Memory of Flames

by Isabel Reid (Translator) Armand Cabasson

  ‘Interesting. As if he prefers climbing back up a slope to climbing it in the first place.’

  ‘That’s a complicated way of saying what I’ve just explained clearly. That’s you all over, that...’

  Margont could easily imagine Charles de Varencourt busily

  studying his cards. When he spoke, he always seemed to be bargaining, to be engaged in a game.

  ‘What did he do next?’

  ‘At about six o'clock, he went to Faubourg Saint-Germain, Rue de Lille. Having played with the poor, he then went to play with the rich. He knocked on the door of a baroque-looking abode with moulded columns and statues of naked beauties supporting a large balcony — exactly the kind of house I dream of! A valet opened the door to him and greeted him with a bow, but not a deep bow. I had the impression that the owner of the house considered himself superior to Varencourt but that he nevertheless enjoyed his company. The servant said: “Monsieur le Comte would be delighted to play cards with you today but he would like to make clear that this time he will shuffle the cards himself” Varencourt agreed and went inside.’

  ‘Perhaps he cheats sometimes and that’s why his host wanted to deal the cards himself...’

  ‘Other players arrived. There was an old aristocrat in a powdered wig, his face whitened with make-up, with one of those horrible tufts of hair on his chin. You could have sworn that he had inadvertently fallen asleep at Versailles and woken up twenty years later thinking, where the devil is Louis XVI? What’s happened to the court and the Swiss Guard? Next to arrive was a captain of the National Guard, jingling his money in his hand. Finally a couple of bourgeois arrived at the same time, boasting of their success in the games they had just played.’

  They must have thought that swaggering would bring them luck. As if they were saying to Luck, “You remember us, don’t you? We spent such good times together the last time ...” What superstition!’

  ‘I think they were all addicted to gambling. I did some research on the owner. He’s the Comte de Barrelle. Imperial nobility. Sixty-three years old and never leaves the house. Varencourt came out th ree hours later looking depressed. Not bitter or angry, more despairing. I’m sure he had lost everything. He went home and sat up late. When every other house in the street was in darkness,

  there was still a candle burning in his bedroom window.’

  ‘What’s his house like?’

  ‘He rents an attic. As small as a pigeon house/

  ‘I’m living like a pigeon too. How can he bear to live like that when he doesn’t have to? The police are giving him vast sums of money!’

  ‘He prefers gaming. And all this time soldiers aren’t receiving any pay!’

  ‘Everything froze during the retreat from Moscow ... Going back to Charles de Varencourt. Why is he addicted to gambling?’

  ‘Is there always a reason?’

  ‘Not always. But sometimes. If he’s the murderer, why the fire? There are too many blanks, too many gaps in what we know about the suspects. Time is not on our side, and yet we mustn’t fail! The situation is already bad enough.’

  Margont looked up the hill of Montmartre. From up there, the whole of the capital could be seen. It was the key to Paris. If the enemy captured it, they would mount large-calibre cannons on the top of it and they would be able to bombard the city. There should have been swarms of crack soldiers on the hill, building redoubts. When an ant hill is threatened, it covers itself in ants. The same should have gone for the heights at Saint-Germain, at la Villette, at Buttes-Chaumont and at Nogent-sur-Marne. From 1809 to 1810, when Wellington, the commander-in-chief of the British troops, had been operating in the Iberian Peninsula, he had erected fortifications at Torres Vedras to protect Lisbon. Margont had seen them with his own eyes. Ditches, pre-ditches, traps, bastions overlapping each other, entrenchments flanking the assailants, little fortresses ... More than a hundred redoubts and four hundred and fifty cannons, all in three stacked lines! A triple line of defence, three raised fists, warning the French to stop! When Marshal Massena came face to face with them, leading his sixty thousand men, he had indeed stopped short. He and his general staff had spent entire days trying to find ways through the blockade, had reached the conclusion that ... it was impossible, and had ordered his troops to retreat. Wellington had triumphed without even

  having to fight. He had prepared for battle so comprehensively that he had won before it had even started! That’s what should have been happening here! Paris should have been encircled by a triple line of defence like at Torres Vedras, and Montmartre should have been made into a great redoubt, more fearsome than the famous redoubt at the Battle of Borodino! But instead, the only activity came from the first butterflies fluttering around the five windmills on the hill.

  ‘I’ve discovered some surprising things about Mademoiselle de Saltonges,’ said Lefine, continuing with his report. ‘I can’t really believe that a woman would have the guts to burn off the face of a corpse, but—’

  Margont burst out laughing. But it was a disturbing, desperate laugh; he was laughing instead of crying. His friend looked at him uncomprehendingly as he tried to shake off a childhood memory. He was thirteen, walking in the streets of Nimes, gradually rediscovering the world after four years being shut away in the Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert. But the ‘real’ world was nothing like the paradise of his imagination. Without explaining why, his mother was taking a series of back routes. She was trying to hide the guillotine from him. The Terror was raging at that time and people were being executed in their thousands - for not being revolutionaries, or for not being revolutionary enough, or for being revolutionary but not in the correct way. Alas, she did not know that the residents of the Esplanade, where the ‘National Razor’ was normally set up, had complained about the smell of blood, so it had been moved. And that was how his mother came to lead him to the very spectacle she had tried to spare him. The sight he had briefly glimpsed would haunt him for ever. He saw women going up to the heads. Heads without bodies, bathing in bright-red blood. And these women, who calmly knitted as the executions were carried out, were aiming the points of their needles at the eyes of the freshly decapitated heads. A black screen suddenly cut off his vision. His mother covered his eyes with her hand to prevent him seeing any more. She fled, pulling her son by the hand, running as if the guillotine itself were chasing them. It was

  the only time in Margont’s life when he had briefly wondered whether he should not return to the Abbey Saint-Guilhem-le-Desertle-Desert of his own accord ... He thought again about Louis de Leaume extricating himself from his shroud of corpses. Had he also seen those decapitated and mutilated heads? Yes, certainly! But no hand had descended to protect him. He had looked at them, his gaze searing into their unseeing eyes.

  ‘My dear Fernand, it’s usually me who’s the naive one. But this time, it’s the other way round. Your misogyny is misleading you. Catherine de Saltonges is as much a suspect as the others, believe me. When I met her, she seemed to want to avoid being present at my ... at any violence towards me.’

  He still could not articulate exactly what he had been through, as if the ordeal of his admission to the Swords of the King had become an absess that was going to go on getting worse.

  ‘But it was obvious that she was just pretending. Had any violence occurred, she would happily have produced her knitting needles.’ Lefine grasped the reference. He had heard about ‘the tricoteuses’.

  Although the nickname was used generally to mean the women who had come, during the Revolution, to listen to the debates at the National Convention, to keep an eye on the elected representatives and to participate in the debates with cheers or booing, it also evoked a much more sinister group, tiny but bloody ...

  ‘She married Baron de Joucy in 1788 at the age of seventeen. Her family were keen on the marriage because the Baron was a good catch. And she was keen on the marriage because she was in love. A good marriage and a love match! But the dream was short-lived and the awakenin
g brutal. The Baron was an inveterate seducer, a regular Casanova, and he cheated on her endlessly - with her friends, her servants, with mothers, with their daughters, with prostitutes ...’

  ‘Surely that’s a slight exaggeration?’

  ‘Well, it’s probably true that the rumours were exaggerated. But I managed to find a former servant of the household, one Guer-loton, who had thrashed the Baron when he found him in bed with his wife! The Baron didn’t press charges, for fear of publicity. He

  merely terminated the employment of the valet and his wife. Happily for the Baron, he now lives in London, because were he to return he would find someone waiting for him who would not stop at thrashing him this time ... The saddest thing was that Catherine de Saltonges was oblivious. She didn’t think that her pregnant servant was anything to do with her husband. He came home at all hours because of his “business affairs”. Her husband flirted constantly with beautiful women. But she saw nothing, suspected nothing.’

  ‘Her education can’t have prepared her for such things. It must have been all crochet and the Bible ...’

  ‘All Parisian nobility was laughing at her behind her back, which delighted her husband, making him all the more desirable in the eyes of certain women. But one day in September 1792, Catherine de Saltonges cancelled a shopping trip unexpectedly because of a storm.’

  ‘A storm that was the prelude to an even more violent tempest. I suppose she went home and discovered her husband in the arms of another woman.’

  ‘That’s exactly what happened. In her own bed, what’s more. She ran away to her parents, who tried in vain to send her back to her legitimate husband. In their eyes, as in his, the couple had been married before God for better and for worse.’

  ‘She being the better and he being the worst ...’

  ‘She changed completely after that. She had previously been shy and self-effacing; now she was transformed into a formidable woman. She decided to divorce! She was one of the first to make use of the famous law of October 1792 permitting divorce. Her grounds were her husband’s “notorious disorderliness of morals”. Can you imagine the reaction of the two families? Not to mention her husband’s reaction. Up until that point the Revolution had not troubled the Baron much. Of course, he feared the revolutionaries, but he would never have thought that the Revolution might harm him because of his wife! She was brave enough to appear before the district tribunal; since it was not a case of divorce by mutual consent and since the Baron denied the accusations she brought

  against him, there had to be a trial. A baroness who wanted to divorce! It caused hilarity amongst the revolutionaries and there was a hue and cry amongst the aristocracy. To his horror the Baron became the laughing stock of his peers! Catherine de Saltonges had succeeded in reversing the roles. She pressed on with the trial despite pressure from her friends and family. The revolutionaries make an example of the case, the newspapers wrote about it endlessly ... I was able to track down a witness at the trial, an old soldier who had been allocated guard duty at the district tribunal. He told me that the trial became a spectacle. When the baroness was expected, reinforcements of soldiers were called in. The crowds grew ever thicker and had to be pushed back to let her through. On the one hand there were some daring priests and hordes of anxious husbands come to boo and hiss. On the other there were revolutionaries and hundreds of women of all ages! Catherine de Saltonges arrived, outwardly serene. She advanced through a barrage of insults, spitting, cheering and applauding. Then she answered the questions put to her. She repeated to the tribunal everything her so-called friends had hastened to tell her after she had discovered her husband’s true nature. Each of her husband’s infidelities became a weapon for his spouse to use against him! She repaid blow for blow. Several times the sessions degenerated and the tribunal had to be evacuated. But each time, she returned, composed, as if she had forgotten the threats and brawls of the previous session.’

  Margont was perplexed. Lefine’s description did not fit at all with his memory of her. He had the feeling that the more he learned about the woman the less he knew her. ‘I don’t know if I would have had her daring, in the same situation.’

  ‘Well, I know that I wouldn’t. I would have left with the silver. The district tribunal found in her favour. Her husband emigrated to London, officially because of revolutionary fury, which was set to increase, but also to escape public derision.’

  ‘Well done, Fernand, good work!’

  Lefine looked pleased. When he was complimented, he thrust his chest out like the fabled crow, though he would never have

  opened his beak and let the cheese fall out...

  Margont grew thoughtful.

  ‘What you’ve told me explains some of her behaviour.

  When I met her, I had the impression that I disgusted her. I had never encountered such a reaction before. Having been deceived for such a long time made the betrayal she suffered much worse. She must have developed a hatred of lies. I think she’s on the lookout for lies everywhere and in everyone she meets. And she’s discerning - she picked up that I was not being honest with them. I’m going to have to be very careful when she’s there!’

  ‘If she poses the most danger to you, why don’t you seduce her?’ ‘What a despicable idea!’

  ‘If she’s in love she will be blind to—’

  ‘I don’t like the way you treat people like pawns.’

  ‘And how do they treat us?’

  ‘You can’t see her burning off the face of a corpse ... but I’m not so sure ... In any case, she’s certainly a strong character. She introduced herself under her maiden name and none of the members dared call her “Madame de Joucy”, even though they probably all disapprove of the divorce.’

  ‘She’s the only other member whose address we know. She doesn’t seem to be aware that the police are investigating her. She lives in Faubourg Saint-Germain - I’m having her house watched.’ ‘Are you using trustworthy men, as I asked?’

  ‘Yes, I can vouch for them. They haven’t discovered anything very interesting about her daily life.’

  Margont rose. ‘Let’s go and stretch our legs.’

  They went towards the hill of Montmartre and started to climb it slowly. It was so easy at the moment ... but should the Allies arrive at the gates of Paris, they would inevitably attack Montmartre. And so with every step, Margont imagined he was already stepping over the enemy corpses that would litter the slopes.

  ‘What did you find out about Honoré de Nolant? I know nothing about him, other than that he was the one the group had allocated to slit my throat, if necessary. So obviously he is capable of killing. Perhaps he has already done so ... He’s the one I know the least,

  but at the same time he’s the most dangerous.’

  ‘You’re right to fear him, because he has done some unpleasant things. The police reports contain some interesting facts about him. His family belongs to the nobility of Champagne. As an adolescent he was part of Louis XVI’s entourage. He used to read to the King and perform other similarly useless services. Nolant really was a good friend. But he was quick to spot the change in the prevailing wind, and after 1790 he began to pass information secretly to the members of the National Assembly who were drawing up the new constitution. He passed on the details of the lives of the King, Marie-Antoinette, the dauphin ... According to what I read, he was the first to reveal the disappearance of the King and his family on the night of 20 June 1791 ...’

  The flight of the King, that ended at Varennes, when a postmaster, Jean-Baptiste Drouet, recognised Louis XVI.’

  ‘Honoré de Nolant was cunning. By the time he had raised the alert, the royal family was already on the road. He claimed that he reacted as soon as he had noticed that the King was no longer there. But I think he was hedging his bets. Had Louis XVI been able to escape abroad, Nolant, who was certainly aware of the plan and had perhaps even helped with arrangements, would have been rewarded. But once the King was arrested, the revolutionaries stopp
ed treating Honoré de Nolant as merely a spy and welcomed him as a real revolutionary. He changed his name to “Denolant” and had a dazzling career. In 1793 he spied on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, the bloodthirsty alliance - Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just - that wanted to guillotine every Frenchman!’ ‘Another spy? Varencourt, me, now Nolant...’

  ‘If you stick your hand in the hornets’ nest, you shouldn’t be surprised if you keep coming across hornets.’

  ‘The Swords of the King must be unaware of all that. They would never have accepted such a man into their ranks! They must know only part of his history.’

  ‘Afterwards he worked for the Revolutionary Tribunal. So he might well have had reason one day to write out the name Louis de Leaume, adding after it, “Condemned to death by guillotine.”

  When Bonaparte was proclaimed emperor, Honoré de Nolant became an imperialist and denounced the partisans of the Republic. He had gathered many contacts during his time as part of Louis XVI’s entourage, and then amongst the higher revolutionary echelons. Which was why Fouche, when he was head of the civilian police, decided to take him into his ministry where apparently he was very useful. He helped put together dossiers on the royalists, on revolutionaries and on republicans who were opposed to the Emperor. But in January 1810 people started to suspect that he was embezzling money. Honoré de Nolant immediately disappeared -from one day to the next! The police realised he had been making fools of them. He had claimed to have numerous informants who would only deal with him. But most of them did not actually exist and Nolant simply kept the sums he was supposed to pay over to them for himself. In exchange for the money, he invented republican plots, assassination plans ... it was all hot air. Expensive with it. The civilian police hate him.'