Marianne m-1

by Жюльетта Бенцони

  'Come,' she said gaily. 'Let's go and have a big, scalding hot cup of coffee. That's the only thing I really want at present. Close the doors carefully, my friend, won't you?'

  The 'Greek prince' grinned. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'It would be too bad if so much as a single draught escaped.'

  In a cheerful mood, they left the house, re-entered the carriage and were driven back to Madame Hamelin's.

  Charles Percier and Leonard Fontaine might have been called the heavenly twins of decoration under the Empire. For years, they had worked together in such close collaboration that beside them, Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylades might have seemed mortal enemies. They had met first in the studios of their common master, Peyre, but then, when Percier won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1785 and Fontaine the second Grand Prix in 1786, they came together again beneath the umbrella pines of the Villa Medici and had remained together ever since. Between them, they had undertaken to re-design Paris in the Napoleonic style, and there was nothing good of Percier's that did not show the hand of Fontaine and no proper Fontaine without a touch of Percier. And being the same age, within a year or two, one born in Paris the other at Pontois, they were generally regarded in every day life as inseparable brethren.

  It was this pair, so eminently representative of French art under the Empire who, late that afternoon, stepped through the doors of Fortunée's salon. That salon had never been so empty of company, but since this was Napoleon's wish, that amiable lady uttered no word of protest. Except for Gossec, not a soul had crossed her threshold all that day.

  The two architects, after bowing politely to the ladies, gave Marianne to understand that they had paid a preliminary visit to the house in the rue de Lille earlier that afternoon.

  'His majesty the Emperor,' Charles Percier added, 'has intimated to us that the work should be so carried out that you, mademoiselle, may take possession of your house with the least possible delay. We have therefore no time to waste. To be sure, the house has suffered a good deal of damage.'

  'But we feel,' Fontaine went on, 'that we shall very soon be able to remove all traces of the ravages worked by time and men.'

  'We have therefore,' Percier took him up, 'taken the liberty of bringing along with us some designs we happened to have by us, simply one or two ideas sketched for our own pleasure, but which seem perfectly suited to this old house.'

  Marianne's eyes, which throughout this well orchestrated dialogue had been swivelling between the two men, from the short Percier to the tall Fontaine, came to rest at last on the roll of papers which the first named was already unrolling on a table. She caught a glimpse of roman style furnishing, Pompeian friezes, alabaster figures, gilded eagles, swans and victories.

  'Gentlemen,' she said quietly, taking some pains to stress the slight foreign accent with which she spoke French so as to lend substance to her supposed Venetian origin, 'can you answer me one question?'

  'What is that?'

  'Are there in existence any plans indicating what the Hôtel d'Asselnat was like before the Revolution?'

  The two architects looked at one another with barely concealed alarm. They had known they were to work for an Italian singer, as yet unknown, but destined for great fame, a singer who was quite certainly the Emperor's latest fancy. They were expecting a creature of whims and caprices who might not be easy to please and this start to the interview seemed to prove them right. Percier cleared his throat with a little cough.

  'For the outside, no doubt we can find plans, but for the interior – but why should you wish to have these plans, mademoiselle?'

  Marianne understood perfectly the meaning behind the question. Why should a daughter of Italy be interested in the original appearance of a house in France? She smiled encouragingly.

  'Because I should like my house, as far as possible, restored to the state in which it was before the troubles. All this you have shown me is very fine, very attractive, but it is not what I desire. I want the house to be as it was and nothing more.'

  Percier and Fontaine raised their arms to heaven in unison, as though performing a well-drilled ballet.

  'In the style of Louis XIV or Louis XV? But, mademoiselle, permit me to remind you that is no longer the fashion,' Fontaine said reproachfully. 'No one has anything like that nowadays, it is quite outdated, not at all the thing. His majesty the Emperor himself—'

  'His majesty will wish first and foremost for me to have what I want,' Marianne interrupted sweetly. 'I realize of course that it will not be possible to reconstruct the interior decorations exactly as they were, since we do not know what that was like. But I think it will do very well if you will carry out everything to suit the style of the house and, especially, the portrait which is in the salon.'

  There was a silence so complete that Fortunée stirred in her chair.

  'The portrait?' said Fontaine. 'Which portrait—'

  'But, the portrait of—' Marianne stopped short. She had been on the point of saying: 'The portrait of my father', but the singer Maria Stella could have no connection with the family of d'Asselnat. She drew a deep breath and then continued hurriedly: 'A magnificent portrait of a man which I and my friends saw this morning hanging over the fireplace in the salon. A man dressed in the uniform of an officer of the old king's—'

  'Mademoiselle,' the two architects answered in unison, 'I can assure you that we saw no portrait—'

  'But, I am not going out of my mind!' Marianne cried losing patience. She could not understand why these two men refused to discuss the portrait. She turned in desperation to Madame Hamelin.

  'Oh really, my dear, you saw it too—?'

  'Yes,' Fortunée said uneasily, 'I saw it. And do you really say, gentlemen, that there was no portrait in the salon? I can see it now: a very handsome man of noble bearing, wearing a colonel's uniform.'

  'We give you our word, madame,' Percier assured her, 'that we saw no portrait. Had it been otherwise we should certainly have mentioned it at once. A single portrait left in a devastated house would have been remarkable enough!'

  'And yet it was there,' Marianne persisted stubbornly.

  'It was there, certainly.' Jolival's voice spoke from behind her. 'But just as certainly, it is not there now.'

  Arcadius had been missing all afternoon but now, as he walked farther into the room, Percier and Fontaine, who had been beginning to wonder if they had fallen among lunatics, breathed again and turned gratefully to this unlooked for rescuer. But Arcadius, as amiable and unconcerned as ever, was kissing the fingers of the mistress of the house and Marianne.

  'We can only imagine someone has taken it,' he remarked lightly. 'Well, gentlemen, have you reached an agreement with the – signorina Maria Stella—'

  'Er – that is – not yet. This business of the portrait—'

  'Forget it,' Marianne said tersely. She had realized that Jolival did not wish to speak of it before strangers. Now, much as she had liked these two in the beginning, she had only one wish, to see the back of them and be left alone with her friends. With this view, she forced herself to smile and say lightly but firmly:

  'Remember only one thing. That my desire to see the house look as it used to do remains unaltered.'

  'In the style of the last century?' Fontaine murmured with comical dismay. 'Are you quite determined on that?'

  'Quite determined. I want nothing else. Do your best to make the Hôtel d'Asselnat look as it used to do, gentlemen, and I shall be eternally grateful to you.'

  There was nothing more to add. The two men withdrew, assuring her they would do their best. Barely hail they gone downstairs before Marianne fell on Arcadius.

  'My father's portrait, what do you know about it?'

  'That it is no longer where we saw it, my poor child. I went back to the rue de Lille without saying anything to you, after the architects had gone in fact, I watched them leave, I wanted to go over the house from top to bottom because there were a number of things which struck me as odd, those well oiled locks among othe
r things. It was then I noticed that the portrait had disappeared.'

  'But, then what can have happened to it? This is ridiculous! It's unbelievable!'

  Marianne was bitterly disappointed. It seemed to her that now she had really lost the father she had never known and had discovered that morning with such joy. This sudden disappearance was very cruel.

  'I should not have left it. I was so incredibly lucky to find it, I should have taken it with me, at once. But how could I have guessed that someone would come and move it. For that must be what happened, surely? It has been stolen!'

  She was walking up and down the room unhappily as she spoke, wringing her hands together. Arcadius, though outwardly calm, never took his eyes off her.

  'Stolen? Perhaps—'

  'What do you mean, perhaps?'

  'Don't be cross. I am merely thinking that whoever put it in the salon has simply taken it away again. You see, instead of trying to find out who took the portrait, I think we should do better to try and find out who put it there in the midst of all that wreckage. Because it is my belief that when we know that, we shall also know who has the portrait now.'

  Marianne said nothing. What Jolival said was true. Instead of grieving, she began to think. She remembered the brightness of the canvas and the frame, how meticulously clean they were in contrast to the squalor around them. There was some mystery there.

  'Would you like me to inform the Minister of Police?' Fortunée suggested. 'He will make inquiries, discreet ones if you like, but I'll be prepared to swear that he will find your portrait before very long.'

  'No – thank you, I would rather not.'

  What, above all, she would rather not see was the astute Fouché dabbling in something which concerned her so closely. She felt that by putting Fouché's men with their dirty fingers on the trail of her father's disappearing image, she would be in some way soiling the beauty of that image which she had so briefly recovered.

  'No—' she said again, 'truly I would rather not.' She added: 'I prefer to try and find out myself.'

  In that moment her mind was made up.

  'Jolival, my dear,' she said calmly, 'tonight, we will go back to the rue de Lille, as unobtrusively as possible.'

  'Go back to the rue de Lille tonight,' Fortunée protested. 'You cannot mean it? What for?'

  'It would seem that there is a ghost in the old house. Don't ghosts prefer the night time?'

  'You think someone comes there?'

  'Or hides there.'

  An idea was growing in her mind as she spoke. Or rather, a memory which was becoming clearer with every moment. Of a few remarks she had heard as a child. More than once, Aunt Ellis had told her of her adventures as a tiny baby, how the abbé de Chazay had found her, left all alone in the house after her parents had been taken away. At that time, the abbé himself had been living in the rue de Lille, in one of those secret hiding places which had been constructed in a great many aristocratic houses in town and country to hide refractory priests. 'That must be it!' she said, finishing her thoughts aloud, 'someone must be hiding in the house.'

  'It is impossible,' Jolival answered. 'I have been everywhere, I tell you, from top to bottom.'

  But he listened very attentively when she told him the story of the abbé de Chazay. Unfortunately, she did not know where this hiding place lay. It might be in the cellars, the attic or behind the panelling in one of the rooms. The abbé himself, whether intentionally or from sheer absentmindedness, had never told her precisely.

  'In that case, we may search for a very long time. Some of these hiding places were completely impossible to discover, except by a stroke of luck. We shall have to sound out the walls and ceilings.'

  'At all events, no one could live long in one of those hiding places without outside help,' Marianne said. 'They would need food and fresh air and all the other necessities of life.'

  Fortunée, who was lying on a blue watered-silk chaise longue, sighed and stretched, then began rearranging the folds of her red cashmere gown, yawning widely as she did so.

  'You don't think perhaps you two are romancing a little?' she said. 'I think the house has been empty for so long that some poor homeless wretch must have been living in it, and our going in like that, followed by the architects, must have disturbed him, that is all.'

  'And the portrait?' Marianne said seriously.

  'He must have found it in the house, perhaps in the attics or hidden away in some odd corner, which would explain why it escaped when everything else was wrecked. Because it was the only pretty thing left, he used it to adorn his desert and when we invaded his domain today he simply went away and took with him what he had come to regard as his own property. I sincerely believe, Marianne, that if you want to get your picture back the only sensible thing to do is to tell Fouché. It can't be easy to wander about Paris with a canvas that size under one's arm. Would you like me to send for him? We are reasonably good friends.'

  It began to look as though the charming Fortunée had good friends everywhere, but once again, Marianne refused. Against all the evidence, some instinct was telling her that there was some other explanation, and that the eminently simple and rational theory put forward by her friend was not the right one. She had been conscious of a presence in the house, which she had at first put down to the magnetic power of the portrait, but now she realized that there was something else. She recalled the footfalls they had heard upstairs. Arcadius had decided it must have been a rat, but was it? She could not help thinking that there was some mystery about her ancestral home and she meant to get to the bottom of it, but she would do so alone. Or at least, with only Arcadius to help her. She turned to him now.

  'I mean what I said. Will you come with me tonight and see what is going on in my house?'

  'Why ask?' Jolival shrugged. 'For one thing, not for anything in the world could I allow you to go alone into that morgue, but for another – I must admit that this peculiar business intrigues me too. We'll leave here at ten o'clock, if that suits you.'

  Fortunée sighed. 'And much good may it do you! My dear child, you do seem to be inordinately fond of adventures. For myself, I shall stay quietly at home, with your permission. Firstly because I have not the slightest desire to go and freeze to death in an empty house, and secondly because someone must be here to warn the Emperor in case you are running into another of those traps you seem to have a knack of finding. And I dread to think what he will do to me if anything should happen to you!' she finished with comical alarm.

  The remainder of the evening passed in supping and afterwards in making ready for the intended expedition. For a moment, it did occur to Marianne to think of the mysterious danger against which Jason Beaufort had warned her but she rejected the idea at once. Why should she expect any danger? Surely no one could have foreseen that Napoleon would give her back the house which had been her parent's? No, the Hôtel d'Asselnat could be in no way connected with the American's fears.

  But Marianne was not fated to go adventuring with Arcadius that night. The clock had just struck a quarter to ten and she had already risen from her chair to go and put on some more suitable clothes for what lay ahead, when Fortunée's black servant Jonas appeared to announce with his invariable solemnity that 'Monsigneur le duc de Frioul' requested admittance. Absorbed in their own conversation, neither Marianne, nor Fortunée, nor Arcadius had heard the carriage arrive. They gazed at one another blankly but Fortunée recovered herself at once.

  'Show him in,' she said to Jonas. 'The dear duke must be bringing word from the Tuileries.'

  The Grand Marshal of the palace was doing better than that.

  Hardly had he entered the room and kissed Fortunée's hand before he said gaily to Marianne:

  'I come in search of you, mademoiselle. The Emperor is asking for you.'

  'Truly? Oh, I am coming, I am coming at once—'

  She was so happy to be going to him that evening when she had been given no reason to hope for it, that for a second she forgot th
e business of the missing picture. In her haste to go to Napoleon, she hurried away to put on a pretty dress of green velvet braided with silver with a deeply scooped out neckline and short sleeves trimmed with a froth of lace, snatched up a pair of long white gloves and flung on a great cloak of the same velvet, cut like a flowing domino with a hood trimmed with grey fox. She loved these things and blew a kiss with her fingertips at the radiantly joyful reflection in her mirror before running down to the salon where Duroc was calmly drinking coffee with Fortunée and Arcadius. He was talking at the same time and, as he was talking about the Emperor, Marianne paused in the doorway to listen to the end of what he was saying.

  '—and when he had seen the finished column in the place Vendôme, the Emperor went on to inspect the Ourcq Canal. He is never still for a moment!'

  'Was he pleased?' Madame Hamelin asked.

  'With these works, yes, but the war in Spain remains his greatest anxiety. Things are going badly there. The men are sick, the Emperor's brother, King Joseph, lacks imagination, the marshals are weary and jealous of one another, while the guerilleros harry the army and are helped by the local population, who are both hostile and cruel. And then Wellington's English are firmly established in the country.'

  'How many men have we there?' Arcadius asked in a grave voice.

  'Nearly eighty thousand. Soult has replaced Jourdan as Major General. King Joseph has Sebastiani, Victor and Mortier under him, while Suchet and Augereau are occupying Aragon and Catalonia. At this moment, Massena and Junot are joining forces with Ney and Montbrun ready to march into Portugal—'

  Marianne's entry cut short Duroc's military disquisition. He looked up, smiled and set down his empty cup.

  'Let us go, then, if you are ready. If I let myself be drawn into army talk we shall be here all night.'

  'All the same, I wish you could go on! It was very interesting.'

  'Not for two pretty women. Besides, the Emperor does not like to be kept waiting.'

  Marianne felt a brief stab of remorse when she met Jolival's eye and remembered their planned expedition. But after all, there was no danger in the house.