The Emperor of Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

pocked cheeks, the creases around her puffy mouth. In small vignettes he had made studies of her hands and their bouquets of arthritic fingers. On the page her hair looked like lengths of wire exploding from under her hat.
    The conductor assured everyone that the rain would stop at any moment; it was only a short walk into the station. Jacob checked his pockets. The money pulled from a tin under his bed, together with the address of a traveller’s hotel found in an old guidebook, was stillwhere he had put it that morning. He tucked the sketching book under his coat. The conductor touched the brim of his cap.
    Welcome to Paris, monsieur. Mind the step.
    Horse-drawn buses loitered outside the station; one or two automobiles chugged past. Jacob looked in the direction of what he sensed might be west, searching for a landmark, something recognizable from his bedroom wall. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun; already the cobblestones steamed. He pulled the guide from his pocket, tried to untangle the maze of streets.
    The quintessential Parisien
, the guide advised,
is known to favour walking as a mode of transport
. Jacob tightened his bootlaces, shouldered his carpetbag and stepped over a recent deposit of manure.
    His mother would have found the envelope by now, propped against her most cherished possession, a photograph of a stiff and uncomfortable toddler. Jacob remembered her telling and retelling the neighbours how much the photograph had cost.
    She would be reading the letter, with her usual stoic frown, stifling tears with a quiet cough, rummaging for a handkerchief. Jacob could hear her voice as though she had followed him out of the station. But why here,Jacob? Of all the insanity. This city is no place for a boy. And who will feed you? Where will you sleep? Could you not draw your pictures back home? Your father and I could send you to Paris when you are a year or two older, if that is what you truly want.
    Jacob adjusted the load across his shoulder and wished he could rewrite the letter, add something about already being older, that he would write once he was settled, that he already missed her spice cookies, that he was a man now, that she and Papa had taught him well.
    He knew his father, having returned from the bank, would be for the moment silent; sitting in his dim corner, deaf to his wife’s worry, wondering how to explain to his best customer that the letter drafted for his signature—You’ll remember my son, sir. His apprenticeship with your firm—would no longer be needed.
    The boy will be fine, my dear.
    Jacob wished his father were tugging at his mother’s arm as they followed him, gently pulling her back toward the station, leaving him to make his own way through the crowds along the boulevard.
    He resisted the temptation to retrieve the guidebook.
And not a plodding vagrant is our native of the City of Light, but one that takes the greatest pleasure in wandering for the sake of it, with neither the assistance of map nor compass nor indeed destination of any kind
.
    ——
    After handing the manager’s wife a month’s advance for an attic room and relieving himself into a trough that was the toilet two floors below, Jacob stepped over the bed and draped his damp clothes from a beam. Falling against the thin mattress, he opened his sketching book to a blank page.
    8.8.08. Arrived. The Academy on Monday
.
    He sketched the remains of the room’s wallpaper, the flaking relics of what had once been a pleasant floral pattern. Someone’s notion of a touch of home for the footsore.

 
    Through the park now, the baker waits at the curb for a lull in the traffic.
    Across the roundabout a mother and her son unfold a small table. The woman carefully positions an orchid planted in an old teapot. She turns it this way and that, searching for its best aspect, facing its one bloom toward the customer. The boy leans a small sign against the pot. The baker can see the writing on the card:
5
something.