14. 401 p.m.
4:01 p.m.
All that happened in the space of a second.
MONTPARNASSE STATIONMASTER,
“A SHATTERED STATION,”
GIL BLAS (OCTOBER 24, 1895)
Towards the back of the train, the impact’s felt only as a shaking, but that’s enough to tip the lunch bucket onto its side.
Crouched between Cécile’s legs, gripping the tiny arm and head in her bloody hands, Mado watches her bomb roll away. Her whole self roars out NO —
The lunch bucket lodges lightly against the foot of Madame Baudin, who reaches down without looking and stands it up again.
The train seems to have stopped. Nothing’s moving. Except Cécile’s baby, shooting out almost too fast for Mado to catch in her skirt.
Up in his birdcage at the front, Léon finds he’s… stunned, winded, that’s all. No sign of injury, elbows only a little jarred from bracing himself. He blinks cinders out of his lashes. His Front Baggage van has somehow stuck on the crumbled remains of the station’s balcony like a piece of bread between a giant’s teeth.
Below him, the tender (spilling coal) and the engine dangle monstrously. Black and white vapours belch, puff, and swirl; embers dot the air with fire. The muffled jerk of the rods, the pulse of the twin pistons still pumping.
The poor rollers! Are Pellerin and Garnier crushed on their footplate underneath him or trapped and burning? Léon turns around and cranes his neck for a view of the rest of the train behind him. The Post Van, the seven, no, including M. Christophle’s, eight passenger carriages, and Rear Baggage are all parked tidily on the gored concourse underneath a clock stopped at exactly four. How bizarre: what astonishing luck.
Front Baggage is poised on the very rim of the gaping hole in the facade and balcony; he realises it could lurch forward at any moment, following engine and tender like slithering links in a chain. And pulling the rest of the train down with it. He has to get out.
Léon’s right-hand door is blocked by girders. He tries the left. It opens onto rubble. Will it give way underfoot? Will the whole front of the station cave in?
No choice. Léon lets himself drop. He lands well on a slab but stumbles sideways, and that’s when a rusty piece of metal sticks him in the thigh.
In Second Class, at the head of the passenger carriages, Alice (dishevelled, nursing one shoulder) is on her feet, tucking her shirtwaist back into her skirt. Outraged. The very idea that she might have died today in a tangle of metal and blue corduroy upholstery having done precisely nothing with her time on this earth—
“Come on.” Arms full of their luggage, Gaumont’s shepherding her out.
But Alice turns back, almost colliding with him, and retrieves Demen?’s heavy camera from the corner. “You’ll let me borrow this.” Not asking, but telling.
“What?” Gaumont’s head to one side, as if reckoning whether she’s concussed.
“Promise!”
“Whatever you like—take the blasted camera!”
Alice presses it to her, its lens digging into her ribs, and rushes to the door.
In the next carriage, Marcelle feels her blood tingling like sugar in her veins as she rubs her bruised face. She grabs her typewriter case with one hand and with the other accepts the hand that Henry’s holding out. Warmth surges between their bare fingers.
He helps her down the steps to the platform. He’s limping a little.
Two guards rush up, demand to know whether the lady’s hurt.
At once Marcelle releases his hand. “No, but this gentleman seems to have sprained his ankle.”
Awkwardness slides its screen between them. Marcelle’s parents knew she was on her way in from Granville today; the minute they hear about a crash, they’ll be worried sick. “Thank you, Mr. Tanner, and good day,” she says in English, and hurries off.
Levassor and Bienvenüe have their heads out the window of Front First, checking whether anything’s on fire. “All I felt was one hard bump, a skid, and then another,” Bienvenüe marvels.
Louise has made herself into a cage around her daughter. She’s saying to death, Not yet, not yet.
“Quick march.” Her husband is holding out a hand for each of them.
“Don’t forget Ouah-Ouah!” Jeanne dives to grab the cocker spaniel.
Albert deposits his little grandson carefully on the platform beside the Christophle carriage and leaps back up the steps. “Anna?” Will his wife be in a state of absolute hysteria?
When he pulls back the heavy drape, she’s sitting up, holding her greyhound to her chest. Her voice oddly steady: “We’re all right.”
Albert lifts woman and dog, and they feel as light as an armful of hay.
In Rear First, the Gévelots and the comte de Lévis-Mirepoix gape at each other.
“Probably anarchists,” Jules-Félix says as soothingly as he can.
They all nod.
Jules-Félix is expecting to feel relief, even euphoria, at having survived. But no, only a sort of suspension, as if the sword’s still dangling overhead. He’ll always know, now, how close he came. He feels every one of his sixty-nine years.
“Well,” Emma murmurs, “Cook had better send up a nice dinner tonight, is all I can say.”
In Front Third, the baby—ah, another wretched female—lies in Mado’s lap in a rusty puddle. Shockingly large for a creature that not a minute ago was part and parcel of her sobbing mother. Pale and limp, hair almost translucently fair.
Silent, unmoving. After all that, is the new Langlois not going to make it, worn out before her story even starts?
“Come on!” Mado shouts at her. She pulls up her stained skirt and scrubs the infant’s sticky back with it. “Come on !”
A sound goes up, the thinnest of cries.
Cécile mutters something exhausted and reaches out a hand.
Mado dumps the newborn on the mother’s bodice. Cécile half laughs. Mado snatches a chequered cloth off somebody’s basket, lays it over the baby’s back, and keeps rubbing. Weeping as she works.
In the next carriage back, John and the other students are trying to puzzle out how the train ripped right through the end of the track and somehow skated across the concourse.
The maid and manservant in matching livery who got on at Briouze have cut lips rouged with blood. They must have been sitting so close that their faces bumped together—or did they kiss when it seemed as if it might be their last moment on earth? Covertly John watches the maid pull out a handkerchief and wipe her lover’s face tenderly before her own.
Why didn’t he think to kiss Annah just before the crash? Two of her plumes dangle askew now, broken. Her monkey gibbers.
Max pulls his head back in. “The engine seems to be gone .”
Annah lets out a flabbergasted cackle, as if she’s seen it all now.
Monsieur Dois laughs too as he wrestles with the door. He has to kick it twice before it pops open, and they all spill out.
They squint at the fuming debris of the distant crash site, where the parcel and baggage vans appear to be perched… in the clouds? Then they’re all staggering about, weak with merriment.
In the rearmost passenger carriage, the old priest is on his knees, arms high, giving thanks in Latin.
“Well, that’s the last train I’m ever setting foot in.” The nurse’s tone is triumphant. She has the little girl on her hip, and she holds out her other hand to Maurice. “Come along.”
Grateful, he takes it.
On the platform, Victor’s got himself up onto his knees. Battered all over, left thumb twisted so badly, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get it straight. “Guillaume!” He lurches upright. The mortification of having let slip the rail and allowed himself to be flung off his engine. He abandoned his post in extremis; worst of all, he abandoned his mate. “Guillaume!” Grief is heading Victor’s way, unbearable loss, because the man he loves must be lying torn apart under these murderous wheels.
Just on the other side of the train, on the empty track, Guillaume’s still stretched out stunned. Nobody’s yet noticed him down there in the shadows. He doesn’t hear his stoker calling his name. He lies still as if dead, because he should be, but his heart’s jangling like the last coin in a tin. Tears stick his face to the wooden sleeper. Guillaume wonders what’s broken; he deserves whatever he gets. To have leapt off before the collision like a coward and left the man he loves to be torn apart—
Jean, at the very back, jumps down onto the platform without a scratch on him. The junior guard breaks into a run, pushing against the tide of passengers fleeing from the front wall, where the Express seems to disappear into a broken sky. He has to find out what’s happened to his crew.
The white-blond newborn is slumped on the dome of her mother’s belly. Blonska’s cut the cord with her sewing scissors and tied it with threads pulled from her sleeve. The other women have donated various bits of cloth for swaddling, and a few coins.
“Never wash her head, it’ll make her an idiot,” the oysterwoman advises Cécile.
“You’re the idiot,” Madame Baudin tells the oysterwoman.
Mado’s wiping her face hard, scrubbing away the wet. Her grand plan, gone to pot. She won’t be setting off any bomb today.
What’s shaming her most is the realisation that her tears aren’t for baby or mother or any of the fellow passengers she was fully intending to slaughter. They’re for herself. Mado can taste the childish disappointment, the vanity, in her grief. It seems she wanted glory, the same martyr’s crown as handsome émile Henry on the guillotine, and she was willing to build a pyre of human beings to win it. She sickens herself.
Mado puts her satchel strap over her shoulder and picks up her heavy lunch bucket. When Blonska glances up from the baby, Mado meets her eyes, but only for a moment.
She shoves open the door and goes down the steps, holding the device carefully away from her legs. She strides down the platform until she spots a rubbish bin. She stands over it, hunching so no one can see her hands fumble to unscrew the lunch bucket’s lid. She lifts out the two tiny, wadded vials of acid and tucks them, still upright, into her breast pocket. She’ll trickle them into the first drain she finds to mingle silently with the rest of the Paris shit. She upends the metal bucket and lets its mingled grits (charcoal, nails, saltpetre, sugar, match heads) spill into the bin, then finds a rag in her pocket, wipes it out, and sets the thing down beside the bin with a clatter.
Mado pushes through the excited crowd. A bewildered station boy at the gate asks for her ticket, and she almost laughs but she keeps walking, down the stairs and past the gathering gawkers.
Out onto Place de Rennes, where she stops to stare at the gigantic, almost upright locomotive with its nose buried in the ground.
The birth, the train crash, all this high drama, and none of it her doing—is the universe mocking Mado, reminding her that she’s only an infinitesimally tiny piece of the puzzle? No accidents. She wonders whether her first twenty-one years were always leading here. Are we borne along, never knowing who we’ll be or what we’ll do any more than we know where the track will turn or when it’ll come to a stop?
Well. Still a filthy world, but Mado seems to have chosen a side; she’s going to have to leave it a little cleaner than she found it. She turns, her sturdy legs bearing her away.
The young photographer stands blinking, the air still thick with dust.
A groaning of metal. The great black engine lolls impossibly, balancing on its nose in a puddle of coal, stone, glass, and splintered planks. Above it, the emptied tender, and behind, the baggage van, garlanded with buckled metal and cocked at an angle on the shattered rim of the balcony. A sight as comical as it is apocalyptic, something out of a bad dream, as if Montparnasse Station has vomited out a train.
Urgency grips the photographer; he must be the first to capture this. He nudges his bike westwards around the disaster zone, hunting for a composition to give order to this magnificent chaos. It’s all too messy, foreground cluttered with gawkers. He nips around a lamppost and moves in closer, till he feels the heat of the dying monster and tastes iron like blood. Better . He’ll cut out the clock with its little hand stuck at 4:05 because what his photograph’s going to capture is an instant out of time. A picture of speed, but frozen. A train unmoving, without driver or passengers, as if shot down from heaven: deus ex machina .
Needing his hands free, the young man straddles his bike and clamps it between his legs. He squints down at the Photosphère’s tiny viewfinder and takes a breath to steady himself. He moves the bellows like a silent concertina to focus the lens and goes in even tighter.
Putain! Inching into the top left, along the station roof, a pair of little intruders, opaque in the dust cloud. Two station crewmen, flat caps, hands in pockets, peering from the parapet as if such wonders are part of the working day. One of them’s pointing down, because who could look at anything else?
No, the photographer can see now that they’re gesturing past the engine at the debris outside his frame. He looks up, eyes watering. Only a few metres from him, two other workmen are tugging at a great lump of rubble in a welter of torn papers. The black of some rag—
No, black and red. The scarlet that can only be blood. Something with shoes. The black is a shawl, and the shoes are on feet.
The photographer’s gorge is rising.
They don’t falter, these men; how can they not balk at this? A third runs up with— no, no, no. A bucket. All three are crouching and scooping it, the red, her , what’s left of this anonymous woman, the wearer of those shoes, that shawl, scraping her into the bucket.
The young man leans away from his camera and retches, but nothing comes out. How could he not have spotted her with his trained eye, the woman mangled by the fallen stones, crushed like a grape?
But he still needs his photograph. He checks his camera; it’s aimed past the horror. He’ll allow the victim some privacy. Or, put another way, he’ll leave her out of the picture. He’ll simplify, paring down this complicated story to a clean, absurd image of catastrophe, one that will live for the ages. He has the glass plate ready; he thrusts it into the back and fingers the spring-loaded lever that will open the shutter for one-fifth of a second. He takes the shot.