"You have lovely hair," says Charles. "What I can see of it."

In the shock of the moment, the Duchess's hand f lies toward her small English bonnet. Patches of purple bleed through her cheeks.

"My apologies," interjects Vidocq. "The young man is not always-his mind appears to be . . ."

"Vile," she croons. "Vile creature."

With a look of disdainful attraction, she advances on Charles.

"I have already turned away several like you," she hisses. "All claiming to be my dear brother. It shall be my great pleasure to turn you away, too."

"I hope you won't," says Charles. "We just got here, you see."

And by now it's no longer a question of whether he will win her over. It's a question of whether he will get out of this room alive.

"Tell me," she says, raising her voice to a crowlike register. "Tell me, Monsieur Pretender. What day was it that my father died?"

The question doesn't so much baff le as f ly right over him. With a twist of a smile, he turns to me, then to Vidocq, then back to her.

"Ah, you have forgot, have you?" says the Duchess. "January the twenty-first. Any student of history might have told you that. But perhaps you remember the firing of the cannon that followed hard upon his death. Do you? Do you remember how you reacted? Do you remember what our aunt said? "

The Marquis places a hand on her elbow. "My child," he murmurs. "Please . . ."

"Do you remember what she and Mother did for you that night? Out of the ordinary?" Her face squeezes down into hard straight lines. "Perhaps you recall the day you gathered my correspondence for me. In what room did you leave it? In what manner?"

For the first time, there is a look of fear in Charles' eye. He puts out his hands, as though he were bracing for a foil thrust.

"Oh, and please tell me what you did to me on New Year's Day, 1793 ? How did you do it? In what room did you do it?"

A long, long silence, as the last embers of hope die out. The Duchess's face? Well, I can only describe it as ecstatically grim.

"It appears to me that Monsieur Rapskeller's silence is all the confirmation that anyone could require. My brother, if he were alive, would have had an answer to each of these questions."

Vidocq begins to scratch his scalp.

"He suffers-I don't believe I've mentioned, Madame-amnesia. Dr. Carpentier here could corroborate-"

"I must regretfully bid you good afternoon."

Flicking her black fan at us, she reaches for the bell to summon her maid. A deliberately slow and ponderous motion: She knows no one can stop her.

No one but Charles.

"It was a moth," he says.

She squints at him.

"What did you say?"

"I found a moth. A death's-head hawkmoth. So strange to find one in January. I put it in a jar."

It's the same dawning I witnessed in the Tuileries gardens. His face, his person are wrenched open; the light pours in.

"And when you were napping," he says, "I stole into your room- you were sleeping on Mother's bed because she had a Marseilles quilt-and I put the moth down your shift. And you woke up screaming. And the moth, yes, it f luttered round inside your clothes. It was dead by the time we got it out, poor devil. I remember it left some of its-its wing dust on your skin. And you said, 'Never mind, we'll bury it, and it will go straight to heaven.' And we buried it in the wood cellar."

Her lips moving silently, the Duchess drops onto a settee. "And your letters," Charles says. "I wrapped them in a white ribbon, and I stuck a rose inside, and I wrote: These Belong to Madame la Serieuse, because that's what Mother used to call you. Open on Penalty of Death, I wrote. And I left them for you on that little winding stair that used to go from the wardrobe to the attic. And I didn't think about the death business. I was just being funny.

"And when the cannons boomed that day, I . . ."

He waves his hand before his face.

"I started to laugh. I was crying, really, but it came out wrong. Aunt elizabeth wasn't angry at all. She said, 'Yes, my child. Your father is laughing, too, for he's with the angels in heaven, where there is endless joy.' And when I thought of Father being with angels, I really did cry, I couldn't stop. And Mother and Aunt elizabeth let me stay up later than usual, and they let me play at backgammon, though I hadn't the heart for it. And they made me a sleeping draught with wine and soda water, and Mother held me-in her arms-till I went to sleep.

"And when I woke up the next morning, you were there. Standing right over me. And you had a senna tree, I don't know where you found it. And you said, 'We must plant this together. For Father. So that every time we look at it, we may think of him.' "