“I need to go to a bank,” he said. If there were to be any problems on their way home, he should be prepared.
The receptionist made a face. “It is difficult, m’sieur. Many banks have not opened since yesterday.” She leaned toward them, suddenly an intimate with drama to convey. “There are rumors, sir. Bad rumors.”
“You’ll have no joy, sir,” said a large American standing nearby. “They believe there’ll be war within hours. I have a letter of introduction from Senator Johnson himself, and I hammered on the doors until they let me in. ‘I’m an American,’ I said, but not a centime could I get out of them. It was all ‘je regrette’ this and that.”
It was only when they were, finally, in bed and had exhausted themselves speculating on what was happening in Europe, that he remembered the telegram. There had been talk in the hotel in Nice that it had become impossible to find boats returning to New York from Italy or France, but he felt confident that his lawyers would find him a ship either from Southampton or Liverpool. He got out of bed, fetched the envelope, and opened it, but not before he had looked at the name on the outside properly and had a first premonition of dread.
Sir Henry Sydenham, Bt., it said in clear black copperplate. He had not even noticed.
CHAPTER NINE
Jean-Baptiste, Paris,
May–June 1914
JEAN-BAPTISTE HAD NEVER REALLY BEEN alone in his whole life. Now the thought of it was exciting and daunting. Alone, he would become a different person. But there were things he had not considered. In all the tales of the river, it was not just the banks and the weeds that were slippery, the fish and the water creatures, but also the spirit of the river itself; once a river had flowed with blood, it might develop an appetite for it. Most of all, he should have realized that if you leave such a place, you cannot reasonably expect it to wait for you unchanged.
He had made Amiens by nightfall. He had his small savings, and Parisians were puny and often drunk, so he had heard, so he should find work. But still, he could count on nothing. He wheeled the bicycle to a tiny repair shop. He’d once been there with Godet. The owner was a dour man and certainly didn’t remember him, but he offered Jean-Baptiste a fair sum for the bicycle.
“I have a job starting in Paris,” Jean-Baptiste lied.
“Oh, yes.” The man couldn’t have been less interested or less convinced.
Paris had been everything he’d expected in that nothing was as he’d imagined. He had spent the first night sleeping in a park. It was a warm night, but he was damp and aching when he woke up. He washed his face in a fountain and set out to find work and somewhere to live. By the afternoon, having failed in both, he was hungry. He stopped at bar after bar, asking for any job, but the young men already working there, neat in their aprons and white shirts, looked at him disdainfully. One even imitated his accent, he thought, although he gave him half a stale loaf.
He had walked and walked, and his feet, in Vignon’s new boots, were tender and blistered. When he sat on the curb and took them off, the fine leather lining was bloodstained. He ended up by the same bushes in the same park, and at dawn he was woken roughly by a park attendant telling him to move on.
He drank bitter chicory coffee from a street stall, then headed toward the great steeple he had seen from the park. He passed a factory that had a notice saying they required hands, but the watchman wouldn’t let him past the door. “Skilled men only,” he said, hardly bothering to take his cigarette out his mouth.
He emerged from a narrow lane onto a grand boulevard running along the broadest river he had ever seen. You didn’t have to be a man of the world to know this was the mighty Seine. It was wider and busier than his river, with barges and skiffs, pleasure boats and pontoons, but it was one sheet of choppy gray rather than the Somme’s many shades and depths of seemingly slow-moving green.
From everything Vignon had said, he had expected something different of the Seine. But he knew now that the doctor was a deceiver. Back home, his river had cut its way through the landscape, and the villages and towns had had to grow where they could and their inhabitants had to learn its ways. This famous river of Paris seemed to exist only at the service of men: to be allotted a space, no more, in the stone city. It was wide, but it was walled in. Perhaps some waterways were better imagined than seen.
At the near side of the bridge, men were bustling about repairing a stretch of embankment. For a moment his spirits brightened; here he was in Paris, at the center of the world, and surely there were possibilities for a strong young man. He walked on to the bridge and could see the city: its domes and its gray and bright green roofs—and he wondered, fleetingly, what his mother would think if she could see him in this new life. Two of the workmen were struggling with a long piece of timber. The older set his end down and wiped his brow. Jean-Baptiste climbed down the riverside steps and, moving to the center, took some of the weight. The other man, a sturdy fellow with a red beard, indicated the direction with his head. He walked along the shingle river edge and helped maneuver the plank into position. Below him, three men were shoring up the sides of a muddy trench.