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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 leave God out of the picture—although the omission was not something he wanted to advertise too conspicuously—he wondered whether life on this planet might have begun from seeds that fell to earth from interplanetary space, with the corollary possibility that the pattern of Earthly evolution might be a recapitulation of one that had already unfolded elsewhere, perhaps many times.”

Again, I thought: No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. An infinite process, with no need of a first cause. As rhetoric went, however, it looked suspiciously like cheating to me.

“Do you believe that?” I asked.

“It’s not a matter for belief,” he said, sharply—and inevitably. “We can only speculate.”

“But you do believe that all life on Earth ultimately had a single point of origin in some kind of primal cell,” I pointed out.

“That’s a different matter,” he said. “The patterns of relatedness between species, scrupulously catalogued by taxonomists like Carl von Linné and the Chevalier de Lamarck provide strong evidence to that effect. To begin with, Linné and Buffon tended to map the relationships in series of circles placed in varying degrees of proximity, but that conceptual geometry is now being replaced by a diagrammatic ‘tree of life,’ in which phyla, orders and genera are represented as branches from a single root-stock. Polygenists, of course, believe in a more generous mechanism of continuous creation or spontaneous generation, which is still ongoing, with respect to primitive organisms, but the monogenists have the upper hand now.”

“I see,” I said, although I was now out of my depth. As usual, when he saw me out of my depth, Dupin hastened to explain—with the inevitable effect of dragging me into even deeper intellectual waters.

“Polygeny is the thesis of multiple origins, as opposed to monogeny, which proposes a single point of origin. As Madame Guérande mentioned, it was one of the principal axes of debate in Achille Malet’s salon. If we had had Malet’s full text available to us then, it would have added an extra dimension to the debate—although our discussions usually focused on the corollary issue of the origin of man, which also gives rise to polygenist and monogenist arguments. Modern monogenists, who believe that the human species had a single point of evolutionary origin, tend to place it in Central Asia—with which Maillet would have agreed—but their estimates of the timing of that origin vary considerably. Polygenists, of course, attribute separate origins to the various human races now extant, some even disagreeing as to the nature of the ancestor-species that preceded the human.”

“Apes, that is,” I said, eager to show that I understood something.

“That’s the most common opinion,” he agreed, “among those who dare voice an opinion at all. Linné and Lamarck both regarded it as obvious, although they would only admit to the conviction in private—but I have heard seals mentioned, and pigs too. The polygenist is, of course, free to accept all three as hypothetical possibilities, although the monogenist is forced to choose.”

“And that was the sort of thing you used to debate in Professor Malet’s salon?”

“Among others. We thought of ourselves as very bold freethinkers—as, indeed, we were. Nor was our secrecy unwarranted. The spies thronging the Sorbonne might have been paid by Monsieur Fouché—who contrived to keep his post as Minister of Police even after the Empire’s fall, just as Napoléon had been forced to recall him to it because he knew too much to be left out in the cold—but their reports reached the Church as well as the Crown, and those members of the salon who had salaried positions in the university still had something material to fear from accusations of heresy.”

“It sounds to me more like metaphysics than biology,” I confessed, “and it surely has no relevance to whatever problems Monsieur Guérande has with his problematic research in the caves of Mont Dagon, legal disputes over the ownership of the land and Thierachian nomads.”

“It’s difficult to imagine how it might,” Dupin admitted. “The probability is that Julie plucked the book off the shelf because she recognized it as one that she had given me, rather than because it struck any chord with regard to her mysterious problem. She has not changed as much as I might have expected, given that she is a quarter of a century older than when I last saw her, a dutiful wife and doting mother. She has not lost her taste for temptation and teasing.”

“She referred to her old self as a flirt,” I told him, “although that was for my benefit, as an American—she was, I think, flirting with me, ever so slightly.”

“Doubtless she was,” Dupin said, dryly. “Even at seventeen, she thought that she could twist us all around her little finger—including poor old Lamarck, while he was still able to attend our gatherings. She had known him for years by then, of course. And she was right—about being able to twist us all around her little finger, that is. The adorable Julie, we called her.”

That, I knew, was a quotation, referring to the star of some eighteenth-century salon, about which Molière had written a famous satire. I could not quite recall the salon-keeper’s name, but I had a vague memory that her daughter—the “adorable Julie”—had kept her multiple suitors dangling for fourteen years before finally condescending to become a Duchesse. But Dupin’s Julie—or, to be strictly accurate, Monsieur Guérande’s Julie—had obviously not strung things out to that extent, and evidently had not granted herself, in the end, to the suitor with the highest-placed rank in the peerage...not that the peerage had counted for much in the 1820s, in spite of the Restoration.

Perhaps, I thought, science had its own peerage now, and perhaps Julie Malet had accepted the proposal of the most promising young scientist in the Lamarckian clique: the man most likely to carry evolutionary theory forward to its inevitable triumph over superstition. If so, that promise did not seem to have come to fruition. I could not imagine, however, that anyone would have considered Dupin to have been a better catch, given the manifest eccentricity of his own interests and exploits. Lucien Groix, on the other hand....

“I was surprised to learn that Monsieur Groix was a member of Achille Mallet’s coterie,” I observed, curiously.

“He wasn’t, quite,” Dupin replied. “He was a regular in the salon, for a while, but his commitment to the Lamarckian doctrine, as preached by Malet, was even weaker than mine. His primary interest was the professor’s daughter, I suspect—and if so, he was not alone in pretending a greater interest in science than he actually had, in order to gain entrée to the circle. On the other hand, he might simply have been Fouché’s spy, at the very outset of his glittering career as a policeman.”

“You’re not serious?”

“Perfectly serious. Fouché had spies in every significant salon in the capital. They were the richest source of information he had. Monsieur Groix has kept up the tradition and his successors will doubtless do likewise. It is, after all, through salon society that ideas circulate at their greatest and most careless ease, and where they thrive in their natural environment. Do you imagine that Louis XIV’s lieutenants of police did not collect regular reports from the Marquise de Rambouillet’s drawing-room?”

The Marquise de Rambouillet, I remembered then, had been the mother of the original “adorable Julie.”

“But Malet and Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire were pillars of society,” I said. “They were men of science, among the glories of the nation in an Age of Enlightenment. They surely posed no danger whatsoever to the interests of Louis XVIII.”

“With the aid of hindsight,” Dupin admitted, “we can probably conclude that they did not—but monarchy, in the final analysis, derives its privileges from the myth of divine right. Evolutionism was seen then—and is still seen, in certain quarters of society—as a dangerous threat to that notion, inherently supportive of the belief that all men are essentially born equal, and that aristocracy is merely a form of unjustified oppression. Had Malet and Geoffroy not been so diplomatic in the assertion and promulgation of their convictions, they really might have given Church and State alike cause for concern. Lamarck can certainly be considered a martyr of sorts, his crucifixion only a little less painful for being slow and subtle.”

He was in full flow by now, his earlier absent-mindedness conquered—but his gaze, even as it was reaching for intellectual infinity, was suddenly captured by the clock. He suddenly sat back in his chair, almost as if he were wondering what he was doing in it, when he ought to be elsewhere.

“I must go home,” he said, abruptly. “I need sleep.”

“Shall I pack my trunk with a view to an expedition to the Ardèche?” I asked.

He looked at me sharply. “I have little idea, as yet, what Madame Guérande is going to tell me tomorrow. Perhaps it would be as well not to be precipitate.”

Perhaps it would, I thought—but I decided to pack anyway. I had not made a specific study of Madame Guérande’s little finger, but I suspected that its potential as a bobbin was by no means exhausted, and the lady had certainly seemed to me to be in a hurry.