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“Do you know much about the French Revolution?” he asked.
“A little,” I said. And by “a little,” I meant almost nothing, but it looked like he was prepared to do most of the talking, so I was okay.
“Well, as I am sure you know, the people overthrew the king and queen and killed off most of the aristocracy. There was a period called the Terror, where thousands of people were killed. Then there was the Law of Suspects. It meant that any citizen determined to be an enemy of the people could be locked up at once or executed. I suppose now we would call them terrorists…. Anyone could be accused. Anyone could be killed. Anyone could be capable.”
I was nodding away, wondering where this was heading, but mostly I was trying to figure out how to drink the lemonade without getting it on the part of my tongue that really reacted to the sourness.
“Marie-Louise was the name of the Princesse de Lamballe, the confidant of Marie Antoinette. She was killed in the September Massacres in 1792. Do you know what they did to her?”
“No,” I said.
“They dragged her from the prison at La Force. A mob descended on her, ripping her to shreds. They sliced her head from her body and took it to a hairdresser to have it…how would you say it…styled? Then they put it on a pike and carried it to Marie Antoinette’s window and stuck it inside, like a puppet. And Charlotte…that is the name of the most famous murderess in all of France. Charlotte Corday. She stabbed Jean-Paul Marat in the bathtub. There is a very famous painting of this.”
“Right,” I said. “But our names are kind of common.”
“They are, of course. This is true.”
He lit up another cigarette, and I noticed that Henri was a bit on the twitchy side. He had to work his way through four matches before he could get it lit. I sort of knew what he was talking about, but now I was ready for him to be done. This was maybe more than I had bargained for, conversation-wise, and I was done with the lemonade. I still had no cell phone signal, and I was going to have to hurry back if I was going to make it on time for Bob l’éponge.
“This is just French history,” he said. “You learn it as a child. But it has always proved a point to me: anyone is capable of murder. Anyone. Many in the revolution said they killed to be free, but this does not explain the mobs…. The people who raided the houses, who dragged screaming people to the streets and tore their flesh, the washerwomen who cried for blood at the guillotine. Completely normal people, average citizens. The revolutionary spirit, it was called. It was never the revolutionary spirit. It was the spirit of murder. It is in France, it is everywhere….”
There was something officially weird about Henri now, at least to me. Maybe this was just a French way of being friendly: a little story about famous mass murders of the past to break the ice. He went on and on about various atrocities until I felt I simply had to bring a halt to the proceedings.
“Would you mind if I used your bathroom?” I asked as he took a breath between sentences.
This request caught Henri off guard for a moment, and he fumbled with his cigarette a little.
“Yes…of course. The toilet is at the top of the stairs.”
Henri’s house was much nicer than ours, but that made sense, as he actually lived there. The living room was very neat. There was no television in there—just a lot of bookcases, some camera equipment, a massive printer, and what seemed to be a nice stereo. The walls were covered in artsy photographs: some of the landscape and some of Henri and a woman, who I presumed was his wife. In one, near the top of the stairs, the woman was completely naked…but it was very tasteful and French and kind of touching. There were piles of books absolutely everywhere and a few dog toys on the floor.
The bathroom was right at the top of the steps, as he said. It was a stark room with blue tiles. There were no towels, no bath mat, no curtains, no toilet paper, no shower curtain—nothing soft. No soap, even. It was as if no one lived here, no one used this bathroom at all.
When I came back downstairs, Henri was standing in the wide-open doorway. A wind had kicked up, and the big red door banged away on the hinges into the face of the house. The wind whipped into the hall and sent things fluttering all over the place. None of this seemed to bother Henri.
“A storm, I think,” he said. “I think tonight. Can I offer you something to eat?”
“No,” I said quickly. “I should get back. My sister…she’ll worry.”
“Ah, yes. Your sister.”
“The pictures are really nice,” I said. “Is that your wife?”
He looked as if he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
“The pictures along the stairs,” I said, pointing back at the dozen or more framed prints.
“My wife,” he repeated. “Yes. My wife.”
“We’ll be around for a while,” I said, slipping past him and out the door. “And I’ll keep an eye out for a lost dog.”
I walked back toward our house quickly, wanting to put as much distance between Henri and me as possible. The wind blew like hell the whole way back, throwing dirt and pollen in my eyes. I was a half-blind wheezing mess when I got back to our bedroom, where Marylou was in the same exact position, her tiny feet tucked up on the chair. She had closed the heavy blue shutters on the bedroom window to block out the wind, so now the room was fairly dark, lit only by an ancient lamp in the corner.
“People around here are weird,” I said.
Marylou looked up from The Big Book of Crazy.
“Define weird,” she said.
