Free The Cthulhu Encryption by Brian Stableford Page B

unwelcome attention and curiosity. I only hope that Père France’s obsessive bibliotaph is in Brittany just now, not in Paris. Once he scents her name….”
    “If it’s scent that you’re worried about,” I observed, “perhaps we should have left her where she was. The keenest bloodhound in the world could not have detected her there.”
    “I was speaking metaphorically,” the notorious pedant said.
    “I had already inferred that,” I told him. “Let’s go downstairs and make our preparations shall we? There’s fresh bread in the larder, so we can have a bite to eat as well.”
    “Tom Linn,” he said, “your every word is music.”
    “My memory’s a little sketchy,” I said, “but didn’t Thomas the Rhymer’s story end tragically—just like Tristan’s?”
    “Folklore is full of sticky ends,” he told me. “And yet, somehow, fairyland always seems so pleasant and peaceful in modern dreams and hallucinations. Perhaps Monsieur Leuret can explain the psychology of that to us, after dinner tonight.”
    “Perhaps,” I agreed.

CHAPTER FIVE
    A PHILOSOPHICAL DISAGREEMENT
    Leuret arrived very punctually at seven o’clock, scrupulously well-dressed and very self-composed. I got the impression that he was glad to be away from Bicêtre, and did not often have the opportunity. I could understand why, even though he was a gentleman through and through, and I fully expected him to by an amiable dinner-companion. The kinds of people who plan dinner-parties as a matter of routine would probably think twice about inviting the director of a lunatic asylum as a guest—especially a reformist who might wax lyrical about the humane treatment of the insane, or the danger posed to the cause of progress by Romantic poets and story-tellers.
    Chapelain was late, and did not arrive until near quarter past, but that did not delay the serving of the soup unduly. Madame Lacuzon was still in the house, “helping out,” but she had been appointed to sit with the sleeping Ysolde Leonys, leaving the preparation of the meal and the actual serving to the Bihans—who did a very creditable job, in my opinion, given that it was not a kind of service to which they were accustomed. The soup was first-rate, and the magret de canard served as the centrepiece of the entrée was not far short of excellent. I blessed the circumstances that had led me to hire servants, for I dread to think what the meal might have amounted to had I still been living alone.
    As convention required, the talk prior to the serving of the coffee—for which we would retire to the smoking-room—was conspicuously general, light and polite. That was in spite of the impatience of all concerned, and I have to admit that it carried a certain underlying edge by virtue of a measurable tension between Leuret and Chapelain, on the one hand, and Leuret and Dupin, on the other. The first two obviously respected one another, and would probably have been unhesitating in naming one another as good friends, but the philosophical differences between them had been further sharpened by the day’s extraordinary events, while the second two did not, as yet, know quite what to make of one another.
    As the soirée’s host, I suppose I might and ought to have deflected the conversation away from any matters likely to prove controversial, but given that Leuret was an exceedingly determined psychologist, Chapelain an exceedingly devoted mesmerist physician and that Auguste Dupin was exceedingly eager to involve himself in their differences of opinion, it would have needed a conversationalist far more talented than myself to deviate them in the slightest.
    As I have said before, the mid-1840s was a time of rivalries, when intellectual battle-lines were being drawn and forces readying themselves for conflict. Bellicosity of every kind was in the Parisian air just then, even though it was to be more than a year before actual barricades went up in the streets and political Revolution