‘You remember it?’ he asks. ‘Mmm? Can you not see your old self in that very armchair?’
‘I can,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He takes in the room — the chair with its blooms of human grease, the mean little fire, the silhouette portraits of mother and sister. . A constancy, a changelessness that, like that of the miners’ colony, is not of a good type.
On the table, a meal has been set out. Some slices of a soused calf’s head, potatoes undressed, bread spread thinly with a previous consignment of the high-smelling butter. At the centre of the table is a bottle containing some clear liquid that Lecoeur now pours into two glasses, draining his own immediately, then passing the other to Jean-Baptiste. They sit opposite each other. Jean-Baptiste saws at the slice of head on his plate (it tastes, poor thing, as though pickled in its own tears). He sips at the stuff from the bottle, sees black flakes of snow collide soundlessly with the window glass.
Three years since they last met — a hurried embrace in the drizzle by the coach-stop in Valenciennes. What rigours have those years imposed that this man should be so hollowed out? He is no more than thirty-five, possibly younger, yet looks fifty and ill. Most of his teeth have gone. His nose is swollen, pitted, strung with swollen vessels. He is pitifully thin and nervous. Once he has started talking, he cannot stop, and what began breezily enough becomes, by degrees, a lament, then a bitter complaint, that has at its heart the mine, that leviathan, that grinder of men’s bones.
Is this how he passes his nights? Alone with a bottle, indicting the air? He has on a waistcoat of clotted brown wool, a garment knitted perhaps by a circle of unmarried female relatives for whom the young Lecoeur, the Lecoeur with teeth, once represented the family’s last great hope. By the time he falls silent and reaches, with a lover’s sigh, for the bottle again, Jean-Baptiste has already decided he must take him to Paris if he can. Here he will not last another winter. And can he really have lost all his former ability? All that good activity of mind he once possessed? With the minister’s money, the minister’s authority, it should not be impossible to extricate him. There is a risk, of course. How far gone is he? But in good conscience, he cannot be left in Valenciennes.
He is thinking it through, trying to construct in his imagination a credible picture of the first day of excavations at les Innocents — himself on some kind of dais or scaffolding, the men below in neat rows with their tools — when Lecoeur suddenly asks, ‘Have you married?’
‘No,’ says Jean-Baptiste, into whose mind — absurdly! — comes the shadow of Héloïse, the whore Héloïse.
‘I thought not,’ says Lecoeur. ‘A married man does not wear a suit such as that.’
‘And you?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘There is some. . involvement?’
Lecoeur smiles, shakes his head, glances into the fire. ‘I have had nothing to do with women for a long time now.’
In the morning, the tocsin rings at three thirty. First shift, first descent, is at four. Jean-Baptiste wakes in the upstairs room. He is looking towards the window, but there is no hint of any light. He swings his legs from the bed. The room is laughably cold. He remembers it all, perfectly.
In the parlour, he finds Lecoeur fully dressed, his face a mask of concentration as he uses both hands to pour himself a glass from the now almost empty bottle. He sets the bottle down, then leans his mouth to the rim of the glass and sucks in the first mouthful while the glass is still on the table.
‘Shall I pour one for you?’ he asks.
‘Later, perhaps,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
They have, the previous evening, talked a little about the scheme for les Innocents, about the men who will be needed. Lecoeur was reassuringly businesslike. He had prepared a list of names and, going down the list (Everbout, Slabbart, Block, Rape, Cent, Wyntère. .), gave Jean-Baptiste a quick assessment of each of them, the approximate age, length of service, moral character so far as it was known, could be known. Nothing was said about adding his own name to the list, but now, in the snow-cold parlour, Jean-Baptiste asks if he might consider it.
‘Consider it!’
In his rush to clutch his friend’s hands, Lecoeur strikes the corner of the table with his thigh, almost upsetting the precious bottle.
‘They will name squares after us!’ he cries. ‘The men who purified Paris!’
He breaks into a jig; he cannot help himself. Jean-Baptiste laughs, claps time. He has saved a life today and has not even had his breakfast.
For almost an hour, having rediscovered their old intensity of speaking, the thrust and parry of the Valenciana days, the two of them discuss the preparations they must make. The transportation of the men, their lodging in Paris. Hygiene, discipline, pay. All imaginable difficulties, from inclement weather to a terror of ghosts.
‘And this place,’ asks Lecoeur, ‘where the remains will be taken. .?’
‘An old quarry.’
‘The arrangements are complete?’
‘They will be soon enough.’
‘And it is dry? We have been using a new pump here after the English model. Much faster than anything we have used before.’
‘My responsibility is the cemetery. Once the carts have left les Innocents. .’
‘How deep must we go?’
‘They say some of the common graves are thirty metres.’
‘So deep?’
‘Most, hopefully, are less so, but for the men, it will not be very pretty work.’
‘It cannot,’ says Lecoeur, ‘be any worse than slithering into the earth with a pick and not knowing when you might crawl into choke-damp or when the tunnel behind you will fall. We lost three this last week. Buried alive. They will not shore up the tunnels properly, for they know they will not be paid for it. Only for coal.’
Beyond the window, the day does not seem to be getting any lighter. Thin gusts of snow are striking the glass again. Jean-Baptiste bestirs himself. He does not intend to be trapped here.
‘I will leave you money. Use what you need. And you may use the minister’s name where it is necessary. But everything must be done without delay. If we drag our feet, I am assured that none of us will be needed. They have been most particular on that point.’
‘Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur,’ says Lecoeur, grinning and rubbing his palms together. ‘Now, will you take a mouthful of food? A few slices of the head perhaps?’ He reaches it down from the meat safe on the wall, holds it like a darling. The poor, hacked-about head.
13
There is snow in Paris too. Snow churned with ash, soot, mud, dung. On the better streets, outside the better houses, it has been swept into grey pyramids. Elsewhere, cartwheels, hooves, sabots have cleared their own paths. In the cemetery, the snow lies along the arms of the preaching cross, sits discreetly on the stone heads of the lanternes des morts, lines the tops of the walls, the sloping roofs of the charnels.
With a spade borrowed from the sexton’s house, Jean-Baptiste prods at the ground, feels its resistance, hears it, the dull ringing, as if he had struck iron. At least the stink of the place is much reduced. He feels no nausea. No active disgust.
Armand appears from the church, ducking under the low door, then crossing the cemetery, his hair like the one thing of vivid colour left in the world.
‘I see,’ he says, nodding to the spade, ‘you are staying true to your name, Monsieur Bêche.’
‘On ground like this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘I would do better with an axe.’
‘You know it could stay frozen for months,’ says Armand, cheerfully.