Petite Mort

by Beatrice Hitchman

  ‘Did you invent your story? Did you make it up?’ someone shouted as Denis manhandled me through the crowd. ‘You should be ashamed!’ cried a woman, and spat, though her aim was bad, and the gobbet landed on the man next to her.

  Someone threw the first projectile as Denis tore open the cab door and bundled me in; it slithered down the glass of the window. ‘All right? All in?’ said the driver, his big, anxious face peering back at us through the partition, and Denis nodded, too breathless to speak. The car began to move. Disappointed faces followed us; the crowd howled louder and some began to run alongside. The police driver swore and shaded his eyes, as if trying to see a clear path.

  I sat, listening to the crowd call my name. Denis said: ‘Are you clear on your lines?’ I nodded. ‘But are you?’ he asked. He looked out of the cab window, white-faced. We were rolling along the rue de Rivoli now, past the Galeries St Paul with gaggles of shoppers queuing outside.

  The low walls of the Pont au Change seemed to fall away on either side, exposing the churning water beneath. Then we were on the Ile de la Cité, and the same noise, the baying, rolled towards us. Looking ahead, I saw the Boulevard du Palais blocked with people.

  In the cab, the driver hunched over the wheel and slowed down, unable to make any headway; the crowd scattered on either side of the vehicle, their faces changing into sneers of recognition. Pointing, shouting: I watched the news spread. Up ahead, policemen lining the high railings of the Palais’ forecourt moved towards the gates, and started to open them; swearing, our driver swung the car round.

  ‘Come on,’ muttered Denis, craning his neck to see what the delay was. I turned to my left and saw that it was another car, inching forward, arriving at the same time from the opposite direction. It was black and official-looking, with two figures sitting in the back seat.

  The car swung round and drew level, competing with us for the front spot. The person looking back at me from the cab window, not three metres away, was Luce.

  She was very changed; lines in the corners of her eyes and reaching down from her mouth had not been there a month before. I also saw that she was frightened, the muscles in her throat moving. The wide, dark eyes snapped shut and open, then stayed open, staring at me. I looked at her waist, just visible above the level of the window; it was as flat as when I had first met her.

  She gave the ghost of a smile and shifted her shoulders sadly. I remembered her in the house last summer, inspecting a new dress that had been sent to her in the wrong size. My, Adèle. What a pretty pass we are in!

  I felt myself want to smile back. Just then, our cab driver swore again, and the car lurched forward and gathered speed.

  Juliette and Adèle

  1967

  ‘What happened to the baby?’

  Adèle says: ‘She’d given birth prematurely.’

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘She was in custody. Her family took it away with them.’

  She looks at me and shrugs: a bitter smile. ‘Rich people closing ranks.’

  I say: ‘What did you feel?’

  Adèle looks at the back of her hands. ‘The papers said that André took it hardest. He broke his cell, threatened guards, and made wild predictions about the end of the world.’

  4. avril 1914

  ‘GIVE ME YOUR HAND,’ Denis said as we stepped out of the car. The noise hit us: from the line of people queuing for seats in the public gallery, which snaked round the courtyard, to the crowd stuck outside, gripping the bars. Some were screaming my name; some were screaming Luce’s name, or André’s. Denis’s fingers closed round mine and he drew me onwards; a tight ring of policemen formed around us and ushered us through the tall doors and into the Vestibule d’Harlay.

  ‘Wait here,’ said the officer.

  I stood looking up at the decorated ceiling, high overhead, and down at the red marble swirls of the floor, and I didn’t feel anything very much.

  ‘All right?’ Denis asked. He gave me a sickly smile, pale to the gills, the hair plastered to his forehead. ‘All right?’ he said again. I nodded.

  The officer reappeared. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘we are to seat you before the crowd is let in, the judge says, to save a riot.’ He ducked his head to invite us to follow him, and led us towards the doors at the end of the vestibule.

  They opened onto an audience room seating about two hundred. At first it seemed a mass of fluted oak, but then the different levels asserted themselves: the judges’ raised bench at the front, and the jury’s to the left-hand side. Denis led us to a bench in front of the judges’, and fussed about organising his papers. He shot me a look: ‘You’ll want to look nervous,’ he said, as I folded my arms across my chest. ‘Like we discussed.’ He fiddled with the collar on his red prosecutor’s gown.

  Just then there was the creak of a small door opening in the panelling on the right-hand side of the room; a police officer appeared, followed by André, then Luce; then by a walrusmoustached man dressed in the defending lawyer’s black. Denis met his level stare, then cleared his throat and began to shuffle papers again.

  The defendants were led straight to the dock and sat. Luce looked down at her hands. André looked up at me, his face blank. He stared, as if searching for something; from my eyes down to my hands and back up; he frowned. I looked back at him, until he too folded his arms and looked away.

  A clatter at the back of the hall; the policeman had crossed to the main doors to open them, and a moment later the hall was flooding with people fighting past each other to secure the best seats in the gallery. They were all men, women not being allowed as spectators, and they were consequently unafraid to be seen staring. The front row of the seats came up to five feet behind my chair; I heard the whispering assessments of my dress, my shoulders and my waist. For the first time, I felt my stomach squirm, and looked to Denis; he saw my face and said: ‘Not bad. If you could just be a little paler.’

  The courtroom filled with people, moving crab-wise along the fixed wooden benches. Men were all but in each other’s laps: a fight almost broke out near the door when one of the workers who had been saving a seat to sell changed his mind and wanted to keep it for himself. The policemen ran around the seats and back – sheepdogs penning in a flock – but still it took five minutes to calm the crowd enough to let in the judges.

  I studied the presiding judge’s face carefully as he walked in, flanked by his juniors, and made his way up to his lofty seat. He was a man of a certain age, bearded like the rest, but his beard was speckled with white. He moved with difficulty, lifting one leg after the other to mount the steps; and when he was there, he looked around the courtroom with infinite weariness, his gaze settling on me for a mere fraction of an instant before he said: ‘Call the members of the jury.’

  Had they a daughter? How old? Had their families ever been the victims of any violence? The jury members turned caps in hands, a soft rub-rub of cloth on skin, as they submitted to Denis’s questioning. And then Maître Lazard’s rich voice: What were their opinions about the cinema? A fine profession? Had they any special feelings about people not born on these shores? The audience behind me shuffled their feet and whistled, bored: the judge hammered on the bench for silence every five minutes. Denis returned to our seat to cough into his handkerchief in between bouts of questioning. A man at the back stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled: ‘Pick me! I don’t have any prejudices about women!’ before a policeman put a hand to his collar and hauled him out. His laughter echoed from the marble walls of the Vestibule; his footsteps squeaked away across the floor.

  ‘If I am correct,’ the judge said, at the end of two temple-massaging hours, ‘we have a jury now. Am I right?’

  ‘Correct, Your Honour,’ Maître Lazard smiled unctuously beneath his moustache. The jury members who had been selected stood up a little straighter, and looked around the courtroom with evident pride.

  ‘Then I will call M. Durand to submit to my preliminary questions.’

>   André stood, head lowered, hands folded in front of him, and made his sober way to the witness stand. Catcalls from the gallery: he didn’t react, just kept the same grave demeanour, the model of the earnest, caring boss. I cursed, inwardly, his face – that lying phsyiognomy which could appear to be anything it wanted.

  Le Temps, 4. avril 1914

  NEWS FROM THE COURT

  THE SENSATIONAL DURAND TRIAL’S FIRST DAY

  […] took the stand, dressed in a sober but elegant suit, and answered the presiding judge’s questions with a countenance which, far from being nonchalant, showed how keenly he felt the seriousness of the charge.

  M. le Juge: M. Durand, you and your wife stand accused of attempted murder and actual bodily harm. What do you have to say in the first instance?

  M. Durand: That I regret it.

  M. le Juge: Do you mean to say you admit wrongdoing?

  M. Durand: On the contrary, I regret whatever circumstances have led our former employee to make such an accusation. She must have felt some slight or injury, unnoticed by myself and my wife; whatever we can have done to provoke such a response, I regret it wholeheartedly.

  M. le Juge: Are you saying you provoked Mlle Roux’s accusation?

  M. Durand: Who knows what goes on in the mind of another? A refusal to furnish her a new wardrobe; to increase pay or prospects? Who knows which small slight may have become magnified, over time?

  M. Durand, a self-made man, spoke at length about his upbringing in the Americas, and the path he had trodden rising to the heights of the film trade; a role which, he admitted, had sometimes led him to neglect his home life in the pursuit of excellence. He refuted utterly the imputation of any improper romance between himself and Mlle Roux, saying:

  M. Durand: I am a man of simple habits, Monsieur. Cinema and my wife are my only pleasures.

  M. le Juge: And you refuse Mlle Roux’s claims of relations within the household and that when she threatened to disclose them you took action?

  M. Durand: I do not dispute that Mlle Roux had romantic interests. But not with us.

  M. le Juge: Your meaning being?

  M. Durand: It is not for me to comment on what attachments she had. I believe M. le Docteur Harbleu will advise on this in due course.

  The judge then called Mme Durand to the stand. Unlike her husband, Mme Durand, who wore an elegant black gown, gave only short answers.

  M. le Juge: What do you respond to Mlle Roux’s claim that you made advances on her?

  Mme Durand: What did you call it?

  M. le Juge: Advances, Madame.

  Mme Durand: ‘Advances’?

  M. le Juge: Mme Durand, are you quite well?

  At this point M. Durand stood and requested that his wife be allowed to rest, her recent troubles having left her under a strain, and this request was granted under special dispensation.

  After the lunchtime recess, the judge chose to call Mlle Roux to answer his preliminary questions.

  Mlle Roux, of small appearance, took the stand and looked the judge directly in the eye as she told of her early youth in the Languedoc. She then answered questions on her time in the Durands’ employ.

  M. le Juge: At what point do you say you started relations with M. Durand?

  Mlle Roux: Almost immediately. It was his suggestion that I come to the house.

  M. le Juge: Rather than set you up in your own apartment like most men?

  Mlle Roux: He wanted it to be convenient.

  M. le Juge: And how did you plan to keep this a secret from Mme Durand?

  Mlle Roux: He didn’t care about that.

  This elicited some laughter from the men in the gallery, who were doubtless imagining the reactions of their wives were they openly to install a concubine in the marital domicile. M. le Juge then asked about Mme Durand.

  M. le Juge: In your statements you allege that there were relations between yourself and Mme Durand.

  Mlle Roux: That is correct.

  M. le Juge: Can you tell us about these relations?

  Mlle Roux: There were various encounters.

  M. le Juge: Encounters?

  Mlle Roux: Various relations between us.

  M. le Juge: But Mme Durand being a married woman…

  Mlle Roux: M. Durand was a married man, but it didn’t stop him.

  At this point uproar broke out in the court so that M. le Juge was forced to eject certain members of the audience in the name of public order. Shouts of ‘Liar!’ and ‘Perfidy!’ rang out from every corner […]

  4. avril 1914

  ‘THIS IS VERY BAD,’ Denis Poperin said, lifting his wine glass to his lips. His Adam’s apple worked; he wiped the dregs from his mouth and looked at me. ‘What were you thinking?’

  We had retired to the gloomiest corner of a worker’s café near Montparnasse, where we hoped nobody would recognise us. It was not far from Denis’s home and my temporary, policefunded apartment; it was far enough away from the Palais de Justice. I looked away from him, at the accordionist playing to the assembled crowd. She was about the same age as me, but utterly lost to what she was doing: swaying on her feet, framed in the window, her fingers melting together on the keys and stops. Occasionally her eyelids would flutter, as if she were scanning the crowd for someone: then they would shut firmly again, blocking out the world.

  ‘To admit to relations with Mme Durand. We agreed – didn’t we – you were to play it down; imply she had made an unwelcome pass. Not that you went along with it without putting up the least resistance.’ He sighed. ‘I should fire you.’

  The accordionist’s tune lifted to its conclusion: she bowed and smiled, and her assistant, a small boy, produced a hat for coins. The customers raised their hands in applause and called ‘Encore!’

  ‘Why didn’t you? Dissemble? You could have said she tried to force it. Nobody could have proved a thing. You could have said anything…’

  Luce, her skirts in her hands, stumbling from room to attic room. I shook my head at the boy, who had appeared at our table, jingling the hat. ‘What will happen next?’

  ‘It speaks!’ said Denis, looking around the room with wide-eyed amazement. ‘The judge has made up his mind already, but he will call other witnesses, though what use it’ll do us, I have no idea…’

  ‘But they found the gun. And the valise…’

  The boy waited patiently, the hat held out in front of him.

  ‘There are a thousand others like it! And no bullet! And the valise – the valise got us as far as a trial, I grant you, but it’s not enough. I will make a brave attempt at a closing speech which will be minced by Maître Lazard’s eloquence, and then you will tell me you can’t pay me because you have not, have never had, a bean.’

  He slumped further in his seat, fished about in his waistcoat pocket for his matches and attempted to light a cigarette.

  ‘Please, Mademoiselle,’ said the boy, ‘my mistress says are you Adèle Roux of the Durand trial? Because if you are, she would like to sing a special song for you.’

  Denis drew himself up in his seat, suddenly self-important: ‘It is she,’ he said, ‘and I am her lawyer.’

  A man by the bar had swivelled in his seat to scrutinise us, and now turned back to his comrades, head low between his shoulder blades; the news spread to the head waiter, polishing glasses, who moved along the bar to a cluster of men hunched over their drinks.

  Amused glances, and caps being pushed back on foreheads; the beginnings of a leer.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll defend you,’ Denis slurred.

  I pulled on his sleeve, hauling him to his feet. Masculine laughter rang out from the walls as we staggered crab-wise to the door.

  The red lights of Boulevard Raspail, advertising rooms by the hour and basement-level nightclubs; a street cat yowled for cover as Denis lurched away, spinning across the pavement, finger raised for a last put-down.

  ‘You think you can have it all your own way,’ he began; tumbled over his
own feet and folded up; teetered sideways into the foetal position, and was suddenly asleep.

  His snores, after his voice, were gently wheezing and childlike.

  I looked up at the sky and gritted my teeth.

  The sound of the café door opening and closing behind me, and a musical exhalation: the accordionist was standing next to me, her instrument slung over her shoulders. It made whimpering sounds as she moved.

  She, too, tottered; then, leaning her hand on my shoulder, she bent down to remove one shoe, and lifted the broken heel to the flickering café light.

  She sighed, and threw the heel across the street; it rebounded off the night shutter of a shop and clattered away. Then she patted her pockets and a cigarette was suddenly between her lips, and a match flaring.

  She had a shrewish, carefully made-up face; the crookedness of the smile, which I had dismissed before as uneven, now seemed her best asset. Her hair was dark, like mine, lifting in wisps away from her face.

  ‘You look,’ – she shook the match out and squinted through the smoke – ‘just like I imagined. Not everybody does. Your lawyer, for example, cut quite a dash on the front page of the Revue Moderne, whereas—’ She prodded Denis with her shoeless foot; the stockinged toes rasped on the material of his jacket, but he did not wake up. ‘Whereas you look just like I thought.’

  She held her elbow with her other hand, the cigarette aloft, threatening to set light to her curls.

  ‘Difficult evening,’ she said.

  I nodded. She blew out smoke.

  Neither of us said anything. The café door swung open and disgorged a group of three burly men, who called goodnight to each other and each set off in a different direction. The street grew quiet again.

  A big smile inched across her face, crinkling her eyes and revealing a set of small white teeth. She stuck her foot out in front of her and wiggled the toes, then said: ‘Chaperone me home.’