Journey to the Core of Creation. Brian Stableford
sure that your sane presence has helped to calm Mr. Reynolds’ metaphorical fevers considerably,” the lady suggested. “I hope you might be able to do the same for another who was once your closest friend.” Her tone now was bantering, with a comfort suggestive of something long dormant but easily reborn. Was this, I wondered, how they had “flirted” twenty-five years ago?
Dupin was less comfortable with the sudden timeslip than our guest. He did not reply to the prompt.
“It’s true that Dupin has had a salutary effect on me,” I said, this time genuinely trying to be helpful. “While I keep close company with him, my infection of melodrama is somehow held within bounds, in spite of everything.”
Dupin gave the impression that he would rather I had not included the last phrase—and, indeed, that I had kept my mouth shut. The great logician had finished his wine, and poured himself another glass. He offered Madame Guérande another, which she declined. I accepted when my turn came.
“You’re right, Madame,” he said, as if making a great concession. “Claude was my closest friend. If he wants my help, I owe it to him.”
A slight shadow crossed Madame Guérande’s face. “Claude needs your help,” she said, stressing the verb slightly, and making it clear that she was the one who was asking, even though she had been careful to obtain her husband’s permission for the invitation.
“I have no influence with Thierachians,” Dupin said. “If I were a diplomat expert in soothing disputes, Lucien Groix would surely retain me here, to unpick all the old quarrels that are seething under the multilayered surface of Parisian society. Nor am I a physician with any expertise in calming fevers, in spite of what my friend says.” He was not refusing his help, but merely warning her that he was not optimistic as to the probability of success. She understood that.
“But you are an antiquarian of great distinction, Auguste,” Madame Guérande countered. “You have not lost your interest in ancient artifacts—antediluvian artifacts, some would say, although you and I...you and Claude...know better than into use such terminology. The hunt for explanation of the puzzles they embody must intrigue you still. Do you remember the discussions you and Claude used to have in my father’s drawing-room, about the kinship of species, the possible origins of life and humankind, and the various rival schools of monogeny and polygeny? I was not allowed to be party to such discussions, of course—my father had too narrow a view of a woman’s place—but I was allowed to be present, by way of decoration, and I listened, Oh, how eagerly I listened...if only because it was so casually assumed that I would not understand.”
“I remember,” Dupin said, perhaps with a hint of uncustomary nostalgia—a nostalgia to which our visitor was now making manifest appeal.
“You were quite the heretic then,” she went on, still probing with her eyes as well as her delicately-judged words. I had no doubt at all that I would soon be packing my trunk for an expedition to the Ardèche, perhaps as early as the impending morning—which was almost upon us, now that the clock’s hands were marching toward their midnight rendezvous.
“Having no beliefs,” Dupin said, rather dully—as if he felt obliged to live up to his reputation for pedantry, although, for once, the zest was not there, “I was incapable of heresy. I still am. I question all firm-set convictions, as everyone should. How else can we ever determine our mistakes?”
There were potential double meanings in that remark, which I would have been very interested to see unraveled, but Madame Guérande was still very conscious of the hour.
“It’s late,” she said, decisively. “I really must get Sophie to bed. We need to return to our hotel. You will you come to see me there tomorrow morning, won’t you, Auguste? I would like to give you a fuller explanation of why Claude and I need your help, but that will take time, and I would prefer to do it in private. Even if you and Mr. Reynolds are nowadays inseparable, there are things that I can only say...you will come, won’t you? It’s the Hôtel Marco Polo—on the nearer end of the Rue Vaugirard, close to the junction where the Luxembourg Gardens are.”
I couldn’t help making a note to the effect that she had referred to the Gardens rather than the old Palace. Sorbonnards accustomed to walking there always did that. No one in the Latin Quarter ever felt truly qualified as an intellectual until he had acquired the habit of walking and reading the Gardens on sunny days—and it was one of the few places in Paris where women from all levels of society came and went freely, sometimes without chaperons. The Gardens played a key role in almost all student love-affairs.
“Of course I’ll come,” Dupin answered, thus making a firmer promise by far than the one he had made to me when he had promised to return in two hours, at the most. “Madame Lacuzon would never forgive me if I did not, and I dare not risk upsetting her, now that she is so vital to my peaceful existence.”
The joke, if it was one, fell flat. Madame Guérande rose to her feet and leaned over to shake her daughter awake.
“I’ll send Bihan to get you a cab,” I said. “You must not step outdoors until it’s as close to the door as it can get. The weather seems mild enough, but that’s when the danger of catching chills is at its maximum. I shall lend you an umbrella—you should not be abroad in Paris at this time of year without one”
“Thank you, Mr. Reynolds,” she said.
It took Bihan a full fifteen minutes to find a fiacre and bring it to the front door of the house, but Madame Guérande had said all she had to say for the time being. She thanked me effusively for my hospitality, and apologized almost as effusively for having disturbed me. She instructed Sophie to thank me too, which the little girl did, mechanically. When she left, the lady shook my hand, as the French always seem to feel obliged to do when they bid farewell to an American, but she only nodded her head to Dupin—who replied to the gesture with a formal bow.
CHAPTER THREE
DUPIN INTRIGUED
When the door had closed behind the unexpected visitors we returned to the smoking-room. Dupin sat down again with unusual heaviness—and not, I judged, simply because his excursion to the Prefecture had tired him out. He picked up the copy of the book that Julie Guérande had left on the seat of her own chair, opened it—not at the fly-leaf but half way through the pages—and stared at the print as if he had momentarily forgotten how to read.
Then he looked up again, and said: “How much did she tell you?”
I sat down, and relied: “Little more than she told you, about her husband’s tribulations. Doubtless she’ll give you more details tomorrow. About you, no more than she said in your presence—that you used to attend salons at her father’s house, where some kind of Lamarckian cabal used to meet in the dark days of the Restoration.”
“There’s little more to say,” he murmured. I did not believe him.
“What are Thierachians?” I asked him, thinking that it was as good a place as any to start, given that that was the bait that seemed to have prompted him to take the lady’s hook.
“Thierache,” he replied, in his most pedantic manner, “is a region overlapping the border between France and Belgium, in the foothills of the Ardennes massif. What the inhabitants of other parts of France often mean by ‘Thierachians,’ however, is a population of nomads—known as the Hescheboix in Thierache itself—who follow a way of life similar to the Romani, but who seemed to have arrived in Thierache at a much earlier date, before spreading out from there to the rest of France...or Gaul, if you prefer.”
“And why are you interested in them?” I asked.
“They are a puzzle,” he said, as if that were explanation enough. “Indeed, they seem to delight in making themselves a mystery—indulging in secrecy for secrecy’s sake. The Romani seem to have similar inclinations, but they’re recent arrivals by comparison, first appearing in the fifteenth century, and some of them, at least, have consented to adapt to French custom, many having converted to Catholicism, albeit of an odd stripe, adopting Sainte-Sarah-la-Noire as their patron saint. The arrival