They’ve been back in the apartment only a few minutes. While he was changing his sullied clothes in his room, Hélène, apparently, has decided to leave any pretense of being a lady far behind.
“I have a dress in the sack.” Hélène’s eyes are darting, not focusing on Thomas at all. She appears to be more distraught now than when they returned to the apartment. “I’ve taken the lemon-coloured one with white panels. It’s linen, not silk. Marguerite hasn’t worn it once. Not since I’ve been here. And a pair of shoes and a hat that almost match. It’s enough. I’ll get a tailor to make adjustments if it’s too large.”
Thomas takes her hands in his and whispers in her ear. “Slow down. You look like someone is coming to hunt you down. Take the time. Try on the dress.” He’s pointing at the sack.
“No, I have to go. I’m shivering. Feel.” She reaches out and puts an icy hand on his cheek.
“My God, you’re freezing.”
“I know. I can’t warm up. It’s this apartment. I thought I was gone, but here I am, back. Back at Marguerite’s.”
“Please, Hélène.” He draws her to his chest and presses hard.
“I don’t want to end up in a pillory, Thomas. People taunting and throwing rotten food. Me branded with the V.”
“Lower your voice. Why are you talking like this? Marguerite is in Brittany, or at best somewhere on the road.”
“I have to get away.” She pushes him back. “Let me go.”
“But I’m going with you, to help you find a place.”
“No. No, you’re not.” She shakes her head.
“Yes, I will.” He stands as stiff as a plank, his feet glued to the floor. His hands reach out.
“No, I’ve decided. You’ve been generous, but from here on, I look after myself.” Her eyes are fierce.
“Well.” Thomas uses a hand to cover his mouth. “Marie-Claude did give me a cunning look at our return. Maybe I should—”
“Yes, you should,” Hélène says to him, her chin jutting up. But then she begins to shiver. She lowers the sack to the floor and begins to sway.
“You don’t look good, Hélène.” Thomas sees an immense sadness on her face.
—
Hélène’s thoughts swirl. She sees now that the incidents on the Pont Neuf are signs from above. She’s been laid low by a vengeful God. The soiling of the silk dress she took from Marguerite was His judgement, nothing less. She has to accept that she’s not fit for any reward in this earthly life. Her dream of marrying someone who could raise her up society’s ladder is gone. She will still try for honest work for one week, she will. But she knows it’s for nought. She will end up paying her bills the way she used to. She only hopes the dress she’s taking will let her pass as a courtesan. She does not want to end up in tattered rags and no perfume at all. She doesn’t want to share her body with stinking men in some stinking stall.
“Good bye,” she says, finally looking Thomas in the eyes. She knows her eyes are wet, so she squeezes them dry. Then she stoops to hoist the sack.
“Oh, Hélène.” Thomas takes her in his arms. “It will be all right. I’ll come to you soon.”
She pushes him away. “I— I— have— to— go.”
Thomas holds out two helpless hands. Hélène takes hold of the handle to the door.
“Wait.” Thomas grabs her elbow. “Where will we meet?”
—
Hélène’s expression is one Thomas cannot place. It’s much more than sad. She looks resigned to some horrible fate.
Hélène starts to shake her head, but then she lets go of the door handle and leans forward. Close to his ear she breathes, “I don’t know. Saint-Médard? I like it there. I like rue Mouffetard.”
“Saint-Médard,” Thomas repeats. “Yes, Saint-Médard is a good choice.”
Neither Marguerite nor any of her circle would be caught dead in that part of the city. It’s named after the church where in a time gone by he met with Collier from the Paris police to pass on secrets about his old writer friends. More recently the crazy shoeless Jansenist beggar priest used the Saint-Médard church as his base. No, he was only a deacon, not a priest. Yet since his death his tomb at the church has become a shrine. People took clippings of his fingernails and snippets of his hair and splinters off his coffin before they buried him in the ground. The cardinal archbishop even came to the funeral. Hélène has selected wisely such a place to meet. The crowd of pilgrims at the deacon’s shrine will provide a cover when they meet.
“What, why the little smile?” Thomas asks of Hélène.
“Doesn’t take much to make you happy. Just the thought of a secret rendezvous.”
Thomas shrugs. “But when? Tomorrow? Or should we make it a week from today?”
Hélène gives him a hard kiss, half biting his lips. “Don’t know,” she says.
Thomas is startled. He steps back.
Hélène turns. She swings the cotton sack over her shoulder and reaches for the door. But before she can grab the handle, the door opens. It comes at her fast, nearly striking her on the chin. She stumbles out of the way.
“No!” Hélène cries. “God be merciful.” Thomas sees her legs wobble and then she falls to her knees.
Thomas grabs hold of the door and pulls it open all the way. “Shit,” he mumbles under his breath.
It’s Marguerite. The look of shock on his wife’s face doesn’t last long. It switches to disappointment then to scorn. “Well, well. So my doubting cousin was right. Here you are, the two of you. Together, right in my home.”
“A minute, Marguerite,” Thomas begins, but the look Marguerite gives him prevents him from saying any more.
“I’ll have you know, Thomas, I was trying to give you the benefit of doubt. But I was wrong. You insist on being with her and so it is. And look at her. Carrying off whatever of mine she wants. And you abetting her theft.”
“No, that is not it.” Thomas finds his legs taking a half stride away from Hélène. “What you think you see, my wife—”
“Don’t call me your wife. It’s a vow. It’s something earned and kept. Can you even understand that?”
“Here.” Hélène is up off her knees. She holds out the sack, its mouth opened wide. She thrusts the opened sack against the front of Marguerite’s dress. “Look. I say look. That’s all it is, Madame. A gift of charity, an old dress, from your husband to a poor reformed whore. Nothing more than that.”
Hélène lets go of the sack and it spills to the floor. She clutches her hands together like she’s in prayer. “To start my life anew, Madame, that’s all I want. A better path. Please do not deny me that.”
Thomas feels his chest clench. “Hélène—”
“Not a word, man,” Hélène says, eyes fixed on Marguerite. “This is between me and your blessed wife.”
Marguerite stoops to take up the sack. She looks inside, and stirs things up with her free hand. An annoyed expression sweeps across her face. She casts the sack back to the floor. “Take it, woman. Take it and go. And never ever come back to my door.”
“Oh, Madame, thank you.” Hélène rises up.
“Go. Just go.”
Sack tossed over her shoulder, Hélène is through the doorway and down the stairs.
—
“As for you,” Marguerite scans Thomas from head to toe. “The only word that comes to mind is 'weak.' Do you know why I say that?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“Well, this is it, Thomas. I’ve had three long days to mull it over. I’m going to explain to you how this marriage of ours is going to work. You will listen and agree. I’ll have your solemn word or else, or else you might as well go after that tramp.” Marguerite points a single finger at the still open door.
Thomas inclines his head and bends a knee in contrition. He chooses to not say a thing.
Marguerite grabs hold of the door to the hall and stairwell and sends it shut. “In there,” she says to Thomas, pointing at the interior door painted a pewter grey. It leads into the salon. “Now, if you please.”
“Of course, Madame,” her husband says, as meekly as a child.
No sooner does Marguerite take two steps toward the salon door but that door opens wide. Marie-Claude gazes admiringly at her mistress. She steps into the doorway and makes a curtsey as deep as if Marguerite were the queen. Clearly, the little woman has been listening on the inside of the room, waiting for some kind of cue.
“Welcome home, Madame. Your return brings me joy. We had no idea when you would return. Your husband and the other one told us only you’d been delayed in Brittany.”
Marguerite catches a smirk Marie-Claude aims at Thomas. It makes her smile to see such support and sympathy. But wait, Marie-Claude is a servant and that makes any smirk toward her husband insolence. Marguerite will have a word with Marie-Claude about that after she has straightened Thomas out.
Marguerite chooses the divan. After she has adjusted the folds of fabric of her dress, she gives Thomas the disdainful glance he deserves. Maintaining a frown she waves him to sit nearby, on the bright green chair whose seat is an inch or two lower than the divan.
—
Thomas flexes warning eyebrows at Marie-Claude as he walks past her on his way to the chair to which he’s been summoned. The servant inflates her chest as her reply, then exits the room.
Thomas slows his racing thoughts. This is the moment he’s been preparing for ever since he and Hélène left Le Mesnil. If there’s one thing he’s learned over and again in this life, it’s that an easy confidence counts the most in a situation like this. And earnestness.
Yes, he’s ready, he’s ready to listen to Marguerite. He will reply only if and when he must. He is prepared. He has a story to tell her and a vraisemblance of contrition that should serve him well.
—
Not that evening, nor the next, nor any time before a week and a day have elapsed, does Thomas feel it’s safe enough to go looking for Hélène. Marguerite’s stern lecture upon her return shook him of any inclination to make his way over to the left bank.
It’s only now, a Monday evening in late June, before he goes home to Marguerite, that he’s heading across the river after a day of clerking in the magistrate judge’s office. He cannot take long, it’s too soon to be errant. Yet he wants to have an initial contact with Hélène. He wants to know that she is all right. Then they can make arrangements for later on. But he has no specific address, only the choked suggestion of Saint-Médard. A preliminary walkabout, he tells himself, a refamiliarizing reconnoitre of the church and its neighbourhood, no more than that. He’s allowing a half hour, three quarters at most. Then it’ll be back to Marguerite’s so as not to raise any suspicions or doubts.
Marguerite made it clear that she is willing to give her young husband another chance, but only if he follows the rules she has clearly laid down. There may have been a dozen rules, Thomas isn’t sure. His mind wandered after the first few. They all seemed to be about not seeing Hélène, albeit worded slightly differently: trollop, tart, wench, strumpet, whore. Oh, and pretender, yes, that was said as well.
Thomas’s ears reconnected with Marguerite when she told him she was going to see if she could somehow locate poor wronged Simone. The servant would be welcomed back, if she could be found.
—
If Thomas had to put down the conclusion of Marguerite’s lecture on the page, let’s say for a character in a play, he would have to say that it went something like this.
“If ever you stray – I’m not naive, Thomas, I know men sometimes do – make sure you wrap yourself in one of those English gloves for your base carnal pleasures. Don’t bring any maladies to me. And under no circumstances will you see that one again, do you hear? Do you understand?”
Seated in the centre of the stage, a character somewhat like Thomas would nod to the audience that yes, he understood.
“The best way to resist temptation, dear husband,” says the wife as she circles his chair, “is to not go near its source. Have you not learned that yet?”
The poor fellow would nod once more that he had. Would the audience applaud or laugh out loud?
“Because if ever I catch you two together, you and that tart, who once shared these rooms and pretended to be my friend, if I catch you with her, on a street, in a room, anywhere at all, in any kind of public arena where others can see my embarrassment, then understand this: it’s you who will pay. You, Thomas, no one else. Understood? Your standing in society, your work with the magistrate, it and everything else will end. Is that understood?”
The character in the play would suck in a breath. Standing at last, still facing the audience, the man would say aloud, “Yes, Madame, I do, I understand.” Then he would wink at the crowd and they would laugh again.
The scene in Thomas’s head brings a smile. If only he had been as brash as the man in his imagined play.
A foul smell fills his nostrils. He looks down at the gutter of the cobbled street. A mound of dead cats – there must be a dozen – has attracted a thousand humming flies.
“Not again,” Thomas mutters. Why do certain types in this city amuse themselves by killing cats? He turns abruptly down a narrow lane to go another way to the church of Saint-Médard. As he reaches out to make contact with the walls on either side, a few lines descend.
Sadness, sadness sublime, you test our measure.
What good, oh what good comes if there is no pleasure?
—
“There it is,” mumbles Thomas aloud.
The spire of what he believes is the Saint-Médard church has come into view at the alley’s end. He has arrived atop the counterscarp in less time than he thought. He hurries on.
“Yes, that’s it.”
Even at this distance, Thomas can see a line of people queuing up at the main entrance of the church. Each one appears to be in a state of reverie. That much he expected, given the still mounting popularity of the cult over the late deceased deacon. But what surprises Thomas is that the devotees are not all poor, as he would have thought. No, there are some well-dressed individuals in the mix. Even a few ladies and gentlemen, judging by the fortune they are showing in their clothes. The pilgrims’ heads are all bowed low or else swaying, gently gazing at the sky. Each no doubt has come to pray for a miracle at the tomb. Thomas shakes his head, but then who is he to judge? He likely has blind spots and foolish beliefs of his own. Then again, maybe not.
He walks up and down the mumbling queue looking for Hélène. Alas, she is nowhere to be seen. So Thomas hurries to the door on the far side of the church and goes in. He takes off his tricorne and carries it by his hip. He pads up the nave then off into the short transepts left and right. Still no sign of Hélène. Back outside, she’s still not there. But what did he expect? That she’d be waiting at the church round the clock? Each day for a week? Of course not.
On this first attempt, Hélène is nowhere to be seen, but it is just a first look. He’ll be back another day. They’ll reconnect. He just hopes she’s not living in some horrible room and forced back into wrapping her legs around strangers for a few coins.
—
Thomas returns to the Saint-Médard church a few days later, then again and again over the days and weeks that follow. He is always a little surprised to see how many are still drawn to the shrine. Not once does he so much as glimpse any woman who even looks like Hélène.
One day it dawns on him that of course she did not say the church building, only the name. The entire parish bears the name. So he begins to pound the cobbles along a much wider, twisting path, as if in a maze. He does so twice a week. Sometimes he circulates after work, but his preference is to come on a Sunday or on a feast day of the church, for on those days he does not have
to work and has more daylight hours to spend on his quest. The evening before a holy day of obligation he tells Marguerite that the next day he is going to reinvigorate his somewhat lapsed faith by going to church. He adds that he has decided to visit as many different churches of the Roman Catholic and apostolic faith as he can.
Marguerite didn’t look like she believed him the first time he made his pledge, but as his feast day disappearances add up, they have a cumulative effect. She has told him that she is greatly pleased. “Contrition and devotion, husband, they are marvelous, are they not?”
“You are right,” was his modest reply, made with lowered eyes.
Thomas supposes Marguerite credits her stern lectures for having made him more alert to his need to restore his faith. So she should, Thomas admits. Nothing like the fear of losing his position to make him inventive. He has asked Marguerite to join him on his pretend spiritual quest, knowing that her aging feet and legs are not up to any such test. She has developed what her phys-ician says is gout. So he wins twice: he does his search for Hélène all by himself yet proves himself a loving, penitent husband to Marguerite.
Each holy day when Thomas comes home from a half-day ramble, Marguerite asks about the church he has worshipped in that day. How fortunate for Thomas that he spent several years working as a fly for the Paris police. He could not count how many nights he spent rendezvousing with Collier in the dark recesses of one church or another. He is able to recall well enough the details of each one to convince and satisfy Marguerite’s queries. Though she did ask the last time, “Why are they all on the left bank? We have churches over here, you know. You do know that?” He replied that he would eventually be done with the left side of the Seine and then he’ll start on the right. He is a man of reason. He likes to be systematic about these things.
And so the late June feast day of Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul goes by. A month later it’s the feasts of Saint-Jacques and Sainte-Anne. All four holy days in August – Saint-Laurent, the Assumption, Saint-Barthélmey and Saint-Louis – come and go. Still no sign of Hélène. As the disappointments add up, the prospect of reuniting with Hélène begins to slip. Certainty becomes probability, then a possibility at best. As September begins in rain he finds himself beneath a cloak going through the motions without any expectation of a result. He begins to stride more quickly in and out of the Saint-Médard church and all around its parish. He looks left and right as he goes, but sometimes after he’s gone up a street he cannot recall what he might have taken in.
The Maze Page 8
