The Phantom of Rue Royale

by Jean-FranCois Parot

  ‘Commissioner, I sense that you are wandering on the shores of truth but cannot find it. Am I mistaken?’

  ‘I still have a few questions to ask you.’

  ‘You don’t need questions, you need answers.’

  Nicolas did not feel in the mood to play this game. ‘You may indeed be able to help me find them. First of all, what were you doing a few minutes ago?’ He pointed to the dying embers in the earthenware dish.

  ‘So, you were spying on me? Never mind. I was imploring the spirits of my people to welcome Élodie into the great land of the dead.’

  ‘You looked as if you were asleep.’

  ‘That is the power of medicinal plants. Inhaling them plunges a person into a halfway world. His spirit flies away and enters into contact with the gods. My father was not only a chief, but also a shaman, in other words, a priest and healer. A sorcerer, you would call him.’

  ‘I heard you say the word gluskabe several times. What’s that?’

  ‘Kluskabe is a great warrior from the world of the gods, our hero and protector.’

  ‘The statue’s very ugly.’

  ‘The statue isn’t of Kluskabe, it’s the frog monster that stopped the waters of the earth from flowing. When he was defeated, Kluskabe passed into the monster’s body. The statue facilitates divination.’

  It was now Nicolas’s turn to be ironic. ‘So you’ve had revelations, have you?’

  ‘The sacred frog foretold my death. Only the son of stone can save me.’ He said these words in an even tone, with a melancholy expression on his face.

  ‘Do you by any chance know what kind of stone that would be?’

  ‘Alas, no! Although it would certainly be in my own interest to elucidate this prophecy. My power allows me to receive warnings, but not to decipher them! It’s the situation of all Cassandras.’

  ‘Don’t worry, the law protects those who tread an honest path. Talking of which, what would you say if I told you that, during the night when you claim you were in a deep sleep, a witness heard footsteps in your room?’

  ‘I would say, Commissioner, that the form of your question implies the answer. There is nothing improbable about it. There must have been a point when someone came in to steal my things.’

  He had answered without hesitation, and the explanation seemed plausible. Naganda was holding Nicolas’s gaze without the least sign of embarrassment or confusion. He was like a bronze statue.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your thoughts,’ said Nicolas. ‘I’m going to lock you in, not because I don’t trust you, but as a protective measure. Be patient, the truth will out. If you are innocent, it can’t hurt you.’

  As Nicolas was on his way back down to his room, he bumped into a bulky figure charging up the stairs. In the darkness, all he could make out at first was the grey triangle of a hat. Then he recognised Dr Semacgus.

  ‘Guillaume, where are you running so fast? Anyone would think you were attacking a ship!’

  ‘Damn it, man,’ replied Semacgus. ‘When a friend sends for me, I come running. Bourdeau passed on your message. I left Vaugirard before dawn. In Rue Montmartre, I woke the whole household, but they told me you were here, so here I am.’

  ‘Come in here,’ said Nicolas, pushing the surgeon into his room.

  Semacgus sat down on the stool, Nicolas on the bed. The commissioner gave an account of the turn his investigation had taken, making no secret of the fact that the highest authorities in the Kingdom were now taking a close interest in the story of the Galaine household. He described the strange events of the night, Naganda’s trance and above all Miette’s terrible attack.

  ‘If I didn’t know you so well,’ said Semacgus, ‘and didn’t know you were a lover of reason and enlightenment, I would fear that the magic spells of your native Brittany had gone to your head.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘Mind you … What you’ve told me reminds me of phenomena I’ve observed when I was serving in the King’s navy. At our trading posts in the Indies, and also in Africa, I witnessed a number of intriguing scenes. Remember Awa going into convulsions – you’ve told me about it dozens of times – and prophesying the death of my loyal Saint-Louis.3 What can I say? I’d first have to examine this maid. That might tell us a thing or two about this supposed devilry!’

  ‘You have my permission. She’s resting in the room above us. The cook’s looking after her.’

  They went upstairs. Standing flat against the wall, Marie Chaffoureau was saying a rosary, kissing the crucifix after each prayer. Nicolas asked her to leave the room. Semacgus approached the prone body and looked down at it for a long time. Then he took Miette’s pulse, lifted one of her eyelids, and parted her legs. Nicolas watched as he lifted her shift. The surgeon stood there for a while, head down, then drew Nicolas outside and asked the cook to resume her watch. Semacgus looked at Nicolas with his large, sanguine face, his eyes sparkling sardonically, and hit his palm with his fist.

  ‘Quite a tall tale, all these virgins of yours! Do you know what’s wrong with the poor girl? She’s expecting a child!’

  Nicolas did not at first react, as if he had not understood.

  ‘Pregnant!’ Semacgus almost yelled. ‘That’s right, pregnant! At least five months pregnant!’

  NOTES – CHAPTER VI

  1. Small, cone-shaped wafers.

  2. Cf. The Châtelet Apprentice, Chapter XI.

  3. Ibid., Chapter IX.

  VII

  PENTECOST

  I shall not speak with you much longer,

  For the Prince of this world is coming.

  JOHN, XIV: 30

  Semacgus was rubbing his hands in glee at Nicolas’s stunned expression.

  ‘So both the young girls in the house were impregnated!’ said Nicolas. ‘One died in mysterious circumstances, and the other, who must either have been concealing her condition or is unaware of it, is now in’ – he hesitated over the words to use – ‘an indefinable state which has yet to be explained.’

  ‘Don’t get carried away,’ said the naval surgeon, now serious again. ‘It won’t help. There are no phenomena which cannot be clarified by reason. So, if this maid of yours is flying, don’t take it for a miracle!’

  ‘But the lives of the saints—’

  ‘Ah, there he is, the Breton, the adopted son of a canon! You’re not going to convince me with tales told by old women and monks. I look at these apparently unintelligible facts in another way. We doctors of medicine – if I may assume this title, which some dispute1 – have long observed attacks like this in simple or ill-educated patients, like this girl. To call things by their name, your patient is suffering from hysteria, the manifestations of which used to be considered works of the devil.’

  ‘I’m not unfamiliar with the term,’ said Nicolas. ‘But you didn’t see the bed rising.’

  ‘Come on now, stop wasting your efforts. Over a century ago, Charles Lepois already saw this sickness as originating in the brain. At about the same time, an Englishman named Thomas Sydenham perfected an opium-based remedy called laudanum, which according to him lessened the effects of such attacks. Even before them, Paracelsus defined such attacks of delirium as deviations of the imagination. I agree with them. Man is a world unto himself. His mind deceives his physical nature, not the other way round. Quite apart from the fact that I reject any idea of a malign influence intent on crushing the heart and exciting the body. Mind you, I must admit this house strikes me as unwholesome, and I quite understand that it’s turning your head.’

  Semacgus’s academic little speech left Nicolas perplexed. His friend, who had not known the torments of the night just past, could have no idea how confused and helpless he felt.

  ‘Be that as it may, Guillaume,’ he countered, ‘everything must be done to throw light on these mysteries. If you have time, you could do me a favour. Go to Rue Montmartre and ask Monsieur de Noblecourt to let me have his dog Cyrus for tomorrow night. If I am tested to the point where I start to see and hear things that aren’t there,
I assume an innocent animal won’t hear or see anything, and that his passivity will confirm your diagnosis. And as I intend to get as much advice as I can from my friends, when you come back I’ll leave you to watch over Miette while I pay a visit to Père Grégoire at the monastery of the Discalced Carmelites. He’ll be pleased to see me; I’ve been neglecting him lately.’

  Reading Nicolas’s mind, Semacgus raised his arms to heaven. ‘After the medicine of the body, the medicine of the soul. You’re off to a bad start … But, of course, I remain at your disposal. I haven’t given up hope of welcoming you back into the legions of nature and truth. And, with that, I must dash off and have something to eat. It seems to me you should do the same.’

  ‘You’re right. The only thing I’ve eaten in the past twenty-four hours was an omelette.’

  ‘That’s not very plump, as your friend the good lady of Choisy used to say.2 May I remind you that an alert mind requires a full stomach. So make sure you get something down you.’

  His friend left, and after a last glance at Miette, who was sleeping peacefully, Nicolas went downstairs to the dining room, where Madame Galaine, wearing a chenille, was serving coffee to the rest of the family. The two sisters appeared to have calmed down. Charles was not wearing a wig, and his balding head made him look older. After a slight hesitation, he addressed Nicolas.

  ‘Commissioner, I have a request to submit to you. Given our situation, I believe it is imperative that that my family and I attend one of the Pentecost services at the parish church. It will silence the gossips, and the Lord may answer our prayers for peace to be restored to this house.’

  Nicolas consented, thinking all the while that peace would only be restored the day the person responsible for the murder of Élodie was discovered. He would stay with Miette, he said, so that everyone, including Marie Chaffoureau, could perform their religious duties on this solemn day.

  Once they had all left the room, he tried to drink a cup of coffee with milk, but his stomach rejected it, because of the skin that had formed on the surface of the liquid – something he had found intolerable ever since he was a small child. But the pump in the courtyard was wonderfully refreshing and rejuvenating on this beautiful, late-spring morning. Deep down, he felt Semacgus was right: the well-being of the body depended on peace of mind and nothing else. But how could he be sure? He went back upstairs to dress and brush his hair. On the stroke of nine, the cook put her head round the door and announced that the family were leaving for the church of Saint-Roch. They were all dressed in mourning clothes. He walked with them to the door of the shop, which they locked from the outside. The commissioner decided to follow through an idea that had come to him when he had realised that he would be alone in the house apart from Naganda, who was locked in his garret, and Miette, who was lying unconscious in her bed. There would never be another such opportunity to look for clues. He decided to begin his search with the bedroom of Monsieur and Madame Galaine.

  The door was open. The bed, beneath a canopy of dusty Utrecht velvet, was unmade. Rumpled night clothes lay scattered on the counterpane. Two wing chairs upholstered in the same fabric, a worn carpet, a pedestal table on which stood a carafe of water and two silver tumblers, and a wardrobe so tall that it almost touched the ceiling joists were the outmoded and somewhat austere furnishings of the room. The only concession to current fashions was a small writing desk of lemon-tree wood, which seemed, in its magnificence, quite out of place in this antiquated environment. Nicolas was always surprised by the interiors of other people’s houses. He had made innumerable searches in his ten years as a policeman, and they had given him a complete range of models into which he could classify what he found, but which did not always correspond to the characters and situations he was investigating.

  Nicolas got down to work with the methodical determination of a hunter tracking his prey. He first turned his attention to the writing desk. Neither the drawers nor the sliding desk-top were locked. They contained commercial documents, bills and letters, as well as women’s jewellery and ornaments, and a man’s shoe buckles. Nothing of interest. For a moment Nicolas stood there, thinking and stroking the fine wood. Then he took out one of the drawers and plunged his arm inside the desk. He groped about for a long time until he felt a small, jointed piece of wood beneath his fingers. He moved it carefully, and heard two clicks. Two narrow panels opened at the back of the desk, and two little oblong drawers sprang out. One contained a number of louis d’or, the other a letter with a broken seal representing two beavers joined by their tails: the emblem of the family business.

  He took it out, his heart pounding. Two feelings struggled within him: the curiosity natural to his profession, and the scruples of an honest man forced to pry into family secrets. Once that border was crossed, there was no turning back, and his innocence could never be recaptured. He sat down in one of the wing chairs and opened the letter. He felt such strong emotion that the characters danced before his eyes and he found it hard to concentrate on the words. The handwriting was small, angular, but determined, and the ink was beginning to fade with time.

  Louisbourg, this fifth of December 1750

  Brother

  The news of our father’s death has brought home to me how terrible it is to be separated from one’s family and to be forced to rely henceforth on the coldness of a brother whose constant and long-standing hostility towards me is quite unjustified. I hope that time will mitigate a conflict which I have never wanted and which I cannot recall without feeling a genuine sadness.

  That being so, I wish to inform you that I am married and have a child, a daughter who bears our mother’s second name, Élodie. Whatever the distance between us, I in New France and you so far away and so little concerned with brotherly feeling, I entrust my niece to you in the event of my wife and myself becoming casualties of the war, which is getting worse. A young Indian named Naganda, whom I took in and raised, and in whom I trust completely, has instructions from me to do everything in his power to ensure that our daughter reaches France.

  The last years have been profitable and you have had a substantial share in the success of our business. I intend, one way or another, to leave an indication of my final wishes. Our notary will be informed of them in case I die in the coming events.

  Embrace our sisters for me. Remember that I am entrusting Élodie to you. Despite everything, your very affectionate

  Claude

  Nicolas carefully copied this text into his little black notebook, then gently folded the letter and put it back in the secret drawer. He moved the small drawers back behind the panels, replaced the large drawer, and closed the desk. The rest of his search proved fruitless. Élodie’s room – curiously devoid of any personal objects – brought no tangible results, nor did Jean’s. In Geneviève’s little room, Nicolas discovered, hidden among her dolls, a crumpled sheet of paper on which a strange scene had been clumsily drawn. Two men, identically dressed in large cloaks and tall hats, one squeezing a kind of dummy and the other holding a shovel, seemed to be dancing a jig. He put this strange drawing in the pocket of his coat. Was the twice-depicted man Naganda? It seemed very likely.

  He finished his inspection in the room shared by the Galaine sisters. Two beds had been pushed together to make one, occupying almost all the space in a room cluttered with devotional objects, two prie-dieus and a number of religious paintings. There was also a small chest of drawers and a kind of alcove serving as a bathroom, with cupboards hollowed out of the wall for storing linen and clothes. Here and there, stuffed birds stood frozen in weary poses, adding a grim, fusty note to the rank atmosphere.

  Suddenly Nicolas heard floorboards creaking in the corridor. Who could it be? He assumed that Miette had woken and got up, but the footsteps were coming closer and the intervals between the creaks indicated rather that whoever it might be was moving very cautiously. His first reaction was to look for a hiding place. The clothes cupboard? Certainly not: the most obvious refuge was always the riskiest. The
fireplace? Much too narrow to hide in. Then, in a flash, he noticed that the faded blue-green cloth that covered the two beds fell all the way to the floor. He quickly slid under the beds and lay flat on his stomach, with his back against the wooden base. In the excitement of the moment, he found it hard to catch his breath, and this was made worse by the fact that his nose was buried in a mass of cloths that lay on the floor. The footsteps had not resumed. The blood pounding in his ears deafened him. A few inches from his face, he discovered a column of tiny ants which seemed to be attracted by the cloths. Quite apart from the rats, vermin and fleas, many houses in the city received visits from these insects in summer.

  Now the noise resumed, came closer, very close … In the narrow field of vision allowed by the cloths, Nicolas saw two bare brown feet cautiously advancing. It could only be Naganda, and he guessed that the Indian was also searching the room. Would it occur to him to look under the beds? Nicolas trembled as he saw him coming closer on the right-hand side. The cover was lifted, the bedding roughly searched, then light appeared through the cracks in the wood: the mattress had been raised. The Indian stamped around the room a while longer, then finally walked out. Nicolas waited until silence had returned to this floor of the house. Monsieur Galaine kept Naganda locked up, but had forgotten that the Indian had already escaped through the skylight, and that there was nothing to stop him trying again. It would only take a badly closed door or window for him to gain access to the rest of the house. What could he be looking for, if not the famous talisman? After all, he was obsessed with the loss of the necklace on which it had hung, the necklace that had contained the pearl found in the clenched hand of Élodie’s corpse.

  Nicolas hoped that his own search would lead to something, even now that Naganda had gone. He forced himself to continue with all the technique of a professional, which the Indian was not. It was as well that he did so, for in passing his hand under one of the drawers in the chest, he found a small piece of paper stuck to the wood with sealing wax. Carefully, he peeled it off. It was a brief note, which read: