The Coral Thief (36 page)

“It’s messy, mademoiselle,” Fin said. “Not as good as it seems.”

“No. There is not much in this world that is as good as it seems,
n’est-ce pas?”

“It depends,” I said. “On your expectations. Whether they are low or high.”

“Oh, my expectations are, I believe, unusually high.”

“Well, then, many things will not be as good as they seem.”

“Bravo, how wise you are, M. Connor. Now I think it’s time to try a different subject. Now I will ask you about how you have been enjoying Paris. I hope you have been along to M. Reaux’s circus on the rue Saint-Honoré to see the Hottentot woman dance. M. Reaux has a rhinoceros on display there too. They call her the Hottentot Venus—the woman, that is, not the rhinoceros.”

“No, mademoiselle. I have not.”

“Then you must be quick, M. Connor. They say she is dying. All the men in Paris want to see the Hottentot woman dance, while there is still time.”

“Yes,” Fin said, a little embarrassed. “I’ve been there.”

“And are they as people say?” she said. “Her parts, I mean. They say they protrude like a man’s. Is it interesting?”

“Well, it’s rather distasteful really. She dances a little. Then reveals herself, part by part…”

“It is alluring, seductive?”

“No, it’s a freak show. A circus. She wears a mask. But yes, her body is remarkable. From the scientific point of view, I mean.”

“And you, M. Connor? Does the body of the Hottentot woman interest you?”

“No,” I said. “No. I don’t think I would want to see that.”

“She fell down on the stage last night, they say. Drunk.”

“Why do you take an interest in this woman, mademoiselle?” I asked.

“My stepfather bought her a few weeks ago when he was sure that she was dying, of course. I hear daily reports about her health, like weather reports. She is coming here, to the museum—as soon as she is dead. She’s in the last stages of syphilis, you see, although she is still young.”

“Surely you can’t buy people in Europe,” I said. “She’s not a slave.” The conversation was making me angry, an emotion I could not afford that evening.

“Oh, you can buy dead people, monsieur, in Paris. My stepfather buys dead bodies—for the purposes of enlightenment, of course. He’s going to dissect the Hottentot Venus in the laboratory where you work, M. Robertson. Then he’ll make a series of casts. She’s to go in the main hall in the museum between the orangutan and the male African. A prize exhibit. She’ll be more famous here than she is onstage. She is to be promoted from the freak show to the museum.”

“That’s grotesque,” I said. “There’s something very degrading in that.”

“Yes, M. Connor,” she said suddenly, her voice at a whisper. “There is something very degrading in that. It sickens me. There are sometimes things here in this house and in this museum that sicken me.”

“Sophie?” Clémentine Cuvier had approached us, dressed in her old-fashioned dress with ruffs at the neck. Her hair was pinned rather too tightly to her head, giving her a pinched expression.

“M. Robertson, may I introduce my sister, Mlle. Clémentine Cuvier. Clémentine, M. Robertson. You know M. Connor, of course.”

I glanced over to Cuvier. In the corner near Brugmans, he seemed to be struggling. A little pale, a little sweaty, he had lowered himself into a chair. His secretary, Charles Laurillard, passed him a glass of water. I couldn’t imagine Cuvier out in the forests of India collecting wild animals. No, he sent his protégés to do that. Some of them would die collecting for him.

“Will you excuse me, messieurs,” Sophie said. “We have duties.”

At the same moment, on the night of October 29, 1815, while Cuvier performed for the Dutch ambassador, in another part of Paris on an unlit road in a region called Picpus, a fiacre followed a woman in a black fur-lined coat who was walking toward the convent carrying a child’s soldier’s uniform wrapped in dark blue tissue paper and tied with gold ribbon.

Manon Laforge knew she was being followed, of course, but it didn’t stop her from feeling anxious. It was meant to be this way. All was as it should be. It was all part of the plan she had gone over and over again with Lucienne. This was the most difficult part of the plan to choreograph.

“It’s the only way,” Lucienne had explained to me. “If Jagot knows we’re going to break the deal and escape through the quarries, he will take Delphine from the convent and bring her as a hostage in exchange for the diamond. Which is exactly what I want him to do. Once Delphine is down there in the quarries, I can reach her. We will be on my ground. But Delphine must not be alone with Jagot’s men. She will be afraid. She must have someone who can protect her if anything goes wrong. I can’t go; it must be Manon.”

So this part of the plan had depended on the staged and slow exchange of secrets between me and Jagot over the course of the previous week.
Manon Laforge will try to rescue the child from the convent on the night of the robbery
, I wrote.
Nine o’clock. When your men change shifts. She will come to the side door dressed in a black fur-lined coat. She will carry a parcel—a red soldier’s uniform for the child. A disguise
.

Excellent. A second hostage will only strengthen my hand
, Jagot replied by return.

Manon looked around. There was no one else in the street, just the fiacre moving toward her. She was anxious, despite the carefully orchestrated plan. She knew there were risks on every side. She walked faster. The blinds of the fiacre were drawn. It moved very slowly, following her through the night as she passed the dark ponds and the clearing, as she headed toward the darkest end of the street, to
the side door of the convent, where a nun took the parcel from her and a few moments later passed out a small child dressed in a red soldier’s uniform.

Manon told Delphine that she was going for a midnight walk in her new costume. Stranger things had happened. The child talked incessantly about chickens, snails, about her new friends. She was excited. She brandished her soldier’s sword.

“Whatever happens now, Delphine, you do exactly as I say, you understand?” Manon whispered. Delphine nodded.

Manon recognized the voice of Jagot as he stepped out of the fiacre and called to her sharply: “Madame Laforge,” he said, “there is nowhere to run. For the safety of the child …”

She ran anyway, taking Delphine’s hand. Her fur-lined coat, bought from the secondhand clothes shop on the alleyway that ran off the rue Vivienne, a coat that had once belonged to a countess who had lost her head, her house, and her name, slipped off her shoulders as she fell.

Delphine, disoriented by the night and imagining herself to be fighting against the English on the side of Napoleon at Austerlitz, brandished her sword to defend herself and her fallen compatriot against the sweaty and unshaven police agent. Jagot and his two men soon disarmed her but she left several tooth marks on the back of Jagot’s hand.

Manon Laforge and Delphine Bernard were now the hostages of Henri Jagot. They were about to spend a few hours under guard in an inn called the Black Cat, on the corner of a street near the Jardin des Plantes, where Manon would order Delphine madeleines and tell her again about Napoleon’s battle positions at the siege of Toulon.

26

N CUVIER’S DRAWING ROOM
the butler rang a bell for silence. Because the guests were now deep in conversation and reluctant to stop talking, he rang it a second time.

Cuvier stepped into the center of the room, speaking in perfect clipped French, which was simultaneously translated by his secretary, Charles Laurillard:
“Mesdames et messieurs,”
he began.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Laurillard followed.

“In honor of our guest, M. Brugmans,” Cuvier went on, “we will now take a tour of the fifteen rooms of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy, before we adjourn here for further entertainment. Please. If you would gather in the hall downstairs, we will enter the museum through the main entrance.”

Fin emptied his glass of wine. So did I. I shouldn’t really be drinking, I thought, but I wasn’t going to impose any rules on myself just yet. It was going to be a long night.

The thirty or forty guests and Jardin attendants followed Cuvier out onto the landing and down the curved staircase into the hall,
where the canna lilies glimmered in the light of velvet-shaded lamps. The butler took his position at the front door; Cuvier took his position on the staircase above us. He waited until the crowd had fallen silent, then began to speak slowly, turning from time to time to address M. Brugmans; a corpulent man, expensively dressed, from his necktie to his medaled dark blue frock coat, to the jewels of his shoes, he puffed himself up like a courting bird.

“Gentlemen, ladies. Please take your time in the museum entrance hall. There is much of interest to see.”

Cuvier descended the staircase to take up his next position at the door; the professors of the Jardin lined up behind him on either side of Brugmans. When Laurillard opened the door, a string of paper lanterns strung from trees marked a path from Cuvier’s house around to the museum entrance. A cloud unveiled the moon, illuminating a fringe of flattened trees. The night air was cold and damp, full of the smell of leaf mold and abandoned bonfires; a lion roared or yawned somewhere in the menagerie and out on the clipped lawn a small band of musicians played chamber music under a blue canopy.

Spots of light punctured the dark bushes and enclosures of the menagerie to the left, where I could hear the muffled sound of peacocks and the cries or grunts of creatures I could not recognize. It was the evening feed. I looked at my pocket watch. “They’re early again,” I said aloud, thinking of the feeding schedules I had watched and recorded through long nights in the warehouse.

“What’s early?” Sophie Duvaucel had dropped back to accompany me the few yards through the garden.

“The birds,” I said, quickly. “They’re early to migrate this year. That usually means a harsh winter. It’s cold, don’t you think? For October, I mean.” I offered her my arm.

The guests gathered outside the front door of the museum while Cuvier stood on the threshold. His next stage. The servants brought the lights closer to him. They had practiced this before, I thought.