Chapter 14
THE LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS
Sherlock, Lupin, and I all slept heavily, without changing our clothes, due to the conditions of the sheets and the many tiny inhabitants of our filthy little room. Since my two friends politely let me choose, I took the most isolated pallet in the room and immediately regretted it.
In the deep silence of the Parisian night, it was a great comfort to hear Lupin and Sherlock breathing. Lupin tossed and turned frequently under his filthy covers as if he was having trouble getting to sleep, while Sherlock’s breath was regular and measured. He lay motionless on his pallet, like a motor that was off but ready to turn back on again at the slightest signal.
For instance, a distant explosion awakened me during the night, causing me to jump from my bed. Lupin swore, without really awakening, while Sherlock had sprung to his feet and was already looking out the tiny window when I sat up.
It’s nothing, I told myself. Maybe a weapons depot. Maybe a collapsing house. But my heart beat wildly, and Sherlock looked at me in the dark.
Without saying a word, we pushed my pallet closer to his. When we fell back asleep again, we were much closer to each other, and I felt better protected.
* * *
We woke early. Still wavering between day and night, the Paris sky was a dark blue mixed with the gray of dawn. It seemed to me that the first light of that day brought a promise with it. The promise of events that would soon take place.
While I got ready, trying to look presentable, a thought kept coming back to sting me like a barb. I thought about how much I must have worried my parents, leaving home as I had. I worried over how to let them know in a way that wouldn’t force me to give up our adventure.
In the end, I gave up on the idea with a sigh. Was it really only the adventure of three daring children? Or was it, instead, an opportunity — perhaps the only one — to discover something important about my family? Indeed, the answer would come shortly afterward in the form of a life-changing revelation.
As soon as we were able to find an open café, we sat down at a table. We sipped a blackish concoction and ate a chunk of stale bread. But it was warm, which seemed wonderful to me.
Sherlock did not even look at the breakfast we had been served. Motionless and angular, his profile stood out against the café window.
“If this were a game of chess, it would be our turn to make a move now,” he suddenly said. “Any suggestions?”
His question caught me by surprise, and — still shrouded in a sleepy haze — I tried to collect my thoughts. All I could do was feel amazed when I thought of all my friends and I had just done.
My flight to Paris to follow the trail of a mysterious person who had somehow directed the actions of other, equally mysterious figures (the woman from the cathedral, Mr. Montmorency, and his useless pawns) now stood out in all its absurdity. And the conversation with Alexandre Dumas fils did nothing past making everything even more incredible. For a moment I felt as if I had been swallowed up by a serialized story.
“Maybe that woman I met in front of the Evreux cathedral was nothing more than a madwoman!” I said, thinking it all over.
But Sherlock shook his head. “And Montmorency? And his thugs? It would have to be a true epidemic of madness, don’t you think?”
My friend was right, but his question fell on deaf ears. Lupin was unresponsive, as if he was having trouble shaking off the weight of a bad dream he’d had the previous night.
I saw him grab his cup with an almost angry gesture. In a single gulp, he drank the whole blackish swill that they passed off as coffee.
“Listen,” Lupin then said, with the air of someone who had just made a decision. “There’s only one thing we can do, even though it will be … far from pleasant for me.”
Neither Sherlock nor even I could have guessed what Arsène was about to propose. We listened without saying a word as he reeled off the story of his family as we had never heard it. From the dark circles under his eyes and the way he wrung his hands as he spoke, I realized this decision had kept him awake all night.
In a few very dry words, and without ever ceasing to look right at us, Lupin told us who his mother was — a French noblewoman named Marie de Vaudron-Chantal, who had rebelled against her family by going out with Theophraste Lupin. It is not known — nor could Arsène tell us — whether theirs had been a short, genuine love affair or a mere act of rebellion. The fact is that the romantic tale between a rich noblewoman and a man of the streets had not worked out, and the couple had not been able to withstand societal pressure. So they had separated, in a cold but civilized way, as if the fading of that impossible passion had stretched a curtain of ice between their ways of seeing the world.
Arsène had grown up on the road with his father and the other circus artists. And despite his father’s attempts to keep this from being the case, Arsène had developed a sense of disdain toward his mother, fed, more than anything else, by his profound awareness that she had abandoned him.
“All that matters now is that my mother lives near here … and I think she could tell us something useful,” Lupin concluded.
“And are you willing to —” I began.
“Only if you come with me,” he replied, lowering his gaze.
Back then, I simply understood Lupin’s request instinctively.
But today, writing so many years later, I understand its deeper meaning: one cannot face the most terrible solitudes alone.
* * *
The Vaudron-Chantal mansion was white, with all its shutters open. There was something impolite about how clean the building was, as if it were a challenge to all that was happening in the rest of the city. We reached it after a long walk uphill — even that detail contributed to the mansion’s extravagant, haughty atmosphere.
Lupin announced himself at what seemed to be a porter’s lodge. In turn, a man who was in charge of the gate led us to a perfectly circular inner courtyard, so pretty that it resembled a tart from a patisserie.
Neither Sherlock nor I spoke much, respecting the difficulties Lupin was coping with to carry out our investigation.
“Actually, this has never been my home,” he revealed to us as the porter disappeared into the corridor of the mansion. “I remember very little about this place. A Christmas party, snow, a large parlor. Little else.” At that point, he let the conversation die.
“Last Christmas, which we spent together, was much better,” he continued, with a forced smile. “Risking life and limb on the Thames River!”
I smiled, patting his hand. Every second of waiting seemed as if it were a further insult, as if the hostile environment wanted to make him finally understand that he was an outsider.
When the porter finally returned, he led us, without apology, down a hallway and a narrow staircase intended for the servants — which they could use to reach different floors of the house without being noticed. My feeling of discomfort grew even more severe. Neither Arsène nor the company he had brought was deemed worthy of the mansion’s main staircase.
So I was surprised that we were received in a library, a vast room above the rooftops of Paris. Its walls were filled with gilded publications and that sense of clutter that shows someone really uses it and that it is, therefore, not merely a collection of valuable books. On a table in the middle of the room, a bunch of white camellias gave off their intense, sweet perfume.
“Arsène,” a very beautiful woman greeted him as soon as the service door opened ahead of us.
I was dazzled. So, too, was Sherlock, I am sure.
Our friend Arsène’s mother was a gorgeous woman. Taller than the norm, lean and slender with long, full black hair and blue eyes like those of a Siamese cat. Her face was a long, perfect oval, and her eyebrows were arched, which seemed to emphasize the meaning of her words.
And yet, from the way she approached her son and avoided embracing him, I understood Lupin’s discomfort. That gorgeous woman was distant. Absent. Cold.
“Madame Vaudron-Chantal,” he greeted her, his voice hesitant. He moved about the library, more awkward than I had ever seen him, without even looking around. “It’s a pleasure to see you.”
“A completely unexpected surprise. What —”
“I would like to introduce my two dearest friends to you,” Lupin continued, pointing us out to his mother. “Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes.”
The lady greeted us with the perfect manners of a Parisian aristocrat.
“It’s a real honor meet you,” I said, curtsying. “Arsène has told us much about you.”
She could not hold back a smile. “About me? Really? He speaks more of me with you than of you with me, then. How many years has it been since you’ve answered my letters, Arsène? I’ve lost count by now. And where are you living at the moment? What are you doing? Perhaps your friends can help me discover who and what my son has become?”
“We’re not here for this,” Lupin said drily, letting his gaze roam along the long rows of books and paintings on the shelves.
“So why, then? Is there a specific reason? Maybe your father …”
“My father’s not involved in this,” Lupin said. “There’s a reason, but it doesn’t concern me, nor them, nor my life.”
I felt like I was attending more than a meeting between mother and son, but rather a match in some terrible game whose rules only the two of them knew. And which it seemed of vital importance to win.
“So why, then, have you come back?”
“For the simplest of reasons. I need help. We need help.”
“Oh,” said Madame Vaudron-Chantal, going over to a table with small drawers made of inlaid wood.
“The help I’m looking for is the answer to a simple question.”
“My goodness! I see my son again for the first time in five years and all he can say to me is that he wants the answer to a simple question!” Arsène’s mother smiled at me — I don’t know why — and then continued. “Have you ever wondered, all this time, how many replies I would have liked, myself? From you or your father? Can you add up the infinite number of questions I’ve had about you both? Are they all right? Are they cold? Are they eating enough? Is Arsène really studying, as Theophraste assured me he would before disappearing again? Will I be able to recognize my son? Why don’t they respond to any of my letters? Did they ever receive them? Do they actually exist? Or are they just a figment of my imagination?”
Lupin did not reply, but his face grew hard and sharp like the blade of a knife. He tried to speak, but his mother spoke first.
“Now you listen here,” she said in a firm tone. “And the two of you will forgive me if this conversation takes place in your presence and not in private, as it should. But if you really are his two best friends, then I prefer there be witnesses to what I’m about to say.”
“Mama …” Arsène whispered weakly.
“We are, ma’am,” Sherlock broke in. “Even though it’s true we’ve only known each other less than a year, and it’s not my habit to speak for others, I can confirm that your son’s introduction was correct.”
“A boy who can speak!” the lady exclaimed.
“Mama …” Lupin tried once again to step in. But he was like a runner wheezing from exhaustion.
“My proposal is the following, Arsène. I give you the help you’re looking for — as much as I can, I mean. But in exchange, you and I must speak. You must promise to come here, alone, to this house. And to tell me everything.”
Lupin raised his eyes to the ceiling.
“I want a week,” his mother continued. “You owe it to me. A week — not a day more nor a day less.”
Silence fell in the library. It seemed to last forever.
“Can you promise me this?” she finally asked.
We waited.
“Yes,” Arsène whispered.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘yes.’”
She took a deep breath and seemed to grow smaller. I had judged her wrongly. Beyond her icy, upper-class demeanor was a mother who was worried about her son. And this meeting had been no less exhausting for her than for Arsène.
“So,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “What do you want to ask me?”
Lupin looked at me, as if he no longer had the strength to talk.
“What Arsène wants to ask you, ma’am,” I began, “is if you know the d’Aurevilly family.”
“I know them like everyone else,” she replied calmly, “but not personally.”
“And the Montmorencys?” I asked.
“I am obliged to answer you in the same way, young lady. I believe I have visited them once or maybe twice. But not regularly, if what you need is an introduction to society. I don’t like that kind of life.”
“And have you ever heard talk of the Grand Master?” I went on.
The woman’s long eyebrows furrowed then. After a long moment of silence, she turned to her son and asked in a quiet voice, “Arsène, what business have you gotten yourself into?”
“No business, Mama, but —” he murmured.
“You don’t plan to tell me about it?” she interreupted.
Then Madame Vaudron-Chantal turned to me. “So then what is this story about the Grand Master?”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but we don’t exactly know,” I admitted. “What would help … is to find the person who is known as the Grand Master.”
“And my son convinced you I could help you find him?” she asked.
We both looked at Lupin, who looked at his mother. “I’m sure you know something,” he muttered.
“That’s an absolutely absurd idea, Arsène!” she exclaimed.
“Mama … you promised.”
Lupin’s mother sighed deeply. “I promised. And you promised, too. A week?”
“A week,” Lupin replied.
Madame Vaudron-Chantal invited us to be seated in the library armchairs and told us what she knew.
They were no more than voices, perhaps little more than whispers and information repeated through the mansions of the Parisian nobility, who had been gripped these past months by harrowing uncertainty. I had the strange feeling that with these words, Arsène’s mother was echoing the old stories that Mr. Dumas père had unearthed for his unfinished novel. According to the legend, a few noble families in the city were guardians of a secret that would let them restore the old regime and put the aristocracy and clergy in charge of France again. Madame Vaudron-Chantal also told us about a relic hidden in a crypt in the depths of Paris, and of a sacred ritual that was supposed to release enormous supernatural power.
“Opinions are extremely vague as to what those powers might exactly be,” Lupin’s mother concluded, her hands fluttering about.
The story that Lupin’s mother told only lasted a few minutes, but when we said goodbye and prepared to leave, it felt as if we had spent much more time there. Sherlock and I left the library and climbed down the steps of a large, pink marble staircase, waiting for our friend. Lupin lingered at the door to the library.
I could not help but hear the few words that mother and son exchanged above our heads.
“Be careful,” Madame Vaudron-Chantal said anxiously.
“Of course, Mama. Of course.”
“And … Arsène?”
“What?”
“When you see him, greet Theophraste for me.”
I was not so indiscreet as to look up over the banister. So I do not know what happened then. But I like to think that before they parted, Arsène and his mother finally hugged each other.