28

ELSEWHERE

—ARE YOU READY to go, gentlemen?

—Ready, Hennezel?

—As I’ll ever be, my dear Delesse.

—You have your instructions? Keep the fire lit until you reach a thousand meters; then bank the stove and follow the wind.

—And when we land, your spotters will come for us, isn’t that so?

—You won’t be out of our sight for a moment. We’ve … let’s see, a breeze from the west. Four knots. You ought to come down by Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and be home for dinner. I’m loosing the ropes, all right, gentlemen?

—Loose the ropes!

—You don’t need to tell him that, Hennezel. He’s done it already.

—So he has. And up we go! Why, look how small everything’s got.

—Hold on … Hey!

—What is it, Delesse?

—I can’t hear you up there!

—How do we know …

—I said, I can’t hear you!

—Is something wrong?

—I say, Hennezel. How do we know when we’re at a thousand meters?

So Hennezel and Delesse left the earth. Their job as balloon testers for the Empire’s nascent Bureau of Meteorology was the best they could find after Haussmann dismissed them without so much as a thank you or a letter of recommendation. Not that a recommendation from the Prefect, in that season, would have opened many doors. After all the stink about the graveyard, Haussmann’s name was, so to speak, mud; in many cases his friends fared worse than those who had fallen from his favor. The papers said that the Prefect had, in the winter of 1869, lost his mind. They produced as evidence the indisputable fact that he’d shaved his beard. Reporters spoke of his mania for cutting everything down … While others, who did not publish their accounts, said that costume had driven Haussmann mad. Inspectors superior in grade to Delesse (before he was sacked, that is) whispered that their boss, the Baron, had gone to Compiègne dressed in ladies’ clothes. They said he’d looked quite gay in that getup; it was the return to a civil servant’s black habit which did him in, in the end. Others still—but Hennezel and Delesse did not know them—said that the trouble began a few days after Compiègne, when Octavie and Fanny-Valentine returned to Paris. Such shouting as you never heard! they whispered. And then silence which was worse than the shouting. It must have been bad, they said, because the Prefect didn’t come to work the next day. When he appeared the day after, his face had a decade of lines scratched in it, and his beard was gone.

So much for rumor. The facts, as sorrowfully apprehended by Hennezel and Delesse: not two days after the Baron’s return, the papers cried that Haussmann was in league with a demolition man, that the ignominious railroad he wished to inflict on Paris’s dead was to be paid for with stolen funds, with monies misappropriated from foundling hospitals, orphanages, and societies which would otherwise have distributed free wine to the poor. The fact that Haussmann appeared beardless before the Municipal Council to defend his graveyard didn’t help. The Councilmen heard his arguments for sanitation, for modernity, for reverence toward the dead; but when his speech was done, all they wanted to know was, why had he made his crooked deal with de Fonce? And what had become of his whiskers?

In truth the Assistant Inspector and Inspector’s Assistant were fortunate to get jobs in the civil service at all. Haussmann threatened them with transfers to Cayenne, to Saint-Helena; but, dejected, already looking forward to exile in each other’s increasingly trying company, they happened to catch sight of an announcement that the Meteorology Bureau was hiring. The pay wasn’t bad; in fact, it was quite good, so good that neither Hennezel nor Delesse could understand why there weren’t more candidates for the job. But we were speaking of the facts in Haussmann’s case. There was, in addition, the fact that, not long after his return from Compiègne, before the trouble with the papers and the Council, the Baron called Hennezel and Delesse into his office. He appeared not to have slept for longer even than was customary for him. The spies preferred not to remember his face: everywhere but the eyes it was raw and old, as though it had been dragged forcibly into its future. The eyes were simply blank. At most they had a trace of expression, the way you can see the outline of a demolished building still on the building next door.

The Baron told them:—Take a half-dozen policemen and go to de Fonce’s house. Say that you have a warrant for the arrest of Madeleine de Fonce—write one yourselves, if you think you’ll need it—and take her into your custody. Bring her here.

—To your office, sir? Delesse asked.

—No, to … no. Haussmann’s hands covered his eyes.—Do nothing. Wait. Leave me.

They received no further orders, and so carried none out. They were the only ones who knew this fact, and it rose with them into the clouds, it rose and rose.

*   *   *

And Madeleine? For weeks after the Ball of the Expropriated, the youth who called himself Poissel went to the Parc Monceau each morning. He arrived not long after dawn and waited in the scant shelter of the observatory’s archways until just before noon. At last his vigil was rewarded: Madeleine, majestic in a gray morning dress, appeared, holding the hand of a girl of four or five. They took the path which ran between the stream (formerly the River Lethe) and the ruins of the naumachia. Poissel followed them in. Madeleine at last! Poissel thought of what excuse he would give: Mademoiselle, I happened to be taking the air … Or would it be better to tell the truth? Someone who seems to know you well told me I’d find you here … Would she be frightened? Or flattered? If only he looked less ridiculous! But Poissel was aware, as only one who claims not to be vain can be aware, that this was impossible. He had been born ridiculous—his neck, when he died, ought to be exhibited in a museum of natural curiosities—and life had done little to change him. To run up to them, Poissel decided, would be undignified, and perhaps alarming. He would wait for them to stop; then he would go up and speak. There. They stopped by a reflecting pool in the center of the park. He would go … no, he’d wait a moment longer. In order that they not see him before he was ready, Poissel waited on the far side of a tree.

—Elise, are you listening? We’re going to take a trip, you and I.

—Mirror, said the girl.

—Yes, the water’s like a mirror. You can see yourself in it, can’t you?

—Mirror.

—To Italy, which is a warm place with pretty things to look at. Then on a ship just like the ones you have at home. With sailors.

—Mirror sailors.

What sort of a language was this? Poissel wondered.

—To Athens, which is in Greece. Greece is … well, it’s another place. They have Greeks.

—Greeks sailors.

—Who are famous sailors, yes. And then we’ll come home again.

—Greeks home.

Why, Poissel thought, this child was amazing! She’d practically told the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey in four words. He was taken with the fancy that this was what all language would become, or ought to become: stripped of everything unnecessary, of everything which came with reflection, complication, abstraction, all the paths by which the world was lost. What an interesting thought! He took a small notebook from his breast pocket and tried to think of a succinct way to write it down.

—No, home to Paris. For a while, anyway. I … I don’t know, Elise.

—Italy Italy. Greeks Greeks.

Just write down what she says, fool, Poissel told himself. You’ll have time to figure it out later. Let’s see. Mirror …

—Does that please you? Well, we’ll hope it does. Do you see yourself? Come on, my heart. I’ll show you the waterfall.

Poissel scrawled a few words more. It was important to get these things down while they were fresh in your mind; otherwise you might lose them forever, and that would be a pity. Besides, he felt that this was the beginning of something important. A new language, in which one could say, perhaps, things that had never before been said—or, to be precise, in which one could write things that had never before been written. Amazing, wasn’t it, how the world kept making itself new! He would write an article chiding those sad scribblers who said that history had exhausted itself, that there was no going on. There was always going on. As soon as he’d finished writing that thought down—how quickly the words came!—he’d follow Madeleine and the girl, and approach when they stopped again. Although perhaps it would be better if he talked to her tomorrow? Tomorrow his mind would be clear again. And perhaps Madeleine would be alone, which would make her easier to approach … Today has served its purpose, Poissel told himself: I have my idea. Let tomorrow serve another. He put the notebook back in its pocket and left the park the way he had come in.

*   *   *

De Fonce profited, of course, from Haussmann’s disgrace, as he did from everything: when the Municipal Council voted not to take possession of M. Duclos’s asparagus farm, it was the demolition man who got the land. It lay fallow through the Empire’s fall, the autumnal year when Louis Napoleon’s bladder and Prussia’s nerve shadow-boxed across the Rhine. Then the Prussians invaded and nerve won out, as it tends to do; the asparagus field was trampled under soldiers’ boots. When the Prussians left, a year later, the land was not good for growing anything, so de Fonce built on it a country estate in the old style, and planted trees that would make a decent park a century hence. Every year when autumn came he announced his intention of moving there for good and living out his days as a country gentleman; but something invariably came up and his departure was postponed. For weeks his trunks stood in the hall and then it was winter; sighing, de Fonce ordered them unpacked and resigned himself to another year in the city. The truth was that Paris would not allow de Fonce to leave. He had become one of the city’s vital functions, like sewers, or dreams, the repository of everything which the Parisians had forgotten, and which they paid dearly to recover from oblivion. He died in Paris, a wealthy old man, his boxes packed for a journey he would never undertake.

By then Madeleine had come back to Paris. She had been away longer than she’d planned, and had seen a great deal: not everything, as Nasérie had predicted, but enough. Elise saw more. Our century unfolded its dark, grasping miracles around her, and she lived bravely within them, and spoke of them as she could. She did not know her father, except by his work, which outlasted everyone. Nor did she wonder what Haussmann’s last wish had been. And they leave us, they leave us and our stories, and we cannot follow them. Nevertheless I imagine that somewhere, far off, under different stars, Madeleine found her marquise again. It is her due.

*   *   *

Haussmann in Constantinople, February 1873. From the balcony everything looks so far away, Haussmann remarks; why, the muddy white houses below might be models of houses, and the Bosphorus a glittering construction of paste, dotted here and there with cunningly wrought replicas of long-necked galleys, their oars lifting and dipping like the legs of a scorpion. A scorpion like the one he thought he’d seen scuttling about the floor of the wardrobe before his servant tossed his trunk into that capacious gloom. They’ve given Haussmann a flattering amount of room, considering that his entourage is but a single manservant, a groom, and an old surveyor who was once employed by the Department of Public Works. The surveyor, whose name is either Vignon or Fignon, Haussmann can’t remember which, was loyal to the last, and defended the Prefect sternly in the evening journals.—If he is corrupt, Vignon put the question, then why is he not rich? No, gentlemen, I assure you, the man is straight as his streets. But it was too late: by then his enemies already controlled the press. Fignon’s article was one of the few his secretary marked as important, along with a handful of notices in the British and American papers. How the secretary had deceived him!—Bring me all the articles which concern me, Haussmann ordered. How had it come to pass that, after eleven years, the secretary whose instructions were nonetheless clear began to tick with his red pen only those rare columns which mentioned Haussmann the builder, Haussmann the host of the Empire’s most charming parties, Haussmann the Magnificent? He had asked for no such flattery. Nevertheless it had happened. It was like … like a servant painting over parts of a mirror so that a fine lady can admire herself in it; first he paints a straight nose onto the glass, then perfectly arched eyebrows, then a bosom endowed with the perfect shadows of an imaginary light. Then come the shoulders, the chin, the hair, and at last the mirror has become a portrait and not a good likeness at that. The philosophers apparently wonder whether, if you replace all the parts of a chair one at a time, it becomes a different chair, and if so at what point? How much paint must be applied to a mirror before it ceases to be a mirror?

The river below is smooth now; the galley has passed. No embankments. Well, there’s a place to begin, Haussmann thinks, and imagines what the Ottomans will say to each other when they meet on the river promenade after evening prayers. Salaam aleikum, salaam salaam, the only word Haussmann knows of Ottoman, to them he must seem a child, always saying hello, piping and bellowing, hello! in an effort to get all his silent, defiant meaning into the word. Your city will have to go, he tells them, salaam salaam, the old quarter will be torn down and you can use the beams for firewood if they’re not too rotten, say goodbye to your medina, your donkey-cart streets and hunchbacked hills, but don’t worry, here comes the Avenue Ismaïl Pasha and the Galleries Lafayette, salaam salaam! To the rats salaam and to the beggars salaam and to the mice and to the lice and the shacks back of the port and to the wells so foul it’s a wonder the whole city hasn’t died of cholera by now or of the runs, which the Baron caught on arrival so that half his mind is always on the horrors of the Turkish cabinet, a stinking hole in the stinking ground, and to your turbans, salaam salaam salaam!

Where’s Fignon? Usually the surveyor, though purblind, respects the time as a draftsman respects a straightedge. Vignon will lead him into the city, today, today they can begin the first measurements. Fignon with his instruments and Haussmann with his fine boots and the velvet waistcoat given him by some gouty ambassador out of gouty recognizance for some gouty diplomatic favor. Fignon, with eye sockets as wrinkled as empty wallets, will carry the tools. The Baron will carry himself erect. Together—Vignon leading and Haussmann behind—they will ply the streets and pull them straight. Constantinople. So small, from the balcony, and so far away. Haussmann shudders, preoccupied suddenly by the fear that the city will not grow when he descends to it, that he will walk model streets dotted with dollhouse-sized houses, he and Vignon, like giants, in a city which will not reveal itself to him except as a model. The fear of never seeing the city, never seeing the real city, rises before Haussmann like a cloak held up by a solicitous attendant: Turn, sir, hold out your arms, there, sir, there. If only Haussmann had relied less on his servants! For they led him into complication, they lead, they always lead into complication. Even friends lead that way; even lovers. If he had never met de Fonce … if he had never met Madeleine … At times the cloak muffles Haussmann’s sight; its wool folds stop his breath, and a curious sharp pain begins in the center of his chest, and spreads into his lungs. It’s the box, he thinks, not the cloak but the box which covers me now.

Then the sensation fades, and he stands as he stood before, on a balcony, wrinkling his nose at the warm and rancid air, while below him the splendor of Constantinople, which has withstood a thousand years of city planners already, winks at him, the sun caught in a bit of tin on a low rooftop. Ah, he thinks, old city, old bitch, I’ll spread your streets like a dancer’s legs, and sow Haussmann in all your courtyards, your covered alleys, your dark places, dark no more.

But Haussmann, who had been commissioned to modernize Constantinople by the newly founded Society of Finances and Public Works of the Ottoman Empire, found the Society’s coffers as empty of ringing coin as its name was long on pomp. He left the city as he found it, waiting for an architect to put the mark of man once more on the work of time.

*   *   *

In 1889 the Universal Exhibition came to Paris again, and the city was lit not with gas but with electric globes which nested like new-discovered planets in the trees of the Champs-Élysées. Across the river, at the end of the Champ de Mars, rose the tower for which the city has become famous. There is a story that an old gentleman wearing a cross of the Legion of Honor like a gilt crab on his breast demanded to be let in there after visiting hours, “to inspect his own work.” The doorkeeper, mistaking him for one of the handymen who’d figured out how to paint the tower’s top stories, or perhaps for the engineer in charge of installing the radio mast, unlocked a service entrance and let the old man go up. He came down an hour later, perplexed, like a man who goes into an empty room expecting to see a ghost and instead finds the shifting moon, some dust, and perhaps a broken bottle on the floor.