An old drunk slumped on a stool in the Au Petit Jour bar on Rue d’Allemagne2 let out a loud hiccup, like a bottle being uncorked.
‘They serve short measures here … it’s a well-known fact!’
Martin Lorson fixed his gaze on the Views of Paris calendar that was pinned to the peeling wall, picked at a stringy ragout and did his best to block out his surroundings. But it was to no avail: to his right, an ex-clergyman with a beard sprinkled with lumps of fried egg declaimed a line from Ecclesiastes, ‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be’, and to his right, a scrawny girl, a mother at just sixteen, was prattling to her baby: ‘Whose are these little hands then?’
A man with a wooden leg leered toothlessly at the ruddy baby and hailed his fellow drinkers. ‘The Middle Ages, now that was a good time to be alive! On Friday, I was sitting right up against the big heater in Église Saint-Eustache, and the sexton shows up. “What’s going on here?” he says. “I’m just getting warm,” I say. “This isn’t a warming house, you know, this is God’s house, and you’d better leave.”’
‘The Middle Ages? You must be joking!’ mumbled the ex-clergyman.
‘Churches were places of sanctuary, Mr Preacher! You think you’re so clever. I might be on my uppers now, but I’m an educated man!’
In desperation, Martin Lorson craned his neck to look at a niche in the wall where, with one hand on her hip and a suggestive look on her face, an Egyptian dancing girl made of wax, rotated slowly to the strains of ‘Plaisir d’amour’. For a moment he dreamt of putting his arms round the dancer and escaping with her from all the ugliness around him. The hoarse voice of the ex-clergyman interrupted his reverie.
‘“There is nothing new under the sun!” I don’t hold it against society, but really, for someone of my background to be reduced to a career on the stage, playing bit parts at the Châtelet. Five changes of costume every performance, and I only get forty sous for it! Ecclesiastes was right, “What profit hath a man of all his labour?”’
The landlord, bilious and sharp-tongued, with a dirty cap askew above his hatchet face, a menacing mouth and hard eyes, gathered up a stack of plates. On his way past, he flicked Martin Lorson with his dishcloth and addressed the listening audience.
‘Now, take this bloke, he’s fallen off a pedestal too. Haven’t you, Swot? That’s what they used to call him when he was still a penpusher at the Ministry of Finance. Look where it got him!’
Everybody turned to stare at the object of his disdain, a bloated, balding man in his forties, whose fraying suit was shiny with grease and dirt.
‘And d’you know why?’ continued the landlord. ‘Debts! Oh, the little Swot wasn’t lazy, and if he’d hung on for another eighteen years he could have worked his way up to being the office boss, which is more or less a rest cure! Oh yes, only going to work three days a week, to read the paper and stamp a few documents. But he hadn’t counted on his dear lady wife!’
A crumpled-up dishcloth landed on the bar. Martin Lorson hurriedly paid the bill, jammed an old top hat onto his balding head and grabbed a coat that had seen better days. He tried to hurry, but his ample stomach and equally impressive posterior impeded his progress. He thus had the pleasure of hearing all the landlord’s venomous comments, like an animal caught in a trap.
‘Her ladyship wanted a posh house and all the trimmings. She wanted to be kept in the style to which she was accustomed, didn’t she? A new dress here, a pair of shoes there, not to mention the servants and the private box at the theatre. Was he rich, though, the Swot? No! So he had to borrow, left, right and centre. And then boom! Creditors rolling up at the Ministry on pay day – it looks bad, doesn’t it? Once, twice, ten times, the cashier agrees to give him an advance, but the eleventh time, he gets fired!’
Martin Lorson had finally reached the door when he realised that he had forgotten his scarf. With burning cheeks, he laboriously made his way back across the room. Suddenly cheering up, the ex-clergyman didn’t feel as bad about himself as usual and the young girl caressed her baby, sure that he would never end up in such a terrible state.
‘“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,”’ brayed the ex-clergyman.
‘Someone get me a drink!’ roared the old drunk.
‘As soon as Madame Lorson got wind of her penpusher of a husband’s disgrace, she chucked him out. It’s just a blessing they never had any children!’ the landlord concluded, eyeing the girl and her offspring.
‘And now?’ asked the ex-clergyman.
‘Now? He’s a pauper dressed as a gent!’
‘“All is vanity and vexation of spirit!” says Ecclesiastes. “That which is crooked cannot be made straight.”’
Suddenly aware of noise outside, Corentin Jourdan got up quietly from his chair. Down below, a streak of orange light fell across the pavement, spilling from the open door of the basement of the bakery. Within, a group of young men, bare to the waist, stood with their arms thrust into the dough, seizing it and kneading it as they chanted rhythmically, like natives around a campfire. Corentin looked at his watch: eight o’clock. The baker’s boys had already begun their night’s labour. Sitting down close to the window, he picked up his book, Treasure Island.
This here is a sweet spot, this island – a sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on. You’ll bathe, and you’ll climb trees, and you’ll hunt goats, you will; and you’ll get aloft on them hills like a goat yourself …
He had read and reread Stevenson’s novel, and each time this paragraph brought tears to his eyes. ‘Bathe … climb trees … hunt …’; for him, all these things were impossible now. But then it occurred to him that the situation in which he now found himself was rather like having a map of a desert island in the South Seas, but not knowing where the buried treasure was hidden. He was Jim Hawkins, sailing alongside Long John Silver aboard the Hispaniola.
A creaking interrupted his reverie. He pulled back the curtain and saw that the metal gate of the house on the corner had just opened. A woman in a gold-sequined cloak, her hair coiled into a chignon and covered with a velvet cap, was hurrying towards Rue Lancry. He jumped up, pulled on his coat and hat and, despite the pain in his injured leg, ran down the three flights of stairs and raced to the courtyard where his horse, already saddled, greeted him with a stamp of its foot.
He caught up with the woman on Boulevard Magenta just as she disappeared into a carriage, which turned round and drove up Quai de Valmy. Corentin followed on his horse, keeping his distance. At the far end of the canal, in the dim light of the lanterns illuminating the locks, a large cylindrical building loomed, like an ancient monument.
Night was closing in on the La Villette meat market, headquarters of butchery and metropolis of steak, mutton and offal, through which Martin Lorson wandered, his spirit wounded by the landlord’s biting remarks. He would have to get a grip of himself.
‘The fish rots from the head first, after all. I should despise these fools. I’m head and shoulders above all of them.’
For a moment, he thought he could hear the piteous cacophony of terrified beasts, brought by blue-overalled drovers to the entrance of the biggest abattoir in Paris, but it was only the roaring of blood in his head. In this strange landscape, where the capital’s lunches and dinners were prepared, the atmosphere was permeated with the fear of the animals about to be sacrificed. Fear was a constant companion to him now. Had it not been at his side ever since his dismissal from the Ministry? Fear and resentment, fear and loneliness, which lasted far longer than the sudden fright caused by the clatter of a passing cart laden with coke or animal fodder. The weight of his fear would sometimes lift for a while, only to return with renewed force. He hoped that he would eventually escape from it by dint of sheer stubbornness.
A