The old nun moved her withered lips soundlessly and rolled her vacant eyes up toward Mireille. Mireille bent forward until her hair touched the nun’s lips.
“Inside,” Claude whispered. “They have taken her inside the abbey.” Then she fell back unconscious.
“My God, are you certain?” said Mireille, but there was no reply.
Mireille tried to stand. The mob whirled about her, crying for blood. Everywhere pikes and hoes slashed through the air, and the screams of the killers and the dying mingled together to drown out her thoughts.
Leaning against the heavy doors of l’Abbaye Prison, Mireille banged as loudly as she could, slamming her fists into the wood until her knuckles bled. There was no response from within. Exhausted and racked with pain and despair, she tried to force her way back through the crowd to the carriage she prayed was still there. She must find David. Only David could help them now.
Suddenly she froze in the middle of the wild swirl of bodies and looked through a small crack that had parted in the crowd. People were pulling back as something moved toward them, in Mireille’s direction. Flattening herself against the wall again and working her way slowly along it, she was able to make out what it was. The carriage she had arrived in was being dragged through the stifling alley by the mob. And propped on a pike driven into the wooden seat was the severed head of her driver, his silver hair drenched in blood, his aged face a mask of terror.
Mireille bit her arm to keep from screaming. As she stood and stared wildly at the hideous head moving high above the crowd, she knew that she could not go back to find David. She had to get inside the walls of l’Abbaye Prison now. She knew with leaden certainty that if she did not get to Valentine at once, it would be too late.
3:00 PM
Jacques-Louis David passed through a cloud of rising steam, where women were tossing buckets of water to cool the hot pavement, and entered the Café de la Régence.
Inside the club, the cloud that enveloped him was even thicker with the smoke of dozens of men puffing pipes and cigars. His eyes burned, and his linen shirt, open to the waist, stuck to his skin as he forced his way through the overheated room, ducking as waiters with trays of drinks held aloft hurried between the tightly packed tables. At each table men were playing cards, dominoes, or chess. The Café de la Régence was the oldest and most famous gaming club in France.
As David made his way to the back of the room, he saw Maximilien Robespierre, his chiseled profile like an ivory cameo as he calmly studied his chess position. His chin resting upon one finger, his double-knotted foulard and brocade waistcoat still uncreased, he seemed to notice neither the noise swirling about him nor the excruciating heat. As always, the cold detachment of his demeanor suggested he played no part in his surroundings but was merely an observer. Or a judge.
David did not recognize the older man who sat across from Robespierre. Wearing an old-fashioned coat of pale blue with beribboned culottes, white stockings, and pumps in the style of Louis XV, the elderly gent moved a piece on the board without glancing at it. He looked up with watery eyes as David approached.
“Excuse me for disturbing your play,” said David. “I have a favor to request of Monsieur Robespierre that cannot wait.”
“That’s quite all right,” said the older man. Robespierre continued to study the board in silence. “My friend has lost the game, at any rate. It’s mate in five. You may as well resign, my dear Maximilien. Your friend’s interruption was well timed.”
“I do not see it,” Robespierre said. “But your eyes are better than mine when it comes to chess.” Leaning back from the board with a sigh, he looked up at David. “Monsieur Philidor is the finest chess player in Europe. I consider it a privilege to lose to him, only to have the opportunity to play at the same table.”
“But you are the famous Philidor!” said David, pressing the older man’s hand warmly. “You are a great composer, monsieur. I saw a revival of Le Soldat Magicien when I was just a boy. I shall never forget it. Permit me to introduce myself, I am Jacques-Louis David.”
“The painter!” said Philidor, rising to his feet. “I admire your work as well, as does every citizen in France. But I’m afraid you are the only person in this country who remembers me. Though once my music filled the Comédie-Française and the Opéra-Comique, I must now play exhibition chess like a trained monkey to support myself and my family. Indeed, Robespierre has been so kind to secure me a pass to leave for England, where I can earn a good deal for providing that sort of spectacle.”
“That is exactly the favor I’ve come to request of him,” said David as Robespierre gave up studying the chessboard and stood as well. “The political situation in Paris is so dangerous just now. And this hellish unbroken heat has done nothing to improve the tempers of our fellow Parisians. It’s this explosive atmosphere that has made up my mind to ask … though the favor is not, of course, for myself.”
“Citizens always require favors for someone other than themselves,” Robespierre interjected coolly.
“I request the favor in behalf of my young wards,” David said stiffly. “As I’m sure you can appreciate, Maximilien, France is not safe for young women of tender age.”
“If you cared so much for their well-being,” sniffed Robespierre, looking at David with glittering green eyes, “you’d not permit them to be squired about town on the arm of the Bishop of Autun.”
“I quite disagree,” Philidor chimed in. “I’m a great admirer of Maurice Talleyrand. I predict he’ll one day be regarded as the greatest statesman in the history of France.”
“So much for prophecy,” said Robespierre. “It’s fortunate you do not have to make your living telling fortunes. Maurice Talleyrand has spent weeks trying to bribe every official in France to get him back to England where he can pretend to be a diplomat. He wishes only to save his neck. My dear David, all the nobility in France are scrambling to depart before the Prussians arrive. I shall see what I can do at the Committee meeting tonight regarding your wards, but I promise nothing. Your request is rather late.”
David thanked him warmly, and Philidor offered to accompany the painter to the street, as he was leaving the club as well. As the famous chess master and the painter pushed their way through the crowded room, Philidor commented, “You must try to understand that Maximilien Robespierre is different from you and me. As a bachelor, he’s had no exposure to the responsibilities that come with child-rearing. How old are your wards, David? Have they been in your care for long?”
“A little over two years only,” David replied. “Prior to that, they were apprenticed as nuns at the Abbey of Montglane.…”
“Montglane, did you say?” said Philidor, lowering his voice as they reached the club entry. “My dear David, as a chess player, I can assure you I know a good deal of the history of Montglane Abbey. Don’t you know the story?”
“Yes, yes,” said David, trying to control his irritation. “All a lot of mystical poppycock. The Montglane Service does not exist, and I’m surprised you should give credence to such a thing.”
“Give credence?” Philidor took David’s arm as they stepped out onto the blazing hot pavement. “My friend, I know it exists. And a great deal more. Well over forty years ago, perhaps before you were even born, I was a visitor at the court of Frederick the Great in Prussia. Whilst there, I made the acquaintance of two men of such powers of perception as I shall never forget. One, you will have heard of—the great mathematician, Leonhard Euler. The other, as great in his own way, was the aged father of Frederick’s young court musician. But this musty old genius has been fated, I’m afraid, to a legacy buried in dust. Though no one in Europe has heard of him since, his music, which he performed for us one evening at the king’s request, was the finest I’ve heard in all my years. His name was Johann Sebastian Bach.”
“I’ve not heard the name,” David admitted, “but what do Euler and this musician have to do with the legendary chess service?”
“I shall tell you
,” Philidor said, smiling, “only if you agree to introduce me to these wards of yours. Perhaps we’ll get to the bottom of a mystery I’ve spent a lifetime trying to unravel!”
David agreed, and the great chess master accompanied him on foot through the deceptively quiet streets along the Seine and across the Pont Royal toward his studio.
The air was still; no leaf stirred on any tree. Heat rose in waves from the baking pavement, and even the leaden waters of the Seine coursed silently beside them as they walked. They could not know that twenty blocks away, in the heart of the Cordeliers, a bloodthirsty mob was battering down the doors of l’Abbaye Prison. And Valentine was inside.
In the still, warm silence of that late afternoon, as the two men walked together, Philidor began his tale.…
THE CHESS MASTER’S TALE
At the age of nineteen, I left France and journeyed to Holland to accompany upon the hautebois, or oboe, a young pianist, a girl who, as a child prodigy, was to perform there. Unfortunately I arrived to discover the child had died a few days earlier of smallpox. I was stranded in a foreign country with no money and now no hope of an income. To support myself, I went to the coffee houses and played chess.
From the age of fourteen, I’d studied chess under the tutelage of the famous Sire de Legal, France’s best player and perhaps the finest in Europe. By eighteen, I could beat him with the handicap of a Knight. As a result, as I soon discovered, I could better every player I encountered. In The Hague, during the Battle of Fontenoy, I played against the Prince of Waldeck as the battle raged around us.
I traveled through England, playing at Slaughter’s Coffee House in London against the best players they had to offer, including Sir Abraham Janssen and Philip Stamma, beating them all. Stamma, a Syrian possibly of Moorish ancestry, had published several books on chess. He showed these to me, as well as books written by La Bourdonnais and Maréchal Saxe. Stamma thought that I, with my unique powers of play, should write a book as well.
My book, published several years later, was entitled Analyse du Jeu des Eschecs. In it I proposed the theory “The pawns are the soul of chess.” In effect, I showed that the pawns were not only objects to be sacrificed, but could be used strategically and positionally against the opposing player. This book created a revolution in chess.
My work came to the attention of the German mathematician Euler. He’d read of my blindfold play in the French Dictionnaire published by Diderot, and he persuaded Frederick the Great to invite me to his court.
The court of Frederick the Great was held at Potsdam in a large, stark hall, glittering with lamplight but barren of the artistic wonders one finds at other European courts. Indeed, Frederick was a warrior, preferring the company of other soldiers to courtiers, artists, and women. It was said he slept upon a hard wooden pallet and kept his dogs beside him at all times.
The evening of my appearance, Kapellmeister Bach of Leipzig had arrived with his son Wilhelm, having journeyed there to visit another son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, harpsichordist to King Frederick. The king himself had written eight bars of a canon and had requested the elder Bach to improvise upon this theme. The old composer, I was told, had a knack for such things. He’d already developed canons with his own name and the name of Jesus Christ buried within the harmonies in mathematical notation. He’d invented inverse counterpoints of great complexity, where the harmony was a mirror image of the melody.
Euler added the suggestion that the old kapellmeister invent a variation that reflected within its structure “the Infinite”—that is to say, God in all His manifestations. The king seemed pleased by this, but I felt certain Bach would demur. As a composer myself, I can tell you it’s no small chore to embroider upon another’s music. I once had to compose an opera upon themes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a philosopher with a tin ear. But to hide a secret puzzle of this nature within the music … well, it seemed impossible.
To my surprise, the kapellmeister hobbled his short, square body to the keyboard. His massive head was covered in a fat, ill-fitting wig. His foreboding eyebrows, grizzled with gray, were like eagles’ wings. He had a severe nose, heavy jaw, and a perpetual scowl etched into his hard features that suggested a contentious nature. Euler whispered to me that the elder Bach did not care much for “command performances” and would doubtless make a joke at the king’s expense.
Bending his shaggy head over the keys, he began to play a beautiful and haunting melody that seemed to rise endlessly like a graceful bird. It was a sort of fugue, and as I listened to the mysterious complexities, I realized at once what he’d accomplished. Through a means unclear to me, each stanza of the melody began in one harmonic key but ended one key higher, until at the end of six repetitions of the king’s initial theme, he’d ended in the key where he’d begun. Yet the transition or where it occurred, or how, was imperceptible to me. It was a work of magic, like the transmutation of base metals into gold. Through its clever construction, I could see that it would go endlessly higher into infinity until the notes, like the music of the spheres, could only be heard by angels.
“Magnificent!” murmured the king when Bach slowly ended his play. He nodded to the few generals and soldiers who sat on wooden chairs in the sparsely furnished hall.
“What is the structure called?” I asked Bach.
“I call it Ricercar,” the old man said, his dour expression unaltered by the beauty of the music he’d wrought. “In Italian, it means ‘to seek.’ It’s a very old form of music, no longer in fashion.” As he said this he looked wryly at his son Carl Philipp, who was known for writing “popular” music.
Picking up the king’s manuscript, Bach scrawled across the top the word Ricercar, the letters widely spaced. He turned each letter into a Latin word, so that it read “Regis Iussu Cantio Et Reliqua Canonica Arte Resoluta.” Roughly, this means a song issuing from the king, the remaining resolved through the art of the canon. A canon is a musical structure where each part comes in one measure after the last but repeats the entire melody in overlapping fashion. It gives the appearance of going on forever.
Then Bach scribbled two Latin phrases in the margin of the music. When translated they read:
As the Notes increase, the King’s Fortune increases.
As the Modulation ascends, the King’s Glory ascends.
Euler and I complimented the aging composer upon the cleverness of his work. I was then requested to play three games of blindfold chess simultaneously against the king, Dr. Euler, and the kapellmeister’s son Wilhelm. Though the older man did not play chess himself, he enjoyed watching the game. At the conclusion of the performance, where I won all three games, Euler took me aside.
“I’d prepared a gift for you,” he told me. “I’ve invented a new Knight’s Tour, a mathematical puzzle. I believe it to be the finest formula yet discovered for the tour of a Knight across a chessboard. But I should like to give this copy to the old composer tonight, if you don’t mind. As he likes mathematical games, it will amuse him.”
Bach received the gift with a strange smile and thanked us genuinely. “I suggest you meet me at my son’s cottage tomorrow morning before Herr Philidor departs,” he said. “I may then have time to prepare a little surprise for both of you.” Our curiosity was piqued, and we agreed to arrive at the appointed time and place.
The next morning Bach opened the door of Carl Philipp’s cottage and squired us inside. He seated us in the small parlor and offered us tea. Then he took a seat at the small clavier and began to play a most unusual melody. When he’d finished both Euler and I were completely confused.
“That is the surprise!” said Bach with a cackle of glee that dispelled the habitual gloom from his face. He saw that Euler and I were both totally at sea.
“But have a look at the sheet music,” Bach said. We both stood and moved to the clavier. There on the music stand was nothing other than the Knight’s Tour that Euler had prepared and given him the prior evening. It was the map of a large chessboard with a number w
ritten in each square. Bach had cleverly connected the numbers with a web of fine lines that meant something to him, though not to me. But Euler was a mathematician, and his mind moved faster than mine.
“You’ve turned these numbers into octaves and chords!” he cried. “But you must show me how you’ve done it. To turn mathematics into music—it is sheer magic!”
“But mathematics are music,” Bach replied. “And the reverse is also true. Whether you believe the word ‘music’ came from ‘Musa,’ the Muses, or from ‘muta,’ meaning mouth of the Oracle, it makes no difference. If you think ‘mathematics’ came from ‘mathanein,’ which is learning, or from ‘Matrix,’ the womb or mother of all creation, it matters not.…”
“You’ve done a study of words?” said Euler.
“Words have the power to create and kill,” Bach said simply. “That Great Architect who made us all, made words, too. In fact, He made them first, if we may believe St. John in the New Testament.”
“What did you say? The Great Architect?” said Euler, growing a little pale.
“I call God the Great Architect, because the first thing He designed was sound,” Bach replied. “‘In the Beginning was the Word,’ you remember? Who knows? Perhaps it was not only a word. Perhaps it was music. Maybe God sang an endless canon of His own invention, and through it, the universe was wrought.”
Euler had grown paler yet. Though the mathematician had lost the sight of one eye by studying the sun through a glass, he peered with his other eye at the Knight’s Tour that sat upon the clavier stand. Running his fingers over the endless diagram of tiny numbers inked across the chessboard, he seemed lost in thought for several moments. Then he spoke.
“Where have you learned these things?” he asked the sage composer. “What you describe is a dark and dangerous secret, known only to the initiated.”
“I initiated myself,” said Bach calmly. “Oh, I know that there are secret societies of men who spend their lives trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, but I am not a member. I seek truth in my own fashion.”