MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESHere Picaud was born a shoemaker; Loupian, the future traitor, hailed from Nîmes as well. It is the genesis of all things—before he became the Count, he was a simple soul, betrothed to a happiness destined to be stolen from him.
Before the irons of Fenestrelle and the gold of vengeance, two sons of Nîmes unwittingly seal a blood pact beneath the unyielding sun of the Roman Arena.
There are cities where the blood runs hotter than elsewhere, baked white upon limestone and centuries of ancient fury. In these early days of the Empire, Nîmes was by no means the slumbering provincial town that modern guidebooks commend to the hurried traveler. It was an acrid hive, steeped in the miasmas of the Agau canal where the hides of tanners lay macerating, choked with Roman dust, and vibrating beneath the blast of a dry mistral that parched men’s throats and stirred their bile. There, within the stifling shadow of a vaulted workshop not far from the colossal amphitheater, a young craftsman was beating leather with a steady hand. His name was François Picaud.
Picaud was as yet nothing. He possessed neither fabulous treasure, nor velvet doublet, nor the sepulchral pallor of one returned from the grave. He was a vigorous fellow of candid gaze, a child of the common folk whose palms were calloused and blackened with shoemaker's wax. Between his clamped lips gleamed the steel point of an awl; beneath his coarse canvas apron beat the innocent heart of a man who still believed that honest labor was enough to command destiny. In Nîmes, he was known to be adroit, good-humored, ever ready to pay for his pint of pale wine and to laugh heartily when the servant-girls passed by, warm crocks of brandade cradled in their arms. None could have suspected then that this young and vital flesh would, a few years later, be ground down in the oubliettes of Piedmont until nothing remained but a vindictive wraith.
A few alleys away, in the recesses of a murky tavern where the reek of stale marc overpowered the scent of the laurels, another gaze was spying upon the shoemaker. That gaze belonged to Mathieu Loupian. A native of Nîmes as well, kneaded from the very same Gardois clay, yet consumed by a caustic bitterness that nothing could slake. Loupian belonged to that wretched race of men in whom the good fortune of others acts like a searing burn of quicklime. While Picaud earned the esteem of his peers and harbored the bold ambition of venturing to Paris to seek his fortune, Loupian paced petulantly behind his greasy pewter counter, tallying his sous with a blackened fingernail.
« Envy is not merely the hatred of greatness; it is, far more savagely, the fury of mediocrity before the grace of the simple. »
Around Loupian there already gravitated the servile shadows of the impending tragedy: the shiftless Chaubard, the feather-headed Solari, and the treacherous Allut—the man who saw through all things yet never once stayed the hand of the assassin. In the warm humidity of the Gardois nights, between two flagons of carignan and a saucer of cracked olives, the cabal began to buzz. Picaud was far too cheerful. Picaud spoke of love with an insolence that gave affront to their moral ugliness. They whispered, they sniggered behind their sleeves, they took the measure of this guileless youth who knew not yet that calamity does not always descend from the lightning bolt, but germinates first within the bilious brain of an ordinary neighbor.
In the forgotten archives of the Préfecture de Police, where the clerk Jacques Peuchet would later unearth this fragment of raw humanity, Nîmes stands as the fateful prologue to a drama that should never have been staged. The four accomplices had not yet dipped their quills into the ink of denunciation; they had not yet drafted that slanderous missive in Paris that would deliver Picaud into the hands of Minister Savary as an agent in the pay of English royalists. Yet the entirety of the corruption was already present, distilled within this corner of Roman Provence.
Loupian surveyed the fragile scaffold of his narrow ambitions. He envied Picaud’s bearing, his uncurbed youth, that indefinable southern pride that refused to bow its neck. One summer evening, leaning against the cyclopean ramparts that Roman emperors had raised for other bloody spectacles, Loupian let slip before his cronies a venomous remark: “That fellow walks with his head too high; it would take a heavy dungeon to bend his spine.” It was then no more than a drunkard’s sneer, a wicked sally cast up toward the stars of Nîmes. In truth, it was the first blow of the pickaxe upon the trench wherein Picaud would be buried alive for seven long years.
When François Picaud buckled his modest leather trunk—stitched by his own hand with the stoutest linen thread—the morning air held the crystalline clarity of dawn over the rows of canal tiles. The young man cast a parting glance upon the majestic arena, that tomb of gladiators where thousands had perished for the entertainment of the multitude. He fancied he was departing toward the light, toward the capital where a wealthy and sweet betrothed, Marguerite, awaited him alongside a flourishing workshop.
He did not know that in crossing the gates of Nîmes, his shadow remained held fast in the grip of Loupian’s hatred. He did not know that this native soil, from which he was departing with so light a step, he would never behold again save in disguise, transfigured by wrath, his heart devoured by the madness of an inexorable vengeance. Behind the shutter of a tavern in the Rue Saint-Antoine, a curtain of rough serge fell silently back into place. Mathieu Loupian had watched his quarry depart. The invisible snare was sprung; the road leading from the amphitheater of Nîmes to the subterranean cells of Fenestrelle had just been laid open, traced with the geometric precision of a sentence of death.