Cross Channel (6 page)

The curé of Pavilly, brought to order by his bishop, left the realm of the theoretical. It was his duty to warn his parishioners in the sternest of terms against contact with the approaching army of Philistines and Barbarians. He had conducted an investigation, even going among them himself, and had obtained the following intelligence. First, that they were Christians neither in the observance of the faith nor in their
moral behaviour. As proof of this, they had rejected their names of Christian baptism, preferring to make themselves known by false names, no doubt with the intention of misleading the forces of order. They did not observe the Sabbath, either working upon the holy day, or else reserving it for activities which ranged from the frivolous, like the washing of their dogs, to the criminal, as in the use of the same dogs for the theft of game and livestock. It was true that they worked hard, and were justly rewarded for their labours, but their threefold wages merely thrust them three times deeper into brutishness. Nor had they any sense of thrift, spending their money as they got it, preferably upon drink. They thieved with no attempt at concealment. Further, they flouted the laws of Christian marriage, living with women in an open state of fornication, and even denying such women the least modesty; their communal huts amounted to no more than dens of prostitution. Those who spoke their own native language blasphemed constantly in the course of their labour; while those who spoke the common language of the excavations were no better than the builders of the Tower of Babel - and did not the Tower remain unfinished and its builders confounded and scattered upon the face of the earth? Finally and greatly, the navvies were blasphemers by their very deeds, since they exalted the valleys and made the rough places plain for their own purposes, heedless and scornful of the purposes of the Lord.

The farmer who kept the fields at Les Pucelles nodded approvingly at the priest. What did you come to church for, if not to hear a powerful denunciation of others and an implicit confirmation of your own virtue? The girl Adèle in the back pew had also been attending carefully, her mouth falling open on occasion.

The French party, who had become regular gawpers at the excavations, who had marvelled at the skills and scorned dangers of the barrow-run, and had come to comprehend why an English navvy was paid 3s 6d to 3s 9d per diem while his French counterpart received 1s 8d to 2s 3d, visited the railway workings for the last time towards the end of the year 1845. The Viaduct at Barentin was now almost complete. Across frosted fields they viewed the structure: 100 feet high, one third of a mile long, with twenty-seven arches each boasting a span of 50 feet. It had cost, Charles-André assured them, some fifty thousand English pounds, and was soon to be inspected by the Minister of Public Works and other high French officials.

Dr Achille examined the slow curve of the Viaduct as it crossed the valley floor, and counted off to himself the elegant, symmetrical arches. ‘I cannot think,’ he said at last, ‘why my brother, who claims to be an artist, cannot see the immense beauty of the railways. Why should he dislike them so intensely? He is too young to be so old-fashioned.’

‘He maintains, I believe,’ replied Mme Julie with some care, ‘that scientific advances make us blind to moral defects. They give us the illusion that we are making progress, which he contends to be dangerous. At least, this is what he says,’ she added, as if in qualification.

‘That fits his character,’ said her husband. ‘Too clever to see the simple truth. Look at that edifice before us. A surgeon may now travel more quickly to save a patient’s leg. Where is the illusion in that?’

In the first days of January 1846, shortly after the approving visit of the French Minister of Public Works, torrential rain fell in the region north of Rouen. At approximately six o’clock in the morning of January 10th, the fifth arch of the Barentin Viaduct sundered and fell. One by one the other arches followed, until the entire structure lay in ruins upon the sodden valley floor. Whether the fault lay in over-hasty construction, inadequate local lime, or the tempestuous conditions, remained unclear; but the French newspapers, among them the
Fanal de Rouen
, encouraged a xenophobic response to the calamity. Not only were Mr Locke the Engineer, and Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie the contractors, all three of them English, but so were most of the labourers, and also most of the investors in the project. What interest could they have except that of extracting money from France while leaving behind faulty workmanship?

The curé of Pavilly felt himself vindicated. The Tower of Babel had fallen and the workmen were confounded. Those who had blasphemed by calling themselves the new cathedral builders had been cast down. The Lord had demonstrated his disapproval. Let them build their folly up again, howsoever high they liked, for nothing could now erase the divine gesture. The sin of pride had been punished; but lest he himself be tempted towards that same path, the priest devoted his sermon the following Sunday to the duty of charity. The farmer who kept the fields at Les Pucelles contributed more generously than usual to the collection. The girl Adèle was missing from the rear pew. She had been absent from the village many times in recent weeks, and her vocabulary had become infected with strange half-bred words. Not everyone was surprised in Pavilly; her mistress had often
remarked that Adèle was likely to become fat before she became honest.

Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie were greatly distressed by the misfortune at Barentin, but responded manfully. They waited for neither litigation nor the apportionment of blame, commencing at once the search for several million new bricks. Suspecting local lime to be the cause of the disaster, they brought in hydraulic lime from a distance away. With energy and determination, and with the skill of their agents, Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie succeeded in rebuilding the Viaduct in less than six months, the whole expense of which they bore themselves.

The curé of Pavilly did not attend the opening ceremony of the Rouen and Le Havre Railway. There was a military guard of honour, and good society of both sexes, including Dr Achille and Mme Julie, was present. Priests in winged surplices bore aloft stout candles which reached the height of the locomotive’s steam dome. As Mr Locke the Engineer and his two contractors doffed their hats, the Bishop passed alongside the sleek cylindrical engine built by Mr William Buddicom, formerly Superintendent at Crewe, in his new works at Sotteville. The Bishop sprinkled holy water upon the fire box, the boiler and the smoke box; he cast it upwards at the steam-cock and the safety valves; then, as if not satisfied, he retraced his steps and asperged the driving wheels, the crank axle and the connecting rods, the buffers and the chimney and the starting handle and the foot-board. Nor did he forget the tender, in which several high dignitaries were already seated. He attended to the connecting links, the water
tank and the spring buffers; he doused the brake as if he were Saint Christopher himself. The locomotive engine was entirely blessed, its journeys and its purposes placed under the protection of God and his saints.

Later, there was a feast for the English navvies. The French cavalry stood guard while several oxen were roasted and the labourers drank their fill. They remained good-natured despite intoxication, and afterwards danced vigorously, directing their partners with the firm dexterity they daily used upon their barrows. Adèle was swung between Yorkey Tom and Straight-up Nobby. When it grew dark they set off fog signals in celebration of the day, and the sudden noise caused alarm among the fearful. The
Fanal de Rouen
reported the event at length, and while recalling once more the downfall of the Viaduct at Barentin, praised the Homeric stature of the English navvies and, in a benign confusion of cultures, likened them one last time to the builders of the great cathedrals.

Ten years after the opening of the Rouen and Le Havre Railway, Thomas Brassey was officially rewarded for his many labours in France. By this time he had also built the Orléans and Bordeaux Railway, the Amiens and Boulogne, the Rouen and Dieppe, the Nantes and Caen, the Caen and Cherbourg. The Emperor Napoleon III invited him to a dinner at the Tuileries. The contractor sat near to the Empress, and was especially moved by her kindness in talking English to him for the greater part of the time. In the course of the evening the Emperor of the French ceremoniously invested Mr Brassey with the Cross of the Légion d’honneur. Upon receiving this insigne, the foreign contractor replied modestly, ‘Mrs Brassey will be pleased to have it.’

E
XPERIMENT

H
IS STORY
didn’t always begin in the same way. In the preferred version, my Uncle Freddy was in Paris on business, travelling for a firm which produced authentic wax polish. He went into a bar and ordered a glass of white wine. The man standing next to him asked what his area of activity was, and he replied, ‘Cire réaliste.’

But I also heard my uncle tell it differently. For instance, he had been taken to Paris by a rich patron to act as navigator in a motor rally. The stranger in the bar (we are now at The Ritz, by the way) was refined and haughty, so my uncle’s French duly rose to the occasion. Asked his purpose in the city, he replied, ‘Je suis, sire, rallyiste.’ In a third, and it seemed to me most implausible version - but then the quotidian is often preposterous, and so the preposterous may in return be plausible - the white wine in front of my uncle was a Reuilly. This, he would explain, came from a small appellation in the Loire, and was not unlike Sancerre in style. My uncle was new to Paris, and had already ingested several glasses (the location having shifted to a
petit zinc
in the
quartier Latin
), so that when the stranger (who this time was not haughty) asked what he was drinking, he felt that panic when a foreign idiom escapes the mind, and the further panic as an English phrase is desperately translated. The idiomatic model
he chose was ‘I’m on the beer’, and so he said, ‘Je suis sur Reuillys.’ Once, when I rebuked my uncle for the contradictoriness of his memories, he gave a contented little smile. ‘Marvellous, the subconscious, isn’t it?’ he replied. ‘So inventive.’