UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY (25 page)

 

It is not the factory girls I gaze at in the arcade, but the
suiveurs
.

I remember almost nothing about the various assignments Lagrange gave me in the early years. All I can remember is a name, Abbé Boullan, but that must have been much later, perhaps just before or after the war (it had something to do with a war, I believe, with Paris in chaos).

The absinthe is doing its job, and if I were to blow on a candle, a great flame would spurt from the wick.

10

DALLA PICCOLA PERPLEXED

3rd April 1897

Dear Captain Simonini,

This morning I woke with a heavy head and a strange taste in my mouth. God forgive me . . . it was the taste of absinthe! I assure you that I hadn't yet read your account of last night. How could I know what you had been drinking unless I'd drunk it myself? And how could a priest recognize the taste of something forbidden and therefore unfamiliar? Or perhaps my head is confused. Perhaps I'm writing about the taste I felt in my mouth when I woke up, but am writing after reading your diary, and what you wrote has influenced me. I have never tasted absinthe, so how could I know that the taste in my mouth is absinthe? It is the taste of something else, which your diary has induced me to think is absinthe.

Oh, good Lord, the fact remains that I woke in my own bed, and everything seemed normal, as if I had done nothing else all last month. Except that I knew I had to go to your apartment. Having reached there, or rather here, I read those pages of your diary, which I hadn't yet seen. I saw your mention of Boullan and some vague, confused picture came to mind.

I repeated that name aloud several times, and it produced a sudden flash in my mind, as if your Doctors Bourru and Burot had touched a piece of magnetized metal to some part of my body, or a Doctor Charcot had waved — I don't know what — a finger, a key, a hand before my eyes and had sent me into a state of lucid somnambulism.

I saw the image of a priest spitting into the mouth of a woman possessed.

11

JOLY

From the diary for 3rd April 1897, late at night

That page in Dalla Piccola's diary ended abruptly. Perhaps he had heard a noise, maybe a door opening downstairs, and must have vanished. Please understand that the Narrator is himself puzzled. Abbé Dalla Piccola seems to reawaken only when Simonini needs a voice of conscience to accuse him of becoming distracted and to bring him back to reality, otherwise he appears somewhat forgetful. To be frank, if it were not for the fact that these pages refer to events that actually took place, such alternations between amnesic euphoria and dysphoric recall might seem like a device of the Narrator.

In the spring of 1865, Lagrange summoned Simonini to meet him one morning on a park bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg and showed him a tattered book with a yellowish cover, which appeared to have been published in October 1864 in Brussels, with the title
Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu; ou, la politique de Machiavel au XIXe siècle, par un contemporain.

"Here," he said. "It's by a certain Maurice Joly. We know who he is and found him smuggling copies of the book into France. He'd had them printed abroad and was distributing them secretly. We had some difficulty catching him, or perhaps I should say it took time but wasn't difficult, since many smugglers of political material are agents of ours. You should know that the only way of controlling a subversive sect is by taking over its command, or at least having its ringleaders in our pay. You don't find out about the plans of enemies of the state by divine inspiration. Someone said, perhaps exaggerating, that out of every ten followers of a secret society, three of them are working for us as
mouchards — p
lease excuse the expression, but that is what they're commonly called — while six are fools who completely believe in what they're doing, and one man is dangerous. But let us not digress. Joly is now in prison, at Sainte-Pélagie, and we'll keep him there as long as we can. But we're interested in finding out where he got his information."

"What's the book about?"

"I must admit I haven't read it. It's over five hundred pages long, which is a mistake — any defamatory work ought to be readable in half an hour. One of our agents who specializes in these matters, a certain Lacroix, has prepared us a summary. But I'll give you the only other surviving copy. In these pages you'll find an imaginary dialogue in hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, where Machiavelli proposes a cynical vision of power and supports the legitimacy of a course of action aimed at curbing the freedom of the press and freedom of expression and all those other things espoused by republicans. He does so in such detail, with such relevance to our own time, that even the simplest reader can see that the object of the tract is to defame our emperor, alleging that he seeks to thwart the powers of the National Assembly, to ask the people to extend the power of the president by ten years, to transform the republic into an empire —"

"Please excuse me, Monsieur Lagrange — we are speaking in confidence and you are well aware of my devotion to the government — but I cannot help noting from what you say that this Joly alludes to matters that the emperor has actually done, so I don't see why we need ask where Joly got his information from."

"But the insinuations in Joly's book are not just about what the government has done but what it may be proposing to do, as if Joly is able to see things not from the outside but from within. You see, in every ministry, in every government office, there's always a mole, a
sous-marin,
who reveals information. He is usually allowed to remain in place so he can leak false information that the ministry wishes to circulate, but sometimes he may become dangerous. We must find out who is informing Joly or, worse still, who has trained him."

Despotic governments, Simonini reflected, all follow the same logic — it was enough to read Machiavelli in order to understand what Napoleon would do. This reflection led him to another thought, which had crossed his mind while Lagrange described the book. Joly had his Machiavelli-Napoleon speak almost the same words that he, Simonini, had put in the mouths of the Jesuits in the document he'd created for the secret service in Piedmont. Evidently Joly had been influenced by the same source — in other words, Father Rodin's letter to Father Roothaan in Sue's
Les mystères du peuple.

"And so," continued Lagrange, "we are proposing to have you taken to Sainte-Pélagie as one of Mazzini's political exiles suspected of having links with French republican groups. There's a prisoner, named Gaviali, who was involved in Orsini's bomb attack. It's natural that you, being a follower of Garibaldi, a Carbonaro or whatever else, would try to make contact with him. Through Gaviali you'll get to know Joly. There's a fellow feeling among political prisoners. They're alone among villains of every kind. Get him to talk — the prison inmates bore him."

"And how long am I to stay there?" Simonini asked, concerned about what he would have to eat.

"That depends on you. The sooner you get the information, the sooner you leave. The word will be that the examining magistrate has acquitted you on all charges, thanks to the skill of your lawyer."

Prison was something Simonini hadn't yet experienced. With the stink of sweat and urine, and soup that made you retch, it was not very pleasant. Simonini, thank God, like other prisoners in respectable financial circumstances, was able to receive a daily food basket.

Off the courtyard of Sainte-Pélagie was a large hall dominated by a central stove, with benches around the walls. Those receiving food from outside generally took their meals here. Some ate hunched over their baskets, using their hands to protect their dinner from the sight of their compatriots, while others showed more generosity toward their friends and any casual neighbors. Simonini realized that the kinder ones were either the hardened criminals, who had developed a solidarity with their fellow inmates, or the political prisoners.

Through his years in Turin, his experience in Sicily and his first years in the most disreputable back streets of Paris, he had gained sufficient insight to recognize the born criminal. He did not share the view that was circulating at the time that all criminals were runtish or hunchbacked or harelipped or scrofulous or, as the celebrated Vidocq had suggested (and Vidocq knew a thing or two about criminals, not least because he was one himself), bowlegged. They did, however, present many characteristics typical of the colored races, such as lack of body hair, small cranial capacity, receding forehead, well-developed chest, highly pronounced, protruding jaw and cheekbones, squint eyes, swarthy complexion, thick curly hair, large ears, uneven teeth, as well as emotional indifference, exaggerated desire for carnal pleasure and for wine, lack of sensitivity to pain, laziness, impulsiveness, improvidence, great vanity, passion for gambling and superstitiousness.

Not to mention characters such as the one who sat next to him each day, as if to beg some morsel from his basket, his face etched all over by deep, livid scars, his lips swollen by the corrosive action of vitriol; the bridge of his nose slashed, his nostrils replaced by two formless holes, his arms long, hands stubby and broad, with hairs down to the fingers . . . Nevertheless, Simonini was obliged to change his ideas about the marks of delinquency upon meeting a fellow by the name of Oreste, who showed himself to be a man of such mildness, and who became, after Simonini had eventually offered him some of his food, so affectionate, as to demonstrate an almost canine devotion to him.

Oreste's story was straightforward: he had strangled a girl who had not appreciated his advances, and was now awaiting sentence. "I don't know why she was so nasty," he said. "I asked to marry her, after all. And she laughed. As if I was a monster. I'm really sorry she's gone, but what else could a self-respecting man do in the circumstances? If I can avoid the guillotine, I suppose hard labor won't be so bad. They say you get plenty to eat."

One day Oreste pointed someone out to me. "That one there," he said, "he's really bad. He tried to kill the emperor."

That was how Simonini identified Gaviali, and came to meet him.

"You conquered Sicily thanks to our sacrifice," said Gaviali. And then he corrected himself. "Or rather, not mine. They couldn't prove anything against me except that I'd had contact with Orsini. Orsini and Pieri were guillotined, Di Rudio was sent to Cayenne. But if all goes well, I'll soon be out."

Everyone knew about Orsini, an Italian patriot who had gone to England and come back with six bombs packed with fulminate of mercury. On the 14th of January 1858, as Napoleon III was on his way to the theater, Orsini and two companions threw three bombs at the emperor's carriage, but they failed to hit their target—157 people were injured, 8 of whom died, but the emperor and empress escaped unhurt.

Before going to the scaffold, Orsini wrote a moving letter to the emperor urging him to defend the unity of Italy, and many said that this letter had had some influence on Napoleon III's later policies.

"I was originally the one who was supposed to make the bombs," said Gaviali, "along with a group of friends who, I may say, were geniuses when it came to explosives. But Orsini wasn't sure. Foreigners, you know, are always better than us, and he took a fancy to an Englishman, who took a fancy to fulminate of mercury. You could buy the ingredients in any chemist's shop in London, where they were used for making daguerreotypes, and here in France they put it into the paper used for making 'Chinese bonbons'—when you unwrapped them, bang, there was a big explosion, what fun. The trouble is that a bomb with a detonating explosive is not very effective unless it explodes on contact with the target. A gunpowder bomb would have produced large shards of metal shrapnel, which would have covered a radius of ten meters, whereas a fulminate bomb disintegrates immediately, and it kills you only if you're there where it falls. And at that point it's better to use a bullet, which goes as far as it goes."