hands were our first charge, huge sausage fingers, and so a large baker from Charenton who fit the bill had been brought in to have his hands cast for a fee. The head for the fat hands was very pockmarked, with a huge, unkempt, clotted wig. He looked like a lion gone to seed. The Comte de Mirabeau was his name.
That first day, those fat hands so occupied me that after a while I almost forgot to think about Elisabeth in her corridor with her plasterman. My mind was on other things. As we worked, I turned to my assistant. “Excuse me, Georges. I don’t mean to pry, but are you paid for your work?”
“Certainly, miss, regular like clockwork. I shouldn’t stick around otherwise. I go to the counting room and am given my due. It’s good employment.”
“Do you think I shall be paid, Georges?”
“’Course you shall.”
“Do you think so! I wonder, Georges, if you would show me the counting room. It’s new since my day and I don’t know how to find it.”
“I’d be happy to. Right now? Certainly. Nothing simpler.”
We went along the corridor and turned a corner and suddenly we were in the old house I had known so well. As we climbed the stairs, we were greeted by the dummy of Henri Picot, now wearing a fine white shirt and a silk waistcoat of bold stripes.
In the place that was called the accounting room stood a tall metal strongbox. The body of this cold personality was filled with the Cabinet’s great fortune. There were three keys, I would learn: one for the widow, one for Curtius, and one for the bookkeeper. This very bookkeeper was perched upon his high stool when we arrived, a man in his middle twenties, prematurely balding, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a pasty face lacking warmth.
“This,” said Georges, “is Marie Grosholtz. And this, miss, is Martin Millot. He keeps the figures.”
Martin pointed at my spectacles and said, “Twenty livres.” Then, after a moment: “You lived at the palace.”
“Yes, I did.”
“For which there came fifty livres a month,” he said.
“Fifty livres!” I wondered at such a sum. It seemed to me a great deal.
“We make that in a few hours sometimes.”
“Is the money mine? That came from Versailles? May I have it?”
“Have it?”
“Since it was in payment for my services.”
“I have no authority to release such funds.”
“But it was for me, was it not? For my wages.”
“That may be, but I have no authority.”
“Excuse me—will I be paid now?” I said. “Now that I am back. Am I to have a wage?”
“I have had no word of it, either one way or the other.”
“The royal family at dinner—I made the heads. They were my work.”
“Were they? And what then?”
“Shall I not be paid?”
“What do you want me to say, miss? I’ve had no word of it, neither for nor against. Without word, the money does not migrate. How miserable you look. Don’t trouble yourself so much, I say, it’s not my doing. I add, I subtract. I cannot say what sort of figure you are. I ask you, please, to calm.”
“Shall we return to our work, miss?” asked Georges.
“I suppose we must, Georges,” I said.
“Do not be so down, miss.”
“No, Georges. I had just hoped.”
We had been working for several hours, and the evening had come on, when there came a growing humming in the building, followed by a shaking of the objects in the room.
“It’s the public,” explained Georges. “The doors have been opened, and they’ve come in. We generally get shaken around a little, tossed and turned, until they go. It’s a good noise really, the widow says so. She calls it prosperity.”
The whole building rattled with the life of people from beyond the gates. A little later, my master put on his coat and went out.
“He often goes out in the evenings,” Georges told me, “with Jacques and Emile.”
“Where do they go?”
“I couldn’t say exactly. Dark places, cock pits and such, dangerous drinking holes where there are fights, murderous places. But now that he’s gone, would you like to see them all? There’s a spy hole.”
Georges took me by the hand down the back stairs and along a dark corridor. Another new man passed us by.
“What are you doing, Georges?” he asked.
“Just showing Miss Grosholtz around.”
Did I need showing around my own old home? I did.
“Should you be doing it?” The other boy’s face came into view, half-sunk in his abundant collar. He had a severe squint, and his eyes were placed so far apart on his head that they seemed entirely unacquainted with each other. “I’m not sure you should.”
“I am Marie Grosholtz,” I said.
“Are you?” he replied. “And so what?”
“I made the royal family.”
“And there was I thinking it was God what done that.” He looked, one eye on each of us, before sneering away.
“That’s André Valentin. He’s a ticket-taker. We have nothing to do with him generally.”
“So much the better.”
“Here it is then.”
He showed me a hole that had been drilled in a wall. Through it could be seen the colossal business—people of wax!—and the people of flesh here to see them. What a populace!
“I think,” I said, “that the rest of Paris must be empty now.”
“I think it must be.”
The old theater props were gone. Everything was very dark and poorly lit. The walls seemed to drip; great black shadows crept across the hall; all the murderers and their murdered were grimly about their business. This was the Salon of Great Thieves. Here were all the most horrible accommodated. Figures everywhere, standing proud in their mischief. And living people moved about these stillborn souls and screamed and laughed at them. Benches were distributed here and there, where a person might sit down and rest from all the infamy.
“Do you see,” said Georges, “a person sleeping at a bench?”
There in the hall was a middle-aged man, his head slumped on his shoulder. Two or three people approached him, pointing and smiling; finally, one stepped forward and tapped the man upon his knee. When he failed to move, he was jogged a little more. Then the little gathering gave a shriek, and I heard the announcement: “He’s wax!”
“A waxman pretending to be the public!” I exclaimed.
“That sleeping fellow,” said Georges, laughing, “is a wax replica of Cyprien Bouchard, painter of porcelain. He won the lottery.”
The lottery, Georges told me, was drawn every six months. A very public occasion: names in a sack, and the name pulled out became a waxwork. There had been three lottery winners so far: a scullery maid, a coiffeur, and a painter of porcelain. They were placed among the exhibits, to mingle with the celebrated and infamous. Scullery maid with assassin, coiffeur near a thief, porcelain painter by drowned bride.
“What an idea!” I said.
All the sounds and humming of the expanded Monkey House, all its chattering and hammering, its odd knocks and reverberations, were so new to me. I lay alone on my pallet in my own workshop that night, after the public departed, and listened to the building breathing, making so many odd sounds—how the house talked, it always had, but in different sounds now, a new complaining, so that just when I thought I might drift into sleep at last, some new noise would waken me. And sitting up, I was certain I heard footsteps nearby.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
A visit.
The sounds came back night after night as I lay upon my pallet, thumping, scratching. Sometimes, half-awake, I thought someone had come into my room; I would sit up in fright and look at the door, and sometimes it would be open, though I always closed it before going to sleep. My master, I said to myself, must have been up in the night.
One early morning when I awoke, daylight just coming in, I was suddenly aware that I was not alone. Someone was sitting at the bench before me.
“Hello,” I said.
There was no answer.
“Who are you there?”
The person kept very still.
“Is it you, Georges? Don’t fool around now, what are you doing?”
But the person only looked on. As more light came I saw the slightest outline of a bonnet. It was a small woman sitting there.
“Is it?” I said in a rush. “Elisabeth! You have come for me!”
But she said nothing.
“Cuckoo?” I ventured.
And there was no response. The daylight rose and slowly I saw the person with more clarity. She was wearing a black dress and a white bonnet; upon her chest was a red cockade with the letter C in the middle, such as all the workers wore now. Slowly, slowly, I saw a little more. The woman was staring at me with shining dark eyes.
“Who are you? Why have you come?”
But she sat still and stared hard.
“Please talk. Speak to me. Why are you here?”
But she just stared.
So I leaned forward and pushed her, and she tumbled forward and fell to the ground and lay there, very still.
I leaned over and touched her hair. The hair came off.
I screamed.
By then I could see: the strange bald woman was not of the living, no she was indeed very dead, and had never been alive, for she was a doll. A doll of an undersized human, made of not wax but wood, wearing a cloth dress, with glass eyes set in her head. I sat her upright; how heavy she was, and awkward, her limbs falling this way and that. Someone had put her in my room to frighten me.
What a horrible, mean-looking face. How it stared at me with its lifeless eyes. I put back her hair, though I hated to touch it. As I righted the wretched doll, the door moved and someone, some shadowy form that had been there all along, darted out through my master’s workroom and along the corridor. I rushed after it, following the creaking of the floor, as if the house itself wanted me to find the culprit. I stopped at the foot of the attic stairs in the old house, at the very edge of the forbidden territory. I didn’t care if the attic did kill me then; nothing would stop me.
I creaked up, very careful, very slow. As I stood upon the top step, looking into the darkness, I saw no one. But then, after a long time, after my breath grew quieter, I saw a small patch grow a little lighter in the gloom, and that patch came drifting toward me. And its name, oh its name, yes its name was Edmond Henri Picot.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Stick no bills.
Edmond Henri Picot. With a mustache and gray in his hair and haunted eyes. My hands over my mouth to stop the screaming. The figure came right up to me, so soft in motion that it might have been the wind stirred by a spider, and whispered:
“Catarrh? This powerful treatment makes cure certain. Nazalia. Cleanses and purifies all the breathing organs; penetrating to the innermost crevices of the mucus membrane of the throat and nose, dissolves and removes all crusts and phlegm, disperses the catarrh, stops buzzing in the ears and cures partial deafness.”
“Oh, Edmond!” I cried. “What has happened to you, my very dear Edmond?”
“Do you suffer from skin sickness,” he continued, “in the form of skin shine, pimples, spots, and redness, that may lead to eczema with its terrible burning and itching? For an absolute cure for eczema, is two livres too much?”
“Edmond, what has happened? Do you live up here all alone?”
“A laxative and refreshing fruit lozenge. Most agreeable to take. Tamar Amar Indien Grillon for constipation, hemorrhoids, bile, headache, loss of appetite, gastric and intestinal troubles. Tamar Amar Indien Grillon.”
“Oh, Edmond, what have they done to you?”
“Mouse traps!” he said. “Rat traps! No more vermin!”
Think, Marie Grosholtz.
“We won’t talk about it. We’ll just sit here awhile. Let me catch my breath.”
“An Oriental dessert in Paris—pistachio nuts.”
“Yes, Edmond, yes of course.”
I could see about the attic rooms now. They were . . . populated. Edmond had placed a shop doll in each lonely space. There were plates and cups, a small table, even a tablecloth. So then I supposed something else.
“They know you’re here? Everyone below, I mean. You’re not really in hiding, are you, Edmond?”
I held his hand. Every one of his fingers was stained black with ink.
“Stick no bills,” he whispered.
“They do know, don’t they?”
“Bill posters will be prosecuted.”
“Yes. They know.” Someone had been bringing him food. “It won’t do, Edmond.”
I touched his face. His ears were pale and cold. I touched his timid mustache.
“Wait here, Edmond. I will be back in just a moment.”
I took a sharp knife from my workshop, and some soft soap, and with a bowl and water I removed Edmond’s mustache. “There,” I said, “that’s better. You look more yourself already.” But in truth he looked like very little without th
e mustache there. “You do know me, Edmond. I know you know me. You left something in my workshop this morning. I do not know what has happened to you, but you shall be well again.”
“Stick no bills,” he said.
“Quite right,” I said.
A bell sounded downstairs.
“I must go now, Edmond, but I shall be back later. I have people to talk to down below. Yes, I do. But I’ll return!”
Downstairs in my workroom, Georges had arrived.
“Edmond Picot,” I declared, “is in the attic.”
He said nothing, but looked uncomfortable.
“Where is the widow?” I called.
“Please, miss, she went out early today.”
“Then where is Curtius?”
“He is likewise gone out, very recently. You’ve just missed him.”
“I believe you. He heard me up there no doubt and left to avoid any mischief.”
“It is possible.”
“Then Jacques?”
“Has not come in yet.”
“Tell me, Georges, does the widow know about the person in the attic?”
“Yes indeed, miss. It was she what put him there.”
“Oh, the wretched woman!”
“He would not stop crying.”
“The poor dear man! Georges, tell me what has happened.”
“He went down with a brain fever, miss, total nervous exhaustion, and when the fever was done with, his brain had left him.”
“No one told me!”
“Forgive me, miss, but was there a reason they should?”
“He is kept on his own in the attic?”
“He is less panicky there, on his own. Have you seen this wooden doll, miss?”
“Yes, I have. It gave me quite the shock.”
“He made it. Do you know who it is of?”
“Edmond made it? Did he? No, I do not know.”
“Truly, you cannot tell who?”
“It is a horrible-faced woman and it makes me shudder.”
“Honestly, you don’t know?”
