“There was never anyone like her before or since. She could make me so angry one minute and happy the next. We had so little in common—but it didn’t matter. The Germans were attacking Paris and we would all be dead soon anyway. We did what so many did at that time. We leaped over the fire. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes,” said Mary Ann.
“When I was able to limp around, they put me to work. We were planning an offensive against the German lines around Paris. If the forces outside the city knew, we could attack at the same time and crush the Germans.
“The message had to be memorized and delivered by someone who understood military strategy. I spent hours with Louise, studying the plans, learning each detail so I could recite it all when I got out.”
“But you could hardly walk...”
“One does not have to walk when one can fly,” said Meurthe. “We began to send balloons out of Paris, hoping they would reach areas of the country that were still free. In the balloons we put homing pigeons, which would fly back to the city, carrying microdots—coded messages in capsules taped to their legs.
“In late November, I was ordered to fly out. By that time daylight flights had become too dangerous. The Prussian cannon-maker Krupp had built guns that would shoot straight up at us, so balloons had to be sent off at night.
“I can still remember that evening when Louise and I arrived at the train yard where they housed the balloons. It was an eerie world of glare and shadow. All around us, the huge lights of the trains no longer in use had been set up. The Germans were firing their guns and one shell hit the corner of the station roof, sending pieces of slate pelting down on us.
“When they brought the balloon out, it was stiff with frost and riddled with small holes; even the mice in our city were hungry. So Louise and I took pieces of her petticoats and, with our cold hands, glued patches on the balloon.
“Then we waited for the signal. Three o’clock came, then four o’clock. We had received our mail and provisions. The balloon was inflated from a nearby gas line. The basket of pigeons, with a blanket to protect them from the cold, was hung from the ropes above our heads. I could hear them cooing to each other.
“We stood there. We said our good-byes—anxious to get the pain of leaving over with. I told her that her nose had turned red. She said mine had turned blue. A moment later our crew received the order to board. I climbed in and they cast off the lines. As we started to rise she looked up at me from below and said very softly, ‘I am having your baby.’ And then, before I could say or do anything, we were a thousand feet in the air and I was looking down at Paris through the clouds.
“The two islands in the Seine, the Ile de la Cité and the Ile Saint-Louis, looked from that height like twin ships, their pointed prows just grazing each other. No one who ever left this city was more torn. I could not stay, and I could not go, and the wind carried me onward.”
He paused. “You know the rest of the story. My balloon ended up on a mountaintop in Norway; all of our messages were lost, the carrier pigeons were lost. Our city was lost. Louise thought that I was dead. Before I could return, Paris had revolted, and the Communards were crushed.
“By the time I got back, my father told me that Louise and all her family had been shot at the Traitor’s Wall at Père-Lachaise cemetery. I don’t know how long I stood at that wall...until someone came and got me, I suppose.
“Then I fell into a loveless marriage and, years later, I saw Louise on the street when she came back from New Caledonia.”
“What did she say?” asked Mary Ann.
“What could either of us say? I was married. And my father, I learned, was the one who had ordered her family shot. So that is the way it remained for all these years. We are two forgotten casualties of war, mutilés whose wounds don’t show, except to each other. But I followed my son’s career every step of the way: through school, through military college, in the army. When stupid officers stood in his way, I used my influence to remove them. I planned this contest to bring him glory. Instead, I brought him death.”
“Alain...and Yvette...didn’t know?” she said.
“Alain didn’t know until the night before he died.”
“And that’s why he agreed to fly, when you told him the truth?”
“I had to. The thing with Alain and Yvette would have been a transient affair, like so many of my daughter’s. Yet for their sakes, I could not allow it to run its course. As for Yvette, she will never know.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
Meurthe looked at her, as if the reason was obvious. “Because I think that Alain loved you. I heard him call you Marianne.”
“But what does that mean? He knew my name was Mary Ann.”
Meurthe smiled gently. “Of course he knew. But it was his secret code for you. You see, Marianne is our national symbol, a flowing-haired peasant girl who represents Liberty. Each year in all our towns and villages there is a special ceremony where the most beautiful woman is chosen to be Marianne.”
He paused. “Come now, Marianne, you did not follow me here so you could hear an old man reminisce.”
“I heard Pouchet tell you that the contest is over.”
“And you want it to continue...”
“If we don’t win, we won’t get home again. Bishop is bankrupt.”
“Do you need money?”
She shook her head. He reached out, cupped his hand under her chin and stared into her eyes. “No,” he said, “you are like Alain. You don’t need money. You need to prove something, to yourself and to the world.”
She could see him do a quick calculation in his head. “I cannot guarantee you much time,” he said. “But I know the Germans will not be ready tomorrow, the day of Alain’s funeral. Can you fly then?”
“I don’t...yes,” she said. “Yes, we’ll fly.”
Suddenly Meurthe looked 10 years younger. He sprang out of the wicker chair, almost knocking it over. “Then I know what I must do,” he said. He walked to the door of the church and looked back.
“You will fly, Marianne,” he promised, his voice echoing through the darkness. “You will fly even if the whole world stands against you.”
Chapter Twenty Three: Place of the Star—Evening, July 16
For his plan to work, Henri Meurthe had to talk to Louise Chevrier. He knew where he would find her that evening. She would be with her son. Alain’s body was lying in state at the Arc de Triomphe.
Meurthe left the Church of Saint-Eustache and walked past the Tuileries, along one of the 12 wide avenues that came together at the Arch at Place de l’Etoile, or “Place of the Star.” At first he thought that the city was deserted; tables and chairs had been left out at sidewalk cafes, but they were empty. Shops were still open, with pots and brooms hanging outside, but with a simple sign on the door—“Gone to the Arch.”
As he drew closer, he saw little knots of people, many of them families, hurrying down the street. Soon the rivulets became a river and Meurthe was swept up with the human tide, stunned at the power of a doomed man to draw a whole city to him.
Up ahead was the Arc de Triomphe, tall as 30 men and massive as a mountain cliff, a monument to battle. There were purple draperies everywhere he looked: at the top of the Arch, obscuring the names of Napoleon’s many victories; at the sides, surrounding the women warriors sculpted into each pillar, and blanketing the base of the coffin itself.
Alain’s body lay in the mammoth bronze coffin at the center of the Arch, hung between heaven and earth by a catafalque so high that it made the bayoneted guards who stood shoulder to shoulder at its edge look like a picket fence around a house. The top was open and, under a glass case, Meurthe could see the white face of the corpse—all that remained of his son.
President Pouchet and the French military had spared no expense. The body was dressed in the full regalia of a major; Alain had been promoted posthumously. Lying next to the casket, winking out from the purple draperies, was another star,
the 10-pointed Legion of Honor that made Alain a “chevalier,” a knight of France. A bitter irony, Meurthe thought. Alain had always made jokes about his name: “I’m a Chevrier—a goatherd—not a chevalier.” But he was now.
Meurthe shook his head grimly. He hated the cult of death, which minimized a person’s importance while he was alive, then glorified it afterwards. But what was one to do? he thought with resignation. We have so little choice over what is done to us in life, even less in death. He searched the crowd for Louise without finding her.
Pouchet and the politicians were standing in a group, admiring their handiwork. The President pointedly ignored Meurthe, as did the others, taking their cue from Pouchet.
Meurthe searched in another direction. He saw orphan girls, tied together by a rope whose end was around the waist of an old nun, being pulled along like Alpine climbers. It would almost be funny, he thought, if his son wasn’t lying dead in the middle of this circus. He moved to the edge of the crowd, searching the shadows. He startled couples who were kissing and groping, seemingly excited by death. All emotions are burning this night, he thought.
He felt his stomach churn. So many people, all moving, all in darkness. He panicked; overwhelmed by the crowd, he was convinced that he would never find her. His plan—and Mary Ann’s hopes—would fall apart if he failed.
Control yourself, he thought. You’ve always survived by your wits, they won’t fail you now. She must be here.
He turned back toward the Arch. Huge torches on each pillar ignited the night, their flaring light reflecting on the red flowers at the peak of the Arch and the scrolling that encircled its edges, as well as the waxen figure inside the coffin. Where the pillars did not obscure the flames, they spread light in four distinct spokes. He told himself to search each one of those shafts of light. Sooner or later she would have to pass through one of them.
Then, in the faint light of one of those spokes, Meurthe spied a tall woman in a black dress, regal in her isolation, like a statue in a lonely square. He knew instinctively that it was Louise. What would she say to him? “You killed my son with your foolishness,” perhaps? Or worse. The churning in his stomach got worse. He could barely make his feet move forward.
Then she saw him and, surprisingly, she smiled.
“Hello, Louise,” he said, still not sure what she would say.
“Hello, Henri. I’ve been expecting you. Many friends have come up to me tonight, but you’re the only one I truly wanted to see.”
“Thank you for saying that,” he answered.
His words came out in a gasp, and with them, all the fear that he had held inside. For a few moments they silently watched the milling crowd—Alain’s army of homage—as it moved, counter-clockwise, around the points of the great Star. The alternation of light and shadow coming from the Arch was hypnotic, Meurthe thought. If you weren’t careful you could be swept along, marching around and around until you dropped from exhaustion.
Fathers would hold their sons over their heads, promising them ice cream if they wouldn’t squirm. “And now you can say that you’ve seen the Great Chevrier,” Meurthe heard one man tell a boy.
Louise winced. “The Great Chevrier,” she repeated. “No one would have taken a second look at Alain two months ago. But he was alive then, wasn’t he?”
“Do you blame me for what happened, Louise? For the contest. And for all the folly that led up to this?”
“No. I’m as much to blame as you are. Even when he was a little boy I encouraged him to climb the rocks on our island in the South Pacific. I knew he could fall, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop him. And now he has fallen, hasn’t he?”
Meurthe drew a long breath and searched for something to say. He wanted to tell her that at least she had known Alain as a child, at least she had that. But it would hurt them both if he did. “You know he was still holding that wheel when the divers found him?” he said finally. “He wasn’t afraid to die, Louise. And neither of us is to blame for making him a man.”
“I blame them, though,” she said, pointing to where Pouchet stood, surrounded now by a squadron of cavalry in their ceremonial breastplates and helmets. “They have turned my son into a mannequin.” Her voice choked.
“Yes, it is quite a show, isn’t it?” said Meurthe.
“Actresses are swooning for him beside his coffin. One even bared her breasts and pretended to commit suicide—with a nail file—to get in the papers. All the famous demimondaines of Paris are claiming that they slept with him. And—after he is dead—they give him the Legion of Honor!” She looked like she was about to cry, and Meurthe reached over to hold her. But she forced herself upright, putting one hand on his shoulder for support.
“Did you know that they would not let me sit with him? They sent a special train to bring in a famous mortician from Vienna. He acted like a chef in his kitchen: ‘No one can stay while I work!’ They pushed me out of the room. They took away my last moment with my son.”
“Do not blame them too much, Louise. All this pomp and pride is only to hide the fact that they are afraid. Their hero has died—now who will fight for them? That is what is really being mourned here.”
As she turned toward him, Meurthe studied her face. People had always thought he was invincible. But he knew that, without Louise, he would have died in that hospital 30 years ago. He remembered, too, how beautiful she had been. And still was.
“I heard that you killed a man in a duel,” she said.
“Yes, he insulted a lady’s honor.”
“Henri...always the brave one.” She touched his face with her hand. It was a reminder of what might have been, if things had been different.
“You know my wife is dead?” he said.
Louise said nothing.
“Do you remember when I was going up in that balloon and you said...”
She smiled. “Yes. ‘I’m having your baby.’ It was my best trick on you.”
“It’s too late for us, isn’t it?”
Louise nodded.
Meurthe sighed. “I have lived 58 years, and sometimes I think that I have learned nothing.”
And then, as if this single, small confession was more than she could take, Louise broke down and cried. She turned and buried her head in his shoulder, and Meurthe did what he had wanted to do for so long. He held her.
“What shall we do, Henri?” she sobbed. “Shall we let it end this way, with children running up on a bet to touch his coffin? With taxicabs selling rooftop seats for five francs so people can see him dead?”
“I know what Alain would have wanted,” said Meurthe.
She studied his face. “Tell me.”
“It will be difficult and dangerous for both of us,” he warned.
Louise’s eyes were full of tears, not all of them for her son. “Why are the men in my life always lost to me?” she asked herself. “First my father and brother, then you, and now, my son. And why is it no loss ever prepares us for the next? Each time it hurts more.”
Now, looking at him in the flaring light, she could see death in Meurthe’s face, and she knew, however hard she tried, that he would be lost to her again.
Chapter Twenty Four: The Catacombs—Later That Evening
Guillaume LeRond entered through the private door in the alley off Denfert-Rochereau, and went down the long winding stairway that took him 60 feet underground. He lit his lamp and looked at the directions. “Go right and take the first left,” he mumbled to himself. The limestone was slippery under his boots. Water dripped from the ceiling, cobwebs caught in his hair.
Then he made a wrong turn, and came upon the remains of a moldering body. He scurried back onto the main path and rushed under a huge arch, now pitted with the smallpox of decay, and passed the well at the foot of a staircase. The still green water below him was silent, without a ripple. He nervously threw a sou in the well—good luck to erase the bad luck of seeing the body. It made a loud splash, and disappeared beyond where his eye could see. He shivered. A b
ody would sink forever in this well.
He walked on, passing between the white pillars with the black crosses on them and under the sign that said: “Stop! This is the empire of death.”
Why did Maximilian want to meet here? Guillaume wondered. Is he playing cat and mouse with me? If he is, Guillaume had an answer. He carried a pistol in one coat pocket, a spring-loaded knife in the other. And he would use them, if necessary.
Guillaume was now in the ossuary, still following Maximilian’s directions. Here lay row on row, pile on pile, of skulls. In Paris, land had become too valuable for the dead. The city dug up its cemeteries and put the bones underground, stacking them neatly in platforms of interlaced thighbones, calf bones, femurs and tibias.
Some of the groupings had skulls laid out in the shape of a cross. Others had symbols that reminded Guillaume of the flag of a pirate ship. Each church had put up a tablet with inscriptions in Latin to mark the section that housed its bones. One of them said: “It is sometimes more advantageous to be dead than alive.” Did anyone really believe that? Guillaume wondered.
The bones were brown with age. The skulls showed the strange stitched design where the three pieces joined together and, in the case of those who died young, a hole in the center where the junction never formed. There were other bones; soldiers of the Commune who were hunted to their death, victims of gangland stranglings whose bodies were dumped in the catacombs, even stray animals who couldn’t find their way out. The remains of more than six million creatures lay beneath the city.
Guillaume heard a whistle from one of the small corridors. He put down his lamp, opened a metal gate, and peered inside.
Maximilian was in the far corner. He lit a match with his fingernail. It flared to life with a hiss of sound and light. Guillaume saw skull after skull and then...Maximilian’s face. His eyes were bituminous—dark and shining. He is like a chameleon, Guillaume thought, he can take on the color of his surroundings. And he was smiling; the secure, self-satisfied smile of someone who is never in doubt, who always knows what will happen.