Julius (4 page)

Again the woman hesitated, looking regaretfully at the slab of rich yellow butter.

‘Even a beggar would afford twenty centimes to nourish his children,’ muttered Julius, and the woman fumbled in her purse, producing the coins. ‘Here, all right - give me a pound then,’ she said.

‘Thank you, madame, thank you,’ and Julius was wrapping the slice in a piece of paper, forgetting her already, his eyes once more searching the faces of those who pressed around the stall. ‘Come on, come on,’ he called,‘is everybody asleep? Does nobody want to spend a sou?’

Grandpère was just behind him, coughing and choking.

‘Oh! it’s always the same now,’ he grumbled; ‘you can spare your voice, my poor boy, no one will put his hand in his pocket because of this stinking war.’

‘Everybody must eat, the war makes no difference to stomachs,’ said Mère impatiently, and she stood with her hands on her hips, red in the face because of the heat, and the dust and the flies.

There was no denying that business was bad. People were timid of spending, they bought small quantities at a time and then hoarded. It was all the fault of the louse-ridden Prussians. Nobody knew when the war was going to end or how or what it was all about. Things were little better under the Republic than they had been during the reign of the Emperor.

The only thing that mattered to the market folk was for prices at the Halles to touch normal again, the quality and quantity of produce to resume their usual standard, and above all for the purchaser to throw aside mistrust and open his purse once more with confidence.

‘Let all governments go to the devil,’ laughed Jean Blançard, ‘it’s their affair, isn’t it? Nothing counts but that people must eat to live. Come on, messieurs, mesdames, come and empty your purses and fill your bellies. The good times are just ahead. Ah! Ha! you’re laughing, my little lady with the scarlet petticoat - what are you laughing at? Don’t you need good butter and cheese to make you round and plump? Come and see, then, I’ll sell cheaper to you because of your smile. Well, what about it? That doesn’t please you, eh? You don’t want any cheese to-day . . . But what do you want, my mignonne, my flower? Go to the legumes at the next stall, it’s a kilo of carrots you’ll need before you’re satisfied.’ He stood with his arms folded, his head thrown back, a colossal figure of self-confidence and scorn, his prices were the fairest and his produce the best in the whole market, if people were not pleased, let them go elsewhere and poison themselves, he did not care. They would always come back to him in the end. That little woman in the red petticoat, wasn’t she smiling at him over her shoulder? ‘So you’ve changed your mind, my beauty? It’s cheese after all and not carrots—Here you are, then, half a pound and no more. Anything else to-day? Hoo! I know what you’d like me to show you . . .’

She scuttled away, blushing and confused, and he shouted with laughter, winking a blue eye at his friend the butcher opposite. ‘They’re all the same, aren’t they? I know them. What a trade, what a life! Come and see, messieurs, mesdames, come and see. Impossible to find anything better in the market. Well - haven’t you hands - haven’t you mouths?’

Julius looked up at his grandfather and smiled. What a figure he was, what a grand fellow! He over-topped the world, he made the other market folk seem dwarfed and pallid with his great strength and health, his vigorous personality.White-haired, blue-eyed, red-faced, was he really sixty-five and an old man! Père, in the corner of the stall, thin and drooping, he didn’t exist beside him. Julius stuck out his chest and folded his arms. Wasn’t he a Blançard too, even if he was only ten years old?

‘Come on, come on. It costs nothing to throw an eye over the stall. But I can see you, monsieur; with your hungry glance at the crate of eggs, are you paralysed that you can’t put your hand in your pocket? New-laid eggs, fifteen sous the dozen . . . Yes, mademoiselle, this is the best quality butter in the whole of Paris. Am I a robber, am I a liar? Try it, mademoiselle, such butter is made for young women like yourself - it is fresh, it is clean, it has a taste . . . No, I’m not cheeky. I’m not a child - I tell you I know a thing or two ... You’ll take a pound, then? Thank you, mademoiselle.’ Julius threw back his head like his grandfather, he winked at the butcher’s son. Oh! it was good to hear people laughing at him, it was fine to feel them slap his shoulder and tell him he was a young rascal.

‘I’m a Blançard - I’m a Blançard.’

The smell of the market was good too, the sight of the stalls, the familiar cries. Cheese, leeks, carrots, sausages, liver, fat over-ripe plums - all of these mingled together, and a blue silk handkerchief, a coloured carpet, green glass beads jingling on a string, white dust of the cobbled stones, a cart rumbling by. A packet of straw blowing past in a litter of paper, somebody laughing, a large-breasted woman shaking her hips, a whiff of cigarette smoke borne on the wind, workmen in their blue overalls clattering by on clogs, smiling at a dark girl with gold ear-rings, blue sky, and the white clouds flying. ‘I’m happy,’ thought Julius. ‘I’m happy,’ and his hands closed over a pile of sous, round and small, chinking together, his own sous that belonged to him. ‘Will it always be like this? Will there be other things? Shall I be old one day?’

He closed his eyes, the better to breathe, the better to smell - the better to feel the rough edges of his money.

‘Which is best to handle,’ he wondered, ‘the chinking hard coins or the warm furry body of my cat? That is a very difficult question. Whom do I like best? What do I want most in the world? Why was I born at all?’

But the voice of Grandpère broke in upon him. ‘Wake up, you slacker, you dreamer.Those who do not work cannot expect to eat, and those who do not eat will never grow tall. Don’t you hope to be a man one day?’

So Julius must lean forward in the stall, his eyes sharp, his hands busy.

The days went past the same as they had always done, and then in a flash as it seemed to Julius there came a morning that for the first time in his life was different to all other mornings, a morning when Grandpère and Père came home from the Halles at seven o’clock, instead of going straight to the market, came clattering over the cobbled stones of the narrow street, the cart empty of produce. Mère, ready dressed, fastening the pin of her petticoat, thrust her head out of the window, Julius beside her.

‘But what is it?’ she called in amazement, ‘what in the world are you doing here at this time?’ Then she trailed off in the middle of her sentence, she saw Paul Lévy shrug his shoulders, indifferent and resigned, she saw Jean Blançard stare up at her with his big blue eyes bewildered like a child, his mouth open, his hands outstretched.

‘They’ve turned us away,’ he said; ‘everywhere there are soldiers, nothing but soldiers. The Halles are guarded, nobody was allowed inside - soldiers with bayonets stood there. In Neuilly, in Courbevoie, in Boulogne - in all the villages the people are flying from the Prussians, leaving their homes. The soldiers could not tell us anything. All we know is that the barriers are guarded - every gate in Paris will be closed. Soon nobody will be allowed to go in or come out.There are soldiers, I tell you, soldiers everywhere. None knows what it is all about or how long it will last.’ He broke off into a torrent of curses and abuses, curses against the Government, against the soldiers, against the people of Paris themselves.

‘Can’t they leave us in peace?’ he shouted. ‘What do they want to meddle with us for, what have we to do with their dirty bloody wars? How are we going to live? What is going to happen to us, to Julius?’

Mère still leant from her window, frowning, perplexed. She twisted her hands, looking from one face to the other.

‘Still I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘why all this fuss, all these precautions? The wife of the baker told me yesterday the Government were going to send the Prussians away. I don’t understand.’

Then Julius watched Père climb down from the cart and walk towards the window, taking no notice of Grandpère, of the old man’s fury and string of words, but he came to where Mère was leaning from the window and he put his hand on her shoulder.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘We must none of us be afraid - it can’t do any good. The baker’s wife told you wrong. Paris is being barricaded everywhere - and the Prussians are marching to Versailles.’

He spoke softly, slowly, never raising his voice, but Julius knew that these were words he should never forget, that would stay in his memory should he live, for ever and ever, words that sank deep into his boy’s brain and remained like letters of ice - blocked and frozen. ‘The Prussians are marching to Versailles.’ And even as Père’s voice was silenced, and they stared at one another, bewildered and lost, it seemed to Julius he could see the long line of the enemy coming towards Puteaux, he could see their spiked helmets, their grey uniforms, he could hear the slow tramp, tramp of their boots upon the cobbled streets, the gleaming steel of their bayonets striking the air. Already men and women were collecting at the street corners, on the doorsteps of houses, already folk ran to and fro in groups, calling excitedly, and a baby cried pitifully, his thin cry rising in the air.

Somewhere, away to the left, hidden by the towering fortress of Mont Valérien and the thick trees of Meudon, the enemy would be marching, their feet echoing hollow on the road; somewhere, beyond the hills, muffled and strange like distant thunder on a summer day, would come the low mutter and rumble of a cannon, and the siege of Paris would begin.

Every day more houses were deserted, more families fled from the villages into Paris.Always the line of carts crossing the bridge, the wheels rumbling on the cobbled stones.

‘Yesterday the baker sent his wife and sons into Belleville to his cousin,’ said Mère; ‘he told me it is no longer safe to stay outside Paris.’ ‘To-day the coal-merchant shut up his house,’ said Père; ‘he has found accommodation for his family in Auteuil. Once inside the fortifications he will lose his fear.’

‘The
blanchisseuse
at the corner of the street is packing up to-morrow, ’ said Julius; ‘her son told me this morning. They are going to relations in Montmartre. They are leaving their dog behind to starve - who is going to feed it? Can I feed it, Grandpère?’

And in every one of their hearts rose the same unspoken question: ‘And us? When are we leaving Puteaux? Where are we going?’

Jean Blançard watched the stream of villagers troop down towards the Seine, cross the bridge, march side by side, bundles over their shoulders, trailing children by the hand. ‘Go on, you cowards, you poor crawling fools,’ he shouted, ‘go on and shut yourselves up behind the barriers of Paris. I was born in Puteaux, and my father was born in Puteaux, and not all the louse-ridden Prussians in the world will turn me from my own house and my own village.’ He watched them, his arms folded, his cap on the back of his head, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

And the booming cannon of Mont Valérien would bark suddenly, a mutter and a rumble of thunder, and Grandpère would take his cigarette from his mouth and smile, jerking his thumb in their direction.

‘D’you hear the fortress?’ he said. ‘They’re ready up there; they’ll send the vandals back to hell. We’re ready, aren’t we? Let ’em come - let ’em all come, every stinking Prussian mother’s son.’

No one could make him move, he would stay in Puteaux until the very stones of the street were blown up beneath his feet, and his blind obstinacy influenced his daughter, she would not leave her house and her belongings, she was a Blançard, she was not afraid.

‘I have a gun,’ said Grandpère, ‘it belonged to my uncle who fought at Austerlitz. I can use it, can’t I, if the Prussians come to Puteaux? They shan’t take my house, not a stone - not a brick.’

And Julius helped him clean his gun, he soaked an old rag in oil and polished the barrel, but he was thinking: ‘What about our money, will the Prussians take that? Oughtn’t we to tie our sous up in bags and bury them in the ground?’

The daily journey to the Halles, the market in the avenue de Neuilly, these were things that belonged to the past, and the Blançards lived as best they could by selling country produce to the few folk left in Puteaux and the nearest villages. It was only October and already food was scarce; careless of danger and a possible encounter with the Prussians, Jean Blançard would take his cart every morning and drive round the country roads to bargain with the peasants living in hovels on their own plot of ground, in search of a few overblown cabbages, potatoes run to seed, a dead horse perhaps to sell in portions, or an old sheep.

Julius set snares to catch birds, he fixed lines on the banks of the Seine below Puteaux in the hope of finding fish.

Soon it would not be a question of selling meat to feed others, but of finding meat to feed themselves.

Any day the Prussians might take it into their heads to descend upon Paris, and might not they march through Puteaux, down the wide high road towards the Pont de Neuilly, burning and destroying as they went? ‘Would they kill us?’ asked Julius, ‘we who are not even soldiers and cannot fight?’ And nobody could tell him. Nobody knew how long they must wait, how soon the evening would come.

They drove in the cart along the high road, Grandpère and Julius, leaving Puteaux and Courbevoie behind them, striking out towards the village of Nanterre over the brow of the hill. The road was rough, the wheels of the cart kept sinking into deep ruts, and there were puddles everywhere, and mud, and from the pallid sky a wet sun shone into the puddles, reflecting a space of blue no larger than a man’s hand, and a loose, straggling cloud.

‘Ha! Ha! my beauty,’ called Grandpère, cracking his whip, and the horse flicked his ears and sniffed at the air. It was cold, sharp autumnal weather. Julius blew upon his hands.

‘In Nanterre we shall find meat,’ said Grandpère, ‘there is a fellow there who used to own a couple of strong mules. They will make excellent eating, and will fetch a good price in the fortress.’