The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  For Professor Cuvier, pacing in his studio in the museum, the hands of the clocks seemed to be moving faster than usual. A Dutch professor of medicine and chemistry and the rector of the University of Leiden, M. Sebald Justinus Brugmans, was on the road to Paris, sent on ambassadorial duties by the newly reinstated stadtholder of Holland. Somewhere on the outskirts of Belgium, Brugmans had stopped to see the battlefield of Waterloo, and in his bed in the inn on the road from Waterloo to Paris, he was reading through his notes, preparing for his meeting with Wellington.

  Brugmans had been sent to Paris to reclaim the world-famous collection of the Dutch stadtholder, requisitioned by Napoleon when he captured Holland. It had been transported in 222 cases carried on 103 wagons, then shipped by barge from The Hague along the North Sea coast and down the Seine into Paris. The cases were filled with rare books, specimens, scientific instruments, rocks, and the complete skeletons of a fifteen-foot giraffe, an orangutan, and a hippopotamus.

  These specimens—thousands of rare fossils, minerals, bones, shells, and crystals—now filled the shelves of the museums of the Jardin. The stadtholders’ collection was now Cuvier’s collection. Brugmans was coming to Paris for restitution. He was patient; as a young man he had written a dissertation on the effect of rain on plants, and he had spent long hours tapping the barometer and waiting for rain. That experience would stand him in good stead for the waiting game he was to play in Paris in 1815.

  In his house in the Jardin, the Baron Cuvier, sleepless, in a purple robe, paced his studio trying to think of what terms he could offer Brugmans, trying to think of ways to persuade the Dutch professor and Wellington that those objects must stay in the Jardin. Without those thousands of objects from the stadholders’ collection, the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, he would say—indeed all the museums of the Jardin—would be nothing. What he knew all too well was that without the stadtholders’ collection Cuvier would be nothing.

  In his house on the quai Voltaire, the director of the Louvre, Dominique-Vivant Denon, the man they called “Napoleon’s eye,” the man who had personally drawn up the list of artifacts to be taken from the great museums and galleries of Europe, was overseeing his men, who in some haste were packing up a series of valuable paintings and objects. Time was running out for Denon. That day Wellington had asked him to account for a series of objects listed as stolen that were still unaccounted for—unaccounted for because Denon had made them disappear from the Louvre into his own cellar: a Caravaggio painting, Egyptian artifacts, a Titian drawing, and a sixteenth-century cabinet of curiosities called the Montserrat Cabinet. And now that Wellington was coming to the quai Voltaire, these objects needed to disappear even deeper into Paris. Completely beyond sight. But Denon had a plan.

  14

  ELPHINE HAS ASKED TO SEE YOU, M. Connor,” Lucienne said the following morning, a Sunday, when I finally woke and went to find her writing at the table among the corals, in her blue silk dressing gown. “She writes to thank you for the figurine of Napoleon you sent her last week. She says it is a good likeness but a little too stout. Would you like to visit her with me? If you have time—that is, unless you would like to sleep some more.”

  Of … of course,” I stuttered. This was the day I had resolved to urge her departure. Although I had tried several times the night before, she had changed the subject, and now I was wary of telling her about the conversations I had had with Jagot—the accusations and the threats. “Yes, of course I’d like to go,” I said. “But I wish you’d warned me. I was thinking about one of those little wooden boats they sell in the Luxembourg Gardens. I was going to buy one and ask you to take it to her.”

  “She’d prefer some accurate news of Napoleon to one of your boats, I think,” Lucienne said, pulling on her shirt and trousers. “What the nuns tell Delphine about the Emperor is always distorted by rumor. Manon took her a map and some pins so that she can trace where he is on his journey. She has that on her wall. I must remind her to pack it into her luggage.”

  “Lucienne,” I began. “You must be especially careful. I think Jagot may be closer than you think.” It was too vague, but it was a start.

  “Jagot won’t move yet,” she said. “He cant. He’s waiting. Manon is going to take Delphine back to Italy, and I will follow next week. I have my ticket. But there are a few things I have to finish in Paris first. Newspapers,” she said. “Remind me to buy some newspapers so I can tell Delphine about the Emperor’s journey. The ship crossed the equator, they say, two or three days ago. He’s unlikely to be rescued now. But I can’t tell Delphine that. She is convinced the Americans will capture the Northumberland and crown him Emperor of America.”

  Lucienne was wrapping a long, narrow object in brown paper and tying it with string. “I have an errand to run,” she said. “And I want to show you a new place that won’t be in your guidebook.” Although I knew she had to go, I could hardly meet her eye.

  A few moments later she said, “It’s a week, Daniel. A whole week more. Please don’t look so dejected. I have already stayed a month longer than I had planned to. Seeing Jagot yesterday, like that in the crowd. So close. That worried me.”

  “But shouldn’t you go immediately?” I asked, relieved that I might not need to tell her about my conversations at all. “He is so close. He could find you at any moment. Look what happened to Coignard.”

  “A week,” she said. “I need a week. Manon is already packed. I know what I’m doing.”

  The air was cool by the river, the trees beginning to lose their leaves after the heat of the summer months; in the wind the leaves, browned, curled, and desiccated, scurried along the pavement, hissing, scraping—the sound of winter approaching. In a strange way it reminded me of home, of the autumn landscapes of Derbyshire. The Daniel who had walked those hills with his notebook and geological hammer seemed a stranger to me now. That Daniel could never have imagined what it was to be so tangled up with love and anticipated loss.

  Lucienne, dressed in a long green velvet jacket with a high collar and white cravat, sand-colored breeches, and boots, walked fast, striding as if she owned everything, as if all these streets and that great swollen river and all the boats on it were hers.

  She was leading me north, away from the river at the quai de la Rapée. We twisted and turned, following side streets, weaving in and out, around construction sites and piles of rubbish, past the frames of half-made buildings. In one place an entire street had been pulled down, leaving the sides of houses shored up with wood and metal girders, like a theatrical set. Workmen were lifting up cobblestones at one end of the street, masons laying them again in another. Here and there I saw FOR SALE signs, in English. We might have been walking in London, I thought, for there were as many English voices as French ones.

  A building craze had started in Paris. All the quarries were exhausted, and new ones had to be opened up on the outskirts of the city. There were new houses everywhere; whole neighborhoods grew up overnight. Anyone with any money was buying up the old buildings or investing in plans for shopping arcades or new residential districts. Paris would not stand still. No one would have known there was an economic crisis that year.

  Lucienne finally stopped at a small sign on the wall of a house in the rue de Picpus. It read WOMEN OF THE SACRED HEART.

  “The nuns run a school here for the children of the poor,” Lucienne said. A nun appeared at the door, her eyes lowered, and recognizing Lucienne, she smiled and waved us through. Addressing Lucienne as M. Duplessis, the nun led us through dark, cool corridors to a cobbled courtyard, where she brought us glasses of lemonade and gestured to us to take a seat at the garden table.

  A few minutes later, accompanied by one of the younger nuns, Delphine appeared, framed in the stone archway of the door, carrying a single white rose. She was no longer dressed in orange satin but wore the dark and simple convent uniform, her hair plaited into coils on the back of her head. As soon as her eyes adjusted to the sunlight and she saw Lucienne sitting at the
other end of the path, she ran toward us; then, a few feet away, she glanced back at the nun who had accompanied her, stopped, curtseyed to Lucienne, and passed her the rose. Lucienne laughed and held out her arms. The nun smiled to Delphine, who clambered up onto Lucienne’s lap and kissed her, burying her head in the nape of her mother’s neck.

  Lucienne began to unpin the child’s hair, uncoiling the braids, and shaking out her curls, while she spoke to her in soft Italian, and passed her the glass of lemonade. Delphine talked as if she would never stop, sometimes to me, sometimes to Lucienne, sometimes to the young nun, who also spoke Italian. I could not follow.

  “She complains,” Lucienne translated, “that they put her to bed too early. They have chickens here; she has given them all names. She talks about the other children. It’s a great novelty to her, all these children to play with. It is good for her, I think. In Italy, she spends too much time with Manon and me and her books. She is too serious. You know, sometimes she sounds more like a woman than a child. They teach her to be a child again. That is good. She wants to stay longer, she says. And of course she wants to know about the Emperor. What do I say? I told her that soon he’ll be on his new island, where they have a beautiful garden waiting for him, and chickens. That made her happier.”

  I fell asleep in the sun under the apple trees watching mother and daughter playing ninepins. When I awoke, Delphine was standing over me, her face blocking the sun, dropping small leaves onto me, one by one. She laughed to see me wake and clapped her hands, spinning around and around so that her hair and her clothes billowed out until, dizzy, she fell over. For a moment I could imagine something of what it must be like to be the parent of a child—to feel that exquisite tenderness always shadowed by fear.

  At a word from her mother, Delphine stood up, smoothed down her dress, and then addressed me in Italian, very properly, holding out a small white hand.

  “She says she is glad to know you,” Lucienne translated again, “that she hopes you will call again and that next visit you will have time to see her chickens. You see, she sounds like a little woman.”

  Delphine embraced her mother, picked up the ribbons and pins that had been scattered across the table, and ran back inside for her afternoon sleep, the nun following. She stood under the arch to wave at us, then disappeared into the cool passageways of the convent.

  “Now that you have met Delphine, properly,” Lucienne said, “I have something else to show you. Another important person. Part of my sad history. Part of the sad history of Paris too, the part no one wants to remember.”

  At the far end of the courtyard another gate led through into the bright sunshine of a long rectangular garden. It was a modest convent garden, nearly empty but for a few late white roses blooming between lines of yew and lime trees. No lavish displays of summer flowers. There were no arbors or follies, no fountains.

  We turned through a second gateway into a plot of land that had been walled off from the rest of the garden. There were three or four new tombs and gravestones, with tended grass in between and a few trees casting shade. It was not like English graveyards, full of ivy and wildflowers, crumbling headstones covered with every color of lichen. This was austere and manicured. It was too open to the sky, I thought, too seared by the sun.

  “They closed all the religious houses during the Revolution,” Lucienne said. “A doctor bought this one and turned it into a private asylum. They brought the mad people here. The ones who were rich enough.”

  Of course. The traumatized mad. The walking dead. I imagined women in white dresses milling around us like sleepwalkers, or the bandaged walking under parasols in the garden, in the shade of trees. A man with a long gray beard rocking backward and forward in a striped deck chair. A woman singing the “Marseillaise” out of key.

  “In the summer of 1794,” she continued, “while the inmates watched, three workmen made a hole in the wall over there, wide enough for a cart to drive through. They also dug two deep trenches in the corner over there.”

  There was no sign of the trenches now. Just a few meager headstones over grass that did not seem to want to grow. A red squirrel ran along the top of the wall, stopping and starting; it jerked its head from side to side, sniffing the air, watching us.

  “Orders of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Robespierre,” she said. “No one told the patients what the trenches were for. The staff knew. The director knew. A few days later three men drove carts piled high with corpses straight from the guillotine in the place du Trône-Renversé. There were more than a thousand bodies. The inmates watched over a wall while the executioner’s assistants undressed the bodies, stripping everything from them.”

  “Why?”

  “That is how the assistants were paid …They could keep anything of value they found on the bodies. They should have burned them like they do in India.”

  I thought of the corpses I had read about on the battlefield of Waterloo, stripped of their valuables by English soldiers in the dark, letters taken from pockets, rings from fingers, buttons from jackets—to be sold as souvenirs or pawned in Paris.

  “It was hot,” she said. “June. They piled the heads on one side, the bodies on the other. The clothes, they went over there—separate piles for the different assistants. The jewels, rings, and coins went into separate baskets. Every now and again one of the assistants was sick.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I just know. I … heard,” she said.

  I imagined disembodied heads, Medusa and the Gorgon, Judith and Holofernes. The bloodied heads, all sinews and flaps of skin, kept resolving into marble and alabaster in my mind, growing out of size. But the bodies of the guillotined dead must have been supple and rotting. I felt the vulnerability of my own body and wondered what I might have done if, like her, I had lived through such times, seen bodies hacked to pieces in the street, carts piled high with the dead.

  “It took them a long time,” Lucienne continued. “More than two weeks. They must have hardened to it. The women’s bodies …”

  I imagined Venus de Milo in the monastery garden, her head missing, blood running from her missing arms.

  “What are we doing here?” I said. “Can we go? I don’t feel well.”

  Lucienne ignored me.

  “They say man is the highest of animals. The smell was so bad here that the men had to build a wooden cover over the trenches with a trapdoor large enough to fit the bodies through. They used pitchforks. I wonder about those men. I wonder what they dream about now.”

  “The headstones are new,” I said, shivering. “Someone hasn’t forgotten.”

  “Amalie Zephyrine,” she said. “Princess Amalie Zephyrine von Salm-Kyrburg of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. A German princess. Poor Amalie. Both her lover and her brother went to the guillotine, and their bodies were thrown into the trench. Amalie bought this plot of land to make a memorial for her brother. A few tourists come, but it’s at the bottom of the tour list, after the visit to the battlefield of Waterloo, the Louvre, the place Louis IV; the catacombs are more interesting, they say, because you can actually see the bones there.”

  She was following the wall, moving between the new gravestones. I followed. “It’s here,” she said. “Saint-Vincent said it would be.”

  She was peering at a large stone plaque on the wall, running her fingers down the lettering. “Amalie has started to trace the names.”

  She began to read out the names and occupations of the dead, like a kind of incantation: “cultivates, domestique, tisserand, instituteur, prêtre, fabriquant d’étoffes, vicaire, contrôleur des douanes, épicier, cabaretier, soldat autrichien prisonnier de guerre, infirmier, garçon meunier … The two de Sombreuils, do you think they were father and son?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, lost in images of blood, the sound of the crowd cheering, hands tied together … a day like this, I thought—hot, birds singing. A few years after I was born.

  Her fingers traced the carvings of a name. One of hundreds
. It read: Lucienne du Luc. 23 ans. Comtesse.

  “My name,” she said. “That’s my name. Lucienne du Luc. I was a comtesse once. A countess in prison. An enemy of the people. There were thousands of us. They moved us from prison to prison; each building was one step closer to the guillotine. It was like Dante’s circles of hell. We played cards. We played cards for hours and hours.”

  The sun was low now. She lay down on her back on the grass, shielding her eyes with her arm. She clenched her fist. Lucienne Bernard, the infidel-thief, had been a countess. I had easily imagined her as the child of a wealthy and reclusive grandmother, but a countess … She would have had servants, carriages, estates, jewels, ward robes full of silks and satins. Yet here she was sitting on the grass in a graveyard dressed as a man, hiding from a police agent.

  I sat down on a tombstone, my head spinning. The warm, sweet smell of crushed grass rose through a swarm of gnats.

  “Were you … an enemy of the people, I mean?”

  “Of course,” she said. “We all were. Not just the aristocrats, the dukes and the duchesses, but also the priests and the grocers and the cabaret artists.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “How did your name come to be listed here?”

  “A woman in the prison took my name. She stole it.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “I don’t know.” She sat up suddenly. “I didn’t know her. I had never spoken to her. Mon Dieu. Perhaps she was mad. I can see her now. Her red hair all cut off. She stood up and walked toward them when they called my name—as if she was sleepwalking. I stood up too, but when I saw what was happening, I sat down again, very slowly. I’ve thought about it ever since. The way I sat down again. The way I let her do that.”

  “So she went to the guillotine and you didn’t?”

  “Yes. And her body was stripped and thrown into the pit—over there—with the others. Her name was Lucienne Bernard. She wasn’t important to the Revolutionary Tribunal, it seems, so I was released from the prison a few months later. Paris gave me a new name. Afterward, those of us who got away … we were a new kind of animal.” She paused, standing up, and steadied herself against the gravestone. Then she began to unwrap the parcel she had carried with her.