Paris Requiem

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘And you think that Monsieur Norton’s absolute conviction that Olympe did not kill herself, is evidence of nothing at all?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Neither a momentary amnesia, nor a cover-up.’

  With that, Marguerite appeared from behind the column and quickly walked towards her guests. The music was drawing to an end. Applause filled the room.

  James hurried after her.

  ‘May we have a moment alone? Perhaps after the others have left?’ He slipped automatically into English. ‘I would so like to speak with you.’

  She looked at him and then behind him. James turned slightly and saw Durand’s vigilant gaze on them.

  With a smile that had nothing of complicity in it, Marguerite held out her hand for the formality of a parting. ‘Ask Pierre to show you to the library on your way out,’ she murmured. ‘Ah, Chief Inspector, Monsieur Norton must already leave us. But not you, I trust. I particularly wanted to introduce you to Anatole Bartholi.’

  ‘I would be honoured, Madame,’ he bowed slightly, then turned to James. ‘We will meet again very soon, Monsieur Norton, I have no doubt. No doubt at all.’

  In the lamplight, the library had the soft stillness of a cocoon. Ranked books watching over him like so many benevolent gods, James sat back in the striped sofa with a sense of well-being which he knew had everything to do with the magic spell of the place and nothing to do with the situation in which he now felt himself inextricably entangled. The stubborn insistence of Chief Inspector Durand’s voice as it spun its web of malign speculation was at a distant remove. Far closer was the intimate waft of cherry blossom which fluttered in through the half-open window and brought with it Marguerite’s presence – so appealing, so reasonable, yet so subtly mysterious.

  He must have dozed off, for he suddenly heard her voice in a double register, both inner and outer. He ploughed through the haze of dream and sat up.

  She was looking down at him with a whimsical smile. ‘I’m so very sorry, Monsieur Norton. Sometimes my friends decide to stay for longer than they are altogether welcome. Let me get you a cognac.’

  She walked to the far end of the room and poured two glasses from a decanter as James gathered his wits.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about the situation, about several things in fact,’ James began when she had sat down in the chair opposite him.

  ‘You overheard my conversation with the Chief Inspector?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sighed. ‘I suspect our dear Chief Inspector is more suggestible than Olympe ever was. He has been hypnotised by the very cases he purports to investigate. He sees crimes of passion everywhere. The very notion that Olympe would be taken over by her role – a part in a play that is already based on a real case … oh yes, Monsieur, perhaps you didn’t know … Well that is altogether preposterous.’

  ‘So you do not think we are dealing with a crime of passion?’

  She stared at him for a moment.

  ‘Do you think your brother is capable of such things?’

  ‘The Rafael I know is most certainly not.’

  ‘But you imagine a Rafael you don’t know?’

  James sipped his cognac thoughtfully. ‘I imagine,’ he said slowly, feeling the rigor of her gaze, ‘I imagine that a woman could be madly, overwhelmingly in love with him. And that he might return that love.’ It wasn’t what he had intended to say. An imp of the perverse had taken him over and propelled him.

  ‘Ah, as for that …’ The sudden flush in her cheeks said more than her words. She collected herself quickly. ‘But there was still no reason for suicide. There was no cause for despair. There was nothing to stop their love. Nothing.’

  James suddenly had an image of his mother hovering above him, her anger palpable in the rigidity of her features, her morality, her faith affronted. He prodded her away, not without a superstitious shiver. ‘No. Of course, you are right.’

  ‘What we must absolutely do is find some evidence to point the Chief Inspector in another direction or he could make Rafael’s life difficult. He is not predisposed in his favour. He does not like journalists. Nor for that matter Jews.’

  ‘Touquet, I believe, said that Durand was an upholder of scientific detection, an honest man.’

  She shrugged. ‘Science can take many forms. Let’s hope the juge d’instruction is better disposed.’

  ‘Juge d’instruction?’

  ‘Yes, the judge who will lead the legal investigation of the case. One will be named very soon I imagine or perhaps already has been …’ she paused. ‘But Touquet is right. Durand is not an altogether unreasonable man. I feel certain that if there is a track we can point him to, I can sway him onto it.’

  James remembered the way the man had responded to the mildest of Marguerite’s ironies and had a feeling that the Chief Inspector might not be as tractable as she assumed. It seemed likely that the Chief Inspector was in at least two minds about aristocrats as well, even the most democratic amongst them.

  But he nodded. ‘Yes. And it’s precisely these other tracks that I wish to speak to you about.’

  She looked at him expectantly.

  He drew out Olympe’s daybook from his pocket where it had made an unsightly bulge all evening. ‘I wanted your help on this. It belongs to Olympe. It charts her appointments. My brother …’ He paused, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘My brother is not altogether easy to talk to when it comes to the poor girl. And you have known her for so many years …’

  She laughed. It was a warm, rich sound. ‘You have made Olympe’s case your own. I can see that. I wonder at it. Perhaps you too have grown a little fond of her?’

  ‘There is no cause for wonder.’ He responded a little stiffly. ‘You must understand. I would like to get my brother home as quickly as possible. I have a certain expertise in sifting evidence – and in this case, a necessary detachment.’

  ‘And you have her appointment book where Durand does not …’

  James relaxed, chuckled. ‘It literally fell into my hands when I was in Olympe’s apartment. Together with some letters.’

  ‘Expertise, indeed.’

  James turned the pages of the notebook until he had reached the last three weeks of Olympe’s life and handed it to Marguerite. ‘Perhaps you could help me with the names some of the initials she noted here stand for. It might provide some clues. There is also a Marcel who wrote to her with great regularity. Do you know who he is?’

  ‘Marcel?’ Her cheek dimpled. ‘Ah yes, Marcel Bonnefoi. A fond and rather foolish young man. He adores actresses. He feels he can help them with their art.’

  ‘Could I meet him?’

  ‘It could be arranged. If he is still in Paris. The season as you know is coming to an end. But there is no harm in him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone an adored creature like Olympe.’

  ‘Does my brother know of his adoration?’

  She laughed outright. ‘You are becoming as severe as our Chief Inspector, Monsieur Norton. A woman behaves a little badly and you say, famously like Dumas, Tue-la! Kill her. I can see how your thoughts are progressing. Rafael could never be jealous of Marcel. That is another preposterous idea.’

  ‘So he knows him?’ James was stubborn.

  ‘Of that I cannot be certain. You must ask him yourself. I am not his keeper.’ She looked down at the notebook.

  ‘There were also letters from an Armand, a Julien and an F de M. Do those names mean anything to you.’

  Marguerite shook her head thoughtfully. ‘I don’t believe so.’ She paused. ‘You know, Monsieur Norton. Actresses have many admirers. Olympe was a very attractive young woman. If these men had been important to her, she would probably have mentioned them to me.’

  ‘Did she mention a painter called Max Henry?’

  ‘Decidedly, you have been busy, Monsieur. Yes, Olympe mentioned that she had posed for a few canvases. He is a neighbour. But nothing more, I believe.’

  ‘Do you know how she treated her admirers?’

 
; ‘You mean might one of them have harboured a passion that grew suddenly violent?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She shivered, then rose to refill their glasses. She didn’t speak again until she had sat down. ‘Anything is possible of course. But my own sense of Olympe is that she was kind. She wasn’t a trifler. An allumeuse as we say, a deliberate kindler of men’s passions. There was a sweet seriousness about her. But one never knows with admirers.’

  Emotions passed over her face in swift succession and settled in regret. She looked down at the notebook. ‘Here. 28 May. Di. Didi. That was her childhood nickname for her sister, Judith. Then RN, that is your brother. He figures quite often. P, I imagine is Papa, yes, he is noted on the Monday he mentioned. The others LI, IB … I don’t recognise.

  James pulled her back. ‘So you know about her sister?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Rafael didn’t. Not until Monsieur Arnhem mentioned her.’

  ‘I see. But that is understandable. There are certain things it is perhaps best to keep from men. With your experience of the world, you will know that, Monsieur Norton.’

  She met his eyes and James felt his pulse beat with a sudden odd insistence. But she was already elsewhere, her expression dreamy, tinged with apprehension.

  He needed to bring her back. ‘How long had you known Olympe? How did you meet her?’ he asked softly. ‘Tell me about your friendship.’

  Her gaze floated back to him. ‘I will tell you. Why not? Though it is a long story.’ She settled back in her chair, her dress rustling in the quiet of the room.

  ‘It dates back to, ’92, no, ’93, just before the great Charcot’s death. You know of Jean-Martin Charcot, then our foremost neurologist? A formidable man. He ran the Salpêtrière Hospital and he turned that madhouse for the poor and deranged into what he named a museum of living pathology. He gave public lectures – demonstrations, really, in what he called his clinico-anatomic method – a mixture of careful clinical observation of patients and an investigation into the physiological abnormalities which precipitated their condition. And they were terrible conditions – tics and strange walks and anaesthesias and paralyses and ravings.’ She paused. ‘Am I boring you?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ James was only astonished that a lady might be interested in such things. ‘Please continue.’

  ‘Well, Charcot held his demonstrations in a large amphitheatre at the Salpêtrière every Friday. They were open to the public. I think, everything else apart, he wanted to show us that these strange diseases were not the product of gods and demons and wicked spirits. They were not punishments or possessions or portents, but painful illnesses eventually as treatable by medical science as any other.

  ‘In any case, I went along to a few of his lectures. I was riveted. He was a wonderful performer and the setting was almost like a theatre. Bright lights illuminated the stage. He would have assistants with him and patients, sometimes a man, but more usually a woman or two who were suffering from hysteria and he would hypnotise them and demonstrate the various phases their illness went through. First he would have his assistants touch the women in a particularly sensitive, what he called a hysterogenic, zone, which brought on the attack. They might foam at the mouth or immediately fall into a deep, a cataleptic sleep. He would then suggest certain things to them and under this hypnosis, it was extraordinary what they would do. I saw one woman completely convinced that a top hat was her baby. She rocked it, kissed it.

  ‘This first stage was followed by a stage of clownism, in which the patient went through impossible acrobatic contortions. Physical spasms, like the strange postures you see in that Breughel engraving of dancing mania. And finally came the attitudes passionelles in which the patient mimed scenes and spoke of her life.’ She stopped. ‘You are looking at me oddly, Monsieur Norton. I shock you.’

  James hadn’t realised he had reached for his pipe. He was somewhat taken aback by Marguerite’s enthusiasm, but he was also fascinated. He knew a little of what she spoke, but he had never seen it mimed so graphically. ‘No, please go on.’

  Abruptly, she threw her head back and lifted her hands to the heavens as if she were addressing her lord and master. ‘This is how I first saw Judith Arnhem. I’ll never forget it. She seemed to be invoking God, speaking to him from the midst of her desperate passion. Then she raised her fist and shook it, like some female incarnation of Job. Her hair was flying, her face agonised. And she was speaking. It struck me as odd that Charcot didn’t listen at all to what she was saying, as if what mattered most was the dramatic pose she struck. But I listened. I was near the front that day and I could hear her mumblings clearly.

  ‘She was evoking a huge conflagration, the burning of a house, the terrible heat, a death, a horribly charred body. The details were so acute that I couldn’t believe these were simply mad ravings. And she chastised God. She tore at her hair. She said she wanted to die, to burn, too, to atone for her wrongs.’

  Marguerite paused again.

  ‘Do go on, please,’ James urged.

  ‘Her pain was palpable,’ Marguerite murmured. ‘So I went to see her. Went the next day into the bowels of the hospital, not the new lecture theatre where I had the comfort of knowing a good number of the auditors, but into the midst of the pandemonium. It was both terrible and terrifying. And it was there I met Rachel Arnhem.’

  ‘She was an inmate,’ James breathed.

  Marguerite shook her head. ‘No, no, I went to see Judith. It took me some time to find her. But I refused to be deterred. I had this innocent notion that I could help her in some way. That I could alleviate her suffering. Rachel was with her. She was visiting. A frightened little girl, painfully thin with those vast tearful eyes, coming to visit her sister. My heart went out to both of them. It was only over the coming months that I was able to piece the story together.’

  In a soft voice, her manner terse now as if the facts conveyed more than enough emotion, Marguerite went on to tell him about the tragedy that had struck and splintered the Arnhem household.

  Like so many immigrant families, the Arnhem’s worked hard and all of them worked to make ends meet. After years of labouring for others, in 1890 they had amassed just enough funds to set up a small tailoring business of their own in premises outside their own lodgings. The father dealt with customers and cut the cloth and ironed, the mother and the girls sewed and looked after the younger children. They worked all hours and every day, taking in overspill from larger establishments, breaking only for the Sabbath, when this was possible.

  On that Saturday late in the autumn of ’92, Judith, the eldest sister by three years, was meant to go into the shop to finish off an urgent piece of work. She refused. She was only eighteen and she wanted a break from the four bleak walls. There was a young man she was seeing. The father was angry. The work had to be done. Judith persisted and to create peace in the family, her mother said she would go in her place and finish the work in no time. It was only right that Judith should see her friend. Rachel could look after the little ones.

  So the mother went off on her own. It was the last any of them saw of her alive. No one ever learned how it had happened, whether it was a gas lamp or a stray coal or a candle that started the conflagration, whether the mother in her exhaustion had fallen asleep over her work or been suffocated by smoke and fumes. Or indeed, whether some madman had broken in to steal, had knocked her out and then started the fire. But it was Judith who was the first on the scene. She had seen her friend, and feeling remorseful, had decided to go to the shop and help her mother out if she hadn’t yet finished the work. It was late afternoon when she reached the shop. The flames were already high, brilliant against the night, an inferno the firemen were struggling to douse. She broke past them and rushed in, only to catch a glimpse of her mother’s charred body before a brave fireman dragged her out.

  The family went to pieces after that. Arnhem blamed himself. He stopped working. He sat in a corner of the room beating his chest and
staring interminably into space. What food there was came from the kindness of neighbours. Judith, too, was ravaged by guilt. She walked the streets in a kind of desperate trance. She was probably raped on one of these walks. In any event, she soon allowed herself to be raped for money. She brought the money home and put it on the table in front of her father. It was Rachel who picked it up and bought food for them all.

  Then came Judith’s first suicide attempt. She slit her wrists. It woke Arnhem into action. He rushed her to a doctor. But the attempts continued, each more desperate than the last and Judith was unreachable, raving. Finally, at his wits’ end, frightened of the impact she was having on the little ones and on Rachel, he brought her to the Salpêtrière.

  Madame de Landois’s voice had trailed off and they sat in silence as James tried to assimilate what – even in broad brush strokes – was a terrifying story. At last, though he sensed he was outstaying his welcome, he said, ‘How do you estimate the impact of all this on Rachel – on Olympe, I mean?’

  Her abrupt laugh held a sob. ‘When I met her, Olympe was a child, but a child that had grown old before her time. She had supped too full of horrors, as your poet says. She was very quiet, unnaturally quiet. Everything was written in her eyes, all her emotions imprisoned in her stiff little form. I thought if she spoke too much she might break. Not only into tears, but into pieces. I asked her on that first day whether she would like to come home with me to take tea, perhaps. On top of everything else she looked starved.

  ‘I had to convince her, woo her, but she came eventually. It was spring. We took tea in the orangerie and I had all kinds of cakes and biscuits placed before her. She just sat, like a large doll, and stared. Stared at everything – the garden, the trees, the piano, the food. She didn’t touch anything. She was frightened of me, too, I suspect. I was like a creature from a different planet.

  ‘I noticed that her eyes kept moving back to the piano and I asked her if she played. I was babbling, you see, saying anything that came into my mind, just to try and put her at her ease. She shook her head. But then a moment later she said what were almost her first words to me, her first question in any case. She said, ‘Do you?’