The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  Louis-Philippe bowed deeply, holding tight to his large bicorn hat with white plumes and a tricolor cockade, set sideways. He was wearing the uniform of a general of the National Guard, with a blue coat embroidered in silver, the great sash of the Légion d’Honneur, silver epaulettes and white trousers that stood out against the crimson velvet of his saddle. The Ling was mounted on Le Régent, a magnificent dappled grey horse, which lifted his feet as he moved forward, prancing. The bridle was golden, with cockades at the front; the saddle-holsters and the saddle-cloth mingled gold and red.

  Riding in single file to the monarch’s left were Brigadier-General the Duc d’Orléans and the Duc de Nemours; to his right was the Prince de Joinville, uniformed as a naval captain, making his first public appearance.26

  Colonel Rieussec, saluting with his sword, had come to place himself to the right of the King. The National Guardsmen brandished their rifles, cheering their sovereign. An officer—the Comte de Laborde—moved along their ranks to collect petitions. Policemen in plain clothes moved along, level with Louis-Philippe.

  Behind the King and the Princes, the imposing mounted procession began to appear: the maréchals and the generals decked out in gold braid, two ministers in no less brilliant coats, one of whom was Monsieur de Broglie and the other—very short, hoisted up on a gigantic horse and crushed beneath the weight of his plumed hat—Monsieur Thiers, with his hooked nose and spectacles.

  “Ah!” Charles exclaimed, involuntarily.

  César, at his window, had turned abruptly to the interior of the room, his face contracted in an expression of great surprise and alarm. He took three steps toward the doors. The one to the antechamber opened violently. César stopped in front of that door, displaying his back. A tall man with a dark complexion, sporting side-whiskers, was standing on the threshold of the room, with a top-hat on his head, his frock-coat buttoned all the way up to his chin, and a July ribbon knotted on his breast. His gaze went immediately to the window. He was panting, as if he had climbed the stairs in haste. He was seen to pronounce a few brief words, while standing very straight. His face was set hard, his eyes gleaming.

  César, seen from behind, made a vague gesture that might have signified many vehement things: refusal, protest or surprise. His raised arms were all that could be seen of his reaction, and if he answered the other’s remarks in any fashion, no one could tell.

  The man had extended his arms with lightning speed. A short-barreled pistol elongated his arm like a monstrous index-finger.

  There was a flash. César fell slowly backwards, his arms extended, face upwards, without any convulsion—but his murderer launched himself impetuously toward the window, for…

  For, at the very instant when the pistol-shot had been fired, another instantaneous flash had sprung forth from behind the Venetian blind on the third floor of the red house. Thick smoke rose up in front of the accursed window, and the brilliant general staff, ripped apart by the discharge of the infernal machine, was hollowed out obliquely by a swathe in which stricken horses and officers thrown to the ground, lying dead or writhing, wounded, in pools of blood.

  In front, the King, pushing down his cocked hat, spurred his horse, which flinched, a bloodstain on its withers, Louis-Philippe passed his white-gloved hand over his forehead as if he were surprised not to bring it back soiled with blood.

  The Princes were striking Le Régent with the flats of their swords, to force him to move forward. The Prince of Joinville’s mount recoiled, though, its hocks giving way, its stifle torn open by a projectile. The maréchals and the generals were making a bloody gilded heap on the ground.

  Maréchal Mortier was dead; Colonel Rieussec was dead; General Heymès, whose nose had been blown away, got up with his frightful mask. A horse bolted in the direction of the Château-d’Eau, mounted by a swaying cadaver. And the furrow of death continued among the National Guard and the crowd beneath the elms, where the carnage was swept away by a human hurricane, the pressure of frightened people in flight.

  César’s murderer, stepping over the corpse of his victim, considered all that momentarily, with his fists clenched on the window-sill. His face, which had gone grey, expressed an indescribable amazement—and immediately, he looked in bewilderment at the telescope on its stand, tapped it mechanically, then, suddenly coming to a decision, ran out, carefully closing the door behind him.

  The smoke of the pistol-shot dissipated slowly, drifting toward the window, where it vanished.

  “Ortofieri, wasn’t it?” Charles asked his neighbors.

  “That’s certain,” said Luc, firmly.

  “I don’t think it leaps to the eyes,” said Bertrand. “All the citizens of 1835 have a period air about them that makes them curiously similar. Perhaps it was Fabius Ortofieri. I wouldn’t swear to it.”

  “You can be reassured, at any rate” said Charles, shaking his hand. “It wasn’t the man with the cane.”

  “Ah! That’s certain! It’s very good of you to have thought of it.”

  These words were exchanged rapidly, in low voices. The historic scene was coming to a conclusion in an atrocious disorder that was in complete contract to the solemn calm of the study in which César was lying dead, his eyes staring and his arms outstretched, almost exactly as Lami’s water-color depicted him.

  The King had succeeded in taking his horse forward. He addressed the national guardsmen, waving his hat, with signs of presence and amity, accompanied with comments that were obviously heated. The tumult reached its height.

  While Louis-Philippe, taking the rest of his escort with him, set off ahead—still followed by more than 100 plumed officers followed by grooms and pikemen—the crowd flooding over the site of the outrage and around the massacre trampled a quantity of objects, vestiges of the panic: umbrellas, headscarves, shawls, rifles, shakos and bearskin hats. Civilians and military personnel lifted up the dead and the wounded, who were carried away on improvised stretchers. The dead horses were dragged to one side. The horrible task was carried out in consternation. White-faced women without hats went past at a slow pace, sustained by sympathetic people.

  There had, however, from the very outset, been a stampede toward the red house; policemen and sergents de ville, brandishing their clubs and swords, had raced to do their duty. A mob suddenly gathered at the door of the Estaminet Rustique, in the house next to Fieschi’s. It was there, in the rear courtyard, that the assassin had just been arrested.

  Having remained on the spot, little Monsieur Thiers, circled by a large white belt, was gesticulating, giving orders, shouting to officers, soldiers and policemen. He leapt about, stamped his feet, went to the right and the left, his white casimir trousers spattered with Maréchal Mortier’s blood. A livid gentleman, whom Colas Dunormand identified as the Prefect of Police, Gisquet, spoke to him from time to time, looking utterly downcast.

  “I know what he’s saying,” said Colas-Dunormand. “It’s History! He’s repeating: ‘But they told me: level with the Ambigu!’”

  “Yes,” Charles agreed. “Always that confusion.”

  The attention of the audience relaxed slightly. The drama was played out. The moment of horror had passed.

  It had not given the certain result on which Charles had been counting. They had looked César’s murder full in the face, and it was impossible to be sure that it was Fabius Ortofieri. The man might have been the one whose portraits were there, but there was no certainty, because the portraits were not sufficiently similar and the man did not resemble any of them closely enough.

  Charles, bitterly disappointed, clung to the hope that the comparison of cinematographic images with the portraits of Fabius might produce a better result. By proceeding thus, they would find themselves in infinitely preferable conditions. They could operate calmly and methodically, instead of being troubled by the emotion of the murder. No matter! The disappointment was considerable, and Charles felt heart-broken at only being able to convey such indecision to Geneviève Le Tourneur.


  He did it, though, excusing himself to make a quick telephone call—because the day of July 28, 1835 continued to run by, and he had to track all its phases, not only by virtue of his duty as a historian, but also because César’s murderer might return to the scene of his crime.

  Guessing that Rita was standing beside Geneviève, listening to his words, he attached to the probable sequel of the operation an optimism that he scarcely felt.

  “But who might it be if it wasn’t Fabius,” asked Geneviève, “since the man with the cane is now out of the picture?”

  Of course! The very same thought had set a chill in Charles’s heart. To doubt that it was Fabius was not reasonable. “We shall see,” he replied, however. “Perhaps the luminite hasn’t said its final word.”

  “Oh!” said Geneviève. “We’re in distress.”

  “No!” he exclaimed. “I beg you. While there still remains a small chance, we must cling to it. Au revoir!”

  “Yes,” said another voice, feebly. Grave and captivating, it caused him to shiver. “Au revoir!”

  “Rita!” he murmured. “Rita!” But all he heard was someone gently hanging up the telephone.

  When he went back into the studio, things were following their course. The audience was still passionately determined not to miss anything of the retrospective spectacle. The startling image of Paris in 1835 was still on its easel, with another audience at its windows, which had lost its joyful sparkle now, and down below, a crowd that had undergone a metamorphosis, struck by slowness and gravity, the sinister clearance of the causeway covered with debris and blood, the arrival of carriages into which officers covered with gilt and bandages were climbing painfully.

  César’s corpse inhabited the solitude of the study. Flies were invading the room.

  A quarter of an hour later, Louis-Philippe and his escort, coming back from the Place de la Bastille, passed by in the opposite direction, this time looking down at the troops on the right. There was then an immediate reflux in the direction of the roadway, and the image displayed the mute agitation of passionately heated acclamations.

  The octagonal clock marked 1 p.m. when the regiments formed up to march away. At the same time, a closed carriage brought Fieschi, who was to be interrogated in the very room of the infernal machine. A jostling crowd of curiosity-seekers, hurrying from both directions, assailed his re-entry to the scene of the crime. It was a wreck, a man half-dead, that they were carrying. Soon, through the slats of the sideways-displaced Venetian blind, they glimpsed moving forms.

  Colomba, who had returned, fortified by a cordial, engaged in a whispered conversation with Charles and Bertrand. Luc de Certeuil and Colas-Dunormand exchanged a few words. Madame Christiani supervised the provisioning of a large table that she had set up at the side of the studio, which constituted a buffet furnished with simple but succulent comestibles, to which everyone felt disposed to do honor—for it was mid-day by the clocks of the present day and the morning had been as long as it had been exciting.

  The troops, in the meantime, filed from right to left, section by section, from the Bastille toward the Place Vendôme. The National Guardsmen and the foot-soldiers of the line, the sharpshooters and the sappers were moving along the contraflow on the far side of the road, in spite of which, as they came abreast of the field of the massacre, the left-hand section of their ranks had to be compressed in order to avoid marching through the bloody horror All of them, passing by with the slowness that was then standard, looked hither and yon and broke alignment, intrigued and alarmed, slowing down even further in order to see better.

  The last of them disappeared. The façades were depopulated, no longer serving as grandstands.

  In César’s study, the flies were circling above the body, and the hands of the clock continued to mark the hours of the day.

  Charles was hoping for some unexpected entry into the mortuary room, but the door of the antechamber only opened later, when the anticipated moment of Henriette Delille’s return arrived.

  She entered like a gust of wind, her face contracted by emotion, after having seen the funereal spectacle that was still displayed on the boulevard, perhaps including the stretchers emerging from the Jardin Turc, in which a sort of field-hospital had been installed. Immediately, her eyes went to the cadaver and filled with horror. Tottering, with one hand on her forehead and the other clawing at her mouth, which seemed to release a scream—a long scream of abomination—she moved a little closer to the corpse and leaned over from a distance, in dread and repulsion.

  Being unable to bear any more, however, she turned round and went out in a hurry to call for help, as she was subsequently to say in the deposition she made in the presence of Commissaire Dyonnet.

  “She’ll cry for help on the stairway,” Charles recalled, “and it’s then that Monsieur Tripe will hear her.”

  Less than a minute later, in fact, Henriette Delille reappeared, halted, leaned on the door-frame, tragically, and beckoned someone to come in.

  Monsieur Tripe—since it had to be him—advanced slowly.

  “My God!” cried Colomba—to which Bertrand supplied a duller, but also more blasphemous, echo.

  “That’s funny,” said Charles.

  What was funny was that the aforementioned Tripe was by no means, as they had imagined, an unknown man—a banal corpulent passer-by, blowing out the rosy cheeks of some pork-butcher. Not at all. Monsieur Tripe, a slender young man tightly laced-up in his black coat, with his cane under his arm and his up-tilted nose, was none other than Henriette’s lover and—for sure—Bertrand Valois’ grandfather.

  “That’s women for you!” said Bertrand. “The scamp had sworn to César that she would be spending the day with her two friends, and…”

  “And that’s why she didn’t come back sooner,” Charles continued. “Henriette must have been with her boyfriend in some flowery riverside inn at Meudon or elsewhere, and not at the Carré Marigny on the Champs-Elysées, so she didn’t find out about the assassination attempt until she returned to Paris. Tripe—since that’s his name—escorted her back to the door of number 53…what am I saying?...as far as the first-floor landing! And if she came out again so precipitately, it’s because she knew perfectly well that he wasn’t far away and that she’d easily catch up with him.”

  “It’s as clear as the water in a rock-pool,” said Bertrand. “Except that she didn’t think she ought to tell the Commissaire all that. She preferred to let him believe that she didn’t know this Monsieur…hmm!...this Monsieur…”

  “Tripe,” Charles finished for him, maliciously.

  Bertrand, disappointed and vexed, looked at Colomba with a calamitous expression.

  “Baron Tripe, perhaps,” Charles added.

  “Oh, don’t go on, I beg you!” Bertrand groaned.

  “How naughty you are!” said Colomba.

  “Bah!” said her fiancé, making his decision. “Whether my ancestor is named Tripe or not, he’s a sound fellow, all the same. Look at him.”

  The newcomer, having deposited his cane and hat on the marble-topped table, was kneeling beside the dead man. A rapid examination was sufficient to assure him of the irreparable misfortune. He got to his feet, pale, letting his thin hands fall on to his thin legs, and enveloped the young woman with a sad gaze replete with tenderness and fidelity: the gaze of a good dog.

  Henriette threw herself against him, sobbing. He touched his lips to the young woman’s forehead, and they stood like that for a several long, gentle and profound minutes.

  Henriette and Tripe, the man with the cane, came back a little later in the company of Monsieur Dyonnet, the Commissaire, Monsieur Joly, the chief of the municipal police, and a sergent de ville.

  Tripe played his role as an unknown passer-by, a disinterested witness, quite well. The representatives of the law devoted themselves to the observations that were customary in 1835, using primitive and expedient methods, with known results.

  Before nightfall, many others came in to per
form their functions, and many auxiliaries also passed through the study. César Christiani’s body was taken away for autopsy.

  “It’s amazing how much they resemble one another!” said Bertrand Valois. “They all have the appearance of being related.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Charles retorted. “but I do recognize that, to our eyes, all these people dressed in an outdated manner, almost all sporting the same side-whiskers, wearing expressions corresponding to the tastes and sentiments of their era—in the psychological fashion of their time—seem to me to be much less dissimilar than my contemporaries. It’s quite bizarre, and, with respect to the case that concerns us, very regrettable. Oh, why couldn’t photography have been invented a few years earlier? If we possessed a photograph—even one!—of Fabius Ortofieri, I’m certain that by comparing it to the images on the film yet to be developed, we’d know what we need to know about the murderer’s identity immediately. We’d know whether it was Fabius or not. But with these hand-made portraits, will we ever arrive at a decisive result?”

  The portraits were lined up before him: the oil-painting, the pastel and the two miniatures.

  Night fell in the studio in the Rue de Tournon. Then the twilight darkened in the study in the Boulevard du Temple, now deprived of the likeable and eccentric man who had spent his last years there. Henriette received César’s relatives there, with all the self-effacement and deference imposed by her situation. Madame Leboulard wept copiously; young Napoléon Christiani looked for a long time, with a somber expression, at the large bloodstain that was now blackening the Savonnerie carpet.

  By the last light of that day of sinister fame, the animation at the foot of the Fieschi house persisted. Soldiers guarded the vicinity. The Café des Mille Colonnes had been transformed into a guard-room. Up above, behind the celebrated Venetian blind, opened crosswise, a vivid light that would not be extinguished until dawn illuminated the interrogation scene. Many arrests had been made, and it was easy to distinguish with binoculars the pale faces of the poor terrorized devils who were protesting their innocence.