Little: A Novel

by Edward Carey

  And I could learn. I was given a card-covered booklet, the Almanach de Versailles, containing a vast list of the people who worked in the palace, from the House of the King to the Department of Palace Couriers. I read this dull little tome again and again in an attempt to stop the Edmond spirit from coming. I tried to picture against each name a person. I tried to understand the king’s two surgeon-dentists, Bourdet and Dubois-Foucou, supposing that Bourdet might be a heavy gentleman, and Dubois-Foucou a trifle fond of himself. I passed through a list of fifty equerries to the king. I moved beyond to the section listed as Bouche du Roi, “the king’s mouth,” which pertained to the king’s eating, and marveled at the list of four men responsible solely for washing the king’s plates. (I remember their names even now: Cheval, Colonne, Mulochor, and de Rollepot. I thought I might have liked Monsieur de Rollepot.) My finger traced long lines of worthies in the King’s Household, pages and pages of people, until I reached the House of the Queen. (Among the thousands in that great army, I can still recall four: Collas, Mora, Carré, and Le Kin, the minor flank of sixteen of the queen’s Fruiterie.)

  At last, I reached the Maison de Madame Elisabeth de France, two hundred and twenty-six pages into the tightly printed Almanach. I counted the people of Madame Elisabeth’s household, the seventh house listed and by far the littlest. Seventy-three people for one fourteen-year-old girl. From her chaplain to her confessor to Madame Mackau, named there as the Lady of Honor. Beyond that followed a gaggle of ladies-in-waiting (fifteen), a single Chevalier d’Honneur, four primary equerries. Under the heading Chambre there were the principal women of the bedchamber (two), the secondary women of the bedchamber (sixteen), the valets of the bedchamber (four), the valet of the upholstery (one), the boys of the bedchamber (four), and the valets of the dressing room (four). Then out of the chamber there was listed Madame Elisabeth’s doctor (le Monnier), her surgeon (Loustoneau), and her surgeon-dentist (Bourdet, who also troubled himself over the king’s teeth—a speck of insight into the great whole). Also listed were Madame Elisabeth’s librarian, her reader, her secretary, her harpsichord teacher, her harp instructor, her painting teacher, and a host of other servants: her tapestry makers (two), wardrobe valets (two), porters (four), porte-chaise d’affaires (two), silver cleaner (one), and finally her bit-maid (one), the lowest of the household, used for sundry unmentionable tasks, name given as Pallier, Lucie. I closed the book, blew out the candle, sat dizzy in the dark. And I summoned the Edmond ghost again because I was so lonely.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Concerning my employment as Person to Her Majesty Princesse Elisabeth.

  On my third day, Elisabeth sent for me again—not for drawing, but for a game of hide-and-seek, the princess’s particular passion. I was to close my eyes and count to one hundred and then try to find Elisabeth and her ladies-in-waiting. When I opened my eyes there was no one in sight, only the furniture, but it took only a moment to find them hiding in a nearby room, a throng of official ladies enjoying their wonderful joke. A few of the tallest demoiselles were gathered in the doorway; I pushed through them—indecorously, I was later scolded—to find Elisabeth eating from a plate of small cakes. They looked rather nice. I was not offered one.

  “Cuckoo,” I said. “There you are.” I touched her arm.

  “No!” shrieked Mackau. “No! Never! You do not touch.”

  The old woman dragged me down the hall, to a plain parlor I’d never seen before.

  “Put out your hands,” she instructed.

  And I did.

  I heard wind, and a cane bit into me. It was withdrawn, then came down again. The third time, I moved my hands.

  “No! No!” the old woman snapped. “It must be three!”

  In tears, I put my hands out once more and the cane instantly delivered its message. I was not too old to be beaten. Perhaps it was my height that confused them.

  “Next time it shall be ten. You do not touch. Repeat after me: I do not touch.”

  “I do not touch.”

  I turned around. Elisabeth was behind me. She had been there all along.

  “It is I who say ‘cuckoo,’ not you at all,” she said. “And the game of hide-and-seek should last at least a half hour. You do not do it right at all.”

  “Well,” said Mackau, “we must grow up. We must all grow up.”

  The following day, we set down to work. I put paper in front of Elisabeth. She held a pencil; I could tell the two were not intimate. The first thing I discovered was that Madame Elisabeth was not clear on the subject of anatomy. The heart, for example, that most noisy of organs and thus the easiest to detect, was to her mind—doubtless inspired by many inaccurate religious paintings—found precisely in the center of the chest. She wondered why two kidneys, why two lungs, and supposed that this doubling of organs might somehow be connected to the bearing of twins. She was amazed to discover that the insides of a person were generally placed in the same position from human being to human being. She absolutely insisted that the insides of a man were completely different from those of a woman, and would not be contradicted on this. I drew the outline of the human form and tried to show her the contents, but it was very hard to make her believe. She could comprehend the notion that some intestines are large and others small, but found it quite ridiculous that everyone, no matter their size, should have both. I decided the best course would be to find a human model to aid my instructions. I asked Elisabeth for assistance, and soon Pallier the bit-maid appeared.

  “Hello, Pallier,” I said.

  Pallier said nothing. The poor girl was not allowed to.

  “Who’s this?” asked Elisabeth.

  “This is Pallier,” I said, “one of your servants.”

  “I’ve never seen her before.”

  “Even so, here is Pallier.”

  Pallier had been in Elisabeth’s service for six years, but she did her work so quietly and anonymously that she had made no more impression than a ghost. The palace was filled with such people, I think, perhaps hundreds of them, who lived so quietly and usefully alongside the royal family that they had not yet been spotted.

  “Pallier,” I asked, “could you please stand in the middle of the room with your arms outstretched like so?” She obliged.

  “This is Pallier,” I said to Elisabeth. “We know what she looks like from the outside, but what is she like inside? What is kept inside the cupboard of Pallier? Let us pretend that her ribs are like cupboard doors, as if we might open them at the sternum, from the center outward. What do we see? What does she keep on her shelves?”

  “Bed linen, I should say,” Elisabeth uttered.

  I let this pass.

  As I signaled hither and yon with my pointer, Pallier learned of many things she harbored within her, none of which she had known of before. Elisabeth learned too. Determined to stay away from my own cupboard as long as possible, I stretched our time together longer and longer, insisting that our lesson would not be complete until I had finished explaining the kidney, then the liver, then the heart.

  “It’s so hard,” said Elisabeth.

  “But we make progress,” I said.

  “Why must I worry over what a servant has inside her?”

  “It is the same with all people, madame. They have the same innards.”

  “I hardly think so.”

  “And yet it is true.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “How horrid.”

  She seemed to look at Pallier with a great resentment then. We walked around Pallier, who blushed and even jolted slightly as I touched. “It’s just your body,” I told her, “just a human body like any other. There’s nothing to be concerned over. Do keep still, we’re trying to learn.”

  And it did help, seeing a real body: it always does. As Elisabeth began to understand how a body worked, her drawing improved. I taught her how to leave off thinking about the rules and laws and passageways of the palace, and to concern herself with those
inside the body. Now, there was a palace to wander in. We burrowed, in our imagination, beneath the skin of Lucie Pallier, down among the organs and bones. Once we had finished the tour of Pallier, I had Elisabeth point to the appropriate places as I called out: “Kidney! Bladder! Esophagus! Small intestine! Lungs! Rectum! Heart! Spinal cord! Diaphragm! Pancreas! Spleen! Palma fascia! Anastomotica magna! Tuber omentale!” And progress was made. Later, in the corridor, Pallier touched her abdomen and whispered to me with great wonder: “Here, within, is my duodenum, which is short for intestinum duodenum digitorum.”

  “Which means?”

  “Intestine of twelve fingers’ width!”

  “Yes, Pallier, that is very well remembered!”

  “Thank you, madame.”

  “Thank you, Marie,” I corrected.

  “Thank you, madame.”

  At the end of our drawing lesson, Elisabeth would be greeted by her favorite ladies-in-waiting, girls she addressed as Bombe, Rage, and Démon, and I would be taken back to my cupboard. I lay there in the darkness thinking about Elisabeth, murmuring her name to the shelf above, until the ghost of Edmond came to lie beside me.

  In those first weeks I had seen little more of the vast building than my cupboard, her salon, and our workroom, and I wanted to see more. I had seen so little in my life, but I’d heard many things and had glimpses of others, and the palace was really too much temptation altogether. I wondered what else there was beyond our small rooms. I had been told I must never leave Elisabeth’s apartment, but I wanted to—if only because I thought it might help me to keep the troubling ghost of Edmond away.

  One afternoon a great opportunity arose in the form of a reprise of hide-and-seek. With Mackau occupied elsewhere in conference with the aunts, Elisabeth announced that she and her ladies-in-waiting should rush away and I should have the pleasure of finding them about her apartment. Off they giggled. I closed my eyes and I counted to one hundred, until I heard them bustle into one particular room—and I took a deep breath and set off in the opposite direction. I went out into the palace; I found new geography, and my feet made noise upon it.

  I ran this way and that through the royal maze, down unfamiliar corridors, into large and gilded rooms. Before almost every door in the palace were people waiting, people sitting down or standing up, all of them without exception holding papers in their hands. When I asked one man how long he had been waiting, he said, “On and off, three years in November.” Another man was gray of complexion, as if by long exposure he’d absorbed the color of the stone walls around him. I climbed stairways and opened doors, and many of these waiting people told me I shouldn’t be where I was. When thunderous Versailles foot traffic came near, I grew uneasy. I began to wonder if the game of hide-and-seek was even still in process, or if it had taken a strange turn in which the hiders were forced to go in search of the lost seeker. I would have been happy to find Elisabeth, just then, for I was utterly lost.

  When a group of men in blue livery rushed past, I hid myself behind a screen in an unlit fireplace to catch my breath and steady myself. As my heart becalmed itself, I became aware of a quiet knocking, and wondered if someone else like me was knocking his or her way about the doors of Versailles. Summoning some store of bravery inside myself, I decided that two lost people might be more comforting than one, and opened the door. The knocking ceased.

  “Who’s there?” said a man’s voice on the other side.

  “Please,” was all I could muster.

  “You mustn’t come in, you mustn’t come in at all. It’s not allowed.”

  “Please, sir,” I managed.

  “Private. Private. And not to be disturbed.”

  “I’m not certain, exactly—”

  “Who is out there? Who is it?”

  I was stuttering now—not least because of the alarming, unnatural heat coming from the room. I began to wonder if I had disturbed some devil resident in the palace.

  “Who are you there? Explain yourself.”

  I tried to explain that I was the sculpture tutor to Her Majesty Madame Elisabeth. I’m not sure how much of my mumbling was intelligible, but at last the voice in the heat replied.

  “Oh, very well then, step in, step in.”

  And in I went.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The locksmith of Versailles.

  Inside was rather a large man in his twenties, dressed in a leather apron, with his shirtsleeves rolled up, leaning over a forge, a small hammer in his hand.

  “Well, close the door, or we’ll have all and sundry within.”

  I did as I was bidden. He went immediately back to his business, tapping on a small piece of metal. It was this, not a knocking on the door, that I’d heard through the walls. Engrossed in his work, he did not look up at me for several minutes. The Palace of Versailles was such an expansive place, I considered, that a great variety of craftsmen must be situated inside. I had stumbled across the locksmith; had I opened a different door I might have found the rat catcher making traps, the clockman busy with his ticking, even the candle maker molding wax.

  I stood in the corner by the door and watched the craftsman before me, hoping that when he had finished his particular piece of business he might be willing to furnish me with directions back to Madame Elisabeth’s apartment. The man had an almost comically high forehead, a sizable Roman nose, full lips, and remarkable large blue eyes, which he often scrunched up and brought quite close to the red-hot objects he was working with—from which I gathered that he too might benefit from spectacles. He had a fleshy underchin and womanly breasts, all of which he stroked from time to time with his pudgy, knuckle-less hands. He seemed not to breathe through his nose, but to use his mouth for the capturing of oxygen. With metal tongs, the man picked up the object he had been bothering and dipped it into a deep basin of water, upon which the object hissed in complaint, a noise the locksmith greeted with a smile. He turned to me, squinted, nodded, delved into one of his apron pockets, pulled out a handkerchief, and carefully laid it upon a nearby table. Then he delved into another pocket, pulled out a crushed-looking piece of cold custard and pastry, placed this upon the handkerchief, and stood back to admire it. Finally, from a third pocket, he took out a handsome penknife, unhinged its blade, and bisected the custard pie, rather unequally. Taking up the major part in his tubby hands, he spoke at last:

  “Don’t tell a soul, and here’s your reward.”

  I stepped forward to take it.

  “Do you really need all of that?” he asked, with crumbs on his lips, his portion already safe inside. “There’s a good deal there, and you are rather small. Come, what do you say I cut it in half again?”

  Once more the piece of cake was fractioned, again not entirely evenly. I leaned forward to take the smaller portion.

  “I say, you do hesitate so,” said the locksmith, interrupting me before I had reached it. “I don’t mean to force you to it. If you’d prefer, I could keep that for you till later,” he said, lifting up the last piece of cake, “or shall I just pop it in here instead?” He brought my morsel very close to his mouth. “Shall I?” Then, without waiting for my say-so, he dropped the cake in between the fleshy lips, chewed, swallowed, and kissed the air in satisfaction.

  “Perhaps now,” I said, “you shall be sick.”

  “But I like it! I like it,” he said, stroking his stomach very earnestly. “And I’m forbidden it. ‘One piece a day,’ she says. ‘Only one and no more.’” Then, in whispers, “So I cheat. Of course I cheat. I’ve grown very cunning.” For a while he was quietly content, locking and unlocking his work, admiring it, making sure the lock was thoroughly dry, then applying a little oil and polish. At last he bowed down, close to me, and I saw those great blue eyes scanning me thoroughly.

  “Well then, old thing, shall we install it together?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “I would like that.”

  Taking my hand with one of his, and with the other picking up his new lock, he led me out of th
e little workshop into a long corridor. We progressed around the corner and stopped at a door missing its lock. Through the door I could see a fraction of what lay beyond: a great room, well lit, with an enormous painted ceiling and vast plates of mirror on one side, echoing the windows of the other and peopled with various elaborate ladies and gentlemen, very engaged with one another. There never was a place so shiny as that one; it sparkled so much you were blinded by it.

  “Is the queen there?” I asked the locksmith. “Which one is she?”

  I was to try to cast the queen—I hadn’t forgotten my instructions, to bring a piece of this impossible shininess back to the dirt of the boulevard. The locksmith jumped a little at my question, looked into the hall, squinted, shook his head. “No,” he said, “no queen. Only decorations.”

  The decorations—he meant the ladies—paid us no attention. The locksmith laid his handkerchief on the floor, then got down onto his knees. I knelt beside him and took out various nails and bits of business from his apron pocket, which I held for him until they were required. He proceeded to place the lock into the door. It fitted snugly, and looked, I told him, very fine.

  “Think so? I designed it myself. Yes, I like it rather.”

  I heard people moving behind us, and turned to see several footmen and in between them the old lady Mackau. She motioned for me to come to her, and by the force of the gesture I understood her to be very, very unhappy. I bade good-bye to the locksmith, kneeling there on his handkerchief peering into his keyhole.

  “You’re off, then, are you?” he said. “Please yourself.”

  “I’ll come again, I promise,” I whispered.

  Seeing myself reflected over and over in those looking-glasses, so out of place and far from home, I thought I might fall into that glass and drown. I walked slowly toward Madame Mackau, who pushed me from the chamber and marched me down the hall. She insisted that she was quite speechless at my impudence—though she was far from speechless, lecturing me all the way back to Madame Elisabeth’s rooms on how I must learn my place. Many guards had been sent out in search of me, she said, and had been told that a dwarfish stranger had been seen opening doors she had no right to open. “This place was not built for your entertainment,” she hissed, her bony hand clamped upon the back of my neck. And then I saw the intimidating room—though it could no longer intimidate, now that I had seen that far grander chamber—and there was Elisabeth herself. “Cuckoo,” she said, though without enthusiasm. Then, turning to the old lady: “This is my person, Madame Mackau, not yours.”