by Edward Carey
“It’s very dangerous,” he said. “It’s not safe.”
“People have babies.”
“You’re old. You’re too old! You’ll die!”
“Perhaps, sir,” I said, “perhaps I won’t.”
“No, oh no. You will.”
Now my master had two women he must look after. He would listen to my chest and belly several times a day, demand that I lie down. He would wash my face, and shake his head. He even came to help me with the Marats. By then our own wax Marat had been returned to us; in its place at the Convention hung the painting by David. That began the decline in demand for Marat casts; though ours was taken from Marat’s own face, it was ugly next to David’s. He had made Marat beautiful and holy, as if he’d come out of the Bible, but he hadn’t really been like that at all. The painting was a lie.
Edmond stitched himself a simple sackcloth suit, one very like a shop doll’s.
“If anyone comes up here,” he said, “they won’t know me for one of them.”
“It is not forever, Edmond,” I said. “Remember who you are. You must not forget. Look out of the window, at Doctor Graham’s. I shall come to you tonight.”
“We shall have a child.”
“I hope so, Edmond, if we are lucky.”
“There’s one there, inside you, growing.”
“Yes, but that does not mean it shan’t suddenly stop.”
He started crying.
“But we shall do our best for it.”
“Yes, our very best.”
It was in those shadowy half-lived days when we moved so slowly in the darkness of our home, making such little noise, that news from outside came to us. Someone from another life. I hadn’t thought of her. I’d forgotten to think of her. If I’d been thinking of her, then perhaps she’d have been safe, she’d still be alive, she’d still be breathing.
I was going out for bread, but the back door was locked. Doctor Curtius was standing by, as if to block it. “Best not go out today,” he said. “We don’t need bread today.”
“We do,” I said. “We do need bread.”
“It is better,” he said, “that we don’t go out today.”
And at first I didn’t think of it.
Doctor Curtius insisted I sit with the widow for a while. Then Edmond showed me a papier-mâché mask he had made himself: it covered his face, with just holes for nostrils. The mask even had crudely painted eyes to cover his own.
“Don’t do it, Edmond, it’s too much.”
“No, no, I feel much better now. Much safer.”
He would put it on whenever he heard someone creaking up the attic stairs. Curtius wanted me to tell him all over again about our days in Berne. That day Curtius said, “Let us talk of our first heads. Put that blanket around you.” And so, wrapped in blankets, we sat by the fire and remembered all that old wax of no consequence.
I worked it out in the end.
My thoughts went like this: The shutters are all shut up, just as they were when the king died and the queen, so perhaps someone of great significance was killed off today. I wonder who. But when I cracked open one shutter and looked across at the remaining occupied houses, I saw that ours was the only house bolted and shuttered, and then the panic began to start. Perhaps it’s her, I thought. Maybe it’s her. Perhaps it is. Why else would they all be looking at me that way? Why would they be stroking and patting and petting so?
“Mmmmmmm,” said the widow.
“Elisabeth?” I asked.
“Marie?” said Edmond. “Let me stroke your belly.”
“Elisabeth?” I asked.
“Marie,” said my master, “sit by the fire with me.”
“Elisabeth?” I asked.
“Tell me of those Berne heads.”
“Elisabeth?” I asked. “Elisabeth? Elisabeth?”
At last he nodded. “Elisabeth.” And then, “Come sit by the fire.”
And I, so help me, I did.
Twenty-seventh May 1794, or Eighth Prairial, Year II, in the language of their new calendars. Perhaps she had her plaster Jesus with her, the wretched thing. I should have been there. All stuffed in the tumbrel, so many of them. Praying, no doubt, all the way. She went on that journey bareheaded, so they say, after the wind blew her kerchief away. She was number twenty-four. There were twenty-three before her that session. My Elisabeth. My Elisabeth, off to death without heart or spleen. My Elisabeth. She never called for me.
Why did you not call?
The next morning I went out to buy the bread.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Gone away.
On the tenth of June, 1794, the Law of Twenty-Second Prairial was passed: The Tribunal must be as active as the crime and conclude every case within twenty-four hours. And so people, ordinary everyday people, were herded from their gaol places to the courtroom sometime in the morning, their verdict was given by two o’clock in the afternoon, and by three they were in the tumbrel on their way to the guillotine. The public prosecutor pointed and declared: “You are guilty by dint of your dress. You are guilty because of your name. You for your mustache. You for your hair. You shall be killed because you were born with more money than others. You because you have less. You because you once whispered an opinion. You because you went out without your cockade. You because your neighbor was heard speaking about you. You because you have not been heard shouting loudly enough. You shall be killed, for we do not like your countenance. You shall be killed to make up the numbers. You shall be killed because we say so. We know you inside your head; you threaten our liberty; you are not safe.”
We stood in the mold room, Curtius and I, shelves on shelves of heads in negative.
“We must break them all up,” I said. “We must, sir. These molds will be our execution if they are found. Every day André Valentin is upon the boulevard. He’ll never leave us in peace. We must break them, sir. They’ll kill us otherwise.”
He looked bleak.
“Here is my life built with the widow,” he said. “To throw it all away!”
“It must be done, sir.”
“Only wait! Wait! Perhaps there is a chance. What if, Marie, we should fill the whole mold room, from floor to ceiling, with plaster? Fill it all in until there’s no room at all, only plaster. All plaster, right through plaster. And later—if there is a later—we come very carefully with hammer and chisel and chip it out. We put the molds in first, at the back of the room, cover them with a tarred canvas, then fill the rest with plaster. Whoever frees this room will know when they come to the canvas that they have reached the molds, safe and sound.”
And so we did. The molds were all stacked and covered over. Bucket on bucket of plaster was poured, and planks were secured against the doorway to keep the rising level in, until there was no room left in the room. A room has space in it; here there was no space, only a few head-size gaps, waiting for another time. I even put in the king’s head. No one had ever called for it, and those who had ordered it were no longer alive. We ripped away the lintels and put in a skirting board where the door once was. A no-longer door to that no-longer room.
We kept to the Great Monkey House, listening quietly as the people marched outside. Sometimes André Valentin appeared at our broken gates, smiling. Once he came in, pushing things over, even rapping his knuckles against the widow’s head. He demanded to know where Edmond was. We told him he had gone away, back to his wife. He did not believe us and set his eyes looking all over the Great Monkey House, even in the attic, especially in the attic, but even though he must have looked directly at Edmond among all those shop dolls there, his squinty eyes did not see him. He came back again, and he looked again, and he left again. And perhaps, we dared wonder, perhaps André Valentin shall just bully us in this way, perhaps he enjoys the game, and it shall only be that, just a game. But then Valentin was downstairs once more, ki
cking up the dust, upturning the chairs. Florence Biblot, former cook, was with him, a tricolor sash across her big body.
“Well, Citizen Biblot, are these the people?”
“Ddddd,” she said.
“And they are loyal to the overthrown king?”
“Ddddd,” she said.
“And they are Swiss?”
“Ddddd,” she said. “Rosti. Fleischkäse.”
“Anything else?”
“Ddddd,” she said. “They are sorry for the king. I heard her. Dddd. Heard them over the years, trying to get a portrait of the queen. Loved them. They all did. That one even lived at Versailles.”
She spat.
“Thank you, citizen,” said Valentin.
“Ddddd.”
He blew his brass whistle.
“You are arrested under the Law of Twenty-Second Prairial,” he said, unable to look at us exactly. “You will follow these men. Shut up this house.”
We were taken away.
All except for Edmond. He stayed in the attic, in his sackcloth suit and his mask. If they came for us, we’d agreed, he’d hide himself away with his brothers and sisters.
I never had a chance to say good-bye. And I dared not look back.
BOOK SEVEN
1794–1802
THE WAITING ROOM AND THE CARDBOARD PROPERTY
From thirty-three years to forty-one.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Life and death in a room.
We were taken first to the prison of La Force, where we were formally charged. There the widow and I were separated from Doctor Curtius, dispatched to different prisons until we were called for our trials, though neither of us understood that this was the parting moment until my master was pulled away. Then another journey, watching the streets and houses through the carriage slats as if seeing them for the first time, finding beauty everywhere, then to the monastery of the Carmelite friars and to darkness. Here, on one of those September nights, it was said that Jacques Beauvisage had done some murdering of priests. That night we had been free, with Edmond beside me; now I was with his failing mother in a room with twenty other women, cattle like us, waiting and weeping on old straw.
Carmes, they called that prison. It sounds so peaceful.
Our little room may as well have been at the bottom of the ocean. Time was heavy in there, filled with the last living of twenty women, all in together. In that room you took every breath seriously. One of us might say to another, “I’m so glad your dress has yellow in it. Otherwise yellow should not be here with us at all, and that would be a pity.”
Here were women, in this little room with its thick walls and doors. The youngest was a girl of twelve, the eldest an old countess in her seventies. I think some of the women, on behalf of the twelve-year-old, resented the seventy-year-old.
What a smell, all those women together.
Women came and women went. It was always certain where they were taken: to the Conciergerie, antechamber of death, from there to the Place du Trône, and then that final journey of all, onto the sliding planks and through the National Window. I kept hold of the widow’s hand. She couldn’t understand where she was, having lost what little sense she had left. Our bodies can be so kind to us.
They did not guillotine pregnant women. Girls yes, old madwomen certainly, but the pregnant were safe, for a while. After I had given birth, in all likelihood I would be taken away. So long as my baby remained inside me, so long was I safe. We kept each other alive. I should live then, by my calculation, another three months.
The room measured, I estimated, twenty by thirty feet. The floor was stone, but bundles of piled straw were offered as bed arrangements. There was not quite enough—sometimes you had to fight for a bed—but mostly people took turns. We were allowed to clean out the room once a week. There was a single horrible little window that looked out only onto a gray, mean-spirited wall. You could not see the sky. One of the walls had a bit of moss on it. I liked to look at the moss. Moss has color.
Our shared bucket was not regularly taken away. Some of the women were very nonchalant about using the bucket; some conversed loudly as they sat there; to others it was a daily humiliation, a profound torment. One mother had her daughter hold up a piece of clothing in front of her while she was at it, but that sorry cover was no wall, it hid none of the noises, merely drew attention to them. Some of the women could not understand the modesty of others. There was no solitude there. Or perhaps the only little solitude was inside the head of old Mother Picot.
I had never been with so many people. The younger women sat together and talked of men. There were fights, of course, over big things, over little. All the little relationships in that room were the last efforts of life. Sometimes we were cruel to each other, sometimes kind. Everyone wanted a little human warmth. I recall one woman, a former lottery-ticket seller, who would move around the room all day, asking one person and then another, “May I hold your hand now, please,” or, “It is your hand that I should like to hold next,” or, “Could I hold on a little longer yet?”
On occasion we were allowed to move around Carmes. There were men there too; the whole place stank of human waste and ammonia and damp. Everyone there moved about in thick, still air. In those moments outside our cell, pushed about among the others, seeing men as hopeless as we were, people whispered about who had been taken, how many yesterday, how many today. At Carmes I heard more stories of Jacques Beauvisage: he’d been seen here and there in the worst of the atrocities, waist-high in blood, murdering whole families, setting fire to villages. But in all these reports there was nothing of substance about Jacques, no solid fact: no mention of his limp, no talk of his tremendous grief for a dead boy. I believed none of them.
Giving form to our lives at Carmes were the lists, published nearly daily, of the people who would be next. Often, after a new list was published, there were twenty-four hours before those people were called for. The pain of those hours! And then the sounds of people being ushered out, goaded upstairs, the screams, the begging, the struggles. But out they went. At night we all sweated, and many cried. If only we could get some air, some new air.
We had so much time.
We had no time at all.
One by one, the women disappeared. No, that’s not true; sometimes three or more went at a stroke. And time somehow went on. And we were alive still, the widow and I. Sometimes a woman could not control herself, would scream or sob, but it made no difference, it only upset everyone else. We tried to live with what dignity we had, to behave well, to be civil and proper and nice. Sometimes we even laughed. For some there was even relief in being there; our lives out in the city had been lived under such pressure, waiting for the banging on the door, that when it actually came there was some comfort, a little peace: we had been taken, we could be ourselves again. Our minds were never far away from the door. Some tried never to look at it, but none of us could stop herself from contemplating the door.
There was one very handsome woman, utterly sensible and kind, who had such dignity that she inspired us all to braveness. The night before her name appeared on a list, I heard her whispering, “I know that I shall be next.” Before leaving she kissed us all good-bye and gave away everything she had left. I thought I would like to go like that.
Our days were punctuated by hard food, bread and peas and beans, which broke old teeth and made the jaw ache from sucking on it. My baby hurt with hunger. How like Elisabeth’s poor suffering people we all were, I thought. As if the misery were a type of mandatory uniform we had all been given. She’d mistake me for one of them if she saw me now, if she weren’t already dead.
We were all in that room together, and everything was precious. There was so little to love. All that noise of Paris people trapped, living with it day and night.
We had so much time.
We had no time at all.
The cast kept changing.
At first my time was occupied by the widow. We played together, and I talked to her of Edmond and of Doctor Curtius. Keeping her calm. Washing her. Wiping her. Holding her to me, letting her rest her wrinkled head on my shoulder. Trying to unpick the twisted nest of her hair with my fingers. Making her look pretty, and telling her so. She was softening so in her illness; I couldn’t hate her anymore. I tried to love her instead. She couldn’t understand the idea of being a grandmother, but she stared at my belly and looked very sad and was always upon the brink of remembering something, but was never quite able. How strange that it should end with us two together.
“You’ve a son. Remember? Edmond, he’s called. He’s alive and well. He is hidden and safe. No one shall find him.”
“Woooooo.”
Edmond skirted her consciousness, a misty figure, gone again soon enough. I so wanted her to remember him. Once I thought she recognized me, a rage showed on her face, but afterward tears flooded her vision; she had lost me again. From behind she didn’t look like a real person at all, poor old child, just a collection of sacks.
She didn’t understand, when her name came on the list. I didn’t tell her; how could she possibly understand. I kept very close the whole day. I sang to her. I never let her out of my sight. She slept a couple of hours with her head in my lap. I stroked her broken hair. Someone would be cutting it soon, before the final journey. Hair was always cut short around the neck. I hoped she would break the shears. When they called her name, she did not understand that that name was hers. I had to answer for her. She was happy enough at first, but she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t coming with her. She started crying when I said I wasn’t allowed. It’s a terrible thing when old women cry. I hope she’d forgotten me by the time she was taken up the stairs. I hope she understood nothing of that cruel process called her trial. I hope someone was kind to her in the tumbrel. I hope she was the first in her batch. I hope she didn’t understand that she would lose her head. Perhaps she thought all those people were being made into tailor’s dummies; perhaps she did not mind that she would be made into one too. I think the blood on the planks would have upset her. I hope it didn’t. I hope it was sunny. I hope it was warm. Big mad old lady. Oh, help me, help me, help us all.
