Memory of Flames (27 page)

It might seem hopeless: one man against an emperor and the thousands of people who guard him. But the flame from a single candle can burn down an entire forest ...

Margont turned to leave, then thought better of it and went to see Catherine de Saltonges. She was sitting despondently on her bed, staring unseeingly in front of her. He put the button down beside her.

'That belongs to you,’ he murmured.

She looked at the object, picked it up and gently closed her hands round it, as if she were cradling the last star to shine in her universe.
 

MARGONT, Lefine, Palenier and his subordinate went to Varencourt’s house. The surrounding streets, muddy and malodorous, evoked a swamp in which rows of run-down houses were planted. The address Charles had given the police was just a garret, ‘a pigeon house’, as Lefine had called it. Under other circumstances it would have been comical to see the men crammed into the small space, bumping into each other and knocking their heads on the ceiling as they searched. Four policemen were already there when they arrived and declared they had found nothing of interest.

‘What do you think about that?’ Palenier asked Margont casually.

‘I must admit I’m vexed. The group had confidently expected to do away with my friend and me. Happily, they had counted without your being on hand to save us!’

Palenier coloured, but continued to look at Margont, not wanting to lose face in front of his men.

'True, we’ve arrested only Catherine de Saltonges and a lookout,’ 
Margont went on, ‘but Charles de Varencourt would not have had time to come back here. And it would have been too risky. I had hoped that we would have found some clues ... He must have at least two places he stays. This one - where the “Varencourt who sells his secrets to the Empire” lives - and another where he must be now. And that’s also where he stored the poison and everything he needed to carry out his plan. Here, there would always have been the risk that the police would lose confidence in him and storm in to search everything from top to bottom.’

‘His mistress would surely know the other address.’

‘I very much doubt it. Look at Colonel Berle’s murder, the complexity of their plan, the double game he’s playing. Charles de Varencourt is careful; he’s meticulous. I don’t think he would have made an error like that. Especially as, thanks to Louis de Leaume, he must have access to many different houses. And then, the other address is probably a little hovel like this. Can you imagine making love amidst the flasks of poison you are going to use to murder someone? Perhaps they would meet at her house, but I 
don’t think so, because Catherine de Saltonges has servants: it wouldn’t have been safe. I expect they met in hotels, passing themselves off as a couple on their travels. In any case, there’s no point in deluding ourselves, she’s not going to tell us anything more.’

He went over to the mattress where the police had lined up the objects they had found. A meagre haul. He picked up a Bible and opened it where there was a bookmark. Although the Bible was obviously fairly new - the binding was in good condition and the edges of the pages were still white — the two pages marked were dirty, crumpled and worn. Sentences had been crossed out, angrily, with a pen, sometimes tearing the paper, leaving only one verse, as if to signify that Cod did not exist, that one should not love one’s neighbour, and that all the words in the Bible were worthless except these remaining lines. Margont was disappointed, because the verse was not one of the passages he had thought of.

He read: ‘Deuteronomy, chapter 19, verse 21: “And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,' '

'The law of retaliation ...’ commented Palenier. ‘We know exactly what he wanted to retaliate for...’

Margont turned his attention to the bookmark, gave a start and dropped the Bible, which crashed onto the floor.

‘Don’t touch anything!’ shouted Palenier, who was worried by the story of the deadly poison and thought that perhaps Varencourt had booby-trapped his apartment with needles soaked in curare. Margont retrieved the Bible, then the bookmark, which was actually a little paper pocket. Inside there was a lock of very light blonde hair. It had not come from Catherine de Saltonges. Charles de Varencourt’s Muscovite wife must have given it to him before he joined the Russian army. That was presumably all that remained of the woman now.

The other objects were all everyday items: a comb, a ewer, clothes ... Nothing that had anything to do with Charles de Varencourt’s Russian past or with his current plans.

They did not discover anything interesting either in Catherine de Saltonges’s house in Faubourg Saint-Germain. The police had read the letters they found in her writing desk, but none of them had been written by Charles de Varencourt; the books on the shelves were not noteworthy; the servants confirmed that Varencourt had never visited.

When Margont took his leave, Palenier shook his hand, saying, ‘Let us know if you find out anything new!’

‘I tell you everything, but I never receive any information in return!'

‘That’s not true!’

‘I counted six policemen at Mademoiselle de Saltonges’s house, four at Varencourt’s. Including the policemen who came with you, and you yourself, that makes twelve people. A whole army of you! And I imagine that’s just the visible part of a much larger operation.'

‘But the Emperor’s security is at stake! It turns out that unfortunately it’s going to be impossible to warn the Emperor about the danger to his life, with all our enemies between us and the army.’

Margont left, staggering with exhaustion, accompanied by Lefine. Day was breaking timidly. A few golden rays of sunshine ventured between the clouds. It was already 29 March. Margont mounted his horse, but Lefine did not follow suit.

‘I have a request,’ he said. ‘Our inquiry isn’t making any progress. We'll just have to await developments ... I’d like to be excused from returning to the barracks immediately. Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for the great battle. But bearing in mind that we might both be killed tomorrow, I don’t want to spend my last hours practising manoeuvres and being sworn at by our colonel and onetime friend. I’d much rather spend them with someone charming and dear to my heart.’

Margont took a piece of paper and wrote out a free pass. He signed it and added his rank and number and the fact that he and Lefine were taking part in a mission under the personal orders of Joseph I. ‘You have until midnight. I can’t let you have longer.’ Lefine grabbed his safe-conduct joyously, bounded into his saddle and trotted off. Margont had been thinking that he would go back 
to his legion. But his friend was right. How should he spend what might be his second-last day alive? Alas, he did not have someone dear to his heart. All right then! He would give himself until midday. Midday! Afterwards he would sleep for a while, then go and join his soldiers. Just a few hours for himself. He had earned it. He felt invigorated as he pointed his horse in the direction of the Louvre.
 

THE former palace of the kings of France had been transformed into a place of such unimaginable wonder that it appeared unreal, mythical. It had been turned into ‘the perfect museum’. Hundreds of masterpieces from all countries had been gathered together in one grandiose place accessible to the public.

The museum was born of the scandalous pillaging of artworks from the countries vanquished by the republican and imperial armies, but nevertheless the result was fabulous. It was based on two principles. The first was the republican idea that art must be available for the public to see. The message was that the possessions of the aristocracy were being redistributed to the people, not physically, for that would have been to cause further inequalities, but visually, in public museums. In 1801 the Directory had created them all over the country and others had appeared later. The second principle was that art should be used as propaganda. Napoleon was adept at this - he liked to exhibit ‘trophies’ taken

from the enemy. And he had renamed the French Museum or Central Museum of the Republic, the Napoleon Museum.

It made Margont smile to think that Napoleon’s religious marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria had taken place not in Notre-Dame but in the Louvre, in the large square hall, which had been transformed for the occasion into a chapel. In republican and imperial France, museums were the new cathedrals.

Fie went past the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, which adorned the square between the Tuileries Palace and the Louvre. It had been erected to commemorate the signing of the peace treaty between France and England at Amiens in 1802. Alas, in the years following the treaty the English and French fought more often than ever. They confronted each other all over the world: in Europe, in the colonies, on the seas ... They would even have fought under the seas, had someone succeeded in realising the crazy plan of the tunnel under the Channel. The only real product of the treaty of Amiens, as it turned out, was the impressive Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel.

The museum was not open, but Margont slipped one of the attendants a good tip to open it for him. Again, Margont was stupefied to see that Paris continued to live almost normally.

He began to walk through galleries of indescribable opulence. He wandered slowly, sometimes hurrying towards a work, then turning back to see another one. He was immersing himself in the labyrinth of art, freeing his mind of rigorous classifications and didactic organisation and allowing his subjectivity to direct him like Ariadne’s thread. Around him satyrs chased nymphs; he was disconcerted by the beauty of a Venus, aroused by the erotic pose of another; Eros sat astride a centaur; Diana received the allegiance of stags and does in a clearing; gladiators slaughtered each other; the draping of togas and robes was so realistic he fully expected to see their stone folds stirring in the breeze; a marble Cupid gently gathered up a butterfly; the paintings were exuberant with here an azure sky filled with cherubs, there a ferocious evocation of a medieval battle; there were the subtle contrasts of chiaroscuros and the seductive charms of Mademoiselle Caroline

Riviere painted by Ingres; the flamboyant depictions of Ancient Rome, bright with colour and movement, contrasted with the calm intimacy of the Three Graces, naked and taken by surprise by the unwelcome spectator. Margont was surrounded by Raphael, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Rubens, Correggio, Veronese, Poussin, David, the Van Eyck brothers. He was drunk on beauty. Then he arrived in front of the Mona Lisa. Yes, if the world were about to be destroyed, he would be quite content to die contemplating that smile.

As he was roaming about in that fashion, he was struck by one particular work, an ancient mosaic imported from Italy. He had never heard of it, and its position in the museum, stuck in the corner of one of the galleries, indicated that Dominique Vivant De-non, the director of the museum and the mastermind behind this ‘Louvre of all the conquests’, knew little more. But what emotion! Margont was overcome by vertigo. The large mosaic fragment represented the face of a woman. Why did he find her so haunting? Her beauty upset him. He reflected that at that very moment, his friend Fernand was in the arms of his lover, whilst here he was with a two-thousand-year-old beauty made of pieces of coloured stone ... His thoughts darkened further. A Prussian cannonball might very well blow him to smithereens in a few hours, turning him into a mosaic of flesh ...

He still could not tear himself away from that face. He stretched out a hand and brushed her cheek; he was enraptured. The woman seemed to be trying to tell him something. His gaze moved from tessera to tessera, taking in the whole picture, then focusing on a single detail. Sometimes he saw a Roman beauty, sometimes all he saw were little fragments of colour. He was reminded of the investigation. Each clue and each of his deductions was like one of those tesserae. And piecing them together in the right order would reveal the whole picture in all its clarity. He had understood everything! Everything fitted, everything made sense! He kept repeating that to himself, but the woman seemed to be murmuring, ‘Not exactly ...’

He decided to embark on a sort of exercise. He would go once

more through all the elements of the inquiry, treating each like a piece of mosaic and building a complete solution.

As he did this, he was able to clear up a few little mysteries without it altering the overall picture. Varencourt had stolen documents about the defence of Paris from Colonel Berle’s house to confuse investigators about the motives for the murder. He hadn’t used curare to kill Berle, because he didn’t yet have any. He had procured it later, thanks to the contacts of the secret society and used it to kill Count Kevlokine in a sort of run-through before attempting to murder the Emperor with it. Varencourt had not imagined that the investigator would call on a doctor for help, still less that the doctor in question would be brilliant enough to be able to discover the true cause of death. People were supposed to assume that Kevlokine’s heart had not been able to stand the pain of the burns. Varencourt was extremely intelligent, but he did sometimes underestimate his enemies. None of this changed Margont’s initial conclusions.

But there were two little mysteries that did not fit. First, why did

Charles de Varencourt not burn Count Kevlokine’s face as he had burnt Colonel Berle’s? And secondly, why had he left the Swords of the King emblem on the second corpse, if his motivation was vengeance for the fire of Moscow? Margont was annoyed. The two details were like tesserae left over after he had completed the mosaic! He had been so happy, so proud that he had been able to unmask his adversaries. But now there were these two annoying grains of sand. He would almost have liked to sweep them under the carpet ...