The Paris Express

2. 845 a.m. Depart Granville

And here is a mill and there is a river;

Each a glimpse and gone forever!

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,

“FROM A RAILWAY CARRIAGE” (1885)

The first of the two Second-Class carriages at the rear of the train has just one occupant, Henry Tanner. The American painter leans back against the partition’s padded section, which is covered in only slightly worn blue corduroy. Granville Station reminded Henry of Monet’s dozen canvases of Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare—like landscapes but indoors, with smoke and steam for clouds, diffusing the light that beams through the glass roof. It strikes him that it’s not easy to portray the passing of time in a picture. The old masters relied on symbolism (sundials, hourglasses, snuffed candles, and skulls) or personification—old Father Time in his silvery beard. But what Monet managed to catch in each of his train canvases was a sense of the fleeting. Henry wishes he could paint only half so well.

He sits with his knees wide, trying to relax. He’s been roughing it out west in Brittany, where you can scrape by on fifty francs a month if you lodge on a farm. After the summer’s economies, Henry could possibly afford to treat himself to a ride in First Class, but here he is in Second, because—though he knows it’s silly—he’d find First too much of a strain on the nerves.

Not that he would have reason to be nervous—French railways don’t have any rule about who’s allowed to sit where. If Henry were riding a train south from New York, say, then when he reached Washington, DC, he’d be forced to change to the small Coloured car that reeks of the conductors’ urine. His jaw tightens at the memory. No, France has a much better claim to being the land of liberté, égalité , and all that.

But if Henry were to travel in First from Granville today… well, even if none of his fellow passengers insinuated that the gentleman might have stepped through the green door by mistake, or even if they failed to read him as a noir , he’d be tense all the way to Paris. So why borrow trouble? Besides, this blue upholstery is quite comfortable, really. Henry’s used to much worse; the studio he shares with a pal from the American Art Association is in a ramshackle building in Montparnasse, loud with the tubercular hacking of artists and models.

He stares out the window to distract himself from the torment of self-consciousness. Small fields and winding lanes sunken between high hedgerows tangled with brush and nettles. Telegraph poles along the track, birds on the wires like notes in a musical score. The train dips down into a cutting, then climbs up on an embankment. Strips of cultivated land radiate from a village. A small, walled-off cemetery, the ghetto of the dead, followed by stubble; Henry supposes late October must be a respite between wheat harvest and sowing.

A knot of peasants by the track, faces turned towards the passing Express. Do they come just to watch these great machines zip by? The railway can’t be a novelty anymore, surely. Maybe it is just an excuse to gather and chat.

Half-timbered houses, rather Anglo-Saxon to American eyes, since the northwest is the part of France that the English held longest. There’s one with what Henry recognises as a hawthorn bush planted by the door—to ward off lightning, a farmer told him. Steep roofs in pinkish flat tile, grey slate. Henry much prefers the old thatch to red corrugated iron. He’s going by so fast, it’s hard to catch all the architectural details. That’s the paradox of trains, he supposes; they show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.

He spent half his youth staring till his eyes hurt. When each of those Philadelphia art teachers in turn turned down the mulatto boy , Henry made do; he’d stand for hours in a free gallery studying a landscape, then scurry home to reproduce it from memory. But at last Mr. Eakins took him on and opened the whole world to him. Eakins had his students paint straight colour onto primed canvas without the safety net of a preparatory sketch. He told them, There are no lines in Nature.

The motion of the train is making Henry a little queasy. He should have had more of a breakfast in Granville. His first winter in Paris, he couldn’t adjust to starting the day French-style with just coffee and a roll instead of beefsteak and griddle cakes. In the evenings, he had a similar problem—waiters threw him out of cafés for failing to order wine like a Frenchman. Eventually he taught himself to get through a small glass in sips; when in Rome and all that.

Henry finds he’s watching out for anything picturesque. A huge pear tree, self-seeded, splits the ruin of a cottage. A road mender working with bucket and spade on a pale, dust-haloed track as straight as the railway line with a stand of plane trees along each side. Two children in a cart—that could be an appealing subject… except that they’re being pulled by a tired dog. (The French have no sentimentality about animals, but such a scene would appal a British or American picture-buyer.)

A man with a massive basket on his back, saucepans dangling. If the tiny figure were closer, Henry could get out his little camera and capture a quick study for later. (Call it Normandy Pedlar? Tinker Crossing Field ?)

Art is a profession of vagabond s, Reverend Tanner intones in his son’s head.

To settle his ragged breathing, Henry thinks about his painting. Not one of the small seascapes parcelled up with his trunk in the baggage van but the large, unfinished Daniel , facing the wall in his studio in Paris. He needs to capture that moment when, thrown into the stinking pit, the prophet didn’t rail or fight the lions but sat down and prayed. Henry has a rectangle of honeyed evening light sliding into the prison from a high window, and he’s setting cool blues against the lions’ yellow fur. He wants to show time stopping as the prophet’s voice gentles the beasts. (So many visits Henry’s made to the Jardin des Plantes to sketch the caged lions in their various discontented poses.) Please, Lord, teach me to paint it right.

The heroes of the Old Testament endured such terrors stoically; why does Henry tremble at the prospect of a fellow passenger giving him a curious look or the hugely moustachioed guard asking to see his Second-Class ticket? You are Henry Ossawa Tanner , he scolds himself, and you have every right to be on this train.

Every minute or so, Victor Garnier turns to squint into the bunker, with its broad chute tilted down towards him, and smashes open a few big lumps with the back of his shovel. If the coal’s very dusty, he sprinkles it with water from a bucket at his feet. He thrusts his shovel into the mass to fill it with ten kilos’ worth, hoists and pivots and heaves it across the footplate without dropping a crumb, missing his mate by a hair, all while hauling open the firebox door with his left clog. A great wash of light and heat blasts in the rollers’ faces from the molten flow, the colour of fresh blood. Victor shoves the coal down the ramp, deep into the furnace’s flaming maw, rakes the coals, then slams the door with his right foot.

Next he grasps the rail with his right hand and leans way out to the left of the train to check that the tracks ahead are clear. There are two small portholes in the iron backhead in front of him, one on each side of the boiler, but Victor can never make out much through the filthy glass. Overhead, a half metre of roof to keep the worst of the weather off. The stoker wears his goggles to shield his eyes from smuts because he’s known tough fellows too careless to wear them who’ve ended up blinded. No gloves, though, not this side of Christmas; Victor’s grip is better without. Wind buffets the hair escaping from his cap; when he opens his mouth to cough, the air cuts right through his red muffler and makes his teeth ache.

Two clogs planted back on the thrumming footplate, he finds his balance again. He eyes the smoke streaming from the chimney overhead; not too much, and light grey rather than black, that’s good. When Engine 721’s in motion, the roaring is so loud that he and Guillaume Pellerin can’t exchange a word. Not that they need to after all these years.

One man in two bodies, that’s how Victor thinks of himself and his driver. He’s the younger fellow’s right-hand man, though always standing on Guillaume’s left. (An old joke.) Outsiders assume Victor’s the brainless one. Feed the hog and slake her thirst—couldn’t a half-wit with a shovel do that much? The truth is, there’s nothing simple about supplying steam, just the right amount of it at just the right moment. Speed is the special task laid on Guillaume, and thrift is on Victor, but both the rollers work to save the Company money while keeping on schedule.

What bothers Victor—what the pencil pushers can’t seem to grasp—is that the two goals are incompatible. Getting to Paris at exactly 3:55 today is possible only if the crew of four and every station porter and guard along the way does his job exactly right. It’s almost always passengers, with their last-minute requests and confusions, who cause delay. In order not to inconvenience these same passengers, any time lost must be made up somehow, which means the Company allows driver and stoker to put on speed—but only up to a point, for safety’s sake.

And quite apart from increasing the risk of accidents, speed eats too much coal, oil, and grease. The Company’s so desperate that every month that a skilled pair of rollers saves on these supplies, they are rewarded with a bonus of up to forty percent. Forty! That’s the difference between Joséphine’s sigh and her smile, the gap between getting by and feeling rich.

At least he and Guillaume are partners in this demanding enterprise, day after day. Not equals, of course; a great hog can have only one master, and Pellerin is among the very best. He’s climbed the ladder fast, not only making driver by thirty-five but always assigned express trains, the pedigreed racers of the fleet. Twice he’s been cited for outstanding acts of vigilance, which Victor happens to know from the Bulletin ; his mate would never mention them. Always careful and scrupulous—is it any wonder Guillaume’s chocolate-brown eyes have a slightly hunted look?

He often says he couldn’t move their engine a metre without Victor. On winter days, both of them suffer frozen backs and scalded chests at the same time, their hands and forearms perpetually branded with scars and burns.

Pastures and woods blur by now. Out of the corner of his eye, Victor sees Guillaume glance his way. He grins and nods back with the usual thumbs-up.

In the Middle Third carriage, John Synge is labouring away with a pencil, making notes.

Balancing on the shaking boards between the benches like a circus equestrian, a coffee seller—North African, John would guess—has a towering tank strapped tightly to his back. The young Dubliner has never seen such an apparatus; he sketches it, inch-high.

The coffee seller opens a tap on his chest now and pours the black stuff deftly through a filter made of woven leaves into a small horn cup on a chain. He takes a sip of his own brew and sighs. Sincerely relishing the coffee, John wonders, or advertising to the carriage? Or both?

The passenger to John’s left turns the page of yesterday’s Little Parisian , chuckling to himself. A mongrel terrier is tucked behind his heels, and a hat is upturned on his lap.

John tilts over just enough to make out the worn letters inked inside the man’s hatband: DOIS. He likes the name and copies it down. John’s writing all the time these days, though not a sentence worth reading yet. He’s just a collector, letting vivid impressions of the world, whatever comes his way, soak into him.

He enjoys all forms of movement—cycle rides, hikes on which he can strike up brief conversations with tramps and labourers—but, perhaps most of all, train journeys. The scenes briefly framed in the window form a continuous, unpredictable drama of happenstance. And inside the carriage, too, it’s all go, especially when a train’s chockablock. The main reason John travels in Third Class is to stretch the meagre remittances Mama sends from their Dublin suburb, but it also lets him study characters, the more colourful the better.

The girl in the extravagantly feathered hat smoking opposite him, for instance. Her small, stern features could come from anywhere between Bombay and Manila. By her clothes she announces herself as a demimondaine, the kind Mama would denounce as a denizen of Gomorrah . John has shaken off all those old pieties; he’d never resort to hiring one of these women, but they wake in him a private, tender sympathy.

The smoker’s hat bears a taxidermied nestful of slightly crumpled black and orange orioles. Her flame-coloured dress is billowing over John’s knees, and… God Almighty, is that a live monkey on her shoulder grinning out from her huge chignon, the morning sun haloing it with red-gold?

Next his eyes are drawn to the passenger beside the plumed girl, a woman with a cone-shaped head, her baby on her lap with its skull tightly bandaged to produce the same weirdly high forehead and flattened ears. Now, that’s the kind of thing you see only deep in the countryside. “Excuse me,” she snaps, making John jump, but no, she’s addressing her neighbour. “Your feathers are in my face.”

The girl blows a smoke ring before saying, “You’re welcome.” Her French is thickly accented; that’s about as much as this Irishman can tell.

“Take it off, why don’t you?” the conehead demands.

“Hats go up in the ropes.” Monsieur Dois points overhead helpfully.

“Not mine. It don’t come off,” the outrageous girl in orange claims. To John it sounds as if she’s learned French only in recent years.

“Why not?” the conehead wants to know.

“It’s sewn into my hair.” Her poker face dares anyone to call her a liar.

Several passengers grunt or mutter. John finds it puzzling that none of them has raised any objection to the monkey.

The girl’s not so much pretty as glamorous, he decides. Her figure’s squat, her face spotty under its powder; she can’t be eighteen, even. But she has a rueful insouciance worth more than beauty. She drops her cigarette stub on the floor, presses it with her high-heeled boot, and beckons to the coffee seller. “With milk.”

The man moves the cup to the tap on his left—like a woman shifting her infant, John thinks, unsettled by the image—and releases a stream of white into the cup. “Fifteen centimes.”

She makes a face. “I get a café au lait for ten centimes in Paris.”

“Then wait seven hours,” the coffee seller suggests cordially.

She sighs, fishes the coins out of a little bag dangling from her wrist.

“Dates, nuts?” he offers.

“Sugar.”

“One centime more.” He produces a lump from the folds of his robe and a tiny spoon on another delicate chain to stir it in.

The Frenchman called Dois looks up from his newspaper. “Did you sell coffee back in Africa?”

“No, monsieur, carpets.”

A chuckle from Dois. He is clearly the sort of man who finds everything funny. John Synge is too solitary to manage that, but he appreciates the spirit.

The smoker swallows her first gulp with pleasure. “ Putain , that’s strong.”

“Slow,” the coffee seller advises. “Morning coffee is prayer.”

“Is what?”

“You sit, sip little by little. Thank your god.”

The girl smirks at that, suggesting she doesn’t have one any more than John does since he threw away that crutch in his teens and broke his widowed mother’s heart. “Any marc?”

John wonders if it might be against this man’s religion to supply grape brandy.

But no, he’s producing a bottle from his skirts. “Another ten centimes.”

“I get a dash of marc for five in Paris,” the plumed girl objects.

“Wait till Paris, then, dear lady.”

With grudging respect for the coffee seller’s bargaining, she hands over another coin.

He adds a slosh. “Pastry?” He holds out a box of small, honeyed crescents.

The young woman tosses her head like a horse irritated by its plumed headdress. “That’s all you’ll get from me.”

John breathes in the scent of the coffee, but he really mustn’t buy any; he’s already behind on the rent for his two rooms (one of them furnished), and it’s only the twenty-second of the month. Most days he gets by on bread and an egg and a cigarette, with the odd visit to a cookhouse for a slice of meat if he’s feeling faint. He borrows library books that he forgets to read and wanders the Louvre for half-days at a time. Since at twenty-four he has no definite plan for his future and little prospect of being able to earn a living, it seems wisest to keep his habits modest.

He fingers the corner of his notebook. He’d like to draw the full sweep of the girl’s extraordinary costume… but she’s right across from him, so she’d see. If she can afford that hat, John imagines she could pay for a Second-Class fare, so why is she mucking in here with the hoi polloi? Maybe she was flush when she bought the bird-encrusted hat, but she’s broke today, and she still has too much pride to sell it? Anyway, though her trade might be legal in live-and-let-live France, surely the respectable passengers in Second would give her the cold shoulder.

She must be far from home, a bright migrant creature storm-blown into these northern European climes. John hasn’t come as far, but as a stranger in Paris too reticent to have made any real friends, he feels for her.

A pair of dandies on the other side of him with the unmistakable air of students—one pale and weedy in pince-nez and a faded tailcoat and bowler that look as if he took them off an elderly corpse, the other East Asian with a natty velveteen jacket and hat—are gulping their coffee with pleasure. John is rather less shy about striking up conversation with his own sex, so he asks them where they’re enrolled.

“At the Colonial School by the Jardin du Luxembourg, being trained up to tyrannize over far-flung regions of the empire,” says the French one ironically. He introduces himself as Max Jacob. He seems to John too frail to tyrannize over so much as a village.

His friend turns out to be Cambodian with the wonderful moniker of Kiouaup, though John can’t tell whether that’s a first or last name. They share a room in a boardinghouse by the “Colo,” sleeping in hammocks while they’re saving up for beds.

“I stroll in the Luxembourg all the time,” John confides, “in the Poets’ Walk.”

Max Jacob sighs: “In the deep shade of those trees!”

He nods. “Were you holidaying in Granville?”

“No, no,” says Kiouaup in his perfect formal French, “one of our professors insists we visit large industrial concerns and write up reports on how well they are administered.”

John didn’t realise Granville had any large industrial concerns. “A shipyard, was it?”

“ Merde —quite literally,” Max quips. “An awfully enterprising pair, the Dior cousins. They charge the townsfolk for emptying their toilets and sewers, then wave the magic wand of chemistry over the stuff and sell it back to the farmers as fertilizer.”

He turns out to be a Breton. “We Jacobs are in the clothing trade—rather a cliché, I admit. We’re the only Jews in Quimper.”

John is impressed by this flippancy. Since the banishment of Captain Dreyfus for espionage, in April, it’s a brave Hebrew who identifies himself as such in public.

A man who looks like a labourer hawks brown on the floor. Is this a hostile comment—could he be one of those ranters from the Antisemitic League? But it was John’s old polished boot he just missed, so maybe it was just spit.

Max pays no attention. “Now, some say my family doesn’t count because we’re not practicing , but I say we don’t need to practice—we’ve been at it for three thousand years.”

This punch line makes John laugh. He wonders what it had been like for the young eccentric to grow up in a Breton provincial town. He remembers his own long, lethargic summers by the sea in County Wicklow, Mama never allowing him to swim on account of his weak lungs.

She’d call a Third-Class carriage a hotbed of infection, which it probably is. But John Synge hasn’t yet discovered a way to study his fellow human beings at close quarters without breathing the same air.

“English, are you, mister ?” That’s the fellow called Dois asking Synge with a touch of mockery.

“No!” John’s French grammar is basically sound, but he knows his pronunciation attracts attention. “Irish.” That comes out too combative, but he simply loathes being mistaken for a member of the nation that has kept his own in chains.

Dois nods equably. “My own parents came from Portugal, but there are so many Italians in France these days, I’m often mistaken for one of them.”

“Oh, yes?” John asks.

A half-chuckle. “After that anarchist baker from Milan stabbed President Carnot”—the conehead sighs at that and makes a sign of the cross on her chest—“my delicatessen got smashed and looted.”

John is shaken by how lightly Dois recounts his persecution. How cruel the mob is, and how blundering. He thinks of the baker turned assassin; part of what’s drawn John to Paris is its cast of radicals with their fascinating variety of proposals for remaking civilisation on fresh principles, and he’d describe himself as a socialist, but as for anarchism, he’s sat through two lectures on the subject, and it seems madness to him.