Madame Bihan brought in a tray, which not only had Sophie’s warm milk but a bottle of red wine, already uncorked, some bread, butter and a selection of cheeses. I could tell be the glint in the lady’s blue eyes that the sight of the food and wine was by no means unwelcome.
The cook positioned the tray carefully on an occasional table, and then stood back, as if to check that I had arranged the armchairs appropriately. She nodded briefly, and returned to the kitchen after the briefest of glances in my direction.
Instead of answering my question, or taking her seat, Madame Guérande suddenly reached out to a bookshelf and plucked a book out of the array.
“Telliamed!” she said, with a slight hint of delight. “I once gave Auguste a copy of this....” As she spoke she opened the volume and glanced at the flyleaf—and her features suddenly changed. “This copy, in fact.” she added. She seemed disconsolate—as if the idea that Auguste Dupin might have given away a copy of a book of which she had made him a present was difficult to bear: a more than commonplace betrayal.
I hastened to redeem my friend’s reputation. “Monsieur Dupin was resident in the house for a while,” I said. “His own apartment is so cramped and cluttered that he moved a considerable number of his books on to what were then almost empty shelves. There is a sense in which he still divides his residence between the two locations; there is a room upstairs that I still call ‘Dupin’s bedroom,’ and there are a great many books here that are most definitely ‘Dupin’s books.’ That is one of them; I have never opened it...or even heard him mention it.”
The lady finally condescended to take her seat. I poured her a glass of wine and invited her to cut some cheese. She did so, painstakingly, with an exaggerated delicacy that suggested deliberate delay. She was thinking hard—and so was I. It was evident that we were both building up a considerable pressure of curiosity, but I did not want to ask another question that would probably be ignored, or begin another statement that would probably be interrupted.
She handed the first plate bearing bread and cheese she had cut to her daughter, who raised her eyes for the first time to look at me. “Thank you,” she said. Sophie Guérande was obviously well brought-up, although shy by Parisian standards.
The lady took some bread and cheese for herself, and then a sip of wine, with evident caution, but seemingly not without a keen appetite. She was obviously a self-contained person—and had brought up her daughter to conduct herself with a similar reserve—but I had a strong impression that she was making more effort than usual to contain herself, because she had more than usual to contain.
Madame Guérande finished her meager meal some time before the little girl, but she had wine to wash it down, while poor Sophie only had milk.
“Has Monsieur Dupin ever mentioned me to you?” Madame Guérande eventually asked, belatedly picking up the thread of my last remark, and the suggestion carefully concealed within it.
“Not that I recall,” I confirmed, leaning forward slightly, in the hope that I might be able to read the inscription in the book, which she had picked up again, after placing it face down on her knee still pen at the fly-leaf.
For a moment, I thought she was going to close it again, but she must have realized the futility of such a gesture. Instead, she held the inscription up to the light, in order that I might read it.
“Julie,” I remarked. I did not cite the remainder of the inscription, which referred to both love and affection.
“Julie Maret, as I was then,” she said, evidently hoping that Dupin might have mentioned her in that guise, if not by her married name.
He had not—but the surname at least, was not unfamiliar. “Might your father, perhaps, be Achille Maret?” I asked. “The late geologist, who was once a close friend of the Chevalier de Lamarck?”
“Yes,” she relied, colorlessly. “Achille Maret was my father.” She still seemed disappointed that I had not recognized her own name. “Monsieur Dupin has, at least, mentioned him?”
“Occasionally,” I confirmed. “But only once did he mention, en passant, that he had been personally acquainted with Professor Maret—and even then, he did not go into detail. If I were to hazard a guess that he had known him in his student days, it would only be a guess. I am not even certain—not absolutely, at least—that Dupin was once a Sorbonnard, or, if so, when. I have not the slightest idea what degrees he holds, if any, or even how he qualified for the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur that he never actually wears. Indeed, after all the years I have known him, and all the hours we have spent in seemingly free-and-easy conversation, I can still say that Dupin’s past, before the day we met, is as much a closed book to me as the one you are holding in your hand.”
She took that aboard, slowly and carefully, and eventually said: “Ah!” She seemed to be wondering whether, in the circumstances, she should say any more, lest she reveal some nugget of information to me that Dupin had been carefully hiding from me for more than a decade. Eventually, however, she seemed to come to the conclusion that she was entitled to some revenge for Dupin never have mentioned her, even to the close friend that she felt entitled to be glad that he had.
“Auguste was one of my father’s students, for a while,” she told me. “It was in the years immediately before and after 1820. I suppose that I was little more than a child, although I felt very much a young lady, entirely ready for society...perhaps something of a coquette—what an American such as yourself would probably call a flirt. My husband was one of my father’s friends, then: one of a little coterie of Lamarck’s disciples, headed by my father and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which met once a week in our drawing-room, in a fashion that always seemed to me to be that of a secret society, although I hardly understood then why the ideas we discussed were considered so dangerous that I was forbidden to mention them even when I went to confession. The Chevalier was still alive then, and still working on his magisterial catalogue of invertebrate species when I knew him, although his health and eyesight were beginning to deteriorate. He was still lecturing to the public at the Jardin des Plantes, although his academic situation had been compromised and he was subject to virtual ostracism by all sectors of society but ours... principally because of the Restoration, you understand....”
She paused, looking at me inquiringly. I nodded. I did understand. Lamarck, like many other pillars of the various branches of the University of Paris, had enjoyed a rocky ride, in terms of his vocation and his career, as the Revolution had produced the Convention, the Convention the Directoire, the Directoire the Consulate, the Consulate the Empire, and so on. His father had been a Baron, but he had become an Encyclopedist even before the Revolution, and had finally nailed his colors too firmly to the Bonapartist mast to be regarded as anything but a traitor to the Bourbon crown after the Restoration. He had clung on to a marginal position in Parisian Academe, and remained popular with the public who attended his open lectures, but the number of people who still counted him a genius in 1820, on account of his Philosophie Zoologique, could probably have fitted into a single room—Achille Maret’s drawing-room, presumably.
“I had not known that Dupin was one of Lamarck’s...disciples,” I commented, for want of any better observation to make.
“He wasn’t, quite,” Madame Guérande replied. “Not in their reckoning, at least. He was certainly very sympathetic to evolutionism, including the supposedly-blasphemous aspects of which my father and his friend spoke in whispers, but he had too much independence of spirit to be anyone’s faithful disciple, and he had ideas that my father considered heretical, without being aware of the irony of that judgment. Auguste was interested...very interested...in a great many subjects. He and my husband were close friends, for a while,
