there was still a candle burning in his bedroom window.’
‘What’s his house like?’
‘He rents an attic. As small as a pigeon house/
‘I’m living like a pigeon too. How can he bear to live like that when he doesn’t have to? The police are giving him vast sums of money!’
‘He prefers gaming. And all this time soldiers aren’t receiving any pay!’
‘Everything froze during the retreat from Moscow ... Going back to Charles de Varencourt. Why is he addicted to gambling?’
‘Is there always a reason?’
‘Not always. But sometimes. If he’s the murderer, why the fire? There are too many blanks, too many gaps in what we know about the suspects. Time is not on our side, and yet we mustn’t fail! The situation is already bad enough.’
Margont looked up the hill of Montmartre. From up there, the whole of the capital could be seen. It was the key to Paris. If the enemy captured it, they would mount large-calibre cannons on the top of it and they would be able to bombard the city. There should have been swarms of crack soldiers on the hill, building redoubts. When an ant hill is threatened, it covers itself in ants. The same should have gone for the heights at Saint-Germain, at la Villette, at Buttes-Chaumont and at Nogent-sur-Marne. From 1809 to 1810, when Wellington, the commander-in-chief of the British troops, had been operating in the Iberian Peninsula, he had erected fortifications at Torres Vedras to protect Lisbon. Margont had seen them with his own eyes. Ditches, pre-ditches, traps, bastions overlapping each other, entrenchments flanking the assailants, little fortresses ... More than a hundred redoubts and four hundred and fifty cannons, all in three stacked lines! A triple line of defence, three raised fists, warning the French to stop! When Marshal Massena came face to face with them, leading his sixty thousand men, he had indeed stopped short. He and his general staff had spent entire days trying to find ways through the blockade, had reached the conclusion that ... it was impossible, and had ordered his troops to retreat. Wellington had triumphed without even
having to fight. He had prepared for battle so comprehensively that he had won before it had even started! That’s what should have been happening here! Paris should have been encircled by a triple line of defence like at Torres Vedras, and Montmartre should have been made into a great redoubt, more fearsome than the famous redoubt at the Battle of Borodino! But instead, the only activity came from the first butterflies fluttering around the five windmills on the hill.
‘I’ve discovered some surprising things about Mademoiselle de Saltonges,’ said Lefine, continuing with his report. ‘I can’t really believe that a woman would have the guts to burn off the face of a corpse, but—’
Margont burst out laughing. But it was a disturbing, desperate laugh; he was laughing instead of crying. His friend looked at him uncomprehendingly as he tried to shake off a childhood memory. He was thirteen, walking in the streets of Nimes, gradually rediscovering the world after four years being shut away in the Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert. But the ‘real’ world was nothing like the paradise of his imagination. Without explaining why, his mother was taking a series of back routes. She was trying to hide the guillotine from him. The Terror was raging at that time and people were being executed in their thousands - for not being revolutionaries, or for not being revolutionary enough, or for being revolutionary but not in the correct way. Alas, she did not know that the residents of the Esplanade, where the ‘National Razor’ was normally set up, had complained about the smell of blood, so it had been moved. And that was how his mother came to lead him to the very spectacle she had tried to spare him. The sight he had briefly glimpsed would haunt him for ever. He saw women going up to the heads. Heads without bodies, bathing in bright-red blood. And these women, who calmly knitted as the executions were carried out, were aiming the points of their needles at the eyes of the freshly decapitated heads. A black screen suddenly cut off his vision. His mother covered his eyes with her hand to prevent him seeing any more. She fled, pulling her son by the hand, running as if the guillotine itself were chasing them. It was
the only time in Margont’s life when he had briefly wondered whether he should not return to the Abbey Saint-Guilhem-le-Desertle-Desert of his own accord ... He thought again about Louis de Leaume extricating himself from his shroud of corpses. Had he also seen those decapitated and mutilated heads? Yes, certainly! But no hand had descended to protect him. He had looked at them, his gaze searing into their unseeing eyes.
‘My dear Fernand, it’s usually me who’s the naive one. But this time, it’s the other way round. Your misogyny is misleading you. Catherine de Saltonges is as much a suspect as the others, believe me. When I met her, she seemed to want to avoid being present at my ... at any violence towards me.’
He still could not articulate exactly what he had been through, as if the ordeal of his admission to the Swords of the King had become an absess that was going to go on getting worse.
‘But it was obvious that she was just pretending. Had any violence occurred, she would happily have produced her knitting needles.’ Lefine grasped the reference. He had heard about ‘the tricoteuses’.
Although the nickname was used generally to mean the women who had come, during the Revolution, to listen to the debates at the National Convention, to keep an eye on the elected representatives and to participate in the debates with cheers or booing, it also evoked a much more sinister group, tiny but bloody ...
‘She married Baron de Joucy in 1788 at the age of seventeen. Her family were keen on the marriage because the Baron was a good catch. And she was keen on the marriage because she was in love. A good marriage and a love match! But the dream was short-lived and the awakening brutal. The Baron was an inveterate seducer, a regular Casanova, and he cheated on her endlessly - with her friends, her servants, with mothers, with their daughters, with prostitutes ...’
‘Surely that’s a slight exaggeration?’
‘Well, it’s probably true that the rumours were exaggerated. But I managed to find a former servant of the household, one Guer-loton, who had thrashed the Baron when he found him in bed with his wife! The Baron didn’t press charges, for fear of publicity. He
merely terminated the employment of the valet and his wife. Happily for the Baron, he now lives in London, because were he to return he would find someone waiting for him who would not stop at thrashing him this time ... The saddest thing was that Catherine de Saltonges was oblivious. She didn’t think that her pregnant servant was anything to do with her husband. He came home at all hours because of his “business affairs”. Her husband flirted constantly with beautiful women. But she saw nothing, suspected nothing.’
‘Her education can’t have prepared her for such things. It must have been all crochet and the Bible ...’
‘All Parisian nobility was laughing at her behind her back, which delighted her husband, making him all the more desirable in the eyes of certain women. But one day in September 1792, Catherine de Saltonges cancelled a shopping trip unexpectedly because of a storm.’
‘A storm that was the prelude to an even more violent tempest. I suppose she went home and discovered her husband in the arms of another woman.’
‘That’s exactly what happened. In her own bed, what’s more. She ran away to her parents, who tried in vain to send her back to her legitimate husband. In their eyes, as in his, the couple had been married before God for better and for worse.’
‘She being the better and he being the worst ...’
‘She changed completely after that. She had previously been shy and self-effacing; now she was transformed into a formidable woman. She decided to divorce! She was one of the first to make use of the famous law of October 1792 permitting divorce. Her grounds were her husband’s “notorious disorderliness of morals”. Can you imagine the reaction of the two families? Not to mention her husband’s reaction. Up until that point the Revolution had not troubled the Baron much. Of course, he feared the revolutionaries, but he would never have thought that the Revolution might harm him because of his wife! She was brave enough to appear before the district tribunal; since it was not a case of divorce by mutual consent and since the Baron denied the accusations she brought