by Otto Penzler
Sherlock Holmes held her gaze dispassionately.
“As a woman, however, you were surely in greater danger of being compromised in your role of adviser than a man would have been?”
If Marguerite Steinheil blushed a little at the innuendo, I saw no sign of it.
“My sex was my advantage. No man is inscrutable to a woman, Mr. Holmes, especially when that woman is devoted to one whom she has decided to help, and when she is supposed to care for nothing more essential than music, flowers, or dress.”
“But you do not play quite the same part now, I take it?”
“No,” she said softly. “The dangers and the threats became so numerous that there could only be one answer—‘The Secret History of France under the Third Republic.’ It is a weapon so powerful that our adversaries dare not provoke its use. Every afternoon, the President adds several pages to it, on foolscap paper which I buy for him myself. At first these pages were locked in an iron box at the Élysée Palace itself. Then, in the crisis of last October, Félix Faure asked me to take home the pages as he wrote them. Until this afternoon, three people in the world knew of this precaution: the President and I, of course, and Monsieur Hamard, Chief of the Sûreté, a man of honour to whom Félix Faure would entrust his very life. Dr. Watson and yourself must now be admitted to the secret.”
“Then I trust, madame, you will use such a weapon as a shield, not as a sword.”
The young woman smiled at this. “A shield is all we ask, Mr. Holmes. The President’s enemies cannot be sure what revelations drawn from the secret papers these chapters may contain. Yet he has taken good care that those from whom he has most to fear are aware of the consequences. If such pages were to be made public, the reputations of those men would be blasted. It would be impossible for them to hold office and they would be fortunate indeed to escape prosecution as common criminals. Perhaps you think such a threat unchivalrous? No doubt it is. I assure you, however, that there is nothing in those pages except what is the proven truth.”
She paused and Holmes said nothing for a moment. He took his pipe from the pocket of his Norfolk tweeds and then replaced it.
“It is on this account that you wish Dr. Watson and I to remain in Paris?”
“Only for a while,” she said gently. “In a month—two months at the most—enough of the work will be done. A copy will be made and deposited elsewhere, to make the work safe for posterity. Meanwhile, new pages and documents will be taken back each night to a hiding-place in the Impasse Ronsin. In the past weeks, the President has been warned by Monsieur Hamard that visitors to the Élysée Palace are being watched by those who may be agents of foreign powers but more probably of our enemies within France. Some of our visitors are being followed. It would not do for a single page of the history or a single document to fall into the hands of those who would destroy us.”
Holmes spoke courteously but the scepticism in his eyes, as he regarded her, was inescapable to anyone who knew him.
“You have begun well, madame, by ensuring that the manuscript is removed from the Élysée Palace. You must surely have more enemies in that building than in the rest of the world. In a crisis, that is the first place where those whom you fear would search for it. As for the opinion of Monsieur Hamard, he and I have been acquainted ever since the case of the Boulevard Assassin. I hold him in the highest regard. If he warns you of a danger, you would be well advised to take heed.”
“Indeed,” she said, “it is on Monsieur Hamard’s suggestion that I am here this afternoon. Knowing that you were in Paris to confer with his colleague Professor Bertillon, he believed you might be prepared to assist. He advises that, for the future, any papers which I take with me to the Impasse Ronsin each evening should be a decoy, documents of no importance. The pages of the manuscript itself will be entrusted to you. At a distance, you and Dr. Watson will be my escort and courier. When you are satisfied that no one is watching or following, you may deliver the envelope through the letterbox of the Impasse Ronsin.”
Holmes looked unaccountably gloomy.
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “Well, Madame Steinheil, I have had this put to me in similar terms by the President. It is hard for a humble ratepayer of Baker Street to oppose the will of a head of state. However, I shall ask you a question that I might not ask the President. What purpose is served by Dr. Watson and myself remaining in Paris to do something that any well-trained policeman might do? Indeed, you might employ a different officer each evening, so that whoever attempted to shadow you would not recognise him. As for the papers, you scarcely need more than a porter to convey your luggage.”
There, I thought, he had tripped her. Marguerite Steinheil looked her prettiest at him.
“A President is surely entitled to ask for the best?”
“No, no, madame!” said Holmes with a flash of irritation. “That really will not do for an answer!”
She flinched a little. “Very well, then. Among the papers from which the narrative is drawn—in the pages of the narrative itself—will be found evidence to prove the innocence of Colonel Dreyfus beyond all argument.”
“Then let that evidence be published now,” Holmes said abruptly.
Again she shook her head. “The man who might put the case beyond any further argument is in Berlin. He has been forbidden from speaking by the Chief of the German General Staff and by the Kaiser himself. If our plan succeeds, they will find in a month or two that they can command him no longer.”
There was a moment’s silence. In that comfortable hotel sitting-room on the Boulevard Raspail, we pictured Dreyfus the innocent, the man of honour, riveted in his irons in the jungle mist of Cayenne Île du Diable, condemned to rot until death released him.
“Fiat justitia, ruat coelum,” Holmes said at last, still with reluctance. “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. Madame, you shall have your way. God knows, it is a small enough price that we pay for the poor fellow’s liberty.”
After she had taken her leave, he sat without speaking. Then, as he was apt to do when something of great weight was on his mind, he walked to the window and stared out into the street. It was dark by now and the scene was one that might have been painted by Pissarro or Manet. Each flickering gas-lamp threw out a misty halo, its shivering image reflected in pools of rain. The traffic of cabs and horse-buses dwindled from the brightly lit shops of the Rue de Rennes to the quiet elegance of the Boulevard St. Germain. Men and women hurried homeward by the darkened skyline of the Luxembourg Gardens.
“So,” he said, turning at last, “we are to remain here in order to guard a few sheets of paper every evening, to prevent them from being snatched away in the street! Can you believe a word of it, Watson? It reminds me of nothing so much as that other useless occupation, the Red-Headed League, whose history you were good enough to preserve in your memoirs! A man was paid handsomely for the aimless daily exercise of copying out the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica by hand. A pretty piece of villainy lay behind that!”
I was a little shocked by his tone.
“You do not call Madame Steinheil a villain?”
“Of course I do not!” he said impatiently. “Wayward, perhaps. She has, I believe, the reputation of what is delicately called, among the fashionables of Rotten Row, a ‘Pretty Horse-Breaker.’ ”
The vulgar phrase sounded oddly in his fastidious speech.
“Then you believe she has not told us the truth?”
“Not the whole truth! Of course not!” He looked at me in dismay, unable to see how I had missed the fact. “It does not require the two of us to prevent an envelope being snatched from her hand or to see whether she is followed. She knows that as well as you or I!”
“What else is there to prevent?”
“After all that we have heard from her of coups d’état and treason, you still do not see why our services are preferred to those of the Sûreté or the Deuxième Bureau?”
“I do not see what else she hopes we may prevent,” I
said with the least feeling of exasperation. “What is it?”
Sherlock Holmes gave a fatalistic sigh.
“In all probability,” he said softly, “the assassination of the President of France.”
V
During the next few days, the prediction seemed so preposterous that I had not the heart to remind him of it, even as a joke. Every afternoon, we took the same cab to the same drab stretch of the Rue de Vaugirard with its hospitals and public buildings. In the Impasse Ronsin, the tall house with its studio windows rose beyond a high street-wall and garden trees. As if at a signal, a second cab turned out on to the main thoroughfare and preceded us by way of the Boulevard des Invalides, the elegant span of the Pont Alexandre III, across the River Seine, and past the glass domes of the exhibition pavilions.
Sometimes, when the winter afternoon was sunny, the young woman would dismiss the cab at the river bridge and walk across the wide spaces of evergreen gardens with their regimented trees and little chairs, at the lower end of the Champs-Élysées. This was done to give us a better opportunity of seeing whether she was shadowed. From time to time a man might look sidelong at the narrow-waisted beauty, the collar of her coat trimmed with fur that lay more sensuously against the bloom of her cheek, the coquettish hat with its net veil crowning her elegant coiffure. Many wistful and casual glances came in her direction yet no one followed her.
Quickly and unobtrusively, she was admitted by the little gate in the gold-tipped iron railings of the presidential palace, at the corner of the Champs-Élysées and the Avenue de Marigny. Not a soul took the least notice. Several times, on her return, she got down from the cab among the little streets of the Left Bank that run from the grands quais of the Seine, opposite the Louvre. In the early dusk, she paused at the shopfronts of the Rue des Saints Pères in dark green or terracotta or black with gold. Curios and jewellery shone in the lamplit windows. The shelves of the bibliothèques glowed with the rich leather bindings of rare editions. Holmes and I knew from long experience that in such territory the hunter easily becomes the prey. The shadow must dawdle or feign interest or linger in his cab, while his quarry visits one shop after another. If there was such a man on these evenings, the trained eye of Sherlock Holmes failed to see him.
On several afternoons, Holmes and I were admitted by the same little gate to the grounds of the Élysée Palace, by the authority of the President’s chef de cabinet, Monsieur Le Gall. The President’s office was on the ground floor of the left wing of the palace, looking out upon a private garden. Beyond the presidential office and the private study, these quiet apartments ended in an elegant bedroom, used by Félix Faure on the frequent nights when he worked into the small hours, so that Madame Faure should not be disturbed by his late arrival.
On our occasional visits to Le Gall, neither Holmes nor I was admitted beyond an outer office, where the chef de cabinet guarded the entrance to the presidential suite. It was on 16 February that we were last there. Madame Steinheil was a little later than usual, arriving at about 5:30 p.m. to collect the papers that the President had been writing. We were received by Le Gall in his outer office a half-hour later. To that moment, there was no sign of anyone—man nor woman—shadowing the “confidential secretary” who had been put under our care.
At the time of our arrival, Madame de Steinheil was already in the office or study of the presidential apartment, no doubt copying pages for the use of her patron. The President himself had just finished a conversation with a visitor who came out of the apartments, escorted by a chamberlain, taking his leave almost as soon as we had begun speaking to Le Gall. Even had I not seen his face in the newspaper photographs of the past few days, I should have guessed by his purple cassock and biretta that he was Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris.
The purpose of the Cardinal’s visit to the President was never revealed. As soon as His Eminence had left, however, Le Gall ushered Holmes and me to a waiting-room at one side. The door swung to but failed to catch, leaving us with a narrow aperture into the chef de cabinet’s office. A tall saturnine man in evening dress with a purple sash and the star of a royal order walked slowly past. On the far side of Le Gall’s office, another door opened and closed. There was a murmur of voices. Holmes stretched in his armchair, took a pencil from his pocket, and wrote something in his notebook.
“The Prince of Monaco,” he said quietly. “This promises well, Watson. My information is that, for several months, His Serene Highness has been the go-between of the President and the Kaiser in the matter of Captain Dreyfus. Berlin is less threatened by the scandal than Paris but it would suit both parties to have the matter settled.”
Shortly after this, Le Gall or one of his assistants must have noticed that the waiting-room door was a little ajar. It was closed from outside, by whose hand we did not see. Whether the Prince of Monaco had left or the interview with the President continued was hidden from us.
In recollecting what followed, I believe it was about three-quarters of an hour that we had been waiting for our summons to escort Madame Steinheil back to the Impasse Ronsin. I was immersed in a Tauchnitz pocket-book and Holmes was reading the evening paper. Not a word passed between us until, without warning, Holmes threw the newspaper down and sprang to his feet.
“What in God’s name was that, Watson?”
His face was drawn into an expression that mingled horror and dismay, a fearful look more intense than any other I can remember in the course of our friendship. The look in his eyes and the angle of his head assured me that Holmes, who had the most acute hearing of any man known to me, had caught something beyond my range.
“Do you not hear it, man? You must hear it!”
In two strides he was at the waiting-room door, which he flung open without ceremony. As he did so, I caught the shrill escalating screams of terror which rang through the private apartments of the President of France. They were a woman’s screams.
Of Le Gall, there was no sign, though the fine double doors of white and gold that led to the President’s office stood open. After so much talk of traitors and assassination, you may imagine what my thoughts were. The screams stopped for an instant, only to be resumed with greater urgency. They were not cries of pain but shrieks of unbridled fear. Perhaps, then, we should be in time to prevent whatever was threatened.
Holmes strode through the presidential office with the red buttoned leather of its chairs and the walnut veneer of the desk. Beyond that, the single door to the private study swung lightly in the draught. The curtains were still open. Outside, in the private garden, thin snow drifted down through the lamplight on to the lawns and formal paths. There was no one in the study itself but the far door opened into a small book-lined lobby. This lobby framed a further pair of doors—again in white and gold—which guarded the boudoir of the presidential suite. Those doors were closed and Le Gall stood facing them, pushing with his arms out and hands spread wide, as if seeking some means to force his way through. The shrieks, which now redoubled, were coming from the bedroom itself. I thought I heard the word “Assassin!” with its French emphasis and pronunciation.
Holmes pushed the chef de cabinet aside, for had we left it to Le Gall he would never have broken open the locked doors. My friend’s right foot rose and he crashed the heel of his boot into the ornamental lock. The double doors shuddered but held. Holmes took a pace back and again smashed the heel of his boot into the fastening. One of the two doors burst open and flew back against the inner wall with a crack. Holmes was first through the opening, Le Gall after him. I brought up the rear with Holmes already calling out, “Here, Watson! As quickly as ever you can!”
I stood in the doorway and saw before me such a sight as I hope never to see again.
VI
The tangled bodies in their nakedness were like nothing so much as a detail from some canvas depicting a massacre. Félix Faure was a well-built man of the heavily handsome type. Approaching sixty years of age, he had a head that was broad and tall, pale blue ey
es, and a long moustache. He lay face down, naked as he was born, the gross bulk of him sprawling and slack in a manner that meant only one thing to me. Under him, trapped by his weight, without a shift or a stitch upon her, lay Marguerite Steinheil. There were spots of blood upon her face and shoulders which had come from his nose or mouth.
It was a horrible and yet, in its way, a commonplace tableau to a medical man. The tragedy of an old lover and a young mistress, cerebral congestion, apoplexy occurring in the excitement of some venereal spasm, is a textbook fact that needs no moral commentary here. I reached Félix Faure in time to detect a pulse that faded under my touch. In the moment of his seizure, the dying man had clenched his fingers in the young woman’s hair, adding to her terror beyond measure. With some caution, I straightened the fingers one by one. Holmes and I turned the dead President on to his back. Le Gall snatched a dressing-gown from the closet and wrapped Madame Steinheil in it. She stood before us, still crying out hysterically, until there was a crack like a pistol as Holmes slapped her across the face.
Le Gall’s hand was on the bell.
“No!” shouted Holmes. “Wait!” Thereupon he took command of the situation while the chef de cabinet did his bidding. “Get this young woman dressed!”
It was easier said than done. Without going to indelicate lengths of description, I can record that Madame Steinheil had been wearing a corset, which few women could put on again without the assistance of a ladies’ maid. So it was that she was helped into her outer clothes, the rest being bundled into a valise.
“Touch nothing, Watson, until I get back! Nothing!”
