Little: A Novel

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by Edward Carey


  Lost, lost. Lost to Cornélie Adrienne Françoise Ticre. Lost: Edmond Henri Picot, the model for shop dolls. My chance. Lost forever. I sat, lost, in the kitchen. No one ever thought to ask me. No one came to me to wonder if Edmond should be married off. No one thought I cared; no one thought of me in any way connected to him. So they did not see my grief, or even hear me weeping in the night. Even Jacques slouched away. A miserable servant is no massive concern.

  The widow had finally found a buyer. When poor Edmond was lost, in his white silk suit, two strong businesses were combined. Several thousand livres came into the Monkey House with that marriage. The pale boy went to live at the Ticre printworks, where he was expected to learn a new and profitable profession and one day to govern it himself. The widow did not trust the Cabinet alone; she was shoring up greater security with a more certain business.

  There was more money in printing than in tailoring, even than in wax. The widow went to visit him often, but I never saw him. In my quiet moments, when I was alone, I closed my eyes and cut the widow open—and slit Cornélie from her mouth to her anus—sitting all the while in the kitchen, waiting for no one to come.

  I could not sleep in those lonely nights—and so instead I stole from Curtius and the widow. Bent over stolen candles, I stole Edmond from Cornélie, or tried to. I stole wax and clay, I stole paper and pencils and wire for armatures. I made a small wax head of Edmond about the size of a heart or a fist: they are the same size. So hard to recall his face, so hard to bring it back; I’d look at the shop dolls on the Rue Saint-Honoré for help and always start with the ears. It became a habit, the stealing of things, to crouch and squint in the night and make my small heads. Always Edmond; no other head mattered. Even if I could never quite find him, still I thought I might yet, one day, if I kept at it.

  {The new Madame Picot, not from life.}

  Perhaps it was my eyes, always so red, that finally alerted my master. I am worried, he told me, holding open my lids and looking into my eyes. As if my eyes were the problem! But he thought I might have a disease there. Most people would muddle on with a weakness such as mine, but my master had my small problem instantly attended to. He took me to a man who put glass disks in front of my eyes and proclaimed me “weakling.” What I needed was something to help me see things close to. Things farther away did not matter so much. The medicine I must take, externally, was called double-folding-temple spectacles. The man measured my head and said he would make temple arms of no more than six inches. Steel, he asked, or coin silver? Curtius looked at me. “I want coin silver for her, but for now I fear it must be steel.” My facewear cost twenty livres.

  “Blind?” said the widow when we returned. “Blind. Blind!”

  “Not blind! Not blind!” I said.

  “If she’s blind, Curtius, what use is she? We shall need more help.”

  “I’m not blind, sir!”

  “What a noise she makes!” said the widow. “And not only in front of us, also crying in the kitchen. The other day I saw her thumping her own head. And such slovenliness. You may say nothing, Curtius, but I have noticed how poor her work has become. And now how she scowls!”

  “And, Little,” asked my master, “are you eating?”

  Jacques Beauvisage was upset by my spectacles. He thought they signified something wrong with me, as if I myself were made of glass. He feared I might shatter.

  “I am just the same, Jacques, as ever I was. I just see everything much clearer, sharper, and closer. As if I’m seeing you properly for the first time.”

  “How you look at me!” he cried. “What do you see now? What is different?”

  “Look for yourself. Here they are.”

  “No! Shan’t! Won’t! Must not!”

  I saw better, saw them all well now, at last. I saw all the holes in human skin, I saw film over eyes, I saw hair on tips of noses. I saw all the little wonderful truths of the human face that before I’d never known. Was it good to see so much? Was it happy-making? Not if I could not see him. I only wanted him to look at, and here was everyone else save him. I could not at first find a use for such sharp eyes. But I could not stop looking. Even children had creases; that I had not known before. Everything was as it had been, only more so.

  “Florence Biblot has small teeth marks on her lips,” I observed.

  “Has she, Marie, there’s a thing!” said my master.

  “The scar on Jacques’ forehead turns slightly blue or green or red depending on his mood.”

  “Does it? Ha-ha!”

  “The Widow Picot has a small dot on her left nostril.”

  “No, no, she doesn’t.”

  “She does indeed.”

  “No one knows her better than I.”

  Even so my master went to look.

  “She does! Never had I seen it before. The smallest mole.”

  And the fact of it brought him to tears.

  Those were the days when the removal of the spectacles from my face left an impression of the spectacles’ clip upon the bridge of my nose. There I was in the shadows, hall-creeper, dish-washer, little lost woman of hair. Before the red sore could grow into a callus, a very different visitor arrived and everything was turned upside down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I am found out.

  So many people of all stations in Parisian life came to the Monkey House. Aristocrats came and fishwives, men who worked on roofs and men who worked in the sewers, men who composed operas and men who composed bricks in the brickyards. And so, in the end, it is not perhaps so extraordinary that a royal person should have called.

  The piece of royalty that came, for there was only one, was fourteen years old. A little girl. Paris and even Versailles were still caught up with Voltaire in those days, and this little majesty decided she wanted to learn a little more of this famous philosopher. This crumb of royalty evidently learned that the Boulevard du Temple was home to a hall filled with famous and infamous people, all made of wax, and accounted to be very lifelike—and among them was Monsieur Voltaire, in exact size and shape. Should her minor majesty be interested in getting an impression of the recently deceased, then, this might be the place to visit. And so a little miracle occurred in my life, a wonderful bit of happy luck.

  In she came, surrounded by her entourage. She did not arrange a visit, she merely came with her people in the morning, when we were closed. It was a very good thing that she did, for had she warned of her visit, I should not have been in the great hall dusting heads when the dead tailor’s bell called out, I would not have drawn the bolts back, nor would I have been the one informed of who was there.

  Madame Elisabeth Philippine Marie Hélène Bourbon, granddaughter of Louis XV, least significant child of the late Dauphin Louis, sister to King Louis XVI, rose no more than four foot eleven inches from the ground. She was a little plump, with delicate gray eyes and a very fair skin, but these details can be skipped over. What was important was that her nose was quite large and bent in the Bourbon tradition. And her chin, her chin was—how could I conceal my delight?—her chin was rather too long and prominent! Need I spill it out? She was not a pretty little girl. Need I spit it out?

  I took my spectacles off.

  The royal bit looked like me.

  I looked like the royal bit.

  Yes, I was seventeen. Yes, unshod I was four foot eight inches in length. I am ready to concede that my lantern chin, a good impression I believe of Father’s, was wider and more jutting. I admit my eyes are brown, not so prettily pale gray, yes, yes. But regard the two noses, first the Waltner snout, and now the Bourbon conk!

  They are very nearly the same.

  As if the world had suddenly doubled itself up.

  We recognized each other instantly. What could be done with this strange unsettling intimacy? I wanted to kiss her and shove her simultaneously. To shout and to whisper. To dance and to flee. What a person! Just like me—a clearer version, more expensive certainly, but my likeness without a doubt. Did she see
it? Yes, I knew she had. I suspected she knew everything about me already. I wanted to cover myself up and to pull off all my clothing. It was as if I’d known her all my life.

  How my heart joyfully, fearfully bounced inside.

  Similarity sometimes breaks barriers, sometimes pulls them up.

  Standing before her, I curtsied. But I could not keep quiet. I wanted to tell her all. “My father died,” I began. “He was behind a backfiring cannon. My mother died, very suddenly.”

  “Her Highness, Madame Elisabeth of France,” announced one of the entourage as the widow came into the hall. The widow went white and bowed.

  But the princess had heard me. “My father died,” she replied in her quiet voice. “And my mother. It was tuberculosis that took them away. Would you show me the people in wax?”

  “Little,” said the widow, “kitchen.”

  But I did not listen. Instead I showed her. First Voltaire, then Doctor Franklin and Doctor Mesmer. It was in front of Mesmer that Madame Elisabeth turned and surprised me: She would like to sculpt, she said. Would I perhaps teach her wax modeling?

  “Me?” I asked.

  “She only does the hairs, Your Majesty,” said the widow.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I know much more.”

  “Little,” said the widow, “that’s enough, go to the kitchen. Your Majesty, she is just a serving girl.”

  “Would you like to see my work?” I asked.

  “There is no work, Little,” said the widow.

  “If you please, Your Majesty, this way. May I show you?”

  “Jacques,” said the widow, “take her outside.”

  “Jacques,” I said, so bold with my new likeness beside me, so bold in my new spectacles, “do not do it.”

  And the princess said, “I should very much like to see your work.”

  I took her to the kitchen; with the thunder of my heart in my ears, I closed the door on everyone but the princess. I heaved my trunk out. I opened the lid. There were all my Edmond heads.

  “I made these,” I said. “Every one.”

  “Who are they?”

  “A boy. From memory.”

  “Who is he?”

  “It doesn’t matter now. He’s gone away.”

  “You did all this?” the princess asked.

  “Only me.”

  “They are wonderful!”

  “Say it again,” I said.

  “Perhaps you would show me how.”

  I put the pieces back. When I opened the door everyone was there waiting. I showed her our wonderful murderers then, and here Jacques stepped forward and would not be silenced.

  “Victor Joly cut up his brides!”

  “Oh dear!” whispered Madame Elisabeth.

  “Audrée Veron,” said Jacques, filled with his special enthusiasm, “sifter in the dust yards, killed her sister Jacqueline, over something in the mud, over a broken watch. Slit her sister’s throat with a rusted shard of iron.”

  “Poor girl,” whispered the princess to me, “to live with such things!”

  “This here,” continued Jacques, who having begun could not now be stopped, despite the widow’s troubled looks, “Antoine-François Desrues. In a trunk he—”

  “Stop! Stop, please stop!” called a member of the entourage.

  “To live every day with such monsters,” the princess said, not looking at our dear murderers but regarding my master, the widow, and Jacques.

  She told me how she felt for me, how terrible it must have been for such a girl as me to grow up in such a place, with such murderers for company. She left soon afterward. What a visit it was, what a holiday.

  I smiled a huge smile, smiled until the door was closed and the bolts pulled across. But then the smile left because here came the retribution. The door of the kitchen was opened again and so was my trunk.

  “What’s this?” asked the widow.

  “Heads, madame.”

  “They’re wrapped in my muslin!”

  “I admit I took some muslin, I freely admit it, and more besides. Why may I not? After all, I have never yet been paid for all my labor.”

  At first, she couldn’t see who it was in all those heads. How could she? She never saw Edmond as I had. In her eyes he was someone else entirely. My master, though, great knower of humans, he knew.

  “Is it? Are they? Edmond? I think they are. Why so many Edmonds, Marie?”

  “Who? Who!” came the widow.

  She knocked my head very hard with a small wax bust of Edmond.

  From wax I went to coal, I was put in the coal room.

  I sat there for very long hours. Jacques came to visit.

  “What are they doing?” I asked. “What’s happening?”

  “The widow’s breaking it all, smashing the heads.”

  “That’s her own son she’s smashing. I’m to be beaten, I suppose, am I?”

  “You’re to have no food, widow’s orders.”

  “That’s like her. For how long?”

  “Doesn’t say. The widow wants you gone.”

  My master came to the door of the coal room.

  “I am trying to keep you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Or find somewhere else for you to go.”

  “No! I must stay with you.”

  “I fear what the widow would do if you did stay. She is so energetic. I honestly fear she may hurt you. She particularly does never like you thinking of her son. I tremble over the punishment.”

  “Please, sir, I cannot stop.”

  “Oh, Marie, I am trying to do everything right. I have had an idea, I have written a letter.”

  “I have to stay. This is my home.”

  “Nothing is decided yet, Marie. It might go this way, it might go that.”

  But it was decided very soon. A man came, on official business. The first I knew of it was Jacques saying I must brush myself down and hurry to the workshop. Curtius and the widow were sat next to each other at one end of the worktable, a stranger at the other.

  “You are,” the stranger said, “Anne Marie Grosholtz, ward of this house?”

  “Ward, sir?”

  “Yes, Marie,” said the widow, “you are to say yes.”

  “Marie?” I replied. I had never heard her call me that. To the man I said, “I am a servant here. I do the hairs.”

  “I am to offer you a position, on a trial basis. Sculptor tutor to Her Majesty Madame Elisabeth of France. Would it be acceptable to you?”

  I said nothing, no words, no words would come.

  “It would not be acceptable to you?” the man asked.

  I could not breathe. I could only, after a time, nod.

  “I should think so indeed,” the man continued. “Your guardians shall be paid for your services by the month.”

  “Yes, sir. But is it my money?”

  “You must take it up with your guardians here.”

  “I think it must be my money. You see, sir, I have never been paid.”

  “That is not my business, mademoiselle. Please may we conclude: I have set the date of your arrival at a week hence. I trust that too is acceptable.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All accommodation and meals will of course be provided.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said, beginning to understand. “I would have to live there, would I?”

  “You would indeed. That is necessary to the position. It is on a trial basis, you understand,” the man said to my master and the widow. “Your ward may be gone only a week, perhaps merely a day. But, should she prove favorable, she may stay as Madame Elisabeth’s household decides and in agreement with you as her guardians.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Your papers shall remain here,” he told me, “at your guardians’ request.”

  “She belongs to us,” said the widow, all charm.

  “Since Berne,” added my master.

  “It is agreed,” concluded the man. “Do you understand?”

&n
bsp; “Yes, sir.”

  The widow was rather quiet afterward, a sourness upon her face. Once or twice I saw her watching me. Jacques kept his distance, but could be heard in the kitchen whining, scratching on the floor.

  “I don’t want to go,” I told my master.

  “It is for the best. Until things are calm again.”

  “Was it you who wrote to the palace?”

  “The little princess was clearly so eager. The man came so quickly.” But he gave a slight nod; I might not have seen it without my glasses. He had tried to help, that much was certain, but the effect of any letter from my master to Versailles was impossible to fathom. I liked to think it was essential.

  “Sir! How can I ever leave?”

  “Marie, be good.”

  In the evening, in the kitchen, the widow.

  “There are royal people,” she said, “at the palace. The queen, for example, she lives there, and is much adored by all.”

  “I suppose so, madame.”

  “You may come upon them, such people, from time to time.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “You must behave well in all situations. You must not make us in any way ashamed of you. You must say only the best things about our work.”

  “Yes, madame.”

 

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