The Orchid Affair pc-8

by Лорен Уиллиг

  This floor, however, was quite definitely the museum. Yellowing, typed card? Check. Wax mannequin in musty uniform? Check. It was spread out across one broad floor rather than upstairs and downstairs on narrower ones, but otherwise it was just what I had expected. There were panoramic maps of Paris, old city ordinances, a smattering of weaponry. I strolled through the exhibits, past the seventeenth-century and the Affair of the Poisons towards the Revolution and my people.

  Tucked away in a corner, I found Georges Cadoudal. There was a print of him, a round-faced man with an open shirt collar. He looked like what my brother would have called “jolly.” He didn’t seem like the sort to keep the entire Ministry of Police hopping. Which just went to show you couldn’t judge anyone by his cover. Notices calling for the arrest of the various conspirators had been framed and posted on the walls. I saw one for André Jaouen, describing him as of medium height, with brown hair and glasses.

  There were ledgers, too, immured under glass in the display cases that ran at waist height along the walls, one open to the page where Cadoudal’s description had been entered upon his arrest. Cadoudal had been arrested in March, after a rather spectacular chase scene, detailed in the typewritten card next to his photo. There was no corresponding entry for Jaouen.

  This was all very interesting, but I needed the documents that weren’t kept under glass, the other ledgers, warrants, and reports. I made my way back to the front of the museum, where the man at the information desk obligingly led me back into the archives, gestured me to a chair, and, after nobly not snickering at my awful French—well, not too loudly—brought me a large box with the items I had requested.

  It was all there. The official bulletins sent by the Prefecture of Police to the First Consul, André’s private reports to Fouché, Gaston Delaroche’s half-mad mutterings. The man was exceptionally fond of memos. Some of them looked as though they had been crumpled and flung against a wall upon receipt. But Fouché wouldn’t do a thing like that, would he?

  I found the transcript of the questioning of Querelle, the crucial pages blurred by a spill of ink. Jaouen’s report on the matter followed, written in a crisp, clean hand.

  I was amused to note that there was mention of a governess in the official papers following Jaouen’s disappearance, but only as a potential witness to be brought in for questioning. They had never figured it out, not any of them. Ten points to the Pink Carnation.

  I worked my way through the disordered pile of material, taking notes in pencil in the notebook I keep for the days I’m too lazy to carry a laptop, or archives that won’t allow electronics. It was fascinating to see the false trails Jaouen had planted, the misleading reports he had written up for his supposed superiors and, later, the elements of the search for him, set out in painstaking detail, reported by Delaroche to Fouché and Fouché to Bonaparte himself.

  Laura was right; the capture of Cadoudal had diverted everyone’s attention but that of Delaroche. That man sure knew how to hold a grudge.

  The official reaction to Delaroche’s capture appeared to be something along the lines of “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

  I jerked around as the archivist tapped me on the shoulder. Uh-oh. Had I been drooling on the documents? Talking to myself?

  Apparently not. The archivist, looking rather amused, murmured that my boyfriend was waiting for me.

  He was? I checked my watch. Wow. Somehow, six hours had passed. I became vaguely aware that my shoulders felt sore and I had the sort of dull headache that’s the caffeine addict’s warning that too much time has passed between coffees. Mmm, coffee. And maybe some pain au chocolat. My stomach reminded me that I hadn’t fed it for a while either. Man cannot live on documents alone.

  I murmured my thanks to the archivist, gathered up my notebooks, relinquished my ledgers, and wandered, stiff-legged, into the museum to find my boyfriend. I tracked him down in the back room, in front of a collection of miscellaneous implements of destruction, including an early attempt to create a multi-barreled gun. He was studying that last with a great deal of interest when I approached.

  “Good research session?” he asked.

  “Mmm-hmm.” I yawned, rubbing my eyes. “I feel like I’ve been sleeping for two hundred years.”

  Colin assessed me with an experienced eye. “You need coffee, don’t you?”

  “Please? I promise I’ll be human once you caffeinate me.”

  He could have made snide comments about not making promises I couldn’t keep, but instead he held out a paper bag to me, one of the narrow ones that more resembles an envelope than a shopping bag. “Here. I got this for you. We’ll see if this keeps you occupied until I can get some caffeine into you.”

  I drew out his gift as we walked. Despite being paperbacked, it was pretty heavy, the pages thick and glossy. It was an exhibition catalogue from the special exhibit at the Cognacq-Jay, featuring the paintings of Julie Beniet and Marguerite Gérard. Unlike the exhibit, this version contained full biographical details on both women, with a great deal of text.

  I accompanied Colin blindly down the stairs, making my way down by chance and luck and the occasional hand on my elbow. About halfway through, I found the portrait of André Jaouen, with two full pages of text going through his career in the National Assembly and his subsequent employment at the Prefecture. It got more perfunctory as it went on, which made sense; the curator’s interest had been in Beniet and the circumstances surrounding this specific painting, not what had happened to Jaouen after her death.

  Nonetheless, in the interest of thoroughness, there were a few terse sentences stating that after being implicated in the Cadoudal affair of 1804, Jaouen had relocated to England, where he had remarried, the daughter of the artist Michel de Griscogne and the poetess Chiara de Veneti.

  Poor Laura. Even in death she was still Michel and Chiara de Griscogne’s little girl. From an art historian’s view, however, that was the interesting thing about her. There was even a little round illustration set into the bottom of the page showing one of her father’s sculptures, now in the Bode-Museum in Berlin.

  Jaouen and his second wife had moved in 1805 to America, where they remained until Jaouen’s death in 1838. Taking advantage of the French-speaking community in New Orleans, Jaouen established a law practice there and eventually became a Louisiana state court judge.

  On the facing page, the curator had placed the drawing of a cherubic-looking Gabrielle and the infant Pierre-André. The baby in the picture, Pierre-André Jaouen, the editor pompously informed us, had gone on to become one of the leading naturalists of his day, known for his fine botanical drawings of the foliage of the American South. A colleague of Audubon, they had collaborated on several projects.

  Hadn’t there been rumors at one point that Audubon was really the lost Dauphin?

  I filed that away for later speculation and went on reading. Gabrielle Jaouen had gone on to become a noted diarist, an advocate for the abolition of slavery and, very late in life, a noisy proponent of the rights of women. She had died in her home in New York in 1893 at the age of ninety-five, leaving behind five husbands, twenty-odd great-grandchildren, and a vast pile of tracts and memoirs.

  I wondered what Laura had thought of it all and whether she and Jaouen had had any children of their own. There were fairly easy ways to find out—including tracking down the memoirs of Gabrielle Jaouen de Montfort Adams Morris Belmont van Antwerp—but it was well out of the purview of my current research.

  I came up for air about a block from the Prefecture, on the doorstep of a small patisserie. “Thanks,” I said, rubbing my eyes at the transition from the shiny page to less shiny reality. “This is perfect.”

  “The book or the café?”

  I could smell coffee in the air. There was a long glass case in front of me, displaying an impressive array of pastries, including—yes!—three large marzipan pigs.

  “Both,” I said, closing the book and stuffing it into my bag, along with my notebooks, my travel umb
rella, a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol, and a plastic thing of tissues that had exploded their plastic. “Did you go back to the Cognacq-Jay?”

  Colin signaled to the waitress, who detached herself from her conversation at the back of the bar. “Deux café crèmes,” he instructed.

  “Et deux cochons!” I chimed in. I pointed at the glass. “Ceux-là? Les cochons de marzipan? Merci.”

  Colin gave me a squeeze. “You found your pigs.”

  “One is for you,” I generously informed him. “What did you do today?”

  Did you speak to your sister? I wanted to ask, but didn’t. Did you call your solicitor? Did you hire a hit man to take care of your stepfather and/or Mike Rock, aka Micah Stone?

  “This and that,” said Colin. We settled ourselves at a rickety table towards the back of the restaurant. “The film crew is scheduled for next month. Fancy coming to stay?”

  “As your buffer zone?”

  “As my interpreter. Your friend Melinda will be with them.”

  “Classmate,” I corrected. A blackboard behind us advertised a dinner prix fixe. It looked rather good. My stomach rumbled again. I smiled gratefully as the waitress put our coffees and a plate with two marzipan-covered pigs down in front of us. “What about Serena?”

  Colin’s expression didn’t change. “She won’t be there.”

  There was something in the way he said it that effectively cut off future questions. I inched one of the pigs closer to me, idly breaking off its curly marzipan tail, turning it into a little blob of marzipan goo between my fingers.

  As much as I hated to admit it, I couldn’t entirely blame Serena for what she had done. It wasn’t just the lure of a partnership in the gallery—that bit I still found vaguely scuzzy. What I could sympathize with was her need to emancipate herself from the protective affection of her one-and-only sibling. It was sweet, but it was also limiting. The way she had chosen was a crummy way to go about bit, but these things are never pretty. Anyone who has ever faced off against a parent knows that.

  Serena wanted to live her own life? She had my blessing. But in doing so, she had hurt Colin. She wasn’t my concern; he was. He needed cheering up.

  “Look at it this way,” I said encouragingly, leaning my elbows on the table. “Having the film crews there could be kind of entertaining.”

  “Like a pleasant interlude on the rack,” said Colin glumly.

  “Can I get a side of thumbscrews with that?” Okay, so it wasn’t much of a smile, but I still got a smile. I took a big gulp of my coffee. “View it more as your own personal slapstick comedy opportunity. Shakespeare? To rap music? It’s bound to be absurd. And you can make them pay through the nose if they damage anything.”

  Colin perked up at that. “They will, won’t they? I’m not letting them into the library, though.”

  I made a fake laughing noise—part chortle, part evil chuckle. “Don’t worry. I’ll see to that.” Micah Stone and his crew were getting anywhere near those manuscripts over my dead body. They were mine, all mine.

  Well, maybe not exactly mine, but I was the one with the use of them at the moment.

  Colin lifted his coffee cup to me. “All for one?”

  I clinked my cup against his, sloshing foam. “And one for all.”

  One for both? There were only two of us, after all. Two. As my childhood Sesame Street record had informed me, it was a much better number than one.

  What would have happened if Colin hadn’t had a girlfriend with him this weekend, or any girlfriend at all? I didn’t like to think of how alone he would have been. I supposed he did still have his great-aunt, but that wasn’t the same. In multiple ways.

  “I nearly forgot.” Colin drew something out of the pocket of his Barbour jacket. It was one of those incredibly deep pockets, designed to hold ammunition and small animal carcasses. Or, in this case, a slim, red-bound book. “We forgot this at the gallery last night.”

  The cover looked very red against the green Formica tabletop. So that meant he had spoken to one of them. Who was the most likely to have picked up the book? My money was on Serena.

  “That was stupid of me,” I said. “I would have hated to have lost it. Did Serena find it?”

  I could see Colin trying to think of a way to dodge. Fundamentally, though, Colin is too honest to lie well. He stonewalls, but he has trouble getting around direct questions.

  “She recognized it from drinks,” he said shortly. Nodding to the book, he said, in a very obvious attempt to change the subject. “Didn’t you promise me love poetry?”

  Right. There’d be time enough to get the details out of him later. We had—I stopped and thought it out—two whole days left in Paris. Two days just for us. There would be plenty of time for grilling Colin, for love poetry, and for all of those couply things I hadn’t thought we would have the chance to do.

  Right at that moment, though, I had more important things on my agenda.

  “Love poetry later,” I said firmly. “In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a pig with your name on it. It’s oink-oink good!”

  Colin regarded me dubiously. “You’re not going to start calling it a love pig, are you?”

  I had recently made him watch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. He had been very alarmed by the “love fern.”

  “That’s cochon d’amour to you.”

  “You are coming to Selwick Hall next month, aren’t you?”

  My free hand covered his. “How could I possibly miss it? All for one, remember? But now . . .” I lifted the pig, adopting a truly obnoxious singsong. “You know you want me. . . .”

  The crinkles came out around Colin’s eyes. “Bizarrely enough, I do.”

  Historical Note

  On January 26, 1804, after being taken before a military commission and sentenced to death, Jean-Pierre Querelle broke under police questioning at the Abbaye Prison. He confessed that a plot was afoot to kidnap—or assassinate—the First Consul and restore the Bourbon monarchy. The Royalist arch-agitator, Georges Cadoudal, had landed in France months before and was already in place in Paris, ready to set events in motion.

  The plot in which André Jaouen is embroiled was lifted from a genuine intrigue, although I simplified some elements and changed others for the purpose of this novel. Uniforms, like those Laura discovered in the Hôtel de Bac, were prepared so that conspirators, disguised as members of the Consular Guard, could nab Napoleon as he traveled to one of his country estates. The conspirators were in negotiation with a high-ranking member of the military, General Moreau, in the hopes that the army could be brought over to their side. A member of the royal family—either the Comte d’Artois, King Louis XVIII’s younger brother; or the Duc de Berry, Artois’s son—was to be brought to Paris to be placed at the head of the uprising.

  In my version, de Berry sneaks into Paris to lead the revolt. In real life, neither de Berry nor Artois ventured across the Channel. In his biography of Joseph Fouché, Hubert Cole opines that “the refusal of either [Artois or de Berry] to venture into France had caused the delay in the scheme and spoiled whatever chance of success it may ever have had.” Elizabeth Sparrow, in her Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792-1815, reports that Cadoudal went to the coast to meet the expected prince and, upon finding him lacking, reputedly cried, “We are finished!” Without a proper figurehead, the plot rapidly unraveled. The arrest and interrogation of Querelle and his fellow conspirators, Le Bourgeois and Picot, were as I described. Cadoudal’s servant, le petit Picot (not to be confused with the other Picot), was arrested on February 6, when he ventured out to fetch provisions; General Moreau was arrested on February 15; and Cadoudal on March 9, after a dramatic high-speed chase through the streets of Paris. As described, the agitated First Consul took drastic measures. On February 28 (the night of André’s make-believe party), the Governor of Paris ordered the gates of the city closed and all vehicles searched. The Senate, in the general spirit of panic, suspended trial by jury. According to Sparrow, 356 people wer
e eventually questioned and arrested in L’Affaire Georges, Moreau, Pichegru, d’Enghien.

  The investigation of the Cadoudal affair was officially in the hands of Louis-Nicolas Dubois, the Prefect of Police. Fouché, formerly Minister of Police, had fallen out of favor with Napoleon in 1802. The First Consul closed the Ministry of Police, although, as a parting gift, he allowed Fouché to retain the 1.2 million francs from the Ministry’s coffers. Fouché used these funds to build an even more elaborate system of informers, setting himself up in direct opposition to the Prefect of Police, André Jaouen’s putative boss. Although Fouché was technically out of power and his Ministry of Police closed, he played a large role in the Cadoudal affair, even though the investigation was technically being run by Dubois at the Prefecture.

  I tried to capture the flavor of the Fouché-Dubois rivalry by having André serve under Dubois at the behest of Fouché, working at the Prefecture but reporting to Fouché. To minimize confusion and avoid extra explanation, I retained Fouché in his old position as Minister of Police. Fouché was officially reinstated as Minister of Police later that same year—a role in which he continued for the duration of Napoleon’s ascendancy. For more about Napoleon’s legendary Minister of Police, I recommend Hubert Cole’s Fouché: The Unprincipled Patriot, as well as the relevant chapters on “Fouché’s Police” and “Fouché the Man” in Alan Schom’s Napoleon Bonaparte. Fouché’s contemporaries, such as Josephine’s lady-in-waiting, Mme. de Rémusat, and Bonaparte’s secretary, M. de Bourrienne, had a great deal to say about the Minister of Police in their memoirs from the period. One can read Fouché’s side of the story in his own memoirs, entitled Memoirs of Joseph Fouché, Duke of Otranto, although these, published after the Restoration, ought to be taken with several grains of salt.

  Unlike the conspirators, who were, with the exception of André and Daubier, taken from the historical record, my artists and actors were all composite characters, based on a combination of contemporary personages. Jaouen’s wife, Julie Beniet, was inspired by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Marguerite Gérard, among others. For a glimpse into the life of a female painter in Paris, I recommend Gita May’s Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun: The Odyssey of an Artist in an Age of Revolution and Mary D. Sheriff’s The Exceptional Woman: Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art, as well as Vigée-Lebrun’s own memoirs. For artists more generally, I relied upon Thomas Crow’s Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris and Warren Roberts’s Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and the French Revolution. Moving from artists to actors, fellow devotees of old swashbucklers will have guessed that the escape via Commedia dell’Arte troupe was inspired by Rafael Sabatini’s classic novel of the French Revolution, Scaramouche. I tip my hat—and my keyboard—to him.