I did want to talk to Dupin. I stepped inside, and let him close the door behind me. He moved swiftly then to take up a position on the threshold of the inner doorway of the minuscule vestibule—one of only two others inside the lodge—but not swiftly enough to prevent me catching a glimpse of the bed-alcove at the far side of the inner room into which the vestibule opened.
Madame Lacuzon, Dupin’s concierge and protective dragon—the “old witch,” as she was known in the neighborhood—was lying on the bed, quite inert. Her eyes were closed, but her face, although drawn, seemed peaceful enough.
The stink was many-layered, but the sharpest stratum was a combination of cleaning fluids, including phenol. I could also smell camphor, and I could identify the distinctive label of a bottle of Raspail’s Elixir on the bedside table. To judge by the other odors, the old woman had suffered from both vomiting and diarrhea, over a fairly protracted period of time—but Dupin had had an opportunity to clean up, and to deploy the measures against the threat of infection that Raspail recommended in his manual of hygiene.
I was profoundly glad that I had not arrived a few hours earlier.
“What wrong with her?” I asked.
“I don’t know. As François Raspail insistently points out, the same symptoms can often be generated by different causes. It might have been picked up by contagion, or it might have been something she ate—thanks to two consecutive bad harvests and the consequent economic problems, the quality of food in Paris has deteriorated markedly of late. I feared for her life at one point, but I think she is over the worst now; if there is no recurrence of the symptoms, I should be able to get her to take an adequate supply of liquids over the next few hours.”
“Did you call a doctor?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, curtly. Madame Lacuzon, I suspected, was not the kind of person to put her trust in licensed physicians—or, indeed, anyone at all apart from Dupin.
“Was it one of Raspail’s tiny parasites, do you think?” I asked. I had always been uncertain as to whether Raspail’s theory of infection was really credible, given that every orthodox physician in Paris, and many of the unorthodox ones, were dismissive of it—especially the Royalists, who hated Raspail’s Republican guts.
“I don’t know, I tell you,” he retorted, with more asperity than might have been warranted. “Any physician would doubtless be able to conjure up some Latin name to pass off as a diagnosis, but it would merely be a device to cover up his ignorance. We have no means, as yet, to search for and identify microbes, if they are indeed the primary agents of infectious diseases—but I was sufficiently familiar with the symptoms to know that it was vitally necessary to settle her gut and protect her from dehydration. I’ve contrived to keep feeding her water, and eventually managed to dose her with kaolin and morphia to line her stomach and settle its spasms. She might yet have another fit—for which reason I will not leave her, at least until morning. With luck, though, she will sleep now until the blight has passed. How did you know that she was ill?”
“I guessed,” I told him. “Once I knew that you had expected to see more at the theater than the opera, I could only think of one thing that could keep you away: mortal danger to someone you would never trust to anyone else’s care. I don’t know exactly what Madame Lacuzon—Amélie—is to you, but I know that she’s no mere concierge.”
“She would do the same for me, and more,” Dupin said, stiffly. “Who told you about Thibodeaux?”
“A woman clad in a domino sitting in a box opposite mine, with Pierre Chapelain and Jana Valdemar. He would not introduce her, on the grounds that she was his patient; evidently, she wanted to remain incognito, or she would not have been wearing the mask. She said that she met you at the theater—the old theater, that is—in 1834, in the Green Room, with Lucien Groix and someone named Thibodeaux, She said that you would be able to deduce her identity. I hope that she did not spoil your experiment by letting the name slip. That is why you were keeping me in the dark, I take it—as an experiment?”
“I’m sorry,” he said—but it was only a reflex. He was not sorry; and, in truth, I could not see why he should be.
“You have your result,” I said. “Even in your absence, with no expectations at all, and without having any more knowledge of Thibodeaux than a vague memory of hearing you mention the name, I saw the ghost in the box. So, I believe, did the lady in the domino—and she, too, knew that it was a ghost. Remarkable, is it not?”
“Remarkable,” he agreed, pensively. “I hardly expected to see it myself, given that the theater had burned down in the interim. Describe the apparition, if you please.”
“A man of about sixty, although his hair and beard were still uniformly black. Dressed as a good bourgeois, slightly behind the times—as is only to be expected. His skin seemed a trifle sallow as well as wrinkled, but that might have been an effect of the reflected limelight.”
“That could be anyone. Was there nothing more distinctive?”
“Yes. He had arthritis, probably in his neck, but definitely in his hands, I saw them quite clearly, in spite of the poor light, clutching the handle of his stick.”
“Ah!” said Dupin. “That does sound like Thibodeaux. Describe the stick.”
I struggled to remember, having paid no attention to that detail at the time. “It was wooden, I think, preserved by some kind of dark stain or varnish—dark brown, that is, not black. It was sturdy, and had a slightly curved handle set at an angle, not a pommel, so that it resembled an elongated lower-case letter ‘r’.”
“That’s Thibodeaux’s stick,” Dupin confirmed. “He had arthritic ankles too—for him, a walking-stick was no mere affectation, but a necessity. What else?”
“There was something odd about his eyes, but I’m not sure exactly what...almost as if he were not the only one looking through them. He was watching the climax of the dance of the nuns when I first caught sight of him, but I don’t know how long he had been there before I became aware of his presence. I might have missed the greater part of the apparition, in terms of its duration. When I did realize that he was there, he turned to look at me—or, more likely, at someone who was sitting in the chair where I was sitting—and he spoke.”
“What did he say?”
“‘Yesterday never dies, but such is the rhythm of time that one has to grasp its echoes on the wing’.”
Dupin nodded his head. “Thibodeaux, without a doubt,” he said. “His sentiment, his style. You did well, my friend—exceedingly well.”
“With regard to the observation and reportage,” I said, “I had a good teacher. With regard to the ability to see ghosts...that, I fear, might have been more a matter of infection.”
He frowned. “Why do you say that?” Perhaps he had taken me literally, in view of the manner in which he had spent his evening.
“I never saw ghosts before I met you, Dupin,” I said. “If consciousness is a refuge, as you’re so fond of saying, I was secure within it until I became your friend. Now, it seems, I cannot go six months without some dread intrusion of my sense of reality. Once touched by the Crawling Chaos, it seems—even as a mere innocent bystander—one is tainted forever.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, again. This time, perhaps, he meant it.
“Don’t be,” I said. “It’s a condition that requires company, if one is to endure it without going mad. Had you lost Madame Lacuzon tonight...but that’s by the by. Who was the woman in the mask?”
“Not having seen her, I can’t be sure,” he said, scrupulously, “but given what she said to you, it was probably Marie Taglioni.”
That name I recognized instantly, although I had never seen her dance. Marie Taglioni was, or had been, the most famous ballet dancer in the world: La Sylphide in person. She had retired now, though—to live as a recluse in Venice, if I was not mistaken as to what the