The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  12

  IME WAS SUSPENDED IN PARIS. Rumors circulated. Wellington was afraid, Fin said, that moving the horses would be too much for the French people, that the horses had become a symbol. But the Venetian ambassadors were still in Paris and pressing hard for their return. They said Wellington was waiting until he had enough soldiers. Everywhere—on the bridges, on the columns, in the palaces-workmen were chiseling Napoleon’s initials from newly laid stone.

  At ten o’clock each night the lamp carriers began to fan out across the city, hailing the fiacres, caterwauling, accompanying late-night walkers through the city to their front doors, looking for more trade. Oil lamps with their swinging circles of light were passing away, Céleste said; they belonged to the old century. So did the lamp carriers and the oil merchants and the sellers of the Artraud lamps; the engineer Philippe Lebon was already lighting his Paris house and garden with gas—he had vowed to light all of Paris this way. Soon there would be no more shadows in the city. Soon there would be no more night in Paris.

  M. Lebon is in league with the enemies of France, the lamplighters, lamp carriers, and oil merchants whispered to anyone who would listen. All Paris will explode. And if they can’t blow us up, they will choke us with their fumes and black smoke.

  One night, as we sat on Lucienne’s roof, in a gully between two gables, looking down over the city, I asked Lucienne about the embalmed animals Geoffroy had brought back from Egypt. There were rumors, I said, that Cuvier stored six of them in the cellars of his museum. It was a clear night—bright stars flecked a blue-black arch of sky and even at midnight the roof tiles were still warm from the September sun. I sat behind her, my arms around her while she smoked a cigar. I kissed her neck.

  “So,” she said and laughed. She blew a single smoke ring into the night air, gray on black. “Cuvier has the mummified animals now, does he? They belong to Geoffroy. They’ve caused a lot of trouble in the Jardin. You know, when I worked with Geoffroy in Egypt, he used to be just like you—always asking questions, one after another. Now he says very little.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “An Egyptian trader took us to the Well of Birds,” she said, “just a few weeks after we arrived. In the middle of fields of melons and lettuces, piles of rubbish and old stones—all that’s left of the ancient city of Memphis—there is an entrance to an underground temple called the Well of Birds. You climb down by rope—it’s the only way in. Under the ground there are labyrinths and passageways that stretch for miles, all of them lined with thousands of mummified birds inside earthenware jars, like so many bottles of wine. They are sacred birds; each has its own priest and altars. Geoffroy bought ten of them. Then he started buying mummified cattle, cats, crocodiles, and monkeys as well, all of them at least three thousand years old. He wanted to use them to show Cuvier that species had transformed. I warned him—I told him they’d be the same. And of course, when Geoffroy did unwrap them back in Paris in front of Cuvier and all the professors and assistants here they were the same. There were no cats with wings or cattle with fins or fish with fur. So Cuvier won again. And of course, Cuvier mocked Geoffroy for months. He’s hardly published anything since.”

  “So there is some proof,” I said, “that Cuvier’s right? The mummies were the same then and now. So species haven’t transformed.” The cat sitting on the roof beside me in Paris was the same as the cat on the roof in Egypt three thousand years ago—four legs, whiskers, a long tail. It was obvious. A cat was a cat was a cat.

  “Of course they haven’t changed,” she said, “not in three thousand years. Lamarck knew that. Animal forms take much longer to change. Three thousand years is nothing. Just a blink of the eye, Lamarck told Cuvier that, but nobody listened.”

  “And how do you square that with Genesis?”

  “What do you mean, ‘square it’?”

  “Make it … fit, add up. Bring one thing in line with another.”

  “Bring one thing in line with another?” she repeated. “I don’t need to. Science isn’t about making things fit with the Bible. Genesis was written two thousand years ago by men who didn’t know what we know. They weren’t trying to explain how the world began, not scientifically. It’s a creation story. A good one. But there are others. In Egypt they say air and water, darkness and eternity joined to form a blue lotus called Ra. In Syria they say—”

  “So the Bible’s not true. Are you saying that?” I could see the pulse beating in her neck. I watched it quicken.

  “It’s always a battle with the Bible.” She sighed. “It shouldn’t be. But Lamarck’s ideas about transformism keep spreading across Europe whatever Cuvier says or does, no matter how much he insists that all species are fixed and unchanging. No matter how many times he insists there’s no proof of transformism. All the students who sit at his lectures, they go back to Hungary or Brazil or Russia and they talk.”

  “How long have you been thinking about all of this?” I asked.

  “Me? Thousands of years. It is the only interesting thing to think about. In my grandmother’s library, I read Buffon. Then Aristotle and De Maillet’s book Telliamed …. Later, when I came to Paris, I signed up for Lamarck’s lectures. That was when he first started talking about transformism—1802, 1803, I think. It was exciting—everyone was speculating about how life began. Everything seemed possible. When Daubenton gave his lecture and announced that the lion could no longer be called the king of beasts because there were no kings in nature, the crowd cheered. You could say anything then. Think anything. Not anymore.”

  Professor Lamarck, now seventy-one—the anatomy students called him “the Old One,” el Viejo—kept to himself in his house in the Jardin des Plantes, where he lived with his third wife and four of his grown children: three unmarried daughters, Rosalie, Cornélie, and Eugénie, and a deaf son, Antoine, who was also a painter. Little Aristide, Lamarck’s youngest son, had been sent away to the Charenton asylum, six miles southeast of Paris. They called him “the Aliené,” the lost one. Other than melancholy Aristide, only two of Lamarck’s children had escaped the crowded house in the Jardin: Auguste was now an important engineer in Paris; André had joined the navy during the Revolution and was stationed out in the Caribbean.

  Cuvier and his protégés sneered at Lamarck; they praised his taxonomic work while ignoring or ridiculing his transformist ideas. But while Cuvier may have called Lamarck a dreamer and a poet, Lamarck had a large and loyal following among the anatomy students. He’d been awarded a medal for bravery in the Seven Years’ War, he’d told Ramon, when he was a soldier back in the 1760s. He wasn’t going to give up what he believed, not easily. He knew how to manage a battlefield.

  “In Edinburgh no one talks about these things,” I told Lucienne. “Or at least not in public. Sometimes in the student societies, when the professors are not around, someone will talk about transmutation, one of the students who has been here to study, but—”

  “It will be the same again in Paris in a year or two,” she said. “Geoffroy is almost blind. Lamarck is old and his eyes are beginning to fail. Cuvier is winning his battles and closing down the conversation. Now the king is back, hiding behind Wellington’s soldiers. It is not a good time to be in Paris. You should have been here ten, twelve years ago. Not now.”

  I thought of what awaited me back home—the gray landscape, my father’s disapproval, and my brother’s blind faith.

  “I am glad I’m here now,” I said. “I only want to be here now.”

  Fin and Céleste teased me relentlessly about the widow Rochefide, whom they had never seen. Fin often complained that he did not see enough of me either and lamented the loss of our drinking days. He suggested that I ask the widow to join us for dinner, and one night when the excuses I gave on her behalf had grown particularly thin, I simply shrugged and said, “There is nothing I can do. I have no control over her comings and goings. What can I say?”

  “I sympathize, my friend,” Fin said, looking over at Céleste with an
exaggerated expression of adoration. “Do I have any control over Céleste? She is my master. I am her slave. What is to be done with these women? We will have to go back and marry British women, you know, if we are to have any control over our destiny.”

  “Tell me when you are ready, M. Robertson,” Céleste said, “and I will buy a ticket for you and a wedding present for your new wife. Then I might find a man for my bed who does not snore … Perhaps Mme. Rochefide thinks she is too good for us,” she added. “Perhaps she is too grand to mix with shopgirls and students.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “She’s not like that.”

  They never did guess that the tall man in the green silk jacket whom they glimpsed me walking with from time to time and whom I called M. Le Vaillant, the botanist, was actually the elusive Mme. Rochefide, nor would they have believed any of the rest of the story that I had begun to unravel—the beguiling tale that twisted out from a garden in Marseilles through prisons and guillotines to the pyramids of Egypt and the caves of the Red Sea.

  N MID-SEPTEMBER a rainstorm began out in the Atlantic and continued for several days. The HMS Northumberland, accompanied by a squadron of ships, was sailing away from Madeira toward the equator through the storm, taking a route calculated by the admiral to avoid the contending trade winds that were so variable at the equator itself. On board, the Emperor played cards with his generals under the supervision of his British guards. He complained of the treachery of Ney and of the stupidity of the American government; he called the king of Spain a fool, the emperor of Russia weak; he had praise only for Wellington. Wellington had had luck on his side, he said. “I should have died at Moscow,” he lamented, revealing his hand, “for there my glory ended.”

  Despite the rain, the Emperor would not forgo his evening walk on deck. Those one-hour walks with his two generals in torrential rain meant that the famous gray greatcoat, hanging in the cabin on its coat stand, never entirely dried out. Steam from the clothes created beads of condensation on all the windows. Napoleon talked to Las Cases of September in Paris and the roses he had brought back for Josephine from all across Europe that would now be flowering in the garden at Malmaison. I would exchange one hundred days on this infernal ship for a single hour walking in Paris at dusk, he said.

  In a small damp cabin at the other end of the ship, Countess Bertrand and Countess Montholon, with the help of a single nursemaid, tried to keep their four small children entertained: three-year-old Tristan Montholon and the three small Bertrand children, Henri, Hortense, and Napoleon. These wives of Napoleon’s exiled generals had thought, when they had agreed to accompany their husbands into exile with the Emperor, that it would mean adjusting to life on a small estate in England. Neither had imagined a rock in the ocean, the island that Napoleon continuously referred to as the Siberian wasteland of the Atlantic.

  When the British statesman had announced their destination all those weeks ago, in a letter from the British government read out in the captain’s quarters of the Bellerophon, Mme. Bertrand had tried to throw herself overboard. Now the Emperor barely spoke to her. He had no time, he said, for complaining women.

  13

  N SEPTEMBER 23, the English and French papers were full of the news of Talleyrand’s resignation and its consequences. Talleyrand, the great French statesman and Napoleon’s right-hand man, was a chameleon, one English journalist wrote, changing his skin, his clothes, his colors, to fit the politics of the day. He’d kept power through three regimes: under the king, then through the Revolution, then under Napoleon, and now he had even brokered the restoration of the king and the return of France to its pre-revolutionary borders. First a priest, then the king’s bishop, revolutionary, exile, foreign minister, grand chamberlain, a prince under Napoleon, now king maker, Talleyrand was a man in constant transformation. But even he had to go. Some said the time of chameleons and turncoats was over. But it wasn’t. Not yet.

  I was with Lucienne when the bronze horses came down three days later. Sophie had, at my request, invented a false errand that released me from the Jardin for a whole day without incurring Cuvier’s disapproval. Now we were caught up in the crowd, all swarming in one direction—toward the place du Carrousel merging into a many-headed, many-limbed tide. We were jostled, pushed, elbowed, knocked about, carried forward. I reached for Lucienne’s hand, afraid for her, but she wouldn’t give it. “I can look after myself,” she shouted in English as she disappeared into the mass of bodies, still dressed as a man, in a tailored brown velvet coat that had seen better days, white breeches, and high boots.

  The crowd stopped abruptly where the street met the entrance to the square blocked by a line of standing Prussian soldiers, like a wave breaking against a harbor wall. Beyond them, a mass of men dressed in pale-blue-and-white uniforms, a thousand foot soldiers of the Austrian army, sat or lay on the stones of the square, blocking access to the Arc.

  “We can’t get through,” Lucienne called out, catching up to me. “They’re not letting anyone past. We can’t see it from here.”

  I pushed my way through the crowd, and Lucienne followed me, until I reached the first mounted Austrian officer. As quietly as I dared, I asked permission to pass. Hearing my English voice, the officer gestured to me to join a group of foreigners gathered under a cluster of parasols.

  “Why so many soldiers?” I shouted to her. “What’s Wellington doing?”

  “It’s to keep out the Parisians. They’ve shut up the palace to protect the king. Look.” She pointed in the direction of the palace, where all the shutters were closed. “What kind of king is too frightened to face his own people and has to be protected by the Allied army?”

  In the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, people pressed up against the windows, pointing, gesticulating. Journalists from the world’s newspapers also stood in front of us in the square, their artists assembled with easels. This was a political performance. Here was proof that Napoleon was not returning. Show the French people. Pull down the horses, the chariot. The Emperor Napoleon is no more.

  Shielding my eyes from the sun, I could see the first of the four horses moving slightly as more ties were unfastened. The crowd, gathered around the perimeter of the square, groaned or gasped, I couldn’t tell which, and began to point. The bronze horse swung into the air, high above the square. My head swam. I felt a rush of blood, the sense of flight and fall, people pressing in from every side; I watched pins of lights come on across my vision and then go out. I fainted.

  When I came to, a crowd had gathered. I looked up to see heads silhouetted against a bright white sky. Lucienne had disappeared, and a man with a voice I recognized was making the crowd disperse.

  “Ah, M. Connor,” Jagot said. “You should be more careful in this sun. You need a hat.”

  “Yes,” I mumbled, allowing him to help me to my feet. “The sun is hotter than I had realized.”

  “I am glad to see you again, M. Connor,” he said, waving away the last onlookers. “It has been a long time since we last met—a month perhaps. Paris has been good to you, I think.”

  “Yes, it has, thank you,” I said, relieved that Lucienne had gotten away.

  “My men tell me you are now working in the Jardin,” he said, “and that your things—the papers, the corals, and the bones—they have come back to you. It is most unusual, you see, for stolen things to come back in such a way. There is usually a story behind such things. Is there a story, M. Connor?”

  “There is no story,” I said quickly, wondering what else Jagot’s men might have told him, what else they might have seen. “It was just a mistake,” I said. “It wasn’t a theft at all. My travel bag had been taken by another passenger—a man—not by the woman I described to you. He, the other passenger, tracked me down and returned my things. All of them.” My hands had begun to shake. I put them in my pockets.

  “Good. That is good news, monsieur. So you must come and give me the name and the address of the passenger who took your bag by mistake, the man who r
eturned your things, because that person might be able to tell me something about the woman you described seeing on the mail coach, the savant, Lucienne Bernard. I will send a man to your lodgings to take details. Perhaps I will even come myself. Good afternoon, M. Connor. Remember, you must buy a hat for this sun. À bientôt.”

  He slipped away into the crowd.

  I walked to the Turkish café on the rue de la Victoire where Lucienne and I had agreed to meet if we became separated in the crowd. But though I waited for two hours, she didn’t come. Instead I heard the clatter of wheels approaching. A number of carts flanked by Prussian cavalry and infantry made their way slowly over the cobbles. For all the world it looked as if they were coming for me. The four horses, each in a separate cart, lying on its side on a straw base, bronzed hooves pawing the air, passed alongside me, so close that I could see into their eyes—eyes that had looked down on Rome, Constantinople, and Venice, for hundreds of years. For them I was nothing, of no significance.

  Now I wondered if Jagot’s apparent disappearance for almost a month had been engineered to make me—us—feel complacent. The stakes were high. I thought of what Manon had said about Coignard’s body being found in the Seine with no hands or feet. Jagot had been following Coignard that day in the fiacre; Manon had said that Coignard’s tortured body had been thrown into the Seine as a warning to others on Jagot’s list. How much more proof did I need of the danger we were all in?

  Whatever I had chosen to believe, Jagot was not a man to abandon his prey. He was just taking his time. For a month I had been distracted, enraptured by Lucienne and by my work at the Jardin. But that was no justification for failing to protect her. While I had been blinded, Jagot’s men had continued to watch and to file their reports. The net was closing in.

  I had to get Lucienne out of Paris.