13. 400 p.m. Arrive Paris-Montparnasse
4:00 p.m. ARRIVE PARIS-MONTPARNASSE
Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.
ISAAC NEWTON,
PRINCIPIA (1687)
Paris-Montparnasse Station is a neoclassical temple of stone, steel, and glass, a hive buzzing with hustle and bustle. The four tracks are stacked two by two to take up less space in this crowded neighbourhood, and the Express from Granville always comes in on the upper level, high above Place de Rennes. Up there, the platform clocks are showing 4:00 p.m. Streams of people are mingling, impatient to meet the Express. The train cleaners set down their brimming galvanised buckets and lean on their mops, their skirts festooned with washleathers. Stalls peddle umbrellas, shoelaces, toys, sweets, books. On a wheeled stove, a Breton woman is frying crepes, a familiar fragrance to hook the homesick.
Whatever’s about to befall Engine 721, for once in her long career she will be more than just a means of transportation. Headline news on every front page. The eyes of the world—those burning spotlights—are about to turn on her at last.
As the screaming train skids into the station, slowing, slowing, but not fast enough, Guillaume braces the reversing wheel with his right hand and clutches the rod with his left, sounding the whistle. On the platform to his right, he glimpses station staff huddling behind a desk. He remembers a rule, or is it only a proverb? The captain always goes down with his ship. But Victor, poor sooty Victor at his left—the man whose scarred body Guillaume knows every inch of from their days on the footplate as well as their nights in the boardinghouse, cots jammed together, nights of embraces the two of them never mention to a soul, not even to each other—
“Jump!” Guillaume roars.
No answer from his dear mate, who’s staring out the left side, gripping the handrail.
All Guillaume can do is hold on, while—
In Place de Rennes below, carriages and cabs wait by the tram terminus, which is usually crammed with multiple vehicles, but right now there’s only one tram, bound for the Arc de Triomphe, with a few dozen passengers waiting bundled up on its two decks. Pacing up and down beside her stack of newspapers, Marie Haguillard winds her black shawl around her neck against the chill and looks up at the station, where the roof ridge rises into a double peak, like joined eyebrows over the two great glass half-moons. A clock is set like a forehead jewel between these lunette windows, and it shows five minutes past four.
The men in Marie’s family are all carpenters; her brother Joseph’s already started teaching one of her boys to handle tools (the bigger one, not the little one, who’s all thumbs). But at thirty-eight, Marie will turn her hand to anything to earn her bread, so she’s both seamstress and newspaper seller; she starts sewing at first light, then stands in for her man, Jules, while he goes to collect the evening editions (which takes two hours, and he comes back reeking of marc). Marie knows not to expect too much of Jules, her husband in the hay , as they say, who has a legal wife already.
An oddly quiet October afternoon. Not that Paris is ever quite still—there’s always something, the hooves of passing cavalry, or bicycle bells, or the deeper clanging of a distant fire engine.
The sharp breeze flaps the edges of Marie’s stack of five-centime dailies, so she weighs it down with a loose cobble half the size of her head. She and Jules stock the Little Parisian , and the Radical , and the Little Journal —when she gets a spare minute, Marie likes to look at the engravings and horoscopes in that one. They always have a few copies of Le Figaro —at fifteen centimes, strictly for the bourgeoisie who delude themselves that it’s written three times better than the others—and the Gaul , for the last few snooty monarchists in Montparnasse. Yellow journalism, to be read on the fly today and used for wiping arses tomorrow. For customers on the tram’s lower deck, Marie hands the papers in the window, but for the upper floor, she has to use a bamboo pole with a mug lashed to the top for them to drop the coins in.
It’s a dull news day; Marie can tell from the small size of the headline type. “?‘Visit of King of Portugal,’?” she bawls out, doing her best. “?‘Death of Monsieur Bonghi.’?” Whoever that is. Le Figaro has not a single headline worth shouting out today; “Architecture Competition” would actually put customers off. Ooh, here’s a juicy one from the Little Journal ; Marie roars gothically, “?‘Disappearance of Young Girls’!”
No, nobody will take a paper off her hands. Killing time, Marie pulls out her knitting to put new toes and heels into a pair of Gaston’s socks; the boy’s feet are as leathery as a soldier’s.
A young photographer’s pedalling down rue de Rennes from the office of Lévy, the postcard publishers, to their print workshop, the address from which their pictures wing around the world. The firm’s already built up a collection of thirty thousand images—the Pyramids, the Alhambra, the Statue of Liberty—but they’re always looking for more, so this young man lives in hope that the Lévys might choose an eye-catching photograph of his. You never know, do you? Mounted on his handlebars by two lugs, in case there’s time only for a snapshot, is his tarnished silver-plated Photosphère with its hemispherical bulge and lens that protrudes like a nipple.
The station’s sending up a dragon’s breath darkening the air, which bewilders Marie Haguillard as she stands in the square below. The horses lashed to the nearby tram are twitchy; all at once, their heads snap up in unison and they’re off, yanking the tram away on its track set into the cobblestones, passengers hanging on to their seats. The cabs too, and the private carriages—they scatter in different directions like dust because all the horses in the square are bolting away from the tram terminus. Animals act without thinking, whereas people wait for explanations. Marie stands looking up at the facade, sore feet frozen to the ground. What’s this rumbling? Why is she blinking instead of running? (But what should she run from, and which way?)
On the station’s upper level, as the Express grinds along the too-horribly-short platform, Guillaume knows he can’t save his train from the collision. And suddenly he finds himself balking at the prospect of sacrificing himself and his beloved mate. Why be loyal to the Company when it uses its men as raw material?
He shrieks: “Jump!”
But Victor shows no sign of hearing him. A pile of mailbags is coming up on Guillaume’s right, and—
His legs choose for him. He launches himself into space.
The platform comes up to punish him. He hits the bags belly-down and hard, all the breath smashed out of him, and keeps going, rolling across the stone floor like a gambler’s die. He can’t get purchase and doesn’t stop till he drops onto the next track over.
Like a knife turning the world to butter, Engine 721 bursts through the wooden buffers.
Her stoker, Victor Garnier, gripping the rail beside his controls like Samson did the temple columns, is thrown clear of the footplate; he flies free, crashes into the awning of the customs booth, and lands in a tangle of limbs. But Engine 721 somehow carries on, her momentum thrusting her through the stonework, sparks cascading through billows of steam and smoke as she mounts the platform and scrapes across thirty metres of marble concourse to pierce the station’s front wall.
Marie Haguillard stands in the square like her pillar of papers until she sees it; in fact, she’s the only one in the world to see it, the Express bursting out of the lunette on the right like a dagger out of an eye—the pointed tip of the engine ripping stone facade and concrete balustrade as if they were gauze. Marie is the sole witness, history’s honoured guest, for half a second, before the engine plunges and the air turns to rock and falls—
Erasing her.