The Black Tower by Louis Bayard

life at all. Better to pretend it never happened.
    Only we can’t, hard as we try. In the end (and by now, you’ve figured this out) there is no forgetting. History lies low but always rises up.
    And so, when we least look for it, we are visited by the specter of a boy. A boy whom, more than anyone else, we would like to forget.
    His name was Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. He was a prince from storybooks: lovely and flaxen, bright of eye, rudely healthy. He was baptized in Notre-Dame. He had armies of servants: chamber-women, ushers, porters, room boys, servants to dress his hair and clean his silver and do his laundry—his own personal cradle rocker. He gamboled through groves of orange trees, he had eight black ponies at his call. He rode in carriages, and palaces were his playrooms.
    He never asked for any of it, he was merely born into it, but the revolutionaries, in their wisdom, found him guilty nonetheless. Guilty of living in luxury while so many thousands of France’s children suffered. What better punishment than to make him suffer, too?
    They sent him to a fortress called the Temple. Night and day they set a guard over him. They stripped him of his title and dignity, they beat and starved him. They didn’t dare execute him, as they had his parents. (The world was still watching.) They merely created the conditions in which he would die—and then they watched him die. Slowly, in agony and squalor, cut off from those who might have given comfort.
    And when they had sucked the last breath from him, they tossed him in an unmarked grave, to mingle with strangers’ bones. No tomb, no marker. No prayer. Equal to the end. He was ten years old.
    As a nation, we’ve worked hard to forget this boy. You can understand, then, why someone like Vidocq, who has ridden each new wave of history without losing his footing, should resent being called back, like an inn guest who hasn’t paid his bill. A modern man, he wishes to speak of the future. Which, I don’t need to tell you, is the past.
     
    “A COUPLE OF EAGLES ,” he mutters.
    He’s repented enough of his outburst to retrieve the ring from the floor. His fingers close round it now.
    “And a fancy cross,” he adds, more loudly. “And I’m supposed to believe a boy’s risen from the dead.”
    “I can only tell you that Leblanc believed it,” says the Baroness. “To his great cost.”
    And as though she’s already dismissed us, she lowers herself onto the bench that sits unmoored in the center of the room. She squares herself toward the wall and extends her arms, and in a flash, it becomes clear what used to be there.
    A pianoforte.
    “I remember when the rumors first reached us in Warsaw,” she says. “All these high-pitched whispers. The prince is alive! Everyone had it on the highest authority, and everyone’s story was the same. A little cabal of royalists had managed to switch the prince with another boy and spirit him to safety. We were told it was only a matter of time before our monarch returned to claim his throne.”
    She rests her hands on her invisible keyboard. The fingers begin to flutter.
    “Well,” she says, “it all sounded very mystical to me. And, of course, as the years went by, no dauphin ever emerged, which did nothing to diminish the faith of certain individuals. There was a duchess, I remember, who would declare at all her soirées that our boy-king was due back the following week. Next week, I tell you! After many months of this, I said, ‘My dear, if he insists on taking so long, I fear Jesus Christ will get here before he does.’ She never did invite me back.”
    Her fingers flutter into stillness. She gathers them into her lap.
    “For my part, I always assumed the rumors were propaganda to pick up ou spirits. God knows we needed it.”
    Vidocq is standing by the window now, rubbing the water vapor from each casement. You can hear the friction of his knuckles against the glass.
    “Madame,” he says, “do you know how