by Robb, Graham
Even in Fenestrelle, social distinctions survived. The prisoner who was about to escape into death that winter was a Milanese noble who had once held high office in the Church. His cell, we may suppose, was not completely bare: some pieces of furniture rented in the village of Fenestrelle, a few unreliable chairs, a flimsy curtain, a rough wooden table that was little better than a cobbler’s bench. (This is how one prisoner, Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca, secretary of Pope Pius VII, described the comforts of his cell.) Some cardinals had contrived to have their own valets incarcerated with them; others found a servant among the common prisoners. For most of those men, the outside world had ceased to exist: the disaster of the Grande Armée on the Retreat from Moscow was just a rumour, and the only reliable bulletins that reached their ears were the rumblings of the mountains: the thunder of the avalanche, the earthquake that drew a crack across the wall like a road on a map. Yet with so many wealthy and powerful men imprisoned in its walls, it is not surprising that Fenestrelle had proved to be permeable after all. Even in that Alpine cul-de-sac, money, like water, could find its way through stone.
One of the immediate effects of Napoleon’s invasions had been to send huge sums coursing through the financial veins of Europe. Fleeing princes entrusted their millions to men like Mayer Rothschild of Frankfurt. After the French invasion of Italy, the Treaty of Tolentino raised fifteen million francs in currency and another fifteen million in diamonds, which lined a few pockets on the way from Rome to Paris. Paintings and works of art were squirrelled away or sold before they could be transported to the Louvre. One of the cardinals who were expelled with the Pope–Braschi-Onesti, nephew of Pius VI and Grand Prior of the Order of Malta–returned to Rome after the fall of Napoleon and ‘had the good fortune to find intact the treasure he had secreted before his departure’.
There was, in short, nothing extraordinary in the fact that the ecclesiastical Milanese nobleman of Fenestrelle had deposited large sums of money in banks in Hamburg and London, that he had sold most of his estates and invested the proceeds in a bank in Amsterdam, nor in the fact that, somewhere in or near Milan, he possessed ‘a treasure’ that was prudently divided into diamonds and the currency of various nations. His motives were not quite so ordinary. He was dying in the belief that his children had abandoned him and were looking forward to spending his fortune. A prison guard or a servant from the village had smuggled out a message for his lawyer in which he arranged to have every member of his worthless family disinherited.
Perhaps this had been his intention all along, but during his long imprisonment in Fenestrelle, he had found the perfect tool of his revenge. He had taken as his servant a young French Catholic, a simple but passionate man in whom he saw an image of his own distress. He, too, had been abandoned and betrayed, and there was something inspired and terrible about his suffering. He had learned the awful truth that torture has its subtleties of which the torturer is unaware. His persecutors had not simply made him wretched; they had robbed him of the capacity to feel happiness.
Those two men of very different age and background formed an attachment more lasting than the bond between a father and his son. A man of the Church might have been expected to instruct his servant in Christian virtues; instead, he taught him about loans and interest rates, shares and consols, and the art of gambling with complete certainty of success. He made his servant the sole heir to his wealth and treasure, and, that winter, as the storms lashed the walls of Fenestrelle and the Continent prepared for another great upheaval, he died in his cell as happy as an abandoned man could be.
TWO MONTHS LATER, in the spring of 1814, the defeated Emperor signed his abdication and sailed for Elba, which lies thirty miles north of Montecristo Island in the Tuscan Archipelago. All over Europe, men and women emerged from prisons and hiding places, blinking in the light of a new dawn. Kings returned to palaces and tourists returned to Paris. In the Alps of north-western Italy, a wraithlike man of thirty-six, bearing a passport that identified him as Joseph Lucher, left the fort of Fenestrelle.
It was almost seven years–or, to be precise, two thousand five hundred and thirteen days–since he had arrived at Fenestrelle in a windowless carriage. In the village below the fort, he entered the tavern and saw a stranger staring at him from a mirror. On passing through the gates of Fenestrelle, he had felt the shock of liberation, the sudden shattering of certainty and habit. Now, as he contemplated those emaciated features, he felt something else besides: the uncanny freedom of a man who was no longer himself. Whoever he might have been before, ‘Joseph Lucher’ was now a ghost, but a ghost who had, as if by some absurd error of the universe, retained the ability to act on the material world.
He followed the valley of the Chisone river, which was swollen by torrents of melting snow, and reached the broad, green plain of the Po. At Pinarolo, he took the road to Turin, from where the icy battlements of the Alps looked like a distant dream.
A man in rags walking into a banking house in April 1814 was not necessarily a sight to bring the constables running. A vagrant whose papers were in order, and who was legally entitled to sums too large to be the fruit of common theft, was probably an exile or an émigré. As far as the banking house was concerned, he was robed in splendour.
For reasons that will become apparent, the next few months are a blank. Lucher must have travelled to Milan, where he probably visited a lawyer and signed some papers. Perhaps he made a brief excursion to a country estate or a lonely wood. Whatever the instructions he had received in Fenestrelle, they were obviously accurate and effective. Before long, he was able to take stock of the situation and to study the new hand that fate had dealt him.
The money that was held in Hamburg and London, added to the income from the bank in Amsterdam, amounted to seven million francs. The treasure itself consisted of over three million francs in currency and one million two hundred thousand francs in diamonds and other small objects–jewel-studded ornaments and cameos that would have graced the Louvre. Applying the lessons he had learned in Fenestrelle, he set aside the diamonds and one million francs and invested the remainder in the banks of four different countries. With an interest rate of six per cent, this gave him an annual income of six hundred thousand francs. It was enough to satisfy almost any habit or desire. By comparison, the deposed Napoleon landed on Elba with four million francs, which enabled him to build a regal residence, several new roads and a sewer-system, and to organize his return to France. Lucher’s total fortune–something in excess of eleven million two hundred thousand francs–was approximately equal to the combined annual income of every cobbler in Paris.
To anyone else, it might have seemed an astounding stroke of luck. With a fortune so colossal, a man could do anything he liked. But how could mere wealth rewrite the story that had told itself in his head a million times? His benefactor and companion in betrayal had taught him to know and hate his enemies. But there was something beyond hatred–the desire for some absolute consolation, a hunger for justice so complete that the events that had led to his living death could never have happened.
No hint of this would have been visible to the proprietor of the maison de santé to which Lucher admitted himself in February 1815, and he would have been amazed to learn that his patient was one of the richest men in France. Lucher had himself delivered to the quiet Paris suburb with very little luggage and no servants of his own. He paid for his board and lodging and settled in to convalesce and regain his strength after what he described as a long illness. The more salubrious nursing homes were built on slopes around the city, with verandas and small gardens. Before regulations were introduced in 1838, a private maison de santé would accept almost anyone who could pay, which meant that the residents were usually a mixed bunch of people: invalids recovering from surgical operations, pregnant women, the old and decrepit, harmless lunatics and wealthy hypochondriacs. The resident of a respectable maison de santé could expect more privacy and discretion than someone who lived in a street with a concier
ge and neighbours.
At first, M. Lucher appeared to be making a good recovery. But then, at about the time Napoleon, having escaped from Elba, returned to Paris and marshalled his troops, his condition seemed to worsen. During the hundred days when Paris was once again the capital of an empire, M. Lucher remained in bed, with just enough strength to eat his meals and to read the newspaper. It was not until Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo and banished to Saint Helena that he felt well enough to venture out and visit some of the sights of Paris.
3
THE THOUSANDS OF émigrés who returned to Paris that summer and saw the arcades of the arrow-straight Rue de Rivoli marching in perfect order towards a distant Arc de Triomphe, and stone embankments corseting the curves of the Seine, might have wondered whether the character of a city could be transformed in a matter of years by a few architects and masons. Paris had changed more in a decade of war than in half a century of peace. There were new bridges and canals, new markets and fountains, warehouses and granaries, better street-lighting and huge, hygienic cemeteries on the northern and eastern perimeter of the city. There was an unfinished Stock Exchange that resembled a Greek temple and a column in the Place Vendôme that would not have looked out of place in the forum in Rome. Napoleon had turned Paris into the backdrop of his imperial drama. Now, the stage was occupied by a new troupe of actors. The Restoration avenged itself on the Corsican dictator by settling into his palaces and enjoying his public promenades–which is, after all, the meaning of ‘revenge’: asserting a legal right or laying claim to something that was taken away.
The biggest change was not immediately apparent. The Sainte-Opportune district near Les Halles was still the puzzle of streets and cul-de-sacs it had been since the Middle Ages. But the people who gave the quartier its life were not the same. Thousands from that district alone had moved away or died in distant wars. Even without the drastic alteration of his face and bearing, Lucher would have been a total stranger.
There was a shop where a young man with a knife in his hand was cutting leather and fitting it to a last. There was a café with an unknown name painted above the door…Perhaps some tiny spark of hope had survived those years of darkness. If so, it was extinguished that morning. Lucher found out that the previous owner of the café, M. Loupian of Nîmes, had bought a new business on the boulevards, and that the woman who had shared his good fortune and his bed these last six years was Marguerite de Vigoroux. No one could tell him the names of Loupian’s cronies, which was a shame, he explained, because he owed one of those men some money. Fortunately, a neighbour eventually recalled the name of Antoine Allut. But as far as he knew, Allut had returned to the south of France many years before and no one had heard of him since. Lucher went back to the maison de santé and paid his bill.
The terminus of the Messageries Royales lay a few streets away in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. There was a daily long-distance service to Lyon and the south, advertised as a hundred-hour journey, which sounded less forbidding than four days. Though it carried only eight passengers, it always brought a crowd of porters, anxious families, sightseers, pickpockets and policemen. In all the bustle, no one would have paid much attention to the elderly priest who boarded the coach to Lyon. The abbé’s name, we happen to know, was Baldini, which means ‘audacious’. The name is common in Italy and the south of France.
The coach left Paris by the Barrière des Gobelins and followed the paved road to Fontainebleau. At Villejuif, at the top of the hill, passengers often alighted near the pyramid that marked the Paris meridian to look back along the road, which was precisely aligned with the towers of Notre-Dame. A traveller’s guide described the view:
From this height, the eye embraces Paris, which is to say an immense and greyish mound of towers and irregular-shaped buildings which compose this city and which stretch away to left and right almost as far as the eye can see.
Travellers on those epic journeys came to know each other extremely well, but it is unlikely that any passenger on that particular coach was much the wiser about the abbé Baldini when he left it at Lyon. He boarded the riverboat that descended the fast-flowing Rhône to Pont-Saint-Esprit, and then the coach that plied the dusty post-road through the foothills of the Cévennes and the hot scrubland of the Gard. He reached the Roman city of Nîmes a week after leaving Paris, checked in at the best hotel (which means that he must have held a passport in the name of Baldini) and spent several days making enquiries. At last, in a seedy part of town, he found himself in a sparsely furnished room, staring at one of the last faces he had seen in his previous life.
The tale the abbé Baldini had to tell–a tale we know in greater detail than parts of the true story of Joseph Lucher–would have seemed incredible to anyone but Antoine Allut. The abbé had been a prisoner in the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples, where he had heard the dying confession of a Frenchman called Picaud. At this, a strangled cry escaped Allut and the abbé raised his eyes to heaven. By some mysterious means (he described it as ‘the voice of God’), Picaud had learned, or dredged up from his deepest memory, the name of a man, Allut, who would know the identity of his betrayers. Being a devout Catholic of almost superhuman moral strength, Picaud had forgiven the men who had destroyed his life. His only wish–the slightly odd but understandable wish of a dying man–was to have the names of his assassins inscribed on a plaque of lead that would be placed in his tomb. In order to reward Allut, or to encourage him to divulge the names, the abbé was to offer him a token that Picaud had received from a fellow prisoner by the name of Sir Herbert Newton.
If Allut or his wife had been readers of serial novels, they might at this point have smelled a rat, but the abbé then produced a large and sparkly diamond which, as far as Allut’s wife was concerned, provided complete and incontrovertible proof of the abbé’s good faith. Momentarily forgetting herself, she flung her arms around the skeletal frame of the abbé Baldini. Why her husband hesitated to accept the diamond was beyond her. Torn between greed and fear, and egged on by his wife, Allut overcame his doubts, and the abbé inscribed in a small notebook the names of Mathieu Loupian, Gervais Chaubard and Guilhem Solari.
A few hours later, the abbé Baldini boarded the north-bound coach from Nîmes.
He left behind him a soul in torment. Antoine Allut had suffered what seemed to him a terrible injustice. He had lived with the fear, confirmed by the abbé, that he had allowed an innocent man to be taken to his death. Now, he had been forced to betray his former friends. Worse still, the local jeweller sold the diamond for twice what he paid the Alluts. Such was Allut’s state of mind that he felt a perverse kind of relief when he finally committed a tangible crime and murdered the jeweller.
It was not a well-planned crime. The gendarmes shaved his head and gave him a green bonnet with a tin plaque on which his matriculation number was engraved. The green bonnet signified a life sentence. As he stood with his ball and chain weaving rope in the factory at Toulon, and when he lay awake on a wooden bench without a blanket, it must have seemed to him that François Picaud had taken revenge from beyond the grave.
4
MATHIEU LOUPIAN had prospered, not quite beyond his wildest dreams, but enough to be able to offer his compatriots an occasional drink at the bar. (They could scarcely afford his prices now.) Applying the business stratagem known as blind luck, he had acquired the new café at exactly the right moment. Restoration Paris was awash with money. The Allied troops who occupied the city had been followed by hordes of eager tourists. The reassuringly sober and expensive Café Anglais was not the only establishment to thrive on the river of foreign currency that flowed along the boulevards.
Loupian was the sort of man who, though rich and successful, was never too proud to bend down and pick up a coin that had been dropped in the gutter. And so, when the unexpected offer was made, he was quick to seize the opportunity. An impeccably dressed old lady, who had never been seen before in the quartier, had asked to speak to the proprietor. Her family, she e
xplained, had been saved from an awful calamity–perhaps a scandal had been averted or a wayward son had been helped to escape from the police. Their saviour was a man who had since lost all his savings but who was so honourable in his indigence that he refused to be helped. M. Prosper’s only wish was to find work as a garçon in a reputable café.
Desperate to pay back their benefactor, the grateful family had decided to play a little trick on him. Without telling Prosper, they would pay the café-owner one hundred francs a month if he agreed to employ him and to overlook the fact that he was no longer in the first flush of youth. A man of fifty was not ideally suited to the athletic life of a Paris garçon. But since a hundred francs was the equivalent of two garçons’ monthly wages or the retail cost of two hundred and fifty demi-tasses with sugar and a glass of cognac, Loupian agreed to help.
Prosper turned out to be quite a find. He was not exactly prepossessing, and there was something about him that troubled Mme Loupian. In fact, his true character was a mystery, but then this was often the mark of a good servant, who was always self-effacing and could mould himself to a customer’s desires. He was quite unflappable and dealt well with all the little accidents of café life. He also had a good eye for detail. It was Prosper who gave the commissaire de police a full description of the customer who was seen feeding biscuits to Loupian’s hunting dog on the day that it suffered a fatal heart attack. It was Prosper, too, who discovered the pile of bitter almonds and parsley when Mme Loupian’s parrot died a horrible death.