The Song Peddler of the Pont Neuf Page 3

  “Monsieur! I must go to the market. Are you finished?” The landlady’s voice was closer now, on the floor below. I snapped the locket shut, replaced it in the box, and, not bothering to relock it, tucked the box back into its hiding place. I replaced the floorboard, stood, and gathered the draft letter and the two other pages. I folded them and tucked them into my cloak pocket, and then ran to the door and opened it.

  “I must go to the market, monsieur,” the landlady huffed as she came down the hallway. “Have you finished?”

  “I am so sorry, madame,” I said. “I lost track of the time.” I gestured around the room. “Unfortunately, I have found nothing here that would lead me to Bricon. But I thank you for your trouble.” I reached into my pocket for some coins and pushed them into her hand.

  “You’ll let me know right away if you find him?” she asked. “I hate the idea of a nice room like this sitting empty.”

  “I will, madame,” I said. I handed her the key. “If I may, I’ll leave you to lock up to your satisfaction.”

  She nodded. I started down the stairs.

  “Oh, wait, monsieur,” she called after me.

  I turned back.

  “About Monsieur Bricon—it’s not much, but it might help lead you to someone who knows where he’s gone. He spent a lot of time at the church. It seemed that whenever I ran into him in the hallway, he was on his way over there, clutching his beads. He might have told someone there if he was leaving the city.”

  “Which church, madame? The one at the end of the street?”

  “No, he once told me he didn’t like that one. He went to the big one. Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.”

  • •

  CHAPTER TWO

  “That is exactly what I’ve been saying. It is despotism! Ministerial despotism!”

  Jean Simard, a portly watchmaker who owned a successful shop a few blocks down the rue Saint-Jacques, paused and took a gulp from a tumbler of red wine. He leaned over and peered at the trictrac board. “Hey, Gastebois. You made the wrong move there.” He belched.

  I had spent the afternoon following the journeyman locksmith, whom I had observed installing locks for two women in the neighborhood while out doing an errand for his unsuspecting master. I had then returned home and started writing a report to the guild. When the light in my room had grown too dim for further work, I had come downstairs to the wineshop, where my landlord had brought in dinner from a nearby caterer. As we finished eating, the shop’s regular customers trickled in and gathered by the warm fire, wine tumblers in hand. I had challenged the local belt maker, Henri Talbot, to a round of trictrac, and several of the patrons had gathered to watch.

  “More wine, monsieurs?” Charlotte, the waitress, stopped at our table.

  “No, thank you, Charlotte,” I said, looking up at her from the game board. She was a plain, moon-faced girl of seventeen, and would never be the first to be picked out of a group of young ladies at a dance, but I fancied that some wise young man would someday notice her wistful eyes, flawless skin, pink cheeks, and full lips waiting for their first kiss.

  “No, chérie,” Talbot said. “Finish up your work and I’ll walk you home as soon as I beat Gastebois here.” He had the same shaped features as his daughter, but without her sweetness.

  I shook my cornet and spilled the dice onto the board.

  “Ah! Again the doubles!” Talbot moaned. He grimaced as I moved two checkers into the far end of his game board. My pieces now owned that area, and in a few more rolls of the dice, I would win another game in the match.

  “The king’s ministers are out of control,” Simard said. He picked up my cornet. “They and the police are sticking their noses into everyone’s lives.”

  “They do seem to be making the rules as they go along,” Théophile Houssemaine, the fourth man at our table, said. He was a compact man in his fifties, with a ruddy complexion that made him appear more like a man who labored outdoors all day, instead of selling books in the small shop two doors north of Lacombe’s establishment.

  Talbot, the belt maker, snorted. “The police are now requiring us to file reports explaining where we purchase our hides.” He shook his head. “I don’t cheat. I buy them from the leather sellers. But if I bought them directly from the tanneries, I could save a lot of money. I don’t see why it is the government’s business where I buy my leather.”

  “All of these problems will be solved when the Estates General meets next year,” Houssemaine said. A few months ago, the king, faced with impending national bankruptcy, had agreed to call a meeting of the French legislative body, made up of members of all three of the medieval estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. The last meeting of the Estates General had been held in 1614. Since the king’s announcement, it seemed everyone in the city had invented a scheme to update the institution to modern times.

  “Commoners make up the majority of the country now,” Houssemaine continued. “We contribute more to the economy than the clergy or the nobility. It’s obvious that we should be allowed more representatives in the Estates General, and that voting should be by head, not by estate.” From what I understood of the matter, in 1614 each estate had consisted of the same number of members, and votes had been cast by estate, not by individual deputies. This meant that the two privileged orders could always work together to defeat the will of the commoners.

  Simard laughed. “Good luck! The court is so corrupt. These nobles will never give a bit of their power to us. And they control the king.” He turned my cornet in his hands. “Of course, I think the king agrees with the commoners, that the Estates General should be modernized. He only wants what is good for the people. But that snake of a brother of his, Artois. When he’s not fucking the queen, he’s plotting to take us back to when the nobility controlled everything in France.”

  “Keep your voice down, please,” Talbot said, gesturing across the room to where his daughter was drying tumblers and placing them on a shelf.

  Simard reddened. “Sorry. I forgot she was over there.”

  “What are you all talking about?” Lacombe came over to our table, wiping his hands on his apron. “Let me guess. Politics.”

  We all laughed.

  “Have a seat, Guy,” I said as I reached over and pulled a chair from an empty table.

  He looked around his shop, and seeing that every customer seemed content, nodded and sat. “Charlotte, could you please bring me a glass of the Blois?” he called.

  “Let me give you some advice, my friend,” Simard said, his eyes twinkling. “Don’t drink the wine here. The owner waters it down so much, it tastes like piss. He’s a cheap bastard.”

  “Then take your business elsewhere, Simard,” Lacombe growled.

  Simard held his hands up. “I’m teasing you, Guy,” he said. “You shouldn’t have such a thin skin.”

  Lacombe grumbled a bit, and after a moment was mollified. Charlotte brought the wine.

  “You have to understand,” Lacombe said. “I have to make a living. The customs fees are so high now.” He lifted his drink. “This wine is from a small producer in the Loire Valley. He doesn’t charge me much for it. But by the time I get it through the customs wall and into the city, I’ve paid double his price in taxes.”

  “Taxes!” Talbot interrupted his study of his game pieces on the board and looked up. “Let’s not ruin the evening talking about them. I’m having too much of a good time preparing to beat Gastebois here.”

  I grinned at him. I had already won the first eight of the twelve games that make up a match, and was well on my way to winning the ninth.

  “If we get vote by head in the Estates General, we’ll be able to do something about all these unfair taxes,” Houssemaine said. “Necker will work with the deputies to set the country’s finances right.” Jacques Necker was the popular, reform-minded controller of finances, the second most powerful man in the kingdom after the king. “There’s so much that can be done for France and her people. We need to regain
our power in Europe. If only we had had the money to intervene when Prussia invaded the Netherlands—”

  I’m not a follower of politics. I don’t vacillate between joy and despair at every move of the government the way that Houssemaine did. I don’t know the king, and will never meet him. I had a feeling that he was as little concerned about me as my own father had been. But lately it did seem, even to an uninvolved observer like me, that things in the country were very bad, and that there was a rot at the court that was affecting all of our lives. Even I knew that change was necessary.

  As Houssemaine continued to drone on about France’s role in Europe, and Talbot pondered the game board, hoping for a miracle, my thoughts wandered to the items I had discovered at Gaspard Bricon’s lodgings this morning. Had the old song peddler really been blackmailing someone? If so, who? Was it the new police inspector, Marc-Étienne Duval? Was that why Bricon had saved the clipping from the Gazette de France? What was the meaning of the page with the columns of names and initials? And why had Bricon hidden his rosary and the locket under the floorboard in his room?

  “Your move, Paul.” Simard nudged me. He gave me my cornet. “The noise about the streets is that Austria is meddling again, trying to turn France against the Turks,” he said. He took a gulp of wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I don’t know why the king would even consider that. The Turks have always been our allies.”

  “The Austrian emperor wants our boys to die so that he and the Empress of Russia can steal Ottoman lands,” Talbot said. “He should keep out of our affairs. His sister Marie-Antoinette is using her wiles to get the king to do Austria’s bidding.”

  “There are other countries trying to influence our policy, too,” Houssemaine added. “I’ve heard that Prussia has agents here in Paris, playing games to try to turn the public against Austria.”

  “Prussia?” Lacombe shook his head and signaled to Charlotte for another glass of wine. “That’s too many countries. I can’t keep track of them all.”

  We laughed.

  “Say, did anyone hear about Perot across the street?” Simard asked. “The one who’s always going on about how wonderful his marriage is, how superior his wife is to all of the other bakers’ wives?”

  We all nodded.

  “She is finally with child. Four months gone already, the midwife told me.” He glanced over to check that Charlotte was out of our hearing and then leaned in and lowered his voice. “I happen to know that Perot was up in Brittany four months ago, tending to his dying father.”

  Lacombe and Talbot guffawed. Simard lifted his tumbler. “I propose a toast, gentlemen. To Madame Perot!”

  “To Madame Perot!” we all shouted.

  “And to our father, the king,” Talbot added.

  “To the king!”

  Talbot returned his attention to the game board. “Hah! You’ve forgotten to move the marker to record your score. I get those points!” He peered at me. “What’s wrong with you, Gastebois?”

  I yawned. “Sorry. I’ve had a long day,” I said. “Simard, would you finish for me?” I rose from my chair. Simard slid over to my seat, rubbing his hands together as he examined my side of the board. “Now you are in for it, Talbot,” he said.

  “Can’t handle the watered wine, is that it, Paul?” Houssemaine laughed.

  “Let the youngster go,” my landlord said. “Let him go to his dreams. Perhaps there is a young lady in them.”

  “How old are you, Gastebois? Twenty-two?” Talbot asked. “I thought men your age could stay out all night.”

  “I’m twenty-five.”

  “Yes, at that old age he’s already lost some of his vigor,” Simard said.

  They all laughed and waved me off.

  “Go on, go off to your nursery cot,” Simard cried. “I’ll hold your winnings for you.”

  I pulled out some coins to pay for the wine, gave my friends a sheepish grin, nodded good night to Charlotte, and climbed the stairs to my bed.

  The next morning I finished my report to the locksmiths’ guild. I tucked it into my cloak pocket and grabbed the dirtiest of my three shirts from my cupboard. I nodded good morning to Lacombe on my way out, and went down three doors to my laundress, where I left the shirt. I then went to a coffeehouse in the rue Saint-Séverin, where I ate a good breakfast of coffee, a roll, and a small knob of butter while I complained about the rising price of the food and caught up on the local gossip with a group of river porters who were taking their morning break.

  I left the shop and made my way to the Île de la Cité. The day was sunny and cold, with puffy clouds in the sky and a slight wind. I followed two young chimney sweeps, their brooms bouncing on their shoulders, along the quai des Orfèvres and onto the Pont Neuf. Although it was not yet noon, the bridge—the oldest in Paris and a popular place for promenading and congregating—was already crowded. A group of old soldiers, several with missing limbs, their uniforms faded and torn, huddled under the statue of good King Henri IV, calling to passersby to spare a coin or two. Carriages and wagons rumbled over the wide road, which was lined with makeshift stalls on both sides. I headed toward the Samaritaine, the giant water pump at the northernmost end of the bridge, where my new client had told me Gaspard Bricon had peddled songs. I passed a man selling false teeth, his wares hung on a cord strung between two rickety chairs. The wind set the cord swinging, causing the wooden dentures to chatter. A few steps beyond, a dog seller stamped his feet to keep warm while two hounds on leads shivered beside him.

  “Your fortune told, monsieur?” A crone wrapped in a thin blanket grabbed my arm as I passed by. I pulled myself from her bony grasp and hurried on. Ahead of me on the right side of the bridge was a small café, really just a few tables and chairs set out on the paving stones. Two customers wrapped in bulky cloaks were playing dominoes at a table while a waiter warmed his hands over the small brazier used to heat coffee and hot chocolate. To my left was the Samaritaine. The pump, which supplied water to the gardens of the Tuileries Palace, was housed in a three-story building made to look like a mansion, with a façade of elegant light stone, walls of windows, a sloped roof covered with blue pantiles, and a gilded cupola. The lowest story sat below the bridge line, atop the giant wheels that drew the water from the river.

  An elderly woman with a large basket of cabbages on her back and a lanky man with the long, drooping face and jowls of a hound stood near the entrance to the building. Hoping they were among the friends my client had told me Bricon worked with, I approached them.

  The old woman gave me a gap-toothed grin. “Here to buy a cabbage, handsome?” she asked.

  “Sorry, not today,” I said.

  “Bad luck for me, then,” she said. She gestured to the man beside her. “Maybe you’d like to hear my friend here sing a song?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am looking for a song peddler,” I began.

  “Vincent here is your man, then, monsieur. He sings the best songs on the bridge. He’s much better than the fellows down at the other end,” the woman said.

  “I’m looking for a particular peddler,” I said. “Gaspard Bricon.”

  The two exchanged glances, but said nothing.

  “Do either of you know him?” I asked.

  “Who wants to know?” the man Vincent growled. His wide-set green eyes regarded me sharply.

  “My name is Paul Gastebois. I’m a confidential inquirer.”

  “My, how fancy,” the old woman said.

  “I’ve been hired by a friend of Bricon to find him. He was supposed to meet Bricon on a Sunday three weeks ago, but he never showed up.”

  The woman opened her mouth to speak. “Yes. I—”

  Vincent pulled her arm. “Look, Marie. That fellow over there is waving to you. He wants some cabbages.”

  “I’ll be back,” she said, and ran across the road to her customer. Vincent scowled at me.

  “Do you know Bricon?” I asked him.

  “Yes. We both work this end of the bridg
e. He’s usually here every day, but I haven’t seen him for two weeks. It’s been cold, but it isn’t like him to let the weather stop him from singing.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, we mind our own business here. He never said much about himself.”

  “How has business been lately?”

  “Good. With all the excitement about the king calling the Estates General, people are interested in hearing our songs.”

  “What kind of songs do you and Bricon sing?”

  “The usual. Couples who are courting like to hear love songs, and everyone enjoys songs that poke fun at the nobles, at their fancy clothes and silly lives. And of course, songs about all of the scandals going on at court. Those are the most popular lately.”

  He rubbed the arms of his thin cloak in an effort to keep warm.

  “Did Bricon ever mention a man named Duval?” I asked.

  He thought for a moment. “No.”

  Across the road, Marie had made her sale and was heading back to us. “Do you sell your songs?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course. If someone likes a particular song, we have copies of the words to sell for a sou or two.”

  “Do you sell anything else?” I knew that many of these peddlers sold pornographic pamphlets, and sometimes contraband tobacco or salt.

  His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean? What sort of things?”

  “Pamphlets, contraband,” I said.

  He took a step backward and squinted at me. “Who did you say you were? Are you with the police?”

  “No, no. I’m just trying to locate Bricon. He’s not in any trouble.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Marie asked as she joined us.

  Vincent glared at me. “I told you. I haven’t seen Bricon in two weeks.” He brushed by me and stomped across the road to the café.

  “Pay no attention to Vincent, monsieur,” Marie said. “He’s been full of bile since his wife ran off with a farmer who brought his pigs to the market where she worked.”