However, with one “offhand” remark from Lussac, André gave a perfect explanation—and an extension—of the law of the conservation and transformation of energy. The remark was this: “Energy can neither be created out of nothing nor vanish into nothing; it can only be transformed from one form into another, or transferred from one body to another, while the total amount of energy remains unchanged.” (Anyone who cannot recite this law is, like me, a classmate whose physics grades in high school were poor.)

  Apart from standing “on the shoulders of giants” to pose as an expert scholar now and then, and playing to the gallery from time to time, André’s greatest contribution to the Academy lay in financial support. So long as an applied project received the approval of André and the United Investment Company, it would receive at least 600 livres in sponsorship, with no upper limit (provided the results were shared).

  What drew criticism from the public was that André, a man of letters and a lawyer by training, almost exclusively supported inventions and innovations in engineering, medicine, and management. As for applications in the humanities, the arts, moral writing, law, and politics, the United Investment Company, following its owner André’s view, rejected all such “boring applications” (André’s words) without exception.

  When Lavoisier learned of this, he burst into laughter, and felt all the more that André was of the same kind as himself: trained in law, yet able to handle the natural sciences with remarkable ease. This March and April, when the United Investment Company came to Paris to raise investment for Reims’s industrial and agricultural projects, Lavoisier, keeping it from his wife, quietly invested a total of 200,000 livres into the United Investment Company. Half of that sum would be used for new construction and capacity expansion at the cotton-yarn mill, the weaving factory, and the cigarette company; meanwhile, an entirely new dyeing and printing plant was also being prepared on the outskirts of Reims.

  In Paris, however, some men of letters grew furious at André’s neglect of them. At a salon gathering hosted by Madame de Sta?l, the daughter of the former Minister of Finance Necker, these disheartened writers even joined forces to attack André, accusing him of despising culture, the arts, and moral letters, while doting instead upon alchemy (chemistry), greasy and clamorous metal (steam engines), and a shocking swindle of medicine (cowpox inoculation). It was, they claimed, a disgrace and a misfortune to Paris, the capital of the arts.

  Toward these buzzing flies, André consistently held to his principle that revenge never waited for a second night. Acting on his employer’s wishes, Chief Javert directly sent men to their doors to “offer greetings” with a few words, so that they might take the initiative to recognize their own errors. Those who remained obstinate would, for no clear reason at all, find themselves running naked through the marketplace, or swimming naked in the filthiest stretch of the Seine—and among them was Madame de Sta?l’s lover, Benjamin Constant

  Only when Madame de Sta?l herself joined the accusations against the Deputy Prosecutor did André step out from behind the curtain and strike in person. Several days later, in the Echo column of , there appeared a detective novel written by André under the pen name “Utopia,” titled “A Study in Scarlet.” In that novel, “Utopia” alluded to the affair between Madame de Sta?l and Constant, inventing a story in which she and her lover conspired to deceive the woman’s diplomat husband of his property. When their plot failed, the pair took the desperate step of murder to silence him, and forged evidence of the diplomat’s suicide—only to be exposed by the shrewd criminal prosecutor Charlotte Holmes

  André’s “A Study in Scarlet” achieved tremendous success. It was the first time a detective novel had been serialized in the history of world literature, and Charlotte Holmes—a scientific detective with a perverse temperament, proud and unruly, yet cool-headed, sharply observant, and formidable in deduction—captured readers’ attention completely. Many Parisians did complain, however, about why the author had chosen an English name to serve as the protagonist of a French novel.

  The day after “A Study in Scarlet” was published, Madame de Sta?l and her lover Constant jointly approached to lodge a protest. Yet amid the public’s reading fervour, such objections sounded exceptionally faint. When Madame de Sta?l’s husband, the Swedish envoy to France, Baron de Sta?l-Holstein, read “A Study in Scarlet,” he demanded that he and Madame de Sta?l sleep separately that very night, and instructed his steward to forbid Madame de Sta?l from touching his teacup and tableware… Several days later, Madame de Sta?l ended her Paris salon two years early and moved to Geneva.

  After “A Study in Scarlet” became wildly popular in Paris, the editor-in-chief of begged the great patron to continue writing Prosecutor Charlotte Holmes’s investigative stories, but André declined. He did, however, agree to authorize to hire ghostwriters to act as “Utopia” and complete sequels to Holmes’s cases, and he even drafted an outline for them in person.

  …

  When Chief Javert, escorted by more than ten patrolmen, entered an apartment building on Rue Corneille, the chief’s signature black dress hat—bearing a tricolour badge, the mark of a senior officer—made the entire atmosphere freeze. Men and women alike looked about in terror at these uninvited guests in black dress coats, holding handcuffs, blades, and short guns, fearing that they had come to arrest them or their relatives.

  A bald building caretaker hurried forward to protest, only to be shoved aside by the overbearing patrolmen. A middle-aged policeman looked around and shouted at the crowd:

  “Everyone back to your rooms. For thirty minutes you are not to leave without permission. Violators will be detained for one day and fined 10 livres. Those who continue to defy discipline will be sentenced to three months of hard labour. Anyone who resists with a weapon will be shot on the spot!” Before the officer responsible for clearing the corridor could shout a second time, the formerly noisy passage fell silent, and no one remained.

  The staircase in such buildings spiralled upward into the depth of the structure—first lit by bright street light, then by dim, yellowish daylight, and at last by the light that filtered through windows. The building had roughly forty-five rooms, suited chiefly to provincials newly arrived in Paris who needed a temporary place to lodge while seeking a livelihood; thus the rent was not high, and the furnishings were markedly crude.

  Chief Javert removed his hat and waved for the caretaker, who had been hiding to the side, to come forward. “Do you have a provincial tenant here named Louis—Demis?”

  “Yes, yes, yes! Monsieur Demis came two months ago. He lives on the third floor, room 316.” The bald man nodded rapidly, pointing out the general direction of room 316, eager to lead the senior officer.

  Chief Javert, his brow faintly furrowed, shook his head and made the caretaker remain where he was. Several policemen tried to follow the chief upstairs, but Javert stopped them at once. “You all stay outside. No one comes up!”

  At the turn of the third-floor landing, Javert suddenly halted. He drew a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and, with practised fingers, slid a filtered cigarette between his lips. When a white-phosphorus match scraped lightly against the wall, the flame instantly lit the cigarette. Filtered cigarettes were not cheap: a pack of twenty cost 2 livres. White-phosphorus matches were even more outrageously expensive—one match alone cost 5 sous.

  Javert tossed away the spent match and took a deep pull. The smoke stabbed his lungs; it hurt, and his brow tightened further. For a long time, this chief—cold in appearance, fervent within—had believed himself exceptionally fortunate, because he was constantly aided by benefactors.

  In his early years, having lost his parents, Javert survived by relying on his sister’s care and the help of Reverend Mother Sophia, and even managed to attend church school for several years free of charge. At seventeen, because he stole a few slices of white bread for his hungry nieces and nephews, Javert nearly had the furious shopkeeper drag him to the Reims police station.

  Fortunately, a young lawyer happened to pass by. After learning what had happened, the kind-hearted lawyer paid the baker triple the value of the stolen goods, and Javert was spared imprisonment. It was also that lawyer who, upon learning that Javert was determined to make his way in Paris, wrote a letter of recommendation to a friend there. With that letter, Javert obtained a simple post as a prison guard at the Chatelet prison, rather than, like most of his Champagne countrymen, sinking into the city’s slums as a labourer, a beggar, or a criminal who robbed and killed.

  After more than ten years in Paris, Javert thought he would live out an ordinary life. Yet an abrupt opportunity brought by the prosecutor André allowed him—who had long lived at the bottom of society—to taste the exquisite flavour of power. In less than two years, Javert rose from an ordinary patrolman to investigator, squad leader, deputy chief, and now chief, answering directly to the Director-General of Police, and taking charge of the criminal investigative bureau for major cases across Greater Paris.

  None of this would have been possible without André’s money, recommendations, and exchanges of power. And of course, there was what André secretly taught Javert—his “miraculous art”: criminal psychology, criminal investigative techniques, fingerprint identification, and the like. In return, the policeman whom his colleagues considered upright and incorruptible offered his loyalty to the Paris prosecutor. Whatever order André issued, Javert would carry it out conscientiously, never asking for reasons. Before long, Javert became André’s absolute confidant planted within the Paris police.

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  This May, Javert, now thirty-four, married Anna, a Polish woman he had loved for a long time, becoming the stepfather of seventeen-year-old Meldar (Anna was in truth Meldar’s unmarried biological mother). On the day before the wedding, André purchased, for 50,000 livres, the three-storey street-facing building at 156 rue Saint-Jacques from Legendre, and presented it to the Javerts as a wedding gift—together with a 50,000-livre promissory note from the United Commercial Bank.

  Yet an hour ago, Javert’s order had been to capture a fugitive using the alias Louis—Demis; if the man resisted, he could be shot on the spot. In reality, however, Louis—Demis was not a criminal who had received a fair trial, but a former provincial prosecutor of Reims whose true name was Hubert. To put it more plainly, Hubert was the kind-hearted lawyer who had once rescued Javert outside that Reims bakery and spared him prison.

  Ever since André successfully “recovered” Reims and established a dictatorship there, Hubert began to regret his earlier decision to support compromise with André. But the die had been cast. Most municipal officials and National Guard officers—including Mayor Basile and Colonel Brice—chose to swear loyalty to the devil.

  Seeing this, Hubert quickly contacted certain restless city nobles, seeking to unite them in resistance to André. Before anything could break, however, Hubert, keenly sensing danger, fled in advance to Paris—far from Reims, far from the gendarmerie—yet he forgot that in Paris there were still police loyal to Deputy Prosecutor André…

  After finishing his cigarette, Javert dropped the butt to the floor and followed the door numbers until he found room 316. Without knocking, the chief pushed the door open and walked in.

  Because it was a cheap room, the furniture was fitted out entirely according to standard, minimal specifications: a bed, several chairs, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and a table with a brass candlestick. The rented space was usually cramped. The coloured window glass and the fireplace chimney looked thick with dust, for no one had paid up in full to hire cleaners to wipe them down.

  The partitions between rooms were made of nailed wooden slats, coated with a layer of lime, and then pasted with a poor blue paper printed with sprigs of flowers—common enough in Paris housing. The partition was not thick, and even by day one could clearly hear the sounds next door. At this moment, the neighbours were mostly trembling beneath their blankets.

  The room’s occupant stood by the window. Facing the uninvited officer, Hubert wore thick-soled shoes, breeches trimmed with sheepskin at the cuffs, and a blue dress coat with a square collar, buttoned all the way to the neck. A black cravat still allowed the former provincial prosecutor to display the proud bearing of a courtroom advocate.

  Chief Javert halted again. He shut the door behind him and stepped forward, speaking in a low voice. “I left you ten minutes. You should have stayed in the room.” Not only that: the chief had concentrated all police forces downstairs, and Hubert could have easily left the building via the fire-escape ladder and slipped beyond the Paris police’s pursuit.

  Hubert shook his head bitterly. “After all these years following André, you still do not understand his hatred of traitors, and his suspicious nature. If I am not mistaken, there is another team in ambush at the far end of the fire escape. As the dictator himself puts it, he never puts all his eggs in one basket.”

  Hubert paused, then asked in a heavy tone, “Tell me. What is his order? To ‘commit suicide’ by jumping from a height and breaking my body, or to be shot on the spot in the course of arrest?”

  Javert fell silent. He did not wish for his former benefactor to die by his hand, yet if Hubert were arrested and delivered to the intelligence bureau under Captain Penduvas (now promoted), then the tortures there would make life worse than death. Javert also knew that this year the intelligence bureau had planted several informants around him; everything he did within the Paris police was recorded by that bureau.

  At the very moment of wavering, Javert heard footsteps outside the door. His brow tightened, for he had already ordered his men not to disturb him. Before long, the door opened again. A middle-aged officer came to the chief, whispered a sentence, and handed him a small slip of paper.

  “Congratulations, my friend—Deputy Prosecutor André wants to see you in person!” After reading the note, Javert was delighted. By past practice, if André wished to see someone who had caused trouble, he would no longer order that person’s execution—meaning there was still value to be extracted, provided that Hubert would not choose death for himself yet again.

  An hour later, in the basement of a villa on ?le Saint-Louis, André looked at the fugitive before him. Hubert’s gaze drifted, his face was haggard; plainly, the days of flight had not treated him well. He was nothing like the earlier, high-spirited prosecutor of Reims. By the ruler’s previous plan, traitors would all be put to death. Yet André had already given a promise to Reverend Mother that he would no longer pursue political offenders; moreover, Hubert still had value.

  Thus André signalled to the Black adjutant at his side to remove Hubert’s handcuffs and leg irons. He also handed his former colleague a glass of Champagne. After watching Hubert drain it in one gulp, André asked bluntly:

  “You have two choices. First: serve as an intelligence-bureau mole, infiltrate Comte de Provence’s circle, and collect information for me. Then the old grievances are cancelled in a single stroke. I know that Bourbon fatso has been secretly courting you all along; even your hidden lodging was arranged in secret by the Comte’s steward. Heh—what the Tuileries wants is nothing more than to open a secure route that passes through Reims and ends in flight abroad. Of course, as part of ‘good faith,’ you—and your cousin’s entire family, who have fled to Brussels—must be placed under the intelligence bureau’s supervision.

  “As for the second choice, I need not say it; you already understand.

  “Now choose. Survival, or death?!”

  …

  André’s sudden intensification of attention toward Comte de Provence was not a whim, but a fact confirmed by the intelligence bureau yesterday afternoon: the reason Berthier of the noble-and-military line had come to serve as Chief of Staff of the Champagne Composite Regiment was that the Tuileries, invoking Mirabeau’s words, had offered this suggestion to General Lafayette.

  Within the Bourbon family at court, the simple-minded King Louis XVI was a blunt club; the Queen, Marie, whose political wisdom was growing under adversity, did not yet wield such influence; the King’s sister, Princess élisabeth, was still green; and the remaining figure was the King’s brother, Comte de Provence, who looked harmless and mild.

  The intelligence bureau suspected that Comte de Provence was deliberately using his wife to attract Lieutenant Colonel Berthier, in order to influence the Champagne Composite Regiment. Yet André’s hold over military power was airtight, and he bound the officer corps to himself through political means and economic interests. Not to mention a newly arrived chief of staff—even General Lafayette, the Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard, could not wrench the Champagne Composite Regiment from André’s hands.

  Still, André did feel a measure of admiration for Comte de Provence’s scheming. He was, indeed, a historical figure who would grind against Emperor Napoleon for nearly twenty years—defeated again and again, yet never discouraged. If André had been born an aristocrat, he might even have been willing to accept the Tuileries’ “seduction” and swear loyalty to the future Louis XVIII. But André, born a commoner, had long since chosen his political stance, and history would no longer place an “if” on that path.

  Since Comte de Provence had planted a not-very-successful nail within André’s army, it was only proper that André would return the courtesy, and send his own mole to the side of the future Louis XVIII.

  After resolving Hubert’s escape, André realized that he, as Deputy Prosecutor of the Marne, had already stayed in Paris for nearly two months. He therefore chose to set, a few days hence—May 20—as his final deadline for leaving Paris.

  With the matters at hand completed and nothing urgent remaining, André decided to drive to Fontainebleau to visit Deputy Prieur, who had just returned from an official mission in the Austrian Netherlands. Several days earlier, Prieur, newly back in Paris, had suddenly fainted. Although two doctors who examined him on the spot concluded that it was merely overwork and nothing serious, they still advised the deputy to leave the foul environment of the city and recuperate for a time outside Paris, so that he might regain his health as soon as possible.

  Thus, the wine estate that André had privately given to Madame Prieur last year—near the Palace of Fontainebleau and 50 kilometres from central Paris—immediately became useful.

  Prieur had not merely been exhausted; rather, he had been frightened senseless by the Financial Committee’s report of a 3,200,000,000-livre deficit. France’s finances could be said to worsen by the day, slipping another step toward collapse.

  The reckless over-issuance of assignats turned that financial instrument into a cornucopia for the powerful (such as André), yet for the national treasury it was a poison taken to quench thirst. As for the 20,000,000 livres that André had extorted from the tax farmers, it merely passed once through the accounts of the treasury before being entirely used to repay interest on old government debts.

  Although, through André’s and Prieur’s relentless efforts, the National Constituent Assembly ultimately pushed an agreement between the United States and the French cabinet, by which a certain sum of debt would be regularly repaid each year, it was still no more than a drop in the bucket—insufficient even to pay the salaries of state officials in Paris, let alone the rations and pay of garrisons across the country.

  The new prosecutor of the Special Fiscal Court, on whom the Constitutionalists’ nobility had placed enormous hopes, nearly saw his first shot in Lyon turn into a dud. Had Barnave not successfully persuaded André to step in and assist, Lameth (the younger one) might still have been held in Lyon, rather than returning to Paris with a cheque for 2,000,000 livres to report back. After that experience, the badly frustrated Lameth (the younger one) postponed without limit the date of his second stop, Marseille.

  As for the plans André had privately proposed to Deputy Prieur and Robespierre—increasing taxes and creating new sources of revenue—although they had passed the Financial Committee five times, they failed to win the support of more than half the deputies in the debating hall, and remained, forever, invalid laws without recognition. This was not hard to understand: the wealthy Constitutionalists’ nobles were unwilling to take money from their own pockets merely to subsidize the bottomless pit of the national finances.

  This time, Prieur’s visit to Brussels, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam in the Low Countries was made in the capacity of a parliamentary envoy, to lobby wealthy merchants there, hoping they would purchase French national bonds worth no less than 100,000,000 livres. Yet after several weeks of hard effort, Prieur and his party sold only a little over 5,000,000 livres in bonds. Thus the deputy, worn out and labouring for the nation, fell ill as soon as he returned to France, and had no choice but to recuperate at the estate outside the city.

  In France, almost every estate villa was inseparable from the vineyards that encircled it; Prieur’s estate was the same. The surrounding woodland, lakes, hills, grassland, and buildings were likewise part of the estate. It lay very near the Diana Garden of the Palace of Fontainebleau. From above the villa on Prieur’s estate, one could look out and see the pines and cypresses of the former royal gardens, paths winding into quiet seclusion, and a broad lawn enclosing a small, delicate fountain, at whose centre stood a statue of the goddess Diana.