Denise relaxed her jaw and lowered her hand, which had been pressed against her mouth. She made herself count up to two hundred. Vaguely reassured, she got up and hurriedly straightened her clothes and hair. The large purple cotton shawl that had carried her meagre belongings from Quimper three years earlier was spread out on the bed. Behind a worn curtain, two patched dresses and the velvet skirt that Madame de Valois had given her hung on a clothes rail. She placed them on the shawl with some stockings, a petticoat and two carefully folded white blouses and, before tying the four corners of the shawl together, she added a tarnished silver crucifix, a mirror and an embroidered tucker – objects that had once belonged to her mother and which constituted her entire inheritance.
On her guard, Denise listened carefully and, hearing nothing, decided to slip on her coat and put back the washstand. She was just about to leave the room when she realised she had forgotten something. She lifted the mattress and pulled out a chromolithograph fixed to a thin piece of wood, which depicted the Virgin Mary, dressed in a blue robe, standing in front of some yellow rocks. She wrapped it quickly in a pillowcase, wedged it under her arm and, picking up her bundle, opened the door.
The grey dawn hadn’t dispelled the menacing gloom of the apartment. Denise held her breath as she had before plunging into the River Odet as a child, and raced down the corridor. She had to get out of that haunted place as fast as possible. When she reached the landing she hesitated. The keys! What had she done with the keys? Had she put them above the fireplace in the sitting room before lighting the candles or mislaid them in her room? It was too late! She slammed the door impulsively, tore down a flight of stairs, then stopped dead in her tracks. Where would she go? The only money she had was the change from the grocery money. She ought to have left it on the hall table, or she might be accused of stealing. But then again Madame de Valois owed her some wages. The money could be considered an advance payment. In any case she did not have the courage to go back up there.
She carried on down the stairs. Where would she go? She didn’t know a soul in Paris. Was there a place that took in homeless young women? Then she remembered Madame’s former lover, Monsieur Victor Legris, the attractive gentleman with dark eyes who always had a kind word for her and occasionally slipped her a coin. She remembered having accompanied Madame de Valois to his bookshop on the Rive Gauche, near the Seine. What was the name of that street? It began with Saint … and there was a hospital nearby.
As she crossed the entrance hall Monsieur Hyacinthe called out to her.
‘You’re abroad early this morning, Mademoiselle Le Louarn. Is anything the matter?’
She shook her head and walked out into the deserted boulevard, unaware that the door to the building had opened behind her and a young boy wearing a gilt-buttoned tunic and a peaked cap had slipped out.
The sun’s early rays shone through a grove of plane trees on to a ruined ivy-covered baluster and lit up a copper brazier that suddenly glinted, startling a small, slender animal with a pointed nose.
‘Come back here, Madame Stone Marten, you coward. Come back, my pretty one, and I’ll give you a big chunk of this crispy pork rind! An offering from Mother Valladier, that paragon among women who still has a fine bosom despite her age … You refuse? You’re a fool. Victory is ours, boom, bang, boom!’
Père Moscou combed his fingers through his hair as he waited for his coffee to boil. He had slept soundly and was fully sober. He wished he had a drop of something with which to toast the beautiful dawn, but it was his principle never to drink anywhere but leaning against the bar of a tavern or, if pressed, at a friend’s house.
‘Being drunk on one’s own patch is unworthy of Antoine Jean Anicet Ménager, otherwise known as Moscou the Brave, grandson of the Emperor of the grognards3 and of the grognard of the Emperor. Remember, I am accountable to the nation for the lives of my men. If the enemy attacks, we’ll run him through, we’ll slit his throat!’
This speech was directed at a few pigeons and a crow attracted by the breakfast scraps. Père Moscou rubbed his neck.
‘Speaking of throats, mine’s a little rough this morning. I must have had a bit of a tipple last night. Moscou, you’re an old lush and for your trouble not a drop of plonk before midday! Come along, it’s time you got to work.’
He poured the remains of his coffee on to the brazier, which billowed with smoke, and made his way through the undergrowth and wild lilies, disturbing a flock of sparrows as he went. He tripped over a pile of plaster debris, bounced off a fig tree and landed in a tangle of clematis.
‘Prepare to die!’ he cried, rushing at the invisible enemy.
He charged across his bivouac, sabre to the fore, then stopped in his tracks and walked nonchalantly over to his cart, which was standing by the wall. He lifted the tarpaulin, and glanced at the contents for a moment.
‘What a load of old rubbish!’
Seizing the parasol, the ankle boot and the top hat, he went to deposit them in their appropriate boxes.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if people left their underwear behind in that cemetery.’
He returned to the cart.
‘Not to mention their children. First they dump the pram,’ he said, dropping the hood of the perambulator on the floor, ‘and then they toss the brat in the nettles!’
He was anxious to try on the coachman’s frock coat and grabbed it, twirling it around as he threw it over his shoulders.
‘I should dye it green or red or the second coachman will jeer at me. It’s not bad, it’ll make a nice coa—’
He stood rooted to the spot with his mouth wide open. A woman dressed in black was lying on the cart, her head resting on a piece of tombstone and a closed umbrella on her chest. Her eyes were shut and her cheeks deathly pale.
‘Well, I’ll be damned! A stowaway!’ He brushed the anonymous woman’s forehead with his hand and cried out as though he’d been stung. There was no doubt about it, she was quite dead. He noticed a brownish stain on her coat collar and pulled it back to reveal a patch of dried blood on the nape of her neck. He lifted her fur cap and pushed her head to one side. The back of her skull had been smashed in. A murder. He let go of the woman’s head in alarm.
‘That’s a serious corpse. I’ve seen enough to know and never balked at burying them. But … a murdered woman on my cart! That’s going too far! I know I didn’t do it, that’s for sure. I’ll fight anything that moves, like a lion I am when I’ve had a few and I’m fired up for battle. But never a woman. Never! Who’s trying to lay the blame for this wickedness on Père Moscou?’
With trembling hands he replaced the tarpaulin and harnessed himself to the cart, which he dragged to the far side of the courtyard and left in a tangle of elder and viburnum bushes while he ran to fetch a spade from his bivouac.
‘Lucky it rained last night so the ground’s soft …’
Removing the tarpaulin again he examined the corpse carefully. He decided he would take the hat but not the coat – too much blood. There was a chain round the woman’s neck with a silver locket on it. I’ll sell that to the jeweller on Rue de Pernelle together with this diamond ring, he thought, as he slipped it off the third finger of her left hand. The wedding ring proved more stubborn and he gave up, considering it improper to deprive a dead person of such a sacred ornament.
Having pocketed the jewellery, he spat on his hands, rubbed them together, picked up the spade and began digging, whistling a marching tune to give him courage. He tried to convince himself the dead woman was a soldier killed in battle and that he, the man’s general, was burying him on the battlefield. It took him a good hour