The Paris Express

12. 231 p.m. Depart Dreux

They didn’t last long. That’s how it is—the loveliest days are the shortest.

HENRI MURGER,

SCENES OF BOHEMIAN LIFE (1851)

Every fine day has its cloud , as the saying has it. The skies draw in—dark to the train’s left, still bright to her right—and rain starts to fall.

Ten minutes late, leaving Dreux. Less than an hour and a half to Paris, the lodestone to which we’re unswervingly attracted. The land begins to slope up. Engine 721’s rollers know every inch of the route and they feel the increasing effort it takes as gravity drags on her, but they fight to gain speed.

Against her will, the train carries death in her belly. Her only power is motion. She didn’t choose this track; all she can do is keep going down it.

Every time Cécile Langlois moans on the bench beside her, Mado reminds herself she doesn’t care. There’s no time left for sentimentality. The pigheaded fool brought this on herself by refusing to get down at Dreux.

Madame Baudin demanded every cloak and shawl to make the poor creature a nest on the floor, but Blonska argued that the bench is rather less dirty. These two women are encouraging Cécile through each protracted pang, but the other passengers have tried to get as far from Cécile as they can—especially the men, with their appalled, averted faces. Except Mado, who’s stayed in her seat with her feet planted, pressing her shoulder blades against the narrow wooden divider.

She’s ignoring her own aching bladder, and the heavy rag roll that may well be leaking red into her skirt by now, and her hunger and thirst. She keeps her eyes half open in case the Russian tries something rash, such as whispering a warning to Madame Baudin or making a lunge for the lunch bucket in Mado’s lap.

But Blonska—having perversely stayed in this hellhole of a carriage when Mado gave her a choice at Dreux—seems to be concentrating fully on her task. Meddling busybody! Clearly the Russian means to die as she’s lived, trying to improve her little stinking corner of the world.

Rain begins to pebble the window. Mado’s plan is quite clear in her mind now: She’s going to set off her bomb as the train pulls into Montparnasse.

How can it have taken her so long to realise that there could be no better moment, no more perfect target? Her bomb would be wasted on a bare stretch of landscape or a country station. It stands to reason an explosion will cause the greatest damage in a densely built-up area, but what’s even more important is the symbolism of the gesture. Paris is the furnace that powers the whole country—in fact, the whole French Empire, from Guiana to Indochina to Quebec. Paris is the beating heart of every form of hateful power: government by corruption and surveillance, church, military, capital, trade, industry… The city’s name stands for exploitation and it jingles like money. Paris (and the rancid Pelletier greengrocery at the heart of it) contains all Mado hates. Soon the Express is going to shoot like an arrow into the belly of the cancerous beast. That’s the moment Mado will blow it up with a boom and a blaze.

She hopes to be the first to die, then those sitting near her: Blonska, Cécile, Cécile’s tiny passenger. ( Does it count as death if it happens before birth? ) Probably everyone in Front Third as well as those in the private carriage, and perhaps also the crew and the hundred-odd passengers, plus station staff, even passersby on the streets. The moment Mado inverts her lunch bucket, she’ll make phoenixes of them all. Impossible to predict the mayhem, how the rolling cars may leap, ride up on each other, telescope, wrench, rip, or burn.

Cécile arches with a groan, gasps, subsides. Smears her teary face. “Such a bad start in life,” she laments.

“Nonsense,” Blonska murmurs.

“No father, no home. Papa told me to leave it in one of the public orphanages in Paris.”

“You can’t be sure what’ll happen,” says the Russian. “Many a long, good life has had a rough start. Who knows what this child will grow up to be? The possibilities are infinite.”

Listening despite herself, Mado scoffs. Infinite possibilities for pain.

“Think of the people on this train,” Blonska urges the suffering woman, “what frail mites they were when they were born. How little they could have predicted the paths they’ve taken. The paths that still lie ahead. All the good they could still do.”

Mado turns her head to meet Blonska’s eyes in their nests of wrinkles. She tells her wordlessly, You can’t stop this.

Here comes the next pang, and Cécile wails and lashes about.

Mado won’t let herself be distracted. She’s guarding her fury like a candle flame.

The rain’s given the tracks a silvery, slippery sheen, and with a nod, Guillaume allows Victor to release a little sand onto them, for grip.

Pushing on, trying to catch those lost minutes. (Guillaume pictures them like rabbits, warm and bleeding in his grasp.) He finds his pulse is hitching and skipping. He’s never given the Company any trouble in twenty-one years. He’ll be riding the rails for another two decades—if his strength holds out. Victor gets worked up about the unfairness of shifting the retirement age from fifty to fifty-five, but Guillaume can’t find it in himself to object. What would he be doing if not this? He has no dream of keeping a few cows under his own apple trees and tasting his own butter and cider. And what would he find to say to Francoise if he had all day to say it in? No, this is the best job in the world until the day it might happen to kill him.

Here comes the ring of train tracks known as the Great Belt that encircles the capital’s ever-swelling belly. For railwaymen, Paris starts here. Shooting through the low pink-and-white station of Versailles-Chantiers is when Guillaume always registers that he’s back and checks his watch. Today, it’s 3:43; his eyes sting with shame. The stationmaster here will already have directed the telegraph woman to wire HQ that the Paris Express is running nearly eight minutes behind. The speed Guillaume and Victor have maintained since Dreux has only managed to make up two of the owing minutes.

If he pushes Engine 721 from the low fifties per hour into the sixties, he could still shave four minutes off the missing eight and get in at 3:59, the right side of four o’clock. Surely arriving at 3:59 couldn’t count as enough of a delay to drag down the crew’s Christmas pay? Guillaume doesn’t need to ask Victor; he trusts his mate will always back him. So he gives her more steam, urging her on like a racehorse.

A signal box ahead marks a set of double compound points, where each train is offered four routes. Rules say to use the regulator to slow down here, so Guillaume does, but he shifts the handle only ninety degrees, so as soon as they’re past the branching tracks, he can push the speed back up, up, up. She’s going faster than she should, but who on a train or watching it pass can be quite sure of its speed? Even her driver can make that calculation only by counting over the course of a minute, using his watch, and what driver on the final stretch into Paris possibly has time for that?

Engine 721 rockets on. Ah, they’re so near home, she smells the stable now…

Louise Sarazin-Levassor leans back on the velvet upholstery, staring out the window. Rain, as if the sky is weeping. Her sideways gaze touches on her daughter playing with the spaniel, but lightly; Jeanne is the kind of sensitive girl who feels it like a touch if someone’s staring.

What was the scientific name for it again? White blood is all Louise remembers. White blood is what she’ll have to say to the doctor. Why does a disease need a nickname, as if it’s a pet? The kind of disease that’s every parent’s nightmare, making straight for Jeanne, inexorably, faster and faster—

Monsieur Bienvenüe’s getting very animated as the train nears the capital. Clearly he wants to tell the Levassors something about the important meeting for which he’s cut his holiday short. “I’ve prepared a proposal… well, let me start by asking you how many horse-drawn cabs ply their trade in Paris, would you say?”

Preoccupied with the pallor of her daughter’s downy cheek, Louise doesn’t answer.

“There must be hundreds,” émile guesses. “Over a thousand?”

“Ten thousand, monsieur.”

“No wonder the streets reek!”

“Each typically carrying just one or two passengers wealthy enough to hire a cab,” says Bienvenüe, “while the footsore poor lose half their day plodding into town to work and out again because they can’t even afford the fare for a bus, tram, or train. Well, I want to do away with them all.”

Louise blinks. “The poor?”

“The cabs—in fact, the traffic in general. Let’s go underground, I say. A system of electrified trains no more than twenty metres beneath our feet!”

émile’s indulgent smile suggests this is a harebrained scheme. “With some well-appointed First-Class carriages in your subterranean kingdom, I hope?”

Bienvenüe shakes his silver head. “All the carriages would be the same, monsieur. All seats priced remarkably low.”

Her husband snorts. “I warn you, don’t expect my friends to muck in with the hoi polloi down in the reeking catacombs!”

“If it were up to me, I’d make all transit free.”

“Free?” émile laughs at the idea.

Louise’s eyes have slid back to her daughter. Jeanne would tell her mother if she felt really ill, surely? Except the girl might well be sicker than she knows. Hard to make sense of lingering sensations. When you’re young, growing can hurt, and everything is new and puzzling. You might be the only one in the world to feel this way. The budding self is a sealed compartment, mysterious. Besides, even if Jeanne does suspect these symptoms are serious, what daughter tells her mother everything?

It’s true, now Louise is really looking, that Jeanne’s as white as paper, shaky, wobbling, a pretty wraith. This is Louise’s fault, one way or another; she’s failed to protect the treasure she meant to pass down the chain of generations. How could I have not felt in my bones that something was very wrong? Louise has been blinded by love, a veil hanging between her and her daughter. Everyone’s noticed Jeanne hasn’t been well; émile asked about it, and Louise said, A touch of anaemia, so common in girls. Her stepfather loves Jeanne so much—if she has this awful disease, this white blood , it will destroy him.

“I must say, I’m startled by our speed this close to Paris. Sixty-four kilometres an hour.” Bienvenüe’s studying his watch.

émile’s eyebrows go up. “How can you put a figure on it?”

“Telegraph poles are fifty-five metres apart, so I count them for one minute, then multiply by three point three.”

“Well, fast is the way I like it,” émile jokes. “I’d fly to Paris if I could.”

He looks to Louise, prompting her to mention the balloon. But she can’t summon her wifely forces. He turns back to Bienvenüe and tells him, “I’ve gone up in a hot-air balloon—though it was rather too slow for me! There’s a fellow called Ader who’s tried out a steam-powered flying machine south of Versailles. Claims it carried him two hundred metres!”

Louise notices that Jeanne is swaying a little. Enjoying the dancing movement of the train or dizzy, fading? Louise’s little finger hooks onto hers. Her daughter turns and smiles—or summons a smile with effort? But she makes it look easy.

“Tired, my pet?” Louise pats her lap as if Jeanne’s much younger than seventeen and they’re not sharing a carriage with a male stranger.

Jeanne inches over and puts her head down on her mother’s skirts, a cat making herself a nest. Not cold; her face is warm and humid to the touch. (The start of one of those fevers Mademoiselle de Heredia warned about?) Louise cups the round cheek, the firm ear, the light prickle of eyelashes. Even through the terror, such happiness. To be required for such a basic purpose as cushioning, to be the right mother at the right moment with no need for words, to know what comfort your child seeks and have it to give.

It’s Maurice’s bladder that wakes him. He has a crick in his neck from leaning his cheek against the window, and Around the World in Eighty Days is splayed on the floor. He didn’t know he was going to fall asleep like some toddler or drunk or old man; it’s mortifying. Maurice snatches up his book with one hand and rubs his eyes with the other.

He’s never seen buildings high enough to loom over the tracks like this, and so many of them close together. “Are we coming into Dreux?” he asks the lean stranger beside him.

A chuckle. “Outskirts of Paris, boy.”

Maurice leaps up, shocked into tears. “I’ve—” Gulping. “I’ve missed my stop!”

“Ah, bad luck.”

“No, but my father won’t know where I am.” Back there, sitting in the cart outside the station. Maurice’s mind is clouded with panic.

“Keep calm,” the nurse tells him. “Tears won’t help.”

It’s her lack of sympathy that steadies Maurice. He nods, sniffing into his sleeve.

“I blame the train,” she says darkly. “It puts folks into a stupor—rocks them to sleep.”

When he finally finds his parents, could he blame his disastrous lapse on the motion of the train? If he finds his parents.

“Just sit tight till Montparnasse,” she commands. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. What’s your name?”

He sniffs again, harder. “Maurice Marland.”

“Well, young Marland, when we get in, you can explain yourself to the guard and he’ll put you on the next train back to Dreux. It might even be this same train.”

His tears start to trickle again. “I don’t have another ticket.”

“I’ll talk to the guard.”

For all the nurse’s brusqueness, Maurice is grateful.

The lean man goes over to the door and lets the pane down. He opens his coat and holds it as if to… oh, he’s doing pipi out the window, Maurice realises. Nobody says a thing; one or two of the women look away, studiously ignoring the man.

Now Maurice’s own need is terribly urgent.

When the man sits down again, he chatters away softly to Maurice. “I was just in Dreux for the day. Well, the half-day. I saw an old castle, and a belfry, and things smashed by a cyclone a few years back.”

Maurice rouses himself to answer civilly. “Why didn’t you stay longer, monsieur?”

“Oh, I only had half a day off. I work as an alarm clock, waking up my twenty regulars. I tap on their windows with my pole.” The man points up to the net overhead, where a telescopic bamboo stick lies. “I use a peashooter for the ones above the second floor.”

“Really?” Maurice would love to try that.

“Then at nightfall I fit a little flame on my pole and go around lighting the streetlamps. When they bring the electric to Montparnasse, I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe be an angel.”

Maurice looks at the clock man, aghast.

A guffaw. “I don’t mean die!”

“Oh.”

“A guardian angel, it’s called. Restaurants pay them to guide drunken customers home.”

The word home reminds Maurice that he slept through his stop. He says, sobbing, “My father…”

“He’ll only have to wait a few hours for you—till the evening, at most.”

“But he’ll… my mother…” Will it be terror that their little boy has gone and lost himself in the dangerous capital that fills the Marlands, or rage at his childish incompetence, or some mixture of the two?

“Maybe the stationmaster will send a telegram,” says the clock man.

Send a telegram to a cart—how would that be done?

But Maurice’s bladder is the most pressing problem. He whispers, “I’m very sorry. I really need to…”

The clock man catches on right away. “Ah. You can’t hold it a little longer?”

He shakes his head. It’s taking all his self-control not to wet himself.

They both consider the window in the door. Maurice is just not tall enough. “Unless I lift you up?”

Another shake of the head. Maurice doesn’t think he could, under such embarrassing conditions; he might fumble it and leak on the clock man.

“Here.” The nurse, who must have heard all this, produces a broad-lipped tin pot. “Take it over by the door.”

“But, madame—”

“Go on, nobody cares.”

Hot-faced, Maurice gives in. Almost pressed against the door, eyes down, trying to shield himself from view, he manages it. The sound goes on and on. Then he succeeds in lowering the glass again, and he tips the hot puddle out into the wind so it splashes the side of the train.

The clock man gives him a nudge and points at a great carousel, brightly painted, bunting aflutter. When Maurice looks closer, he sees that the riders are powering it themselves, by pedalling!

“Ugh.” The old priest, rousing himself from his doze. “This city gives me palpitations. There’s that monstrosity.” He nods at the other window.

Maurice follows his gaze and recognises the extraordinary structure. The postcards didn’t prepare him for this—slim and upright and tapering gracefully, like a gigantic dancer made of wire.

“And that’s from five or six kilometres away,” the priest complains in Maurice’s direction. “Wait till you see it up close.”

But it’s gone already; the city’s swallowed it up.

“Or climb it,” the clock man suggests.

“You can do that?” Maurice asks, thrilled.

A conspiratorial nod. “It’s stairs all the way, with the wind blowing through.”

“You can ride up in an elevator, I heard,” the brick-brown woman contributes.

The old priest shakes his head. “The arrogance of it, to erect the tallest building in the world in homage not to Our Lord but to science! I marvel it hasn’t been levelled yet, like the Tower of Babel.”

“It gets struck by lightning all the time,” the clock man says mildly, “but the rods carry the power safely down to the ground.”

Maurice wants to see Eiffel’s monstrosity again, more than anything. To mount those breezy steps into the sky. To feel the lightning sing through the struts.

Cécile Langlois is letting out terrible, animal sounds, just like the ones Maman used to make on those worst days of Mado’s childhood when hope was lost over and over again in a rush of blood.

The oysterwoman passes Cécile her cider bottle for another swig.

The rain’s cleared up, and a big, pale crescent moon hangs in the afternoon sky. A man walking beside the tracks leads a small brown bear on a chain, and Mado thinks she might cry but instead she curses the handler; better to starve than earn your bread by such means. On the left, in the distance, she spots the sprawl of the vast French Society of Munitions and curses that too, for spewing out hundreds of millions of shotgun cartridges every year. Soon, so soon, the whole tent will start to rip and come down.

“Oh, sweet Saviour.” Cécile Langlois gasps. “I can’t wait.”

“Keep your legs together till Montparnasse,” the soldier protests from the far end.

“For shame!” The women shout him down.

“How do you imagine you came into the world yourself?” the oysterwoman demands.

Now Vanves Fort rears up, and the train’s cutting through the Firing Zone, that filthy bathtub ring around the capital. In the quarter century since the Prussians marched in and out, the zone’s eroded trench and glacis have been kept clear, but housing of a fungal sort has spread across it anyway—peasants squeezed off their farmland, Romani, evicted Parisians squatting in horse stalls, low shanties of tin or tarred cardboard on ground awash with sewage. Mado can see ragpickers bent down, gleaning for rubbish. Graffiti on a wall, as if urging her on: No gods, no masters.

A roar. Dripping with sweat, Cécile holds her breath, eyes bulging—

The unmistakable sign that she’s bearing down. Mado wishes this whole messy business weren’t so familiar to her from her mother’s luckless deliveries.

“That’s right, Madame Langlois,” Madame Baudin encourages, “keep it up. Harder, harder!”

Cécile’s heels are up on the bench all at once. Her skirt’s spread like a damp valley between the crags of her knees. Her chin presses to her chest as she pushes: “Unhhhh!”

The soldier suddenly shoves his way through the pack. “Air!” He tries to let down the window.

But Madame Baudin shouts, “A cold draught—do you mean to kill her?”

Someone slaps his hand away.

The soldier slings his bag across his body and stumbles over to the door, knocking half a dozen oysters to the floor. He opens it into the blasting wind.

Screeches of protest.

The soldier steps out, grips the rail, and toes his way along the footboard towards the next carriage, leaving their door swinging and the carriage buffeted by wind—

The bowler-hatted man lunges for the handle, grabs it, and slams the door shut.

Blonska grips Cécile’s hand. “Be ready for the next one.”

Mado can actually hear the wave of pain rising in Cécile’s throat, the way the woman sucks in a big breath and holds it while she heaves—

Then lets out a burst of loud air, desperate.

Mado’s trying to remember all her reasons. Property is theft . (But they’re just words right now; they strike no sparks.) She’s going to make her great gesture in the name of those who build houses they’ll never live in, those who bake bread that they can’t afford to feed their children. Mado’s striking a blow on behalf of the women going blind over their needles and the girls who can’t afford to say no. She’s setting off this bomb for her papa, the only one who never lied to her; she’s going to make his ignominious life matter.

Never mind reasons now. Mado’s vowed to do this terrible, dazzling deed. A purging fire, a red night, a storm, a new dawn.

“Someone has to die.”

Everyone turns to stare at the oysterwoman.

“To make room for the new one,” she spells out. “Don’t you know the saying? One must die before the next can be born. Don’t worry, Madame Langlois, it shouldn’t take long in such a big city.”

Mado blinks at the high buildings, the choked streets flickering by. A fur shop with a stuffed tiger, a butcher hanging up a split cow, a fishmonger displaying a tuna taller than a man, an undertaker selling funeral crowns of wired white beads. Like a litter of handbills and flyers, each wall and building is trying to sell something— Liberator Cycles, Vermouth, Biscuits, Music New and Secondhand, Casino, Egg Mousse, Manicure with Electric Massage. A chimney sweep’s leading his tiny, black-caked boy.

Cécile only sobs.

Is she wondering whether it’ll be her who has to die? But it’s all of us , Mado wants to tell her.

“Urghhhh!”

Not long now , Mado would like to whisper in Cécile’s ear. Clocks will stop, tools down, work done.

Once you let one yawn out, it starts a family. Léon Mariette can’t stop yawning as he hunches over his desk in Front Baggage, hedged in by trunks and valises and portmanteaus. All his waybills are in order, weighted down with a horseshoe. But he always has his journey report to fill in on this last run from Dreux. Léon uncaps the little bottle of ink swinging by its string from a nail. (Never more than half full in case the motion of the train makes it slosh.) He checks that his nib is clean and dips his pen. Index finger marking his place on the preprinted form, he consults the notes in his log and fills in the registration numbers of today’s crew and the description, depot, and vehicle number of each piece of rolling stock.

Another huge yawn. Léon dropped off over dinner the other night, and Marie wasn’t happy. But it’s hardly his fault if he’s up half the night fretting over omissions and fudgings in that day’s paperwork. Now he adds to the journey report each halt with the time of arrival and departure and how many minutes late, with any possible justifications.

He finds himself brooding over Camp Hill, that junction in Pennsylvania where some forty years ago, two trains met head-on. It turned out all the American companies were running on fifty different regional times. Scores of passengers burnt to death for want of synchronisation, and a guard, not even to blame, poor fellow, topped himself the next day. What slackers like Jean Le Goff don’t grasp is that a railway is a system of standardised, interlocking parts—trains, tracks, staff, passengers—and the system runs smoothly only if every part does what it is designed to, down to the millimetre and the second.

Léon still has to add the final details at the very moment of arrival at Montparnasse so he can hand the report over to the waiting clerk for scrutiny. He wipes his watering eyes with both hands, then closes them for just a moment and lays his forehead down on his right wrist. Gather your forces. Very soon your shift will be done.

His sleepy mind slips back through a haze of nostalgia to his days in the Zouaves. Those baggy trousers were the most comfortable item of clothing he’s ever worn. Very decent fellows he met in the army, on the whole—conscripts from mainland France as well as enlisted Arabs. Always a superior to give orders, so most of the time all the privates had to do was stand guard, which really meant waiting, leaning against a sunbaked wall…

Henry Tanner can tell they’re in Paris proper by the graceful green cast-iron street furniture: lampposts curled like ferns, public benches, Wallace drinking fountains with their nymphs and dolphins, domed Morris columns covered in posters. “The ones by popular artists never last long,” he tells Marcelle de Heredia. (They’re still speaking English, as a concession to him.) “The pal with whom I share a studio pinched us a seven-foot poster of Sarah Bernhardt.”

She laughs at that.