"The Paris Express"

Emma Donoghue's fictionalized account of a derailment at the Paris Montparnasse train station is a quick read that transports one to that not-quite-modern time briefly.

• So the stationmaster puts back the hands of this clock, the one inside the station, with the result that half the passengers will believe they’re boarding on time when in fact they’re dawdlers, and the train’s been waiting patiently for them. “You mean the Express actually runs five minutes late?”
  “Every train in France does.”
  What a cheat! Railways are pure speed, the most modern thing there is. They’re a shortcut to the future, steaming along gleaming metals. So the clocks should all tell true, and the trains should set off on time and leave the dawdlers in the dust.
• * eyes fixed on the mud-brown wall covered with words and pictures—Louriste Razors, Valda Pastilles, The Divine Sarah, Smoke Gauloises, Irisine Beauty Powder, Liebig Meat Extract, St. Raphael Quinine, Rochet Bicycles, Colle-Bloc Glues Everything—as if he’s enclosed in a book, a sturdy volume with the power to carry these people all the way to Paris.
• they spend ten days out of every eleven elbow to elbow on the footplate of Engine 721 and every second night in the same boardinghouse in Granville. Even their work clothes have merged over the years; they grab smock shirts, soft jackets, denim trousers, and caps from the one parcel the laundrywoman sends back... He cracks four eggs into a puddle of butter on his shovel to test the fire’s heat.
• * When she tips back her head, she realises that the iron-and-glass roof of the station needs to be this high to make room for the steam and smoke; a low ceiling would trap passengers and crew in a blinding fog.
• Third Class is always placed at the front of the train so as to catch the brunt of the coal dust and of course so that in the event of a head-on collision, those in the cheap seats will do their duty by getting crushed before their betters... Blonska might move with the frail, bobbing glide of a seahorse, but she’s a tough old boot.
• The oysterwoman sighs. “Poor people’s bread always burns.”
• * “The Company’s trying to force anyone with the cash to fork out for Second. See these tiny holes drilled in the floor to make draughts?”
• * she likes to see how long she can sit on a winter day without lighting a fire; scrimping gives her a little shiver of triumph. That’s conceited in its own way, Blonska knows; everyone has his or her vanity, and doing without happens to be hers.
• Every time Pellerin moves the train out, Léon fingers the leather binding of his hand brake and leans a little on the crank, which turns a screw under the floor and presses the iron teeth softly against the wheels to smoothen the gathering movement. Without that, the links of the train can jerk, which Léon feels just like the ache in his hips at the end of each day. (He turned forty-two this year.) He wishes passengers would understand that rolling stock is called that because it rolls;
• Granville Station reminded Henry of Monet’s dozen canvases of Paris’s Gare Saint-Lazare—like landscapes but indoors, with smoke and steam for clouds, diffusing the light that beams through the glass roof. It strikes him that it’s not easy to portray the passing of time in a picture... But what Monet managed to catch in each of his train canvases was a sense of the fleeting.
• Henry much prefers the old thatch to red corrugated iron. He’s going by so fast, it’s hard to catch all the architectural details. That’s the paradox of trains, he supposes; they show you what you’d never have seen otherwise, but only for a tantalising second.
• at last Mr. Eakins took him on and opened the whole world to him. Eakins had his students paint straight colour onto primed canvas without the safety net of a preparatory sketch. He told them, There are no lines in Nature.
• She must be far from home, a bright migrant creature storm-blown into these northern European climes.
• Marcelle, feeling rather underdressed in her tailored navy-blue outfit, is horrified to see that each earring is made of the head of a hummingbird.
• Despite what fairy tales teach about remarrying, Marcelle often finds that second marriages have this quality of relaxation about them, perhaps because the match is based on sounder judgement.
• * Speed is the only new pleasure invented since the ancients. The thrill of danger, the rush in the veins…”... “But if I may say, in favour of the railways”—Bienvenüe, in his thoughtful tone—“they democratize that pleasure.”
• * Ever since Mado discovered the public library, she’s been reading to learn how the machine of the world chugs on and how no fiddling little adjustments will ever fix it. When she came across Proudhon’s line Property is theft, the words went off like firecrackers in her brain.
• The rich read on trains, escaping into made-up stories, having (they like to complain) time to kill. Don’t they realise it’s the other way around? The poor understand that old Father Time is killing all of us, little by little. Only those who work for a living understand the value of the limited time they’re granted. They sell their portion by the hour or rest to gather their forces to do it all over again the next day.
• * You wonder how a train can read her passengers’ minds? Consider the circumstances of her making. Iron ore (grey streaked with red) was drawn up from the veins of France and smelted to form gigantic plates. Forty-metre-tall teak trees in the Malay Peninsula were axed and toppled, chopped into logs, then planks, and shipped around India and through the Suez Canal. Of these precious stuffs, each of this train’s parts was precisely and laboriously formed.
• she does her best to discourage direct overtures, but a drip of flirtation is what oils the wheels of French life.
• He’s clearly never given a moment’s thought to the question of where a single woman and her married boss should sit on a train. If the two go together into an empty Second-Class carriage
• (Ever since that morning in Le Havre decades back when Monet daubed his Impression, Sunrise, Normandy’s been infested with painters.)
• * For now Alice buries herself in her novel, one of Zola’s. Generally she enjoys stories about the railways—lovers just missing assignations or hurling themselves under the wheels.
• A driver intimate with his route will lengthen the pistons’ travel to boost the torque before an upgrade, then shorten them to put on a burst of power. He’s been trained to keep his hands off both the powerful air brake and the weaker shoe brake because having to brake is an admission of failure and means you’re going too fast. The best way to control speed is with the reverser. Keep the regulator open but move the reverser closer to its midpoint between forward and back, which will reduce the cutoff, the moment in each stroke when no more steam is let into the cylinders, thus leaving room for the steam to expand. The Company notch, rollers call that magic midpoint at which the train runs with enough power but burns the minimum of coal.
• Louise’s pulse is speeding up. She may not understand exactly what Mademoiselle de Heredia is getting at, but the implication is clear: that Jeanne may be suffering from something serious, a mysterious disorder revealed by a special test. What a thing to suggest to a stranger on a train!
• “And what was the scene these Messieurs Lumière showed you?”
  “That’s an excellent question,” Alice says, “because—”
  But Gaumont cuts in. “Oh, it could have been anything, really. The technological innovation is the thing.”
  She sets her teeth. Any woman who works with men learns ways to avoid disagreeing head-on.
• You never know what people will try to send by parcel post: snakes, parrots, pickaxes… Even if a parcel has its origin station and destination written legibly on the correct colour card, labels can come ungummed and peel off or get stuck to other items and transfer themselves like ticks in long grass. Léon’s world is one of bothersome objects: goods lost, delayed, in bad order; undercharges; overcharges. Natural vice covers the inherent tendency of barrel hoops to rust and soft fruits to go mouldy, say, which can’t be considered the Company’s fault, not to be confused with negligence (clumsy handling or violent shunting),
• *  They sleep in the fug of each other’s feet, so Victor can’t tell Guillaume’s smells from his own anymore. This is Company policy, to keep driver and stoker closer than brothers, because both speed and safety depend on the two knowing each other like catcher and flier on a trapeze.
• But the hard mathematics of his job means that it costs a kilo of coal to turn six litres of water to steam, and more coal than that if there are impurities. The railways have covered France so fast, and every decade the new trains are heavier and longer and move faster, so French coal’s in chronically short supply, and much of it is dirty—yet if Victor and Guillaume use up the 721’s whole allowance of the stuff, the Company cuts down their blasted bonus to nothing. It’s only October; in the cold months it takes more fuel to feed a fire, so their forty percent shrinks away fast.
• “Extremist troublemakers everywhere—and, it must be said, tyrants putting them down. The police have started arresting the glassmakers’ organizers and bringing in trainloads of scabs from all over France.”
  “I don’t suppose you allow unionizing at your factory?”
  Jules-Félix is wary of talking politics with his wife’s friend, who thinks an arch tone makes up for her ignorance.
• Newspapers sometimes blame the railways for the rising rate of self-murder, but a train never commands or lures a man to throw himself down. In every age, ways have been devised to unseal a bag of skin, and if not by train, a determined person will find another means.
• Such a makeshift, primitive apparatus Mado Pelletier’s lunch bucket holds in contrast to this train’s vast and exquisite mechanics—yet potentially just as powerful. Death on a grand scale, carried like a terrible secret inside the Express today.
• “No accidents, only fate misnamed. That’s what Schiller said.”
  Mado’s dry lips purse. “How defeatist.”
  “On the contrary, Schiller was known for his loud resistance to tyrants.”
  “But to take refuge in this mystical notion of destiny—”
  “Is it mystical?” Blonska shrugs. “To me, it describes the way things work. A train can run only on the tracks laid down for it.”
  “So we’re powerless to do anything about the way things work?”
  “I didn’t say that at all,” Blonska says a little crisply. “Perhaps it’s our destiny to try. The attempt to right wrongs is all the braver for its difficulty, no?”
• Blonska searches her memory for an example. She drops her voice: “I recently met a journalist convinced that Captain Dreyfus is the victim of a conspiracy.”
• * “A politician, retired now. He was once president of the municipal council.”...
  “Ah!” Remarkable; how did a Cuban of colour end up running Paris?
  She seems to read his mind, and her face tightens. “Bigots used to call Papa ‘the Chocolate Deputy.’ ”
  Henry winces. This is the moment when he can match her candour, gift for gift: “American journalists sometimes dub me ‘the Darkie Painter.’ ” ..
  “He’s fought for votes for women, limits on the working day for children—”...
  She’s let slip her first name, or perhaps dropped it like a handkerchief for Henry to pick up: Marcelle.
• “Indeed. These pious monarchists are always harping on about family and how much more virtuous the nation was before the revolution.” Since the whole snarling pack brought down Dreyfus last year, they’ve been insufferable; can’t they get it into their heads that they don’t run France anymore?
• She nods. “Strange you remember it so well even though you were a baby.”
  “Oh, I’m afraid it’s a false memory,” he admits, “based on what my mother told me much later.”
  “Not false,” Marcelle objects. “Handed down.”
  Henry likes that way of putting it, as if the pain is a family treasure. Or at least a useful tool.
• She suddenly changes the subject. “You asked what set me on the track of studying physiology. The truth is, it was the day my brother drowned.” <> “I’m so sorry to hear that.” How funny that Henry’s bleeding all over her seems to have made intimates of them. He watches, listening hard; he knows Marcelle’s honouring him with this confidence.
• The radiance is of course the miracle-working love of Christ. The challenge for Henry is to paint this in such a realistic way that it’ll move the doubters and even the godless. He doesn’t say any of this, because Marcelle de Heredia may very well be one of those scientists who have left the consolations of religion behind.
• Towards old Blonska, whose eyes in their wrinkled pouches are burning weirdly. Who drops her head, too fast, and works her clacking needles. <> And Mado realises with a prickle of shock that the old woman’s somehow guessed.
• Nothing. For now, that seems the safest thing to do. Blonska’s trapped in her knowledge, unable to act. <> Strangely, she finds she doesn’t want Mado Pelletier hurt. Or arrested, even. If the police collar her, she’ll be excoriated in the papers, put on trial, and guillotined like those other anarchists, and in turn she’ll inspire new martyrs.
• There’s a ring cutting into her fat finger, but Jean’s not fooled. The capital is where her kind go for its public assistance and free medical care and anonymity. (He’s heard of a hospital just west of Montparnasse at Denfert-Rochereau with a turntable in the outer wall where you can place a newborn; you put it in a box there, spin the wheel, ring the bell, and walk away before the nun comes.)
• * These days every public building has three rubbish bins—one for the reclaiming of paper and cloth; the next for glass, ceramics, and oyster shells; and the last for perishables, which is where she drops the handkerchief.
• When you’re young, growing can hurt, and everything is new and puzzling. You might be the only one in the world to feel this way. The budding self is a sealed compartment, mysterious. Besides, even if Jeanne does suspect these symptoms are serious, what daughter tells her mother everything?
• * Louise cups the round cheek, the firm ear, the light prickle of eyelashes. Even through the terror, such happiness. To be required for such a basic purpose as cushioning, to be the right mother at the right moment with no need for words, to know what comfort your child seeks and have it to give.
• * Henry Tanner can tell they’re in Paris proper by the graceful green cast-iron street furniture: lampposts curled like ferns, public benches, Wallace drinking fountains with their nymphs and dolphins, domed Morris columns covered in posters.
• Henry wonders whether every scientist, like every artist—like every person who puts in ridiculous hours at work they love—isn’t motivated in part by vanity.
• * Synge grits his teeth at the image. A Frenchman using this uprooted child as maid, nude model, and mistress...
  “I never smile in pictures. It’s stupid.” Her eyes are hazy with reminiscence. “In Brittany where they throw stones—”
  “This Gauguin brought you to Brittany?” John asks. “The time they called you a witch?”
  A nod. “He sends me back here to tidy up, so, ha! I sell it all.”
  “You sold the painter’s stuff while he was out of town?”
  “Axes, boomerangs, chairs, rugs, even the bed. Rooms look better. Bigger.” Annah’s lit up with pleasure at the memory. “I can’t sell his pictures, though.”
• train delivery: What Blonska reads on that small face is not so much innocence as a stoic disenchantment, a readiness despite everything.
• * “Hold her,” Mado orders, and Blonska and Madame Baudin tighten their grip as Mado approaches with a wet, shaking hand that’s marked with the dark line of the handle she’s been gripping all day. Remorseless, she pushes two fingers into the awful line between flesh lip and infant neck, between half-born and mother, until her fingers disappear. Mado closes her eyes. Blonska wonders how the girl can possibly find what she’s fishing around for in all that pressure and heat. <> A minute rubbery arm flips out beside the tiny head as if waving.
• He snatches at all four levers of the sandbox to release sand down the hoses in front of the wheels to see if a bit of grit will help, though if a train’s going too fast, sand can actually make matters worse by letting the wheels grip the rails more tightly, but he has to try something,
• Not a view of a train coming into a station, but the world as seen by someone on a train, or even the train’s own point of view. A bewildering succession of images, perhaps nothing but a blur, a waste of ten seconds of film, but worth a try, no? Everything’s worth trying once, especially if the train’s about to crash, and most especially if Alice Guy, twenty-two, has only a matter of seconds left. <> She snatches the cap off the lens and starts to crank the handle as if her life depends on it.
• “Never wash her head, it’ll make her an idiot,” the oysterwoman advises Cécile. “You’re the idiot,” Madame Baudin tells the oysterwoman.
  Mado’s wiping her face hard, scrubbing away the wet. Her grand plan, gone to pot. She won’t be setting off any bomb today.
  What’s shaming her most is the realisation that her tears aren’t for baby or mother or any of the fellow passengers she was fully intending to slaughter. They’re for herself. Mado can taste the childish disappointment, the vanity, in her grief. It seems she wanted glory, the same martyr’s crown as handsome Émile Henry on the guillotine, and she was willing to build a pyre of human beings to win it. She sickens herself.


• Urgency grips the photographer; he must be the first to capture this. He nudges his bike westwards around the disaster zone, hunting for a composition to give order to this magnificent chaos. It’s all too messy, foreground cluttered with gawkers. He nips around a lamppost and moves in closer, till he feels the heat of the dying monster and tastes iron like blood.
• He checks his camera; it’s aimed past the horror. He’ll allow the victim some privacy. Or, put another way, he’ll leave her out of the picture. He’ll simplify, paring down this complicated story to a clean, absurd image of catastrophe, one that will live for the ages.

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Marcelle de Heredia, later Lapicque (1873–1960), published research on nerve impulses on her own and with her tutor and then husband, Louis Lapicque, for sixty-five years. Her work earned her the Legion of Honour that her Cuban father, Severiano de Heredia, had been denied.
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) had his Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1895, lost and now known only through a later copy) accepted for the 1896 Salon; he won a medal there the following year for his Resurrection of Lazarus.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Resurrection_of_Lazarus
Alice Guy, later Blaché (1873–1968), secretary to Léon Ernest Gaumont (1864–1946), wrote, directed, and produced some seven hundred films, kicking them off with The Fairy of the Cabbages in 1896. The work of this forgotten Mother of Cinema includes the first full-length epic set in antiquity and the first “making of” feature.
Edmund John Millington Synge (1871–1909) would spend part of each year in Paris from 1894 to 1902, but he got most of his inspiration from long stays in the west of Ireland,.. The Playboy of the Western World
Annah (c. 1880–fl. 1895?) is the only name we have for the teenage model who appears in photos by Alphonse Mucha and a painting known as Annah la Javanaise by Paul Gauguin. We know that when Gauguin was out of town in 1894, she sold off all his furniture and decamped, disappearing from the historical record;
Madeleine (born Anne) Pelletier (1874–1939), whom I have nicknamed Mado: At sixty-five, she was arrested for giving an abortion to a thirteen-year-old incest victim and was sent not to prison but to an asylum, where she died in a matter of months.