“So what?” he says, and there’s a bite to his voice.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him, feeling worried, looking around for a more private place to talk than the Boulevard Henri IV.
“Nothing.”
“Come on,” I say, dashing up a side street. “What’s up?”
“Some guys messed with my cab this morning.”
“What, like, they stole your mirrors or something?”
“No, like, they tried to steal my car. With me in it.”
“Oh my God. You were carjacked?”
“Almost.”
“Virgil, are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just wired.”
“What happened?”
“There was a fight. The cops came and—”
“A fight?”
“I’m fine. Really. Can you just sing?”
“Okay, yeah. Um … no. No, I can’t. Not until I know you’re really okay.”
“I am. For real. One of them threw a punch but I ducked it. Mostly. He grazed me. I’ve got a cut on my cheek, that’s all. Sing, Andi. Please. I’m tired. I’m so damn tired.”
So I did. I sat down on a bench in the park and sang stuff we’d sung at Rémy’s the other night. Then tunes from Plaster Castle. But it didn’t work. He was still awake. Still amped up on adrenaline. I could hear it in his voice.
I need a lullaby, I thought. I wracked my brains but all I could come up with was “Rock-a-bye Baby,” the worst, most scary-ass lullaby of all time. A cab passed by as I was thinking, with an ad on its side for a British travel agency, Smith and Barlow, and their cheap flights to London. Smith and Barlow. The Smiths. “Asleep.” Perfect, I thought.
I didn’t do the greatest of jobs on it. I could’ve used a piano to back me. And Morrissey. But it didn’t matter. He needed a song. From me. And I needed to give him one.
He sang the last verse with me. Well, mumbled it.
There is another world
There is a better world
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
And then he whispered, “Thank you,” and hung up. And I sat on the bench afterward. Eyes closed. Squeezing the phone. Thinking about what just happened. Thinking about what happened last night. Wishing I was with him. Lying beside him. Listening to him breathe. I don’t know what this is, if it’s even anything. But it better not be anything because he’s more than cool and more than hot. He’s something I’ve never known before. Something real and amazing. And I’m out of here in a few days.
So I tried my best to put him out of my head, but I was humming “Asleep” all the way to the library.
I look around now for the molemen pushing their trolleys but they must still all be underground, because they’re nowhere to be seen. It looks like it’s going to be a few minutes, so I take out the diary. I packed it this morning so I could read it at lunchtime, while the library’s closed.
I open it up, hoping. Even more than I was last night. Hoping that Alex survived. Hoping that Virgil calls me tonight. Hoping so hard that I scare myself.
5 May 1795
The guards have not caught me yet. They have not killed me. My wound has not turned septic. The pain abates. I may yet live to finish this account.
I was writing of Versailles before I was chased, and of the fishwives. We survived the attack, all of us.
At dawn General Hoche, a leader of the Paris guard—the very soldiers who had earlier marched upon the palace—received word of the mob’s attack and came to the king’s aid. Hoche and his men pushed the mob out of the palace. General Lafayette arrived and made peace by asking the king to step out on his balcony and address his people. This the king did, promising that he would indeed go to Paris, where he could be certain of the love of his good and faithful subjects.
Did I not tell you he was stupid?
Afterward, Louis-Charles and his family were hurried away and I was dismissed, swept aside like so much rubbish by the soldiers of the Paris guard. I tried to follow Louis-Charles but they would not let me.
I found myself pushed outside the king’s chamber, back into the Hall of Mirrors. There, a few servants—pale and dazed—collected the dead. Others hurried to and fro, packing dresses, shoes, linens, perfumes—everything the queen needed to travel. Still others wandered, lost. Please, madam, take me with you, a scullery girl begged, clutching the sleeve of a lady-in-waiting. I can cook and mind children. Please, madam!
Maids and chamberlains, fireboys and footmen, cooks and grooms and gardeners—all had been told to leave. They were no longer needed, for Versailles was no more. The king and queen would live in another palace now—the damp and crumbling Tuileries—under house arrest.
Outside, some of the mob were still singing, still shouting, and dancing. Liberty! a woman yelled. Liberty for all!
Liberty. The marchers had shouted it over and over again, all night long. They’d carried banners with the word writ large. Was this liberty? If so, I wanted no part of it. I was free now, yes. Free to pin silly cockades to my hat. Free to sing daft songs. Free to go back to Paris and starve.
On the palace steps, a man mopped up blood. Two more swept up pieces of glass. The jagged shards made an ugly music as they were dumped into a bucket.
I heard the tune and knew it—it was the sound of my dreams shattering.
35
“Miss? Here are your boxes.”
The voice startles me. I’m lost in the diary again. “What?” I say. Way too loudly.
The man holds a finger to his lips. “Here is the material you asked for,” he says, gesturing to the cart beside him. “Sign for it, please. There are five boxes in all. One for Amadé Malherbeau’s death certificate and will. Three of his sheet music. One containing personal papers.” He places the boxes on the table, then hands me a clipboard.
“Yeah, okay. Thanks,” I say, signing. “Hey, do you know why there isn’t a birth certificate?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Amadé Malherbeau’s death certificate is here but not his birth certificate. Why is that?”
“When would he have been born?”
I know when he died, and how old he was, so I do a quick calculation. “Seventeen seventy-five,” I say.
The man smiles. “That was a very long time ago. It’s likely his birth certificate was destroyed during the many uprisings and invasions Paris has experienced. It might have gone up in flames. Been pulverized by bombs. Or destroyed by damp if it was stored in a basement room, as many records were. If Malherbeau was born in the country, it could be sitting in the attic of some ancient town hall.”
He takes his clipboard back, places it on his trolley, and starts to motor off. But then he stops suddenly and turns around. “Or …” he says.
“Or what?”
“Or he wasn’t born Amadé Malherbeau. Perhaps he went by another name. Our birth and death records are cross-referenced by year if you care to look through them.”
Hmm. Didn’t think of that. “How many do you have for 1775?” I ask.
“A few thousand.”
“Um, no thanks. I’ve just got today, you know? Not the rest of my life.”
The moleman leaves and I get busy. It’s 10:15 now and I have a lot to do before lunchtime. I’ve just started to open the box with the death records in it when I hear a loud, sharp banging.
I look up, startled. It’s Yves Bonnard. He’s pounding on his desk with a gavel. “Number twelve! Gloves, please!” he barks.
Number twelve is me, of course. All the other researchers are giving me a look like I just killed someone. “My bad,” I say. I put the gloves on and snap Yves a sharp salute. He narrows his eyes at me, holds up one finger. I’m pretty sure he means strike one.
I open the first box and carefully take out Amadé Malherbeau’s death certificate and his will. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. He died at the age of fifty-eight, in his house. He had no wife and no heirs, so he left everything to the Paris Conservatory. Neither document
tells me anything I don’t already know, but they sure look cool, with all their big scrolly ink letters and flourishes. They’ll make great visuals.
Next, I open the box of personal papers and start going through them. There are receipts in here. Tons of them. For everything from horses to furniture to clothing to a carriage.
There are letters from music publishers, from concert hall owners, from people who wanted him to perform in their homes. There’s one from the violinist and composer Paganini with a return address in London. I pull it out and read it excitedly, thinking maybe the scholars missed this one since I haven’t read about it in any book; hoping for a long, involved, enlightening discussion of their shared musical philosophies.
But no. Paganini spends the whole letter bitching about English roads, English audiences, damp English hotels, the terrible English weather, and the inedible English food. He signs off by saying that he’s looking forward to stopping in Paris in June, on his way back to Genoa, and sharing a pot of coffee with his friend Malherbeau underneath a canopy of red roses in his garden.
I put it all back in its box, disappointed. I’m going to photograph a lot of it, the receipts and the letters—if I fade them out they’ll make great backgrounds for my PowerPoint slides—but I still have to talk about Malherbeau the man in my introduction, I still have to say something meaningful about him, and none of this, and none of what I’ve read in any of the books, is bringing me any closer to understanding him. I mean, what can I say? That he liked coffee and roses? That’s not going to get me to the airport.
Then I open the first box of his music. Malherbeau’s Concerto in A Minor is on the very top. I’ve seen the music. I own a copy of it. It’s the Fireworks Concerto. I’ve played this particular piece a hundred times. But I’m not prepared for this—for seeing the notes and measures exactly as he wrote them, for feeling the master’s hand upon the page.
The paper is still milky white, but browned and broken at the edges. I lift the score out carefully and start sight-reading it. Some of the notes are misshapen. There are blots and cross-outs and I realize I’m not looking at the final score, I’m looking at a draft. And it doesn’t quite work. In fact, it’s kind of a mess.
I look at the next piece of music in the box. It’s another draft of the same concerto. This one’s showing definite improvements. How cool is that? There are four more drafts of the same concerto. I place them all in order on the table in front of me so I can see all the first pages at the same time. Looking at one after another, I can see what Malherbeau changed and why. I can see how his mind worked. I can see the originality. The genius.
My heart’s beating really fast. I’m so excited by all of this that I start fingering the measures on an invisible fretboard, without even thinking. And tapping the beat with my foot. And singing the notes. “Ba ba ba BAH da dadadada DAH da …”
And then I hear it again. The gavel pounding. And the voice of God: “Number twelve, quiet, please!” I look up. Yves Bonnard is now holding up two fingers. One more strike and I’m out.
“Sorry!” I whisper.
At that second, at that very second, my cell phone goes off. It might not be so bad if I had, say, Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1 for a ring tone and the volume was turned down. But I don’t. I have “Kashmir.” Turned up. Way up. And I can’t find the phone. Anywhere. I’m digging in my bag and then my jacket pockets. Robert Plant’s warbling about time and space and I still can’t find it. I grab my bag again. I’m frantically pulling everything out of it—wallet, keys, Alex’s diary—when I see it. Finally. It was under the diary.
I turn it off. And I can hear a pin drop. Nobody’s rustling papers or coughing or scribbling notes because they’re busy staring at me in shock and horror. I don’t want to look up at the front desk, but I do. And I see exactly what I thought I would—Yves Bonnard holding up three fingers.
36
So yeah, I’m out. Big-time. Yves Bonnard sent me packing.
It’s not even eleven o’clock. I should be in the library, photographing Malherbeau’s papers. Instead I’m sitting at a café, drowning my sorrows in a big bowl of coffee. The day’s warm and sunny and I’m sitting outside watching the world walk by.
I still don’t know what happened. I mean, not putting on the gloves was a stupid mistake. And the singing? Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that. But honestly, I didn’t know I was. The music just took over. And the cell phone—definitely not my fault. I know I turned the ringer off after I talked to Virgil. I was in a bakery, buying Yves Bonnard that croissant. I remembered the library’s no–cell phones rule as I was waiting to pay and I set the phone to vibrate. Then and there. Just to be safe. So what happened? Something in my bag must’ve knocked against the ringer button and reset it. The diary probably. It was lying on top of the phone. The weird thing is, the caller didn’t leave a message, and there was no callback number, either.
“You can’t throw me out. Please. I just got my documents. I need to finish reading them. And then I need to photograph them. And I need to do it today. Today’s Friday and I’m leaving Paris on Sunday and the Abelard’s closed on Saturday.”
“You should have thought of that before you disrupted the entire reading room. Three times. The people around you are here to work.”
“I am, too,” I tell him. “I really am. It’s just that my work tends to be on the noisy side, you know?”
He said he did not know and then he told me goodbye. And here I am. Totally screwed. If I don’t get those photos, I’m not going anywhere.
I take a deep breath and think it all through. I know what to do—I’ll stay away until after lunch. Give Yves Bonnard time to cool off. When the library opens again, I’ll slink in and beg him on my knees to give me another chance. Until then, I have two hours to kill. I have the diary with me, so I’ll sit here and read it.
“Just like she wants you to,” a little voice inside me says. The same little voice that piped up yesterday as the library was closing. “I mean, it’s kind of funny that your phone rang when you turned the ringer off, don’t you think?”
The words send a little chill up my spine, but I shrug it off. It’s the drugs, that’s all. Too much Qwell. “But you only took one pill this morning,” the voice reminds me. “You dialed it back again.”
“Shut up,” I mutter. I gulp my coffee and start to read.
6 May 1795
The king and his family rode to Paris after Versailles fell. My family and I walked.
We were exhausted when finally we reached the city. After a long search, we found a room in the Marais. It was small and damp, but it did not matter to me as I was rarely in it. I was out on the streets morning and night, in all weather, trying to get inside the Tuileries. Because I had come to love Louis-Charles and hoped to see him. And because I loved advancement, too, and still hoped that the queen might procure it for me.
I played my guitar by the gates, by the Queen’s Walk, and along the tall iron fences that surrounded the gardens, always hoping for a glimpse of Louis-Charles, but I never got one for the guards chased me away. I tied notes to stones and tossed them over the wall. And once a puppet, but I later saw the cook’s child with it. I disguised myself as a laundress and tried to sneak in with the washerwomen on a Monday morning. Another time I hid myself in a butcher’s wagon. Both times I was found out and beaten.
The Tuileries Palace is in the middle of the city. Its grounds are small and confined. They are nothing like the open lawns and shady groves of Versailles. Often whilst walking round them I wondered, How would Louis-Charles run and play there? Who would sit with him under the night sky, counting the stars? Who would filch squibs and crackers from the firemasters and shoot them off for him? He was a strange child, prone to sadness. The queen had asked me to keep his poor heart merry. If I could not, who would?
I wanted to find a way in. I wanted to keep trying but I had to stop for I was needed to help with the puppets. We were poorer than ever and hungrier than ever for it was harder
than ever to earn our daily bread. Paris had changed. It was not the same city we had left only six months earlier.
On the streets, none talked of frivolous topics. The papers were no longer filled with the doings of actresses and courtesans. No one marveled at a duke’s new calèche or the matched pair he’d bought to pull it. No one argued over who served the best calves’ brains—the Chartres or the Foy. Women put off their powdered wigs. They stuffed their silk gowns into their closets and wore dresses of muslin. Men wore suits of sober fustian.
It was the goings-on in the Assembly that now captivated the city. What had Danton said this morning? Whom had Marat called bugger? What had Madame Roland written in her column? What was being said at the Jacobins, the Cordeliers? Would the king accept the Rights of Man? And who was this lawyer from Arras, Robespierre?
There was a new spirit in the air, a spirit of hope, of change. There was a new energy in the city, a true excitement. People no longer addressed one another as sir or madam, but citizen. They talked openly of a constitution for France, of equality and freedom.
It is a time of miracles, my father said. Anything can happen.
Miracles? my uncle spat. It will be a miracle if we don’t starve to death. This revolution of yours is bad for business.
He was right. Wig makers suffered. Silk weavers, too. Jewelers, flower sellers, and confectioners failed. In the fancy shops, gilt tables and marble statues could be had for a song. And we, too, struggled ever harder. The people of Paris, newly high-minded, no longer laughed at farting puppets, so we had to give new plays—my father’s plays. They were earnest affairs about the tyrant Caesar or the excesses of mad King George, and they were so dull, I usually fell asleep during the first act, or sneaked off to auditions. I cared nothing for citizens and constitutions. I cared only for playing. If I could not get back into the Tuileries, and the queen’s favor, I would have to find another way to the stage.
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