And, as if it were answering a cue, the ring slides from view. When I next look up, it's resting in Vidocq's palm; in the next second, it's being f lung against the nearest section of wall. With it goes the last reserve of Vidocq's decorum, for the word that now emerges from his mouth is something that should never be uttered in the same room as a blue satin stool.

"Shit!"

"In a manner of speaking," says the Baroness. "Yes."

CHAPTE R 1 1.

The Lost Dauphin If the Ba ron ess has chosen to excuse Vidocq's vernacular, she is simply being true to her times.

You see, these early days of the Restoration are meant to be a great forgetting. We are meant to forget that a world was overturned, that a king and queen were carried to the Avenger, that the Place de la Revolution ran red with blood, that the rich man and the bishop quaked before the artisan and the peasant.

We are meant to forget that, from the ashes of this conf lagration, emerged an upstart who overran half a continent and made monarchs tremble before his name and cost France nearly a million of its men.

We are meant to forget-all of it-everything that happened between 1789 and 1815, between the Bastille and Waterloo. No hard feelings. Let the Restoration begin.

And here's the interesting part: Forgetting can be quite easy. In just the last two years, without a backward glance, we have thrown out our monogrammed Bonaparte dinner plates, our eagle pictures. We've torn down the emperor's statues, stripped every N from the Louvre walls, painted royal over every imperial. We have cheered our new king as loudly as we once execrated our old one.

It has been, in part, a blessing to do this, for living in historic times is no life at all. Better to pretend it never happened.

Only we can't, hard as we tr y. In t he end (and by now, you've f ig ured 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 f laxen, bright of eye, rudely healthy. He was baptized in Notre-Dame. He had armies of servants: chamberwomen, 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 eag les," he mutters.

He's repented enough of his outburst to retrieve the ring from the f loor. 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 f lash, 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 f lutter.

"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 soirees that our boyking 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 f lutter into stillness. She gathers them into her lap.

"For my part, I always assumed the rumors were propaganda to pick up our 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 many dauphin pretenders have come out of the wormholes already? I've had the pleasure of meeting a few myself. One was a tailor's son, one belonged to a clockmaker. There was a boy who claimed to have the pope's mark on his leg, but it was a scar from poaching rabbits. Mathurin Bruneau, maybe you've heard of him? A shoemaker's son. Very celebrated trial down in Rouen. You will find him now holding court in the dungeon of Mont-Saint-Michel." Sneering, he raps his fist against his chest. "If you've got another lost king to peddle, Madame, you'll have to knock on someone else's door."

"I am peddling nothing," she answers, the first touch of frost crisping her voice. "It was Leblanc who believed, not I. And if he was wrong," she says, rising and fronting him, "may I ask why he is dead?"

She waits, with great courtesy, for his answer. Then, tilting her head in deference, she adds: "Surely, there would have been no need to kill a man who was laboring under a delusion."

Vidocq's arms are locked across the spur of his belly. A long stream of breath issues from his nostrils.

"Tell me this," he says. "How would Leblanc know anything about Louis the Seventeenth? You said he wasn't an aristo."

It's the first time I've seen her f linch. That old epithet of the Revolution-aristo-strikes her like a clod of dirt. She pauses to gather herself. Then, in the coolest possible voice, she replies:

"Leblanc would be only too glad to tell you, I'm sure. If he could."

"And the only proof he had was this damned ring? He might have stumbled over that anywhere. I've seen Marie-Antoinette's old plates turning up in the beet market at Les Halles."

"He swore to me he had other tokens. When I asked him to show them to me, he told me it would have to wait. He was too occupied in finding someone."