In the added minutes of peregrination Thomas’s thoughts turn to his wife. He is fond of her, he admits, biting his lip. Moreover, he is pleased that the marriage brings him a definite advance in rank. Yet she does not stir up anticipation. No, alas, when he goes home each evening he does not look forward to seeing her there. Still, he respects the vow that he took. He now uses something to prove just how much he respects the union he has joined. Assurance caps they are called, though he prefers the word “safes.” It’s not so much making a trollop pregnant that he fears, but rather the blisters and sores that could later show up. It would be wrong, a failing on his part, a disloyalty of the lowest sort, for him to bring anything so vile back to his dear wife. So he makes a point to put on a safe just before it’s time to dip and delve. The linen ones have some chemical imbued into them and he doesn’t like them much. The smell is off-putting and the feel of the stiffened glove around his soldier not pleasant at all. So this evening he will try a different type. It’s a little more expensive because it’s made of animal intestine stretched fine and thin. An acquaintance told him it’s like wearing a second skin. That sounds better. He is pleased to try it for the sake of Marguerite. It’ll be as if the soldier has not been anywhere it shouldn’t. Instead, uncovered, it’ll be fresh and ready for her advances when they come. It would not do to disappoint her in bed. Most nights she likes a tumble before sleep.
Thomas glances toward the river. Two barges carrying stacks of firewood are slowly making their way toward the mooring point alongside where he is walking. In winter, the number of cords of wood that make their way into the city, from up and down river, is phenomenal. But then, there are a lot of cold rooms and shivering people the firewood strives to keep warm. Now that he’s living in Marguerite’s apartment Thomas doesn’t give the cost of the wood even the slightest thought. It’s one of the many ways in which his life has improved. He watches approvingly as the scrawny little man in charge of one of the barges makes an angry face. The man shouts and waves his pole menacingly. The other barge man yields the day. It’s the little guy who first poles his cargo to the docking spot.
Thomas strides on, adjusting the black ribbon that keeps his hair tied in a queue. He’s been thinking lately that maybe it’s time to get a wig. In certain mirrors, in an unflattering light, it looks as if his boyish brown hair is starting to thin and lose its sheen. Sooner or later it happens to every man, but he was surprised to see it happen to him and so soon. At least it’s not the same as what happened to his father, whose hair thinned on top in an oval shape like he was tonsured. Which was quite a laugh considering his father’s views on the idleness of the religious orders. Well, Thomas won’t be caught with a thinning hairline as he gets older. With his marriage and his position in the magistrate’s office, he has to look the part. It is only correct for him to start wearing a wig, and one that suits the level he is now at. He’ll not be taken for a fop or a sword-dragger, with a perruque overdone. He’ll ask Marguerite when he gets home this evening as to which type and colour he should choose. She will have good advice. She’s been in these circles far longer than he.
There’s a shout from behind, a yell from the river. Thomas turns. He sees that the scrawny little fellow on the firewood barge has knocked the other bargeman he was yelling at into the water with his pole. The victor is waving the instrument of his triumph above his head. The loser, a foul-mouthed lout, is splashing about in the Seine.
“Well done,” shouts Thomas toward the river. His encouragement brings a victor’s wave and an upraised chin. “Enough of that,” mutters Thomas under his breath. His delay has gone on long enough. The temperature is dipping. He now wants to be inside where it’ll be warm, and someone will make him feel right.
Thomas turns the corner onto rue des Augustins. It will take him over to the rue Saint-André des Arts which leads down to the rue de l’Eperon and finally on to the rue du Paon. That’s the street where his evening’s expectation awaits. He picks up his pace.
He’s surprised to see a new bookshop up ahead on the rue des Augustins. He doesn’t remember one there at all. Was it not a tailor’s shop a month before? Funny, he thinks, there are so many books for sale all over Paris. It’s as if all the world wants to read. Yet if that’s how it is, how come authors find it so hard to make a living from what they write? Thomas blows out a stream of breath. Yes, he would prefer if he could to make a living from his imagination and his quill, but unpublished manuscripts don’t pay any bills. Thank goodness he now has Marguerite. As well as his clerk’s toil for the magistrate, short and bushy-browed Sieur de Karsozy. But how much better if someday he were independent of all that.
Thomas strides on. There is a rise in his groin. The expectation of an evening of pleasure is making its presence felt.
On the rue Saint-André des Arts Thomas’s thoughts turn to Jean Gallatin, who has crossed over the Manche and is now in London. The former bookseller has already sent Thomas two enthusiastic letters. He is working as a tutor to the Dutch ambassador’s children, children who are not too bratty, it seems. He doesn’t mention a new woman, but then Gallatin is always so discreet. Thomas wonders if his friend will again search for an older woman like he had in the late Marie.
What Gallatin does tell him is that in the evenings he gets about with London’s scribbling crowd, much like he did in Paris with Thomas and the rest. Every so often he runs into Voltaire in this or that café. The wit has been in England since he insulted the Rohan family and chose exile over incarceration in the Bastille. A wise choice that. Though Voltaire was never the least bit interested in Gallatin when they were both in Paris, Gallatin reports the fellow is friendly to him now. Both being Frenchmen out of France has given them a fleeting bond. Gallatin writes that Voltaire’s English is very good, much better than his own. Though Jean says his English is coming along.
In the second letter Gallatin wrote that he’s mostly chumming around with a young writer called Henry Fielding. They went downriver together to a place called Greenwich and had a splendid time. They climbed its hill and tried to get into the observatory but were denied. Fielding told the sentry that he knew where to look in the sky to find a seventh planet if only the soldier would let them in. The guard was not amused, seeing as how the noonday sun was right overhead. Gallatin and his friend then spent the afternoon eating bread, meat and cheese and drinking far too much in an establishment at the water’s edge. On the return trip they both felt the effects of too much alcohol imbibed. As the boat bucked and tossed, Fielding was the first to retch his lunch over the side of the boat. Gallatin did the same soon after. Thomas wishes he’d been there. He misses Gallatin. He is sure that he’d like this Fielding as well.
Of most interest to Thomas in the letters received so far is the news that Gallatin has spoken with the great Daniel Defoe. Yes, the writer of the marvellous Crusoe tale. Defoe is apparently a crusty type, as well he might be given his accomplishments and great age. Nonetheless, he agreed to have a glass of wine with Gallatin, provided the latter did the buying. Jean also reports that he has seen at a distance Isaac Newton. The old man was holding himself erect without a cane walking around some park or other. “At least,” Thomas mumbles to himself, “he does not claim to have seen or met his dead hero John Locke.” Thomas allows himself a grin.
Thomas comes onto the rue du Paon, the street that is his destination. He pulls out the folded over piece of paper he was given. He reads it one last time. It is the house on the corner, the one with the turret covered in slates. There, in that very room with the turret is a woman he is looking forward to meeting. She plies her trade on her own without a handler, no pimp or abbess at all. Odd to be sure, as is the neighbourhood in which she does her business. This part of Paris is not one Thomas associates with this sort of thing.
Thomas reaches out for the handle at the street-level door. The sheet in his pocket says to climb up two flights then knock on the second door on
the right, the one with fading blue paint. His arrival is anticipated. He is impressed with the quality of the stairwell. This building is as respectable inside as it looks to be on the outside. Pity, he thinks, he didn’t know about such discreet places before. He’s sorely tired of the dreary places he’s had to go in the stalls. Well, “had to” might be a bit strong. Nobody was forcing him.
Two knocks delivered, Thomas waits to hear something from the other side of the door. He is excited. It’s true what he was thinking before: anticipation is everything. How much better this evening is going to be than when he was first in Paris. Slipping off into a back room of a cabaret or lowering his breeches in a stall that reeked and resounded with the moans and shouts of others in their own nearby stalls. Oh, what we do for sex.
Out of the blue Thomas recalls Gallatin once telling him that the reason the Church makes people abstain from eating meat each week and for all of Lent is because those animals fornicate. That’s right, they fuck. Fish, on the other hand, they do not. The male fish spill their seed on eggs laid by the females so there is never any rutting involved. Gallatin assured Thomas with upraised hand that that was the Church’s reasoning for the meatless days.
Thomas hears a scuffle of feet on the other side of the door. He takes a shallow breath. The door swings open. He sees a woman dressed in a watery-looking silk dress, vertical shades of delicate blue and white. Her gaze is averted. She does not look directly at him. It’s as if she’s being modest. Thomas likes that touch. He also likes that she looks like a real lady with a lace cap atop her well-coiffed hair. Thomas inhales deeply. He’s made the right decision coming here. This evening’s adventure is with no trollop. She pushes the door a little wider, wide enough for him to step right inside her rooms. It is only then, when she has given the door a shove behind him and they are standing face to face, when she turns her eyes for the first time fully on her client, that there comes the moment of recognition. She sees it first. An instant later he sees it too. There are two gasps.
“Hé … lène, Hé … lène,” Thomas stutters. He shakes his head. “Hélène?”
Hélène it is, and she’s as shocked as Thomas. This is the room where she lives and where she receives her clients. But this is the first time a client has been someone she knows from her life before she started doing what she now does.
“What?” says Thomas before his confusion gives way to anger. “Why?”
“Shit,” is all Hélène replies. She reaches out and pulls Thomas by the hand over to the other side of the room, away from the door where anyone walking by might hear a scene. She sits him down on the dark blue divan. They spend the next few minutes catching up. He begins by asking about Voltaire. She replies that the skinny imp left her for another woman a couple of years ago. No, she corrects herself and says in an artificially articulated voice: “It is time for me to think about my advancement. It is time for me to move on. It will be for the best.” She recites it like she might be on a stage, nose lifted up. She finishes by saying she’s heard that Voltaire has gone to England. Thomas nods that it is so.
“Well, after we parted it wasn’t easy to make ends meet. So I took a job in a cabaret. It was just like I was back in my uncle’s place in Évreux. So many men tugged at my skirt and ogled my tits that, well, one evening I decided to give them what they wanted.”
Thomas makes a face of disapproval. Hélène scowls. She reaches out to grab him by the chin.
“And you, why are you here, if not to do me the same?”
Thomas’s eyes admit that is true. She releases his chin.
So, Hélène continues, she started to “see company,” but only on her terms. She became a courtesan. No, not a whore. She runs her own business with no one else taking a share. She demands enough so that she only has to see about one visitor a day. She takes days of abstinence off. She observes the Church’s rule about that. It’s been enough to buy herself some finery. She points at her dress and the rest of her ensemble. Thomas nods that she is indeed dressed very well.
As for the encounters, they happen where and when she selects, of late in this very place. The more she charges the clients the more they like it and the greater the demand. It allows her to move in the lower circles of high society. Hélène waves a hand in the direction of the turret that overlooks the busy street below. “Not bad, don’t you agree?”
Thomas glances around the room where they are seated and what he can glimpse of what lies beyond. It’s true: Hélène’s rooms are well appointed. Maybe not as expensively furnished as the large apartment he shares with Marguerite, but much better than what he had when he was living on his own. The candles are beeswax, the chairs and divan are upholstered with the same dark blue fabric, suggesting Hélène bought them together as a set. Thomas brings his gaze back to the woman he has come to … well, the idea was to ride. He has something to tell her about himself.
“I’m married.”
Hélène’s eyebrows arch. “Well now.”
“A widow. She’s rather well set up.” Thomas cannot help but give a self-satisfied smile.
“I see.” Hélène leans away. “And yet....” She unfurls the fingers of one hand, gesturing around the room. “And yet, here you are, not with your widow, your well-set-up wife, but with me.”
She recoils the fingers of her open hand and brings the formed fist back to press against her chest. Her raised eyebrows ask Thomas to explain.
“Ah, well.” Thomas shrugs his shoulders and pouts. “She’s much older and she’s....” His voice trails off.
“Ah.” Hélène’s voice is low, not quite a whisper but not much more. Most of her clients have stories like Thomas’s. Their wives or women friends are too old or too young, too skinny or too fat, too this or too that. She never asks like she has with Thomas, but sooner or later they tell her why they are there. Why they have come with a bulge in their pants, looking for an hour’s escape. An escape from something they cannot face or wish briefly to forget. Too bad, Hélène often thinks with narrowing eyes as she hears variations of such tales, too bad that their wives can’t do the same thing for themselves. Such is the world as it is, a world made by men for men, with the women doing the best they can in between the cracks. Or with their cracks, she thinks with a little smile.
“What’s that about,” asks Thomas, “that tiny smile?”
Hélène answers with a shake of her head then stands. She leaves Thomas seated on the divan and walks over into the circular space that is the inside of the turret. She puts her hands on the back of the big wooden chair she keeps there. From time to time, when she is by herself and feels like it, she sits in the chair. She likes having an undetected regard on the city as it moves past, from one window to another of the turret. Right now there is not much daylight left in the sky. The hanging lamps are just starting to be lit and raised back up with the ropes. In the dusky glow she can make out an old man pushing a squeaking cart filled with barrels. Coming the other way are three young men, arm in arm and already wobbly drunk. They are singing a tavern song.
Hélène turns round, not to face Thomas but at least more or less look his way. She wishes she did not know him from an earlier time and place. Though he’s just another man with a need, he’s one she’s been with a few times before; it’s just not as easy as with a stranger. She and Thomas were both younger at the time and it was just for fun. Now she doesn’t do that for free. So Thomas has to pay and she must insist he does so before she gives him what he came to get.
Thomas remains seated on the divan. He is unaware of it, but his hands are clasped like he’s a lad in parish school. It makes him look younger than he really is. Like he doesn’t know what is going to come next. He studies her in profile where she stands, from the lace-capped dark hair down her shoulders to where her waist narrows just before her hips. The gaze continues down all the way to the tiny greyish blue leather shoes. He cannot explain i
t, but he likes what he sees very much. He wonders why. Why are we drawn to those to whom we are drawn? Whatever it is, he wants to be with Hélène, in the same way as when they were young. But this is awkward. It would be easier if they didn’t know each other at all.
Hélène shifts her gaze to focus on her client. The sight of Thomas seated on her divan, hands clasped as if in prayer, makes her laugh.
“Going to church? To little boy’s school?” There’s a broad smile on her face.
Thomas looks to his lap, where his hands are clasped. He sees what she finds so funny and unclasps his hands. He stands and strides toward her. He grasps her by the elbows.
“So,” she says.
“So,” he replies.
“Just you and me.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, not exactly. You have to pay me now.”
Thomas shakes his head. Hélène is not sure what it means. Does she have to spell it out? “You … have … to pay,” she insists, shaking off his grasp. “It’s how I…”
“Not that. It vexed me to see you with Voltaire that time at Le Procope. You should not have run away from me before that. It was our very first morning in the city and I had to find work. You didn’t give it a chance. You just took off.”
“Enough,” says Hélène, arms extended. “I know.”
She walks back into the turret and grabs hold of the back of the wooden chair. She sees no point in arguing over what’s past. What’s done is done; it’s good and gone. Maybe, she thinks, maybe she should just ask Thomas to go. An evening’s lost wage, but that’s likely better than dealing with a sulking man.
Thomas, A Secret Life Page 28