The Coral Thief (19 page)

“It’s all so tight,” she said as we squeezed past a group of Englishwomen standing by the flower borders taking notes for their gardeners. “This place.
C’est un jardín militaire
. Everything grows in straight lines. Everything is trained, and clipped. It makes me think of corsets and whalebone.”

“Surely a garden has to be managed,” I said. “Or everything goes to seed.”

“My grandmother had a garden in Marseilles …,” she began. “I spent my summers there.”

As she talked, one garden opened up inside another. She spoke of peacocks and hares, a grotto lined with shells, and borders full of hybrids
and flowers allowed to throw their seeds wherever they wanted. And inside the house, she said, her grandmothers collection of shells, fossils, and corals filled most of the downstairs rooms so that there was never anywhere to sit.

“My grandmother let me take the corals from the drawers on special days, then, while I arranged them in patterns on the blue velvet cloth, she would tell me where each of them came from, and she would show me on her map and talk to me about the sea and all the undiscovered creatures that lived there. She told me that when the ships’ captains talked about seeing mermaids and mermen, they were really describing a race of humans that hadn’t yet found their way onto land. They didn’t need to, she said, because they had everything they needed under the sea.”

Lucienne talked as if she was dreaming. I imagined a dark-skinned child running through large shuttered rooms, sleeping among giant snuffboxes and bones and ammonites, chasing peacocks.

During the Revolution, her grandmother’s collection was requisitioned for the republic, she told me, for the enlightenment of the French people. Cuvier had made a list of the important natural-history collections in the great houses of France and handed it to Napoleon, who in turn had handed it to his generals.

“My grandmother’s collection was only one of hundreds on Cuvier’s list,” she said. “When I went back to Marseilles after the first years of the Revolution, everything was gone; the soldiers had killed all the peacocks and the animals in the menagerie; they’d walked over my grandmother’s gardens and dug up her botanical collection. Inside the house, all the drawers and cabinets were empty except for a few shells and fragments of broken pottery. All the paintings had gone …”

“And your family?” I hardly dared ask. I knew something of what had happened to wealthy families such as Lucienne’s. Even out on their provincial estates the rich were not safe from the fury of the people. Cuvier might have made a list of notable natural-history collections, I told myself, but he wasn’t responsible for that fury or for what the French soldiers might have done in the name of the republic.

“It was 1794,” she continued. “I came to Paris to find them—my parents and my grandmother. I was your age. I saw things no one should ever see. People called it
la Terroir
. The Terror. Robespierre called it
la Justice
. He thought he was doing the right thing for France. Purifying his country. Imagine that. Thousands of people dead in just a few weeks. It wasn’t justice. It was a massacre.”

“The guillotine.”

“Yes, there was the guillotine, but what happened in the streets was worse—people with pickaxes, kitchen knives, scythes. I saw one woman and a child cut to pieces limb by limb … trying to crawl to each other. I still see them in my dreams.”

“Enough to send someone mad,” I said. “I don’t know how you stop remembering things like that.”

“You don’t,” she said. “It just keeps on coming back.”

We were climbing up through the labyrinth now, taking paths to the right and left through low hedges. Ahead, I could see the golden pavilion and the dark horizontal branches of the cedar where birds sang.

I was still trying to understand how Lucienne Bernard had come to be, how the child of slaughtered aristocrats had become the philosopher-thief. I was looking for causes and effects and straight lines; instead there were only loops and spirals and tangles.

Below us the Jardin stretched away in avenues of lime trees flanked by neatly bordered rows of flowers and small shrubs. Beyond the garden the Seine made a horizontal line of blue before the city rose again, all spires and domes and towers, on the north bank.

“I wish we were inside,” I said. “I wish we were in your bed. I can’t stop thinking about you. Do you know how much I think about you?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “Yes, I know that. I remember how that feels.”

“I don’t want you to
remember
it,” I said. “I want you to feel exactly as I do.”

“I’m twenty years older than you,” she said. “It doesn’t feel the same. It doesn’t hurt so much. It’s better. Softer.” She seemed distracted, as though she was trying to recall something.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked, seeing her blush.

“When I was in Egypt, there was a man, a trader in corals, who taught me how to dive in the Red Sea. He was a friend of the Bedouins. He traded with them.”

“You swam in the Red Sea with him?” I asked before I could find a way of saying it differently. She turned to look at me, her head tilted a little, and smiled.

“Yes, there were many of us, the Bedouin men and the local divers who taught us how to reach the corals. Are you jealous?”

“I don’t know,” I said, embarrassed. “I think I am more jealous of you—of your life—of everything you have done, the places you have been. And yes, I am jealous of that man, the Portuguese man.”

“Davide, yes,” she said, her face darkening. “I’ve been looking for him. But everyone is in hiding in Paris. Nothing is where it used to be. I was hoping Saint-Vincent might know where he is. But he doesn’t.”

“Silveira,” I said slowly.

“Yes,” she said. “Davide Silveira. The man I traveled with in Egypt. Do you listen at all? You are always daydreaming.”

Silveira. This was the man Jagot called
Trompe-la-Mort
. The man who defied death. I did not like the sound of him.

“How long have you known him?” I asked.

“Since Egypt. That’s seventeen years now. A long time. You know, Daniel,” she said, changing the subject, “your questions are like the heads of the Hydra—cut off one and another grows in its place. You will kill me with your questions. It’s a good thing I am leaving Paris.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “Look, Lucienne, surely if it is a case of mistaken identity, you could go to Jagot and explain it; you could prove he has made a mistake. And then you would be free to come and go in Paris as you wish.”

“Lucienne Bernard is an exile and an émigrée—there is no reparation for her.”

“Other émigrés are being given reparation. Wellington is bringing in new laws.”

We sat there for a long time looking down over the Jardin until she said: “There are no mistaken identities, Daniel, and there is no putting things right or being free. Not anymore. Not for me. I steal. I stole.
We
steal things … You understand? It’s what we do—Manon, Saint-Vincent, and I, and sometimes others when we need them. It’s what we’ve done for twenty years. It has paid for everything—Saint-Vincent’s botany and his expeditions, my work on corals, my book, microscopes, library, the house in Italy. After the Revolution, the émigrés paid us to take things back from the museums and libraries and galleries. We were good. We made a lot of money. But we stopped six years ago when things went wrong. We all left Paris and tried to start our lives again in different places. But Jagot, there was no stopping
him. If his man hadn’t died, perhaps, things might have been different.”

In the silence that followed, we watched a heron fly slowly across the Jardin, disappearing into the wide branches of the cedar. Now I also understood the presence of the antique dueling pistol I had come across in the atelier only days before. It had been recently cleaned and loaded.

12

IME WAS SUSPENDED IN PARIS.
Rumors circulated. Wellington was afraid, Fin said, that moving the horses would be too much for the French people, that the horses had become a symbol. But the Venetian ambassadors were still in Paris and pressing hard for their return. They said Wellington was waiting until he had enough soldiers. Everywhere—on the bridges, on the columns, in the palaces-workmen were chiseling Napoleon’s initials from newly laid stone.

At ten o’clock each night the lamp carriers began to fan out across the city, hailing the fiacres, caterwauling, accompanying late-night walkers through the city to their front doors, looking for more trade. Oil lamps with their swinging circles of light were passing away, Céleste said; they belonged to the old century. So did the lamp carriers and the oil merchants and the sellers of the Artraud lamps; the engineer Philippe Lebon was already lighting his Paris house and garden with gas—he had vowed to light all of Paris this way. Soon there would be no more shadows in the city. Soon there would be no more night in Paris.

M. Lebon is in league with the enemies of France, the lamplighters, lamp carriers, and oil merchants whispered to anyone who would listen. All Paris will explode. And if they can’t blow us up, they will choke us with their fumes and black smoke.

One night, as we sat on Lucienne’s roof, in a gully between two gables, looking down over the city, I asked Lucienne about the embalmed animals Geoffroy had brought back from Egypt. There were rumors, I said, that Cuvier stored six of them in the cellars of his museum. It was a clear night—bright stars flecked a blue-black arch of sky and even at midnight the roof tiles were still warm from the September sun. I sat behind her, my arms around her while she smoked a cigar. I kissed her neck.

“So,” she said and laughed. She blew a single smoke ring into the night air, gray on black. “Cuvier has the mummified animals now, does he? They belong to Geoffroy. They’ve caused a lot of trouble in the Jardin. You know, when I worked with Geoffroy in Egypt, he used to be just like you—always asking questions, one after another. Now he says very little.”

“Where did they come from?”

“An Egyptian trader took us to the Well of Birds,” she said, “just a few weeks after we arrived. In the middle of fields of melons and lettuces, piles of rubbish and old stones—all that’s left of the ancient city of Memphis—there is an entrance to an underground temple called the Well of Birds. You climb down by rope—it’s the only way in. Under the ground there are labyrinths and passageways that stretch for miles, all of them lined with thousands of mummified birds inside earthenware jars, like so many bottles of wine. They are sacred birds; each has its own priest and altars. Geoffroy bought ten of them. Then he started buying mummified cattle, cats, crocodiles, and monkeys as well, all of them at least three thousand years old. He wanted to use them to show Cuvier that species had transformed. I warned him—I told him they’d be the same. And of course, when Geoffroy did unwrap
them back in Paris in front of Cuvier and all the professors and assistants here they
were
the same. There were no cats with wings or cattle with fins or fish with fur. So Cuvier won again. And of course, Cuvier mocked Geoffroy for months. He’s hardly published anything since.”