The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (62 page)

In the hours that passed before I saw him again, I no longer doubted that the “purpose” of our visit was working itself out. Holmes had used his
influence, the Order of the Legion of Honour, as well as the reputation of a man who had rid Paris of the Boulevard Assassin, to obtain an audience with President Faure. The intention could only be to convince Félix Faure that Captain Dreyfus was no traitor and that the letter sent to Colonel Schwartzkoppen, the Military Attaché, would be shown on scientific examination to be the work of another hand.

It was late in the afternoon when my companion returned. He knew as well as I that there was no need for an explanation of his absence. He stood in the sitting-room of the hotel suite, a familiar figure in the unfamiliarity of his formal costume.

“Your patience may be rewarded, Watson,” he said with the quick movement of his mouth, which was sometimes a smile and sometimes a nervous quirk, “I have put our case to President Faure.”

“Our case?”

He smiled more easily. “Very well, then, the case of Alfred Dreyfus. The matter of the handwriting. We have, I believe, a chance to vanquish Professor Bertillon on both fronts. Who knows? If we succeed in this, there may be a path to victory over him in other matters. I have struck a bargain with Félix Faure. The evidence against Dreyfus will be reviewed. Indeed, though he still thinks the man guilty, in all probability, he has not set his face against a retrial.”

“Then you have succeeded?” I asked the question because, to anyone who had known him for a length of time, it was evident that Holmes was holding back some unwelcome detail.

“Not quite,” he said, another nervous movement plucking at his mouth. “I fear, Watson, you will not like our side of the bargain. We are to remain in Paris for a few more months.”

“Months! What the devil for?”

“That, my dear friend, will be explained to you within the hour by President Faure's confidential secretary. It is not too much to say that the fate of France and the peace of Europe may depend upon the safety of the treasure we are to guard.”

“Treasure!” I exclaimed. “What treasure?”

But Holmes waved his hand aside, recommending patience. He turned and went to his room, exchanging formal clothes for familiar tweeds and Norfolk jacket. Short of pursuing him and standing over him while he changed, there was little I could do. I walked about the tall corniced sitting-room on the first floor of the Hôtel Lutétia, folding a paper here and tidying a table there, in anticipation of a visit from the confidential secretary of the President of the Republic. Then I paused and stared down into the Boulevard Raspail with its busy traffic from the suburbs and markets. Would Félix Faure's confidential secretary really make a habit of visiting confidants in what was almost a public room? I thought of Sir Henry Ponsonby and Sir Arthur Bigge as Her Majesty's private secretaries, conducting confidential negotiations in the hotels of Bayswater or Pimlico. The idea was plainly absurd.

This was one of the rare occasions when I suspected that Holmes, on unfamiliar territory, was out of his depth. He had just reappeared in his tweed suiting, when there was a knock at the door. It was a hotel page-boy who had brought our visitor from the lobby. The stranger entered the sitting-room. As the page closed the door again, Holmes bowed, took the hand of the President's confidential secretary, and kissed it with instinctive gallantry. This newcomer was not the type of Sir Henry Ponsonby nor Sir Arthur Bigge, but one of the most striking young women upon whom I had ever set eyes.

She might have been eighteen, though the truth was that she was thirty and already had a daughter who was ten years old. Yet there was such a soft round beauty in her face, a depth to her wide eyes, and a lustre in the elegant coiffure of her dark hair that she reminded one irresistibly of a London
débutante
in her first season. To describe her figure as elegant, narrow-waisted, and
instinctively graceful in every movement is to resort to the commonplaces of portraiture. Yet Marguerite Steinheil was possessed of all these attributes and was never commonplace.

Such was Félix Faure's confidential secretary. Though I was struck by her beauty, even her modesty of demeanour on this occasion, the thought that preoccupied me was that no English politician's reputation could have withstood such an association with a young woman of so remarkable a presence as hers.

“Watson!” Holmes turned to me with a look of triumph. “Let me introduce to you Madame Marguerite Steinheil, the emissary of President Faure. Madame, allow me to present my colleague, Dr. John Watson, before whom you may speak as freely as to myself.”

Somehow, I scarcely recall how, I mumbled my way through the pleasantries of formal introduction in the next few minutes. If I had thought before this that Sherlock Holmes had plunged into the Dreyfus affair beyond his depth, I was now utterly convinced of it. Madame Steinheil took her place on the chaise-longue, Holmes and I facing her from two upright gilded chairs. She spoke almost perfect English with an accent so light that it added to the charm of her voice.

“I believe,” she said, “that I may soon be able to bring you good news of Captain Dreyfus, of whose innocence I have never myself entertained the least doubt. However, I may only help him, or help you, if you will assist me in return.”

“Then you must explain that, madame,” Holmes said quietly. “I believe it is the President whom we are to serve, is it not?”

She smiled quickly at him and said, “It is the same thing, Mr. Holmes. More than four years ago, I became his friend because of his interest in art. My husband, Adolphe Steinheil, is a portrait painter. Our drawing-room has long been a meeting-place for men and women from literature, art, music, and public life. We have a house and a studio in the Impasse Ronsin, off the Rue de Vaugirard, near the Gare Montparnasse. Félix Faure was a guest at my
salons
, a friend before he became President. After his election, he bought one of Adolphe's paintings for the private rooms in the Élysée Palace. He is the President but he is also the greatest friend in the world to me. I must make this confidence to you. My own father is dead but Félix Faure has been, in his way, a father to me and I, perhaps, like a daughter to him.”

The more I heard of this, the less I liked it. I saw that Holmes's mouth tightened a little.

“Forgive me, Madame Steinheil, but you are not—are you?—a daughter. You are a confidential secretary and you will betray your trust if you seek to be anything more.”

She put her hands together and stared down at them. Then she looked up with the same smile, the same openness of her face and gaze, that would have softened any accusation in the world.

“Mr. Holmes,” she said quietly, “I need not tell you that the Third Republic of France was born from war and revolutionary bloodshed almost thirty years ago. Since then, there has been scandal, riot, and assassination. In England, I think, you have not known such things. Were you to see the secret papers of the past thirty years in our own country, you would be more deeply troubled still and perhaps a good deal more shocked than you have been even by the affair of Captain Dreyfus. These papers of which I speak are known to very few people. Naturally, they have been seen by fewer people still.”

“Of whom you are doubtless one, madame!”

The cold precision of his voice was a harsh contrast to the softer tones of Marguerite Steinheil. Yet she was a match for him.

“Of whom I am one,” she said, inclining her head. “Since the President came to office, he has suffered abuse in the Chamber of Deputies, he has been physically attacked in public and spat at. Lesser men would have resigned the office, as his predecessor did, and France would go down in civil war. But he will not resign, Mr. Holmes. He will fight. In order to fight, he must have a weapon. The pen, as you say, will prove mightier than the sword.”

“If it is used with discretion,” Holmes said gently.

She smiled again and then dropped her voice a little, as if fearing that even now she might be overheard.

“For the past three years, Félix Faure has been engaged upon his secret history of France since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It is to be his testament, his justification of steps that he must take, before the end of his
septennat
—his period of office.”

“And you, madame?” Holmes inquired coolly. “What are you to him in such a crisis?”

There was no smile as she looked at him now.

“What am I in all this? Félix Faure saw in me a friend who would offer an undivided loyalty, a loyalty that is not to be found among the ministers and officials surrounding him. You have not lived in France during the past ten years, Mr. Holmes. From your well-ordered life in London, it is hard to imagine the scandal and near-revolution that plagues this city.”

“One may deduce a little, even in London.”

“No,” she said, and shook her head with a whisper of disagreement, “Félix Faure was called to office among the mortal injuries which France seemed determined to inflict on herself. The Boulangists would overthrow republicanism and restore the monarchy. The Anarchists would plunge us in blood. We had watched the
bourse
—the stock exchange—and the Quai d'Orsay brought to near-ruin by the Panama corruption scandals and the disappearance of two hundred and fifty million francs. We had seen governments created in hope, only to collapse in dishonour after a few months. Six months before my friend was called to the highest office, President Carnot himself was stabbed to death at Lyons by a terrorist. President Casimir-Périer was driven from office by libel and ridicule within a few weeks. During those weeks came the Dreyfus affair.”

Holmes was about to say something but seemed to think better of it.

“I watched that man's epaulettes torn from his tunic,” the young woman continued softly, “on the parade ground of the Ecole Militaire, his sword broken over the adjutant's knee. Mobs shouted for his death in the riots that followed. France had degenerated into such chaos that government itself seemed impossible. In our relations with the world, we had drifted from our alliance with Russia and were close to war with England over Fashoda and the Sudan. Félix Faure tried without success to persuade his ministers that a
rapprochement
with England and Russia was our sole salvation abroad. He failed to move them. How could he succeed when, as the secret papers confirm, his closest adviser in foreign affairs was a man whose mistress had for years been in the pay of the German Embassy? Four months ago, in October, matters were so grave that Monsieur Faure considered carrying out a military
coup d'état
as President, taking absolute power to impose order on the country by martial law.”

“And you, madame?” Holmes still pressed for an answer to the most important question of all. “What were you to Félix Faure?”

“I was his eyes and ears throughout all this, as well as his amanuensis. I went privately to sittings of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, to certain receptions and parties. He is surrounded by enemies in government and now he knows it, through me. I was better able to identify certain men who might have destroyed him, had they been appointed to office. They are, Mr. Holmes, without scruples or principles under their masks of public virtue. They are
arrivistes
ready to sell themselves to achieve their ambitions.”

Sherlock Holmes held her gaze dispassionately.

“As a woman, however, you were surely in greater danger of being compromised in your role of adviser than a man would have been?”

If Marguerite Steinheil blushed a little at the innuendo, I saw no sign of it.

“My sex was my advantage. No man is inscrutable to a woman, Mr. Holmes, especially when that woman is devoted to one whom she has decided to help, and when she is supposed to
care for nothing more essential than music, flowers, or dress.”

“But you do not play quite the same part now, I take it?”

“No,” she said softly. “The dangers and the threats became so numerous that there could only be one answer—‘The Secret History of France under the Third Republic.' It is a weapon so powerful that our adversaries dare not provoke its use. Every afternoon, the President adds several pages to it, on foolscap paper which I buy for him myself. At first these pages were locked in an iron box at the Élysée Palace itself. Then, in the crisis of last October, Félix Faure asked me to take home the pages as he wrote them. Until this afternoon, three people in the world knew of this precaution: the President and I, of course, and Monsieur Hamard, Chief of the Sûreté, a man of honour to whom Félix Faure would entrust his very life. Dr. Watson and yourself must now be admitted to the secret.”

“Then I trust, madame, you will use such a weapon as a shield, not as a sword.”

The young woman smiled at this. “A shield is all we ask, Mr. Holmes. The President's enemies cannot be sure what revelations drawn from the secret papers these chapters may contain. Yet he has taken good care that those from whom he has most to fear are aware of the consequences. If such pages were to be made public, the reputations of those men would be blasted. It would be impossible for them to hold office and they would be fortunate indeed to escape prosecution as common criminals. Perhaps you think such a threat unchivalrous? No doubt it is. I assure you, however, that there is nothing in those pages except what is the proven truth.”

She paused and Holmes said nothing for a moment. He took his pipe from the pocket of his Norfolk tweeds and then replaced it.

“It is on this account that you wish Dr. Watson and I to remain in Paris?”

“Only for a while,” she said gently. “In a month—two months at the most—enough of the work will be done. A copy will be made and deposited elsewhere, to make the work safe for posterity. Meanwhile, new pages and documents will be taken back each night to a hiding-place in the Impasse Ronsin. In the past weeks, the President has been warned by Monsieur Hamard that visitors to the Élysée Palace are being watched by those who may be agents of foreign powers but more probably of our enemies within France. Some of our visitors are being followed. It would not do for a single page of the history or a single document to fall into the hands of those who would destroy us.”