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“Aha!” said Lucien.
“Aha!” replied the snail.
At which point Lucien dropped his wooden bucket and ran away, flailing his arms and screaming as if he’d just seen a ghost, which he was fairly sure he had.
“Wait, wait, wait, boy!” said a voice from behind.
Lucien looked over his shoulder, although he continued to scream, so as to not lose his place. But it was neither a ghost nor a charging, angry, and talkative escargot, but a rather old man, skeletally thin, wearing an ochre-colored plaid suit that had seen its prime perhaps thirty years before. The old man was holding the snail, shell pinched between two fingers, offering it to Lucien.
“It’s yours, boy. Come now, take it.” He wore thick spectacles in tortoiseshell frames and had a long, angular nose.
Lucien crept back toward the old man, retrieved his bucket, and held it out. He’d seen this old man before, tending a small garden in the Maquis. Always in his very clean, if threadbare, plaid suit, a medal on a tricolor ribbon pinned to his chest. The old man dropped the snail in the bucket. “Merci, monsieur,” Lucien said, bowing a little, although he wasn’t sure why.
The old man was very tall, or at least he seemed so, because he was so thin, and he crouched and looked into the bucket. “There should be great thoughts in that one. I’ve been watching him on Foucault’s tomb for an hour now.”
Lucien didn’t understand. “It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for Madame Jacob.”
“Just as well,” said the old man, standing up now. “They taste like dirt. And with no butter or garlic to put them in, you might as well be eating dirt. But here’s the secret: only eat snails from the graves of great thinkers. Foucault here was a brilliant man. He calculated a way to measure the speed of light. And he is dead only two years. Surely his soul still trickles from the grave, to be consumed by this snail. If we eat the snail, we absorb some of that brilliance, do we not?”
Lucien had no idea, but clearly the old man expected an answer. “Yes?” Lucien ventured.
“You are correct, young man. What is your name?”
“I am Lucien Lessard, monsieur.”
“Also correct. And I am Professeur Gaston Bastard. You may call me Le Professeur. I was a teacher, retired now. The Ministry of Education gave me a pension and a medal.” He tapped the medal on his chest. “For excellence.”
The Professeur paused again and tilted an ear, as if waiting for another answer, so Lucien said, “Excellent?”
“Très bien!” said the Professeur. “Come.” The Professeur turned on the heel of a very broken-down boot and strode off down the path, his back as straight as a twenty-year-old’s, chin high, as if he were leading a march. “You know this entire cemetery stands over a limestone quarry dug by the Romans two thousand years ago?”
The Professeur paused, turned, waited.
“The Romans,” Lucien said. He was beginning to get the rhythm now. When his mother, his father, or nearly any grown-up talked to him, they were really just interested in hearing their own voice and he could let his mind wander, to his lovely Minette, or dinner, or how he might need to pee, but the Professeur required attention.
“Much of early Paris was built from the limestone in this quarry. There! There is one.”
The Professeur stopped and waited while Lucien picked a fat snail off a very old tomb, completely green with moss. Then they continued.
“Later they began to mine the gypsum from Montmartre, from which they make…?”
Lucien had no idea what gypsum was. He stopped breathing for a moment, trying to think. He knew that if something came out of a mine it was in the ground. He tried to think of anything he knew that was made from something in the ground.
“Onion soup?” he said.
The Professeur looked at Lucien over his glasses. “Plaster,” he said. “They make plaster from gypsum. The finest plaster in the world. Perhaps you have heard of plaster of Paris?”
Lucien hadn’t. “Yes,” he said.
“Well it was actually plaster of Montmartre. The whole butte was once so riddled with mine shafts that it became unsafe to build on. They had to pour concrete into the old mines to make it stable. But some of the mine shafts are still down there. They open up after a strong rain or if someone digs a cellar too deep. One of them even opens into the Maquis.”
The Professeur raised an eyebrow, as if waiting for an answer, even though he hadn’t asked a question.
“The Maquis?” Lucien said.
“Yes, not far from my house. It’s hidden. It’s where the best rats come from.”
“Rats?” said Lucien.
