Luckily for Feuilly, and for Prouvaire, the card makers were hiring. The entire demoralizing day could have been cut short had Sophie been less fearful. A cardmaker in the rue de l'Arbre-Sec hired Feuilly on the spot, his fourth visit of the morning. "We've been down three good hands since the smallpox this summer," the owner, Meunier, complained. "I've bought pictures for my wife from Duret, so I know you can do the work. Two weeks, minimum, at 6 francs for the week as a learner, just because you haven't done cards before, but I think you'll only be on probation for a fortnight. Piece rates should give an easy 10 francs a week once you're up to speed."

"Do you observe the Holy Monday?"

"Not for light work like this."

Feuilly thanked him with relief. "Other places I've worked observed it because the light work couldn't go on without the heavy work. I want to work, not to have holidays."

"I shutter Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and I've given up on Mardi Gras. There's no off season."

Nothing could have suited Feuilly better. The workshop employed two additional painters and two girls who took it in turns to paste cards and boxes and cut completed sheets. One girl had died, and Meunier had lost two painters to family upheavals. Of the remaining painters, the leader appeared to be Tisset, a man of middle age, greyer than Meunier. The two girls, both still young enough to indeed be girls, were his daughters. The other painter, Fréry, was about Bahorel's age and chatty. Fréry took it upon himself to relate the recent history of the shop while Feuilly tried to listen more carefully to Tisset's general orientation to the work.

"We lost another learner last week," Fréry explained. "Three months. He couldn't take it anymore."

"So you're saying my luck has turned right around, because two weeks ago, there wouldn't have been work?"

"No, we still need a fourth. Tarot go so much better with more hands."

Meunier produced playing card decks for export. Tarot for the Midi and Italy, traditional decks with different letters for America, and Spanish cards for South America. Red pips were put in by stencil, work that mostly went to whoever was learning the trade or to one of the girls. Tarot were so intricately designed and required so many colours that in the absence of enough hands, Meunier was behind on orders.

It was not the sort of shop that would have suited Sophie, but it perfectly filled Feuilly's need. Work without personalities getting in the way. Tisset's daughters were quiet, whispering between themselves out of earshot of the men. Tisset himself joined in Fréry's conversation as necessary, but Fréry seemed content to speechify for an hour at a time. It was only reasonable that Feuilly divulge his own work and his practised scraps of personal history. "The girls don't remember our native place, either, though they were both born there," Tisset commiserated. "After the wars, it was better to come to Paris. They'll marry better here, too, even if I'd rather they go home."

Fréry himself was quite lately married, and between his desire to go straight home to his new wife and Tisset's care for his daughters, Feuilly found he need not wet the new job properly. "We'll take you up on it tomorrow, when we get paid."

Laforêt was relieved at the news. "Hired on the spot? Damn. How desperate were they?"

"Very. They've been behind on orders for months."

"You are a lucky bastard."

"You're one to talk. They took you on immediately. And it isn't as if anyone was directly vouching for you, either. I think we finally made it."

"Thank god."

Which Feuilly did, with all his heart. For both Meunier's openness and Prouvaire's assistance, without which he would never have found a shop labeled with only a weather-beaten card tacked to the door. He would never cease to be grateful for God's benevolence and mercy.

Prouvaire was grateful to hear it, too. "I am glad to hear that my assistance was indeed helpful. One never knows. You know?"

"It's not exactly official yet, but I can't imagine this one going sour."

They were meeting in a café Bahorel had found that suited Nadal's demand for a public meeting. Feuilly felt out of place among the carters and other heavy labourers that were most evident among the clientele, and he was certain delicate bourgeois Prouvaire must feel even worse.

The others came hard upon their heels, however, and in a back corner, Combeferre apologised for calling them together when there was nothing to discuss. "It is mere gossip. I offended no one, nothing of any interest was said, and it was really quite a bore of an evening."

"At least tell us who was there!" Courfeyrac begged.

"Laffitte, no one from the Assembly, a society physician whose name I have entirely forgot because he will not be on the committee next week, and a number of businessmen more or less like my father. I put forth what charm I could muster for Mme Davillier, I drank two glasses of her excellent wine, and I said not a word about politics. And no one else did, either. I practised my paper on the physician. I listened to conversation on the price of Bavarian wine in London. In mourning, the true habitués of the salon do not go out. Or, I believe more accurately, Mme Davillier takes their absence as an opportunity to grant favours to the lesser lights of the city. It was a wasted evening, and I waste another by telling it over. If anyone has better news, let us speak it now and depart quickly."

Prouvaire nudged Feuilly visibly enough he caught everyone else staring at him. "I'm in work. It's not useful to any of this. Two other men in the shop, and it isn't the right sort of shop, so there isn't really anything to say."

But he had congratulations from all, and though they immediately scattered, Combeferre asked him to accompany him on the walk back across the river. "What have you thought of Sismondi?" Feuilly had to admit that he had not yet opened the book of political economy. "You began with Vasari," Combeferre smiled. "How could you not? I have been thinking about our conversation when last we met."

"I'm as embarrassed as you are, I'm sure," Feuilly insisted quickly. It was better to head off any further sympathetic attempts.

"I had an idea that I have been mulling over, and I do believe it would be useful. Would you like to visit the dissecting chamber with me?"

That was patently not the part of their previous conversation Feuilly had fixated on. "What?"

"Partly to see that our work is not evil or tawdry, but also for some anatomical drawing."

"To do your anatomical drawings for you?" he asked skeptically.

"No. My few drawing lessons have proved perfectly sufficient for my needs. I mean for you. It would be an opportunity. You said once that you needed nude models, I assume to practise anatomical drawing. The previous assistant in the dissecting rooms was more concerned with rules than with order, but I have found Friedmann very agreeable, and I believe once an introduction is made, he will let you in to do whatever work you like."

"I need models and you give me corpses." Feuilly sighed. "Well, they're naked and they're free, I'll give you that."

"And in both genders and some variety of age, which is very difficult to view if you cannot access the drawing academies."

"It's a kind offer."

He was about to decline when Combeferre interrupted. "Your people were buried properly, I assure you. And we bury our dead with full respect. A priest blesses each one, and they are interred at Père Lachaise with all honours. It does sound a bit ghoulish, I admit, but artists have been admitted before. Where do you think Géricault got his models for the dying?"

"I'll think about it." It was ghoulish, but it was easier to simply put off a decision rather than invent reasons to decline. Feuilly was uncertain what his reasons were, and he dared not lose Combeferre's respect by turning superstitious.

"I'll be at the medical school at 8 o'clock on Wednesday night. If you come, then I shall introduce you to Friedmann and supervise your work. If you do not, then I have work of my own to do."

Feuilly again agreed to think about it and managed to split off from Combeferre before additional awkward offers of assistance could be made. He could not possibly say yes, but he had some time to discover a proper reason to say no.

Yet Combeferre's offer sounded better when Meunier demanded Feuilly's attention and not at all privately informed him, "I'm told you're a pain in the arse and you need to know immediately that I have no intention of ever producing novelty cards, so you'll get no design work."

Feuilly instinctively went on the defensive. "I never intended to ask!" Duret must have enjoyed spreading truths about him that sounded very like lies, and if that was the case, it was probably time to beg. "I just want a job, monsieur. I am a very good colourist."

"I know. I was told that part, too. We're both clear on what you're doing here, right?"

"You need a colourist. I'm a colourist."

"Good. You can get started for the day."

"What was that about?" Fréry asked.

Feuilly sullenly answered, "I did some piecework for a gent who apparently gives very complete references." If Duret was going to spread insults, Feuilly was going to have to show him a thing or two by selling work to someone else. Which meant drawing corpses for practice. His self-respect demanded it.

The appointed evening was very cold, yet the medical students stood about in shirt sleeves whilst they smoked in the courtyard outside the medical school. They were as motley a crew as anyone Feuilly had grown up amongst: unkempt hair, beards in various stages, shabby in dress, and loud and boastful in their conversation. The key differences were that they were all of an age and their conversation was in good French. Combeferre in his natural state was far better kept. Whatever freak had taken him to a fancy barbershop had not come from rational comparison with his fellows. Feuilly saw him standing apart from the crowd, hatless like the rest but wearing his coat. "I'm glad you came. Let me warn you that it is as cold inside as it is out here. Our profession is not a comfortable one." He led Feuilly inside the third of the six low buildings abutting what may have been an old garden wall.

Feuilly had assumed from his name that this Friedmann must be a Jew, but he turned out to be a friendly, blond Swiss. "M. Feuilly is the art student we were discussing earlier," Combeferre explained upon introduction.

"Of course, of course. I'm to close up at ten tonight. The rules are simple: if you have not paid a fee, you may not touch the cadavers." Feuilly had thought that Combeferre was granting him a great favour, but M. Friedmann was as professional as if this visit were a daily occurrence requiring a standard set of regulations pertaining to art students. "Those who have bought one have labeled it with their names. I've nothing new and unclaimed this late, of course, but I do have several to prepare for burial among which you may take your time. Do not interrupt anyone at work. Well, I know Combeferre will look after you. If I can be of any assistance, please let me know."

"Do you have my gallbladder?" Combeferre asked.

"In a jar in the office labeled with your name."

Feuilly had expected a place more like the morgue, with the huge viewing window of the room sometimes too small for the corpses on full view. The morgue was a grim place, stinking with rot, darker than was often ideal, and populated by desperation and violence. He had never identified anyone, though he had gone often enough in his youth to see if a victim had succumbed to his injuries or shame or instead had slunk off to whatever backward pays he had come from. He had also earned a few sous in his time from dares by the apprentices whenever a floater had come in. Despite his more recent history, he still thought of the floaters first, their greenish, bloated bodies exuding horrific smells.

The dissecting chamber proved nothing like the morgue. It held twenty tables – twenty stone slabs inhabited by corpses, most covered with a shroud, a few others uncovered by the students still at work. The fireplace at the far end sent a horrific flickering light across the nearest tables and a skeleton hanging against the wall, but the students worked by lantern light, one holding the lamp whilst his fellows made their cuts. Every step was muffled by the thick layer of damp sawdust on the floor. The smell was not as bad as Feuilly had expected – no worse, really, than the slaughterhouses and far better than places he had laboured before – but there was a bone-chilling dampness that seemed the more piercing for the skeleton grinning in his corner. His bones were chilled through, too, he seemed to say gleefully.

Combeferre began lifting the shrouds from the bodies Friedmann had pointed out were ready for burial. He beckoned Feuilly over when he had found one he deemed suitable. "An elderly woman. Full bust and left arm are intact. I think she'll do to begin. If you are ready."

Feuilly was not ready. An elderly woman had died friendless, a pack of students had taken her half apart but not finished the job, and now he was delaying her funerary preparations for a half-baked notion that he ought to rub Duret's face in a true statement by not even proving him mistaken. "What becomes of them when you are done?"

Combeferre must have waived Friedmann over because it was the Swiss who replied. "I sew them up, then I sew them into their shrouds. A priest gave last rites at the hospital, of course. Each morning, I send a note to the undertaker with how many we have to take away, and he places the bodies in plain coffins and drives them to the cemetery for a fifth-class burial. It is all entirely proper."

He must give the same speech to everyone, Feuilly thought. A practised bureaucrat of exploitation. No, a Swiss no older than Combeferre and with the same abundance of good will. "Do you know what she died of?"

Combeferre checked something under the shroud. "Old age. She came to us from the hospice for the blind. Nothing catching, nothing shameful, nothing disgusting. Shall I turn down the blanket?"

The blanket was a rough canvas shroud and the bed was a stone slab from which her blood had drained away into the ruined sawdust below. But Feuilly gave a nod, and Combeferre revealed what he dared and tucked the canvas as tenderly under her good arm as if she was still a living patient.

Combeferre and Friedmann left him to his work, but Feuilly could not concentrate. She was probably a good old woman, and like him, she had no family to claim her in the end. He would end up on one of these slabs, one of these days. Who was there to claim him? Laforêt? Ada would never countenance it. The dissecting chambers weren't much better than the morgue. Yet he was here to work, so work he half-heartedly tried to do. She was thin, and her bones stood out under her wrinkled skin. That was probably good, he told himself. If he was to learn the shape of the body, he should start with the frame.

One group of students noisily put away their knives and saws, treating the borrowed tools with bourgeois disrespect. Their departure left two groups hard at work, and Combeferre and Friedmann silently bent over their private tasks. Feuilly had no idea what a gallbladder was, but if it had been kept in a jar, it was disgusting. He looked up to see Combeferre bent over a corpse with a basin balanced on its knees.

Back to the task at hand, Feuilly reminded himself. Her collarbone into her shoulder. Dimension. It has so much shape with nothing but shadow to cloak it. He moved the lantern slightly to change the position of a shadow. Collarbone into shoulder. The collarbone into the shoulder. Not her shoulder. The shoulder. This is how they must do things. Don't look at the face. He hadn't looked at the coachman's face, just his neck. It was the same thing. Just another body.

"Hey, artist," one of the students called to him as he warmed his hands at the fire. "This your first time?"

"First time what?" Feuilly replied defensively.

"First cadaver, I mean."

He turned back to his work. "I can't imagine a life so sheltered a person would first encounter a corpse in this place."

"Ha, you hear that, Charvet?" he called to one of his companions. "Even the artist thinks you're full of shit."

If Charvet made any sort of response to defend his honour, it was silent. The dead woman was more interesting, more useful, than young men so lucky as to have never seen death. This wasn't death, Feuilly was beginning to understand. It was sad because there was so little to it. He had known death. He had caused death. And his fear in accepting Combeferre's invitation was of seeing death again. But these were the dead, not death itself. Death was active, really. The life leaving the body. All he had here were shells. Even at the morgue, it felt more active. The shells were unidentified, decomposing. The final moment seemed to be prolonged. But here, all was over.

The neck was ropy. He had no other word for it. The muscles or sinews or whatever were in a person's neck stood out in this one, the thin, wrinkled skin not quite enough to hide all those supports. This was what Duret had meant, wasn't it? Here, with this one, one saw the body under the cloak of skin, as he had not seen the shoulder under the sleeve. Draw the sinews, then shade the skin. Draw the bones, then shade the hollow between. Understand how the unseen body must be under the sleeve, then draw the shoulder to hold up the puff.

The students had gone back to work, murmuring amongst themselves and poring over a book. For a moment, it was a good workshop, everyone at their assigned task, with low, companionable chatter to get through the day. Feuilly idly wondered if Combeferre was grooming Friedmann to join them. This felt the sort of shop where, in small groups, one might mention something and have it taken up with interest a few days later.

The companionable environment was broken, however, by the same group of students, who broke out into a loud stream of profanity, some hilariously bourgeois in its mildness and some properly profane. Feuilly look up at the outcry to see four disgusted and angry students, the one who had accosted him mocking them, and the other table staring at the uproar. A new stench began to spread through the room.

"What the hell did you mangle now?" one of the students at the quiet table asked the rowdies.

"Viscera," a companion explained. "Can't you follow directions?" he accused the other table.

Whatever the word meant, Feuilly found the smell more reminiscent of Montfaucon than of the morgue. Friedmann had hurried over to intervene.

"Now you know why you are to tie off both ends of the bowel before removal," he chastised the group. "I don't care what it smells like; you've no call to turn green over your own failures. A mistake like this is expected at la Pitié, not here."

"Lord, Charvet, if you're going to puke, go outside," the annoying one ordered the butt of his previous jokes.

"You'll all wash yourselves down, and the cadaver, and you'll help take up this mess," Friedmann ordered.

"We don't clean!" one of them complained.

"You do when I'm the prosector. You cannot leave your failures to others to rectify. There's clean sawdust in a bin outside."

Several students had taken out pocket handkerchiefs and were trying to recover from the smell of festering shit that was filling the room. It was the chemical factory all over again, so far as Feuilly was concerned, and he turned back to his work. He heard a voice take note of his coolness. "It's not that bad. The artist isn't even bothered."

Watching bourgeois students bungle at cleaning up a stinking mess of sawdust and shit was at first entertaining but quickly became depressing. How hard was it to drop some more sawdust on the mess, then shovel it up? He was trusted to do it with more dangerous spills at fourteen, and this class was so useless they could not invoke the common sense necessary to wield a shovel. Friedmann and one of the quiet students finally took over and sent the incompetent rowdies home. "Really," the volunteer complained when they had gone, "it's just like manuring my mother's flowerbeds."

"Shall I burn some gunpowder?"

"We're nearly done for the night. Four more snips and we can close. It isn't worth it."

Combeferre had let the entire spectacle go past, engrossed in whatever he was doing with his gallbladder and corpse. When the last table of students had cleared up and left, he put away his materials and joined Friedmann. "What I can't abide is how flippant they are in their incompetence," Friedmann complained to him as he finished sewing up one of his final corpses. "They do not own their mistakes or wish to make it up to their fellows. If I had the authority, I would refund their money, strike their names from inscription, and send them over to la Pitié where they belong."

"It was a mistake."

"For which their laundresses will pay most dearly."

Combeferre laughed, to Feuilly's surprise. "I do not envy their landlords, either. They will have consequences tonight, even if not at your hands."

"I shan't let them in late again. One of the other assistants will have to deal with them the next time."

"I can't thank you enough for the late hours."

Feuilly thought he saw the glint of a coin change hands. Was that for his admission? It was supposed to have been a favour, not another expense to add to the tally. Or was it for the gallbladder?

"You and any of your friends are welcome any time. And Ronat's crew. If they happen to end up higher on the next distribution list, I would not be surprised."

"No one would be offended if you told them that yourself."

"Some things are better as a rumour, or even just as a feeling."

"I'll let them know next time I see them."

It was colder outside than in, Feuilly thought, because there was no wind inside. He gulped in the frosty air, cleaner than the fetid remains of the failed dissection. Combeferre tried to apologise, but Feuilly cut him off. "I told you I worked for Lesage. And I've viewed drowned bodies at the morgue to win bets. I've smelt worse."

"The real trouble is the way it lingers, and the windows do not open. Truly, I do apologise. I had hoped that an evening session would be quiet and uneventful. Was it useful to you?"

"It's very stiff. One position. I'm not sure," he confessed.

"It is not a replacement for life drawing, having the body always at rest," Combeferre agreed. "But is it a good start? A useful framework?"

"Maybe. Could I try legs at some point?" he dared ask.

Even in the dark, he could feel Combeferre's relief that he had not been frightened off. "Legs and hips, I assume. I'll see what I can do."

Laforêt was less pleased with how he had spent the evening. Combeferre was right: the smell lingered. "Did you fall in the privy?"

"Combeferre took me to the dissecting rooms so I could do some drawing. Some students had an accident. I'll bathe, leave everything in the hall, and take it to the laundress tomorrow."

It was cold night for a cold bath, especially for going to bed with wet hair, but Feuilly felt he had passed some sort of trial. None of the students, obnoxious though they could be, had taken him for anything but an artist. He had set aside his fears and superstitions and joined them on their own terms to learn as they learn. He had been allowed to belong.