Memory of Flames

CHAPTER 41

THE former palace of the kings of France had been transformed into a place of such unimaginable wonder that it appeared unreal, mythical. It had been turned into ‘the perfect museum’. Hundreds of masterpieces from all countries had been gathered together in one grandiose place accessible to the public.

The museum was born of the scandalous pillaging of artworks from the countries vanquished by the republican and imperial armies, but nevertheless the result was fabulous. It was based on two principles. The first was the republican idea that art must be available for the public to see. The message was that the possessions of the aristocracy were being redistributed to the people, not physically, for that would have been to cause further inequalities, but visually, in public museums. In 1801 the Directory had created them all over the country and others had appeared later. The second principle was that art should be used as propaganda. Napoleon was adept at this - he liked to exhibit ‘trophies’ taken

from the enemy. And he had renamed the French Museum or Central Museum of the Republic, the Napoleon Museum.

It made Margont smile to think that Napoleon’s religious marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria had taken place not in Notre-Dame but in the Louvre, in the large square hall, which had been transformed for the occasion into a chapel. In republican and imperial France, museums were the new cathedrals.

Fie went past the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, which adorned the square between the Tuileries Palace and the Louvre. It had been erected to commemorate the signing of the peace treaty between France and England at Amiens in 1802. Alas, in the years following the treaty the English and French fought more often than ever. They confronted each other all over the world: in Europe, in the colonies, on the seas ... They would even have fought under the seas, had someone succeeded in realising the crazy plan of the tunnel under the Channel. The only real product of the treaty of Amiens, as it turned out, was the impressive Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel.

The museum was not open, but Margont slipped one of the attendants a good tip to open it for him. Again, Margont was stupefied to see that Paris continued to live almost normally.

He began to walk through galleries of indescribable opulence. He wandered slowly, sometimes hurrying towards a work, then turning back to see another one. He was immersing himself in the labyrinth of art, freeing his mind of rigorous classifications and didactic organisation and allowing his subjectivity to direct him like Ariadne’s thread. Around him satyrs chased nymphs; he was disconcerted by the beauty of a Venus, aroused by the erotic pose of another; Eros sat astride a centaur; Diana received the allegiance of stags and does in a clearing; gladiators slaughtered each other; the draping of togas and robes was so realistic he fully expected to see their stone folds stirring in the breeze; a marble Cupid gently gathered up a butterfly; the paintings were exuberant with here an azure sky filled with cherubs, there a ferocious evocation of a medieval battle; there were the subtle contrasts of chiaroscuros and the seductive charms of Mademoiselle Caroline

Riviere painted by Ingres; the flamboyant depictions of Ancient Rome, bright with colour and movement, contrasted with the calm intimacy of the Three Graces, naked and taken by surprise by the unwelcome spectator. Margont was surrounded by Raphael, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Rubens, Correggio, Veronese, Poussin, David, the Van Eyck brothers. He was drunk on beauty. Then he arrived in front of the Mona Lisa. Yes, if the world were about to be destroyed, he would be quite content to die contemplating that smile.

As he was roaming about in that fashion, he was struck by one particular work, an ancient mosaic imported from Italy. He had never heard of it, and its position in the museum, stuck in the corner of one of the galleries, indicated that Dominique Vivant De-non, the director of the museum and the mastermind behind this ‘Louvre of all the conquests’, knew little more. But what emotion! Margont was overcome by vertigo. The large mosaic fragment represented the face of a woman. Why did he find her so haunting? Her beauty upset him. He reflected that at that very moment, his friend Fernand was in the arms of his lover, whilst here he was with a two-thousand-year-old beauty made of pieces of coloured stone ... His thoughts darkened further. A Prussian cannonball might very well blow him to smithereens in a few hours, turning him into a mosaic of flesh ...

He still could not tear himself away from that face. He stretched out a hand and brushed her cheek; he was enraptured. The woman seemed to be trying to tell him something. His gaze moved from tessera to tessera, taking in the whole picture, then focusing on a single detail. Sometimes he saw a Roman beauty, sometimes all he saw were little fragments of colour. He was reminded of the investigation. Each clue and each of his deductions was like one of those tesserae. And piecing them together in the right order would reveal the whole picture in all its clarity. He had understood everything! Everything fitted, everything made sense! He kept repeating that to himself, but the woman seemed to be murmuring, ‘Not exactly ...’

He decided to embark on a sort of exercise. He would go once

more through all the elements of the inquiry, treating each like a piece of mosaic and building a complete solution.

As he did this, he was able to clear up a few little mysteries without it altering the overall picture. Varencourt had stolen documents about the defence of Paris from Colonel Berle’s house to confuse investigators about the motives for the murder. He hadn’t used curare to kill Berle, because he didn’t yet have any. He had procured it later, thanks to the contacts of the secret society and used it to kill Count Kevlokine in a sort of run-through before attempting to murder the Emperor with it. Varencourt had not imagined that the investigator would call on a doctor for help, still less that the doctor in question would be brilliant enough to be able to discover the true cause of death. People were supposed to assume that Kevlokine’s heart had not been able to stand the pain of the burns. Varencourt was extremely intelligent, but he did sometimes underestimate his enemies. None of this changed Margont’s initial conclusions.

But there were two little mysteries that did not fit. First, why did

Charles de Varencourt not burn Count Kevlokine’s face as he had burnt Colonel Berle’s? And secondly, why had he left the Swords of the King emblem on the second corpse, if his motivation was vengeance for the fire of Moscow? Margont was annoyed. The two details were like tesserae left over after he had completed the mosaic! He had been so happy, so proud that he had been able to unmask his adversaries. But now there were these two annoying grains of sand. He would almost have liked to sweep them under the carpet ...

A memory came to him. He loved to talk medicine with Jean-Quenin. One day he had asked him what, in his opinion, was the hardest thing to learn in his field. Margont had been prepared for anything - complicated anatomical drawings bristling with Latin terms, or exotic illness, pharmacology - except for the response he received. Jean-Quenin had said, The hardest thing is having the modesty and courage to reconsider a diagnosis.’ Now Margont finally understood what his friend had meant.

He remembered that Pinel had confirmed that the question of which part of the body had been burnt should not be overlooked. He mentally swept away the old mosaic and started again with the two surplus tesserae, which he placed in the middle of the new picture. But he was incapable of fitting the other elements round them.

The Roman lady continued to smile at him, relishing her unalterable beauty. Meanwhile, Margont now felt more fragmented than she was.