Thomas, A Secret Life

by A. J. B. Johnston

  “Envy’s a terrible thing,” says Caylus, relieved to be able to pick on someone away from their table for a moment.

  “I suppose it is,” says Tinville, propping up his chin, “but what can I do? Envy might be my middle name. Arouet, Voltaire, whatever he wants to call himself. He’s not even thirty and he’s, well he’s all cleverness and wit. If you like that kind of thing. Did I mention readers? Yes, well, he has those too. Why wouldn’t I be envious? Which of us at this table is not?” Tinville looks around, pointing his right hand at his tablemates like it’s a pistol. “Do any among have as many readers as Voltaire?”

  “I might,” says Fougre, head held high and slightly back.

  There’s a groan from the rest of the table. Though Fougre’s yellow press pornographic tales are indeed well read, his name is not attached to them nor does he want it to be.

  “Quite enough, Pokus,” calls out Gallatin.

  The table goes briefly silent. It’s Caylus who breaks it.

  “The Voltaire name is an anagram of some sort. Heard that from someone somewhere. Not sure exactly how, but then who cares? It works. You remember it. Voltaire.” Caylus sends a hand into the air like he’s a conductor without a baton. “Voltaire.”

  A fresh silence covers the group, this time of failure and disappointment. They are a group of either little-known or completely unknown writers. And one bookseller, the ardent Jean Gallatin. Voltaire’s arrival serves only to remind them of their obscure place in the literary world of Paris. Unable to help themselves, all eyes except Thomas’s follow Voltaire as he takes his seat. The young hero brushes back his long wig over his shoulders and sits up straight as an arrow. He displays his smiling monkey face the whole time. He knows eyes are upon him and he looks to be as pleased about it as a man could be.

  Only Thomas is focusing not on Voltaire but on the person the writer is with. He cannot get over the smug look on the lips of the woman who once was his girl Hélène.

  “You all right, my friend?” Fougre asks Thomas with worry on his face.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? What kind of answer is that? Whatever your ‘nothing’ is, it sure looks like something. Is it Voltaire? Has the bastard written something to burn you? You’re not alone, you know.”

  Thomas does not reply. He stands, seems to think about something, then heads off toward the entrance to the café.

  “What’s he doing?” comes from Jean Gallatin down at the far end of the table, arms upraised to emphasize his disbelief.

  “No, Thomas.” Fougre rises from his seat. “Just leave the man. Not here.”

  The warning comes too late. Thomas is gone, heading for the couple’s table. He has a hand on each hip, a swagger that turns a few heads at different tables as he goes along. He comes to a halt facing Hélène. She looks up puzzled to see someone, and not the server, standing as stiff as a sentry a mere body length away. Then she recognizes the face.

  “You!” Hélène turns an initially startled look into a welcoming smile. “It’s Thomas, isn’t it?” She quickly looks across the table at Voltaire. “François Marie, this is an old acquaintance. He’s from Évreux. We shared a diligence ride into Paris way back when.” She turns back to Thomas. “The diligence. Yes, Thomas, I remember that.”

  Thomas makes a face. As if she has to make an effort to recall who he is. “Yes, Mademoiselle. Only I think we shared more than just one ride.”

  Hélène throws a searching look at Voltaire. The renowned writer casts back at her much the same look. It’s as if he is her mirror. Then he rediscovers his more usual grin.

  “Well,” Hélène continues, “that was way back when, wasn’t it? You had a little friend with you as I recall.”

  Thomas tilts his head until he catches her drift.

  “That’s right. A soldier.”

  Hélène’s lips half pucker in amusement such that Thomas can see the humour in the whole thing. But Thomas cannot leave it at that. Something within him makes him say more.

  “Strong little guy, wasn’t he? He could go on for a while as I recall.”

  Voltaire tilts his head at a quizzical angle, recognizing the innuendo.

  “Well anyway, Thomas, how wonderful of you to come say hello.” Hélène has picked up Voltaire’s suspicion and she wants to turn the conversation in a different direction. “Perhaps we will see you again sometime. We are just about to order. You understand.”

  Thomas feels his shoulders slip. The country girl he once knew has evidently become someone else.

  “Pichon, Thomas Pichon,” says Thomas, not moving away. He is speaking now exclusively to Voltaire. There is a fierceness in his voice that wasn’t there before. Hélène cannot just dismiss him like that. Thomas gives a quick stiff half bow. “It’s Voltaire, is it not? Hélène did not properly introduce us to each other, did she now? Foolish girl. And you’re a writer too, I understand?”

  Voltaire rests his chin in his hand. The grin on his face tells Thomas the man is thoroughly pleased. “Why, yes I am. Are you as well, Thomas Pichon?”

  “From Vire in Normandy, not Évreux. And yes, a writer like you.” Thomas bites his lower lip for what he has just said. He has written much but not yet published a thing.

  Voltaire rises from his seat, amusement in the eyes as well as forming on his lips. He extends a hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, I am, good friend of Hélène that you are. From Normandy and a writer like me. My goodness.”

  The two young men shake hands like each is trying to damage what the other writes with, if Voltaire is right-handed, which Thomas does not know.

  “The same,” says Thomas, “just the same. Pleased, that is.”

  The mutual grips come apart slowly. Each man wants to wipe off his now sticky hand on his pants but neither does. To do so would be beyond impolite. So the two of them stand where they are, feet nailed to the floor, doing nothing but staring at each other with pretend grins locked on their faces. Hélène brings a hand to her mouth to hide her smile.

  “So,” begins Voltaire, the grin finally gone, “what have you published, Thomas Pichon? I have to confess I don’t recognize the name. But you will forgive me, I’m sure. No one could read everything. There is so much out there, is there not? And I don’t often see what comes out Normandy. No, I don’t. What does come out of Normandy anyway?”

  “Calvados and cider,” says Hélène. Her lips are now shaped into their own version of Voltaire’s usual tiny grin. “And some cheeses, of course.”

  Thomas glares at her before returning his attention to Voltaire. “Normandy?” he says, putting a hand to his chin, somewhat like he saw Voltaire do when seated moments ago. “Hmm, I don’t know what comes out of Normandy.”

  Thomas glances around the café. To his surprise he sees that nearly everyone in Le Procope has their eyes turned toward him and Voltaire. And that but for his own table of friends, where everyone appears to be in deep gloom, everyone else has a laughing grin on his face. That’s when Thomas realizes that he is an object of ridicule, nothing else. Heat rising with the blood to his head, Thomas turns back to the standing Voltaire. The supposedly great writer, the man who is intimate with the woman who was once his Hélène, appears to be studying Thomas like he’s an insect whose wings he has just plucked. Is that right? Well, Thomas could change that by punching this Voltaire right through his smiling mouth. That would be one thing that comes out of Normandy, would it not?

  A numbing sensation lodges in Thomas’s forehead. He can’t think of anything further to do or to say. Why, for god’s sake, did he tell this man standing across from him that he is from Normandy and a writer just like him? Bits and pieces of incomplete essays in his room. Verses once, and only back in Vire when he was a boy. The lines of poetry don’t descend on him like they did before.

  Thomas glances down. His two
legs are twitching like they want to go somewhere else. Sudden words echo in his head: “Failure is mine, saith the lord, no one else’s.” The words bring a sad smile to his face. It’s funny, it is. A clever twist on the line from the Bible. If only he could share it with Hélène and maybe even her Voltaire.

  “Have to go,” says Thomas at last. Voltaire and Hélène exchange baffled looks. “Yes, I have to go,” says Thomas beginning to twitch his arms. “Busy. Busy, you know.”

  “Well said,” offers Voltaire, retaking his seat. “That more or less sums it up, doesn’t it? Busy. Yes, it does. Well said.”

  Thomas feels his eyes narrow. He is uncertain whether Voltaire is genuinely agreeing with him or just making fun. Thomas judges that the absence of a grin on the man’s face means that for a moment the bastard is serious. Satisfied, Thomas continues in a rapid mumble as his feet start to shift.

  “They’re manuscripts. Not ready yet.”

  “Ah,” says Voltaire, smiling benignly. He might be a surgeon telling you he’s sorry, but your leg, it will have to come off. “But of course. That’s the trick, is it not?”

  Thomas says nothing in reply. It’s simply time to go.

  “Hélène,” says Thomas bowing curtly before his former lover. “Monsieur,” he offers to Voltaire.

  And with that, he’s off. He’s out the door of the Le Procope and into the street. It is not until he has gone a dozen paces, and starting to feel a growing chill, that he realizes that he was wearing a coat when he went into the café. He slaps at his upper arms and his chest as he recalls that he put the coat on the back of his chair when he first came in. That was down at the table with his friends. Well, there’s no going back now, not so Hélène and Voltaire can laugh at his mistake. Instead, Thomas heads home in a rush. His scheduled rendezvous with Collier and his desire for a tumble and thrust with one of the women he pays for the privilege are not going to happen this night.

  As he steps onto the Pont Neuf Thomas feels a need, despite the cold, to reach out and touch the stone rail. He wants to make contact with the world through which he passes. He stops for a moment in front of the statue of Henri IV. He does not glance the ancient king’s greenish way but rather vows he’ll not be going back to Le Procope any time soon. There are hundreds of other places for him to gather with his friends and obtain their information, or simply to drink and despair. The Café de la Régence, for example. He’ll not risk a second encounter with Hélène and Voltaire. There are enough disappointments in his life. He does not need any more. He doesn’t want to see Hélène again, not so long as she’s with someone else. Least of all a writer who is the talk of the town.

  As he starts to move again, tapping here and there the stone parapet along the bridge, Thomas comes to a decision: he has to move out of his pitiful attic room. A better address he must find, rooms suited to the position and life to which he aspires. It may not win Hélène back. Well, likely not, but he has to start living like he is more of a success than he really is.

  —

  Thomas is at work, in the law office where he toils as a junior clerk. He pauses in his copying work. He lifts the quill and looks to the window, its panes spotted with tiny drops. He imagines a great, dark cloud is advancing toward Paris. It’s coming to unleash a downpour, like piss from an unseen cow. It will bring another day of wintry rain. When it begins, the rainfall drumming on the cobbles and those streets that are still of packed earth, people will scatter and scurry. They will run for cover as best they can, hoping to get out of the downpour before it’s made their garment colours run and takes the starch out of their stiff-pressed ruffles. Splattered and soaked, they’ll hurry this way and that along the streets.

  Is it really wrong to smile at the thought of other’s misfortunes? Thomas muses. He remembers his mother’s remark to that effect. Right and wrong, so simple then. But to be thankful that he’s dry when others are not, there’s nothing wrong with that. We all get our share of troubles, do we not? So why not rejoice in being safe and dry when it’s others’ turn to be wet?

  He glances at the quill in his hand. He supposes there is no need to think about things like that. Life is complicated enough without bringing morality into it. That brings a grudging frown. His indoor work this afternoon is not what he would choose to do if the world gave him a choice. However, the world does not often work like that. Choices are few and far between. So he is by day a copy clerk in the law offices of the great Pontécoulant. The man who hired him, Monsieur Deauville, Pontécoulant’s premier commis, said he was impressed that little Vire could produce such a well-educated lad. Thomas’s level of French and Latin was “strong,” or so pronounced Deauville. And Thomas’s knowledge of the classics was regarded as “not so bad.” So Deauville offered him a copyist job, which in truth required not much knowledge of anything at all, but only a good and steady hand. Thomas gladly took the position four years ago, yet how differently he feels about it all now. Four years of copy quillwork six days a week has long since become drudgery. It has driven the poetic muse and every other muse far, far away. Or at least that’s where Thomas lays the blame. Moreover, the low salary of the position does not allow him to eat, drink, dress and generally live as he would like to. That is where the other source of income comes in, that which he receives from Collier in return for stories about fellow writers passed on. And all that involves is for Thomas to listen carefully and retell a few highlights to the man of the Paris police. That particular job could be described, this is what Collier claims, as helping to keep the realm safe. Thomas cannot but smile at that. Safe for whom, and at whose cost? Thomas does not really care about the boy king or his realm. But he does want and need the extra coins. More than that, his involvement with Collier gives him something the lowly clerk’s job beneath Deauville and Pontécoulant does not. That’s the satisfaction of being part of something bigger than just himself.

  Thomas glances down at the work before him. He is halfway through his latest set of documents. He is to copy all the paperwork relating to a case in which reimbursement is being sought for expenditures made in the service of the king. The claim is on behalf of the widow of a certain Pastour de Costebelle. The man was a naval officer and governor, originally from Languedoc where he was born a younger son in a family of lesser nobility. He apparently served and died overseas. Thomas looks again to see where the death occurred. It was in some colony called Louisbourg, the capital of a colony called Isle Royale, also called Cap Breton. Thomas is not sure exactly where it is, but he thinks it’s near Terre Neuve. Whatever the particulars, it’s across the Atlantic and far away. Thomas thinks perhaps he should purchase a map of France’s holdings across the sea.

  Why anyone would venture across any ocean is beyond him, though he supposes it has to do with either duty or advancement, or maybe both. In any case, it’s Costebelle’s young widow, an Anne Mius d’Entremont, who is asking for compensation. Thomas does not always pay attention to the details, but this case sounds sad. The aforementioned Governor Costebelle fulfilled his duties in the colony of Isle Royale but in so doing went deep into debt. That was the thanks he got for establishing the settlement and keeping up the king’s honour and good name. The widow is now in France and reduced to penury. At least that is what she claims. There are lessons in this, thinks Thomas. The first would seem to be not to get caught in an overseas colony, where out of sight is out of mind. The second lesson is this: do not go too far out on any branch on behalf of any king. Branches break and no one catches you when they do.

  Thomas puts the content of the widow’s case out of mind. Instead, he takes pride in the form and shape of his script as he writes. It is as fine as he can make it, all that he can claim as his own in this office. He sighs that his aspiration to be a writer is reduced to this. He turns to see what Rooster might be up to down at the far end of the suite of rooms. At the moment, his red-haired sometime stairwell friend and fellow office clerk i
s listening with rapt attention to everyone’s master, Monsieur Deauville. It looks from Thomas’s distance as if Deauville has yet another new vest-coat. By Thomas’s calculation, that’s at least the eighth the man has in his circulation. Thomas has but two and Rooster three.

  Thomas takes a shallow breath and returns his gaze to his quill. A gift from a goose, he thinks, and smiles at the thought. Some gift, plucked out of the goose’s body after his neck is wrung. He turns his attention back to what it is he is working on atop his writing table. Thomas’s loops and links are well constructed, with the flowery esses at the end of lines as good as any. The quill moves surely and swiftly under his control, with nary a sign of where he’s lifted the nib and gone to dip for ink. He takes the blotter paper and lays it gently on top of his first copied page.

  Thomas straightens and stretches to begin a yawn. The skies outside are darker still. It truly is almost like night. The rain has picked up, driving against the panes. He turns back to his task, and before he dips his quill again into the ink he examines the nib. It is truly and finely cut. He dips the quill into the well and writes a while then dips again and adds words to the second page. The first paragraph is done. The letters are well shaped, the words well spaced and the sentences are holding the imagined line. He moves on. He begins to copy the part that is the conclusion to the widow’s appeal for compensation when a roll of thunder rumbles through the office. Thomas turns back to the window. The rain is pounding now, angry fists thumping on the glass. Unbidden, the nib of the quill in his holding hand touches the paper without him feeling the contact. Black ink spills from the carefully cut tip, spreading to form a tiny pool. The ink spreads to swallow nearly an entire word. Thomas turns back to his work and notices too late. He sighs out loud. He’ll have to start the page over again. It is an effort lost, but then every hour he spends in the law office as a lowly clerk is time lost.

  He reaches for a fresh sheet of paper, straightening the alignment of the paper on the table. The lines of everything – chair, paper, body posture, arm and hand – have to be right, just right. Quill in hand, Thomas hesitates to dip the nib. He gently shakes his forearms, as if there were some bit of dust to remove. To the inkwell at last he goes, a ceramic container from Moustiers in the south of France in its distinctive blue and white. The quill is loaded with ink, so to speak, yet Thomas does not take it to the paper. Instead, one more time, it is to the window that his face turns. The panes are a-blur with winter’s rain driving hard. A shudder courses through the young man’s body, a chill he cannot shake. Thomas’s face is that of someone sad and lost, someone meant for more than this, a copyist in a lonely office of the law.