"No, no, of course not, I have known Bernier for years and he is a vast pig of a man, lacking completely in charm, you are much superior in every way to Bernier." The painter spoke consolingly, as if Marie-Lucien had confided a terrible dissatisfaction with himself.
They walked along the streets in silence, Rousseau's arm looped through Marie-Lucien's. He was not an old man, the painter, not even as old as Marie-Lucien who was not yet seventy, but he strolled along at an old man's pace, limping slightly and facing straight ahead when he walked, turning his entire body on the frequent occasions when he paused to peer into shop windows with a concentrated frown. Marie-Lucien waited while the painter carried out these examinations, waited without interest but also without impatience. It had been three months since he had traveled farther than the sidewalk directly in front of M. Queval's foundry; he was astonished to find himself out and about so late at night, interested to find he was not afraid of the streets largely emptied of all but the unsavory and the wretched.
At the gates of the Botanical Gardens the painter clasped the iron bars with both hands and thrust his head as far into the closed park as his shoulders would permit. "Such a strange and mysterious world," he said very quietly. Marie-Lucien, standing behind him, peered into the darkness without seeing anything he considered strange or mysterious. But he became gradually aware that, away from street lamps as they were here, the trees and bushes were wrapped in fantastic black shadows. He pushed his own head between the iron bars and leaned into the fence; and after several moments he began to make out amongst the shrubbery the vivid yellow blossoms of a rose, magnified hugely against the blackness.
In the nights that followed, Marie-Lucien and the painter, after sharing a bowl of soup at one apartment or the other, shut the aggrieved cat and dog in the upstairs apartment and strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens and Montsouris Park and leaned into the fences of various private gardens. They explored not only the parks and woodlands and brushy clearings but traversed the bridges and aqueducts and watched the late-night goings-on at the quais and along the banks of the rivers and canals. They spoke little, which suited Marie-Lucien: he found Rousseau to be a strange sort, just as people had said, possibly a confidence trickster or a candid idiot. Once, while they were studying the statue of a lion in the darkness of the Luxembourg Gardens, the painter said matter-of-factly that the "other cats" he had spoken of, the ones that occupied his apartment, were in fact lions and jaguars and tigers that wandered in from the jungles to visit him at night and sit for their portraits. It was impossible to know if he was speaking figuratively, or if he was genuinely hallucinatory, or if he merely enjoyed playing the part of an eccentric artist. But Marie-Lucien, walking with him at night, looking into the dark corners of the city-coming suddenly upon the black statue of a lion in the midst of clipped hedges and graveled paths-often felt as he had when he had first walked into the painter's apartment and gazed on his strange canvases: a vivid awareness of how beautiful and dangerous the world was, both tender and cruel. And this was the closest he had come, since the deaths of his wife and his son, to discovering any sort of meaning in the world.
One night while they were standing on a viaduct watching the body of some sad unfortunate being fished out of the water, the painter said thoughtfully, "I have run into ghosts everywhere. One of them tormented me for more than a year when I was a customs inspector."
Marie-Lucien did not believe in ghosts. Belief in ghosts would have required him to believe in something beyond death, a world of the spirit. He had been, as a young man, at the battle of Sedan where thousands had died; and he had watched his wife and his son on their death beds; and he had never had the least inkling that any scrap or glimpse of the people he loved remained anywhere in the universe. He had come to the unshakable conclusion that death was unremitting and permanent; death, he believed, was death. He said to the painter, to turn him aside from his ghosts, "You were a douanier?"
Rousseau smiled modestly. "Nothing so grand. A mere inspector." But he was not put off the track. He said, "Whenever I was on duty this ghost would stand ten paces away, annoying me, poking fun." He turned to Marie-Lucien with a somewhat amused grimace. "Letting out smelly farts just to nauseate me."
Marie-Lucien smiled slightly.
"I shot at him, but a phantom apparently cannot die again. Whenever I tried to grab him, he vanished into the ground and reappeared somewhere else."
Marie-Lucien asked him uninterestedly-mere politeness-"Was he someone you knew? An old acquaintance?"
"Not at all. He was not haunting me, but the post, which was at the Gate of Arcueil. When I left that post, I never saw him again. I suppose something must have happened there, perhaps something in the way he was killed, that caused his soul to attach itself to the gate, or to the person guarding the gate."
At the muddy edge of the canal several men were now standing in the glare of gas lamps, surrounding the naked body of a young woman, a woman only recently dead, her body still lovely, unblemished, not sufflated, her long brown hair from this distance seeming to hang in a neat braid across one shoulder and breast. The painter's expression, looking down at the scene, slowly softened into satisfaction. "I don't like to read the big tabloids that talk a lot of politics, what I read is the Magasin Pittoresque." He laughed. "The more drowned bodies in the river the greater my reading pleasure."
Marie-Lucien was taken aback. "That's a terrible thing to say."
"Is it?" Rousseau said, in a tone of complete sincerity, and might have been about to turn to Marie-Lucien to collect his answer, but suddenly swept his hand and his glance skyward. "There goes that poor woman's soul," he said, with surprised delight.
Marie-Lucien looked quickly where Rousseau had pointed but saw only the full moon hanging low and white on the night sky, as perfectly round as if it had been drawn with a compass. "What?" he said in frustration. He did not at all believe the painter had seen a drowned soul flying up to heaven but couldn't help his question, or its meaning: Not, What did you say? but What did you see?
"Ah, such peace!" the painter said quietly, which he may have meant as an answer.
In the early part of August, Rousseau came to Marie-Lucien's door unexpectedly-it was morning, and Marie-Lucien was still drinking his terrible coffee, still wearing the rumpled clothes he had slept in. The painter took hold of his arm and said, "Le Ménagerie! Best seen at night when the animals are at their most alert, but unfortunately open only in the daylight. Ten centimes and you're in." Marie-Lucien attempted to refuse. It was one thing, their nightly strolls, the two not-quite-old men leaning into fences, peering at trees and flowering shrubs in dark public parks and private gardens; but the daylight hours he intended still to keep for his own use, which was not grieving, as his friends had supposed, but a prolonged, expectant waiting for his own death.
Rousseau, of course, would not be put off. He had a long-established morning practice of strolling through one or another of his favorite amusement parks, and he had made up his mind to share that pleasure with Marie-Lucien. Shortly, they were out on the lively daytime streets, and Rousseau, brisk with morning energy, led the way to the Zoological Gardens, where he spent a good long while studying a mangy lion rocking restlessly in a space too small to accommodate pacing; and kinkajou monkeys and gibbon apes quietly pining in their cages. None of this was of much interest to Marie-Lucien, or only insofar as to strengthen his old opinion that he lived in a brutal, godless universe. He stood back from the animal pens, shifting his weight lionlike in anxious boredom.