The Man with the Lead Stomach by Jean-FranCois Parot

Author:Jean-FranCois Parot
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781906040499
Publisher: Gallic Books
Published: 2011-08-16T19:00:00+00:00

So Nicolas let Bourdeau prepare the expedition. Before leaving the Châtelet he wrote a brief new report for Monsieur de Sartine. He entrusted it to old Marie: the usher was to hand it to the Lieutenant General of Police in person if their raid on Grenelle went wrong. Otherwise he was to return it to Nicolas the following day. Having arranged this, he climbed back into his coach.

Reflecting on the relations he had established with the brothel-keeper, he considered what set a police officer apart from an ordinary citizen. He now exercised his profession without too much soul-searching. Monsieur de Sartine had once made him read Fontenelle’s eulogy of Monsieur d’Argenson, one of his great predecessors. In it he had noted this sentence: ‘To tolerate an industry of vice only in so far as it might be useful, to keep the necessary abuses within the required limits, to ignore what it is better to ignore than to punish, to enter families by covert means and to keep their secrets hidden providing it is not necessary to make use of them; to be everywhere without being seen and to be the active and almost unknown spirit of the teeming masses of the city.’ All these precepts led to close and regular links between the police and the world of pleasure. Each side benefited from the arrangement.

Nicolas had a strange feeling every time he lifted the knocker on the door of the Dauphin Couronné. He had almost died in this house and he himself had killed a man here. He was still sometimes haunted by that look and that face when he could not sleep at night. And sometimes he relived the duel he had fought blindly in La Paulet’s drawing room against an opponent whose every move he had had to anticipate.

He heard a cry of surprise and the door opened to reveal the face of the little black girl, who gave him a half-amused, half-frightened look.

‘Good evening,’ said Nicolas. ‘Is La Paulet available to see Nicolas Le Floch?’

‘Always for you, Monsieur. You please follow.’

She pointed towards the entrance to the drawing room, tittering behind her hand. It was too early for the usual customers to have arrived and yet snatches of conversations were coming from inside. Nicolas stopped at the door and listened. A man and a woman were talking.

‘My dear child, you are delightful. Kiss me, I beg you.’

‘I’m only too willing.’

‘I was as stiff as a dog while serving at table because of you. I could hold out no longer.’

‘That was obvious enough and so I left the table to come and find you.’

‘I’ve got to take you here and now.’

‘Yes, but what if your master catches us?’

‘What does it matter, for God’s sake? I’d shag you on a boundary stone, I’m so desperate!’

Nicolas gently pushed the door ajar. In the large drawing room with its furniture upholstered in daffodil-yellow silk, the curtain of the little theatre was raised. The trompe-l’oeil set depicted a boudoir. The only items on stage were a sofa and two chairs.

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