‘Well, I actually want to lay my hands on whoever made use of the curare. I agree though. If I succeed—’
Jean-Quenin shook his hand vigorously. Thank you, Quentin!’
‘Wait... How did the curare get to Paris?’
I’m not sure. Apparently it doesn’t last more than a few months. The problem is that Brazil is a viceroyalty of Portugal, and we’ve been at war with them for several years. With all these conflicts, exotic substances are hard to come by. English researchers are ahead of the French in this respect because they’re allied to Portugal, which allows them to get hold of curare more easily than we can.’
What a simplistic way of representing the war! Jean-Quenin, although normally so philanthropic, was displaying breathtaking egotism.
Margont wondered out loud whether members of a Parisian royalist group would have been able to get hold of curare through the Allies. If they had the right contacts and enough money, it was quite possible.
He added: ‘It must have taken them months to get it! They would have had to contact an Allied agent, get him to agree to undertake to find it, then convince the Portuguese to send one of their ships to Brazil - although that is happening all the time: in 1807, Portugal’s prince regent fled from the French armies and installed his court in Rio de Janeiro - to bring back curare, which would have to be obtained from an Amazonian tribe ...’
If Jean-Quenin was right, the Swords of the King had been preparing their action for much longer than Margont had imagined. And it was also unlikely that the murderer was operating on his own. It would take the support of an organisation to mount such an operation.
‘Hang on, the murderer must be a doctor!’ exclaimed Margont. Jean-Quenin took a moment to react, then he reddened. That had not crossed his mind. ‘Very probably. A doctor or a traveller who’s been to South America.’
‘Or else a French aristocrat who fled to Portugal, then followed the court to Rio. Have you told me everything?’
‘Yes.’
Margont thanked him and left his friend. Jean-Quenin wandered around Paris for a while, trying to calm himself down. But he could not stop thinking about his plans for greatness and his imagination ran riot. Margont had not understood at all ... He didn’t want to make a great discovery for reasons of selfaggrandisement! All his life he had had the feeling that he had not done enough for his patients. Today he had felt that it really would be possible for him to take a giant leap forward for medicine. There were so many people he had not been able to save and their ghosts accompanied him everywhere - yes, everywhere! - forming a monstrous cohort that was growing with the years. If he succeeded in discovering the secret of curare, then he would be able to appease those tormented souls. Like every doctor he dreamt of being able to say one day, ‘Yes, I have done more good than harm in my life.’
CHAPTER 27
ON 27 March, Paris was in turmoil. Until then Napoleon and his army had formed a barrier between the Parisians and the bad news, shielding them from the worst of it. But now that the Emperor had moved away to threaten the rear of the Allied armies, the citizens were exposed to the flow of bad tidings that accompanied the haggard streams of refugees, wounded, deserters, and soldiers that were converging on Paris from all over the country.
Margont had difficulty making his way through the crowds, skirting round chaotic groups only to find himself enmeshed in further rabble. Wagons were piling up, heaps of furniture and trunks stuffed to overflowing were falling over, adding to the uproar, and the guards of honour were getting impatient with the crowds. Those who wanted to leave were no more able to move than those who were arriving; the columns of soldiers were collecting new conscripts, known as Marie-Louises, in their wake (in 1813 the Empress Marie-Louise had signed the decrees, in the absence of her husband). All this humanity formed a sort of glue that stuck to the passers-by, forcing them to elbow their way through.
Somewhere near his printing works, Margont went into a packed cabaret. He had asked Lefine to meet him there and found him seated in a corner, drinking beer. He was savouring the drink as if it might be his last.
‘It’s the end of the world, our world anyway,’ he declared, putting his glass down on the table.
‘Don’t be so defeatist!’
‘No, of course not. You’re going to set me right.’
Margont drew closer and spoke into his ear. ‘Now people are beginning to realise what’s happening, their reactions are going to be unpredictable. Who knows how a panicked crowd will react if a group of determined royalists promises them the sun, the moon and the stars? Paris is becoming a powder keg and our friends are about to throw torches into its midst.’
He indicated that he and Lefine should leave. He needed air, although he was not sure he would be able to breathe any more easily outside.
‘I’ve had an idea. Follow me, you’ll understand in a minute where we’re going. But first, we’ll get our bearings.’
Margont was not normally mysterious like this, at least not with his close friends. But Lefine was not put out. He went with Margont in all confidence, without wasting time wondering where he was being taken.
Lefine gave Margont back the button found in Notre-Dame. Unfortunately the friend who worked in the commissariat had not been able to identify it and had reached the conclusion that it was not a French army button. Despite his best efforts, Lefine had been unable to find out anything new about their suspects either. Catherine de Saltonges had not left her house, and she had not received any visitors.
Margont told Lefine about his second meeting with Joseph and Talleyrand, and how he had been given a new objective, about his examination of Count Kevlokine’s body and what Jean-Quenin had discovered. He had also obtained copies of two reports from
Mathurin Jelent, which he had read and then immediately destroyed. Lefine reproached him for not observing the security precautions they had agreed on, but again Margont objected that time was pressing.
The first report had been written by Inspector Sausson for his superiors. He was making no progress with his investigation, which he found incomprehensible. Not being a man to mince his words, he had written: ‘I am almost coming to suspect that someone (why and under whose orders I cannot yet say) is hiding clues from the official and only legitimate investigators, in order to conduct a parallel investigation.’ No doubt those words had sent Joseph into a rage.
The second had been produced by the section of Joseph’s secret police that had arrested the people visiting the Gunans. It was an incomplete, censored copy. And it didn’t say who the author of the report was. All names had been omitted; some paragraphs simply fizzled out, since their endings had been scored through. Certain sentences were limping because parts of them had been amputated. This half-report revealed that so far twenty visitors had been interrogated, but that it had not been possible to tell which were genuine royalist agitators.
‘But why murder the Tsar’s envoy?’ said Lefine.
They were walking past the Botanical Gardens. Napoleon had had it transformed into a zoological park.
‘I don’t know, Fernand. I’m not even sure that Colonel Berle and Count Kevlokine were murdered by the same person. Joseph and Talleyrand were counting on the latter to help them negotiate a separate peace with the Russians. Perhaps our assassin had found that out, or guessed, and that was the motive for the murder. The extremists kill the moderates, the moderates end up killing the extremists, even though that’s what they themselves have become. Isn’t that one of the bloody lessons the Revolution taught us?’
‘But why leave the emblem of the Swords of the King?’
Margont had developed a sort of tic, a grimace. Leading investigations made him adopt the expressions of a hunting dog scenting the odour of its prey.
That’s a very good question! Either, there’s one murderer who’s sending a signal to others in the group that he’s prepared to execute them if they don’t start to take action! That would be proof that he didn’t care about being re
warded for his acts since, if the monarchy is restored, Louis XVIII will immediately imprison the man who killed the Tsar’s friend, even if that same man has done him a great service by preventing a compromise from being reached between Napoleon and Alexander I. Or else, we are looking at two murderers, and the second one is trying to pass his crime off as being committed by the first, by using the symbol and by mutilating the body with burns.’
‘In the first case, it only makes sense if the Swords of the King find out that their symbol was pinned to Count Kevlokine’s body.’
‘You’re right. But the Swords of the King know all sorts of things they don’t tell me! I was completely unaware that some of them were in contact with Kevlokine; it’s possible that the police keep them informed. Honoré de Nolant must have kept in contact with his old colleagues who’re still serving the Empire. We can’t
assume they don’t know about the symbol - they’re very well connected. If they don’t know already, they’ll find out sooner or later.’ ‘Are we sure it’s the same symbol?’
‘Yes. Mathurin Jelent told me that Joseph’s agents compared the two emblems - Monsieur Palenier removed the second one from the body, right under the nose of Sausson ... They’re identical. But we still know nothing about the symbols.’
Margont slowed down. They were almost there. ‘Or there’s a third possibility. Maybe the assassin isn’t genuinely royalist. Perhaps he’s killing for personal motives and leaving the emblem to make them look like politically motivated crimes.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The burns. We need to probe the significance of fire for the murderer.’
‘How do you propose we do that?’
‘By coming here.’
Margont pointed out a majestic gateway with two pillars bearing a massive pediment surmounted by a rounded arch. The Salpetriere hospice welcomed - or more often imprisoned - the capital’s old women who could no longer fend for themselves, invalids, the handicapped, indigents, beggars, orphaned or abandoned girls, prisoners of conscience and lunatics.
CHAPTER 28
LEFING was scarlet with fear and anger. Of all things, madness frightened him the most. He had a long-standing and obscure dread - it must have its roots deep in his psyche — that if he ever set foot in an asylum, he would be locked up there indefinitely. He even wondered if this was what Margont had in mind. He was somewhat reassured by the fact the Salpetriere was only for women, but what if this was a ruse, and he was later carted off to Bicetre or Charenton? Margont, who was aware of his friend’s fears, tried to be as reassuring as possible.
‘Stop battling your demons! We’ve only come to interview Dr Pinel.’
Pinel, Pinel ... Lefine had heard of the famous doctor. It was pride that forced him on - he would not flee from his chimeras. But he felt as oppressed, as if all the buildings of the Salpetriere were closing in on him.
Margont gave the doorkeeper a few coins and he let them through.
The place was vast. There were rows of little houses, courtyards, gated yards, gardens filled with trees (walking in the shady fresh air was part of the treatment), streets, a chapel ... It was a city inside a city, a little Paris inside a big one. Margont felt uncomfortable in the closed environment cut off from the rest of the world.
‘It’s like a prison in here! Or a fortress, Castle Madness ...’
Women were strolling along the lime-tree-lined paths. Some of them were on their own; some were with keepers or nuns (the Empire had recalled the nuns sent away during the Revolution). As soon as any of them looked at Lefine, he felt his fears getting the better of him. Although the vast majority of the inmates were not lunatics, Lefine saw mad people everywhere, in their thousands; they were circling him and Margont, and were about to leap on them, and beat them and suffocate them and crush them under their weight. The more he told himself his fears were ridiculous the more his imagination inflated them.
‘Why are we here?’
Margont pointed out the Saint-Louis Chapel, the little masterpiece built by Liberal Bruant, who was better known as the designer of the Hotel des Invalides.
‘I disapprove of it. Ostensibly it allows the inmates to pray in a consecrated place. But I think it’s much more about preventing them from going out. Supposing an inmate wants to go for a walk in the Botanical Gardens nearby? Well, she can’t; she’ll be told to walk in the Salpetriere gardens. She wants to go to church? She can go to the Salpetriere chapel. Go for a swim? In the Salpetriere. Get married? In the Salpetriere. The Salpetriere! The Salpetriere! The Salpetriere! All this here has been built so that the inmates never have to go out! All of life takes place within these walls. Nothing exists outside these walls. It’s like being in a sort of secular abbey for lunatics and old women!’
He remembered the years he had spent in the Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert and dizziness clouded his vision. One of the wings of the Salpetriere exploded in front of his eyes. Stones and mortar were scattered by twelve-pound cannonballs and
Austrian artillery shells. It was his fury that had set off the imaginary explosion. The walls were hurled into the air where they broke up like papers torn up in rage; they were pulverised; their debris rained down like the drops of a violent spring storm; clouds of dust blended together forming an ochre fog ... The battle moved past, receding into the distance. Calm descended. And the lunatics and paupers, much to their astonishment, found themselves free to come out from their shelter, climb through the gaping holes in the walls and wander off, at liberty, into Paris ...
The warden who was guiding Margont and Lefine indicated a building, telling them that they should go up to the first floor, and then went back to his post.
‘Why are we here?’ repeated Lefine.
‘We’re going to ask Dr Pinel about burns inflicted after death.’ Lefine thought that was ... was ... how should he put it? There were no words strong enough to express what he thought it was. Absurd, stupid, irrelevant, idiotic, ridiculous, laughable, capricious, grotesque, mad, dangerous, unreasonable! All that and much more besides!
‘A doctor of the mind will have a different perspective from ours. Perhaps he will already have encountered a deranged criminal who burns his victims after they’re dead,’ said Margont.
‘Why choose Pinel? I vaguely recognise his name.’
‘He was the one who freed the lunatics. In 1793, when he’d just taken up his post at the hospice of Bicetre, he decided to free the madmen from their chains. To the horror of the wardens. Their argument was that some of the patients were deranged, raving lunatics whom it was necessary to keep in chains day and night, but Pinel’s point was that it was the restraint that caused them to be violent. He decided to begin by freeing twelve of them.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember! One of the men freed was Chevinge, a simple soldier who thought he was a general and was giving orders to all and sundry. I was told about it when we were bivouacking and it made a big impression on me. Because I’ve always secretly wondered if Irenee will end up like Chevinge. When he was a lieutenant he behaved like a colonel and now that he’s pretty much a colonel,
he thinks he’s already a marshal. He’s been put in charge of a legion so he thinks he’s Julius Caesar. If he gets promoted any further he’s going to want to overthrow the Emperor ... or Louis XVI—11/
Margont did not react to the reference to monarchy.
'I'm not sure if it’s myth, but apparently some of the patients he liberated were instantly cured and none of them was violent any more. It sounds too good to be entirely true. But I hope that Pinel was not the only doctor to unchain mad people ... In any case, he did it and how do you think he was rewarded? He was transferred to the Salpetriere less than two years later, where he also freed the mad people!’
Margont was excited but nervous. He was gearing himself up to meet one of the people he most admired - a veritable living legend! - and was fearful that the reality would not live up to his expectations.
They went inside the
building and were greeted by shouting. A young woman was being forcibly restrained by wardens under torrents of cold water. She was yelling, and struggling, soaked to the skin, her hair plastered to her head, her lips blue. The staff were struggling to control her, water spurted on all sides and Margont was splattered. Lefine, who kept behind Margont, received only a drop on his hand. But he whitened as if all the heat of his body had been absorbed by this one little drop as cold as a snowflake.
‘Watch out!’ fumed Margont. The meeting was terribly important to him and here he was with wet coat and trousers. ‘What are you doing? That water is freezing!’
He rarely made use of his authority in that way, but he had spoken to the men in the tone of a lieutenant-colonel reprimanding his soldiers, even though he was not wearing uniform.
Lefine muttered to him in a conciliatory tone, ‘We’re in civilian clothes, watch out - they might think you’re another Chevinge ...’ One of the wardens looked Margont up and down.
‘It’s to refresh her. Dr Pinel says it helps relax someone who is having bad thoughts. A good cold shower abruptly interrupts the
flow of those thoughts/
‘What does that mean? Bad thoughts?’
The poor creature imagines that God is talking to her, that she’s a saint!’
‘And besides, she’s being punished,’ countered another warden. ‘Because she refuses to eat. She’ll be sprayed until she agrees to feed herself.’
Not knowing much about illnesses of the mind and their treatment, Margont dared not interfere any further. But he was consumed with doubt as he turned away to go upstairs.
The hallway on the first floor was very crowded. Several of the residents were waiting to see Dr Pinel. One of them had her arms immobilised in a strait-jacket and was surrounded by three keepers. Although unable to move, her eyes expressed unbounded fury. Was her rage the cause of her immobilisation or the consequence of it? Margont wondered if he would have dared free her had he had the power to do so.
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