Читать книгу Yesterday Never Dies - Brian Stableford - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

ROBERT LE DIABLE

I had been to the “new” Salle Favart several times before the evening of the thirty-first of October 1847, when I went there to see the première of the latest revival of Robert le Diable. Indeed, I had gone to see Hector Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust there the previous year, whose relative failure had been one of the factors determining the Opéra-Comique’s recent policy of favoring known crowd-pleasers rather than risking too many new productions. Anxiety about the political situation played a part in that too; in turbulent times, esthetes often develop an exaggerated nostalgia for relatively recent pasts that have taken on a golden edge in retrospect.

I must admit that I felt a trifle embarrassed settling into one of the three seats in the box on my own, and could not help feeling a trifle resentful of Auguste Dupin, who had insisted on my reserving the three seats while leaving one of them unfilled, and had then sent me a note on the very afternoon of the performance, saying that he had been “unavoidably delayed,” but that he hoped to get to the theater by the interval—which was scheduled to take place after the second act.

I felt even less comfortable when, on glancing around the auditorium, I saw Pierre Chapelain sitting in the middle seat of the similar box directly opposite. Dupin and I had not seen much of Chapelain of late, but I would certainly have invited him to take the third seat in our box had Dupin not forbidden me to do so. It was not much consolation to observe that there was an empty seat in his box too, to the physician’s left. Strangely enough, the seat to his right was occupied by a woman wearing a domino, complete with half-mask.

It was by no means unknown for Parisiennes to wear dominoes as fashion accessories on other occasions than masked balls, in the days before the 1848 Revolution, although I associated the habit more with spring than autumn, because Shrove Tuesday and Mid-Lent were the peak times for such indulgences. I wondered momentarily whether the woman might possibly be an American, for All Hallows’ Eve tends to be a more important occasion there than the following day—Toussaint, in France—because of the customs imported by poor Irish and Scottish immigrants. Having been taken up by the general populace and Americanized in its social democracy, its celebration was now often associated with costuming and the wearing of masks.

There was no way to know who the woman was, however, although I took note that the lower part of her face, as seen by means of a rapid peep through my opera-glasses, suggested that she must be in her forties: much the same age as Chapelain. That, coupled with their appearance together in a box at the Opéra-Comique, always a popular exhibition-hall for relationships on the brink of formality, inevitably led me to wonder whether the physician might be thinking of marrying again, perhaps to some prosperous widow. If that were so, it would have helped to explain his recent neglect of the company of Dupin and myself, which had been such an important aspect of his social life a year before. On the other hand, it still left the empty seat to Chapelain’s left unexplained.

Chapelain saw me too, of course, and we exchanged polite nods of the head, although his expression seemed to me to be a trifle distracted, almost bordering on the sullen.

There was still some ten minutes to go before the curtain was due to go up when the door of my box suddenly opened, and someone came in. I turned my head gratefully, expecting to see Dupin, his unavoidable delay happily terminated, but it was the so-called Comte de Saint-Germain.

He did not sit down in either of the vacant chairs. Indeed, he plastered himself against the far partition of the box, seemingly concealing himself behind the curtain—which had not been drawn back to ensure maximum visibility to a hypothetical observer sitting in the right-hand chair, because there was no one in the chair in question—at least until he moved it slightly across to give him better cover.

“What the devil do you think you’re doing, Saint-Germain?” I said. “This is a private box.”

He did not even look at me, being too busy peering surreptitiously out into the auditorium. “I know,” he said, “but we’re friends, are we not? What is more natural than friends dropping into one another’s boxes before a performance to say bonjour? Except that Chapelain is all the way over the far side of the hall—why is that?”

“No,” I said, coldly, deciding to focus on his first question. “I don’t believe that we are friends.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “It’s only a matter of months since I saved your life—that’s a bond that lasts a lifetime. Pass me those opera-glasses, would you?”

So ingrained are habits of politeness that I actually reached across to hand him my opera-glasses, even as I replied to him, in an even colder tone: “As I remember it, Monsieur de Saint-Germain, it was the Breton who called himself Oberon Breisz who saved my life in Saint-Sulpice—after you had endangered it, by enticing me there.”

Still hiding behind the curtain, but still peering out clandestinely, he put the opera-glasses to his eyes and focused them on the opposite box. I could not believe that he was using them to study Chapelain, and drew the natural conclusion.

A distinct grimace of disappointment crossed his face

“Let’s not quibble,” he said, by way of a response to my objection. “Do you know who that woman is in Chapelain’s box, perchance?”

“No,” I said, shortly—but I looked at her again, automatically, and saw her turn to greet someone who had just stepped through the door of her own box: two people, in fact, both men who would presumably have preferred to think of themselves as still just about in the prime of life rather than merely old.

With four people temporarily crammed into a three-chair box, the small space seemed crowded, but the occupants did their best to exchange polite formal greetings while maintaining a respectable distance between them. My impression was that Chapelain had not met either of the older men before, but that the lady knew them well.

“That’s odd,” Saint-Germain murmured.

“What’s odd?” I asked, reflexively, still in a state of some confusion as to how to put an end to the importunate visitation.

“Meyerbeer and Scribe obviously know who she is,” he said. “Meyerbeer must have come all the way back from Vienna to see the performance. Maybe’s he’s come to make sure that there are no unauthorized alterations. Last time Robert was produced here—well, not here exactly, but in the old hall, before it burned down—the piece was considerably revised. That was thirteen years ago, before my time, of course, but I heard a couple of the members muttering something about mystery and sacrilege while reading the theater notices, and naturally pricked up my ears. Meyerbeer took umbrage, apparently, although....”

He was cut off abruptly when the door opened again, and this time we both turned, presumably both expecting to see Auguste Dupin appear.

Again, it was not Dupin. It was Lucien Groix, the Prefect of Police. He seemed even less pleased to see Saint-Germain than Saint-German was to see him, and I sensed a flare of mutual hostility, although I thought it possible that both men were merely disappointed that the other was not Dupin. At any rate, the fake Comte’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he blurted out—unwittingly, I’m sure: “Are you following me?”

Groix collected himself with the rapidity that one would expect of a man in his position. “Don’t be absurd, Monsieur Falleroux,” he said with deliberate disdain. “I have people to do that sort of thing for me.”

I could see that the comment stung, and not merely because the Prefect had used the charlatan’s real name. Saint-Germain/Falleroux had no time for a reply, though, for Groix had immediately turned to me.

“Where’s Dupin?” he asked bluntly. His customary urbanity seemed to have gone missing.

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “He sent me a note saying that he’d been unavoidably delayed and couldn’t get here before the interval. I’d rather assumed that it was you who had detained him.” That had been my natural assumption, although the Prefect, like Chapelain, had been conspicuous by his absence from Dupin’s life of late.

Groix evidently wanted to ask more questions, but was obviously inhibited by Saint-German’s presence. I could not help noticing the way that the prefect was clutching his walking-stick with his gloved hand, almost as if it were a weapon, although it was a light and slender black-lacquered affair, far less use than ornament. Probably without realizing it, Saint-Germain had raised his own cane slightly, although it was a similarly elegant model, made of Chinese bamboo, as useless for sturdy defense as for reckless aggression.

I reflected that all our standard masculine accoutrements had become useless, in spite of their stubborn survival. Canes no longer function as swords, hats as helmets, or gloves as gauntlets, but we cling to them nevertheless, as symbolic residues of the past, reluctant to let go of them in spite of their redundancy—almost as if they still had potency as talismans, if not as instruments. Saint-German was not clutching his own stick as convulsively as Groix was gripping his, but even he seemed unusually tense, and I judged that their present fit of animosity had been generated on the back of an existing ill-humor in each case.

“Monsieur de Saint-German was just leaving,” I said, hoping that the Comte would take the hint. “He just stopped in to say bonjour, even though we are not really friends.”

Saint-Germain showed not the slightest sign of retreating, however; he obviously wanted to get back at the Prefect for the casual slight.

“I’m surprised that you have time to visit the theater, Monsieur Groix,” he said, snidely, “with the regime and the administration tottering around you. Shouldn’t you be busy making preparations to emigrate? Or do you imagine that your bulging files contain enough blackmail material on Monsieur Raspail and his friends to allow you to survive a Republican revolution?”

I was shocked by his rudeness, but Groix seemed unsurprised. He was probably all too keenly aware of the precariousness of his position, and well used to the diminution of respect that had been suffered by the court and the administration alike. It had always seemed to me that Lucien Groix was more interested in the criminal aspects of the prefecture’s work, in which he often employed Dupin as an unofficial consultant, but as Prefect, he had responsibility for the political police too, and the Republican orators of Paris had every reason to detest as well as to fear him. If Louis-Philippe were toppled—and there were few people in Paris who thought him capable of clinging to the throne for another year—then Groix would surely have to leave Paris, and perhaps France, if he were not to run the risk of ending up in one of the prisons to which his agents had sent so many others.

“Are you sure that your own organization will survive, Monsieur Falleroux?” Groix countered. “You might be a man devoid of faith yourself, but the majority of your members are royalist through and through.”

“The Harmonic Society is above politics,” Saint-Germain stated, airily. “We are seers and sages, and we are irreplaceable. This time next year, I shall still be here, while you are in hiding in London.”

Groix must have been under a great deal of pressure, for I saw him snap then, as I had never seen him snap before. It was his turn to let his mouth get ahead of his mind. “What makes you think that?” he said, his voice almost reduced to a hiss as he fought to control his wrath. “Have you cast my horoscope?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Monsieur Groix,” Saint-German retorted, with a smile of smug self-satisfaction. “I have people to do that sort of thing for me.”

Groix’s eyes glittered, but his face did not turn red. He made no explicit threats, but I had the distinct feeling that if he were still in place this time next year, Saint-Germain might be the one hiding in London, for fear of being sent to the bagne.

The 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 act.

I could not help thinking, churlishly, that it had been unjust as well as foolish for Scribe and Delavigne to identify the legendary Robert the Devil—as featured in the folktale prominently reproduced in the Chronique de Normandie and various other metrical romances, about a boy sired by the Devil who eventually represses his inherited evil ways to become a good Christian—with the historical Robert the Great, Duke of Normandy. The identification had apparently been forged by mistake, because seventeenth-century reprints of the “original” Robert le Diable had often been juxtaposed it with Richard sans peur, a completely different story about the son of Robert the Great.

Having researched the question in a desultory fashion the first time I had seen the opera, I suspected that the confusion might extend even further, given that the name Robert had also been attached, by subsequent Norman chroniclers, to the much earlier Viking founder of the province that had become the Duchy of Normandy: a pirate who had sailed up the Seine to attack Paris and run riot in the surrounding territory on two occasions, and whose real name had been Hrolf. At least Hrolf really had undergone a repentance of sorts, promising to convert to Christianity as the price for being granted legal title the province of Normandy by Charles the Simple—the least of Charlemagne’s namesake descendants—although he had subsequently reverted to the bloody worship of his pagan gods.

I tried hard to put such pedantic ruminations out of my mind, however, and concentrate on the opera itself.

As I watched the first and second acts unfold, gradually revealing Robert of Normandy’s difficulties in wooing Isabelle, Princess of Palermo, his accidental disruption of his half-sister Alice’s romance with the minstrel Raimbaut, and the virtuous Alice’s attempts to redeem him from the road to ruin along which he is being prompted by his “friend” Bertram, I could not help seeing all of it as a mere prelude to the dance of the nuns—much more so at any rate, than a preparation for the denouement, in which Bertram, who is actually Robert’s father, fails to keep the bargain he has made with the Devil to deliver his son’s soul, and is dragged off to hell, like all the other devil-led fools of the genre, in imitation of the prototypical Don Giovanni.

The dance of the nuns actually adds nothing to the opera’s plot, being merely an arbitrary intrusion of a scene in which Robert has to recover a magic branch from the ruined convent of Saint Rosalia, in order to render himself invisible—which will allow him to gain the access to Isabelle that he has been forbidden. The ballet does, however, add a strong, and arguably unhealthy, dose of eroticism to the story, because the ghostly nuns dance in remembrance of a debauched past grotesquely unbefitting their vocation. Knowing that the erotic ballet was to come, it was difficult to see the machinations of the first two acts as anything but teasing foreplay, or mere delay. I told myself, however, that it was merely my annoyance at Saint-German and Dupin that was making me impatient, and that I really ought to try to enter into the true spirit of the piece, savoring the music as if I were hearing it for the first time.

I could not do it. Other thoughts kept getting in the way, in spite of all my efforts—not merely the question of where Dupin was now, but the question of exactly when and where he had seen the play before. Obviously, it had been before my arrival in Paris, and if it had been at the Opéra-Comique, it must have been before the fire in 1838, quite probably the 1834 revival to which Saint-Germain had made oblique reference. That had been some while before Lucien Groix had worked his way up to his present position, but he and Dupin had already been old friends. Was it possible that Dupin and Groix had seen the opera together thirteen years ago? Did that have something to do with the singular circumstance of Groix coming here tonight, expecting to see Dupin?

Tormented by such unanswerable questions, I could not even keep my eyes on the stage. I looked across at Chapelain’s box repeatedly—and then looked away again, ashamed of my rudeness, scanning the upper galleries as if I were merely parading my gaze around the entire house. In spite of the poor light, I was convinced that I saw Saint-Germain on the far side of the upper gallery, in one of the worst seats in the house. That would have been extremely atypical of him, but the abormality did not make me any less certain of the identification, which I checked with further glances every time the lighting of the stage was bright enough to allow the possibility of a glimpse.

My restlessness lasted all the way to the interval, when I remained in my seat rather than going down to the foyer, hoping that Dupin might appear at any moment, having been waiting outside for the opportunity to come in without creating a disturbance—but he did not, and after ten minutes, my patience ran out.

If the Comte de Saint-German and Lucien Groix thought that it was acceptable behavior to burst into other people’s theater-boxes uninvited, I thought—atypically, I ought to say—then why should I not do the same? If all the other mysteries of the evening were insoluble, one, at least, was within my potential grasp.

Pierre Chapelain and the masked woman had also remained in their seats, and showed no sign of budging—so I got up, stamped around the circular corridor behind the boxes, and barged into theirs.