The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  If only we’d known. I had traded the coral fossils for five of her days. If I hadn’t been enraptured, if she hadn’t wanted to see the Venetian horses’ flight from the Arc, if Jagot’s man hadn’t followed me to the atelier as she had suspected he would … she might have gone. And she might have gotten away.

  I knew there would be no hiding anything from Fin. I had not slept in my bed that night, and for Fin that would mean only one thing. I would have to have a story prepared. When I let myself back into the lodgings the following evening, he was ready for me. He had come home early from the hospital, tidied the rooms, and then arranged himself on the chaise longue with a medical textbook. Despite his overwhelming curiosity, Fin had clearly intended to maintain, at least to start with, an apparently casual indifference to my reappearance. He failed.

  “Bonsoir, M. Connor,” he said, his eyes scrutinizing me over the top of the book.

  “Bonsoir, M. Robertson,” I replied. “You’re home early.”

  “And you’re home late, my friend, by a small matter of an entire night.”

  “It’s a fine evening out there. I passed a group of Prussian soldiers swimming under the Petit Pont, and there were circus performers on the quai. We should go out.”

  “Where have you been?” he asked.

  “I stopped off at the bathhouse on the river on the way home.”

  “I mean before that.”

  “Lunch. Before that, breakfast at the café on the rue de Rivoli. I had soup and cheese and half a loaf of bread. Then I went to the barbers in that little alleyway near the Tuileries this afternoon and had my hair cut.”

  “Connor, I am losing my patience. You didn’t come home last night.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I stayed somewhere else.”

  “Mon Dieu. So Daniel Connor finally got lucky? Did you find a girl who was good enough for you? Will you see her again? What does she look like—blond, brunette, tall, short?”

  “I’m going to dress for dinner,” I said. “Then I think we had better go out. We have some celebrating to do.”

  I placed the wooden box containing the mammoth bone and the travel bag on the table, stepped into the bedroom, and closed the door.

  A few moments later he called out, “Mon diable! Is this what I think it is? It’s a bloody mammoth bone. Merde. Did you find her as well? The beautiful thief? And she just gave it all back to you? Just like that? You must have been good.”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said, grateful that he couldn’t see the flush on my face. “Fin, you know what this means?”

  “I do indeed. Daniel Connor got lucky. Mon diable—it’s about time.”

  “It means I’m back in the Jardin. It means I’m in time. I told Cuvier I’d start work at the end of August. I can now. I can start over—”

  “Weren’t there other specimens apart from the mammoth bone and the manuscript?” Fin asked. “Fossils?”

  “Yes, but I can find a way of explaining those. Look, Fin. This means I can start work at the Jardin. I will have money. I can pay the rent. I don’t have to go home. I can stay in Paris.”

  “And her? Tell me about her—immédiatement. There is no time to lose. Fin is curious. Fin must not be kept waiting.”

  I had composed a story that would protect both Fin and Lucienne if Jagot came by asking questions. So as we walked toward the first bar, the sky fading from dark blue to pink on the horizon, the smell of garlic and spices heavy on the air, I told Fin that my thief wasn’t a thief at all but a widow called Mme. Rochefide—Victorine—and that she had taken my luggage by accident. I had seen her at the Palais Royal that afternoon, and she had taken me back to her lodgings to return my belongings and eventually one thing had led to another. Well, it was almost true. I felt slightly ashamed at the ease with which I could turn the philosopher-thief into a mysterious widow with a life story all of her own. Now all I had to do, I thought, was remember it.

  “It was your first time, wasn’t it, Connor?” Fin said drunkenly, sometime in the early hours of the morning, propped against a seat in the Café des Deux Chats. “That’s something to drink to. You know there’s no shame in that. I’ll tell you a secret—Céleste was my first too … my first and only. There are not many people I would admit that to, you know. But you, my friend …”

  He was asleep before he had finished the sentence.

  Two days later I found Lucienne sitting on the steps of the Louvre, reading a newspaper, waiting for me. I stood nearby in the shadows watching her, remembering. I watched her for as long as I dared, my heart beating, sure she would disappear again, or turn into something with wings and fly up to circle the square.

  The streets of Paris were hot and dusty; foreigners in holiday spirits made their way to the gallery to see the latest gaps in the walls. Everyone was talking. Wellington’s name was whispered everywhere. Defeating Napoleon at Waterloo had made him a kind of god. Now he had become the puppet master who controlled the strings in Paris. They said he had given the authorization for the Prussian army to enter the Louvre. Wellington was playing it slow, as diplomatically as he could, but he was lighting matches over a powder keg, the English papers said, sending soldiers into the Louvre like that.

  The Parisians were incensed. These trophies Napoleon had brought back to Paris were for them, for France. They were theirs: their paintings, their Venetian horses, their sculptures. They belonged to Paris. And of course, everyone still half believed that Napoleon would stroll back into Paris as if nothing had happened and send all the ambassadors and diplomats and soldiers packing.

  That day, against the stone steps, Lucienne was only a man, in a gray-green coat, slightly worn, brown breeches, and boots. This masquerade of hers was carefully put together, I thought, so that she would not stand out. She looked like a thousand artists or writers in Paris. She wore her hair falling straight around her face, in the way I had seen artists do. Would I have noticed, I wondered, if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t uncoiled her in candlelight? Would I have been able to pick her out from a crowd in a coffeehouse or bar, nudge my companion, and say: That is a woman dressed as a man. Almost certainly not. She used no tricks. There was no false hair. She was only a very tall woman dressed as a man, and thus, understood to be so. And she was only one of many masqueraders in Paris, women who passed as men, men who passed as women, thieves turned police agents, thieves turned counts.

  “Imagine the crowds there must have been here in the square,” she said, pointing down the place du Carrousel to where the four bronze horses made black muscular shapes against the sky on top of the Arc De Triomphe. “It’s seventeen years since they brought the horses to Paris—on carts in a long procession, flanked by animals from the menagerie—ostriches, camels, gazelles, and vultures—soldiers and a military band.”

  “You saw it?” My shoulder brushed against hers. We both sat looking down the street to the Arc, its stone gleaming in the sun after two days of rain.

  “No. I was in Egypt,” she said. “I read about it in the French papers there.”

  “You went to Egypt?” I heard the incredulity in my voice, my own boyish awe and envy. “In Napoleon’s campaign?”

  Napoleon had taken savants with him to Egypt—archaeologists, botanists, astronomers, doctors, and engineers. I knew that. He took them with him so that they might study Egypt and bring ancient knowledge back to France. That story of Napoleon and his savants and soldiers in Egypt was glorious to me. It seemed a uniquely imperial act. Jameson had read the newspaper descriptions of the expedition out to us in a lecture, describing with transparent envy the boatloads of scientific equipment and books that had accompanied the 167 savants. And for me there had been two men in particular who held my attention—Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Marie Jules Savigny. Geoffroy, then just twenty-six and already a professor at the Jardin des Plantes, was put in charge of all the vertebrate investigations, and Savigny, only twenty-one, the invertebrates.

  “I was in Egypt when the horses came to
Paris,” Lucienne said, “yes, at the end of July 1798. I went out as one of Geoffroy’s assistants. They made us wear uniforms. It was incredibly hot.”

  “They made women wear uniforms?”

  “I went as a man, of course,” she said, laughing. “They wouldn’t let women go to Egypt except as camp followers and I didn’t want to be a camp follower.” I pictured bright uniforms against white sand, thousands of men and boys a long way from home. Yes, I could imagine her there in Cairo’s streets, a French soldier moving through crowds of Mamluks, camels, and dancing girls.

  “Geoffroy was collecting new species of fish,” she said. “So I went out with the fishermen on the coasts and rivers, or visited the fish stalls of remote fishing villages. Sharks, rays, puffer fish, lungfish, I brought them all back to Geoffroy, packed in cases of ice and straw. You can’t imagine all the different fish out there where the desert meets the fertile land, and fresh water and seawater join.”

  “What was it like working with Geoffroy? Is he as brilliant as they say?”

  “It was frustrating more than anything,” she said. “He worked so hard he made himself ill. He found a fish in the waters of the Nile that he decided was a chalnon manquant—how do you say that in English?”

  “A missing link,” I said. “A fish?”

  “When Geoffroy dissected it, he found bronchioles that looked like the lungs of a human. It changed everything for him. It made him see that we’ve all come from one form. I kept telling him it was the Red Sea corals we should be looking at. Further back. They’re the key, Geoffroy, I’d say, not the fish. But he wouldn’t listen. He could not see anything beyond that fish of his, not even when the British were camped right outside Alexandria.”

  Now, as well as the drawings and descriptions of the Egyptian campaign I had seen or read in Jameson’s yellowing newspapers, I saw another world out there, one in which men quarreled over microscopes in brightly lit rooms with shelves of glass jars full of dead sea creatures. And corals in a red sea. I wasn’t stupid. I knew, even then, that the Red Sea wasn’t red, but that’s what I saw when I closed my eyes: tentacled cream-and pink-tipped corals swaying in red water. And I saw her in the water among them, her hair undulating like sea snakes, her skin bare like the pictures of the half-naked Japanese pearl divers I had seen, diving like birds of prey.

  “Look, see the soldiers over there, looking up,” she said. “They’re wondering how to take the horses down.” A group of English soldiers on the other side of the square were looking up at the Arc and pointing. “Just a few more days perhaps.”

  “So Napoleon’s war trophies will go back to Venice, where they belong,” I said.

  “They’ve been war trophies for a thousand years, at least,” she said. “Passed back and forth between emperors and invaders. Napoleon took them from Venice but before that the Venetians stole them from Constantinople. And before that the emperor Constantine took them from Rome, and the Romans had stolen them, or copied them, from the Greeks. So where should they go back to? Venice or Constantinople or Greece? Only they know where they began.”

  “They’re made of bronze,” I said. “They can’t know anything.”

  “You are so literal, M. Connor,” she said, laughing. “Where is your imagination?”

  I wondered what we must look like—two men sitting together under the Arc looking up. We must have looked like brothers or friends. But we were lovers. I wanted to touch her again. The memory of her body tormented me.

  “Where is Jagot’s man today?” she asked suddenly, looking up and down the street.

  “He’s gone,” I said, trying not to show my satisfaction. “I lost him.”

  “No one loses one of Jagot’s men,” she said. “Trust me. Jagot must have called off his surveillance for some reason … I wonder what that means.” She hesitated, calculating. “That will make things easier,” she said. “For the moment. Until I get out of Paris. What will you do now that you have your things back?”

  “I’ve written to Cuvier and sent him the letters from Jameson. He wrote back yesterday. It was easy. I have an appointment with him at three o’clock on Monday, and then on Tuesday I start work. I wish it was sooner. There are so many things I want to discuss with him.”

  “A week today,” she said. “Bon. A new beginning for Daniel Connor. Yes, that is good. Where will you work? For how long?”

  “Seven hours a day. Monday to Saturday. In the Museum of Comparative Anatomy. I have my own desk. I am to go to Cuvier’s own study for the appointment. He writes that he is overwhelmed with the work for his new book.”

  “Bon,” she said. “That’s very good. You are lucky. You will learn many things in Cuvier’s house.”

  “He is writing a catalogue of the whole animal kingdom,” I said, “which will include a description of every species in the world. No wonder he is overwhelmed. It’s the most ambitious project since Buffon’s Historie Naturelle. Just think—all the species on earth will be collected in those pages.” It thrilled me to imagine my own name listed among others on the title page of one of those volumes.

  “All the species that have been discovered,” she said. “That is not the same as all the species on earth. It seems a strange thing to be cataloguing species when there are so many important questions to be answered—like how life began or why species change. Cuvier still wants to prove that species are fixed.”

  “I am to work on the bird volume,” I said, slightly offended by her disparagement of Cuvier’s work. “That is where I will begin. With the birds. The volume is progressing, but it is behind schedule, apparently. He needs more assistants.” Although I was beginning to question everything I had ever known, even the definition of species, the full implications of transformism still alarmed me. Without belief in order and structure and providence, where would we be? The imagined godlessness of such a world frightened me.

  “And by the time you begin your work with the Baron,” she said, “I will be back in my study in Italy, among my books and papers.”

  “The end of the summer,” I said. In an instant, thinking of the loss of her, what had seemed important dulled into insignificance. “Stay in Paris till the end of the summer. Till the leaves have fallen. Jagot can’t find you. He has too much to do and too few men. You are not in danger now.”

  And Lucienne smiled that slow smile of hers that said she knew better. But she promised to stay just a little longer, and in that last week before my work began in the Jardin, as the days shortened and the gardeners tended late-summer roses, she showed me the Paris she remembered—her Paris: rooftops, hidden coffee shops and bars by the river, traiteurs that sold the best fish in Paris for a few sous, abandoned pleasure grounds and old palaces. One afternoon we lay in the bottom of a boat under a willow tree for hours in the sun talking about the circulation of the blood, spontaneous generation, and the colors of the corals on the seabed off the coast of Egypt.

  Fin and Céleste never tired of asking me about Mme. Rochefide, the beautiful widow—what she wore, whom she saw, what she did. When I could, I made things up, though doing so made me feel uncomfortable. I’d never been much good at lying. But I had no choice. I was always vague about the street on which she lived. Eventually, Fin began to goad me, persuaded by my evasiveness, saying that Mme. Rochefide was not a widow after all, and that there must be a jealous husband waiting in the wings.

  10

  N AUGUST 27, in a new sky-blue coat I had bought for the occasion, I stood outside Cuvier’s house in the Jardin, clutching the mammoth bone in its case and the manuscript, waiting for the bells to sound out the hour of my appointment. All the shutters were closed against the hot afternoon sun. A family of French visitors had laid white tablecloths across picnic tables in the shade of the plane trees. Women in straw bonnets passed children plates of small cakes and poured glasses of milk from earthenware jugs. Beyond them and beyond the latticework wooden fence that surrounded all the enclosures in the Jardin, a gardener pruned white roses.


  The woman who opened the door introduced herself as Cuvier’s stepdaughter, Sophie Duvaucel, a tall, handsome, but tired-looking young woman who worked as Cuvier’s assistant and one of his many illustrators. From the hallway I glimpsed a series of rooms with polished floorboards, full of books, vases of flowers, and richly colored rugs.

  She took me up a flight of stairs. I followed her through a long library broken up into a suite of rooms, each containing works on a single subject—osteology, law, ornithology—and then to the door of Cuvier’s studio. This was his famous sanctum sanctorum where he wrote his books and thought his thoughts and solved the puzzles of time and origins.

  “No one is allowed in here,” Sophie whispered as she pushed the heavy door open, “except by invitation. Not even the aide-naturalistes.”

  The room—dark and shuttered and with eleven desks arranged around the walls—was scattered with bones, books, and papers. Cuvier sat behind his desk like an eastern sultan receiving a dusty foreign envoy in his inner chamber. Yes, I had traveled a long way, I thought, with these gifts. More than he could know.

  It was a little hard to breathe.

  Cuvier was impressive: his bulk, his bearing, his clothes, even his head of thick, loose curls, flecked with gray. He had the bearing of a man of state; his dark blue tailcoat was decorated with medals.

  If the short welcome speech seemed rehearsed, I did not mind, but I did mind the fact that in the full ten-minute interview, Cuvier barely looked at me. I knew I was one of many scores of aide-naturalistes who had stood where I was now standing, but I had persuaded myself that, as a protégé of Jameson, as the Edinburgh student specially selected and commended most highly for his skills of dissection and observation, who had been sent bearing gifts for the great French professor, I would be regarded as a particularly important arrival. It seemed it was not so. Cuvier was distracted, a little impatient, although he managed a certain degree of warmth in his welcome and in his handshake. He spoke in French with a pronounced German accent. His voice was tight, a little constricted, a small voice for such a big man.