The Nicolas Le Floch affair

by Jean-FranCois Parot

‘To ask the question is to answer it,’ said Nicolas.

  ‘What did he mean by that order from above? Why would anyone want you and Madame de Lastérieux to be introduced? What interest could there be for this unknown person in throwing you into her arms? In fact, the plan succeeded only too well. After what we heard earlier, I wonder if this could have been another of Monsieur de Sartine’s little tricks?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ replied Nicolas. ‘He would have told us. He’s already revealed that, in his determination to know everything, he was having me spied on. That was the main thing. Why would he have omitted a detail such as the fact that he had had me introduced to Julie?’

  ‘Who, then? The First Minister, the Duc d’Aiguillon? Monsieur de Saint-Florentin, Minister of the King’s Household? He and Monsieur de Sartine are very close. The King?’

  ‘Why not the Pope or the general of the Jesuits? Don’t get carried away. Balbastre seemed terrified. Do you think he could be a Mason?’

  ‘Sartine is.’

  ‘Yes, but there are rival lodges and different obediences. What if someone wanted to get Monsieur de Sartine into trouble?’

  ‘We’d still have to resolve an equation. The police have a hold over Julie. Balbastre has influence and authority over her. How is all that linked, unless there’s a connection between her secret activities and the pressure exerted on her?’

  ‘The best thing might be to ask Monsieur de Sartine.’

  Bourdeau nodded and looked at his watch. ‘Let’s go back to the Châtelet. You can get rid of that disguise and dress as yourself again. Then we’ll go to police headquarters.’

  Nicolas was lost in thought again. What Bourdeau did not know, and what he could not tell him, was that both he and Sartine belonged to a select group of men trusted by the King and involved in secret diplomatic activities. Even the Duc d’Aiguillon, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, for all the esteem in which the monarch held him, had not been deemed worthy of penetrating its mysteries, or perhaps it was more convenient for him to be kept apart. In his secret study in the small apartments at Versailles, the King received information from foreign capitals, some of it sent by his appointed ambassadors, but some sent in coded dispatches by his secret agents. There were a few ambassadors who combined both functions, but they were the exception. The information, coming as it did from two kinds of sources, often tallied but was sometimes contradictory, giving the King much food for thought. Nicolas himself received information from a native of New France named Naganda, a chief of the Micmac tribe who had remained loyal to France after the defeat in Canada, and had been recruited after a particularly grim affair4 to keep an eye on the English and secretly monitor their activities. Since then, Nicolas had been involved, both directly and indirectly, in a number of different missions. It was possible that these had come to the attention of someone wishing to thwart the King’s policies. Many people were involved in shadowy intrigues around the throne: foreign powers, the Duc d’Aiguillon in his desire to hold on to his position, Maupeou in his struggle with the parlements, and finally Choiseul, who had arranged the marriage of the Dauphin, and who hoped to reap benefits from the gratitude of Marie-Antoinette.

  Nicolas was delighted to get back into his own clothes. By the time he left the Châtelet, night was falling. The fog was so thick that nothing could be seen beyond twenty paces. A shadowy figure emerged from the entrance to the old prison. Nicolas heard a brief whistle and turned, recognising Rabouine’s signal. Rabouine came away from the wall and told him that their carriage had been followed by a cabriolet, and that an unknown man had got out of it, but that it had been too dark to make out his face. It could all have been a coincidence, so for the moment Nicolas did not take too much notice of this information. He did not even mention it to Bourdeau, who was waiting for him in the cab, half asleep.

  At police headquarters in Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, Monsieur de Sartine, who was receiving visitors, joined them for a moment in the antechamber. He gave no indication of the impression Bourdeau’s account made on him, merely observing that the early stages of the investigation had done nothing to strengthen Nicolas’s position, and that the King had to be informed of the threat hanging over the head – he smiled graciously at Nicolas – of his servant. Nicolas was to come back at six o’clock in the morning, and they would go to Versailles together in his coach. They would attend mass in the Saint-Louis chapel, after which Monsieur de Sartine was hoping to bring forward his private audience with the King. Not that Nicolas should feel too conceited, he added: there was another affair, a very serious one, requiring an urgent decision, which had to be put before the monarch. He bade them both good night.

  Bourdeau accompanied Nicolas to Rue Montmartre. Nicolas, remembering Rabouine’s information, ordered the coachman to stop the carriage in the vicinity of Saint-Eustache. Bourdeau understood that something was the matter and asked no questions. He simply told Nicolas that the coachman would come and pick him up in Rue Montmartre the following morning. Nicolas plunged into the night. Once the cab was out of sight, he turned and walked back the way he had come until he was outside Saint-Eustache. From somewhere close by, he heard the sound of clogs, and the breathing of a horse. But the fog had grown thicker, and he could not make out a thing. He found the entrance to the church and went in. The huge nave was dimly lit by candles. He crept along a shadowy side aisle as far as a chapel which he often used when he wanted to make sure he was not being followed because from it he could see all the entrances. A few moments later, a figure wrapped from head to foot in a voluminous cloak came in and started looking around. The figure approached the chapel, brushed against the pillar behind which Nicolas was hiding, then continued on its way round the church. When it was on the opposite side of the central bay, Nicolas took advantage of the distance and the shadows to creep to the little door at the back of the building. He came out into a dead-end street which led to Rue Montmartre, close to Monsieur de Noblecourt’s house. On reflection, it seemed to him that the person who was following him probably did not know him, or he could have saved himself the trouble and simply waited for him outside his dwelling. There were clearly threats against him coming from different sources, but he was still no clearer as to what they might be.

  Nicolas found Monsieur de Noblecourt sitting by the hearth in the servants’ pantry, wrapped in a madras and sipping a calming herb tea which Catherine had made for him.

  The former procurator demanded to hear a detailed account of his day. The one thing that reassured him in what he heard was that the King was offering Nicolas his protection. He went back up to his apartments leaning on Nicolas’s arm. Cyrus barked weakly but reproachfully when he saw them, not understanding why the regularity of his master’s bedtime had been disrupted.

  ‘As you’ve witnessed several times,’ said Noblecourt, ‘I sometimes have a kind of sixth sense that allows me to get to the bottom of complicated cases without being sure why. Age is turning me into a prophet. This seems to me a particularly difficult affair, because it conceals something else, and probably not just one thing but several.’

  He saw a kind of incomprehension on Nicolas’s face.

  ‘Do my words seem confused to you?’ he asked. ‘Let me explain. Just as a river is the result of the convergence of several streams, this crime is the outcome of a number of different plots. Of that I am sure. Think about it and sleep peacefully.’

  Thinking about this enigmatic remark, Nicolas prepared his Court clothes and went to bed in the silence of this friendly house.

  Notes – CHAPTER 4

  1. See The Phantom of Rue Royale.

  2. Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713–1769), a Jesuit, later a Benedictine. He was a diplomat and the author of works on art including Essai sur l’architecture.

  3. This facelift was eventually carried out in 1779 during the hundred weddings celebrated in Notre Dame on the occasion of the birth of Madame Royale, the first child of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.

  4. See The Phan
tom of Rue Royale.

  V

  VANISHING TRICKS

  You have made me pass through the fire of the crucible, and have found in me no impurity.

  PSALM 16: 3

  Sunday 9 January 1774

  Cardinal de La Roche-Aymon, the Grand Chaplain, had just intoned the Domine salvum fac regem. It was taken up in canon by the white-clad choristers grouped on either side of the organ gallery above the choir, barely visible in the waves of incense wreathing the high altar and the two gilded bronze angels tilting towards the tabernacle. The incense rose in spirals towards the half-dome of the apse and the skies in Charles de Lafosse’s painting of the Resurrection of Christ. A strong emotion, an almost religious sense of loyalty, came over Nicolas as he gazed at the grey form kneeling on his prie-dieu: his master, King Louis XV.

  The solitude of the man came home to him. Beside the King, the Dauphin and Dauphine, as well as his grandsons Artois and Provence, represented the hopes of the future. Since Nicolas had arrived in Paris, the Grim Reaper had cut a swathe through those surrounding the throne: two daughters of France – Anne-Henriette and Madame Infante – their mother, Queen Marie Leszczyńska, too soon gone, the King’s son and his wife, the princess of Saxony, the good lady of Choisy1 and many others whose faces he could still recall. This thought added to Nicolas’s sadness. The unfolding of the liturgy had reminded him of the advice of his guardian and adoptive father, Canon Le Floch. ‘You mustn’t disperse your energies because you see torment and death everywhere. You know that everything is a test. Mourning and patience must engender the hope and impassivity through which one dies to the world.’ Alas, he had not yet attained such wisdom!

  Nicolas and Sartine had arrived just in time for the beginning of the service. Positioned behind his chief in a side gallery, he had been able to observe the personalities of the Court at his leisure. Beside Sartine was the shrunken form of Monsieur de Saint-Florentin, Minister of the King’s Household. He could not think of him by any other name, even though the monarch’s favour had raised his properties at Châteauneuf-sur-Loire to the status of a duchy and he now bore the title of Duc de La Vrillière. The best-informed man in France could see no end to the favours bestowed on him by the monarch: when he had lost his hand in a hunting accident, the King had provided him with a silver prosthesis, which he usually concealed with a silk glove.

  Some distance from him was the Duc d’Aiguillon, Minister for Foreign Affairs and War, happily ogling all the women present with scant concern for his wife’s feelings: he knew she would not hold it against him, accustomed as she was to the handsome duke’s infidelities. She herself, Monsieur de Saint-Florentin’s niece, was an example of piety, devotion and resignation to the rest of the Court. It seemed to Nicolas, as he looked at her, that they had not lied about her. He noted the sunken mouth, the lopsided nose and the distant gaze, not to mention a fishwife’s figure with a huge chest and arms. The general effect, though, was not unpleasant, and he had heard her compared to ‘a performance full of machines and decorations, with some marvellous features in no particular order, admired by the stalls but jeered from the boxes’.

  The service was ending. The organ played a joyful fugue. The murmuring of the faithful grew louder. Everyone stood and repeated the words of the blessing. The officiating priests saluted the royal gallery and left the chapel in procession. The nave emptied. The King rose and took his gloves and hat from the hands of a chaplain. The doors of the chapel were thrown open and the Swiss Guards presented arms to the sound of a drum.

  Monsieur de Sartine was whispering something in the minister’s ear. The minister made a face and Nicolas heard him agree to speak to the King immediately. They waited a long time for him to return, which Sartine filled by examining a statue depicting Glory Holding the Portrait of Louis XV. A page appeared and summoned them to the council chamber, which was where, unusually, the King would receive Sartine today. The page bowed to Nicolas, who recognised him: it was Gaspard. Once in the service of Monsieur de La Borde,2 Gaspard was now in the monarch’s internal service. It was the King’s trust in La Borde that had got him this flattering promotion. Although the man had performed a signal service for Nicolas in the past, he did not think the choice was an especially judicious one, and would not himself have advised it: the fellow was too partial to the lure of gold, and there were many temptations in the corridors and antechambers of the palace. They crossed the Hall of Mirrors, still filled with the Sunday crowd. Nicolas, who for a long time had been responsible for providing security for the royal family, particularly dreaded these days when anyone, provided they were properly dressed, with a hat in their hand and a sword by their side – a sword that could be rented at the entrance to the palace – could approach the King and his associates. Sartine signalled Nicolas to wait on a bench and entered the council chamber.

  The commissioner could remember the days when there had been other furniture in the hall, before the taste for novelty had swept it away in 1769. He admired the gilded pedestal tables representing groups of women and children holding horns of plenty. Above, the cartouche in the central tableau proclaimed: The King Rules by Himself. Mercury was descending from the clouds, his caduceus in his hand, hovering over Louis XIV in Roman dress.

  ‘Aha!’ came a sarcastic voice. ‘Young Ranreuil, sitting and gawping!’

  Nicolas stood up and bowed respectfully to a little old man dressed in white satin, his face excessively made up, who was looking at him with an ironic expression.

  ‘All hail, Monsieur,’ Nicolas said. ‘I was lost in the stars on the ceiling, with glory all around me. You are right to mock. I am unforgivable, and would deserve a blow from that stick of yours decorated with fleur-de-lis.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve left it at home,’ replied the Maréchal de Richelieu with a laugh. ‘In truth, it’s too much of a hindrance. One could not be more gracious than you are: a good pedigree hunting dog. The marquis, your father, had such repartee … Is it the marquis or the commissioner who is waiting on this bench at the door of the council chamber?’

  He sighed, with all the bitterness of an old man who had never been admitted to the King’s councils.

  ‘To tell the truth, Monsieur, I still don’t know that myself. His Majesty is receiving Monsieur de Sartine, and as you have so well observed, I am waiting.’

  ‘But this isn’t the usual hour for their weekly meeting. Some exceptional case, some salacious scandal likely to distract the King’s melancholy soul? No matter. I wish you, Monsieur, a good wait. I am off now to pay court to the divine comtesse.’

  The maréchal was a friend of Madame du Barry’s, and was still hoping, through her, to satisfy his political ambitions. He had no compunction in recalling that his help had been indispensable to her when she had wanted to be presented at Court. Like it or not, it was thanks to him that enough sponsors had been assembled.

  At last, the mirrored door of the council chamber opened and Monsieur de Sartine put his head out. Without a word, he looked at Nicolas with a pious air. Nicolas knew what that meant, and he followed him in. The King was tapping with one finger on the face of a bronze-trimmed rocaille clock that glittered between two Sèvres vases in the centre of the griotte marble mantelpiece.

  ‘Commissioner Le Floch, at Your Majesty’s service,’ announced Sartine.

  He had drawn Nicolas into the centre of the room, halfway between a console table and the end of the desk. The King turned and smiled. He was more stooped than ever, and his paunch filled out his grey, gold-embroidered coat. His face struck Nicolas as even more marked than usual, puffy in places, mottled in others. Only the brown, almost black eyes recalled the monarch of old. Louis took a few steps towards the table and leant on it with both hands, so that the ribbon of the Holy Spirit across his chest came loose. Then he turned his head and looked at the busts of Scipio the African and Alexander the Great.

  ‘Who can tell me where Scipio defeated Hannibal?’

  ‘If I may be so bold, Your Majesty, I bel
ieve it might have been at the battle of Zama.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it!’ The King sighed. ‘Ah, a Jesuit education …’

  Nicolas knew that the monarch never approached a subject directly. Like a ship tacking against a contrary wind to reach port, the King, either through shyness or a concern not to rush his interlocutor, always took a roundabout route towards whatever he wanted to say.

  ‘The Lieutenant General of Police has told me everything,’ he said at last. ‘You may rest assured that we consider you innocent in this affair. Now is not the best time to keep the matter quiet. The tragedy is already public knowledge and such censorship would only create even more of a stir. I do, however, insist on hearing from your own lips your word as a gentleman.’

  ‘Sire, you have my word as the son of the Marquis de Ranreuil and your servant that I have no connection with the death of Madame de Lastérieux in any way, shape or form.’

  ‘That is good enough for me, Monsieur.’

  Showing little consideration for Nicolas’s sensitivity, the King, with that delight in morbid subjects which was one of the strangest aspects of his nature, then asked for a detailed account of the autopsy on the victim. When he had heard it, he reflected for a long time.

  ‘Do you understand English, Monsieur?’

  ‘Yes, sire. Without taxing Your Majesty’s patience, I can tell you that when the English fleet entered the estuary of the Vilaine, the Marquis de Ranreuil captured a detachment, including a naval lieutenant. This officer stayed at the Château de Ranreuil for one year as a prisoner on parole. At my father’s request, he taught my sister Isabelle and myself his language.’

  ‘That’s very good.’ There was another silence, then the King asked, ‘Do you know anything about conjuring, Sartine?’