Paris: The Novel Page 18

  “She went out again. She’s gone to that stall she likes in the rue Saint-Honoré, to buy some ribbon,” her mother replied. “I’m sure she’ll be back soon.”

  Then, in low tones, Jacob quickly told her about Aaron.

  “Not a word to anyone,” he cautioned. “Nobody must know. Go to the ribbon stall and see if you can find her. Then come back and meet me here.” Meanwhile he went to saddle his horse.

  Sarah didn’t find her. Within the hour, Jacob was on his way. He crossed the river to the Left Bank and took the rue Saint-Jacques, the pilgrims’ path, that led toward the south. If they had started for Savoy, they would probably have gone that way.

  And now, two days later, he knew he had lost her. Naomi’s cunning letter made that quite clear. For a long time, he stared at the shining carpet of mist over Paris. The rising sun was starting to strike the towers of Notre Dame, making them gleam.

  He started to read the letter again.

  It wasn’t long. After some expressions of affection, she announced that she had news that she knew must cause them sorrow. She thanked her father for offering her such a fine collection of worthy suitors, and allowing her to choose a husband from among them. But now she must make a confession. She loved another.

  I love another. He is a good young man, but I know he would not be acceptable to you, for he has no fortune. He comes from Aquitaine, where his father is a miller. He came to Paris as a servant in a nobleman’s household. But now he is returning to Aquitaine. And I go with him.

  I am his woman. We shall marry when we reach his home. He has promised it.

  Do not try to follow us. It is too late for that. But you shall hear from me again, once we are married. Until then, I beg your forgiveness, my dear parents.

  He could not fault the letter’s cleverness. There was not a word about Aaron, the Jewish boy. The miller’s son was obviously Christian. Of course, he didn’t believe in the existence of this boy from Aquitaine for a moment. But any outsider to whom the letter was shown would see no reason to doubt it. All they’d see was that she’d run off with a poor boy. She was already living with him in sin. She’d disgraced herself and her family. Such things happened.

  Nor was there any hint that she might have gone to Savoy. Just a false trail to Aquitaine.

  Once or twice, he still asked himself if there mightn’t be a chance of recovering her. What if he brought her back and married her to one of the eligible young men he’d chosen for her? But he knew it was useless. If Naomi was determined to run away with Aaron, then she was never going to settle down with a Christian boy, even if he led her to the altar in chains.

  To make it believable, he’d probably tell a few friends what had happened, and set out for Aquitaine where, of course, he would not find her. Nor would any letter come from her. People would suppose that something had happened to her and her lover on the way, or that the young man had jilted her, and she was too ashamed to return to her parents.

  He’d apologize to the families with whom he’d been negotiating her betrothal. He’d probably show them the letter. They’d hear about it anyway.

  It would be highly embarrassing. But yes, he thought sadly, it would probably work.

  For another hour, he paced about in his orchard, going over the thing this way and that, glancing from time to time at the the city below, where the mist was gradually thinning and the houses beginning to emerge.

  After that, he decided to return home. Out of force of habit, he followed the path that he and Naomi always took, which led down the slope and into the city past the great fortress of the Temple Knights. There were still some wreaths of mist where the ground fell away beside the lane, but he could see the fort’s walls clearly enough from some distance.

  He was about a hundred paces from the Temple’s gateway when he saw the crowd. He wondered what it could mean. Then he noticed a gleam of swords and armor, and saw that a cart was emerging from the gate.

  Was this a bullion shipment setting off? He drew closer. There was something odd about the cavalcade ahead of him, but he couldn’t decide what it was. Another fifty paces, and he realized. The mounted men were not Templars. They were the king’s men-at-arms. There was also a troop of men following the cart. They weren’t armed, though. Some of them looked as if they were only half-dressed. As he stared, he saw that they were shackled together with chains. It seemed to him that he had seen some of their faces before. Then he realized.

  They were Templars. Knights Templar. In chains.

  “What is happening?” he asked a fellow in the crowd before the gateway.

  “The Templars are being arrested.”

  “Which Templars?”

  “All of them. Every Templar in France. In all Christendom, I believe.”

  “By whose orders?”

  “King’s orders. And the pope’s.” The man grinned. “Same thing these days, isn’t it, now that our king owns the pope.” The fellow seemed rather proud that France now controlled the Holy Father.

  “Upon what charge?”

  “All kinds of crimes. They read the proclamation not an hour ago. Loose living, heresy, sacrificing to idols, magic arts, sodomy … You name it. They’ve done it all.”

  “Heresy? Sodomy?” The Templars, sitting on their stupendous fortune, were often said to eat too well and drink too much nowadays. Jacob suspected people said this because they were jealous. And what if it were true? So did half the monks in Christendom. But sacrificing to idols? Magic arts? These other charges were clearly absurd. Jacob had no particular love of the Templars, but his sense of justice was outraged. “Is there evidence?” he asked.

  “There will be.” The fellow laughed. “The Inquisition will see to that. After they’ve been tortured. You know the way of it.” They were going to torture the Templars, like common criminals. Like heretics. “Once they’ve burned a few at the stake,” the man continued cheerfully, “they’ll talk.”

  “But what about all their forts, and their money?” Jacob asked. “What’s to become of them?”

  “Forfeit. The whole lot. They’re bust, from dawn today.” This thought seemed to give the fellow particular satisfaction. “These Templars and their damned Crusades. They cost us a fortune and achieve nothing.” He shrugged. “Look at Saint Louis.”

  So impressed had the papacy been by the piety of King Louis IX of France that ten years ago the builder of the Sainte-Chapelle, and supporter of the Inquisition, had been canonized as a saint.

  “He went on crusade,” the man went on. “Got himself captured. And we, the people of France, had to pay his ransom. And all for what? He had nothing to show for his stupid war, and most of his troops died of disease. Damn the crusaders and damn the Templars who support them—that’s what I say.”

  Jacob knew that most Parisians nowadays would agree. But behind this attack on the Templars, he realized, was a simpler and more brutal truth. By disbanding the order, the king had just canceled all his debts to them.

  The heresy, the immorality and the arrests were all a screen. With the pope and the Inquisition in his pocket, King Philip the Fair was going to torture and burn God knows how many unfortunate men to get their bogus confessions. Every instrument of Holy Church was to be used. And all for what? To plunder the bullion of the Templars, and to renege upon his debts.

  The expulsion of the Jews had been bad enough, but for the king to turn upon his own Christian soldiers, it seemed to Jacob, showed a cynicism that, in its way, filled him with an even deeper disgust.

  There was no loyalty, no mercy, no interest in truth, nor thought of justice. There was no respect for God. There was nothing.

  When he got home, Jacob told Sarah what he had seen. Then he went into his counting house and closed the door. He did not emerge all day.

  In the evening his wife came in.

  “Will you not eat something, Jacob?”

  “I’m not hungry.” He stared at the table.

  Sarah sat on the small wooden chair he used for vis
itors. She didn’t say anything, but she rested her hand on his. After a while, Jacob spoke again.

  “Naomi said she didn’t want to live in a land with such a king. She blamed me for converting.”

  “She is young.”

  “She was right. I shouldn’t have converted.” He was still staring at the table.

  “You did what you thought was for the best.”

  “You know”—he looked up at her now—“I have no problem with the Christian doctrine of love. It is wonderful. I embrace it.” He shook his head. “The trouble with the Christians is that they say one thing, and do something completely different.”

  “The king is corrupt. The Church is corrupt. We know this.”

  “Yes, I know this.” He was silent for a long moment. “But if they are corrupt, then I am corrupt also.”

  “What would you do? Stand before the king and curse him like one of the prophets of old?”

  “Yes,” he cried, with sudden passion. “Yes, that is what I should do, just as the prophets of my forefathers did in ancient times.” He threw up his hands. “This, no doubt, is what I should do,” he added sadly.

  “And what are you going to do?” Sarah gently asked her husband.

  Jacob paused for a while.

  “I have an idea,” he said at last.

  Within a week all Paris knew. The lovely daughter of Jacob the merchant had run away with a poor miller’s son. It was a humiliation. His family was dishonored. But one had to respect his reaction.

  For Jacob the merchant was leaving Paris. He, with his wife and son, were setting forth for Aquitaine, where it was believed the couple were, and would not rest until Jacob had seen his daughter properly married in church. Then it was their hope to return to Paris where, if the young man was up to it, Jacob would take him into his business.

  Not many fathers would have done it. They’d have cast their daughter out. But it was generally agreed that he was showing a truly Christian spirit.

  The luckiest person in all this, people also said, was the miller’s son. He was going to get an heiress for his trouble.

  “If only I’d known,” joked one of the eligible suitors for Naomi’s hand, “I’d have run away with her myself.”

  It took Jacob ten days to close up his business and put his affairs in order. The merchant guild wished him a safe return. The royal authorities gave him a travel pass and wished him luck.

  In the last week of October, in the year of Our Lord 1307, Jacob the merchant set out in a horse and cart, taking the rue Saint-Jacques, the old pilgrim’s road that led up the hill past the university. Before passing through the gate, Jacob paused.

  “Look back at the city,” he said to his son. “I shall never see it again, but perhaps you will one day. In better times.”

  A week later, they reached Orléans.

  Two days after that, however, instead of continuing southwest toward Aquitaine, they took another road that led them eastward. Journeying south and east by stages they continued another two weeks until they passed into Burgundy. And then they traveled another ten days until finally, looking eastward early one morning, Jacob said to his son: “What do you see in the distance?”

  “I see mountains, whose peaks are covered with snow,” he answered.

  “Those are the mountains of Savoy,” his father said.

  By the time he reached them, he would be a Jew again.

  And feeling a great weight of corruption and fear fall from his shoulders at last, he murmured the words he had missed for so long.

  “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”

  Chapter Seven

  • 1887 •

  They were all furious with him. Madame Michel was not speaking to his parents. As for Berthe, no one knew what she thought.

  And how could he explain? He hadn’t liked Berthe so much, nor her mother’s business. He thought only of working on Monsieur Eiffel’s tower. But even if his parents understood, he wasn’t sure how much they’d care. His mother pursed her lips. His father looked glum. As well they might, having hoped he was going to feed them.

  “I suppose,” his father once suggested, “you could still be an ironworker and marry Berthe.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Thomas.

  “The girl goes with the business,” said his mother simply. “It’s obvious.”

  “You’ll just have to find another rich girl,” said Luc with a grin, but everyone ignored him.

  So it was partly to escape his family for a while that, within a week of starting work on the tower, Thomas made an announcement.

  “I think I’d better get lodgings closer to my work.”

  “It’s only an hour’s walk,” his father pointed out.

  “More than that. And the hours are long. Monsieur Eiffel’s got less than two years to build the tower.”

  “You’ll be paying rent to someone instead of bringing the money home,” his mother said quietly.

  “Just while I’m working across the river.”

  He was being selfish and he knew it. Nobody said anything.

  He found the lodgings without much difficulty.

  In almost every house and apartment building in Paris, up in the roof, there was a warren of servants’ rooms, some of them garrets with windows, others hardly more than wooden-walled closets. Those not being used by servants could be let out by their owners to poor folk. An advertisement led Thomas to the house of an elderly gentleman who lived alone, with only a single servant, across the river from the building site on an ancient street named the rue de la Pompe, which worked its way up toward the avenue Victor Hugo. Having given proof that he was respectably employed on Monsieur Eiffel’s great project, Thomas was able to rent a tiny attic room with creaking floorboards, just enough space for a mattress on the floor, and a small round window through which he could look out at the surrounding rooftops. The old man asked a peppercorn rent, and it was only a short walk to the Pont d’Iéna, which gave straight onto the building site.

  After that, Thomas went to see his parents every Sunday, and always gave his mother any spare money that he could.

  Every morning, when he came onto the site, Thomas felt a sense of pride. As everyone knew from the newspapers, it was only three years since, in America, the 555-foot Washington Monument had surpassed the ancient pyramids and the medieval spires of Europe to become the tallest building in the world. But Monsieur Eiffel’s tower wouldn’t just beat the record. It was going to soar to almost twice that height—a triumph for France.

  Yet the site was strangely quiet, almost deserted. In the huge open space, the tower’s four mighty feet looked like the stumps of some vanished fortress in the desert. And as the four spread legs of the tower began to grow from those feet, with the workmen up in the iron girders, the ground below was often nearly empty.

  “Why is there nobody here?” a visitor once asked Thomas.

  “Because Monsieur Eiffel is a genius,” Thomas proudly replied. “There are only a hundred and twenty of us workmen on the site at any one time. And we alone build the tower.”

  Prefabrication. This was how it was done.

  Out at the factory lay the network of girders, in their prefabricated sections fifteen feet long and weighing no more than three tons. Each day, the huge horse-drawn wagons would arrive at the site with just enough sections for that day’s work. Big, steam-powered cranes would lift the sections up into position, and under the watchful eye of their foreman, Jean Compagnon, Thomas and his fellow workers—the flyers, as they were proudly called—would swing their hammers onto the hot rivets to fix them in place.

  “The precision is astounding,” he told his family. “Every piece fits exactly, every hole is drilled to perfection. I never have to pause in my work.” He grinned. “The whole tower will go up like clockwork. It has to,” he added. “The exhibition starts in eighteen months.”

  Soon after he began work on the site, he took his brother, Luc, around it, and showed him how everything was
organized. Luc was much impressed.

  “And how’s your head for heights?” Luc asked him.

  “No problem,” Thomas told him. “None at all.”

  The foreman of the flyers, Jean Compagnon, was a sturdy workman who looked like a battle-hardened sergeant. His watchful eyes missed nothing. But Monsieur Eiffel himself was also on-site most days. Thomas took care never to interrupt the great man, but if Eiffel saw the young worker, he’d always give him a friendly nod.

  As the huge lower legs began to grow, upward and inward, it appeared as if the tower’s four feet were the corners of a vast iron pyramid. Day after day the sections went in. By the end of August, the legs were over forty feet high.

  Early one evening, as he was looking at the progress before going home, Thomas heard a voice at his side.

  “Well, young Gascon, are you enjoying being a flyer?”

  “Oh yes, Monsieur Eiffel. It’s so well organized, monsieur.”

  “Thank you.” Eiffel smiled. “I’ve done my best.”

  “But I suppose this is the easy part,” Thomas ventured. “When we get higher …”

  “Not at all, young man. This is the hardest part, I assure you.” Eiffel pointed to the rising legs that sloped in toward the center. “Those legs are inclined at an angle of fifty-four degrees. Does anything strike you about them?”

  “Well …” Thomas didn’t like to say. But the great man nodded encouragingly. “Won’t they fall over?” he finally dared to ask.

  “Exactly. They will fall over, I calculate, on the tenth day of October. To be precise, when they reach a height of ninety-two feet.” He smiled. “But they will not fall over, my young friend, because we shall prop them up with big wooden pylons. You have seen the flying buttresses of Notre Dame?”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “They will look a bit like that, only they will be inside the legs. Then we shall continue to build the legs up to the height of the first huge platform, which will hold them all together. That will be at a height of one hunded eighty-two feet. And it will be necessary to put scaffolding under the middle of the platform while we build it, of course.” He paused. “It’s not easy to do all that, I assure you.”