The Emperor of Paris (4 page)

And now the head. A simple oval: relaxed, leaning easily to one side. As though absorbed in conversation.

The young man buried his drawing hand in his armpit. He squinted at the oval, tilted his head in unison, felt the stiffness in his own neck.

He ached for anatomy. For an easel and a place amid a circle of fellow students. For a master to stand at his shoulder as he painted: offering encouragement, a gentle suggestion regarding technique, or perhaps even telling his classmates to gather round and watch a future member of the Academy at work.

The young man thought of his mother, her face pinched and worried, were she to learn of his ambitions. And his father, entering someone else’s balances in a ledger, dreaming a noble life for his son.

The face. A midline vertically through the oval, for the eyes a horizontal. Two more: the line of the mouth; the tip of a nose eventually to be straight and handsome. Swipes of eraser to sharpen the jawline and hollow the cheeks. And the eyes. Deep-set, shadowed under the brow. Heavy strokes marked the crease of eyelids; fine lines became lashes. Each pupil darkened with layer on layer of lead, a tiny spot left to reflect the light.

He ached for creation. For life to somehow rise from the drawings in his sketching book. For his own energy, his own impressions to swirl and spin on a canvas. For a dream city he had tacked above his bed: postcard parks warmed with a painter’s light.

The young man signed the corner of the page.

Jacob Kalb, December 1907
.

A Saturday, the following August. The Paris Direct from Geneva pulled into the station twenty minutes behind schedule. The sky could hold no more: a summer rain broke in waves across the station’s glass roof. The third-class carriages remained out in the weather.

Jacob Kalb, a stuffed carpetbag under his feet and his knees under his chin, hurried a last sketch of the old woman across the aisle. Since crossing into France he had managed a passable likeness of the woman’s pocked cheeks, the creases around her puffy mouth. In small vignettes he had made studies of her hands and their bouquets of arthritic fingers. On the page her hair looked like lengths of wire exploding from under her hat.

The conductor assured everyone that the rain would stop at any moment; it was only a short walk into the station. Jacob checked his pockets. The money pulled from a tin under his bed, together with the address of a traveller’s hotel found in an old guidebook, was still
where he had put it that morning. He tucked the sketching book under his coat. The conductor touched the brim of his cap.

Welcome to Paris, monsieur. Mind the step.

Horse-drawn buses loitered outside the station; one or two automobiles chugged past. Jacob looked in the direction of what he sensed might be west, searching for a landmark, something recognizable from his bedroom wall. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun; already the cobblestones steamed. He pulled the guide from his pocket, tried to untangle the maze of streets.

The quintessential Parisien
, the guide advised,
is known to favour walking as a mode of transport
. Jacob tightened his bootlaces, shouldered his carpetbag and stepped over a recent deposit of manure.

His mother would have found the envelope by now, propped against her most cherished possession, a photograph of a stiff and uncomfortable toddler. Jacob remembered her telling and retelling the neighbours how much the photograph had cost.

She would be reading the letter, with her usual stoic frown, stifling tears with a quiet cough, rummaging for a handkerchief. Jacob could hear her voice as though she had followed him out of the station. But why here,
Jacob? Of all the insanity. This city is no place for a boy. And who will feed you? Where will you sleep? Could you not draw your pictures back home? Your father and I could send you to Paris when you are a year or two older, if that is what you truly want.

Jacob adjusted the load across his shoulder and wished he could rewrite the letter, add something about already being older, that he would write once he was settled, that he already missed her spice cookies, that he was a man now, that she and Papa had taught him well.

He knew his father, having returned from the bank, would be for the moment silent; sitting in his dim corner, deaf to his wife’s worry, wondering how to explain to his best customer that the letter drafted for his signature—You’ll remember my son, sir. His apprenticeship with your firm—would no longer be needed.

The boy will be fine, my dear.

Jacob wished his father were tugging at his mother’s arm as they followed him, gently pulling her back toward the station, leaving him to make his own way through the crowds along the boulevard.

He resisted the temptation to retrieve the guidebook.
And not a plodding vagrant is our native of the City of Light, but one that takes the greatest pleasure in wandering for the sake of it, with neither the assistance of map nor compass nor indeed destination of any kind
.

——

After handing the manager’s wife a month’s advance for an attic room and relieving himself into a trough that was the toilet two floors below, Jacob stepped over the bed and draped his damp clothes from a beam. Falling against the thin mattress, he opened his sketching book to a blank page.

8.8.08. Arrived. The Academy on Monday
.

He sketched the remains of the room’s wallpaper, the flaking relics of what had once been a pleasant floral pattern. Someone’s notion of a touch of home for the footsore.

Through the park now, the baker waits at the curb for a lull in the traffic.

Across the roundabout a mother and her son unfold a small table. The woman carefully positions an orchid planted in an old teapot. She turns it this way and that, searching for its best aspect, facing its one bloom toward the customer. The boy leans a small sign against the pot. The baker can see the writing on the card:
5
something. He steps from the curb and crosses the roundabout.

The July sun beats against the steps of a nearby church where a man sits in a crumpled heap, his tears
dripping on a bible spread open on his knees. The baker knows it would be right to stop and offer assistance. He continues on though, trusting that a priest will be along shortly to help the man.

At the entrance to the Métro a young man in an ill-fitting suit and flopping pocket square bounds up the stairwell, knocking the baker against a light post. The man carries an armful of flowers. He mumbles a hasty apology, checks his watch and ponders the street signs pointing in every direction. Finally he makes a decision, shoots his cuffs and sets off, his strides nervous, his trouser legs revealing knobby ankles with every stride.

A
fter departing Beauvais, a December wind gathered itself and twisted into the fourth district of Paris. A boy stood shivering in a narrow passageway, his grandfather hunched beside him.

Concentrate, the old man said.

Henri Fournier was a month from his tenth birthday. His spectacles kept sliding down his nose as he stood on the open pages of a book.

Spread your arms, Henri.

The book had been bound in an animal skin dyed the colour of blood oranges, its edges long since darkened by
the sweat of many hands. The case was embossed: a diamond shape, the four corners punched with pinholes. In the centre of the diamond, a pair of exotic slippers, toes curling upward, had been tooled into the leather. The design was faded, worn shallow with age, but could still be seen if one turned it at an angle to the light. Opened flat, the book was wide enough to carry Henri’s feet, each to a page.

His grandfather believed the book magical, set in a font the old man had not seen in seventy years along the quays. Henri’s father, proprietor of the family bookstall, wished the thing would be eaten by worms; for too long it had taken up space without returning a centime. Monsieur Fournier was quick to remind his son that no one trusted the invisible these days, and the less magic the better. Upon which Henri trusted his grandfather all the more.

Wider, Henri, palms up. Open your fingers.

The Fournier bookstall held too much poetry, mixed its philosophies with its mechanics and its travelogues among its fictions. It offered a selection of tattered orchestral scores, back issues of illustrated newspapers and postcards intended for the tourists: ten mademoiselles to a set. The stall was painted a peculiar shade of green, known to every bookseller on both banks of the
river. They claimed the paint was a mysterious Fournier concoction, no doubt flammable, and depending on the season and time of day, it would glow. As though the stall were capable of producing its own light: lime green in the early morning, emerald at midday, mossy grey as the day faded.

If one stood on one’s toes, one might snatch a glimpse over the stall and a view of the Pont des Arts.

Perfectly still now, my boy. Close your eyes.

Henri’s face puckered; spots of light swam behind his eyelids. The old man whispered in his ear.

Do you feel anything?

I don’t think so, Grandfather.

Your feet, Henri. Are they precise?

The boy squeezed his eyes behind his glasses. I can’t see them.

Be certain, Henri. Without precision we are—?

Vague and lost, Grandfather.

Precisely. Quiet now. No scrunched faces.

The grandfather bent double, examining the position of Henri’s feet. Left on the verso right on the recto, he muttered, and tapped at the toe of the boy’s right boot. Henri crept his foot so as to not leave a scuff on the thick pages.

Careful, boy. And now?

Henri opened one eye. Nothing, Grandfather.

The old man moaned as he straightened up. Henri lowered his arms and released a cloud of breath. His mother, watching from the family apartment three floors up, called down to Henri.

Enough, young man. There are plenty of Fourniers in that godforsaken book trade already. No more games, the pair of you. Come in for supper before you freeze to death.

Off you go, the grandfather said. We will try again next summer.

The August downpour had settled to a fine drizzle. The Fournier men went off to scour the used bookshops near the university. Henri, halfway to his eleventh birthday and still in need of better spectacles, was left to mind the stall. Lingering puddles trickled off the lid.

Henri slapped at a drip on the back of his head, then moved his stool away from the stall. He worried about the heat, the sky beginning to cloud again, the books warping behind him, the postcards moulding, the itch in his bottom. He stood, sat again, squirmed, scratched, shook out his legs. He adjusted his spectacles, looked along the quay, upstream, downstream. There was no sign of his father and grandfather, nor the sound of their cart creaking under the weight of more volumes
no one would buy. Henri began pacing from one end of the stall to the other, running a hand over the books, his fingers bouncing across the spines.

It was a game his grandfather had taught him, much to the dismay of his father, when Henri was hardly tall enough to reach the books. No peeking, the old man had said. Feel the books. When you think you are ready, make a selection.

Henri did as he was told, eventually pulling a slim volume from the rows in the stall, holding it against his forehead. The object of the game was to describe the case without seeing it.

The material, Henri. What do you feel? Fine linen or rough leather? Or both? And the stamping? The foil? You could try smelling it if you think it would help.

Can anyone actually smell a good book, Grandfather?

Of course not, the old man would bluster. All the buyer need do is hold it. As you are now. Let it rest in their hands. Curl fingers around the spine as if it were stitched for only them. Run a thumb along the soft edges of its pages. When they hold it, Henri, is when you have them. After that they can smell it all they like.

Henri chose a book and put it to his nose. A whiff of lavender. Henri pictured himself standing in a field of
purple flowers. He turned at the sound of pounding hooves. A huge black horse sped past him at full gallop, the rider hunched in close to the mane, one arm brandishing a heavy sword. Henri saw the cruciform of a crusader sewn across the back of the rider’s tunic. In the distance a castle smouldered with the fires of a siege.

Henri thought of purple.

He opened his eyes. The case was calfskin, as black as tar. The stamped design on the boards was ornate: tiny flowers in bloom, a twist of stems and leaves flowing across the case, over the spine and onto the back. The title had been foiled in copper, mottled now with the damp. Henri took another sniff. There was a faint odour of smoke.

His grandfather would have shaken his head. Purple, Henri? Wherever would you get such a notion?

Henri moved the stool closer to the stall and stretched his legs. He leaned against the green wood, pressed his spectacles against his nose, and opened the book.

Chapter One
.

Henri’s eyes kept snagging as the first paragraphs lazed their way to a beginning. A couple was strolling
gay and carefree
along a country riverbank. They approached from a distance, she in a
charmingly lovely
dress, the colour
of
spring’s own buttercups
; her hair
as rich and luminous as glittering chestnuts
. A wide-brimmed straw hat,
as graceful as the heavens
, shielded her
youthful and sun-kissed
face from the heat. Her companion was
crisply turned out
in morning suit, gloves, cravat, a pair of
immaculate spats
. His hand searched
romantically, longingly
to hold hers. And yet there were
morose and hateful
clouds in the sky, threatening
the freshest bloom of love
.

As he read
spring’s own buttercups
, Henri cringed.

By page 20 the writer had finally gotten things moving. Henri could feel trouble rising from the typescript, the snags turning to jolts.

The lovers drew near, their voices grew louder. The woman
refused
her companion’s gift.
You will forgive
me, the man
demanded in a blind rage
. The woman was
fearless
. She would not accept a book of poems from a
deceitful scoundrel
who kept her waiting. He protested,
fuming and lashing out, cursing her foolish schoolgirl pride
. No monsieur, she said in a
sharp and biting
voice,
you are the fool
. A thousand stanzas will
never pardon
a man who
betrays
. The
threatening
clouds turned
deadly black
, the woman in the yellow dress
pulled
her hand from his.