‘Well, my cousin left yesterday!’
‘But that’s awful!’ said Auguste, horrified, his effeminate hands pressed to his lips.
‘Have you tried Rue Piat?’ suggested Perrachon.
‘What’s on Rue Piat?’
‘There are these mysterious advertisements. Take a look . . .’
And the young man pulled two newspapers from the pile of dailies lying around.
‘Look, there, down the bottom, it’s in there every day.’
‘Serviceman entitled to furlough is offering to replace young soldier currently enrolled as a student: present yourself at 12 Rue Piat.’
‘Several young men wishing to enlist in the army as substitutes: present yourself at 12 Rue Piat.’
‘Where’s Rue Piat?’
‘At the top of Rue de Belleville, between the Buttes-Chaumont Park and the customs posts.’
Auguste consulted his watch.
‘If I take a carriage now, I’ll make it before nightfall.’
The young man left without further ado and hailed a fiacre to take him to the address indicated.
The cab headed down Boulevard Poissonnière, then turned at Rue du Faubourg du Temple to head up to Belleville, as Rue Piat lay well beyond the invisible border drawn by Boulevards Strasbourg, Sébastopol and Saint Michel, which divided Paris in two, the wealthy on one side, the poor on the other.
Although he had never ventured so deep into these neighbourhoods, he was aware what living conditions there were like since Haussmann’s opening up of the city and the dizzying increase in rents. Thousands of people were crammed into rickety, overpopulated buildings or makeshift dwellings amounting to little more than a pile of clapboards, and all this in deplorably unhygienic circumstances. He knew the labourers who went to work in the city centre every morning came from these neighbourhoods. That they were exploited, lucky to be paid even three francs a day, and their wives half that, when in order to feed and lodge a family, a minimum of four francs was required for a room in a slumlord’s lodgings, even in Belleville.
He would have to have been blind not to notice the hordes of scruffy children left entirely to their own devices, the young girls being prostituted, the single mothers who’d been impregnated by their master then dismissed from their position, their sickly offspring clinging to their skirts, all of them doing their best to linger on the edge of that area where they might rub up against the wealthy and make off with a few coins.
He would have to have been a fool not to realise that something in society was not functioning as it should.
To display sensitivity to the distress of the poor in the face of one’s own good fortune was a matter fraught with complications, and one his own family was evidently incapable of comprehending, but Auguste found himself seduced by the challenge. He could not deny his own social status and the gap that might exist between himself and the proletariat whose cause he was espousing; nonetheless, he was keen to find a way to at least bridge that gap, through some form of exchange or contact, even if he were unable to fill it entirely.
He was convinced it required people such as himself to consider how the most deprived might access an education, and most importantly how to assist them in freeing themselves of the Church . . . convinced that to be a member of the affluent classes would prevent him neither from thinking nor theorising in the name of those who were in economically too fragile a state to rise up in revolt: Étienne de la Boétie, Thoreau, Marx, Engels . . . they were all sons of the bourgeoisie, and yet they expounded dazzling notions of brotherly solidarity.
To be able to philosophise at length about the destiny of mankind! All well and good, except that his conscription problem was casting a shadow over his entire future, and preventing him from making any sort of plans whatsoever. It was becoming an obsession. It had got to the point where he could no longer spend time with young people his age without wondering what arrangements they had made . . . however, short of having the audacity to ask them outright, the topic of purchasing a man, an insurmountable paradox for a socialist, proved an impossible one to broach. Whenever he saw his family – itself no sinecure – it was worse: every conversation around the dinner table seemed to lead in one direction only: conscription. They would bring up some person or other and thoughts would turn immediately to their son and thus to his departure or to his exemption. They would start talking about the year ahead and would have to contemplate Auguste’s absence, or worse his death, and there would be sobbing.
It felt as if he were damned.
He pondered all this as he took in the squalid hovels, their façades blackened by soot, rags drying in the windows.
He was yanked from his thoughts when the coachman halted the carriage on Rue de Belleville, any further progress along the carriageway proving impracticable. Auguste was forced to walk the rest of the way, but barely had he taken a few steps before he found himself gagging on the abominable stench of excrement and rotting carrion, causing him to stumble.
The address he had matched a grubby eating house: a regular there was known by everybody in the neighbourhood of whom he asked directions to be trading men.
Mister Anquetin received him into a cubbyhole of a room, where he was having his supper.
Small and thickset, his face cleanshaven and leaning more to purple than red, the hustler was busy devouring an enormous sausage with evident appetite and delight. A candle was burning next to him with a generous flame, as if it were being fed not just by its wax, but by the foetid, stale stench that emanated from the man and filled the room.
As Auguste, feeling nauseous, in a tremulous voice and with faltering words, explained his circumstances, the dealer would from time to time fix his feverish interlocutor with an amused, sausage-laden look.
‘For 15,000, I have a man, five foot eight inches, a fellow from Anjou. Magnificent, he is. Already served,’ he finished up, his mouth spattered with fat. ‘He suffered a wound to his leg which led to his discharge, but he’s perfectly recovered now.’
‘My brother-in-law, who’s in the military, has warned me off such types. Often, after appearing before the recruitment board, they have themselves declared unfit for service, asserting that in truth while their injury may well have healed, the limb in question remains weak, meaning they are no longer able to serve. Which means my family would lose their down payment and I would be given my marching orders.’
‘Well then . . . for the much cheaper sum of 11,000, I have a smaller fellow: four foot eleven inches, but if you tease up his quiff, that would do the trick. He has good feet, no varicose veins. I’d take 30 per cent. I need 500 francs to kit him out and pay for his tobacco and wine. You bear the cost of having the contract notarised. A third on signing which I keep. A second third on the day the substitute is accepted by the recruitment board. The last third a year after conscription on certification from his corps’ administrative officer confirming he’s fit for his post.’
‘11,000 for such a small man, but that’s an enormous amount . . .’
Anquetin lost his patience and raised his voice.
‘We’re well past the point when fancy fathers could keep us dangling before they settled the deal. We’ll be at war in a few weeks and parents of dandies like you will be begging me to sell them my midgets. For double the price.’