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 of the Thierachians in Thierache certainly predated the influx of the Franks, and even the attempted invasion of the Huns, who were deflected southwards by an alliance of the Romans and the Catalauni. No one—including the Thierachians, I assume—knows for sure exactly how long ago their first excursion into what is now France occurred. I would have to go to the Bibliothèque Nationale to find out more about them, but I have a vague memory that their own religion, or mythology, claims that they preserve the true blood and the secret knowledge of the original human race, which dispersed from its cradle in Central Asia an exceedingly long time ago.”
“Long before Adam, I presume,” I observed. I understood now why the word had caught his attention. He knew perfectly well that any “secret knowledge of the original human race” had to be a fiction, but it was the kind of fiction that fascinated him, as an evolutionist as well as an antiquarian
“Indeed,” Dupin agreed. “Their legendry, it seems, is more closely akin to the time-scale of the world’s affairs imagined by the Comte du Buffon and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire...though not quite on the scale imagined by Maillet.” He lifted his hand to confirm his reference to the book he was holding.
I was aware of the fierce dispute raging between Biblical chronologists, who dated the creation of the world to the year 4004 B.C., and contemporary geologists, whose analysis of the various strata of the Earth’s crust had convinced them that the upheavals in the Earth’s surface recorded there must have extended over hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps millions. Indeed, I knew that the English geologist James Hutton, in founding a new school of “uniformitarian” geology, to rival that of the “catastrophists” who attributed the epochs of nature to violent events such as deluges and volcanic eruptions, had boldly declared that the evidence of the Earth’s crust displayed “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”
“And what sort of time-scale did Monsieur de Maillet envisage?” I asked, meekly accepting the invitation that Dupin had issued.
“Monsieur de Maillet studied the geology of North Africa—particularly that of Egypt—while he was a diplomat in that region,” Dupin said. “His analysis of the strata persuaded him that the Earth is at least two billion years old.”
“Two billion?” I echoed, with all due respect. “But he surely does not think that human history extends over more than a tiny fraction of that span.”
“Indeed not. He was an evolutionist before Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and would now be recognized as a genius of their stature had his friends, careful of his reputation, not censored his work before its posthumous publication. Only a handful of people—of whom I am privileged to be one—have seen the full text, which he compiled between 1692 and 1718, complete with its annotations. The published version—there were three editions, the second and third slightly augmented—has the bare bones of his thesis, which suggests that behind the various upheavals affecting the Earth’s surface there has been a slower and more measured process, in which a world that was once entirely covered by the sea has gradually given birth to continents as the sea’s level has declined. Much of what was left out of the published versions concerns the evolution of vegetable and animal life by adaptation to the new milieu. According to Maillet, all land-dwelling species are ultimately descended from sea-dwelling species, and have continued to evolve as new species have gradually appeared to exploit the changing resources of the land in its various aspects. Similar processes of evolution, he believed, must have taken place under the sea, but he remained conscientiously agnostic with regard to whether the ultimate origin of species was Earthly or other-worldly.”
“Other-worldly?” I queried, sensing a reference to Dupin’s theories about leakage between the parallel worlds filling the space that seems empty to our senses.
“As soon as Maillet became a pioneering evolutionist,” Dupin said, a trifle absent-mindedly—as if he had other matters still on his mind, “he ran into a problem that still vexes evolutionism today: if all living cells derive from other living cells, and all Earthly species from earlier species, how did the process begin? Wanting to
