Читать книгу Journey to the Core of Creation - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

THE REVELATION

No matter how mild a winter might be, one is always glad to see the return to Paris of spring, which is said—not without reason—to be the city’s best season. No matter how much delight lovers of darkness may take in the long nights of winter, they eventually become wearisome. To tell the truth, as Auguste Dupin and I got older, the particular fascinations that had united us in the early days of our acquaintance, including our fascination with darkness, began to fade somewhat. Even though fate continued to deliver us into dark places on occasion, we became increasingly glad to find or create light within them as time went by.

I cannot say that, before the spring of 1847, we had suffered any personal revolution in anticipation of the political upheaval that was shortly to arrive, nor even that we had changed in any essential way—the notion of Dupin changing seemed absurd, given that his character seemed only to have hardened as a result of all our bizarre adventures—but I think we had become less emphatic in our commonplace idiosyncrasies. As for less commonplace idiosyncrasies...well, those remain emphatic by necessity, if not be definition.

The perversity of my own temperament had left me in considerable doubt as to the so-called joys of spring in my youth, even though the changing of the seasons was sufficiently well-marked in Boston, where I spent much of my early youth, and noticeable even in Virginia, where I spend the most significant fraction of my adolescence—although Virginia, in particular, had nothing of the exaggerated changes in the relative duration of light and dark enjoyed by Paris. It is, however, entirely in keeping with the principle of perversity that a man who has avoided such follies when they might have taken fruitful effect should begin to feel something of a special zest at the advent of the season of renewal, once he in his forties and no longer likely to express that zest in any fashion remotely connected to procreation.

The one problem with the equinoctial season in Paris, however, is the changeability of the weather. There are bright days, to be sure, but there are also rainy ones, often in abundance. The vegetable world needs both, of course, to fuel the sudden rise of its saps, but rain, especially when it comes in near-deluges, can have a singularly dispiriting effect on a human spirit that has only recently been buoyed up by emergence from winter torpor.

It was raining heavily on the strange evening in 1847 when I learned more about Auguste Dupin’s history in a matter of hours than I had contrived to winkle out of him in more years than I had fingers to count. There must, I suppose, have been dozens of people in Paris who had been acquainted him when he was authentically young, including at least three whom I saw on a regular basis, but they never talked about it any more than he did. His discretion was contagious, to a remarkably insistent degree.

I say “authentically young” because it was very difficult to judge Dupin’s age. When I had first met him he had seemed younger than I was, but I had soon learned to doubt that judgment; for a while I had thought him much older, and then had changed my mind again—but all my attempts to determine a exact chronology of his birth and education had been met with a conscientious vagueness that had begun to seem irritating. I suppose that it was necessary for me to encounter someone who had known him a quarter of a century before but had not seen him since, thus avoiding the contagion of discretion, in order to discover any reliable information.

Dupin had come to dinner that evening, with the understanding that we would spend the evening together, chatting as we had in the early days of our acquaintance, but we had not even finished dessert when a messenger came from the Prefecture begging him to come, in order to offer his advice on a matter of urgency. For once, even Dupin seemed annoyed by the rudeness of the summons.

“I’ll come back,” he promised me. “Within an hour, if possible—two at the most.”

As an unusually scrupulous man, he did not like to make promises he could not keep, but I knew better than to take that one too literally. Even so, I told him that I would wait up, at least until eleven o’clock.

Inevitably, two hours passed, and almost three. When the doorbell eventually rang, I assumed that it was a messenger from the Prefecture, come to tell me that my friend had been delayed, and would be busy all night with whatever mystery some bewildered inspector had been obliged to pass up the chain of command until it claimed that attention of the Prefect himself. I allowed Madame Bihan to answer it, sticking to my armchair, where I was reading through the sections of Le Constitutionnel that I had not bothered to peruse in the morning.

When she came in to the smoking-room, however, it was not to deliver the expected message.

“It’s a lady, sir,” she said, “asking for Monsieur Dupin.”

“A lady?” I echoed, more in puzzlement than surprise.

“Yes, sir,” Madame Bihan confirmed, “and a child.”

Had I echoed the latter item of information, astonishment would no doubt have come to the fore, but I did not. The drumming of the rain on the widows had reminded me that it would be extremely impolite, on a night like this, to leave a lady—let alone a child—standing on one’s doorstep.

I hastened to the door without bothering to mutter any further response to Madame Bihan, and begged the lady to come into the hallway even before making any assessment of her appearance and quality. That would have been difficult, in any case, until she was within direct reach of the light of the solitary oil lamp hanging from the ceiling of the vestibule.

She was evidently grateful for the consideration; although she had presumably arrived in a fiacre, the short interval between stepping down therefrom and being admitted into the house had sufficed to soak her upper garments, for she had no umbrella. When she had removed her slightly-bedraggled hat I saw that she was mature—not quite as old as the century, but not far off—but still very handsome. Her eyes were a piercing blue and her brown hair was only just beginning to display flecks of gray. Her clothing was not cheap, but not aristocratic either, Parisian in its tailoring but provincial in its style. It was evidently a traveling costume, and gave every indication that she had come a long way. Her complexion was not excessively sunburned, but her skin was beginning to show evidence of the inevitable stress exerted on Norman delicacy and pallor by a long sojourn in the south.

I confess that I hardly glanced at the child, who was a girl approximately twelve years old. She seemed somewhat vexed by the rain, although her broad-brimmed hat and capacious cloak had saved her from its worst effects, but she was sufficiently well brought-up to stand meekly by, half-hidden behind her mother. The family resemblance between the two left no doubt in my mind that the lady was, in fact, the child’s mother.

“Is Monsieur Dupin here?” the lady was quick to ask, with a rather un-Parisian carelessness regarding the formalities of introduction.

“No, Madame,” I relied. “He dined here, but he was summoned to the Prefecture. He promised to return, but....”

Still showing no respect or etiquette, she cut me off. “The Prefecture?” she queried.

“Yes,” I said. “He is often summoned, as a...consultant.”

The lady’s lips pursed slightly. “Lucien,” she said, more to herself than me, as if the explanation of Dupin’s absence had suddenly occurred to her. Evidently, she knew—or had once known—Paris’s Prefect of Police well enough to think of him in first name terms.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “As I said, he promised to return, but....”

Again, she cut me off, this time rather paradoxically, to say: “I’m the one who owes you an apology. I really should have introduced myself. My name is Madame Guérande, and this is my daughter Sophie. I’m very sorry to call on you unexpectedly like this, at such an unsocial hour, but Amélie told me that Monsieur Dupin was here, and assured me that it would be acceptable to look for him here.”

It took me half a second to realize that she not only thought of the Prefect of Police in terms of his first name, but that she thought of Madame Lacuzon, Dupin’s concierge and guardian, in the same informal way. That was by far the more remarkable of the two facts, all the more astonishing because Madame Lacuzon, who protected Dupin’s privacy with all the fierce determination of a dragon, had made the remarkable exception of telling Madame Guérande where he might be found, and assuring her that it would be perfectly acceptable to seek him out at my house.

For the time being, however, politeness demanded that I try to make my visitors a little more comfortable. The only fire that had been lit outside the kitchen—which doubled as the servants’ parlor—was in the smoking room, but the windows had been open earlier in the day and I had been saving my pipe until Dupin returned, so the atmosphere was not as toxic as it might have been, and it seemed to me that their greatest urgency was allowing the two visitors an opportunity to relieve the chill of their sudden dampness. While Madame Bihan took their mantles away in order to dry them by the kitchen stove, I brought two more armchairs to the hearth and sat them down. I offered the lady a glass of brandy, which she refused, asking instead for some warm milk for Sophie. I gave the order to Madame Bihan, who accepted it with no more complaint than a world-weary sigh.

Sophie sat down meekly in the chair I had moved for her, but Madame Guérande did not accept my invitation immediately. Instead, she moved around the room curiously, inspecting it with what seemed to me to be unnecessarily minute care. The walls were, of course, lined with books, which she was not content merely to scan with a glance. She was actually inspecting the titles—those which could be read on the spines in spite of the uncertain light—as if attempting to measure me by my reading habits.

A full half minute passed before she suddenly turned to look me in the eye and said: “Your name would not be Poe, by any chance?”

I suppressed the shock of the question, and all the possibilities raised by the fact that it had been asked. “No,” I replied. “Mr. Poe was a close friend of mine once upon a time, and we still maintain a correspondence, although it has become a trifle desultory of late. It was from my letters that he drew the information on which he based a number of stories in which Monsieur Dupin figures as a character, but I never had his literary talent. My name is Reynolds: Samuel Reynolds.” I felt a curious thrill as I articulated the syllables of my name, and realized that Dupin’s contagious discretion had affected me to such a degree that I rarely pronounced them any longer.

“Are you from Virginia?” she asked, point-blank.

“I’m originally from Boston, Massachusetts,” I told her, a trifle stiffly. “I lived in Virginia for some years in my youth, and met Mr. Poe at university there. I traveled a good deal before settling in Paris, and no longer feel myself to be a native of anywhere in particular. I have not entirely lost my appetite for travel, but Monsieur Dupin is a reluctant tourist, and....”

This time, she did not interrupt, but I left the sentence dangling of my own accord, not entirely sure how to explain the fact that Dupin’s reluctance to leave Paris somehow functioned as an anchor restraining my own excursions.

Madame Guérande did not seem surprised to learn that Dupin was a reluctant tourist, but a shadow of doubt passed over her face, which was then in the lamplight, and I immediately jumped to the conclusion that she had some interest in breaking that habit.

What she said, however, was: “I’m glad that he has a friend. He needs society, although he is probably still reluctant to recognize or admit it. I’m sure that you’re good for him.”

I was sure of that too, although I was by no means sure exactly why it was the case. “Have you known him long?” I asked, mildly.

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, and Claude was certainly interested in Auguste’s heretical notions, in spite of my father’s disapproval but...the matter became complicated. Auguste could not bring himself to speak as diplomatically as Claude, and my father was not a man to tolerate overmuch dissent from his students....”

By this time, of course, my imagination was conjuring up all kinds of wild fantasies. Throughout the time I had known him, Dupin had shown even less interest in the opposite sex than I had, and had always seemed to me to have cut himself off conclusively from all emotions of that kind. I had never quite been prepared to take it for granted that the sole reason for that exclusion was his devotion to the cause of study and rationality. I had always wondered whether his excessive commitment to dispassionate logic might have been, at its inception, a reaction to some wounding experience. Now, the notion that he might once have been in love with Julie Maret, but had lost her, in a context of parental disapproval, to an older rival he had initially counted as a friend, and then as a betrayer....

I had to remind myself, sternly, that real life does not normally bear overmuch resemblance to a feuilleton in Le Constitutionnel.

“At the risk of being indiscreet,” I said, glad for once to be an unrepentant gambler, “may I ask why you want to see Monsieur Dupin so urgently.”

“I want to ask him, rather urgently, for his help,” she said, bluntly. After a moment, during which she challenged me with her eyes, she added: “You don’t seem surprised. I presume that Lucien isn’t the only person who solicits his aid on a regular basis.”

“Indeed not,” I murmured. I could not resist the temptation to add: “But Madame Lacuzon turns most of them away, with a ferocity that has become legendary. I have never known her to reveal his whereabouts to anyone.”

“Amélie always made an exception for me,” was Julie Guérande’s curt but revealing reply. In a sense, I supposed that “Amélie” had always made an exception for me, too, but never with a conspicuously good grace. The gorgon evidently understood that I was in some sense essential to Dupin, and therefore to be tolerated, but it seemed, if I were reading the implication correctly, that Julie Maret had not been merely tolerated, but actively welcomed. Julie Maret had evidently grown used to thinking of the old witch as “Amélie”—a name that even Madame Bihan, her cousin, hesitated to pronounce.

It was possible, of course, that Madame Lacuzon had not been a “gorgon” or a “old witch” in 1820, but a mere middle-aged woman of much milder character—but somehow, I doubted it, Dupin might have been young at heart then, but not the concierge.

“If she did not guard him so closely,” I admitted, “he would be besieged. He lives semi-reclusively, but his reputation has nevertheless spread. I suppose that is partly my fault—or Poe’s, for not observing the convention of changing names to protect the innocent. Eddie assumed that his stories would never filter back to France, and would not strike a chord if they did...but even in the absence of translations, the tales have somehow been communicated. The steamships that have regularized communication between the continents have facilitated a freedom of information that Eddie, in spite of being an unusually far-sighted man, had not quite grasped imaginatively. Even without that excessively lurid account of the murders in the Rue Morgue, however, Dupin’s adventures in detection and the solution of strange mysteries would have generated rumors. Even the wizards of modern Paris take Dupin for a magician as great as themselves; at least one of them firmly believes that he is a reincarnation of John Dee—which goes to show how rare logic and erudition are in today’s world.”

Madame Guérande did not laugh at the half-hearted witticism. She weighed the book she was holding in her hand, and then glanced around the shelves again. “Has Auguste abandoned his more esoteric interests, then?” she asked, curiously. “I did not see his once-precious copy of Les Harmonies de l’enfer on your shelves.”

“Oh, he keeps his shelf of forbidden books in his own apartment,” I told her, laconically. “They might not be safe here, without Madame Lacuzon to guard the threshold.”

She looked at me strangely, apparently wondering how serious I was, or ought to be. Then she nodded her head, almost imperceptibly. It was not a communication, but a faint reflex.

“Has the reason you want his help something to do with the Harmonies of Hell?” I asked, tentatively.

“Not in the sense that the silly book in question means the phrase,” she assured me, “although there is an underworld involved, and strange legends concerning it—but it’s more a matter of disharmony than harmony. There’s nothing truly supernatural involved, so far as I can tell.”

“If there’s one thing I have learned in my acquaintance with Dupin,” I said, with a slight sigh, having taken note of the cautionary truly, “especially in recent years, is that one never can tell. He is very adamant in saying that everything that happens is natural, but if he is right...well, the bounds of the natural are not what I once thought them to be.”

Again, there was an imperceptible nod, as if she were taking note of another echo of the distant past. “That was one point of faith on which all the members of my father’s secret society agreed,” she said, softly. “Everything that had ever happened was natural: the origin and progress of life; the origin and progress of humankind. They took reverent delight in private speculation and deduction on such subjects, all the more so because their mouths were routinely sealed in public.”

I had discussed similar issues many times with Dupin, and had always been struck by the idiosyncrasy of his attitude when he mentioned certain matters. The majority of intelligent men, he had once told me, had believed ever since Carl von Linné published his taxonomy of species, that humans were a natural product of evolution, closely related to the great apes—but none had dared say so in their writings, and some had even resorted to vehement denial, for fear of the disapproval of the Church. I had been in Paris long enough to know that the Revolution of ’89 had not put an end to the power of that disapproval, especially in the upper echelons of Academe, which still retained the legacy of its one-time domination by the Church.

Madame Guérande looked at her daughter, who had fallen asleep in the armchair. Gently, she removed the empty plate from the little girl’s knee and set it down on the tray.

“Have you come far?” I asked, innocently—but with an extensive hidden agenda of my own.

“From the Ardèche,” she said, casually.

“That’s a long journey,” I observed, although I had only the vaguest notion of where the Ardèche was.

“It was very long the first time I made it,” she agreed, “but now that the railway from Paris has reached Chalon...within three years, or five at the most, it will stretch all the way to Lyon, perhaps to Marseilles....unless a new Revolution throws the country into chaos again.”

“The one thing about which there is no political dispute is the necessity of expanding the railways as rapidly as possible,” I said. “On that matter, the king and Monsieur Thiers are in complete agreement, and have no need to seek a juste milieu. The most hardened Legitimists and the most radical Anarchists are similarly besotted with railways, even if they disapprove of the role played by the Bourse in their instigation. No one can any longer imagine how we could once have been content with canals. You traveled by train, then, all the way from Chalon to Paris?”

“Yes. Have you traveled by railway yourself?” What she wanted to know, I presumed, was whether Dupin was amenable to railway travel. In spite of my enthusiastic little speech, she and I both knew that there were people in the world who had sworn that they would never step into a railway carriage, either for fear of accidents or love of horses.

“Only as far Rouen,” I told her. “It was an experience. If you’re correct about the speed of the network’s extension, I may one day be able to overcome Dupin’s resistance to tourism.”

“I’m convinced of it,” she replied.

“You’re hoping to persuade him to travel to the Ardèche, then?” I queried.

“The word I used,” she pointed out, with a little smile, “was convinced.”

“I’m delighted by your conviction, Madame,” I said, permitting myself a hint of over irony. “I’ve never been to the Ardèche.”

Her blue eyes bored into mine like gimlets. “Do you go everywhere with Monsieur Dupin nowadays?” she asked.

“Everywhere,” I assured her.

This time, she nodded more conspicuously—and much more dubiously. “I suppose we shall get to know one another better, then,” she said.

“I hope so,” I said, mildly. “If I am to be allowed to accept your invitation too, might I enquire as to the nature of the urgent problem with which you intend to confront him? You mentioned strange legends—which have become a particular fascination of Dupin’s of late, and mine too.”

“That’s a peripheral mater,” she said, “and rather conventional, I fear. The house that my husband inherited from his father shortly after our marriage—in which we took up residence almost immediately—is situated at the bottom of a mountain. The mountain is meager by comparison with the larger peaks of the Central Massif, which lie to the west on the other side of it, and it has a rounded top that soothes its outline, but it seems impressive enough when viewed from the valley floor. It is known in the valley as Mont Dragon, because local folklore says that there is a dragon sleeping underneath it, whose breathing can be heard and felt every spring, when it always comes close to waking—but fortunately never quite does. The mountain is part of a range of long-extinct volcanoes, however, and the prolonged geological effects of fire and water have left it honeycombed with caves. When the winter ice that forms in the outer layers of the mountain soil and the superficial fissures of the rock breaks down, and the melt-water begins to drain away, it generates sounds that reach the surface as muted hisses and groans. Occasionally, there are slight earth-tremors. There’s nothing supernatural about it, although I must confess that the phenomena began early this year, and seem more striking than usual—circumstances that seem to have added to an anxiety that seems to have gripped the whole valley, and prompted me to an action that I have contemplated several times before but never undertaken.”

“It must be an interesting location for a geologist,” I remarked, “Your husband spends a good deal of time in the caves, I imagine.”

She hesitated, but then decided that she might as well continue, given that Dupin would presumably tell me anyway, once she had confided in him.

“Far too much, in my opinion,” she confessed, “and he spends all winter fretting, waiting for the thaw in order to gain access again. It’s become something of an obsession, reaching an unprecedented fever pitch in the last two weeks. He has made discoveries there—indeed, he told me long before we married, swearing me to secrecy from the other members of my father’s coterie, that he had first gone into the caves as a child, while his father was away at war, and found something wonderful there, about which he was anxious to send a mémoire one day to the Académie—but nearly thirty years have gone by since he told me that, and no mémoire has been forthcoming. He keeps on saying that there must be far more to find, which he would find, if he only had a little more time—but I know little more now about what it was he found as a boy than I did when he first confided that news to me, even though I have seen the specimens he has brought out. Whenever I ask him about what still remains inside the mountain, he merely mumbles that it is immovable, and that he has not yet discovered the whole of it. I have often had to fight a powerful temptation to go into the caves to see for myself, in spite of the danger.”

I did not imagine that she meant danger from the dragon, or any other phantom of folklore. She seemed an eminently commonsensical person, sufficiently well-controlled to suppress the agitation that she must be feeling. She seemed glad of an opportunity to talk—and perhaps glad, too, that she had an opportunity to talk to someone else before renewing an old acquaintance with Dupin that would inevitably stir up echoes. I wondered how much she had confided to Madame Lacuzon—and how much Madame Lacuzon had confided to her.

I filled the lady’s wine-glass again. She took a long sip, and relaxed slightly.

“I can understand why your patience has worn thin,” I observed.

Her lips formed a wry curve that I could not honestly describe as a smile.

“I have often suggested to my husband that we should invite people that we had known in Paris to visit us—especially Auguste,” she remarked, distantly. “He always agrees in principle, but always puts it off.”

“But this time,” I said, probing gently, “he finally agreed?”

“Yes,” she said. “He agreed.”

I had the strong impression that her husband had been given little choice—that the agreement had been forced. I also took the inference that the lady had not paused after obtaining that agreement, lest it be rescinded. Otherwise, she would surely have written to notify us of her arrival...unless, of course, she was also anxious that Dupin, too, might be inclined to procrastination, if given an opportunity to object.

“Perhaps I have said too much,” the lady suddenly remarked. “I beg you to let me put this matter to Auguste in my own way, in my own time.”

“Of course,” I said.

I heard the front door open then, as if one cue. I knew that it was Dupin; he was the only person in the world who was entitled to do so without ringing. The Bihans always used the back door, as befitted the dutiful servants they took an altogether un-post-Revolutionary pride in being.

I gathered myself together in anticipation of Dupin’s surprise, and my enjoyment thereof...and, of course, of the further revelations that were still to come.