No clocks chime in the palace behind him — it is not quite the hour — but the path offers itself just as it did a year before, leads him to the arbour, the bench, the stone cupid above it. He sits. Why not? The afternoon is nearly warm and he does not expect to be a frequent visitor to the Palace of Versailles. The cupid’s shadow falls across his knees. He closes his eyes, breathes, is briefly touched by a sense — utterly convincing — of the moment’s eternity. Is he asleep? Small birds come to wake him. They gather round his feet, but he has nothing to give them. They come closer and closer, seem as if they might hop onto his hands; then, at the thud of heavy boots running on the path, they scatter into the air. A man appears, pauses by the arbour, regards Jean-Baptiste over the top of the scarf wrapped round his nose and mouth, speaks a few muffled, incomprehensible words and runs on. Some seconds later, another man is there, also masked, also running. Then a third, this one in the kind of leather hood with pointed snout house-searchers used to wear in times of plague. After a fourth has run by, Jean-Baptiste gets up to follow them. It is like following bees to their hive. Every time he comes to a fork in the path and is unsure which direction to choose, he has only to wait a moment for another man to run past him. For twenty minutes he plays this game, moves stop-start through a maze of high hedges until he comes to a gate in a brick wall and beyond it to a sanded courtyard. On the far side of the yard is a large stone shed, the sort of building one might imagine being used to house carriages of the better sort, the sort there are a great many of in Versailles.
He stands with his back to the bricks, watching. It is through the shed’s open double doors that the masked men are disappearing. Some of them reappear, run out of the doors and lean panting against a wall before trudging back inside. One, a boy in blue, staggers to a horse trough, tears down his mask and vomits.
Clearly, it is the moment to leave. Clearly too, it will be impossible to leave without knowing what is in the shed. He goes closer, makes a circling, sidling approach to the doors, then passes into the gloom beyond them. In the centre of the shed, the shadowy tumult at its centre, masked men are hauling on ropes. Four gangs of men, four thick ropes. And attached to the end of the ropes something grey and vast and lonely. Each time the men pull and the grey mass is rocked, there is a chiming like the playing of a hundred small bells. Overseeing it all, this hauling, is a man on an upturned pail. He does not notice Jean-Baptiste, not until the engineer has crept close enough to finally understand what it is the men are trying to shift, the great death-swollen bulk of it in its nest of empty wine bottles, one dull eye big as a soup plate, the delicate veined edge of an ear, a curving yellow tusk. . Then the overseer is raging at him, his breath puffing out the cloth over his mouth. He points to the dangling end of the nearest rope. He flails his arms: despair as fury. For several seconds Jean-Baptiste looks up at him, feels for him a terrible brotherly pity, a terrible brotherly disgust. Then he turns away from him, wipes the flies from his face and hurries back to that soft line at the edge of the shed where the light begins.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of the imagination, a work that combines the actual with the invented, though the church and cemetery of les Innocents certainly existed, much as they are described in the story. Today, of course, there is nothing to be seen of the cemetery except for a small square surrounded by restaurants and fast-food outlets near the underground shopping complex of les Halles. The old fountain, the Italian fountain, was moved in the nineteenth century to the middle of the square, where it serves as a meeting place, a place for weary shoppers to sit and rest. The bones from les Innocents may be viewed in the Catacombs of Paris, where later they were joined by the bones from other cemeteries: countless human remains arranged along thousands of metres of dripping walkways deep below the city traffic. Victims of the Terror that followed the destruction of les Innocents by a few years are also said to be hidden in the old workings of the quarry. Above the entrance to the catacombs, a carved inscription reads, ‘Arrête! C’est ici l’Empire de la Mort.’
The market established on the site of the cemetery, the Marché des Innocents, was closed for the last time in 1858.