3. 959 a.m. Halt Vire
9:59 a.m. HALT VIRE
The most salient characteristic of life in this latter portion of the nineteenth century is speed.
W. R. GREG,
“LIFE AT HIGH PRESSURE” (1875)
Léon Mariette sits in his birdcage on the roof of Front Baggage. On this first leg from Granville, he’s already checked all the labels and arranged trunks and valises by destination on shelves and in nets. He’s read, absorbed, and filed in his pigeonholes the latest orders of service and memoranda from HQ. (Young Jean Le Goff may smirk at Léon’s officiousness , but doesn’t that word suggest zeal in performing one’s duties of office?)
Now the Paris Express is pulling into Vire, where this route crosses into Léon’s home department, Calvados. How proud his meat-salter papa would have been to see him in a smart uniform with clean hands. The decaying town, known for its smoked sausage, sits on wooded slopes rising from the river, a factory chimney on one side, a clock tower and a ruin on the other. By the two-storey station, a couple of cabs are waiting, and people are standing about near the tracks.
As Pellerin slows the Express to a halt, Léon delicately applies his hand brake. One indecisive local scuttles across just in front of the train’s nose. He shakes his head in exasperation; even when you build these fools a bridge or an underpass, they prefer to save half a minute by nipping across the rails. He glances over his shoulder to scan the seven passenger carriages behind. When a door starts to open, he peeps on his whistle and shouts, “Keep your seats till the train’s come to a complete stop!”
The door is pulled to but not quite shut.
Passengers! He wishes he could lock them all in while the train’s in motion. That used to be standard protocol—to stop anyone from falling out—but it’s against the law since what happened in Meudon, on this very line just west of Paris. More than half a century ago, a train derailed there, and hundreds burnt alive in their locked carriages.
A final jerk now as Front Baggage’s buffer bumps into the tender full of coal at 9:59, right on time; Léon stuffs his watch back into his fob as he clambers down three rungs into the van. A guard and his train are relay racers; while she’s moving, he must wait, and only when she’s at a standstill can he come to life. In Léon’s mind, a ticking starts up like a deathwatch beetle. This halt is five minutes, fewer if possible, six at a pinch but not a minute longer.
“Vire,” he calls as he jumps down onto the platform, “Vire Station.” He grabs each of the pieces of baggage he’s stacked ready on the floor of the van and passes it to a boy porter to prop on a waiting trolley. People rush the lad, snatching at handles. “Monsieur,” Léon snaps at the first, “you’re impeding the work.”
Jean Le Goff’s over on his right, slinging the valises of embarking passengers like sacks of turnips.
People are streaming off the train to find a water closet or buy wrinkled apples or pickled herring in newspaper from the woman with the basket. You’d think they’ve had a full day of travel already, rather than an hour and a half. If some of these time-wasters were considerate enough to keep their seats, it would be easier to see to those who required help, such as this conehead woman staggering down the steps of Middle Third with her arms full of bags as well as a large baby with a similarly modified skull. Léon snaps his fingers and directs a uniformed porter (hovering near a top hat, hoping for a tip) to her side. Sometimes the sheer number of people to be transported every day makes Léon’s spirits quail.
There’s a soldier carrying his kit out of Rear Third, and that crop-haired young woman with a lunch bucket right behind him. Neither of them heads into the station; are they thinking of sneaking into a Second-Class or even First-Class carriage while Léon’s occupied?
No, the soldier’s switching to Front Third, maybe because it’s less crowded. The mannish girl does the same, but pauses on the step and calls out, “Guard?”
“What is it?”
“Parcels, Mariette,” says a boy with a barrowful of goods to be shipped to Paris.
“Monsieur,” Léon corrects him sharply, gesturing for the crumpled bundle of documents. It’s 10:02 already. Come on, come on. If he ever falls down in an apoplectic fit, it’ll be at a station in the last two minutes before the Express simply must depart.
“Any bigwigs riding with us today?” The crop-haired young woman is staring at the next two doors, the green ones.
Léon raises his eyes to heaven at her cheek. “Kindly take your seat!” Snapping his fingers to get the parcel boy’s attention: “Get these trunks and valises into Front Baggage.” Léon seizes the barrow himself and pushes it— squeak, squeak —one door down to the Post Van and starts loading parcels in by the armful.
For travel, Alice Guy wears one of the tailored suits she’s had made for the office, a mauve one with a fitted jacket, great leg-of-mutton sleeves, and a skirt (plumped up by a bustle pad) that sways over her pointed boots. She hopes it’s not too flattering but avoids actual dowdiness. Alice is twenty-two, and she’s strikingly pretty, which is even more of a problem than her youth. When men come into Gaumont and Company, she does her best to discourage direct overtures, but a drip of flirtation is what oils the wheels of French life.
A step ahead of her, Monsieur Gaumont reaches for the handle of the first blue door.
He’s clearly never given a moment’s thought to the question of where a single woman and her married boss should sit on a train. If the two go together into an empty Second-Class carriage—apparently seeking privacy for the six hours back to Paris—how will that look to anyone who may glance in the window or get in at the next stop? If an acquaintance of Gaumont’s glimpses him and his secretary in a tête-à-tête, Alice is the one who’ll seem immoral, despite all she’s done to ensure the respectability of this overnight trip to meet a photographic-lens supplier in Vire. All this flashes through her mind fast enough to make her murmur, before Gaumont even turns the handle, “Perhaps the next one, monsieur?”
“Really?” he asks blankly.
Is the idiot going to make her spell it out?
“As you like.” Gaumont picks up their luggage and moves along the platform.
The next Second-Class carriage turns out to be already occupied by a dark man who smiles nervously with well-tended American teeth.
Gaumont stops short in the doorway and looks back. “Ah, mademoiselle, should we—”
“No, no”—Alice urges him in—“the whistle’s about to go.”
The American twitches, and for a moment she’s afraid he’ll offer to move to another carriage, leaving her and her employer alone after all.
Gaumont asks, “But wouldn’t we be more comfortable in the first one?”
Alice restrains a sharp sigh. “This is fine.” She takes a seat at the window opposite on the blue corduroy grudgingly stuffed with horsehair.
Her boss shrugs and puts their cases up in the net before he sits down across from her. He probably thinks her whimsical, arbitrary: an irrational female.
Alice nods to the other man, who wishes them good morning correctly but with a strong American accent. He turns out to be a painter. (Ever since that morning in Le Havre decades back when Monet daubed his Impression, Sunrise , Normandy’s been infested with painters.) Alice spent her childhood in Chile among people of all stripes, and she’d guess that most of this Henry Tanner’s ancestors were African, though he’s very light-skinned.
Gaumont casts a discontented look around. They’re riding in Second less for comfort than to avoid the rowdy crowds in Third. Alice is sure he would travel in First if the firm could afford it. But she happens to know that Gaumont didn’t grow up posh; he had to leave school at sixteen and work as a secretary in a precision-tools workshop. (At least he wouldn’t have had her trouble with the gentlemen customers.) He didn’t buy the camera firm until this August, scraping the money together with the help of Monsieur Eiffel and two other investors. Word at the office is that the firm, Gaumont and Company, bears her boss’s name only because Eiffel’s has been so unfairly stained by the scandal over the Panama Canal.
“May I have your notes to refresh my memory of the meeting, mademoiselle?”
“Of course.” Alice opens her case, slides out the pages of specifications and prices in her neat writing—as unfeminine a hand as she can make it—and passes them over.
She was hired last year by the previous owner for her shorthand and typing (and, yes, perhaps for her Swiss-boarding-school polish). She had no knowledge of camera manufacture, but the business is oddly fascinating. In fact, there’s something she wants to propose to Gaumont… but she hasn’t found the right moment to broach the topic.
For now Alice buries herself in her novel, one of Zola’s. Generally she enjoys stories about the railways—lovers just missing assignations or hurling themselves under the wheels. But this Zola book is verging on ludicrous, since virtually every character who sets eyes on a train seems to be driven to bloodshed as a result.