“Good night, monsieur.”
Without responding, François Carbon, France’s most notorious fugitive, took leave of the sisters Saint-Michel and climbed the stairs to his garret, swaying on his sea legs, also from inebriation.
His intimates did not call him “Petit François” out of irony. He was no larger than Bonaparte himself, which was not unusual in his former profession. Beefy, brawny sailors existed mainly in popular novels; maritime men were frequently compact of build, to suit the cramped quarters belowdecks. The narrow steps accommodated his small feet, unsteady as they were.
They were steep, nearly as much so as a ladder. They brought memories of the wretches’ climb to the guillotine when the Terror was in full swing.
At the top, he crossed himself. He had a sailor’s superstition, and to think of such things just before retiring did not promise a good night’s sleep.
The sisters shook their heads at his retreating back. As usual, their guest had neither bowed nor offered thanks for the superb meal their girl had served that evening.
In that house, every repast was a seven-course ritual, the table laden with out-of-season delicacies and joints roasted to a golden turn, the desserts worthy of state dinners. The sisters, former nuns done out of a job by the atheistic Republic, forgave the gruff Breton his bad manners, according to their religious training, and because such men were useful in the struggle to restore the monarchy and the Holy Church. With patience and proper training they would make reliable servants.
Their vows of poverty aside, the Saint-Michels were of good family and lived in a house in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a former rectory now carpeted in silk and sparkling with precious metals. Their front windows provided an excellent view of the venerable cathedral they still considered their place of work.
They had been asked by their aristocratic acquaintances to board Carbon indefinitely. They were not told why, but the prospect of intrigue seasoned a life of waiting, waiting—waiting—for the grand event that would return the world to sanity. They took the man in, and resisted the compulsion to glare when he ate truffles off one of their gold-chased knives and guzzled wine their great-grandfather had placed in the cellar during the Sun King’s reign as if it were English grog, intended solely for inebriation.
It had been exciting at first, having such a creature living under their roof: the stuff of high adventure, and swashbuckling tales of pirates and smugglers from the coast. But that had been at Christmas, at the height of the excitement over the explosion in the Rue Saint-Nicaise, which had come so near to ridding the world of the appalling Bonaparte. Now it was two weeks into the new year—the new century!—and their boarder’s ill manners and assumption of entitlement had tarnished the glitter of adventure.
Carbon, for his part, was bored.
He’d been cooped up in the house so long his sunburn had faded for the first time in his adult life, and he found the sisters’ company no more diverting than they had his. When they’d given up trying to draw him into any sort of genteel discourse, they’d fallen to gossiping about neighbors and highborn families who meant nothing to him—indeed, he suspected some of them had either been beheaded or had perished in prison, their names so obviously marinated in the Ancien Regime they could not possibly have survived the first frenzy; the sisters’ world was inexorably buried in an idealized past.
They were jackdaws cawing nonsensically outside his window, and without cease. It had never been his ambition to be privy to aristocratic tittle-tattle. His sacrifices on behalf of Restoration were purely mercenary in intention; Cadoudal himself had promised him a high commission at journey’s end, with a pension and a grant of land in the wine country, where he could live out his days in leisure while others of his class tended the vines and he drank up the profits.
He’d hoped by now to be in close conference with Cadoudal, circulating the word among Royalist troops to strike into the heart of Paris and wrest the Tuileries from the dead hands of the monster. But that fool Saint-Réjant had touched off the fuse too late, and God alone knew where he and Limoëlan had gone after the debacle.
Now Carbon was stuck in this rose-scented prison, waiting for the police to shift their activities away from the city and the ports and out into the countryside, where the Jacobins cowered. Then it would be safe for him to leave the country.
He took some comfort from the fact that the very Revolutionaries who had made a Bonaparte possible should be accused of attempting to end his existence; Police Minister Fouché rarely made such a blunder, aiding the Royalist cause by eliminating its traditional enemy. Surely it was only a matter of time before the two anti-Bourbon factions slaughtered each other.
Meanwhile he fought ennui the only way a sailor knew how: stuffing himself with rich foods and sucking up grape.
This night, dizzy and flatulent, he hurled himself fully clothed onto his cot and clutched the rails tight, riding out the storm in his muddled head. At length the inner sea grew flat and he sank into sleep.
The stairs below thundered, gaffing and jerking him back to the surface.
He threw his legs over the side of the cot, but his reflexes were boggy with sleep and spirits. He got to his feet just as the floor hatch crashed open and what seemed a battalion of heavily armed men in uniform collided with him and bore him to the floor.
He tried to speak—Gentlemen, a terrible mistake has been made!—but his chest was constricted. The point of a bayonet pierced the skin of his throat, releasing a warm trickle inside his collar. François Carbon knew himself as good as dead.
How the Republic of France found Georges Cadoudal’s most trusted menial was this:
After canvassing the neighborhood around the Rue Meslée, where the grain merchant Lambel had sold his horse and cart, police learned that there were at least three men involved. Early eyewitness accounts had prepared them for four, but then the fourth man was located and identified as Philippe Jardin, the cooper who had been paid to reinforce a barrel, a job like all the rest; “Sirs, I assure you I supported the plebiscite in favor of the Consulate.” Chief Inspector Limodin was inclined to believe him. He was tortured but mildly.
When the screw was removed, the man confirmed that there had been a horse and cart on the premises at 23 Rue du Paradis.
“Did you see any bolts of cloth?” Limodin asked.
“No. Only the cask.”
“Sacks of brown sugar?”
“The cask, that was all.”
The chief inspector interviewed others, including Rue du Paradis neighbors and Auguste Marmont, a half-pay general of the Republican Army: a figure above reproach, and therefore not to be tortured.
“Citizen General, I understand you own the shed where the horse and cart were quartered.”
“Times are hard, monsieur. The rent is a necessary supplement.” He agreed with Jardin’s description, in particular of the man with the scar, who had paid cash.
“Did he give you a name?”
“No. But one of the others addressed him as “Le Petit François.” Further, Marmont identified the man’s accent as coastal.
At the Prefecture, officers gathered to hear the information.
“I think I know this man,” said one, who patrolled the area between the Portes St.-Denis and St.-Martin. “His sister runs a rooming house.”
Madame Valon was a self-proclaimed widow who boarded sailors when they were between assignments. She filled in the craters in her face with lead-based powder, and dirty brown strands of hair strayed out from under an ancient white wig tipped with brown, inviting an instant comparison to bird shit.
The house, like its mistress, was in an advanced state of dilapidation, the atmosphere inside sordid. It reeked of cabbage and unemptied chamber pots, a situation that Prefect Dubois found nearly as offensive as assembling parts of a rotting horse.
Dubois, who conducted the interview personally, compared the harridan to a parrot in a seaside inn: The blasphemies that laced her speech appeared to have no meaning to her.
“You have a brother you call Le Petit François, Citizeness?”
“I do.”
“What is your maiden name?”
“Carbon.”
“Your brother, then, is named François Carbon?”
“It would stand to reason.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Not in ages.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Certainly not since before Christmas.”
Valon and her two adolescent daughters—coarse creatures, after the maternal example—were placed in custody and removed to a place of questioning not mentioned in the city broadsides (or anywhere else), while bulletins issued from the Prefecture bearing the name and description of the fugitive sought in connection with the incident on the Rue Saint-Nicaise. His companions were described also, with the putative nom de guerre Brunet—he of grain merchant Lambel’s windfall six francs—appended to one.
Relentless, round-the-clock interrogation followed, with the woman and her daughters shaken awake whenever they dropped off to sleep. Dubois, who clung to such scraps of chivalry as a man in his position could support, was discreetly absent during much of this time, and when he stepped in to observe and participate, did not remark upon swellings and bruises. They might have been obtained, after all, when the person under scrutiny fell off her chair from fatigue.
The daughters were the first to break the chain of lies. First one revealed, then the other confirmed, that Uncle François had stayed in the rooming house for a time after Christmas Eve. No, he had not mentioned what he’d been about, or why he preferred not to venture outside during his residence there. No, they had suspected nothing.
Dubois ignored this obvious untruth when they added that he had left the house to stay with friends.
“What friends?” He asked this of each separately. Both claimed ignorance.
“Madame?” he inquired of the mother.
“You must not pay attention to whatever those girls say. They’re filthy little liars.”
Dubois spoke again to the younger sister. A homely child with a bulbous forehead, she looked more like a stubborn and unpleasant infant than the sullen courtesan she attempted to resemble in her mended petticoats and bead necklace.
“Come, come, little one. Time is not on your side. If your sister speaks first, it will be good for her and bad for you. The workhouse needs healthy hands.” He leaned in close, in the attitude of confiding a secret. “Do you know what work is done in a workhouse?”
“No, monsieur.” It was barely a murmur, with her gaze on the floor.
“It has the laundry contract from the prisons. Maggots and worse on the stained sheets, and lye soap to spoil your lovely hands for life.” In fact her nails were dirty and appeared to have been gnawed by vermin.
The Prefect had counted upon the younger girl to fold like a standard shorn from its lashings; but in this he was wrong. She kicked her feet and sucked in her lips, as if to prevent anything from issuing from them.
Came a knock: Limodin, who had been interviewing the older girl in a separate room. Dubois stepped out into the narrow hallway, impatient with the interruption.
The chief inspector’s eyes were bright. His superior forgot his vexation. The older daughter had broken: The maggots had worked the trick.
François Carbon was in custody within the hour.