Paris: The Novel

work,” his wife said to him quietly.
    “Let them do without their water,” he said defiantly, “until my son is found.” And Thomas guessed his father thought that little Luc was dead.
    “Your aunt gave him a balloon yesterday afternoon, and sent him home,” his mother continued to Thomas, “but he never got here. None of the children at the school have seen him. One boy said he had, but then he changed his mind. If anyone knows anything, they’re not telling.”
    “I’m going out to search,” said Thomas. “What color was the balloon?”
    “Blue,” said his mother.

    Once outside, Thomas paused. Could he find his brother? He told himself he could. There seemed little point in searching the Maquis again. Down the hill, the city outskirts spread northward to the suburb calledSaint-Denis. But so far as Thomas knew, his little brother never went out there. The small free school his mother made him attend, and most of the places Luc knew, lay up the hill. Thomas started to climb.
    The Moulin de la Galette stood on the ridge just above the Maquis. It was one of a pair of windmills owned by an enterprising family who had set up a
guinguette
bar with a little dance floor there. People came out from the city to enjoy some cheap drink and rustic charm, and Luc haunted the place. He’d sing songs for the customers, who’d give him tips.
    The barman was sweeping the floor.
    “The police have been here already,” he said. “Luc never came last night.”
    “He may have had a blue balloon.”
    “No balloon.”
    Thomas went along several streets after that, stopping here and there to ask if anyone remembered a boy with a balloon the day before. Nobody did. It was hard not to feel discouraged, but he pressed on. After half an hour of wandering about like this, he came out onto the great platform of ground overlooking the city where, behind a high wooden fence, they were building the huge basilica of Sacré Coeur.
    Thomas had been seven years old during the German siege. He remembered the big cannon up on the hill, and the fighting over them, and the terrible shooting of Communards when the government troops arrived from Versailles. His father had been careful to stay out of trouble—or perhaps he was just too lazy—but like most workingmen, he had no liking for this vast, triumphant monument to Catholic order that the conservative new republic was placing on the hill to stare over the city. Thomas, however, had been fascinated: not by the church’s meaning, but by how the huge thing was built.
    And for that reason, as he gazed at the sacred site on the hill of Montmartre, he began to feel a sense of dread.
    The hill was mainly composed of the soft stone material known as gypsum, which possessed two qualities. First, it would slowly dissolve in water, and was thus a poor foundation for any large building. Second, when heated, after giving off steam, it could easily be ground to the powder from which white plaster was made. For that reason, men had been burrowing into the hill of Montmartre for centuries to extract the gypsum. And so famous had these quarryings become that now, even across the oceans, white plaster had come to be known as plaster of Paris.
    When the builders of Sacré Coeur began their task, therefore, they found that the underlying terrain was not only soft, but so honeycombed with mine shafts and tunnels that, had the great building been placed directly upon it, the entire hill would surely have collapsed, leaving the church in a stupendous sinkhole.
    The solution had been very French: a combination of elegant logic and vast ambition. Eighty-three gigantic shafts were dug, each over a hundred feet deep, filled with concrete. Upon these mighty columns, like a huge box almost as deep as the church above, the crypt was constructed as a platform. This work alone had taken almost a decade, and by the end of it, even those who hated the project would remark with wry amusement: “Montmartre isn’t holding up the church. It’s the church that’s holding up Montmartre.”
    Every week, Thomas had gone to the site to gaze. Sometimes a friendly workman would take him to see the cavernous excavations and giant masonry up close. Even when the work on the church itself had begun, the site was still a muddy mess, cratered with pits and trenches. And now, as he stared at the high boards of the fence, the thought came to him, with a horrible urgency: What if his poor little brother’s body had been