not exist. They are us, we are them. You appear to me to be perfectly reasonable today, but you might just as easily appear to have lost your mind in a year’s time. Whilst the insane might well have recovered their reason. And that’s without taking into account those whom today we consider insane, but whom we will later come to understand just had a different way of looking at the world, a way that we didn’t understand at the time. I’m thinking for example of the Marquis de Sade, whom you must have seen in the corridor...’

Anxious to bring the conversation back to his inquiry, Margont voiced one of his thoughts. ‘I thought of all the things that fire symbolises in the Bible. The suspects are all aristocratic, so religion for them—’

‘Fire? But it’s not fire that is the most striking thing in what you have told me. It’s the repetition of fire. He burnt someone, then he burnt someoneelse.'

‘I think I follow, more or less ... So might it be someone who was himself burnt?’ ‘More than that! He’s still burning today.’

‘You think this man is in some way haunted by fire? He has been the victim of fire in one way or another. He thinks about it constantly ...’

Margont vaguely understood that. He had participated in several battles and they regularly came back to him as nightmares. The same went for his childhood memories of being shut up in the Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert, although these days, those memories were not as strong.

‘Unlike some of my colleagues,’ emphasised Pinel, ‘I think that mental illnesses have a cause, that they result from shocks to the mind, which themselves stem from violent emotions that the subject was unable to control. The man you’re looking for has probably suffered a traumatic experience to do with fire, which has disturbed the working of his mind.’

‘So if we find the original inferno, we will be able to identify the man ...’ said Margont thoughtfully.

Pinel was delighted. ‘Bravo! You should become a doctor and treat the insane, like I do!’

‘Pardon?’

'I'm serious! Everyone is interested in the mind but no one wants to work with the insane! Do you know what most of my colleagues do when confronted with madness? They bleed the patient! What an aberration! They’re so worried by anything abstract that they want to do something practical, although it has be said that bleeding is the opposite of practical! The profession would appeal to you and I think you would have a gift for it. If you were interested, and you started your medical studies, I would willingly accept you as a pupil.’

Margont was struck dumb and the doctor went joyously on, ‘Have you never thought what you will do when the war is over?’

Lefine sniggered. ‘Will it ever be over?’

‘I think about it all the time,’ replied Margont. ‘I’d like to launch a newspaper—’ He caught himself. He had said too much!

‘Do both!’ suggested Pinel. The study of madness would give you plenty of material for your articles, believe you me! There would be enough to fill ten newspapers on the subject of the ill treatment of the insane. When I decreed they should be freed from their chains,

I was almost locked up with them!’

‘I’ll think about your proposition. But going back to our investigation ... The fire ...’

‘You’re hiding behind the fire so that you don’t have to answer my offer. That’s understandable. But it still stands. Take all the time you need to think about it.’

‘Do you think the murderer is unstable?’

‘No. It’s not someone who was operating in a blind fury otherwise they would have destroyed everything in the room, making an unbelievable uproar, which would have had the police come running. I don’t think either that they hear voices, because the poor souls who suffer from that plague are so deranged by it that when they go to commit a crime, they are easily found out. Because their thoughts are so disturbed, they’re incapable of scheming and carrying through a coherent plan. Besides, their illness is evident in their behaviour and their speech ...’

‘I haven’t noticed anything like that in any of my suspects.’

This man is in full possession of his intellectual faculties. But he has been profoundly affected by fire and is trying to free himself from the grip of its memory. There are many kinds of debilitating or oppressive feelings: grief, hate, regret, fear, remorse, envy, jealousy ... But they don’t degenerate into madness unless they reach great intensity, often after a shock.’

Margont clasped his hands together. It was an instinctive gesture, as if his ideas were floating in front of him like a cloud of midges, and he was trying to gather them together. It was also like the strange prayer of a believer, who was so exasperated by religion that he thought himself an atheist.

‘He’s hiding in a group of monarchists. Might he be dividing his thoughts between his obsessive fear and his political ideals? No, everything is linked to the fire. In one way or another, even his royalist loyalty must relate to fire.’

Pinel nodded. ‘I think so too. He seems to have a real monomania about fire. It’s an obsession, his only one. Even if there is something else that interests him, which initially has nothing to do with fire, fire will spread in his mind and burn it up.’

‘Something else or someone else that interests him. And he will be obsessed until he succeeds in extinguishing the blaze - assuming that’s his aim. How will he be able to do that?’

Pinel gave an apologetic smile. ‘I think you know how ...’

In a sense, Margont did. He had been haunted by his own ‘fire’: being sent away to the Abbey Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert. Unfortunately by the time that fire had in effect been reduced to embers, a new fire had been ignited in him by the war. ‘He has to settle the score with his past ...’

‘Isn’t that what we all do, all through our lives?’

‘Why are the burns in different places on the two victims? The face, then the arms. Is that significant?’

‘Yes, it will be significant, but I’m not sure how. You mustn’t ignore that question. Because fire is at the heart of this criminal’s monomania. All his thoughts converge sooner or later on fire. So nothing he does with fire is without meaning.’

Pinel could offer no help on the question of curare. Margont shook the doctor’s hand warmly. He was physically exhausted - as if the conversation had been a race several hours long - but his spirit had been completely revived. ‘I can never thank you enough!’

‘Good luck. And think about my proposition.’

CHAPTER 30

ON 28 March, now that the Allies’ real plan had been discovered, Napoleon held a new council of war at Saint-Dizier. The day before, they had learnt of the destruction of General Pacthod’s division and the retreat of Marshals Marmont and Mortier to Paris. Only Marshal Macdonald was in favour of abandoning the capital and battering the rear of the enemy lines with all their fire power. All the other officers wanted to try to save Paris. The Emperor came to a decision. The French army would hurry towards the capital to rescue it - if they could get there in time. A race against the Allies began.

CHAPTER 31

MARGONT was waiting under the arcades of Rue de Rivoli. In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte had decided to run a long, large avenue east to west along the Seine. This one went past, amongst other things, the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace. It was part of a grand scheme of urbanisation: fine residences were to be built with steeply pitched roofs, a sewer system, paving of the streets. And so Rue de Rivoli was born. But no one wanted a home in the new buildings, which were all identical and lined up like stone soldiers awaiting imperial review. It was very humiliating for Napoleon to realise that Parisians wanted nothing to do with his magnificent Rue de Rivoli. To encourage people, now the Imperial Government was offering a thirty-year exemption from taxes to each buyer. But it was not working. Rue de Rivoli remained resolutely empty ... Lefine had tried to convince Margont that they should pool their meagre resources to buy lodgings because he was sure that one day they would be very valuable. Margont had, of course, refused.