The Beasts of Paris: A Novel

Prologue

May 1871

Blue smoke swathes the avenue in drifting veils, making it hard to see, and there is a peculiar noise outside: a constant spitting and humming, as of angry insects. The blue smoke is gun smoke and comes from the cannon and rifles; it eddies through the warm air and mingles with black smoke from the burning buildings. The fires themselves speak with a low, intermittent roar. The weather has been so dry that everything burns with a demented, ferocious joy.

Trees that survived the winter are innocent casualties. Showers of green confetti flutter to the ground as bullets whip the leaves from the branches. Soon, they are leafless again. And throughout the city a black snow is falling – flakes of charred paper rain gently down on the pavement, stinging eyes, coating throats, clinging to skin.

From behind the curtain, she peers down at the ghostly street, hearing the strange sound without knowing what makes it. She sees dusty figures creeping around, clothes and faces the same nondescript grey. Outside the café, a barrel pierced by a bullet belches wine into the dirt.

A man lies on his back in the road, one hand to his forehead, as if he were trying to remember something. Half an hour ago, she saw him suddenly toss away his rifle and fall over. Another of the ashy figures picked up the weapon and continued firing. She stopped watching. When she looks out of the window a little later, he has disappeared.

The bodies lie here and there, but her attention becomes fixed on a horse lying across the central gutter, jerking its head and limbs in a hopeless effort to get up, its coat matted with ash and blood. She has not shed tears until now. She prays that it will die; begs out loud, even though no one can hear her, that someone will put it out of its misery. The animal goes on struggling, making those awful, convulsive movements, although, as the afternoon wears on, it becomes weaker and at last is still.

1

One year earlier

Great quartz lamps: that’s what he always thought. He’d tried to come up with other ways to describe them, but always came back to lamps. More than gold: there was the outer ring of golden brown, which became paler, reticulated with cream and yellow, then dissolving into green and blue, though always more green than blue, and that depending on the light. Even a hint of mauve, at times, before plunging into darkness. To stare into them gave Victor the sensation of falling. Sometimes he saw a landscape of unmapped rivers, or polished marble, or sun-struck water. Or himself, reflected. Lamps, but never illumination. Marguerite would stare back at him, or through him, or past him; impossible to say which. He had known her for years, and he didn’t know her at all.

Victor Calmette’s days did not contain much time for dreaming, but, after his rounds were finished, he stopped by the fauverie and watched, trying with his mind to reach through the bars, cross the gulf between man and beast. His training had hardly equipped him for the needs of animals like these. Despite superficial similarities, zebras were not horses, antelopes were not cattle, and tigers were, most emphatically, not house cats.

The great cat pavilion in the menagerie had some fine specimens – like Tancred, the venerable lion, and the panther, Nero, a minor celebrity in his own right, who had briefly belonged to an actress from the Comédie-Française – but Victor’s favourite haunt was outside the last cage in the row. Marguerite was the Caspian tigress. She had never known her vague, unimaginable homeland; she had been born in the zoological garden at Berlin, and they, having a surfeit of tigers, sold her to the Jardin des Plantes. Victor and the tigress had arrived at the same time – he, a newly qualified assistant to the chief veterinarian; she, a cub a few months old, malnourished and listless. Given responsibility for the new arrival, Victor fed her by hand, first on goats’ milk, then rabbits, offal and horsemeat. At first there was little hope she would survive, and indignant letters passed between the menagerie’s director, Monsieur Lapeyre, and his opposite number in Berlin. But, in a few weeks, she grew stronger and wilder, until it was no longer safe to sit with her in the cage. Ten years on, she was a magnificent, full-grown beast. More than once, Victor had suggested that Monsieur Lapeyre write to another zoo, asking for the loan of a male Caspian, but nothing had come of it. They had no cages to spare for such a dangerous animal, said Lapeyre. Victor, who was still, after ten years, the assistant veterinarian, was not best placed to argue.

He liked to think that Marguerite recognized him as different from the other humans who passed in front of her eyes, that she returned his gaze and some inchoate, tender memory stirred in her feline brain. He sometimes fancied that he discerned a softness in her expression, and that she would have been happy had he reached through the bars and stroked the broad slope of her muzzle, or caressed the rough velvet behind her ears. Some of the cats were relatively docile: Tancred, for all his fearsome appearance, was lazily tolerant; Olga, the lynx, could be as playful and affectionate as a kitten; but Marguerite was always aloof and unpredictable. Last year, a keeper had gone into her cage to remove some rubbish. He hadn’t startled her, hadn’t done anything foolish, but in less than the blink of an eye she lashed out: there were roars, screams, blood. The man was lucky not to lose the arm, or worse.

Victor did not reach through the bars; he might be sentimental, but he wasn’t stupid. Nevertheless, he loved Marguerite with a devotion that sometimes puzzled him. For her part, the tigress blinked lazily. Folly to imagine there was any feeling there for him, yet she seemed to focus on him, and a soft, deep growl emanated from her throat. He felt it thrum in his ribs and pelvis, his bones a tuning fork she casually struck. Then, just as casually, she turned her head away, bored (not bored? How would he know?), lifted a massive, cinnamon paw and began to wash.

Mondays were always busy for the veterinarians, as Sunday was the day of free entry to the public, and the hoi polloi of Paris had a tendency to throw things into the cages. The keepers tried to prevent visitors from poking umbrellas through the bars (with or without needles attached) or chucking rotten eggs into enclosures, but there weren’t enough of them to prevent mishaps – and, sometimes, tragedies. Robitaille, the head keeper, was a good man, who truly cared for his charges, but some of the keepers were little better than the trash who threw stones at the quagga, or fed the bears meat laced with poison. Just last week, someone had ripped the wings off a Reeve’s pheasant – God knows how they had got hold of it, or why. No one had been caught.

Today, due to the rain, there were few visitors, and Victor’s eye was drawn to a lone figure. A young woman gazed down into the bear pit. She held herself very upright. Her dark hair was barely hidden under a little straw hat; her attire was careful, but shabby. It was the rigidity of her posture that held his attention. She gripped the railings with both hands, and he had a feeling that she had not moved for some time. He was aware of a sense of foreboding. Not that she would throw poison to the animals, he felt… What, then?

Slowly, he drew nearer. In the pit, the bears were lying in a heap. The smell was like a wall one had to walk through. The big male lifted its head and peered, scenting humans. Victor stopped a few yards from the visitor. Her hat glistened with rain. To his own surprise, he spoke.

‘They won’t do much, at the moment. They won’t move until they’re fed, around four.’

He wasn’t surprised that she didn’t turn her head, but neither did she walk away. He willed her to look in his direction.

‘People think that bears are friendly animals. They aren’t. They can be ferocious, believe it or not.’

The bear rolled his head back on to the ground and sighed, as if ferociousness would be too much effort.

‘That’s Clovis. He’s a bad-tempered old devil. I’m fond of him, though – he’s been here longer than I have.’

Victor was unused to speaking with strangers; he was not a forthcoming man at all, really, especially with women, but something about this girl and the singleness of her attention spurred him to keep talking.

‘I’m the assistant veterinarian of the menagerie, Victor Calmette. I’ve been here ten years. Clovis has been here for nineteen. He was born here. The female, next to him – she came from Finland. Her name is Aino.’

‘How long do they live?’ Her voice was barely more than a whisper; her accent Parisian.

‘Oh, bears can live about forty years.’

She gazed at the animals. The floor of the pit was made of stone flags, the walls were brick. A tree trunk, cemented into the centre of the pit, spikes hammered through it at intervals, served as a climbing post.

‘A long time to live in a pit.’

‘They have everything they need. They have company, plenty of food. No predators. Animals live longer in zoos than they would in the wild.’

He meant this to sound reassuring, but, somehow, it wasn’t. He cast around for something to appease her.

‘Have you seen the tigress, Marguerite? I looked after her when she first came, as a cub. When I first started. She had come from another zoo and was starving. She wasn’t expected to live.’

The girl looked towards him and allowed him a brief glimpse of her face. Victor was put in mind of a Russian icon: a slim, sombre face, with melancholy, reproving eyes.

‘You saved her?’

‘It was my job. Anyone could have done the same.’

The hands on the rail loosened their grip. He wondered if she lived nearby.

Victor was about to speak again, but she moved away from the railings, nodded in his direction and, in the same action, turned and walked away. He hung on to the railing and rocked back on his heels, surprised by the depth of his disappointment.

Anne Petitjean marched away from the bears, her heart clattering against her ribs. Being addressed by strangers had this effect. This one had been polite, neither aggressive nor insinuating, yet she was almost blind with panic. She never knew what to say, or how to extricate herself without causing offence. Sometimes the panic was so overwhelming, she took refuge in silence, although it was a poor refuge, as it made people angry. She didn’t want to be silent. She formed words in her head, sentences that seemed normal, but nothing would come out. Sometimes, it was as though a hard thing like an apple rose up and blocked her throat – not that there was a thing, she knew perfectly well, but that was what it felt like. At other times, if she did manage to speak, the things she said sounded odd, or rude.

Anne made herself slow down; she would not be panicked – not here, of all places. The menagerie was her place. She came whenever she could. Here, she revelled in a solitude that was otherwise denied her. Even when the park was busy, people generally left her alone. Even the sort of man who persisted in bothering young women could be repelled if she turned her eyes on him in a certain way. It cost her, that look; she had to reserve it for the worst offenders. But having that power pleased her.

Her friends begged her to teach them the secret.

‘No, it’s like this! Look, I’m doing it now,’ said Marie-Jo, making her eyes bulge.

‘You look like you’re constipated,’ said Lisa, her sweetheart, snorting with laughter. ‘Anne, do it again! How do you do that?’

Anne didn’t know what to tell them. It felt as though she simply allowed the fear that lived inside her to look outward. The nightmares showed in her eyes.

The animals in the zoo didn’t ask questions. They didn’t expect her to talk. She felt calm around them. Anne would have loved a pet – a dog or cat, a rabbit, anything, really – had that been possible, but, as it was not, she made do with this: in her free hours, she would come to the menagerie and stare through bars.

Impossible to shake off the feeling that the man’s words had given her. He had disturbed her – first, by talking to her at all, and then, by mentioning Marguerite as though she belonged to him. The tigress had a special place in Anne’s affections, and now that small, private territory had been trespassed upon. She was compelled to look at him when he said he had raised her, because she had to see what sort of man had done something so wonderful. What she saw was unremarkable: not very tall, a pelt of dark hair, round brown eyes, and a big moustache that made her feel he was peeping at her from behind a hedge. The eyes seemed kind, but who knew what went on behind a face? He was just anybody, like a thousand other men, but he had stroked the tigress’s rich, golden fur. Did he still do so? Did she like him? Was that possible? Marguerite was so superb, an exiled queen. Complicit, surely, in her imprisonment, for she could have killed a man like that with one swat of her paw.

Anne turned down the path to the cat pavilion, hoping, in the increasingly heavy rain, she would have it to herself. But she was not in luck: a couple were loitering by Nero’s cage, sheltering under a large umbrella. The man was saying, ‘… surely be too difficult; it’s so dark – what about the contrast?’

In one glance, everything about them was printed on her mind; she noted the young man’s longish hair, his attempt at growing whiskers, his dark eyes. The woman was a little older, with the sharp features of a falcon. She was saying, ‘We have to have him; he’s famous.’ The man spoke in a foreign accent. The woman was bourgeoise, her voice silvery and sure, and she wore a dress of violet cloth caught up in elaborate flounces. Even to Anne’s untutored eye, an expensive dress, a fashionable woman. But stupid. Didn’t she know the animals were not for sale? Alongside their appearance and their words, her mind recorded the flat smack of raindrops on umbrella fabric, the warning half-breath, half-growl of the black cat; his rank smell of fear.

Anne walked past, trying to erase the imprint, and sent her farewells to Nero, expressing the wish that he soon be left in peace. Nero was sensitive; the actress’s scars were hardly his fault. The panther was the midnight prince of the zoo, a pale-eyed shadow. Sometimes, he seemed more absence of light than flesh, melted into invisibility in his shelter; she wondered why he did not just slip out of the cage and vanish.

Further along, Tancred paced, a malign light in his eyes. The lion was rumoured to have killed a man in his native land, but maybe they made that up to make him more interesting. The zoo visitors loved murderers. The hippopotamus was known as Kako the Terrible because he had attacked two of his keepers. This was no rumour: one man had died, the other had been crippled for life. But a hippopotamus is a fat, lumbering thing. It is not a golden monarch; its eyes do not glow like topaz held to a flame. Tancred gazed at Anne through his bars, head lowered. Irma the lioness lay beside him like a lumpy, dun rug. The patch of mange on her flank was worse than last week. She, though his mate, and dear to Anne, was not the queen of the zoo. There could only be one queen, and that was Marguerite.

Anne glanced back at the couple, still arguing, when the violet woman turned and caught her eye. Anne stiffened, her breath stopped, sweat dampened her armpits and her heart hammered. She dreaded meeting someone’s eye; it was as though something painful and dangerous shot between them and scalded her very being. She tore her eyes away too late, trembling. She knew the man was looking at her too. Why couldn’t they leave her alone?

The tigress was curled into a massive cushion on the concrete, where her coat glowed like fire in a hearth, one paw reaching through the bars in a casual reminder of her power. Marguerite was huge, three metres from nose to tail. Even in repose, she was defiant. As Anne stared, she lifted her head and gazed at her. The lambent eyes were calm, and Anne could allow her eyes to be held, because this gaze didn’t hurt.

Anne had known the names of the bears before the man told her. She knew the names of all the animals – at least, of those important enough to have been granted names. The zoo giants had names: the elephants were Castor and Pollux; the rhinoceros, Murielle. They were like headline actors at the theatre. The other animals were members of the chorus. It wasn’t just a matter of size. Mostly, if you ate other animals, you were given a name. The antelopes and bison, grass-eaters that lived in peaceable herds, didn’t have names. But the zebras and the quagga, the solitary freak that looked like an experiment and made her feel sad, did. The lemmings didn’t have names, nor did the various small, brown, desert creatures. As for the birds, through the whole rainbow of gaudy parrots and turacos, down to the smallest finch, they were nameless.

Anne sometimes thought that, where she lived, the women were like small, herbivorous creatures. Men were predators: important and memorable. Women were prey, like lemmings, or like the birds that so many visitors walked past without even stopping – sometimes noisy, occasionally decorative, but not individually of interest. Unless you paid the closest attention, you couldn’t even tell them apart.

Most women – certainly most of the women in the hospital where she lived and worked – were like the sparrows of Paris: ubiquitous, inconsequential; their voices a nondescript background blur. She – Anne Petitjean – was unusual, because she had a name that had acquired a certain notoriety. Granted, the name she was known by was not the name she had been given at birth, nor was it one she had chosen for herself. Still, to be known by anything at all – surely that was something?

2

An easy stroll from where Anne lived on the Left Bank would take you to the avenue that was being driven through the districts of Sorbonne and Montagne Saint Genevieve. Here, as throughout the heart of Paris, a merciful operation was taking place. What was narrow and crooked was uprooted, what was stinking and unsanitary was pulled down, and in its place went broad, tree-lined thoroughfares, where you could see trouble coming from a thousand yards. The Boulevard Saint Germain already carved a swathe from the Quai Saint Bernard to the Boulevard de Sébastopol, but, at various points along its length, it followed the plan of existing streets, appropriating the grander and nobler buildings, excising the poorest and most dilapidated.

Number 104, Boulevard Saint Germain, had started life on the old street still known to locals as the Rue des Ciseaux. It was a well-proportioned building, its south-facing frontage dappled by the shade of a plane tree. Plate-glass windows bore the words Studio Lamy, Portraiture Photographique and displayed a rustic bower, framed photographs and a camera. Someone had done a fine job of arranging the display; passers-by slowed as their eyes were caught by the colours of the backdrop and the glimmer of what appeared to be a pool of water surrounded by flowers.

The building had two entrances. The door on the boulevard represented its public face: prosperous and respectable. Its neighbour on one side was a bakery; on the other, a dealer in fine art and majolica. The back door opened on to a crooked alley that ran behind the boulevard: a dark canyon between unseeing walls, where the sun never hit the ground and the gutter never ran dry. This was a much older street that had survived the operation by clinging to its neighbour, burrowed in like a louse. The clientele who used the front entrance to commission a portrait or some cartes de visite would never dream of setting foot in that smelly, dark street. There was no street sign, but it was the Impasse de Bièvre, and it marked the ancient course of a river that had, long ago, been diverted. The back door, always in shadow, had no name or number. It gave on to a windowless corridor and a staircase which wound its way up the back of the building.

Both doors led, ultimately, to the attic: a huge room, which spread the length and depth of the building. Five floors above the street, the roof was pierced with skylights, which flooded the room with light. From the rafters hung calico screens, which could be positioned by pulleys to reflect or soften the light. A number of cheval mirrors stood at odd angles, like party guests arrested in mid-conversation; from a hook in the ceiling dangled a stout, leather harness.

A large mirror lay flat on the floor, next to which knelt a young man. The day before, Lawrence Harper had been at the zoo, discussing the challenges of photographing a black animal in a dark cage. Now, he was gluing artificial ferns and flowers around the edge of the mirror to give it the appearance of a pool. He had been adding foliage since before dawn and was cold and stiff. The skylights let in draughts and the stove struggled to drive off the damp.

Footsteps on the stairs. Mademoiselle Ernestine Lamy, his companion from the zoo, swept a glance over the arrangement on the floor.

‘Quickly, if you please, Monsieur Harper. The model will be here in quarter of an hour.’

‘I’m finished. We need more coal.’

Ernestine tugged on a bell rope and frowned at his ferns.

Lawrence was ready for criticism. ‘I thought too many flowers would be distracting. You need some darkness here.’

Ernestine pursed her lips, then nodded.

Lawrence was never quite sure what tone to take with her. She wasn’t his employer; strictly speaking, he worked for her parents, but she made him more nervous than either of them. She was a few years older than he and a Parisienne to her fingertips. Not exactly pretty – her face was too sharply defined for that – but she was considered handsome and was sophisticated in ways that were unfamiliar to him.

Lawrence spoke excellent French, but in Paris he felt clumsy, unsure of the nuances of words, too uncertain to assert an opinion or attempt anything as bold as humour. And his accent (he hadn’t previously realized he had one) brought people up short. During his first weeks in the city, stallholders had stared at him in incomprehension and children laughed. ‘Quack quack! He talks like a duck!’ they would shriek, flapping elbows and flattening their vowels. Gifted with a quick ear, he learnt to modify his vowels, but he couldn’t eradicate all traces of his otherness.

Ernestine dressed the set. There was a backdrop – one Lawrence had painted recently – depicting a ruin in front of mountains and waterfalls. In front of this, she positioned a plaster column, draping swags of silk ivy over it. She stepped away to judge, twitching the ivy so that it mingled with the ferns. To the naked eye, it looked crude and artificial, but Lawrence knew it would be transformed through the camera lens into an enticing pool in a forest glade. Lawrence left her fussing over the ferns and went to the darkroom, at the other end of the studio.

He turned up the gas, casting a red glow over the counters with their neatly squared dishes, the shelves of bottles, the wooden drying racks. He ran a finger around the glass squares to check the edges were sufficiently filed. He gave them a final polish and covered them with a cloth. He picked up a bottle and held it to the light. Yesterday, he had made the collodion, this syrupy, golden fluid with the power to stop time. The thought still gave him a thrill.

He emerged from the darkroom to see Madame Lamy with a young woman. Madame turned to him with a smile.

‘There he is. Fanny, you haven’t met our assistant yet. This is Monsieur Harper – we have an American in our midst. Monsieur Harper – this is our model for the day, Fanny.’

Fanny shook his hand and smiled shyly. She was pretty, but unremarkable looking, with a head of beautiful chestnut hair.

‘Hello, Mademoiselle—’

‘You can call her Fanny. Anyway, she is a madame, now – aren’t you, dear? Madame Klein, for all of, what is it? Two months? I trust Monsieur Klein doesn’t mind you continuing to model for us?’

The new Madame Klein shook her head and blushed. ‘No, not at all.’

‘Fanny is one of our best models. Very popular. Ah, here’s Monsieur Lamy. Everything ready, Monsieur Harper?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll leave you. Fanny, dear, I’ll see you downstairs afterwards.’

The galleries of the Louvre and the Grand Palais are full of naked women: acres of painted flesh are purchased by the state and stared at by its most respectable citizens. The postcards that emerged from the Lamys’ studio were smuggled out the back door, furtively sold by roving salesmen, pored over in private. It was a puzzle to Lawrence why a painting of a nude woman was a different kind of thing from a photograph of a nude woman. Was it because a painting took longer? Was it because it claimed to represent something that happened in myth? A painting could be named The Rape of Lucretia or Susanna and the Elders, and be held to edify (the Bible, in particular, lent a gloss of respectability to any amount of skin). It could not be due to artistic merit, as there were terrible paintings, and beautiful photographs, and Monsieur Lamy’s photographs were beautiful. Lawrence had tentatively brought up the subject with Madame Lamy – he couldn’t discuss it with her husband, who was deaf and mute – and she simply laughed. Then, more seriously, she said, ‘Of course, what we do are academy studies. We don’t do smut.’

Fanny came out from behind the screen wrapped in a robe, her chestnut hair streaming down her back.

Ernestine held out her hand for the robe, looked the girl’s body up and down, and tutted. ‘You shouldn’t have laced so tightly. You can see corset marks.’

Fanny rubbed at the pink welts on her skin. ‘I had to. I can’t do up my dress otherwise. I’m sorry, Mam’selle; they won’t last.’

Ernestine directed Fanny to lie on a blanket on the floor and gaze into the make-believe pool. Serge Lamy took up his station behind the camera and signed to his daughter, who added a wreath of flowers to the girl’s head and twirled a hank of her hair so that it snaked down her spine. Fanny lay with her bottom towards the camera, her face visible in the glass. Ernestine gazed at the effect, then pointed to the girl’s hand.

‘Wait! The wedding ring… Papa, should she take it off?’

Her father shook his head, then raised a screen and angled a cheval mirror to throw more light into Fanny’s face. He signalled to Lawrence, who leapt to the darkroom to sensitize a plate and place it in the camera. Serge Lamy raised his hand and the studio went very still as he pulled out the dark slide. After several seconds, he slotted the slide back in, pulled out the plate and took it to the darkroom. Once he had teased out the image to his liking, he passed it to Lawrence to fix in a bath of hyposulphite of soda. Serge went back into the studio while Lawrence washed the plate and put it on the rack to dry. The vapours of ether, alcohol, bromide, pyrogallol, guncotton and silver nitrate, mingled with the fumes from the gas lights, began to give him a headache.

He heard Ernestine directing the next pose: ‘Kneel here… on one knee, like that, and put your hand on the pillar. Turn a little to the left… No, twist more… All right, Papa?’

Fanny could find a pose faster than any model Lawrence had seen. She would subtly transform herself, for those few seconds, from a demure young woman lying awkwardly on a cold floor, into an exotic seductress, a forest nymph, a pagan goddess. It was the first time he had seen a model do this – and he couldn’t say exactly what it was she did, but she became more graceful, more magnetic, her face intent with inner life; even her skin seemed to draw the light. When the pose was captured, she went back to her everyday self, and, if the scenario were to change, pulled on a robe and slumped in a chair while Ernestine and Lawrence stripped the set and created a new one – a Moorish bedchamber, say, with a divan, arabesques of organza, a suite of paste jewels.

When he first started working at the studio, Lawrence had been astonished that Mademoiselle Lamy took such an active part in the work. But then, the Studio Lamy was an unconventional business. Serge Lamy could not speak or hear. It did not seem to matter: the Lamys communicated with rapid hand movements that were just as complex and subtle as actual words. With the models, his wife or daughter interpreted for him, and things proceeded no slower than in any other studio. Some of their regular models had even learnt some basic signs – and that was down to him. Monsieur Lamy was a man of natural charm; good humoured and thoughtful, his presence cheered and soothed those around him. He had a loyal clientele who appreciated this; they also, perhaps, appreciated his discretion.

Ernestine’s presence with the naked girls made the business seem more domestic, almost innocent, as though she and the model were sisters, one adorning the other for her wedding night – except they weren’t. Every eye in the room constantly assessed the desirability of Fanny’s body. She was uncovered, decorated, adjusted for the pleasure of others who were not in the room, but whose desire was nonetheless palpable. Lawrence found her beautiful, but felt no twinge of desire. He had learnt early that there was nothing less erotic than the creation of erotic photographs. A session meant hours of concentration, each image meticulously prepared for, then executed quickly and without error. While Ernestine ran the studio, ringing for refreshments, checking the stove, dressing and undressing the set and keeping a list of poses, Lawrence ran back and forth to the darkroom to prepare plates, or rush exposed ones into the developing bath. They hardly had time to eat, snatching sandwiches and coffee that Madame Lamy sent up, and at the end of the day they were exhausted.

When the last plate was fixed and set on the rack to dry, the daylight was fading. Lawrence’s eyes stung and his head throbbed; his fingers and palms were stained black with chemicals. He coughed and spat to rid his mouth of the taste of metal. He scoured his blackened hands with a stiff-bristled brush until they hurt. He scrubbed them every day, but the stains never entirely faded. He was used to it, was even proud: it was the badge of his profession.

3

Anne was crossing the hospital courtyard when there were shouts from the door to one of the wards.

‘Anne! Coucou, Anne!’ It was Marie-Jo and Lisa. ‘We’ve been looking for you. Where’ve you been? Jospin wants to see you.’

‘What did he say?’

‘You’re to go to his office,’ Marie-Jo said, with a suggestive leer. ‘When you have a moment. He wants to see you on a very important matter.’ She made an obscene gesture. ‘The Saint’s in his bad books.’

‘Oh? Why?’ The Saint was Jospin’s pet patient, everyone knew.

Marie-Jo leant towards Anne, her eyes alight with joy. ‘I heard she hit him in the face with her bloody napkin. Wouldn’t I love to do that – if I still could.’

Anne’s eyes widened. She wouldn’t have thought the Saint had it in her.

She found Dr Jospin in his office, surrounded by tottering stacks of files. Philippe Jospin was the medical director of the Salpêtrière, a doctor world-famous for his pioneering work with the insane. Anne knew this because the other doctors in the hospital said so. He was a vigorous man in early middle age, with a strong resemblance to Napoleon Bonaparte, but today he looked tired, his boulder-like head sunk into his shoulders, as if weighed down by all it contained: lists of patients, reams of pathologies, the hydra-like proliferation of all the women’s disease. But his face brightened when Anne came in.

‘Anne – wonderful! Come in, come in. Sit, please. Will you take a glass of wine?’

When she hadn’t seen Jospin for a while, Anne forgot the power of his voice. It was round and musical, with a warmth that made you want to draw near. Anne nodded and he got up to fill two glasses from the decanter on the shelf.

‘Your health, Anne. I see from your records that you haven’t had an episode for some months, now.’

‘No.’

‘Excellent. How are you finding the work?’

‘All right.’ After a pause, she remembered to add, ‘Thank you, monsieur.’

He nodded. ‘You don’t find it too hard?’

She almost smiled at that. ‘No. Not too hard.’

Anne’s work as a ward girl consisted of cleaning up after the worst-afflicted and most troublesome patients. In a week, she would mop kilometres of floors, carry tons of linen, strip hundreds of beds. She scrubbed out slop buckets and cleaned up mess – anything the nurses considered beneath them. The smell of shit and vomit was so pervasive she hardly noticed it. Her muscles had grown hard since she began on the wards, and her hands were calloused and raw. There were hundreds of ward girls – most, like her, current or former patients of the Salpêtrière. Anne wasn’t sure which she was. Sometimes, it was hard to tell.

‘Good.’ Jospin tapped steepled fingers together, his elbows on the desk. ‘Well, I know that it’s been a while since you took part in a Tuesday session.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But I wondered if you would take part tomorrow?’

‘Eleven months.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s been eleven months since the last one.’

‘Yes, it must be.’ He smiled. ‘You have a better memory for dates than I do. I had to look it up.’

‘What about Odile?’

‘Odile?’ He looked politely enquiring, as if he didn’t know the name.

‘Odile Sabatier. I thought… nothing.’

Odile Sabatier, the Saint, was the current star of the Tuesday lectures. A flaxen-haired eighteen-year-old who specialized in religious ecstasies, she had been referred to, in Anne’s hearing, as ‘a perfect hysteric’. Perhaps less perfect, now. Jospin blinked and looked down at his desk, as if the memory was too much even for his formidable composure.

‘We will do what we used to do – all right?’ He smiled, confident in her acquiescence, as well he might be; within these walls, Jospin was God.

Anne looked down. ‘What if I can’t… you know.’

Jospin laughed. ‘Let me worry about that, Anne. Have no fear. You always were a most responsive subject.’

He rolled the words over his tongue and Anne felt a twinge of pleasure. Words of praise were so rare; it was nice to be complimented for something, even if it was for her illness.

The Salpêtrière was so vast, it was more like a small town than a hospital. It had been on the site on the Left Bank of the Seine for centuries – first arsenal, then prison: a holding pen for prostitutes and other women awaiting deportation. After that, it became a women’s hospital. It had sprawled over the years, benefactors adding buildings in a jumble of styles: here, classical symmetry; there, a Swiss chalet. Now, it boasted an indoor amphitheatre, a church (and a smaller chapel for Protestants), a library, vegetable plots, an orchard and, in its public spaces, many fine paintings. It had stables, bakeries and shops, a café, a dairy, a butcher. There were sewing workshops for the inmates and a photographic atelier for the staff. It contained scores of wards, endless corridors. Some on the upper floors had barred windows, but the elegant symmetry of its courtyards gave a civilized air to the confinement. Some wards had no bars, and some had no windows, like the subterranean dormitories where the ward girls slept. Altogether, the buildings housed thousands of women.

It was a hospital, but not a hospital like most others. Few of the patients were expected to recover, but then, how could they? Some were simple, some were violent or hopelessly deluded. Others had made the mistake of being abandoned by their lovers, or of growing old without family to care for them. Some were the victims of accidents, like Lisa, who had been kicked in the head by a horse; now, she suffered from fits and her words were hard to understand. But by far the greatest number were indigent and desperate: drunkards who couldn’t hold down the most menial job; wives on the run from violent husbands; worn-out women of the town, like Marie-Jo. One thing united them: they had nowhere else to go. With its modern facilities – there was even a ballroom – it was far from the worst place an unfortunate woman could end up.

On Tuesday, at half past twelve, Anne waited her turn outside the amphitheatre. Her skin was up in goose bumps; the corridor was chilly and smelt of damp stone. She felt nauseous – as usual, on these occasions – but focused her attention on the grain of the dado rail under her fingers. Various sounds came through the double doors in front of her: deep murmuring, a shriek, yelled commands that she couldn’t understand; gales of laughter.

Dr Jospin was on the other side of the double doors, declaiming to a full house. Anne listened to his muffled voice, and the adenoidal breathing of the orderly who waited with her. There would be a number of patients brought on to illustrate Jospin’s public lecture. Today, Anne was preceded by a middle-aged woman known as the Colonel, whose special gift was being told, under hypnosis, that she was an officer in the Prussian army, whereupon she would bark commands in a fearsome baritone. Only under hypnosis, she spoke fluent German. As her demonstration concluded, the lecture hall resounded with laughter. Anne had never seen this performance, but she had heard it, through this door, on many occasions. Now, the laughter died down, and Jospin’s voice could be heard again, bringing the Colonel out of her trance, gently asking her questions, to which she responded in her normal voice, which was breathy and monotonous. There was applause, more laughter, coughs.

The door opened and the Colonel came out; the orderly grasped Anne’s upper arm and led her into the theatre. She took a deep breath and deliberately unfocused her eyes.

‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to our next patient – Honorine,’ Jospin said, and a murmur of recognition rippled through the auditorium.

Behind Anne, on the wall facing the audience, hung a painting on a heroic scale. It showed a man standing in the courtyard outside, surrounded by women in various states of derangement. He wore a cloak and Napoleonic bicorne, while the women were either in the process of, or had recently finished tearing their blouses to reveal their breasts. His face bore a look of stern sympathy; with one hand, he gestured towards the prettiest déshabillée girl, while the other hand was kissed by a kneeling woman who had managed to keep her clothes on. The painting depicted a former director of the hospital, surrounded by his patients. Current inmates found the painting hilarious.

Anne was no longer nervous, although the lecture, like every Tuesday lecture at the Salpêtrière, was a sell-out. Raked benches were packed with men and women in fashionable garb – representatives of the beautiful world that inhabited the same city as Anne, but floated above her, on a different plane of existence. Some would doubtless be notable; there was usually a sprinkling of painters, actresses, courtesans, novelists… even politicians came to see the show. Massed together, they made a kaleidoscope of scarlet, black, yellow and green, and they generated a cacophonous twittering, punctuated by the occasional squawk. It was the closest Anne ever came to the higher ranks of Parisian society.

She let her attention float upwards, like the cigar smoke that gathered under the lights. She had worried that she wouldn’t be able to do it anymore, but already she felt its approach: that odd sensation of being drifted away from her body; a thin, stretched feeling. Something dark and ominous was looming to her right, and she smelt a familiar burning smell. The hard ball climbed into her throat, gagging her, but he had told her not to worry,