required her to work in a churchyard in the dead of night, briskly doing inexplicable things with freshly decapitated heads. She had told me that the older woman who shared her midnight labors was her teacher, Marie Grosholtz… but her teacher in what craft or art?
Of one thing I was certain, having had my knowledge confirmed by Old Jules: Melanie had accompanied Radcliffe to Paris. And the elderly servant, after their party had reached the city, had heard Melanie give the young man the same Parisian address I had happened to overhear—Number 20, Boulevard du Temple.
Well, the key to what success I enjoy usually lies in instincts and hunches, not in logic. It is somewhere away from the paths of science and reason that I will find my salvation, if I ever do. I might have taken other pathways to attempt to locate my savior in his own hour of need; but somehow this one beckoned.
Looking for the address, I made my way on foot at dusk along the tree-lined boulevard, passing the building which had housed the once-famous English circus, now shuttered and apparently fallen on hard times. A number of theaters were in the same neighborhood.
The establishment I was seeking turned out to be a large house, three stories high, with a covered porch in front. The building fronted closely on the street but possessed spacious grounds in the rear. On the front of the house a sign, large and brightly painted but with a certain dignity, announced an enterprise headed by Dr. Curtius: a wax museum.
And at last, belatedly, comprehension came.
Not wishing particularly to be observed, since it was by then after public viewing hours at the Cabinet du Cire, I entered the grounds at the rear. The habitation effect proved too weak to prevent my uninvited entrance to the museum portion of the building, though no doubt the actual living quarters would have been denied me.
Moments later, rummaging about at random, I found myself inside a locked and otherwise deserted storeroom. Here light was almost nonexistent, yet for my eyes quite adequate.
There I paused, marveling. I had thought that, after three hundred years of life, there was no longer much in the world that could surprise me. But I had been wrong.
Of course, after only a moment's shock, I understood what the figures were. But still they were surprising. The lopped-off heads of Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were looking at me from a shelf. Some eyeblink fraction of a second passed before I was entirely sure that they were only wax, glass-eyed and painted with great realism.
The modeled heads of royalty, in keeping with the times, were stored in an inconspicuous position on a low shelf. Other celebrities of the past, great and small, were stacked until their time should come again; and the elaborate costumes usually worn by many of these figures had, as I discovered later, been folded away and locked in trunks. A few were stored hanging up, and thus were easier to see. The most popular feature of the museum, to judge by the amount of space allotted, in notices and on the floor, was the Caverne des Grands Voleurs, a display of images of executed criminals.
A great many visitors of all kinds came through the museum every day that it was open. It was evidently nothing unusual for some of the customers to wander into the adjoining work areas and semidetached living quarters. None of the residents or workers were particularly surprised this early in the evening, so soon after closing time, to see a stranger poking about in their midst.
Politely I enquired of several workers for Melanie Remain, but for my trouble received only shrugs and thoughtful looks conveying cautious ignorance.
Attracted by a peculiar, small, mechanical noise issuing from a kind of workyard behind the house, I turned my steps in that direction. A moment later my eye fell upon the small form of a ten-year-old boy, raggedly clad in appropriate Revolutionary style, who was sitting by himself in a small veranda just outside the main building. I noted at once that the lad's features displayed an arresting resemblance to those of the woman I was trying to find. The likeness was so definite that I felt sure at once it was not accidental.
Casually I strolled in his direction, and observed what he was playing with. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, what he was working on.
In the small model machine there lay a small wax doll, clumsily made from scraps by his own childish fingers, standing by in an attitude of sturdy indifference, ready to be beheaded. Whatever the lad's talents were to be in life, I thought, sculpture did not seem to be among them.
'What is your name, my lad?'
'Auguste.' He was a dark and brooding child, evidently quite at home in this place.
Accustomed as I was to observing human faces change with age, and to observing several generations of a family in sequence, it was no great feat for me to convince myself beyond a doubt that small Auguste was a blood relative of Melanie Remain. My next thought was to consider whether this was likely to be her son. The age difference between them seemed not too small to make the relationship impossible.
'That seems an interesting game that you are playing.'
He looked at me doubtfully—an enigmatic, dark-haired child with a pinched and gnome-like face, who as I later learned was not allowed to go to the cemetery with his mother, but spent most of his time at the museum engaged in building a toy guillotine out of some scraps of wood and a few bits of hardware.
I made my tone more businesslike. 'Is your mother here, my lad?'
'I will see, citizen,' the boy answered, politely enough, and got to his feet. 'Who shall I say is looking for her?'
'Tell her her most recent patient is now quite restored to health; but even so, he wishes a consultation… never mind, tell her: Citizen Legrand.'
Auguste gave me a strange look at that, then put aside his toy guillotine and arose to go and look for his mother.
As soon as he was gone, I picked up the toy and examined it. Ingenious, though not technically sophisticated. When the trigger was pulled, a brick fell on the poised blade, adapted from a broken pocketknife, giving it impetus enough to slice the neck of a tiny animal clean through. Maybe, I thought, a powerful spring would work better than a heavy weight, but such hardware would not be commonly available to children.
My brother, I thought, would be delighted to see this.
* * *
I waited patiently, and little Augusts was back in a minute or two. 'Citizen, they tell me that her work has taken her to the cemetery this evening.'
'Thank you, my lad—I know which one.'
In the cemetery, many of the circumstances of our first meeting two years ago were now repeated, with minor variations. The trench, and the burial mound that marked where the trench had been, had moved on for a considerable serpentine distance. Again Melanie and her cousin Marie were at the raw end of this mound, where the latest burials were to be found. And they were hard at work, but now equipped with a smaller, better focused version of the Argand lamp.
When I came upon them, Melanie was absorbed in the grisly task of looking for one particular head, while Marie held another in her lap, painstakingly coating the features with wet plaster. Now that I understood the point of the work, it seemed almost commonplace. The actual pouring of the wax, and the many remaining steps in creating the replica which was the object of all this labor, would of course take place back at Curtius's workshop, behind the museum.
Tonight the rats seemed bigger and bolder, more willing to interfere, than they had been on the occasion of my last visit.
The women took turns in interrupting their work, to try to drive away the annoying and dangerous rats by throwing pebbles. But mostly the beasts—arrogantly well-fed, confident clients of the Revolutionary state—ignored the ineffective bombardment and continued to pursue their own agenda.
With a slight bow and a polite murmur, I did the ladies a favor, or at least saved them some time, by driving off a whole swarm of the rodents with a great silent shout.
'I think they will not bother you for a while.'
In response the two women gave me a strange look.
I wondered, aloud, if they ever had trouble finding the head they had been sent to model, and decide to use a substitute instead? They could at least hope that no one would be able to tell the difference. If so, they would not
