The Nicolas Le Floch affair

  Discover the next Nicolas le Floch Investigation

  Praise for Jean-François Parot

  ‘The period detail is marvellously evocative, Le Floch is brave and engaging …’ Economist

  ‘Parot succeeds brilliantly in his reconstruction of pre-revolutionary Paris, in splendid period detail.’ The Times

  ‘A solid and detailed evocation of pre-revolutionary France – the poverty and squalor, side by side with the wealth and splendour, are brought lovingly to life. And the plot has all the twists, turns and surprises the genre demands.’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Jean-François Parot’s evocation of eighteenth-century Paris is richly imagined and full of fascinating historical snippets.’ Financial Times

  ‘Parot’s clever plotting and sharp eye for detail are, as ever, first rate …’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘… Le Floch is an engaging conduit for the reader through the teeming, phantasmagoric capital that is eighteenth-century Paris.’ Independent

  ‘The atmosphere is marvellous, the historical detail precise, and Le Floch and his colleagues are an engaging bunch …’ Guardian

  ‘An interesting evocation of place and period.’ The Literary Review

  THE

  NICOLAS LE

  FLOCH AFFAIR

  JEAN-FRANÇOIS PAROT

  Translated from the French by Howard Curtis

  Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la Culture – Centre National du Livre.

  This work is published with support from the French Ministry of Culture/Centre National du Livre.

  For Maurice Roisse

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Background to The Nicolas Le Floch Affair

  Dramatis Personae

  The Nicolas Le Floch Affair

  I NEAP TIDE

  II SUSPICION

  III TRAPS

  IV DARK DEEDS

  V VANISHING TRICKS

  VI LONDON

  VII CONFUSION

  VIII DEAD END

  IX HUNTING

  X THE KING

  XI ILLUMINATION

  XII THE BATHS OF JULIAN

  XIII THE SEAL OF SECRECY

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Also by Jean-François Parot

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Background to The Nicolas Le Floch Affair

  For those readers coming to the adventures of Nicolas Le Floch for the first time, it is useful to know that in the first book in the series, The Châtelet Apprentice, the hero, a foundling raised by Canon Le Floch in Guérande, is sent away from his native Brittany by his godfather, the Marquis de Ranreuil, who is concerned about his daughter Isabelle’s growing fondness for the young man.

  On arrival in Paris he is taken in by Père Grégoire at the Monastery of the Decalced Carmelites and on the recommendation of the marquis soon finds himself in the service of Monsieur de Sartine, Lieutenant General of Police in Paris. Under his tutelage, Nicolas is quick to learn and is soon familiar with the mysterious working methods of the highest ranks of the police service. At the end of his year’s apprenticeship, he is entrusted with a confidential mission, one that will result in him rendering a signal service to Louis XV and the Marquise de Pompadour.

  Aided by his deputy and mentor, Inspector Bourdeau, and putting his own life at risk on several occasions, he successfully unravels a complicated plot. Received at court by the King, he is rewarded with the post of commissioner of police at the Châtelet and, under the direct authority of Monsieur de Sartine, continues to be assigned to special investigations.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  NICOLAS LE FLOCH : a police commissioner at the Châtelet

  MONSIEUR DE SARTINE : Lieutenant General of Police in Paris

  MONSIEUR DE SAINT-FLORENTIN: Minister of the King’s Household

  PIERRE BOURDEAU : a police inspector

  OLD MARIE : an usher at the Châtelet

  TIREPOT : a police spy

  RABOUINE : a police spy

  AIMÉ DE NOBLECOURT : a former procurator

  MARION: his cook

  POITEVIN : his servant

  CATHERINE GAUSS : a former canteen-keeper, Nicolas Le Floch’s maid

  GUILLAUME SEMACGUS : a navy surgeon

  AWA : his cook

  CHARLES HENRI SANSON : the public executioner

  MARIE-ANNE SANSON : his wife

  LA PAULET : a former brothel-keeper

  LA SATIN : a brothel-keeper

  LA PRÉSIDENTE : a prostitute

  JULIE DE LASTÉRIEUX : Nicolas Le Floch’s mistress

  CASIMIR : her manservant

  JULIA : her maid

  MONSIEUR DE LA BORDE : First Groom of the King’s Bedchamber

  COMMISSIONER CHORREY : a police commissioner at the Châtelet

  COMMISSIONER CAMUSOT : a retired former police commissioner

  GASPARD : a royal page

  FRIEDRICH VON MÜVALA : a Swiss traveller

  BALBASTRE : organist of Notre Dame

  THÉVENEAU DE MORANDE : a French lampoonist living in London

  THE CHEVALIER D’ÉON : a French secret agent in London

  LORD ASHBURY : an agent of the British secret service

  THE DUC DE RICHELIEU : a marshal of France

  KING LOUIS XV

  MADAME DU BARRY : the King’s mistress

  THE DAUPHIN, later KING LOUIS XVI

  MASTER BONTEMPS : senior member of the Company of Notaries

  Royal

  MASTER TIPHAINE : Julie de Lastérieux’s notary

  MASTER VACHON : a tailor

  MONSIEUR DE SÉQUEVILLE : the King’s secretary with responsibility for ambassadors

  MONSIEUR RODOLLET : a public letter-writer

  NAGANDA : a Micmac Indian

  MONSIEUR TESTARD DU LYS : Criminal Lieutenant of Police

  MONSIEUR LENOIR : a State councillor

  I

  NEAP TIDE

  The torch of discord lit by his own hand

  Set off a hundred fires in the land.

  The anger spread …

  VOLTAIRE

  Thursday 6 January 1774

  The carriage narrowly missed him; leaping back, he landed with his feet together in a muddy, viscous puddle of melted snow. The splash sent a foul-smelling spray over him, which started dripping from the point of his tricorn. He cursed under his breath. Another good woollen cloak to take to the cleaner. Ever since his youth in Brittany, Nicolas Le Floch, police commissioner at the Châtelet, had liked to wear practical garments. These days, frock coats were all the rage in Paris, and the kind of warm, heavy cloak he liked was the preserve of cavalry soldiers and travelling merchants. Master Vachon, his regular tailor as well as Monsieur de Sartine’s, despairing of his stubborn loyalty to old habits, had nevertheless managed to persuade him to accept a number of extravagances – a particular cut of the collar, buttons on the lower part, a wider flounce, no lining – hoping, without a great deal of conviction, that Nicolas, who was seen both in the city and at Court, would set the fashion.

  Nicolas was sure that his low-fronted evening shoes were soaked, their fine gloss soiled, and that there were flecks of mud on his stockings. His cloak would have to suffer the outrage of an over-vigorous cleaning. That might not be too bad as long as the caustic mud did not leave indelible marks on the cloth; however, according to those in the know, it had an unparalleled ability to stick. Come to think of it, it might be better to leave the cloak to the meticulous, affectionate care of Catherine and Marion, the two guardian angels of Monsieur de Noblecourt’s house. It was sad to think that Marion, her
body twisted with rheumatism, now only presided in a symbolic manner over the household chores, although everyone strove to make her believe that her toil, however derisory, was as necessary as ever to the smooth running of the house.

  This petty incident, so common in the streets of the capital, had briefly dispelled his unpleasant reflections. Now the reasons for his vexation, not to say his anger, came back into his mind. Better to think about it now than when he was trying to sleep. What a New Year season it had been! For days, he had been feeling a gnawing sense of anguish. He always dreaded, and never enjoyed, the transition from one year to the next, and should have become accustomed to it by now, but this year everything seemed to be conspiring to ruin it for him. Somehow, though, the old year had ended, and 1774 was here. Epiphany was being celebrated this Thursday, he recalled, but this detail merely increased his irritation.

  A crisis in his relationship with Madame de Lastérieux had been brewing for some time, but truth, like fruit, cannot be harvested until ripe. Anger welled up in him once more, and he stamped his right foot on the ground, again spattering himself with mud. His nose itched, a shiver ran down his spine, and he sneezed several times. That was all he needed: to catch his death of cold, running about like this in the melted snow! He remembered the evening’s events … Everything pointed to the fact that this liaison had gone on for too long. The vessel of their passion had been drifting along, accompanied by all kinds of incompatibilities and irritations which for a long time had been overshadowed by their physical compatibility. It was a far cry from the harmony of their early days, when the woman had been transfigured in his eyes into an object of worship.

  He remembered that evening in February 1773. He had been invited to dinner by Monsieur de Balbastre, the organist of Notre Dame, whom he had known for more than ten years via Monsieur de Noblecourt, a great music lover. Their first encounter, when Nicolas was a young man, had been a humiliating experience for him, but that had been followed by other occasions on which a love of music and a veneration for the great Rameau had drawn them together, despite the sarcastic tone the virtuoso loved to adopt. His drawing room was full of guests going into ecstasies over a Ruckers harpsichord, the pride of the host’s collection. Every surface of the instrument, inside and out, had been painted, as meticulously as if it had been a coach, or a snuffbox belonging to a member of a royal household. The outside was decorated with the birth of Venus, and the interior of the lid depicted the story of Castor and Pollux, the subject of Rameau’s best-known opera. Earth, hell and Elysium were all shown, and in the last of these the illustrious composer sat enthroned on a bench, lyre in hand. Nicolas, who had seen Rameau in the Tuileries some time before his death, had judged the portrait a fine likeness.

  Against one wall of the drawing room stood a large pedal organ, on which Balbastre performed a fugue, all the while deploring the piercing sound of the instrument and the frightful noise of its keys. He needed it for his exercises, he said, adding with a laugh that it drove his neighbours to despair. A young woman with red-tinged hair and a fine, expressive face, made all the more striking by the grey and black widow’s clothes she was wearing, cried out in enthusiasm at the organist’s virtuosity. As a regular visitor, she was invited to try the harpsichord. She performed a particularly difficult sonata with a great deal of feeling, after which the host took over and played an air by Grétry. The sound of the instrument struck Nicolas as delicate and somewhat lacking in power. He asked the young woman about this, and she explained that the touch was very light because of the use of plectra made from quills. They continued talking, and both left the house at the same time. Nicolas offered to see her home in his carriage. By the time they reached Rue de Verneuil, where she had a large house, Nicolas was already a happy man, having completed the preliminaries. The moments that followed, after she had invited him in to admire a pianoforte in her possession, sealed their alliance. The next few weeks were a whirl of embraces and kisses and languor, and, although they were followed by long periods of absence and impatience, it did not look as though anything would ever put an end to the insatiable hunger that united them.

  *

  What, after all, did Nicolas have to reproach her with? Her beauty was undeniable: thanks to the young Dauphine – and despite the passionate efforts of Madame du Barry, the King’s official mistress – blonde hair with a tinge of red had come back into fashion. Julie de Lastérieux’s conversation was witty and ornate, and she charmed everyone with the range of topics she could speak on and the originality of the views she expressed. At a young age, directly after leaving her convent school, she had married a navy steward many years her senior, who had been appointed as a financial official in Guadeloupe. Entry into the King’s service had ennobled Monsieur de Lastérieux, who had had the good manners to die almost as soon as he set foot in the West Indies. His widow had been left comfortably provided for, and she had returned to Paris in the company of two black servants.

  Even though by nature she tended to wax enthusiastic about everything indiscriminately, when she was with Nicolas she took care to observe a certain reserve, tinged with tender admiration, which impressed him more than any assertion of will. Nevertheless, causes for irritation emerged between them. At first, while their passion was still aflame, these rifts were more than made up for by the delight of their reconciliations. As the months passed, however, these repeated skirmishes grew wearisome. The bones of contention were always the same. She would constantly proclaim that she hoped he would come and live with her. He would refuse, sensing behind this request another unformulated demand which he preferred not to acknowledge. Every time they quarrelled, she would complain about his absences, his enslavement to a profession which so often left him unavailable. He was also endlessly having to tell her not to introduce him as the Marquis de Ranreuil. What he, as an illegitimate son only belatedly recognised, could accept from the King and the members of the royal family as an honour, his pride and sense of decorum rejected from anyone else. He knew how desperate she was to appear at Court, and how much their relationship encouraged her pretensions, and this desire of hers embarrassed him, as if it were something unseemly, a lapse of taste. Last but not least, he could not conceal his annoyance and sadness at Julie’s successive attempts to distance him from his closest friends, apart from Monsieur de La Borde, First Groom of the King’s Bedchamber, to whom every virtue was attributed due to his access to the monarch and his personal prestige. A dinner at Monsieur de Noblecourt’s house had proved a disaster. Despite the effort they had made for Nicolas’s sake, neither the former procurator nor Doctor Semacgus had managed to cheer the young woman. It had taught him never to bring together those he loved, and he was tormented by the idea that his choice did not meet with their approval. As soon as this thought had insinuated itself into his mind, his devotion to her had suffered a fatal blow, and he had realised with a sense of dread that you could not continue to love someone if you were unable to excuse that person’s faults.

  The silent dismay of those closest to him had saddened Nicolas, although for a long time he had refused to draw the appropriate conclusions. But eventually he had had to accept that the relationship had been a mistake, and that Madame de Lastérieux was not worthy of him. He had immediately felt it as a blow to his pride that he had yielded to a creature he could not respect – for which there was nobody to blame but himself – but then, although ashamed of loving her, had told himself that she still loved him. What had happened this evening, though, had been the last straw. Why had he agreed to that intimate dinner? Of course, he knew perfectly well why … Accepting her invitation had obliged him to reject Monsieur de Noblecourt, who had planned to share a Twelfth Night cake this evening with some friends: Nicolas, Semacgus, Inspector Bourdeau, and even, if his duties to the King allowed him, Monsieur de La Borde. It was with a heavy heart that Nicolas had had to decline.

  When he had arrived at the house in Rue de Verneuil late that afternoon he had found, much to his surprise
, that a merry company had already gathered. He was irritated by the ironic pout with which Madame de Lastérieux expressed her dismay at seeing him arrive so early, and by the announcement that there would be a dozen people for dinner, some of whom were already there. Abandoning him, she ran, laughing, to turn the page for a young man who was playing the pianoforte. Balbastre came and greeted him, his plump, outrageously made-up face creased with irony, his dark eyes devoid of warmth. Four strangers, all young, were playing cards at a precious Coromandel lacquer table. Apart from the organist, who was a regular visitor, Nicolas was the oldest person there. He felt a twinge of bitterness, and then immediately reproached himself. It was absurd: why should a young woman in her twenties make him feel as though he were playing the role of some greybeard in a play, some Alceste surrounded by young dandies? He leant back against a window. The angular face of the young man sitting at the pianoforte intrigued him: it seemed to conjure a vague, faded image from the distant past, like the face of a drowned man coming to the surface from the deep. Everything was conspiring to make him feel uneasy. And why hadn’t she introduced him to her guests? One more wound to his pride, to be added to the growing list of daily snubs. Casimir and Julia, her two servants from the West Indies, served syrup, chocolate and macaroons, and a delicious beverage which Nicolas had enjoyed on other, more intimate occasions: a clever mixture of sugar syrup and white rum to which Julia added a slice of bergamot peel and a few drops of a special potion – whenever asked what it contained, she would always laugh loudly and refuse to divulge the secret.