“Shall we do the monuments?”
I
was barely awake, buttoning my coat, chasing Aunt Mill as she whisked across
the courtyard and out the carriage door.
Just before stepping through the door, I glanced back and spotted Sief,
nose mashed against a window three flights up, frowning down. Just five minutes before that, Aunt
Mill had charged into my bedroom with that obnoxious, singsong, sappy-happy
voice that my mom uses in the morning.
They might as well blow a bugle in your ear. You get blasted out of deep sleep, traumatized for life,
unable to resist the power of suggestion: put on your clothes, brush your
hair, get going, up-up-up, march-march-march, we are going to have fun today if
we die doing it.
“We’ll
catch a croissant at Au Petit Versailles,”
said Aunt Mill, striding ahead down rue Vieille du Temple. It was
cold and clear, light the color of dead flesh. “They make beautiful, flaky, buttery, perfect croissants and
we’ll catch them right out of the oven.”
I stubbed my toe on a curb, rasped an inch off my knee cap, put a hole
in my jeans. Aunt Mill turned back
to see me rolling around like a flipped-over June bug, clutching my leg. “Are you all right?”
Teeth
clenched, I nodded, struggled up, limped on.
“Let’s
take you out of our neighborhood, shall we? There’s plenty here of course: the Hôtel Salé around the corner, the Musée Carnavelet just a little further on, the Musée de la
Chasse. But you can discover those on your own. Let’s see the big tickets, just so we
can say we did, so we can cross them off our list and all that.” The sidewalk was narrow, so I hobbled
on behind her, mood darker than the sky, wishing I had a knife to throw into
her back.
But
all that changed when we stepped into Au Petit Versailles du Marais. The
placed glowed. The smell instantly
grabbed your stomach and made you happy to be alive. The ladies behind the counter sang out, “bon
jour m’dame ‘moiselle,” like they came from the land of eternal spring, like
they’d never skinned a knee or thought an evil thought, like they loved this
hour of the morning more than any other.
Briskly,
Aunt Mill ordered four croissants and briskly a pink-cheeked, sparrow-voiced,
white-smocked, madame tucked them into a
thin paper sack and made change and wished us a “bonne journée” as we floated out. Or at least I floated out. You are never so starved as just after you’ve purchased a
croissant that you can’t yet eat.
By
the time I emerged from croissant bliss and was able to notice anything else,
we were charging west down rue de Rivoli,
passing the Hôtel de Ville
again. Aunt Mill was going on
about how the Hôtel de Ville was
built by Francois I, burnt down by the Commune, whoever that was, in 1871, and
rebuilt to match the original. She
handed me a second croissant.
Buttery bliss.
We
passed Tour Saint Jacques again. Yikes this lady walked fast. I pointed out that we were going by the
street where Sief’s rat shop was.
“Yes,
down rue des Halles, which leads to the
belly of the beast.”
“The
what?”
“It
used to be the central food market for all of Paris.”
I
nodded. Things looked
familiar. The city was stitching
itself together for me, or at least this tiny part of it.
“Rue
de Rivoli,” said Aunt Mill, “is one of the
longest in the city. The first
part of it was built by Napoleon, named after one of his battles in Italy, then
Baron Haussman continued it, driving it right through Les Halles, connecting it with rue Sainte Antoine.”
We
marched on, then hooked left where rue de Louvre changes into rue Admiral
Somebody-Or-Other. As we walked
into the center of the Cour Carrée,
Aunt Mill said she was taking me to one of her favorite spots in Paris.
We
stood there a long time, Aunt Mill breathing in the air like it was somehow
different than all the other air in Paris. She went on about it for a full five minutes, how unique the
architecture was, built by blah-blah, rebuilt by blah-blah, how the style was
blah-blah, and the statues were symbolic of blah-blah and blah-blah, how the
stone came alive at certain hours of the day and “just glowed.” I nodded, wishing she’d dole out the
last croissant she had in her purse before it froze.
I
don’t mean to knock the place. The
Cour Carée was cool.
But I was tired of walking already, half asleep, still hungry, knee throbbing,
plus I wanted to ask Aunt Mill a hundred questions about codes and diamonds.
Yet
on we went, exiting south, crossing the Pont des Arts, where all the lovers ink their names onto locks and
lock the locks onto the bridge—suspended forever over a watery death, so to
speak. The wind, of course,
smashed its way down the river and sucked the warmth out of us, Aunt Mill
pausing forever to point out interesting things as I tried to shrink my neck
into my coat like a turtle. I
hardly heard any of what she said, wondering instead if lovers came with keys
in the middle of the night to remove the locks when things went bad. Or did they just add new locks? A person like Clymene could have ten
locks on the bridge by now.
Eventually it would collapse under the weight.
We
marched onward. Aunt Mill pointed
out the College de Quatre
Nations, roost of the Acadamie
Française, saying that if it looked a bit
like the Capitol, in Washington D.C., that was because we modeled our dome
after theirs.
West
along the river we went, my hands jammed into pockets, fingertips numb, along
the Quai Anatole France, passing the Musée
D’Orsay, “a must see” according to Aunt
Mill—though clearly we weren’t destined to see it today—once a railway station,
where, during the Commune (again the Commune) they set up a hot air balloon
factory to make the balloons that floated mailmen over the Prussian lines to
give news of the fate of Paris.
We
swept past l’Assemblée Nationale, Aunt
Mill noting that it was, “like our house of representatives. The columns match the Madeleine church,
which we passed on your first day, on the way to the Embassy School. This is the south end of the cross. Remember the cross? At the center, is the Place de la
Concorde.” We soldiered on across Pont
de la Concorde, into the huge space with
the tall, pointy, Egyptian thingy in the middle, while a never ending stream of
cars, vans, buses, and taxis tore past, filling nostrils with icy exhaust.
“So
this is where the guillotine was set up?
“One
of them. There were several actually.
They did a lot of business for awhile. Over there is The Tuileries Garden. Let’s cross over.”
Aunt
Mill pointed out the Orangerie, were the
king’s oranges grew, and the Jeu de Paume, his private tennis club.
Finally I just blurted, “Aunt Mill, what happened to the diamonds?”
She
had to think about it awhile. “You
mean from the necklace Jeanne de la Motte stole?”
I
nodded, “the book I read said some of the diamonds were sold in London and
others in Paris, but it sounded like most of the necklace, or some of the
necklace anyway, was never even found.”
“That’s
one theory.”
“What’s
the other?”
“There’s
more than one. Some speculate the
diamonds were recovered by agents of the crown and secretly returned to Boehmer
and Bassanges because the king didn’t want more scandal, others that the whole
necklace was broken up and sold off, but that they could never track down the
fences.”
“You
mean like someone who sells stolen stuff?”
“Exactly. They were obviously exceedingly hot
diamonds, so even with all the police spies at the time, the Eighteenth Century
underworld just clammed up tight.
That seems unlikely to me though, considering how much criminals like to
blab, especially when they are trading down convictions. There’s another theory, that they were
smuggled to America, and another, that one of the participants, perhaps
Contesse de la Motte herself, hid some part of them—buried them, put them in a
deposit box, or tucked them under a floorboard. Did you read about Retaux and Villette?”
“The
husband and boyfriend.”
“Right. They bo—”
By
this time we’d strolled across the Tuileries, passing the giant Ferris wheel,
crossing the rue de Rivoli. We were walking under the Napoleon
Arcade with flocks of tourists, when, mid-sentence, mid-syllable even, Aunt
Mill whipped out her cane as a boy sprinted by, catching him in the throat,
knocking him flat.
It
happened so fast and with such violence, I was still processing it a minute
later. Just as the boy—eight
maybe, dark eyes, dark tangled hair, filthy clothes, foul smell—smacked down on
his back, a woman, six steps away, started screaming, “My purse! He’s taken my purse!”
Aunt
Mill had somehow spotted the kid making the snatch even before the woman knew
and when the kid came our way, Aunt Mill laid him out. She poked her cane into his chest,
jerked the purse out of his hand, and held it out to the woman—sunglasses,
Hermés scarf, expensive camel coat.
“Oh-my-god,
thank you!”
The
waif, or gypsy, or whatever he was, rolled over, popped up, and dashed away
without a word, lost instantly in the crowd. The woman thanked Aunt Millicent about a thousand times,
offered to buy us lunch, dinner, pay us, have us to her house in the Hamptons,
but Aunt Mill demurred and we scooted on.
My mouth was hanging open, eyes, no doubt, bugged out and inch or two.
“Let’s
see, where were we?” she said.
“Oh-yes, Retaux and Villette.
They both died before Jeanne, so they might have taken a secret with
them, but it seems unlikely, since they were both tortured by the police. If anyone took a secret with them, it
would have been la Motte herself, when she plunged from the window.”
By
this time we were half way up the rue de Castiglione, getting a first glimpse of the Place Vendôme. Aunt
Mill was already explaining that the first column had been erected by Napoleon
to celebrate the victory at Austerlitz but that it had been pulled down during
the—you guessed it—Commune.
“You
think she was murdered?”
“Jeanne
de la Motte? I do, yes.
“I
read it might have been an accident.”
Aunt
Mill smiled and looked at the column a moment. “Well, Daisy, there’s an adage, among people who deal in
this kind of thing, that no one ever accidentally falls out of a window. It’s either a suicide or a murder. And, by the way, one of the hardest
kind of murders to trace.”
“Really? Who says that?”
“Spies
mostly.”
“I
never knew that.”
“Why
would you?”
☠
