Pure Read Free Page B

swaying coffins, then the muttering of the office and finally – the climax of it all – the moment the dead man or woman or child was lowered into the ground as though being fed to it. And when the others had left and the place was quiet again, she was still there, her face close to the window, keeping watch like a sister or an angel.
    She sighs, looks back to the street, to the rue aux Fers, sees Madame Desproux, the baker’s wife, coming past the Italian fountain and pausing to talk to the widow Aries. And there, up by the market cross, is Merda the drunk. And that is Boubon the basket-maker, who lives alone behind his shop on the rue Saint-Denis . . . And there , coming from the end of the rue de la Fromagerie, is that woman in her red cloak. Did Merda just call something to her? It must relieve him to insult a creature lower even than himself, but the woman does not pause or turn. She is too used to the likes of Merda. How tall she is! And how absurdly straight she holds herself! Now someone, some man, is talking to her, though he keeps himself at a distance. Who is he? Surely not Armand (or should one say, it is all too likely to be Armand)? But now they part and each is soon lost to view. When darkness falls, some among those men who, in the light, tease her or insult her, will pursue her, make an arrangement, a rendezvous in a room somewhere. Is that how it works? And once they are in the room . . . Ah, she has imagined it, pictured it in great detail, has even, in the privacy and firelight of her bedroom, made herself blush furiously with such thoughts, sins of the mind she should confess to Père Poupart at Saint-Eustache, and perhaps would if Père Poupart did not look so like a scalded pig. Why are there no handsome priests in Paris? One has no inclination to confess anything to an ugly man.
    ‘Anyone interesting in the street, my dear?’ asks her mother, coming into the room behind her, a candle in her dimpled hand.
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘No?’
    Madame Monnard stands behind her daughter, strokes the girl’s hair, absently winds a finger in its beloved thickness. On the rue aux Fers, a lamp-lighter is propping his ladder against the lamp opposite the church. In silence they watch him, his neat ascent, his reaching into the glass head with his taper, the blossoming of yellow light, his swift descent. When Madame and Monsieur Monnard first came to the house, there were no lamps at all on the rue aux Fers and hardly any on the rue Saint-Denis. Paris was darker then, though everyone was accustomed to it, inured.
    ‘I am afraid,’ says Madame, ‘that our new lodger has become lost. As he is from the country, I very much doubt he will be able to find his way among so many streets.’
    ‘He can ask people,’ says Ziguette. ‘I suppose he can speak French.’
    ‘Of course he can speak French,’ says Madame, uncertainly.
    ‘I think,’ says Ziguette, ‘he is going to be very small and very hairy.’
    Her mother laughs, covers her mouth, her little brown teeth, with her hand. ‘What silly notions you have,’ she says.
    ‘And he eats,’ continues Ziguette, who since earliest girlhood has been given to flights of this kind, sometimes amusing, sometimes alarming, ‘only apples and pig’s feet. And he wipes his fingers on his beard. Like this.’
    She is miming it, clawing her fingers through the air beneath her shapely pink chin, when, with a clatter of wooden sabots, the servant girl comes in.
    ‘You have not seen anyone, have you, Marie?’ asks Madame.
    ‘No,’ says Marie, stopping in the gloom by the door, her young and sturdy figure braced as if for some accusation.
    ‘Your father assured me he would be home early,’ says Madame to her daughter. ‘It would be most unfortunate if we had to receive him ourselves. Marie, Monsieur Monnard has not sent some message, has he?’
    The girl shakes her head. She has been the servant there for eighteen months. Her own father was a tanner in the faubourg