The Curse of La Fontaine

by M. L. Longworth

  “I remember,” Verlaque said, savoring the last few sips of his wine. “My grandfather told me a Montaigne story when I started first-year law. Montaigne once saw a man lying on the road, bleeding after having been stabbed. A group of peasants, who had water and bread, also came upon the dying man, and Montaigne begged them to give him some water, but they ran off.”

  “Terrified they would be held responsible if they helped,” Marine suggested.

  “Exactly. My grandfather used the story as a moral lesson—help thy neighbor—but Montaigne used it to tackle judicial problems. His complaining actually resulted in some real improvements, if I remember correctly.”

  “Absolutely,” she agreed. “Although some of his opinions were too . . . original . . . for sixteenth-century lawmakers. For Montaigne believed that the greatest problem with the law was that it did not take into account our common human condition: our fallibility.”

  “Who’s flawed?” Verlaque asked, smiling. “Pas moi.”

  “Evidence, especially in those days, was often faulty or inaccurate,” Marine went on, speaking louder and faster. “So how could a judge reach a decision that was one hundred percent accurate?”

  “And yet he had to make a decision.”

  “Right. Montaigne joked that judges’ verdicts often depended upon how well they digested their lunch.”

  Verlaque laughed. “Spoken like the true Périgourdin that Montaigne was. And Rabelais? What did he think?”

  “Rabelais’s character, Judge Bridlegoose—”

  He laughed. “Which book did he appear in?”

  “One of the Gargantua and Pantagruel books,” she answered, getting impatient. “The judge had this mountain of paperwork on his desk, and he’d spend hours reading the documents and pondering, unable to make a decision, until he finally figured out a solution.”

  “What was that?” Verlaque asked, finishing his wine.

  “Simple,” Marine answered, getting up and running her fingers through his thick graying hair. “He tossed some dice.”

  Chapter Eight

  A Day in the Life

  V erlaque was out the door the next morning at 8:30 a.m. He walked down the rue Adanson and would make his way along his usual route, turning left on Littéra and then immediately right down Aix’s narrowest street, less than a meter wide, the rue Esquicho-Coude. The mornings were getting warm enough to leave the apartment with just a suit jacket, and as long as the sun stayed out, by noon the café terraces would be full. Since getting his new cell phone he had become obsessed with the weather and had programmed into it his favorite cities: Paris, Stockholm, Dublin, Rome, and Aix. It amused him how varying the weather in these cities—all of them in Europe—would be on any given day. It was his way of armchair traveling, for in that minute that he had the time to check their heat, or cold, or rain, or fog, he would picture himself there, standing on a bridge or sitting in a café. For fun he added Havana, which always seemed to hover around eighty-eight degrees. Someday he would go and see for himself.

  As he approached Esquicho-Coude he felt his shoulders involuntarily narrowing, as they always did, as if they wouldn’t fit down the tiny street that in Provençal meant “street of the squeezed elbows.”

  He heard voices—a man and a woman—discussing “rocks” and “stones” and as he got closer to them, the words changed to “lab” and “Palais de Justice,” and then segued into what they were going to eat for lunch that day. “Good morning,” Verlaque said, holding out his hand to Officers Jules Schoelcher and Sophie Goulin.

  “Sir!” Jules, a transplant from Alsace, said, giving the judge a Herculean grip.

  “Good morning, Judge Verlaque,” Sophie Goulin echoed, shaking his hand.

  “What’s going on here?” Verlaque asked, pointing to her gloved hand.

  Goulin gestured up to the oratory, a statue of Mary holding Jesus that sat in a niche on the corner of Esquicho-Coude. “Someone attacked the statue early this morning,” she replied. “A neighbor who heard the rocks hitting the wall called us.”

  One of the dozens of oratories put up in Aix during the seventeenth century, the Esquicho-Coude statue had little protection: just three thin metal bars going across the niche and two down. “Is she hurt?” Verlaque asked, immediately regretting his choice of words.

  “No, not badly,” Schoelcher replied, nonplussed by his boss’s sentimental language.

  “There are some nicks on her face,” Sophie Goulin said, pointing up. “But those might have been there before. We’re going to call in the historical society; they have detailed photographs of the oratories.”

  “Some drunken fool,” Verlaque murmured, looking up at the statue.

  “Perhaps,” Goulin agreed. “It’s especially sad as there are so few black virgins left. There used to be more.”

  Verlaque looked at the young officer, impressed by her knowledge. He looked up again at Mary holding her infant. “I just always saw a mother and son,” he said. “I never noticed the color of her skin.”

  “Someone did,” Jules Schoelcher said. He did not have to remind his boss or his fellow officer of the recent rise of France’s right-wing nationalist party Le Front National. “I would bet on it.”

  Verlaque left the officers to their work and carried on down through the narrow streets of old Aix toward the Palais de Justice. As he walked he kept an eye out for other oratories, trying to remember why so many were built in Aix in the seventeenth century. Something to do with the plague, he thought. Were they a request to a saint to intercede with God to prevent another deadly outbreak of the plague? Or were they a thank-you for sparing people during the epidemics? He thought the former. His cell phone rang; it was Rebecca Schultz, his father’s girlfriend.

  “Good morning, Rebecca,” he said. She was bilingual, and they sometimes spoke in French, sometimes in English. He chose the latter that morning.

  “I see you have my number programmed into your phone,” she replied. “Am I disturbing you?”

  “I’m walking to work,” Verlaque replied. “It’s fine.”

  “Two things,” she went on. “We want you to get us good seats for the summer opera festival.”

  “Done. At least I’ll try my best.”

  “Great. The second: I have some questions about the French judicial system.”

  He laughed. “Go on.”

  “We—your father and I—have been following the Roland Perdigon case. Your dad has been trying to explain the role of the examining magistrate—your job—which I just don’t get. If you don’t mind me saying, I think it’s outrageous that the judge who gathers evidence and launches a probe, in this case against an ex-president, is the same judge who orders a formal investigation. Will he also be the one to judge the case if it goes to trial? Wouldn’t he be biased by that point?”

  “Didn’t you wonder all of that when I was questioning you here in Aix?”

  “Of course,” Rebecca replied. “But I was too terrified to ask.”

  “I’m sorry,” Verlaque said, smiling. “The examining magistrate in the Roland Perdigon case, who’s an old school friend of mine, has called for a formal investigation. I heard about it early this morning.”

  “So he thinks that the ex-president is guilty.”

  Verlaque paused. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Suspicious enough to warrant an investigation. Let me explain. Your system in the United States is the adversarial system. Have you heard of that term?”

  “I’m an art historian,” she said, sipping some orange juice. “So, no.”

  “In your system, it’s up to the plaintiffs and defendants and their lawyers—many lawyers—to gather evidence in their favor or evidence that incriminates the other party. The judge is there to make sure the law is respected, and the jury decides if the accused is guilty. The judge is more of an observer.”

  “So our system is like a compe
tition where two sides try to prove their case.”

  “Exactly,” he answered. “In fact, the parties are encouraged to win. That’s the emphasis.”

  “Isn’t that normal? You want to find out if the accused is guilty, right?”

  “I like to think that my job, here in France, is more about uncovering the truth.” Verlaque realized immediately that he sounded like a prig, and he thought about his conversation with Marine the previous evening, and Montaigne and Rabelais. He could picture Rabelais’s judge’s gnarly hands throwing a pair of dice across his desk. He smiled and went on. “The adversarial system can be like those puppets—Punch and Judy, right?—where it becomes a war between the defense and the prosecution.”

  “Now describe your system,” Rebecca said. “If you have time.”

  Verlaque opened the front door to the Palais de Justice and sat down on a bench in the inner courtyard, thankful that he had decided to speak to Rebecca in English. “Ours is the inquisitorial system,” he began. “The rest of continental Europe uses it, along with most of South America, Africa, and Asia. It’s tied to common civil law.”

  “Okay.”

  “The truth is uncovered through questioning those most familiar with the dispute by a judicial authority. An independent prosecutor, or an investigating magistrate, will then distinguish between reliable and unreliable evidence. By interviewing complainants, witnesses, and suspects, we will steer the investigation in the interest of the State. We then decide whether there is enough evidence to go to trial.”

  “So in your system there’s less trial time.”

  “Yes,” Verlaque answered, watching people come and go across the courtyard. “But the system is slow and secretive, and many think inefficient. It can take two years to gather evidence. But in answer to your first question, yes, if a judge here orders you to court, there’s a strong chance he or she presumes you are guilty, as is the case with Roland Perdigon. In his trial, and in other serious ones, which are held in courts of assize, there are nine jurors and three judges.” Verlaque didn’t tell her of the lack of resources; how there were only 562 examining magistrates in France who had to deal with 60,000 cases a year. Some judges, especially in Paris, had 100 cases to deal with simultaneously.

  “That must be a crazy waste of a magistrate’s talent,” Rebecca mused, “if the judge spends all that time looking at evidence for all kinds of crimes, big or small. Surely the police should take on some of the ordinary crimes so that the magistrates could concentrate on bigger ones?”

  He laughed. “That would be a great idea.” Magistrates already worked with the French police in towns and cities, and with national gendarmes in the countryside, but it was a relationship often fraught with tension. He knew that the current system demotivated police, and that was something he had vowed to try to improve in Aix. Both old-fashioned and high-tech forms of police detection were downgraded by the system, as the emphasis was more on what judges knew best: interrogation and mind-games. But having a commissioner as sympathetic as Bruno Paulik helped enormously. He hoped that Paulik was available for lunch. “Are things clearer for you?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Rebecca answered. “I’ll be able to argue intelligibly with your father now.”

  “By the way, have they decided about the painting?”

  “I have,” she said. “It’s a real Cézanne. But the director of the Musée d’Orsay is calling in more experts. One of them won’t be able to come to Paris until midsummer. So wait we must.”

  “Well, I’d better head upstairs.” Verlaque got up, stretched, and hesitated a moment before adding, “Send Dad my love.”

  “Will do!” Rebecca cheerily replied, as if a Verlaque son telling his father that he loved him was the most natural thing in the world. She set her cell phone down and turned it to silent; she had research to do for a paper she was giving in Amsterdam on Cézanne, and she needed silence. Lying on top of her laptop was a padded manila envelope that Marine had sent; in it were five photographs of the wedding. Rebecca picked up the envelope to move it aside but then hesitated and reached in, taking out one of the photographs. It was the one she had already chosen to frame for their living room. The young photographer—she couldn’t remember his name but he was dark-skinned like she was—had positioned himself inside the church, in the doorway, just behind Marine and Antoine, who were standing on the steps, looking down at the square. The morning light streamed into the church. Marine and Antoine waved to their friends and family down below. Someone had thrown handfuls of rice, and it floated around in the sky, caught by the camera. Rebecca smiled. She loved this photo: the blue-green sea, out beyond the village; the red rooftops of the ancient palazzos; and although the wedding party was small, there was so much joy seen in the guests’ expressions. She brought the photograph up to her nose and looked at herself, her arms around Antoine’s father, Gabriel, who was waving. Marine’s mother had made it clear that she disapproved of their age difference, and that hadn’t bothered Rebecca as much as it did Gabriel. Her own parents probably would have disapproved, had they still been alive. She knew that in ten years Gabriel would be over eighty and she only in her forties, but they had agreed not to think past a year, or even months. They were lucky to have found each other, which they said aloud every evening, just before falling asleep, holding hands.

  • • •

  Bruno Paulik was indeed available for lunch. Verlaque put in a good case for eating at La Fontaine, but Paulik complained that he was trying to lose weight and that he didn’t have time to walk across town. So they ate salads in a café in the Place de Verdun, across from the Palais de Justice, and both regretted their decision.

  “If you get a salad with potatoes and bacon in it, you might as well eat homemade pasta,” Verlaque said once they were back in his office and, after a series of afternoon meetings, were finally ready for coffee.

  Paulik rubbed his stomach. “I know,” he replied. “And La Fontaine wouldn’t have been much more expensive.”

  “But we would have ordered wine,” Verlaque said, turning on the espresso machine in his office. “That would have doubled the bill.”

  “Hélène was impressed with La Fontaine’s wine selection the last time we ate there,” Paulik said. Paulik’s wife was a winemaker who, thanks to Antoine Verlaque’s financial contribution, now made her own wine at the foot of Montagne Sainte-Victoire. “Hélène says hello, by the way.”

  Verlaque handed Paulik an espresso and began preparing a second one. “Give her my best. How are the wines looking?”

  “Fantastic,” Paulik replied. “And I have big news. A journalist came last week from New York, from, I’m proud to brag, the world’s most-important wine magazine.”

  Verlaque turned away from the espresso machine and stared at his colleague. “Are you joking?”

  “Nope.”

  “And? So?”

  “He loved the wines,” Paulik said, grinning. “Hélène is going to be on the cover of the September issue.”

  Verlaque raised his hands in the air. “Hallelujah!” He walked over to Paulik and wrapped his arms around him. “Congratulations!”

  “Oh, excusez-moi,” Mme Girard, Verlaque’s secretary, said from the open door.

  “Come join in the love,” Paulik said, laughing.

  Mme Girard, a well-off sixty-year-old who didn’t have to work but did so because she loved the job, replied, “Another time, perhaps, Commissioner. Judge Verlaque, the report is in from the car accident.” She handed Verlaque a manila envelope and, after giving the two men a quizzical look, turned around on her low-heeled Chanel pumps and left.

  Verlaque took the envelope and sat down behind his desk. “She thinks you’re gay,” he whispered.

  Paulik pointed a finger at the judge. “I’ve been resisting your advances for years, it’s true.” The two men broke out laughing. He sat down. “Is it the double car accident?�
� he asked.

  “Yes,” Verlaque said, putting on his reading glasses. He read while Paulik finished his coffee. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Poor girl.”

  “Suicide?”

  “It seems so, according to Dr. Cohen. There was no alcohol or drugs in her system, and she had just texted a friend a sort of farewell message.”

  “Very sad,” Paulik said.

  Verlaque looked at the photographs of the twenty-two-year-old’s crumpled Renault Clio, which she had driven into a tree at four in the morning, the day after speeding through a pedestrian crossing and killing an elderly woman.

  Paulik looked at his watch and got up. “I have to go to Le Tholonet before going home,” he announced. “Caroline Rosa and her lawyer are countering.”

  “As we knew she would,” Verlaque said. “I liked Aix better before there were famous actors moving here. Did she think that no one would notice an illegally built fifteen-hundred-square-foot guesthouse on her property?”

  “It was done in good taste,” Paulik said, heading toward the door. “That was her reply when handed the papers.”

  “In good taste but without a permit.”

  “She was shocked when handed the court order,” Paulik said as he paused at the door. “Life has been good to people like Rosa . . . rich parents, private schooling, beauty . . . and so they’re genuinely surprised when things don’t go their way. Anyway, she’s to be charged three hundred euros a day for every day she’s late in demolishing the guesthouse. I get to go tell her that.”

  “See you later,” Verlaque said. “And tell Hélène congratulations.” He put on his reading glasses and picked up a file from his desk and began reading interview reports taken from witnesses to an armed robbery, thinking of his conversation with Rebecca. His commissioner was being sent off to slap a wealthy actress’s hand, and he was working on what Rebecca had called “ordinary crimes” instead of taking corrupt officials, businessmen, and crime bosses to court.