Illumination

by Matthew Plampin

  Elizabeth had been unsurprised. She’d produced some cash, a loan from Inglis she’d said, and had issued him with ten francs for his expenses; hardly a fortune, but it gave him a few more options. Clem had quickly decided that he wouldn’t seek out Jean-Jacques Allix that morning, as she’d suggested. Hannah’s battle-scarred beau was far too daunting for a first foray. A return to Besson’s balloon factory was more manageable; he’d walked from the Grand full of purpose.

  ‘So this is where it happens, eh?’ he asked. ‘This is where the balloons are made?

  ‘Well, the rope-work is done upstairs. The netting, the tackle – the baskets and ballast also. The sailors’ skills are proving most useful.’ Besson led Clem towards the courtyard. ‘But this room is inadequate. We need more height to hang the calico properly. A second factory has been founded in the Gare d’Orléans – there they can hang it from the roof, from the iron girders. Far better to see imperfections in the material.’

  They stopped in the courtyard’s open doorway. Clem took out a cigarette, offering one to Besson. ‘When will the first siege balloon actually be ready?’

  ‘Our first launch is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, in the place Saint-Pierre,’ the Frenchman replied, refusing it. ‘The Neptune – the old spotter balloon Nadar has been running up for the past fortnight. They have made some repairs and say it is good enough for the flight. A few others have been located as well, around the city, and are being inspected.’

  ‘How about these, though?’ Clem nodded at the balloon outside, which billowed briefly only to catch a breeze and be flattened against the façade opposite. ‘The ones you’re making here?’

  ‘Two weeks, perhaps. They must be thoroughly tested, you understand.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ Clem said with a grin, ‘the war might well be over and done with in two weeks, if your newspapers are to be believed. They’re full to bursting with reports of French heroism. Two hundred Prussians captured in the Bois de Vincennes. A fourteen-year-old boy from La Villette killing an enemy sentry with his own rifle. Letters found on dead Uhlans revealing how the poor blighters just want to pack up and head home. They are all but beaten, surely?’

  Clem hadn’t read any of this himself, of course; he’d sat across from Elizabeth that morning as she’d translated from the heap of papers she’d had brought in. The Parisian press was in a funny fix indeed. Censored to the quick by Napoleon III, it now flourished like weeds in springtime, new papers sprouting up daily. However, a mere forty-eight hours into the siege, this profusion of organs was already running short of real news; and as a result no piece of baseless conjecture, no ludicrous boast or lie, was too outrageous for them to print.

  Besson did not rise to it. ‘It is talk only,’ he said. ‘You know this. The Prussians have whipped us back – contained us. They are waiting to see what we will do.’

  Clem adopted a thoughtful look. ‘I hear that Trochu has sent Vice-President Favre through the lines to Bismarck, to discuss terms for peace.’

  The aérostier dismissed this. ‘A formality. It will come to nothing. The Prussians will demand too much, and Jules Favre is not a weak man.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Besides, the government is terrified of how the ordinary people might react if they surrendered. And any terms acceptable to Bismarck would definitely be seen as surrender.’

  ‘They’ve been too stoked up by the reds, haven’t they?’ Clem flicked ash through the doorway. ‘Tell me, what do you make of those types – the radicals and ultras?’

  There was a pause. Clem thought he’d been being pretty slick so far, extracting information with deft delicacy; now, though, Besson was staring at him as if he was an absolute imbecile.

  ‘They will finish us, Mr Pardy. Surely you see this. Les Rouges will end all hope of a fair and enduring republic, with their Marx and their Proudhon and whoever else. Freedom is what they want, so they say, but it is not a freedom that I recognise.’ He looked back at the pattern cutters, guiding their shears through creamy folds of fabric. ‘The old ones are veterans of the revolutions of ’48 and ’51. Many were exiled or put in prison, and they have their scores to settle. As for the younger ones – who knows? Every society has its madmen. And they have influence in the poor districts. Here in Montmartre, for example. The workers suffered under Napoleon. They have nothing to lose.’

  ‘I met one of these Rouges the other night, you know, after we parted ways in that café. Raoul Rigault, his name was.’

  Besson was growing angry; his slight, hard-won amiability disappeared. Clem remembered the spoiled photographic plate – the shattering of the glass against the track. ‘Rigault is among the worst. They say he wants to set up a guillotine in every square – a guillotine, Monsieur. The Jacobin fool would return Paris to the darkest days of the Terror.’ The aérostier snorted. ‘That is a strange kind of freedom.’

  ‘What about our Monsieur Allix, then?’ Clem asked. ‘How does he compare? Rigault couldn’t praise him highly enough.’

  This was a further mistake. Besson lowered his eyes; he pulled at his sandy moustache. ‘Him I do not know about,’ he muttered. ‘You should ask your sister.’

  Clem threw his half-smoked cigarette into the courtyard. He thought of their first conversation, as Besson had prepared his camera on that railway embankment. The Frenchman hadn’t given an opinion on Allix then either, merely performing a subtle sidestep. The reason for this was suddenly clear.

  ‘You’d say he was a bad lot though, wouldn’t you? A source of danger? Worth removing Han from, maybe, should the opportunity arise?’

  Besson did not look up. ‘You are talking about that letter,’ he said. ‘You think that I wrote it.’

  An incisive fellow indeed. ‘You speak English pretty damn well, Monsieur Besson. You plainly care for my sister and know a fair bit about her sweetheart and his friends. What would you think?’

  The picture was compellingly complete. This intelligent, awkward man had watched from the wings as Jean-Jacques and Hannah paraded around Montmartre. He’d seen the situation get more fraught, and the rhetoric more heated – with Hannah caught right at the heart of it. Delving into her past, he’d found out about Elizabeth and penned the letter. Perhaps he’d even discovered the connection with Montague Inglis, contriving a professional link in order to monitor Mrs Pardy’s movements. Perhaps their acquaintance had been no accident.

  ‘If I cared for her as you claim,’ Besson asked, ‘why would I want her gone? Why would I want her back in London?’

  ‘To know she was safe,’ Clem replied, ‘well away from Allix and Rigault and their revolution. It was selfless, I’ll give you that. You’re a decent man, Monsieur Besson.’

  ‘If you were a decent man,’ the aérostier snapped, ‘a decent brother, you would take action. You would separate them. You would do it today.’

  Clem chuckled uneasily. ‘Lord Almighty, what the deuce d’you think is going to happen here? What do you—’

  Besson shook his head; he walked off, back into the busy hall. ‘I have duties to attend to,’ he said. ‘You must leave, Mr Pardy. At once.’

  Clem stepped into the street outside the dancing school, imagining Hannah on the barricades, waving an enormous tricolour; sitting on a revolutionary committee, at Allix’s right hand, sending scores to their deaths. Comrades, inevitably, would turn on each other. He saw Han climbing the scaffold; saw the great angled blade rising in its frame, catching the light; heard the flat thunk as its lever was released.

  No, Clem told himself sternly – none of this would occur. He’d become infected by Besson’s melodrama. Han was a sensible girl, for the most part; she’d run a mile from such lunacy. Still, it might be wise to pay her a brotherly visit, just to get the lie of the land. He stood for a few seconds, trying to remember the way to the rue Garreau, then fastened his jacket and started uphill. It was a glorious day of blue skies and sharp shadows. Cannon-fire sounded in all directions, but it was no longer causing much alarm among the few who milled on the p
avements around him. Give people twenty-four hours, he supposed, and they’ll get used to more or less anything.

  As he approached a corner someone rushed up behind him, grabbed his buttock and squeezed hard. He spun around; Laure was giggling, chewing, lunging in for another pinch. She was in her vivandière’s uniform, but bare-headed, her orange hair loud in the sunshine. In her left hand was a roll, missing a couple of bites; a thin cigarillo smouldered between her fingers. Her eyes shone with delight at having caught him unawares. She certainly isn’t angry with me, Clem thought as he hopped to the side; I can’t have disgraced myself too badly.

  Laure said something in her deep, tarnished-sounding voice. Clem understood none of it. He stopped weaving about, his mind brimming with questions. What exactly had happened that night? What did he do? What did she do? How in God’s name did he get back to his room in the Grand? He hadn’t a hope of putting these in comprehensible French, though, or of following her replies.

  Seeing that he’d lost interest in their game, Laure halted her attacks and offered him her roll. He declined it so she took another bite herself. Around her mouthful she said something else, nodding back towards the school; she’d spotted him going in, it seemed, and had waited in the street for him to emerge. From her gesticulations Clem gathered that she’d once been a pupil of the Elysées-Montmartre, until an unknown circumstance had obliged her leave. To prove this she threw the remains of her roll into the gutter and performed a pirouette in the middle of the pavement, the cigarillo still poking from her fingers; and although hampered by her ankle-boots, she pulled the move off with remarkable grace.

  Clem smiled and clapped, but his mystification was growing. What was going on here? What could she possibly want from him? They were long past the point where she might ask for money; besides, he’d never felt that what was happening between them was any sort of transaction. He’d assumed that they had simply ended – that it had gone as far as it could. He wasn’t at all sure of his experiences in the later stages of that night, but he suspected that he’d drifted a good few feet out of his depth. Watching Laure now, in fact, triumphant after her pirouette, caused a memory to resurface: her lying in the arms of her friends, her blouse open, laughing like a docker as one of them licked her nipple. Could a girl really share the embraces of other women and then return to her lover afterwards without a care? Was it just how things worked in Montmartre – the habit of a certain class of Parisienne? Clem considered himself a thoroughly liberal-minded chap, but this made him pause for thought.

  Laure had no time for his confused deliberations. She sucked a last drag from her cigarillo before reaching out to take his hand. ‘Viens.’

  Her skin was cool and slightly damp; its touch negated every question, every other concern. The events of that night were plainly nothing to her, so they were nothing to him. It was as simple as that. Clem looked at her again, the mischievous, voracious smile, the perfect line of her nose, the fine china complexion, and knew that he’d do pretty much anything she wanted him to. She tugged him downhill, towards the boulevard de Clichy. A few more steps and she’d moved to his side, her breast pressed against his upper arm. Before very long her hand settled on his midriff, soon finding its way through both his waistcoat and shirt; and then Laure changed her mind, altering their course, steering them to the nearest alley-mouth.

  ‘Mademoiselle Laure,’ said Clem as they stumbled inside, her lips seeking his, ‘you are completely bloody amazing.’

  The Neptune could be seen from several blocks away, huge and dirty white between the buildings, bulging like a sack of flour. Laure squealed, removing the cigarette from her mouth to plant a smacking kiss on Clem’s cheek. It was only a few minutes after seven, the sun just breaking over the rooftops, but many hundreds had already arrived in the place Saint-Pierre. A good number had come up from other districts, filling Montmartre to capacity; balloons were common enough in Paris, but this first expedition of an aerial post, in a city still reeling after its encirclement, was being exalted as a grand act of defiance.

  Clem and Laure hadn’t slept. They’d stayed in bed all of the previous day, emerging at last in the early evening. The cafés had been starting to close, operating on an austere siege timetable. Laure had convinced the owner of a small place on the rue Pigalle to serve them an entrecôte, which they ate as he mopped the floor around them. The main streets were soon dark and dull so they’d returned to the assommoirs, embarking on a second tour of backrooms, attics and basements. There had been demonstrations against the government that afternoon, they’d learned, down in the square before the Hôtel de Ville. National Guard battalions from the northern arrondissements – the red battalions – had come out to demand that none other than Victor Hugo be given a seat in Trochu’s cabinet, to serve as their voice. Clem had felt a vague guilt at having missed this – that instead of fulfilling his role as Elizabeth’s eyes and ears he’d been engaged in vigorous and ever more inventive fornications – but he couldn’t honestly say that he regretted it. There’d be another protest soon enough.

  They approached the southern side of the place Saint-Pierre. The Neptune seemed almost to block out the sky. Recent repairs marked the side of the old balloon – sections that had been patched up like the elbows of an old coat. Clem took Laure’s cigarette and puffed on it happily. He’d avoided absinthe, hashish, and any other strange pipes or powders – he was just drunk, and proudly so. Laure was still in uniform, trading flirtatious salutes with passing guardsmen, although he had yet to gain any idea of what her actual duties were or when she might be required to perform them.

  In Clem’s hands was a bottle of champagne, bought in the last bar they’d visited. It was for Émile Besson; Clem envisaged them toasting the balloon post as the Neptune rose into the air. He was determined to make amends for that unfortunate conversation in the balloon factory – and to show that if the aérostier had sent the letter, he admired him for it more than anything else. The bottle had been out of ice for over an hour and was starting to lose its chill. For the fourth or fifth time Laure indicated that he should just open it, turning away with an exaggerated sigh when he refused.

  A detachment of National Guard – not from the Montmartre battalion – had cordoned off an area beside the merry-go-round. Arrayed around the Neptune were several ranks of dignitaries, many in uniform, lending the launch a ceremonial atmosphere. To his excitement, Clem spied the great Nadar among them, a corpulent, pale-suited impresario with an impressive waxed moustache, beaming at everyone as if savouring a moment of vindication. And there was Besson, one of a small team carrying out the final operations – winding back the coal-gas pipe that had been used to inflate the envelope, checking the valve at the base of the balloon, loading on the ballast. He was doing all this with the same precise, measured manner he’d gone about his photography.

  Clem pointed him out to Laure. ‘Mon ami,’ he said.

  She nodded absently, kissing him again before joining in the inevitable ‘Marseillaise’ that was building around them. A tent had been pitched nearby, behind the dignitaries; the crowd cheered as several large canvas mail-sacks were carried from it and secured in the Neptune’s basket. Besson was now standing to one side, his work done. Clem tried to lead Laure towards him, within earshot at least, but with no success. There was much he wanted to ask. Could the Prussians try to shoot the Neptune down? Could they send their own aerial contraptions after the balloons of Paris – mount an airborne pursuit? Would the Parisian aérostiers be able to outmanoeuvre them?

  The Neptune’s pilot appeared from the tent, causing a surge towards the cordon. Clem felt a sudden impact, liquid gushing across his thighs and stomach – the champagne cork had popped out. He swore, searching about for it, thinking that he could maybe work the damned thing back into the bottle neck. When he gave up a minute later the pilot was in the basket. The fellow was young, no more than twenty-five, and looked undaunted by the voyage ahead of him; his jacket was made of heavy brown leather and
the letters ‘AER’ had been stitched in gold on his flying helmet. Raising a gloved fist, he shouted ‘Vive la République!’

  As the crowd roared it back the tethers were released; and very slowly the balloon left the ground, like an ocean-going steamer easing from its berth. The pilot let down two of his ballast sacks, then two more. This accelerated his ascent dramatically; in two seconds flat the balloon had cleared the rooftops of Montmartre and was breaking out into open sky, the morning sun blazing against the envelope. Clem watched it get smaller and smaller, gaping with tipsy exhilaration. Standing on the stones of the square, it seemed to him that gravity had been reversed – that the balloon was actually falling upwards, away from the earth, a bright white ball plummeting into the heavens with some brave fool roped to its underside.

  A breeze caught the Neptune and it was carried off to the west – prompting massive movement in the place Saint-Pierre as many made to follow. Across the square, among the blues, greys and browns of the remaining crowd, Clem noticed a spot of coral. It was Elizabeth, up from the centre of the city to witness the launch. In her hands were her notebook and a pair of binoculars. Inglis was next to her, feigning boredom with the whole business. Clem got an uncomfortable sense of how he must appear: pink-cheeked, clothes dishevelled, clutching a bottle to his chest. He wanted to look away, to pretend he hadn’t seen her, but he couldn’t.

  Elizabeth had seen him too, of course, and Laure; she knew very well that he’d been neglecting his task – taken on barely a day before – to romp about with his cocotte. A cold nod directed her son’s attention to the opposite side of the square. Jean-Jacques Allix and some others were at the mouth of the rue Saint-André, surrounded by a company or two of the Montmartre National Guard; Clem recognised a couple of faces from the evening after Châtillon. They were standing apart from the rest of the crowd – watching the event rather than participating in it.