The Coral Thief (32 page)

UCIENNE BERNARD SLEPT FOR TWO DAYS
. Manon sent me a note late on the first day to say she was ill, that she wouldn’t wake up, that I was to come immediately and bring my medicine bag. In the warehouse, Silveira, Manon, and Saint-Vincent waited in an adjoining room.

The scene I found when I arrived moved me. Silveira had lit candles in every corner of the room where she slept and had brought flowers from the market—late sunflowers and roses—that spilled out of vases on every surface. There were bowls of figs and grapes and the air was sweet with the smell of scented oils warmed over lanterns. Where two days before there had been not only dissent but open conflict between Manon, Saint-Vincent, Lucienne, and Silveira, now there was silence, the silence of a darkened room that smelled of oil of myrrh.

An empty blue-glass bottle stood by her bed—Manon had found it among Lucienne’s discarded clothes. Silveira identified the bottle as one he had given her only days before, a bottle that had contained a strong opiate tincture given to him by an apothecary in a village on the
coast near Goa. He had given it to her to help her sleep. It contained perhaps eight or ten doses, he said. In a moment of desperation, sometime after she had left the warehouse that night, she had drunk the entire bottle. She had not woken or stirred since, Manon said—and her pulse was weak. I said what there was to be said, that there was nothing that would wake her until the effects of the sleeping draft had worn off.

“She’s done it before,” Silveira said. “Three times. Damned woman. I should have known. Once, in the desert, when we were camped in the remains of a Roman city, she stole a sleeping draft from me and slept for a week—just to spite me, I swear. When she woke she didn’t know that any time at all had passed. She had been dreaming of the sea, she said, while I worried and paced about day and night. The Bedouin women gave me myrrh oil to burn. They say it is good for sleepers.”

I sat with Alain and Manon through the first night. Silveira would not stay—he and Sabalair had work to do, he said. For the first hour, I sat at the window and they talked, as only Saint-Vincent and Manon could talk, one story opening up inside another, shared memories and disagreements about dates and the order and origins of things.

“There are many things I don’t know about her,” Saint-Vincent said, turning to me and taking a knife to slice the top off one of the eggs he had boiled in the pan over the fire. “She comes and goes. She’s in Paris; but then she’s gone. She’s running and then she’s not.” He paused. “We are all running, I think. She was sixteen when I first saw her—she was living with her grandmother and Manon in Marseilles.”

“My mother was the housekeeper there,” Manon said, glancing in my direction. “The old marquise adopted me when she died. You know, Alain, Lucienne fell in love with you when you first came to dinner, that very first night when you talked to her about the structure of algae.”

“Algae? Hardly the stuff of romance,” he said.

“It was to her. She was in your bed by the end of the summer.”

“She seduced me…”

“She was sixteen. You were her tutor.”

“And I was eighteen,” he said, looking at me with a glint in his eye, “and I was hardly in a position to refuse or know better. It was a fine summer. But that was before the Revolution.”

“In the old times,” she said. “Before Daniel was born.”

“Don’t start on that,” I said.

“It was 1793 before I saw her again. The same year that the revolutionary commission renamed all the months and years and started the new calendar from year one,” Saint-Vincent said. “It took me an eternity to remember that Thermidor was half of July and half of June and Brumaire was half of September and half of October. I’d been to university and on an expedition to Africa by then. I was working in the Jardin, in the glasshouses, attending the botany lectures when I could. It was October—Brumaire—a thunderous, wild day, just three weeks after they had taken the queen to the guillotine in the place de la Révolution, the beginning of the fifteen months of the Terror, and only a short while after they had renamed the Jardin du Roi the Jardin des Plantes and appointed all the professors. No one knew quite what they were supposed to do or who was in charge of what but there was a great sense of expectation. Lucienne turned up the same week Marchini brought the leopard to the Jardin.”

“Your memory fails you, Saint-Vincent,” Manon said. “It was November. I remember very clearly. It was just after she left the prison. I had given her up for dead until the letter came. And by the time I found her she might as well have been dead. She looked like a walking corpse.”

I thought of the red-haired woman Lucienne had described, the woman who had stood up in the prison, who had taken Lucienne’s name, the woman who disappeared into another prison and would take Lucienne’s place on the guillotine the following summer. I remembered
Lucienne’s guilt at having sat down again. Lucienne de Luc had become Lucienne Bernard, and the red-haired woman’s bones and skull were thrown into the trench in the convent garden.

“The leopard,” I said. “You said it was the day they brought the leopard to the Jardin.”

“Oui. C’est vrai
. The revolutionary committee had just issued a decree,” Saint-Vincent said, “outlawing the exhibition of wild animals on the streets of Paris because they were a threat to public safety. That’s funny, eh? A threat to public safety. The guillotine was released onto the streets just as the wild animals were cleared off them.”

“Where did it come from?” I said, imagining a leopard stalking through the streets of Paris, its reflection caught in the glint of shop fronts and coffeehouses.

“A man called Marchini,” Saint-Vincent said, “owned an exotic-animal shop near the place de la Révolution. The police arrested him and brought the last four animals in his shop to the Jardin: a polar bear, a leopard, a civet, and a monkey. Once word got out that we’d taken Marchini’s animals, everyone began bringing their animals to the Jardin—you could see them all coming over the bridge, or sailing down the Seine in barges. There was a queue along the quai, and chaos—monkeys, bears, even an alligator. Dubenton was in a panic. There was nowhere to put them, and people were asking ridiculous prices. They closed the gates of the Jardin and put some of the botany students at the front gate to try to stop people from pushing and shouting. That’s when I saw Manon in the crowd with Lucienne, who was holding a parrot. Lucienne was dressed as a laborer; you’d never have known she was a woman. She was thin and hollowed-out, as if her clothes were holding her together.”

“They were,” Manon said. “There was nothing left of her, and she wouldn’t let go of the damned parrot. She’d found him in the street. He was crawling with lice and so was she. None of the doctors I found would even look at her. They said there were too many mad people in Paris, it wasn’t worth the time or the trouble. They were past mending,
unless I had thousands of francs, of course, which I didn’t.
Mon Dieu
, I was pleased to see you that day, Saint-Vincent. I had no idea what I was going to do with her.”

“She terrified me,” he said. “I’d never seen anyone like that before. I couldn’t look at her, poor thing. I took the parrot and gave it to the people in the Jardin. Then I took her and Manon to the convent in the rue de Picpus, where a doctor I knew was looking after a few of the
aliénés
.”

“The mad people,” Manon added. “It was the only thing we could do to help her. I left Paris. I had to. It wasn’t safe in the streets that winter. I went back to Marseilles, where I had family.”

“And I went to my house in Bordeaux,” Saint-Vincent said. “I should have taken Lucienne with me, but what would I have said to my wife? When I returned the following autumn, I went to find her. The convent was closed and the windows had all been boarded up. There was no one there. It took me weeks to find her—she was begging on the streets outside the Palais Royal. I wrote to Manon and moved Lucienne into a room in a house in the rue Royale. Charlotte Holbach, who was my mistress at the time, gave them lodgings for the winter.”

“We were in good company in that house,” Manon said. “There were scores of heretics and migrants living there—people who had escaped the guillotine, atheists, libertines, philosophers, artists, and writers. Everyone in that house was either mad or sleepwalking.”

“Lucienne was gambling all the time at the Palais Royal,” Saint-Vincent said. “Night and day. When she played, she seemed to be in a trance. She was winning more than was natural. They kept throwing her out. She kept going back. We’d lock the door to keep her in, but she’d always find a way out.”

“What was wrong with her?” I asked Manon.

“She said she could see absolutely clearly in her own head what had happened all across Paris: the dying, the rotting bodies lying in the streets, the eyes of the child she saw cut away from his mother’s
body in the rue du Bac, the bodies they had thrown into the trenches in the convent. She couldn’t get away from it. It was a constant noise, a roar inside her head. She could go to the other side of the earth and it would follow her, she said. She wanted to die.”

“She was completely unmanageable,” Saint-Vincent said. “She started to break into buildings to steal things in the middle of the night. I spent half my nights out looking for her. Stealing was like gambling; it excited her. It made her feel she might still be alive. She came back to the house on the rue Royale one morning with five pieces of coral from the museum. They were from her grandmother’s collection, she told us. And they might have been, for all I know. She believed she had a right to them. Who knows how she did it. Reparation, she called it.”

“What’s the collective noun for
thieves
in French?” I’d asked Lucienne one morning as we lay listening to the sounds of the street.

“Un repaire de brigands
. A hole, no, a den, of thieves,” she said.

Den.
Répaire
. Reparation.

A reparation of thieves.

“Then she found Léon Dufour, the poet,” Saint-Vincent continued, weaving Lucienne’s story out of strands of the ribboned night. “She met him in the Palais Royal, and once he’d taught her to pick locks and copy and make keys, and had taken her into his bed, she started to disappear for weeks rather than days. One night she broke into an old convent and brought back some of Charlotte Holbach’s paintings, which had been requisitioned by Vivant Denon and were destined for the walls of the Louvre. She was elated.”

“That was it for me,” Manon said. “I’d had enough. I went back to Marseilles. I wanted a quiet life. When I came back a year later, everything was different.
She
was completely different. She dressed expensively—and as a man.”

“She was using a tailor on the rue Vivienne,” Saint-Vincent said.

“She and Dufour and Saint-Vincent, they were organized. She had regained half of her grandmother’s collection and had savings in the bank.”

“I brought her books and papers on corals and zoophytes from the library in the Jardin,” Saint-Vincent said, opening a bottle of brandy. “We were making a great deal of money. We had our first commissions from émigrés that winter: the Louvre, the museums in the Jardin, a monastery or two, five private houses: sixteen paintings, four necklaces, and a collection of curiosities. We charged more and more. We could because we were good.”

“And Egypt,” I said, meaning Silveira. “How did that happen?”

“Once the police started looking for us seriously—and who could blame them, we were a thorn in their side—I arranged for her to go to Egypt with Geoffroy,” Saint-Vincent said. “She met Silveira there. They disappeared into the desert, and when she came back to Paris, years later, she had changed again. The same, but different. She started her book on the corals out there, based on conversations she’d had with Geoffroy and with Silveira and the coral traders and coral divers who worked with him.”

“It was 1803 or 1804—a long time—before she came back to Paris,” Manon continued. “By then I had a job drawing botanical and animal illustrations in the Jardin.”

“And I was working for Lamarck,” Saint-Vincent said. “Lucienne signed up for the lectures Lamarck gave that summer in the amphitheater. It was a remarkable time—it was the summer that Lamarck first began to talk about transformism. The priests were gone; the menagerie in the Jardin was getting bigger all the time; Napoleon was sending us animals from palaces all across Europe: lions, camels, ostriches, and gazelles. And then a zebra arrived from South Africa—”

“And Lucienne?” I interrupted, afraid that we were about to disappear into the menagerie and never find our way out.

“I was stationed at Dunkirk in 1805,” Saint-Vincent said, “and then in Austria, and I fought at Austerlitz, so once again we lost contact.
I was wounded there. They don’t give you honors or medals for being wounded, you know. And she was in Paris, back with Dufour. Sometimes she would summon me—if she had a new commission, if she needed me—but mostly she didn’t. I was in Prussia and Poland in 1807, busy bayoneting Cossacks, but I missed the Battle of Eylau because I was ill …”