19

MANY CIVIL SERVANTS ARE DEPORTED

THE GUARDS OUTSIDE the Hôtel de Ville had orders to admit no one. Too many journalists had been skulking by, waving their pens of malignant affliction and asking to interview clerks, however petty, to squeeze from them the truth of the Prefect’s plans. Was Haussmann going to tear down Notre-Dame? Would he expropriate the Deity, and, if so, how was payment to be arranged?—Keep them all out, the Baron said, until I tell you otherwise.

They knew their orders, and the penalty for disobeying them—reassignment to the dimmest and farthest corners of the civil service, of which it had many—but how were they to resist entry to a poor girl, visibly pregnant and dressed in black, carrying a basket of white flowers and protesting that it was her father, she had to see her father, for her mother had only just passed away?

—What’s your father’s name, child? the guards asked, but the girl sobbed so much that they did not insist.

—I’ll take you to him, offered a handsome young guardsman for whom the prospect of reassignment held few terrors. The girl was, after all, quite pretty; she had the sort of beauty which only gets better with mourning. Her pale skin caught the shadow attractively in its furrows; her lips even without makeup were a deep blood-red where she had bitten them in her grief.

She shook her head, and held up the flowers entreatingly.—May I go in?

—Sure you may, waved the handsome young guardsman (who, if you’re curious, spent five unpleasant years watching convicts in the Cayenne penal colony, until the Second Empire ended and it was safe for him to return to Paris).

Madeleine, for of course it was she, now murmured to this clerk and now to that:—Pray where is the Prefect? I’ve come on urgent business … Her interlocutor saw her face, her big-bellied figure, her flowers and mourning costume in that order. Well, each clerk thought in turn, if she’s come this far it must be really important, and showed her on to the next-highest clerk, who, of course, thought just the same thing. O the manifold relocations that followed in her wake! Madeleine could not have done a better job of scattering the civil servants if she’d fired on them with grapeshot. One ended his days on Mauritius, another on tiny Réunion; several went to Algiers and met the range of fates which awaited French colonists in those times; still others were packed off to Lorraine until the Germans took it and called it Löthringen; then they were transferred to Lille, to Brest, to every dreary corner of the Third Republic, and it had many. The fact that they had once been disgraced led others to disgrace them further, and so Haussmann’s displeasure survived his term as Prefect, and hounded them like a curse from an antique play.

In no time Madeleine stood outside the Prefect’s office. She tapped lightly on the door.—Yes?—It’s me. Madeleine … She was pulled into the office before the clerks, who had all gathered to see how the interview went, heard her so much as gasp.

A quarter of an hour later she came out again. Evidently the interview had not gone well. The girl was in tears, and the Prefect in a state one dares not observe in one’s superiors. His face was red and his hair awry; his hands were fists and veins danced in his neck to the harsh suck of his breath. The clerks ran like geese before a gale, but not before they overheard Haussmann hiss,—Tell him I’m not so easily bought! Then the door slammed, and the girl hurried out as quickly as she had come. The guards watched her go, little suspecting that she was practically the last Parisienne they’d see, and certainly the most beautiful. She ascended the steps of her carriage and was gone in a chorus of wheels and equine agitation.

Fortunately we’re not clerks. We can peek into Haussmann’s office without fear of transportation, and hear, a few minutes earlier, Madeleine’s imperious question,—Why have you avoided me?

Haussmann, conciliatory when cornered, hedges:—Why my dear, didn’t you get my letter? I’ve been working …

—Your letter didn’t say anything. “A terrible struggle.” I don’t know what you mean by that. Aren’t you always struggling terribly?

—Does it seem so? I am afraid I do often … work …

—Are you ashamed of me?

—Ah, Madeleine, Haussmann sighed, you’re so young! And you don’t understand so many things. I’m not ashamed of you: on the contrary. But you must think of me as two people, my dear: Georges-Eugène your lover, and Haussmann the Prefect of Paris. If only we could go our separate ways! Georges-Eugène would be with you every night, while Haussmann labored to bring the fruits of progress to an undeserving city. But alas, we have only one body between us, and that body must remain here, where it can be seen, leading on this … this lot. By the way, how did you get in?

—Surely your body’s been seen here enough that you can spare it for a night or two?

—Georges-Eugène regrets that Haussmann cannot tell you more. In a month, two months, you understand, he may be free, but now …

—Well! Please tell Georges-Eugène that if he wants to see me, he will do so tonight, or never again.

Haussmann shrugged sadly.—If he had a choice in the matter, I’m sure he would go.

—A choice! You’re free to do as you like. Your servants don’t have any choice, but you …

—I am less free even than they, for I answer to my work. It does not forgive and its memory is long.

—Hmph! said Madeleine. And do you think I’ll forget how you treated me? Do you think I’ll forgive you?

—When you see all that I’ve accomplished, perhaps …

—If you don’t come to me tonight, then you’ll accomplish nothing. Baron.

It was as though she’d struck him with her fist. Haussmann recoiled; he raised his hand, to strike back, she thought, and shouted,—De Fonce is behind all this! Isn’t he? He put you up to it, confess! He’s trying to blackmail me, to twist my arm. The conniving cripple! Tell him … tell him that it won’t work. Tell him that it will be his own ruin he engineers, and his alone. Or his and yours, and that of your child. But you’ll have nothing from me. Tell him you’ll have nothing. Go.

—I don’t believe you’ve understood, Madeleine said. My father has nothing to do with it. But I see that he was right: all you value is your reputation. You don’t care whether what you do is right or wrong, as long as you’re remembered for it! Well, you’ll be remembered, I promise you: you will be remembered.

—Go! Haussmann gargled, and, except for the Baron’s final exclamation noted above, the interview ended.

*   *   *

Of Saint-Grimace not even rubble remained. The inn or convent that had survived atheism, revolution, superstitious nuns, and profiteering geologists had vanished altogether; the front half, where the convent proper had stood, was now a deep ditch; the rear, the former garden, was being dug up, along with the rest of the rue de la Licorne, which had been stripped of its paving stones. Clods of earth flew into the ditch as though in preparation for a score of funerals. Beyond the old convent lay other streets similarly naked, and between them an unrecognizable jumble of stonework: some buildings had been pulled down to their foundations; others stood half-demolished, baring their smoke-spotted insides for the first time to the light and the rain. Like Prometheus chained to the rock they were ravaged by nesting pigeons, who rose from the hulks in clouds each time a mattock struck home nearby. Only by staring fixedly at a building for the moment left intact, a flophouse on the rue de la Vieille Draperie, did Madeleine recognize something of the district: these were the walls she had seen from the convent windows, these the facades, gone now, all their busy order turned to mud, confusion, and the clang of metal on stone.

How had so much managed to pass unnoticed? Madeleine would have liked to stop the coach, to descend and inspect the site. But a procession’s worth of carriages waited behind hers; she waved and let herself be carried on toward the opposite bank. She looked back indignantly at the muddy future road. Why had no one protested the demolition? The nuns might have objected; theirs was after all a holy place (in her anger she forgot the years that separated her from religious fervor), and full of precious antiquities besides! Not every Parisian might have known of the convent, for there were others, and greater ones, in profusion; still, its disappearance would leave the city somehow less fit for its purpose, the way a dictionary loses value if words are cut from it, even—or perhaps especially—if they are words no one knows. And what, she wondered, had become of Saint-Grimace’s clientele?

(In fact the demolition had been protested by a single petitioner. Jacob, who watched its windows long after his daughter had fled, and continued to watch them even when they no longer turned yellow at vespers. With Madeleine gone, the windows were his only connection to the world which, he thought, had opened to him when he fished the girl from the river: a romantic world of bastards, intrigue, aristocrats, devotion, and—who knew?—perhaps a great fire in the end, to kill off the villains. So he waited. Haussmann replaced the city’s oil lamps with gas lamps, and many lamplighters were laid off; Jacob was among them. He no longer made the rounds on the Île de la Cité; his walks now took him only from one bar’s counter to another, less and less far every night. No longer a lamplighter nor a voyeur, he told his fellow drinkers how his daughter was a noblewoman, how she had been educated in a convent, how she consorted with the greatest names in Paris, with de Morny and Rothschild and with Haussmann himself! I’ll bet she does, said Jacob’s fellow drunks, winking. One night as he staggered homeward he passed the place where Saint-Grimace had stood. The convent was half-demolished, and, for the first time, he saw what was inside: only rubble and rooms, which, in the white gaslight, looked like any other rooms anywhere.—Abomination! he roared. Catastrophe! He ran up and down the street, shouting to anyone who would listen,—They’ve ruined everything! First the lamps and now this! Monstrosity! O cruel, cruel, cruelty! To which the few passersby replied,—You’re drunk, old man. Go home. Jacob got blind drunk that night and nearly fell into the Seine; he left the city the next morning and went to work in a mill town where voyeurs were unheard of, for the inhabitants snuffed their lamps and went to bed a half hour after nightfall. So we respond to the moralists who criticize the excesses of the Second Empire and the demolition of so many beautiful old buildings: even destruction may, when seen in the right way, have an edifying effect.)

Madeleine let the coach carry her back to the boulevard de Courcelles. She sank into the cushions with a sigh almost of relief; still, as she rested her hands on her belly, she wondered against herself what had become of Saint Grimace’s stone hand.