Heretic Dawn (19 page)

“Certainly it’s a beautiful monument, but, like us, it’s lodged in all of this filth and garbage. But this is better,” he added, as we entered a wide street, lined on both sides by very alluring shops, which were surmounted by very beautiful new houses, all of equal height and all aligned and built of brick and stone. “You will notice, Monsieur de Siorac, how the pavement here has been washed clean: the merchants have kept it so, since they don’t wish their customers to be put off by the bitter stench of the city’s mud.”

“So what’s the name of this street?” I asked, amazed.

“It’s not a street!” replied L’Étoile, “it’s the Pont Saint-Michel!”

“A bridge?” I gasped, thinking he was joking. “But I can’t see the Seine!”

“You can’t see it since the houses on both sides are hiding it!”

“Well! I don’t know what to admire the most,” I mused after a moment, “the beautifully joined paving stones, the cleanliness of the gutters or the pink bricks of these houses!”

“In which I’d hate to live!” said L’Étoile, pouting.

“Why ever not, Monsieur?” I asked. “They’re so beautiful!”

“Because it’s dangerous living over a river that’s as turbulent as this one! For the moment, the Seine is in a sweet mood, but in her fury she floods and spares nothing! There’s not a bridge in Paris that she hasn’t swept away at one time or another, drowning everyone on it. The Pont Notre-Dame was the most recent to go, and before that, the Meuniers! And this very bridge on which you’re standing dates roughly from the time I was born, since the previous one collapsed under the water’s furious assault some thirty years ago.”

Since I didn’t feel that the danger was imminent, and there was so much to see in these shops, whose windows were brightly illuminated already, well before nightfall, with candles, I would have been happy to dawdle here—especially since I observed that there were many fine young ladies crowding the pavement who were beautifully dressed and who wore elegant black masks, a sure sign of their noble rank.

“Monsieur de Siorac,” cautioned L’Étoile in his most morose and moral tone, “if, as I fear, you have an appetite for the ladies, Huguenot though you may be, you’ll have your hands full in this city, which is more corrupt than ancient Babylon, and enjoys such a monstrous reputation that it’s enough for a wench from the Île-de-France to spend a few days here for the people of her village to believe that she’s lost her virginity. But, I beg you, let us tarry no longer! The rue
de la Ferronnerie lies at some distance and, come nightfall, the streets are no longer safe, for there are some streets and alleys in Paris where you’ll get your throat cut as soon as the sun sets!”

“You mean the city has no lights?”

“It should. And, by law, they are supposed to be provided by its citizenry. But in Paris, laws often remain dead letters, since Parisians are, by nature, so oppositional. It’s the same with the gutters: each house is required to wash the street before it with buckets of water, especially when they discharge their excrement.”

“Oh, no! What’s this? My head is all wet! It’s raining!”

“It’s nothing,” said L’Étoile, “some housewife has just watered her potted plants. In truth, you’ll see these flowerpots full of marjoram and rosemary everywhere in Paris, despite the fact that they’re a great annoyance to passers-by and expressly forbidden by royal decree. So you have the choice, Monsieur de Siorac, when you’re out walking: you can either walk in the middle of the street bathing your feet with sewage, or walk close to the houses and have your head sprinkled. And it’s really not so bad when it’s only water. But, I beg you, we must not tarry here! It’s getting dark, we should hurry.”

We set off at a trot, mostly to please him, since he needn’t worry about the thieves of Paris, surrounded as he was by the four of us, all armed to the teeth and packing pistols in our belts. It’s a fact, however, that as we were heading along the rue de la Barillerie, which goes by the palace, a monument I would have liked to stop and enjoy, even at dusk, the press of carts had thinned, and from every side I could see people hurrying as if they could think only of getting home and barricading themselves inside.

“What about the watch, Monsieur de L’Étoile?” I panted, surprised to see the Parisians prey to such anguish and terror at the approach of night. “Aren’t there any nightwatchmen to protect the workers and inhabitants of the capital?”

“There are two groups,” replied L’Étoile, grimacing with a bitter smile. “We’re so well defended in this city! Two! One is a made up of bourgeois and artisans who patrol their neighbourhoods and are called ‘the sitting guards’—and God knows, they sit! For these hardies spend their time under an archway, throwing dice by lantern light and emptying their flagons—and you can bet they’re not going to get off their rears if they hear anyone calling for help. The other group, ‘the royal watch’, is made up of forty officers on foot and another twenty on horseback. This group can’t be accused of sitting—they gallop, since throughout the night they ride around fully armed, always moving and forever useless since, as they are riding on paving stones, they make such a racket that any thieves who may be afoot hide until they’ve passed and then go back to their work like flies on sugared candy.”

“Monsieur de L’Étoile,” I said, “as soon as we’ve greeted Maître Recroche, and if he’s indeed willing to lodge us, I plan to escort you immediately to your own house.”

“Oh, Monsieur, a thousand thanks,” sighed L’Étoile. “What a relief! My lodgings are in the rue Trouvevache but, as close as it is, it would be perilous for me to attempt to go there alone.”

This said, we fell silent for a while. Once over the Pont au Change, we rode along the grand’rue Saint-Denis, which had enough mud and filth to fertilize a farm, so different from the rue de la Ferronnerie, where we turned left, another merchants’ street whose paving stones were washed clean—although it was, according to L’Étoile, the worst aligned street in the capital, the houses on one side appearing to bump into each other in their attempt to stick out into the street, and with, on the opposite side, a series of shops built as lean-tos into the wall of the Cimetière des Innocents like warts on a hog’s back, so that it was a miracle that you could make your way through all of these extravagant projections and protuberances. And I imagined it was even worse when the merchants set out their stalls in the street in front of their shops.

“You might think,” said my guide, in the mournful tone that was habitual with him when he spoke of this city, which he cherished despite all its faults, “that you see here an abuse which cries out to be rehabilitated, but you should realize, my friend from Périgord, that in Paris, the more an abuse cries out for reform, the greater its chances of being perpetuated.”

I laughed at this witticism, but soon fell silent again, since, out of the corner of my eye, I could see from his expression that he didn’t think it was a bit funny and that I should take him seriously.

“What?” I gasped. “If the king says ‘I wish it!’ they wouldn’t fix it?”

“Listen to this,” replied L’Étoile bitterly. “Henri II, as he was riding in his royal coach from the Louvre to his house in Tournelles, passed, as always, by the rue de la Ferronnerie. Because of all these projections, warts and excrescences, he was caught up in a tangle of carts so impossible to clear that he was delayed there for an hour, swearing and ranting. When he finally arrived at Tournelles, still fuming, he made an ordinance that required that every structure in the rue de la Ferronnerie that exceeded the proper limit to be demolished within the month. So what do we see, Monsieur de Siorac? Eighteen years later, things are in exactly the same state they were that day.”

“But, Monsieur de L’Étoile,” I said, open-mouthed, “is this not amazing? Every Huguenot in the kingdom trembles at the very name of Henri II, yet Paris pays him no heed!”

“Well, that’s just what I was telling you!” cried L’Étoile. “Paris is a rebel and a renegade and tolerates no restraint or law! She takes herself for the king himself and seeks only her own good pleasure, preferring disorder, tumults and fornication! To make her bend the knee before him, the king would have to twist 300,000 necks one by one!”

“May it not please God to do so!” I laughed. “I’d never want an unpopulated Paris!”

But I wouldn’t have laughed if I’d been able to see the future:

and all of these Parisian encumbrances which made our good L’Étoile gnash his teeth seemed mere fodder for a good laugh to my happy nature. Oh, my good reader! I’m writing this from the vantage of old age, and as I trace these lines thirty-eight—yes, thirty-eight!—years after my arrival in Paris I get a knot in my throat and tears spring to my eyes, since, two months ago, in this same rue de la Ferronnerie, which lack of respect for the royal ordinances left so tortuous and impassable, the royal coach was stopped not by the protuberance of the shops but by an encumbrance of wagons, and an assassin, armed by the zeal of the priests, pierced the noble heart of Henri IV. Ah, what a terrible blow! Oh, misfortune! In my immense grief I cannot imagine how France will ever recover from it!

Pierre de L’Étoile, once he’d dismounted, had to bang loudly on the door and shout Maître Recroche’s name repeatedly before an eye appeared though the iron lattice of the peephole and the door was half-opened to admit L’Étoile and myself, but not a soul more, and, as soon as we had squeezed through, our host and Baragran, his assistant, both heavily armed, slammed the door closed in our companions’ noses and immediately refastened all the chains and bolts.

“Maître Recroche,” began L’Étoile, “I would be extremely grateful if you could provide lodging for these three gentlemen friends of mine and their valet and horses. Monsieur de Siorac is a medical doctor and the younger son of a baron from Périgord.”

To this, Maître Recroche shook his head, but answered not a word or a grunt. He appeared to me as much dwarf as full-grown man, with lustreless, dirty, greying hair and cheeks that were pale and pockmarked; he was adorned in a ragged greenish doublet, wore no ruff collar, but a dirty flat one, and had very long, spidery arms (short as he was) and a vulture’s hooked nose.

Telling his assistant to hold the candle high, he silently looked me over, his little bright-blue eyes shining as if he were weighing us (my purse and me) to the nearest ounce.

“Maître Recroche, did you hear me?” asked L’Étoile.

“Quite well, Monsieur. But baba!” (And what he meant by this “baba”, which he stuck in here and there, I could not fathom, and wonder if he himself knew, having the extravagance to invent words at will, and to use ten where one would have sufficed, perhaps consoling himself for his miserliness by this copious verbal expenditure.) “Baba, Monsieur, I don’t offer chambers, it’s beneath me.”

“Of course! Of course!” said L’Étoile with more grace than I would have expected from his atrabilious nature. “But, on the other hand, you have chambers!”

“Baba, chambers! Chamber-ettes! Mini-chambers! Nothing that could accommodate this gallant gentleman!”

And here he tried to make a sort of bow to me, by lowering his head and making a sweeping gesture with his long arm, and that this salutation was done more out of pure form than civility I was convinced by L’Étoile, who knew the man, and I frowned angrily, but didn’t give ground, and returned his bow with a like degree of stiffness.

“This gallant gentleman,” returned L’Étoile, “has no place to sleep.”

“Baba, that’s different,” conceded Maître Recroche, scratching his nose with a very dirty fingernail. “If the gentleman has no place to sleep and is, in addition, a friend of yours, we must accommodate
him, must we not, even if it’s with a micro-chamber. But can I do this? There’s the rub!”

“I beseech you, Maître Recroche,” said L’Étoile, who appeared to be working so hard at maintaining his patience that sweat was dripping from his brow. “I beg you! Decide! It’s getting very late!”

“Decide!” stalled Maître Recroche. “Baba! That’s sooner said than done! The chamber-ettes I’m referring to are only big enough for two and there are four of these gentlemen.”

“Then we’ll sleep two to a room,” I conceded.

“Baba,” returned Maître Recroche, “the thing is, the beds in these rooms are scarcely wide enough for one!”

“But we’ll have to fit two in a bed,” I said.

“Not on your life!” gasped Maître Recroche. “Two big men like yourselves would surely break these little bedlets!”

“Whatever is broken we’ll pay for,” I parried.

“Well said!” agreed Maître Recroche as if to himself, running his right index finger along his nose. “I can imagine things working out with this lodger, if I lodge him. However, Monsieur de Siorac,” he countered, “the window is agonizingly small and is covered in oil paper rather than glass.”

“Then I’ll open it.”

“Don’t you dare! It overlooks the Cimetière des Innocents, whose soil gives off such poisonous vapours that they’ll eat up your flesh within nine days! Why, the night air is so sulphurous and gaseous that it sets off will-o’-the-wisps!”

“Maître Recroche,” I demanded, “name your price!”

“All right, if I must!” sighed Maître Recroche with a nasty glint in his little blue eyes. “Venerable medical doctor,” because you are the friend of Monsieur de L’Étoile, I will charge you a mere three écus for the three of you for the month, whether you stay the month or not.”

“Three écus for two chamber-ettes!” cried L’Étoile, raising his arms heavenward.

“Nay! Nay! You’re mistaken!” corrected Recroche with a benign air. “I mean three écus per mini-chamber, and one sol per day for each horse, but you must pay for your own hay.”

“Six écus!” cried L’Étoile. “That’s highway robbery! Lower your price!”

“Baba!” replied Recroche. “Highway robbery? The problem is that there is a great demand for rooms in Paris now. What can I do? I have to live. My chamber-ettes are more in demand than palaces in Poland and I offer them to this gentleman only out of my great love for you!”