The House I Loved (2 page)

I had my hat on, as I never leave the house without it, but in their haste, many had forgotten theirs. Madame Paccard’s bun threatened to collapse as her head waggled furiously. Docteur Nonant, hatless too, was waving an irate forefinger. At one point the wine merchant, Monsieur Horace, managed to make himself heard over the din. He has not changed much since you left us. His curly dark hair is perhaps a trifle grayer, and his paunch has no doubt swollen a mite, but his flamboyant mannerisms and loud chuckle have not faded. His eyes twinkle, black as charcoal.

“What are you ladies and gentlemen doing out here gabbling your heads off? Much good it will do us all. I’m offering the lot of you a round of drinks, even those who never come in to my den!” By that, of course, he meant Alexandrine, my flower girl, who shies away from liquor. I believe she once told me her father died a drunk.

Monsieur Horace’s wine shop is damp and low-ceilinged, and has not been altered since your day. Rows and rows of bottles line the walls, hefty tubs of wine tower over wooden benches. We all gathered around the counter. Mademoiselle Vazembert took up a vast amount of space with her crinoline. I sometimes wonder how ladies live a normal life ensconced within those cumbersome contraptions. How on earth do they get into a hackney, how do they sit down for supper, how do they deal with private, natural matters? The Empress manages easily enough, I presume, as she is pampered by ladies-in-waiting who answer every whim and attend every need. I am glad to be an old woman of nearly sixty. I do not have to follow the fashions, to bother about the shape of my corsage, of my skirts. But I am rambling on, am I not, Armand? I must get on with the story. My fingers are increasingly cold. Soon I shall make some tea to warm myself up.

Monsieur Horace handed out eau de vie in surprisingly dainty glasses. I did not touch mine. Neither did Alexandrine. But no one noticed. There was much going on. Everyone compared their letters. They all had the same heading. Expropriation order by decree. We were all going to be offered a certain amount of money according to our property and our situation. Our little street, the rue Childebert, was to be utterly demolished in order to build the continuation of rue de Rennes and the boulevard Saint-Germain.

I felt that morning I was by your side, up there, or wherever it is that you are now, and that I was watching the agitation from a distance. And somehow this protected me. And it was thus, wrapped in a sort of numbness, that I listened to my neighbors and noted their different reactions. Monsieur Zamaretti’s forehead glistened with sweat and he kept patting it with one of his fancy silk kerchiefs. Alexandrine was stony-faced.

“I have an excellent lawyer,” gulped Monsieur Jubert, knocking back his eau de vie with grubby, blue-stained fingers, “he will get me out of this. It is preposterous to envisage abandoning my printing house. Ten people work for me. The Prefect is not going to have the last word.”

With a seductive toss of frilly petticoats, Mademoiselle Vazembert stepped forward. “But what can we do against the Prefect, against the Emperor, monsieur? They have been ripping up the city for the last fifteen years. We are but helpless.”

Madame Godfin nodded, her nose bright pink. Then Monsieur Bougrelle said, very loudly, startling us all:

“Maybe there is money to be gotten out of this. Lots of it. If we play our cards right.”

The room was hazy with smoke. It made my eyes sting.

“Come, now, my good man,” scorned Monsieur Monthier, who had at last stopped sniveling. “The power of the Prefect and that of the Emperor is unshakable. We have witnessed enough of it to know that by now.”

“Alas!” sighed Monsieur Helder, his face very red.

As I watched them all in silence, with an equally silent Alexandrine by my side, I noticed the angriest of the bunch were Madame Paccard, Monsieur Helder and Docteur Nonant. They no doubt had the most at stake. Chez Paulette has twenty tables, and Monsieur Helder employs an entire staff to run his excellent eatery. Remember how that restaurant was never empty? How clients came all the way from the right bank to sample the exquisite blanquette? The Hôtel Belfort stands proudly on the corner of the rue Bonaparte and the rue Childebert, it boasts sixteen rooms, thirty-six windows, five stories, a fine restaurant. Losing that hotel, for Madame Paccard, meant losing the fortune of a lifetime, everything her now-deceased husband and she had strived for. The beginnings had been hard, I knew. They had worked day and night to refurbish the place, to give it the cachet it now possessed. In preparation for the Exposition Universelle, the hotel was booked solidly, week after week.

As for Docteur Nonant, never had I seen him so incensed. His usually calm face was contorted with ire.

“I will lose all my patients,” he fumed, “all my clientele, everything I have built year after year. My consulting rooms are easy to get to, on the ground floor, no steep stairs, my cabinet is sunny, large, my patients approve of it. I am a step away from the hospital where I consult, on the rue Jacob. What will I do now? How can the Prefect imagine I will be satisfied with an absurd sum of money?”

What you must know, Armand, is that it was an odd feeling to be standing in that shop and listening to the others, and knowing in my heart of hearts that I did not share their wrath. I was not concerned. They were ranting about money. And they all glanced at me and expected me to speak, to voice my own fear, as a widow, about losing my two shops, and therefore losing my income. Oh, my love, how could I explain? How could I begin to tell them what this meant to me? My pain, my suffering, existed in different realms. Not money. No. It was beyond money. It was the house that I saw in my mind’s eye. Our house. And how much you loved it. And what it meant to you.

In the midst of all of this racket, Madame Chanteloup, the buxom laundress from the rue des Ciseaux, and Monsieur Presson, the coal man, made a spectacular entrance. Madame Chanteloup, purple with excitement, announced she had a client who worked at the Préfecture, and that she had seen a copy of the layout and the opening of the new boulevard. The condemned streets in our vicinity were as follows: rue Childebert, rue Erfurth, rue Sainte-Marthe, rue Sainte-Marguerite, passage Saint-Benoît.

“Which means,” she shrieked triumphantly, “that my laundry and Monsieur Presson’s coal shop are safe. The rue des Ciseaux is not being destroyed!”

Her words were met with sighs and groans. Mademoiselle Vazembert stared at her with contempt, and swept out of the boutique, head held high. Her heels tapped down the street. I remember being shocked that the rue Sainte-Marguerite, where I was born, was also doomed. But the real anxiety, the one that gnawed at me, the one that instilled the fear that has not left me since, was about the destruction of our house. Of the rue Childebert.

It was not yet noon. Some had had a trifle too much to drink. Monsieur Monthier started to cry again, childish sobs that both repelled and touched me. Monsieur Helder’s mustache once again bobbed up and down. I made my way back to our house, where Germaine and Mariette were waiting for me anxiously. They wanted to know what was going to happen to them, to us, to the house. Germaine had been to the market. Everyone was discussing the letters, the expropriation order. About what this would do to our neighborhood. The market gardener pulling his ramshackle cart had asked after me. What is Madame Rose going to do, he had demanded, where is she going to go? Both Germaine and Mariette were flustered.

I took off my hat and gloves and calmly told Mariette to get luncheon going. Something simple and fresh. A sole, perhaps, as it was Friday? Germaine beamed, she had purchased just that from the fishmonger. Mariette and she scuttled to the kitchen. And I sat down, still calm, and picked up
Le Petit Journal
, like I did every day. Only I did not make out a word of what I was reading, my fingers trembled and my heart was pumping like a drum. I kept thinking about what Madame Chanteloup had said. Her street was safe. It was a few meters away, just at the bottom of the rue Erfurth, and it was to be safe. How come? How was this possible? In whose name?

That same evening, Alexandrine came up to see me. She wished to confer about what had happened that morning and how I felt about the letter. She rushed in as usual, a whirlwind of curls and a wispy black shawl despite the heat, kindly but firmly ordered Germaine to leave us, and sat next to me.

Let me describe her to you, Armand, as I met her the year after you died. I wish you had known her. She is perhaps the only sunshine in my sad little life since you left. Our daughter Violette is no sunshine in my life. But you already know that, do you not?

Alexandrine Walcker replaced the aging Madame Collévillé, as she was also in the flower trade. So young, I thought, when I saw her for the first time, nine years ago. Young and bossy. Barely twenty years old. She stamped around the shop, pouting and making scathing remarks. It is true to say that Madame Collévillé had not left the place looking particularly tidy. Nor cheerful, for that matter. Never had the shop and its premises seemed drabber and darker than that morning.

Alexandrine Walcker. Surprisingly tall, bony even, yet with an unexpected lush bosom that pushed up from beneath her long black bodice. A round, pale face, almost moonlike, that made me at first fear she was daft, but how wrong I was. As soon as she set her fiery toffee-colored eyes on me, I understood. They fairly snapped with intelligence. A small, buttonlike mouth that rarely smiled. An odd, turned-up nose. And a thick mane of glossy chestnut curls elaborately piled on top of her round skull. Pretty? No. Charming? Not quite. There was something very peculiar about Mademoiselle Walcker, I sensed that immediately. I forgot to mention her voice. Gratingly sharp. She also had the odd habit of pursing up her lips as if she were sucking on a bonbon. But I had not heard her laugh yet, you see. That took a while. Alexandrine Walcker’s laugh is the most exquisite, delicious sound you have ever heard. Like the tinkle of a fountain.

She certainly had not been laughing as she glanced into the tiny, dingy kitchen area and the adjoining bedroom, so damp that the very walls seemed to exude water. She ran a finger along the moisture, glanced at it doubtfully, and said, with that sharp voice:

“Has anyone ever tried to do anything about this?”

The meek notary who was accompanying us squirmed, not daring to meet my eye.

“Well,” I said brightly, “we were planning to, at one point. But Madame Collévillé did not seem to bother with the damp all that much.”

Alexandrine Walcker looked down at me with disdain, her eyebrows arched.

“And you are the owner, I believe. Madame…”

“Bazelet,” I stammered. Oh, my dear, she made me feel like a downright fool.

“I see. It is my belief that property owners should bother about damp. After all, you do live here as well, do you not?”

Without even waiting for my answer, she carefully made her way along the rickety steps to the cellar, where old Madame Collévillé used to keep her flower stock. She seemed unimpressed by the whole place, and later I was flabbergasted to hear from our notary that she had decided to take it on.

As soon as she moved into the flower shop, a dazzling transformation took over. Remember how Madame Collévillé’s shop always looked gloomy, even at high noon? How her flowers seemed classical, colorless and, let me admit it, trivial? Alexandrine arrived one day with a team of workers, sturdy young fellows who made such a terrific racket—crashes, bangs and hearty laughter—all morning long that I sent Germaine down to see what the fuss was about. As Germaine ended by not coming back at all, I ventured down myself. I was astounded as I stood on the threshold.

The boutique was inundated with light. The workers had gotten rid of Madame Collévillé’s dreary brown drapes and gray finishings. They had scrubbed all traces of dark and damp away and were painting each wall and corner over with a luminous white. The floor had been polished and fairly gleamed. The partitions separating the shop from the back room had come down, making the place twice as large. I was greeted cheerfully by the young men and could tell why Germaine had taken her time about coming back up, as they were indeed a handsome bunch. And most jovial. Mademoiselle Walcker was in the cellar, bossing another young man around. I could hear her strident voice from where I stood.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, young man, that spot will need another go. Don’t sigh like that, now, you know as well as I do the job is not finished. So get on with it, pray. We haven’t got all morning.”

When she saw me, she nodded curtly, and that was it. Not even,
Good day, Madame Bazelet.
I sensed I was de trop and took my leave, feeling as humble as a servant.

The following day, Germaine breathlessly told me I must come down at once and take a peek at the shop. She sounded so excited that I hurriedly put my embroidery away and followed her. Pink! Pink, my love, and a pink like you had never imagined. An explosion of pink. Dark pink on the outside, but nothing too audacious or frivolous, nothing that made our house look indecent in any manner. A simple, elegant sign above the door: “Flowers. Orders for all occasions.” The window arrangements were adorable, as pretty as a picture, trinkets and flowers, a profusion of good taste and feminity, the perfect way to catch a coquette’s eye or a gallant gentleman in search of a becoming boutonnière. And inside, my dear, pink wallpaper, the latest rage! It looked magnificent. And so enticing.

I knew nothing about flowers, and neither did you, and Madame Collévillé’s humdrum taste certainly had not taught us anything. The shop brimmed over with flowers, the loveliest flowers I had ever seen: divine roses of the most unbelievable hues, magenta, crimson, gold, ivory; gorgeous peonies with heavy, droopy heads, and the smell in that place, my love, the intoxicating, dreamy perfume that lingered there, velvety and pure, like a silken caress.

I stood, entranced, my hands clasped. Like a little girl. Once again she glanced at me, unsmiling, but I caught a twinkle in those astute eyes. And then it seemed to me that her lips were quivering with amusement.