Petite Mort

by Beatrice Hitchman

  Do it now.

  Caroline filled her lungs with air and screamed to Auguste to help her, flailing at André with her hands; André turned and shouted out in shock, then pulled away from her and knelt, covering his shame.

  Caroline made her eyes wide and pleading, she looked up at her husband. ‘The shame of it! He forced me,’ she whispered, ‘as though possessed…’

  Seeing Auguste’s face turn purple, she thought: He will send the boy away. He will cut him out of the will. I have done it.

  But: ‘My love,’ Auguste said to Caroline, and then he toppled. The servants ran into the room and took him by the shoulders and ankles; one of them ran screaming for horses, to fetch the doctor.

  They found André’s present afterwards, skidded under a chair. It was a book: a fine new edition of a new book. The inscription read: To my son, who I always knew would come back, and the spine said: Thomas Edison’s PRINCIPLES OF MOTION TELEGRAPHY.

  Juliette, i.

  The Pathé archivist unrolls the promotional poster lovingly, smoothing the edges with her white cotton gloves.

  ‘This was made in preparation for the release of the Petite Mort,’ she says. ‘It’s all we have in terms of promotional material. Everything else was lost in the fire.’

  The poster isn’t as large as the modern ones I’m used to seeing – only a bit bigger than typewriter paper.

  At the top of the page, in curvaceous black type, is the title – LA PETITE MORT. Underneath, down the right-hand side, is a drawing of a slender woman in a floor-length black dress. Her posture is elegant and composed apart from her face, held between her cupped hands as she stares directly at me. Her lips are pulled back from her teeth as she screams at something we can’t see. In the background, there is a slit window and bare stone walls, and in the corner of the room, a full-length mirror.

  The left-hand side has text on it. In the same bold font, it reads:

  A TALE OF MYSTERY AND SUSPENSE! FEATURING A NEVER-SEEN-BEFORE DOPPELGÄNGER TRICK BY ANDRE DURAND!

  PATHE FRERES

  I signal to the archivist, who comes over to stand beside the desk.

  ‘They told me the Doppelgänger trick is what’s missing from the print that’s turned up?’

  ‘Yes, that’s correct.’

  ‘Do we know what the trick consisted of? Aren’t there any papers?’

  She shakes her head apologetically. ‘All we know is the studio gossip. It was supposed to be a great coup, a hitherto unseen trick, and everyone was excited about the film’s release. Only then, there was the fire.’

  I look at the poster for a minute longer, as if there might be some hidden detail somewhere, but there is nothing: just the girl, and the mirror, and the castle room.

  ‘Don’t you have a script somewhere? Couldn’t we get an idea from that?’

  She touches the tips of her gloved fingers to each other in turn: ‘No. I’m sorry. We looked all through the archive when the film print was found, but there was nothing.’

  The girl’s eyes in the poster are dark blots in a pale face.

  9. juillet 1913

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, something happened which eclipsed even Camille’s arrival.

  When I got to the costumery at ten past eight Elodie was already there, holding something up to the light for inspection.

  ‘Is that the Absinthe Fairy’s costume?’ I asked.

  It was venom-green: the seed pearls on the bodice were winking at me.

  ‘That’s it,’ Elodie said, admiring it. ‘Her assistant’s coming to pick it up in a minute. They’re filming today.’

  Terpsichore was somewhere close by; perhaps in the very next building, putting on her make-up in front of a mirror, being fussed around by executives and flattered by the director.

  I sat at my station and started my machine, trying not to steal glances at the costume. Five minutes later, we heard a clattering of boots in the corridor, and a girl about my own age appeared in the doorway.

  She wasn’t wearing a uniform: instead she had a smart dress on, which had been well-tailored, and her boots were polished to a bright black shine.

  She stepped into the room as if she owned it; I felt the collective hackles rise. ‘Is this it?’ she asked, and when nobody answered, picked up the green dress and swept away, nose in the air.

  As I remember it, that morning was full of gossip: enough to distract me totally from the problem of my sister. An ageing wolf had escaped from the zoological film section of the factory and was at large in the Bois de Vincennes; it was not proposed to retrieve him, on the basis that a lifetime of being fed treats had made his teeth too soft to bite. Another rumour: they were going to divert the course of the river to run through the Pathé lot in order to film the story of Moses. Moses was to be played by Charles Pathé’s grandson, widely considered an ugly baby – but of course everyone was too afraid to object.

  At half past eleven, we heard running feet again. The door opened and a runner stood there, excitement all over his face. ‘You’ve got to see this.’

  We all looked at Elodie, but she was already half out of her seat.

  At the joining of the corridors we met a crowd of other workers – the secretaries and producers from the first floor – the whole of Block One was emptying in front of us.

  We spilled out onto the building’s top step and into the back of a crowd made up of the other workers. The sky was a mutinous grey, and fat drops of rain bounced up from the paving stones. Across the courtyard, workers were crammed into every crevice of the doorways of the other buildings.

  ‘There,’ murmured Elodie, pointing to the centre of the courtyard, where a few people stood huddled. A low-slung studio car was waiting there, and next to it was a group of men in the expensive suits of high-ranking employees, talking to André. The men had their arms crossed. The rain had damped André’s curls to his forehead. It was clear from his gestures that he was losing the argument.

  And standing next to André was a person who must be Terpsichore. She was wrapped in a fur coat, holding an umbrella tilted against the rain.

  I whispered to Annick: ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘They’re saying she threw a glass vase at her assistant.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Apparently the costume didn’t fit right.’

  ‘Is she all right? The assistant?’

  ‘She’ll live, but it’s not the first time. They’re putting her on leave of absence,’ Georgette whispered.

  The tall figure turned towards us, bending to open the car door. She shut her umbrella with a shower of raindrops; the door clicked open and she bent to get in.

  ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ said Georgette.

  Then the door closed, and all I could see was a shadowy profile, sitting quite still and unconcerned in the cab. André leant in to speak to the driver, their heads bent close together, then stood back from the car. The engine fired, and the car purred away down the narrow alleyway between the buildings.

  André, iv.

  Three o’clock in the afternoon, the day after Auguste’s stroke. Rain drums on the roof, but the sick-room itself is quiet. Caroline sits beside Auguste’s bed, brushing the creamy edges of the coverlet with her fingers.

  The doctors have said that Auguste won’t survive. His breathing is slow and gurgling, like a person drowning. Caroline remembers how apologetic he was on their wedding night and how scornful and impatient she must have seemed to him. She recalls the way Auguste patted her knee after her miscarriage; how he held her hand as she cried herself to sleep.

  The door shuts quietly, and André is standing just inside the room.

  She knows why he has come: because the carriage is outside waiting, because he is leaving. His face has changed: all the pallor and the passion is gone. Caroline has one weapon remaining, a final effort dispensed through gritted teeth.

  If you’ll only wait for the will.

  Perhaps if André knows about the money he will be persuaded to stay; pe
rhaps in time he’ll understand why she had to trick him.

  Last night’s scenes come back to her. André, wild and hysterical: You wanted him to find us together, he said. You wanted him to send me away.

  She had moved towards him, and the shock on his face vanished so quickly, replaced by arctic cold.

  Now, standing in the sick-room doorway, André shakes his head as though shaking off a fly. I don’t care about the money. I’m going now. I want to be someone to make him proud.

  Caroline crosses to watch his departure from the sick-room window. Perhaps now he will remember her crooked smile in the schoolroom; perhaps now he will recall the night-sweats and fevers and her thumb on his jaw. But André steps through the puddles and into the waiting carriage without looking up at her. She stays watching at the window anyway, even when the carriage has vanished. The clock ticks softly on.

  When she turns back to the bed she sees that Auguste’s chest has stopped rising and falling.

  She is fascinated by the change in him: in death his face is fixed and molten at the same time, like wax.

  Then André dips out of view for a while. There were sightings in a brothel in New Orleans; reports of a young man in blue serge hiding out in a railroad car. Tramps along the Montana line, presented with a sketched likeness, shook their heads and could not swear to it.

  It was easy to lose him because nobody really wanted to find him. Auguste’s family lawyers made a cursory investigation and then recalled their agents. There had been rumours of an unfortunate entanglement at the plantation, the details of which were vague but damning; better, they thought, that André make his peace with himself in his own time.

  On January 3rd 1897, André presented himself at the offices of Mr Thomas Edison in New York.

  The office door was opened by Edison himself – now in middle age, with tufty grey hair and a lean, narrow-eyed cast to his face. He saw a gangly teenager with grey eyes and a careworn shirt in expensive material. André in turn took in the view through the half-open door: three foreign-looking gentlemen were sitting in the offices. One gentleman’s hand rested protectively on a machine which André immediately recognised: a projector. With Edison distracted at the door, the gentleman leant across to his colleague and André heard him say, in French: Let’s not sell for less than a million.

  Edison saw André peering round the edge of the door. ‘Are you the interpreter?’ he grunted.

  The French gentleman wore a fur stole and a monocle and spoke very quickly, in a Parisian accent; André, translating, struggled to keep up. The man accorded his salutations to Mr Edison; it was his pleasure to present the new Visiscope, his very latest invention, a revolutionary projecting machine that could show images to an ever-larger audience. He patted the projector’s casing, extolled its many virtues – Think of the profits, sir! – and sat back with folded arms, waiting for Edison to make an offer.

  André was bewitched. Auguste had taken him to a nickelodeon once in Baton Rouge, and he had seen illustrations, but never the apparatus of such a thing before. When the inventor opened the casing to demonstrate the mechanism, André leant closer and looked at the loving, ingenious armatures, savouring the hiss of the machinery. When the Visiscope started, and shapes leapt to life on the blank wall of the office, Edison was transfixed; but André did not glance at the wall once. He looked only at the way the film unspooled, smooth as water, inside the projector.

  Edison hemmed and hawed and twirled his moustaches. He hated to lose money on a deal, but feared still more that he would lose to one of his competitors. The inventor waited politely, with a smile like ice. Finally Edison sighed, crossed his arms behind his head and said to André: ‘Damn patent’s worth a million. Tell them I’ll pay it.’

  Though he did not understand English, the inventor leant forward, sensing victory.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that,’ André said to Edison.

  Edison coloured instantly. He was the inventor of the light bulb, of X-rays; it was years since anyone had contradicted him. ‘What the devil do you mean?’

  ‘The mechanism that holds the film in place could be improved. If we were to introduce a simple loop here, you would reduce the pressure on the film as it passes through. It would be safer. And sufficiently different to qualify for a new patent. We wouldn’t have to buy theirs.’

  Edison peered into the body of the projector and saw the boy was right.

  The inventor’s eyes darted from one face to the other.

  Edison sat back, the Visiscope forgotten, and stared at André.

  The year 1897 was a busy one at the New York State Patents Office. There were ten patent applications for new cinematic equipment. And, though they ranged enormously in technology – projectors and cameras and primitive sound-cylinders – eight of those patents bear the same blocky and youthful signature. Beneath the first signature was the confident flourish that the patent office knew so well – Thomas Edison – which signified joint ownership.

  In the year that followed, the patents continued to flow thick and fast, all with the same scribble and confident employer’s countersigning. It is only in 1899 that the rate of invention tails off: it peters out in a series of applications for licences. One for a ‘folding mirror device’ and another, a ‘handle-operated smoke-producing machine’.

  These were the traditional paraphernalia of the fairground attraction, with minor modifications. They were not countersigned by Edison, and not original enough to be considered seriously. They were rejected by the Patent Officer out of hand.

  Electricity was Edison’s business. He understood that a current will not always run smoothly: instead, it may leap erratically from point to point, arriving at its destination through the route that suits it best. And, though he never shared his view with anyone, Edison believed that people worked like electricity – coursing for the most part drone-like through life, but sometimes throwing up an anomaly. He, who had been expelled from school as mentally deficient, when all the time he was studying the flight patterns of the birds through the window, was his own proof.

  Therefore – knowing that brilliance, physical or metaphysical, might flare in unexpected ways – Edison gave André a long leash. Along with the rest of his engineers, the boy was set up on a decent salary and given workshops on Edison’s lot. By and large he was left to his own devices, to tinker in whatever way he chose. And for almost two years Edison’s policy bore fruit.

  Nevertheless, by the summer of 1899, André’s erratic ideas could no longer be ignored. All spring, the guards had come running to Edison with reports of men in fur coats drawing up to André’s offices late at night; peering through the window, the guards saw the room lit up by zoetropes in action, by mirrors laid out in odd formations on the floor. They saw André’s pensive face as he poured hard liquor for the men, listening to them give away their fairground secrets one by one.

  Was this some kind of fad? Edison told himself that he was angry because André was inviting dubious characters onto the site, and called André to his office.

  The young man stood before his desk. Edison made him wait a full minute before looking up from the papers he was signing.

  ‘What is this I hear about inviting trick-film merchants in?’ he asked.

  André had known it was only a matter of time.

  ‘The mechanisms are ingenious—’ he began, but Edison held up a palm.

  ‘Charlatans and misfits: it must stop.’ He didn’t want reasoning; he wanted contrition. Why didn’t the boy make it easy for himself?

  André knew he could not convince Edison to see the world the way he did. Edison looked down at his papers, dismissing him. ‘Don’t be careless with your future,’ he said, more sternly than he felt; his faith in his electric metaphor was undimmed. André might fizz and crackle, but he would eventually find his way home.

  André packed the same night. He bore Edison no personal grudge; his decision was calculated on the basis purely of profit and loss. Nobody saw him slip out of the
compound. He stayed the night in a hotel by the docks, and boarded a ship the following morning.

  9. juillet 1913

  ALL THAT MORNING, the studio talked of nothing else. The vase had been crystal, and had lodged in shining splinters in the assistant’s face. The assistant had found a lawyer; the assistant had been paid off handsomely.

  ‘It’s the Absinthe Fairy producers I feel sorry for,’ Georgette piped. ‘Having to replace Terpsichore at the last moment.’

  The others shook their heads. I stared at her, dazed by a new idea. Unsettled, Georgette gave her shoulders a mutinous little shake and said, ‘Poor M. Durand. All his film in tatters, and his wife too.’

  There was general assent, and gradually the subject died away. But I was listening only to myself. I was overdue this, wasn’t I? With Terpsichore gone, who would replace her in the role, if not me? Somewhere in the building across the courtyard, André would be persuading the casting directors. Let’s give the Roux girl a chance, he was saying. And one by one the others would be slowly nodding: Let’s.

  There was no sign of him in the early afternoon; three o’clock and four o’clock came and went. By the end of the day I was cross, taking it out on the others with needling little asides; Annick flushed once or twice and bit her lip; I had almost made her cry.

  It was only at ten to five that a runner came to the door. ‘Message for Mlle Roux,’ he said, ‘M. Durand wants to see you in his offices immediately.’

  Elodie looked up, surprised.

  I beamed as I rose, smoothing the cloth of my skirt.

  ‘This way,’ the runner said, and I followed him up to the second floor of the building, where the upper echelons of staff had their offices.

  There was a corridor with just one door at the end of it. The runner knocked, and André’s voice called out: ‘Come in!’

  I opened the door to a long, low-ceilinged room. At one end was a green baize desk. Two of the walls were lined with bookshelves, and stuck to the third was a mass of paper – sketches and geometric drawings.