Pure Read Free

paper, then a purse. He gives both to Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste bows to him, bows more deeply to the minister, steps backwards towards the door, turns and exits. The man who was waiting with him has gone. Was he an engineer too? That Jean-Marie Lestingois the minister mentioned? And if the yellow-eyed servant had looked at him first, would he be the one now charged with the destruction of a cemetery?
    He gathers up his riding coat from where he left it draped across the chair. On the floor, the dog’s urine, having exhausted its momentum, is slowly seeping into the wood.

3
    For a corridor or two, a wing, he is sure he is retracing his steps. He passes windows big enough to ride a horse through, even, perhaps, an elephant. He descends flights of curving steps past enormous allegorical tapestries that shiver in the autumn draughts and must have exhausted the sight of scores of women, every detail detailed, stitch-perfect, the flowers at the foot of Parnassus, French country flowers – poppies, cornflowers, larkspur, chamomile . . .
    The palace is a game, but he is growing tired of playing it. Some corridors are dark as evening; others are lit by branches of dripping candles. In these he finds jostling knots of servants, though when he asks for directions they ignore him or point in four different directions. One calls after him, ‘Follow your nose!’ but his nose tells him only that the dung of the mighty is much like the dung of the poor.
    And everywhere, on every corridor, there are doors. Should he go through one? Is that how you escape the Palace of Versailles? Yet doors in such a place are as much subject to the laws of etiquette as everything else. Some you knock upon; others must be scratched with a fingernail. Cousin André explained this to him on the ride to Nogent, Cousin André the lawyer who, though three years younger, is already possessed of a sly worldliness, an enviable knowledge of things.
    He stops in front of a door that seems to him somehow more promising than its neighbours. And can he not feel an eddy of cool air under its foot? He looks for scratch marks on the wood, sees none and gently knocks. No one answers. He turns the handle and goes in. There are two men sitting at a small, round table playing cards. They have large, blue eyes and silver coats. They tell him they are Polish, that they have been in the palace for months and hardly remember why they first came. ‘You know Madame de M—?’ asks one.
    ‘I am afraid not.’
    They sigh; each turns over a card. At the back of the room, a pair of cats are testing their claws on the silk upholstery of a divan. Jean-Baptiste bows, excuses himself. But won’t he stay to play a while? Piquet passes the time as well as anything. He tells them he is trying to find his way out.
    Out? They look at him and laugh.
    In the corridor once more, he stops to watch a woman with heaped purple hair being carried horizontally through a doorway. Her head turns; her black eyes study him. She is not the sort of person you ask directions of. He descends to the floor below on a narrow stone screw of service stairs. Here, soldiers lounge on benches, while boys in blue uniforms drowse curled on tables, under tables, on window seats, anywhere there is space for them. Towards him come a dozen girls running half blind behind their bundles of dirty linen. To avoid being trampled, he steps (neither knocking nor scratching) through the nearest door and arrives in a space, a large, spreading room where little trees, perhaps a hundred of them, are stood in great terracotta pots. Though he is a northerner, a true northerner, he knows from his time waiting on the Comte de S— that these are lemon trees. They have been lagged with straw and sacking against the coming winter. The air is scented, softly green, the light slanting through rows of arched windows. One of these he forces open, and climbing onto a water-barrel, he jumps down into the outside world.
    Behind him, in the