9. 1211 p.m. Halt Surdon
12:11 p.m. HALT SURDON
The ticking of the clocks sounds like mice nibbling at time.
ALPHONSE ALLAIS,
THE BLACK CAT (1890)
Jules-Félix Gévelot watches a score of passengers hop off with the constrained gait of people in urgent search of a latrine. (Where station facilities exist, they’re so nasty, most men relieve themselves out the window as they’re passing through the countryside. Emma and Aimée have already used a boat-shaped china bourdalou under their skirts, which Jules-Félix has emptied for them.)
Surdon seems nothing more than a hub for those changing trains on their way to or from Caen to the north or Le Mans to the south. An engine screams by and Emma jumps.
Aimée seizes her hand. “Darling, it’s only the down train.”
“Who’s nervous now?” Jules-Félix can’t resist the quip.
His wife ignores that. “Remember that night at the Ga?té, Aimée?”
“The theatre in Montparnasse?” He rarely has the time to take his wife to anything. “What happened?”
“It was nothing,” Emma assures him. “Some scenery fell down with a clatter backstage, and half the audience bolted, screaming, Anarchists! ”
“We could have died in the stampede, thanks to those idiots,” Aimée complains.
Or you could have been burnt alive if it really had been a bomb , Jules-Félix doesn’t say. If people are jumpy these days, haven’t they reason to be?
He thinks of poor President Carnot, gutted like a pig. And in the Chamber of Deputies, when that drifter tossed his nail bomb—Jules-Félix happened to be there that day. He remembers a boom and a fog, a clattering, screams. How random it seemed, whose flesh those flying nails found—for instance, three deputies from Morbihan who weren’t even sitting together. The sixty or so who got hurt included some watchers in the gallery: a waiter, a tailor, a nurse… Jules-Félix picked a nail out of a spatter browning on the floor and kept it as an aide-mémoire.
This latest president—Faure, an inoffensive leather merchant—is so desperate to make peace that he’s declared amnesty for the anarchists, appealing for an end to governmental retaliations and guillotinings. That probably would be the best thing for France, but try persuading the crazies…
Mouth against Aimée’s ear, Emma says something that Jules-Félix doesn’t catch; Aimée giggles.
On the whole he’s glad his wife has her friend to keep her company. The fiction is that Aimée is merely visiting the Gévelots for long stretches, even coming with them on trips such as this latest one to Christophle’s country place, but as far as he’s aware, she has no other home.
No one could disagree that the Gévelot marriage has been a success. Emma’s military connections were invaluable in helping the firm become such a pillar of the state that last year its official name was changed to the French Society of Munitions. At this point, Jules-Félix doesn’t much care that the two of them no longer share a bed; almost two decades his junior, Emma must find him rather an old man, one who values unbroken sleep when he can get it.
There’ve been no children, though, which is rather a pity. Too busy to look for a bride, Jules-Félix was almost forty by the time they married, but still, many men sire offspring later than that. The matter’s never been explained medically. Jules-Félix thinks of it as he would a lingering problem at the works. A cartridge without a bullet is termed a blank ; a dummy is completely inert; a dud has powder but fails to ignite; and a squib ignites but without enough power to push the bullet out of the barrel. Whether Jules-Félix is a squib, dud, dummy, or blank is unclear, and he supposes it comes to the same in the end.
“My, my,” he murmurs now, finger to the window glass. On the platform, a gentleman with a monocle holds a case in each hand. He stands in close confabulation with a matron with glossy brown hair, a canary-yellow dress, and a basket.
“What is it?” Eager for entertainment, Emma and Aimée lean over to see.
“Here’s another of my fellow deputies for Orne—the comte de Lévis-Mirepoix.” Jules-Félix also knows the aristo from military circles; the Lévis-Mirepoix steam sawmill makes clogs for the same soldiers who are supplied with Gévelot bullets. But politically the two are poles apart. The comte recently had the gall to vote against free primary education.
“So that’s the comtesse with him, in yellow?”
He chuckles. “No, ma chère . I happen to remember that his wife, mother of a half a dozen Lévis-Mirepoix—”
“Half a dozen?” Aimée sounds incredulous.
“Conservatives and Catholics,” Emma murmurs.
“Is a blonde,” he finishes.
His wife tilts her chin. “Is that so? Now, we mustn’t leap to judgement. Could the comte have been recently widowed and remarried?”
Jules-Félix shakes his head. “I’d have heard. All those hours we stand around at the Assembly waiting for a vote to be called… politicians are inveterate gossips.”
“Some ladies of our age do colour their hair.” That’s Aimée, being ostentatiously fair.
“To cover up silver, yes,” Emma concedes, “but from blond to brunette, really?”
He snorts. “No, this has to be a hole-in-the-corner affair.” Lévis-Mirepoix’s figure is remarkable for a man in midlife—wide shoulders, narrow waist—which he must owe to a superbly tailored corset. The brunette’s face (not young, but pleasing) is familiar.
“It’s the hypocrisy of the old snoot that bothers me,” Emma tells her friend.
Jules-Félix, who must have twenty years on the comte, grins at old snoot . “Indeed. These pious monarchists are always harping on about family and how much more virtuous the nation was before the revolution.” Since the whole snarling pack brought down Dreyfus last year, they’ve been insufferable; can’t they get it into their heads that they don’t run France anymore? He squints through the glass. “I’m almost certain… yes, mon Dieu , she’s Riotteau’s sister.”
“Who’s Riotteau?” asks Aimée.
“Riotteau the shipowner who represents Manche?” That’s Emma.
He nods. “Used to be mayor of Granville, a good progressive.”
Aimée protests: “So the lady in yellow’s brother is yet another of your fellow deputies? This is like a gathering of a subcommittee.”
“I suppose they’re all heading back to Paris for the new session,” says Emma.
Jules-Félix strains his memory. “Riotteau’s sister has been married for decades to a fellow of the name of Heureux. Or L’Heureux, maybe?”
“Love across the divide,” Aimée croons, “a leftist’s sister of a certain age and a royalist count criminally, fatally, drawn together!”
“And caught out at a railway station,” Emma adds, “like something from a Feydeau farce.”
As if the comte de Lévis-Mirepoix has somehow heard through the sooty glass, he catches his colleague’s eye and blanches.
Jules-Félix smiles silkily and gestures for the pair to join them.
But the comte backs away from the brunette, muttering out of the corner of his mouth, and sets down her valise as if he picked it up by mistake or was carrying it as a courtesy to a lady stranger. His mistress’s eyes slide in fright to the window where the Gévelot party sit watching. She grabs her case and heads for the next carriage.
Emma lets out a hoot. “Trying to pretend they’re not travelling together.”
“They must have been at his chateau,” says Jules-Félix. “That’s the only possible explanation for their both catching a train at Surdon, of all places.”
“What a boor.” Aimée sighs. “He might have had enough discretion to take his paramour to a hotel in Paris.”
There are only two First-Class carriages, so unless the comte de Lévis-Mirepoix wants to be left behind at this windswept station, he has no choice but to open the door and climb in. “Gévelot.” Greeting Jules-Félix with a bow. “Madame, always a pleasure.” The comte has clearly decided to bluff it out, daring any of them to make a direct accusation, but he has a clammy look about him.
Emma introduces her companion, so he kisses Aimée’s hand too.
Neither of the ladies asks whether that was Madame L’Heureux on the platform, but they do teasingly interrogate the comte about whether he feels restored by his time in the country.
“Ah, as always.” He adjusts his monocle.
Having honoured his own marriage vows all these decades, Jules-Félix greatly relishes the adulterer’s discomfort. The comte should have stuck to opera girls rather than seducing a married lady. And in his wife’s own country house under the eyes of her own servants no less. Well, one way or another, word will spread now and he’ll get his comeuppance. So much for the romance and anonymity of rail travel. Really, the two might as well have shown themselves off in the Lévis-Mirepoix coach on the afternoon drive through the Bois de Boulogne! It’s a small world, and trains have only made it smaller.
“Shall I?”
“What’s that?” Jules-Félix blinks at Emma.
“It’s past noon, mon cher . Shall I open the hamper?”
“Certainly.”
The comte is revealed to be travelling without so much as a crust, clearly because his mistress has the basket; the Gévelot party smirk at each other and Emma insists on sharing everything.
Perhaps to make up for the Christophles’ guests not having been accommodated in the invalid carriage, the housekeeper at Gué aux Biches has packed them salt-marsh lamb accompanied by pommes au gratin. The Gévelots bicker amiably about whether the lamb really tastes any different from ordinary lamb, salted—but it’s undeniably delicious. They open a jar of duck aiguillettes with caramelized apples and another of truffled pigs’ trotters. For cheeses, they have Livarot, Brillat-Savarin, and Pont l’évêque, and, instead of cider, a pommeau made of Calvados mixed with fresh apple must.
His mood mellowed by the good lunch, Jules-Félix pours himself and the comte a glass each of a hearty burgundy. He doesn’t feel obliged to make conversation, though; the two men shouldn’t argue about politics in front of the ladies nor bore them by discussing army contracts. Instead, he folds the morning paper over and checks the tiny figures as he sips his wine.
“My husband’s incapable of relaxation. He always has a watch in his hand, as it were,” Emma complains.
“Well, time is gold, madame,” the comte points out.
“Hear, hear,” Jules-Félix murmurs without looking up.
“You men of business have your gazes so fixed on what’s coming, the stock market and so forth, that you look right past the pleasures of the moment,” Aimée scolds them. “And, really, once you’re over the crest of the hill of life, what destination are you hurrying towards except, well…”
Jules-Félix gives her a hard look. The grave , she means. Not a remark in very good taste for a dependent female to direct towards a man approaching seventy in whose house she camps.
Feeling a little churlish, he doesn’t ask the ladies’ permission before he gets out cigars for himself and the adulterous lord.
Jean Le Goff had his cold lunch in Rear Baggage half an hour back—potato stew and pickled herring, washed down with cider— and found time to trim his nails with his penknife; a single man has to keep up his standards. So now he runs for a piss and a quick coffee in the porters’ room, pausing on the way to open the gate to the Third-Class platform area where a dozen passengers are chafing to be allowed onto the Express. Not to be confused with those in the local pen farther down the platform, resigned to waiting another hour for the cheaper train that stops forty times between Granville and Paris.
Checking Rear Second, Jean finds a young lady and gent having a rather intense conversation that they break off when he gets in. They hold out their tickets. Hers is green.
“Oh, but, mademoiselle,” Jean says with an apologetic jerk of his thumb, “First Class is at the front.”
Instead of thanking him, she lets out a small sigh. “I just wanted—I really had to get some typewriting done. I moved back here at Flers so as not to disturb the others.”
He frowns, never having encountered having encountered a passenger sneaking into a lower class than the one for which he or she paid.
“Is there a rule against it?” she asks a little sharply.
No doubt Léon Mariette would be able to answer; that stickler reads the Company handbook as if it’s a detective novel. Jean looks at the man pointedly; didn’t she care about disturbing him?
That flusters the young lady. “This carriage was empty when I switched.”
Ah—she’s saying she’s not that kind of woman .
“I got in at Briouze.” The man’s voice is hoarse, his French stiff, his accent American.
Jean examines his blue ticket. “Says here Granville .” Again, odd—cheaters tend to carry tickets for journeys shorter than the ones they’re taking.
“I got on at Granville, but I got in here , this carriage, at Briouze.”
“Find the view better, do you?”
The American looks blank, bewildered.
“The view from this carriage?” Jean adds. Though it kills a joke to have to explain it.
Sarcasm is lost on this fellow. “No! I am not looking at anything.” And then blood’s suddenly trickling darkly down the man’s lip, as if an invisible hand has dealt him a hard blow.
Jean recoils.
The American stares down at his white shirt. One poppy bloom of blood, another…
A nosebleed, but heavier than Jean’s ever seen, as if the fellow’s tank has sprung a leak. Now, what is it you’re meant to do for a nosebleed? Smelling salts, brandy? Guards are expected to have a medical kit always on them, though only old Mariette bothers.
“Let me.” The young lady moves in, businesslike, lawn handkerchief at the ready. She presses the white lace-edged square to the unfortunate’s nose and pinches it hard. He’s shaking, sweating like a hog. “Breathe through your mouth, slowly.”
“Is he dying?” If so, Jean needs to alert the Surdon stationmaster.
“Not at all. Such remarks are most unhelpful.”
The American draws a long, shuddering breath.
“Don’t speak,” the lady orders him.
She seems to have the matter well in hand, so Jean swings the door open and drops lightly down.
One minute left. Just enough time to stick his head into Front Third. “Anyone who’s boarded since Granville, hold up your tickets.” Jean can check the colours, at least. Across from the Russian, a plump one with flaxen hair flaps about, saying she can’t find hers—oldest trick in the book. Jean has a weakness for blondes, so he waits rather than issuing her a fine.
“Has he boarded, that third deputy you mentioned? Where’s he sitting?” the stocky girl asks.
He gives her a look; a nosy parker, this one. The Russian seems to think so too.
“What’s all this about deputies?” a Breton woman wants to know.
“Today’s train carries no fewer than three rulers of the nation, all from Orne,” Jean boasts on behalf of the Express.
“Oh là là!”
The blonde produces her ticket just as a shout comes from Mariette on the platform: “Le Goff!”
So Jean jumps out, already sounding his warning whistle. Out of the corner of his eye he spots a red-faced man racing across a pasture towards the station, battered valise in hand. No, that poor dawdler’s out of luck; he’ll never catch this train in time.