I could see it as if I was walking through it—colonnades and staircases and hushed libraries. The universities of Europe. I saw botanical gardens and shelves stacked with glass jars of yellowing liquid preserving the shapes of rare animals and fishes. I heard animated conversation at a distance—voices speaking in Spanish, Italian, German. I pictured myself there at the center of it all: on the steps, among fountains and bougainvillea, in shady lecture halls—arguing, questioning.
Derbyshire was a backwater as far as ideas were concerned. None of the members of the local Natural Philosophical Society at Castleton, which now had a substantial collection of fossils and bones displayed in its museum, had read James Hutton or Georges Cuvier or even Alexander Humboldt. They were not philosophers but myopic collectors arguing over taxonomy, I told myself, counting angels on a pinhead. Only three men in the town of Ashbourne—the vicar, the doctor, and the judge—knew Greek. Even Edinburgh Medical School, when compared with the medical schools of Paris, seemed to be locked in the past century. I had attended all the lectures in anatomy, geology, and natural philosophy several times over by the time I graduated. The university library, where I had first read volumes of Shakespeare and Locke and Fielding and Scott as well as anatomy textbooks, closed and opened at unpredictable hours; it had no catalogue and an impenetrable shelving system. The anatomy theaters were always full to bursting, and you couldn’t get a seat or see what was happening; there were never enough cadavers for us to work on.
Meanwhile the medical students I knew who had spent a winter at the Jardin des Plantes came back whispering of lecture theaters filled with the cleverest men in Europe, libraries overflowing with thousands of volumes of specialist books, museums crammed with specimens from every corner of the world, new dissection and classification techniques, and ever more powerful microscopes. Paris had become a kind of mirage in my mind—a shimmer of light on the horizon.
I had only my inheritance, but I had merit, and in France, people said then, merit still counted for something. Napoleon Bonaparte had proven that. His rise to power had been theatrical and spectacular: Corsican country boy comes to Paris during the Revolution, becomes a soldier, becomes lieutenant, becomes artillery commander, becomes general, becomes first consul, becomes Emperor of France. He was breathtaking. You couldn’t not admire him. In fifteen years he had captured most of Europe, swept his way with his Imperial Army through city after city, like a high tide across mudflats, to establish himself as one of the greatest rulers the world had ever seen.
But of course, although I admired Napoleon perhaps above all men, my father would not permit my journey to Paris until the Emperor had fallen. By the time I arrived, Napoleon was already a captive on the HMS Bellerophon, while the Allies quarreled about what to do with him.
In 1815 Napoleon’s fate seemed strangely—inversely, superstitiously—bound to mine. Just as my journey began, his seemed to be coming to an end. As I reached Paris, he was already heading away from it. Europe had begun the process of remaking itself, redrawing its borders, and forming new alliances. The trajectory of Napoleons power, at first relentlessly upward, like an arrow in flight, had started into its downward curve. I would follow the newspaper accounts of his journey all through that autumn, measuring my own days against his, spellbound, as I would have watched the trail of a strange comet across the night sky.
“I plan to leave Paris in the spring,” I told her, “and travel down to Montpellier and then Heidelberg, then across to Padua and Pavia. My father does not approve. He thinks I should buy a practice in Derbyshire and settle down or study for the church. He says I am a dilettante. He says philosophical questions are of no practical use in this world. He does not like France or the French.”
“And your mother? What does she think?”
“My mother always agrees with my father.”
Over thirty years my mother had adapted to married life and a house full of large and noisy sons by retreating to her room with a vague, unnamed medical condition. Your mother is not to be worried, my father insisted, using her constitution as a way of ensuring compliance from his sons. Conversations with my mother were almost entirely conducted in hushed tones in darkened rooms. I remember a table of colored bottles like stained glass in her drawing room and the thick burnt-flower smell of laudanum that hung about her like incense. She had little interest in my childish obsessions with butterflies, newts, and fossils, but she taught me to draw and paint watercolors of birds and plants, which I would bring to her like offerings.
“If your father hates the French,” the woman said, noticing my distraction, “why does he let you come here?”
“My professor at Edinburgh wrote to him several times pressing my case. I am the youngest son, so I think he is more indulgent with me than with my brothers.” I didn’t tell her how many times Jameson had used the word exceptional in his letter to my father or that he had described me as the finest student in my year. I had worked hard for that word exceptional and for his letter of recommendation to Cuvier.
“So you will take the Grand Tour.”
“Well, no. Not like that. Paintings and ruins are interesting enough, but it’s the natural-history collections and libraries I want to see. Knowledge, not art. That’s what’s important now. Advances in knowledge. We will soon discover the key to all of nature’s laws. Soon we will know God’s purpose and design—”
“God’s design,” she said. “Are God and Nature the same thing, or different? I find that a difficult question. Nature? Is she God’s agent, his servant—doing his work for him, following his plan, or can she go her own way? And I wonder if they argue sometimes, Nature and God—it seems to me that they want different things.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She baffled me. I had never met a woman who thought about philosophical questions. The women I had spoken to at the dinner tables of Derbyshire or Edinburgh seemed only to want to gossip about people or novels or to talk earnestly about the poor. I wasn’t very good at talking about those things and hadn’t really listened. “You are much too serious with women, Daniel,” my brother Samuel had once said. “They really don’t want to know about your microscopes and your fossils and your butterflies.” He was right. They didn’t. I had long since given up talking about natural philosophy to women.
The horses, sensing the closeness of their destination, picked up the pace. We passed another group of French soldiers by the side of the road, wounded Waterloo veterans making their way wearily back to Paris. I had sketched several groups of soldiers since leaving Calais and had tried repeatedly to capture the details of the war-torn landscape. I had drawn fields full of ripe corn and no one to harvest it; rubbish blowing in the warm wind; half-empty villages, every second house boarded up or left with its doors and shutters flung open. I drew the white flags that peasants had suspended from windows and rooftops and trees. I sketched disoriented soldiers, some badly wounded, others being dragged on boards tied to horses, traveling home, carrying their swords over their shoulders to support bundles of clothes and food, women in uniform walking alongside them.
“It is a good plan, of course,” she went on, “this one of yours to travel. But what will you do when your money runs out? Go home? Become a doctor? Marry and have children? Grow fat? Stand for Parliament, perhaps?”
“No,” I said. “I have to make my own living. I’m not ashamed to say that. But I want to continue my studies, and if I’m careful with my money… I might—”
“You have a letter of introduction to Professor Cuvier?” she asked, yawning.
“Yes, from Jameson. And some specimens to present. Do you know him, Professor Cuvier? What is he like?”
In my mind’s eye, Baron Cuvier appeared larger than life. Perhaps that had something to do with the bones he worked on—the giant bones of mammoths and megatheriums dug out from the quarries of Paris or brought to him from the canal workings or mine shafts of Europe. I imagined him walking through halls of bones, through the bellie
s of whales. He, more than anyone, could make them speak. He could see how they fitted together, how this joint here fitted with that foot there. He could take a single fossil toe bone, they said, and rebuild the entire skeleton of the creature from it. I wanted him to teach me to see what he saw. That’s why I was in Paris. I wanted to see through Cuvier’s eyes.
“He is stiff,” she said. “Rather formal in his manner, but clever, very clever. A very important man in France. You seem young for such responsibility.”
“Yes …” I hesitated. “Well, no … I am one of the oldest in my year. My friend—”
“You have much to see in Paris, M. Connor. The natural-history collection at the museum in the Jardin is beyond compare. I cannot imagine what it will be like to see it for the first time. I envy you. I would like to show you, take you there.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Of course.” She laughed. “We’re almost in Paris now. Perhaps another hour or so. See how the light is lifting up the color in the fields—they are not flat anymore. The shapes are filling out and the stars have almost disappeared.”
“The mammoths have gone back to the hills,” I said.
“One day, when the water has retreated even more, you will be able to walk from London to Paris. There will be no more English Channel. Your country will be joined to mine.”
“It will?”
“Well, perhaps not soon. It might take a few thousand years. And who knows, perhaps by then we will have wings.”
In a sleeping village on the outskirts of Paris, the mail coach stopped to change the horses. A dog ran alongside us, barking. A young woman, awake in the dawn, stepped into her doorway; a small child strapped to her back stared up at us, bleary-eyed.
“I can’t keep my eyes open any longer,” my companion said. “I shall sleep. You should too.”
I leaned against the leather side of the seat, watching the hunched silhouette of the driver beneath me, his clothes coming into color in the light of the morning, steam rising from the backs of the horses. I glanced over at the woman who had pulled her cloak around her and the child curled in sleep. I wondered why I had not asked her more questions. What else did she know? I felt the mail coach lurch one last time, and tired and hungry, I fell asleep, thinking of mammoths lumbering in the dark.
When the mail coach stopped at the Barrier of Saint Denis an hour later, I woke to find the woman and the child gone, along with my travel bag and the small case containing the specimens. She had left me only my identity papers and my wallet, which had been placed under my arm as I slept.
Two notebooks of writings and annotations. Years of precious notes on natural history taken from books I might not find again and from experiments I could not hope to repeat. A book of sketches. Letters of introduction from Professor Jameson. The cases of specimens and the manuscript entrusted to me—gone.
Startled, and still half-asleep, I turned to look for her among the ragged tangle of buildings that made up the outskirts of the city. But she was nowhere. Outrage gave way to bafflement, then a sickening sense of my own stupidity. I had fallen asleep. I might as well have given my possessions away. I climbed over to the luggage rack, turning over bag after bag, trunk after trunk, calling out to the driver for help. He was busy reining in the horses and only cursed me in French and shouted that I had better return to my seat unless I wanted to get everyone killed.
A Scottish soldier standing guard with several Prussians at the barrier called out for identity papers. The English passengers passed papers through the window of the coach below. My spirits lifted for a moment at the familiar sight of the tall soldier in his kilt.
“Sir,” I called out. “My bag has been stolen.”
“Welcome to Paris, my friend,” the soldier called back.
“What should I do?”
“Go to the Bureau de la Sûreté and report it. Give yourself a few hours. There’s usually a queue. Want me to lend you a few francs?” He passed my papers back.
“No. I have money. She didn’t take my money.”
“She didn’t take your money?” He turned to the Prussian soldier, mimicking sexual gestures. They laughed: a joke at my expense. “There can’t be a single woman in Paris who doesn’t want your money. They’re not cheap, mind. Forget your bag, monsieur, and find yourself a woman. Just make sure you get what you pay for—and don’t fall asleep.”
The coach lumbered through the gates and into the city.
N THAT SAME HOT NIGHT, IN JULY, the Emperor Napoleon lay sleepless in a small bed on board the HMS Bellerophon, a British ship making its way around the westernmost point of France about to enter the English Channel. Its captain, the Scotsman Richard Maitland, also lay awake listening to the sound of the gulls and calculating how long it might take Parliament to decide the Emperor’s destination. Someone had to find an island secure enough to keep the Emperor a prisoner this time. There must be no further escapes. It was a responsibility that weighed heavily on Captain Maitland. There would almost certainly be a rescue attempt.
At the other end of the ship, the Emperor lay in his bed, looking back on the trajectory of his life thus far, wondering what had happened to break the rising curve of his power. His luck had begun to falter for the first time only a year before, in 1814, when the Allies, afraid of what he might do, had defeated his armies, captured him, and imprisoned him on Elba, an island off the coast of Italy. It had been a humiliation almost beyond endurance.
But he had shown his captors what it meant to be Emperor of France. While the Allies were congratulating themselves on their victory, he had escaped from Elba and had marched on Paris a second time in March 1815. He had retaken and occupied the city for a hundred days but then been defeated by the Allies a second time, at Waterloo. Now he was a captive again, at the mercy of the British government. But, he thought, if he had escaped the clutches of the Allies once, he could do it again. His men whispered daily of rescue attempts and plots. Perhaps the British would grant him free passage to America after all.
At dawn the Emperor appeared on deck in his famous gray greatcoat. Midshipman George Home, anxious about the slipperiness of the newly scrubbed decks, offered Napoleon his arm. On the poop deck, Napoleon stood in silence for the rest of the morning. His entourage—his generals, their wives, his servants and valets—gathered around him, but he spoke to no one, keeping his eyes fixed on the lighthouse on the isle of Ushant and the slowly receding coastline of France.
2
S THE COACH MADE ITS WAY along the length of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, I looked for my thief among the soldiers in vividly colored uniforms and the men and women pushing handcarts, carrying flowers, wood, fruit, and vegetables into the city from outlying farms. Narrow cobbled roadways to each side trickled with stinking water; ancient lanterns hung from ropes overhead. All down the street, as far as I could see, haberdashers were hanging long strips of bright calico outside their shops like flags. On street corners old men clustered around smoky braziers, roasting fish and meat. I was hungry.
I tried to make out the full magnitude of what had happened. Professor Jameson, I reminded myself, seeking to build bridges between British and French science now that the war was finally over, had entrusted me with gifts and a manuscript to take to Professor Cuvier, probably the most important man of science in France. The specimens and the manuscript were irreplaceable. The loss was not only an embarrassment, it was a scandal. This would almost certainly mean my return to the gray streets of Edinburgh, or to my father’s house, shamed. Even if I went to the police and could make myself understood, even if the specimens were found and returned, the story would be the same: Daniel Connor had lost the rare and irreplaceable gifts entrusted to his care because he had dropped his guard and fallen asleep on the mail coach, seduced into a false sense of security by a beautiful woman. It was pitiable.
The mail coach turned into a wide covered courtyard, where half a dozen other coaches were drawing up at the same time. Drivers were unloading towers
of luggage from roofs; porters were bustling about and attendants shouting. “Dis way, sare; are you for ze Otel of Rhin?” “Hôtel Bristol, sare!” Cards were thrust into hands; English voices jabbered. “Hicks, Hicks, take the coats and umbrellas.” “Count the packages, John. There should be twenty-seven.” There were nurserymaids, carpetbags, hatboxes, cloaks, and trunks everywhere. “Enfin,” I heard an old lady say to her daughters, yawning and rubbing her eyes with her cambric handkerchief, “nous voilà!”
“Hôtel Corneille,” I said to the first porter who met my eye. Grinning, he lifted my three suitcases onto his handcart and set off on foot. I followed close behind, lest the man suddenly take off with the rest of my possessions. On each side of the street shopkeepers were opening up their doors to morning trade, setting up their windows and storefronts; waiters put out tables; fiacre drivers washed down the wheels of their carriages at the street pumps or brushed down their horses.
Paris was now a military encampment for the Allies. Everywhere uniforms made a mosaic of color in the morning sun—helmets, bearskins, two-pointed hats, plumes, epaulettes, sunbursts and grenade ornaments, standards, cravats, buckles, and shoulder cloaks. The British, someone had said, had set up camp right in the middle of the Champs-Élysées, their white conical tents clustered along the walkways under the plane and chestnut trees. Russian soldiers, young men with flaxen hair, round caps, and tightly tapered waists, sat about smoking and telling stories in the cafés. Prussians were in blue, Hungarians in dark green, Austrians in white, British in red, French in blue and red decorated with silver.
Was I glad Napoleon Bonaparte had fallen? No. Of course not. None of us at Edinburgh had been glad, despite what we might have said at the dinner tables of our professors or in the company of our elders. Napoleon Bonaparte, not Welllington, was the real giant killer.
Of course I had kept silent when my father muttered over his morning newspaper, saying how he would hang the captured Corsican bastard if he were in charge in Paris, how he’d make a public spectacle of him. And there was the fact that it was only after Wellington had defeated Napoleon on that battlefield at Waterloo that my father finally gave his consent to my European travels. “British order,” he had declared, thumping the dinner table with his fist, “is exactly what those barbarians need. We’ll show those French savages a thing or two.”
The Coral Thief Page 2
