Paris, 1870
WHEN LUCIEN WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, WAR CAME TO MONTMARTRE. Because of the war Lucien became the Rat Catcher and had his first encounter with the Colorman.
Of course war had come to the butte before. In the first century BC the Romans had built a temple to Mars, the god of war, on the mount, and from that point forward, you couldn’t catapult a cow at Paris without someone setting up for siege on Montmartre. With her seven freshwater wells, her windmills, her vegetable gardens, and her commanding view of the entire city, everyone agreed that there was no better butte on which to be besieged.
And so it came to pass that Louis-Napoléon, feeling pressured by Chancellor Bismarck’s proposing a Prussian derrière be put on the throne of Spain (thus putting hostile forces on borders to both the north and south of France) and buoyed by his successful campaigns against Russia and Austria, plus the reputation of his illustrious uncle as the greatest military strategist since Alexander, declared war on the Prussians in July of 1870. By September, the Prussian army had kicked nine shades of umber out of the French and Paris was under siege.
The boulevards were barricaded and the Prussian army surrounded the city. The great Krupp guns fired sporadically, which did little more than keep the city’s national guard running from neighborhood to neighborhood to put out fires. Hot-air balloons were lined down the middle of the Champs-Élysées, prepared to try to smuggle out letters as soon as night fell, and most would actually make it.
An early frost had dusted the cobbles of Place du Tertre that morning, as Lucien and Père Lessard stood at the edge of the butte, behind the iron fence that crowned the square, waiting for the loaves to be done, and watched French soldiers making their way up rue des Abbesses, pulling a hundred cannons with horses.
“They will store them in the Church of Saint-Pierre,” said Père Lessard. “And use them as a last resort if the Prussians try to take the city.”
“Maman says that the Prussians will rape and kill us,” said Lucien.
“Really, she told you that?”
“Oui. If the steps are not swept perfectly clean, they will rape and kill us all. Twice.”
“Ah, I see. Well, yes, the Prussians are a thorough people, but I don’t think you need to worry about it.”
“Papa, what is raping?”
Père Lessard pretended that his pipe had gone out and fumbled with a match against one of the iron fence bars as he tried to formulate a way to answer without actually having to answer. Had it been one of his daughters, he might have sent her back to her mother, but Madame had a way of implying to the boy that all the evils and plagues of man could be blamed, more or less, on the hapless baker of Montmartre, and he was in no mood to try to explain to his only son how he had invented rape.
And damn the match, it had burned all the way to his fingertips.
“Lucien, you have heard the term ‘making love’?”
“Yes, Papa, like when you and Maman are kissing and tickling and laughing. Régine said that is what you were doing.”
Père Lessard swallowed hard. It was a small apartment, but he always thought the children were asleep when—That spiteful woman and her giggling. “Yes, that’s right. Well, rape is the opposite. It is making hate.”
“I see,” said Lucien, mercifully satisfied with the answer. “Do you think we will get to shoot the cannons before the Prussians rape and kill us?”
“There will be no cannons for us. Our part of the fight will be feeding the hungry people of the butte.”
“We always do that. Perhaps Monsieur Renoir will come and fire the cannons, now that he is a soldier.”
“Perhaps,” said the baker. Renoir had been drafted into the cavalry, despite having been raised in the city and having never ridden a horse. A training officer who saw Renoir trying to handle horses took pity on the painter and hired him to teach his daughter how to paint, thus keeping him out of action. Monet and Pissarro had escaped to England. Bazille was training with the army in Algiers. Cézanne, the roughest of the lot, had gone into hiding in his beloved Provence.
“With all your pets gone, perhaps a suffering wife will at last be taken dancing?” said Madame Lessard. “In a new dress of white and black stripes, as was ordained by the Holy Father.”
“The Pope did not decree that you should have a striped dress to go dancing in, woman.”
“Well, perhaps now that your pets are gone, you’ll go to mass instead of drinking coffee all morning and talking about art, and you’ll know what the Holy Father said.” Madame Lessard turned then to her daughters, Marie and Régine, who stood by, pretending to mend stockings. “Have no fear, my ducklings, Maman won’t let you marry a heretic.”
“So I am a heretic now?”
“Who would say such a thing?” said Madame. “I will have their ears boxed by that sturdy doorman, Monsieur Robelard. I believe his price is two francs.” Madame held out her hand for the coins. “S’il vous plaît.”
Père Lessard dug into his pocket. Somehow, it seemed perfectly acceptable that he should pay Monsieur Robelard, the doorman at the Moulin de la Galette, to defend his honor against the accusation of being a heretic that no one had leveled. If nothing else, Père Lessard had the business sense of an artist.
Despite a siege on the city, Madame Lessard was saving for a black and white striped dress in which to be taken dancing. But there would be no dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, or any of the other dance halls in the city. The men who stayed in the city, even those who had been able to afford to send their families away before the Prussians arrived, spent their evenings and Sunday afternoons defending the barricades, and the women, when not hiding in the cellars, went about the business of feeding and caring for their children. The grocers, butchers, and bakers went about trying to provide for the Parisians when there was nothing left to provide.
The chickens and ducks pinned in the backyards of Montmartre disappeared first. The ducks and most tender yard hens in the beginning, but once the feed grain was gone, even the laying hens were short for the pot, until not even a single time-toughened rooster remained unstewed to announce the dawn. With no trains to bring livestock from the country, the butchers for Paris’s great Les Halles marketplace spent their days in cafés with their ham-sized fists wrapped around delicate cordial glasses of Pernod, until that, too, was gone. Montmartre’s two milk cows, belonging to Madame Jacob of the crémerie, were spared for a while because they could graze on the back slope of the butte and in the fencerows of the Maquis, the shantytown by the cemetery, but when the grass was nibbled to nubs and the National Guard’s horses were being slaughtered for meat, then even the sad-eyed Sylvie and Astrid found their way into the pot-au-feu, which Madame Jacob salted with her tears.
As the siege had fallen in the autumn, every vegetable garden in Montmartre and the Maquis was brimming with maize and snail-scarred squash, but two weeks after the Prussians arrived, with nothing coming into the city from the countryside, only the root vegetables remained, and those so rare that a gentleman in possession of a turnip might find himself in the company of a brace of Pigalle harlots, eager to exchange a full evening of lubricious charms for the promise of a demi-tuber.
When the Prussian guns first thundered in the distance, Père Lessard knew what was coming, so he bought all the flour he could find, then gathered a dozen empty flour sacks from the storeroom and led Lucien down the butte to a cooper’s shop tucked among the factories of Saint-Denis. There, for the price of asking, they were able to fill their flour sacks with the fine oak sawdust.
“You will use it to fire your ovens, no?” said the barrel maker. “Very smart. Burns very hot. But be careful. It can be explosive if the air is filled with it.”
“Yes, like flour,” said Père Lessard. “I will be careful.” He hadn’t thought of using the sawdust to fire the ovens. He shook the cooper’s hand, then hired a ragpicker with a donkey cart to haul the bags of sawdust up the butte.
“If strong French oak is good enough for our wine, it will be good for our bread, too,” he said to Lucien as they wound their way up Montmartre behind the cart. “The trick is to use no more than a quarter sawdust or the dough will not rise. But for piecrust, you can go as much as half.”
“How did you know to use sawdust, Papa?”
“Ours is a very old profession, and no one wants to hear excuses why the baker does not have wares, so we learn tricks. Why, once there was a pair of bakers on the Île de la Cité that were killing and baking foreign students from the Sorbonne into pies. And no one who bought the pies ever complained. Only a German father who missed his son and came to investigate his disappearance finally found them out. Cannibalism, right there on the doorstep of Notre-Dame.”
Lucien’s eyes had grown as big as his fists at the horrific prospect of what Father was proposing. “But, Papa, I don’t think I’m big enough to make students into pies. Perhaps you should have Marie and Régine do it. They are taller.”
“Oh, we won’t start you out on students, Lucien. They are quick and hard to knock on the head. We’ll start you out with something easier, a grandmother, I think.”
Lucien was having a hard time catching his breath. Why was the ragpicker smiling? Maybe he was going to be in on it. Maybe he would haul the grandmother to the bakery. Which was good. Lucien knew that unless he picked a grandmother who lived on Montmartre, he’d never get her up the hill without help.
“Maybe I can just ask a grandmother to come to the bakery. I could make up a story of how Maman needs help, and—”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary, Lucien. You’ll just conk her on the head. That is the proper way.”
The ragpicker nodded, as if it was well-known that conking a grandmother on the head was the accepted method.
Tears began to well in Lucien’s eyes. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to conk a grandmother. I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”
“Eh, war is hell,” said the ragpicker.
Père Lessard tousled Lucien’s hair, then pulled the boy’s head against his hip in a hug. “Shhhh, son, stop crying. I’m just fucking with you.”
Now the ragpicker threw his head back and laughed in the way only a Frenchman with seven teeth and a conscience soaked in wine can laugh, the sound his donkey might make if he were a heavier smoker and had just licked the devil’s ass to chase all taste of goodness from his tongue. The ragpicker wasn’t a scoundrel, but scoundrels envied his laugh.
Humiliated, horrified, and not a little out of breath, Lucien flailed at Father with his fists; the first bounced harmlessly off the baker’s bottom, the second plowed solidly and with great force into Père Lessard’s testicles, and in that instant, time stopped for the baker, and even before the breath left his body and he crumpled to the ground in pain, he thought, The boy has his mother’s sense of humor.
As Lucien ran up the hill toward home, Père Lessard said to the ragpicker, “He’s a sensitive boy. I think he should be an artist.”
Madame Lessard met him at the top of the stairs, her hands on her hips, her chin jutting like the prow of a warship. “So, you will have my son bake my mother into a pie, will you?”
“Just a grandmother, not his grandmother. I was teasing him.” Although it then crossed Lessard’s mind that if one were choosing a grandmother from which to make pies, Madame’s mother, who, upon a sunny day, when the twin locomotives of her bosom towed her cumulus skirts through the market at Louveciennes, was followed by children and dogs seeking shade, would indeed make for a rich and prodigious filling. He would atone for the thought, he knew, whether he chose to or not.
“I adore your mother, my love. I was simply preparing Lucien to help find new sources of filling for our pastries.”
“Like his grandmother?”
“Like rats,” said Père Lessard.
“No…” said Mère Lessard, for once not feigning shock.
“You know, the rabbit is a rodent also, and delicious.”
“Now you will feed me rat. Mother warned me about you.”
“No, ma chère, the rats will be for the customers only.” But your mother should thank the saints she lives in Louveciennes or there would be fat bitch pie for everyone on the butte, he thought.
LUCIEN DID NOT TAKE IMMEDIATELY TO THE DUTIES OF RAT CATCHER; IN FACT, for the first two days, he spent his morning chasing his quarry into the dark corners of Montmartre, only to find himself chased right back out of those same corners by a rat that had tripled in size and, if he was not mistaken, was carrying a knife.
Madame Jacob, who owned the crémerie, found him sulking one morning behind the Moulin de la Galette. She had gone to the north slope out of habit, to fetch her cows, but they had already passed on by then, and she was simply herding ghosts.
“No rats today, Lucien?”
“No one is supposed to know I am catching rats,” Lucien said.
“Well, you aren’t, are you?”
“They’re huge! They tried to rape and kill me.”
“Ah, but Père Lessard needs to feed Montmartre, as do I. I’ll tell you what, Lucien, let me give you something easier to catch, and you bring them to me, and I will give you three traps that I have, and some garlic, which your father can use for his rat pâté.”
“Easier to catch?” Lucien asked. He hoped Madame Jacob wasn’t going to suggest grandmothers again, because after his experience with the rats, he didn’t want to imagine what kind of raping and killing an angry grandmother might visit upon him.
“Escargots,” said Madame Jacob. “You’ll find them early morning in the cemetery, when the mist is still running over the gravestones.”
“Merde!” said Lucien, for the first time in his life.
THE NEXT MORNING, WHILE FATHER WAS STILL PROOFING THE OAKY LOAVES for baking, Lucien made his way up rue Lepic, past the still blades of the Moulin de la Galette, and down through the Maquis, with its row upon row of tiny, ramshackle houses, splintering privies, decimated vegetable gardens fenced with pickets of rough sticks, and the occasional broken wagon or junk pile. Usually the Maquis woke up shouting, but today it was oddly still, not even a late whore or early scavenger about; no rooster crowed, no dog barked, anyone able-bodied enough to have been at work was away, camped at the barricades with the militias. Of the scores of tin chimneys, but one bled a tarry stream of smoke over the roofs, someone burning oily rags to chase the morning chill, the only sign at all that the Maquis was still alive.
Lucien shivered and hurried down the hill to the cemetery. There, among the sycamores and chestnut trees, the moss-covered monuments and blackened bronze crypt doors, he found his prey. Upon the third tomb he passed, a fairly fresh slab of basalt belonging to the late Léon Foucault, was an angry escargot, his horns extended, lording over his stony realm like a dragon over his hoard of gold.
“Aha!” said Lucien.
“Aha!” replied the snail.
At which point Lucien dropped his wooden bucket and ran away, flailing his arms and screaming as if he’d just seen a ghost, which he was fairly sure he had.
“Wait, wait, wait, boy!” said a voice from behind.
Lucien looked over his shoulder, although he continued to scream, so as to not lose his place. But it was neither a ghost nor a charging, angry, and talkative escargot, but a rather old man, skeletally thin, wearing an ochre-colored plaid suit that had seen its prime perhaps thirty years before. The old man was holding the snail, shell pinched between two fingers, offering it to Lucien.
“It’s yours, boy. Come now, take it.” He wore thick spectacles in tortoiseshell frames and had a long, angular nose.
Lucien crept back toward the old man, retrieved his bucket, and held it out. He’d seen this old man before, tending a small garden in the Maquis. Always in his very clean, if threadbare, plaid suit, a medal on a tricolor ribbon pinned to his chest. The old man dropped the snail in the bucket. “Merci, monsieur,” Lucien said, bowing a little, although he wasn’t sure why.
The old man was very tall, or at least he seemed so, because he was so thin, and he crouched and looked into the bucket. “There should be great thoughts in that one. I’ve been watching him on Foucault’s tomb for an hour now.”
Lucien didn’t understand. “It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for Madame Jacob.”
“Just as well,” said the old man, standing up now. “They taste like dirt. And with no butter or garlic to put them in, you might as well be eating dirt. But here’s the secret: only eat snails from the graves of great thinkers. Foucault here was a brilliant man. He calculated a way to measure the speed of light. And he is dead only two years. Surely his soul still trickles from the grave, to be consumed by this snail. If we eat the snail, we absorb some of that brilliance, do we not?”
Lucien had no idea, but clearly the old man expected an answer. “Yes?” Lucien ventured.
“You are correct, young man. What is your name?”
“I am Lucien Lessard, monsieur.”
“Also correct. And I am Professeur Gaston Bastard. You may call me Le Professeur. I was a teacher, retired now. The Ministry of Education gave me a pension and a medal.” He tapped the medal on his chest. “For excellence.”
The Professeur paused again and tilted an ear, as if waiting for another answer, so Lucien said, “Excellent?”
“Très bien!” said the Professeur. “Come.” The Professeur turned on the heel of a very broken-down boot and strode off down the path, his back as straight as a twenty-year-old’s, chin high, as if he were leading a march. “You know this entire cemetery stands over a limestone quarry dug by the Romans two thousand years ago?”
The Professeur paused, turned, waited.
“The Romans,” Lucien said. He was beginning to get the rhythm now. When his mother, his father, or nearly any grown-up talked to him, they were really just interested in hearing their own voice and he could let his mind wander, to his lovely Minette, or dinner, or how he might need to pee, but the Professeur required attention.
“Much of early Paris was built from the limestone in this quarry. There! There is one.”
The Professeur stopped and waited while Lucien picked a fat snail off a very old tomb, completely green with moss. Then they continued.
“Later they began to mine the gypsum from Montmartre, from which they make…?”
Lucien had no idea what gypsum was. He stopped breathing for a moment, trying to think. He knew that if something came out of a mine it was in the ground. He tried to think of anything he knew that was made from something in the ground.
“Onion soup?” he said.
The Professeur looked at Lucien over his glasses. “Plaster,” he said. “They make plaster from gypsum. The finest plaster in the world. Perhaps you have heard of plaster of Paris?”
Lucien hadn’t. “Yes,” he said.
“Well it was actually plaster of Montmartre. The whole butte was once so riddled with mine shafts that it became unsafe to build on. They had to pour concrete into the old mines to make it stable. But some of the mine shafts are still down there. They open up after a strong rain or if someone digs a cellar too deep. One of them even opens into the Maquis.” The Professeur raised an eyebrow, as if waiting for an answer, even though he hadn’t asked a question.
“The Maquis?” Lucien said.
“Yes, not far from my house. It’s hidden. It’s where the best rats come from.”
“Rats?” said Lucien.
They spent another hour picking the snails from gravestones and the Professeur showed Lucien how to follow pearlescent slime trails under the bushes and leaves to track down the snails who were already finding their hiding places for the day.
“They would taste better if you could put them in a tub filled with cornmeal, let them live on that for a week to purge the earth from their bodies. Alas, there is no corn. But you should only eat Foucault’s snail, anyway.”
The Professeur had insisted that Lucien keep the snail they’d plucked from Foucault’s tomb in his pocket and made him promise he alone would eat it so he could absorb some of the snail-eaten soul of the great scientist.
“Now,” said the Professeur, “if we could get some snails from Père-Lachaise Cemetery, there are some great thinkers buried there. Most of these you’ve collected graze on the souls of scalawags.”
Lucien was happy that he had nearly filled his bucket with snails, but as he followed the old man back to his little house in the Maquis, he was beginning to suspect that his benefactor might be a madman.
The Professeur showed Lucien into the two-room cabin. Most of the hard-packed dirt floor of the front room was taken up by what looked like a small racetrack. Against one wall were two cages, each about knee-high. One was full of mice, the other rats. There were perhaps a dozen of each species.
“Horses and charioteers,” said the Professeur.
“Rats,” Lucien said with a shudder. There, in the cage, they seemed much smaller, less dangerous, less likely to rape and kill him than the ones he’d encountered in the wild.
“I’m training them to perform,” said the Professeur. He reached into the larger cage and retrieved one of the rats, who seemed completely unbothered by being handled and simply sniffed at the old man’s hand as if looking for food.
“I am going to teach them to perform the chariot-race scene from the novel Ben-Hur,” said the Professeur. “The rats shall be my horses and the mice my charioteers.”
Lucien didn’t know what to say, but then he noticed that there were, indeed, six little chariots lined up along one side of the oval track.
“I will train them and then take my spectacle to Place Pigalle and charge people to watch the races. There may even be wagering.”
“Wagering,” Lucien repeated, trying to mimic the enthusiasm in the Professeur’s voice.
“You have to reward them when they do what you want. I tried punishing them when they misbehaved, but the hammer seemed to crush their spirit.”
Lucien watched as the Professeur hitched the rat to a chariot, then set him down and retrieved a mouse from the other cage and placed him in the chariot. The mouse immediately wandered off and started looking for an opening in the wall around the track. Soon there were rats and mice running all around the little arena, and two rats had even crawled over the wall and were dragging their chariots around the outer walls of the house, looking for an opening to the outside. The Professeur engaged Lucien’s help, and they chased and replaced rat horses and mouse drivers until the two of them were kneeling over the tiny hippodrome, gasping for breath.
“Oh, they mocked me,” said the Professeur. “Called me a loon. But when I achieve the spectacle, I shall be hailed as a genius. I have eaten Foucault’s snails as well, you know?”
“Pardon, monsieur, but they may call you a loon anyway.”
“Do you think me a loon, Lucien?” the Professeur asked with the same schoolmaster’s tone with which he had asked every other question.
Fortunately, he was asking the baker boy of Montmartre, a place where loons tended to congregate, and whose father had taught him that great men were often eccentric, unpredictable, and enigmatic, and just because we did not understand the path they chose, we should not doubt their vision.
“I think you are a genius, monsieur, even if you are a loon.”
The Professeur scratched his bald head with a rat as he considered the answer, then shrugged. “Well, I have my medal anyway. You should get your snails to Madame Jacob. Tomorrow you can return and help me teach the mice to hold the reins. Come, I’ll show you where to catch meat for your father’s pâtés.”
MADAME JACOB HAD NOT BEEN IMPRESSED THAT LUCIEN’S SNAILS HAD FED ON the souls of geniuses, but she did give him the three rat traps she promised, as well as a braid of garlic for his father. The traps were actually little cages, cast in bronze, with a round port in the side where a rat might enter and a spring mechanism that snapped the port shut when the rat stepped on a plate inside. A brass chain with an anchor ring was attached to each trap.
The Professeur had shown Lucien the entrance to the old gypsum mine, concealed beneath a thicket of laurel bushes just above the Maquis. Lucien often played in the Maquis with his friends, and he knew the bushes, and that there were blackberry brambles with vicious thorns woven through the laurel. The thorns were probably the only reason the bushes hadn’t long ago been hacked up for fuel and the mine filled in like the others.
“You’ll need to go far enough into the mine for it to be dark,” said the Professeur. “Rats are nocturnal and prefer to move in the dark. But don’t go too far in. It may not be safe from cave-in. Just past where the light reaches. That is where I caught my charges.”
The next morning, Lucien carried his heavy traps into the mouth of the mine and when the light stopped, so did he. While trying not to look at the spiderwebs overhead or stare into the pitch-black of the mine, he baited each of the traps with a tiny strip of rind from a wheel of camembert cheese, then closed the lids and wound the clockwork mechanism that set the trap, just as Madame Jacob had taught him. He pushed each trap into the dark against the mine wall, at which point the panic overcame him and he ran out of the mine as if pursued by demons.
He resolved that the next day, when it came time to retrieve his traps, he would bring a candle, and perhaps Father’s butcher knife, and maybe he could borrow one of the cannons from the church if they weren’t using it, but instead he brought his friend Jacques, lured him with a slight exaggeration of the value of what they would be retrieving from the mine.
“Pirate treasure,” said Lucien.
“Will there be swords?” asked Jacques. “I would like a sword.”
“Just hold the candle. I have to find my traps.”
“But why are you looking for rat traps?”
Lucien was trying to calculate how they had come so far into the dark and still not found his traps, and Jacques’s questions were distracting him. “Jacques, be quiet or we will have to rape and kill your grandmother and put her in a pie.”
Lucien was fairly sure his parents would have been proud of the way he had handled the problem, but when Jacques started to sniffle, Lucien added, “Because that is what pirates do.” What a baby. Why did children get so upset about a little pie?
“No!” said Jacques. “No you won’t! I’m—”
But before Jacques could announce his intent, a scratchy voice sounded out of the dark.
“Who’s there?”
And with that Jacques was off, wailing toward the entrance, and Lucien took off behind him. After a few steps, Jacques’s candle went out, and after a few steps more, Lucien tripped and fell headfirst against the wall of the mine shaft. When his head hit, a splash of bright white lights fired across his vision and he heard a high-pitched note in his ear, as if someone had struck a tuning fork inside his head. When he was finally able to push himself up on his hands and knees and the points of light cleared from his vision, he was in total darkness, with no sense of which way was out of the mine. He could no longer hear Jacques’s steps retreating or where they might have faded to.
He crawled a few feet, afraid that if he stood he might trip again. The powdered gypsum on the floor of the mine was soft on his hands and knees, and after his abrupt encounter with the wall, he thought he’d take his chances closer to the ground. A few feet more and he thought he might be able to see some light, and he stood up. Yes, there was definitely light.
He stood and started toward it, probing cautiously ahead with a toe before planting each foot. He saw a shape, an orange rectangle, and thought it might be the mouth of the mine, but as he moved, the shape revealed itself as something that was illuminated from the side, not the source of the light, and he realized he’d been moving around a bend in the mine. It was a canvas, he thought, but it was the back of the canvas. He could see the nail heads on the stretchers, illuminated by the light of a single candle.
From behind the canvas, the sound of labored breathing.
Lucien moved a little farther around the corner and stopped. Stopped breathing. There was a little man there beyond the canvas, naked, brown, his feet and legs dusted with white gypsum powder, bent over something, a dark, long shape on the floor. He was scraping the dark thing with some kind of blade. The blade looked like it might be made of glass, but it looked very sharp.
Lucien started to shake from holding his breath, so he allowed himself a breath, slow, shallow, quiet. He could feel his heart beating in his temples, behind his eyes, yet he dared not move.
The little man would scrape the blade down the length of the dark shape, then he would scrape the blade into some sort of earthen jar and sigh, as if with satisfaction. It was the motion that Father used when scraping flour from his bread board after the loaves were formed.
Then the shape on the floor moved, moaned, the sound of an animal, and Lucien nearly leapt straight up in the air but managed to catch himself. It was a person, a woman, and she’d moved a leg into the narrow band of light thrown from the candle. The leg was blue. Even in the dim orange light of the candle, Lucien could see it. Now he could make out how she lay, on her side on the floor of the mine, one arm stretched out above her head until it disappeared into the black.
The little man tapped the blade into the jar, then turned and placed the blade right where the woman’s face would be and pressed down. The woman moaned, and Lucien’s breath caught again, this time with a bit of a yip.
The little man wheeled toward Lucien with his blade up, his eyes like black glass, in the darkness. “Who’s there?”
“Merde!” Lucien said for the second time ever, although it came out in a very long, siren wail behind him as he bolted into the darkness, his hands held before him, and he kept trailing that audible “merde” until he saw the light of day and escape—the sweet green light on the thorn-bushes outside—and he was nearly there, almost there, when a long arm reached down by the mouth of the mine and snatched him up.