I do not think that a visit to the Château de Cygne could be of interest to you therefore, and the house itself will in any case be closed for major repairs this summer.

No doubt, monsieur, you have French ancestry. But if you wish to find connections in France, you will have to look elsewhere.

He put down his pen with grim satisfaction. That should dispose of Monsieur Dessignes, whoever he might be. He signed and sealed the letter and laid it on the desk. A task completed. It was just four o’clock.

At the very moment that he sealed the letter, a pale, well-dressed lady reached the door of the house near the boulevard de Clichy where Marc Blanchard had his studio. She looked about her uncertainly, not having been there before. But the address was correct.

Wondering what it would be like to have her portrait painted, Hortense Ney started up the stairs.

Chapter Ten

•  1572  •

He was just a very ordinary little boy. No one would have imagined that he’d change the history of his family by opening a window when he had been told that he must not.

On this Monday morning, the eighteenth day of August in the year of Our Lord 1572, young Simon Renard was excited. His father’s cousin Guy was about to arrive. And then Uncle Guy, as he called him, and his father were going to take him to see the royal wedding. He’d never seen such a thing before.

And he was doubly curious after his father had told him: “This is the strangest royal wedding that’s ever been seen in Paris.”

Simon was eight years old, and he lived with his parents, Pierre and Suzanne Renard, in a small house that lay down an alley of storehouses, near the fortress of the Bastille.

Simon liked the old Bastille. He knew that long ago it was put there to protect the Saint-Antoine city gate from the English. But there was no fear of English attacks nowadays.

In the previous century, cunning King Louis XI had seen to that. He’d wanted to make his kingdom into a mighty country, and he’d succeeded. While in England, the Plantagenets had torn each other to pieces in the Wars of the Roses, King Louis, by fighting, and by devious diplomacy, had spun his spider’s web until he’d gathered all the great independent regions—Normandy and Brittany in the north, Aquitaine and warm Provence in the south, mighty Burgundy in the east—into the huge, hexagonal entity that would be known henceforth by the single name of France. For a while the English had kept one town, the northern port of Calais. But now they’d lost that too. The English threat was over. Paris was safe. And the Bastille just seemed a friendly old place to the little boy.

He’d also grown up with a deeper security.