Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (8 page)

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.

I
N 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

B
EYOND 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.

T
WO 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.