‘If memory serves, he has difficulty moving.’
‘His health is not much more satisfactory than mine,’ said Père Grégoire, with a weak smile. ‘He’s suffered from kidney stones, gallstones and diurnal fevers since his elevation. Little by little, the struggle with the Jansenists and the expulsion of the Jesuits have sapped his strength. In his isolation, he’s prone to fantasies, such as his claim to be descended from an illustrious line. I can intercede with him, but before you have your audience it would be wise to obtain a nihil obstat from Monsieur de Sartine, in other words, from the King. Of course, as a defender of the Jesuits, he should be impressed by the fact that you were educated by them.’
‘And who is currently the exorcist of the diocese?’ asked Nicolas.
‘Père Guy Raccard,’ murmured the Carmelite, shaking his head. ‘A strange but very scholarly colleague,’
They had said all they could. Nicolas’s uncertainties had not been dispelled by this interview, but he had been shown a course to follow. He would just have to wait and see what happened next. He took effusive leave of Père Grégoire, who remembered as they bade each other farewell that he had a letter for him from Pierre Pigneau de Behaigne,5 who was working as an apostolic missionary in Cochin-China. A native of Thiérache, who had pursued his studies at the Seminary of the Thirty-Three in Paris, he had been friends with Nicolas in the old days. They had attended concerts of sacred music at the Louvre together, and had both savoured the delights of the Stohrer pastry shop in Rue Montorgeuil.
Nicolas decided to return on foot: he needed to think, and being in the open air helped him to do so. Père Grégoire’s words may have traced a path for him, but they had not lessened his sense of dread – in fact, the monk’s physical condition had increased it. He realised that the generation which had surrounded him in his youth was on the verge of dying out. His closest friends, he thought with regret, were also the oldest. Even Inspector Bourdeau was old enough to be his father. The only exceptions were Monsieur de Sartine, who was younger than generally supposed, La Borde, who was not much older than he was, and dear Pigneau, now a long way from France. He unsealed the letter, all stained and yellowed by its journey, and read it as he walked:
Hon-dat, this fifth of January 1769
My dear Nicolas
You must have been surprised by my mysterious departure in September 1765. Called to the hard but fertile labour of the apostolate, I told neither family nor friends (in the first rank of whom I place you), being aware of both my weakness and their friendship. It cost me a great deal to make that decision without telling you.
I embarked at Lorient on one of those ships belonging to the Company of the Indies. I arrived at Hon-dat, a small island in the gulf of Siam, after many adventures which I hope to tell you about one day. At the beginning of January 1768, the Siamese invaded and I had the joy of spending the holy time of Lent in prison, condemned to the cangue, that is, carrying a six-foot ladder around my neck. I caught a fever and was sick for four months, but I am cured now.
I pray the Lord to grant me the honour of going back to prison soon, there to suffer and die for his holy name. Remember me, I have not forgotten you.
Pierre Pigneau
miss. apost.
What were his own torments compared with such faith, such sublime self-denial? Nicolas suddenly realised how much he missed this friend of his youth. He hailed a two-wheeled sedan chair. He had decided to go to the Grand Châtelet. Semacgus could wait until his return. He needed to speak to Bourdeau and entrust him with various missions designed to verify the findings he had made in the course of his search of the Galaine house. But the inspector was nowhere to be found. Old Marie, surprised by his presence, pointed out that it was Sunday, and Pentecost, and that on this major feast day Bourdeau devoted himself to his large family. Disappointed, Nicolas was just setting off back to Rue Saint-Honoré when he felt someone tugging at the sleeve of his coat. It was Tirepot.
‘Don’t go, Nicolas! You’re going to like this. I’ve been working for you, like you asked. Bourdeau described your savage to me. I know him well. Not difficult to spot in that bizarre get-up. He was always hanging around the area.’
‘Before the day of the festivities on Place Louis XV?’
‘Well before that! Months even. A big gangling fellow like that, you can’t really miss him. On the night of the disaster, I saw him twice.’
‘Twice?’
‘Twice, yes, and not in the same place.’
‘There’s nothing remarkable about that.’
‘Really? So if I see you on the banks of the Seine, standing motionless near the parapet, and then in town, three hundred yards away, I see you walking towards me, I can take it you’re a ghost playing hide and seek, can I, or that there are two of you? If you think that’s normal, I bow down to your superior judgement.’
He bowed, and the two pails he was carrying rang on the stones.
‘All right, then. Was he alone?’
‘No, the first time he was with a girl in rags, and the second time with a girl in yellow. And that’s not all. The same evening, I heard a couple of French Guards who were using my services – they’d been knocking them back a bit too much, if you ask me – anyway, I heard them chatting away merrily and they described the savage, in his hat, leading this girl in a pale yellow dress into a hay barn near the gardens of the convent of the Conception. Yelling her head off, she was. They were laughing about it, saying he must have tipped the girl in the straw and had his way with her.’
‘Yelling, you say? What do you mean?’
‘Seems she was struggling and kept shouting insults.’
Nicolas’s head was buzzing with ideas. Surely this was it, he thought, the Ariadne’s thread which might lead him out of the maze of assumptions and towards real evidence. Geneviève’s remarks, as well as her apparently meaningless drawing, suddenly took on a whole new significance. Now it was a question of reducing what he knew to a logical sequence of facts, then confirming those facts and comparing one with another until he discovered the truth.
‘Jean,’ Nicolas resumed, ‘when was the first of these appearances?’
‘I’m not too sure, but certainly before the firework display. And, as I sense you’re going to ask me about the second one, too, I’d say that was a few minutes later.’
‘And you’re sure it wasn’t the same person?’
‘Absolutely! The first savage was shorter than the second one.’
‘Let’s see if I’ve got this right. You saw two individuals resembling the savage, accompanied by two girls who were dressed differently, and you’re certain they couldn’t have been the same. What about the French Guards? When was it they needed your services?’
‘After the display. There were already rumours that things hadn’t gone too well in the square. But this thing they mentioned, about the savage and the girl, I got the impression that had happened quite a while before. When they came to me, it was two hours to midnight, at the latest.’
‘Thank you, Jean. You’ve been a great help.’
Shaking his hand, he slipped him a five-livre ecu. Tirepot grinned with pleasure. Nicolas continued on his way. How unfortunate, he thought, that Miette had not regained consciousness and it was still impossible to question her! He had been told very explicitly that she had accompanied her young mistress to the festivities. What had happened? And what was behind this absurd double appearance of Naganda when the man himself lay drugged in his attic and his clothes had been stolen?
Nicolas decided to take his time getting back to the Deux Castors. He needed to clear his mind in order to try to make sense of all the confused and contradictory elements this investigation kept throwing up.
By the time he arrived in Rue Saint-Honoré, the Galaine family were getting ready to have dinner. He declined Charles Galaine’s invitation to join them, but reassured him that he would continue to pay his board and lodgings. He found Semacgus in Miette’s room, puzzling over the nature of t
he girl’s drowsiness, which he could do nothing to dispel. He entrusted Cyrus to Nicolas and informed him in a sardonic tone that he planned to spend the evening, and probably also the night, at the Dauphin Couronné. In other words, he would not be far away and would come running immediately if Nicolas sent for him.
Back in his room, Nicolas contemplated what was left of the food Semacgus had brought. He was not hungry, so he let Cyrus have it, and also poured a little water into a bowl for him. Fortunately, his friend had brought him some candles made of good-quality wax. As soon as it started to get dark, he lit them, undressed and lay down on the bed, intending to catch up with his reading. Monsieur de Sartine had authorised him to borrow books from the library at the Hôtel de Gramont, a particular privilege as he collected banned or confiscated works. He plunged into d’Alembert’s Essai sur les gens de lettres et sur les grands. In it, the philosopher contrasted the vain pretensions of the aristocracy with the virtues of talent and equality, and argued that society should be organised around the progress of science and trade. Soon, the book fell from his hands. He heard the members of the Galaine family return to their respective rooms. He thought back over his day and, remembering the ravaged face of Père Grégoire, his tired mind suddenly superimposed on it that of the King. He, too, had aged a lot, and was going through an unhappy time. His daughter Louise’s piety had led her to envisage becoming a Carmelite nun. In April that year, she had finally yielded to her vocation and, with her father’s agreement, had entered the convent of Saint-Denis, cutting herself off from everything pertaining to society and the dignity of her rank. According to La Borde, the King had not yet recovered from this blow. Only the celebrations for his grandson’s marriage had somewhat lightened his mood, but there was a strong possibility that the disaster of 30 May would plunge him back into depression.
Cyrus had heaved himself up onto the mattress and was sleeping trustfully, one paw on his friend’s leg: Nicolas gently moved it away. Before falling asleep, he had one last thing to do. He took a bottle of wig powder from his toiletry bag, tiptoed to the door and out into the corridor, and spread a semi-circle of the substance all around the entrance. If anyone tried to play a trick on him, he or she would leave footprints. Then he went back to his bed, observing the same precautions against creepy-crawlies as he had the previous night. Lulled by Cyrus’s calm breathing, he fell asleep immediately, although not without first saying the prayers he had learnt from the lips of Canon Le Floch and his nurse when he was a child. Never forget them, his nurse had advised him, for fear of rousing the demon.
Monday 4 June 1770, three in the morning
Someone was knocking loudly at the door. He sat up, breathing heavily and bathed in sweat, and listened. But all was silent again; nothing moved. There was no doubt, though, that the noise had been real: poor Cyrus had also woken, and was trembling with fear and whining plaintively. Just as Nicolas was starting to get a grip on himself, the knocking came again, as loudly as before. This was followed by a series of unconnected sounds – banging, whistling and scraping – which suddenly gave way to a muffled cry, itself then transformed into a mocking laugh. Nicolas took a lighter and lit his candle, then walked resolutely to the door and opened it. Nobody. He crouched to light the entrance: the layer of powder was undisturbed. Once again, he heard what sounded like a storm inside the room, and felt poor Cyrus against his legs. The dog, mad with terror and desperate to leave, now lay down on the floor and relieved himself. Then Nicolas felt a kind of emptiness: the presences responsible for the din had gone. The outside world gained the upper hand again, and in the neighbouring garden a night bird gave a call that echoed like a cry of liberation. Should he send for Semacgus? He did not think that the surgeon would be any more convinced by these new phenomena than he had been by the previous ones. He would merely take Nicolas to task again, and deliver platitudes on the weakness of the human mind and the light of reason.
Nicolas went back to bed, but could not sleep. At about five, a wild cry rang through the house. He quickly dressed and rushed to Miette’s room. The men of the house had also come running. They found Marie Chaffoureau lying on the floor outside the door, unconscious. In the room itself, Miette, almost naked, her palliasse floating a few inches from the floor, seemed to be suffering unbearable tortures. Completely silent, her mouth wide open, her lips flecked with foam, she was tearing at herself with her nails, as if struggling with incredible strength against an invisible adversary. Nicolas, Charles Galaine and his son ran to her. For a long time, at the risk of having their own eyes poked out, they fought to stop the girl from wounding herself in the face or chest. Every time one of them seized a limb, it immediately became as stiff and as hard as a bar of iron, but no sooner was it released than it relaxed again. Finally, however, she regained her former immobility. Nicolas noted with astonishment that the sweat and foam with which she was covered receded like the waves of the sea at ebb tide, or like water evaporating from a white-hot plate. He placed his hand on one of her arms and immediately recoiled: it was an inferno. The sensation was that of a burning coldness, the kind you feel in winter when you leave your hand for too long on the iced-over surface of a pond. Miette’s breathing, almost choked at the height of the attack, recovered its normal rhythm.
Exhausted, the men stood catching their breath. Jean Galaine seemed to Nicolas to have the air of a hunted animal: he kept looking about him, as if fearing that someone or something were about to attack him. Nicolas was getting ready to make new arrangements, judging that, now the morning attack was over, nothing more would happen immediately, and that Miette would wait, prostrate, for the dawn of the following day to exhibit further symptoms – if, that is, her condition showed no improvement. Such was often the way with certain fevers or agues which recurred at regular intervals.
He was about to go and attend to the cook, who was still unconscious, when Miette sat up, her arms stretched before her, until the top part of her body was at right angles to her legs. Her eyes slowly opened, like those of one of Monsieur de Vaucanson’s automata. Her head swivelled to the side, jerkily, as if driven by an invisible inner mechanism. Her dilated pupils seemed to Nicolas to have changed colour – the dull blue-grey he remembered had assumed a deep, bronze-green tinge, like the liquid in Père Grégoire’s retorts – and there were disquieting purple specks in them. Her head suddenly stopped moving, and her frighteningly intense gaze came to rest on Nicolas. As the three men looked on in astonishment, the girl’s tongue emerged in a snake-like movement, grew inordinately long, then slid sinuously back inside her mouth. Nicolas remembered another face, other eyes, and as if the memory had set something irresistible in motion, he heard Miette utter, in a man’s voice, words that made him freeze with terror.
‘So, my Breton friend, I see you’ve recognised me! No, you’re not dreaming, these are my beautiful green eyes, my snake’s eyes, as you thought nine years ago, on the staircase of the Châtelet. Yes, you may well tremble, for it was indeed me you ran through with your sword.’6
Nicolas resisted the desire to run out of the room with his hands over his ears to blot out that mocking voice from beyond the grave. It was the voice of Mauval, Commissioner Camusot’s angel-faced henchman, whom Nicolas had killed in self defence in the drawing room of the Dauphin Couronné. He somehow found the strength to cry out, ‘Who are you?’
‘Ah! Ah! Antichristos, the counterfeit of the lamb! He who was foretold by Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Lactantius and Augustine.’
‘Are you a demon?’
‘In Ja und Nein bestehen alle Dinge!’
‘I don’t understand that language,’ said Nicolas.
‘It’s German,’ said Charles Galaine, in a faint voice. ‘It means “all things consist of yes and no”.’
‘In the name of Our Lord,’ said Nicolas, crossing himself, ‘be off with you!’
Rather belatedly, he remembered Père Grégoire’s advice about the caution that needed to be observed with such entities. It was clear now that
whatever it was that was speaking through Miette was a loathsome thing, a demon. Miette swayed like a statue being rocked on its pedestal and spat out a long jet of slime. Nicolas, fascinated despite all that he was feeling, realised that the ‘thing’ was changing, that the maid’s poor envelope was about to be used, like a garment sold to a second-hand clothes dealer continuing its existence on other backs, to house another deceptive presence.
‘You’re threatening me,’ uttered another man’s voice, ‘as you one day defied me, you who tried to seduce my daughter, your own sister.’
Nicolas felt weak at the knees: Miette was now speaking with the voice of his father, the Marquis de Ranreuil.
‘Yes, your father,’ the pitiless voice went on. ‘And I see the man who lent you his dog struck down instead of you.’
After this last taunt, Miette fell back on the bed. For a long time the three men stood there motionless, unable to look at each other or say a word. Nicolas kept asking himself why this ‘thing’ – he could find no other name for it – was attacking him, revealing secrets of his past life that he alone knew, secrets he kept buried deep in his heart like ever-open wounds. He sensed vaguely that this frenzy must be connected with the visit he had paid Père Grégoire, that the creature expressing itself through Miette’s body had recognised him as its principal adversary, the man through whom would be delivered the lightning stroke destined to thrust it back into outer darkness. He shuddered at the curse uttered against his friend and host in Rue Montmartre, Monsieur de Noblecourt.
The sound of voices and hurried steps came from the staircase. Everyone rushed out to the landing. An old man was climbing the stairs, followed by Madame Galaine. It was Poitevin, Monsieur de Noblecourt’s old servant, with his white hair dishevelled, his livery in disorder, his breath coming in gasps. He fell into Nicolas’s arms.
The Phantom of Rue Royale Page 18