The Monterant Affair

by Richard Grindal

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The victim is Sophie Monterant: a young actress who is already challenging the divine Sarah Bernhardt for the finest roles. Inspector Gautier visits the theatre to see Sophie at the first night of Dame aux Camélias, but the first night is also to be her last: after the curtain fall, Sophie eats a poisoned chocolate and dies. Gautier is immediately on the case and his investigation takes him to the upper echelons of Parisian society, including the blue-blooded Comte de Limousin and the Minister for the Beax-arts, who is likely to become the next president of France. Gautier's impertinence enrages Courtrand, the director of the Sûreté, but what is Courtrand himself concealing?

Release date: December 14, 2015

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 180

Sample

THE AUDIENCE IN the Théâtre du Châtelet sat silent and absorbed as they watched the closing moments of La Dame aux
Camélias. On the stage the courtesan, Marguerite, was dying of consumption in front of her lover, Armand Duval. Most of the people in the theatre had seen the play before, some many
times, but the ending seldom failed to move them.

Sophie Monterant, the actress playing Marguerite, was declaiming her final lines. Not even the exaggerated pallor of a consumptive’s make-up could conceal her striking beauty.

‘Armand, give me your hand. . . . I can assure you it isn’t hard to die.’

A few seconds later, gently and without histrionics, Marguerite died, leaving Armand distraught with anguish, and it was one of the minor characters, Marguerite’s friend Nichette, who
ended the play with a spoken epitaph.

‘Sleep in peace, Marguerite. You will be forgiven much because you loved so much.’

The curtain was lowered slowly and after a long moment of emotional silence, the theatre erupted with tumultuous applause. To almost hysterical cheering the curtain calls began, with the leading
actress modestly acknowledging the many flowers that were carried up on to the stage.

Gautier and Duthrey had been sitting by an aisle and were able, while the ovation still continued, to leave their seats and make their way out of the theatre to a line of fiacres which stood
waiting on the corner of Rue de Rivoli. They had agreed to dine after the theatre at the Cloiserie des Lilas and the fiacre took them towards the Ile de la Cité and the Left Bank beyond.

‘That was the first time you’d seen Sophie Monterant, wasn’t it?’ Duthrey asked Gautier. ‘What did you think of her?’

‘I was impressed. She has style, that one.’

‘Style certainly. And courage as well.’

‘You mean because she dared to appear in a play which the great Sarah believes to be hers by divine right?’

‘Yes, and in the Châtelet, just across the road from the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt.’

‘Perhaps she’s one of those people who likes to thumb a nose at royalty.’

Sarah Bernhardt was one of the most widely known and admired actresses in the world. She had played Marguerite scores of times in Paris as well as in most of the capitals in Europe and it had
been one of the most popular rôles in the repertoires of her great tours of the United States. Although she was now not far short of sixty, Sarah could still play the parts of young women
with enough conviction to fill a theatre.

‘I prefer Monterant’s acting to that of Bernhardt,’ Gautier remarked. ‘She’s more realistic. Bernhardt’s ranting and grimaces are too exaggerated for my
liking.’

Duthrey laughed. ‘So you too have been seduced by the modern heretics?’

‘What heretics?’

‘The new realists; playwrights who put some bestial, oafish character on the stage, make him shout “Merde” a couple of times and think they are giving us immortal
drama.’

This time Gautier laughed. ‘I think you’re the one who has been seduced—by the theatre. Why this sudden interest in the stage? Is Figaro making you its dramatic
critic?’

‘Heaven forbid! No, it’s just that I have to write an article on Sophie Monterant, not so much on her career, you understand, but on the woman. I spent three hours talking to her in
her apartment the other day. But how can one write about an actress without first watching her act?’

‘How did you find her as a person?’

‘Seductive, full of charm and vitality, but tough.’

‘Didn’t she cause some great scandal a year or two ago?’

‘Yes. She married the famous English actor, James Henry, walked out on the marriage after a few weeks and then had the temerity to get a divorce.’

Their fiacre was passing the Palais de Justice. To their left the twin towers of Notre Dame stood watching over the moonlit city, symbols of tranquillity. And yet, Gautier reflected, only a
short distance away his colleagues on night duty at Sûreté headquarters would be involved in the turbulent real-life drama of Paris after dark: robberies in the wealthy houses on
Avenue du Bois, a knifing in Place Pigalle, perhaps a student riot in Montparnasse.

As usual the Cloiserie des Lilas was crowded. Long recognized as a meeting-place for writers and poets, it was now becoming popular with artists, many of whom were drifting away from the
cafés and restaurants of Montmartre to escape the extravagant behaviour and excesses of the misfits and foreign eccentrics who were flocking to the Butte, drawn by its growing reputation as
the spiritual home of bohemians.

There were no vacant tables at the Cloiserie but Duthrey, who was evidently a habitué, recognized a friend dining alone and the two of them joined the man. Duthrey introduced him as
François Vernot and Gautier remembered the name. Vernot was a young writer from a wealthy bourgeois family who had created a stir in Parisian literary circles a couple of years previously
with an avant-garde novel. The book had attacked France and the French government so viciously that there had even been talk of a prosecution for sedition. People had also said that this modest
success had so embittered Vernot that he was killing himself with ether and alcohol, but this evening he seemed cheerful enough.

‘Don’t tell me you two have been to see that preposterous melodrama, La Dame,’ he said while Duthrey and Gautier were ordering their meal. ‘Do you know that
Dumas fils wrote the play in only eight days, to pay his debts?’

‘We didn’t go to see the play,’ Duthrey explained. ‘I wanted to see Monterant act.’

‘That’s the reason for the decline of the theatre today. People go to watch actors, not to see plays. A play has become just a vehicle for a well-known actor. And so the stage offers
us nothing but the same old drawing-room comedies, the same old historical romances.’

‘What about Ibsen, Strindberg and the rest of those gloomy Scandinavians? We’ve had enough of them these last few years. And aren’t you forgetting Antoine and
Lugne-Poe?’

‘One has to make an exception of Lugne-Poe,’ Vernot admitted. ‘He’s the only theatrical producer of vision and intelligence in France today.’

‘Does that mean,’ Duthrey mocked him gently, ‘that he’s going to put on a play of yours?’

‘As it happens he has promised to.’

‘Well, I hope it gets a better reception than Jarry’s.’

Duthrey was referring to the first performance of Ubu Roi, a play by Alfred Jarry which Lugne-Poe had staged a few years previously and which had been greeted by the audience with
catcalls and cries of derision. It was Ubu Roi to which Duthrey had been alluding when he made disparaging remarks about modern drama to Gautier during the journey to the Cloiserie des
Lilas. The play had earned the producer the unfortunate nickname of ‘Lugne-Pot-de-chambre’.

‘Make sure Gautier is invited to your première,’ Duthrey told Vernot. ‘He’s a modernist too; prefers Monterant to the great Sarah.’

‘My God, I should think so!’

‘Of course I never saw Bernhardt when she was in her prime,’ Gautier said. ‘They tell me she was superb when she was with the Comédie-Française.’

‘Her Phèdre was unmatchable,’ Duthrey told him. ‘The best ever.’

‘Gautier and I are too young to know,’ Vernot put in acidly. ‘After all, the old harridan is not far short of sixty.’

‘Sophie Monterant can live to be a hundred,’ Duthrey said firmly, ‘but she’ll never die like Sarah does. No one has ever played a death scene as magnificently as Sarah.
Think of how she died in Fédora, Théodora, La Tosca, not to mention L’Aiglon.’

The three of them continued to discuss the state of the theatre in France over their meal. Gautier found himself regretting that he could not contribute more to the conversation, but his
knowledge of the contemporary stage was slender. As a young man he had sometimes been to the theatre with other students, joining them in the highest gallery as they shouted their approval or their
catcalls with traditional vigour. Later, as his career in the police began to take shape and after he had married, he seemed to have neither the time nor the inclination for the escape from reality
which an evening at the Odéon or the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin afforded.

Had he found time, had he taken Suzanne out in the evenings sometimes to a theatre or even to a café-concert, they might still be together. The thought that his wife had left him for
another man still disturbed him, not through vanity—he was not a vain man—but because it stirred a twinge of guilt. And ironically it was probably only because Suzanne had left him that
he had been spending this evening at the Châtelet. Duthrey and his other friends, Gautier noticed, invited him out in the evenings from time to time and he suspected that they did it mainly
through kindness, knowing that otherwise he would be alone.

When they had finished eating, two or three other diners joined them at their table to drink brandy. The conversation turned from the stage, almost inevitably, to politics. Not many years
previously most people had believed France to have been on the brink of either a revolution or a military coup. Successive financial and political scandals, followed by the Dreyfus affair, had left
the country bitter and neurotic, split into hostile factions: royalists and republicans, chauvinists and anarchists, militarists and pacifists, anti-semites and intellectual pro-Jews. The Great
Exposition of 1899 and the arrival of the new century had restored a large measure of stability and confidence, but the habit of political debate still lingered.

Once again Gautier contributed little to the discussion, not because he did not have political opinions but because he was conscious that a policeman was supposed to be neutral. He was conscious
too, that by talking freely in front of a policeman, his friends were showing their trust in him. It was not so many years ago that the government used to send spies, agents-provocateurs and even
policemen into cafés to identify anarchists and other potential trouble-makers. Some people believed it still did.

The argument spun on, partisan but not acrimonious, until after midnight. They were the only customers left in the café when a messenger arrived from the offices of Figaro.
Duthrey read the note which the man gave him, read it again, then got up from the table and drew Gautier to one side.

‘Sophie Monterant is dead,’ he said quietly.

Gautier stared at him incredulously. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘It’s true, I am afraid. My people have just heard the news.’

‘My God! Has she had an accident?’

‘They appear to believe she was poisoned.’

SOPHIE MONTERANT’S apartment was on the third floor of a large house in Rue Murillo. The Plaine
Monceau, as the district was called, had over the last few years become a fashionable place to live as wealthy bourgeois families followed the lead of some of the aristocracy and moved into the
imposing houses in the vicinity of Parc Monceau.

The concierge, ill-tempered and sleepy, refused at first to admit Gautier and Duthrey to the building. A few years previously a wave of bombings by anarchists had produced panic bordering on
hysteria among the concierges of Paris. Most of them had refused to admit a stranger after dark, fearful that he might be about to place a bomb in the building. Some had even refused to open the
wicket door unless their tenants could identify themselves by saying a prearranged password. An unfortunate resident who forgot the password of the day might find himself left out in the streets
all night.

When Gautier explained who he was, the woman did let them in, but grumbled that she had already admitted two policemen that evening, not to mention a doctor. As they climbed the stairs to Sophie
Monterant’s apartment, Duthrey remarked: ‘It makes me feel almost guilty when I remember that less than an hour ago we were debating the ability of Monterant to play a death
scene.’

In the apartment they found two policemen; a man from the commissariat of the eighth arrondissement and Inspector Lemaire, one of Gautier’s colleagues from the Sûreté. The
inspector was talking to the personal physician of the dead actress, a Dr Laradon.

Gautier explained to Lemaire that he had not come in any official capacity, but that he had been dining with Duthrey when they had heard the news of the actress’s death. He added:
‘Duthrey may be able to help you as he has been collecting material for an article on the dead woman. I’ll go and leave Duthrey with you, if you wish.’

‘No need for that,’ Lemaire replied. ‘I’ll be glad of your help.’

‘How did she die?’

‘Poison, so the doctor says.’

Hearing his name mentioned, Dr Laradon turned round. ‘It would seem that Madame Monterant ate a chocolate containing cyanide,’ he said.

‘That can scarcely have been an accident.’

‘No.’ Lemaire pointed to a box containing chocolates which stood on the table behind him. ‘Those are the chocolates.’

He explained to Gautier and Duthrey that the chocolates had been delivered to the apartment that afternoon. When Sophie Monterant had returned from the theatre, her maid had handed the box to
her. She had eaten one of the chocolates and died almost at once.

‘Where’s the maid now?’ Gautier asked.

‘In her mistress’s bedroom next door with the corpse.’

‘The woman’s in a bad state,’ Dr Laradon said, ‘Shock and grief. She seems to blame herself and refuses to leave her mistress. I’ve arranged for the body to be
collected and taken to the mortuary and the sooner it’s moved the better, in the interests of the maid.’

Gautier glanced round the room. Its décor, flamboyant but without style, showed that it had been lived in by an extrovert of constantly changing moods and whims. In the fashion of the day
it was overcrowded not only with furniture, but with paintings, photographs, ornaments, bric-à-brac and personal mementos. In the centre was placed a chaise-longue draped with oriental silks
on which, one supposed, the mistress of the house reclined to receive the homage of her admirers. On one wall hung a superb Chinese screen, but it was flanked by theatrical posters announcing
performances of the Comédie Française, at the Gaiety Theatre in London and the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg. Directly opposite these there was a portrait of Sophie Monterant in
the chic, fashion-plate style which was becoming popular in France and this was surrounded by banal picture postcards interspersed with photographs of the actress in famous stage rôles:
Phèdre, Jeanne d’Arc, Cléopâtre and inevitably the Dame aux Camélias. On the mantelpiece, the book-shelves and the cabinets were more theatrical mementos, a
medallion struck to honour the return of Victor Hugo from exile after the fall of the Second Empire, a miniature plaster bust of Molière, a fan which had once belonged to Rachel and the
quill pen with which de Musset was supposed to have written Lorenzaccio. They had been distributed, seemingly at random, among paperweights, coins, eighteenth-century miniatures and
Venetian glass bowls, some valuable, others trivial and worthless.

Duthrey was questioning the doctor about the poisoned chocolates and Lemaire, who had clearly been waiting for such an opportunity, took Gautier on one side.

‘Jean-Paul,’ he said anxiously, ‘I suppose you would not be willing to do me a tremendous service.’

Gautier smiled. ‘That depends on what the service is.’

‘I scarcely like to ask. Would you consider taking over the investigation into Monterant’s death?’

‘But I’m not on duty tonight.’

‘I know, and I am. But as you may have heard my wife is expecting a child and although it’s nowhere near her time, she’s frightened at being left alone. There was a dreadful
scene when I left her to come on duty this evening, I can tell you. In the normal way I might have been home by now, but this business could keep me occupied for hours.’

‘So you want me to take over?’

‘Is it asking too much?’ Lemaire’s eyes pleaded. ‘After all, in a way you’re already involved.’

What Lemaire really meant, Gautier knew, was that Gautier had no family obligations, no pregnant wife waiting hysterically at home, no wife at all to all intents and purposes.

‘The director won’t like it,’ he said. ‘You know what an obsession Courtrand has for regulations and discipline.’

‘Oh, I can manage him. I can always tell him that I had an urgent message to go home as my wife thought her labour was beginning.’

Gautier shrugged and nodde. . .