by Edward Carey
“She was found—”
“Let her go immediately,” ordered Elisabeth, with such confidence.
My neck was unclamped.
“Shall I have you beaten again?” Elisabeth mused.
I put my hands out.
“Send her away,” said Mackau. “Beat her first.”
“You shall not go back to your home,” Elisabeth said, “until you have taught me everything.”
“She has broken the rules!” cried Mackau.
“I should like very much—” said Elisabeth, with a wonderful new firmness, “I should like us to resume the game of hide-and-seek.”
“We must grow up,” said the old woman.
“And this time, dear Mackau,’” said Elisabeth, “I have decided that you shall have the pleasure of hiding. We shall count to one hundred.”
“But I never do the hiding.”
“It has long been your turn, then. One . . . two . . . three. You must run, Mackau, and hide. You know the rules, do run along. We shall come and find you. Go and hide, and nowhere easy or close, or I shall be very cross.”
Mackau, uncertain, left the room.
“Sit down,” said Elisabeth. “I have something to say to you.”
“That was very well done,” I said.
“Thank you, I quite surprised myself. It’s you that inspired me to it. To run off like that! Only don’t do it again, my person, my body.”
“No, I promise you.”
So we sat, two similar-looking undersized young women, upon a sofa designed for bigger people, and we talked.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Poor Suffering Bodies of Madame Elisabeth, by Herself.
I am going to tell you about my people,” Elisabeth told me. “The people I collect and put in here.” She held a beautiful leather-bound tome in her lap.
It was her brother, the king, who had inspired her to assemble people all in a book. He was always writing everything down, she said; he so loved lists; he knew the Almanach almost by heart. He had written down how many steps there were to the Queen’s Staircase, how many windows there were in the entire palace, the number of times their grandfather sent for him. (Not very many, she recalled.) He knew the precise number of seconds, hours, days, and years that their brother the Duc de Bourgogne had lived before he succumbed to tuberculosis of the bones, and the exact number of years, days, hours, and minutes after his birth that their mother had died. The king counted everything, it seemed, and wrote it all down. He had books and books of lists.
“I thought, in my small way, I might do like the king,” she told me. “So I collect up my people. There are so many buildings beyond the palace, horrid, mean places, and there do I see such people. Oh, how awfully sad they make me feel. And I make a note of it, and I give a little money, and then I tell them that I, Elisabeth of France, shall pray for them. That’s why I keep the notes, you see here. Read.”
She handed me a long list of people and their distress. Barse, Renaud: broken leg. Grulier, Madeleine: pains in the stomach. Gibier, Agnes: headaches. Billinger, Jean: his little finger, his daughter’s nose. Enderlin, Odile: kidney. Roger, Roland: his mother shrieks. Pynson, Rose: discolored skin on back. Parlant, Alphonse: hungry. Moulin, Dominique: pregnant again. Levesque, Pierre: son has died. Salvia, Huguette: corns, toothache, cannot see. Vincent, François, and his wife, Olivia: cannot conceive. Cutard, Adeline: spots.
“I pray for them all,” she said.
Then I had the idea.
“You might do better yet,” I said.
“Have a care, my body, take warning.”
“You could sculpt the maladies.”
“Sculpt?”
“Yes! Think of it—the people’s most grievous problems, captured in wax!”
“Miniature models? In wax?” She fidgeted a bit, as if imagining holding one in her hand. “Oh—could we take them to the church? Good heavens! Might we? We could make them votive objects, couldn’t we? Votive objects that are different? That are very accurate? Then God would be sure to listen. Then He would see how much good we’re doing. Oh, my body, despite your unhappy face you are indeed a very clever one. Yes! Oh yes!”
Unsure what to say, I reached to take her hand.
“No! Stay back! No closer! But what a lovely idea!”
We never did search for Madame Mackau that afternoon. She was found some hours later behind a tapestry by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. When she explained that she was hiding from little Elisabeth, the lady asked why—was she frightened of the princess? The story spread about, so widely that when the imperious lady appeared, people smiled at her. Her authority slipped, and she slowly began protecting herself by summoning great blankets of imaginary maladies.
The next morning, I was awakened by a hammering on my cupboard doors before the sun was up. In the darkness I dressed and was escorted to that room where all Madame Elisabeth’s drawings had been, though they were no longer there. A table had been set in the middle of the room, covered with tools and wax and clay. I ran my fingers over the tools, touched the clay. And last of all lifted the wax to my nose.
“I shall call you,” Elisabeth told me as her hands molded soft clay, “I shall call you my heart.” And after a week she presented me with that object made in wax, crudely modeled but there it was. And I asked her if I might hold her, and she said I must certainly never consider it. But I was so happy I could not stop myself and asked again. And she said no again but quieter. So that I felt I might try once more. This time, I didn’t ask permission. I put my hands around her and I felt her head resting upon my shoulder. And her smell, deep and warm, a tiny, perfectly grown cabbage. Only when Madame Mackau’s voice came from outside did Elisabeth quickly break away and return to her work. I slipped the heart into my pinafore pocket and have kept it among my possessions ever since.
At my suggestion various animal organs were brought up from the kitchens, so that we might examine them, cut them open, and draw them to help us get a better understanding of their place and function. A cow’s heart, a sheep’s lungs, a pig’s bladder. Initially reluctant, Elisabeth was soon happy to sink her fingers in. Great heavy books were brought also from the libraries, huge wonderful volumes with prints that folded out and showed just how the human is. Here was good instruction; we studied closely, and then we set to work.
As we modeled, we opened up to each other. I showed her Marta and she told me her secrets. Elisabeth’s greatest hope was to be married; her profoundest fear was to end up a spinster like her aunts. She told me that her hand had once been promised to the Infant of Portugal, but that somehow the proposed union had been broken off. The Infant of Portugal had been proclaimed “not becoming.” The king said that someone else would certainly be found, that Elisabeth must just be patient, and so she went on being patient, and though she saw her brother often enough, her marriage had never been discussed again.
“Let me not be like my aunts Adélaïde and Victoire,” Elisabeth said. “All they do is complain all day and eat and drink and talk of things that don’t matter at all. They’re just filling their days, it seems to me, one after the other, always the same, again and again, until one day they will just lie down and die. That’s all they have to look forward to. Oh, my heart, I feel so much stronger since you’ve been here. I don’t want my aunts’ future. God in Heaven, do anything to me, but save me from that!”
Madame Elisabeth had devised her own regimen of visits beyond the estate, in search of her needy, and each time she returned we made new anatomical votives. One day, I asked if I could join her. She frowned a moment but then happily agreed. Her poor and suffering lived very near the palace, she told me, but out of sight of it. Tucked away behind woods in miserable cottages in states of advanced dilapidation. We made the trip by carriage, accompanied by two guards. I asked why.
“For protection,” Elisabeth said. “Sometimes the people are very unhappy and do not always hide it.”
At the sound of our carriage, peopl
e began to come out of their homes. The first thought I had was that their faces and bodies seemed of a piece with the distressed architecture. They approached the carriage. Elisabeth asked me to pull down the window.
“Hello, good morning to you,” she said.
They bowed, their hats removed from their heads.
“How are you? How do you do?”
And then, one by one, they came up to her and gave small details of their misfortunes, in some cases showing the maladies they carried with them. Only when they had spoken, revealed their agony, would Elisabeth pass them a coin.
“Do you find them fascinating, my heart?” she asked me.
“Are they starving?”
“I’m not certain. What do you think?”
“How did they come to be like this, so close to the palace?”
“Food is delivered to them.”
“But not enough.”
“And I make my visits.”
“What, I wonder, can it be like inside their houses?”
At this she stopped. “Inside? I have never thought of it.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Yes, I suppose I am.”
“Then let us.”
I opened the carriage door; how the people hurried back to let me by. Elisabeth followed. We walked up to one exhausted building, and I asked the derelict woman before it if we might go in. She said something I could not fully grasp. I pushed at the door. So dark it was inside that it took a while to comprehend the place, despite its small size. Dirt floor. A bed propped up on bricks, stained blankets lying in a state of rigor mortis on top of it. Walls black with mold. A couple of dented pots. A stool much repaired. The whole place smelled like the inside of some very rancid animal, long given over to despair. Nothing else save a tied-up dog, the woman’s sole companion, who clearly followed her diet. Looking at the creature, you understood precisely how its skeleton was articulated. It raised its hackles, and with a look of profound outrage it showed its rotten teeth, and once it started barking at us it would not cease. Elisabeth clung to me. If the dog were loosed from its fetters, I was convinced that we might have become the first decent meal it had ever had.
“How horrid,” Elisabeth gasped.
The woman began to speak to us then, though the language was no tongue I had ever heard. Strange guttural noises, grunts, and gnashes—but all the while, and this was the crucial thing, her mouth, that jagged slit, remained quite still. It wasn’t exactly her who was calling out in gulps and spurts: it was her body talking. Her neglected and failing corpus, making noise, involuntarily berating us. It was the muffled voice of some helpless spirit coming from within this poor creature’s forsaken pelt. Then there came a tumbling from her, a sudden lurch forward, a bending in two, and we left in haste.
We had been inside perhaps half a minute before we were out again, inhaling the cleaner air. I would never forget that place, the miserable room and dog and lady.
Look away from the hovel; look anywhere else. Behind the village houses were a small chapel and a large graveyard with many fresh-dug graves.
We retreated to the carriage.
“How does a woman come to be like that?” Elisabeth panted.
“Not overnight, that’s certain.”
“Can she be helped, do you think?”
“I wonder. In some cases, death itself is the only remaining help.”
“I must try to help. Heavens, my dear heart, what kind of soul was she?”
“Only a woman.”
“Oh! Horrid! What can I do? What can I do? The votives, more and more! Marie, I need your help.”
As we returned to the palace, it seemed color had been restored to the world around us. I had never known the world to change so quickly.
With each excursion, the walls of the side chapel in the nearby Church of Saint Cyr were slowly being furnished with waxen human bits. At first no one worried about these additions, never imagining how their number would grow. We brought kidneys and bladders and lungs, arms and eyes and hearts, livers and stomachs. Passing this wax or clay flesh back and forth, we once or twice touched hands ourselves, and felt, I thought, such a comradeship there, a great closeness among the body parts.
Three months were gone already. I was to return to the Monkey House. But I was so nervous to leave; I should much rather stay with Elisabeth. When I told her that, she responded that it couldn’t be simpler: someone would write to them and tell them that I could not be spared. My master—or probably the widow in his stead—wrote back to say that, in that case, they must be further compensated for my absence. They were. I never saw that letter. I was so relieved not to go. I never wanted to go back, not then. It was too sad. The longer I lived in that cupboard, the easier it was to forget I had ever been anywhere else.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Up on the roof.
I spent ever-longer days with Elisabeth modeling organs. I went into her bedroom as soon as she was awake; she told me all the business of her day, and asked me again and again if I was happy. Very happy, I said, very happy. And I was.
After a while, my presence was credited with somehow giving comfort to the royal child, and I began to be sent for at different odd times of the day. Soon enough I was given the strictest instruction never to venture far from my cupboard, for I could be needed at any moment. Should I require something, I must only call out and one of the other servants would come to me. Sometimes I would sit in the corner of that disapproving room of hers while she and her ladies-in-waiting ate their evening meal. Bombe, I discovered, was the Marquise de Bombelles, Rage the Marquise de Raigecourt, and Démon was the Marquise des Monstiers-Mérinville. They were three pleasant enough young ladies, I understood now, the princess’s classmates; they smiled at me and slipped me a piece of chocolate or a biscuit or a lump of sugar and patted me on the head.
Before Elisabeth was to enter some official gathering, I would be positioned nearby, standing very still, very upright; the knowledge that I was near, ready to be looked at, had the effect of lightening her terror. I would sometimes be positioned by a footman in the strangest of places, behind screens in great halls, so that once or twice an evening Elisabeth might quickly glance at me there, pinch my nose or take hold of my chin, and so be put at ease.
One early evening I was rushed up to the roof of the palace by one of Elisabeth’s blue-liveried servants and told to wait there, at a certain spot, until called down. From where I stood—pressed against the balustrade, midway between two large stone vases, just above Madame Elisabeth’s rooms—I was in a perfect position to see the road to the Church of Saint Cyr, not to mention the Grand Canal of the palace gardens, stretching so far away, as if it were there to serve as a lesson in perspective. Although I lived in a cupboard, such vastness was no longer peculiar to me. I was instructed to keep to my position, so that Elisabeth going by in her coach on some official venture might pull down her window and see me up there, and be made happy because of it.
I stayed at my post, as I was bidden, and watched people drift away from the vast garden. It began to drizzle, but still I remained, for that was my instruction. After a while dusk descended, until I could no longer see the canal or gardens so well, and soon enough I could hear little save for a few laughs and cheers from somewhere within the palace and the shrieking of a few cats down below. I was beginning to feel certain that I had been forgotten when I heard someone else walking on the roof, and coming closer. Whoever it was stopped nearby and leaned against the balustrade, holding on to one of the stone vases for support, staring downward. The figure began to busy himself with some sort of long rod. The next thing I heard nearly sent me over the balustrade to be dashed upon the cobbles: my rooftop companion had lifted and fired a gun, directly at the cats below. I heard a great bang, saw a burst of light, and heard a shriek, which I took to be that of a cat. Then, shortly after, a second shot, no second shriek. Fearful of being shot myself if he should mistake me for a cat, I called out, “Please, please, s
ir, I’m up here with you. Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot.”
“Who are you? Who’s there?”
The gunman hobbled over to me, his large white face becoming more intelligible as it approached. It was my old friend the locksmith, dressed in a large overcoat.
“It’s you!” I said. “I’m so glad. I’m sorry I haven’t brought you any pastries yet—I’m kept so busy.”
“Oh!” he said when he was close enough to see who I was. “Oh, that’s all right.”
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t be sentimental. There are so many of them,” he said. “Cats everywhere. Hairs and smells in every corner of the palace. And so it falls to me, from time to time, to lessen the problem. Come and sit,” said the locksmith, patting the slope of the roof.
“It’s beginning to rain,” I said. “I wonder if I should go down.”
“Come, it’s just a little wet. I’ll wipe it myself. There. Come now, sit, sit. I insist!” And so I sat by him, and felt his warmth next to me. He shared his overcoat between us, and we sat, side by side, in the dark.
“Do you like it up here?” he asked, and continued, “Well, I’ll tell you, I love it. I come here often. It’s really, I sometimes think, save for my forge, the only peaceful place in the whole pile. How I love moments like this. Ah!”