‘The women here,’ says Armand, ‘despise her, in part because their husbands can buy her for an hour, but mostly because she doesn’t fit, doesn’t belong. If she was over in the Palais Royal, no one would blink an eye. You’ve seen the Palais, I suppose?’
‘I have heard of it. I have never—’
‘What a study you are, man! You are like one of Montesquieu’s Persians. I shall write about you in the newspaper. A weekly column.’ He strides ahead and, as they pass below the buttresses of Saint-Eustache, he launches into a loud, airy, impromptu lecture on the history of the Palais, how it was once the garden of Cardinal Richelieu and how the Duc d’Orléans had given it to his son, who filled it with cafés and theatres and shops, and how it was always crowded and unspeakably elegant and the biggest bordello in Europe. .
He is still describing it when they come to the thing itself, one of its several entrances, a passage no wider than the rue de la Fromagerie, and through this they are jostled into an arcaded courtyard, in the middle of which a marionette show is coming to an end amid hoots of laughter. To Jean-Baptiste, it appears that the puppets are being made to fornicate. When he looks more closely, he sees that they are.
‘The police patrols never come here,’ says the organist. ‘The duke makes them little presents and they find something else to do. Lewd puppetry is the least of it.’
Who are these people? Do none of them have trades, occupations? Their movement, their costumes, the sheer noise of it, suggests carnival, and yet there is no obvious centre to any of it, no sense of structure. It is, seemingly, all spontaneous, the moment’s continual self-invention.
‘Come,’ says the organist, tugging at the elbow of Jean-Baptiste’s coat, urging him towards the door of a café halfway down one of the galleries. ‘We’ll try our luck in here.’
Inside is as crowded as outside, but the organist, with a well-aimed greeting to one of the waiters, is soon provided with a little table, a pair of battered cane chairs. He orders coffee, a bowl of sweet cream, two glasses of brandy. The clientele is exclusively male, mostly young. Everyone speaks at the top of his voice. Now and then someone reads aloud from a newspaper or raps on the window to draw the attention of a passing acquaintance, perhaps some woman he wishes to grin at. The waiters — small, concentrated men — navigate tightly winding paths between the backs of the chairs. An order is shouted, acknowledged with the barest nod. Two dogs leap at each other’s throats, are thrashed by their owners, caged under the tables again. Jean-Baptiste pulls off his coat (hard enough to do in such a space). The café is the warmest place he has been in for weeks. Hot, smoky, slightly damp. When his brandy arrives, he drinks it out of pure thirst.
‘Better?’ asks the organist. His glass is also empty. He orders two more. ‘You may call me Armand,’ he says. ‘Though I’ll leave it up to you.’
Now that they are sitting opposite each other, and now that he does indeed feel better, Jean-Baptiste can start to take him in, this Armand, especially as the organist has the restless habit of looking past him at all the other faces in the café. He wears no wig, nor is his hair powdered: powder in such hair would serve little purpose. His clothes — expensive-looking, though more so from a distance than close to — belong to no fashion Jean-Baptiste can recognise. Trousers, striped and worn tight as a second skin. A waistcoat half the length of his own, a coat with lapels so large the points extend almost past his shoulders. A cravat of green muslin, metres of it. When he drinks, he has to hold it clear of his mouth, his big, purplish lips.
‘You did not expect to find an organist at the church,’ says Armand, returning his gaze to Jean-Baptiste. ‘In fact I am the director of music.’
‘You have been there long?’
‘Eighteen months.’
‘Then you were appointed when the church was already closed.’
‘Can a church be closed like a baker’s shop?’
‘If the order is given, I suppose.’
‘You suppose, eh? Well, no doubt you are right. My predecessor drank himself to death. I dare say he found the situation. . unsettling.’
‘And you do not?’
‘Positions, as perhaps you know yourself, are never easy to come by.’
‘But there is no one to play for.’
Armand shrugs, picks up his second brandy. ‘There’s myself, Père Colbert, God. Now you. Quite a good audience really.’
Jean-Baptiste grins. Though it troubles him that he is sitting in a café drinking brandy rather than making a survey of the cemetery, troubles him that he could barely breathe inside the church, he is not sorry to have discovered this flame-haired musician. And after all, he may learn something to the purpose. The work that has been entrusted to him will not be a simple matter of digging up bones and carting them away. He has understood that much. It will be the living as much as the dead he will have to contend with.
‘If I can stay in with the bishop,’ says Armand, ‘then one day I’ll get something better. Saint-Eustache, perhaps.’
‘Even there,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘you will be able to smell it.’
‘The cemetery? It is as I said. You get used to it. Which is to say you never really get used to it, but it becomes bearable. One adjusts. Tell me, what did you notice about the Monnards?’
‘That they are. . respectable people?’
‘Oh, yes. Very respectable. And what else?’
‘That they like to talk?’
‘The only way to silence them would be to put a tax on words. Something our masters may be considering. But come now. Be open. What else?’
‘Their breath?’
‘Exactly. And you have probably noticed that mine is not much sweeter. No, there’s no need for politeness. Anyone who spends time at les Innocents gets to be the same way.’
‘Is that what I have to look forward to?’
‘You are thinking of staying so long?’
‘I do not know how long I shall stay.’
‘You do not care to speak of your work.’
‘I am sure it would not interest you.’
‘No? I suspect it would interest me greatly, though I shall not press you on it now. We will speak of something else. Ziguette Monnard, for example. You had a good look at her?’
‘I sat across from her when we ate.’
‘You were not impressed? She’s one of the prettiest girls in the quarter.’
‘I’ll admit she’s pretty.’
‘Oh, you’ll admit it? How grand! You have someone at home, perhaps? Wherever home is.’
‘Bellême. Normandy.’
‘In Bellême, then. No, I can see you do not. Well, watch out, my friend. If you stay, they will certainly try to marry you to her.’
‘To Ziguette?’
‘Why not? A young engineer. A confidant of the minister.’
‘I have never claimed to be his confidant.’
At the next table, a man with a network of silvery scars about his throat glances up from the backgammon board, looks at the young men, looks slowly back to his game.
‘And what of you?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘They tried with you?’
‘Musicians are less eligible. People like the Monnards consider a musician little better than an actor.’
‘Her father runs a cutler’s shop. Can they afford to look down at musicians?’
‘It costs very little to look down on people. And yes, they considered me.’
‘You liked her?’
‘As one likes the company of any attractive woman. But with Ziguette, one must be careful.’
‘How so?’
Armand scoops a gob of sweet cream from the bowl, sucks his finger, wipes his lips. ‘Ziguette grew up in that house. She has lived there all her life. In that air.’