I knocked. After a while a boy of about ten or eleven opened the door. He was dressed like a perfect miniature of a bank teller or a law clerk, or perhaps an undertaker’s assistant—dark suit, white shirt, silk vest, and bow tie, his hair slicked down to such a degree that it looked as if it had been painted on. All that was missing was the watch chain and the pocket watch.
“Monsieur Gilbert is in the darkroom,” he said. “But you are welcome to wait. Is it regarding a portrait?”
“For now I only wish to have a few words with Monsieur Gilbert,” I said vaguely.
The boy pulled up a chair for me and offered me “refreshments,” as he called it, but since all he had to offer was absinthe or lukewarm white wine, I abstained. The young man remained standing at attention, some meters from me, observing me with an unrelenting interest that was rather unnerving.
“What is your name?” I asked, in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness.
“Bruno,” he answered without taking his eyes off me for as much as a fraction of a second. He clearly preferred looking to conversing.
I ended up being the one to break eye contact. My sense of embarrassment was simply better developed than his. I tried instead to get a sense of the surroundings without letting myself be too distracted by the undertaker’s gaze.
The room was larger and lighter than the façade had suggested. One half of it was pretty clearly a later addition to the back, somewhat like the laboratory at home. Here, there were skylights and large windows facing a courtyard that might well be full of latrine sheds and garbage cans, but was wider and more open than the alley in front of the house. The floor in that half of the studio was painted black and seemed to be raw cement under the paintwork. The shutters and thick black curtains made it possible to close out the daylight, and a clever set of pulleys operated a shutter system for the skylights. Along one wall stood a number of painted backdrops and assorted furniture—a white garden bench, a plush ensemble of two armchairs and a chaise longue and, somewhat surprisingly, a tandem bicycle, attached to an iron stand so it would not fall over. There was also a miserable-looking palm tree in a pot, a pair of enormous baskets filled with dried flowers, and a not especially lifelike stuffed dog. Who on earth would want to be photographed with that? I wondered. It was a kind of spaniel, with a reddish coat and long shaggy ears hanging too limply, and its brown glass eyes glittered at me lifelessly, like a visual echo of the boy’s persistent staring.
I heard a faucet being turned on, and there was a clatter of glass behind the door that I assumed led to the darkroom. Shortly afterward, Aristide Gilbert emerged, in his shirtsleeves and a canvas apron, an embroidered smoking cap perched rather rakishly on his head. He stopped abruptly when he saw me.
“Mademoiselle Karno,” he said. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“I would like to speak with you,” I said, “regarding a certain newspaper photograph.”
I cannot claim that he grew pale with guilt, but a certain resignation settled on his already somewhat morose features.
“Yes,” he said. “Bruno, you had better go home now. Your mother will be expecting you.”
The boy fetched his jacket and a peaked black cap from a row of hooks by the door.
“At what time should I come tomorrow, monsieur?” he asked.
“Not before five,” said Gilbert. “You have school, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course, monsieur. Au revoir.” There seemed to be a hint of disappointment in the way he trudged to the door and closed it quietly and politely behind him.
“He is an odd sort of boy,” the photographer apologized. “But he is polite to the customers, and he is precise and thorough when he helps me mix the chemicals. I think his mother is very happy that he has something sensible to do elsewhere, so that he doesn’t disturb his father’s sleep. The poor man is a baker and must get up at two in the morning.”
Aristide Gilbert might be described as a presentable man. Broad shouldered and well built, with regular smooth, clean-shaven features, dark combed-back hair without a hint of gray, well-kept hands, and precise pleats in his pants. The smoking cap was for me an exotic surprise. When he was working, he invariably wore an entirely ordinary round felt hat.
Despite all these advantages, he was not someone one would notice in the street. Much less prepossessing men strutted along with self-confidence and aggressive virility, convinced of their own powers of attraction. Gilbert seemed to have no such conviction. At any rate, his manner was so quiet and modest that few people noticed him before he spoke. If he had once possessed youthful male panache and boldness, he had shut down both long ago. There was a sadness about him, somehow underscored by the smell of chemicals and the scent of anise that probably originated with the absinthe the boy Bruno had offered me.
“Varonne Soir,” I said.
“Yes.” He made no attempt to deny it. “I am truly sorry. I had no idea that he would use the picture in that way.”
His confession deflated my anger a bit. Most of my self-righteous indignation died for lack of resistance.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“For the money,” he said without demur. “I have debts, you see. Monsieur Christophe offered me a hundred francs for a picture of the incident that showed you as well.”
“Me?”
“Yes. He offered me fifty for a picture of the corpse, but if you also were in it, it was a hundred.”
One hundred francs. That was a considerable amount—for many people several months’ wages. But still . . .
“Monsieur Gilbert, if the Commissioner finds out, you will be fired. The police will never use you again.”
He smiled sadly. “The pittance they pay is no sort of living. Unfortunately, there are not enough crimes committed in Varbourg.”
Was that irony? An attempt at jocularity, even? I thought so, but his general air of depression made it hard to be certain. My eyes fell randomly on the stuffed spaniel with the stiff blank gaze. It must be difficult to make a living as a portrait photographer when one so blatantly lacked the ability to imagine how other people wished to appear, I thought.
“I assume you will now inform the Commissioner,” he said. “I am really sorry that my unfortunate circumstances have also caused you embarrassment, and I can assure you that I had no idea that the newspaper would present you in this . . . bizarre way.”
I realized that I was actually wondering if I might be able to convince the préfecture to pay a little more for the poor man’s services so that he would not be tempted to resell his pictures to the highest bidder. And I, who had come to . . . in fact, I did not know quite why. To make him admit it, first and foremost, but he had done that within the first minute.
“If I refrain,” I said, “will you promise me never again to sell photographic evidence to Monsieur Christophe and his ilk?”
He looked up, evidently surprised. I once again caught the scent of absinthe on his breath.
“Do you mean that?” he asked. “That is . . . far more than I could expect.”
“Of course I cannot guarantee that it will not come out anyway,” I said. “Even though the picture is taken at a distance, the angle of it makes it clear that the photographer was not at the gate but in the actual courtyard. If I can make that deduction, so can the Commissioner. But if you give me your word, then you have mine that such a revelation will not come from me.”
“My word? Of course. And thank you.”
The scent of absinthe brought an unwelcome association.
“When did Christophe come here?” I asked.
He considered. “It must have been Thursday afternoon. Yes, it was. A little before five. Bruno had not yet arrived.”
“And I imagine you offered him a glass of absinthe?”
“How do you know?”
“Because he still smelled of it when he came to see me later Thursday afternoon.”
He looked at me with intensified misery.
“It is a very distinct od
or, isn’t it?” he said. “Perhaps I should attempt to change my habits.”
“That is none of my business,” I said firmly. “As long as you keep your word about the other point that we have discussed.”
He merely nodded.
I left him with an oddly downcast sensation, as if Gilbert had infected me with his melancholy. I now knew that Christophe had been planning to write his article about Mademoiselle Death even before I refused to supply him with a comment. Beyond that, I was not much the wiser.
It was shortly after nine in the evening when I arrived home. My father was sitting in the salon—he had not yet managed to carry out his threat of going to bed without saying good night—but he was not alone.
“August!”
“Are you surprised?”
“I didn’t think you were coming until tomorrow.”
“I decided to take the afternoon train.”
He stood there entirely untouched by the rigid tension that I still sensed in my father. His tall athletic figure exuded a relaxed vitality. His dark hair fell across his forehead in its usual untamed fashion, and he must have taken a bath at his lodging before coming here, because it was still damp, and he smelled of eau de cologne and soap. A burst of heat shot through me, spreading from my abdomen into my entire body so that I had the sensation of being pink all over, like an infant just plucked from its bath. My entire being unfolded and made itself ready, in a way that Madame Aubrey and her academy would definitely not have approved of.
He saw it. Blind though he was to my father’s repressed anger, where I was concerned, his acuity was complete. He took my hand and kissed it, all very proper, and yet . . . I could feel him inhaling, taking in my scent, and his lips parted lightly in midkiss so that his tongue touched the skin between the third and fourth fingers on my right hand.
“I hear that the good Commissioner is getting married. He is overtaking us, Madeleine. Don’t you think we should soon follow suit?”
Yes. Now. Tomorrow. No, even better: tonight.
I had to control myself not to say any of this out loud. My legs had begun to shake a little, and I was afraid he would notice the slight movement of my skirts. There had actually been a short course for the senior class where Madame Aubrey herself had explained to me and my blushing schoolmates what marriage involved, in her opinion. Nothing she mentioned seemed to acknowledge the existence of a female sexuality, and her florid and strongly metaphorical account left the impression that my body was a flower meadow, which my future husband would feel a certain need to water at regular intervals, and that I would have to put up with this watering process as a “happy duty.” Nothing was said of shaking knees and overheating in a considerable area south of my navel. Yet he had only kissed my hand . . .
I attempted to force my decidedly unfloral impulses back where they came from.
“Perhaps this fall,” I said cautiously.
He lit up. “Do you mean that?”
It was the first time I had come close to setting even an approximate date, but his very eagerness immediately made me a bit more reticent. The old litany began to echo somewhere in the back of my head: married, impregnated, conquered by biology. What if I conceived? The thought cooled my blood considerably. I could not risk it. Not now. Not when I had finally been admitted to the university, not when I stood on the threshold to everything I desired even more than . . . the other thing.
“We will have to see,” I said. “Perhaps you will not feel like being married or engaged to Mademoiselle Death.”
I could tell that he had read the story.
“If you ignore the journalist’s bizarre choice of words,” he said, “then there is nothing in that article that I did not know already. Besides, the engagement is now official—it has been announced in the newspaper.”
He was right. I had no idea how the journalist had unearthed the fact, but the article noted that “young Mademoiselle Karno is engaged to Professor August Dreyfuss of the University of Heidelberg.”
August smiled at me and kissed my hand again, not quite as lingeringly this time. Perhaps he sensed it would not be to his advantage to push me off this particular ledge. His words were similarly light and jesting: “You are not getting away that easily, Madeleine!”
I inadvertently looked at my father. He had not risen when I came in, as August had. He still sat brooding and grim in his usual armchair, only minimally softened by August’s presence and the cognac that made the bottom of his glass glow golden in the lamplight.
“August thinks that we should not take it too seriously,” he said reluctantly. “He thinks people will forget it as soon as the next sensation catches their attention.”
“Let us hope so,” I said firmly.
When he thought of his father, his teeth hurt. It was an inescapable fact, even though he knew perfectly well that a dentist would find neither cavities nor abscesses. This morning, the monthly Sunday visit was upon him, and he could literally feel his gums pull back and expose the sensitive neck of the tooth so everything he ingested, hot or cold, sweet or sour, shrieked against his nerve endings. He also knew that once he was there, when his mother kissed him dryly on the cheek and welcomed him in, when his father came out of his study and stretched both his hands toward him, the toothache would disappear. It was only in the phase of anticipation, if you could call it that, that his dental symptoms kept him awake at night.
“I will be back at nine tonight,” he told his housekeeper, Madame Arnaud, entirely unnecessarily, since he always came home at nine in the evening after these Sundays, but she just nodded and handed him his hat, cane, and gloves.
He walked there. It rarely took him more than an hour, and in principle he could therefore visit his childhood home much more frequently. But the pattern of monthly visits had been set when he lived in Jena, and all parties had maintained the model without discussion even now when he lived on Rue Faubourg, less than an hour’s walk from the old gray house behind the cast-iron fence on Boulevard Saint-Augustine. If he had made use of the new streetcar, he could have been there in fifteen minutes.
A light drizzle speckled his gray overcoat but without penetrating the worsted fabric to the layers underneath. He held his cane under his arm; he was not the kind of man who felt a need to swing it and thus take up about twice as much room on the sidewalk as necessary. At the corner of Place d’Armistice and Rue Concorde, he ran into Oreste Gervaise from the Botanical Institute, who was out walking with his wife. Though he did not actually care for the man, he stopped for a moment and exchanged a few words with him. One should avoid rudeness; it would inevitably damage one’s chances in the constant and frequently acrimonious interdepartmental squabbles. Madame Gervaise was a large, bony woman without a trace of charm, but it was said that she had money, and that this was the reason Gervaise himself was so blithe and cocksure in the debates about the future of the university. He could always, it was said, purchase his own institute if he felt like it.
Adrian smiled politely at both Monsieur and Madame and was not at all jealous of Gervaise. One could pay too high a price . . .
The brief intermezzo had cost him five minutes, and he therefore picked up his pace a little. And it was while he was thus hastening along the promenade that Mademoiselle Karno’s likeness appeared before his inner eye.
Two pictures of her fought for his attention. One was the grainy newspaper photograph under the unbelievably vulgar headline “Mademoiselle Death.” How did these journalists come up with their peculiar ideas? The other one was sharper and more fascinating, in spite of the fact that it was plucked from the dubious records of memory. Her profile, bent over the entrails of the rabbit, concentrated, competent, free of any feminine feeling, delicacy, and distaste.
Interesting.
Yes, that was exactly the word. There was no doubt that she was the most interesting woman he had met in a very long time. A pity, really, that she was, as the article noted, engaged to the Foghorn of Heidelberg, the unbearably self-absor
bed Professor Dreyfuss.
He realized that while he had been thinking of Madeleine Karno, his toothache had disappeared. Should he consider this a sign?
Engaged to Dreyfuss. But the insufferable Dreyfuss was not invulnerable. Far from it. He had an Achilles’ heel so glaringly obvious that it practically hurt one’s eyes.
Adrian smiled and found himself actually swinging his cane a little. Tonight when he got home, he would write a letter. No, wait—perhaps even two.
He began to whistle quietly. The toothache had entirely disappeared and did not return.
Intermezzo: Ari and Alice
It was in October 1887. The death masks were not selling as well as before, said his father. People did not appreciate the craftsmanship anymore, and many preferred instead to have a photograph taken. That was the future, but cameras were expensive and the development process was complicated, and though Ari had attempted to obtain an apprentice position, he had not succeeded. But instead there was work at the new Hôpital Marine des Hyères that had been built a bit south of the city, below Costebelle and—naturally—in proximity to the sea.
Two English doctors, Dr. Madden and Dr. Griffin, ran and owned the place. Dr. Madden was the older and had had a practice in Hyères for some time; he spoke French, albeit with an almost incomprehensible accent. Dr. Griffin had arrived only recently, from the English city of Birmingham, it was said, and it seemed he had brought along half of Birmingham’s population, or at least half of its invalids—Hyères was teeming with cloth manufacturers and merchants, and to an even greater extent their wool-wrapped wives and daughters, who strolled along the newly constructed palm-lined Boulevard Victoria, or took their afternoon tea on the hotel terraces along the promenade.
What the English doctors were looking for was “bath assistants.” Since a significant part of the treatment of their English patients consisted of daily immersion in the sea, they had ordered the construction of a number of bath machines so that even the weakest could benefit from the healing effect of the seawater. A cabin on tall wheels was pulled out into the water by a horse. While this was happening, the patient changed into a bathing costume inside the cabin, and when the horse was unhitched, the bather could descend directly from the cabin and into the waves, with the assistance of what the English clientele, in spite of Doctors Madden and Griffin’s nomenclature, simply and plainly called “dippers.”