“Very well,” he says. Then he hands my call slip back to me and tells me to come back when I’ve filled it out properly.
“But I’ve filled it out two times already!” I protest.
“Then perhaps you will do it correctly the third time,” Yves Bonnard says. “The instructions are clearly posted on the wall above the card catalog.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve read them ten times,” I tell him, but he’s already talking to the woman behind me.
I’d waited in line for thirty minutes for my turn to hand over my call slips, watch Yves Bonnard put them in a little vacuum tube, and send them down to the bowels of the archives, where blinky-eyed molemen in blue lab coats fetch what’s written on them and bring it up on metal carts. Judging from the number of people in front of me, I will now be waiting another thirty minutes.
Yves Bonnard is really pissing me off. I got here at eleven o’clock and he made me spend the next two hours running all over Paris. He told me I could not possibly be let loose on the archives without an archives pass, and to get an archives pass I would have to produce proper ID. I showed him my Brooklyn Public Library card, but that didn’t cut it. So back I went, all the way to G’s, to get my passport. Then back to the archives. Then back out again to a photo shop to get pictures taken for the archives pass. Because it’s a photo ID pass. Then back to the archives, which were closed for lunch. Of course. What was I thinking? This is France. The whole country grinds to a halt for lunch. So I went to a café to kill some time. Then I returned to the archives again, and went back to the desk of Yves Bonnard, who questioned me—no, interrogated me—about my project, had me fill out three forms, and then finally gave me my pass.
And that was just the beginning.
I stood in line again, at another desk, to apply for a seat at a table in the reading room. After I got that, I was shown the card catalog. Yes, a card catalog, for here inside the Abelard Library it’s still the thirteenth century. I looked up Malherbeau, Amadé, and found that the library has handwritten scores, personal letters, household papers, his will, and his death certificate. I went back to Yves Bonnard’s desk to ask for Malherbeau’s original scores only to be informed that I can’t just ask for what I want; I have to fill out a call slip. So I did that. But I didn’t do it correctly. Not the first time, and apparently not the second time, either.
I trudge back to the card catalog. A professor type is working in the N section. I ask him if he’d take a look at my call slip and tell me what I did wrong. He takes it from me, then says I have the section and department reversed and that when I write my name I must stay precisely within the lines of the little box allotted for it.
“You’re kidding me.”
The man shakes his head. “We call him Cerberus,” he tells me in a whisper. “The three-headed dog who guards the gates of hell.”
“I can think of other things to call him.”
“He is difficult, yes. But no one knows the archives like he does. I advise you to get on his good side.”
I thank him, fill out yet another call slip, and get back in line. It’s nearly three-thirty and the archives close at five. I really want to get these records, like, now. I borrowed a digital camera from Lili. I’m going to photograph everything and use the images in my PowerPoint presentation. I’ll take some photos of Malherbeau’s house and the street where he lived, and put those in, too. Between images and music, my intro alone will have more going on in it than a Ken Burns flick.
Ten minutes go by. The line barely budges. Yves Bonnard recites the rules of the archives to every single person as they hand over their call slips. His voice drones on. All the people in line have books and papers to read while they wait. I’ve got nothing. I dig in my jacket pocket for my iPod, thinking it’ll help pass the time, then remember that I don’t have it—Virgil does.
And then I remember this morning and I wonder if it really happened or if I dreamed it. It was nice. And weird. And tender. I’m not used to tender. It’s a fossil, that word. Conditions changed and it died out. Like the woolly mammoth. It just couldn’t live in the same world as dick box. Ho dog. Or wiener cousins.
For a few seconds, I let myself wonder if it means anything, that odd phone call. Then I decide it means he has my iPod and that’s all. Because nothing’s more dangerous than hope.
I dig in my bag, pawing past my wallet, and my keys, and my pills, thinking maybe I’ve got a magazine in here, or an old Musician’s Friend catalog, something, and then I see it—the diary.
“Forgot about you,” I say, remembering that I stuffed it into my bag last night when I ran to my room to avoid my father.
There’s a bench against the wall. I sit down. I’m tired from running around all morning and my legs hurt from standing. I’ll just read a bit, keep an eye on the line, and hop back on when it goes down a little. Yves Bonnard drones on. His voice is torture. Listening to it makes me want to bang my head against the wall.
“… then one of the junior archivists will bring the materials to you. Keep them in their acid-free boxes until you are ready to use them,” he’s saying. “You may use only pencils to make your notes, no pens. If you use a pen, it will be confiscated. If you use a second one, your reading privileges will be revoked for the day. You must wear the cotton gloves we provide when handling the materials. Failure to do so will result in a warning. A second failure will result in your reading privileges being revoked for the day. If you wish to photograph the records, you may. In the photography room. Without a flash. Failure to observe this rule will result in a warning. A second failure will result in your reading privileges being revoked for the day.…”
I look down at the two-hundred-year-old priceless historical artifact in my ungloved hands. Good thing Yves Bonnard doesn’t know I have it. He’d have me shot.
I open the diary and flip through the first few entries, rereading the page where I stopped—where the queen asked Alexandrine to be a companion to Louis-Charles—then take up with the next entry.
26 April 1795
Go away! Kill yourself, you bloody fool, but don’t kill me! They suspect me! They are watching my house!
That is how Fauvel, firemaster at the National, greeted me this morning.
But we’re not at your house, Fauvel, are we? I said to him. We are here, taking coffee at the Café Foy. Two citizens exchanging pleasantries on a lovely spring morning. What could be more innocent?
As I spoke, I dipped my hand into my coat pocket and drew out a heavy gold ring inlaid with diamonds. One of Orléans’. My fingers grazed Fauvel’s wrist as I placed it in his sweaty hand. I felt his pulse leap.
I need twenty rockets, I tell him.
It’s too much! The gunpowder will be missed! Do you not know the danger you put me in? he hissed.
I put my hand out for the ring.
Tomorrow, he said.
Tonight, I said.
He swore at me, but pocketed the ring. Have you more of these? he asked.
I have more of everything. A gold clock. A diamond picture frame. A sapphire big as a pigeon’s egg.
Lies, all of it. I have mostly circus jewelry left, a few more rings, six gold coins. He must not find that out, though. I need him to believe I’m worth more alive than dead. I must have rockets from him.
Where do I leave them? Fauvel asked.
At the Church of St-Roch. In the Valois crypt, I said.
It’s the safest place. From there I can take them underground and hide them in the catacombs. Fauvel, who hurls lightning bolts onto the stage, who makes demons appear in a flash of light, may go about the streets with powder and rockets and fear nothing, for they are the tools of his trade, but I cannot.
Until tonight, then, he said.
I bade him good day, popped a clove into my mouth, then picked up the newspaper he had left behind, hoping, as ever, to read something about the orphan in the tower—that General Barras has taken pity on him, that he will go free soon. But there was nothing.
&n
bsp; The Green Man has struck again, a headline shouted. A deputy was quoted as saying that the Green Man is an Austrian bent on revenge for the queen’s death. A housewife said she was certain it was Lucifer himself throwing hellfire, while a member of the Academy asserted that the fiery explosions came from a surfeit of bilious humors in the moon.
The moon has gas. How Louis-Charles would laugh at that, I thought. Nothing is funnier to small boys than a fart. I will tell him this one day. Soon. I will hold his hands in mine and say—
He will not answer you. He speaks no more. He cannot. There are no words for what he has suffered. But it will not be long until he walks free again. With us.
I looked up and saw a woman sitting where Fauvel had sat, blood down the front of her dress. I knew her. She was the Princesse de Lamballe. Killed because she cried for the king. The dogs of September tore her to pieces.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, she was gone. They terrified me once, the princess and the others like her, but I am used to them now.
I turned back to my paper and learned that the Assembly is outraged anew by the Green Man’s activities. And then I saw this: Bonaparte has raised the price upon my head. He’s offering two hundred francs for me now.
I am flattered. Judas sold Jesus for a good deal less. And one day, quite soon, Fauvel will sell me.
29
“Wow,” I say to myself, turning to the next page. “That’s pretty wild. Alex talked to dead people.”
I did, too, back in Brooklyn, but I had an excuse. I was stoned on Qwellify. She wasn’t.
I look up and see that the line hasn’t moved so I keep reading.
27 April 1795
I must write about him now, about Louis-Charles. I must tell you what he was like. They call him Enemy of the Republic, Viper, and Wolf Cub—his captors. Because they are clever. Beat a child, cage a child, starve a child—and the world will call you monster. Beat a wolf cub, cage him and starve him, and the world will call you hero.
He was no wolf cub. He was gentle and kind. Courtly and brave. He was a statesman at the age of four, parrying questions from ministers and nobles when others his age could not yet say their letters.
Well now, young sir! brays the Italian ambassador. Tell me which is mightier—Austria’s army or Spain’s?
It is an impossible question. Austria is ruled by his grandmother, Spain by his cousin. Praise one and he insults the other. All around the table, heads turn. His mother’s. His father’s. Scores of courtiers’. All eyes are upon him.
Sir, I cannot say which is mightier, only which is mightiest, he gamely replies. Neither Austria nor Spain, but my own glorious France.
The guests laugh and clap. All are pleased. He smiles, sits straight and tall, but under the table, his small hands make knots of his napkin.
I spirit him away as soon as I am able. We go to the terrace to listen for owls and watch bats swoop over the fountains, and I tell him stories of Paris. I tell him of Luc the dwarf, who has flippers for hands and plays a trumpet with his feet. Of Seraphina, who rides horses standing on their backs. Of Tristan and his dancing rats.
I tell him of the Palais-Royal at midnight, raucous with music and blazing with torchlight, and of all the marvels to be seen there—snake charmers with their hissing vipers, mannequins who come to life for a sou, a man with a hole in his chest, through which one can see his beating heart.
He does not believe I wander such places. Or that I do so alone. He has never been alone, not once in his life, and cannot conceive of it.
When it grows dark, the court comes out of doors to see fireworks. We sit on the grass and watch the rockets explode above us. He loves them better than chocolate or his tin soldiers or even his pony. He loves the sparkling fountains and cascades and says the strangest things as he watches them.
They look like stars breaking.
Or, They look like Mama’s diamonds.
Or, They look like all the souls in heaven.
And once, They make me sad because they are so beautiful.
Beautiful things are supposed to make you happy, Louis-Charles, I tell him. The firemaster doesn’t go to all this trouble to make you sad.
They do make me happy. Except sometimes they don’t.
Why not?
Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow nor my aunt’s teeth. And not fireworks, either.
I cannot make him an answer, not at first, but I know I must, for my work is to make him happy. I look around, then see it—my answer.
Some beautiful things do last, I say.
They do not.
They do. Look there. Behind you. At the table where your family sits. I see three beautiful things. One, the queen your mother. Two, the dainty goblet she sips from, and three, Versailles rising behind her. All of these are here now and will be here tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.
He smiles and hugs me, happy again.
Now his mother is dead. Her pretty goblet smashed. The palace shuttered and empty.
I have stolen. I have deceived. I have damaged things and people. And yet nothing grieves me more than to think he now remembers that night.
And calls me liar.
“Holy shit,” I say out loud. “The fireworks were for him. For the dauphin. For Louis-Charles. She was—”
“Quiet, please!” Yves Bonnard barks, glaring at me.
“Sorry!” I whisper, slinking down on the bench.
But it’s true. It must be. Louis-Charles loved fireworks. That’s why Alex became the Green Man. So he would see them from his prison cell and know she was there, that someone was still there for him.
They look like stars breaking, he said. Like all the souls in heaven.
It sounds like something Truman would’ve said.
He loved fireworks, too. We spent so much time on the Promenade in Brooklyn watching them. Memorial Day. Fourth of July. Labor Day. Sometimes they would go off for no reason at all. We’d hear the booms in our house and grab our shoes. The memory of the four of us running down the street, laughing in the dark, is so clear in my head, and for a few seconds, I’m so happy. And then I remember it’s all gone. Truman’s dead. My mother’s in the hospital. My father left us.
I lower my head and start reading again. So no one can see the tears.
28 April 1795
He was stupid, the king, it’s true. He was high-handed, a ditherer, and far too free with the country’s money, but his gravest fault was none of these—it was that he lacked all imagination.
He had someone to hand him his underwear in the morning and someone to hand it back to at night. He had a palace with two thousand windows in it. Chandeliers of silver. Paintings above his privy. What was left for him to imagine?
If ever he caught sight of a child, thin as death, standing in a barren field, if ever he heard the wail of a poor, ragged mother kneeling by a tiny grave, he could always comfort himself with the notion, beloved of royals and other fortunates, that the child was a hungry child and the mother a grieving mother and he himself a fat king because God so willed it.
And yet it is hard even now for me to hate him, for I believe he meant no harm. You would not beat your dog because he is not a cat. He was born a dog and cannot change it. The king was born a king and could not change that either.
He had warnings. So many. And heeded none. He would sometimes gather his soldiers and threaten to put down the unruly Paris mob. Or talk about moving the court to the safety of a border town, where it could more easily be defended. Yet he did nothing. He would not act. The rioting in Paris could not make him do so. Nor the meeting of the Three Estates. Nor the oath his deputies had sworn at the tennis court. Nor July the fourteenth, 1789.
On that day the price of bread in Paris skyrocketed, and rumors were put about that battalions of soldiers were massing on the outskirts of the city. Angry and afraid, thousands of Parisians gathered at the Palais-Royal, where Desmoulins jumped up on a table and urged them to gather arms
and ammunition in order to defend themselves and liberty. They attacked the Bastille—a fortress prison into which any might be thrown without trial—to get at its weapons and powder stores. It was a sign writ large, a prologue so unsubtle a bumpkin could grasp its meaning. Yet that evening, the king wrote NOTHING in his diary. I heard the queen speak of it in disbelief to one of her ladies.
In the days that followed, we read in the broadsheets how Desmoulins’ ragged army took the Bastille and how all of Paris, poor and rich, celebrated its fall. Men and women, from the rudest beggars to duchesses in silk, chiseled at the fortress’s stones and heaved them down from the ramparts.
* * *
The summer wore on. The rumblings from Paris grew louder. Workers from the St-Antoine swaggered through the city streets in their red caps and long pants, attacking anyone in fine clothes. Bakers who had no bread were pulled from their shops and beaten. The antiroyalist play Charles IX received standing ovations. Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.
In August, the Assembly decreed that nobles must pay taxes, and that they could no longer tithe peasants. Then they went even further. They published a thing called The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.