____________________________________________________________________
I hurried across the Place de La Concorde and up the Champs Elysées, moving beneath the naked branches of the Rond Point chestnuts, past elderly gentlemen in their three-sou chairs, ignoring the darkening skies and rising wind to observe through a descending fog the ceaseless parade of landaus, victorias, buggies, fiacres, and coupes, the uncertain light reflecting off coachmen’s whips and the polished rumps of shimmering hackney ponies.
The high clear blast of a hunting horn broke the air, an outriding piqueur’s warning of a tally-ho stage’s rumbling passage – the fanfare for the joy of living in Paris, I used to
think – a florid-faced gentleman driving smart clubmen and fashionable ladies holding tight to the brims of immense hats. And every so often, the chug chug of an approaching automobile, a Panhard perhaps, or a Dion or maybe a Mercedes, the harsh gasoline smell obliterating momentarily the odor of horse manure that clung to even the most stately boulevards.
The Paris where I lived, the Paris that played the luminous backdrop in the adventure of my childhood, preened and primped in the final moments of 1898, outdone, when it came to self-importance, only by France herself, huffing and puffing about her exalted place in the world. Her army shone, everyone boasted, industry thrived, trade grew and the gold franc was the proud equal of the pound sterling. There were poor people, too, apparently. Homeless clochards huddled around trash-can fires beneath bridge spans along the Seine. The poor were in Les Halles and they occupied the rabbit warrens of Montmartre and one vaguely heard of them on the outer boulevards, and in the slums of the St. Antoine district. But generally anything of an unsavory or unsettling nature was not discussed or even much considered. Enjoyment and the pleasure of life were everything and to be fair, living for most citizens was astonishingly easy. A good dinner in a fine restaurant cost one franc fifty (asparagus with your meal, an extra twenty centimes). A bottle of champagne, four francs; a passable vin ordinaire ? Three sous a litre. A student rented a pleasant room in the Latin Quarter for thirty francs a month, including a balcony. A maid happily worked for three hundred and sixty francs a year without a vacation.
Everyone from the maid to the elegant flaneurs ceaselessly strolling the streets and parks, talked optimistically about the new century that would make France greater than ever. The coming Exposition Universelle scheduled to open the following year was the proof of that. Any doubters, invariably communists--the sort who insisted upon freeing Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the army officer convicted of spying for the Germans—why, they had only to glance up at that most obvious and astonishing symbol of Paris’s remarkableness, the Eiffel Tower.
Over the course of a long life I have found that what is most true is what endures. I say this as a very old man who survived a depression and two World Wars and has seen more than his fair share of things, and not as the boy about whom I write in this chronicle. The truest things find the deepest roots in the landscape of our souls. They cannot be swayed by time or fashion or cries of outrage against them. True is true and it lasts beyond anything.
Monsieur Gustave Eiffel’s achievement was the embodiment for me of what was most true and therefore most enduring. Real truth becomes part of nature, its lines simple and pure melding seamlessly with the universe. So it was with the tower. It was my beacon, my centre of gravity, the high, iron-strutted demonstration of man’s ability to do better than he ever imagined. Invariably when I completed my restless, lonely ambles through Paris I ended up at the tower, as I did that grim day at the end of 1898, my sketchpad and pencils in hand, determined to render its magnificence on paper, to somehow capture its essence. So far I had failed, but like so many of my failures in life, these only inspired me to try harder.
Along the Champ de Mars, crowds jostled me, foot soldiers mounting an army of umbrellas against an abruptly leaden sky that cast a grimy air around the rising spires and domes of the exposition, reducing the Trocadero Palace to a hazy outline beyond the arch of the tower’s girders. A great globe twisting on its axis disappeared into the thickening fog tangled in the three-hundred-and-fifty-foot high Ferris wheel, creeping toward chimneystacks spewing puffs of smoke that turned the already dense air soft and black.
Snow began falling on the footpaths, and on the Exposition’s spires, flakes attaching themselves to slipping and sliding pedestrians with their waving umbrellas. Snow clung to the crisscrossing girders, transforming the tower into something captured in one of those tiny glass globes.
The footpaths grew slippery with snowy mud, the sea of umbrellas before me trembled, indistinguishable, and then abruptly parted like soot blown away to reveal a man. He moved through the snow and the mud and the retreating umbrellas with a rather formal, measured gait, as though he was some sort of military gent on a parade ground.
Except this was no military man but a fellow in a long gray topcoat, bareheaded, with a thick mustache. His face was the color of bone, nearly as white as the snowflakes attaching themselves to the front of his coat. The fog turned him gray and ghostlike, the snow gave him stark form, applying itself to his hair so that even though he had dark locks – or brown perhaps, it was hard to tell –they appeared white. All that white made the red stand out. It burst from his mouth suddenly, red spewing down his white chin, dripping onto his white chest and falling to the white ground, a delicate crimson latticework splattered against the white.
He peered down at himself, vaguely surprised at the mess he had made. Then he collapsed forward on the muddy, snowy ground, red running into brown and turning the white to a coppery stew. I charged toward him, vaguely aware of the gasping, straining crowd trying to escape this thing made of mist and snow and blood. Why I ran forward as everyone else withdrew in such panicky, fearful haste, I do not know. I reached the man. He was not moving. He stared at me with eyes like lumps of coal. Flecks of snow descended upon their glassy panes so that even the coal eyes turned white – a snowman dying beneath the Eiffel Tower.
The snowman’s lips parted. He said, “My son.”
These were the last words he ever spoke, for a moment later he was dead, the life yanked out of him. You could practically see it fly away, a soul departing.
My son.
_________________________________________________________________
I must tell you this straight away because it may affect your view of me. Certainly it affected my view of myself, and not to the good, I fear, and it seems to have affected the view of my late father who, I imagined, took one look at this deformed child and right then and there decided he wanted nothing to do with me.
You see, I possessed only one arm. Well, one and a half arms I suppose would be more accurate. My right arm ended at the elbow with a neat little nipple where the rest of my arm should have started. I have no idea what caused this to happen. Why would I get only a single arm, or one and half arms if one is looking at it optimistically, when everyone else got two?
Perhaps it was because I killed my mother. I’ve thought about this any number of times, and that’s the only logical explanation. I did not mean to kill her. It’s just that when I came out of the womb, she died. If there was anything I could have done to prevent her death, I would have done it, believe me. Someone suggested that bad things happened to me because I was a Jew and terrible things just naturally happened to Jews. But was I? And what was a Jew as opposed to anything else? Most importantly, did Jews generally kill their mothers at birth and therefore were most Jews short half an arm? Unanswered questions this morning at Père-Lachaise.
Named after Louis XIV’s confessor, the seventeen acres of Père-Lachaise constituted the most prominent cemetery in Paris, a city of the dead, someone said, at the gates of the capital. Having recently decided that leaving the dead lying around created an awful stench and was not healthy for the portion of the population that managed to go on living, the city had made popular final resting places such as Père-Lachaise, and thus had created another example of the order and reason everyone generally believed prevailed in French life – and death.
I shivered in the rain and stared numbly at my father’s coffin poised above a black hole adjacent to a graveled roadway on the highest part of the cemetery. Paris spread out below, the twisting Seine black against the grey of the city rising from its banks. An old priest in a black cassock approached. With his sour pudding face and puffy bags hung haphazardly beneath watery eyes, the priest seemed perfectly constructed for funerals. You wouldn’t want some rosy-faced cheery soul presiding over an occasion such as this, would you? No, it was a time for gray skies and glum preachers.
“Arnheim,” he breathed in my face. A breath laced with gin. “Are you a Jew?”
“I am an American,” I said.
“The eternal aliens,” said the priest sadly. “Cursed to wander the world yet always outside the world.”
“The Americans or the Jews?” I asked.
The priest commenced to mumble curious Latin words. Jew or Catholic, or American for that matter, what was the point? Was the priest talking to his Latin speaking Jesus, preparing the way for my father? Did the priest even know my father? I doubted it. I didn’t know him. How could the priest? Even my father’s name was something of a mystery. How could Felix Xavier Arnheim, known to everyone as Flix, possibly be Jewish with a middle name like Xavier? Was that not a good Catholic name? That would explain the priest, I suppose. But how could you be anything with a Jewish last name and a Catholic middle name? Or perhaps that wasn’t his real name at all. Could it be that he was not part American (on his father’s side) and part French (mother from Lyon) as I had heard? And if he was not any of those things, who was I? Nothing?
After all, not only was I deformed but I had also killed my mother, even if I didn’t mean to. So my father, whoever he was, shoved me into a succession of private schools for boys. The main aim of those schools was to keep troublesome offspring out of sight of adults who had better things to do than raise children. My father apparently had much, much better things to do.
The priest raised his voice suddenly, as though to interrupt the unsavory thoughts of an orphaned one-armed boy rude enough to allow his mind to meander on the day of his own father’s burial. I do believe the man was drunk. He slurred his meaningless, joyless, comfortless Latin words. How did he get here anyway? I’d never seen him in my life. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’d ever encountered a man of the cloth before, drunk or sober, except to pass on the street. Must have been the school that dispatched him.
That’s the Lonsdale School for Boys where I was currently ensconced just outside Paris. Not for much longer, though. With my father dead, who was to pay for a little Jew bugger like myself ? That’s what I overheard one of the proctors call me. “A malicious, sharp-tongued little Jew bugger, that one.” From that I deduced they did not like me at Lonsdale. They said I was strange and distant, a boy keeping to himself and his books. When the adults did approach I tended to doubt the absolute truths with which they assaulted me.
And I “talked back.” That was a common complaint at the schools I attended. Adults would talk to me and that would inspire me to “talk back,” a major failing on my part, I discovered. Adults could talk to a child, apparently. But good children did not answer back. I was not counted among the “good” children, thus I would “come to no good at this rate.” I wondered at what rate one would have to operate in order to come to good. No one ever discussed this. Children were never on their way to Good. They were always headed for No Good.
Being constantly reminded that I was on the wrong course only made me more determined than ever to fool everyone. The way to defeat rock bottom expectations was to be a good student, and indeed that’s exactly what I was, bright you might say, diligent in my studies, about to earn my baccalauréat. Despite my considerable shortcomings, it was my dream to someday enter the École Polytechnique, the fountain from which had flowed many of the great scientific innovations of the past century. But now my dream abruptly was no more than that. What was I to do?
At the ripe old age of fourteen, here I was an orphan, only one good arm at my disposal, and penniless to boot. I choked back tears, cold and wet, trying not to feel sorry for myself as I stared at that dark mahogany coffin, glistening with raindrops and hung above the open grave like a black box of secrets.
The clop of horses’ hooves interrupted my grim reverie. I turned to see a great white horse weaving through the tombstones and crypts, a horse so white it shone in the misty rain. Its rider wore a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat pulled down over his eyes. The black of him contrasted so vividly with the white of the horse that from a distance the steed appeared to be moving forward cut into halves. Neither the coffin nor the priest took the slightest notice of this approaching apparition, but I watched with growing apprehension. When the rider was twenty-five yards or so away, he drew his mount to a stop. The horse threw back its head, emitting an impressive snort producing great funnels of air.
The man jumped nimbly off, a tall, lanky gent floating through the drizzle with an easy confident gait. Evil walked with the same sort of throwaway nonchalance, I imagined, and evil had the same thick mustache and unreadable black eyes. Closer, those eyes glowed suddenly like coals lit from the bowels of a furnace in hell. A long white scar slashed down the side of his nose and wound along a gaunt cheek.
At his approach, I instinctively backed off, immediately feeling like a fool for reacting so fearfully. I should be pleased there was finally another mourner present, an old friend of my father’s perhaps, not evil at all but a comforting presence to help me through my ordeal. He jerked his head roughly toward the coffin.
“You sure that’s him in there?” He spoke in rough English.
“Who?” Was all I could think of to say.
“Flix, of course. Is it Flix in there?”
“I suppose it is,” I said. “I don’t know who else would be in there. I doubt there’s room for more than one person, but it’s hard for me to say, since I don’t know about these things.”
The man then did the most amazing thing. He stepped smartly forward, past the priest, and rapped a knuckle against the side of the coffin. He cocked his head, as though listening for a response. When none was forthcoming, the man returned to study me with those fiery black eyes. His mouth was a tight white line that opened like the jaws of a trap.
“You the son?”
“I am,” I said, immediately wondering if I should admit to anything. But if I was not the son, what would I be doing here?
“Then you’re the fellow to talk to, aren’t you? You’re the fellow who can return it to me.”
“Return? Return what?” I asked.
The line turned into what passed for a smile on that pale, wounded face. Skulls contain more merriment. “If Flix is in that box over there, and I have my doubts, then he would have handed it off to his flesh and blood. That would be you. Ned is it not?” He did not wait for me to answer. “If that isn’t Flix in there, you find him and you tell him this: Corbeau hasn’t forgotten. Corbeau is in Paris, and he’s not leaving until he has it. Got that?”
“Corbeau isn’t leaving until he has it,” I repeated, trying to keep my voice from shaking. What failure. It shook like a tuning fork.
He reached out with long, wet bony fingers to touch my cheek. I felt as though the devil himself had marked me. “Do yourself and your dad a favor, lad, and come up with it. Otherwise, it’s a world of pain and damnation. Got that?”
I managed a nod. “Pain and –.” I paused. “What was it? Damnation?”
“That’s right,” said Corbeau with some irritation. “Try to remember what it is I tell you, lad.”
“I’ll try,” I promised. Even though I had not the slightest idea what this fellow was talking about, I thought it better to go along. You could get in enough trouble talking back to teachers. I could only imagine what would happen with evil incarnate standing over you.
A moment later he was back on the great white horse. He yanked at the reins. The horse to my astonishment rose up on its hind legs and the next thing the man Corbeau was urging him away at a gallop along the roadway. The misty rain swallowed him up.
________________________________________________________________
Lesson learned: The son could lose the father he didn’t know, and still be left with his father’s misdeeds, even if he had no idea what they were. The man Corbeau wanted “it” back and he supposed that because I was my father’s son, I could get “it” for him. Whatever “it” was. Pain and damnation otherwise followed. I had promised to remember those things; I found I had no difficulty making them stick in my head. I had managed to get myself into trouble merely by standing next to a man’s coffin, so how to handle it, lacking any practical knowledge of adults and their demands other than to have surmised sometime ago that those demands invariably were unreasonable.
Corbeau
was no different from most adults I encountered, more dangerous, that’s
all. Once again I heard the pounding of horses’ hooves. The return of
Corbeau, impatient to regain what was his, and in no mood to put up
with frightened orphans pleading ignorance? I looked up through the
rain to see a black brougham, complete with the white cockade of the
Orléanistes come to a stop on the roadway. The bearded coachman, a
malevolent pirate shrouded in shiny black rain garments, jumped to the
ground. Producing an umbrella, he proceeded to throw open the carriage
door. A moment later an elegant figure in mourning noir stepped out and snapped the umbrella away from the coachman. Umbrella held high, she proceeded to make her way to the gravesite, a graceful ship’s prow cutting through the rain, not as pale as you might have heard or quite as red headed, but tall, if not taller than expected, and with lips more full than had been advertised, highlighting the face of a deceitful angel barely visible beneath a funeral veil. To paraphrase another, less fervent admirer of hers, she was a work of art making great demands on one’s curiosity.
“He sleeps with Molière.”
The woman’s voice choked with emotion. An amadou-gloved hand touched a handkerchief quickly to what I presumed were moistening eyes beneath that funeral veil. Water dripped from her umbrella.
“I was unaware he even knew the gentleman,” I said.
She glanced at me, and even with the veil I could see the flash of steely emerald eyes. Eyes no longer clouded by tears, I noticed. Or I thought I noticed. Maybe I was imagining things, the way one came to imagine so many things around her.
“Why are you shaking like that?” She demanded in an imperious voice.
“I suppose I am cold and fearful,” I said.
“What is there to be afraid of?”
“Everything,” I said, thinking of the ringing threats left by the recently departed Corbeau.
“Well, you must not be afraid of anything,” she said. “Or you must not seem to be afraid of anything, which I suppose is the same thing.”
“That is easier said than done,” I ventured. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Who am I? Why I am Mrs. Cheveley, of course. Who else would I be?” I stared at her blankly. I had no idea.
She threw a sharp look in the direction of the priest. He had begun to mumble in Latin again. “Whatever is that man saying? Is he drunk?”
“I believe he is, and whatever he’s saying, he’s saying it in Latin,” I said.
“Not a language one should speak after drinking spirits. Or maybe it is exactly that.”
“He’s worried that my father is a Jew,” I said. “Do you know whether he is or not?”
Those emerald eyes studied me again, narrowing, as though to take the measure of me.
“You are a strange boy, Ned.”
“Because I lack two arms? Or because my father could be a Jew?”
“Because the fools at that dreadful boys’ school where you are imprisoned say so.”
“There you have it. One shouldn’t listen to fools.”
“Or foolish, rebellious boys.”
“They are seldom seen and certainly not to be heard. I have that on very good authority.”
“Excellent advice but I have a suspicion, Ned, it is advice you have failed to heed.”
“I stand so accused, alas.”
“So you see yourself as a boy cursed with a sharp tongue and one arm. Is that it?”
“One and a half arms, actually.”
Mrs. Cheveley allowed the hint of a smile. “Well, you are not for regular society, and that’s to the good.”
“It is?”
“It suits my purposes. I am an outsider as well. I just know how to put a better mask on it. Well, I can teach you how to wear the mask, Ned. Don’t worry about that.”
“Why should I wish to wear a mask?”
“Because if you are no one thing, then you can be any thing, and that opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.”
She glanced around impatiently. “But we are wasting words and time standing about here. Let’s be off.”
I looked at her in astonishment. “Off? Off where? I have no place to go.”
“Of course you do. I am now in charge of your care.”
“How did that come to pass?”
“It came to pass because I am all you have in the world.”
She did not sound all that happy about it.
“I suppose you will put me in another school,” I said.
“Why should I do that?”
“Because it will be best for me.”
“Will it? Who says that?”
“Everyone at all the schools I’ve attended. Besides, I’m close to my baccalauréat.”
“Science is it not?”
“That’s right,” I said.
She made an unpleasant face. “I’m afraid there is far too much reality in science for my liking.”
She craned her neck around and motioned to the coachman, standing in the rain near the carriage. He did not move. She frowned. “Honestly, that man.”
She turned and marched away, holding the umbrella high. The coachman held open the door for her, deftly plucking the umbrella from her fingers as she entered.
The priest stopped his drunken Latin mutterings. The world turned from grey to black and the rain began to fall harder, obscuring the view of Paris below the hill. Lightning ignited the sky.
Thunder
rumbled like a deep warning drum. I turned back to the roadway. The
brougham had not moved. I debated what to do. The rain fell even harder
now. Seemingly from nowhere, gravediggers appeared and went to work
lowering my father’s coffin into the ground. I watched it disappear as
thunder rumbled again and more lightning creased the ever darkening
sky. I turned and started toward the brougham. A hand gripped my shoulder and spun me around. The priest’s rain-drenched face was inches from mine. I could smell the stale liquor on his breath as his mouth opened and he said, “This will all end badly.”
I tore fearfully away from that gripping hand and stumbled toward the brougham. The coachman blocked my path. He possessed large, sweeping features as though God were an artist determined to make bold strokes with a mouth as long as a river, a foothill of a nose, and eyebrows like curling black snakes. The boldness made the man’s face seem as impenetrable as the side of a cliff.
High up on that cliff, like small warning lights, gleamed eyes that held all sorts of suspicion as they inspected me.
“I am Prince Gamelle,” he said. “Make sure you don’t give me any trouble.”
“A prince?” I stared at him in astonishment, never having seen a prince before, let alone one who immediately threatened me.
“I have been in exile in Lausanne, but now have returned to reclaim my rightful place on the French throne.”
“But there is no French throne,” I protested. “And if you are a prince, why are you driving a carriage?”
“There. I knew it. You have a big mouth. You are trouble. Young rascals like you are always trouble.”
The rain seemed even more intense. The priest was a hazy specter near the gravesite. The ground had swallowed up Flix Arnheim’s coffin. My future was as bleak as death. Prince Gamelle held the door open so that I could climb inside.
It was as though I was slipping into the devil’s womb.
_____________________________________________________________
Mrs. Cheveley raised her veil to give me a better view of her pale beauty. The intoxicating scent of her perfume filled the interior. Later, when I knew something of Greek mythology, she would remind me of Danae, whose magnificence so entranced Zeus, he transformed himself into a shower of gold in order to seduce her. That was Mrs. Cheveley for me; so beautiful the gods themselves pursued her in showers of gold – precisely what she was after, as it turned out.
“The man driving your coach,” I said.
“What of him?”
“He says he is a prince.”
“Gamelle is indeed a prince,” asserted Mrs. Cheveley. “When the monarchy returns to France it is quite possible he will be king.”
“How soon do you think that will happen?”
“I have no idea.”
“The future king of France driving your coach, that is very impressive,” I said, wondering if everyone but me had taken leave of their senses.
“You must tell me this,” she stated flatly, as though continuing a previously interrupted conversation. “Have you been approached by a man named Edmond Corbeau?”
I hesitated too long before I said, “I know of no such man.”
True. I didn’t know him. That was not enough for her. She turned toward me. Those emerald eyes were like searchlights investigating the darkness around my words. I’m not sure why I did not tell her about my encounter with Corbeau. I could say I was too surprised by her mention of his name. But there was more. A lack of trust? Yes, that might have something to do with it.
“Are you certain Monsieur Corbeau has not approached you?”
“Why would this person approach me?”
“If he does, it is important you tell me immediately,” she said.
“Why? What difference would it make?”
“Are you going to demand ‘why’ of every question asked of you? Is that your plan? If it is, our relationship will be extremely difficult.”
“I don’t think there is harm in asking about a man named Edmond Corbeau about whom I know nothing, when you obviously know something.”
“I know this: If you have dealings with this man it will put your life in grave danger.”
The next king of France started the carriage forward. I stared out glumly at the passing crypts and vaults. Originally, no one had wanted to be buried here. Père-Lachaise was too far from Paris. The city with great fanfare moved the remains of Molière here as well as what they said was left of those lovers Abélard and Héloïse. Suddenly everyone wanted to be buried at Père-Lachaise. Not me, I decided as the carriage came along Avenue Principale headed toward the main entrance. I had no desire to be buried in such a place, burial having taken on an added dimension as a result of threats recently leveled at me.
“I suppose you are feeling sorry for yourself,” she said airily.
I did not reply.
“That’s understandable under the circumstances. But you must stop as soon as possible.”
“I am not feeling sorry for myself,” I said.
“It is important you recover the sense of yourself, Ned. I can help you do that to a certain extent, but mostly you must help yourself.”
Those cold emerald eyes briefly inspected me once again before turning back to the departing gloom of Pére-Lachaise. “Well, we can make too much of childhood, can’t we? Childhoods, are, when all is said and done, only that and we must get on with life itself, and somehow put away our youthfully endured miseries.”
Put away youthfully endured miseries? How was I supposed to do that, being at once a youth and someone enduring misery? However, I chose not to argue the point, but instead asked, “What is it you want from me?”
“Co-operation for a start.”
“And after you have that?”
“Providing you do not turn out to be the trouble you so far threaten to become, you will be pleased to help me do what it is I do.”
“And what do you do?” I asked.
“I provide the confidence that allows one to believe.”
“What good is that?”
“If you can show off a puddle and convince someone it’s the River Nile, then it is of a great deal of benefit.”
“I don’t want anything to do with such a thing,” I stated archly.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I offer you a life of adventure and you offer me clichés about right and wrong.”
“I never said a thing about right and wrong,” I protested.
“You will soon enough. A fellow who stands up for what he believes. Where else has he to go? Two minutes in the coach and already you assault me with dull protestations about what you will and will not do. Can right and wrong be far away?”
She waved her hand to and fro as though brushing away something particularly unpleasant. “I have no time for such delineations, so don’t bother me with them.”
“I don’t think I like you,” I said crossly.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
___________________________________________________________
The carriage containing
my sullen self and the oblivious Mrs. Cheveley continued to number 48
Rue des Saints-Pères in the city’s St. Germain district. I felt overwhelmed by this overwhelming woman, so certain of her next step while I, despite my show of combative arrogance, remained so uncertain of mine. The sense of my own vulnerability did not help matters. I had lost my father, attracted a dark customer named Corbeau who might or might not murder me, and was left with no one in the world except this mysterious and enigmatic woman. Who knew what she had in store for me? Perhaps I would be better off in the clutches of the scar faced Monsieur Corbeau. She was much more beautiful of course, but in her way she scared me as much as the threatening gentleman in black.
No. 48 turned out to be a grand house all but lost behind a high wall replete with a mass of clinging vines and a dramatically arched entranceway. I followed Mrs. Cheveley through the entrance and across the narrow courtyard. Weeds pushed up between the cobblestones near a broken down carriage shrouded in cobwebs and dust, shoved into a corner of the crumbling stone wall. Mrs. Cheveley fumbled in her purse for the iron key that unlocked the massive front door and we proceeded into the gloomy vestibule. The staircase was voluminously cobwebbed, its marble tiles scuffed and broken.
The eight rooms on the main level were traditionally French, naturally, with their ten-foot ceilings and their intricate wedding cake scrolls, but the walls of those rooms were faded and cracked with age and neglect. The toilet leaked – and wasn’t it something of a triumph that there was a toilet in even a fashionable Paris house at the turn of the century? The toilet, however fashionable, caused the walls in the drawing room to buckle and stain. French doors badly in need of paint opened proudly onto balconies with wrought iron grillwork by Hector Guimard. However, one dared not step onto those balconies to inspect Monsieur Guimard’s artistry for fear they might collapse. What’s more, there were no servants, not even a chambermaid to attend to Mrs. Cheveley’s needs. In such a house at such a time in Paris, this was unthinkable.
“They are a waste of time,” pronounced Mrs. Cheveley.
“Anything that does not suit you appears to be a waste of time,” I noted.
“Anything that does not suit me is.”
At mid-afternoon the funeral gloom had given way to a sun that found its way above the wall, seeping through the tall windows, casting the salon in the light shafts floating in swirls of dust. Bad paintings adorned the walls. La peau laiteuse of a nude reclining woman surrounded by Roman centurions about to do god knows what, gleamed out of the gloom. Tiny figures stood before a vast Romanesque ruin.
Naked wood nymphs frolicking in a forest glade near a bubbling stream ignored a tanned but quite bored Christ – the erotic vision of a long forgotten Italian painter Mrs. Cheveley apparently befriended in Florence. The nymphs were beginning to crack and peel on the canvas. Jesus, however, remained intact and unmoved.
A black rococo sofa was flanked by armchairs covered in embossed red velvet long since faded pink. Globe-shaded lamps were set upon brass end tables from North Africa (as it turned out). No books disturbed the dust on the shelves, as Mrs. Cheveley, despite the intellectual appearances she loved to cultivate, could not sit still long enough to read anything more complicated than the most popular daily papers.
A long kitchen, its cupboards and counters made of cherry wood, clusters of copper pots and pans intricately hung above a flagstone floor, stretched across the rear of the house. Spice boxes sat upon countertops. A magnificent cast iron, coal-fired Eagle kitchen range of British manufacture dominated one side of the room.
Swathed incongruously in a white apron, the coachman cum bodyguard and general Jack-of-all-trades, Prince Gamelle, stood guard over simmering, steaming pots atop the hotplate. His vast features quickly reformed themselves into a frown aimed in my direction – a frown I was to see often in the coming days.
“You rise every morning at six,” he commanded. “You will come down to the kitchen, retrieve the coal from the bin in the back and start the fire in the stove. It is fitted with patent reversing dampers so that the ovens can be heated at either the top or the bottom. But to accomplish this, we must have coal first thing – by six thirty at the latest. That is when I arrive to prepare breakfast.”
“Ned will do just fine,” said Mrs. Cheveley in that airy manner of hers that seemed designed to put an end to further conversation on the matter. Gamelle did not say anything but I was certain his gaze fell on my useless right arm and thus he said everything about what he thought of my capabilities. The Lonsdale School for Boys began to seem like a shining, welcoming oasis of joy.
Late that afternoon, having just that morning watched my father dropped into the cold ground, I was put to work helping Gamelle prepare dinner. He shoved meats into the oven, roasted mushrooms and potatoes in frying pans, sliced vegetables all accompanied by various grunts and growls as though he was a stalking animal on the hunt for food at sunset. There was no conversation, even when I tried to provoke it.
“How long have you worked for Mrs. Cheveley?”
This was answered by the banging of a pot on the hotplate.
“I mean, you do work for her, do you not?”
He concentrated on roasting onions in a pan over the coal fire.
“Or is there something more to your relationship that I should know about?”
The oven door banged open.
“After all, I am going to be living here, aren’t I? So these are the things I should know. Don’t you agree?”
He turned from the stove. His florid face gleamed with perspiration. He held a large pan containing the sizzling roast with oven mitts the size of a blacksmith’s bellows. I thought he was going to throw the roast at me.
Dinner was served in a large dining room overhung with a crystal chandelier. Mrs. Cheveley sat at one end of a long table, I at the other.
“Do you need help with the meat?” she asked.
“No, I can do it myself.”
She said no more about it as I went to work first with the knife and then with a fork. Gamelle poured red wine from a decanter for her. For me, he offered his customary scowl. Mrs. Cheveley did not feel particularly compelled to engage in conversation, either. I felt quite compelled.
Since Gamelle was from Lausanne was I correct in concluding that is where she had met him? She paused before she agreed that yes that was the case. He was her servant? A partner in various business ventures. That was their relationship? What would happen once he became king? Surely he could not continue to work for her and run France at the same time? Mrs. Cheveley concentrated on her food. Had she heard me?
She lifted her fine head and said, “I have it on the best authority that the Comte de Chambrun, the dashing cavalry officer all Paris is talking about, will put himself up for election to the chamber.”
“Do you know what happened to my father?” I asked.
“Apparently, the comte is a royalist,” Mrs. Cheveley continued, undeterred by my attempt to shift the conversation. “I have no doubt he will support Gamelle in his quest for the throne of France. I must arrange a meeting between the two of them. I’m sure they will find much common ground.
"I’m a bit of a royalist as well, the more I think about it and come under the influence of men like Gamelle. This whole idea of a republic makes me slightly suspicious. The restoration of the House of France might not be such a bad idea, and it’s not just the aristocrats who think like this. Much of the fashionable monde with whom I’m acquainted is intrigued by the notion. And of course they love Gamelle.”
“I asked you about my father,” I said. “I want to know what happened to him.”
She carefully placed her fork down on the plate before she said, “He died.”
“The police told me he was murdered.”
“The police should not have told you that,” she said quietly.
“They said he was stabbed with a knife. A number of times.”
She picked up her fork and used it to pin a piece of the roast before lifting it delicately to her mouth.
“This man Edmond Corbeau, could he have murdered my father?”
“Monsieur Corbeau is certainly capable of all sorts of monstrosities. I suppose he is capable of that one as well.”
“Then perhaps we should tell the police.”
“They are fools, the police. It would be a waste of time to tell them anything.”
That
night, I slept in a tiny room up a narrow flight of back stairs in the
attic at the top of the house. All my things had been taken from The
Lonsdale School for Boys, packed into a steamer trunk and moved into
this room. I say I slept but mostly I lay on my back, studying the swirling shadows crisscrossing the cantilevered ceiling, visions of my father’s rain-splattered coffin hovering like an unanswered question above his grave. I contemplated my aloneness in a cruel and uncaring world.
Eventually, I got up and went to the tiny window that overlooked the courtyard and the street beyond the wall. There, bathed in the light from a nearly full moon, stood a figure in black.
He shifted around and I realized it was Edmond Corbeau. What was he doing outside Mrs. Cheveley’s house at this time of night? Waiting for me? The thought sent a cold shudder down my spine.
I crawled back to bed and finally fell into a troubled sleep. I had two good arms. Edmond Corbeau appeared with a large knife. He cut off one of my arms. That brought me awake with a jerk. I arose and in the milky pre-dawn light went to the window.
The street in front of the house was empty.
