The Nicolas Le Floch affair

by Jean-FranCois Parot

  The Dauphin handed his rifle to a page and leant back against a birch tree. He looked benevolently at Nicolas with his grey-blue, slightly blurry eyes. Nicolas dealt briefly with the preliminaries and insisted, knowing the prince’s interest in cartography, on how advantageous it would be for the French navy to have new information concerning the coast of the great Chinese empire, from both a military and a commercial point of view. The Dauphin knelt, picked up a twig and drew the coastline of Asia on the ground, from memory. Warming to the subject, he expounded arguments so well founded and so well thought out that they surprised Nicolas. Although the decision remained with the King, he hoped that he would involve his heir.

  ‘Monsieur,’ said the Dauphin, ‘I’m glad to have seen you again on a topic of such importance to the interests of the King. I imagine I will please you by giving you news of Naganda, the Micmac chief to whom you introduced me some years ago. His reports have been consistently interesting. The tribes with which he has made contact look upon him as a man who has come to help them against the English. You know how restless the American colonists are at the moment … He’s making a lot of good contacts. For example, he’s already spoken to the Tuscaroras, the Onondagas, the Senekas, the Mohawks, the Oneidas and the Cayudas. He’s a real treasure, and we’re very grateful to you.’

  Nicolas was astonished at the prince’s memory and knowledge. At that moment, the pages pulled them by the sleeve. More flights of birds had been sighted. For a while, the two men devoted themselves to the pleasures of the hunt, shooting up at the flocks that sped by overhead and seeing them scatter and reform. Unlike venery, this was not a struggle with the noblest of animals, nor a dangerous game played against a fierce foe, but an entertainment whose interest lay in the abundance of the prey and the rapidity of their flight. The Dauphin complimented Nicolas good-naturedly on the fact that he was shooting with the King’s rifles: an exceptional gesture, reserved for those whom His Majesty wished to distinguish. The birds fell one after the other, so quickly that the breathless spaniels could no longer gather them. Swiss Guards would load the rifles and pass them to the pages, who would hand them to the hunters. The amount of game collected would be totted up on tablets by the First Page of the Small Stable, who would then go to the King’s office to receive orders concerning its distribution. The largest portion went to the pages, along with the traditional twelve bottles of champagne. The King had remained in his coach. His foot-warmer had been taken to him and he was talking to La Borde. The shooting party was coming to an end, and the Dauphin graciously invited Nicolas to his coach. Their conversation, quite relaxed now, centred on hunting, a subject on which the prince was unstoppable and the commissioner a mine of information.

  Nicolas was duly present when the King’s boots were removed, and was granted a happy smile by the monarch. Monsieur de La Borde, who was returning to Paris, offered him a lift. No sooner was he in the Court carriage than he lowered the window, despite the cold.

  ‘Are you rather too warm?’ asked Nicolas.

  ‘My dear fellow, a plague on the Maréchal de Richelieu! I was next to him in the King’s study. The old dandy measures his own youth by the power of the smell he gives off. He’s always soaked himself in pure musk, and wherever he goes, the odours of the badger, the stag and the rutting boar go with him. In Paris they sing:

  Whenever old Richelieu enters a room

  Strengthen your heart and plug up your nose.

  He has his breeches made from Spanish hide soaked in the same perfume. In the theatre, his scent is so strong that the boxes adjoining his quickly empty in the intervals. How did you find the King?’

  Nicolas had noticed that, for some years now, the monarch’s closest and most attentive servants had invariably asked the same question.

  ‘To tell the truth, a little older …’

  La Borde’s face tensed and he let out a sigh, as if trying to rid himself of a fear that lay heavy on his heart.

  ‘But he seems better as soon as he speaks. That livens him up.’

  ‘If only you saw him more often!’ exclaimed La Borde. ‘It’s enough to mention your name and his face lights up. I don’t know where you get the gift which allows you to distract him. Many others try, but in vain. One conversation with you, though, and he’s young again! How sad to see him huddled in his carriage against the cold. He so used to love hunting!’

  He fell silent for a moment, as if lost in thought, and sighed again.

  ‘At the time of Madame de Pompadour, hunting was followed by delightful little dinners where everyone enjoyed themselves. Now it’s quite different … Madame du Barry is causing a great deal of anxiety and worrying the King’s doctors. He feels it’s his duty to respond to her ardour. Richelieu supplies him with strong stimulants, and he certainly takes too many of them. To tell the truth, he’s scared of getting old. He’s constantly trying to make sure his powers have not diminished. Stag’s horn in powdered form and pills filled with cantharids1 are his favoured remedies.’

  ‘Semacgus has always warned me against such products.’

  ‘Quite rightly. Alas, there comes a time when an old machine runs out of steam, its springs stiffen from overuse, and nothing we do can mend it. The worst of it is that the weaknesses we notice, instead of making us wiser, lead us to try even harder and more often.’

  ‘But didn’t His Majesty sell the deer park to Monsieur Sevin, the usher of Madame Victoire’s chamber?’

  ‘Yes, but the temptations remain. For some people, the more there are, the better. In the harem of the Great Turk, the most desirable girls are those who are not yet there.’

  Nicolas wondered if his friend, who was a great libertine, would apply the same counsels of prudence and moderation to himself when he was older. Everyone led the life he wanted, and wisdom sometimes prevailed in the end. The change in Semacgus’s behaviour was proof enough of that.

  ‘Alas, my friend, as President de Saujac never stops saying, “We do not change our habits, it is our habits that change us.”’

  Nicolas decided on a frontal attack. ‘What were your feelings towards Madame de Lastérieux?’

  The use of the word ‘Madame’ seemed to implicate him less directly in the question. La Borde looked Nicolas in the eyes gravely and a trifle sadly. It was as if a whole lifetime’s experience of love were in those eyes, and the difference in age between them was suddenly made clear.

  ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ he replied, ‘but I thought her flirtatious and quite unsuitable for you. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I think her death has liberated you in a way, and has certainly spared you many disappointments. I don’t deny that she was fond of you. But the question is, what was the basis of this fondness: the love she claimed to feel for you, or her desire to succeed? I would incline to the latter hypothesis. These days, we are no longer content with appearing vermillion, we want to become crimson. I don’t know if it was just an impression, but she seemed to treat me differently and was less arrogant in my presence than with other people. Her simpering was meant to enhance her charms and act as a bait.’

  ‘And you think …’

  ‘That she was only interested in me as a man of the Court. She was so anxious to get herself there, by whatever means …’

  Faced with such honesty, Nicolas could not but dismiss the few suspicions that had crossed his mind, even though, as a professional, he knew that it was unwise to base a properly conducted investigation on feelings and impressions. A long silence fell between them, which La Borde broke suddenly.

  ‘It was I who had you invited to the King’s shooting party. His Majesty commented that you didn’t need to be invited, as you were entitled to come by right. He added that he regretted not seeing you as often as he would like. Please come hunting more often, for his sake and for mine!’

  Monsieur de La Borde dropped Nicolas at the Grand Châtelet, where a very agitated Old Marie informed him that something serious had happened and that Inspector Bourdeau had gone to Rue Sai
nt-Julien-le-Pauvre, leaving a message that the commissioner was to join him as soon as he got back from Versailles. A police carriage was waiting to take him across the Seine. It was not very far, but the traffic was heavy this late in the afternoon and a spot of congestion blocked the carriage in Rue du Marché-Palu, as they were leaving the Cité. He had to abandon it, ordering his coachman to join him as soon as he got through. He went along Rue du Petit Pont, then Rue de la Boucherie, and finally entered the narrow Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.

  An animated crowd surrounded a police wagon. French Guards were holding them at a distance from the door of an old house whose façade leant with age. Nicolas made his way through the crowd and identified himself. Bourdeau hailed him from one of the windows. In the hall, he also had to move aside a group of gossiping women, who swore at him. On the fourth-floor landing, he found the inspector and an officer. Bourdeau stopped him, took him aside and brought him up to date.

  ‘Rabouine had been keeping watch on this house since yesterday. Nothing unusual happened until noon today, when Balbastre appeared. He went up to Monsieur du Maine-Giraud’s apartment. He only stayed a few moments, then came out again looking distraught. Rabouine did not hesitate. He dispatched a messenger boy to inform me of the facts and followed the organist. I haven’t heard from him since. As soon as I was reached – I was dealing with an affair of contraband wine in Montmartre – I rushed here. The room wasn’t locked: the latch falls as soon as you pull the door. I found the young gentleman dead, transfixed on a sword that had been jammed between the bars at the back of a chair. Everything points to suicide. I avoided touching anything, as I wanted you to be the first to examine the body and the room.’

  Without a word, Nicolas opened the door. At a single glance, the whole drama was revealed to him. The furnishings were so sparse that the room seemed empty: a white wooden wardrobe, a bunk with a straw mattress covered with a worn damask counterpane, a rickety table, a stool with holes in its straw seat, a half-folded screen made of oil paper, a dressing table with a washbowl. The window, presumably opened by Bourdeau, faced the door. To its right, at a slight diagonal from the entrance, a body in a shirt sat totally motionless, sprawled over a chair in a corner of the room, hair covering the face. Slightly to the left, beneath the shoulder blade, glinted the tip of a sword.

  Nicolas approached the victim cautiously, like a pointer at a hunt. He examined the bloodstained floor, registering every detail. He stood up again and read the titles of the books on a small shelf. A few garments hung on nails above a pair of boots. Bending, Nicolas noticed a series of scratches on the floor. Some gashes on the flowered wallpaper also caught his attention, so recent that the plaster dust still lay on the floor. He took a step forward for a closer look at the body and pulled on one of the arms: it was not yet stiff. Clearly death had occurred not long before, a few hours at the most. That coincided more or less with Balbastre’s brief visit, he calculated. He called Bourdeau and the officer. Together, they moved the body and laid it on its side, as Nicolas wanted to leave the weapon in its place, to be carefully examined during the autopsy at the Basse-Geôle. He was struck, like the others, by the expression of terror on the victim’s still almost childlike face. But, distorted as the features were, he recognised him as one of the card players he had glimpsed during the party at Madame de Lastérieux’s house. The body was then taken away on a stretcher, while Nicolas noted down the pattern of scratches on the wooden floor. Before leaving the room and having seals placed on the door, the inspector and he conducted a thorough search. Their task was made easier by the poverty of the place. It was Bourdeau, as he moved the clothes, who pointed out to him the pair of boots they had glimpsed earlier: they turned out to be Nicolas’s, the very same boots that had disappeared from Madame de Lastérieux’s house. One of the soles had a nail sticking out. That, clearly, was what had made the scratches on the floor, as it had in Julie’s bedroom.

  It was with this remarkable observation that they left Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. At the Châtelet, Nicolas gave instructions for the autopsy to be performed as soon as possible. He felt a few scruples at once again having to turn to Sanson and Semacgus, but he did not want to leave such an important operation to the prison’s own, mediocre doctors. He next decided to pay a visit to Master Tiphaine, Madame de Lastérieux’s notary, at his practice in Rue de la Harpe. There, he found the clerks in a panic and the notary’s young wife in tears. She told him that her husband, after receiving a visit from a person she did not know, had thrown a few things in a portmanteau and hurried to his carriage. All he had said to her was that she was to write poste restante to his banker in The Hague: he would go regularly to collect his mail. Disappointed by this twist of fate, Nicolas returned to the Châtelet. In the duty office, he found Rabouine making his report to Bourdeau. Nothing had attracted his attention during his surveillance of the house of Monsieur du Maine-Giraud. Only a few common women had gone in and out, as well as a monk he had not seen again.

  ‘A monk?’ said Nicolas. ‘Of what order?’

  ‘A Capuchin,’ said Rabouine. ‘With his hood pulled down.’

  ‘Don’t look any further!’ laughed Bourdeau. ‘I thought you were a clever fellow, Rabouine. Well, you were had!’

  The informer bowed his head. ‘Later,’ he went on, ‘a young man came out, with a folded sheet under his arm. I took him for a laundryman’s assistant. Finally, after an hour, Monsieur Balbastre, whom I know, appeared. He seemed very nervous, and kept looking around as if he was afraid he was being followed.’

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘Impossible, Monsieur Nicolas. He came out again five or six minutes later.’

  ‘Was he carrying anything?’

  ‘A package.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Well, I thought I should follow him. He took a cab back to his house – he lives near Saint-Gervais. He didn’t stay there long. When he came out, he was walking quickly and reading a letter, which he tore up and scattered to the four winds.’

  ‘Were you able to collect any of the pieces?’

  ‘How was I supposed to run after him and pick up the pieces at the same time?’

  There was nothing you could do, thought Nicolas, when bad luck played all these tricks on you, one after the other. You just had to endure them and wait for your luck to change.

  ‘I hope you kept after him and didn’t lose him?’

  Rabouine lifted his angular profile. ‘On the contrary, Monsieur Nicolas, I stayed with him all the way to his destination.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘His carriage turned into Rue de l’Université and stopped near the Palais Bourbon. Balbastre got out and went in through the gate of the Duc d’Aiguillon’s mansion.’

  ‘Now that is interesting!’ exclaimed Bourdeau.

  ‘And you didn’t stay to keep watch?’

  Rabouine winked. ‘You seem to be doubting my abilities today. I have my contacts in all the best houses. And to see a case through to its conclusion, you only have to know human nature and how to exploit it.’ He made a gesture of counting money.

  ‘No,’ said Nicolas impatiently, ‘we don’t doubt your abilities, but we don’t have much time.’

  ‘Well, then, to cut a long story short,’ said Rabouine, ‘I spoke to my contact a little while later. He told me that our man had a conversation with one of the minister’s associates, who gave orders for lodgings to be made ready in the attic of the mansion and for the organist to be taken up there. That’s where he is right now, apparently with a high fever and shivering all over.’

  ‘Bravo, bravissimo!’ cried Bourdeau. ‘Rabouine, you’re the best! You redeem your previous negligence with this latest feat!’

  Once Rabouine had left, Nicolas and Bourdeau summed up the situation. They were in the presence of another death clearly linked to the murder of Madame de Lastérieux. What they had to do as soon as possible was determine the exact circumstances of Monsieur du Maine-Giraud’s suicide.
Added to that was a mysterious monk and the visit of Balbastre, who had come out of the dead man’s lodgings with a package. The same man, clearly terrified, had run to seek refuge at the house of the First Minister, the Duc d’Aiguillon, where he had been received like a regular guest. Last but not least, why had Master Tiphaine left hurriedly on an overseas trip?

  The two men again divided up the tasks. Nicolas would be present at the autopsy, which would be performed that very night, if possible, while his deputy would go and search Balbastre’s house near the church of Saint-Gervais. After which, to obtain authorisation for more exhaustive investigations, they would have to apply to the Lieutenant General of Police, who usually left for Versailles on Saturdays to prepare for his weekly audience with the King.

  Saturday 22 January 1774

  The interview with Monsieur de Sartine had begun pleasantly enough. Preoccupied with his hobby, he first informed Nicolas that, after enquiries in London, a full chest of wigs was on its way to France, and he was dying with impatience to receive it. However, the commissioner was far from sure that this preamble did not conceal something else, and he knew his chief’s character well enough to realise before long that the apparent gentleness of his tone hid a growing irritation.

  Nicolas therefore made his report in a deliberately neutral manner, making sure that no exaggeration opened the floodgates to a torrent of reproaches. A vain hope: the news of Casimir’s death, Semacgus’s discoveries in the Jardin du Roi and the investigation into Julie’s supposed letter and will, even though it did not occasion any outburst, nevertheless led to Sartine moving a number of objects about on his desk, a sign that he was growing impatient. The information about the death of Monsieur du Maine-Giraud and the possible involvement of Balbastre produced the same reaction. But then the announcement of the organist’s escape to the Duc d’Aiguillon’s mansion and above all the latest news of the night really did startle Monsieur de Sartine. The search of Balbastre’s house had in fact led to the discovery of a pair of bloodstained shoes and, hidden at the back of a wardrobe, the Capuchin’s robe, equally soiled. In addition, the autopsy performed by Semacgus and Sanson at the Basse-Geôle had made it possible to rule out suicide as the cause of death: Monsieur du Maine-Giraud had been murdered. An examination of the wound had revealed that a first blow had punctured the liver, provoking a fatal haemorrhage, and what had happened thereafter was pure make-believe. The body had been run through with a sword stuck between the bars of the chair, the point of the blade being driven into the original wound. This second penetration had followed a different route from the first. There was no doubt possible: the blood spattered around the room and the scratches on the floor, caused by boots whose soles had been cleaned before being put away, proved that there had been a violent attack. The threatened victim could well have struggled or have tried to parry the fatal blow. In conclusion, Nicolas requested authorisation to arrest Balbastre, who might not be the murderer but who certainly had information crucial to the progress of the investigation. This conclusion, although perfectly logical, unleashed Sartine’s rage. He began striding up and down his office, ranting and raving.