The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  Fragments of conversation in several languages reached us from men and women crossing and recrossing the space, the sound of shoes on marble, the keys of a guard, the creak of a door. Somewhere far away, a gunshot.

  “I have money,” I said.

  She laughed. “I don’t want your money.” I watched the guard begin his walk down the gallery.

  “I’m going to have you arrested,” I said, grabbing her arm. “I shall call the guard.”

  “And what will you say to the guard?” she said, her face suddenly close to mine. “How will you prove that I am the woman you saw in the dark on the mail coach? I will deny it of course. My French is better than yours, and I have excellent identity papers. It’s all about evidence, you see. I shall tell the guard that you accosted me. That you are a little drunk. That I have never seen you before. I think you had better take your hand off my arm.”

  “I will take you myself to the Bureau de la Sûreté.”

  “Take me?” Her black eyes flashed. “You propose to take me by force to the Bureau?” she whispered. “Do you think a man like you can force a woman like me to go anywhere and not be stopped? If I call out, people will be concerned for my safety. It is quite a distance from here to the Île de la Cité.”

  She had paralyzed me a second time, I thought, like a wasp with its prey. I let go of her arm. I had stepped into a spell, across a threshold. Curiosity had prevented me from calling out when I first saw her, and the delay had been critical. Her talk. Her voice. I had wanted her to talk to me. I began to plead like a child.

  “Yes, yes, I will give them back to you,” she said, “but come. Walk this way. I want to show you something. If you have time, of course, M. Connor. I know you are in a great hurry.”

  She turned away from the Laocoön toward the door to the Long Gallery, where scores of fashionably dressed visitors crowded in front of paintings by Veronese, Titian, Rubens, and Raphael. We walked through arches of light falling slantways from the tall windows onto the marble floor, easing our way between groups, slipping in and out of hushed conversations. I watched her black slippers appear and disappear beneath the blue silk drapery of her skirts, offering the occasional glimpse of white lace.

  “Taking me to the Bureau will not get your things back. That will do nothing for you. And it will be bad for me. I think you had better sit down, Daniel. You are pale.” She gestured to a marble seat in an alcove. I sat down, my hands and legs shaking. She took the seat next to me.

  “Jameson will never trust me with anything again,” I said. “Without those things I have no job, nothing…”

  She didn’t respond. She was watching a woman dressed in gray who was sitting nearby. Her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown back from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek. Her white bonnet made a halo around her braided dark brown hair. She was not looking at the paintings; her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight that fell across the floor.

  “What would you have me do?” I asked.

  “You need do nothing now. I wanted to show you the Caravaggio boy, that’s all,” she said. “Look. There he is.” She gestured up to a painted boy. “He is the image of you. See? The hair. The eyes. The flushed face. He has just stolen something for himself, don’t you think? Look at the pleasure in his face. As if he has lost his virtue for the first time.” She turned to look at me and said, “First you are pale, and now you are flushed.”

  “I am angry…”

  “You will have to trust me, I think.”

  “What do you want?”

  She hesitated for a moment and then said quietly, “I need something from you. There is something that only you can get for me.”

  “I won’t make deals with a thief.”

  “No,” she said, and sighed, “I didn’t think you would.”

  The bells of Notre Dame struck out across the city, marking four o’clock.

  “I must go now,” she said, standing. “I will keep your papers and your bones for the moment. Then in a few days I will come and find you and explain. Wait for me, Daniel Connor. I will bring your things back. I promise you that. And then perhaps you will do something for me.”

  And, yes, I let her walk away. Some unaccountable instinct made me trust her. I watched her disappear down into another hole in the city, back into the shadows.

  I said nothing to Fin that night; I did not return to the Bureau and ask for Jagot. I kept my secret, biding my time, conscious that I was tied to this woman by an invisible thread and that I was already complicit in something I did not understand.

  I walked back to the Caravaggio boy that afternoon. From high on the crowded wall he stared down at me, his face knowing, goading me, his pleasure in his own transgression palpable. What had she seen there in the face of that painted boy that she could also see in me?

  That night I dreamed of Laocoön. I was entangled in the coils of the snakes, but they were flesh, not marble. They were in my mouth and around my ankles, so that I couldn’t stand. And somewhere in a darkened and empty Louvre, where Titian women walked and Caravaggio boys took off their clothes, a seated woman in a blue satin dress leaned toward me and said, “Daniel, I have a confession to make. All this time we have been talking, I have wanted to kiss you. There is something about your mouth, I think, that makes me want to … kiss you.”

  I woke and sat up, sweating, shaking, aroused, and saw Fin sleeping there on the pallet bed I had made up for him on the other side of the room, in the moonlight. He was breathing heavily, lying on his back, sprawled, as if all those long and heavy limbs of his had fallen from some great height. I dressed and took myself out into the Paris night and walked, through labyrinths and alleyways and in and out of the lost colonnades and stone staircases of imagined great universities, until I no longer wanted to kiss her back.

  5

  HE FOLLOWING DAY the sun disappeared and a gray sky settled over the city. The concierge brought me a package that had been delivered to the hotel that morning. Inside, an unsigned note said only: I have been called away. I will write again in a few days. Wait for me. She knew where I lived, then. The package also contained an ornate shaving mirror, considerably bigger than my own, and a copy of Rousseau’s Confessions.

  She was no longer on the map. But, I was sure, my papers and the specimens were. Somewhere in a hotel room or atelier in the city. Was she watching me now? I wondered as I folded up her letter and put it away. I walked to the window and looked down into the street: children playing with ninepins; the fruit stall on the corner and the lemonade stand. No thief. No woman with a false name looking up, waiting for me to come down.

  I bought myself a little time that day, sending Cuvier, under Fin’s direction, a short formal letter, pleading illness to explain the delay. I told Cuvier that as a consequence of my illness—about which I was vague—a short period of convalescence would be necessary before I took up my position. I petitioned his tolerance. I would, I promised, be with him by the last week in August. I also wrote once to my father, assuring him that all was well and that I was taking care of myself, and extolling the virtues and beauties of the city.

  I told no one about my encounter with Lucienne Bernard in the Louvre. Despite Jagot’s revelation of her criminal life, I had persuaded myself that her reappearance depended, at least for now, on my silence, patience, and discretion. I gave her three weeks. After that, I determined, I would resign my position at the Jardin and return to England.

  On July 29, six days after I had arrived in Paris, Fin and I moved into the new lodgings on the top floor of the hotel next door, where, beyond the pigeons who occupied the window ledge, you could see the turrets of Notre Dame. The concierge told us not to feed the birds, but we gave them our stale bread just the same, and so our flock became a feathered multitude, pushing and shoving one another behind the cracked glass. In the afternoons the light seemed to have feathers in it.

  We found furniture at the flea markets to supplement what was pro
vided by the concierge: old pieces that had seen better days. I bought two chairs, their gilt flaking off, a desk with a missing drawer, and a mahogany table gouged along its sides, which we covered with an old velvet curtain and stacked with our growing library of books and my microscope. We bought linen, worn but still white and stiff, which we threw across the horsehair mattresses. Fin spent his allowance on a chaise longue in purple velvet, an antique glassware set, and an inlaid cupboard to store wine. I wrote all the expenses down in my notebook and tried not to think about money.

  This shifting, edgeless life of ours was quite unlike any I had known. I had been used to austerity. Now, if we wanted to preserve candles, we went to the Palais Royal. Wine was cheap, and there was entertainment on every street corner. I preserved what I could of my previous ways, reading through the volumes of anatomy books Fin owned, but any routine I established was quickly eroded by Fin’s sudden impulses and whims. The lack of order alarmed me at first, but I told myself it would all fall back into place once I had taken up my desk at the Jardin des Plantes. This was an in-between time. It did not need to be accounted for. I had only to wait.

  At night we watched the occupants in the building opposite move about in their candle- and lamp-lit boxes behind frayed curtains—other students like us bent low over desks piled with books, an ancient violinist who played what sounded like Russian Gypsy music from eleven at night until well past midnight, two young women who hung their underwear from their balcony and waved to us as they did so. Fin called them les dames aux sous-vêtements.

  “Now if we can find a few women, we can have our very own salon,” Fin said, admiring the view, waving back to les dames. “You can’t have a salon without women in Paris. It’s too civilized otherwise, much too tame. How about Wednesdays at midnight? We’ll have to think of a signature, something to make our salon different. Some stuffed animals and a few skins might do it. Then we can call ourselves the Salon of Dead Things—it sounds much better in French: le Salon de nécrologie. I will invite Mme. de Staël to join us. She’s moved into a house only a few streets away, apparently, back in Paris from England at last; though she’s very old now, they say she talks as well as she ever did. She’ll be here at the drop of a hat, of course, once she knows she has such illustrious neighbors, once she knows who we are.”

  “Who are we?” I said, “that Mme. de Staël should want to call on us?”

  “L’Amputator and l’Homme qui a perdu ses choses,” he said. “You know, I think I will write a little poetry today. Poetry from the Salon of Dead Things.”

  While I waited for Lucienne Bernard’s return, the days swung into grooves, filled with domestic pleasures. Early in the morning, before he left for the hospitals, Fin bought bread and cheese and fruit—grapes, figs, apples grown in country orchards—from the stalls at the end of the street. I kept the rooms tidy and carried our dirty clothes to the laundress, collecting them again a few days later. I read all day, studying, and taking notes from books borrowed for me by Fin’s friends from the library in the Jardin des Plantes, books and geological and zoological papers by Cuvier, to improve my French, so that when the papers and parcels had been returned, I would be ready to engage in informed conversation with the great man. I prepared and honed the questions I wanted to ask him about homologies and extinction. And in the afternoons, in the cafés along the Left Bank, I read Lucienne Bernards copy of Rousseau’s Confessions. Her penciled annotations hung around the margins of every page.

  A few days after we moved in, Fin put up some shelves to hold the wax anatomical models he had bought cheaply when the wax model maker’s shop closed down and for the scratched glass domes of the stuffed curlew and fox he had bought from the flea market. Now le Salon de nécrologie was open for visitors, he announced, draping a gold cloth across a life-sized torso.

  Several of the anatomy students Fin brought back to our rooms that first night were students of Lamarck, the transformist professor at the Jardin des Plantes. Francisco Evangelista and Louis Ramon were zealots and reformists; they called themselves the “advance guard of the people.” Lamarck’s ideas about species shaped and defined their politics. Simple forms of life, Lamarck claimed, were being created continuously all the time by spontaneous generation—spores, germs, flecks, maggots crawling out of mud or soil or pond water. Over thousands or millions of years, as they adapted to their habitats, growing a longer neck here to reach for higher leaves or losing a no-longer-needed leg there, these simple organisms became complex animals—maggot became fish, fish became lizard, lizard became mammal, mammal became man. Everything was improving, Lamarck claimed. Striving toward perfection. And for Fin’s friends this meant the principles of the Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity, and the overturning of the authority of the priests and the kings—were enshrined in natures laws. And of course, in Lamarck’s world life on earth had been established over a much longer period of time than the story the Bible told, immeasurably longer.

  “Imagine an arm,” Ramon said, slightly drunk, stretching out his own arm. “According to the priests, human history starts out with Adam and Eve in the garden up here on the shoulder and reaches down to the tip of the finger—the present—where you are now. Here’s Herodotus near the shoulder, and here’s Napoleon down toward the end of the index finger. But the real truth is that all human history can be contained on a single fingernail. All of this, all of this from the shoulder down to the fingernail here, is prehuman history. So now you have to look for Herodotus and Napoleon with a microscope. And us, well, where are we in all of that abyss of time, and where is now? Time doesn’t stop for us. La marche.”

  La marche. Lamarck’s slogan. It meant forward movement. March. Walk. It even sounded like him: la marche; la mark. For the anatomy students like Ramon and Evangelista, this idea explained everything. La marche meant throwing off the past, marching forward.

  While the others talked of transformism, Céleste, Fin’s girl, talked to me about Rousseau. She sat curled into the purple chaise longue under the shelf of wax heads, sweeping back her long blond hair, which was always escaping from the knot she tied at the back of her head. “There may be a new king back on the throne of France,” she said, “and the priests may be buying new robes, but they can’t simply put everything back the way it was. There’s a new spirit in Paris. They will try to pacify it, but it will be back. You will see, this isn’t the end yet. Paris hasn’t had the last word.”

  For the anatomy students who came to Fin’s salon that night, Cuvier was considered clever, even brilliant, but wrong; he was a conservative protector of the old order. In his repudiation and mockery of Lamarck’s transformist ideas, Ramon said, Cuvier was maintaining the status quo, reinforcing the old values. In stressing that animal species were hierarchical and fixed, he was talking about social hierarchies, they said; he was really saying everyone had his place in society and should stay there. For Fin’s friends, Lamarck’s world of change and flux and progress was revolutionary, a world of horizontals and possibilities, whereas Cuvier’s was a world of fixed and vertical hierarchies. Politically, they were absolutely opposed ways of seeing.

  Despite my loyalty to Cuvier, or perhaps because of it, I kept my own counsel; I hedged around the subject of transformism when asked for an opinion. Besides, I told myself, my French was not yet good enough for me to hold my own in such heated and fast-moving arguments. I would only look a fool. I resolved to watch and learn. Know your opponent, Jameson used to say at the student debating societies. Understand the way he thinks.

  “It’s what’s in front of us that matters,” Céleste said, looking at Fin, her eyebrows raised in that way she had. “If we stick with the fathers, the autocrats, the husbands, the priests—all of you men who want to keep the past at the center of everything because it suits you—if we listen and obey, if we do everything exactly as our fathers tell us, then we’re acting against nature. That’s why the Revolution must go on. It must not be allowed to stop.”

  “Trans
formism is an act of dethronement,” Ramon said. “A bloody, brilliant dethronement of man. And once man is dethroned, we’re just one more organism among all those others. Larger and more powerful, yes, but it’s always the small organisms that make the long-term difference. The people will make the future, not the kings anymore.”

  “Lamarck teaches that?” I said. “Lamarck is a republican?”

  “Of course not. He’s only interested in science, not politics, but if you think about it, it’s brilliant. If you accept the principles of transformism, you have to think differently, put yourself in a different kind of picture—one where everything’s moving and changing, where there is no high or low. La marche is a political liberation, not purely a scientific one. And Céleste is right—we have to burn the old books. Only then can we step into the future.”

  I had overheard fragments of conversations about transformism in the coffeehouses and taverns of Edinburgh, where the medical students talked politics. Most of us had read that chapter in Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia in which he claimed that species had started out as aquatic filaments, but Erasmus Darwin was mostly ridiculed by the students in Edinburgh; there was a whole set of jokes about whether we had descended from cabbages or oysters.

  In Paris they called all of this transformism. In Edinburgh it was transmutation or sometimes the development hypothesis. For Jameson it was heresy. And for Cuvier, it was nonsense. Fin’s friends talked openly about transformism, and rationally, not speculatively or apologetically, but as if their hypothesis was beyond question. They—the heretics and infidels of Fin’s salon—now fascinated me.

  Jagot’s one-armed man in his dirty coat came and went. Sometimes I glimpsed him at the corner when I left the house in the mornings. Sometimes when I looked down on the street at night watching for the arrival of Fin’s friends, I could see the gray shape of him in the alleyway opposite.