Free A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel Page A

office will give you. Try to work out for yourself a Life Plan. There’s plenty of work in your part of the country. Five years from now, you’ll be nicely on your way.”
    “I’d like to make a career in Paris.”
    Maître Vinot smiled. “That’s what all the young men say. Oh well, get yourself out tomorrow, and have a look at it.”
    They shook hands, rather formally, like Englishmen after all. Georges-Jacques clattered downstairs and out into the street. He kept thinking about Françoise-]ulie. Every few minutes she flitted into his head. He had her address, the rue de la Tixanderie, wherever that was. Third floor, she’d said, it’s not grand but it’s mine. He wondered if she’d go to bed with him. It seemed quite likely. Presumably things that were impossible in Troyes were perfectly possible here.
     
     
    A ll day, and far into the night, traffic rumbled through narrow and insufficient streets. Carriages flattened him against walls. The escutcheons
and achievements of their owners glowed in coarse heraldic tints; velvet-nosed horses set their feet daintily into the city filth. Inside, their owners leaned back with distant eyes. On the bridges and at the intersections coaches and drays and vegetable carts jostled and locked their wheels. Footmen in livery hung from the backs of carriages to exchange insults with coalmen and out-of-town bakers. The problems raised by accidents were solved rapidly, in cash, according to the accepted tariff for arms, legs, and fatalities, and under the indifferent eyes of the police.
    On the Pont-Neuf the public letter writers had their booths, and traders set out their goods on the ground and on ramshackle stalls. He sorted through some baskets of books, secondhand: a sentimental romance, some Ariosto, a crisp and unread book published in Edinburgh, The Chains of Slavery by Jean-Paul Marat. He bought half a dozen for two sous each. Dogs ran in packs, scavenging around the market.
    Every second person he met, it seemed, was a builder’s laborer, covered in plaster dust. The city was tearing itself up by the roots. In some districts they were leveling whole streets and starting again. Small crowds gathered to watch the more tricky and spectacular operations. The laborers were seasonal workers, and poor. There was a bonus if they finished ahead of schedule, and so they worked at a dangerous pace, the air heavy with their curses and the sweat rolling down their scrawny backs. What would Maitre Vinot say? “Build slowly.”
    There was a busker, a man with a strained, once-powerful baritone. He had a hideously destroyed face, one empty eye socket overgrown with livid scar tissue. He had a placard that read HERO OF THE AMERICAN LIBERATION. He sang songs about the court; they described the Queen indulging in vices which no one had discovered in Arcis-sur-Aube. In the Luxembourg Gardens a beautiful blonde woman looked him up and down and dismissed him from her mind.
    He went to Saint-Antoine. He stood below the Bastille, looked up at its eight towers. He had expected walls like sea cliffs. The highest must be—what? Seventy-five, eighty feet?
    “The walls are eight feet thick, you know,” a passerby said to him.
    “I expected it to be bigger.”
    “Big enough,” the man said sourly. “You wouldn’t like to be in there, would you? Men have gone in there and never come out.”
    “You a local?”
    “Oh yes,” the man said. “We know all about it. There are cells under the ground, running with water, alive with rats.”
    “Yes, I’ve heard about the rats.”
    “And then the cells up under the roof—that’s no joke either. Boil in summer, freeze in winter. Still, that’s only the unlucky ones. Some get
treated quite decent, depends who you are. They have beds with proper bed-curtains and they can take their own cat in to keep the vermin down.”
    “What do they get to eat?”
    “Varies, I suppose. Again, it’s according to who you are. You do see the odd side of beef