by Claude Izner
‘What do you think?’ she asked Victor who was struggling, hammer in his hand, with a recalcitrant nail.
‘I’m not sure. I think I’m about to have a fit of jealousy. I find this sudden friendship very suspicious.’
‘I’ll never be able to fathom men. You’ve been waiting for a truce between us for months, and when it finally comes…’
‘I am comforted by the fact that he poses for you with his clothes on.’
‘Don’t be too sure; this is only a beginning.’
‘No, you’re not his type, he prefers brunettes. Ninon was…’
‘She still is.’
‘…And perhaps Iris is too. Little redheads don’t interest Kenji; he leaves them for me.’
He put down his hammer and she her paintbrush and they kissed.
‘So, do you like it?’ he whispered in her ear.
‘You mean the way you kiss?’
‘No, idiot, the studio.’
‘If you insult me, I’ll go back to Helga Becker! Of course I like it. I’d be hard to please if I didn’t. Do you know what I like most about it, though?’
‘The bed?’ he said, pointing to the alcove, which was now home to a double bed draped in liberty satin.
She shook her head.
‘The water closet?’
‘No.’
‘The furniture?’
She looked at the various pieces of furniture Victor had bought at the auction house on Rue Drouot: the two Henry IV armchairs, the Regency sofa and the Tudor tables and chairs.
‘They’re truly lovely, but no. The thing I like most is the running water.’
‘Women are beyond me,’ sighed Victor.
There was a knock on the door. Tasha let in Madame Pignot and Joseph, who presented her respectively with an enormous fruit basket and a potted palm purchased at L’Île de la Cité flower market. When they’d set their gifts down in front of the ceramic stove she gave them each a kiss.
‘I won’t wash my cheeks for a whole year!’ declared Joseph.
‘Is Monsieur Mori here yet?’ whispered Madame Pignot.
‘We’re expecting him soon. In any case Germaine has prepared a cold buffet supper,’ Victor replied, pointing to the sideboard creaking under the weight of terrines of braised beef and chicken, platters of foie gras, salad bowls filled with cress and red lettuce, strawberries and cream, cakes and bottles of champagne.
‘Rustic but plentiful,’ he added. ‘Have you made your peace with Madame Ballu?’
‘Yes, but it cost me two pounds of oranges and five of pears,’ muttered Madame Pignot.
‘Don’t forget to tell them she gave you a brand new broom,’ Joseph remarked, eyeing the braised beef.
There was another knock, and the door opened to a young delivery boy hidden behind a bouquet of lilies.
‘Is this the house warming at Madame…Sacha Kherson’s?’
‘Tasha,’ Victor corrected him as he took the flowers from the boy. ‘Would you care for a glass of champagne?’
‘Oh! There’s a card! It’s from Kenji!’ cried Tasha.
‘No thanks, sir, not while I’m working. But I’d love a bit of pâté.’
Clutching his slice of bread and pâté, the delivery boy made way for Kenji who had just walked in carrying a large package.
‘This is for you,’ he said to Tasha.
‘More! You’re spoiling me – your flowers are gorgeous.’
She tore through the wrapping paper and carefully lifted out a yellow tea set with flecks of green resting on a lacquered tray.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she murmured.
‘It’s seventeenth century. Nothing is too beautiful for a pretty woman.’
‘Careful, Kenji!’ Victor groaned.
‘Why don’t we eat?’ Joseph suggested, to defuse the atmosphere.
He went and stood in front of the potted palm clasping his plate, and said with his mouth full: ‘They need plenty of light and heat these things. By the way, do you know what I read in Le Passe-partout yesterday? It wasn’t on account of a palm tree that Marie Turnerad chose that funny name Palmyre, it was because when she was a girl her grandmother had a Siamese cat called Palmyre. And the other name she used, Delarme, wasn’t just any old name either. You’ll never guess what it stands for, not in a million years: emerald. An anagram! What a plucky woman she was.’
He had just realised why Tasha kept looking at him frantically and signalling to Kenji, when the latter observed: ‘Why do you speak of her in the past tense? She’s rapidly becoming famous. Her cell, it seems, is filled with flowers sent from all over France by her many admirers. The Prince of Wales visits her twice a week, and they say the Duc de Frioul has offered to marry her. She’s even begun writing her memoirs. I hope to goodness she doesn’t mention my name.’
He looked at them defiantly and they admired his courage. Victor wondered whether Iris knew anything about her Kenji’s peccadilloes. He remembered the words Numa Winner had attributed to Daphne: ‘You can be reborn if you break the chain.’ Whether this advice came from her or from the clairvoyant, its meaning was becoming clear. Victor realised that the bond between him and Kenji had changed. They were no longer father and son, but two men on an equal footing.
‘This fascination for criminals amazes and disgusts me. One mustn’t forget their victims.’
‘Rest assured, I am not in the slightest bit fascinated,’ Kenji replied, walking over to Tasha. ‘I appreciate your concern,’ he added in a low voice, ‘but it is useless to try to spare me. My pride has suffered, but, as we all know, such wounds are superficial. Your friend Maurice Laumier appears far more upset by his lover’s duplicity than I am. He’s still fuming.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve been to the Soleil d’Or.’
‘Really? I’m touched.’
‘I very much liked your work.’
‘The portraits most of all, I’ll wager,’ mumbled Victor, who was hovering around them, eavesdropping.
‘I confess I think I’ve turned out rather well,’ retorted Kenji, standing in front of his portrait resting on the easel. ‘Have you sold any paintings?’
‘Only one. My favourite, the Paris rooftops at dawn.’
Kenji poured himself some more champagne and wondered how long he’d have to keep his acquisition hidden at the bottom of a chest.
‘But the most wonderful reward of all was that Anatole France went out of his way to come to the exhibition and encouraged me to remain faithful to my ideal.’
‘Only he who remains faithful to his ideal can feed at the table of Art,’ Kenji announced, cutting himself a large slice of apple tart.
‘You just made that up!’ exclaimed Victor.
‘By the way, the battleaxe came to the shop two days ago. You wouldn’t happen to have Betrayal by Maxime Paz in the Ernest Kolb edition, would you?’
‘Joseph, I’ve told you not to use that expression. You must say, La Comtesse de Salignac,’ declared Kenji, frowning.
‘But it’s not an insult, boss. Mademoiselle Tasha calls me the moujik and I don’t make a fuss about it. If you prefer, I’ll call her the Mousmé, it’s more flattering if less suitable. It means “young girl” in Japanese…doesn’t it? Since it’s like that, I shan’t tell you the end of the story about the horses’ manes.’
‘Oh please do, Joseph, even though I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about!’ implored Tasha.
‘Well, it’s like this. A while ago, some individuals broke into the stables owned by the omnibus company on Rue Ordener, and chopped the manes off twenty-five horses. The mystery’s just been solved. They sold the hair to the wig makers who supply the Opera.’
‘Bravo, my pet! You’re following in the footsteps of Inspector Lecacheur!’ exclaimed Euphrosine Pignot.
‘But, Maman, I didn’t solve the case. I’m just telling you the…’
‘Nonsense! Don’t be so modest; I know it was you. Let’s drink a toast to my pet!’
> They clinked their champagne flutes and a ray of sunlight refracted through the cut glass shone on to the eyes of Kenji’s portrait, making them twinkle. Tasha whispered in Joseph’s ear: ‘Thank you, my little moujik, or should I say my guardian angel. You saved Victor’s life and for that you deserve a kiss and my eternal gratitude.’
Appendix
A Few Historical Notes On France In 1890
In 1890 there was a new air of liberty in Paris. At the Moulin Rouge the cancan was all the rage and the dancers’ skirts were daringly short. The style of dress of both men and women became less formal and the term fin de siècle began to be heard.
The start of 1890 was nonetheless grim. Paris was in the grip of an influenza epidemic that had claimed 370 deaths by fourth January. In Panama the deaths were counted by the thousand. Of the 21,000 Frenchmen who had gone to Panama since the start of the digging of the canal nine years previously, 10,000 had died of yellow fever.
The fever was not the only hazard of the canal. The project started in 1878 when Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was granted a concession to build a canal in Panama by the Colombian government. Ferdinand de Lesseps headed up the construction company, and the project was financed by hundreds of thousands of French investors, many of them of modest means, who put their faith in ‘the great Frenchman’ as de Lesseps was known because of his success in building the Suez Canal. Work began on February 1st 1881. The canal was intended to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Seventy-five kilometres in length, it was to be dug across the narrowest place on the continent, in the Colombian state of Panama. De Lesseps insisted on using the same construction methods as in Suez making no allowances for the different climatic and geographical conditions. For example, the geology of the Culebran hills created enormous technical difficulties. Under the tropical rain, machinery sank into mud and trenches collapsed. In the dry season, work was possible, but there were monsoon conditions for seven months out of the year, along with constant humidity. Along the coast the many lakes were breeding grounds for mosquitoes. In the 1880s, no-one knew that mosquitoes carried yellow fever. In fact, to counteract the invasion of ants in their homes, people would put the feet of their beds in water, where mosquitoes multiplied. The result was the spread of yellow fever.
After seven years of work, it was discovered that the company was in serious debt. In December 1888 it applied to the French government for a deferment of its liabilities which was refused. In February 1889, the company was dissolved and liquidated. More than 870,000 investors did not receive their payment and were subsequently ruined. Suicides rates soared.
Back in Paris, predicting the future was all the rage. Everyone was turning to occultists, cabbalists and necromancers, pseudo-spiritists who claimed to be able to reveal the future and communicate with those beyond it. These characters abounded in the city with small announcements appearing in the newspapers such as ‘Madame Duchatellier, 45 rue Sainte-Anne, answers all questions about the future’, or even ‘Madame Berthe, the famous somnambulist, 23 rue Saint-Merri, receives every day between one and six, by appointment only.’ ‘How is one to distinguish between the real mediums and those who only claim to possess the gift of divination?’ asked the French painter James Tissot who became very interested in spiritualism when his mistress died. From 1869, the London Dialectical Society selected a committee of 33 members to study supernatural phenomena. Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Victorien Sardou and Conan Doyle stuck to the spiritualism that Allan Kardec (Hippolyte-Léon Rivail to use his real name) shed light on, defining the following principles: man is not solely composed of solid matter, there exists within him a thinking soul linked to the physical body by the perispirit. This thinking body controls the physical body, which it then leaves, as one would remove a worn-out piece of clothing, when its present incarnation has completed its course. Once disincarnated, the dead can communicate with the living, either directly, or through mediums, visibly or invisibly. Opinions varied but many were convinced that spiritualism was scientific proof of life after death.
The interest in spritualism sat alongside significant scientific progress, but not everyone embraced the changes that this brought. Some people in 1890 looked back nostalgically to the past and vigorously denounced the lack of manners, the de-population of the countryside, the pessimistic and pornographic literature, socialism, soaring crime rates, and the influx of immigrants from Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Russia and Poland. As the end of the century approached, France was having to open itself to the rest of the world.
Also By Claude Izner
Murder on the Eiffel Tower
Notes
Chapter One
1. Grouchy (Emmanuel de, 1766–1847): Marshal of France. Charged with giving chase to the Prussians routed at Ligny, he lacked initiative and failed to come to Napoleon’s aid at Waterloo.
2. The ruins of the Palais d’Orsay which housed the Conseil d’État (Council of State) and the Cour des Comptes (Court of Accounts) stood on the Quai d’Orsay until 1898, when the Compagnie des chemins de fér d’Orleans built the Gare d’Orsay. Today the building houses the Musée d’Orsay.
3. A grognard is an historical term for the soldiers of the old guard of Napoleon I.
Chapter Two
1. Japanese artist, famous for his paintings, illustrations and etchings (1752–1815); celebrated for his works depicting the theatrical world and for his portraits of women.
2. Japanese painter and printmaker (1797–1858); celebrated especially for his landscape prints, which transmuted everyday settings into intimate, lyrical scenes.
3. Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) served as Minister of Police under Napoleon and was instrumental in the return of Louis XVIII to the throne in 1815.
4. This is a play on words, Père Moscou is spelling out the sound of the name Josephine de Beauharnais, later Josephine Bonaparte, as if speaking in code.
Chapter Three
1. A Parisian popular daily newspaper founded in 1879, which lasted until the outbreak of World War I.
2. This affair began with the disappearance of a porter named Gouffé on 26 July 1885 and concluded with the arrest of two men, Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompart.
3. In the fifth arrondisement, now known as the Marché Maubert.
Chapter Four
1. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
2. Popular novelist (1823–1902) and author of a considerable body of work. His most famous work is La Porteuse de Pain (The Bread Delivery Girl)
3. Crébillon fils, Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1707–1777), Parisian novelist, son of the famous tragedian Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon
4. Tripes à la mode de Caen: A traditional recipe of tripe baked in a casserole dish for twelve hours, with layers of onions, beef suet and a calf ’s foot, topped with a pie crust.
Chapter Five
1. Pierre François Joseph Lefebvre (1755–1820), duke of Danzig, Marshal of France.
2. A policeman and hero of many of Émile Gaboriau’s detective novels.
Chapter Six
1. A popular figure of the Latin Quarter during the 1890s. He was a bohemian and autodidact, who supported himself doing odd jobs, and became the right-hand man of the poet Verlaine, selling off his mementoes of the poet after Verlaine’s death in 1896
2. (1755–1842) French painter, most famous for her portraits of European aristocrats.
Chapter Seven
1. Catholic journalist (1844–1917). In 1890, Maurice Barrès said of him: ‘Antisemitism had not been a well-established tradition in France until, in the spring of 1886, Drumont reawakened these sentiments in a way that caused an uproar.’ It was in this year that he published Jewish France, one of the great bestsellers of the second half of the nineteenth century
2. Mentioned by Jules Verne in Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), this portable apparatus with an electrical charge gave off a light strong enough for use in intense darkness.
Chapter Eight
1 A dolphe-Léon Willette (1857–1926). A painter who did illustrations, lithographs, pastels and posters and first became known at the Chat-Noir cabaret. Creator of popular impish versions of the figures Pierrot and Colombine. He was a virulent anti-semite
2. French painter, engraver and sculptress (1858–1927).
3. The panorama, from the Greek pan (all) and orama (view) was invented by an Irishman called Robert Barker. It consisted of a series of gigantic landscapes painted in trompe-l’oeil on canvases and placed inside rotunda.
Chapter Ten
1. His real name was Étienne Marin (1807–1874). He began his acting career at the Théâtre de Belleville. Such was his success that in 1831 he played in Paris where Alexandre Dumas introduced him into the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin.
2. Jean Eugéne Robert-Houdin (1805–1871), a conjurer who first had the idea of performing his magic acts wearing a black suit to banish from the audiences’ minds any sense of watching an illustion. This brilliant inventor of electric automatons first opened his spectacle, Magical Evenings, in 1845 at the Palais Royal, and then in 1854 on Boulevard des Italiens
3. The Prison de Mazas was opened in Paris in 1841 and located near Gare de Lyon.
Chapter Eleven
1. Powerful licorice pastilles, developed in 1880 by a French pharmacist as a breath freshener.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.