In the winter of 1785, the frost lay on the valley of the Loire like a wrinkled white sheet. The apple orchards were barren, the fields deserted, and the post road, such as it was, had become a twisted ribbon of ice and snow. Anxious as the passengers were to reach the Chateau Perdu before dark, there was only so much the driver of the carriage could do. If he urged the horses on too fast, they could slip on the ice and break a leg, or a wheel could catch in a rut and snap loose from its axle. That had happened once already, and it was only with the help of the two armed guards—one riding in front of the carriage and one behind—that they’d been able to mend it well enough to continue on their way at all.
Charles Auguste Boehmer, official jeweler to the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, was beginning to regret having made the journey at all. Perhaps he and his partner, Paul Bassenge, reclining in the seat opposite, could have persuaded the queen to order the marquis to come to Versailles instead. It would have been so much easier, and, given the nature of what they were carrying, so much safer. But he knew that the Marquis di Sant’Angelo did only as he pleased, and it did not please him these days to come to Versailles. Boehmer suspected it was the presence at court of the infamous magician and mesmerist Count Cagliostro that was keeping him away. Boehmer had no use for the count, either, but so long as the man provided amusement to the queen and her retinue, he was sure to remain a fixture there.
At a crossroads, the carriage ground to a halt, and Boehmer, throwing his scarf around his neck, stuck his head out the window. The withered carcass of a cow was lying in the middle of the road, and three peasants, wrapped in rags, were hacking away at it with an assortment of knives and hatchets. They looked up at the coach—and its mounted guards—with barely concealed hostility. The whole countryside was starving—the winter had been especially harsh—and Boehmer knew that the rage, which had been simmering in France for years, might boil over into an outright rebellion any day.
He marveled that the king and queen were so blind to it.
“Pardonne, monsieur,” Boehmer said to the one in the red stocking cap, who had stood up with his hatchet in his hand, “but can you tell us which of these roads leads to the Chateau Perdu?”
The man didn’t answer, but clomped instead, in his heavy wooden shoes, toward the carriage; he conspicuously admired its fine lacquered sheen and the pair of well-tended, black horses that drew it. The horses’ breath clouded in the air as they nervously pawed the icy road. Boehmer instinctively drew his head, like a turtle, farther into the cabin, and one of the armed riders spurred his mount closer to the coach.
“You have business with the marquis?” the man said, more insolently than he would ever have dared in years gone by.
“Official business of the court,” Boehmer said, to put the peasant on his guard.
The man stood on his tiptoes to survey the inside of the carriage, where Boehmer sat with a cashmere rug across his lap and Bassenge was filling his pipe with tobacco. The man nodded, as if this explained the armed riders, and said, “He is expecting you?”
“I don’t see where that’s any of your business,” Boehmer said, in a voice that he tried to make more forceful than he felt.
“The marquis makes it my business. He likes his privacy, and I help him to keep it.”
Bassenge, putting his pipe on the seat, seemed to divine what was going on before his partner did. Taking several francs from his pocket, he leaned toward the window and handed them to the man with the hatchet. “We thank you for your help, citizen.”
The man took the coins, rolled them around in his closed fist, then said, “Take the turn to the left. About three more kilometers. You’ll see the gatehouse.” Glancing up at the darkening sky, he said, “But I’d hurry if I were you.”
Boehmer did not know what precisely the vague threat implied, but he did not care to find out. “If you and your friends can clear the road, we would be grateful.”
“You would?” the man replied, and Bassenge, shaking his head at Boehmer’s slow-wittedness, again handed out a few more francs.
When the carcass had been dragged off the road, and the carriage was again on its way, Bassenge, a tall lean man with a sepulchral voice, chuckled. “To think that you still don’t understand what greases the wheels.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Money, my dear fellow. Money greases the wheels of the world.”