has told me all about your great love of the books in your library.’
‘Not at all, it is a pleasure for me to offer them to you! Don’t worry, I still have Monsieur Burman’s large folio edition, published by Westeins and Smith in 1732, with splendid intaglio figures …’
‘Many thanks, Monsieur. These books will be dear to me, knowing they come from you.’
While the former procurator looked on approvingly, Louis opened one of the volumes and leafed through it carefully and respectfully.
‘Monsieur, what are these handwritten pages?’
He held out a piece of almond-green paper covered in small, densely packed handwriting.
‘Quite simply, translations made by yours truly of the Latin quotations in the preface. You will be able to check their accuracy.’
‘Louis,’ said Nicolas, ‘it is a true viaticum our friend is giving you. Follow his counsel. I have always benefited from it. He was my master when I first arrived in Paris, when I was only a little older than you are now.’
They all rose from the table. The farewells took a while longer. Semacgus, who was returning to Vaugirard, would give Louis a lift and drop him at his mother’s in Rue du Bac. Nicolas made his final recommendations to his son. He was particularly insistent that the boy write him a letter, however short, every week. He opened his arms and Louis threw himself into them. Moved, Nicolas had the curious feeling that he was reliving a distant past, as if the Marquis de Ranreuil had reappeared in the person of his grandson.
The guests having dispersed, he went back to his quarters, overcome with a quiet melancholy. Life often had tricks up its sleeve, chance ruled, and fate often struck repeated blows. But this time it was different: his continuing disgrace was of little importance compared with an ambiguous destiny that offered him compensations which restored the balance. The discovery of Louis constituted the most important of these unexpected favours for which he had Providence to thank.
Monday 3 October 1774
Nicolas’s first thought, after Mouchette had woken him as usual by breathing in his ear, was for his son, who was starting a new life that morning. He had explained to him why he would be absent when his coach left. He dreaded the emotion he would feel, which Antoinette’s own emotional state would merely accentuate. He found it hard to think of La Satin as Antoinette, even though that was the name by which he had known her in the early days of their liaison. But, anxious for the past to be forgotten and to offer her son a mother worthy of the unexpected future opening up to him, she had certainly turned over a new leaf.
When he left Rue Montmartre, the pedestrians and the carriages were shrouded in autumnal fog. Where should he begin the errands he had planned? First of all, he had to purchase an oil for removing stains from clothes. He knew only too well how difficult it would be for a boarder like Louis to clean his clothes, since only underwear was washed by the establishment. This oil was designed to remove stains from any kind of material, however delicate, without in any way altering its colour or sheen. In addition, it possessed the useful ability to destroy bugs and their eggs, moths and other eaters of wool. It was in Rue de Conti in Versailles that he had discovered the inventor of this precious compound. The success of the formula had encouraged the man to start selling his product in Paris, at a haberdasher’s shop in the Grande-Cour des Quinze-Vingts.7 Nicolas knew that each bottle was wrapped in an explanatory note which would enlighten his son as to the best way to use this oil.
He also wanted to go to Madame Peloise’s shop opposite the Comédie-Française, which stocked a large selection of imitation gemstones of various different colours. He would choose one, have his son’s initials engraved on it, and have it mounted as a seal. The idea briefly crossed his mind of adding the Ranreuil arms, to link the grandson to the grandfather in a kind of continuation of the line. Some secret instinct made him hesitate, as if he feared that this initiative might cause inconveniences for young Le Floch. He stopped for a moment to wonder about his decision. Why had both he and his father found themselves in the situation of having illegitimate sons? A mere coincidence or a kind of fatal repetition, the reason for which escaped him? Last but not least, he thought he might take a stroll around the second-hand bookstalls, with a view to unearthing a few books to be added to the package he would soon be sending Louis at the school in Juilly.
He noted with satisfaction that all his shopping would take him to the same district, Rue Saint-Honoré and the environs of the Louvre. After a bracing walk, he began his rounds with Madame Peloise, who cleverly succeeded in making him spend much more than he had anticipated. An antique intaglio showing a Roman profile, mounted on a silver shaft, particularly attracted him and replaced his initial choice of a seal with initials. It was both more elegant and less banal, more discreet, too, and hard to imitate. From there, he proceeded to the shop selling the stain remover, where he was assured that the desired quantity of the product could be delivered to Juilly in the name of Louis Le Floch, which greatly simplified matters.
He left the maze of old streets around the Quinze-Vingts and walked to the galleries of the Louvre. He noted with regret that the former royal palace was increasingly disfigured by all kinds of excrescences. The colonnade had recently been cleared, and already a multitude of second-hand clothes dealers were insulting it with displays of rags and tatters. Nicolas also deplored the fact that the presence of the academies entailed lodging some of their members here, to the detriment of the surroundings. Everywhere, even within the precincts of the monument, frame houses had sprung up, adorned with shapeless staircases that detracted from the majesty of the complex. He recalled a conversation between Monsieur de La Borde and the Marquis de Marigny, the brother of Madame de Pompadour and superintendent of buildings, about the noble plan to restore the palace to its former splendour. He had quoted Voltaire’s complaint at seeing the Louvre, ‘a monument to the greatness of Louis XIV, the zeal of Colbert and the genius of Perrault, hidden by buildings of the Goths and the Vandals’.
A multitude of stalls had taken root in the chinks of the vast edifice. Among them were those selling paintings and engravings. Fakes were more frequent here than genuine works, and the Lieutenancy General of Police was determined to settle a number of serious cases in which rich foreigners, victims of such swindles, had involved their embassies. In 1772, Nicolas had managed to unmask a group of forgers, which had been a salutary warning to the rest of the crooks.
He was well known to the merchants – both honest and dishonest – and his arrival always provoked a shudder of fear. Taking advantage of the presence of enlightened connoisseurs, some second-hand book dealers had chosen to join the sellers of prints and paintings, and offered customers a wide range, from the less good to, occasionally, the best. Nicolas recalled a few happy discoveries, like that of an original edition of François-Pierre de la Varenne’s Le Pâtissier Français. He had presented this small red morocco-bound duodecimo volume, published in Amsterdam in 1655 by Louys and Daniel Elzevir, as a gift to Monsieur de Noblecourt, who had almost swooned at the sight of it. The dealers would visit the houses of the recently deceased, and buy whole libraries from the grieving families. Unfortunately, there was nothing now that was not known about, and rare books had gradually become impossible to find. The few there were would be immediately spotted by scouts who, in the know, no longer offered four sous for treasures which were worth a thousand times as much. Here and there, you also came across banned or condemned books, handled conspiratorially behind the stalls, in the hope of concealing them from the inquisitive glances of the police spies who frequented the place and were on the lookout for anyone bringing illicit brochures to sell or seeking out copies of such lampoons as had escaped the bonfire.
On one of the stalls, Nicolas discovered a Plautus, a Terence, the complete works
