[I read this 2011 novel in its parts, writing about each one before reading on so I never knew what was coming. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
3 March 2026
First, Chapters 1-13
For some reason I’m reading another historical novel. OK, it was recommended to me, and I chose it for a book group without knowing what it was about. I always worry that historical novels might be no more than time tourism, with our paid guide pointing out the sights and sounds—and, in this novel, the appalling smells—that make the past such a foreign country. And what will my book group make of it? As (almost) always these days—by which I mean these recent decades—we get an uncensored version of history, with the nasty bits left in. The state of the cemetery surrounding Les Innocents in Paris in the 1780s, the stink of it that penetrates inside the houses in the surrounding streets, even into the clothes and breath of the people living there… and the erection a young man discovers when he undresses, which he’s perfectly comfortable with until there’s an unexpected knock at the door.
Do I always start any commentary on a historical novel like this? I’m not going to check now, and besides, it isn’t what matters. Does Miller build a convincing world? Is the first quarter or so of the novel engaging? Are the characters? I’d say, so far, yes. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, in the city for the first time, has the unenviable task of organising and supervising the complete clearance of the cemetery and the demolition of the church. Not so much a poison chalice for the ambitious young engineer—the minister is keen to leave a subordinate to oversee our man—but a poison cesspit. He has a fine new suit in the most modern style, bought during a drunken excursion with the organist, and we wonder how long it will survive untainted. His lodgings are near the cemetery, and people’s clothes, like everything else, stink of death.
Ah, death. It isn’t a background hum or an occasional grace-note, it’s the fabric of this place. I can’t help being reminded of Zola at his most grisly. Never mind the churchyard, almost entirely composed of human remains. We’ve already witnessed, slightly offstage, the beheading of a chicken in preparation for the pot, and the meal an old friend in a mining town he visits is a sliced calf’s head: ‘it tastes, poor thing, as though pickled in its own tears.’ So, a world of gritty realities, ever-so-slightly relieved by Jean-Baptiste’s own wry perceptions. It’s his point of view we’re usually getting, but not always. Miller is happy to have us peek inside that of another character, like Marie the maid in the room above his at his lodgings, watching through a knot-hole in her floor. The detail is a part of this world, in which close proximity is a constant reminder of a particular aspect of the human condition. Jean-Baptiste contemplates it, helped along by Miller’s dry observations:
‘Is the life of the body the true life? The mind nothing but a freakish light, like the St Elmo’s fire sailors see circling the tips of their masts in mid-Atlantic? He is savouring this little pensée (in which he does not believe at all), holding his cock like a pen he might use to note it down with—’
—when the knock comes. It’s Marie, as it happens, but we don’t know about the knot-hole yet. As he contemplates her young form—he always looks at women and girls like this—he has to hide the state he’s in, and can’t possibly stand to speak. This is the life of the body indeed.
Women and girls. Aside from Marie, there are two in the lodgings assigned to him, Mrs Monnard and the Monnards’s strangely sequestered daughter Ziguette. There’s something Dickensian about the family, but Miller doesn’t inflict Dickens’s male gaze on his readers. He can bring other senses into play—regrettably, mainly smell. And there can be another kind of proximity, where that life of the body really comes into play. When he goes to Armand’s lodgings one evening, Miller can describe the organist’s relationship with the widowed landlady—he’s told Jean-Baptiste all about it—as openly as Zola would. But definitely not Dickens. People live in their own bodies in this novel, and are always aware of everybody else’s. Jean-Baptiste meets Héloïse on the street after seeing Armand and his political friends. ‘He lifts a hand and touches her cheek. She does not flinch. “You are not frightened of me?” he asks. “No,” she says. “Should I be?” “No. There is no reason.” His fingers rest on her skin. He could not say what he is doing, what he is guided by, he whose experience with women is so little. Is it her being a whore that lets him do it? But in this unlooked-for hour, words like whore, like engineer, like Héloïse or Jean-Baptiste, are empty as blown eggs.’ Words, eh? Overrated.
It goes with Jean-Baptiste’s ‘philosophical’ turn of mind, Rationalist and, as we’ve seen, unwilling to relegate the body to some lower order of consideration. His ‘catechism’ is individualist, and he recites it (not always convincing himself) every night. ‘Who are you? I am Jean-Baptiste Baratte. Where are you from? From Bellême in Normandy. What are you? An engineer, trained at the Ecole des Ponts. What do you believe in? In the power of reason…’ He has no religious or sentimental qualms about clearing les Innocents, although he has been advised to keep the truth to himself until the work starts. He’s sensible enough to understand why. Before Chapter 13 he’s only told his new friend, the organist Armand, and nobody else. He knows it will be contentious—but he doesn’t know he’s in a novel. I’m sure the reader expects far worse trouble than he does.
I ought to go back to the beginning. We first see Jean-Baptiste inside the Versailles Palace, being given the brief he’s been appointed for by the minister. We don’t know the date yet, but the place is already slackly run, with random courtiers lounging in corridors. We only hear derogatory references to the Austrian queen later, and it’s the tailor who mentions that it’s 1785. In other words, it’s pre-Revolutionary France and, it turns out later, Armand is in a group that goes out on drunken night-time jaunts to deface state proclamations. Are they in a serious cadre? Is their ‘modern’ thinking just a fashion, as it is for the tailor? (With heavy dramatic irony—thanks, Andrew Miller—he tells Jean-Baptiste his pistachio-green silk suit will be even more fashionable in 1795 than it is now.) I’ll come back to Jean-Baptiste’s own modern thinking later, when Miller does.
He finds his lodgings, meets the Monnards and the all-pervading cemetery taint and, in his cold room on the same floor as Ziguette’s, finds himself thinking not about her but about the bed’s previous occupant, a musician. Next day—cue J-B’s attempts to get used to the smell, seeking occasional relief with a perfumed handkerchief—he’s examining the church organ. It might be worth saving, he thinks… and suddenly the organist appears and starts to practise. There’s only the sound of the pedals and keys clattering, and they get talking. Cue a visit to a bar, using some of the minister’s money, then for lunch and a lot more to drink then, as though Armand has ambushed him, J-B finds himself at the tailors. He leaves two hours later in the green suit and a ‘banyan’ robe, later regretting he’s left his old suit with the tailor to sell on. It’s October, and the new one won’t be suitable for the winter. And he’s paid far more than he can afford.
Are alarm bells ringing? He’s sensible enough not to waste another day like that, and gets on with his measuring. Jeanne, the young grand-daughter of the sexton, shows him around the churchyard, crypts and ‘charnels’, where burials ended only five years ago. But she can’t know how deep the pits and other graves actually go, and Jean-Baptiste has to estimate. He knows the paupers’ graves are deep, and high…. He makes a plan of what work needs doing and how many men and horses he will need—and is reminded by Lafosse, his immediate boss, that ‘every sou needs to be accounted for.’ And Jeanne’s chatter has made him remember that these remains are human, the relatives of the living. Hmm.
Meanwhile, over the course of not many days, he’s getting to know the place better. Armand assures him the Monnards would love to get their daughter married off to the eligible engineer—musicians are no better than actors to them, he says, so he was safe—and they agree it would be like marrying the cemetery. He sees Héloïse, the Austrian woman, who makes a living selling her body. He is stirred by that chance encounter with her after the drunken defacement spree he’s spent with Armand and his friends with their silly noms-de-guerre. (J-B is ‘Beche’ now, in honour of his trade.) Had it not been for his having to rise early for his trip to Valenciennes to recruit miners for the work, he might have taken Héloïse home.
He knows about the mines at Valenciennes because he worked there with Lecoeur, a man who became his friend. They spent a lot of their free time imagining the Enlightenment utopia ‘Valenciana’ together, a nod to the philosophy that was leading more serious minds than theirs or Armand’s to consider their next moves. J-B has written to him and received a reply—and is shocked by Lecoeur’s appearance after only three years. And his drinking appals him—alcoholism isn’t an 18th Century concept, but that’s what Jean-Baptise sees in his old friend. And near-malnutrition. He’s already considered him as the overseer to supervise men he knows— Lecoeur has talked him through his list of suitable workers—and feels he’s ’saved a man’s life’ by offering him the job. Lecoeur is ecstatic he will soon be leaving the hell-hole of the mines.
This first part ends when Jean-Baptise is back at les Innocents. He is talking to Jeanne, the girl who first showed him the layout of the cemetery, and Armand is with them. He already knows about the minister’s plan to raze it all, and teases Jean-Baptiste into telling her. She takes it calmly, but he can’t help making her promises about her future which, Armand reminds him, he can’t possibly keep. He also teases him about Jeanne as a possible bed-mate—‘our beloved queen was wed at fourteen’—and Ziguette. Armand is a cynic, and admits he would have Ziguette if there were no strings—and tells Jean-Baptiste that so would he. And then Héloïse passes by, carrying books—I didn’t mention that there’s more to her than her night job—and Armand notices a certain look that passes between them. ‘Oh, no. Not her as well?’ And he starts to laugh.
Enough? Before I go I’ll mention an interesting little interlude at the end of Chapter 8. Following a star symbol to mark a new section, Miller lets us into the night-time worlds of five different characters, their thoughts and dreams. There’s Marie, looking down at the engineer, ‘the foreigner’, and what appear to be his troubled dreams. There’s Armand in bed with the willing landlady. ‘To the west’ there’s Héloïse and Young Werther. There’s Père Colbert, the possibly half-crazed redundant priest and his obsessive musings on the devil and his servants, who he expects to encounter at any moment. And there is Jeanne, lying in a little bed at the feet of her grandfather’s, now that he considers her too womanly to be sleeping next tom him. She hates the idea and still misses the closeness.
If I think of anything else I’ll let you know.
Second, Chapters 1-12
Stuff happens, between the end of 1785 and about February 1786. Not that Miller is counting the days—in fact he keeps it very vague indeed. Like, what has Jean-Baptiste been up to in Paris for the eleven weeks before his return home to Normandy for Christmas? A bit of measuring in the cemetery and those arrangements with his friend Lecoeur to bring thirty miners from Valenciennes some time? Jean-Baptiste is back in Paris when he finally gets a letter from Lecoeur to say he and the miners will be there in a week. That makes it about three months—doing what? Answer: we’ll never know, because Miller isn’t saying. The vivid bursts of activity in this novel—far more vivid than in First—occur in blank space. Some novels are like that.
J-B’s Christmas is vivid enough. We’re on ground that’s been well trodden by plenty of other novelists, the return of the native educated beyond the world of his parents. He finds himself envying his brother, a comfortably embedded feature of this peasant world. Who is happier? And his sister, plain but sensible, has somehow acquired the wisdom she needs to be an active member of the community. Their father has been dead for some time, and with his brother J-B shares almost nostalgic memories of his domineering nature. At the church, and everywhere else, there is no one whose life and character he doesn’t know every last detail of. He hasn’t worn his fancy suit, but has borrowed one of M Monnard’s. At first, his family don’t mention the smell he’s brought with him… but then one of them does. Paris needs to be cleaned up, purified, he tells them, and that’s the job he’s doing when he’s not royalty-watching at Versailles. He tells them nothing of the reality. And while he’s there, he finds himself walking with the slow deliberation of the countryman.
A big part of the vividness is the close-up fleshliness, in Normandy and Paris. It means that he always notices everything about the women and girls who occupy almost as much space in the narrative as the men. The two Monnard women, especially the increasingly strange Ziguette—I’ll come back to Ziguette; Marie, as bold in her observation of him as he is of her; Jeanne, the young daughter of the sexton; Lisa—always referred to as Lisa Saget—Armand’s landlady and lover. And then there’s Héloïse. Miller, in a single chapter, gives Héloïse almost as full an internal life as J-B’s own. She’s no common sex worker—Miller insists on referring to them as whores—and J-B becomes more and more intrigued by her. Why is he so drawn to her? Why, when she tears off a piece of the bread she is eating as she walks nearby, does he find the action so thrilling? And why do Armand, especially, and Lecoeur seem to much more relaxed in the company of women?
Meanwhile, once the miners arrive, the digging out of the cemetery can begin. Miller describes the work sketchily. He’s much more interested in his educated, middle-class characters, so he only gives us an outsider’s view of what the working conditions in the pits must be like. Lecoeur blandly reminds J-B that the men don’t have to spend a long shift underground, crouched and in fear of roof falls and explosions. The sexton has shown J-B where the pits are, each ten metres square and many, many metres deep. Having worked for a day or two, the men become used to the strangeness of what they are doing—‘work is work’—and a methodical approach is possible. Each man can dig for two hours before the atmosphere becomes too oppressive, and the carriers and stackers of the bones can change roles with them.
In these chapters, two pits are dug, to a depth of almost twenty metres. (I’m slightly annoyed that Miller uses a measure only invented a decade or more later. If he’ll borrow from the language of the time for ‘whores’, why not in this case?) There’s a near-death in the first pit. One man, Block—the men are mostly Flemish—reaches the top of the ladder, faints and falls back on to the crushed and broken bones of the pit bottom. The illness he contracts soon afterwards is diagnosed by one of the doctors researching there—I’ll come back to them—as deriving from the wounds in his back. They are fiercely inflamed, and the man almost dies of fever. Luckily, the doctor has ways of treating them, and Jeanne is a good nurse.
Then, unlike the first pit, the second contains coffins. The men become adept at prising these open ‘like oysters’—but two of them contain the almost perfectly-preserved bodies of two young women. It’s a field-day for Dr Guillotin—yes, him—and one of the bodies, left intact, provides an opportunity for one of the novel’s strange memento mori moments. (In First, Armand had taken J-B to see a haunting waxwork in what must be Madame Tussaud’s museum, an exotic and beautiful princess killed by an asp. Armand goes there often, he says.) Unable to sleep one night, Lecoeur goes to look at the body being examined by the doctor. The fourteen-year-old Jeanne is there to look as well—Miller likes to mix it up, the girl introduced to us in First as on the cusp of womanhood and fascinated by the changes she feels in herself. Youth, death and sex… which reminds me. Later in these chapters, having passed an extraordinary evening of organ music from Armand, seeing the men with the sex workers J-B has allowed in for Saturday night only, she makes it clear she wants him to kiss her. He doesn’t—‘I’m twice your age!—but regrets not allowing her a small moment of fantasy. He suspects the others would have had no such scruples.
I was wondering whether the Germans might have a word, like Bildungsroman, but focused on less lofty themes. What this novel is really about is a man looking for his place in a bourgeois society. Are his clothes right? His hair? And does he have the right man-management skills? Isn’t Lecoeur much more natural with the men? Unlike J-B, he seems to have an instinct for what will keep them not only on-task, but content enough to carry on. Armand, with his ability to seek pleasure without any sense of guilt, is a natural too. He confirms Lecoeur’s suggestion about giving the men clay pipes, drinks happily with Lecoeur while J-B goes to bed and fails to sleep, and is all for the idea of letting the sex workers in. J-B fears he has no instinct for any of it.
Poor J-B. There must be plenty of readers who recognise his chronic lack of faith in himself, and his chronic sense of failure. Other men manage it all so much more easily, he thinks, while he frets and ends up being prescribed an opiate tincture by the accommodating Guillotin. They don’t really work—and if they work for Lecoeur, who he shares the bottle with, who can tell? He is drunk most nights, and it leads to the inevitable row with J-B one particularly stressful morning. They make it up, but J-B is never at his ease, with himself or anyone else. The only time he relaxes with Lecoeur is when they re-live the excitement of their ‘Valenciana’ project. Things were simpler then, as they now realise, noble ideas that would encounter impossible obstacles if brought up against the realities they both understand better now.
Plenty of other things are happening. Miller isn’t letting us forget about the pre-revolutionary mood amongst some in Paris—Guillotin included, to J-B’s surprise—and, suddenly, the threat seems personal. It must be one of the two men in Armand’s subversive little cadre who has daubed a provocative message in huge letters on a wall in the street outside: ‘FAT KING SLUT QUEEN BEWARE! BECHE IS DIGGING A HOLE BIG ENOUGH TO BURY ALL VERSAILLES!’ The only person outside the group who knows the name is Héloïse, and she is there when he sees it. It makes the connection between them only seem stronger. Later, he wonders if she is one of the women who make their way into the men’s encampment. He’s pretty sure she wouldn’t—it’s ‘no more probable than her spreading her cloak and flying over the wall’—but he doesn’t know what we know, that she is the perfect petit bourgeois. Her little business is discreet, everything is assiduously managed—and she has no interest at all in any such thing as reputation. ‘Héloïse Godard, reader, woman for sale … recently entered into her twenty-fifth year though not yet quite finished with her long project of debasement, rises with the six o’clock bell from Saint-Eustache.’
And then there’s the other woman in her life, the unfathomable Ziguette. All the Monnards are deeply uncomfortable about the work J-B is doing—‘“It is hard for us to think of it,” said Madame, a strange shrill voice’—but Ziggy is beside herself. ‘Ziguette began to cry. A thin whining followed by a gulp, then a sob rising out of her bosom, all of it accompanied by a vigorous working of her face so that she looked to Jean-Baptiste like someone he had never seen before. She fled the room.’ She stops eating, withdraws to her bed like a would-be madwoman in the attic, and J-B is very uncomfortable about it.
But that’s nothing. Chapter 11 opens ominously: ‘When the assault took place, when precisely, no one could ever say with any certainty’—and we see it from two points of view. J-B sees his assailant, Ziggy, naked down to her curling pubes (which he notices, of course) before she comes close. ‘Her face, tilted over the light of the candle, seemed calm and almost tender, a chiaroscuro angel bent over the bed of some ailing hermit. They may even, for an instant, have smiled at each other. Then her arm swung up, swung down and the whole world broke against his skull in a surge of exterminating pain.’ Then we’re whisked away into the consciousness of Marie. She notices light from downstairs in the middle of the night—J-B never, ever, lights a candle after going to bed—and she peers down through the knothole. She sees someone in his room, but who?
‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what could have prepared her for the shock of seeing Ziguette, dog-naked, step quietly into view! … Ziguette, with her big, rosy bubs! The big, rosy curve of her arse! In one hand she held a candle, and with the other hand she took something off the lodger’s table, something that caught the light and made, knocking against something else on the table, a little chiming sound that he must have heard in his sleep for he started to stir. It was that thing of his, the metal thing for measuring. Was she going to measure him? Measure what? His neck, his feet, his cock-a-doodle-doo? For the last scene, a very short one, he was, she would swear, awake and looking at Ziguette, though neither of them said even the smallest word. In her imagination, Marie seemed already to be watching what must follow – the covers thrown back, the lovers snugly wrapped in each other’s arms, the kissing and cuddling, the oohing and ahing, and she above it all, squirming on the boards. But it didn’t happen like that. The metal thing, the ruler, cut through the air and came down on his head and killed him. She must have made some noise herself, a little squeal, for Ziguette suddenly looked up, her face all dark, a dark mask, and at that, the sight of that, she had at last lost a few drops of Monnard’s wine.’
It’s like a male author’s challenge. Unpack that, you feminist critics. Or don’t. Maybe it’s just Miller being Miller. Which is who he carries on being as he follows Marie into the room, into Ziggy’s room—she’s tucked up in bed, feigning sleep—then downstairs to gleefully tell the Monnards what their daughter has been up to: ‘she really could not stop herself – ‘“Why, madame, I suppose they might even hang her.”’ Well.
What have I missed? Among the miners is an unexpectedly authoritative man, straight-backed and with cool, violet eyes that J-B finds disconcerting. Perhaps implausibly—there are only 32 miners in total—we, and J-B, know little about him by the end of these chapters. He has been seen presiding over what looks like an impromptu gathering of some sort, but that’s all Miller is going to tell us about that. And all he’s going to offer us about a possible incipient relationship between Lecoeur and Jeanne is the fact of her presence, twice with the intact (or intacta) corpse and once on the stairs when she has been tending to Block in the night: ‘“Don’t be afraid, … it is only Lecoeur.” “He woke,” she says, “but he is sleeping now.” “You are a good girl,” says Lecoeur. “I believe I was dreaming of you.”’ Gaps and elliptic references are things that authors use all the time… but I feel that Miller’s often simply feel unhelpful. Or just too… gappy.
Third, Chapters 1-15
The most noticeable gaps in this section are all in J-B’s head. No, not literally, although there will always be a scar. It’s his memory that’s shot—I’ll come back to a different kind of shooting later—especially in the first days. Before he’s not quite well enough, he forces himself to get dressed in his work suit, then he packages up all the clothes he bought from the disdainful tailor and leaves the house with them. He can’t tell what it is that isn’t quite right with him, but we recognise the disinhibition. For today, and a few days, it seems to clarify his self-conscious thoughts about his own place in the world, and he is as forthright in his encounter with the tailor as a more confident man would have been the first time. He insists on a suit so black he looks like a Swiss pastor, later calls out to Héloïse on the street, but passers-by mock both of them and she goes without really speaking to him. Things improve, he starts to remember words that had been eluding him… but some of the disinhibition remains. In a good way. I’ll get back to that.
Long before Third, I’d been thinking about whether this novel is as schematic as I suspect it is. Miller has set it at a time just before one of the biggest political upheavals ever seen in Europe, and if J-B represents the contemplative aspect of Enlightenment thinking— although now, he thinks of ‘Valenciana’ ass no more than two young men’s fantasy—Armand is a pragmatist and something of a cynic. Meanwhile, Lecoeur doesn’t feature so much in these chapters… until he does. He is already under Miller’s examining eye as one type of masculinity, and turns out to be even more lost than J-B. Armand is almost too perfect a version of a future male behaviour—he loves talking about the imminent arrival of a new future—and has attitudes that become more or less accepted as normal two centuries later. He would have been very comfortable in the 1960s.
And J-B. The old forms of what is acceptable between the sexes are of no use to him and, through the happy accident of his close encounter with death—we’re there as he finds himself somehow outside himself, in a horrifying way, before he recovers consciousness—he is able to get what he needs. This isn’t schematic on Miller’s part, it’s a cocktail of plot devices. There’s a fine petite bourgeoise available for the taking if he ignores all society’s norms—which are being more and more undermined by even ordinary people’s perception of corruption and promiscuity in high places. He doesn’t have any plan of what he will say to her, but a kindly author has arranged it so that his shaken-up brain is just right for the times. He finds himself asking Héloïse to move in with him… and it’s fine. Mme Monnard loves her, her husband doesn’t seize the moment to object, and there’s a much bigger room available now that Ziggy’s been sent away to some convenient relatives.
In other words, I don’t believe a word of it. But that’s OK—it’s engaging, and the inside of J-B’s head is recognisable enough to us without making it seem as though he’s been parachuted into the past from our own times. His bang on the head has cleared away a few cobwebs, that’s all, while a few unwelcome new ones have taken their place. He hasn’t fully recovered his quickness of mind, finds it impossible to read the books he used to find easy—there’s a memorable scene when, caught short, he has to use the pages of one of them to wipe himself and throw the pages into the latrine. You couldn’t make it up. He also has terrible migraine-like headaches, and no sense of smell or taste. But that’s no great loss sitting at the Monnards’ dining table.
Where is it all going? The work, hardly really described at all now, progresses. Five nights a week, cartloads of bones, escorted by priests audibly intoning prayers to satisfy the proprieties, leave for the duly consecrated former quarry that is at last ready for them. And Héloïse is the perfect partner. She is patient and tolerant, that same kindly author having arranged it so that the love J-B is offering her now is the first she’s ever known. Her parents, innkeepers, only used her as a free servant and, we discover, pimped her to satisfy some of the guests. She’s even good in company, Armand and Lisa finding her well-read and personable when they go to see—what else?—Beaumarchais’s proto-revolutionary Marriage of Figaro. It’s all coming together.
But Miller has a sad archetype of failed masculinity to deal with. It’s Lecoeur, whose toxic fascination with the preserved corpse concludes in a ghastly assault. It isn’t on the dead woman, although it isn’t for want of trying on Lecoeur’s part. By the time the badly damaged corpse is discovered in the cemetery, it’s after Lecoeur has beaten and raped poor Jeanne. She’s covered in bruises, her face is a mess—but she’ll recover. J-B, discovering a new strength in himself, seeks him out in a ‘charnel’, one of the dark crypts they have just started digging out. There’s a tussle—it seems the mad priest, possibly taking J-B for the rapist, attacks him in the dark and gets floored by the spade J-B has taken with him. Lecoeur speaks, another voice from a mindset that isn’t fit for purpose. J-B knows he has his pistol with him—but also knows if Lecoeur shoots him the men will murder him for what he did to their little virgin mother. (Ironically, it’s Lecoeur who had called her this when explaining to J-B why the men would never harm her.) There’s nowhere for his toxic masculinity to go, and he shoots himself.
Is Miller really tying up thematic loose ends like this? I’m not quite sure he is—maybe, really, the other male characters have the job of representing different ways of navigating the highly imperfect realities of pre-revolutionary France. Armand’s comfortable pragmatism? Guillotin’s equally comfortable seen-it-all-before worldly wisdom? The charismatic miner, as fine an archetype of a new world order as you could hope to find? Far rather him than Monnard’s weak, unthinking conservatism or the rabble-like daubers of provocative slogans. And here’s Lecoeur, the man too weak to resist his own desperate needs. In the end, it’s his habit of seeking out the quick fix—his alcoholism is presented as a definite character flaw—and when the dead woman turns out to be too far-gone for his purposes, he does the worst thing any man can do. When J-B had found him in Valenciennes, he looked as if he would soon be dead, and needed to be saved. In the end, it didn’t work.
Anything else? I’m wondering what’s going to happen with the provocative graffiti, which is appearing in other places now. Surely, I’m thinking, Miller hasn’t set up such a threat to J-B with no intention to follow it up in some way…. And, when J-B tries to resign almost as soon as he is recovered, Lafosse has made it very clear who is still in charge. He tells him that he, ‘the engineer, is in fact a type of servant and not even a particularly senior type of servant. A servant who was taken on at the minister’s pleasure. A servant who will be released when the minister has no further use for him. Those are the terms. To abuse them would be to destroy utterly any hope of future advancement.’ Lafosse doesn’t know what we know, that nothing will be the same very soon. But so? Surely the novel will end before that. Won’t it?
As for Héloïse…. She, daughter of innkeepers, knows exactly how to be Jeanne’s replacement caterer for the men, and a sensible pair of ears for J-B. He has really landed on his feet with her—something about his muddled egalitarian philosophy and his new, looser mindset have led to this happy outcome. Good old Andrew Miller, for now anyway—we don’t know what Fourth will bring. It’s the spring of 1786 and, unless Miller speeds up a lot, we won’t see the actual Revolution. But a lot could happen in the final 60-odd pages.
Fourth, Chapters 1-3—to the end
Only three chapters, but two of them are long and Miller wants to pack a lot in. A lot of what? Meaning? Significance? Some kind of resolution? All those. ‘A year unlike any other he has lived. Will ever live? A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love…’ This comes in the final chapter, the work all finished and the Revolution still a long way off. Any sense of jeopardy is finally drained from the narrative, everything, essentially, satisfactorily resolved. OK, there’s a strange moment in Versailles when men in masks run urgently past him, but that’s just so Miller can take us to a neat little final image. You remember the king’s pet elephant? Did I not mention that? Tell you later.
If Miller was giving his sections titles instead of numbers, he could have called this one The Sense of an Ending, if Julian Barnes hadn’t used it for the title of his own novel the same year as this one. But at the start of this section J-B has only just finished burying Lecoeur’s body at the bottom of the now cleared third pit. By the next morning the body is sixteen metres deep beneath the tons of earth that now fill it. There are rumours all over the neighbourhood that J-B shot Lecoeur in a jealous rage—we saw one of those during his first, ill-judged perambulation after the attack, when somebody was insulting Héloïse. Jeopardy at last? Might he be arrested? Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing comes of it, just as nothing comes of the Beche-related graffiti that springs up all over Paris in the summer. Beche becomes a bogeyman for J-B, who wonders if there just might really be such a murderous revolutionary haunting the city. Which just shows how messed up his head still is.
But that’s later. At the start of Fourth it’s not even spring yet, and the work carries on. ‘They dig – dig and fill like men who lack the invention to do anything else. Pit fourteen gets its sixteen metres of earth and lime. In the next pit, the very centre of the cemetery, the bones are piled so thickly they can be handed up like bundles of brushwood.’ By now, spring has properly arrived, and J-B is living the dream. As I mentioned, Miller packs a lot into these chapters—including, at last, details of J-B’s slow progress towards maturity. Following a conversation with Armand he considers his thoughtlessness towards the Monnards: ‘his behaviour towards them—treating them with the barest possible civility, keeping Ziguette in her exile, doing exactly as he wished in their house, living there with Héloïse – all this had seemed entirely reasonable. Just and reasonable. Now it strikes him he has behaved towards them much as Lafosse has behaved towards him, much, perhaps, as the minister behaves towards Lafosse. He has set them at nought. He has humiliated them.’ He’s been relying on outmoded, ancient regime notions of superiority. But Armand will make an egalitarian of him yet.
There’s other growth as well, first the spring flowers and then, as Miller likes to mix things up, something life-changing. In this place of death there’s new life, too—Jeanne, painfully recovering from Lecoeur’s assault and rape, is going to have his child. And Miller isn’t presenting it in any way negatively. Jeanne has a faithful follower, the aptly named Block, who will never forget the care she took of him. And to remind us of the archetypal nature of his characters, Miller has J-B summarise it for us neatly when the sexton’s house is about to be demolished some months later. ‘He watches them leave, the miner, the old man, the pregnant girl, watches their departing backs, the fragility of their diminishing forms. It is, he thinks, like the beginning and end of every story ever told.’ Got that?
Miller has other emblematic moments to play out before this. When the weather has become too hot for the men to work in the pits—they’ve dug out much more than half the cemetery—J-B decides it would be a good time to dismantle the church. Cue admirably competent master mason and assistants on their scaffolding—is his surprise part of J-B’s growth?—and the opportunity for plenty of symbolic moments. Can this really be the beginning of the end of an old world order? When the masons first break through the old roof, everyone inside is moved by the shaft of sunlight that suddenly appears, and they instinctively avoid the growing patch of intense light on the floor.
J-B knows who would love to see this. ‘A half-hour later, while Armand improvises on the organ, the engineer conducts a tour of the light. Héloïse squeezes his elbow. The sexton looks up, blinks his eyes like a prisoner trapped fifty years in some oubliette, some dank cachot like those said to exist in the fortress of the Bastille. Lisa wets her lips, opens her face like a flower. Guillotin says softly, “But this is philosophy.” Jeanne begins to cry silently. She will not at first touch the light. Jean-Baptiste – it is the moment’s permission – takes her hand. She does not flinch. He lifts it, and when the light strikes it, her skin – the skin of both their hands – seems surrounded with a fragile blue fire.’ My goodness.
There are other moments. A miner J-B has been companionably working with a few moments before is suddenly killed by a beam dislodged from above. The professionals have ideas about how his death should be marked, and where he should be buried… but it’s another marker on J-B’s path towards an understanding that his class don’t always know best. Mr Violet-eyes comes into his own, as the gents and would-be gents find him leading the miners in a remembrance ceremony of their own making inside the church, where the body lies. They have made a pyre of the centuries-old, dried-out pews and they are going to give him a proper send-off. When the others remonstrate that they will burn the place down, he has two answers for them. ‘This place killed him. Our brother. We have done with it.’ As they fret about the danger to the surrounding houses, his second answer is just as assured. ‘We know about fire. It is a thing we understand well.’ He’s right, of course. Not only do they hasten the demolition of the church, they do it safely, making sure that no more than a couple of houses suffer minor damage.
Maybe, Andrew Miller doesn’t tell us, this isn’t just about the fall of the old, but the rise of the new order. If only. Maybe he’s as conscious of the irony as we all are—and anyway, this isn’t about France. His theme is too individualised for that. This is all about his flawed hero’s growth, and I think this is the book’s limitation for me. The Revolution feels like a convenient add-on, and it’s no surprise that he ends the story nearly three years before it begins.
So, in the final, shorter chapter, there are just a few ends to tie up. J-B is in Versailles again, musing on the final weeks of the work. The priest, found naked in his bed as the church begins to burn, has been found a safe place in an asylum. J-B and Héloïse will move into an apartment they’ve found, leaving the Monnards to do as they will with Ziguette. And… we don’t really get to hear what happens to the miners. Will they return to their old lives? Those with families, J-B and the others think, probably will, but Miller simply lets them fade away into the background. We don’t even know whether Block has a future with Jeanne.
J-B, with his report duly completed (with Héloïse’s help) and signed, waits outside the minister’s office. But nobody calls him in, and nobody else is to be found in the place. Eventually, he tentatively pushes at the door. He leaves the report in the middle of the minister’s empty desk and leaves. And gets lost, just as he did the year before.
Cue that final totemic motif. We’ve seen the downfall of the church, and now it’s time for the state. It might not be yet, but if the king’s pet elephant is anything to go by the State isn’t even on its last legs. The masked men who rush past J-B are headed towards a huge shed, dark inside, and he follows them in: ‘men are hauling on ropes. Four gangs of men, four thick ropes. And attached to the end of the ropes something grey and vast and lonely. … [Soon] the engineer has crept close enough to finally understand what it is the men are trying to shift, the great death-swollen bulk of it in its nest of empty wine bottles, one dull eye big as a soup plate, the delicate veined edge of an ear, a curving yellow tusk….’ I get the feeling that if Andrew Miller could have found the king a pet dinosaur, he would have been much happier. He doesn’t actually call it an elephant.
But whatever it is, J-B turns away, ‘wipes the flies from his face, and hurries back to that soft line at the edge of the shed where the light begins.’ Ah. The light. If only we, like J-B and the others, didn’t know about the years following the Revolution. And all the years after that.
We can read it for you wholesale 