The Prisoner in the Mask

by Dennis Wheatley

  ‘Then the sooner you turn your hopes in some other direction the better. I will not permit you to wear the uniform of any Republic, least of all that of France.’

  ‘My heart is set upon it; Sir; and you cannot stop me.’

  ‘Can I not? You seem to forget that you are as yet only eighteen. For the past year I have allowed you to enjoy the private income which will be yours when you are twenty-one. But there are three years to go before you become of age, and until then I can cut off your money by the stroke of a pen. I hardly think that your enthusiasm for becoming a sous-lieutenant will survive the idea of supporting yourself solely on the miserable pittance paid to officers of that rank.’

  De Quesnoy sighed. ‘The prospect is a most unpleasant one, and I must confess, Father, that I foresaw that you might confront me with it. In consequence, I felt bound to take certain precautions against any such distressing eventuality.’

  ‘What the devil are you talking about?’

  ‘About your Star of the Order of St. Louis, Sir.’

  ‘My, my—?’

  ‘The one with the pigeon-blood ruby in its centre, which is said to be worth a million francs.’

  ‘Yes, yes! What of it?’

  ‘When you were showing the family jewels to our friends the other day I slipped the Star into my pocket and put the empty case back in the safe. Yesterday I did the Star up in a sealed packet and without disclosing what the packet contained gave it to one of our guests who left this morning with the request that it should be banked in Paris in my name.’

  De Richleau’s eyes bulged and his beard was bristling. He looked as if at any moment he was likely to have a fit. ‘A thief!’ he gasped. ‘My son, a thief!’

  ‘No, Sir. For the time being it cannot be said that I have done more than borrow this family jewel. And I was driven to resort to that stratagem owing only to my knowledge of your fanatical hatred of modern France. You alone can make me a thief by compelling me to sell the jewel. Since I prize it as greatly as yourself only dire necessity would drive me to do so. But necessity knows no law and sell it I shall have to if you carry out your threat to deprive me of my income.’

  For a moment the Duke stared at his son, then he said: ‘You are old beyond your years, Armand; and there are times when I think you have a devil in you. Only possession could make a young man of such promise so determined to throw himself away. You will rue this day before you are finished, for France is as rotten as a putrefying corpse. I see though that there is no persuading you of the truth. Go then, but remember this. As long as you remain in the service of the French Republic I will not receive you in my house.’

  6

  PARIS IN THE NINETIES

  Paris in the Nineties—what pictures those words conjure up. La Ville Lumière, the Mecca of the pleasure-loving from all over the world, the Queen city of fashion and the Patroness of all that was new in literature and art.

  Every night hundreds of fiacres drove visitors from all nations up the hill to Montmartre, to watch the girls dance the cancan or to sup with a charmer of their own choice in a private room. In the Moulin Rouge, Abbaya de Téleme, Bal Tabarin, Café d’Enfer, and scores of less famous haunts round the Place Pigalle, corks popped without ceasing, violinists played catchy tunes and kisses were snatched openly at the tables between jokes, crazy bets and hilarious laughter.

  France was cashing in handsomely on the craving of the better-off males in more sober countries to have a place to go to in which they could let off steam; and while the ‘wages of sin’ at length overtook a proportion of its female denizens many a hard-boiled little French girl retired with enough cash to settle down happily as the wife of a minor official, or a small farmer in the part of the country from which she had originally come. Vice had yet to be driven underground by well-meaning moralists, so this nightly Saturnalia continued from year’s end to year’s end, and even most of the wives of the male revellers accepted it as quite natural that when in Paris their husbands should go on the spree.

  But the wives had their way of making the husbands pay. For them Paris meant dresses, furs, jewels, hats, shoes, lingerie. And if a bewhiskered spouse did not return till dawn from trips to ‘see the sights’ with some of his men friends, he could not complain overmuch at the size of the bills that came in from the famous shops in the Rue de la Paix and the Rue St. Honoré; or at another huge round-lidded trunk in which to carry these female delights back to the United States, Russia, the Balkans, England or the Argentine.

  There were, too, the Museums, the Opera, the Churches and the Galleries; the races at Longchamps and Auteuil; afternoon tea at the Ritz, the Crillion or the Meurice and dinners at those world-renowned restaurants Larue, Tour d’Argent, Voisins and Maxims, all then at the height of their fame.

  On the Left Bank there was another equally stimulating, if less plutocratic, world. There Henri Murger’s ‘Vie de Bohême’ was still being lived by thousands of students of all nationalities. From dusk to dawn the gas jets flared in their cafés while they debated the merits of the arts through all the centuries and, more eagerly than all the rest, those of tomorrow. Only six years earlier the Impressionists, infuriated at the refusal of the committee of the Salon to hang their pictures, had started an annual exhibition of their own, known as the Salon of the Rejected. Degas, Renoir and Monet could often be seen in the neighbourhood of the Luxembourg. In the cafés vitriolic leader-writers like Rochefort, Clemenceau and Drumont could be heard declaiming, and admiring circles of young people gathered round writers of such diverse talents as Alphonse Daudet, Emile Zola and Anatole France.

  Such, as seen by foreigners, was the Paris to which Armand de Quesnoy came towards the end of January 1894. But it was not until very much later that he got to know, even superficially, either Montmartre or the Latin Quarter. For him Parisian life centred in the sedate Faubourg St. Germain where, behind high walls and private courtyards, stood the mansions of the great families of the ancien regime.

  For the past half-century most of these families had lived in dignified retirement. They had ignored the Second Empire as though it had never occurred, and they despised the Republic as much as did de Richleau, but they preferred to remain in Paris rather than go into voluntary exile. Their great wealth enabled them to continue as an elegant and rigidly exclusive society that toiled not, neither did it spin. They kept chefs who were as much maestros as those in the best restaurants and their table talk was often wittier than anything which could have been heard in Montparnasse. Many of the men had taken up learned pursuits, and nearly all derived their principal amusement from a succession of affaires with the wives of their friends. The women gave considerable time to religious observances and frequently debated the merits of their respective Father Confessors; but their favourite reading was typified by Beaudelaire and Housmans, and at six o’clock each evening, when their husbands were theoretically at the Club, their maids brought to their boudoirs by way of the back stairs their lovers of the moment.

  Yet even into this little world apart de Quesnoy was slow to penetrate. That was not from lack of introductions, as he was related to several of the leading families, but because he was much more tied by the curriculum at St. Cyr than he had anticipated. He arrived in Paris only a week before the term was due to start, and much of that was taken up by interviews, buying his military equipment and badgering a tailor into hurrying with his uniforms.

  The Syvetons, he found, lived in the wealthiest quarter of Paris. They had a house in the Rue de Lisbonne which stood in its own grounds and backed on to the Parc Monceau. His first call was on Angela, but to his annoyance he learned that she and her husband were on holiday in the South of France. On his presenting himself to his cousins, the de Grammonts, the de Brissacs and the de Polignacs—they all received him most kindly, as too did the Marquise de Galliffet, who was one of the leaders of this exclusive society, and he was soon showered with cards of invitation; but at the end of the week he found himself swallowed up in the milit
ary machine, so had to refuse all those for the future that he had hoped to accept.

  The little town of St. Cyr had a population of about three thousand and was some eighteen miles from central Paris. The train service was poor, slow and indescribably dirty, and the only alternative a carriage drive of at least two hours, so the capital was not readily accessible; but the real bar which prevented de Quesnoy going there was that for first-term students it was out of bounds.

  The French Army took itself very seriously and, as de Galliffet had warned his young protege, the officer cadets at St. Cyr were worked extremely hard. The college was housed in a seventeenth century convent from which its religious inmates had been ejected at the time of the Revolution and, apart from equipping it with beds and desks, very little had since been done to it; so it was far from comfortable. But young men who were roused for their first parade at five-thirty, did not get away from their last lecture till six, and were expected to spend the rest of the evening reading up their notes, had little time left to worry about the niceties of existence.

  On Sundays, after Church Parade, they were allowed to go into Versailles, but they had to be back in mess for dinner; so illicit trips for the sake only of a few afternoon hours in Paris were hardly worth the risk, particularly as their uniforms made them easily liable to be noticed and reported.

  This life of hardship and restraint was so different from any that de Quesnoy had ever led that he might have been expected soon to become bored and resentful; but, on the contrary, now that he was actually learning about the trade of arms he found so much in it to interest him that he thought of nothing else. All but a few of his ancestors had been soldiers and through his mother’s mother he was descended from the Great Condé, so his enthusiasm was understandable; and this, together with his quick mind and agile body, early led his instructors to regard him as a young officer of great promise.

  Had he been conceited or priggish, this might have led to cold-shouldering by his less gifted colleagues, but he told them airily that he owed his swift progress only to two pieces of luck—having been made to read history so extensively before coming to St. Cyr, so that he was already conversant with the development of many outstanding campaigns, and having hunted from his infancy, as there was nothing like it to prepare a man for the physical side of military life. Moreover he was decidely open-handed. Money played little part in their lives, but wine did, and he was always calling on others to share with him bottles of the choicer vintages that he ordered both to drink with his dinner and afterwards. So, although he displayed little interest in anything but his work, they put him down as an amiable eccentric.

  In the circumstances it was natural that he should have had only a vague idea how events in France were shaping, but general conversation in the mess kept him informed of the main features of the situation.

  There had been fifteen cabinets in nine years and in the previous autumn the elections had shortly been followed by another change of government. Charles Dupuy, the previous Premier, had come back, but only to fall after a few weeks and to be replaced by Jean Casimir-Périer. It was, as usual, a government formed from a combination of the Centre parties, but as a result of the elections the Socialists had secured fifty seats, and the Anarchists were active. In December they had actually thrown a bomb into the Chamber, but their outrages were now turning public sentiment against them and the other parties of the Left.

  Between him and Dupuy, who was a scholarship boy, there existed a natural antipathy and when, in accordance with convention, on the death of a President, Dupuy resigned office, Casimir-Périer asked his friend Burdeau to form a government. Burdeau, on account of ill-health, refused, so Dupuy had to be recalled. More bitter now than ever against the President he resolved that he should be allowed no say whatever in the conduct of affairs, and Dupuy’s henchman Hanotaux even went to the length of refusing to allow the President to see the Foreign Office telegrams.

  Of more interest to de Quesnoy, and most of his fellow students, were the fortunes of French arms overseas. Algeria had long been ruled by France, although only in ’81 had the final rebellions of its people been suppressed and the country reduced to an orderly colony. In the same year, by the Treaty of Bardo, the French had annexed Tunisia and soon afterwards subdued its much less war-like inhabitants. But the war in North Africa was never-ending. The blue-veiled Tuaregs of the Atlas could be kept in check only by establishing outposts ever farther south into the Sahara, and the trade routes to Morocco and the Sudan were in constant need of protection.

  In the past ten years France had also made great conquests in Indo-China, Saigon had been occupied in the sixties, but it was another twenty years before any extensive area had been brought under French rule.

  In West Africa, from the seventeenth century, the French had had trading posts on the coast of Senegal, but it was not until the sixties that General Faidherbe had penetrated its hinterland to any depth and still later that the great explorer Savorgnan de Brazza had pushed his way deep into the interior. Now, in the nineties, French expeditions were busily annexing Dahomey, the Ivory Coast, great areas of Nigeria and the Congo and one, this very year, under an engineer officer named Joffre, had occupied Timbuktu.

  But it was Madagascar above all which now held the imagination of the young officers. That great island was dominated by the Hovas, who were the descendants of a warrior Polynesian race which had arrived there many centuries earlier from the South Pacific. They had accepted French Protection during the Second Empire, but they had failed to honour their agreements and, it was said, exercised a brutal tyranny over the tribes which constituted a considerable proportion of the population of the island. Rumours had it that measures were already on foot to despatch an expedition under General Duchesne to reduce the Hovas to obedience, and as the General had shown great initiative in the Indo-China campaigns all the most ambitious officers would have given much to accompany him.

  Soon after the election of the new President, the college broke up for its summer vacation. De Quesnoy had intended to spend it in Paris but found that nearly all the big houses in the St. Germain district were closed. Many of the old nobility still adhered to the custom of pretending to enjoy family life in the country during the height of summer and, having no flair for it, more or less picnicked in considerable discomfort at their châteaux; while others, less hide-bound by convention, took villas at Biarritz or Deauville. In consequence after a few days the Count once more put on civilian clothes, and took the night express for Vienna.

  He knew the Imperial city well as he had often stayed there with his father, who when in Austria was known as Count Königstein, a title he derived from a Castle that he owned on the Danube. In Vienna, Frau Sacher was delighted to welcome the young man again at her hotel and after a day spent looking up old friends he was at once plunged into a round of gaieties.

  Most of his contemporaries had now become junior officers in crack cavalry regiments, and if many of them were not overburdened with brains nobody could accuse them of lacking high spirits. Attendance at formal dinners, balls and concerts at the houses of their parents were interspersed with noisy drinking parties, mad moonlight rides across country and, one night, the kidnapping by a party of them of the whole chorus after the performance of a musical comedy at the Stadttheater.

  Early in August, having worked five months’ pent-up exuberance out of his system, de Quesnoy returned to St. Cyr, resigned once more to accepting its discipline as the price of acquiring the sort of military knowledge in which he had found his Austrian friends sadly lacking. But now, as a student in his second half-year, he found life there much more pleasant. Not only was less time spent on the barrack square and—for the cavalry side to which he had naturally had himself posted—in stables; but, providing their work was satisfactory, officer cadets were allowed Paris leave from midday Saturday to Sunday night every other week-end.

  This at least enabled the Count to enlarge the circle of his Parisian acquaintances,
and during the autumn he became on friendly terms with many families whose doors his cousins were able to open for him. A second call he had made on the Syvetons before leaving for Vienna had proved as fruitless as the first, as they were then staying with friends at the newly fashionable seaside resort of Le Touquet. He had left cards on both occasions, but this had drawn no response from Angela which puzzled him considerably.

  Although he would not have admitted to being passionately in love with her, he had come nearer to that state than he had with any other girl, and even after all these months he still could not get her out of his mind. So now that it was easier for him to get into Paris he decided to try to reopen their affaire. But he did not mean to make a third call that might prove unlucky again.

  Ordinarily, a wealthy bourgeois like Gabriel Syveton would not have been received in the aristocratic St. Germain circle, but being a member of the committee of the Royalist Ligue de la Patrie Française had given him a tenuous footing in it; and that had been strengthened by his marriage to Angela, as she was the granddaughter of an English Earl—an asset that he had by no means overlooked when tempted by her youthful beauty into asking for her hand. So de Quesnoy, by tactful inquiries among his friends, was able to find out when he would be certain of finding Angela at home, and it transpired that she habitually received between three and six on the first and third Thursdays, and at ten o’clock in the evening on the first Tuesday, of every month.

  To attend an evening reception in the middle of the week was more than the Count could hope to manage, but he at once took certain steps. First he mentioned to one of the senior instructors that migraine was interfering with his work, then he consulted the college doctor. A week later he told the instructor that the pills the doctor had given him were doing no good, and asked permission to make an appointment to see a specialist in Paris. His request was granted, and at half-past three on the third Thursday in September he presented himself at the house backing on to the Parc Monceau.