Pierre considered this, then looked up again. ‘I’m the lion in this forest!’ He grinned at Kinnaird the mouse.
Kinnaird nodded in admiration, as if he’d just realized the comparison. Actually he was remembering a rich boy from Greenock who’d fancied himself a tobacco importer, fat and rather stupid.
With half a loaf and some cheese in his belly, and the little knife in his pocket, Kinnaird sat for an hour in the fringe of the forest watching the lads who came from a village referred to only as ‘The Windmill’ to trade eggs or bread or beech oil or things they’d stolen from their neighbours. He watched Pierre and the few like him, furtive and hasty nearer the daylight, make their trades and hurry back into the trees. He saw the quietest, most cautious of the lads. And then he followed him.
Halfway to the village the boy turned to confront him. Kinnaird held the knife blade forwards, as a weapon. The boy stayed silent, the eyes on Kinnaird and watchful, and Kinnaird knew he’d chosen well. He switched the knife around in his fingers, so the handle was forwards, and now the boy looked at it. Finally Kinnaird held it upright between them, and explained that when the boy returned with three chickens, two of which needed to be in lay, the knife would be his. After that he would get a fixed sum, once at dawn and once at dusk, for any mixture of items he cared to bring according to an agreed tariff.
Inside twenty-four hours Kinnaird had brought the forest economy forwards by three centuries, replacing the mediaeval era with the mercantile from his branch-and-blanket headquarters. Inside a week he had doubled his original purse, and a lawyer, a former tax farmer and a couple of murderers were in his debt. Soon afterwards he bought a horse and emerged from the forest.
‘You came back for me.’
Pinsent heard his own words as if distant. His vision came slowly. Raphael Benjamin bubbled into focus.
The words seemed to surprise him; he was even uncomfortable. ‘My dear fellow . . . A bit of theatre, and a coin for a lad to divert them.’ Then he was busying again. ‘Ned, you look atrocious.’
One and a half eyes flickered. ‘Accommodation distinctly average.’ He realized he’d been asleep before. ‘Raph, I must know – ’
‘We need to get you washed and shaved, and if we can’t do something about those bruises we’re better laying up here rather than having you frightening the children. And I’d rather not lay up.’
‘Won’t the bandages do?’ Once clear of La Force, Benjamin had lost them in the heart of the slums, put a bandage around Pinsent’s face and a sling over one arm and a blanket around his shoulders, turning a manacled fugitive into a wounded soldier. This had got them out the city, and for ten miles, to the cheapest tavern that still offered a private room. There Benjamin had fed Pinsent broth until he’d passed out.
Pinsent’s hand came up to feel his head, and he remembered the manacles. ‘And ain’t these the bigger problem?’
‘Manacles I can change, Ned. Your face, alas, I cannot. And the bandages do draw the attention rather. For now, sleep; we won’t move until dusk.’
Pinsent slept. In the evening, as the blacksmith of the village of Cergy was letting his fire die with the sun, he was startled by two shadows who appeared behind him. Their faces were masked. One of them stepped forwards, and the blacksmith took a tighter grip on the tongs he’d been holding, and waited. The shadow thrust his hands forwards, revealing manacles. The blacksmith’s eyebrows came up.
The other shadow placed two objects on the workbench in front of him: a pistol, and a gold coin.
The blacksmith shrugged, and pulled the manacles onto the anvil.
In the dawn, Pinsent woke again. Benjamin saw, and pointed to a loaf of bread and a flask of milk on the floor. ‘Get your strength up, old lad. Can’t have you snoring all the way to Switzerland.’
Pinsent absorbed the room: its cheapness, the smell, Raph’s bed placed to block the door. He flexed his wrists, feeling the absence of the manacles. Then he took a mouthful of milk and buried his face in the bread. He was talking before he’d finished swallowing. ‘’Fore God, Raph, what’s been happening?’ Benjamin, sitting tidily on his bed with his back against the door, frowned mildly at the question. ‘Hal Greene! What about him?’
‘What indeed?’
‘That – that he’s dead!’
Now Benjamin came upright. ‘You said what?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Ned, I’ll guillotine you myself if you don’t talk straight.’
Pinsent finished another mouthful, watching the other carefully. ‘It’s all they would talk about. All they wanted to know about. Hal Greene mixed up with some royalist plot, and found dead.’
‘But where? How?’
‘There was some servant – used to be the King’s valet or something – ’
‘Wait – You mean Bonfils? Was the name Bonfils?’
Pinsent frowned, and saw the irritation. ‘You’ll pardon me, I’m sure,’ he murmured, grim, ‘if I ain’t crystal on the details.’ Benjamin nodded, impatient. ‘May have been the name. He was murdered, some little town somewhere, and Greene was found beside him, dead and stinking the place out.’
Benjamin slumped back against the door.
‘You know anything about it, Raph?’
Benjamin gazed at him, and said nothing.
Pinsent returned to his breakfast. After a while, he said: ‘I didn’t tell them anything. Nothing to the purpose, you know?’ Benjamin got what he was talking about, and smiled. ‘Not Emma’s name. Not yours.’
‘Course you didn’t, old fellow. Civil of you.’
A silence, and then the stolid wonder again. ‘You came back for me.’
The eyes of the genius Lavoisier would not meet Fouché’s. They stared up, into the infinite, and would never deign to drop to the representative of a terrestrial power.
A servant had checked, and then invited Fouché in. And it was in the entrance hall that he first saw the legend: saw the wide clear eyes gazing up and away from the earth; saw the mind working, saw the dreams.
What kind of man puts up a portrait of himself in the front hall? Didn’t have time to tidy his papers when he’d been forced out of his offices at the Arsenal, but managed to bring out the prize portrait. The existence of the painting told him something. And if Lavoisier owned it, then it was Lavoisier as he wanted to be seen.
Fouché considered the image again. It depicted a man of prosperity. It depicted a man of purity. The Lavoisier in the picture was doing something noble; and Lavoisier was humble in his contemplation of . . . of whatever was to be seen in the notoriously brilliant mind. Chemical speculations as the mysteries of Olympus.
The servant was whispering to him again, and Fouché followed through into another room. The servant left him and closed the door, and Fouché took the opportunity of solitude for further exploration. There was a table across the room with papers on it.
He was halfway towards the table when he glimpsed movement, somewhere on the edge of his vision.
At the far end of the room, in front of a window, a man was sitting at a desk and bent over some work in front of him.
The rounded back, the wigged head, were absolutely still. Only an arm moved, slowly, to touch something obscured by the body; then the other arm shivered as he wrote.
Fouché stood still, caught in the middle of the rug, and waiting.
The man at the desk did not turn. Adjustment of something with left arm; shiver of writing with right.
Fouché waited. Eventually he said, ‘Good day to you, Monsieur le Professeur.’
Nothing.
Is he deaf? Surely Lavoisier was not so old. Louder: ‘It was most kind of you to agree to see me.’
Adjustment of something with left arm; shiver of writing with right. Shifting cautiously round, Fouché could see more clearly what the man was working at: a glass vessel of some kind, on a metal stand, with metal pipes protruding from the top of it.
Surely he had seen the movement now, even if he hadn’t h
eard. Fouché was irritated, but a kind of awe restrained him. He was not accustomed to being other than the cleverest man in the room; but the cleverest man in this room was the cleverest man in the world.
Fouché contrived a mighty cough. It produced no effect. He thought about continuing to the papers on the table, but discomfort wouldn’t let him. After another minute he sat in the nearest chair.
Coal burned dull in the grate. He feels the cold, even in a mild autumn.
He considered the room – the furnishings showed affluence, and absolutely no distinction or unnecessary elaboration. The room was no more than comfortable: a rich man’s book and paper store.
He considered the rich man’s back, across the room.
Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier: trained as a lawyer; trained as a geologist; presented his first paper to the Academy of Sciences at the age of twenty-one; gold medal from the King at the age of twenty-three; by the age of thirty he was changing the way men saw the world. Where most men saw the air, Lavoisier saw strange invisible fumes and powers; things you could not touch or see but which burned. Lavoisier saw not air, but spirits he named oxygen and hydrogen. Lavoisier saw the world in closer detail than any man had ever seen it.
Fouché waited.
Also: a tax farmer, a gunpowder broker, and the husband of a charming and much younger wife.
Fouché shifted uncomfortably on his chair.
And as if inspired by the same unseen power, the back across the room shifted for the first time, and stood. The man turned, and came to Fouché. ‘Young man, you’re most welcome. Please don’t stand.’ A bell touched, the servant immediately in the room, drinks ordered. The hospitality was entirely normal, and there was no acknowledgement of Fouché’s wait. Lavoisier pulled a chair round to face him.
Fouché met Lavoisier for the second time. This was an older Lavoisier: the nose, the eyelids, the jaw, had gained a little flesh and lost their sharpness. Gone with them was the sense of freshness, and purity. The face of a tax farmer, not a dreamer.
The eyes, though, still had an innocence as they considered Fouché. And innocence was what he was supposed to be doubting.
‘You must forgive me, young man, but I don’t – ’
‘Joseph Fouché, Professeur. Of the cabinet of the Minister of the Interior.’
Lavoisier stiffened in the chair. Fouché read alarm, distaste, discomfort in the souring face. ‘Of course. I am at the service of the Revolution, Monsieur Fouché.’ He tried to cross his legs, but the pose of relaxation did not last more than a moment. ‘I realize that it was necessary for me to leave my post at the Arsenal, but I trust my work here will continue to be of use to the authorities.’ He’d stopped pretending now, and the voice got faster. ‘There is still much to be done to improve the quality of our powder. Kellermann and Dumouriez are still advancing against our enemies, yes? How many cannon?’
Pause. He was actually, Fouché realized, waiting for an answer. Fouché shrugged, back in the schoolroom.
‘A small improvement in the quality of the powder – it’s a matter of its properties during the combustion reaction – will create a significant improvement in the strength and reliability of the detonation. We may also, I think, safely expect to see a more efficient expenditure of powder – a lesser charge for the same effect. You will rapidly understand the benefits, young man, to the treasury and to our straitened resources.’
Silence. Fouché wondered if he was supposed to clap.
Instead he said, gesturing towards the apparatus on the desk: ‘You continue your . . . your investigations, Monsieur le Professeur?’
‘Investigations? I am not a magistrate.’ Fouché the errant pupil again. ‘To investigate is to follow a trail of footprints, not knowing whither they go. To experiment is to devise, based on great knowledge, an hypothesis, and then to design tests that must, by unavoidable logical implication, prove or disprove the hypothesis.’ He began to tick off the steps on his hands, stiff-fingered. ‘Hypothesis – test – observation – inference – synthesis.’
‘I under-’
‘And repeat!’
‘I – ’
‘France is mediaeval, young man. A land of spirits, of superstitions, of credulousness. Do the peasants expect the touch of Danton to cure them of the pox?’ Quite the opposite, probably. ‘My great hope of the Revolution is that it drags this primitive land of ours into the age of reason. We must trust to nothing but facts: these are presented to us by nature and cannot deceive.’ Lavoisier’s lips were dotted with spit in his excitement. ‘Reason – experiment – observe! This is the only law we must follow.’
‘The National Convention – ’
‘The Convention is a gathering of mammals. A herd. Each of them is so much chemistry: a chemical process, a burning of fuel to maintain heat and the working of the organism.’ Fouché was feeling uncomfortable. ‘Chemically speaking, we are little more than the fire in my grate there. If I had been allowed to continue my experiments on respi-’
‘But you weren’t, Professeur, were you?’ Enough of these dreams. ‘You made your fortune as a tax farmer, not a natural philosopher, and the people felt the pain of your taxes before they felt the benefit of your philosophizing.’
Lavoisier deflated in a long sigh.
‘In the end you were little better than the bishops, selling pardons and positions to clothe their mistresses.’ Lavoisier’s body and face started to contort. ‘Professeur, I respect you for your mind – you . . . you have a purity of mind that I admire. But the Revolution . . . it demands conformity, not genius.’
Fouché stopped. It was not an idea he’d had before.
Lavoisier was nodding. Slowly, unhappily. Eventually he said: ‘As chemistry, young man, we are all alike. You may reassure your comrades of that. But the same chemical substance may be manifest in utterly different forms.’ As he regained familiar ground he regained confidence. ‘You see the coal burning over there? In chemical terms, a lump of that coal is the same as a diamond.’ He smiled at the wonder of it, smiled at his own certainty.
Fouché’s face showed his uncertainty, and he fought it down. ‘We may have to give up our diamonds, Professeur, to keep the coal burning.’ The King’s diamonds, he was thinking.
Again, the unhappy nod. This time Lavoisier stayed silent.
Fouché gathered himself. ‘Professeur, I had the responsibility to monitor your premises in the Arsenal, after your departure. I found a ledger, and a sheaf of notes. They were sent on to you here.’ Lavoisier nodded vaguely. ‘I recently found that one other item had been misplaced in my office. A letter to you, from Monsieur Bailly, that had arrived after your departure from your former premises. I take the opportunity to return it to you.’ A very precise copy was in the appropriate dossier.
Lavoisier showed no inclination to casual gratitude.
‘Monsieur Bailly describes to you certain experiences of his acquaintance, the mathematician Delambre, during the present expedition to measure the meridian.’
A half-nod. ‘I shall look forward to reading it.’
Fouché stood to leave. ‘One more point, Monsieur. A minor curiosity merely.’ Lavoisier waited warily. ‘We noted the marking “1/6” on the letter, and wondered at it.’
Lavoisier shrugged. It was not a natural gesture, indifference, to this mind.
Fouché watched his face. Saw the wariness.
‘Curiosity, Monsieur, as I say. In the ministry we are naturally attentive to these trivial details. Even in the correspondence of a man of absolute public reputation.’ They both knew that Lavoisier was short of this, and falling fast. ‘Even unwittingly, a man could obstruct or assist the ministry most significantly.’ He smiled. ‘Such a volatile time.’
The chemist was not a natural dissembler. The face was stone; the eyes were hatred.
It was a child’s hatred. The passion of an infant mind caught out in a deceit, or deprived of a toy.
‘I wondered if it might be a copyist’s mark. If the same mes
sage – this very innocent message, between men of reputation – was being sent to others.’
Lavoisier forced a smile. ‘You’re quite right, Monsieur Fouché. I’m delighted to satisfy you on the point. Always happy to assist the ministry, naturally.’
‘I am sure of it.’
‘We are a small circle of . . . of acquaintances. Men of a philosophic inclination. Theorizers and experimenters. We were once brought together for a particular scientific enquiry and, finding each other’s intellectual society congenial, resolved to maintain a correspondence wherever our activities should take us.’
It sounded credible; and innocent. Fouché felt disappointed. ‘It sounds a most natural proceeding.’ He forced a smile of his own. ‘And you very naturally adopted the services of a copyist who would both copy any message to all members of the group, but also manage the sending onwards.’
‘Quite. Years ago now, and we rarely make use of it. But I informed the copyist of my move here, nevertheless. The note you have, from Bailly, must have been sent before I did so.’ His voice went flat. ‘Rather an upset time.’
‘I would be fascinated, Monsieur, to know the enquiry that brought you together.’ I would be fascinated to know the names.
Lavoisier grunted. ‘It was a foolishness – a charlatanry, indeed – in the time of . . . of the old order. Several years ago: the . . . mid-eighties. Eighty-four. His Maj- That is, Louis called a Commission of Enquiry. It was the Secretary to the Commission – insignificant old functionary; he’s dead now, I think – who found the copyist and established this arrangement.’ He smiled, and there was discomfort again. ‘Monsieur Fouché, you have discovered the secret of the Friends of Magnetism.’
1. MAY 1784
In Paris, an unnatural theorem is to be scrutinized
Sir,
Louis the KING has conferred upon MESMER, the physician of Vienna and darling of the salons, the uncomfortable honour of a Commission to examine his outlandish speculations.
Mesmer – and the outline of his speculations – has been mentioned in earlier reports. (I sent you myself his notorious Mémoire with its Propositions.) Such is his renown that he has moved from only private practice to conducting séances involving small groups, and I have now had the opportunity to attend one of his matinées and to see the phenomenon for myself.
Treason's Spring Page 23