Prefect turned back to me. “Would you be so kind as to ask Monsieur Dupin to come to see me tomorrow morning, without fail, Monsieur Reynolds,” he said. And with that, he stalked out. He did not slam the door, but I believe that it was a testament to his powers of self-restraint that he did not.
Saint-Germain let out his breath and sat down in the right-hand chair. He reached out across the empty chair to hand my opera-glasses back. He no longer seemed anxious about the possibility of being seen, although I could not imagine that it was the Prefect from whom he had been hiding in the first place.
“Something’s going on,” he said, with a hint of malicious delight in his voice. “Where’s Dupin?”
I hesitated over giving him an explicit order to leave, because I was not sure what I could do if he simply refused. The idea of a public quarrel in the quality section of the Opéra-Comique, which would immediately attract the attention of the hoi polloi and journalists in the stalls, was distinctly unattractive.
“The curtain will be going up in two minutes,” I told him, feeling like a coward for settling for such a weak-kneed hint.
“No it won’t,” he said. “It’s always late on the first night—and Meyerbeer’s still chatting to the mystery woman. They won’t dare to start before he’s back in his own box. The director would doubtless have rather he’d stayed in Vienna, but since he’s here...he is the composer, after all.”
I glanced across at the other box. The two men—the composer and one of the librettists, I now knew—were, indeed, still conversing with the woman in the domino. Chapelain, however, was looking across the space of the auditorium at our box, and frowning, He had seen Saint-Germain now that the President of the Harmonic Society was no longer lurking behind the curtain, and obviously found his presence no less welcome than I did.
Saint-Germain was obviously right—something was going on; but I had not the slightest idea what it might be.
When he saw that I was not about to give him any more information, Saint-Germain continued talking, as was ever his wont. “If the Prefect had simply wanted Dupin to visit him tomorrow,” the charlatan said, “he would have sent a messenger. If he wanted to see him on Prefecture business, he would not have come to the theater to do so. When he first came in, I assumed that the third seat must have been reserved for him, but that was obviously mistaken. Besides which, he really cannot afford to be wasting time at the opera with things falling apart around him...unless he has a very strong personal reason. Was it your idea to come here tonight, or Dupin’s?”
I had to clench my teeth to avoid polite reflex giving him the answer. Eventually, I managed to say: “That really is none of your business, Monsieur Saint-Germain.”
“It’s foolish of you to make a game of it, my friend,” he said. “You know me well enough to know that I can’t resist a challenge. If there’s a mystery here, I’ll not rest until I get to the bottom of it. Do give my regards to Monsieur Dupin, when he arrives...if he arrives. I consider him a dear friend too, of course, even though there’s a sense in which he got me into this mess.”
“What mess?” I asked, utterly confused.
He stood up, shaking his head. “No, no,” he said. “If you won’t confide in me, I’m not going to confide in you. It is, to borrow your phrase, none of your business. Bonsoir.”
And he left. He closed the door very quietly—which was perhaps as well, as the curtain was going up, only a couple of minutes late. Giacomo Meyerbeer was no longer in Chapelain’s box, and the company obviously felt ready to begin, in spite of the inevitable first night nerves.
Alas, I was no longer in a fit condition to pay much attention to Robert and Bertram’s unfortunate encounter with the minstrel; my mind was all at sea. Fortunately, I had seen Robert le Diable before, and knew that I would be able to pick up the plot easily enough, once I had collected myself—not that Robert has much of a plot, being even more of a hotchpotch than most operas.
Oddly enough, I knew that Dupin had seen the opera before too, and until he had been so insistent that I take a box for tonight’s performance, my impression had been that he did not care for it overmuch. When I had invited him to accompany me to see La Damnation de Faust a year before, he had been rather rude about “devil operas” in general, and he had been unimpressed by my insistent claim that Berlioz was an as-yet-unappreciated genius. Although he seemed to have made more of an effort to reacquaint himself with modern music after the unfortunate affairs of the lost Stradivarius and the haunted cello, he was still a trifle sensitive about the darker properties of music, as outlined in the book that had once obsessed him—Les Harmonies de l’enfer—but which he now seemed reluctant even to open.
Why then, had he been so enthusiastic to see this particular play on this particular night? Whatever the reason was, did it have something to do with Groix’s presence—and, for that matter, the presence of Chapelain’s masked lady?
The deepest mystery of all, of course, from my own point of view, was why I could not even begin to venture an answer to those questions. Why, if Dupin had had a particular reason for wanting to be here tonight, in company with me and an empty seat, had he not told me the reason? If “something was going on,” why was I not party to it?
And where was Dupin? If it was not a summons from the Prefect of Police that was keeping him away, when he had seemed so enthusiastic to be here, what could it be?
I knew that racking my brains over such questions was futile, not merely because I had no chance of working out the answers at present, but because I knew that I only had to be patient until I was able to ask Dupin, perhaps in the interval or—if Saint-Germain turned out to be right about the possibility of him not turning up at all—tomorrow. The sensible thing to do, for the time being, was to concentrate on the opera. That was, after all, why I was here.
I tried to do that, but my ill-humor overflowed, transforming itself into criticism of what I was seeing and hearing.
I was not one of the many music-lovers who considered Meyerbeer to be the greatest composer of the era, of a stature only slightly less than his great forebear Rossini. Chopin, who had allegedly taken great inspiration from the original version of Robert, way back in 1831, had, in my opinion, far surpassed him, as had Berlioz, not to mention Wagner. It was no surprise to me that, in spite of its awesome reputation as the grandest of early grand operas, few works had been more extensively revised in its various revivals than Robert le Diable, sometimes involving music written by other hands—much to the composer’s displeasure.
The problems with the piece had, I knew—although it was all ancient history from my viewpoint, unfolding long before I had come to Paris—arisen long before its completion. Meyerbeer and Scribe had initially planned it as a three-act comic opera for the old Opéra-Comique in 1827, more as a parody of than an homage to the first of the great “devil operas,” Weber’s Der Freischutz, which had had a phenomenal success at the other Opéra in 1824. The Opéra-Comique had run into acute financial difficulties, though, and when the collaborators had finally been able to go back to the piece, Meyerbeer, Scribe, and Casimir Delavigne had been commissioned to rewrite it as a five-act grand opera instead.
Eugène Scribe was by now famous as a writer of “well-made” plays, but he had not been able to do much, even with the help of Casimir Delavigne, to adapt a short comedy that had already played fast and loose with its supposed legendary source into a substantial drama. What remained of the original plot had evidently been twisted out of shape, and the story had been blatantly padded by the addition of the entirely gratuitous sensational episode that had done much to secure the work’s success: the so-called dance of the nuns, the highlight of the third
