She sighs, looks back to the street, to the rue aux Fers, sees Madame Desproux, the baker’s wife, coming past the Italian fountain and pausing to talk to the widow Aries. And there, up by the market cross, is Merda the drunk. And that is Boubon the basket-maker, who lives alone behind his shop on the rue Saint-Denis. . And there, coming from the end of the rue de la Fromagerie, is that woman in her red cloak. Did Merda just call something to her? It must relieve him to insult a creature lower even than himself, but the woman does not pause or turn. She is too used to the likes of Merda. How tall she is! And how absurdly straight she holds herself! Now someone, some man, is talking to her, though he keeps himself at a distance. Who is he? Surely not Armand (or should one say, it is all too likely to be Armand)? But now they part and each is soon lost to view. When darkness falls, some among those men who, in the light, tease her or insult her, will pursue her, make an arrangement, a rendezvous in a room somewhere. Is that how it works? And once they are in the room. . Ah, she has imagined it, pictured it in great detail, has even, in the privacy and firelight of her bedroom, made herself blush furiously with such thoughts, sins of the mind she should confess to Père Poupart at Saint-Eustache, and perhaps would if Père Poupart did not look so like a scalded pig. Why are there no handsome priests in Paris? One has no inclination to confess anything to an ugly man.
‘Anyone interesting in the street, my dear?’ asks her mother, coming into the room behind her, a candle in her dimpled hand.
‘Not really.’
‘No?’
Madame Monnard stands behind her daughter, strokes the girl’s hair, absently winds a finger in its beloved thickness. On the rue aux Fers, a lamp-lighter is propping his ladder against the lamp opposite the church. In silence they watch him, his neat ascent, his reaching into the glass head with his taper, the blossoming of yellow light, his swift descent. When Madame and Monsieur Monnard first came to the house, there were no lamps at all on the rue aux Fers and hardly any on the rue Saint-Denis. Paris was darker then, though everyone was accustomed to it, inured.
‘I am afraid,’ says Madame, ‘that our new lodger has become lost. As he is from the country, I very much doubt he will be able to find his way among so many streets.’
‘He can ask people,’ says Ziguette. ‘I suppose he can speak French.’
‘Of course he can speak French,’ says Madame, uncertainly.
‘I think,’ says Ziguette, ‘he is going to be very small and very hairy.’
Her mother laughs, covers her mouth, her little brown teeth, with her hand. ‘What silly notions you have,’ she says.
‘And he eats,’ continues Ziguette, who since earliest girlhood has been given to flights of this kind, sometimes amusing, sometimes alarming, ‘only apples and pig’s feet. And he wipes his fingers on his beard. Like this.’
She is miming it, clawing her fingers through the air beneath her shapely pink chin, when, with a clatter of wooden sabots, the servant girl comes in.
‘You have not seen anyone, have you, Marie?’ asks Madame.
‘No,’ says Marie, stopping in the gloom by the door, her young and sturdy figure braced as if for some accusation.
‘Your father assured me he would be home early,’ says Madame to her daughter. ‘It would be most unfortunate if we had to receive him ourselves. Marie, Monsieur Monnard has not sent some message, has he?’
The girl shakes her head. She has been the servant there for eighteen months. Her own father was a tanner in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, dead of the typhoid when she was too young to remember him. Like everyone else in the house, she suffers from dreams.
Dusk gives way to the first of the night. Madame Monnard lights more candles. She pokes the fire, carefully. They burn wood, and wood is expensive. A little log no longer or thicker than a man’s arm costs twelve sous and one needs twenty such to keep a fire burning all day. She sits, picks up the edition of the Journal des Dames Modernes she and Ziguette were so entertained by yesterday and turns again to the illustration of the savages, noble savages — great lords in their own savage kingdoms — whose faces were fantastically printed from chin to eyes with blue tattoos, swirls and spirals like plans for formal gardens. Just imagine if their lodger should arrive with such a face! What a coup! Better even than the pianoforte (and what a triumph that had been, the instrument raised up on a pulley like a cow being rescued from a quarry, then swung through the window, half the neighbourhood looking on). A pity it cannot be kept in tune. It drove Ziguette’s poor tutor almost to tears, though it must be admitted Signor Bancolari was the sort of gentleman never far from tears.
On the floor below, the street door thuds. A draught, finding its way up the stairs, ripples the candle flames in the drawing room and a few moments later Monsieur Monnard appears. He is still wearing his leather apron from the shop, the leather dark with use, with age, though why it should be necessary for him to wear an apron at all given that he has no fewer than three perfectly competent apprentices to do all the polishing and sharpening is quite beyond Madame Monnard’s understanding, quite beyond. Her husband, however, must be master in his own house.
They greet each other. He greets his daughter, who is now at the piano stool picking out notes that may or may not be part of some melody she knows. He takes off his wig and scratches hard at his scalp.
‘Still no sign of our guest?’ he asks.
‘Ziguette,’ says Madame Monnard, ‘has been saying the most ridiculous things about him. She thinks that because he is from Normandy, he will not speak French.’
‘In Brittany,’ says Monsieur Monnard, ‘they speak something quite impenetrable. It’s thought they learnt it from the gulls.’
‘Why is he coming, anyway?’ asks Ziguette. ‘Wasn’t he content at home?’
‘I assume,’ says her father, ‘that he intends to make his fortune. Isn’t it why anyone comes to Paris?’
Marie asks if she should bring in the soup. Monsieur wishes to know what kind of soup they have today.
‘Bones,’ says Marie.
‘She means from Tuesday’s veal,’ says Madame Monnard. ‘To which we have added any number of pleasant things.’
‘Like pig’s feet,’ says Ziguette, which sends her mother into trills of delighted laughter.
5