The Crimson Heirlooms

by Hunter Dennis

  He had met Franck in their first year, at the tender age of eleven. Franck was a loner, but was similar in temperament to most of the other students. Jake was more extroverted, but considered to be a bit of a loose cannon. Franck had a knack for numbers, was methodical, precise and always received high marks. Jake hated math, loved poetry and history, but usually did well in most subjects due to an amazing intuitive intelligence. They naturally hated each other.

  The pot came to a boil over chess. Both excelled. Franck read chessology books, and catalogued the moves of every game. Jake barely knew the rules. Word was whispered to both of the other’s prowess and conflict became inevitable. They played three games back-to-back, surrounded by half their class. Jake won all three games. A month later, Franck asked Jake for a rematch - and Jake lost just as speedily as he had won before.

  They became inseparable. The students who found Jake intimidating and foreign could now connect with him through Franck. The ones who found Franck to be staid and boring warmed to him through Jake. The pair of them became a popular fixture of their class.

  But when Jake first began his escapes from the school, Franck was not the sort to accompany him. Alone, Jake drowned himself in experience. His father always sent him money, and he had absolutely no use for it except to finance his nocturnal itineraries. He went to every play of the theaters of the Boulevard du Crime in the Marais, whether written by Scribe, Dumas, de Musset, or anyone else. He saw Rossini's opera Guillaume Tell and Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable, and even La Sylphide, a grand ballet, at the beautiful Le Peletier theater. He read every scandalous news pamphlet he could get his hands on. He even saw a midnight duel at the Place Royale, where a man was cut deeply on the arm. He went to the wine taverns, and, apart from enabling his wish to become stumbling drunk for the first time, they weren’t exactly what he expected. They were places for the people of the neighborhood - men, women and children - to socialize after work, and the wine flowed with the gossip. Right about the time Jake arrived, the taverns devolved into places of drunken arguments and violence. His visits - to them, at least - became infrequent. He sometimes entertained thoughts about employing a lady of the night, curious as all young men are, but he was far too romantic to carry through with such a thing.

  Jake discovered his regular haunt quite by accident. One night, while walking the border between the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he saw an establishment that looked somewhat like a café, named Le Menu du Duc Mort, which was curious in and of itself. The tables seemed much larger than in a normal café and, rather than a coffee counter, doors led to a large, well-appointed kitchen. Although it served food, it was plainly not an inn or public house.

  Jake saw a thin, balding, young man cleaning tables. “Bon soir, Monsieur,” Jake had called out, “What manner of establishment is this place?”

  “Why, it is a restaurant, Monsieur.”

  “And what is a restaurant?”

  “You truly do not know?”

  “I do not.”

  “Then sit down, and I will tell you.”

  Jake sat. The man gave him wine and bread, and an interesting yarn. During the revolution, it went, the aristocrats fled the country - or their heads fled their shoulders. Their cooks and chefs de cuisine were suddenly unemployed. They came up with an amazing idea: why not continue creating food fit for kings, only now for normal citizens? An entire culture was suddenly born on the right-bank, near the theaters. This man, the head chef and owner, went by the nickname of Fatiguer, and was thanklessly trying the same thing on the left-bank. He had studied under Marie-Antoine Carême, the man who invented grande cuisine, this new “high art” of cooking. Poor Fatiguer had been given his name because he could never sleep after the bustle of dinner service. He would dismiss his staff for the night, work on new recipes, serve stragglers himself, and was always tired the next day. But, because he could not sleep, his restaurant was always available during Jake’s late-night outings.

  Fatiguer’s dishes were exquisite. On Jake’s first visit he had a black truffle camembert so delicious it had literally brought tears to his eyes. Jake had no idea food could create such emotion. Soon he met the other men and women who joined the late-night haunt at Dumort, as it was known, and he began to look forward to the conversation as much as the food.

  Jake was a product of his education at Louis-le-Grand. He was therefore a member of what was then called the Left-Wing. The words that casually issued from his mouth were both anti-government and revolutionary.

  He was noticed.

  One night, Jake was sitting at a table, talking and laughing with three locals he knew only as Arouet, Daumard and François-Marie. Suddenly, another man, a stranger, sat at their table uninvited. Jake’s three friends stood up and left the restaurant without so much as a word. Jake was dumbstruck.

  The intruder was tall, and of average build. He was well-dressed in a black suit under an exquisite ermine cloak and top hat. His features were large and crude. He had blue eyes, and light brown hair streaked with grey.

  Jake regained his speech, “Who are you?”

  “Who I am is not important. What I am, however, is.”

  “Then what are you, Monsieur?”

  “Address me as Citizen, if you please.” That meant he was an anti-monarchist.

  “Very well, Citizen.”

  “What I am is a bourgeois. Do you know this term?”

  “Vaguely, Citizen.”

  “A bourgeois is a new class of man. Advancements of the modern age have produced opportunities in industry, trade and finance. Those who have taken this new path are called bourgeois.”

  “I see.”

  “Our new class has a new religion. Gold and respectability have taken the place of Christ and salvation. We are not faithful or adherent, but we are scrupulously honest and forthright. We believe in hard, smart work, governed by order, rules and law. We call ourselves men of reason, and our time was the Age of Enlightenment.”

  “Yes, of course. I have studied-”

  “Studied!” he snorted, “That is a point in and of itself. In intellectually lazy times, it is hard to understand an age obsessed with thought. But once, long ago, the world was besotted with the promise of ideas. Ideas moved men and nations, philosophy trumped custom and memory. Ideas glued people together in new ways, and then drew their blood - in old ways, but for new reasons.”

  Jake was spellbound. He had never heard anyone talk quite like this.

  The man calmed, “But what of you? A student from Louis-le-Grand, are you not?”

  “I am.”

  “Voltaire, Diderot, Desmoulin, Robespierre, Saint-Just. Do you know of these men?” he asked.

  “They are graduates of Louis-le-Grand. Extraordinary and famous ones, at that.”

  “Why extraordinary?”

  “Because they changed the world.”

  “How?”

  Jake was starting to enjoy this mysterious conversation in spite of himself. “The first two invented the concept of the modern age. The second three brought it about. Two philosophers, three revolutionaries.”

  “What is the concept of the modern age?”

  Jake thought about it for a moment. “Rousseau, with perhaps a little bit of the Roman classics mixed in. As if Rousseau met Cicero, and they agreed with each other.”

  “Go on.”

  Jake organized his thoughts, “God may have created the universe, but he is now gone from us. Death is but the great sleep. We have only here and now.”

  The man nodded.

  Jake continued, “Man is basically good, and all men are equal. Because man is good, man deserves freedom and happiness.”

  “If man is basically good, why is there so much evil?”

  “Evil is the product of oppression and slavery. Freed from oppression, man reverts to nature and goodness. I believe that man, in his natural state, is capable of creating a wondrous and fair society.”

  The man nodded, “I believe, like Rousseau, that
youth is sacred. For youth is humanity in its natural state. Care and education of the young is paramount. The new youth, of which you are a part, will change the world. The question is, into what? Into what state do we mold our world?”

  Jake took a sip of wine, and pursed his lips, “The state must be strong, and its law paramount, for its duty is sacred.”

  “What is the duty of the state?”

  “To protect and secure individual freedom. It is the duty of all citizens to be civic-minded and virtuous: to uphold the state and its values - with their lives, if necessary.”

  The man smiled, “Rousseau meets Cicero indeed.”

  Jake, for some reason, was very proud that his conversation was satisfactory to this man, and he didn’t even know his name.

  “I wonder, if these men changed the world, these graduates of Louis-le-Grand, why does France now have a King?”

  “France has a king because of many reasons, mostly because of the world’s combined force of arms.”

  “And why, at one point, did we not?”

  “Why did we not have a king?” Jake thought about it, “I suppose because men invented a different way of life, and fought to bring it about.”

  “Why can we not do this now?”

  “But we can!” blurted Jake. The man, who Jake soon knew by the alias of Citizen Bouche, had smiled. He had come to recruit Jake - and Jake had recruited himself.

  Monsieur Bouche was a high-ranking member of The Society of the Rights of Man, or just The Society, a group forming the current wellspring of rebellion. For the last fifty years, secret societies had been the backbone of rebel movements. In the decades preceding the True Revolution, it was the Freemasons. Now it was The Society. As an act of self-preservation, the King had outlawed all secret groups. If more than twenty people were associated by secret membership, they could be arrested for doing nothing else. All cells of The Society were therefore composed of exactly twenty people.

  After indoctrination and some rudimentary training, Jake was tasked to create a military cell by recruiting students from the school, a splinter group he was told to name Student Soldiers for the Constitution. Jake had a hard time keeping the membership below twenty, finally gave up, and ended up with nearly double. As pupils attending Louis-le-Grand, they were of higher status within the movement than their ages would indicate. As a security precaution, Jake had only met one man from The Society, who was Citizen Bouche. He had a suspicion that his three former friends - Arouet, Daumard and François-Marie - were also members, but he never saw them again.

  Jake found his life’s purpose through his secret identity. To be a revolutionary was to feel as if one were in love, spiritually enraptured, and an artist at work on a masterpiece - all at the same time. He had often thought about why it felt so true and so right. Perhaps it was because he wanted to change the world, and he wanted to do the right thing. Neither course is easily plotted, but now he believed he was assuredly doing both.

  But there was one other thing, he came to realize. Jake had an emptiness, a canyon of darkness, of which he never spoke. It was caused by a tragedy too painful to think about – which precluded healing, or moving past it. The revolutionary cause seemed to fill the emptiness, or at least put a board over the chasm.

  He was part of something that started before he was born - the True Revolution began in 1789, around the time Jake’s father was born. The rebels actually overthrew King Louis, and had off his head. Napoleon took power, dismissed the revolution completely, and proclaimed himself Emperor. Jake was only an infant when the world finally managed to subdue him, humbling and restraining France as a criminal nation. It had been chaos ever since. Another King Louis was placed back on a rebuilt throne – and Jake was a child when this new Louis passed away and King Charles succeeded him in 1824. But two years ago, in 1830, there was a second revolution. King Charles was overthrown and replaced with King Louis-Philippe. Unfortunately, at that time, Jake hadn’t yet found a way to escape the school. He thought he had lost his opportunity to be a part of history, his one chance at a great destiny gone.

  Paris had other ideas. The city, indeed the world, roiled in the throes of a cholera epidemic. Whispers that the plague was the product of a government plot were widely believed throughout the wine taverns. Jake heard nonsensical tales of government agents dressed in black, creeping around the city at night, poisoning wells and violating casks of wine and brandy. Cholera then claimed the lives of two well-placed ministers: Périer; doyen of the rich and powerful, and, less than a week ago, Lamarque; beloved of the poor. Both were keeping the wolves at bay, and King Louis-Philippe lost what little support he had with their deaths. More and more, the revolution of 1830 seemed a fraud - just a pacification of the mob’s energy and a return to the status quo.

  Then the letter was delivered to Jake at the school - five characters on an otherwise blank sheet: 0001 G, advising him of a meeting that night, at one minute after midnight in the Gobelins quarter of Paris.

  Jake realized he hadn’t missed anything. Paris was boiling over. It was time again for radical action. Soon the air would ring out with gunfire, and voices singing the Marseillaise and the Ça Ira.

  Jake came to a T-shaped intersection, where the roof angled-off nearly straight north and south along the Rue Saint-Jacques.

  And Rue Saint-Jacques was no street inside Louis-le-Grand: it was Paris, a pendulum of starvation and wealth, a city gravid with ideas, art and philosophy. Violent, rude, drunk - ancient, its buildings raised when men fought in chainmail and plate: a chaos maze of tall, shaky, medieval warrens barely separated by narrow cobblestone streets. Its main roads were laid by the Romans before Christ met his cross. Its name was taken from even more ancient inhabitants: the Parisii Gauls. And this city was no virgin, either. She had been burned, looted and plundered - time and time again, changing hands like a coin to the bearer of the longest sword. No single person knew all its streets and buildings - much less its sewers and secret passages. It was full of dark places and ideas, full of hidden history - the foibles of man etched upon it like the rings of a tree. Yet this city was a beacon to intellectuals and theologians, not to mention artists and craftsmen. The modern age was invented here – along with all other ages after the fall of Rome. The western world was the child of mother Paris, truth be told, like it or not. All of modern European history - right or left, east or west - started here.

  Jake neared his destination. He came to the roof of another raised window, coming up from the attic like a stone wave. He felt along the base of the wave, and found his second rope, hidden there long ago. He secured it to the top of the jutting window, and threw it over the side. He climbed down to the end of the rope, which was purposefully short so it could not be seen from passers-by on the sidewalk. A bone-rattling jump landed him on the cobblestones of Paris.

  He was free.

  ***

  At the very same time Jake was exiting Louis-le-Grand, a private carriage entered the city by the old toll gate of Barrière d'Enfer.

  Only one man sat inside. Since he had entered France, he had used an alias - usually, but not always, Monsieur Tyran. His ancient travelling papers indicated he was a French citizen, had left the country long ago, and his true name was Jacques Bonhomme Cale. The name meant next to nothing, for when Monsieur Tyran was called by his true name he was of little account. But the name of Monsieur Tyran was to be known in France very soon, and to a cabal of powerful men, who would soon wish to know his true identity. Their agents, who would search the rolls of the admitted at ports such as Nantes, would scan over the name of Jacques Bonhomme Cale without a second thought, and be no more aware of anything.

  Monsieur Tyran had many reasons to be in Paris, but every single one of them - without exception - revolved around Jacob Esau Loring, Jake to his friends. Tyran was easily twice Jake’s age, they were not related, they had never seen each other, nor would they recognize the other. Monsieur Tyran, however, knew Jake’s name, how and why he came to be a
student at Louis-le-Grand, and the origin of his family. Indeed, Monsieur Tyran was convinced that Jake was the key to his own salvation. Monsieur Tyran could not tell anyone the true nature of his obsession, at least for the foreseeable future, because the airing of the truth might eliminate its chance of success. Rather, Monsieur Tyran had half-truths and outright lies ready for the telling, to completely obfuscate what he was really after and what he truly wanted.

  For now, it was simple. He knew Jake had a cheap cross around his neck. It was a flat, simple thing, stamped with numbers and letters – and the year 1805, the same year that a priceless heirloom named the Cross of Nantes went missing. It was no coincidence. Jake was star-crossed, doomed by the heavens, and Monsieur Tyran was to bring him word of his dark destiny.

  Monsieur Tyran, at the end of a long journey across ocean and dusty road, was soon to make the fateful decision to go to his hôtel in the Marais, and not go directly to Louis-le-Grand. On the surface, his decision made absolute and perfect sense; it being of a late hour.

  On the morrow, he was to miss Jake by less than half an hour, and this proved to be a costly mistake for both men.

  ***

  For Jake, it was less than a two-mile walk to the staunchly-Republican Gobelins neighborhood to the southeast. The route involved nearly all major streets - narrow but well-lit, and well-patrolled by the ultra-competent Paris Night Watch police. Apart from almost being run over by a huge carriage - no mean threat - the trip had been quick and uneventful. In less than an hour, he found himself alone at a table, in a dimly-lit wine tavern on Rue du Fer named Tribus Coloribus. The smoke from cheap, native-grown Franche-Comté tobacco burned his eyes and made him nauseous. The dirty wood and plaster walls were decorated with military memorabilia - but nothing was from before 1789 or after 1815. A tricolor flag, damaged from battle, hung over the bar. It was late, and most of the patrons had stumbled home. A few were left, an unusual handful of men and women, frightening and strange in the flickering lamplight. They were all of different classes and stations, but all of them were furtive and suspicious-looking, as if plotting separate coach robberies. Jake thought it was a foul and secretive place.