Yesterday Never Dies, page 11
“Naturally, I was reluctant to accept that possibility, in spite of my subjective impression—until last night, when I saw Professor Thibodeaux’s ghost appear in one of the vacant seats in Monsieur Reynolds’ box. I was certain of what I saw, even before Monsieur Reynolds confirmed it, even though Dr. Chapelain had tried to persuade me that it was a mere hallucination. Obviously, I did not see the part of the abbess danced as I had tried to dance it in 1834—but nevertheless, I believe that I saw what I was really intended to see—what Professor Thibodeaux intended me to see. Whether Professor Thibodeaux was responsible for the affliction that I began to suffer that night, I do not know; I make no accusations. I am now convinced, however, that there is a connection between what happened to me and whatever Professor Thibodeaux did that night in order to prepare for his remanifestation—his reincarnation, one might almost say—last night.
“If that is so, it shifts my problem from the realm of the alienist to that of...well, I might have said the metaphysician, but Dr. Chapelain tells me that you prefer to be represented as a logician, Monsieur Dupin, and that pleases me even more. If there is any hope of obtaining a rational explanation of what has happened to me, I would be exceedingly glad to hear it, for rational explanations give rise to solutions, while alienists’ attempts at analysis, however well-intentioned or plausible, often do not. I know, Monsieur Dupin, that you have seen Monsieur Groix and Monsieur Saint-Germain, both of whom were at the theater last night, as well as Monsieur Reynolds, so I assume that you are now in possession of the full facts of the matter. Will you kindly tell me, therefore, whether there is a rational explanation for all of this?”
“I certainly hope that I can be of service to you, Mademoiselle,” Dupin said, politely. “Logic, however, can only process information, and only produces reliable results when the information is reliable. I now have a great deal more than I had yesterday, it’s true—and would have even more if Monsieur de Saint-German were not so churlishly determined to tease me by withholding the items that he deems to be key—but I cannot be certain, even in the light of the evidence of Professor Thibodeaux’s reappearance, that his thesis regarding the resonance of time is really reliable.
“One thing of which I am sure, however, is that we have only seen the first installment of his intended demonstration. Whatever Thibodeaux hoped to produce by way of a resonant reproduction of long ago, it is something far more spectacular than a momentary apparition in a theater box. This scheme has been at least thirteen years in the hatching, and we have only seen the prelude. We are, I think, playing out the preliminary acts, but will not reach the denouement for several hours yet. I am sorry to have to ask you to be patient, and also to have to ask for your cooperation in tonight’s adventure, but I suspect that might be the only way that you can hope to obtain the solution you desire.”
“What adventure?” demanded the dancer, bluntly, speaking for us all.
“In Thibodeaux’s theory,” Dupin said, “the most plangent resonance of the past has to be actively produced. If he were still alive, doubtless he would produce it himself. Since he is not, Saint-Germain will have to do it for him. The Comte has kindly invited us to watch—and I fear that we have no alternative, if we want to understand this business.”
“All of us?” Chapelain questioned.
“Seven of us, in all,” Dupin said, with a slight sigh. “Himself, of course, the five of us—and Lucien Groix.”
“But what is it that he wants us to do?” Marie Taglioni demanded. “And what does he think is going to happen?”
“He won’t tell me. All that he would tell me is that we shall have to go to Fontainebleau to do it—the forest, not the town—and that he wants to set off before eleven o’clock, in order to get there at the appropriate time. It’s infuriating, I know—all the more so as he was the only one of us whose presence at the Opéra-Comique last night was purely coincidental.”
“According to what I’ve been reading today,” I put in, “there’s no such thing as coincidence. Everything is resonance, in Thibodeaux’s worldview.”
“A fair point,” Dupin conceded. “At any rate, that is the situation. If we want to know what Thibodeaux’s plan was, we shall have to follow the man who has the instructions—and, apparently, the magic branch. It might all be nonsense, of course, and we might all have another sleepless night for nothing—but the ghost did appear last night. We have two unimpeachable witnesses to that fact. It was certainly no mere hallucination—indeed, it had a materiality that I find both surprising and, I must admit, slightly disturbing.”
“Do you think there might be some danger in carrying this plan through?” Chapelain asked. He had shared one of our adventures before.
“Perhaps,” said Dupin. “Perhaps there might also be danger in refusing. I cannot tell, as yet, exactly what resonance Thibodeaux contrived to lay groundwork for thirteen years ago, but his ghost was no mere mirage. It seems to be something capable of action, and perhaps of intelligence. We must not forget that Thibodeaux’s scheme permits resonant patterns not merely to be echoed, but to be amplified and augmented. Strictly speaking, it might not be Thibodeaux’s plan that we are dealing with here.”
“Whose, then?” Marie Taglioni asked sharply. She was entitled to her sharpness, I thought—she was more heavily invested in this than anyone, given that it had been tormenting her for thirteen years rather than a mere twenty-four hours.
I knew the answer, of course; I think we all did, but I was as eager as anyone to hear exactly how Dupin would phrase it.
“The entity,” he said, carefully, “that is, in Thibodeaux’s view, echoed in a whole series of folkloristic and literary references: Robert the Devil, in the legend first recorded by the Chronicle de Normandie and Étienne de Bourbon, Robin Goodfellow in English folklore, Oberon the Fay in Huon de Bordeaux. Unsurprisingly, Thibodeaux seems to have preferred Oberon, as the most distinguished appellation.”
“The Fairy King?”
“In Huon, merely a king blessed with fairy gifts, but in Shakespeare, yes, the King of Faerie—although Thibodeaux was rightly unconvinced that whatever entities lie behind fairy mythology actually possess the institution of monarchy.”
“But this invocation of Oberon the Fay is all absurd, is it not?” said Chapelain. “Surely, whatever Thibodeaux succeeded in doing thirteen years ago, and however he conceived it, we can only have to deal with the projection of his own ideas and desires—the resonance, as it were, of his own obsession?”
“Possibly,” was as far as Dupin was prepared to go on that issue.
Again, it was Marie Taglioni what wanted to take a pragmatic line. “But whatever it is that Thibodeaux produced or reproduced, your opinion, Monsieur Dupin, is that we ought to do as Monsieur de Saint-Germain asks, and attend his supposed demonstration—his conjuration of the past?”
“I would not presume to give instructions to anyone else,” Dupin said, “but for myself, yes, in view of what he has told me, I feel obliged to do as he asks. At the least, there is a chance of taking part in an interesting experiment. I am willing, in spite of the fact that I do not like Saint-German, and that I shall have to offer a quid pro quo in order take part.”
I did not have to ask what quid pro quo Saint-Germain was demanding.
There was a momentary pause. No one immediately volunteered to go with Dupin on Saint-Germain’s excursion to Fontainebleau—but no one refused either.
Eventually, Marie Taglioni said: “Can you tell me what connection all this—Thibodeaux’s ghost, Saint-Germain’s magic branch, and the mysterious archetype of the Fairy King—has to do with the distress I have been suffering these last thirteen years?”
Dupin was, of course, far too polite to say “perhaps nothing,” even if that was what he thought, or suspected.
“That is one matter,” he said, “on which I do not have sufficient information to license a plausible hypothesis.”
“In that case,” said the dancer, decisively, “we had better give you all the information that we have. If it is agreeable to you, I shall give you as much as I can before we take time out to eat something. Afterwards, perhaps, Dr. Chapelain and Mademoiselle Valdemar can add their insights.”
Dupin immediately nodded, and said: “Of course.” The doctor and his medium seemed more hesitant, and actually exchanged a quizzical glance—the first, I thought, since I had come into the room—before making vague signs of consent.
Marie Taglioni did not press them—but only, I suspect, because she was supremely confident that if she wanted them to speak, they would speak.
“Very well,” she resumed. “I have already said that eventually, when my vague discomforts reached a certain stage, I began to think that I was haunted—not necessarily by a person, and certainly not one to whom I could put a name, and quite possibly by a phantom of my own imagination....but nevertheless, that is the way in which I came to conceive the phenomenon.
“If I did not give it a name, I did eventually begin to personalize it, at least to the extent of attributing a sex to it...to her. I might have been ashamed to mention this if you had not introduced the subject, but she did seem to me, from the moment I began to personalize my affliction, to be a spirit of some sort—a sylphide, perhaps, although a wilder one than the delicate creature I portrayed in the ballet of that name.
“What can I tell you about her? Well, if she ever was a person, or an individual of any sort, then she was surely a dancer; if she never was a person, then she is a creature whose very nature involves dancing...which would, I suppose, be entirely expectable if, like Dr. Chapelain, you consider her to be merely a projection of my own personality, an aspect of myself with which I had begun, unaccountably, to quarrel.
“When I took on the role of the abbess that night in 1834, it seemed to me that I took it on in a more intimate fashion than I had ever taken on a role before, or have ever done since. Indeed, it seems to me now, in retrospect, that the role took on a life of its own that night, and was only employing me as an instrument, in order to be danced—but that it only served to confuse my feet, and I danced badly.
“You must not think, however, that I imagine that I am being possessed by an actual abbess with a history of debauchery. When I say that the role was using me, I do not mean the role as imagined by Messieurs Scribe, Delavigne, and Meyerbeer, nor by the composer who provided Father with the alternative version, in order that he might extend and reorganize the steps. The spectral abbess was mere artifice—but within the artifice there was, so to speak, an echo of something more distant. A resonance, Monsieur Thibodeaux called it, when I tried to explain to him, in the Green Room afterwards, what had gone wrong. I was still dazed, or I would not have said anything at all, and what I told him was a good deal vaguer than what I have just told you, but he seemed very sympathetic and understanding.”
Almost as if he had been expecting to hear it, I thought—but I said nothing aloud. Dupin was conducting the performance.
“Do you happen to know who composed and choreographed the substitute music?” Dupin asked.
“Yes, of course—but the composer did not want the fact broadcast at the time, because he did not want to offend Monsieur Meyerbeer, with whom he had a slightly uneasy relationship of rivalry. I don’t suppose it matters any longer, but I’d be obliged nevertheless if you did not pass the information on. It was Hector Berlioz.”
I wanted to ask whether Berlioz had redeployed the music in question in any of his own compositions—specifically, the Damnation—but it did not seem sufficiently important to warrant an interruption. I presumed that Dupin had merely wanted final confirmation of the falsity of the suggestion that Zann, or any other diabolically-inspired composer, had been involved. For all his fascination with occult themes, Hector Berlioz was certainly no diabolist.
“And your father was the sole choreographer?” Dupin prompted.
“As usual,” Mademoiselle Taglioni said, “Working in close association, of course with Monsieur Berlioz, Monsieur Guiscard, and me. It was a challenge, but one that interested us all. My father and I were, if you remember, in the process of trying to redefine and extend the limits of ballet. It was an exciting time for us...and that was probably why we overreached my talent, or the capacity of the art.”
Dupin was nodding, slowly, but I had long since learned to read such gestures on his part, and I could tell that he had was still direly uncertain as to what kind of interpretation to put on what Mademoiselle Taglioni was saying. His nods were the nods of a master of deduction who was still unable to see the wood for the trees. Perhaps, if he had not been so tired, he would have been quicker in his calculation.
She, presumably, had taken enough heart from what Chapelain had told her about Thibodeaux’s theories, further endorsed by what Dupin had just said about Robert the Devil, alias Oberon the Fay, to believe—perhaps even to hope—that she really had been invaded by some kind of unruly spirit that might yet be expelled; but for the moment, at least, I thought Chapelain’s opinion that it was merely a aspect of her own personality far more plausible.
“Has the haunting been constant or sporadic?” Dupin asked.
“Sporadic, I suppose—but I must say, in qualifying that observation, that I never really felt that my haunter was absent, merely quiet. It is most often, or most obviously, present when I am dancing, but even that is not consistent; its force seems to wax and wane. It also seems to be exceptionally evident in my dreams. I sometimes wake up in the early hours—usually between three and four o’clock—sweating copiously, with my heart hammering, as if I had been dancing madly in a dream, but without actually moving. Oddly enough, however, I can never remember the choreography of the dream-dance.”
“I realize that you might not have been able to take note of this, Mademoiselle,” Dupin persisted, “but is there a seasonal aspect to its manifestations? Is it, for instance, more insistent at this time of year?”
“I believe that it is—but I had always attributed that to my own sensitivity. People do tend to be sensitive about anniversaries, do they not?”
“Indeed,” said Dupin. “Forgive me if the question seems indelicate, but did you, perchance, wake up between three and four o’clock this morning in the condition you just described?”
“No,” she said—defying my expectations, at least until she added: “But that is perhaps because I did not sleep a wink last night, in spite of my relief that I felt no exceptional symptoms during last night’s opera—not even in the third act. Is that good news, do you think?”
“We may certainly hope so,” Dupin answered—which was perhaps his most delicate way of saying probably not. “Have you attempted to dance the steps of the nuns’ ballet since that night?” he asked.
“Of course I have,” she said. “Only the original version in public, of course, but I have certainly attempted the other in private, in the vain hope of appeasing my haunter—and my father, who still feels the bruises of the failure. Perhaps that was unwise.”
“Perfectly understandable,” Dupin opined, “and less likely to have done any harm than stubborn avoidance might have done, whatever the true explanation of the apparent haunting might be.”
Mademoiselle Taglioni did not seem to approve of the stubborn uncertainty of my friend’s doubts. “Do you have any better idea, now, of what is happening to me, Monsieur Dupin?” she demanded, showing a hint of asperity for the first time.
“Not yet,” he replied, candidly, “but with Monsieur Thibodeaux’s aid, I think I might soon be able to formulate a hypothesis.”
“Monsieur Thibodeaux is dead,” she pointed out.
“True,” Dupin agreed, “but he left behind a book summarizing his life’s work, and, dead or not, he was present at last night’s performance. When I accompanied him to the 1834 performance, at his request, he told me that he would be able to prove his thesis to me if I did so. I admit that I was disappointed, because I thought he meant that I would see some manifestation of the past on that occasion, but I did not...or did not realize what I was seeing, if I did, and could not interpret it in that way. After the performance, however, when he dragged me down to the Green Room—where I was briefly introduced to you, as you have been kind enough to remember—he told me that I ought to make every effort to be in the Salle Favart again, in the same seat, in exactly thirteen years’ time. He said that he would see me there, and that I would then have my proof of the virtue of his method. In the interim, he died, and the original Salle Favart burned down, and had it not been for one singular factor, I might not even have given the matter another thought...but when the company announced its intention of performing the same opera that it had staged thirteen years before, I thought, just as you did, that it might be interesting to conduct the experiment.
“Had I known what Thibodeaux had told Lucien, I would have been more determined, but at that time, I only knew that Lucien had been supplying Thibodeaux with statistical information from records of murders and suicides. I even made a joke about it, regarding the famous Unknown Woman of the Seine, which obviously stuck in Lucien’s mind—but he never mentioned Thibodeaux’s prediction to me in all this time. I think I can understand why, now.”
Tantalizingly, he paused.
I would have been unable to stay silent then, but Chapelain beat me to it.
“What prediction?” he demanded, a trifle churlishly.
“Thibodeaux had already told him, before the performance, that the bodies of three young women would be recovered from the Seine during the seventy-two hours from the beginning of Toussaint Eve to the end of All Souls’ Day, and that one of them would have been present at the performance. He invited Lucien to look around the audience, in order that he might recognize that particular corpse when it was displayed in the Morgue—but that was a tease, for it was an impossible task.
“After the performance, he told Lucien that the pattern would be repeated, exactly, in thirteen years’ time. He also told my friend that Paris would be on the brink on Revolution at that time, and that his own life would be in deadly danger: that he too would hurl himself into the Seine before the seventy-two hours had expired, if he was not exceedingly careful. He advised him that he ought to practice swimming against a current in the meantime. Even when the prediction of the three deaths turned out to be correct, Lucien refused to take the affair seriously—but he too decided, albeit belatedly, to go to the anniversary performance. He found out early this morning that one of the two suicide-victims so far recovered from the Seine in the relevant period had, indeed, been present at the performance, in the very gallery from which he was watching.”
