Hannah nodded; he was going to let her stay, for Clem’s sake if nothing else. ‘The street was quiet.’
‘Then tell me, Mademoiselle Pardy,’ he asked next, sliding a pen from between two piles of papers, ‘can you work a sewing machine?’
Monsieur Besson, it turned out, had his contacts; by the end of the day he’d learned that Clement was being held in the infamous Mazas prison in the 12th arrondissement, a short distance upriver from the Hôtel de Ville. Reliable information was hard to come by, but it didn’t seem that he was in any immediate danger of execution. Furthermore, the stand-off on the grand staircase had somehow been resolved without bloodshed. The subsequent negotiations between the provisional government and the rebels had carried on until the early hours of the morning. All hostages had been released, and Flourens’s declaration of a commune retracted, on the understanding that elections would be held within a week – and no reprisals would be made. After the pandemonium of the day everyone simply went their separate ways.
This news left Hannah dazed with relief. ‘I can go, then,’ she said. ‘I don’t need to hide.’
Monsieur Besson begged to differ. ‘There are men in the government who won’t accept these terms, and the lack of arrests in particular. Edmond Adam, who brokered the truce with Blanqui and Delescluze, resigned this afternoon as the chief of police. Nobody knows why. His replacement, though, is a Monsieur Cresson, who is said to lack Adam’s conciliatory attitude. I would advise you to stay out of sight a while longer.’
Reluctantly, Hannah admitted the sense of this and agreed to remain for a few more days. They established a routine, fitted around that of the balloon factory. A bed was made beneath his desk from coats brought up from the lost property office that had first granted her access to the station. Besson would come in with a lantern at around half-past five, bringing her food for the day – rice, cabbage, coarse brown bread, sometimes a few scraps of boiled meat. She’d change into the work gown he’d found her while he waited outside; he’d unlock the station bathrooms for her to use; then they’d go down together through the empty tiled stairwells to the concourse.
The lampposts were dark, the ticket barriers gone and the tracks beyond obscured by swathes of calico that hung from the rafters like waterfalls of hardened wax. The two of them would head across the weaving area, between rolls of netting and the wild stalks of half-spun baskets, to the sewing benches that lined the far wall. Hannah would take her place at one of these, Besson walking off to begin his endless round of checks and inspections. It was carefully timed; within five minutes the other workers would start to arrive, the seamstresses, sailors and other aérostiers, complaining about the cold and swapping the latest rumours. For the next twelve hours or so – with a half-hour for lunch – she would do her part in fashioning the balloon envelopes, stitching and double-stitching under the direction of Madame Vuillard, the overseer.
There was an unexpected peace in this noisy, repetitive labour. Hannah’s thoughts would wander far into the past, to places and people she hadn’t seen for a decade or more. In particular, she found herself returning to a train journey she’d once made with her father – to Guildford or Reading or somewhere like that, where he was due to give a lecture on his poems – when she’d been eight years old. As she worked her machine’s foot-pedal, running cloth beneath the stuttering needle, she recalled the way the countryside had unfolded around them; and the great wash of contentment she’d felt as he’d taken hold of her hand.
The other women on the sewing benches were told that Hannah’s name was Jane Ashford and that she was the daughter of a coachman employed at the British embassy, but they clearly had their suspicions. It was not lost on them that this Anglaise had appeared the morning after that business at the Hôtel de Ville. Wages in the balloon factory were good, though, and had never been needed more; Émile Besson’s standing there was strong; and Nadar, who wielded ultimate authority, was said to be a communist sympathiser who’d once had Félix Pyat over for supper. The seamstresses decided that he must be in on it, whatever it was, and that they’d better stay quiet. They kept Hannah at a distance, eyeing her warily, making their excuses if she ever tried to strike up a conversation – leaving her well alone.
Monsieur Besson himself behaved with perfect honour. Hannah hadn’t known quite what to expect from the aérostier, but he never so much as hinted at the precariousness of her situation, or her dependence upon his goodwill. There were no lunges for a kiss; no lingering sadly in doorways; no excruciating attempts to enquire whether romance between them was truly beyond hope. His conduct was so restrained, in fact, that it made her wonder if she’d been mistaken. Perhaps this man was not so smitten by her after all.
Each morning, along with her food, her host would hand her a small sheaf of newspapers. It was in his office, therefore, only two days after the occupation of the Hôtel de Ville, that she learned of the arrest of several dozen prominent reds and the dismissal of sixteen battalion commanders of the National Guard for their radical activities. Monsieur Besson had been right. This was a barefaced betrayal, showing total contempt for those betrayed. Hannah’s sole consolation was that Jean-Jacques hadn’t been among those taken. Along with Flourens, he’d escaped Cresson’s policemen, disappearing, the moderate papers claimed, into the lawless ultra underground that spread across the northern arrondissements.
Then came the miserable sham of the elections. Rather than a proper municipal vote that could deliver a commune, the city was granted a plebiscite. They were asked merely to answer the question: Do you support the continuance of the authority of the provisional government? A ‘yes’ was widely viewed as a vote against unrest and disorder, against the red insurgency – and a vote for peace, as a story was going around that negotiations were again underway with the Prussians. Hungry bourgeois longing for normality turned up at the ballots in droves, whilst left-leaning Paris stayed away in protest. Trochu’s government won by a staggering majority; Jules Favre made a public declaration that this meant the negation of the commune.
After reading this Hannah stood up at Besson’s desk and threw her newspaper at the wall. In the Gare du Nord, however, her fury could not be bolstered or magnified by that of like-minded comrades; it felt disconnected, uprooted somehow, and soon subsided into brooding. No one here cared. They were concerned instead with the confirmation that armistice talks had indeed been conducted with Chancellor Bismarck – and had already collapsed for a second time. The siege was to grind on. This brought dejection to the sewing benches; the women employed there, like so many in the central districts of Paris, were ready to give up.
Hannah grew convinced that Jean-Jacques must be trying to find her – to get word to her about what was to happen next. She took to sitting at the office window long into the night, watching for a signal or a figure on the tracks below. There was a store of candles and matches in the desk, meaning she could read or draw after dark. She’d get out her sketching materials, thinking to ease her tormenting sense of impotence with work, but more often than not she’d just stare at the studies she’d made of her lover in the last days before the march on the Hôtel de Ville, in preparation for Elizabeth’s portrait. There was Jean-Jacques seated with his arms crossed; leaning forward, reading a pamphlet; standing with his head lifted, as if about to speak.
Having had the task forced upon her, Hannah was now determined to make this portrait the best thing she’d ever done. She wanted to shame Elizabeth – to have her admit how wrong she’d been to treat her daughter like a ten-a-penny illustrator. She could picture the end result very clearly: a half-length likeness on a five-foot canvas, an interior in natural light that would present Jean-Jacques in such a way that no one who saw it could possibly doubt his conviction or his visionary intelligence. This was rather more ambitious than any of her previous portraits. The prospect was daunting, and a part of her was relieved that circumstances had denied her the means to begin.
Hannah usually had no difficulty with
solitude; before Jean-Jacques, she’d painted alone in Madame Lantier’s shed for days on end. Here in the balloon factory, however, she found that she had a keen desire for company. She began to look forward to the short conversations she had with Monsieur Besson as they paced through the station corridors or tried to warm themselves by his meagre fire. At first he simply updated her about Clement – who was well, as far as he could ascertain; safe from firing squads, at any rate.
‘Elizabeth will be attending to this,’ Hannah said, to convince herself as much as Besson. ‘She won’t let them keep him locked up in there.’
Gradually, though, they moved onto other topics. Hannah discovered that the aérostier possessed a sceptical wit; she came to enjoy dispelling his habitual terseness and drawing it out. Judging her work to be an uncontroversial area, she showed him the couple of sketches she’d managed to set down since her arrival – views from the office window, depicting the twelve sets of empty rails running into the station and the tall weeds growing around them.
‘I depict what I see, Monsieur,’ Hannah explained, ‘what is before me, shorn of contrivance. We naturalist painters want to bring about an age of freedom, in which a sincere art can be nourished – a true art. No more nonsense from the Bible, or Ovid, or French history, or anywhere else. Nature without invention or manipulation is the goal – thrown raw upon the canvas.’
‘So it is a scientific approach, in essence,’ Besson said. ‘You make yourself like a photographic plate, devoid of preconception, merely setting yourself before your image – awaiting the impression the light will make upon you.’
Hannah conceded that there might be something in this, but her brow was furrowed; she’d always considered photographs to be dull, mechanical things, lacking any real creative power. She decided to steer them away from artistic theory from then on.
They spoke of their lives. Besson made his revelations in plain, compact sentences; this was not a man comfortable with talking about himself. Hannah learned that he’d been born in the Marais, the son of a cabinet-maker, and had trained as an engineer in the Imperial schools before devoting himself to aeronautics. During the Exposition Universelle of 1867 he’d worked as a pilot for the gigantic balloon Captive, taking visitors up fifteen times the height of the exhibition hall, over the green and golden sprawl of Napoleon III’s Paris. Strangely enough, on one ascent he had stood but four feet from Crown-Prince Frederick of Prussia – who now directed the besieging armies from a state room at Versailles.
‘Several among his party were terrified, but the Crown prince surveyed the city without a tremor.’ Besson shook his head. ‘Many times since have I wondered what he was thinking.’
In return, Hannah told him about her last years in London – about her mother’s attempts to direct her life, to interfere at every stage and in every area. Hannah wanted to paint; so Elizabeth immediately produced these artist friends of hers, stolid old Royal Academicians stuck firmly in the thirties and forties, to whom she could be apprenticed. She’d barely turned fourteen when various eccentric gentlemen – poets, musicians, radical philosophers – began to call at the Pardy home for no obvious reason. She came to realise that these were suitors, of a sort, candidates for the first of her public affairs; a vital component, apparently, of a Pardy woman’s renown.
Besson gave her his uneven smile. ‘So instead you choose to live in Montmartre – in a shed, your brother tells me.’
‘I do,’ Hannah answered proudly. ‘Every year I submit my work to the Salon, and every year I am rejected. I live on vermicelli and day-old bread. I fail, Monsieur Besson, but on my own terms. I wouldn’t go back to England for anything.’
Their connection could only ever be a fragile one, though, no matter how many private recollections they shared. Both of them felt it: a great subject sat unmentioned between them. Hannah was careful to conceal her sketches of Jean-Jacques when Besson was in the office, but she knew that he couldn’t stay hidden for long.
One painfully cold morning, almost three weeks after Hannah first sought refuge at the station, Besson strode straight into the office without his customary knock. He dumped the day’s newspapers on the desk and went to the window. At the top of the pile was the Figaro. Emblazoned across its front page was the headline Le Léopard Est En Retour. Hannah sat down; she glanced at Besson’s back and read on.
‘This true hero of Paris is once again spilling the blood of the enemy that so cruelly confines her. This newspaper can reveal that only last night he was out stalking his prey in the forest of Bondy – snaking between the trees, eyes fixed on the lights of a Prussian outpost glimmering up ahead. Gunpowder is tipped from a cartridge at the base of an oak; a match is touched to it and it fizzes furiously, sending a white flash across the canopy of branches above. The sentries are sent out to investigate. Our Leopard strikes with all the grace and savagery that Paris has come to expect. It is knife-work, requiring an expert hand; and the second man dies before the first has fully collapsed among the fallen leaves. The unlucky third has seen nothing, but he senses that danger is near; the trees around him seem to be moving, closing in around him. He offers a last prayer to his German God, firming up his grip on his rifle, and he advances to his end. Later, the Leopard slinks back to Aubervilliers, and then to the wall, seen by no one, three brass helmets stowed in his haversack.’
There was more, several paragraphs in fact. The only reference to the recent red ructions and the role the Leopard might have played in them was Jean-Jacques’s drop from ‘Major Allix’ to a mere ‘Monsieur’; he’d evidently been stripped of his rank along with so many of his Montmartre comrades. Numerous allusions were made to a sortie, Elizabeth stressing that it was the patriotic duty of all Frenchmen to follow the Leopard’s bold example. Prussian morale, she claimed, was desperately low due to the coming winter and their fear of Parisian might. There was no better time to strike.
‘The invaders are like beaters standing fearfully around a thicket heaving with wild beasts,’ the article concluded, ‘of which our Leopard is just one. They know that at any second thousands of ferocious fighters could pour out through those gates, their bloodlust sharpened by their deep and abiding love for their land. They know, in short, that they would be massacred – lashed back to Prussia with their brave Kaiser leading the retreat!’
‘It’s going to happen,’ said Besson. ‘There will be a sortie now. You reds made Trochu look weak, holding him hostage for half a day in his own inner chamber. Our hesitant general has been embarrassed into action. Gambetta has managed to assemble an army, out in the countryside somewhere to the south-east, and is reputed to be doing great things. Trochu imagines that a coordinated action is possible – that the forces of Paris will be able to break through the Prussian line and link up with this other army.’
‘You know this, Monsieur?’
‘Men close to the cabinet have all but confirmed it.’
The Figaro was shivering in Hannah’s hands. One of their aims, at least, would be met. ‘It will turn the war,’ she said. ‘It will give us our chance.’
‘You cannot think that.’ Besson looked over at her. ‘Mademoiselle Pardy, you are a clever woman. You cannot honestly think that a sortie is the best course.’
Hannah put down the newspaper, stung by the trace of condescension in his manner. ‘What would you do, then?’
‘Surrender,’ the aérostier replied, ‘at once, on any terms. They have won. We are beaten. Can you really not see it? All a sortie will achieve is more dead men. If the government and the generals honestly think that the Prussians won’t work out this plan of theirs – won’t see it coming a hundred miles away – then they are fools who deserve their doom. The tragedy is that so many will be made to follow them.’
Disagreement surged through Hannah so strongly that it propelled her from her chair. ‘A sortie can succeed, of course it can!’ she cried. ‘There are millions of us, far more than there are of the Prussians. How can it possibly fail?’
‘It is too late. Our enemy is dug in. They have been adding to their forces for two months now. Perfecting their strategies. How many sieges have they won so far, in this poisonous, pointless war? Three, four? And they have the men from Metz, don’t forget – two hundred thousand experienced troops.’
They faced each other over the desk. Hannah knew then that it would be bad – a collision between immoveable objects.
‘You talk like a bourgeois defeatist,’ she told him. ‘A man who just wants to get back to his damned shop.’
‘Perhaps I am. What is so wrong with that? And why do you care so much, anyway? You are English. Why have you adopted the cause of France with such passion?’
‘Christ Almighty, I am so very tired of hearing that! The question, Monsieur Besson, is why you have abandoned it!’
Besson stopped for a second; this had struck home. ‘Life would be hard for a while if we surrendered,’ he admitted, ‘and our pride would suffer a grave blow. But we would go on. We would rebuild.’ He nodded at her drawing folder. ‘You could resume your work – properly, I mean, without all this distraction.’
Hannah glared at him. He doesn’t believe that I mean any of it, she thought; he thinks that my politics are an affectation that I will shrug off, as one might an obsessive interest in Italian opera or the modern novel. ‘You underestimate the people of Paris. You don’t realise what they are capable of.’
‘I am a Parisian, Mademoiselle Pardy, and I realise it very well. It is one thing to proclaim a wish to die for your country – and quite another to actually risk doing it. Your Leopard should know all about that.’
Silence filled the tiny office, like that which follows the smashing of something valuable. Hannah blinked. ‘What – what do you mean?’
The aérostier appeared momentarily regretful, as if impatience had led him to speak out of turn; then he pressed on. ‘These heroics – this prodigious murder of Prussians. Does it not seem improbable to you?’
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