The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “Lucienne was gambling all the time at the Palais Royal,” Saint-Vincent said. “Night and day. When she played, she seemed to be in a trance. She was winning more than was natural. They kept throwing her out. She kept going back. We’d lock the door to keep her in, but she’d always find a way out.”

  “What was wrong with her?” I asked Manon.

  “She said she could see absolutely clearly in her own head what had happened all across Paris: the dying, the rotting bodies lying in the streets, the eyes of the child she saw cut away from his mother’s body in the rue du Bac, the bodies they had thrown into the trenches in the convent. She couldn’t get away from it. It was a constant noise, a roar inside her head. She could go to the other side of the earth and it would follow her, she said. She wanted to die.”

  “She was completely unmanageable,” Saint-Vincent said. “She started to break into buildings to steal things in the middle of the night. I spent half my nights out looking for her. Stealing was like gambling; it excited her. It made her feel she might still be alive. She came back to the house on the rue Royale one morning with five pieces of coral from the museum. They were from her grandmother’s collection, she told us. And they might have been, for all I know. She believed she had a right to them. Who knows how she did it. Reparation, she called it.”

  “What’s the collective noun for thieves in French?” I’d asked Lucienne one morning as we lay listening to the sounds of the street.

  “Un repaire de brigands. A hole, no, a den, of thieves,” she said.

  Den. Répaire. Reparation.

  A reparation of thieves.

  “Then she found Léon Dufour, the poet,” Saint-Vincent continued, weaving Lucienne’s story out of strands of the ribboned night. “She met him in the Palais Royal, and once he’d taught her to pick locks and copy and make keys, and had taken her into his bed, she started to disappear for weeks rather than days. One night she broke into an old convent and brought back some of Charlotte Holbach’s paintings, which had been requisitioned by Vivant Denon and were destined for the walls of the Louvre. She was elated.”

  “That was it for me,” Manon said. “I’d had enough. I went back to Marseilles. I wanted a quiet life. When I came back a year later, everything was different. She was completely different. She dressed expensively—and as a man.”

  “She was using a tailor on the rue Vivienne,” Saint-Vincent said.

  “She and Dufour and Saint-Vincent, they were organized. She had regained half of her grandmother’s collection and had savings in the bank.”

  “I brought her books and papers on corals and zoophytes from the library in the Jardin,” Saint-Vincent said, opening a bottle of brandy. “We were making a great deal of money. We had our first commissions from émigrés that winter: the Louvre, the museums in the Jardin, a monastery or two, five private houses: sixteen paintings, four necklaces, and a collection of curiosities. We charged more and more. We could because we were good.”

  “And Egypt,” I said, meaning Silveira. “How did that happen?”

  “Once the police started looking for us seriously—and who could blame them, we were a thorn in their side—I arranged for her to go to Egypt with Geoffroy,” Saint-Vincent said. “She met Silveira there. They disappeared into the desert, and when she came back to Paris, years later, she had changed again. The same, but different. She started her book on the corals out there, based on conversations she’d had with Geoffroy and with Silveira and the coral traders and coral divers who worked with him.”

  “It was 1803 or 1804—a long time—before she came back to Paris,” Manon continued. “By then I had a job drawing botanical and animal illustrations in the Jardin.”

  “And I was working for Lamarck,” Saint-Vincent said. “Lucienne signed up for the lectures Lamarck gave that summer in the amphitheater. It was a remarkable time—it was the summer that Lamarck first began to talk about transformism. The priests were gone; the menagerie in the Jardin was getting bigger all the time; Napoleon was sending us animals from palaces all across Europe: lions, camels, ostriches, and gazelles. And then a zebra arrived from South Africa—”

  “And Lucienne?” I interrupted, afraid that we were about to disappear into the menagerie and never find our way out.

  “I was stationed at Dunkirk in 1805,” Saint-Vincent said, “and then in Austria, and I fought at Austerlitz, so once again we lost contact. I was wounded there. They don’t give you honors or medals for being wounded, you know. And she was in Paris, back with Dufour. Sometimes she would summon me—if she had a new commission, if she needed me—but mostly she didn’t. I was in Prussia and Poland in 1807, busy bayoneting Cossacks, but I missed the Battle of Eylau because I was ill …”

  Hearing those stories about Lucienne was like turning the pages of a book, but I couldn’t fit them together into anything that looked like a life with a trajectory, an arc, a beginning, a middle, and an end. I imagined her in the desert in white robes and then again in a derelict house among books, or with a parrot, standing in a queue at the gates of the Jardin.

  “I hope Napoleon remembered to take my map,” Saint-Vincent said as he began to fall asleep. “I expect you didn’t know that I drew the very first map of Saint Helena. Yes. It’s true. Absolument.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “My crew docked there en route back from Mauritius thirteen years ago. I collected butterflies too so I presented Napoleon with my map and the best butterfly in my collection when I got back to Paris.”

  “What was it like?” I saw a bare rock rising out of endless ocean.

  “The butterfly? Spectacular. Blue and white with piebald markings—”

  “The island.”

  “Oh. The island. Forty-seven square miles of paradise: samphire, tea plants, gumwoods, redwoods, she-cabbage trees, and some of the most beautiful ferns I’ve ever seen up on the ridges. Not such a bad place to be imprisoned.”

  N OCTOBER 1815, the Emperor’s captors provided lodgings for him in a marquee adjoining the Balcombes’ ballroom. Soon Betsy Balcombe was bringing tea to the Emperor every morning in the shady grove of vines where he liked to work. He would only stay at the Briars for three months, until the paint had dried on the walls of his new prison, Longwood.

  In the Briars’ garden the Emperor continued to assemble the story of his life, dictating each account of battle or victory to each member of his household in turn, producing the great flow of words that would make him a legend. The Emperor was surprised by the poignancy of some of his memories. A dog came to embody all his feelings about war. “In the deep solitude of a moonlit night,” he told Las Cases, “that dog came out from underneath the clothes of a dead soldier. It rushed at us and then returned to its shelter, howling with pain. It licked its master’s face and then rushed at us in turn. It was asking for help and seeking revenge at the same time. Nothing,” he said, “has ever made such an impression on me on any of my battlefields.”

  Betsy, who would leave Saint Helena for England with her mother a few years later in the wake of allegations that her father had been smuggling Napoleon’s letters off the island, spent the rest of her life talking about her conversations with the Emperor of France, until she could no longer remember where the edges of dream and reality began.

  The garden at the Briars, then full of white roses and oranges, would not last another ten years. The East India Company, which owned the house, bought it when the Balcombes left the island. They planted mulberry trees there and tried to cultivate silkworms. The enterprise failed, and the garden, where an Emperor had once unwrapped a Sèvres bowl to show a child a hand-painted ibis, reverted to wilderness.

  23

  ARLY ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 18, only a few hours after she had risen from her bed and asked for coffee, fried fish, and a loaf of bread before pulling on the plaster-splashed clothes of a laborer retrieved from the back of a cupboard, Lucienne took me back to the Jardin des Plantes.

  “I have an idea,” she s
aid. “I want to see what you think before I tell the others. And don’t tell me I’m not well enough. I am perfectly well. We have twelve days. Twelve days is not long.”

  “You’re not still planning on going in?” I said. “That’s madness. I told you—”

  “Doucement,” she said. “Silveira says they’ve doubled the guard at the convent. They’re expecting trouble. They are not going to get it. We play the game, Jagot’s game. Right until the end.”

  We were early so we had to wait for the gates of the Jardin to open. Lucienne sat on the edge of the stone parapet on the quai, kicking her boots against the stone impatiently. The clothes were too big for her and made her look thin, but she had color in her cheeks and had walked so quickly I had hardly been able to keep up with her. I thought of the broken woman with the parrot standing outside the gates of the Jardin in 1793 among the keepers and cages and wondered if Lucienne remembered her too.

  The embankment was now empty. It began to rain a little, light autumn rain. The drops made intersecting circles on the water which streaked and stirred the rainbow colors of the oiled surface. A few barges began to make their way downriver; an oarsman or two took coins from a few early passengers. It made me tired to watch these moving things. It was cold.

  “Before Napoleon, all of this was just mud,” she said, “open land. On a day like today there’d be only swamp between here and the river, a little quai over there and timber yards and piles all along here and gardens farther down. People walked across the swamp on planks. Everything sank into the mud. Now look at it.”

  She was staring out across the water, lost in thought. Both banks of the Seine were clustered with washing women, casting great sails of white into the water, scrubbing fabrics of every kind against the wooden sides of washing boats or against the wide shelves of the wooden structures that jutted out into the water. Fabric, hung on lines to drip and billow in the wind, made white squares and rectangles against the green-brown of the moving water and the ragged platforms of wood. I had tried to draw them, these women with their white scarves tied across their chests and their black dresses and white bonnets, but they moved too fast.

  “You were right,” she said. “Je suis désolée.”

  “About what?” I said.

  “About everything. Well, almost everything. Jagot. You were right about Jagot. You are still wrong about species. Stupide, if you don’t mind me saying so. Daniel Connor is still blind about species.”

  “So you say,” I said, and smiled. “Pig-headed, crow-headed, fish-headed. Whatever you say.”

  We looked down over the thin stretch of mud at the platforms on the river where bargemen stacked wood or hauled coal, and where all that wood, nailed and bolted against the water’s movement, made a fragile, splintered existence, a kind of shantytown.

  I thought of the huts I had seen spring up alongside the canals that were being built across the north of England—temporary shacks, like something that had been expelled from some hellish region underground. At night you could see them across the moors, lit up, smoky, loud with drinking and shouting. As a boy I had been fascinated by them, watching from the hill above as the figures of men dug deep into the earth; from time to time they used explosives to blast their way through a rocky hillside. There were fatalities. I had seen men, bloodied and half-alive, carried from the moors into the town. Some had later been buried in the local churchyard.

  Here, even in Paris, I thought, in this most stony and solid of cities, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs had once swum. Even now miners were digging out their bones from the quarries of Montmartre and the canal workings of Derbyshire. In the Jardin, where rows of plants made neat squares in the manicured lawns, here too there had been a seabed populated by trilobites and sea squirts and other creatures that I could conjure an image for but not name. Elephantine creatures would have lumbered their way up the hill of Montmartre, where windmills now turned against the skyline.

  “You’ve changed the way I see things,” I said. “Everything, the whole world, looks different now. Older. Even more of a miracle than before. I see mammoths everywhere.”

  “You must join an expedition,” she said, “like Saint-Vincent did. Get a job as a ship’s naturalist, and then you can sail around the world collecting specimens and taking trips inland, up into the mountains. Then you will start to understand how it all fits together. Go to countries you’ve never even dreamed of: South America, Chile, Australia …”

  “Where would you go, if you could go anywhere?” I asked, thinking of Cuvier’s plans to send me to Sumatra, which seemed to me a land full of exotic princes and palaces buried deep in monsoon-drenched jungles. I couldn’t tell her about Cuvier’s promise. I didn’t want her to know how much I was risking.

  “The Keeling Islands,” she said, “halfway between New South Wales and Ceylon. Silveira’s been there. He says there are coral reefs there that are the largest he has ever seen. And New Zealand. And Tahiti and Peru… or to the fossil coral beds on the mountains of Timor.”

  Beyond the wooden platforms, the Seine, swelling, rising, and falling, had left the imprints of its own movement on the mud printed like the annotations of music or the marks of wind on sand. There were the prints and scratchings of men and river birds and animals—horses’ hooves and the paw marks of dogs. A boy, in the water up to his waist, appeared to be looking for treasure, filtering river water and mud through an old sieve. He had already amassed a neat pile of driftwood. Later he would tie the wood into bundles and sell them as firewood at the market.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “Lamarck calls it la marche,” she said. “He calls it progress. He assumes everything is moving forward, progressing, improving. That process is still a straight line though—even for Lamarck. I don’t see straight lines. I see a net. Nature is a great tangle, like the coral reefs. Like a garden in which everything lives on everything else, some things changing, others staying almost the same. Everything—animals, trees, rocks—made of the same materials.”

  “And if the Bible …” I couldn’t finish the sentence. My questions were breaking up; I didn’t know how to frame them. “And if?” I repeated and stopped.

  “Look at this rock,” she said, running her finger along the pink-white stone of the embankment wall. “See the madrepores, the circles here and here, and these sea creatures here, mixed in among the shale. Their bodies made the continents, over millions and millions of years. Not God in one sudden sweep of his hand. Napoleon may have built the wall, but sea creatures made the stone.”

  “There is no god?”

  “That’s not what I said. Who am I to say? Who are any of us to say?”

  “Saint-Vincent thinks there is no god. He is a heretic.”

  “He might think it; he would not say it. He has principles. He keeps these things to himself.”

  “And Manon?”

  “Manon? She would say it. Out loud. Oui. She would shout it. Her mother was a Catholic. She died in torment, terrified of damnation. Manon watched that and it was enough for her. She is a heretic.”

  “And Silveira?”

  “He goes to synagogue. He reads the Torah. He keeps the Sabbath.”

  “He believes?”

  “No. Silveira has no god. He says it’s a Christian obsession, this insistence on God, on belief, on talking about it all the time. For him, it’s the rituals, his people, l’histoire, that matters. It is his anchor. The root of everything. Yes, I think that’s what he would say.”

  “There it is,” she said once we’d made our way through the Jardin. “That building, with the green roof.” She gestured at a hut in the middle of a small enclosure just outside the Botany Gallery, where a few students waited in the rain. “I didn’t see it on the map until the other night, after I’d drunk the sleeping draft. It’s listed as number nine on the map. I tried to stay awake but… On the key you’ve labeled it as the entrance to the quarries. Is that what it is?”

  “Yes. Inside the hut there�
��s a set of stone steps that lead down to the quarries.”

  “Just as I had hoped. How did it get there?”

  “You mean who built it? Men with spades and pickaxes and wheelbarrows, I expect. It goes a long way down.”

  “Mais, non. Why is it there?”

  “Cuvier and Brongniart had it built a few years ago, when they were writing the joint paper on the rock strata of the Paris basin, I think. They wanted to see the rock layers as far down under the city as it was possible to go. Cuvier uses the quarries for teaching occasionally, when he’s doing his lectures on fossil bones, but mostly the entrance is unused.”

  “And the steps go all the way down to the main quarry system?”

  “Straight down, yes.”

  “Can you get me the key to the hut?”

  “I’ve no idea where it’s kept. But I can probably find out. I’ll try,” I said, seeing her frustration. “If it’s important. But why?”

  “Alors. Jagot’s orders are that we leave the Jardin by the gate at the river entrance on the night of the party. He will wait for us there. That is where we’re supposed to hand over the diamond. And although he says he won’t, that is where he will arrest us. Instead we will change things a little. We will leave the Jardin a different way—we will go down Cuvier’s staircase, through the main quarry system, and then back up into the streets of Paris. We will do things my way.”

  “That’s brilliant,” I said. “Jagot will never know how you got out. It will be as if you’ve disappeared completely.”

  “Except that Jagot will still have Delphine. You forget that. Now, Daniel, listen to me. I want you to tell Jagot that we’re going out through the quarries. I want you to warn him that we will break the deal. Find a way to make sure he is waiting for us, exactly in the passage de Saint-Claire, and make sure he brings Delphine.”