The Cavalier of the Apocalypse [Hardcover]

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Sunday, 1 January 1786

Family-minded bourgeois Parisians spent New Year’s Day attending Mass, exchanging gifts, and hosting convivial dinner parties. Bachelors, students, and the literary cliques, on the other hand, tended to spend the holiday in taverns or cafés, which were invariably crowded and lively with those who had not yet settled down to respectable marriages and the producing of heirs. More than that, Aristide thought, as he hurried toward the Cordeliers district with an icy wind at his back, the cafés would be far warmer than his attic room—which had no fireplace and was heated only by a small charcoal brazier—in the midst of a miserably cold winter.

He was feeling unexpectedly wealthy, having earned another ten louis for a political pamphlet, with nearly sixty livres still at his disposal after clearing up accounts with his landlord. Giving way to an extravagant impulse, he established himself, with a demitasse of strong coffee, at a corner table in the Café Zoppi, wondering if anyone he recognized might come past.

He recognized a few faces, though no one whom he knew intimately, and at last he contented himself with pulling out the manuscript upon which he was currently working, and scribbling notes to himself with a battered pencil. Around him, the coffee drinkers came and went and clustered about the tall heating stove, conversing earnestly about the sad state of literature, and the even sadder state of current affairs. Inevitably the gossip would turn to the continuing delicious scandal of what people were calling "the queen’s necklace," though it had never, it seemed, been hers. By now the chief characters in the drama— Cardinal de Rohan; his avaricious mistress, Jeanne de la Motte; and the notorious alchemist, soothsayer, and mystic Cagliostro—were safely locked away in the Bastille, awaiting trial. Though all legal proceedings were supposed to be conducted in the greatest secrecy, leaks, from time to time, oozed from the fortress to enliven the thousands of illegal handbills, pamphlets, and satirical songs that circulated around the city without benefit of the censor’s stamp of approval.

"But it’s impossible to be bored in Paris," a young man declared, some hours later, in loud, offhand tones to his companion, as they seated themselves at the table next to Aristide’s. "Can’t be done."

Aristide cast a sideways glance at him. He wore his hair long and unpowdered, following the careless fashion of the younger generation who patronized Zoppi’s; but his clothes, well cut and crisp, betrayed him as a pampered young sprout from a comfortable bourgeois family, playing at the literary life in Paris.

Aristide glanced at his own frayed cuffs and immediately loathed him.

"There’s so much to do, so much to see," the young man continued, for the benefit of his friend, who as clearly, by last year’s cut of his redingote, was a country cousin. "The theater, the opera, the Italian comedy . . . Why, even if your purse is feeling a bit light, you can get cheap tickets to seats up in Paradise and go to the theater every night if you want. Or you can buy tickets to the costume balls at the opera house and perhaps find yourself dancing with a duchess."

"A duchess?" echoed the country cousin, impressed.

"Or a prostitute. You’ll find both there. They say even Antoinette goes sometimes."

"My word!"

Aristide could have told him that the queen hadn’t been spotted at the opera balls for years; her giddy days as the spoiled, thoughtless, pleasure-seeking young princess were behind her, now she was past thirty and the mother of three children, though popular opinion was ready to believe anything of her, the more scurrilous the better. The salacious details that had been turning up in café talk and the gutter press about the diamond necklace affair, and the queen’s alleged sexual relations with both the cardinal and the so-called Comtesse de La Motte, the adventuress behind the notorious theft, had been titillating Parisian scandalmongers for months.

He signaled to a waiter, who elbowed his way across the crowded, candlelit room toward him—insolently slowly, Aristide thought, acutely aware of his threadbare clothes.

"Yes, monsieur?"

"Another coffee." He stifled a yawn and glanced at his watch, the only thing of value he presently owned. Twenty past eleven. "With sugar."

"Three sous."

Nearby a pair of earnest-looking young men were looking furtively about them as they talked, a newspaper lying forgotten on the table between them.

"You know anyone with any sense wants the Duc d’Orléans on the throne, even if it’s just as regent for the boy, but first you’d have to ensure that the king’s brothers were out of the running."

"How do you get rid of Louis, though? Certify him as an imbecile?"

The first man smiled sourly. "Please. He’s not stupid, no matter what people say: just inept at the role he’s forced to play. I heard he has his own private library on mechanics and the sciences. Of course, it’s a tragedy of fate that he had to be a king; I expect he’d have made an excellent professor of natural philosophy instead."

"Like Father Houdelot at school," said the other man, grinning.

"Exactly. The woolly-headed sort of intellectual monk—"

" ‘Monk’ is right. He must be the first king of France in about five hundred years who’s never had a mistress!"

"—not blessed with too much practical sense—"

"What does that say about him?"

"—who’s vastly knowledgeable about just one or two abstruse subjects and knows nothing at all about any others."

"Or indeed about much of life."

"But instead he had to be king, and concern himself with administration, power, and politics, which he obviously has no talent for, and probably detests . . . the duke’s far better suited to the part—"

"Lord, nearly anyone would be . . ."

"Or of course you can go to the Palais-Royal," the young man at the next table continued, raising his voice above the din.

"What’s that?"

"Oh, it’s quite new, and it’s the latest sensation! We ought to visit tomorrow. It’s part of the Duc d’Orléans’s hôtel particulier, you know, the family’s Paris mansion."

"Orléans? The king’s cousin?"

"They say he was badly in debt by the time the old duke finally breathed his last and Philippe inherited; at any rate, he knocked down the old walls and houses about the garden—it’s immense—and he’s building new houses with covered arcades all the way around on three sides, and collecting shop rents."

"But he’s a prince," protested the younger man. "A prince of the blood!"

"That’s what makes it so delicious. They say the king, when he heard about it, said ‘I hear, cousin, that we’ll only see you on Sundays, now you’ve turned shopkeeper.’ But that’s beside the point. The gardens are simply the latest rage. Ever hear of Vauxhall or Ranelagh in London? Well," he continued, as his companion nodded, "it’s much the same. You can stroll through the Palais-Royal and visit a dozen different gaming houses or brothels within a hundred steps. And there are plenty of cafés and theaters and luxury shops and bookstalls if your tastes are tamer," he added, with a dismissive shrug.

"Is it expensive?"

"Well, yes, of course. It’s fashionable. But the police aren’t keeping watch over your shoulder, saying what you shouldn’t do and shouldn’t read. Orléans keeps them out—of course, someone like him can get away with doing that—because he believes people should be able to think and read as they please. If they’re reading satires about the king, at any rate!"

"Father said I wasn’t to spend all—"

"Oh, if you just want to see the sights for a fortnight, and you haven’t much money, you can admire the royal art collection—that’s at the Louvre Palace, but anyone properly dressed can get in—or the queen’s formal court gowns . . ."

The fellow prattled on. Aristide endeavored to ignore him and leaned on the tiny table, chin balanced on fists, drowsily surveying the room from his dim corner. Zoppi’s prices were outrageous—coffee was only two sous elsewhere, even at the Palais-Royal—but it was a good place to meet people; everyone in the lively Cordeliers district eventually turned up there. You were also paying for the privilege of drinking your coffee or hot chocolate beneath the same gilded chandeliers under which, twenty or thirty years ago, Voltaire and Diderot had once sipped theirs and discussed the philosophy of the day. Zoppi kept a bust of Voltaire on the mantel to remind his customers of this fact, although people said that when the canny Italian had bought the Café Procope and renamed it after himself, Voltaire was in no condition to visit his favorite café, having already been dead for several years.

His coffee arrived at last. He sipped it, slowly coming awake again. Coffee for wakefulness and as much sugar as you could stand for a burst of energy: that was the trick to keeping late hours. That night he had to finish copying Maître Carriau’s brief before the next morning. Only two or three hours’ work left on it, thank God!

"It’s all about privilege," said a man to a companion as they passed and found a table. "What about the frustration of the ambitious, talented commoner who knows he’ll never rise past a certain level in the army, the government, the Church, because all the top positions are reserved for sons of the nobility—plenty of whom are brainless fops who have done nothing besides being born into the right families?"

"You sound like Figaro: ‘You too...