Authors: Matthew Plampin
Hannah could tell from his face that he’d known where she was from the start. The artists greeted him, offering vague words of admiration. Jean-Jacques had caused them enough disquiet before the siege, when they all used to gather in the Danton; now he was the far-famed Leopard of Montmartre they hardly dared to look his way.
He nodded at them. ‘Will you come outside with me, Hannah?’
The courtyard of the Moulin de la Galette had been its great attraction before the war, the outdoor dances attracting revellers from across the arrondissement. That evening, however, jackdaws flapped through the splintered remains of its acacia groves, and dun-green mould striped the glass globes of its lampposts. It was bitterly cold. Hannah hugged herself, saying nothing. There was an unfamiliar smell about him, sharp and floral. She didn’t know what she was going to do or what he expected from her.
Why
, she nearly shouted,
did you abandon me?
After a minute or so Jean-Jacques said, ‘I have been here, Hannah, since that night in the Hôtel de Ville. Up there, to be exact.’ He turned, looking beyond the dance hall to a tall shape behind, rising from the roof of an adjoining building: the windmill from which the Galette took its name. ‘Would you like to see?’
Hannah followed him into the lane, through a small door and up a tight, musty stairwell. The windmill was about ten foot square and twenty-five tall. In the darkness she could just make out the cluster of gears behind the sails and the central column of the driving shaft. It was filled with the same raw, flowery smell that clung to Jean-Jacques’s suit. He lit an oil lamp, shuttering the flame to prevent light escaping through the many cracks in the walls. The wood of the mill was old, the bleached beams full of knots and fissures; what metal parts there were had rusted over entirely. He’d bedded down by one of the circular millstones. There was a blanket-roll, a small sack of clothes, two spare pairs of boots and an assortment of military equipment, both Prussian and French from the look of it, including a shining revolving pistol. It was neat, Spartan: a soldier’s bolt-hole. Hannah wondered how he stayed so clean. She couldn’t even see a mirror. Opposite where he slept was a bale of dried plants – the source, she realised, of that odour.
‘Iris root,’ Jean-Jacques said. ‘The owners grind it for a perfumer in Les Batignolles. Everything I possess reeks of it.’
Hannah sat on the millstone. She was going to get an explanation. ‘Where have you been, Jean-Jacques? Why didn’t you try to find me?’
‘I knew you’d be well.’
‘But why didn’t you
look
? Didn’t you care what had happened to me?’
‘The provisional government was at my heels, Hannah. They would have imprisoned me, or worse. I’ve not been in a position to wander the city. I’m not now.’
‘You’ve been going to my mother, though,’ Hannah countered, thinking of Laure’s sneers. ‘You’ve been managing to get to her.’
Jean-Jacques moved closer, taking three slow steps through the creaking mill. The cramped surroundings made him seem astonishingly tall, his shadow stretching up among the sail-gears. His hands were crossed in front of him, the left holding the damaged right at the wrist. He wore a slight, patient smile.
‘I’ve been sending her written accounts. Chomet has them taken down into the city for me. I can’t risk the Opéra quarter, Hannah. I only go north – past the wall, out of the city.’
Hannah glanced at his crippled hand, motionless within its glove. ‘That must be difficult. The writing, I mean.’
His smile slipped; there was a faint contraction of the skin around the scar. ‘I have a guardsman to whom I dictate. One of Chomet’s adjutants – a lawyer’s scrivener.’ Jean-Jacques stopped for a moment; he plainly felt that he’d revealed enough. ‘But you must tell me where you went after you left the Hôtel de Ville. Everyone said it was as if you’d dived into the Seine and swum out to the ocean.’
Hannah told him about the Gare du Nord and Émile Besson – omitting to mention their argument on the day she’d left.
Jean-Jacques understood; he showed no surprise or jealousy. ‘You did what was necessary. It is the same for us all.’
‘My brother was arrested as we fled, though, by some bourgeois guardsmen. He’s been in the Mazas ever since. Can anything be done for him?’
‘He’s out,’ said Jean-Jacques simply. ‘He was released at the same time as several of our comrades.’
Hannah stared; a laugh burst from her lips. ‘Thank Christ,’ she exclaimed. ‘Thank
Christ
. I – I was afraid that he’d die in there. That they’d let him starve.’
‘I hear that he is with your
aérostier
now, as a matter of fact, in the Gare du Nord. The odd fellow appears to have swapped one Pardy twin for the other. They’ll soon be leaving Paris – flying out in a post balloon.’
Hannah’s happiness was marred by confusion; Jean-Jacques seemed well informed about her brother’s movements. ‘Are you having Clem followed?’
‘No. No, of course not.’ He was beside her now, blocking the lamp’s light. ‘Rigault told me. The fool wants us to bring down the balloon post. He has people watching both the Gare du Nord and the Gare d’Orléans. I tell him that it’s a waste of effort, but you know how he can be.’ He sat beside her. Their legs pressed together; his thigh felt hard and warm against hers. There was deep tenderness in his eyes, along with the first stirring of desire. ‘It’s the truth.’
Hannah felt a spike of guilt so abrupt and painful that she almost looked away. How could she ever have doubted this man – this remarkable man who’d shared so much of himself with her? It was Besson’s fault, Besson and her stupid, detracting friends. Their utterances had sent her scouring through Jean-Jacques’s words and deeds, hunting for duplicity where there was none – whipping up needless conflict in the one calm part of her soul. Well, no more. All this noxious suspicion would be cast aside. The siege might force them down strange and onerous paths, but they would endure. Hannah was sure of that now.
‘I know,’ she said.
Their foreheads touched; her shoulders sagged with relief at his kiss. He lifted her from the millstone to his place on the floor, settling over her, enveloping the two of them in his black coat. The shape and weight of his body, so familiar yet absent for so long, made Hannah squirm with bliss. She opened his jacket, tugging his shirt free from his belt and coiling her arms around his naked waist; then she slid a hand up, over his flank and ribs until she could feel his heart, beating quickly against her fingers.
‘Jean-Jacques,’ she murmured, ‘I love you.’
He pulled back; his hair fell onto his face, hiding it. ‘Please, Hannah,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’
They rose at dawn the following day and went together to the rue Garreau. Jean-Jacques gave Hannah three hours; he was an excellent model, sitting completely still, barely seeming even to breathe. She concentrated on the face and especially those fine dark eyes, knowing as she worked that she was capturing a clear likeness. The setting she’d chosen – a spot beneath the window, well lit by the morning sun – was being painted as it was, and her sitter precisely as he appeared in it. She didn’t break off to make a considered assessment until after he’d gone, off to a last meeting with some senior ultras. Putting down her palette, she walked over to the shed door; she folded her arms, the rounded end of her paintbrush poking into her ribs; then she took a breath and turned.
Still it was no good. The best naturalist portraits Hannah had seen – Edouard Manet’s of his journalist friend Monsieur Zola, Edgar Degas’s of his sister and her husband – had immediacy, and realism purged of affectation or contrivance, but they had something else as well; a suggestion of private meditations, of human complexities; an inner light that revealed a
life
rather than just a form. Nothing lay beneath the surface of Hannah’s portrait of Jean-Jacques. This subtle illumination was absent. Her image was a shadow, a shell, as empty as a photograph.
I could go to them, Hannah thought suddenly. Monsieur Manet and Monsieur Degas have remained in Paris – they are in the artillery division of the National Guard. I could go to them and ask for guidance. Their whereabouts are common knowledge. Manet was up in the north, past Montmartre, in Bastion 40; Degas to the east in Bastion 12. I could cast off my objection to such fawning and use this damned siege to get ahead. Why on earth shouldn’t I? Degas was a renowned misanthrope with an especial hatred for women and foreigners; speaking with him would most probably be futile. Monsieur Manet’s reputation, though, was quite the reverse. Much was said about his fashionable attire, debonair manners and sophisticated conversation – and his notable fondness for assisting young female painters. All it would take was a walk out to the fortifications. The scene was easily imagined. Hannah could see the parapet, with its row of cannon; the artist at work in a quiet corner, sketching men stacking sandbags perhaps; herself approaching under some pretext or other, and making a comment; the instant affinity between them.
The paintbrush clattered against the floorboards; Hannah swore, jerked from her daydream. This was the exact strategy her mother had proposed on the day of that march to the Strasbourg. Taking on this commission had evidently tainted her with Elizabeth’s reasoning. She stooped with a grimace, retrieved the thin, foot-long brush and snapped it in half, throwing the pieces across the room. She was not that desperate; she would never be that desperate. She wasn’t going to offer herself to Edouard Manet or anyone else.
Hannah wiped the paint from her hands and looked again at the painting. More work was needed; whether it was a few small corrections or another task for the canvas knife she couldn’t tell. It felt as if she’d been driving in a nail that had gone fractionally off-centre with the hammer’s first stroke, every subsequent blow making things worse until all she’d got was a chipped wall, a bruised thumb and a bent, useless nail.
It would have to wait. Hannah was due at her guardhouse in less than ten minutes. She located her
vivandière
’s satchel and ran for the door, leaving the portrait gazing out from its easel.
Clem was shaken awake, none too gently. He rolled over. It was still dark. There was snoring around him and the distant sound of cannon-fire. His throat was dry, his head swimming; he picked a speck of sleep from his eye with the tip of his forefinger.
‘Pardy,’ said Émile Besson, close to his ear. ‘
Nous allons
.’
After a second’s blankness Clem remembered what they were to do that day. He bounded from his pallet, all thoughts of bed banished, wobbling only slightly as he pulled on his trousers and worked his feet into the heavy boots supplied by the Balloon Commission. A minute later he was fully dressed, his long navy-style coat buttoned and belted, striding from the sailors’ dormitory four paces behind Besson. He felt alert, immensely capable, powerful almost. For the first time in his life he was part of something righteous and important. The gold ‘AER’ embroidered on the front of his leather flying helmet seemed to glow like a miner’s lamp, guiding him across the cold tiles of the Gare du Nord. Thirty yards into the concourse they peeled apart, Besson heading straight to the balloon, while Clem went to where they’d stowed the borrowed Dallmeyer. Slinging a large canvas sack over his shoulder, he heaved up the camera, the plate-box and the doctor’s bag of photographic solutions, and edged out backwards through the main doors.
The
Aphrodite
stood in the square before the station façade. Fully inflated and upright, it looked far larger than it had inside, easily five storeys tall. In the low light of early dawn the envelope was a flat grey; like a whale, Clem thought, or an outsized elephant. A breeze crept in from an intersecting boulevard, and the
Aphrodite
quivered and veered, straining against its cables. This was a rather different proposition to that fixed balloon he’d ridden in at the Crystal Palace: bigger, certainly, but also somehow
fiercer
. He’d always conceived of balloons, even free balloons, as essentially tranquil: soap bubbles, dandelion seeds, that sort of thing. The
Aphrodite
, however, verged on the monstrous. That bulging envelope had a pent-up energy that was completely its own, beyond all control, easily enough to tear down a house or capsize a boat – or dash the hapless idiots attached to it against a remote, airless mountaintop.
‘What the devil am I doing?’ he muttered under his breath, equally amused and apprehensive. ‘This is
madness
.’
There were no lamps lit in the square, due to the danger of igniting the coal-gas. Everyone there was relying on their eyes and their extensive experience with the procedures underway. Sailors laboured in the murk around the basket, winding in the gas-pipe, attaching the ballast sacks and fighting to keep the whole contraption secured to the ground. No one paid Clem any notice; the arrival of the crew was routine, without interest. A handful of officials were huddled a few feet from the car, conferring with Besson as they partook of some light refreshments. The
aérostier
, standing there in his flying garb, was a reassuring sight. Their impending escapade did not appear to be bothering him in the least. His lean, precise face was composed; he actually seemed in significantly better spirits than usual. Anticipation, Clem supposed. He went over, set down the camera equipment and accepted a glass of what turned out to be brandy-and-water.
One of the officials, still tending to fat despite the siege’s privations, was dressed in an unlikely mauve greatcoat and a broad-brimmed hat. It was the great Nadar himself, come to see off his protégé. Spotting the Dallmeyer, he swivelled his bulk towards Clem, took hold of his hand and pumped it up and down as if he was working an uncooperative machine.
‘My friend,’ he said in an extravagant French accent. ‘My friend, so very good to meet you.’ He released the hand as suddenly as he’d seized it and turned to Besson. ‘Émile tells me that you are a genius with the camera – among the best of your nation. An apprentice of Mr Fenton, no less?’