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Avant, avant, lion le melhor
‘Forward, forward, Lyon the
best’
Motto of the city of Lyon
My parents were what is known as respectable. I know that my mother is dead and assume my father is also. If he were not, I would not wish to see him anyway, so we can say that he is dead to me. I don’t know how much my mother was grieved by my conduct, for no-one ever asked her opinion on anything, and I have not seen her since my flight to Paris with Gaston. My father, I since learned, turned to drink after what happened to me. It had always been his regular solace, but it was to become his life. I want you, my reader, to be reassured that I was not the cause of his descent, but his own greed and foolhardiness. I prefer to think that he drank to smother his own conscience.
I was brought up in the Croix-Rousse district of Lyon, not amongst the crowded dwellings of the canuts, the silk weavers of the Montée de la Grand Côte, but closer to the foot of that steep quarter, where the traders and merchants lived. The further up in lyonnais society one was, the further down the hill one dwelled – pronounced calf muscles by contrast were a sign of poverty. My father straddled both ends of the silk trade, much as our home did. He was not a weaver, nor a merchant, but built the Jacquard looms that enabled both. Forty thousand looms whirred and clacked in Lyon when I was a child, many of them in the tall buildings marching close to each other up that gradient. If I close my eyes here in London, I can still hear that sound behind the rattle of hansom cabs on cobbles, the clop of their horses. The sticky, cloying smell of silk is in my nose still, as though when breathed in it clotted itself forever in those tiny hairs.
Father would regale us with tales of the grandeurs of Lyon silk, telling us the brocades of Lasalle adorned palaces as far afield as St Petersburg. I wondered once if those who swathed their vast halls with the work of the canuts ever spared a thought for those who wove it. Now I know that they do not, any more than the respectable ladies of London consider those who trim their bonnets, stitch their ballgowns or accommodate their husbands. Once of Girondist principles, my father had grown to admire Napoleon, for every man can be bought, though not as easily as a man can buy a woman, perhaps. The Directorate effectively brought the heyday of Lyon silk to an end, for dressing sumptuously one’s person or one’s home amounted in some cases to a capital offence and Fouché’s butchery in 1793 is I am sure still remembered. It was thanks to Napoleon that the part of Lyon destroyed in that siege was rebuilt, the silk trade re-established to clothe the new dynasty’s court, and thus Father had money to feed and clothe us.
It was through Father’s trade that I met Gaston. You do not need to know his real name so I do not supply it, even if he could be dead by now. For years my allowance was remitted. It was stopped when Théodore reached fifteen (if indeed he did, but its regularity until then suggests that was the case). Certainly someone is dead. It may be Gaston, and so his wife has ceased to honour his shabby commitment. It may be that she has followed her husband to the grave, and some notary has seen the payment made to the Comptoir in London, shrugged his shoulders and cancelled it. It may be that my child is dead, his grave unvisited because everyone who knew who he was is also deceased, and I am the only one who remains, not knowing it. I wondered often if Gaston and his wife had any children, not because I was allowed any concern in their marriage, but because a woman without children may choose to love another woman’s child, or to hate him.
In my own case, I keep as far away from children as I can, walking in the opposite direction should I encounter a nursemaid with a perambulator in Russell Square Gardens (but then if the nursemaid knew what I was, she would do the same). Monsieur has a passionate dislike of all small humans, yet he will photograph those he regards as the most peculiar specimens, according to Mr Jones. I have seen some of these plates: barefoot Italian urchins, sturdier somehow than their London equivalent, as though clean air and sunshine nourishes them. Mr Cathie has shown me them, as he assists at the birth of these images in the darkroom. Never does Monsieur photograph the kind of children who have nursemaids or governesses. Sometimes I think his eye is cruel; some of those Italian children are crétins, horribly goitred. Mr Jones said that this is because they live too far from the sea. These poor souls dwell, for the most part, corralled behind high walls with others similarly afflicted. But if their parents do not gaze on them, I do not see why others should. Monsieur could have found a different subject for his camera.
I have ceased to wonder what my life might have been had I not met Gaston. There is no benefit in regret unless it prevents one from making similar mistakes in future. You see, the problem is that once one falls, one is obliged to keep on in one’s descent, for that precipice is sheer. It isn’t that one doesn’t want to go on making mistakes; the desire to live makes them an obligation.
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Sample book of Lyon silk, 1861
Wikimedia Commons: Prelle livre de patron 1861 La Canute |
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