by Robb, Graham
Those were difficult times for honest people, when even a domestic parrot could not sleep peacefully in its cage. A king was on the throne again, but thirty years of war, tyranny and unrest could not be wiped out by a few decrees and executions. Napoleon’s marauding armies had not simply vanished into the gun smoke at Waterloo. On the pavement outside the café, mutilated beggars sat in their tattered uniforms, bothering the customers. Gangs of ruffians who had burned and pillaged their way across Europe in the name of the glorious Empire were making the streets unsafe, and the new Prefect of Police was too busy with anarchist provocateurs and royalist counterterrorists to do much about them. The newspapers that were placed in the rack at the entrance of the café were full of grisly tales of violence and crime.
One morning, when Prosper was laying out the papers to fold them neatly into place, Loupian happened to notice a familiar name: Gervais Chaubard, his compatriot from Nîmes. The day before, Guilhem Solari had visited the café. For once, Chaubard had not been with him, and his concierge had not seen him return the previous evening. The newspaper supplied the explanation. Just before dawn, on the new iron pedestrian bridge by the Louvre, Gervais Chaubard had been found with a fatal stab-wound to the heart. A curious detail recommended this murder to the newspaper readers’ attention: the knife had been left in the wound, and on the handle someone had glued a small piece of paper bearing these printed characters:
N°.1.
THOUGH NO OFFICIAL RECORD of it survives, the murder on the Pont des Arts must have tested the wits of the new Sûreté brigade. Suspicion probably fell on typesetters, who, as literate members of the lower orders, had always been a threat to public stability–though, of course, the murderer could simply have cut the characters from the title page of a gazette. The only likely motive was theft. The fact that the dead man’s pockets contained some coins presumably meant that the murderer had been disturbed and had run away without retrieving his knife.
On learning of Chaubard’s murder, Loupian felt something like the first inkling of an illness, but he was too busy and distracted to worry about other people’s misfortunes. The man who had risen from provincial obscurity to become the owner of one of the finest cafés in Paris was now contemplating the kind of advancement of which his fellow Nîmois could only dream.
Loupian had a sixteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage. She was a tasty little creature, besotted with her nascent charms and excited by the possibilities she saw in men’s eyes. Her parents’ money had dressed her almost to perfection. Mlle Loupian was the special dish awaiting the special customer. In those changing days, even the daughter of a Loupian could dream of marrying a lord.
So much money had been lavished on her that it seemed only right and proper when a man of superior manners and appearance declared his interest in an unmistakeable fashion. He tipped the garçons like an English tourist and bribed the girl’s governess with a fabulous sum. Mlle Loupian received the homage of his purse and, in exchange, allowed him a taste of future happiness. It was not until the dish had been not only sampled but devoured that she confessed to her parents. Too late, they saw their mistake. They should never have trusted a man who overpaid the garçons.
There was enormous relief, therefore, in the Loupian household when the gentleman–who turned out to be a marquis–announced his honourable intentions, offered proof of his lineage and fortune, and ordered a wedding feast for one hundred and fifty guests at the Cadran Bleu, which was the most expensive restaurant in Paris.
The fairy-tale came true. The marquis married Loupian’s daughter and caused quite a thrill at the banquet when he sent a messenger to apologize for his late arrival: the King had asked to see him, but the marquis expected to be free by ten o’clock that evening; meanwhile, the Loupians and their guests should proceed with the meal. The wine flowed as swiftly, but not as cheaply, as it does at harvest-time in Provence, and although the bride was not in the best of moods, the banquet was a great success. Several courses passed before dessert. Fresh plates were placed on the tables, and then, on each plate, a letter in which the bridegroom was revealed to be an escaped convict. By the time the guests read the letter, the groom would have left the country.
A financier who sees his chief investment suddenly lose its value could not have been more distraught than Mathieu Loupian. Luckily, Prosper was on hand to offer advice: at his suggestion, the Loupians spent the following Sunday in the country, to erase the painful memory and to count their blessings. The café was still a successful business, the bill from the Cadran Bleu would be paid off within the year, and Mlle Loupian, though irreparably spoiled, was still young and might yet be served up to a foreign gentleman or a wealthy customer who was unfamiliar with the quartier.
While the Loupians breathed the country air and planned a rosy future, a column of smoke was rising from the city somewhere north of Notre-Dame. Fire had broken out in several different rooms above the café. Long before the sapeurs-pompiers came galloping down the boulevard with their brass helmets and canvas buckets, the fire had spread to the café below, and as the plaster mouldings dropped from the ceiling and the paintings shrivelled up, a gang of ragged paupers, as though forewarned, came rushing in to help. They carted out the chairs and tables and everything of value, and in so doing broke the mirrors, gouged the polished counter and smashed every single piece of glass and porcelain. When the Loupians returned from their picnic, they found in place of their home and business a smouldering, empty space.
Insurance companies usually refused to cover damage caused by ‘popular riots’–which appeared to be the cause of the inferno. The man who owned the building had no choice but to turn them out. All their true friends rallied round, which is to say, no one, except the faithful Prosper, who not only stayed at their side but also refused to accept his wages. It was a comfort to know that there was still some good in the world. When, a few weeks later, Loupian’s wife died of cerebral congestion and nervous exhaustion, Prosper arranged the funeral as conscientiously as if it had been his own wedding.
THE LONG STREET that snakes into the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine towards the Place de la Bastille is the continuation of the rectilinear Rue de Rivoli. A person who could read the configuration of streets as a chiromancer reads the lines on a hand might have interpreted its sly meandering as a sign that, in that surly suburb where workers and revolutionaries plotted their coups, no course would ever run true.
At about the time of Loupian’s disaster, a young writer called Honoré Balzac moved into a small room in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. He described the view from his side-street window:
Sometimes the pale glow of the street-lamps cast yellowish reflections up through the fog, showing the roofs in faint outline along the streets, packed together like the waves of a great motionless sea. The fleeting, poetic effects of daylight, the mournful mists, the sudden shimmering of the sun, the silence and magic of night, the mysteries of dawn, the smoke rising from every chimney, each detail of that strange world became familiar to me and entertained me. I loved my prison, for I had chosen it myself.
Without the imagination of a novelist, the quartier seemed drab and unpromising. Loupian had been forced by the terms of the marriage contract drawn up by his parents-in-law to pay back his wife’s dowry. With the remnants of his fortune, he had rented a café in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine that was little more than a drinking-shop: it had a smoky oil-lamp, a wrinkled rug, the smell of cheap tobacco and customers who made cleaning seem a waste of time. His handsome dame de comptoir was dead, and Mlle Loupian’s unrefreshed ringlets hung down like the tendrils of the weeds that grew from the gutters. Only Guilhem Solari seemed pleased. This was more like the café of the old days, where he could talk in Provençal without being treated like a country bumpkin.
Sitting alone with his everlasting beer and lemonade, Solari was not good for business–especially not when it became known that, after a visit to Loupian’s bar, he had suffered convulsions and died after se
veral hours of intense, untreatable pain. Nevertheless, Loupian’s customers might not have made the connection with the earlier murder if the newspapers had not reported a peculiar detail. Before the funeral, as was customary, Solari’s coffin was displayed just inside the entrance of his building. It had lain there for a while when someone noticed a small piece of paper on the black cloth covering the coffin. It bore these printed characters:
N°.2.
News of this grisly sequel to the murder on the Pont des Arts spread quickly through the quartier. From one day to the next, Loupian found himself without a single customer. The two straw chairs outside the door were permanently empty and used only by the neighbourhood dogs. Perhaps he was beginning to suspect that all these horrible events were in some way connected, but he could find no reason for his ruin, and though murder no. 2 had filled him with foreboding, he had only the faintest inkling of a motive.
Without the faithful Prosper, Loupian and his daughter would have found themselves on the street. Prosper offered them his meagre savings, which would at least allow them to avoid the beggars’ hospital. However, even this small mercy came at a price. Prosper attached to his offer a condition so humiliating and foul that Mathieu Loupian was surprised to find himself capable of accepting: Mlle Loupian was to live with Prosper as his concubine, to warm his bed and to satisfy his aged longings.
The arrangements were made. A double bed was installed, and the girl who was to have been the instrument of her family’s social rise became a prostitute in her father’s house.
As Loupian lay on his thin mattress at night, listening to the muffled howl of the city and trying to let the sound of that restless ocean drown out the noises that came through the partition wall, he knew that Prosper, though old in face and body, was filled with savage energy.
5
ON SUNNY DAYS, the avenues of the Tuileries Gardens were thronged with children and nurses, shop assistants and office workers on their lunch break, dog-walkers and dandies, and elegant women who filled the air with perfume and colour like the flowers in front of the Tuileries Palace. At dusk, the gardens took on a more reflective air. A few lonely figures wandered along the terrace by the river and among the trees, where white statues seemed to beckon from the gloom.
One evening, a burly man in a dark coat slipped into the gardens shortly before the iron gates along the Rue de Rivoli were closed. Just then, Mathieu Loupian was walking back along one of the shadier avenues, delaying the moment when he would have to return, past the shops and the busy cafés, to the scene of his misery and shame.
A figure appeared in front of him. As he moved to let it pass, Loupian heard the name ‘Picaud’. Even before his mind had attached the name to a memory, his body froze. The face was close enough for him to see it clearly; yet its features were not, it seemed to him, those of the cobbler Picaud; it was the sneering mask of the man who feasted on his daughter every night.
The brief conversation in the Tuileries Gardens is not recorded in the confession. Loupian would certainly have learned that he was looking at the man who had stabbed Chaubard, poisoned the parrot, the dog and Solari, married his daughter to a convict, arranged for the café to be looted and destroyed, caused the death of his wife and turned his daughter into an adulteress and a whore. He would also have learned that Picaud–also known as Lucher and, more recently, Prosper–had spent seven years in hell. And he probably had just enough time to feel his eyes burn with fear and hatred before the knife marked No. 3 was pushed into his heart.
LOUPIAN’S BLOOD was still forming a dark pool on the gravel when a powerful arm seized his murderer from behind. In less time than it takes to truss a pig, Picaud was gagged, bound with rope, wrapped in a blanket and hoisted onto a man’s shoulders. It may have occurred to him that the police had finally traced the murders to Prosper. But a gendarme would not have acted alone nor taken such extraordinary precautions. Though he could see nothing under the blanket, the smell of the river, the sudden chill and the sounds of the city coming from a wider vista would have told Picaud that his abductor had left the gardens by the riverside gate and was crossing to the Left Bank.
The confession states only that Picaud was carried on the man’s back for about half an hour and that, when the blanket was removed, he found himself, still bound, on a folding bed in an underground room. Apart from the bed, the room contained a dim lamp and a Prussian stove, the pipe of which disappeared into the ceiling. The walls seemed to be the rough limestone sections of an abandoned quarry. If the Paris police had conducted an investigation when they received the confession several years later, these details would have enabled them to identify the location with some precision. Walking at about two miles an hour, along the Quai Voltaire and across the Place de l’Odéon, Picaud’s abductor could, within thirty minutes, have reached the area where charts show a zone of ancient quarries rising up towards the river. This would put the room in which Picaud was held captive somewhere along the northern end of the Rue d’Enfer.
Many months, perhaps years, had passed since the abbé Baldini’s visit to Nîmes, and many things had happened to Picaud’s abductor since he escaped from the hulks of Toulon. He, too, had changed almost beyond recognition. He had to introduce himself as the man whose life had been ruined by Picaud’s mad campaign, the man who–though less guilty than the others–had been singled out for an especially subtle form of punishment. Whether or not Picaud had known that the diamond would be the ruin of Antoine Allut was irrelevant; Allut was bent on revenge. Unfortunately for him, he made the mistake of trying to satisfy two passions at the same time.
In prison, Allut had seen something that should have been obvious to him from the start: the abbé Baldini’s tale was a fabrication. Allut was a God-fearing man, but could he really believe that ‘the voice of God’ had whispered his name in Picaud’s ear? After making his escape, he could easily have discovered that there was no such person as Sir Herbert Newton, and that the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples had not been used as a state prison since the days of Emperor Romulus Augustus. It would not then have taken a genius to guess the abbé’s true identity and to suspect that the famous numbered murders were the result of the information that he had extracted from Allut.
The abbé Baldini was a fake, but the diamond was unquestionably genuine, and it was safe to assume that a man who could treat a diamond as loose change must be extremely rich. It is more than likely–for a reason that would become ever clearer to Allut in the years to come–that Picaud confirmed his assumption: he was indeed fabulously wealthy and owned a treasure almost too big to be imagined.
Allut now put into effect a plan that must have struck him as fiendishly clever when he first thought of it: he would starve Picaud until he was forced to reveal the location of the treasure. By this simple device, he would not only become a millionaire, he would also avenge himself on Picaud and rid the world of a rampaging maniac. He might even escape with a clear conscience.
The account of what happened next in the room beneath the Rue d’Enfer unfortunately bears the bloody fingerprints of the novel-writing Baron, who liked to reward his readers with an occasional shower of gore, and it leaves several questions unanswered. But since Peuchet’s record of the confession has disappeared along with the confession itself, this is the only evidence from which the facts can be deduced.
To Allut’s surprise, Picaud declined to pay several million francs for a crust of bread and a glass of water. Even after forty-eight hours without food or drink, the former prisoner of Fenestrelle seemed to consider his own existence a matter of small concern. It gradually dawned on Allut that his scheme had a serious flaw: if he starved Picaud to death, the treasure would be lost forever.
Picaud’s refusal to divulge the whereabouts of his treasure was–according to the confession–inspired by simple avarice. But the confession itself contains a detail that contradicts this. As Allut paced about the room in a frenzy of greed and disappointment, he suddenly noticed a diabolical smile on P
icaud’s face. Enraged to see his enemy triumphant, Allut ‘pounced on him like a wild animal, bit him, pierced his eyes with a knife, disembowelled him and fled the premises, leaving behind him nothing but a corpse.’
There are no further details on the fate of Picaud’s mortal remains. A shrivelled, eviscerated body strapped to a bed in an underground room would surely have been mentioned in the newspapers, and although rats could dispose of a corpse and its clothing in a matter of days, the landlord would surely have noticed the smell. Yet no other record of such a murder has so far come to light.
The end of the story, as we know, is relatively uneventful: Allut fled to England, where he lived, manacled to his own conscience, until a French Catholic priest known only as the abbé P…‘helped him to see the error of his ways and to loathe his sins’. (These are the words that the abbé himself used in his letter to the Prefect of Police.) Allut dictated his confession to the abbé, received his sacred blessing and died in the knowledge that he had been absolved of his sins.
When the abbé P…sent the confession to Paris with an accompanying letter, he drew the obvious conclusion. Now that the horrors of the Revolution and the Empire were over and Paris was once again the capital of a Catholic monarchy, it was important to make sure that the Prefect of Police understood the moral:
Men in their arrogance try to outdo God. They pursue vengeance and are crushed by their revenge. Let us worship Him and submit humbly to His will.
Yours faithfully, etc., etc.