The Lord—make that the State—deliver a man from amateurs; this was Dubois’ prayer.
Discounting those accusations that were patently the inventions of invidious Parisians, and discarding outright those that were unsigned, the clerical workers Dubois had pressed into service to free his men for other duties spent hundreds of hours matching names to official files. They reported their findings to the Prefect, who dispatched forty-eight teams of officers, each commanded by a police commissioner, to question witnesses and suspects who might shine light on the Christmas Eve affair. Based on their reports, one hundred thirty known Jacobins were questioned, then forcibly expelled from Paris and warned—in some cases with physical encouragement (Officer Junot was particularly suited to this activity, having trained after hours in the brickyards) not to return on pain of imprisonment or death. A shattered rib cage and the loss of a kneecap were persuasive arguments in favor of exile.
Bonaparte himself contributed names to the list on hastily scribbled sheets of foolscap stuck together with peppermint, which were brought by messengers to the Police Ministry and Fouché’s private quarters in the Rue de Bac, many in the middle of the night when inspiration struck and old insults recalled, with orders to act immediately. À la carte retribution was a meal best served cold.
Fouché deeply resented these incursions into his private life. He was genuinely fond of his wife and children, and the experience of the past dozen years had taught him to insert a wide distance between his domestic arrangements and the affairs of state. But off would go his dressing gown, on with his tailcoat, and away messages to his office staff to rouse them from their beds.
Dubois, who frequently attended these midnight confabulations, twitched his smear of moustache and went off to alert the Paris police force. He offered no opinion in the Minister’s presence or anyone else’s, but privately he regarded these addenda on the part of the First Consul as no improvement over the baseless calumnies that continued to pour into the Prefecture from every quarter. The only difference was that these were signed, by that angry slashing hand in which only the letter B was legible.
It had all led to a great show of energy on the part of the Myrmidons, and screaming broadsides, but nothing of account; unless one regarded removing notorious rabble-rousers from under official scrutiny and releasing them abroad as progressive action. The enemies of the Republic were only too eager to harbor French subversives. The First Consul was as adept at raising armies for the jackals as he was for France.
Dubois fumed at such an uncharacteristic lack of vision on the part of his master; but not being a political creature, he lamented only the waste of industry.
Jules Limodin, his chief inspector—a more outspoken type—viewed each new list with mounting distaste.
“If these swine continue to provide names without leaving their own, no one in France is safe. Something must be done.”
“I concur,” the Prefect replied. “That is, in the case of the anonymous denunciations. This one, as you see, bears the seal of the Consulate. You have your instructions.”
Limodin saluted, palm forward, and turned on his heel to carry them out.
Good man, Dubois reflected; but so many good men had perished on the altar of the Revolution. The Prefect, for his part, wished only for things to settle down.
But such was not the case. More iron-reinforced wagons rattled away from the extinct monastery of Les Carmes, the political prison that had replaced the Bastille, and another score of accused conspirators were dragged out into the cold, barefoot and in their nightshirts, for a session with the formidable Officer Junot.
Dubois finally confided his doubts to Fouché, who was wearing a black band of mourning for the recent loss of his exceptionally talented personal manservant to an undocumented disease.
“We have nothing to connect these individuals to the incident of the fourth Nivose.” The Prefect’s language was always correct in these official meetings: Christmas Eve would have been inappropriate in the book-lined office on the Quai Voltaire. Impolitic, he thought, with bitter irony.
Fouché was admiring the illustrations in some ancient tome plundered from Italy. He gave no indication he’d been listening.
Dubois cleared his throat. “I fear we’re wasting all our time and resources inventing a reason to hold on to the people we already have in custody, instead of looking for the ones responsible.”
With apparent reluctance, the man behind the desk closed the book, marking his place with a worthless assignat left over from the first Revolutionary government.
“Precisely right, Monsieur le Prefect. We could exile or execute every Jacobin in the Republic—in Europe, for that matter—and not touch the true villains. This is a Royalist plot. I feel it in my bones.”
Dubois did as well, although his bones were considerably less obvious beneath his healthy quilting of flesh. One could see the very workings of the jointed tubes beneath the sallow skin of the Minister’s hands.
“Then why are we not questioning Royalists, may I ask?”
“Because the First Consul has decided it is Jacobins, and as you know, Bonaparte is never wrong.”
“Nevertheless I should like to investigate the other possibility, if the Minister has no objections.”
Fouché’s brows lifted. “Something?”
“Possibly so. More probably not. But we have a description from one of the National Guardsmen on duty that night, of a man standing near a cart who asked him for flint and steel to light his pipe.”
“Why have I been told nothing of this?”
“The fellow just came forward. Quite likely it slipped his mind in the excitement that followed, as he claims.”
“Likelier still, he was drunk on duty and took the time to sober up.”
“I think we can leave that to his commander. In any case it is no crime to happen to be standing near a cart and request a light, even if it’s the same cart; it is not even suspicious. No less than a dozen people passed it in the course of the evening, not counting twenty-seven of the National Guard. It’s also doubtful a guilty man would risk calling attention to himself in that way. He must have come there with means to ignite the fuse! But the description is specific enough to act upon.”
“What is it?”
Dubois read in a monotone from his greasy notebook. “‘A stocky man with a scar above his left eye.’”
“Do we know of such a person?”
Dubois shook his head. “That is to say, we do not want for stocky builds and facial disfigurations; since the Revolution we have rather more of both than not. As well separate one crow from a flock.”
“Circulate the description regardless. Perhaps our culprit has a mistress with an axe to grind.”
“I’ve taken that liberty. I’m reporting it to you now so you can inform all your … people.”
“Spies, you mean. I’m not offended by the term.” Fouché sat back with a quizzical smile on his pale features. “What news of your experiment in equine reconstruction?”
“The veterinarian was able to provide us with a description based on the remains. My men are knocking on doors. I have hopes for the cart as well. No two are alike, despite all appearances.”
But the Minister was scarcely listening. He thought of the first trip he would make to the Tuileries, should anything come of the man with the scar, and his opening address:
“Your excellency, the Ministry has uncovered something which I feel important enough to report.…”
“Citizen?”
He’d almost forgotten the ridiculous little man was there. He looked so much like the officious policemen one saw directing traffic at the Place du Carrousel that one wondered why he was worth so much concern; but what was Bonaparte before Toulon? A shabby lieutenant who spoke French with the accent of a Dago rag peddler. One could no longer count on appearances. As if one ever could.
“Yes, Dubois. Follow up on those descriptions. If we can convince the Strong Man of France that this business is Royalist in origin, we can convince any court.”
Not that the courts meant so much as a pile of dogshit under so impatient a governor.
Beginning Christmas Day (5 Nivose, in the official record), Parisians and visitors from the suburbs filed through the Prefecture courtyard round the clock, as if the remains of the cart horse belonged to a great leader lying in state. Some came in response to a broadside asking for assistance from the public, others merely out of curiosity. The officers Dubois assigned to conduct the tour quickly developed a line of questioning that separated the gawkers from those who sincerely wished to contribute to the investigation. The former were turned away at the gate.
The remaining parties entered, examined the splintered boards of the cart, stared at the carcass, which had begun to turn with the weather; they pressed wadded handkerchiefs to their nostrils, scented if they could afford it, and shook their heads. Some appeared relieved that relatives and close acquaintances were not involved. Others seemed disappointed; their opportunity to shine, however briefly, had vanished.
Then three things happened in rapid succession.
Ironically, it was a police inspector who provided the first item of real intelligence based on the display; the investigators had been so intent upon recruiting civilians for the case they had neglected to invite their fellow officers to view the evidence. The man had simply wandered in for a look. The horse meant nothing to him, but the cart resembled one he had passed four days running in the Faubourg du Temple.
Next, a farrier from that neighborhood happened to drop by the courtyard out of curiosity; on his way he actually had to hurry aside to avoid being run down by the commissioner and his team hastening to Faubourg. He inspected the shoe on the mare’s one surviving hoof and recognized it as the product of his forge.
“You are certain of this, monsieur?” asked the officer on courtyard duty.
“I should say so. I kept this poor beast shod for four years.”
“You know the horse?”
“Naturally. I don’t just look at hooves all day.”
“To whom did she belong?”
“Lambel, the grain seller in the Rue Meslée.”
A messenger was sent to the police team in Faubourg. Lambel was located on the street the farrier had named, and brought. Chief Inspector Limodin himself accompanied the grain seller personally.
He spent several minutes scrutinizing the horse’s head in particular and the bits of bridle that had been reassembled and placed where it had been worn in life. Straightening, he shook his head, as had so many.
Limodin, muttering to himself about cocksure farriers, turned in discouragement to show him the cart.
“Poor Marguerite,” said Lambel then.
“Marguerite?”
“She was not worth much, but she did not work hard all her life to die in such a way.”
Limodin seized his arm. “You know this horse?”
“I used to own it.”
The inspector hauled him to the shattered vehicle. The grain seller recognized it as the one he’d sold along with the mare on the 17th Frimaire, the month of frost, to a man claiming to be a cloth merchant.
“Can you describe this man?”
“A roughneck, Citizen, with a sailor’s roll and an evil scar. I would not have bought a bolt from him for fear of attempting to resell it to its proper owner.”
“Where was this scar?”
“Above his eye. The left, I think.”
Chief Inspector Limodin drew a deep breath—and nearly retched from the stench. The National Guardsman who had refused to give the man in the Rue Saint-Nicaise a light had been quite emphatic about the fellow’s scar. “Come with me.”
With Limodin present, Prefect Dubois questioned Lambel personally in his Spartan office overlooking the courtyard and its contents, which by then had emphatically outstayed their welcome in all five senses, including the din of buzzing flies. In the interval, the grain seller had remembered more. Standing before the desk, circling his tattered hat brim between his fingers, the man hesitated.
“Come, come, Citizen.” The little man with the great responsibility of keeping Paris safe could be unctuous when required. He suspected Lambel was holding back something that was uncomplimentary to his character: Scratch a man in trade, there was always larceny to be found. “We’re concerned with murder and nothing else.”
The merchant had been holding his breath. Now he let it out with a whoosh redolent of onion.
“He offered two hundred francs. The horse and cart weren’t worth it, but the times, monsieur, so many changes in government, licensing regulations, the wholesale grain market—” He shrugged in a way entirely Gallic.
“You made a good bargain. It isn’t a crime.” Dubois kept his patience. If only the guilty intimidated as easily as the innocent.
“That isn’t all. When the other man came and paid—”
“Other man?”
“He was so happy with his friend’s purchase he gave me an additional six francs.”
Now he pounced.
“What other man?”
“He said his name was Brunet. He came with the first man to pay me three days later, and I invited them for a drink in the Rue du Temple. He accepted.”
“You must have gotten a good look at this man Brunet”—surely an alias—“in the course of your celebration.”
Lambel furnished details, but Brunet’s description offered nothing so easily spotted on the street as his companion’s scar; that fellow had not troubled to give even an invented name.
Limodin took him to another room, where in response to questions the grain seller repeated the information to a secretary. The inspector was much more imposing physically than his superior, and barked his inquiries like a prosecutor cross-examining a prisoner in the dock. But the Rue Meslée merchant gave him the same answers he’d given the Prefect. As the secretary sprinkled sand on the document, the inspector asked Lambel if he could read.
“No, monsieur.”
The secretary read aloud from the paper and Lambel made his mark, with Limodin writing the name beside it and adding his own as witness. Told he was free to go, the man stood, but did not put on his hat or move to the door.
“May I keep the two hundred francs, monsieur?”
“I don’t see why not. It was a lawful transaction upon your part.”
The man’s face relaxed for the first time.
“Thank you, thank you. You see, the last time I was asked about my business, I had to pay ten francs for the privilege of answering.”
“When was this?”
“Two years ago.”
Limodin nodded.
“Under the Directorate. Well, you needn’t worry about such things now.” Thanks to Bonaparte, the graft was spread more evenly.
Lambel said “Thank you” twice more and put on his hat. Then he took it off again. “Poor Marguerite.”
“Not so poor, Citizen. Had I my way, I would recommend her to the First Consul for a posthumous decoration.”