Roch felt his cheeks burning. Now this wedding ring business seemed sillier than ever. The shopkeeper was looking at him in an inquisitive manner, with a half smile on her lips.
“No, thank you, Citizen,” said Roch. “Just the ring, please.”
“Certainly.”
He noticed a large diamond on her finger as she weighed the ring on a goldsmith’s scale. She announced a price of thirty francs and put the jewel in a case.
“My congratulations again, Citizen,” she said, smiling. “You may find that you need something else before long. Do not hesitate to come and ask. Anytime.”
She pressed his hand slightly as she gave him the tiny parcel. He hastened to leave.
Roch was too preoccupied to give the elegant jeweler’s offers any consideration. He kept thinking of Blanche and her mother while walking the few dozen yards that separated him from the Prefecture. He remembered Piis’s words: No man of honor would read his beloved ’s police file. Perhaps Piis was right. Roch, until now, had never thought of doing such a thing, or even sought to discover whether there were any files at all at the Prefecture on Blanche, her husband or mother.
Yet now he felt that something was amiss. Instead of going straight to his office, he walked to the archives, where, as usual, he winced at the odor of musty paper. Indeed many files here dated from before the Revolution, for the archives of the old Police Lieutenant had simply been moved to the Prefecture. “Governments change, the police remains,” his colleague Henry liked to say.
Roch followed with his finger the shelves marked with the letter C. He saw a folio marked with the name Cléry and proceeded to pull it. He started when a tiny ball of gray fur, followed by a long pink tail, scurried away with a squeak. Roch had a peasant’s aversion for mice. He had already complained to Dozier, the archivist, about the damage the little pests wrought and had suggested the introduction of several cats.
But fortunately the Cléry file was intact. It contained several sheets. The earliest dated from decades before the Revolution. Renée-Amélie de Cléry was born in Paris in 1750, into a family of ancient but impoverished nobility. So she was fifty, older than Roch would have guessed. She had married a Louis-Célestin de Cléry, an obscure gamester who styled himself Captain de Cléry without having ever belonged to any known army. The man had wisely fled to America in 1775, to avoid his many creditors and charges of forgery of promissory notes.
Abandoned penniless in Paris at the age of twenty-five, Madame de Cléry had resorted to the profession favored from times immemorial by females in financial distress. She had become a kept woman. The birth of her only child, Blanche, was recorded in 1780, and so was, at the same time, the opening of her gaming salon in the galleries of what was still called the Palais-Royal. Madame de Cléry had sought, and been granted, a divorce as soon as the Revolution had made it possible, in 1790. Her former husband might still be alive somewhere in America. Or, for all anyone seemed to care, he might have died years ago. Roch bit his fingernail. What was sure, he reflected, was that the fellow had disappeared years before Blanche’s birth.
Another sheet in the file related that Madame de Cléry had been jailed during the spring and summer of 1794. She had been suspected of spying for England and being a Royalist conspirator. Roch frowned. That was the time of the Great Terror. It did not take much then for anyone to be accused of counterrevolutionary activities, jailed or sentenced to the guillotine. The woman might have been compromised by an unwitting association with patrons of her gaming salon. Or she might have really been an English spy. But then he would have expected a steady stream of entries in that regard. There were none. All recent notes concerned routine matters dealing with the gaming salon and the renewals of its license.
On a separate sheet was a list of the men reputed to have been Madame de Cléry’s lovers. It seemed to contain the name of everyone rich or fashionable in Paris before the Revolution. Yet Roch’s eye was caught by one name in particular: that of Albert-Firmin Coudert, banker, who was reported to have kept the Cléry woman from 1778 to 1780. 1780! Roch clenched his fists. 1780 was the year of Blanche’s birth. All was clear now. Not only was Coudert old enough to be Blanche’s father, he was her father.
There might have existed a separate file on Coudert, maybe yet another one on Blanche herself, but Roch felt no desire to peruse either. He had read enough.
Roch’s first impulse was to find Coudert and beat him to a pulp. Then, when his heartbeat slowed a bit, he realized that he needed to speak to Blanche first. Not to confirm his guess, because he did not doubt its correctness for a moment, but to hear the truth, painful as it was, from her lips.
32
Roch set forth for Blanche’s mansion on Rue de Babylone. He had not returned there since the day of the musical party, when Blanche had slipped him the note summoning him to their first assignation. What a fool he had been then, and since. He remembered the ease with which Blanche had seduced him. After a chance meeting at her mother’s gaming salon, after an exchange of only a few words, she had invited him to share her bed, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
At the Coudert mansion a footman in a powdered wig and red and gold livery answered the bell. Before the man had time to open his mouth, Roch said, “I need to see your mistress.”
“I am afraid Madame is not home, Sir.”
Roch pushed his Prefecture card in the man’s face. “Police. She’ll be at home for me.”
The footman stammered before recovering his disdainful composure. He let Roch in and opened the door to a salon on the ground floor. “Very well, Sir. Please wait here while I go announce you.”
“I won’t wait, and let’s dispense with all of this buffoonery. Take me to Madame Coudert directly.”
The footman seemed frozen, his eyes and mouth wide open.
“Faster, if you please,” said Roch, “or I’ll have to arrest you.”
The lackey, without a word, led Roch up the grand staircase and down a corridor before stopping in front of a door. Roch shoved him aside before he had time to knock. He stepped into a vast bedroom, hung in pale pink silks. In the far corner, facing a window, Blanche was seated at a mahogany dressing table supported by life-size swans of gilded bronze. Her maid was adjusting white egret feathers in her hair. She turned around and stared as Roch approached.
“So, Blanche, my love,” he said, “is there anything at all you have forgotten to tell me?”
She turned crimson, from the roots of her black hair to the embroidery that decorated the bodice of her white dress. Her eyes darted wildly from the maid to the footman. She motioned to both to leave. Roch slammed the door shut behind them, pushed the lock and returned to post himself in front of Blanche.
Her eyes, flashing with anger, or maybe fear, were fixed on his. “How dare you come here uninvited? Speak to me in this manner in front of the servants? What if they tell my husband?”
He hit his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Ah yes, your husband! Silly me, I was forgetting about that fellow.”
“I don’t understand what you want.”
“I want the truth, Blanche.”
“What truth? Of what are you talking?”
“What truth?” he repeated between his clenched teeth. “Is Coudert your father?”
She swallowed large gulps of air.
“Is he?”
“Yes,” she whispered, her eyes closed.
“Little whore. Liar.”
Now her eyes were wide open, defiant. “I didn’t lie. You never asked.”
“Never asked? Is that a question one is supposed to ask? But I did ask why you married Coudert, didn’t I? Wasn’t that enough of an invitation to tell me the truth? Instead all I got was that ridiculous tale about no one else wanting to marry you.”
Her face was firm, but the silky egret feathers in her hair were quivering, as if agitated by an emotion of their own.
“Come, Blanche, tell me the truth at last,” he continued in a calmer to
ne. “You knew that Coudert was your father when you married him, didn’t you? Have you no decency? No shame?”
“I am not one of your suspects, Roch, someone you can bully at your pleasure. If you want the truth, I will tell you, but you must listen to me.” She took a deep breath, staring straight ahead. “Yes, Monsieur Coudert is my father. And I have always known it, since I was a little girl. But he is not my husband.”
Roch swore. “Do you take me for an imbecile?”
“We only wed in a civil ceremony. This doesn’t make us husband and wife before God. And he never touched me.”
“So why would he have married you?”
“He married me out of kindness.”
“Out of kindness? Are you mocking me?”
“Please listen to me. He never touched me. He only married me to help me. You don’t know, Roch, how things are at Mama’s gaming salon. Many of the patrons court her, and some began courting me as well. This is how I met the Count de Rivoyre, Armand. I was fifteen. He was young, handsome, dashing. I fell in love with him. He convinced me to wed him secretly, without telling Mama—”
Roch glowered at Blanche. “What? You were married before?”
“You wanted the truth, Roch. I pretended to go stay in the country with a friend, a former schoolmate, while in fact I joined Armand at his Paris lodgings. We were married secretly by a Franciscan Friar, and we spent a week together, the happiest of my life. Then he had to leave for England. He promised to claim me as his bride as soon as he returned to Paris.”
Blanche caught her breath. “In the meantime Mama had called at my friend’s country house, and discovered my absence. She was furious, of course. When I came home at the end of my week with Armand, I had to tell her the truth. She said no one would ever be able to find the monk who had celebrated my marriage, that Armand would probably deny it, that he had disgraced me.”
Roch sneered. “Let me risk a guess: the scoundrel had bedded her as well. So you stole your mother’s lover?”
“I was truly, passionately in love with Armand. I believed him when he said he would come back to me and acknowledge our marriage. I still believe that he would have done so. But he was captured a few months later, during the Bay of Quiberon invasion. He was part of the army of French émigrés the British fleet brought to the shores of Brittany to join the Chouans. He was captured, court-martialed and shot for treason, along with hundreds of others.”
“You and your mother must have been heartbroken.”
“I was. Then I discovered that Armand had left behind in Paris all of the letters I had written him. One of his former mistresses, who still had a key to his lodgings, found them when she went through his papers after his death. Out of spite, she showed them to other people. Soon they began to circulate in society. Mama had been right on one point: there was no way of proving my marriage. The Franciscan Friar, an unsworn priest, had disappeared, and both of our witnesses had been shot at Quiberon with Armand. My reputation was ruined. It was terrible to mourn my husband, to miss him as I did, and to know at the same time that people were laughing at my sorrow. Mama was always trying to convince some man or other to marry me, but no one would have me, no matter how much money she offered for my dowry. I didn’t care anyway, because I didn’t want to marry any of them either. Mama and I had terrible arguments about that all the time.”
Tears were gathering in Blanche’s eyes. “Then one day, when I was eighteen, Monsieur Coudert took me, without Mama, for a ride to the Champs-Elysées in his carriage. It was a beautiful October day, the trees were all golden in the sun. He asked whether I was happy like that, living with Mama. I told him that no, I wasn’t happy at all. Then he proposed. He said that he would never touch me, of course, that he would try his best to make me happy. I agreed right away. But Mama was very angry when she heard of it.”
“I wonder why! She finally displayed some common sense.” Roch frowned. “You told me the general outline of this story last time. You only omitted a few minor details, such as your supposed marriage to that Rivoyre fellow, and Coudert being your father. He was only a longtime friend of your mother’s then. But I am sorry, I interrupted your narrative. Please proceed.”
Blanche opened a reticule lying on the dressing table. She pulled a tiny lace handkerchief and blew her nose.
“At first Mama was adamant in her refusal,” she continued, “but Monsieur Coudert insisted. He promised to leave me everything upon his death, and he is very rich. He said that it would be far easier for me to inherit his fortune if I we were married. He couldn’t acknowledge me as his daughter because Mama was married to Monsieur de Cléry when I was born. So she finally relented. She said I was making a grave mistake, that I was still a child, that I would regret it later. But I guess she was tired of fighting with me all the time. So Monsieur Coudert took me away from her. He gave me everything I wished for, most of all my freedom. I reconciled with Mama very soon afterwards.”
“You never saw anything wrong with marrying that man?”
“I didn’t care at the time. After Armand’s death, I thought I would never love again. I only wanted to leave Mama, have my own house, my own life, to see the friends I liked, to be at liberty of doing the things I thought right. And in the two years we have been married, Monsieur Coudert has never breached his promises. He has mistresses, and he never tried to touch me.”
Tears were welling up in her eyes. “It is only when I met you that I realized Mama had been right. I began to regret what I had done. I didn’t want to see you only in a place like the Five Diamonds, only for a few stolen hours. I wanted you to take me to the countryside, I wanted to walk on your arm in public places. I wanted some happiness at last. I even thought sometimes of asking Monsieur Coudert for a divorce, but I never had the courage.”
Roch sneered. “Hence the ring.”
“Yes. It would have made me feel as though you wanted to marry me.” She raised her eyes to him. “So you understand now? You believe me?”
“Yes, I think I understand. And I may be enough of a fool to believe you. But you deceived me about so many things, Blanche. At this time I can’t bear it. Yours is a sad story, and I feel sorry for you. But you lied to me when I was begging for the truth. Can you imagine what trust means to me at this moment? How can I ever trust you again? I don’t even know who you are now. Every time I would look into your eyes I would wonder what else you could be hiding.”
“So you don’t want me anymore?”
“It breaks my heart to give you up, but no, I don’t want you anymore.”
Silent tears were rolling down her cheeks. This was too painful. He turned around and softly closed the door behind him.
He crossed the river over the Pont-au-Change, the Bridge of the Money Changers, to reach the Prefecture. As a gust of wind lifted the tails of his coat, he felt in his pocket the jewelry case containing the ring. He stopped in his tracks and pulled the circle of gold out of its box. It was perfect, round, free of any scratch or blemish. Roch gazed at it intently as he held it between his thumb and forefinger. He leaned over the parapet and dropped ring and case into the river. They were swallowed by the waves in an instant and disappeared without a ripple.
33
For the rest of the day Roch immersed himself in his work in an attempt to chase away the thought of Blanche. There were ever more witnesses to interview, none with anything of interest to say, ever more clues to follow, all leading to nothing. At least he was busy, and that was his sole comfort now. It was past ten when he reluctantly closed the door to his office that night. As he was leaving the Prefecture, a slim figure appeared from the wisps of fog that rose from the river.
“Ah, here you are, Citizen Chief Inspector,” chirped a familiar voice. “I thought I’d freeze to death waitin’ for you. It’s mighty cold ’round here.”
“Pépin! Why didn’t you ask the guards to take you to my office?”
“No offense, Citizen Chief Inspector, but I’m not sure it’s safe to be see
n too much with you, if you catch my meanin’ . . .”
“So you must have a good reason to wait for me out here.”
“I’ll say. You owe me some silver this time.”
“Silver? What for?”
“It’s about the Mayenne Inn, Sir. You’ll want to hear my story.”
Roch sighed. He doubted that there was much to learn, but any news was better than no news. He pulled a coin from his waistcoat pocket and held it in front of Pépin’s face. The boy grinned.
“Well, Citizen Chief Inspector, I was abeggin’ in front of the Mayenne Inn. Nothin’ wrong with earnin’ a sol or two more’n what you’ll give me, eh? An’ it made me look like I was doing somethin’ beside watchin’ the place. Like I told you, usually there’s almos’ nobody comin’ in and out. But then some big sack o’ lard opens the door. An’ what d’you think he does?”
“He grabs you by the scruff of the neck and skins your scabby ass for begging in front of his door?”
“No, Sir. I’d be too fast for him. He looks right an’ left, then he beckons to me: D’you want to earn three sols, boy? he says. Yes, Sir, I say, I’d do ’most anythin’ for three sols. So he says, You take this to Catherine Vallon, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, above the Biré grocery, in front of Saint-Martin Church.”
Roch held his breath. “And did you go to that Catherine Vallon?”
“Oh, yes. An’ is she ugly! A reg’lar witch, with her bones poking out of her skin, an’ a big red nose, an’ a screechy voice too, like a cat in season.”
“And what did you take to her?”
“Oh, jus’ a letter, an’ not a thick one. I’d tell you more, but I can’t read.”
The boy reached for the coin, but Roch closed his hand. “When did you say that happened?”
Pépin scratched his hair under his cap. “I’m not too sure, really.”
Roch dropped the coin. Pépin crouched to pick it up. Before the boy had time to reach it, Roch seized him by the ear and slowly raised him to his feet. “Now think well, Pépin. When did that happen?”
Catherine Delors Page 17