Journey to the Core of Creation. Brian Stableford

could twist us all around her little finger—including poor old Lamarck, while he was still able to attend our gatherings. She had known him for years by then, of course. And she was right—about being able to twist us all around her little finger, that is. The adorable Julie, we called her.”

      That, I knew, was a quotation, referring to the star of some eighteenth-century salon, about which Molière had written a famous satire. I could not quite recall the salon-keeper’s name, but I had a vague memory that her daughter—the “adorable Julie”—had kept her multiple suitors dangling for fourteen years before finally condescending to become a Duchesse. But Dupin’s Julie—or, to be strictly accurate, Monsieur Guérande’s Julie—had obviously not strung things out to that extent, and evidently had not granted herself, in the end, to the suitor with the highest-placed rank in the peerage...not that the peerage had counted for much in the 1820s, in spite of the Restoration.

      Perhaps, I thought, science had its own peerage now, and perhaps Julie Malet had accepted the proposal of the most promising young scientist in the Lamarckian clique: the man most likely to carry evolutionary theory forward to its inevitable triumph over superstition. If so, that promise did not seem to have come to fruition. I could not imagine, however, that anyone would have considered Dupin to have been a better catch, given the manifest eccentricity of his own interests and exploits. Lucien Groix, on the other hand....

      “I was surprised to learn that Monsieur Groix was a member of Achille Mallet’s coterie,” I observed, curiously.

      “He wasn’t, quite,” Dupin replied. “He was a regular in the salon, for a while, but his commitment to the Lamarckian doctrine, as preached by Malet, was even weaker than mine. His primary interest was the professor’s daughter, I suspect—and if so, he was not alone in pretending a greater interest in science than he actually had, in order to gain entrée to the circle. On the other hand, he might simply have been Fouché’s spy, at the very outset of his glittering career as a policeman.”

      “You’re not serious?”

      “Perfectly serious. Fouché had spies in every significant salon in the capital. They were the richest source of information he had. Monsieur Groix has kept up the tradition and his successors will doubtless do likewise. It is, after all, through salon society that ideas circulate at their greatest and most careless ease, and where they thrive in their natural environment. Do you imagine that Louis XIV’s lieutenants of police did not collect regular reports from the Marquise de Rambouillet’s drawing-room?”

      The Marquise de Rambouillet, I remembered then, had been the mother of the original “adorable Julie.”

      “But Malet and Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire were pillars of society,” I said. “They were men of science, among the glories of the nation in an Age of Enlightenment. They surely posed no danger whatsoever to the interests of Louis XVIII.”

      “With the aid of hindsight,” Dupin admitted, “we can probably conclude that they did not—but monarchy, in the final analysis, derives its privileges from the myth of divine right. Evolutionism was seen then—and is still seen, in certain quarters of society—as a dangerous threat to that notion, inherently supportive of the belief that all men are essentially born equal, and that aristocracy is merely a form of unjustified oppression. Had Malet and Geoffroy not been so diplomatic in the assertion and promulgation of their convictions, they really might have given Church and State alike cause for concern. Lamarck can certainly be considered a martyr of sorts, his crucifixion only a little less painful for being slow and subtle.”

      He was in full flow by now, his earlier absent-mindedness conquered—but his gaze, even as it was reaching for intellectual infinity, was suddenly captured by the clock. He suddenly sat back in his chair, almost as if he were wondering what he was doing in it, when he ought to be elsewhere.

      “I must go home,” he said, abruptly. “I need sleep.”

      “Shall I pack my trunk with a view to an expedition to the Ardèche?” I asked.

      He looked at me sharply. “I have little idea, as yet, what Madame Guérande is going to tell me tomorrow. Perhaps it would be as well not to be precipitate.”

      Perhaps it would, I thought—but I decided to pack anyway. I had not made a specific study of Madame Guérande’s little finger, but I suspected that its potential as a bobbin was by no means exhausted, and the lady had certainly seemed to me to be in a hurry.