Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (9 page)

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

T
HE 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:

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

M
ATHIEU
L
OUPIAN
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 counterterrorists 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:

N°.1.

T
HOUGH 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.