The painters nodded, smoking and scowling as if they thought their position – this noble campaign to which they had pledged their lives – utterly ridiculous.
Hannah banged her heel against the panels of the bar. ‘But how can you expect to be beaten? Haven’t you been listening to all that’s been said? We outnumber them. And we are defending our home. This gives us a natural advantage. This gives us a motivation that—’
They weren’t listening. Hannah realised that Laure was weaving her way towards them. There was sash of plum silk around the waist of her National Guard tunic, and a pair of patent-leather bottines on her feet – dainty ankle-boots several leagues above the scratched workhorses Hannah was wearing. She’d slept with Benoît, this was common knowledge, and very probably Lucien as well; she hailed the men with a languid tilt of the head, ignoring Hannah completely.
‘Mademoiselle Laure!’ Benoît cried, grasping at this distraction. ‘How strange to see you in the Galette. I always think of you as a lady of the Mabille. For you to be here, well, it’s rather like putting a shark into a duck pond.’
Laure set down one of her wine bottles and slapped his arm. ‘Quiet, you beast. I come to the Galette on occasion. I rather like it.’
‘We were talking about the sortie,’ Lucien told her, ‘and why we’ve joined up. Hannah here thinks that only the most devoted reds are qualified to fight.’
Laure snorted as she filled Benoît’s cup, emptying the bottle. ‘Not a surprise. There are ultras who wear it lightly, aren’t there, and then there are those who become the most incredible bores …’
‘That’s not what I said, Lucien, and I don’t like—’
‘Why did you join up, Mademoiselle Laure?’ Benoît interrupted.
The cocotte shrugged, tossing the bottle behind the bar. ‘My boys love me. I can’t let them down, now can I?’ She met Benoît’s stare. ‘You got a cigarette for me, black-eyes?’
The young painter took one from his jacket, lighting it between his own lips and then passing it over with a flourish. ‘For ever your slave.’
Laure winked at him as she inhaled. ‘There’s a rumour,’ she said, quite pointedly not to Hannah, ‘that a certain spotted cat has been sighted around here – this afternoon, in broad daylight and everything.’
Hannah sprang down from the bar. ‘Where did you hear that?’ She barely stopped herself from seizing the cocotte by the shoulders and shaking her. ‘Answer me!’
Laure’s right eyebrow rose a cruel inch, her red mouth parting at the corner to release a coil of smoke. ‘Sounds to me as if someone’s feeling a little neglected.’
Hannah stepped back, regaining her composure – cursing herself for having handed Laure an advantage. ‘He needs to stay hidden,’ she said, ‘to keep striking at the Prussians and supplying stories to the Figaro. You know this.’
‘To your mother, you mean,’ corrected Laure, acting as if she was trying to get the situation straight in her head. ‘To keep supplying stories to your mother. You don’t see him for weeks but he can go to the centre of the city, into the Grand Hotel no less, meet with that famous old mother of yours and gab away quite happily about all the Prussians he’s killed. Isn’t that right?’
Hannah looked to her artists for support. None was forthcoming. Benoît and Lucien were grinning; Octave didn’t seem to be enjoying himself, but he wasn’t about to intervene. ‘He has his reasons,’ she said. ‘He does what is best for our cause. For this city and everyone in it.’
‘And he is a hero. A hero! Don’t be coy about it, Mademoiselle Pardy! The slogans are everywhere. And the paw-prints. Have you seen that? Red paw-prints on the side of buildings? So sweet.’ Laure flicked ash onto the floor. ‘Nobody knows where he is. Nobody knows what he’ll do next. All very exciting. For everyone, that is, but you,’ she took a drag before adding, ‘the forgotten lover.’
The anger felt physical, like a blow to the stomach; Hannah blinked, slightly winded. She clenched her fists. The blood surged beneath her skin, pressing around her fingernails. ‘Enough. I won’t hear this. You are an enemy of my family. You led my brother into the heart of a riot and then you abandoned him to his fate. Did you know that he was arrested – thrown in the Mazas? That he rots there still?’
Laure rolled her eyes. Hannah couldn’t tell if she’d already known Clement was in prison; she obviously didn’t care much anyway. ‘Your brother,’ she replied, ‘is a hopeless horse-prick who deserves whatever happened to him. He dropped me, Mademoiselle Pardy, like men spit into the gutter. Like I was nothing.’ She gave Hannah a meaningful look as she picked tobacco from her teeth: Like your lover has dropped you.
Hannah was consumed by the desire to fight. She was aware that Laure would be by far the more experienced brawler, but this didn’t check her. She wanted to act, to hurt – to punch this callous bitch on the chin.
A murmur rose from the back of the hall, gathering quickly to a cheer. The commanding officer of the 197th, a local apothecary turned colonel named Chomet, had climbed up onto the bandstand to address the company. Benoît and Lucien hopped off the bar, blocking Hannah’s path to Laure. It was useless to protest. Hannah crossed her arms, biting hard on her lower lip. She resolved to leave the second Chomet had made his proclamation.
The colonel, a stocky, moustachioed man with a ponderous manner, began by announcing a twenty-four-hour delay to the sortie. This elicited a disappointed groan from his militiamen. He told them that the recent rainfall had swollen the River Marne, making General Ducrot’s planned pontoon crossing to the Villiers Plateau impossible. All arrangements were to be put off by a day.
‘One good thing, however, has come from this,’ Chomet continued, starting to smile. ‘It means that we have an opportunity to salute the very best among us – a champion of the common man, of the worker, who has evaded the policemen of our weak and compromised government for well over a month …’
The battle-group shifted; Hannah forgot Laure Fleurot immediately. She looked over to the edges of the bandstand – to the doors of the hall. He was here.
‘… who returns to lead us in this crucial hour. Our wretched government may have stripped him of his rank, of his official post in our battalion, but they cannot stop him from taking up arms beside his fellow citizens. They cannot stop us from following his noble example.’ Chomet paused, beaming now, savouring the moment. ‘I present to you: Monsieur Jean-Jacques Allix.’
The militiamen lost themselves in cheering. A fast chant shook the hall: Vive le Léopard! Vive le Léopard! Hannah stood up on a chair to get a proper view and there was Jean-Jacques, thanking Colonel Chomet and wrapping him in a brotherly embrace. The sight untethered Hannah from the earth. Her breath felt shallow; her vision seemed to drift. Octave planted a broad palm on the middle of her back, steadying her as she teetered atop her chair.
Jean-Jacques was the same. His clothes were plain but immaculate; his hair was swept from his brow, as always; his broken jaw-line was freshly shaved. Paris was slowly coming apart, weathering, fraying, crumbling; yet amongst all this Jean-Jacques Allix was like a polished black stone, perfect and immutable, proof against any hardship. He faced the hall, his posture opening, drawing everyone to him as he prepared to speak. If he saw Hannah, he gave no sign of it. The speech was typical of him: it appeared spontaneous yet appealed powerfully to his audience in terms they understood at once. After extolling their bravery, he told them of the pitiful numbers who’d volunteered to fight from the bourgeois militia divisions. So keen to gun down their fellow Parisians at the Hôtel de Ville, they would not now take this great chance to turn their weapons on the Prussians!
‘And I’ll tell you this,’ Jean-Jacques went on, ‘if the saviours of Paris are her ordinary working people then Paris will afterwards be obliged to give us a proper hearing. To give us the fair, free society that we deserve.’
‘They’ll give us fairness!’ someone cried. ‘They’ll have to!’
‘Prepare yourselves, my fellow citize
ns, for what lies ahead of you. Our foe is ruthless. His stranglehold upon our city is strong. But we will break it – we will inflict a defeat that will be remembered for centuries. This coming day is your last as untried militia. By the end of the next you will be soldiers, heroes of France!’
‘That,’ muttered Lucien, ‘or cadavers.’
Hannah did her best to disregard him, to applaud and cheer, but something felt wrong. The exhilaration that usually came when she heard Jean-Jacques speak was missing. Had she been infected by the artists’ cynicism – by Émile Besson’s senseless doubts? Was her commitment weakening? She’d always taken these speeches as the earnest avowals of a man of deep conviction. Now, though, she saw a clear end to the oratory – a manipulation, almost. It was a performance as expert as that of any professional stage-actor, intended to stoke up his audience: to get them running out gladly before the Prussian guns.
Few others in the Moulin de la Galette shared her uncertainty. Jean-Jacques’s words met with a roaring affirmation, the battle-group declaring that it would follow him to death. He was mobbed as he left the bandstand, dragged into a lengthy round of embraces, toasts and congratulations. They were asking him about this Leopard mission or that, so he began to retell a story from the Figaro with understated verve; soon there was laughter and exclamations of praise.
It was growing dark. Candles were lit – there had been no gas in the Galette for several weeks – and more wine poured. Hannah got down from her chair and waited by the bar. The others talked on, Laure needling her again; and then their conversation stilled. Jean-Jacques was approaching. Laure slid herself before him – hip and head cocked at opposing angles, fingers splayed along her collarbone – and attempted to launch into a flirtatious exchange. His response, although friendly enough, presented her with an unmistakable dead end.
Hannah could tell from his face that he’d known where she was from the start. The artists greeted him, offering vague words of admiration. Jean-Jacques had caused them enough disquiet before the siege, when they all used to gather in the Danton; now he was the far-famed Leopard of Montmartre they hardly dared to look his way.
He nodded at them. ‘Will you come outside with me, Hannah?’
The courtyard of the Moulin de la Galette had been its great attraction before the war, the outdoor dances attracting revellers from across the arrondissement. That evening, however, jackdaws flapped through the splintered remains of its acacia groves, and dun-green mould striped the glass globes of its lampposts. It was bitterly cold. Hannah hugged herself, saying nothing. There was an unfamiliar smell about him, sharp and floral. She didn’t know what she was going to do or what he expected from her. Why, she nearly shouted, did you abandon me?
After a minute or so Jean-Jacques said, ‘I have been here, Hannah, since that night in the Hôtel de Ville. Up there, to be exact.’ He turned, looking beyond the dance hall to a tall shape behind, rising from the roof of an adjoining building: the windmill from which the Galette took its name. ‘Would you like to see?’
Hannah followed him into the lane, through a small door and up a tight, musty stairwell. The windmill was about ten foot square and twenty-five tall. In the darkness she could just make out the cluster of gears behind the sails and the central column of the driving shaft. It was filled with the same raw, flowery smell that clung to Jean-Jacques’s suit. He lit an oil lamp, shuttering the flame to prevent light escaping through the many cracks in the walls. The wood of the mill was old, the bleached beams full of knots and fissures; what metal parts there were had rusted over entirely. He’d bedded down by one of the circular millstones. There was a blanket-roll, a small sack of clothes, two spare pairs of boots and an assortment of military equipment, both Prussian and French from the look of it, including a shining revolving pistol. It was neat, Spartan: a soldier’s bolt-hole. Hannah wondered how he stayed so clean. She couldn’t even see a mirror. Opposite where he slept was a bale of dried plants – the source, she realised, of that odour.
‘Iris root,’ Jean-Jacques said. ‘The owners grind it for a perfumer in Les Batignolles. Everything I possess reeks of it.’
Hannah sat on the millstone. She was going to get an explanation. ‘Where have you been, Jean-Jacques? Why didn’t you try to find me?’
‘I knew you’d be well.’
‘But why didn’t you look? Didn’t you care what had happened to me?’
‘The provisional government was at my heels, Hannah. They would have imprisoned me, or worse. I’ve not been in a position to wander the city. I’m not now.’
‘You’ve been going to my mother, though,’ Hannah countered, thinking of Laure’s sneers. ‘You’ve been managing to get to her.’
Jean-Jacques moved closer, taking three slow steps through the creaking mill. The cramped surroundings made him seem astonishingly tall, his shadow stretching up among the sail-gears. His hands were crossed in front of him, the left holding the damaged right at the wrist. He wore a slight, patient smile.
‘I’ve been sending her written accounts. Chomet has them taken down into the city for me. I can’t risk the Opéra quarter, Hannah. I only go north – past the wall, out of the city.’
Hannah glanced at his crippled hand, motionless within its glove. ‘That must be difficult. The writing, I mean.’
His smile slipped; there was a faint contraction of the skin around the scar. ‘I have a guardsman to whom I dictate. One of Chomet’s adjutants – a lawyer’s scrivener.’ Jean-Jacques stopped for a moment; he plainly felt that he’d revealed enough. ‘But you must tell me where you went after you left the Hôtel de Ville. Everyone said it was as if you’d dived into the Seine and swum out to the ocean.’
Hannah told him about the Gare du Nord and Émile Besson – omitting to mention their argument on the day she’d left.
Jean-Jacques understood; he showed no surprise or jealousy. ‘You did what was necessary. It is the same for us all.’
‘My brother was arrested as we fled, though, by some bourgeois guardsmen. He’s been in the Mazas ever since. Can anything be done for him?’
‘He’s out,’ said Jean-Jacques simply. ‘He was released at the same time as several of our comrades.’
Hannah stared; a laugh burst from her lips. ‘Thank Christ,’ she exclaimed. ‘Thank Christ. I – I was afraid that he’d die in there. That they’d let him starve.’
‘I hear that he is with your aérostier now, as a matter of fact, in the Gare du Nord. The odd fellow appears to have swapped one Pardy twin for the other. They’ll soon be leaving Paris – flying out in a post balloon.’
Hannah’s happiness was marred by confusion; Jean-Jacques seemed well informed about her brother’s movements. ‘Are you having Clem followed?’
‘No. No, of course not.’ He was beside her now, blocking the lamp’s light. ‘Rigault told me. The fool wants us to bring down the balloon post. He has people watching both the Gare du Nord and the Gare d’Orléans. I tell him that it’s a waste of effort, but you know how he can be.’ He sat beside her. Their legs pressed together; his thigh felt hard and warm against hers. There was deep tenderness in his eyes, along with the first stirring of desire. ‘It’s the truth.’
Hannah felt a spike of guilt so abrupt and painful that she almost looked away. How could she ever have doubted this man – this remarkable man who’d shared so much of himself with her? It was Besson’s fault, Besson and her stupid, detracting friends. Their utterances had sent her scouring through Jean-Jacques’s words and deeds, hunting for duplicity where there was none – whipping up needless conflict in the one calm part of her soul. Well, no more. All this noxious suspicion would be cast aside. The siege might force them down strange and onerous paths, but they would endure. Hannah was sure of that now.
‘I know,’ she said.
Their foreheads touched; her shoulders sagged with relief at his kiss. He lifted her from the millstone to his place on the floor, settling over her, enveloping the two of them in his black coat. The shape an
d weight of his body, so familiar yet absent for so long, made Hannah squirm with bliss. She opened his jacket, tugging his shirt free from his belt and coiling her arms around his naked waist; then she slid a hand up, over his flank and ribs until she could feel his heart, beating quickly against her fingers.
‘Jean-Jacques,’ she murmured, ‘I love you.’
He pulled back; his hair fell onto his face, hiding it. ‘Please, Hannah,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’
They rose at dawn the following day and went together to the rue Garreau. Jean-Jacques gave Hannah three hours; he was an excellent model, sitting completely still, barely seeming even to breathe. She concentrated on the face and especially those fine dark eyes, knowing as she worked that she was capturing a clear likeness. The setting she’d chosen – a spot beneath the window, well lit by the morning sun – was being painted as it was, and her sitter precisely as he appeared in it. She didn’t break off to make a considered assessment until after he’d gone, off to a last meeting with some senior ultras. Putting down her palette, she walked over to the shed door; she folded her arms, the rounded end of her paintbrush poking into her ribs; then she took a breath and turned.
Still it was no good. The best naturalist portraits Hannah had seen – Edouard Manet’s of his journalist friend Monsieur Zola, Edgar Degas’s of his sister and her husband – had immediacy, and realism purged of affectation or contrivance, but they had something else as well; a suggestion of private meditations, of human complexities; an inner light that revealed a life rather than just a form. Nothing lay beneath the surface of Hannah’s portrait of Jean-Jacques. This subtle illumination was absent. Her image was a shadow, a shell, as empty as a photograph.
I could go to them, Hannah thought suddenly. Monsieur Manet and Monsieur Degas have remained in Paris – they are in the artillery division of the National Guard. I could go to them and ask for guidance. Their whereabouts are common knowledge. Manet was up in the north, past Montmartre, in Bastion 40; Degas to the east in Bastion 12. I could cast off my objection to such fawning and use this damned siege to get ahead. Why on earth shouldn’t I? Degas was a renowned misanthrope with an especial hatred for women and foreigners; speaking with him would most probably be futile. Monsieur Manet’s reputation, though, was quite the reverse. Much was said about his fashionable attire, debonair manners and sophisticated conversation – and his notable fondness for assisting young female painters. All it would take was a walk out to the fortifications. The scene was easily imagined. Hannah could see the parapet, with its row of cannon; the artist at work in a quiet corner, sketching men stacking sandbags perhaps; herself approaching under some pretext or other, and making a comment; the instant affinity between them.
Illumination Page 22
