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The idea is now hovering before me that man himself can act as creator even in living nature, forming it eventually according to his will.
—JACQUES LOEB, BIOLOGIST, FEBRUARY 26, 1890
She stood awkwardly, stooping to dip the sponge into the hot water. The steam from the copper tub rose up around her stocky figure, clinging moistly to her hair and skin, imprinted still with the marks left by the stays of her under bodice. She had retained her pantaloons, and he permitted it. For the moment, it was of no significance, just as it did not matter that she was neither handsome, nor slender, nor young.
“Sit down,” he said.
“Monsieur?”
“Sit in the tub.”
She did as she was told, albeit slowly and uncertainly. She looked as if she had never bathed before, and indeed it was possible that she had not, at least not like this. He imagined that for most of her life, her ablutions had been scant and hurried, performed at a washstand with a few splashes of cold water.
“I just want you to be clean,” he said. “Everywhere.”
“Monsieur. Might I do this . . . alone?”
“No,” he said simply.
She had been standing under the streetlight outside Les étoiles, with her shawl tied under her heavy breasts in order to present them to their best advantage. She was probably in her late twenties—not young, as noted, and there was a weariness even in the smile with which she tried to lure him closer. A narrow smile, with her mouth closed—later he discovered that she was missing several teeth—followed by a batting of the kohl-smeared eyelashes that did not have the seductive effect on him that she probably imagined it had. Her hair was so darkly auburn that it was nearly black, except for a russet sheen where the light fell; her dress was stained and threadbare, the hem fraying at the bottom.
They had agreed on four francs. He had therefore not expected her to be bashful about bathing in his presence.
“Wash yourself,” he said. “What are you waiting for?”
On a chair next to the tub lay the worn dress and bodice, the black stockings, the blue shawl. She glanced in that direction as if she would have preferred to get dressed again.
“Listen,” he said, with some annoyance, “you were willing to give yourself to me for four francs. If bathing first is such an inconvenience to you, I am prepared to raise the sum to five.” That had been her original price.
“And then you wish that I . . . give myself afterward?”
He could tell she was making an effort to speak more properly than she was used to. He had noted the yellowish-brown stains that seemed ingrained in the skin of her hands, especially around the nails and in the folds of skin by her knuckles—a tobacco worker, he concluded. She might have been fired after the strike, or perhaps her meager factory wages simply did not stretch far enough to cover the rent. That was equally insignificant; he had no particular need for affected speech or parlor manners.
“Yes,” he said, though that was not, in fact, what he had in mind. He had learned that the women became calmer when they knew the exact nature of the transaction. Or thought they knew.
It seemed to have the desired effect on the tobacco worker too. She sat down in the copper tub and ran the sponge over her upper body and neck, even managing a clumsy attempt at coquetry. The water was high enough to provide her pale, blue-veined breasts with a certain buoyancy, and the air trapped under the fabric of her undergarments caused them to balloon around her hips and thighs.
He made no attempt to hide his arousal—merely sat there in his armchair, legs apart, feeling his erection push against the fabric of his trousers. Foam clung to the nape of her neck where her hairline made it downy and dark. He did not touch himself, not yet. It was enough to see the sponge slide over breasts borne up by water, and when, in a moment of inspiration, she began to nip playfully at the sponge with her lips, he had to look away.
Waste not your seed on the ground, he admonished himself. You have better uses for it. He glanced at the tall glass that stood within convenient reach on the mahogany humidor next to the chair.
She raised one arm up out of the water, soaping it with long, near-graceful strokes. The sight of the dark hair in her armpit aroused him further, and one of his legs began to tremble. He breathed heavily through his mouth and placed a hand on his thigh in an attempt to keep the offending limb still.
Now she clearly felt that she was in control of the game. She arched her back and thrust her breasts forward, and let her right hand disappear into the water for a moment. In the thinly misted mirror at the foot of the bath, he could see that she was touching herself through the white cotton of the pantaloons.
“No,” he said sharply. “Not you. All you have to do is . . . bathe.”
The correction brought back her nervousness. She snatched her hand out of the water and reached for the soap instead, but it slipped from her wet fingers and skated across the floor, ending up at his feet.
“I’m sorry, m’sieur.” She looked at him with widened eyes. Kohl bled into the half-dissolved face powder that still clung to her cheeks, and any attempt at grace had evaporated. But it did not matter. The scent of lavender soap, the wet trail across the floorboards, the smell of a woman’s body and wet undergarments . . . he only just managed to get hold of the glass in time.
Later, he sat hunched over the microscope for almost an hour, observing them with an excited fascination infinitely more intense than anything the half-naked body of a woman could ignite in him. They looked like tiny, wriggly water creatures, darting tadpoles that raced in every direction in their drive toward life. One half of the moment of creation. A miracle so precious that five francs was a scant and almost insultingly low price to pay.
June 24, 1894
It was an unusually hot and torpid night in June. Every window in the house had been left open, not just the ones overlooking our small rooftop garden, but those facing Carmelite Street as well, and yet not a breeze stirred. I lay dozing with only a sheet across me, but the heat made it difficult to fall deeply asleep.
Something was happening in the city. I could hear a faint murmuring unease, distant shouts, dogs barking, hoofbeats. A certain curiosity nudged my drowsiness. What had happened? Great disasters, great defeats, great victories . . . it had to be something like that, something that could move many people at once.
Oh, Lord. Had war broken out again?
Now wide awake, I listened carefully. The commotion was drawing nearer. There were footfalls and voices in our street now, so hushed that I could not distinguish any words, and yet somehow a sense of anxiety and anger seemed to communicate itself through the rising accents. Doors slammed. In the house across the way, the lights came on.
I sat up. Even as I did so, I heard steps immediately below my window, and then someone knocked rapidly at our door.
My father was away, he had been called to Saint Bernardine to do emergency surgery on a little boy who had been kicked in the head by a horse. Instead, Elise Vogler was staying over, sleeping on a cot in the living room as she so often did when he was not here. For some reason, no one seemed to believe that I was capable of sleeping alone in the house.
There was another knock—a long, insistent series of small, hard raps.
I leaned
out the window and thought I recognized our neighbor, Madame Vogler.
“Elise,” I called. “It’s your mother.”
I threw a shawl around my shoulders, out of consideration for propriety rather than any need to cover myself from the chill, and went downstairs to see what Madame Vogler wanted.
She was no more properly dressed than I. A skirt, to be sure, but under her shawl the blouse was no blouse at all, merely a sleeveless nightgown, and her blond hair, usually neatly pinned, hung limply down her back in a long braid. Her face was entirely dissolved into tears.
“Madeleine,” she said, even though she rarely called me by my first name anymore. “Dear Lord, it is a terrible thing.”
“What has happened?” I asked.
When the answer came, it hit me like a blow to the chest.
“Someone has murdered the president.”
Madame Vogler was right. The president of the Third Republic, Marie François Sadi Carnot, had been stabbed by an Italian anarchist. The details reached us gradually. That Sunday, President Carnot had begun what was intended to be a three-day sojourn in Lyon to attend the great national exhibition being held there. After a banquet in his honor, he had just set off in the landau that was to take him to a gala performance at Lyon’s theater. The vehicle was surrounded by cheering crowds who broke into “The Marseillaise” when they caught sight of the popular president. A young man made his way toward the carriage, waving a piece of paper that most people presumed was a petition of some kind. The cheering and tumult may have been a source of distraction for the president’s escorts because the young man, Sante Geronimo Caserio, succeeded in reaching the landau without being stopped. He leaped onto the carriage step, clinging to the door with his left hand, and plunged the knife with his right, hitherto hidden by the paper, into the president’s stomach.
The prefect from the Rhone district, Monsieur Riveaud, felled the young Italian with a single blow, but by then it was too late. The knife had penetrated the president’s liver, and the internal bleeding could not be stopped. Some hours later, at twelve forty-five in the morning, the president of the Republic was declared dead.
The authorities sought to prevent the news from spreading too rapidly by stopping all telegrams dealing with the president’s tragic plight, but there were enough phones in France now for this to be a forlorn effort. Varbourg Gazette had the first broadsheet on the street shortly after midnight—while the president still lived—and could cite the préfecture’s latest bulletin: “The president’s condition is critical, but far from hopeless. The wound is in the liver region. The bleeding, which at first was profuse, has now been stopped.” Varonne Soir was slightly less timely, but more precise: “THE PRESIDENT MURDERED” shouted the succinct headline, above the scant details about his assassin that sufficed to ignite the spark of xenophobic rage even in peaceful Varbourg: He was an anarchist, and he was Italian.
That night, in the major cities of France, few people slept. Varbourg was no exception. Around the Italian consulate in Rue Picaterre, an agitated crowd had gathered, and the gendarmes had to be called in to protect the blameless office workers who lived and worked there. Several of them were not even Italian, but merely locals earning a living, stamping travel documents and expediting export permissions.
Madame Vogler made us coffee.
“I do hope the Doctor does not try to come home,” she said. She almost always called my father “the Doctor,” as if there was only the one in all the world. “It is not safe to walk the streets tonight!”
Going to bed was unthinkable. I was reminded of childhood summer visits with my aunt and uncle in the country. When there was a thunderstorm, everyone—from the smallest child to the oldest farmhand—would sit in the kitchen until the storm had passed, and my aunt and the kitchen maid would make coffee and put out bread and cheese. I remembered feeling indulged and anxious at the same time. It was exciting and unusual to be allowed to stay up so late and eat with the grown-ups, but also frightening with the thunder rolling and crashing overhead. The sudden pale flashes made the faces around the table appear stark and unfamiliar.
Madame Vogler, Elise, and I gathered in the salon, drinking our own “thunder coffee” while we waited for the human storm outside to subside.
Around four in the morning, there was a boom very close by, with a tinkling echo of glass falling to the ground.
“What was that?” Elise asked anxiously.
“I don’t know.” I got up, opened one of the windows, and leaned out to look. On Carmelite Street, there was nothing to be seen, but . . . did I smell smoke?
“Mademoiselle, be careful . . .” Madame Vogler was on her feet as well.
“Yes, yes.” Definitely smoke, but not the comforting kind from fireplaces and hearths. This was a hostile reek—black, bitter, and acrid—and in the windows at the end of the street, I saw the reflected glow of flames.
“Someone has set fire to something,” I said. “In Rue Perrault.”
“Sweet Mary and Jesus,” whispered Madame Vogler with quiet sincerity. “It’s not a house, is it?”
“Perhaps it is just a bonfire . . . ,” I suggested. I was too young to remember the Paris Commune and the unrest of 1871, yet I had some vague memory-like flashes of barricades and fires in the streets, which my imagination must have created from the stories I had heard. Such things seemed to me to accompany riots and outrage and public unrest.
“Oh no. I hope they light no fires here . . . ,” said Elise.
There was yet another boom from Rue Perrault, and all at once the crowds came surging around the corner and down Carmelite Street. Our narrow, peaceful alley was suddenly filled by a tangled darkness. It was not possible to distinguish one darkly clad figure from the next, and I saw only a black wave, broken in glimpses by a flaming torch here, a hatless head there, and a lone upturned face, mouth open, like a drowning man gasping for air.
“Find them!” roared a mouth somewhere in the maelstrom. “Those bastards are not getting away from us!”
There was pounding on doors—ours as well. I had instinctively pulled back from the window already, and now Madame Vogler slammed it shut so hastily that there was a squeak of protest from hinges and hasps. But someone had seen me, apparently.
“Open up!” a second voice roared. “We’ll get those murdering bastards, you just see if we don’t!”
My heartbeat accelerated abruptly, and I felt a bitter dryness in my mouth. What murderers? It was absurd. They could hardly imagine that we were sheltering someone who had anything to do with the assassination. Or could they? There was a madness, an irrational violence in the shouts, the torches, the heavy fists that pounded on not just our door but also on random doors and windows down the entire street.
“Death to the anarchists!” someone shouted. “Death to the traitors!”
Anarchists?
“We aren’t anarchists,” whispered Elise. “What do they want?”
“I don’t think they mean us in particular,” I said. “I just think we happen to live in the wrong place . . .” I had realized that it might be the neighborhood itself that they wanted to wreak their vengeance on. It wasn’t a purely working-class community; tradesmen and accountants and other families of the lower bourgeoisie lived here too, but in the old, narrow medieval streets, rents were considerably lower than along the boulevards in the city’s modern center just a stone’s throw away, which was also the reason my father and I lived here. And it was true that in Rue des Maisoniers a few streets away, there was a dilapidated half-timbered building that housed a Socialist society with its own printing press, but that had never caused us any trouble before now.
A flat crack echoed between the houses, and then another. The sound sent a galvanic spasm of fear through my entire body.
“Was that a shot?” gasped Madame Vogler.
“I’m afraid so.” I hoped with all my heart that no one told Papa about the trouble here, or he would undoubtedly try to come home. I could barely sta
nd the thought. Although the fractures he had suffered in the spring were more or less healed, he still could not walk without limping, and it seemed to me that in the press and surge of the crowds, his fragile body must inevitably be trampled and broken like a dry twig run over by a wagon wheel.
Shots. Though I was attempting to maintain my composure for the sake of Madame Vogler and Elise, the fearful jerk that had shuddered through my body at both the first and the second had no doubt been visible.
“It’s probably just some hothead shooting into the air,” I said, a little too late to maintain the relaxed and carefree demeanor I had meant to present. Not so long ago, someone had shot at me, deliberately and with the intention to kill, and certain natural reflexes were still hard to restrain. I turned away from the window to get my impulses under control and instead caught a pale flash in the French doors that led out to the little courtyard garden my mother had established on the flat roof of the kitchen many years ago.
For a second—no, a fraction of a second—I simply tried to make sense of what I had seen. Was it the lights in the salon that had created a peculiar reflection, or perhaps a bird, or a wayward scrap of paper caught in the wind?
Then I could not hold back a scream.
A face. A bloody face right outside the window, cupped by two bloody hands. A gaping, gasping mouth and two staring eyes wilder than those of a crazed horse.
Madame Vogler turned and screamed as well, but more quietly. One might think she had seen a mouse, not that she was about to be attacked by a madman. I think she recognized him almost at once in spite of the blood and the wild look. I realized who it was only some moments later when he knocked lightly on the pane with one hand, surprisingly politely, considering the circumstances.
It was Geraldo, dishwasher and errand boy at Chez Louis, the little bistro where my father and I usually went for dinner. Less than eight hours ago, we had been comfortably seated in the wicker chairs under the awning, enjoying an excellent coq au vin.