Bones of Paris (9780345531773) (16 page)

“The Displays are fine. It’s Didi himself I’m not too crazy about.”

“He is an odd one, that is for certain. What are you doing now, if not working in the gallery?”

So she told him, and told him, too, that her time with the old lady whose library had needed cataloging was coming to an end. And he asked about that job, and about some of the others, until after a while she suddenly realized that she had gone on far too long about her not terribly fascinating self.

She gave an embarrassed laugh. “I mustn’t monopolize you, Monsieur. I’m sure you have friends here who—”

“One must never disregard a message from the universe.”

“Sorry?”

“Mademoiselle, a long and varied life has taught me that key decisions invariably rest on what the thoughtless call coincidence. ‘Coincidences’ are gifts. If the machinery of the universe presents one with such a gift, one overlooks it at one’s peril. But lest you fear you have been cornered by a religious maniac, let me explain.

“My assistant was in an automobile accident, a few weeks ago. I thought I could do without his services until he returned, but we learned recently that it will be several months, and just today I came to the decision that I must hire someone for that interval.

“And now you, a person with the skills I require, stand before me and mention that you are about to be leaving your current employ. Surely you agree that I would be a fool to pass up such a gift from the universe?”

He had probably once been striking, and even in his fifties, those patrician features were handsome, made only more so by the sadness behind his eyes. And because Sarah had spent a year among the skirts of the Paris art world, she knew why.

People called him simply Le Comte, which, in fact, he was: Count Dominic Pierre-Marie Arnaud Christophe de Charmentier—Dominic to his friends and close associates. He and another nobleman, the Viscount Charles de Noailles, vied informally for who could support the greater number of French artists. But where Noailles and his wife went in for film, Le Comte had been a patron of modern theater long before he turned his eye to the world of art.

Le Comte’s wife had loved theater. Their elder son had enjoyed amateur dramatics. The son had died in 1917 at the age of nineteen, two
days before Christmas, shot by a sniper in the trenches. Le Comte’s beloved little daughter was said to have been a gifted mimic. She sickened and died a few months after her brother was shot. And on the heels of that tragedy, Le Comte’s fourteen-year-old son was killed when a German shell hit a Paris church.

Then the wife committed suicide.

A man does not recover from that series of blows. And indeed, after the War, Le Comte disappeared into his house in the XIV arrondissement. He was not seen for two years.

But he emerged, clearly determined to build some meaning out of the chaos of his life. His first efforts were in a neurological clinic treating soldiers too damaged to function in the world. Oddly enough, he arrived there by art: a painting by Giorgio de Chirico led him to an essay by André Breton, whose wartime work with shell-shock led to the use of “automatic writing” as a therapy. Le Comte became interested. He funded a clinic based on the Breton interpretation of Freud. He bought paintings.

He resumed his interest in the theater.

But his eyes had never lost their melancholy.

“In fact,” Sarah told him, “I do understand acting on impulse. My brother once told me that my mind works faster than my brain.” Not that her snap decisions always turned out so well. “However, I’m not sure what sorts of ‘skills’ you need.”

“I do not require a typist,” he said, seizing the touchy subject without hesitation. “I need a person with brains and imagination. I think I see those.”

After that, how could she refuse? They made an appointment for Tuesday morning, and went back to the party.

She spent the next two days casting out gentle feelers for information, and found that in addition to being an art collector, sad-eyed widower, and bereft father, he was from one of France’s oldest families and a genuine war hero, an amateur painter, a one-time fencing champion, the half owner of four Rive Droite galleries, an occasional lecturer at the Sorbonne, a personal friend of two out of the last four Presidents of France, and the financial support beneath several foundations for the
benefit of injured artists and veterans of war. He was known all over the city; the parties in his family mansion were famous, as was the house itself, from the life-sized garden chessboard to one of the world’s most ornate clocks at the mansion’s center. His current passion was said to be an odd French theater up near Pigalle, the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.

She’d heard of the theater, but had never considered it the kind of entertainment she would enjoy. But since Le Comte was one of the backers, she felt she should go, before she accepted any kind of job from him.

She chose a matinee. And sat, stunned motionless, from the curtain’s rise to its final drop. Afterwards, she had walked the streets in a fog, so unconscious of her surroundings that it was amazing she hadn’t been run down or pick-pocketed.

Because one of the plays had shown—clearly, lovingly, and so graphically the woman sitting beside her had gagged—a man driven to madness, cutting off his own hand.

S
ARAH HAD THOUGHT
she was over the bomb—over the worst of it, anyway. Yes, she still felt a ghostly hand, occasionally reached to scratch an itch on a missing finger, but there were entire days when a hand was just a hand, and not the end of a life. She’d lost a limb: she’d gone on with her life.

But that evening after the Grand-Guignol, it was as if the bomb were rolling across her all over again, slowly, inexorably, repeatedly. Without even drugs to muffle the reaction.

All night, in a fever-dream over endless cups of tea, she relived it all, over and over: Laura’s face, a family’s destruction, that lovely building ripped apart and splattered with blood. Her brother, plunged into hell because of her. Harris Stuyvesant and the death of hope.

Only the bomb itself was a blank: a profound stillness, as if the world’s heart stopped, followed by a wall of noise. There wasn’t even pain: that didn’t come until she reached the hospital.

Why even consider a job with this in the background? No. Bury it, shovel the days and weeks on top. She would
not
keep her appointment with Dominic Charmentier. She would have nothing more to do with the Grand-Guignol or its owners.

And yet …

When the sun rose, she bathed and dressed, intending to take a tram as far as she could go in the opposite direction. Maybe a train. She
hadn’t been to Chartres in a while; the rose window would be a joy. And yet her feet carried her north: past the tram stops, away from the Gare Montparnasse, to the river and beyond.

In the end, she was only slightly late for her appointment with Le Comte, in a café around the corner from the theater. He rose. She simply stood in the doorway, unable either to enter or to flee, so after a moment he came forward, gently shepherding her to the chair across from him. If he felt her trembling, he said nothing, merely poured her coffee and laid a fragrant brioche before her.

She could not meet his eyes. She felt as if she’d uncovered something nasty about a friend. She opened her mouth to tell him that she had decided not to accept his job, but he spoke first.

“You went to the theater, I imagine.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“One is not meant to like it. One is meant to respond to it.”

“It was … awful.”

“The Grand-Guignol is not me,” he said, simply.

She did not answer.

“Let me tell you how I came to be involved. Like many of my countrymen, I lost loved ones in the War. Like many of us, my reaction was to push it away, believing that to speak of it would grant it authority. It was not until a friend introduced me to the work of a neurological clinic treating shell-shocked soldiers that I began to understand: the only way to overcome one’s fears is to confront them. The clinic aimed at bringing the dark things to light.

“We French, as you English, have survived a time of unparalleled horror. Our impulse is to deny it, to paint a pretty stage set of normality and tell ourselves, again and again, that this is the real world.

“But the horror behind the painted set invariably leaks through. The effort of maintaining it, of convincing ourselves every day that this is life and it is lovely undermines our balance, eats at any faint trace of happiness.

“The only way is to face it.”

He might have been talking about Sarah’s life, rather than his own.

He told her about finding the theater, how offended he was—and
yet how drawn he was, too, both for what was on the stage, and what was in the audience. How those in the seats seemed lighter when they left, as relieved as if they had survived an actual ordeal. How he talked to doctors, psychiatrists, soldiers—and learned how a play could be a catharsis, freeing those who had spent far too long bottling up their natural impulses. How a theater might bring in people for an illicit thrill, but in the end, perform an act of psychological cleansing far greater than any priestly confession.

By bringing the dark things to light.

The Grand-Guignol had opened in 1897. Many assumed its appeal would shrivel after the real-life horrors of the Front, he told Sarah, but it had not. Plays that immersed an audience in stark terror followed by wild laughter opened a door. They invited the audience to believe that their own fears were as ephemeral as what took place onstage.

And if she thought this cerebral view contrary to the visceral reaction of the audience, he said, it was not: as Freud would explain, the analysis of a mental aberration and the experiences of the sufferer were two sides of treatment’s coin.

His voice was soothing, gently pulling her from her state of prolonged shock. She picked up her cup, took a swallow of the cold chicory-flavored liquid, and lifted her gaze.

His eyes crinkled and he sat back. “I see you begin to understand. As I told you the other night, what I require is an assistant with both ability and imagination. There is considerable responsibility. The hours are erratic. You would be dealing with everyone from dukes to dustmen. And although when I request that something be done, I expect my instructions to be followed promptly and to the letter, I also would ask that you contribute your own thoughts concerning the projects you undertake. My assistant is, to some degree, a partner.”

“Just what does this ‘assistant’ job entail?” she asked.

“Ah,” Le Comte said, “now, there is the question. When is a job not a job? When is a theater not a theater?”

He reached into his vest pocket to draw out a silver lump about two inches across: a skull. With a touch, the top of the skull came open, revealing a watch-face.

“The death-watch,” he told her. “A joke, of course, but also a serious and beautifully made timepiece. My tailor despairs, because there is no way to wear it that does not wreak havoc on the waistcoat. But I carry it for two reasons. First, it amuses me. But equally important, this particular watch is purported to have belonged to the Marquis de Sade—a ‘fact’ known by many. Every time I draw it out to check the time, those around me experience that brief quiver of fascination we all have at the forbidden.”

He tucked the timepiece away.

“It represents what I try to contribute to the Grand-Guignol.” He spoke in more detail about the history of the theater, the changes he has made after becoming involved half a dozen years ago.

She found she was leaning forward on her elbows, interested at last. Le Comte pointed out that, as the Opéra sold the voices on its stage and the Folies Bergère sold its dancers’ legs, the Grand-Guignol sold its atmosphere. “Our audiences are not fools, they know it is not real violence and bloodshed taking place before them, but we go to enormous trouble to make them suspect it
could
be—just as my watch
could
have been in de Sade’s pocket when he performed his atrocities.

“We accomplish this in two ways: verisimilitude, and the wider stage.

“As you have seen, we pay meticulous attention to detail. The blood looks real, the motions of violence are closely choreographed, the mutilations look extraordinarily realistic.

“But the workings of the stage—the believable effects, the intensity of the actors, the subtle effects of lighting and sound—are only a part of our impact. Reality and fiction blur at the Grand-Guignol, every step along the way: anticipation rises and builds, becoming nearly intolerable as a patron gets off the Métro, walks down the ill-lit alley, enters a former convent sacked in the Terror, passes the house doctor who stands ready to treat the faint of heart.

“But the performance begins even before that patron leaves his front door. Rumors of darkness pervade the theater: the actors are unstable, the directors and owners untrustworthy, bitter feuds are written up in the newspapers. Even the format of the plays—one is immersed in unbearable,
claustrophobic madness, and a moment later plunged into light comedy, only to have the stage darken and terror creep in again—makes one doubt one’s very sanity.

“Between the staged effects and the real-world knowledge, people who come to the Grand-Guignol are already half-convinced that one day, those in control of the plays may lose their hold, and permit a murder to become real. That a fake knife or vial of poison may be replaced by a real one. You heard giggles during the performance, did you not?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Those were the high-pitched laughs of fear, not of relief. We consider it the highest applause when a Guignoleur cannot help calling out a warning as a man creeps across the stage with a knife.

“Max Maurey, the theater’s last owner, established the idea that a performance is never limited to what happens onstage. He made publicity stunts central to the world of Guignol. Some of those feuds are, frankly, inventions. When a murder is discovered, we volunteer comments to the
Figaro
and
Petit Journal
. When a Surrealist makes a film with dramatically mangled bodies, one of us will write a prominent review.