Illumination (12 page)

As Elizabeth tried to place this quote, dropping a sheaf of eminent socialistic names in the process, a vigorous new chant started up around them, telling Prussia to prepare coffins for her sons. The march gathered speed.

‘We must get to the Strasbourg,’ said Jean-Jacques. ‘Excuse me, Madame Pardy.’

And so their discussion ended. Jean-Jacques was away, catching Hannah’s eye for an instant as he stepped from the kerb; he’d been civil but dismissive, as if Elizabeth Pardy was not in the least bit interesting or important. Hannah made to bid her mother farewell and follow him – but as she opened her mouth to speak Elizabeth’s grey-gloved fingers locked around her arm.

‘Lead on, girl,’ she said. ‘You must show me the best place to stand.’

Hannah stiffened, cursing inwardly; she should have anticipated this. Elizabeth had attended many popular demonstrations during her career, in France, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere – her published accounts of them, of her intrepid exploits at the heart of them, had been one of the pillars of her fame. If Jean-Jacques’s manner had offended her she gave no sign of it; she had the firm satisfaction of somebody for whom everything was going to plan. Her top-hatted companion positioned himself to their rear. He was markedly less pleased to be joining the procession. Hannah knew his kind – he was one of Elizabeth’s journalists. Men like him had once dandled her on their knees; quizzed her constantly on topics of general knowledge; and then, from her early adolescence, subjected her to a barrage of lechery, often before her mother’s unconcerned gaze.

‘Montague Inglis of the
Sentinel
,’ Elizabeth informed her. ‘He’s proving a little more useful than he looks.’

Mr Inglis touched his hat-brim. ‘Charmed, Miss Pardy,’ he said. ‘Truly.’

Hannah didn’t react. She was stuck with her mother once again: pinioned to her side as they marched down the boulevard des Capucines. It was almost too ghastly to be real. The hopes she’d entertained in the Café Géricault now seemed quite absurd. Elizabeth Pardy would not be
dwarfed
by the siege of Paris. She’d strut about the beleaguered city as if it was a private pleasure park.

National Guard were everywhere, uniformed men saluting, hugging, making the usual pledges of brotherhood until death. Jean-Jacques was soon off among them. Left behind with Elizabeth and Mr Inglis, these bourgeois foreigners, Hannah weathered more slurs and hostile stares than she’d done for some months.

‘Heavens, Hannah,’ Elizabeth said, oblivious to this antipathy, ‘I do believe that you have fallen in with an authentic socialist revolutionary!’

‘Told you, Mrs P, didn’t I,’ chipped in Mr Inglis, ‘there’s a red plague in Paris, a regular contagion. Just look at this rabble.’

‘They want change,’ Hannah told him tersely. ‘A purging of the old evils. Fairness after the Empire.’

Inglis snorted. ‘A
purging
indeed!’

Elizabeth squeezed her arm. ‘I appreciate that, my girl. I applaud it, most enthusiastically.’ She glanced at the inflammatory phrases scrawled on the buildings; the shuttered windows and barred doors; the multitude of red flags. ‘But this is beginning to look rather serious. It might proceed in all manner of grave directions.’

‘Are you trying to scare me, Elizabeth? Was that to be your strategy to convince me to return to London?’

A tiny line bisected Elizabeth’s brow. ‘I made my journey because I believed you were in trouble. Any mother would have done the same.’

‘You are not
any mother
. You are not—’ Hannah took a breath. This wouldn’t help. ‘You must see that I’d never have gone with you. Paris is my home now.’

‘I can see, certainly, that there is much to keep you here.’ Elizabeth looked at Jean-Jacques. ‘He’s a fine one, I must say. Quite extraordinary. Mars in a plain black suit.’ Her lip curled. ‘Your virtue, I suppose, is but a fading recollection?’

Hannah flinched; she’d grown unused to such questions. Elizabeth’s attitude towards intimate matters had always been stark in its pragmatism – and far more direct than anyone who believed themselves respectable would accept. There had been a couple of uncomfortable incidents in Hannah’s youth, errors made while conversing in general society, before she’d fully understood how irregular her upbringing had been. Her mother plainly remained beyond shock or embarrassment and was expecting a full disclosure. She decided that she would not provide it.

Elizabeth was studying her with shrewd fondness. ‘I thought as much,’ she said, as if an answer had been supplied. ‘This is Paris, after all. Was Monsieur Allix actually the one to—’ She stopped, seeming to rebuke herself. ‘It is not my place to ask. I only hope you have obtained the correct preparations.’

‘You’ve been to my house, Elizabeth. You’ve poked through my things. What do you think?’

‘By Jupiter,’ murmured Mr Inglis, ‘what kind of a family
is
this?’

‘
I
think,’ Elizabeth said, ‘that your bond with this man is still recent, and perhaps a little cautious. He doesn’t actually live in the shed with you, does he? No, of course he doesn’t – a noble specimen like that would hardly consent to dwell among Madame Lantier’s courgettes.’ She took Hannah’s hand in hers; the palm of her old suede glove was rubbed smooth. ‘You are grown at last. It is so marvellous to see. Returning to Paris has brought back such memories of my own residence here … dear Lord, more than twenty years ago now. We weren’t in Montmartre, but somewhere very like it. A band of us occupied the same apartment. It was a heady time – the country was changing fast, as it is today, despotism giving way to freedom, and we gave everything we had to it.’

Hannah snatched back her hand. ‘Are you honestly saying that I remind you of
yourself?
I came here to
work
, Elizabeth, not be passed around by long-haired poets!’

Her mother’s smile didn’t waver. ‘And what work you have done. You are thriving in Paris, my girl. The liberty of the place has nourished you.’ She surveyed the march. ‘There are real benefits to be derived, you know, from situations such as these. Sieges tend to break down the barriers of ordinary acquaintance. I don’t suppose that you have considered this.’

And there it was, exactly as Hannah would have forecast: they’d been together for less than five minutes and Elizabeth was attempting to reclaim control. The procession had slowed to a halt before the columns of the Madeleine, too swollen to fit down the rue Royale. As they waited for this jam to clear Elizabeth imparted her advice. It took a predictable path. For one who hadn’t set foot in France for almost twenty years she knew a great deal about the Paris art world, the naturalist style Hannah had adopted and the whereabouts of its most prominent practitioners.

‘The grand prize, naturally, is Monsieur Manet. He is the head of your school, is he not? Creator of the
Olympia
? I gather that he does much to promote women artists – even ensuring that his female protégés are shown alongside him in the Salon.’ Elizabeth’s tone grew reproving. ‘To be frank, Hannah, you should really be on friendly terms with him already.’

Hannah kicked at a fresh crack in the asphalt. She’d vowed that the only way she’d ever encounter Edouard Manet and his set would be if they sought her out after noticing her pictures at the Salon exhibition – for which her submissions had now been rejected two years in a row. There was no chance at all of her mother being able to understand this. She said nothing.

Elizabeth let it pass. ‘I’m told that he used to be commonly found in the Café Guerbois in Les Batignolles. It has closed, however, and its regular patrons taken flight, a fair number of Manet’s friends among them. They say that he has enlisted in the National Guard, in the artillery – I’m sure we can discover where he is stationed. He’ll no doubt be feeling isolated and starved of artistic conversation. Obtain a pretty gown, Hannah, and perhaps the services of a hairdresser. Take along one or two of those canvases I saw in that shed. It could transform your fortunes entirely.’

This speech was unpleasantly familiar. Hannah shrugged off her mother’s arm. ‘Do you mean that I should offer myself to him, like you offered me to that painter-poet of yours in Chelsea? Do you think Manet might fancy having Mrs Pardy pen a book about him as well?’

Elizabeth frowned, feigning forgetfulness. ‘What on earth are you—’

Hannah pointed at the red banners cramming into the rue Royale. ‘A war is being fought here – a
war
– and you are plotting my next strategic seduction. Monsieur Manet has set aside his brushes, Elizabeth. He has joined the militia. And I intend to do the same.’

She said this in anger, simply to oppose her mother, but knew immediately that she meant it. Here was the answer. She thought of Jean-Jacques’s lapel pin; of Laure Fleurot in her
vivandière
’s uniform. It was so simple, so absolute and perfect, that she wanted to jump in the air.

‘You aren’t in earnest,’ Elizabeth pronounced, the smallest hint of uncertainty in her eyes. ‘You can’t be. I don’t for a second presume to tell you what to do, Hannah, but you are quite unquestionably English. This is an affair for the French. You might feel very close to this dashing demagogue of yours, but in the end we can only hope to be spectators.’

‘Too bloody right,’ said Mr Inglis, biting the tip off a cigar.

Hannah faced her mother. ‘What, then, of your time in Paris twenty years ago? What of giving the cause of liberty everything you had?’

‘I meant marching and writing – making speeches and singing songs. Excuse me if I didn’t take up the flag of a citizen army! Goodness, girl, how can you be so perverse? And what in heaven’s name makes you think they’ll have you?’

The crowd began to move again.

‘They’ll have me,’ Hannah said, ‘I’m sure of it. I’m going to enlist the next chance I get. Look at these people, Elizabeth. Listen to the
guns
, for pity’s sake.’ She walked forward. ‘Paris no longer has any need for painters.’

The workers’ march emerged onto the place de la Concorde. Dusk was approaching, grey and flat after the overcast afternoon. Someone beside Hannah sang the first words of the ‘Marseillaise’, and the next instant the whole parade was belting it out as loudly as possible. Elizabeth and Mr Inglis were lost behind a wall of bellowing militia. Hannah was caught in a rush of bodies; she couldn’t see her mother or anyone else she knew. She was alone, suddenly vulnerable, hemmed in by National Guard. Fingers were soon pinching at her thighs and waist; drunken propositions were barked in her ear. A lamppost passed and she grabbed for it, hooking an arm around its iron stem and climbing up to safety.

The Strasbourg statue occupied a plinth on the Concorde’s eastern side. It depicted a seated woman in a toga, rendered in pale stone; the statue’s lap was heaped with flowers, a victory garland had been placed on its head and around its feet glittered hundreds of candles. A huge congregation had assembled before it, enclosing the gold-tipped obelisk in the centre of the square, reaching all the way back to the Seine. There were chants –
Vive la France! À bas les Prussiens!
– and the impassioned cries of a dozen competing speakers. Hannah was amazed. She’d visited the Strasbourg statue on many occasions, but never before had there been such numbers, such an armada of banners and flags. All Paris had turned out in defiance of the Prussian guns. Automatically, she began to arrange a composition – the bloated sea of hats and bare heads; the first few torches held aloft; the white statue, lit from beneath, luminous against the heavy sky.

This remarkable solidarity was short-lived. The working people from the north of the city, conditioned by lifetimes of antagonism and oppression, were soon harassing those around them. As evening came they roared out songs that exalted the poor and damned their masters; shoved and spat at the frock-coated bourgeois who’d gathered at the mouth of the Champs Elysées; hissed the arrival of ministers from the Hôtel de Ville. Hannah looked for Jean-Jacques, expecting him to be raised above the crowds, working as hard as he could to bring focus to the aggression and ill-will – to correct the pervasive feeling of anticlimax. He was nowhere to be seen.

Across the square, a detachment of mounted soldiers appeared on the Quai des Tuileries, heading for the Strasbourg. To the workers they represented the regular army, the men who’d routed in the face of the enemy that morning; the hoots and jeers reached an incredible level, obscuring even the Prussian artillery. Word spread that among these soldiers was General Louis Trochu, president of the provisional republic and governor of Paris, the man who was leading them against the Kaiser. Hannah craned her neck, leaning out from her lamppost; and there he was, a tiny uniformed shop dummy atop a skittish bay, trotting behind a torch-bearer with his right arm lifted in salute. Some sections of the Concorde applauded, but the workers, who’d welcomed Trochu’s appointment a fortnight earlier, now judged him a coward and a fraud. As his party drew closer to the statue it was pelted with litter, rotten vegetables and balls of manure, obliging the general to curtail his observances and withdraw from the square.

The satisfaction of having vanquished Trochu did not last long. The men and women beneath the red banners had lost interest in paying tribute to the Strasbourg. Many were spoiling for further confrontation – and Raoul Rigault was on hand to offer it to them. From another lamppost back towards the rue Royale, he announced that a column of the morning’s deserters was being brought up from 14th arrondissement for interrogation in the Louvre – and that it was their patriotic duty to ensure the worthless pigs never got there.

‘Enough of Imperial justice,’ the agitator cried, his full cheeks scarlet, ‘that miserable sham, where cowards prospered and traitors were given generals’ epaulettes! It is time, my fellow citizens, for
revolutionary justice!
It is time for the enemies of the people to get what they truly deserve!’

This met with a frenzied yell:
Death to the enemy!
The most rabid and reckless of the reds thronged to Rigault, who threw out a few dramatic gesticulations before leaping among them. They circled the Strasbourg statue, plainly intending to cut across the Jardin des Tuileries – the shortest route to the bridges that connected the Louvre with the Left Bank. These gardens, until recently the outdoor lounge of fashionable Paris, were being converted into a barracks-ground and artillery park. Army-issue lanterns glowed along the promenades; teams of soldiers were at work among the parterres and fountains, putting up dormitory sheds and hacking back the fragrant shrubs.