The Saint-Florentin Murders (4 page)

‘Your breath, yes, but no more lamb or Saint-Nicolas,’ said Semacgus. ‘The Faculty is strongly opposed to such things.’

Noblecourt assumed a contrite expression, while Nicolas’s cat, Mouchette, put her little head above the table and sniffed the tempting aromas.

‘An
haute-contre
,’ explained La Borde, ‘is a French tenor, the highest of all male voices, producing high notes from the chest, a powerful, resonant sound. To get back to our discussion, I am surprised to hear you criticise this choice for the role of Orpheus. It was a bow to the French habits which you love. To be replaced by what? you asked.’

‘Yes, by what? I stand my ground.’

‘Even with your gout,’ sighed Semacgus.

‘By a natural way of singing,’ resumed La Borde, ‘always guided by the truest, most sensitive expression, with the most gratifying melodies, an unparalleled variety in the turns and the greatest effects of harmony, employed equally for drama, pathos and grace. In a word, true tragedy in music, in the tradition of Euripides and Racine. In Gluck, I recognise a man of genius and taste, in whom nothing is weak or slapdash.’

‘Listening to both of you,’ remarked Semacgus, ‘I seem to recognise the same kind of discussion that so often arouses our host on the subject of new habits in cooking.’

‘How right you are,’ said La Borde. ‘Except that our friend supports the natural and the true in cooking, while defending the artificial and the shallow in music.’

‘I’m not admitting defeat,’ said Noblecourt. ‘I don’t need to justify my contradictions. I certainly maintain that meat should be
meat and taste like meat, but in art I’m delighted by fantasy. A well-organised fantasy that makes us dream.’

‘But the depth of the new style,’ said La Borde, ‘stimulates our imagination by combining the emotion of tragedy with the pleasure and delight of melody.’

‘I see nothing in it but faults and pretence. A kind of deceptive mishmash of meat and fish.’

‘You are talking just like the directors of our Royal Academy of Music, who ignore foreign art for fear it will bring down theirs.’

‘Peace, gentlemen,’ growled Semacgus. ‘I’m sure you’re both right, but you seem to take a perverse pleasure in forcing your arguments, with even more bad faith than the Président de Saujac.’

‘Oh,’ said Noblecourt, laughing, ‘that’s the whole pleasure of the thing. To maintain the unmaintainable, push your reasoning beyond the reasonable and put forward exaggerated arguments – all that is part of the joy of the debate.’

‘You admit it, then?’

‘I admit nothing. All I’m saying is that we should increase the controversy and put some bite into our presentation. The alternative would be like defending a dull thesis to the academics of the Sorbonne.’

Marion approached Louis, who was starting to doze off, and gave him a bag of fresh hazelnuts from a tree in the garden. Nicolas noticed his son’s tiredness.

‘My friends,’ he said, consulting his repeater watch, which sounded softly, ‘I think it’s time to bring this memorable evening to an end. Our host needs to rest after this royal feast and his excesses.’

‘So early?’ said Noblecourt. ‘Do you really want to interrupt this delightful interlude?’

‘Tomorrow has already sounded, and Louis’s mother is waiting for him. He is leaving for Juilly at dawn on the first mail coach.’

‘Before he leaves us, I want to give him a gift,’ said the procurator.

Monsieur de Noblecourt undid the second package, took out two small leather-bound volumes bearing his arms, and opened one with infinite care. Everyone present smiled, knowing his fanatical devotion to his books.

‘Here,’ he said with blissful solemnity, ‘are Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
translated by Abbé Banier, of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres. These fine works are decorated with frontispieces and illustrations. My dear Louis, I offer them to you with all my heart …’ He added in a lower voice, as if to himself, ‘The only gifts that matter are those from which one parts with sorrow and regret.’ Then, raising his voice again, ‘May these fables, with their gods made flesh, stimulate your imagination and instil in you a love of literature.

May reading them persuade you that what is elegant in Latin is not necessarily so in French, that each language has a tone, an order and a genius peculiar to it. Whenever you need to translate, remember to be simple, clear and correct, in order to render the author’s ideas precisely, omitting nothing of the delicacy and
elegance of his style. Everything should hold together, in fact. Just as, in life, one becomes hard and heartless by being too attached to the letter of a principle, so in translation, the tone can become dry and arid as soon as one tries to impose one’s own ideas in place of the author’s.’

‘Monsieur,’ said Louis, now completely awake again, ‘I don’t know what to say. I certainly wouldn’t like to deprive you of a treasure to which I know you are attached. My father has told me all about your great love of the books in your library.’

‘Not at all, it is a pleasure for me to offer them to you! Don’t worry, I still have Monsieur Burman’s large folio edition, published by Westeins and Smith in 1732, with splendid intaglio figures …’

‘Many thanks, Monsieur. These books will be dear to me, knowing they come from you.’

While the former procurator looked on approvingly, Louis opened one of the volumes and leafed through it carefully and respectfully.

‘Monsieur, what are these handwritten pages?’

He held out a piece of almond-green paper covered in small, densely packed handwriting.

‘Quite simply, translations made by yours truly of the Latin quotations in the preface. You will be able to check their accuracy.’

‘Louis,’ said Nicolas, ‘it is a true viaticum our friend is giving you. Follow his counsel. I have always benefited from it. He was my master when I first arrived in Paris, when I was only a little older than you are now.’

They all rose from the table. The farewells took a while longer.
Semacgus, who was returning to Vaugirard, would give Louis a lift and drop him at his mother’s in Rue du Bac. Nicolas made his final recommendations to his son. He was particularly insistent that the boy write him a letter, however short, every week. He opened his arms and Louis threw himself into them. Moved, Nicolas had the curious feeling that he was reliving a distant past, as if the Marquis de Ranreuil had reappeared in the person of his grandson.

The guests having dispersed, he went back to his quarters, overcome with a quiet melancholy. Life often had tricks up its sleeve, chance ruled, and fate often struck repeated blows. But this time it was different: his continuing disgrace was of little importance compared with an ambiguous destiny that offered him compensations which restored the balance. The discovery of Louis constituted the most important of these unexpected favours for which he had Providence to thank.

Nicolas’s first thought, after Mouchette had woken him as usual by breathing in his ear, was for his son, who was starting a new life that morning. He had explained to him why he would be absent when his coach left. He dreaded the emotion he would feel, which Antoinette’s own emotional state would merely accentuate. He found it hard to think of La Satin as Antoinette, even though that was the name by which he had known her in the early days of their liaison. But, anxious for the past to be forgotten and to offer her son a mother worthy of the unexpected future opening up to him, she had certainly turned over a new leaf.

When he left Rue Montmartre, the pedestrians and the carriages were shrouded in autumnal fog. Where should he begin the errands he had planned? First of all, he had to purchase an oil for removing stains from clothes. He knew only too well how difficult it would be for a boarder like Louis to clean his clothes, since only underwear was washed by the establishment. This oil was designed to remove stains from any kind of material, however delicate, without in any way altering its colour or sheen. In addition, it possessed the useful ability to destroy bugs and their eggs, moths and other eaters of wool. It was in Rue de Conti in Versailles that he had discovered the inventor of this precious compound. The success of the formula had encouraged the man to start selling his product in Paris, at a haberdasher’s shop in the Grande-Cour des Quinze-Vingts.
7
Nicolas knew that each bottle was wrapped in an explanatory note which would enlighten his son as to the best way to use this oil.

He also wanted to go to Madame Peloise’s shop opposite the Comédie-Française, which stocked a large selection of imitation gemstones of various different colours. He would choose one, have his son’s initials engraved on it, and have it mounted as a seal. The idea briefly crossed his mind of adding the Ranreuil arms, to link the grandson to the grandfather in a kind of continuation of the line. Some secret instinct made him hesitate, as if he feared that this initiative might cause inconveniences for young Le Floch. He stopped for a moment to wonder about his decision. Why had both he and his father found themselves in the situation of having illegitimate sons? A mere coincidence or a kind of fatal repetition, the reason for which escaped him? Last but not least, he thought he might take a stroll around the
second-hand
bookstalls, with a view to unearthing a few books to be added to the package he would soon be sending Louis at the school in Juilly.

He noted with satisfaction that all his shopping would take him to the same district, Rue Saint-Honoré and the environs of the Louvre. After a bracing walk, he began his rounds with Madame Peloise, who cleverly succeeded in making him spend much more than he had anticipated. An antique intaglio showing a Roman profile, mounted on a silver shaft, particularly attracted him and replaced his initial choice of a seal with initials. It was both more elegant and less banal, more discreet, too, and hard to imitate. From there, he proceeded to the shop selling the stain remover, where he was assured that the desired quantity of the product could be delivered to Juilly in the name of Louis Le Floch, which greatly simplified matters.

He left the maze of old streets around the Quinze-Vingts and walked to the galleries of the Louvre. He noted with regret that the former royal palace was increasingly disfigured by all kinds of excrescences. The colonnade had recently been cleared, and already a multitude of second-hand clothes dealers were insulting it with displays of rags and tatters. Nicolas also deplored the fact that the presence of the academies entailed lodging some of their members here, to the detriment of the surroundings. Everywhere, even within the precincts of the monument, frame houses had sprung up, adorned with shapeless staircases that detracted from the majesty of the complex. He recalled a conversation between Monsieur de La Borde and the Marquis de Marigny, the brother of Madame de Pompadour and
superintendent
of buildings, about the noble plan to restore the palace
to its former splendour. He had quoted Voltaire’s complaint at seeing the Louvre, ‘a monument to the greatness of Louis XIV, the zeal of Colbert and the genius of Perrault, hidden by buildings of the Goths and the Vandals’.

A multitude of stalls had taken root in the chinks of the vast edifice. Among them were those selling paintings and engravings. Fakes were more frequent here than genuine works, and the Lieutenancy General of Police was determined to settle a number of serious cases in which rich foreigners, victims of such swindles, had involved their embassies. In 1772, Nicolas had managed to unmask a group of forgers, which had been a salutary warning to the rest of the crooks.

He was well known to the merchants – both honest and dishonest – and his arrival always provoked a shudder of fear. Taking advantage of the presence of enlightened connoisseurs, some second-hand book dealers had chosen to join the sellers of prints and paintings, and offered customers a wide range, from the less good to, occasionally, the best. Nicolas recalled a few happy discoveries, like that of an original edition of François-Pierre de la Varenne’s
Le Pâtissier Français
. He had presented this small red morocco-bound duodecimo volume, published in Amsterdam in 1655 by Louys and Daniel Elzevir, as a gift to Monsieur de Noblecourt, who had almost swooned at the sight of it. The dealers would visit the houses of the recently deceased, and buy whole libraries from the grieving families. Unfortunately, there was nothing now that was not known about, and rare books had gradually become impossible to find. The few there were would be immediately spotted by scouts who, in the know, no longer offered four sous for treasures which were worth a thousand times
as much. Here and there, you also came across banned or condemned books, handled conspiratorially behind the stalls, in the hope of concealing them from the inquisitive glances of the police spies who frequented the place and were on the lookout for anyone bringing illicit brochures to sell or seeking out copies of such lampoons as had escaped the bonfire.

On one of the stalls, Nicolas discovered a Plautus, a Terence, the complete works of Racine and a Lesage, all of which ought to give great pleasure to a schoolboy. He found the sight of the other book lovers amusing, spellbound as they were by the range on offer. Much to the chagrin of the bookseller, who was always afraid that some work of value might be stolen, they would spend hours looking through the books and searching in the crates, often without buying anything in the end.

Absorbed in the account of a journey to the West Indies, Nicolas suddenly felt a hand tugging at one of his coat buttons. Turning, he recognised the humble, contrite face of one of the officers who worked for the Lieutenant General of Police in Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin. The man was not alone: a second henchman, whom Nicolas did not recall having seen before, stood watching.

‘Commissioner,’ said the first man, ‘you must follow us.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We have orders to take you to Monsieur Lenoir immediately.’