Illumination (36 page)
Authors: Matthew Plampin
The atrium of the American Embassy was filled with people, as it had been on Clem’s five previous visits since the sortie. All nationalities were present among this crowd, but by far the majority were Germans, the Prussians and Bavarians who’d lived in Paris under the Empire – waiters, jewellers, barbers, locksmiths, along with their wives and children – and been sealed in by their own army. As they lacked official representation, and met only with hostile unconcern from the French, no attempt had been made to secure them safe passage out of the city. They were a miserable, persecuted-looking bunch, gaunt and shabbily clothed even by the standards of besieged Paris. Sticking together in groups of a dozen or more, they murmured in their guttural language and glanced constantly towards the doors, as if expecting National Guardsmen to burst in and start making arrests.
It was around half-past three on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and these German mendicants were gathered for a festive almsgiving. The American minister, the honourable Eli Washburne, had taken it upon himself to care for all who found themselves stranded in Paris without the means to live, sustaining several thousand from his apparently bottomless stockroom. Some Second Empire bureaucrat had thought it a great jest to assign the world’s one true republic a building decorated in the most splendid, palatial fashion. Trestle tables were set out across lush red carpets; boots, blankets and tins of grits were being dispensed beneath gilded archways and pilasters; earnest exhortations not to neglect religious observance at this holy time of year were echoing from ceilings splashed with pastel-hued rococo debauches.
Clem disposed of his cigarette end in a marble urn. ‘Stirs the deuced soul, don’t it,’ he said, scratching his beard. ‘Such disinterested charity. Basic humanity and all that, asserting itself in a time of crisis.’
Besson was peering ahead into the gloomy hall, which was unlit in the late December afternoon – gas had been turned off across the city a fortnight earlier. He was attempting to catch the eye of an official standing at one end of the tables. He didn’t comment.
‘Puts one in mind of Richard Wallace,’ Clem went on, enjoying this rare spot of positive reflection. ‘The only rich Englishman left in Paris, Émile – who’s now feeding all the poor ones. I’ve heard that he’s taken recently to walking from
mairie
to
mairie
, leaving packets of banknotes for the relief of the needy. They say—’
The
aérostier
went forward without a word, snaking through the queues, honing in on his target. Clem wondered briefly if he should follow and decided that there was little point. What could he possibly add to the discussion? He lit another cigarette, slid a flask from his pocket and took a swig; and recoiled with a hard shudder, the hair standing up on his neck and forearms. He’d bought this stuff a few minutes earlier, out in the street. It was rum, he supposed, but had a suspiciously chemical whiff about it – rather like formaldehyde or some kind of preserving fluid. What was a fellow to do, though? The second sip was not so bad; the third actually quite pleasant.
Besson was walking back over – and straight past, towards the doors. Clem followed him out into the street. Thirty or forty Parisians were gathered around a government bulletin that had been pasted to the wall of a church, striking familiar attitudes of dismay and disbelief. This notice told of another decisive defeat, scarcely three and a half weeks after the hammering at Champigny. A few days earlier, the unlikely decision had been reached to attempt a second breakthrough, this time to the north. There had been a surprising amount of enthusiasm for this assault, both in the government chamber and on the boulevards – to cleanse the humiliation of their previous trouncing, Clem guessed, or just to alleviate the stifling ennui. The word at the Grand, however, as the casualties had started to come in, was that the French had been outclassed once more. The National Guard had again fled the field, infecting the reserves with their cowardice and insubordination. Regular troops sent to dig forward trenches had found the earth frozen hard; and had been left shivering on the battlefield, without orders and close to mutiny, until the Prussian artillery had opened up and torn them to scraps.
Clem buttoned the doctor’s green wool suit – now the tone and texture of old moss after an unsuccessful attempt at laundering in the lower reaches of the hotel. The rum sloshed about in his pocket. He would have taken another gulp to rub the edge off the gruelling cold, but was obliged to adopt a sort of half-trot just to keep Besson in sight. He couldn’t tell if the Frenchman was actually going somewhere – or if he was walking at this speed to shake off his emotions, in the way that a man might try to rid himself of a persistent wasp.
‘They haven’t seen him, then?’ Clem called out after they’d covered a couple of blocks. ‘No sign?’
Besson stopped, waiting impatiently for Clem to catch up. There was hatred on his sharp, quick face – hatred for all mankind. He turned, extending his right hand. ‘Sergeant Peabody has disappeared,’ he said.
Clem tossed him the flask. Tracking down the ravenous American had been Besson’s fixation since their return to Paris; Clem had joined him as soon as his headache had subsided to a manageable level. Peabody was the link, Besson was sure of it. He was the only person who’d known of the
aérostier
’s intention to speak to that American newspaperman in Tours. He must have told someone else, someone who could be traced back to Allix. They were going to find him, Besson had declared, and obtain a confession. This would be the proof they needed, the definite connection between Allix and the demise of the
Aphrodite
– and enough, surely, to merit a full investigation into the Leopard of Montmartre.
Sergeant Peabody, however, had eluded them utterly. No one had seen or spoken to the embassy night-watchman in weeks. They’d been all over the city, to every one of his haunts; a string of drinking dens and low theatres on the Left Bank; the arcades of the Palais Royal, where he’d apparently liked to linger with his pipe, staring at the shop-girls. It was as if he’d slipped out somehow, run the line, or taken refuge in a private hideaway unknown to any of his countrymen. They were at an impasse.
‘What now, then? A word with Allix himself?’ Clem suggested – seriously doubting as he spoke that he’d have the nerve for it.
This won him a withering look. Besson, like Clem, hadn’t shaved since the doctor’s house in Tournan-en-Brie; there were a couple of new silver hairs in his beard. He drank down a long draught of the rum, not seeming to notice its coarseness.
‘Do you honestly think I have not tried that?’ he said, wiping his mouth on his glove. ‘I could not even get
close
to him. The mood in Montmartre has deteriorated further since the sortie – grown yet more aggressive towards anyone seen to be bourgeois. If they thought I was attempting to blacken the name of their great chief they would hang me from a windmill sail.’
Jean-Jacques Allix had been far from quiet in the storm of fury and recrimination that had followed the Prussian recapture of Champigny. He’d not been chastened by the devastation he’d helped to bring about. His bereavement, if it had affected him at all, appeared to have only intensified his desire to fight – to lead the National Guard into battle after battle. He’d been one of the louder voices demanding this latest disastrous action, and had continued his one-man raids; several strident calls to arms had been worked into Elizabeth’s accounts in the
Figaro
. Those daft little red paw-prints and sets of cat-fangs were being painted everywhere, across every arrondissement, alongside slogans that called for the destruction of the Prussians and the destruction of bourgeois Paris as if they were heads on the same monster.
The two men walked onto the place de l’Étoile. The Arc de Triomphe was encased in wooden panels and sandbags to protect its statues, making it resemble a huge gravestone – appropriately enough, Clem thought. Lengths of cord were strung across the mouths of the avenues leading into the square, from which petroleum lamps had been suspended. These were a common sight in Paris since the end of the gas, casting a thin, insubstantial light that seemed to deepen the murk rather than relieve it. At night you sometimes got the sense of no longer being in a city, surrounded by man-made structures and people; it was easy to believe yourself shut up in a system of giant caverns, far underground.
Several companies of militia milled about near the Arc, lounging on the artillery emplacements around its base. Clem couldn’t tell if they’d been engaged in the recent action, but they’d responded to defeat as the National Guard responded to everything: through the consumption of heroic quantities of hard liquor. Paris had next to no food left, but was still awash with drink of every description, the populace pickling itself to forget its woes, seeking solace in the bellowed certainties of intoxicated patriotism. There was bickering among these guardsmen, though – debates and brawls and defensive declarations. Some passers-by were shouting abuse their way; a group of women in black raincoats informed them that they were
la honte de Paris
before hurrying off down the avenue de Friedland.
Clem went to a bench beneath a cluster of inert lampposts. ‘Come on, old man,’ he said, ‘let’s rest ourselves for a minute.’
They drank in silence, passing the flask back and forth. This taste for grog was a recent thing for the
aérostier
. Clem had been unsurprised to discover that the stuff made him a touch surly.
Neither had mentioned her name, not once. They were both united by their grief and completely divided by it. Besson, on the surface at least, was angry. In his mind was a list of the people responsible for what had happened: Jean-Jacques Allix was at the top, no doubt, and Émile Besson in the first five. He now strove to make things right, as he saw it, despite plainly knowing that this was impossible – and when he was finished and all was over she would still be gone.
For his part, Clem was confused, mainly; numb as well, definitely numb; and more than a little anxious. He did have a sense that he could have done more – insisted that she leave the National Guard or something like that, the way that brothers were supposed to be able to – but was also aware that she’d have just ignored him as always. The situation really was unfeasibly strange. Hannah Elizabeth Pardy, his twin sister, so vital and astounding, had been brought down by a Prussian sharpshooter. She wasn’t away in another city or another country but
dead
, extinguished for ever, buried by Allix in an allotment on the fringes of Champigny – to spare her the indignity of a soldiers’ mass grave, he’d said. It was beyond anything Clem could bring himself to imagine. He was familiar enough with loss, from the passing of his father and others, to realise that something else was coming, something bad: the blackness that follows the blind shock of impact. Often, as he wandered half-cut about the dreary streets of Paris, he could feel it hovering above his head, ready to drop over him. He was waiting for it.
‘You’d think,’ Clem said at last, indicating the National Guardsmen by the Arc, ‘that our Leopard would have tired of lionising that lot by now. I mean, they’re proving a bit of a bloody disappointment, aren’t they?’
‘He might also be inclined to hesitate,’ Besson remarked, ‘if he appreciated that the provisional government is delaying our surrender in order to kill off as many of his potential revolutionaries as it can in these foolish sorties.’ He paused to drink. ‘Unless, of course, he appreciates this all too well.’
Clem snorted. ‘That scheme hasn’t got much chance of working, has it? The blighters drop their guns and run the instant anybody takes a shot at them.’
Besson had nothing to add and the conversation lapsed. Clem considered broaching the topic of Christmas, now only hours away; the shrivelled turkeys on sale in Les Halles for upwards of two hundred francs apiece, for instance, or perhaps the story of the gent on the rue Lafayette who was fattening his pet cat to serve up in place of a fowl – to be garnished with grilled dormice, it was rumoured, as substitutes for sausages. Right then he found that he regarded Christmas with a certain vague fondness, largely on account of the association with crackling fires and large dinners. As he opened his mouth to speak, however, he saw Hannah, his companion at so many of those festive tables, sitting next to him in her best dress as Elizabeth lectured them on the specious wickedness of Christianity, or relieved their elderly butler of the carving knife so that she could hack at the goose herself. The memory was indescribably painful. He leaped away from it, casting about desperately for something else to say.
‘Have – have you been up to the Gare du Nord, Émile, of late?’
Besson shifted uncomfortably on the bench. ‘I go there, Clement,’ he muttered, pronouncing the name to rhyme with
cement
, ‘but there is little point to it. They are giving most of the flights to Godard’s men now, over in the Gare d’Orléans. I do not know why. Nadar thinks—’ The
aérostier
stopped talking and sat very still for a few moments. ‘None of it is any use. We are wasting our time, every one of us. We would be better off surrendering – letting the Prussians march up our boulevards, barrack their soldiers in the Louvre, stable their horses in Les Invalides. If we do not hand Paris over to them they will see her burn. It has all been for nothing.’
He looked away suddenly, towards the Arc, as if disgusted both by his own outburst and the passions that underpinned it. Cursing in French, he rose to his feet and strode off, making for one of the north-eastern avenues.
This had become Besson’s standard leave-taking. Clem didn’t try to follow or find out where he was going. ‘See you later then, old man,’ he said to the pavement, giving the flask a shake to gauge how much was left. ‘You know where I’ll be.’
The gates of the Jardin des Plantes had been left open to admit anyone who cared to enter. Elizabeth went through first, skirting the museums of natural history and mineralogy, heading for what appeared to be a refreshment pavilion; Clem was a few steps behind, retying the voluminous scarf he’d fashioned from one of his bathroom’s purple velvet curtains. It had been a long walk. There were no cabs or omnibuses in Paris any more; every horse saved from the abattoir was harnessed to a gun-carriage or an ambulance-cart. The morning was clear and not too blindingly cold, meaning that the crowds on the central boulevards were heavier than they’d been for a while. People were stamping up and down the rue de Rivoli, between the Hôtel de Ville and the place de la Concorde, damning Trochu and his wretched failure of an administration, waving their red flags and demanding all sorts of fine-sounding, unachievable things. The boulevards themselves were dirtier than ever, caked in mud as noxious as any found in the back alleys of Limehouse or St Giles. Pasted declarations and counter-declarations, torn and weather-bleached, hung from every available wall like beggars’ rags.