Memory of Flames (15 page)

Michel was amused to see how Margont, who was obviously a soldier - he had a scar on his left cheek and his assured manner spoke of success in dealing with dangerous situations - could not bear the enforced inactivity. Michel, on the other hand, was enjoying it. He was being paid to do nothing - what could be better?

‘You’re going to give us away, Boss,’ he told Margont with his most ironic smile.

‘Don’t call me “Boss”.’

The boss is the person who pays, Boss. If you don’t stop walking about and turning in circles, someone is going to notice us. You need to melt into the crowd - but you hate crowds.’

‘Because they don’t move fast enough. You’re right, though, I’ll try to calm down.’

Half an hour later he was less calm than ever. He was on the point of returning to the printer’s when the door opened. He hurriedly hid out of sight. Michel was aghast. ‘It’s a good thing your woman is still crying and can’t see anything much, otherwise she would be wondering who that man was, pressing himself against the wall and dirtying his overcoat just as she was coming out.’

‘You stay here, Michel.’

‘Happy to.’

Margont followed Catherine de Saltonges. He had not taken offence at the brat’s comments. He knew the child was right, and

tried to behave like someone out for a stroll like everyone else. He raised his collar and crammed his hat down on his head to make himself unrecognisable at first glance, hoping it would be assumed that he was feeling the cold. The crowd also helped to make him less noticeable.

Catherine de Saltonges was making her way along Boulevard Saint-Germain in a strange fashion. Sometimes she would walk quickly, at other times she was almost stationary. She was riven with indecision. She branched off towards the Seine, reached the embankment and went over to the river, moved closer to the river, then closer still ...

She’s going to throw herself in, thought Margont. What should he do? Save her and ruin all his efforts to be accepted by the Swords of the King? Call for help? Catherine de Saltonges leant over the green, glacial water. An invisible thread seemed to pull her backwards. Nevertheless she continued to walk along the embankment. It was as if she was walking along beside Death and finding it surprisingly soothing. Finally she turned back and went across the old Saint-Michel bridge, which now resembled a plucked peacock. In 1809, the sixty houses that had been built on the bridge two centuries before were all destroyed.

When she reached Tie de la Cite, she crossed the cathedral square and went into Notre-Dame. Margont went in as well and kept to one side so that he could slide discreetly from pillar to pillar. Although thousands of churches and abbeys had been devastated, pillaged, transformed into stables or stone quarries with readymade stones, or even into the Stock Exchange (the Paris Stock Exchange had been installed in the church of Petits-Peres from 1796 to 1807), Notre-Dame had been left relatively unscathed. It was in fact where Napoleon had been crowned emperor of the French on 2 December 1804.

Catherine de Saltonges’s steps resounded with surprising force, as if the burden she was carrying was weighing her down. She looked tiny amidst the vertiginously tall columns. In the gloom, the multicoloured windows gleamed, transmitting the light of God to man through their images.

She went into a chapel and knelt down - or rather fell to her knees - and joined her hands. She was motionless, so wrapped up in prayer that it seemed as if she had been changed into a pillar of salt. Christ looked down at her from his Cross with such compassion that he might have been about to rip his hands free from the nails to hold her in his arms.

Moments passed. When she eventually moved again it was to bow, as if she were about to prostrate herself. Then she rose and returned shakily through the cathedral. She stopped at the intersection of the nave and transept and looked up at the dome where there was a painted medallion representing the Virgin holding the baby Jesus in her arms, against a starry night background. Catherine de Saltonges repressed a sob.

But when she reached the light of the entrance, she began to walk firmly. She must not reveal her wounds and hurt to the world. Ever.

Margont hesitated. Instead of following her, he went back to the chapel. At the foot of the cross, in the middle of the lighted tapers, were three little objects, nestling next to each other. A folded woman’s handkerchief, a button, and a golden bracelet just big enough to fit the wrist of a baby ...

Margont stretched out his hand, feeling as if it were being devoured by imaginary insects born of his guilt. The button was gold-coloured metal, like the button from a uniform. But it had been beaten with a flat object. Not with a hammer, in which case it would have been cracked and crushed. The heel of a shoe? Unfortunately the motif was unrecognisable: perhaps a number or a letter, an emblem, or two symbols intertwined.

Margont decided to leave the two other items since they did not tell him anything he did not already know. The bracelet would soon be stolen. Catherine de Saltonges had not wanted to keep the jewel she had intended for the newborn. But she had not been able to bring herself to give it to someone else, or to have it melted down or to throw it away. Instead she had offered it up to Christ in the hope that he would authorise a mother come to pray to him to take it for the wrist of her child.

Margont knelt on one knee and scraped the edge of the button on the ground leaving a light tracing of gold dust. Then he slipped it into his pocket.

He went out and caught up with Catherine de Saltonges, who was walking slowly home. He reflected on the strangeness of the little family: a woman who had almost thrown herself into the Seine, a child dead before it was born and a man of whom nothing was known but this damaged button.

THE needles were lined up on the table along with the terracotta pots. Their geometrical neatness reassured him. The first needle had been soaked in curare forty-eight hours earlier, the next one thirty-six hours, then thirty, twenty-four, eighteen, twelve, nine, six, five, four, three, two and finally one hour previously. He picked up the oldest one and went over to the rabbit he had bought at Les Halles. The animal was trembling in its cage, trying to squeeze out through the bars ... The man injected it. The beast squealed and began to leap about its prison. The movement should have accelerated the circulation of blood and hastened the action of the poison. But the rabbit continued to thrash about and bang into the sides of the cage. Failure. After forty-eight hours the curare must have evaporated or mutated on contact with the air and was no longer effective. He had expected problems like that ... Little was known about curare, partly because it was so hard to come by and partly because there were so many variants.

He took the next needle and injected his victim again. Another failure. The animal’s movements, more erratic than ever, contrasted with the irreproachable order of the lined-up needles. A third attempt led to a third failure. Had the product deteriorated in the pots? A fourth injection, still no result. He started to lose his temper. He would have liked to wring the stupid rabbit’s neck, making its vertebrae crack so that it would be rendered as motionless as the other objects in the room. But he controlled his mounting rage. He was used to doing that.

The four-hour needle was effective: instantaneous death. So once the needle had been soaked in curare he would have to try to take action within four hours. That was not very much ... As a result he would have to have the pot with him, in case too much time elapsed and he had to impregnate the needle again. What did it matter? He had the poison, everything else was just a question of organisation and method.
 

MARGONT was pacing about his room. After the wide open spaces of the desert during the Egyptian campaign and the endless plains of Russia, he was suffocating in his chicken coop. Sometimes the interplay of his vivid imagination and the shadows contrived to change the colours in the small space. The walls took on a slight ochre hue and seemed to close in on him, crushing him, and transporting him back to his monastic cell at Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert. Lefine, stretched out on his straw mattress, seemed to belong to another world. Margont had insisted that he come back with him.

‘Can I go now, Chevalier?’ Lefine now asked sarcastically.

‘No, I need you.’

‘It’s not very nice of you to keep me here.’

‘There’s no more time for being nice. Or rather, we have to be nice in a different way.’

Lefine got up smartly, like a cat bounding to its feet as it scented

danger, and went over to his friend. Margont looked him in the eye.

‘You’re not obliged to agree to the plan I’m about to propose.’

‘I want to refuse already ...’

‘We’re in a race against time because of the military situation, and I fear we are being overtaken.’

‘Of course, Joseph’s limping devil ...’

‘If people realised that the war was at our doors, they would be out buying everything edible and the cost of food would soar! But prices haven’t gone up, not by a sou! All Paris is blind! Almost no one is preparing defences. Our ill-preparedness offers a wide margin of manoeuvre to determined monarchist groups ...’

Lefine reflected that here was a fantastic business opportunity. Perhaps he could buy chickens today and sell them for five times the price in two weeks?

‘What is your new plan that apparently involves me?’

‘As a result of all that they’ve been through, our royalists are adept at protecting themselves. I’m under no illusion - their acceptance of me is only partial. They’re prepared to listen to me, but they won’t reveal anything to me. Everything is partitioned; each member knows something that his neighbour doesn’t and vice versa. The group functions a little like a chest of drawers full of secrets where each person has access only to his own two drawers. Only Louis de Leaume has an overview of all the plans of the group — and I’m not convinced even he knows everything! I’ve been accepted onto the committee, but I haven’t been told a word about the plan to carry out a series of murders to destabilise the defence of Paris. I must admit I had hoped that they would be so keen to enlist my help that they would have told me more. Of course, they’re suspicious of me. But they’re also anxious to act. So, to sum up, the group are working on two plans. The first is to distribute propaganda to rouse part of Parisian society to support the King. The second is their campaign of murders - but fortunately some of their members are not yet in favour of that. But what if they have a third plan?’

‘What makes you think they might?’

‘Louis de Leaume and Jean-Baptiste de Chatel are both men of action and prone to violence, albeit for different reasons. They’re ultras, and the two plans I’ve just mentioned are probably not extreme enough for them.’

‘Isn’t killing people enough proof of the group’s intransigence?’ ‘No. Not for fanatics like them.’ Margont added, ‘I feel I understand those two, you know, because I share one of their defining characteristics - idealism! Of course, our ideals are not the same. Which means I feel both close to them and repelled by them. Nothing is more beautiful than idealism. But there is nothing worse either. If you consider history, idealism has resulted in great progress, in leaps forward and improvements ... but it has also brought untold carnage and other abominations. For these two men the two plans are not enough to quench their thirst for action.’

Lefine tried to gather his thoughts. Half an hour ago he had had a clear picture of the situation. Now he was confused. His mind was like a calm pond into which Margont had just thrown his hypotheses, stirring up mud and silt.

‘But Charles de Varencourt keeps us informed, and he likes his money, that fellow.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t know about it. Or maybe he’s frightened to speak, or else he’s waiting for the best moment to exact the highest price ... Or perhaps he’s playing both sides to make sure he doesn’t lose out, whoever wins.’

‘I don’t always understand what it is that you want me to do ...’ ‘When things aren’t moving fast enough, sometimes you have to administer a kick to the ant hill.’

‘And I suppose I’m the kick.’

‘The group is like a liquid bubbling on the fire of events. If we wait until the flame is big enough to show itself, it will be too late. So I propose to add an ingredient - that’s you! - to create an instability that will force them to lower their guard.’

‘Oh, I see, you want to play the alchemist! But do you know how many of those, by playing with sulphur in the hope of turning lead to gold, blew themselves up with their concotions?’

‘You’re not obliged to accept. If you agree, all you have to do is stay with me. I know that I’m regularly watched, so eventually they will spot you. If you don’t agree, you are free to leave now.’

Lefine was more torn than ever. His instinct for survival was shouting at him to make for the door. But there was another part of him ... He always worried that if confronted with a difficult situation, Margont would not escape without his help. And he did not want to lose his best friend. Because once the Napoleonic dream had been comprehensively shattered, once everything had collapsed and the Revolution was nothing but a distant memory that no one dare evoke, what would be left for him apart from Margont, Saber, Brémond and Piquebois? Whilst Margont thought in the abstract terms of universal ideals, Lefine thought in concrete terms of his own wellbeing. Margont was trying to look as if he were thinking through his hypotheses, but Lefine could see that all he was thinking about was whether or not his friend was going to accept. Although Margont had tried to produce elaborate justification, sometimes he was easy to read, even though he was unaware of it.