Guédiguian untied his scarf and rolled it in a ball.
“Monsieur Dupin?”
I have described elsewhere how Edgar Poe lived beyond the date chiseled on his gravestone in Baltimore. Far from being, as is popularly believed, the drunken victim of a “cooping” gang at the elections in October 1849, he encountered that night, by remarkable coincidence, his doppelgänger, complete with a one-way ticket to Europe, and sensing escape from the rigors of his former life, swapped clothes with the dying inebriate, abandoning his old identity for an unknown future. He made Paris his secret home, at first in self-imposed exile at the Hôtel Pimedon, aided by his friend and translator Charles Baudelaire, assuming — with typical playfulness and black humor — the name of his famous detective of “Rue Morgue” fame: Dupin, and occasionally, under that appellation, helping the French police with their more baffling investigations, as food for a brain no longer with an appetite for mere fiction.
“Monsieur Guédiguian. My pleasure, yet again.” As he shook his hand Poe saw our guest eyeing the thin young man standing at the window — myself. “This is my assistant, Monsieur Holmes. He speaks French like an Englishman, but is a master of discretion, as are all his countrymen. You may talk freely.”
I met Poe in the guise of “Dupin” when I first came to Paris in my early twenties{See “The Comfort of the Seine” in Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes—ed. J.R., Campbell and Charles Prepolec (Edge Publishing, 2011)}, and once within the penumbra of his intellect, having succumbed to his alluring devotion to hisscience, was unwilling—unable—to leave until I had learned all I could from the great man’s unparalleled talent for deduction. Little did I know how that learning — or that friendship — would change my life forever.
“Allow me first to introduce Madame Anais Jolivet.” Guédiguian touched the woman in the veil lightly on the elbow as he led her gently forward. She shuddered with every step as if treading on broken glass, so much so that, had she not possessed a curvaceous and upright frame, I might have taken her for an old crone.
Poe, as was his custom, took her hand to kiss it, and I saw instantly that the hand was not only shivering, but bandaged. She quickly inserted it in her fur muff as Guédiguian guided her to a seat, puffing up a cushion before she settled in it.
Sitting on the arm of her chair, the man seemed exhausted merely from being in her presence, and I feared he would not find the wherewithal to speak. She certainly showed no willingness to do so. It seemed as though all her physical effort went into holding herself in one piece, and a gust of wind might make her tumble down before our eyes. I also realized that the dress I took to be black was in fact navy blue, with tiny embossed fleurs-de-lis that sparkled like stars in a summer night. And who, I asked myself, dresses in navy blue whilst in mourning?
“Tea?” enquired Poe as Madame L’Espanaye, the maid, entered with a pot of Darjeeling. “Or something stronger? A glass of Virville? Pernod?” He was a teetotaler since his resurrection, but did not begrudge the pleasures of others, and kept a moderate cellar.
The woman looked up at Guédiguian like a frightened puppy.
“Water,” he said. “And a drinking straw. If you please.” He took her other hand gently in his own as the maidservant quietly exited, closing the doors after her. “I don’t recall precisely how much you know about opera…”
“I know,” said Poe, “by a certain deportment and an assessment of the capacity of the lungs that I am in the company of a prima donna.”
I could not tell if the woman blushed behind her veil, but her chin sank slightly and she let go of the manager’s hand in order to avail herself of a handkerchief.
“But, monsieur, that term only puts her within a category of greatness,” said Guédiguian. “Madame Jolivet is beyond that. Madame Jolivet is immortal. We are blessed that she walks the streets of this fair city and does not sit in Heaven making the saints weep. When she played Gounod’s Juliette she raised the roof of the Theâtre-Lyrique. Her Marguerite in Faust was outstanding. Those who missed her Pamina in Die Zauberflöte or the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro missed the supreme roles of the supreme soprano of her generation.” I could see my elderly friend sinking in his armchair, his forearms making a bridge and his fingertips touching and separating with patient regularity as he listened. “She is a monument, sir. A monument! To both coloratura and dramatic intensity. There is… not another lyric singer… alive… who is… who can rise to the demands of…” The impresario’s shoulders sank and he pressed his fingers to the corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”
“Not at all,” I offered, sitting at the nearby bureau and opening my notebook.
Poe leapt from his chair the moment Madame L’Espanaye knocked and snatched the tray from her. He knelt in front of the veiled woman’s chair and placed it on a foot stool. The glass filled, he inserted the straw and held it out to her. The merest croak of thanks — not even that — emerged from her lips. I would not have credited it as a woman’s voice, had you pressed me. And possibly not even human.
She lifted the veil an inch and put the straw in her mouth.
“No,” said Guédiguian as he saw Poe reach out his hand, but it was too late to stop him.
“I must.”
The veil was raised, in the manner of a groom lifting the veil of his bride on their wedding day to plant a kiss on the lips of his betrothed. Nothing can be more grotesque or appalling an idea in view of what actually greeted our eyes.
I beheld the face of a rotting corpse. No. Half a face. Which, far from diluting the impact, only served to throw it into heightened obscenity by contrast. One eye was lustrous, that of a poor, frightened doe, the other lidless, shriveled, and blistered. The skin on one side flawless and pure, that of a beautiful woman, yet on the other — pitiful thing! — almost non-existent. She was eaten to the bone. I can only describe it, absurdly, as resembling the surface of a burnt sausage. Even that is inadequate. Her right cheek was gone, a flayed cavern in which I could count the teeth in her jaw and see her pink tongue wriggling, her right ear nothing more than a gristly stump. All this absorbed in an instant, and not forgotten in a lifetime.
I heard a death rattle, which was Madame Jolivet breathing with the horrid restriction her injuries compelled. Yet she held Poe’s eyes without self-pity. And to his credit, he did not avert his gaze.
“Who did this?”
“We do not know.” Guédiguian whimpered and sandwiched his hands between his thighs. “That is why we are here. It happened three weeks ago. Madame has not been well enough to move until today.”
“You’ve spoken to the police?”
“We told them everything.”
“Tell me everything.”
“We had just begun rehearsing La Traviata. I had fired the conductor for being a drunk.” Guédiguian began to pace back and forth behind her chair, occasionally tweaking it with his fingers as if to steady himself on a rolling sea. “I was calling in favors from old friends to ensure the production didn’t run off the rails, but everybody was excited about Madame playing the part of Violetta. I knew it would be a complete triumph.”