RESTORATION

IT ENDED SOMEWHERE IN England in 1828. An elderly man lay in bed, dying of an illness that left his mind clear enough to feel the weight of sin that clung to his immortal soul. Beside the bed, a French Catholic priest sat at a writing desk with a sheaf of paper. A scene like this suggests Soho, where most French exiles and expatriates lived. The abbé P…(only his initial is known) would have heard dozens of death-bed confessions in which the recent history of France was twisted up in personal tales of loss and betrayal, but this man’s tale was long and twisted even by the standards of exile. Fortunately, the story had told itself in his head so many times that the dictation was quite straightforward.

He reached the end of his tale – his flight from Paris and arrival in England. Then the abbé handed him the confession and held the candle while the dying man scratched his signature on every page. A few days later, he died and the abbé P…kept his promise: he sent the signed confession to the Prefect of Police in Paris. In the accompanying letter, he explained that he and his parishioner thought that ‘the police should be apprised of the series of abominable events of which this wretch was both the agent and the victim’.

There might have been a brief investigation and some tying-up of loose ends, but the events in question dated back more than a decade, and the Paris police had more pressing concerns. A new Prefect of Police had just been appointed and was busy cleaning up the city: M. Debelleyme had instituted regular sweeping and sprinkling of the streets; he obtained government funding for sanitary inspections of prostitutes; he poisoned unclaimed dogs and silenced hurdy-gurdy men who sang obscene songs; he also arranged for all the beggars who were not from Paris to be given passports and money and sent back to their towns and villages. Following the example of Sir Robert Peel, he was equipping his previously invisible policemen with bright-blue uniforms, cocked hats and shiny buttons bearing the arms of the City of Paris.

The confession was sent to the archives, where it would have disappeared forever were it not for the man who should really be the hero of this story. When the confession arrived in the vaults of the Préfecture, it was immediately devoured by one of the hungriest minds ever let loose in an archive. Until recently, Jacques Peuchet had been the head archivist of the Paris police. It was the job he had dreamed of, a reward for the courage and duplicity he had shown in the dark days of the Revolution. In his early thirties, Peuchet had been elected as a representative of the Commune of Paris but had grown disgusted with the violence of the mob. He became a secret royalist overnight. By posing as a blood-red revolutionary, he secured the job of dealing with fleeing émigrés, refractory priests and royalist conspirators. In this way, he claimed, he was able to save many people from the guillotine. ‘Running with the wolves’, he later told his friends, ‘does not mean having to share their meals.’ Of course, to keep his job in such terrible times, he must have sacrificed a few to save the many. Even so, he was never out of danger. The infamous Billaud-Varenne, who demanded the execution of the King ‘within twenty-four hours’, warned Peuchet: ‘Friend, take care. You have the face of a fanatical moderate.’

Somehow, the fanatical moderate survived. Jacques Peuchet pops up in so many places that it is hard to believe that he was a single human being. A search for him at any time between the fall of the Bastille and the fall of Napoleon might have found him hiding in the countryside north of Paris, running a town four miles to the east (and sending only a few of its citizens to the guillotine), languishing in prison, being released by a friend, editing two official newspapers and, later, censoring the press. He also compiled two encyclopedias and a statistical survey of the provinces of France.

At last, he came to rest in the archives of the Préfecture de Police. After years of looking at the world through the peephole of politics, he saw it in all its bulging reality. Those wooden shelves and boxes in the vaults of the Préfecture were the streets and dwellings of a megalopolis of secret information. Everyone who had ever lived in Paris could be found there – the rich and the poor, the innocent and the guilty. This, he thought, was the single source from which a complete picture of human nature could be deduced. In classifying the archives, he would organize ‘the unfathomable chaos’ of human history. In that seething mass of detail, he would discover ‘the mysterious tableau of private life’ and reveal it to the world in a work of many volumes.

Every morning for eleven years, Peuchet crossed the bridge by Notre-Dame and disappeared from the light of day to rummage through the chaos. Every evening, he emerged, his mind filled with conspiracies and crimes, and a growing sense of enlightenment. But a man with a murky past and a passion for the truth inevitably has enemies. Someone – a jealous colleague, a policeman whose misdemeanours were recorded in the archives, a forgotten survivor from the difficult days of compromise – spread a rumour that Peuchet was an unreformed revolutionary. Could such a man be trusted with the nation’s dirty secrets? Obviously not, especially since more dirty secrets were being created all the time. As Peuchet himself would reveal in his book, the Prefect of Police, M. Delavau, was allowing his officers to run protection rackets, gambling dens and brothels.

Peuchet was removed from his post. In a city of twenty-six thousand civil servants who read about each other’s promotions and demotions in the daily paper, it was a very public humiliation. In his memoirs, Peuchet lied and said that he gave his beloved job to someone else. In private, he described his dismissal as ‘a fatal blow’. A mysterious illness crept up on him. He sensed its progress and blamed it on his enemies. For three years, he grovelled and cajoled, cashed in old favours, traded on his reputation, and when the new Prefect, Debelleyme, took office in 1828, he was given a job in the archives, but lower down the hierarchy. After serving the state for forty years, he found himself, at the age of sixty-eight, in the position of a junior clerk.

It was then that the confession arrived from England. With his encyclopedic eye, Peuchet saw in those sheets of paper a priceless gem. The confession showed what could happen when a population was not properly policed. It also contained certain details that reminded him of his own predicament. He took copious and precise notes and added them to the enormous pile of documents at his home.

By now, he was working night and day, converting the raw material into prose. But his enemies, too, were hard at work. Peuchet was rumoured to be suffering from a mental illness. He was a threat to national security. He should be sent away to die a harmless death.

With each attack on his reputation, he felt his illness gain in strength. He began to use the book he was writing as a diary, which is not a good sign in a historian, unless perhaps he felt that his own truth was part of the bigger picture. The last pages of his manuscript contained some terrible notes:

Today I am in so much pain that I thought I might throw myself into the Seine, if I had the strength.

Today, 5th March 1830, the eve of my birthday, I feel so sick and disheartened that I am setting down my pen to start again later, if ever I can clamber out of this abyss.

A few months later, death released him from physical pain, but it came with the gloating face of his enemies. At least he had the consolation of knowing that his work was practically complete – which was just as well, because, forty years later, the Préfecture de Police went up in flames, torched by the anarchists of the Paris Commune. In the space of a few hours, the archival evidence of five hundred years of Parisian history – including the signed confession – disappeared into the skies above the Île de la Cité.

 

PEUCHET HAD left his wife with a civil servant’s pension and an embryonic magnum opus that was crying out for publication. Publishers came a-courting with their contracts. After several years of indecision, Peuchet’s widow sold the manuscript to Alphonse Levavasseur, who had published Balzac’s first book.

Peuchet’s style was a little dry for modern tastes but his tales of conspiracy and murder, despite apparently being true, were highly marketable. Levavasseur assured the widow that her husband’s memory would be well served and did what any reasonable publisher would have done: he hired a fluent processor of texts who could turn the swathes of documentation into tidy tales. Since retiring from the civil service, Baron Lamothe-Langon had specialized in writing the memoirs of people who never wrote their memoirs. His publications included the six–volume Memoirs of the Comtesse du Barry, Written by Herself, the Recollections of Leonard, Hairdresser of Marie-Antoinette, and several multi–volume novels such as The Vampire, or the Virgin of Hungary and The Hermit of the Mysterious Tomb. The Baron’s memorable description of epic witch-burnings in fourteenth-century France (in his well-received History of the Inquisition in France) gave historians a seriously skewed impression of the period until it was shown, in 1972, to be a complete fabrication.

The Baron left most of Peuchet’s writing intact but went to town on some of the tales, especially the confession. He added dialogues and saucy details to please the novel-reading public. The confession finally saw print ten years after it was dictated to the priest in England, tarted up and travestied, and reeking of implausibility. It can be found in the fifth volume of Mémoires Tirés des Archives de la Police de Paris, by J. Peuchet, Police Archivist (1838). The Baron’s name does not appear on the title page, which is why Jacques Peuchet is often described by historians, who are forced to use the Mémoires instead of the incinerated archives, as a hack writer, a fantasist and a forger.

Extracts from the book were reprinted in magazines and miscellanies. In 1848, Karl Marx read the chapter on suicide and abortion and misquoted it to make Peuchet sound like a Marxist. The confession, titled ‘The Diamond of Vengeance’, was read by a popular novelist, who found it ‘ridiculous’ but captivating. ‘In that oyster’, he wrote, ‘I saw a pearl – a rough pearl, without shape or value, but a pearl that merely required the hand of a jeweller’. He took the plot and turned it into a magnificent, rambling and fantastic tale in a hundred and seventeen chapters. That pearl was The Count of Monte-Cristo.

The pearl, of course, was the work of Alexandre Dumas. He used the basic elements of the plot and threw away the oyster, which has lain ever since on the rubbish-heap of literary history. But perhaps, if that remnant of a lost confession could be purged of the Baron’s elaborations, and subjected to a test of historical plausibility, it might yet reveal a corner of that ‘mysterious tableau’ to which Peuchet devoted the last years of his life.

1

IN 1807, A BLIND MAN tapping his way through the muddle of streets between the Seine and Les Halles might briefly have imagined himself hundreds of miles away in the South of France. Migrant workers always settled in certain districts where they could speak their own language and eat the food of their region. The Sainte-Opportune quartier near the central markets had a thriving colony of Catholic migrants from Nîmes. In Nîmes, all the best jobs went to Protestants, but in Paris, a man could make a living regardless of his religion. If he fell on hard times, the network of relatives and compatriots would ensure that he never starved. Naturally, those crowded urban villages were not the cosy havens outsiders imagined them to be: they magnified the petty rivalries of provincial towns, where one family’s gain was another’s loss. But it was better for a man to know his neighbours than to cast himself blindly into that ocean of humanity.

Each migrant community had its café, which served as a meeting place. As such, they were well known to the police, and any café owner who cared about his profits made sure that he was on good terms with the local commissaire. The café of the Nîmois community stood in a street near the Place Sainte-Opportune, close to the central markets. On the day in question (Sunday, 15 February 1807), the owner of the café, Mathieu Loupian, was listening to the gossip even more attentively than usual.

A cobbler from Nîmes called François Picaud, a handsome and hard-working young man, had come to share his good news with the café regulars. He had just become engaged to a local girl, Marguerite de Vigoroux, who was, according to the Mémoires, ‘fresh as a daisy, comely and alluring’ and in any case endowed with the kind of beauty that comes from having a large dowry. Picaud’s compatriots concealed their envy and congratulated him on his astounding good fortune. With twenty thousand cobblers in Paris competing for one-and-a-half million feet, it was not often that a simple cobbler made such a good marriage. When Picaud left the café, Loupian and the regulars did what a bridegroom’s acquaintances were supposed to do: they tried to think of a way to make the lucky man’s last days as a bachelor as uncomfortable as could be.

Apart from Loupian, there were three men in the café that Sunday. Their names (unknown to the cobbler at the time) were Antoine Allut, Gervais Chaubard and Guilhem Solari. None of these men can be identified with certainty, but the names are worth mentioning as a mark of the tale’s authenticity. All of them were found in the region of Nîmes, but not so frequently as to be glaringly typical.

It was Loupian himself who came up with the best idea. He called it ‘a little prank’. They would tell the commissaire de police that Picaud was an English spy, then chortle merrily while Picaud tried to talk his way out of a police cell in time for his wedding. This struck Chaubard and Solari as an excellent scheme, but Antoine Allut refused to have anything to do with it. It seems his motives were sensible rather than honourable. He must have known the danger of toying with the police and was afraid that Picaud would fail to share the joke. He also suspected the café owner of having designs on Marguerite: Loupian had lost his first wife and was looking for another; the comely Marguerite would make a splendid dame de comptoir, enthroned on a red velvet chair in front of a gilded mirror, arranging sugar-lumps on the saucers, giving orders to the garçons and flirting with the customers. A girl like that was worth several thousand francs a year.

Allut was right to be wary. Yet he did nothing to warn Picaud. He left the café and went home to mind his own business. At least his conscience was clear.

 

IN THOSE DAYS, police commissaires were professional writers. They concocted dramas and novelettes, the success of which was determined, not by happy audiences and good reviews, but by a prison sentence or an execution. That afternoon, the commissaire of the 13th quartier closed the door to his waiting room and cleared a space among the licences and passports and confiscated song-sheets. He sat down with just a few details – cobbler, Catholic, Nîmois, possible English spy, a name sufficiently unremarkable to be an alias – and by the time the sun set over the city, he had in front of him the masterful revelation of a plot to overthrow the Empire. Even if Loupian was wrong about the English spy, cobblers were a notoriously troublesome breed. They suffered from liver complaints (too much sitting), which gave them melancholia, and from constipation (same cause), which made them disgruntled and politically active. As anyone who had lived through the Revolution knew, cobblers were always looking for trouble.

The commissaire sent his report to the Minister of Police, who was mulling over the news from the west of France. Since 1804, there had been fresh stirrings in the Vendée. British ships were occasionally seen off the coast. Spies had reported links between the rebels of the West and the royalists of the South. In the Minister’s clockwork mind, the details slotted into the grander scheme. In Nîmes, noble Catholic émigrés had returned from English exile to find the Protestants still in power. They were dangerously disillusioned with Napoleon. Now, while the Emperor was away fighting in Prussia, a web of sedition was being stretched from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coast.

It mattered little whether the commissaire’s intelligence was reliable and true in every detail. There was either a doubt or there was none. In this case, there was a doubt. Even if he was innocent, Picaud was guilty of having been denounced. And there were sufficient similarities between François Picaud and a previously untraceable suspect by the name of Joseph Lucher to warrant immediate action.

That night, men came for the cobbler and took him away without disturbing the neighbours. For the next two months, Marguerite de Vigoroux made frantic enquiries, but no one knew or no one could tell her what had happened to her fiancé. Like so many people in those turbulent times, Picaud had vanished without rhyme or reason. Loupian, who was one of the last to have seen him, consoled Marguerite as best he could. Given the slightly unexpected turn of events, it would have been madness to confess to the commissaire. Only a lunatic would try to save a falling man by jumping off the cliff after him. And perhaps, after all, the police had known something about Picaud?

Two years passed with neither news nor rumour. Then, one day, Marguerite dried her tears and married Loupian. With her dowry and the profits from the café, they were able to leave the old neighbourhood with its sad memories and its thrifty customers. In a bright new quartier, life could begin again. All those faces and carriages passing on the boulevard, the officers playing cards and the ladies sipping lemonade, the daily panorama of a great city, would make it easy to forget the past.

2

BEYOND THE PEAKS that mark the border of France and Italy, in one of the most desolate valleys of the Cottian Alps, the fortress-complex of Fenestrelle clings like a parasite to an almost vertical crag. Its bastions once blocked the road that led to France – if a trackless, rubble-strewn ravine could be called a road. According to scholars of the time, the name Fenestrelle means either ‘little windows’ (finestrelle) or ‘end of the earth’ (finis terrae). Both interpretations are appropriate. From the courtyard of the lower fort, a prisoner could watch the eagles soar over the snowy wastes and trace with his eye the Great Wall of the Alps that climbs for two miles along Mount Orsiera. Inside, with the hangings pulled across the window, he could hear the howling of the wind and the wolves. This Siberia of Italy was a wretched place to live and die, and it would have been hard to explain, other than by insanity or deep religious conviction, why the old man who was preparing for his final journey that day in January 1814 had a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.

Fenestrelle was one of the strongest links in Napoleon’s chain of prisons. Instead of rebuilding the Bastille, ‘that palace of vengeance’, as Voltaire had called it, ‘where crime and innocence alike are locked away’, he used the fortresses that had survived the Revolution: Ham in the north, Saumur on the Loire, the Château d’If in the Bay of Marseille. These were the Bastilles of the new age: capacious, impregnable and a long way from Paris. Fenestrelle itself was like a human anthology of the last ten years of empire. Napoleon occasionally wrote to his brother Joseph, King of Naples: ‘You may send to Fenestrelle all whom you find troublesome’ (February 1806); ‘None but abbés or Englishmen are to be sent thither’ (March 1806); ‘I have given orders to arrest all Corsicans in the pay of England. I have already sent many to Fenestrelle’ (October 1807). In Fenestrelle, hired thugs from the slums of Naples rubbed shoulders with Roman nobility; bishops and cardinals who had refused to take the oath to the French Republic held clandestine masses with spies and assassins as the altar boys.

Even in Fenestrelle, social distinctions survived. The prisoner who was about to escape into death that winter was a Milanese noble who had once held high office in the Church. His cell, we may suppose, was not completely bare: some pieces of furniture rented in the village of Fenestrelle, a few unreliable chairs, a flimsy curtain, a rough wooden table that was little better than a cobbler’s bench. (This is how one prisoner, Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca, secretary of Pope Pius VII, described the comforts of his cell.) Some cardinals had contrived to have their own valets incarcerated with them; others found a servant among the common prisoners. For most of those men, the outside world had ceased to exist: the disaster of the Grande Armée on the Retreat from Moscow was just a rumour, and the only reliable bulletins that reached their ears were the rumblings of the mountains: the thunder of the avalanche, the earthquake that drew a crack across the wall like a road on a map. Yet with so many wealthy and powerful men imprisoned in its walls, it is not surprising that Fenestrelle had proved to be permeable after all. Even in that Alpine cul-de-sac, money, like water, could find its way through stone.

One of the immediate effects of Napoleon’s invasions had been to send huge sums coursing through the financial veins of Europe. Fleeing princes entrusted their millions to men like Mayer Rothschild of Frankfurt. After the French invasion of Italy, the Treaty of Tolentino raised fifteen million francs in currency and another fifteen million in diamonds, which lined a few pockets on the way from Rome to Paris. Paintings and works of art were squirrelled away or sold before they could be transported to the Louvre. One of the cardinals who were expelled with the Pope – Braschi-Onesti, nephew of Pius VI and Grand Prior of the Order of Malta – returned to Rome after the fall of Napoleon and ‘had the good fortune to find intact the treasure he had secreted before his departure’.

There was, in short, nothing extraordinary in the fact that the ecclesiastical Milanese nobleman of Fenestrelle had deposited large sums of money in banks in Hamburg and London, that he had sold most of his estates and invested the proceeds in a bank in Amsterdam, nor in the fact that, somewhere in or near Milan, he possessed ‘a treasure’ that was prudently divided into diamonds and the currency of various nations. His motives were not quite so ordinary. He was dying in the belief that his children had abandoned him and were looking forward to spending his fortune. A prison guard or a servant from the village had smuggled out a message for his lawyer in which he arranged to have every member of his worthless family disinherited.

Perhaps this had been his intention all along, but during his long imprisonment in Fenestrelle, he had found the perfect tool of his revenge. He had taken as his servant a young French Catholic, a simple but passionate man in whom he saw an image of his own distress. He, too, had been abandoned and betrayed, and there was something inspired and terrible about his suffering. He had learned the awful truth that torture has its subtleties of which the torturer is unaware. His persecutors had not simply made him wretched; they had robbed him of the capacity to feel happiness.

Those two men of very different age and background formed an attachment more lasting than the bond between a father and his son. A man of the Church might have been expected to instruct his servant in Christian virtues; instead, he taught him about loans and interest rates, shares and consols, and the art of gambling with complete certainty of success. He made his servant the sole heir to his wealth and treasure, and, that winter, as the storms lashed the walls of Fenestrelle and the Continent prepared for another great upheaval, he died in his cell as happy as an abandoned man could be.

 

TWO MONTHS LATER, in the spring of 1814, the defeated Emperor signed his abdication and sailed for Elba, which lies thirty miles north of Montecristo Island in the Tuscan Archipelago. All over Europe, men and women emerged from prisons and hiding places, blinking in the light of a new dawn. Kings returned to palaces and tourists returned to Paris. In the Alps of north-western Italy, a wraithlike man of thirty-six, bearing a passport that identified him as Joseph Lucher, left the fort of Fenestrelle.

It was almost seven years – or, to be precise, two thousand five hundred and thirteen days – since he had arrived at Fenestrelle in a windowless carriage. In the village below the fort, he entered the tavern and saw a stranger staring at him from a mirror. On passing through the gates of Fenestrelle, he had felt the shock of liberation, the sudden shattering of certainty and habit. Now, as he contemplated those emaciated features, he felt something else besides: the uncanny freedom of a man who was no longer himself. Whoever he might have been before, ‘Joseph Lucher’ was now a ghost, but a ghost who had, as if by some absurd error of the universe, retained the ability to act on the material world.

He followed the valley of the Chisone river, which was swollen by torrents of melting snow, and reached the broad, green plain of the Po. At Pinarolo, he took the road to Turin, from where the icy battlements of the Alps looked like a distant dream.

A man in rags walking into a banking house in April 1814 was not necessarily a sight to bring the constables running. A vagrant whose papers were in order, and who was legally entitled to sums too large to be the fruit of common theft, was probably an exile or an émigré. As far as the banking house was concerned, he was robed in splendour.

For reasons that will become apparent, the next few months are a blank. Lucher must have travelled to Milan, where he probably visited a lawyer and signed some papers. Perhaps he made a brief excursion to a country estate or a lonely wood. Whatever the instructions he had received in Fenestrelle, they were obviously accurate and effective. Before long, he was able to take stock of the situation and to study the new hand that fate had dealt him.

The money that was held in Hamburg and London, added to the income from the bank in Amsterdam, amounted to seven million francs. The treasure itself consisted of over three million francs in currency and one million two hundred thousand francs in diamonds and other small objects – jewel-studded ornaments and cameos that would have graced the Louvre. Applying the lessons he had learned in Fenestrelle, he set aside the diamonds and one million francs and invested the remainder in the banks of four different countries. With an interest rate of six per cent, this gave him an annual income of six hundred thousand francs. It was enough to satisfy almost any habit or desire. By comparison, the deposed Napoleon landed on Elba with four million francs, which enabled him to build a regal residence, several new roads and a sewer-system, and to organize his return to France. Lucher’s total fortune – something in excess of eleven million two hundred thousand francs – was approximately equal to the combined annual income of every cobbler in Paris.

To anyone else, it might have seemed an astounding stroke of luck. With a fortune so colossal, a man could do anything he liked. But how could mere wealth rewrite the story that had told itself in his head a million times? His benefactor and companion in betrayal had taught him to know and hate his enemies. But there was something beyond hatred – the desire for some absolute consolation, a hunger for justice so complete that the events that had led to his living death could never have happened.

No hint of this would have been visible to the proprietor of the maison de santé to which Lucher admitted himself in February 1815, and he would have been amazed to learn that his patient was one of the richest men in France. Lucher had himself delivered to the quiet Paris suburb with very little luggage and no servants of his own. He paid for his board and lodging and settled in to convalesce and regain his strength after what he described as a long illness. The more salubrious nursing homes were built on slopes around the city, with verandas and small gardens. Before regulations were introduced in 1838, a private maison de santé would accept almost anyone who could pay, which meant that the residents were usually a mixed bunch of people: invalids recovering from surgical operations, pregnant women, the old and decrepit, harmless lunatics and wealthy hypochondriacs. The resident of a respectable maison de santé could expect more privacy and discretion than someone who lived in a street with a concierge and neighbours.

At first, M. Lucher appeared to be making a good recovery. But then, at about the time Napoleon, having escaped from Elba, returned to Paris and marshalled his troops, his condition seemed to worsen. During the hundred days when Paris was once again the capital of an empire, M. Lucher remained in bed, with just enough strength to eat his meals and to read the newspaper. It was not until Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo and banished to Saint Helena that he felt well enough to venture out and visit some of the sights of Paris.

3

THE THOUSANDS OF émigrés who returned to Paris that summer and saw the arcades of the arrow-straight Rue de Rivoli marching in perfect order towards a distant Arc de Triomphe, and stone embankments corseting the curves of the Seine, might have wondered whether the character of a city could be transformed in a matter of years by a few architects and masons. Paris had changed more in a decade of war than in half a century of peace. There were new bridges and canals, new markets and fountains, warehouses and granaries, better street-lighting and huge, hygienic cemeteries on the northern and eastern perimeter of the city. There was an unfinished Stock Exchange that resembled a Greek temple and a column in the Place Vendôme that would not have looked out of place in the forum in Rome. Napoleon had turned Paris into the backdrop of his imperial drama. Now, the stage was occupied by a new troupe of actors. The Restoration avenged itself on the Corsican dictator by settling into his palaces and enjoying his public promenades – which is, after all, the meaning of ‘revenge’: asserting a legal right or laying claim to something that was taken away.

The biggest change was not immediately apparent. The Sainte-Opportune district near Les Halles was still the puzzle of streets and cul-de-sacs it had been since the Middle Ages. But the people who gave the quartier its life were not the same. Thousands from that district alone had moved away or died in distant wars. Even without the drastic alteration of his face and bearing, Lucher would have been a total stranger.

There was a shop where a young man with a knife in his hand was cutting leather and fitting it to a last. There was a café with an unknown name painted above the door…Perhaps some tiny spark of hope had survived those years of darkness. If so, it was extinguished that morning. Lucher found out that the previous owner of the café, M. Loupian of Nîmes, had bought a new business on the boulevards, and that the woman who had shared his good fortune and his bed these last six years was Marguerite de Vigoroux. No one could tell him the names of Loupian’s cronies, which was a shame, he explained, because he owed one of those men some money. Fortunately, a neighbour eventually recalled the name of Antoine Allut. But as far as he knew, Allut had returned to the south of France many years before and no one had heard of him since. Lucher went back to the maison de santé and paid his bill.

The terminus of the Messageries Royales lay a few streets away in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires. There was a daily long-distance service to Lyon and the south, advertised as a hundred-hour journey, which sounded less forbidding than four days. Though it carried only eight passengers, it always brought a crowd of porters, anxious families, sightseers, pickpockets and policemen. In all the bustle, no one would have paid much attention to the elderly priest who boarded the coach to Lyon. The abbé’s name, we happen to know, was Baldini, which means ‘audacious’. The name is common in Italy and the south of France.

The coach left Paris by the Barrière des Gobelins and followed the paved road to Fontainebleau. At Villejuif, at the top of the hill, passengers often alighted near the pyramid that marked the Paris meridian to look back along the road, which was precisely aligned with the towers of Notre-Dame. A traveller’s guide described the view:

From this height, the eye embraces Paris, which is to say an immense and greyish mound of towers and irregular-shaped buildings which compose this city and which stretch away to left and right almost as far as the eye can see.

Travellers on those epic journeys came to know each other extremely well, but it is unlikely that any passenger on that particular coach was much the wiser about the abbé Baldini when he left it at Lyon. He boarded the riverboat that descended the fast-flowing Rhône to Pont-Saint-Esprit, and then the coach that plied the dusty post-road through the foothills of the Cévennes and the hot scrubland of the Gard. He reached the Roman city of Nîmes a week after leaving Paris, checked in at the best hotel (which means that he must have held a passport in the name of Baldini) and spent several days making enquiries. At last, in a seedy part of town, he found himself in a sparsely furnished room, staring at one of the last faces he had seen in his previous life.

The tale the abbé Baldini had to tell – a tale we know in greater detail than parts of the true story of Joseph Lucher – would have seemed incredible to anyone but Antoine Allut. The abbé had been a prisoner in the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples, where he had heard the dying confession of a Frenchman called Picaud. At this, a strangled cry escaped Allut and the abbé raised his eyes to heaven. By some mysterious means (he described it as ‘the voice of God’), Picaud had learned, or dredged up from his deepest memory, the name of a man, Allut, who would know the identity of his betrayers. Being a devout Catholic of almost superhuman moral strength, Picaud had forgiven the men who had destroyed his life. His only wish – the slightly odd but understandable wish of a dying man – was to have the names of his assassins inscribed on a plaque of lead that would be placed in his tomb. In order to reward Allut, or to encourage him to divulge the names, the abbé was to offer him a token that Picaud had received from a fellow prisoner by the name of Sir Herbert Newton.

If Allut or his wife had been readers of serial novels, they might at this point have smelled a rat, but the abbé then produced a large and sparkly diamond which, as far as Allut’s wife was concerned, provided complete and incontrovertible proof of the abbé’s good faith. Momentarily forgetting herself, she flung her arms around the skeletal frame of the abbé Baldini. Why her husband hesitated to accept the diamond was beyond her. Torn between greed and fear, and egged on by his wife, Allut overcame his doubts, and the abbé inscribed in a small notebook the names of Mathieu Loupian, Gervais Chaubard and Guilhem Solari.

A few hours later, the abbé Baldini boarded the north-bound coach from Nîmes.

He left behind him a soul in torment. Antoine Allut had suffered what seemed to him a terrible injustice. He had lived with the fear, confirmed by the abbé, that he had allowed an innocent man to be taken to his death. Now, he had been forced to betray his former friends. Worse still, the local jeweller sold the diamond for twice what he paid the Alluts. Such was Allut’s state of mind that he felt a perverse kind of relief when he finally committed a tangible crime and murdered the jeweller.

It was not a well-planned crime. The gendarmes shaved his head and gave him a green bonnet with a tin plaque on which his matriculation number was engraved. The green bonnet signified a life sentence. As he stood with his ball and chain weaving rope in the factory at Toulon, and when he lay awake on a wooden bench without a blanket, it must have seemed to him that François Picaud had taken revenge from beyond the grave.

4

MATHIEU LOUPIAN had prospered, not quite beyond his wildest dreams, but enough to be able to offer his compatriots an occasional drink at the bar. (They could scarcely afford his prices now.) Applying the business stratagem known as blind luck, he had acquired the new café at exactly the right moment. Restoration Paris was awash with money. The Allied troops who occupied the city had been followed by hordes of eager tourists. The reassuringly sober and expensive Café Anglais was not the only establishment to thrive on the river of foreign currency that flowed along the boulevards.

Loupian was the sort of man who, though rich and successful, was never too proud to bend down and pick up a coin that had been dropped in the gutter. And so, when the unexpected offer was made, he was quick to seize the opportunity. An impeccably dressed old lady, who had never been seen before in the quartier, had asked to speak to the proprietor. Her family, she explained, had been saved from an awful calamity – perhaps a scandal had been averted or a wayward son had been helped to escape from the police. Their saviour was a man who had since lost all his savings but who was so honourable in his indigence that he refused to be helped. M. Prosper’s only wish was to find work as a garçon in a reputable café.

Desperate to pay back their benefactor, the grateful family had decided to play a little trick on him. Without telling Prosper, they would pay the café-owner one hundred francs a month if he agreed to employ him and to overlook the fact that he was no longer in the first flush of youth. A man of fifty was not ideally suited to the athletic life of a Paris garçon. But since a hundred francs was the equivalent of two garçons’ monthly wages or the retail cost of two hundred and fifty demi-tasses with sugar and a glass of cognac, Loupian agreed to help.

Prosper turned out to be quite a find. He was not exactly prepossessing, and there was something about him that troubled Mme Loupian. In fact, his true character was a mystery, but then this was often the mark of a good servant, who was always self-effacing and could mould himself to a customer’s desires. He was quite unflappable and dealt well with all the little accidents of café life. He also had a good eye for detail. It was Prosper who gave the commissaire de police a full description of the customer who was seen feeding biscuits to Loupian’s hunting dog on the day that it suffered a fatal heart attack. It was Prosper, too, who discovered the pile of bitter almonds and parsley when Mme Loupian’s parrot died a horrible death.

Those were difficult times for honest people, when even a domestic parrot could not sleep peacefully in its cage. A king was on the throne again, but thirty years of war, tyranny and unrest could not be wiped out by a few decrees and executions. Napoleon’s marauding armies had not simply vanished into the gun smoke at Waterloo. On the pavement outside the café, mutilated beggars sat in their tattered uniforms, bothering the customers. Gangs of ruffians who had burned and pillaged their way across Europe in the name of the glorious Empire were making the streets unsafe, and the new Prefect of Police was too busy with anarchist provocateurs and royalist counter-terrorists to do much about them. The newspapers that were placed in the rack at the entrance of the café were full of grisly tales of violence and crime.

One morning, when Prosper was laying out the papers to fold them neatly into place, Loupian happened to notice a familiar name: Gervais Chaubard, his compatriot from Nîmes. The day before, Guilhem Solari had visited the café. For once, Chaubard had not been with him, and his concierge had not seen him return the previous evening. The newspaper supplied the explanation. Just before dawn, on the new iron pedestrian bridge by the Louvre, Gervais Chaubard had been found with a fatal stab-wound to the heart. A curious detail recommended this murder to the newspaper readers’ attention: the knife had been left in the wound, and on the handle someone had glued a small piece of paper bearing these printed characters:

THOUGH NO OFFICIAL RECORD of it survives, the murder on the Pont des Arts must have tested the wits of the new Sûreté brigade. Suspicion probably fell on typesetters, who, as literate members of the lower orders, had always been a threat to public stability – though, of course, the murderer could simply have cut the characters from the title page of a gazette. The only likely motive was theft. The fact that the dead man’s pockets contained some coins presumably meant that the murderer had been disturbed and had run away without retrieving his knife.

On learning of Chaubard’s murder, Loupian felt something like the first inkling of an illness, but he was too busy and distracted to worry about other people’s misfortunes. The man who had risen from provincial obscurity to become the owner of one of the finest cafés in Paris was now contemplating the kind of advancement of which his fellow Nîmois could only dream.

Loupian had a sixteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage. She was a tasty little creature, besotted with her nascent charms and excited by the possibilities she saw in men’s eyes. Her parents’ money had dressed her almost to perfection. Mlle Loupian was the special dish awaiting the special customer. In those changing days, even the daughter of a Loupian could dream of marrying a lord.

So much money had been lavished on her that it seemed only right and proper when a man of superior manners and appearance declared his interest in an unmistakeable fashion. He tipped the garçons like an English tourist and bribed the girl’s governess with a fabulous sum. Mlle Loupian received the homage of his purse and, in exchange, allowed him a taste of future happiness. It was not until the dish had been not only sampled but devoured that she confessed to her parents. Too late, they saw their mistake. They should never have trusted a man who overpaid the garçons.

There was enormous relief, therefore, in the Loupian household when the gentleman – who turned out to be a marquis – announced his honourable intentions, offered proof of his lineage and fortune, and ordered a wedding feast for one hundred and fifty guests at the Cadran Bleu, which was the most expensive restaurant in Paris.

The fairy-tale came true. The marquis married Loupian’s daughter and caused quite a thrill at the banquet when he sent a messenger to apologize for his late arrival: the King had asked to see him, but the marquis expected to be free by ten o’clock that evening; meanwhile, the Loupians and their guests should proceed with the meal. The wine flowed as swiftly, but not as cheaply, as it does at harvest-time in Provence, and although the bride was not in the best of moods, the banquet was a great success. Several courses passed before dessert. Fresh plates were placed on the tables, and then, on each plate, a letter in which the bridegroom was revealed to be an escaped convict. By the time the guests read the letter, the groom would have left the country.

A financier who sees his chief investment suddenly lose its value could not have been more distraught than Mathieu Loupian. Luckily, Prosper was on hand to offer advice: at his suggestion, the Loupians spent the following Sunday in the country, to erase the painful memory and to count their blessings. The café was still a successful business, the bill from the Cadran Bleu would be paid off within the year, and Mlle Loupian, though irreparably spoiled, was still young and might yet be served up to a foreign gentleman or a wealthy customer who was unfamiliar with the quartier.

While the Loupians breathed the country air and planned a rosy future, a column of smoke was rising from the city somewhere north of Notre-Dame. Fire had broken out in several different rooms above the café. Long before the sapeurs-pompiers came galloping down the boulevard with their brass helmets and canvas buckets, the fire had spread to the café below, and as the plaster mouldings dropped from the ceiling and the paintings shrivelled up, a gang of ragged paupers, as though forewarned, came rushing in to help. They carted out the chairs and tables and everything of value, and in so doing broke the mirrors, gouged the polished counter and smashed every single piece of glass and porcelain. When the Loupians returned from their picnic, they found in place of their home and business a smouldering, empty space.

Insurance companies usually refused to cover damage caused by ‘popular riots’ – which appeared to be the cause of the inferno. The man who owned the building had no choice but to turn them out. All their true friends rallied round, which is to say, no one, except the faithful Prosper, who not only stayed at their side but also refused to accept his wages. It was a comfort to know that there was still some good in the world. When, a few weeks later, Loupian’s wife died of cerebral congestion and nervous exhaustion, Prosper arranged the funeral as conscientiously as if it had been his own wedding.

 

THE LONG STREET that snakes into the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine towards the Place de la Bastille is the continuation of the rectilinear Rue de Rivoli. A person who could read the configuration of streets as a chiromancer reads the lines on a hand might have interpreted its sly meandering as a sign that, in that surly suburb where workers and revolutionaries plotted their coups, no course would ever run true.

At about the time of Loupian’s disaster, a young writer called Honoré Balzac moved into a small room in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. He described the view from his side-street window:

Sometimes the pale glow of the street-lamps cast yellowish reflections up through the fog, showing the roofs in faint outline along the streets, packed together like the waves of a great motionless sea. The fleeting, poetic effects of daylight, the mournful mists, the sudden shimmering of the sun, the silence and magic of night, the mysteries of dawn, the smoke rising from every chimney, each detail of that strange world became familiar to me and entertained me. I loved my prison, for I had chosen it myself.

Without the imagination of a novelist, the quartier seemed drab and unpromising. Loupian had been forced by the terms of the marriage contract drawn up by his parents-in-law to pay back his wife’s dowry. With the remnants of his fortune, he had rented a café in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine that was little more than a drinking-shop: it had a smoky oil-lamp, a wrinkled rug, the smell of cheap tobacco and customers who made cleaning seem a waste of time. His handsome dame de comptoir was dead, and Mlle Loupian’s unrefreshed ringlets hung down like the tendrils of the weeds that grew from the gutters. Only Guilhem Solari seemed pleased. This was more like the café of the old days, where he could talk in Provençal without being treated like a country bumpkin.

Sitting alone with his everlasting beer and lemonade, Solari was not good for business – especially not when it became known that, after a visit to Loupian’s bar, he had suffered convulsions and died after several hours of intense, untreatable pain. Nevertheless, Loupian’s customers might not have made the connection with the earlier murder if the newspapers had not reported a peculiar detail. Before the funeral, as was customary, Solari’s coffin was displayed just inside the entrance of his building. It had lain there for a while when someone noticed a small piece of paper on the black cloth covering the coffin. It bore these printed characters:

News of this grisly sequel to the murder on the Pont des Arts spread quickly through the quartier. From one day to the next, Loupian found himself without a single customer. The two straw chairs outside the door were permanently empty and used only by the neighbourhood dogs. Perhaps he was beginning to suspect that all these horrible events were in some way connected, but he could find no reason for his ruin, and though murder no. 2 had filled him with foreboding, he had only the faintest inkling of a motive.

Without the faithful Prosper, Loupian and his daughter would have found themselves on the street. Prosper offered them his meagre savings, which would at least allow them to avoid the beggars’ hospital. However, even this small mercy came at a price. Prosper attached to his offer a condition so humiliating and foul that Mathieu Loupian was surprised to find himself capable of accepting: Mlle Loupian was to live with Prosper as his concubine, to warm his bed and to satisfy his aged longings.

The arrangements were made. A double bed was installed, and the girl who was to have been the instrument of her family’s social rise became a prostitute in her father’s house.

As Loupian lay on his thin mattress at night, listening to the muffled howl of the city and trying to let the sound of that restless ocean drown out the noises that came through the partition wall, he knew that Prosper, though old in face and body, was filled with savage energy.

5

ON SUNNY DAYS, the avenues of the Tuileries Gardens were thronged with children and nurses, shop assistants and office workers on their lunch break, dog-walkers and dandies, and elegant women who filled the air with perfume and colour like the flowers in front of the Tuileries Palace. At dusk, the gardens took on a more reflective air. A few lonely figures wandered along the terrace by the river and among the trees, where white statues seemed to beckon from the gloom.

One evening, a burly man in a dark coat slipped into the gardens shortly before the iron gates along the Rue de Rivoli were closed. Just then, Mathieu Loupian was walking back along one of the shadier avenues, delaying the moment when he would have to return, past the shops and the busy cafés, to the scene of his misery and shame.

A figure appeared in front of him. As he moved to let it pass, Loupian heard the name ‘Picaud’. Even before his mind had attached the name to a memory, his body froze. The face was close enough for him to see it clearly; yet its features were not, it seemed to him, those of the cobbler Picaud; it was the sneering mask of the man who feasted on his daughter every night.

The brief conversation in the Tuileries Gardens is not recorded in the confession. Loupian would certainly have learned that he was looking at the man who had stabbed Chaubard, poisoned the parrot, the dog and Solari, married his daughter to a convict, arranged for the café to be looted and destroyed, caused the death of his wife and turned his daughter into an adulteress and a whore. He would also have learned that Picaud – also known as Lucher and, more recently, Prosper – had spent seven years in hell. And he probably had just enough time to feel his eyes burn with fear and hatred before the knife marked No. 3 was pushed into his heart.

 

LOUPIAN’S BLOOD was still forming a dark pool on the gravel when a powerful arm seized his murderer from behind. In less time than it takes to truss a pig, Picaud was gagged, bound with rope, wrapped in a blanket and hoisted onto a man’s shoulders. It may have occurred to him that the police had finally traced the murders to Prosper. But a gendarme would not have acted alone nor taken such extraordinary precautions. Though he could see nothing under the blanket, the smell of the river, the sudden chill and the sounds of the city coming from a wider vista would have told Picaud that his abductor had left the gardens by the riverside gate and was crossing to the Left Bank.

The confession states only that Picaud was carried on the man’s back for about half an hour and that, when the blanket was removed, he found himself, still bound, on a folding bed in an underground room. Apart from the bed, the room contained a dim lamp and a Prussian stove, the pipe of which disappeared into the ceiling. The walls seemed to be the rough limestone sections of an abandoned quarry. If the Paris police had conducted an investigation when they received the confession several years later, these details would have enabled them to identify the location with some precision. Walking at about two miles an hour, along the Quai Voltaire and across the Place de l’Odéon, Picaud’s abductor could, within thirty minutes, have reached the area where charts show a zone of ancient quarries rising up towards the river. This would put the room in which Picaud was held captive somewhere along the northern end of the Rue d’Enfer.

Many months, perhaps years, had passed since the abbé Baldini’s visit to Nîmes, and many things had happened to Picaud’s abductor since he escaped from the hulks of Toulon. He, too, had changed almost beyond recognition. He had to introduce himself as the man whose life had been ruined by Picaud’s mad campaign, the man who – though less guilty than the others – had been singled out for an especially subtle form of punishment. Whether or not Picaud had known that the diamond would be the ruin of Antoine Allut was irrelevant; Allut was bent on revenge. Unfortunately for him, he made the mistake of trying to satisfy two passions at the same time.

In prison, Allut had seen something that should have been obvious to him from the start: the abbé Baldini’s tale was a fabrication. Allut was a God-fearing man, but could he really believe that ‘the voice of God’ had whispered his name in Picaud’s ear? After making his escape, he could easily have discovered that there was no such person as Sir Herbert Newton, and that the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples had not been used as a state prison since the days of Emperor Romulus Augustus. It would not then have taken a genius to guess the abbé’s true identity and to suspect that the famous numbered murders were the result of the information that he had extracted from Allut.

The abbé Baldini was a fake, but the diamond was unquestionably genuine, and it was safe to assume that a man who could treat a diamond as loose change must be extremely rich. It is more than likely – for a reason that would become ever clearer to Allut in the years to come – that Picaud confirmed his assumption: he was indeed fabulously wealthy and owned a treasure almost too big to be imagined.

Allut now put into effect a plan that must have struck him as fiendishly clever when he first thought of it: he would starve Picaud until he was forced to reveal the location of the treasure. By this simple device, he would not only become a millionaire, he would also avenge himself on Picaud and rid the world of a rampaging maniac. He might even escape with a clear conscience.

The account of what happened next in the room beneath the Rue d’Enfer unfortunately bears the bloody fingerprints of the novel-writing Baron, who liked to reward his readers with an occasional shower of gore, and it leaves several questions unanswered. But since Peuchet’s record of the confession has disappeared along with the confession itself, this is the only evidence from which the facts can be deduced.

To Allut’s surprise, Picaud declined to pay several million francs for a crust of bread and a glass of water. Even after forty-eight hours without food or drink, the former prisoner of Fenestrelle seemed to consider his own existence a matter of small concern. It gradually dawned on Allut that his scheme had a serious flaw: if he starved Picaud to death, the treasure would be lost forever.

Picaud’s refusal to divulge the whereabouts of his treasure was – according to the confession – inspired by simple avarice. But the confession itself contains a detail that contradicts this. As Allut paced about the room in a frenzy of greed and disappointment, he suddenly noticed a diabolical smile on Picaud’s face. Enraged to see his enemy triumphant, Allut ‘pounced on him like a wild animal, bit him, pierced his eyes with a knife, disembowelled him and fled the premises, leaving behind him nothing but a corpse.’

There are no further details on the fate of Picaud’s mortal remains. A shrivelled, eviscerated body strapped to a bed in an underground room would surely have been mentioned in the newspapers, and although rats could dispose of a corpse and its clothing in a matter of days, the landlord would surely have noticed the smell. Yet no other record of such a murder has so far come to light.

The end of the story, as we know, is relatively uneventful: Allut fled to England, where he lived, manacled to his own conscience, until a French Catholic priest known only as the abbé P…‘helped him to see the error of his ways and to loathe his sins’. (These are the words that the abbé himself used in his letter to the Prefect of Police.) Allut dictated his confession to the abbé, received his sacred blessing and died in the knowledge that he had been absolved of his sins.

When the abbé P…sent the confession to Paris with an accompanying letter, he drew the obvious conclusion. Now that the horrors of the Revolution and the Empire were over and Paris was once again the capital of a Catholic monarchy, it was important to make sure that the Prefect of Police understood the moral:

Men in their arrogance try to outdo God. They pursue vengeance and are crushed by their revenge. Let us worship Him and submit humbly to His will.

Yours faithfully, etc., etc.

 

THIS IS THE STORY that was dictated to the abbé P…, recorded by Jacques Peuchet, and embellished by the Baron. Even in its novelized form, it contains several gaps and inconsistencies – which might be taken as a mark of its authenticity. The moral – vengeance destroys the avenger – scarcely matches the events described in the confession. That ‘diabolical smile’ on Picaud’s face suggests that, for a man who considered himself in some way posthumous, there was indeed such a thing as complete and happy vengeance. And there are other problems, too. How, for instance, did Allut know so much about Picaud’s life in Fenestrelle, the exact composition of his treasure, his hiding place in Paris, the orchestration of his crimes and a hundred other details? How did such a clueless man become so well informed? And why, if he knew so much, was he never able to locate the treasure?

The Baron – or perhaps it was the abbé P…– noticed the inconsistency and found a gratifying solution: Allut had been visited by the ghost of François Picaud. ‘No man’s faith can be stronger than mine’, Allut is supposed to have said, ‘for I have seen and heard a soul detached from its body.’ After the restoration of the monarchy, devout, mystical fantasies were in fashion, and few readers of the Mémoires Tirés des Archives de la Police de Paris would have felt cheated by the novelistic device of a garrulous ghost. Many would have been perfectly willing to accept it as the literal truth.

One day, some of the incidents described in the confession may be authenticated by the chance discovery of a letter or a police report that escaped the conflagration of the archives, but it is too much to hope that this particular detail will ever be confirmed. Information supplied by disembodied souls is of little use to historians. From a rational point of view, there was only one person who could have known the whole story, and that person had either been disembowelled or left to die twenty feet below the Rue d’Enfer.

There is every reason to believe that Picaud’s death was indeed described in the original confession and duly registered by the Paris police. It is also quite likely that the blinding and disembowelling occurred only in the Baron’s Gothic brain, and that, in reality, Allut left the half-starved remnant of François Picaud to die a miserable death. So much of the story is missing that no definite conclusions can be reached. Birth, marriage and death certificates went up in flames in 1871 on the same day as the police archives. It is a sad irony that a story that was rescued from obscurity and destruction by an archivist with a passion for the hidden truth should be so full of unconfirmable facts. It is even more ironic that the abbé P…who provided the Paris police with all this information, who taught Allut to loathe his sins, recorded his confession and sent him to the next world with the absolution that only an ordained priest can confer, is, for some reason, the only person in the story whose full name is unknown.