For the King (3 page)

Roch took his leave, too preoccupied to respond to his father’s protests. All that was on his mind was Blanche’s safety.

3

R
och, on the doorstep of Mighty Barrel, wondered about the location of the blast. It had sounded so close. He could not keep his thoughts off Blanche Coudert, his mistress of several months, in whose company he had spent a few most enjoyable hours that afternoon. He knew that the première of
The Creation of the World
would begin shortly at the Opera, only a few hundred yards away. All of fine society would attend. Blanche and her husband had their own box, and she loved music. She would be there, of course. He imagined her injured, bleeding, dying, far from any help.

He ran towards the Opera. Everywhere he had to force his way through anxious crowds, which became more and restless as he drew closer. But then, when he reached the entrance to the Palais-Egalité, he realized that the center of the uproar must be further to the south, towards Rue Nicaise. He felt relieved. Blanche was safe then. Her carriage, even if it had arrived fashionably late, would not have taken that route to go to the Opera.

Roch prepared to turn into Rue Nicaise, but paused for a minute. There was no street there anymore, only a sort of tunnel, a gaping hole, its edges softened by drifting smoke. All the lamps had been extinguished, and the scene was only lit by wobbly points of light in the distance. Roch entered the darkness. A gust of wind, carrying the stench of gunpowder and fire, hit him in the face. He tripped on an unseen obstacle and cursed under his breath. After a few dozen yards, he distinguished a dozen characters, male and female, in strange costumes, their faces caked with white powder and rouge, huddled together. A man shivering in a Roman toga, his bare feet in antique sandals, held a lantern. Roch remembered that the Théâtre du Vaudeville was nearby. A popular entertainment for those Parisians who could not afford the Opera. Roch approached the little group.

“Police!” he said. “If you don’t mind, Citizen, I will borrow your lantern.”

The actors gathered around him and proceeded to ask questions all at the same time.

Roch raised his hand. “No,” he said, “I have no idea of what happened. Go home now and report to the nearest police station in the morning to give your statements.”

He headed further down the street. Shards of glass briefly reflected the light of the lantern and crushed under the heel of his boot. Sometimes his foot sank with a wet noise into soft, spongy, indefinable things, which he preferred not to imagine.

There were more lanterns ahead. Those were not moving. They were fitted at the top of poles planted into the rubble that covered the ground. He saw a large gathering of men, but these were no actors. He recognized his colleague Sobry, the Police Commissioner for the district of the Tuileries. Sobry was a former attorney, a tall man with a handsome, thoughtful face. He was giving orders to blue-uniformed National Guards. Other men, in civilian clothes, were bent over prone bodies. All the physicians in the district must have rushed to the scene.

“A bomb, an infernal machine,” Sobry said in response to Roch’s question. “On a cart, apparently. Several witnesses noticed it, stopped in the middle of the street, not far from the Café d’Apollon. The bomb exploded just as the First Consul’s carriage drove by.”

Roch frowned. “So Bonaparte . . .”

“No, amazing as it sounds. Not a scratch, though I heard that the windows of his carriage were shattered. His lucky star again, I guess. Apparently none of his attendants were seriously injured either. His carriage simply drove on to the Opera.”

The image of Blanche returned to Roch’s mind with renewed urgency.

“What about the Opera? What’s going on there? Another bomb?”

“No, all is safe there, apparently. Bonaparte may be there already. They must have searched the place before they let him set foot inside.”

Roch pictured Blanche, by her husband’s side, seated in her red velvet box at the Opera. Her white skin must have turned paler than usual at the news of the attack. But at least she was unhurt.

He turned his attention to the crater, several yards across, that gouged the street. The fronts of the nearby houses had collapsed. Blackened paneling, shattered furniture, half-collapsed ceilings were exposed to his view. An hour earlier, those had been ordinary rooms, filled with ordinary people, in a well-to-do district. Now there was something oddly immodest about the sight of those private places, suddenly exposed to anyone’s view.

“I can’t imagine how Bonaparte escaped this,” muttered Roch.

He looked around at the bodies littering the street. Some were moaning, and a woman’s shrill cries pierced the air. Roch, trying to shut off all noises, squatted next to the remains of a horse, yards away from the crater. He examined the animal’s sole remaining hoof. The shoe was bright and shiny in the light of the lanterns.

“From the extent of the mutilation,” he said to Sobry, “it looks like the horse that drew the cart. See this? The shoe is new. This poor beast must be taken to the Prefecture. A blacksmith may be able to recognize it.” Roch looked around. “What about the cart itself ? Did you find the plate number?”

“No, only the two shafts, each on one side of the street. They seem quite ordinary. As for the plate, it may have been shattered or blown onto nearby roofs. We will search there as soon as day breaks.”

“Where is the Prefect?” asked Roch.

“On his way, I guess. I sent him word of the situation.”

“And what about the Minister?”

Sobry looked straight at Roch. “Like you, I report to the Prefect.
He
will inform the Minister as he deems appropriate.”

“How many dead?”

“Too early to tell. So far we discovered eight bodies. I had them taken to the police station on Rue Thomas. But there must be more buried in the rubble, and there are scores of wounded, many gravely so. A butchery.” Sobry nodded in the direction of an intact house down the street. “I had the stables in there turned into an infirmary.”

Roch was staring at a dark, elongated form a dozen yards away, in the midst of the rubble. “Sobry, have you seen this?”

The object had the color and texture of charcoal. It looked like a large log, blown off from a fireplace. Followed by Sobry, he walked cautiously towards it. He stopped when he saw tufts of reddish hair still sticking to the far end. A human skull. He turned away and took a deep breath, then willed himself to look again. Now he could see that both arms were missing.

Sobry shuddered. “Poor thing. He, or she, must have been very close to the infernal machine to be so badly burned. Some witnesses mentioned a child, poorly dressed, holding the bridle of the horse and playing with a whip. Most say a girl, but some swear that it was a boy.”

Roch nodded, still too nauseous to speak.

“You know how it goes,” continued Sobry. “You can never get two people to agree on anything. True, it was hard to tell, with this fog.”

Sobry ordered two National Guards to deposit the charred body onto a door that was found lying on the street, and Roch followed them to the police station. There was no end to the night’s horrors. On the floor lay eight corpses, some almost intact, some barely evoking a human form. Severed limbs had been piled in a corner. The physicians were all busy attending to the wounded, a guard told him, and no one had come to examine the bodies yet. The only information available was the names of the dead, at least those who had been identified thanks to their
Cartes de Sûreté
. Roch wrote them down in the booklet he always carried in his pocket. He was relieved to leave in search of a cart to take the carcass of the horse to the Prefecture.

He walked away in the direction of the Louvre Embankment. Once he left Rue Nicaise, the reassuring glow of streetlights reappeared. He breathed in deeply the cold air. He could smell the river now. He looked around and saw a familiar figure, slim and raggedy, among a band of street urchins. Perhaps they expected to scavenge something out of the wreckage, once the guards and policemen left.

Roch beckoned to one of the boys. He often used him as an informer, a
mouchard
, in Parisian slang, an
interposed person
, in the official language of police reports. Pépin was thirteen, small for his age and fleet of foot.

“Come here,” called Roch, “I have something for you.”

The boy approached, grinning. “Always at your command, Chief Inspector, Sir. Looks like you’ve your hands full tonight. So Bonaparte’s tripe’s blown all over the street? The King’ll come back, eh? Are they goin’ to guillotine you, Sir? Or maybe hang you, like in the ole days? That’d be a pity.”

“Shut that damned trap of yours, little snot. The First Consul is unharmed and no one’s going to hang me.”

Roch pulled his booklet and scrawled a few sentences on a blank page. He tore it off, folded it and addressed it in pencil to
Citizen Fouché, Minister of Police
. He handed Pépin the note. The guards at the Ministry knew him by sight and would let him pass. As the boy took it, Roch seized him by the fraying collar of his jacket.

“You’re going to take this to the Minister. Right away. If for any reason it doesn’t reach him within ten minutes, I’m going to send you to jail. About Bicêtre? I’ll see to it that you’re thrown into the
Pit
, in the middle of fifty common criminals. A
mouchard
, especially a fresh young one like you, will be quite a treat for them.”

Pépin looked chastened. “My apologies, I’m sure, Sir.”

Roch let go of him. As soon as the boy’s feet rested on the ground again, he took his cap off. “Really, Sir. No offense meant.”

“None taken. Just remember that the
Pit
awaits you if you play any tricks.”

Roch threw him a copper coin. The boy caught it deftly and saluted before disappearing.

4

R
och, followed by a cart and its sullen driver, returned to Rue Nicaise, where he oversaw the removal of the horse’s remains. He agreed with Sobry that, after stopping at the Prefecture, he would go to L’Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital where most of the wounded had been taken.

Roch headed for the Isle of the Cité. He left the carcass of the horse in the care of the guards on duty at the Prefecture of Police, and continued in the direction of Notre-Dame. The massive square towers of the Cathedral stood darker than the night sky. Roch walked past the Enfants-Trouvés, the Foundlings Hospital. There were abandoned the orphans, the little bastards and the offspring of paupers who could not afford to feed them.

L’Hôtel-Dieu was next door, to the side of the cathedral. It had officially been called L’Hospice de la République since the Revolution, but Parisians had never stopped using its old name.
Hôtel-Dieu
means “House of God,” an odd term, Roch always mused, for a place that had been for over a thousand years the repository of all of the misery of the great city. But perhaps all misery was the work of God. Everything in the world was, apparently, even the atrocities of that night.

Roch had forgotten most of the catechism the parish priest had taught him when he was a child in the small town of Lavigerie. Still he remembered Old Miquel, in the days before the Revolution, stopping by every cross they met during their long yearly journey between Auvergne and Paris. Both father and child would take off their hats and kneel. Together they recited a prayer in the Roman language before resuming their progress:

Little by little,
sol
by
sol
, the old man had saved some money, and borrowed more from his friend Vidalenc. He had purchased the Tavern of the Mighty Barrel and settled permanently in Paris. Then the Revolution had happened in 1789, when Roch was fourteen. Old Miquel had become a proponent of the new ideas of liberty and equality, a fervent admirer of Robespierre, the Jacobin leader. Like him, he would mention a deity called the Supreme Being, but in terms so vague as to mean nothing to Roch. Now all Roch knew for sure was that most of Paris paupers died, four to a bed in cavernous common rooms, in that earthly House of God.

Roch tried to ignore the howls coming from the hall of the women in labor. He breathed in a mix of excrement, putrefaction, unwashed bodies and cabbage soup. It was the odor of poverty, familiar from the time of his childhood. Here the sense of smell outlived all other perceptions, the stench stuck to the skin, to the hair, to the bedclothes. It accompanied the dying to the doors of eternity.

Citizen Naudier, Chief Surgeon, led Roch to the room where the victims from Rue Nicaise had been taken. They had been given separate beds, with clean sheets, and segregated from the other patients.

Roch walked past the bed of a young woman, her stomach bulging under the sheets. She was unconscious, so wan that Roch surmised she might never experience the trials of childbirth. In the next bed lay a man, his eyes wide open. Muffled cries came out of the bandage, stained red, that covered his mouth.

The plump woman down the line of beds resembled a pincushion. Her body was pierced by dozens of thin, sharp wooden arrows, which a young surgeon was extracting with pincers. She was screaming at each of his attempts.

“A musician, according to her
Carte de Sûreté
,” explained Naudier. “These must be the shards of her instrument.”

Roch nodded. He was beginning to despair of gathering any information when he walked to the last bed of the row. There lay a man, rather handsome, about forty years of age. He did look pale, but his eye was steady when it met Roch’s.

“Captain Platel,” said the Chief Surgeon. “Thigh and leg broken, multiple cuts on the torso and abdomen.”

Roch would have guessed that Platel was a military man. Two side braids hung in front of the ears, while the rest of his dark blond hair was gathered in two more braids that joined on the nape to form a queue. Those
cadenettes
protected the cheeks and neck in close combat and were popular with soldiers.