The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  “Charles Christiani,” Rita repeated, without any reluctance. The name, pronounced by her beautiful brazen voice, sounded in all its crystalline musicality, simultaneously pompous, ethereal and quasi-evangelical.

  “I couldn’t say it like that!” Geneviève admitted. “It’s easy to see that you’re Corsican, and in love.”

  “Shh! Not that word! Not yet!”

  “I’ve added the address. What next?”

  “Received and transmitted telegram. Nothing new. Any decision deferred. Our kindest regards. Le Tourneur.”

  “That’s done. It’s simple and in good taste. With those two lines in my handwriting, anyone could have me hanged high and short by our amiable father! Now, of course, I have to go and send it?”

  “Of course. In fact…it’s late.”

  “What a job!” lamented Madame le Tourneur, delightfully excited. She put a red beret over her pale blonde hair and went out of her room, gently pushing her friend in front of her. “Farewell, Juliet,” she said. “Ours is the nightingale, the lark and the silken ladder with a little balcony at the end!”

  They parted in the corridor, to which dusk was adding its darkness to the customary gloom.

  “It will go this evening, won’t it?” said Geneviève to the young woman at the counter, from whom she was separated by a grille.

  “Yes, Madame; we’ll send it immediately.”

  “Thank you.”

  With a gracious smile that took its time to fade away, she pivoted unhurriedly, in the manner of one of those nonchalant wisps of vapor that float above marshes in the moonlight.

  On the threshold of the post office, Luc de Certeuil, who was coming in with letters in his hand, paused in order to greet her.

  “Behold the conqueror!” she said, merrily, as she passed by.

  “Excuse me,” he said, very amiably. “I dread that my letters might miss the post.” And he vanished into the office.

  The man doesn’t seem to have anything against me, Geneviève thought. After all, it’s quite probable that he has no suspicion. Even so, we must be jolly careful about taking chances. If he’d arrived a few minutes earlier, he’d have been able to dart a covert glance at my telegram—and it would only have required a little ill luck for the receptionist to repeat the name of the addressee: “Charles Chris…Christiani? Is that right, Madame?” A charming soirée! My god, I’m very grateful to have been spared that aria, as the nice people say. Rita’s amours must be blessed, since a fortunate destiny is favoring them.

  While Madame Le Tourneur was saying all that to herself, however, confiding her tranquil steps to the slope of the terrain, Luc de Certeuil, standing at the post-office counter, was watching her from a distance. He had plenty of time to do so.

  “How can I help you, Monsieur?” the young receptionist had asked him.

  “Two registered letters.”

  “They won’t go until tomorrow morning, by the first post. Would you permit me to attend to this telegram; I’m on my own at present…”

  “Yes, of course—since it’s too late for my letters.”

  At the back of the room, the tap tap of the Morse apparatus measured out the electrical transmission of the telegram.

  Slowly, Madame Le Tourneur went down the hill. In the evening light, her red beret took on an extremely rare color against the whiteness of the walls that she was moving alongside. Luc de Certeuil did not appear to be interested in Geneviève, and if she had been able to see him she would have been fully reassured. Perhaps she might even have been shocked by an indifference that was hardly flattering and surpassed her wishes. It was not the woman he was looking at mechanically, but the red dot made by her beret as it was struck by the rays of the setting sun, blazing like a piece of stained glass amid the whiteness of its surroundings. His absent eyes were not those of a man who sees.

  The calm of the evening was profound. There was nothing to be heard in the vicinity but confused and intermittent voices and the dry clicking of the telegraph-operator.

  “I’m all yours, Monsieur,” said the receptionist. She stuck the sheet of paper bearing the text on a long spike, and hurried to the counter. “Monsieur! Monsieur!”

  “Ah! Yes, here! Two letters and two forms.”

  He seemed to be intensely absorbed. He was looking straight ahead, with his eyelids creased, etching two unequal slits were in his cheeks; his mouth was compressed on one side, which gave him a rather villainous expression.

  “Three francs, Monsieur…Monsieur: three francs.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle; I was distracted. I was distracted because I’ve thought of a reform, the necessity of which has just occurred to me—a reform in the operation of your services.”

  “Really?” The young woman, as she wrote out the receipt, looked at him kindly, not to say affectionately. He was known to be an intrepid sportsman and telegrams had been sent informing the newspapers in the region and in Paris of his victory.

  “I’m told,” he said, “that nothing is easier that to read a telegram by sound. Is it true that by listening to the noise of an apparatus, one can, with practice, understand the words that it is striking?”

  “It’s as easy as transmitting them, Monsieur.”

  “And yet, Mademoiselle, you don’t have the right, as a functionary, to communicate the text of a telegram that a citizen has confided to you to anyone else?”

  “Oh no!”

  “Then why does the administration of the Telegraph Service permit telegrams to be transmitted by a loud series of clicks, Mademoiselle, in a public office, open to all comers? Suppose I were to give you a confidential dispatch, and, while you were sending it, there happened to be someone here very well acquainted with the Morse alphabet who was interested in knowing what I had had sent…?”

  “My God, Monsieur, you’re right…”

  “Well, there you are!” said Luc, solemnly. “That’s a necessary reform. Ah, there are reforms to be made in that respect!” Satisfied with the effect he had produced, he addressed a nice smile to the young woman, who visibly took a pleasant pride therein. “I might even mention it to the minister,” he concluded, “if the opportunity arises.”

  And he wrote in his notebook, following a sporting reference:

  Monsieur Charles Christiani,

  Château de Silaz, via Ruffieux (Savoy)

  Received and transmitted telegram. Nothing new. Any decision deferred. Our kindest regards. Le Tourneur.

  XI. The Old Crime

  In spite of the assurance that “any decision” had been “deferred,” Charles Christiani continued to think that it was necessary to get to work quickly. In the matter of an engagement, the course of events cannot be maintained in suspense for very long, and Luc de Certeuil was not a man to let himself be played along. A resolution, one way or the other, was bound to be reached as soon as possible. The plan was to bring forward, as far as he could, the date at which, in the presence of witnesses and all precautions having been taken, he could proceed to the retrovision of César’s murder.

  That extraordinary séance could only take place in Paris. It was there that all the desirable commodities, all the advice and the maximum number of guarantees could be found. However, Charles restrained himself from taking precipitate action and fixed his departure for two days hence. In fact, he wanted to take with him everything that might be useful to his efforts—not only the most precious plate but the others, Lami’s water-color, the secret manuscript, the corsair’s memoirs and correspondence, and everyone other document, written or otherwise, relating to César. With that plan in mind he undertook to visit every room in the château from top to bottom, to search the furniture, and carefully to examine all the surfaces that might be plates of luminite clandestinely deposited there by César.

  That is why he checked all the dark panels, wainscots, cupboard doors and dressers, desirous of verifying whether they might be plates that light had not yet traversed. He also took down all the glazed pictures to make s
ure that the painted or engraved images that were visible within were not images of yesteryear. It even occurred to him, as he took an old Temptation of Saint Anthony out of its frame, to reflect that, if the engraving had been taken out after once having spent time behind its plate, it would have continued to be visible for years when it was no longer there—and now, behind the glass, he would no longer find anything, even though the glass still displayed the engraving.

  No mirror, glass or panel was suspect. In any case, if César had placed other plates of luminite elsewhere, his secret manuscript would probably have mentioned them. And besides, although luminite that was still dark could easily pass unnoticed, the same was not true of luminite that had begun to emit its light. The latter would have been revealed before Charles had become involved—there could be no doubt of that, especially if one considered that, entirely naturally, the substance sometimes showed daylight scenes, or night-time scenes well-lit by lamps, chandeliers, moonlight or stars, in pitch darkness. It was quite by chance that the mornings and evenings of 1829 displayed by the panes of the high window had coincided so exactly with mornings and evenings of 1929; otherwise, old Chalude and Péronne would have been able to see the nocturnal phantom of César moving his feeble light behind a near-dark window in the middle of the day, and by night, the little top room would have seemed to them to be bathed in inexplicable sunlight.

  With the intelligent aid of the chauffeur Julien, these checking operations were conducted swiftly. The next day was not yet complete when the garaged automobile already contained, in tightly-wrapped packages, the principal elements of a counter-enquiry unprecedented in human memory. Charles would find the other elements in Paris, to wit: everything of César’s conserved in the Rue de Tournon; the records of the Ortofieri case filed at the Palais de Justice, which Charles had already consulted; the 27 boxes of records of the Fieschi case in the National Archives, of which it would doubtless be important to make an accessory study; and, finally, certain documents that Rita Ortofieri would surely not refuse to lend him, concerning her ancestor.

  The day after, very early, Charles said his goodbyes to the two servants. The dawn was grey and wan. The sky hung down in ragged clouds on the dull and ochreous mountains. The damp roofs glistened bleakly. The road was shiny, littered with puddles of water. A winy odor emerged from the press, and a little four-wheeled cart laden with barrels, drawn by two oxen, emerged therefrom at a rapid pace with a noise of grinding wheels and creaking axles.

  “Thank you very much, Monsieur Charles,” said Claude.

  “Oh, yes, thank you!” added Péronne, gratefully.

  “Do you still believe in the sarvant?” Charles asked.

  Claude, however, preferred another topic of conversation. “When shall we see you again, Monsieur Charles?”

  He leaned out of the car widow, his hat in his hand. “I don’t know. In the spring, at Easter…”

  Easter! Between now and then, his destiny would be settled. How would he feel when he saw this sad rainy landscape, which was scented today by moist grass, dead leaves and new wine, when the chestnuts and lilacs were in flower? Would he be happy or unhappy?

  “Come on, Julien, let’s get going! Au revoir, Péronne, Claude!”

  The polished, gleaming car, adorned by a thousand sparkles and as many reflections, moved off smoothly as the brake was released. Sprays of water sprang forth as the enormous tires moved through the cart-ruts.

  Until Easter! Enigma! Mystery of the future!

  And yet, thought Charles, everything is written. I don’t know how, but what is happening now is written, represented in advance, as if in a fantastic plate—a plate impossible to conceive in the physical domain! And he tried to imagine what César’s state of mind had been when he had left Silaz in a carriage a century before, to reach Paris ten days later, with his birds and his monkeys: Paris, where the assassin was lying in ambush with his pistol, at the future turning-point of July 28, 1835.

  César would certainly have been more surprised to see his descendant moving along the roads of Savoy at 100 kph than Charles had been to see his ancestor climbing into a carriage at the end of a 100-year-old avenue!

  Charles made sure that the movement of the car could not do any harm to the luminite plates. The fear of an accident, of a breakage, began to haunt him. He wondered whether there was a treasure in the world more precious than the sealed packet in which, by the effect of a natural prodigy—as rare, now, as the presence on Earth of one of those creatures whose ancient species is almost extinct—a century-old scene was on the move, retained in the same way that millenary ice sometimes retains entire mammoths intact, and prehistoric resins, gums and ambers similarly retain insects that seem to be still alive and merely sleeping. A bloody scene: a scene on which his happiness or distress depended, according to the face of the murderer who would appear in César’s study.

  Unless the murderer had concealed himself in order to shoot…

  Unless things happened in a way that he had not been able to imagine—something absolutely unforeseeable, which would reduce all hopes of clarification to nothing!

  And to think that, in order to find out, he had only to take hold of that plate, and dissociate its leaves! A mistake! Charles had a very imperfect memory of the features of Fabius Ortofieri—the man that he had to recognize, or not.

  I’ve only ever seen him, he thought…

  “I’ve only ever seen him, and not recently, in a poor portrait,” Charles Christiani repeated, the following afternoon, to Bertrand Valois. “It was a mediocre lithograph that was hawked around at the time of the crime, of which the Ortofieri family bought up almost all of the prints—as, I presume, the author hoped!”

  Bertrand Valois, with a bright gleam in his eyes and sniffing the air with his crafty nose, came to a halt in front of his future brother-in-law—for he had been striding back and forth in the latter’s room in the Rue de Tournon. “Mademoiselle Ortofieri will entrust us with other portraits, won’t she? That’s the basis of our enterprise.”

  “I’m sure that she will do everything I ask of her.”

  The young dramatist had come to dine with the Christianis in response to a telephone call from Charles. Madame Christiani had not yet been put in the picture with respect to her son’s plans; she did not know anything at all about his discovery and did not even bother to ask why Charles had called from Silaz asking for his friend’s help. Colomba, however, had known the essentials since the morning of her brother’s arrival, and Bertrand had just heard Charles’s story in her presence, to which he had listened as the Sultan Schariar must have nourished himself on the stories of Scheherazade. He was dazzled, charmed, carried away by enthusiasm and impatient to act.

  The packets were there, at the bottom of a vast open cupboard, which could be closed at the slightest alarm. And in that darkness, which they illuminated with a fabulous light, the unwrapped plates were pierced by the semblances of windows: one overlooking the grounds of Silaz, one into the little to room and the third, the inestimable third, into César’s study in the Boulevard du Temple—and in that plate, César himself was smoking his pipe at his window, with his back turned, watching the pedestrians, the carriages and the crowds of spring 1833.

  They saw him turn round, with a smile, at the entrance of a young woman who came into the study through the drawing-room door and began to speak to him. She was very pretty, no more than seventeen or eighteen years old, coquettishly clad in a printed cotton dress with flounced sleeves, with a black collar and a little apron, and a white underskirt. Her long shiny hair had been put up, in plaits rounded into large wings. She wore light shoes whose ribbons were wound around her slender ankles.

  “Who is she?” asked Bertrand. “She’s not a visitor.”

  “She’s charming,” said Colomba. “Who can she be, Charles? She seems very free-and-easy, for a servant…”

  “She’s not a relative, though,” Charles replied. “At that time, César had no young woman in his imme
diate family. Why, of course—that’s it! It’s Henriette Delille!”

  “Who’s Henriette Delille?” asked Bertrand.

  “An orphan that César took in at the end of 1832, if I remember rightly. She was the daughter of one of his former lieutenants, who had asked him to look after the girl before dying, and whose guardian he became. César detested domestics. Henriette supervised his household until the end. She looks eighteen, but I think that in 1833 she was only 16. She’s very pretty!”

  “Oho! Might our César have had some inclination toward his ward?”

  “His memoirs, at any rate, offer no grounds for thinking so. He only left her a modest sum of money in his will. I don’t know what became of her after her guardian’s death. She was the one who discovered the corpse on the evening of July 28, 1835. Her deposition is in the files of the Ortofieri case.”

  “Could you give me a brief account the case?” Bertrand asked.

  “Nothing simpler. In my bookcase, I have all the notes I took in the past, which summarize the examination. Give me two minutes—I’ll be back.”

  Charles’s study was next door to his bedroom. The two rooms, overlooking the gardens and the apse of the church of Saint-Sulpice, were immersed in the silence of a small provincial town. A worker could not have wished for a quieter retreat in the heart of Paris.

  While Charles was rummaging through his archives, Bertrand and Colomba, holding hands, continued watching old César conversing with his ward.

  He looked at her very tenderly, but also very paternally, and little Henriette, cheerfully respectful, seemed neither to fear him nor to be treating him in a familiar manner. Their moving lips were visible, as well as the gestures and expressions accompanying their speech—and, rather strikingly, there was an astonishing characteristic quality in their movements and the play of their features, the form of which was unexpected: something foreign, not of our country or our era. It was evident that they sometimes pronounced words that have since fallen into disuse, and gave an accent to others that would make us smile.