the pyramid that marked the Paris meridian to look back along the road, which was precisely aligned with the towers of Notre-Dame. A traveller’s guide described the view:
From this height, the eye embraces Paris, which is to say an immense and greyish mound of towers and irregular-shaped buildings which compose this city and which stretch away to left and right almost as far as the eye can see.
Travellers on those epic journeys came to know each other extremely well, but it is unlikely that any passenger on that particular coach was much the wiser about the abbé Baldini when he left it at Lyon. He boarded the riverboat that descended the fast-flowing Rhône to Pont-Saint-Esprit, and then the coach that plied the dusty post-road through the foothills of the Cévennes and the hot scrubland of the Gard. He reached the Roman city of Nîmes a week after leaving Paris, checked in at the best hotel (which means that he must have held a passport in the name of Baldini) and spent several days making enquiries. At last, in a seedy part of town, he found himself in a sparsely furnished room, staring at one of the last faces he had seen in his previous life.
The tale the abbé Baldini had to tell–a tale we know in greater detail than parts of the true story of Joseph Lucher–would have seemed incredible to anyone but Antoine Allut. The abbé had been a prisoner in the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples, where he had heard the dying confession of a Frenchman called Picaud. At this, a strangled cry escaped Allut and the abbé raised his eyes to heaven. By some mysterious means (he described it as ‘the voice of God’), Picaud had learned, or dredged up from his deepest memory, the name of a man, Allut, who would know the identity of his betrayers. Being a devout Catholic of almost superhuman moral strength, Picaud had forgiven the men who had destroyed his life. His only wish–the slightly odd but understandable wish of a dying man–was to have the names of his assassins inscribed on a plaque of lead that would be placed in his tomb. In order to reward Allut, or to encourage him to divulge the names, the abbé was to offer him a token that Picaud had received from a fellow prisoner by the name of Sir Herbert Newton.
If Allut or his wife had been readers of serial novels, they might at this point have smelled a rat, but the abbé then produced a large and sparkly diamond which, as far as Allut’s wife was concerned, provided complete and incontrovertible proof of the abbé’s good faith. Momentarily forgetting herself, she flung her arms around the skeletal frame of the abbé Baldini. Why her husband hesitated to accept the diamond was beyond her. Torn between greed and fear, and egged on by his wife, Allut overcame his doubts, and the abbé inscribed in a small notebook the names of Mathieu Loupian, Gervais Chaubard and Guilhem Solari.
A few hours later, the abbé Baldini boarded the north-bound coach from Nîmes.
He left behind him a soul in torment. Antoine Allut had suffered what seemed to him a terrible injustice. He had lived with the fear, confirmed by the abbé, that he had allowed an innocent man to be taken to his death. Now, he had been forced to betray his former friends. Worse still, the local jeweller sold the diamond for twice what he paid the Alluts. Such was Allut’s state of mind that he felt a perverse kind of relief when he finally committed a tangible crime and murdered the jeweller.
It was not a well-planned crime. The gendarmes shaved his head and gave him a green bonnet with a tin plaque on which his matriculation number was engraved. The green bonnet signified a life sentence. As he stood with his ball and chain weaving rope in the factory at Toulon, and when he lay awake on a wooden bench without a blanket, it must have seemed to him that François Picaud had taken revenge from beyond the grave.
4
M ATHIEU L OUPIAN had prospered, not quite beyond his wildest dreams, but enough to be able to
From this height, the eye embraces Paris, which is to say an immense and greyish mound of towers and irregular-shaped buildings which compose this city and which stretch away to left and right almost as far as the eye can see.
Travellers on those epic journeys came to know each other extremely well, but it is unlikely that any passenger on that particular coach was much the wiser about the abbé Baldini when he left it at Lyon. He boarded the riverboat that descended the fast-flowing Rhône to Pont-Saint-Esprit, and then the coach that plied the dusty post-road through the foothills of the Cévennes and the hot scrubland of the Gard. He reached the Roman city of Nîmes a week after leaving Paris, checked in at the best hotel (which means that he must have held a passport in the name of Baldini) and spent several days making enquiries. At last, in a seedy part of town, he found himself in a sparsely furnished room, staring at one of the last faces he had seen in his previous life.
The tale the abbé Baldini had to tell–a tale we know in greater detail than parts of the true story of Joseph Lucher–would have seemed incredible to anyone but Antoine Allut. The abbé had been a prisoner in the Castel dell’Ovo in Naples, where he had heard the dying confession of a Frenchman called Picaud. At this, a strangled cry escaped Allut and the abbé raised his eyes to heaven. By some mysterious means (he described it as ‘the voice of God’), Picaud had learned, or dredged up from his deepest memory, the name of a man, Allut, who would know the identity of his betrayers. Being a devout Catholic of almost superhuman moral strength, Picaud had forgiven the men who had destroyed his life. His only wish–the slightly odd but understandable wish of a dying man–was to have the names of his assassins inscribed on a plaque of lead that would be placed in his tomb. In order to reward Allut, or to encourage him to divulge the names, the abbé was to offer him a token that Picaud had received from a fellow prisoner by the name of Sir Herbert Newton.
If Allut or his wife had been readers of serial novels, they might at this point have smelled a rat, but the abbé then produced a large and sparkly diamond which, as far as Allut’s wife was concerned, provided complete and incontrovertible proof of the abbé’s good faith. Momentarily forgetting herself, she flung her arms around the skeletal frame of the abbé Baldini. Why her husband hesitated to accept the diamond was beyond her. Torn between greed and fear, and egged on by his wife, Allut overcame his doubts, and the abbé inscribed in a small notebook the names of Mathieu Loupian, Gervais Chaubard and Guilhem Solari.
A few hours later, the abbé Baldini boarded the north-bound coach from Nîmes.
He left behind him a soul in torment. Antoine Allut had suffered what seemed to him a terrible injustice. He had lived with the fear, confirmed by the abbé, that he had allowed an innocent man to be taken to his death. Now, he had been forced to betray his former friends. Worse still, the local jeweller sold the diamond for twice what he paid the Alluts. Such was Allut’s state of mind that he felt a perverse kind of relief when he finally committed a tangible crime and murdered the jeweller.
It was not a well-planned crime. The gendarmes shaved his head and gave him a green bonnet with a tin plaque on which his matriculation number was engraved. The green bonnet signified a life sentence. As he stood with his ball and chain weaving rope in the factory at Toulon, and when he lay awake on a wooden bench without a blanket, it must have seemed to him that François Picaud had taken revenge from beyond the grave.
4
M ATHIEU L OUPIAN had prospered, not quite beyond his wildest dreams, but enough to be able to
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