The Emperor of Paris (3 page)

To waft around the fat thighs of Pascal Normande, kneeling behind the door and encased like so much
mince in a waistcoat embroidered with peacocks, an immaculate suit, high collar, silk tie and pearl stick pin. He ran his fingers around the frame, measuring the drafts. In such a position, his face would glow an alarming shade of pink. His plump lips tightened to a sneer.

Screw these goddamn farmers, he said.

He grunted as he got to his feet, brushed the knees of his trousers, tugged at his waistcoat, fingered his collar and peered through a frost-skimmed window to the empty square beyond.

Screw them all to hell and back.

Pascal had seen no more business this day than yesterday, or the day before, or the month past, or in the year since opening Atelier Normande. Yet in a glance he surveyed the shop, reassuring himself that all was ready. Poised, he might have said were the weather not so frigid.

Dismembered mannequins leaned against the icy walls. Shelves sagged under the weight of fabrics: bolts of browns and greens, a selection of Irish wools, rare satins, saffron cottons from the dye pots of Morocco. In the window a chorus of heads wore a collection of
CHAPEAUX MERVEILLEUX
!, so proclaimed the advertising card, each aeronautic brim layered in country dust. A row of ladies’ footwear, their toes placed neatly in line, stood along the counter.

Behind which: Madame Céleste Normande. Forced by the temperature in the shop to abandon her code of daywear, she was wrapped in a rough blanket that would eventually produce a rash. She looked to her husband, a wisp of vapour escaping her clenched teeth.

Paris, she said.

Pascal Normande had been born in the city’s twentieth district, the bastard son of a piecework dressmaker. She had doted on her boy, only to stitch herself to death in the backroom of a musty ladies’ shop. The first suit he owned was the one he had worn to grieve her. He had made it himself, those dark days and nights at her elbow leaving their impression; his buttonhole work as fine a tribute as any eulogy. He promised her grave that he would be the Normande to improve the family’s lot.

Céleste Renault was the daughter of a porter who had made the rounds working the finer hotels of the boulevards. As a girl she would put on her cleanest smock, tug the hem down to cover a hole in the knee of her stockings, and meet her father after his shift. She sat in his lobbies, practising grown-up postures under the potted palms, admiring the guests as they came and went. The heaps of travelling cases would bring on a fit of giggles whenever they jammed the
revolving doors. On their way home, she would ask her father where the luggage had come from. The brass-riveted trunks, the leather wardrobes as tall as she was, the hatboxes decorated as though they were birthday cakes.

How much could all that hold, Papa?

A world entire, her father would say. The likes of which you and I will never see.

They grew up in the twentieth, Céleste at the top of the Belleville hill, Pascal at the bottom. Yet their paths never crossed until the World’s Fair of 1900.

Tracing through the exhibit halls and pavilions, the fair’s great attraction was the Moving Promenade: the guidebooks described it as
A MARVEL OF AN AGE TILL NOW UNFULFILLED
! The contraption consisted of wooden platforms sliding along at different speeds. At a slow and easy pace, the inner course was advertised as being for those of weak or infirm constitutions, women, young children and the clergy. The outer course moved twice as fast.

Pascal, grown into a young gentleman, stood on the outside gripping the handrail and trying to look relaxed as he moved along. Near the Russian Pavilion he passed an enormous black hat on the slower course, its brim shading the face of Céleste. Though
the hat was from one or two seasons past, it was the burst of orange pheasant feathers across the crown that caught Pascal’s practised eye. He knew them instantly as a bit of magic, an inexpensive trick that on the right head could distract the viewer from noticing less fashionable details of an ensemble. And he knew they had worked on him: he began shuffling backwards to stay alongside this vision. He lifted his bowler and complimented her on her dress. Céleste scanned the neatly parted hair, the athletic shoulders, the slim hips, the gleaming shoes. She offered her hand. Pascal took it and, without a moment’s hesitation, Céleste stepped from the slower platform to his. Together they moved off toward the Palace of Electricity, the feathers’ long tapered ends swaying with the speed.

Céleste believed, once, that her husband would do as he vowed on the day the smallest of emerald rings had finally emerged from his pocket: he, the enthusiastic Pascal, would build for her a life that would see a jewel on every finger. She, his dearest, dearest heart, would live under cloudless skies. They, the newly engaged Normandes, would stride into the twentieth century with elegance and style. They may be obliged to begin that journey outside Paris, with rents being
what they were, but sooner or later the city would beg them to return.

By the evening of her first day in Beauvais,
once
had become a word for fables.

Madame Céleste tightened the blanket around her shoulders and threw Pascal his scarf and gloves. A smile as cold as her fingers creased her face.

Paris, was all she said.

Within the week the Normandes were gone, the shop’s shutters left banging in the winter wind. The loss of a good tailor, like the arrival of the medieval armies that had once trod their fields to muck, the citizens of Beauvais shouldered with characteristic stoicism and dry humour. They would recall the December of 1907 as having the strangest sort of weather.

Atelier Normande reopened on the first day of the new year, unveiling its windows in a Paris back street near, though not quite near enough, the prominent fashion houses. A summer collection was presented—most notices called it quaint—petits fours were served, Pascal scurried about.

One newspaper did remark on Madame Céleste’s dress. She skimmed the article, her eyes pouncing again and again:

She turned to her husband. As well they should, she said.

The August skies had cleared. Pascal Normande slid a key from his vest and locked the shop, leaving the cutters, seamstresses and pressers to work through the night. A new season approached and preparation was all.

Pascal believed a client of Atelier Normande expected timeliness or they just as promptly took their business elsewhere. He conveniently forgot that his clients were not those of the great houses. They were a more practical sort, interested as much in the thickness of their billfolds as in the newness of their wardrobes. Just as conveniently he forgot how his mother had spent her nights.

He pulled his handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his face. He cursed the wet heat sliding up from the
river, along the boulevard, around the corner and through his front door. Convinced the day had been the hottest of the summer, he set off for home.

One might have missed the soggy handkerchief, the stained hatband, the flushed cheeks; such was the rehearsed swing of Pascal’s walking stick. Here was a gentleman, one could assume, overdressed for the weather but still at ease with himself and his world, wanting for nothing. For Pascal Normande was in the business of illusion.

It was an expensive business. The last francs in his Beauvais pockets had been spent moving back to the city. Every franc since went to outrageous taxes and mysterious fees. Every franc that did not pay his workers, or barely covered the rent on his apartments, or dripped from his wife’s earlobes, every centime leveraged or mortgaged or begged, threatened his end.

And yet. Word had it a shipment of Chinese silks sat idle and cheap on a wharf in Le Havre. Simply wire the money and an autumn line, the talk of the boulevards, would appear as though from thin air. There were rumours of a baroness planning a series of fancy dress parties for the following spring. Fold a franc into the aprons of the kitchen staff and a winter’s worth of orders would materialize like aces from one’s sleeve.

Pascal stepped off the pavement to allow a governess and her young charges to pass. He touched the brim of his hat. A few paces on, he stopped and looked back, his pink face brightening.

A children’s collection, he thought.

With a few mothers in the client book, no shop on earth would be more magical than Atelier Normande.

At that moment Madame Céleste was at home selecting a hat for the evening’s opera.
Carmen
, box eleven. Adjusting the angle of the brim and running a hand through a nest of ribbons, she rehearsed her exit from the taxi, the discreet hoist of her hems to avoid the puddles left by the afternoon’s rain, her walk up the grand staircase, the curve of her necklace, her pause, her pose, her wave to an acquaintance, the turn of her feet as she stood waiting for the chair to be slid under her charmeuse bottom, the glare in her eye and the arch of her brow at the usher’s flustered request: would madame be so kind as to remove her hat?

As she passed each mirror in the Normande apartments, she paused and considered her reflection. The tickets would have cost Pascal a fortune.

Her smile, she concluded, was perfection.

A one-room apartment hides in the shadows of a small courtyard. Inside a young woman paces the uneven floorboards, dressed only in her underwear: a cotton chemise, dull and shapeless with overwashing. She circles the room, stumbling over books, sidestepping memorized knotholes. She fusses over the time, rechecks the address she had written on a strip of paper. Her stomach in knots, she worries the weather will be as oppressive as yesterday’s. She fills a cup from the kitchen tap. The gulped water makes her belly complain all the louder. She frets over what to wear, frets
then over her fretting. From a rope strung above her bed she takes down a hanger. Her only proper dress: summer cotton, a ghost of its former rose-petal pink, the waistline long out of fashion. The sleeves, she thinks, heaven help me what if I sweat. For a cooler fit she considers shortening them or removing them altogether. She knows she could do the alterations blindfolded, the number of times she has watched others manage it.

She slips on a pair of canvas shoes. Flat-soled, broken in, comfortable for the walk. She adds her best scarf, the one with the suggestion of peacock feathers. Once a vivid swath of violets and greens, its colours faded now with time and wear. She checks in the mirror by the door, smoothing the scarf to each side of her face and throwing the ends over a shoulder. One motion, as mindless as breathing: the look, the adjustment, the toss.

The young woman picks up the parcel she will deliver, running her fingertips over the careful re-wrapping, smoothing lingering wrinkles in the paper. Satisfied no one could suspect it had been opened she takes a breath and settles her stomach. Then a flash of memory: the man in the Tuileries.

She had recognized him from the museum. He was carrying a bundle of books, which had explained the stories he told about the paintings. Her story man, she had named him.

Had she seen one of his books work its way loose from the bundle as he passed? Would he have forgotten such a beautiful thing? Impossible, she thinks. The books he was carrying that day were frayed and worn, at best second- or third-hand editions. Nothing so cared for as this one, certainly none so carefully wrapped. And if it had fallen, how would it have found its way to her chair by the pond? No, she decides. This one belongs to someone else. A child to be sure, judging by the scrawled and misspelled handwriting at the back. For a moment she imagines how anxious the young owner might be, how he might be missing his favourite stories, how upset she would be if she had misplaced one of her own books. She decides to hurry to make her delivery. It is the least I can do, she thinks, for a fellow reader. With luck I can finish the errand and return to the boat pond in time for lunch.

The young woman locks the door to her apartment. A voice calls from the darkness of the courtyard, as though her mother has waited for this moment to rise from her grave.

Are you the daughter of gypsies, child? If you insist on walking out so plainly, then remember to cover yourself. Tighten your scarf, my dear; we do not want someone staring for the wrong reason, do we?

O
n a crowded Geneva tram, the evening commuters looked up in annoyance, their elbows bumped, their newspapers jostled, to see someone rushing for the rear doors. They returned to their reading without a second thought. The young man stumbled into the street.

He gathered himself, slapped at the satchel slung across his chest and dug his hands into his coat pockets. Relieved he hadn’t left anything behind, he turned his shoulder to a gust of wind as the tram moved off into the dusk.

He found a bench in a nearby park. A woman with a small child hurried past, both bundled against the cold. He watched them as he lowered his head into his upturned collar. The pair rounded a corner and disappeared.

He pulled off his gloves and blew on his fingers. He removed a sketching book from his satchel and laid it across his lap, gently, as though the air itself might dissolve the paper. He rummaged through his pockets for his penknife, pulled a pencil from his jacket, made one more survey of the park. He began whittling at the pencil.

Testing the point with his thumb, the young man closed his eyes and pictured his left hand hovering over a fresh page.

A hesitant line, the beginning curve of a reclining form.

Two more strokes, echoing arcs: one for the shoulders, one for the pelvic joint, drawn at opposing angles to the bodyline.

The legs. One line turning out from the hip, the other raised and bent to form a peak. Arms: the right cocked to bear the weight of the upper body, the left outstretched, resting on the knee to come. Then quick strokes, suggestions of slender fingers extending from relaxed hands.