Eugenie had told her the vague outlines of my own story with Monique. She listened intently as I filled her in on all the details of my relationship with Monique, up to and including Monique’s final revelation to me that she was pregnant with Lucius’s child.
“You see? Plus ça change,” she said with a little laugh. “She tricked him too.”
I suddenly felt ill. The twilight and potpourri atmosphere of the apartment enveloped me like a shroud. I had to escape from there, get some fresh air. I thanked the old woman for the tea and her time. Before I left, she handed me a photograph. It was of a much older man with a mustache standing alongside of Monique, who looked very girlish in a short white dress and a little white hat with a veil, holding a bouquet of lilies of the valley.
“My brother on his wedding day,” she said bitterly.
When I looked closely, I saw the resemblance. Brother and sister both had the same Old World aristocratic looks, the same weary regal air, the last gasp of a proud heritage without consequence in today’s world. The Count, with dark circles under his eyes that were beyond tired, offered the camera a crooked, cynical smile. As I tucked the photograph into my handbag, the old woman said: “My brother was all I had in the world.”
She waved a sad little good-bye to me. I left Anne-Marie de Passy wishing in many ways I’d never gone to see her, fascinating as our visit had been. She was so sad and lonely. I had a vision of myself in reduced circumstances like that one day, in some phase of organized decay, living with cats. But worse than that, her conviction that Monique had killed her brother solidified my own view that she had somehow killed Lucius as well—or at a minimum purposely induced the fatal heart attack. Descending to the ground floor in an elevator as cramped as a coffin, I suddenly saw the obvious: Monique had killed Michel, just as his sister suspected, in order to trade up to Lucius, who was far richer and more powerful. Then she killed Lucius, just as I suspected. I resolved to find out what had happened to this predator’s second husband.
Chapter 17
I walked back to Eugenie’s feeling agitated. A bright late afternoon sun glinted across the ever-bustling Boulevard Saint Germain. I stopped by the Café de Flore for a brandy. It was too cold to sit outside, but I did anyway. The winter streets were crowded with cars and passersby. The brandy warmed my insides but not my spirit. All I could think of was Monique and how evil she was.
Eugenie was waiting for me at the apartment anxious to know how the meeting had gone. She saw immediately how upset I was. She sat me down in the salon and poured me another brandy, which I was only too happy to drink. I was fast becoming a devotee of the Betty Waterman school of problem solving: “Just say when.” I told Eugenie everything that the old woman had told me, including her suspicions that Monique had killed her brother. I showed her the photograph of Michel and Monique on their wedding day. Eugenie studied the picture for a long moment.
“She thinks Monique may have used these.” I handed her the vial of Rotinal.
“Ah, Rotinal. I’ve heard it can do rather interesting things. Shall we try it this evening after dinner? Might be amusing,” she said with an impish smile. “Don’t worry, I’m joking.” Eugenie handed me back the bottle and the photo. “So, do you think she killed Lucius?”
“The thought has crossed my mind,” I said softly. “I really want to know what happened to her second husband.”
“The rich old guy.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you think she could have killed him, too?” Eugenie said just like a wide-eyed kid.
“Who knows?”
Eugenie laughed. “So you believe Monique de Passy is a serial killer . . . A real Scheherazade of crime! You must find out.”
“I intend to.”
I rang up my dear old friend Bernard Longueville, who had once served as the French consul general in New York and who was now assistant to the president in the Elysée Palace. If anyone could help me, Bernard could.
Longueville, a gregarious and cultivated bachelor, had been a favorite of mine during his tenure in New York. His frank, open countenance, impeccable manners, and contrarian humor made him an ideal extra man. He was a constant fixture at our dinner parties. When Lucius was out of sorts or away on business, I often tapped Bernard to accompany me to the opera and other cultural events. We both shared a passion for Louis XVI furniture.
I met Bernard at the Ritz bar for lunch. In palmier days, I always stayed at the Ritz in a small suite on the top floor overlooking the rooftops of Paris. I preferred that suite to the far grander Chanel suite favored by Lucius because it was cozy, more intimate, less like a hotel. I’d always invite Bernard to lunch in the bar. It was a little ritual. We both enjoyed the Ritz version of a salade niçoise.
Bernard was punctual as usual. We gave each other a long embrace—the meaningful, knowing embrace of two old friends who have not seen each other in a while, one of whom has incurred much sadness since their last meeting. We sat down across from one another at a small corner table in the dark, wood-paneled bar. At first, we exchanged pleasantries, catching up on all the superficial New York and Parisian gossip. After Bernard ordered our salads and we both had a couple of glasses of wine to loosen up, he looked across the table at me and said, “Jo, my dear, you look wonderful, as always.”
I looked back at him and replied without hesitation, “Bernard, how in God’s name were you such a successful diplomat when you’re such a rotten liar?”
Longueville shook his head and chuckled. “Ah, Jo, you know me too well. Franchement, I could not believe it when I heard what had happened. You know, I always thought Lucius was a rather strange man, but I never dreamed he would do something like that to you. You, of all people.”
“No, me neither. But he did. And now I need your help,” I said, coming straight to the point.
Bernard leaned forward and said with utmost sincerity, “Anything, Jo. How can I be of service to you?”
“This Frenchwoman, Monique de Passy, whom Lucius left the money to—she was married before. I need to find out about her second husband and particularly how he died. Apparently, there was an inquiry but it was hushed up for some reason.”
I knew that Longueville would be tactful enough not to ask me why I needed the information.
“Do you know his family name and where he was from?”
“Pierre Marcel. He owned real estate in Neuilly. They lived on Rue Parmentier when they were married. That’s all I know. Here’s a picture of Monique with her third husband, Count de Passy.” I handed him the wedding photo Anne-Marie de Passy had given me. He examined it.
“She’s pretty.”
“Pretty lethal.”
Bernard’s eyes flicked up at me. “Évidemment . . .” He turned the photo around where Monique’s and Michel’s names were written on the back. “Bourot . . . An ugly name. Uncommon,” Longueville reflected. “Even so, Jo, I must be frank with you. It’s not easy to check on records in France. Family records are the most difficult. Did you know that all birth and death certificates in this country are strictly private unless they are over one hundred years old?”
“No. Why?”
“France is not America, Jo. This law was made to prevent a recurrence of what happened in the ’30s and ’40s when the Nazis obtained records of people’s heredity so they could uncover any Jewish ancestry. After the war, it was decided that all personal records should be sealed to the public. You can understand why.”
“I see. But this is more of a police matter. Isn’t that a bit different?”
“Still, it’s a record of a death. It’s a bit risky to try to go into these things—not to mention illegal.”
“Forget it then. God knows I don’t want you to get into any trouble on my account.”
The diplomat laughed. “Heavens, no. I can get into enough trouble on my own account. Let me see what I can do. I might be able to ‘flirt with the law’ a little, as we say. May I keep this?”
“Of course.”
&nbs
p; He tucked the photograph into his breast pocket, raised his glass of wine to me, and said: “You know how fond I am of you, Jo. And ‘the mind is always the dupe of the heart,’ as La Rochefoucauld said.”
After lunch, just for the hell of it, I wandered over to the Conciergerie and walked around the old castle where Marie Antoinette had spent the last months of her life. Oddly enough, I’d never been to that dank place before, always preferring to visit Versailles, Le Petit Trianon, and Le Hameau, the venues of the Queen’s happier days.
As tourists around me came and went, I stood staring into the claustrophobic cell where the Queen was imprisoned until her death. Seated at a small wooden table, dressed in peasant clothes, was a life-size gray-haired mannequin of the Queen. As she was depicted there, alone in stifling quarters, old before her time, one could not help but feel sorry for this rather silly woman whose tragic fate awoke a dormant regal soul.
I then went and checked out the names of all the people who had been guillotined. There, on the wall, was a list of de Passys, just as Monique had said. I stood there, imagining her being led to the scaffold and myself as the executioner.
For the next few days, I visited the antiquaires and fabric houses of Paris, shopping for my one remaining client. I avoided the very expensive dealers, keeping instead to Les Puces, the large flea market on the outskirts of town, and the smaller dealers around the Quai d’Orsay where I was not well known and where I could bargain.
One afternoon, Eugenie invited me up to her atelier. I always loved going there to see what she was up to. That day she said she had something very special to show me. Eugenie designed costume jewelry for a fantasie jewelry boutique on the Rue Bonaparte. Her creations were so beguiling that a very rich Indian woman famously bought a slew of the fake pieces and took them back to Jaipur where she had them copied in real gold and precious stones. Eugenie often made replicas of ancient or historical jewelry for special exhibitions. It was one of these pieces that she said she wanted me to see. When I asked her what it was, she said I’d have to wait. She wanted to surprise me.
I took the elevator up to the fourth floor of the commercial building on the Rue La Boétie where she had her workshop. Inside the long narrow room, lit by overhead fluorescent lights, four intent craftsmen sat at wooden tables assembling the one-of-a-kind costume pieces with the same mounting and setting techniques used to make real jewelry. They barely noticed as Eugenie and I walked past them to her small office in the back of the shop.
On her desk lay a large rectangular black leather jewelry case. Flipping up the lid, she turned the box toward me. There, glittering on a black velvet interior, was an exact copy of the famous diamond necklace that Marie Antoinette had refused to buy from Charles Boehmer in the early 1780s. This uncharacteristically frugal act on the Queen’s part eventually led to what is arguably the greatest swindle in history and, ironically, to the monarchy’s downfall. Goethe dubbed the infamous Necklace Affair, as it was called, “a precursor to the French Revolution.”
Knowing of my fascination with the period and with this story in particular, Eugenie couldn’t wait to show it to me.
“I made this for the Versailles Foundation,” she explained. “It will be in a special exhibition of Marie Antoinette memorabilia—one of the highlights,” she said with pride.
“It’s fantastic,” I said, admiring the fine craftsmanship of the piece.
“Try it on,” she urged me, lifting the large, loopy necklace out of the case.
Eugenie fastened it around my neck. The long, drooping ropes ending in thick diamond tassels looked like garish upholstery fringe. I walked over to look at it on myself in the small oval mirror hanging in a far corner of the office.
“Imagine that idiot jeweler thinking Marie Antoinette, of all people, would have liked such a hideous thing,” Eugenie said. “She, who was the epitome of elegant simplicity.”
I fingered one of the heavy diamond tassels. “It reminds me of Monique.”
Eugenie cocked her head to one side. “Why?”
“We used to talk about the Necklace Affair. We both agreed it was an underrated event in the history of the French Revolution.”
“There is no question that historians don’t take it as seriously as they ought to because it’s about a piece of jewelry,” Eugenie agreed.
“And because it has such a wild, theatrical cast of characters.”
I’d always loved the story of how a clever conwoman found a prostitute who looked like Marie Antoinette and duped one of the most powerful men in France into handing over a four million dollar necklace. It was the stuff of romantic fiction—only it was all true. As I examined Eugenie’s skillful copy, I went back over the story in my mind of how an impoverished noblewoman named Jeanne de la Motte-Valois convinced Cardinal de Rohan, a Prince of the Blood, that Marie Antoinette wanted him to obtain the diamond necklace in secret for her so there would not be a public outcry over another of her wild expenditures. De la Motte dressed up a prostitute named Madame Oliva, who was a dead ringer for the Queen, and arranged for the Cardinal to meet her on a moonlit night in the Parc de Versailles. There, the flighty, sycophantic Cardinal was completely taken in by the ruse. Believing the young prostitute to be Marie Antoinette herself, he threw himself at her feet and swore to do her bidding. He obtained the necklace and handed it over to de la Motte, whom he assumed would give it to the Queen. Instead, de la Motte broke the necklace up, sold the diamonds separately, and set herself up in high style until the scam was discovered a year later.
King Louis XVI made the fatal mistake of arresting the Cardinal for fraud. De Rohan’s trial exposed the court as a collection of spoiled, arrogant nincompoops. And, despite the evidence, most people believed Marie Antoinette to be guilty rather than the unwitting victim of a sting. De Rohan’s acquittal left the Queen’s reputation in shreds and the monarchy fatally weakened.
“What happened to the prostitute who impersonated the Queen?” Eugenie asked as she helped me unfasten the unwieldy piece of jewelry.
“Madame Oliva? They let her go. De la Motte was branded on both her shoulders with a V for voleuse and went to jail—where I’d like to see Monique.”
“Marie Antoinette was the one innocent party in all of it and she wound up losing her head,” Eugenie observed.
“Do we wonder why that story has resonance for me?” I took off the necklace and put it back in the case.
“Monique is your Jeanne de la Motte,” Eugenie said.
“Not exactly. De la Motte got caught.” I snapped the lid shut.
One drizzly afternoon, returning home at around two o’clock after an expedition to the Louvre, I found a plain white envelope on my bed. It had no return address on it, nothing except “Mme. Jo Slater” printed in block letters on the front. I opened it, thinking it was a bill from a small shop around the corner where I’d purchased a pair of antique needlepoint pillows for my client that very morning. Inside was the wedding photograph of Monique and Michel wrapped in a single sheet of paper. Unfolding it, I read the following:
Dear Jo,
Your friend died on August 27, 1989, of a heart attack, aged 68. A drug overdose was suspected but never proved. No charges were filed. The widow waived all her rights to his estate—rather unusual. I hope this helps you.
Je t’embrace, B.
So Monique had literally gotten away with murder—twice, counting Lucius. And no one could prove a thing.
Before I left Paris, I wanted to pay Anne-Marie de Passy one last visit. In order to protect Bernard, I could never tell a soul what I had learned about Monique’s second husband, or the way I had obtained that information. But I had decided to take the old woman up on her offer to go through her brother’s things. If she would allow me, I intended to sift through every scrap of paper in those old boxes piled up high in her living room until I found the letter Lucius had written to Monique. If, indeed, it still existed, I wanted to examine it with my own eyes, to see exactly what he’d written to her, ho
ping it would shed more light on how he had been hooked by this lethal adventuress. I was becoming more and more obsessed with Monique in the wake of this new revelation, and oddly more interested in what the letter might reveal about her rather than Lucius.
I took a taxi back to the Rue du Cherche-Midi to see the old woman. She answered the intercom in a groggy voice and buzzed me in. I ran up the stairs, not wanting to wait for the slow, creaky elevator. I rang the bell twice and waited, then thumped the old bronze knocker in the shape of a shield. De Passy took a very long time to come to the door and, indeed, she looked as if she’d been sleeping. She was wearing a flowered housecoat and slippers. I got the awful feeling I was the only company she ever had except for the cats. I apologized for disturbing her, but she didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary.
“I’m delighted to see you,” she said, stepping aside for me to enter. “I was going to call you but I lost your friend’s telephone number. Do come in.” She straightened up her hair, which fell in strings around her haggard face. “After you left, I found the courage to go through my brother’s belongings. I cannot say I am happy I did. The effort churned up many memories. The happy ones were the saddest of all,” she reflected. “But I believe I have found what you want.”
She bade me sit down while she disappeared into her bedroom. I was in a state of anxiety and anticipation, trying to fathom what the letter would say. The slow, deliberate ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece was a heavy reminder of time. I hated the gloom and the dust. The stifling little apartment palpitated with loneliness. The old woman took forever to come back.
She emerged several moments later, smelling of freshly sprayed lavender perfume. She handed me the letter. The neat black ink printing on the envelope read:
Please hold for the Countess de Passy
Crillon Hotel
I lifted the flap. Inside was a sheet of paper made of heavy crisp white stock with a dark blue border. I knew that stationery well. I’d received many a thank-you note written on it.
I slid out the sheet and unfolded it. My hands were trembling. The monogram at the top, in dark blue to match the border, was “NPN.” The signature at the bottom, in neat prep school print, read, “Nate.”
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