The Coral Thief (2 page)

“It will get bigger, you know,” she said, her eyes shining in the dark with a touch of malevolence.

“What will?”

“The city. It doesn’t look so big now, at night, but it will swallow you up. Are you not afraid?”

“Yes.” I smiled. “Yes. Of course I’m afraid.”

Paris aroused complicated feelings in me then. What did I know of cities—the sound of thousands of people moving together, the tangled dealings of commerce and trade? I had always been a country boy. I knew the insides of the cave networks and mine workings of Derbyshire; I knew the angles and curves of the hills, the names of trees, ferns, lichens, and fishes; I could tell you how the light fell across the lakes, but I knew almost nothing of cities.

Edinburgh—quiet, solid, rainy Edinburgh, hewn out of the rock and built across a ravine—where I had lived and worked for four years, had overwhelmed me as a seventeen-year-old boy arriving by carriage one frosty morning. As I slipped through the crowd of Princes Street, I could scarcely feel the beginnings and ends of myself in the roar and flow of it. So I had anchored myself, establishing daily routes between the lecture theaters, the anatomy school, the libraries, museums, and taverns. Despite the best efforts of my fellow students, one of whom urged me with mock seriousness to fall in love for the sake of my health, I had lived largely in and among books.

I had seen London fleetingly, passing through from time to time on my way from Edinburgh to my family home in Derbyshire. One day in May I walked from the inn where I was staying to the optical-instrument
maker’s shop in the Strand and bought a bronze-cased microscope in a velvet-lined box with money I had saved for three years. On that brief walk, London, for all its smoke and smell and noise, enraptured me. My curiosity, that shapeless thing that drove at me relentlessly, that propelled the search for origins and explanations and connections, my desire to see further and further into the insides of things that had compelled me from the day I had touched my first microscope, or turned the first page of Aristotle’s
History of Animals
, or opened the encyclopedia at the page marked “Anatomy,” had seemed all the more heightened in London. There were answers to be found in cities; there were libraries, instrument shops and museums and professors who knew how to pose extraordinary questions.

Now that I had graduated, I wanted more than anything to be part of what was happening in Paris—the conversations and discoveries in the debating rooms, the libraries, and the museums. The French professors, given authority, freedom, and money by Napoleon, were making new inroads into knowledge. The museums in Paris were remarkable, the lectures groundbreaking. But it was also the city my father and his friends feared and loathed, the Paris of the Revolution—a city of people so hungry they had marched on Versailles, stormed the Bastille, imprisoned and then killed a royal family. I thought about the newspaper reports my father had kept that described the guillotine swallowing up lives, thousands of them; blood in the streets; mobs; children with sticks and garden tools hunting down the children of aristocrats and beating them to death; a king made to wear a red cap; bloodied heads on spikes; the grocer burned alive on a pyre made of furniture thrown from the windows of the palaces of émigrés.

Then there was the Paris of Napoleon Bonaparte. I had seen drawings of the buildings and squares and streets the Emperor had built: the vast classical perspective of the Arc du Carrousel and the Arc de Triomphe; the new bridges and water fountains; the classical façades, colonnades, marble columns—all so cool and quiet—the imperial
aspirations of the Emperor laid serenely on top of fire, blood, and death. Paris was to be the new Rome, Napoleon had declared.

Now that Napoleon had been captured, Wellington had restored the French king to the throne—Louis XVIII, they called this one; the brother of the guillotined king. But everyone was still half expecting Napoleon to rise again, like a body that just wouldn’t drown. Anything could happen, and I wanted to be there to see it. Whatever
it
was going to be. There was going to be a spectacle of some kind.

“Daniel into the lion’s den …” she said.

“How do you know my name?” The coach lurched so that my body crushed up against her shoulder in the darkness. “Pardon, madame. Have we met before?”

“A Portuguese priest taught me some tricks in a bar on the Amalfi coast,” she said, turning her head toward me with a slow smile. In the lightening of the morning, I could see her face for the first time against the black folds of her hood.

She was darkly, heavily beautiful. A woman of middle years with black eyes and olive skin and thick black eyebrows that almost touched in the middle, making the shape of an archer’s bow, a falcon in flight. Even in the half-light, the directness of her gaze startled me. She held me there, her eyes searching out mine, her lips forming the faintest of smiles, but I could not look back, not directly, though I wanted to. Always immersed in my studies, and growing up as a boy among boys, I had had little practice conversing with women. I felt myself blush and began to stammer. “What tricks?” I asked. “What did he teach you?”

“My friend, the abbé Faria,” she said, “is a magnetist. He is half Indian, half Portuguese. He taught me many things. I put you to sleep for a few minutes, and then you told me everything—first your name, your family, your dreams … and then your secrets. Now I know all your secrets. Every one.” She smiled.

“You didn’t put me to sleep,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.” I looked at my pocket watch. The hands were still moving clockwise at the same rate. It was half past five. I was certain I had lost no time.

“How can you be sure, monsieur?” She was no longer looking at my eyes; now her gaze had settled on my lips. Her eyes on my lips, her thigh against my thigh, her shoulder against mine. I could feel the heat of her body through my clothes. In the early-morning light, with the child sleeping in the crook of her arm, she looked like a painting. Almost sacred. Yet the intimacy of her talk and manner disturbed me.

“You must be about twenty,” she said, examining me more closely. “You remind me of someone I once knew. You have the look of a Caravaggio boy—your dark curls, your skin, your coloring, your eyes.”

“Caravaggio?”

“The Italian painter.”

“Yes, I know who Caravaggio is.”

“I think it’s something about your lips. Your beauty begins there, in your lips. Some of Caravaggio’s paintings are in the Louvre. You should go and see them.”

“I am twenty-three,” I said, exaggerating a little, while trying to steady my breathing. Could she see my discomfort, my body betraying its secrets?

She smiled. The wind had picked up. It tugged at her cloak and blew through her hair. She pulled the cloak further around the child’s head. The child, disturbed, woke for a moment and sat up, black eyes wide, her black hair disheveled and wild, and said in French, as if still dreaming:
“M. Napoleon, il est mort.”

“No, no, little one,” the woman replied in French, “it’s only a dream, just a dream. M. Napoleon is sleeping safely in his own bed. Really. His soldiers are guarding him. Now, go back to sleep. We will be in Paris soon.”

The child, comforted, dropped her shoulders, closed her eyes, pulled the cloak around her, and was soon sleeping again.

The woman turned back to me, her voice low and lingering. “Your name is Daniel Connor. You are studying anatomy at the medical school in Edinburgh. You have written up your dissertation. Probably, I think, on something to do with generation or embryology—”

“The circulation of the blood in the fetus … How did you …?”

“And now you come to Paris to study at the Jardin des Plantes, M. Daniel Connor. You think about philosophical questions. What else? Am I correct so far?”

“How can you
possibly
know that?”

My voice, when I spoke, was shaky. I was tired, I reminded myself. Just that. And this woman was a specter. Probably just a figment of my imagination, conjured in the night.

She laughed again and gestured toward my traveling bag, which sat between us on the seat, open.

“You are labeled, my friend … here.” She ran her fingers over the letters engraved on the inside of the bag. “You see:
DANIEL CONNOR, MEDICAL SCHOOL, EDINBURGH
. I guessed the rest. You are easy to read.”

“That is not fair,” I said, relieved. “You have taken advantage of me.”

“You see,” she said, “I am a great investigator. We say
enquêteur
. There are many Edinburgh medical students like you in Paris now. They come to listen to the French professors of the Jardin des Plantes: Professors Lamarck, Cuvier, and Geoffroy. I like to watch them. They amuse me.”

I didn’t like to think of myself as just one of many, but she was right. For me and for hundreds of other medical students in July 1815, all possible roads led to—or through—the great Jardin des Plantes. Built as an herb garden on the banks of the Seine for a French king in the seventeenth century, the Jardin du Roi had, with the severing of a kings head a hundred years later, become the Jardin des Plantes, a garden for the enlightenment of the people. Twelve venerable French professors lived in the Jardin in the elegant houses built among the museums, libraries, glasshouses, and lecture halls, professors who between them knew how to formulate questions about everything in nature and would soon, without doubt, I believed, know all the answers. In a few weeks, Professors Lamarck, Cuvier, and
Geoffroy would no longer be names on scientific papers or abstracts, they would become real people to me, fellow explorers and patrons. The prospect awed me.

“How long will you stay in Paris, M. Daniel Connor?”

“I don’t know yet. I have six months’ employment in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy in the Jardin des Plantes, working for Professor Cuvier on a new volume of his book—some illustration, some dissecting. I will be an
aide-naturaliste
. After that I have a little money. My uncle died and left me a small inheritance. I shall use it to travel.”

I could see it as if I was walking through it—colonnades and staircases and hushed libraries. The universities of Europe. I saw botanical gardens and shelves stacked with glass jars of yellowing liquid preserving the shapes of rare animals and fishes. I heard animated conversation at a distance—voices speaking in Spanish, Italian, German. I pictured myself there at the center of it all: on the steps, among fountains and bougainvillea, in shady lecture halls—arguing, questioning.

Derbyshire was a backwater as far as ideas were concerned. None of the members of the local Natural Philosophical Society at Castleton, which now had a substantial collection of fossils and bones displayed in its museum, had read James Hutton or Georges Cuvier or even Alexander Humboldt. They were not philosophers but myopic collectors arguing over taxonomy, I told myself, counting angels on a pinhead. Only three men in the town of Ashbourne—the vicar, the doctor, and the judge—knew Greek. Even Edinburgh Medical School, when compared with the medical schools of Paris, seemed to be locked in the past century. I had attended all the lectures in anatomy, geology, and natural philosophy several times over by the time I graduated. The university library, where I had first read volumes of Shakespeare and Locke and Fielding and Scott as well as anatomy textbooks, closed and opened at unpredictable hours; it had no catalogue and an impenetrable shelving system. The anatomy theaters were always full to bursting, and you couldn’t get a seat or see what was happening; there were never enough cadavers for us to work on.

Meanwhile the medical students I knew who had spent a winter at the Jardin des Plantes came back whispering of lecture theaters filled with the cleverest men in Europe, libraries overflowing with thousands of volumes of specialist books, museums crammed with specimens from every corner of the world, new dissection and classification techniques, and ever more powerful microscopes. Paris had become a kind of mirage in my mind—a shimmer of light on the horizon.

I had only my inheritance, but I had merit, and in France, people said then, merit still counted for something. Napoleon Bonaparte had proven that. His rise to power had been theatrical and spectacular: Corsican country boy comes to Paris during the Revolution, becomes a soldier, becomes lieutenant, becomes artillery commander, becomes general, becomes first consul, becomes Emperor of France. He was breathtaking. You couldn’t not admire him. In fifteen years he had captured most of Europe, swept his way with his Imperial Army through city after city, like a high tide across mudflats, to establish himself as one of the greatest rulers the world had ever seen.

But of course, although I admired Napoleon perhaps above all men, my father would not permit my journey to Paris until the Emperor had fallen. By the time I arrived, Napoleon was already a captive on the HMS
Bellerophon
, while the Allies quarreled about what to do with him.

In 1815 Napoleon’s fate seemed strangely—inversely, superstitiously—bound to mine. Just as my journey began, his seemed to be coming to an end. As I reached Paris, he was already heading away from it. Europe had begun the process of remaking itself, redrawing its borders, and forming new alliances. The trajectory of Napoleons power, at first relentlessly upward, like an arrow in flight, had started into its downward curve. I would follow the newspaper accounts of his journey all through that autumn, measuring my own days against his, spellbound, as I would have watched the trail of a strange comet across the night sky.