Sacré Bleu

They spent another hour picking the snails from gravestones and the Professeur showed Lucien how to follow pearlescent slime trails under the bushes and leaves to track down the snails who were already finding their hiding places for the day.

“They would taste better if you could put them in a tub filled with cornmeal, let them live on that for a week to purge the earth from their bodies. Alas, there is no corn. But you should only eat Foucault’s snail, anyway.”

The Professeur had insisted that Lucien keep the snail they’d plucked from Foucault’s tomb in his pocket and made him promise he alone would eat it so he could absorb some of the snail-eaten soul of the great scientist.

“Now,” said the Professeur, “if we could get some snails from Père-Lachaise Cemetery, there are some great thinkers buried there. Most of these you’ve collected graze on the souls of scalawags.”

Lucien was happy that he had nearly filled his bucket with snails, but as he followed the old man back to his little house in the Maquis, he was beginning to suspect that his benefactor might be a madman.

The Professeur showed Lucien into the two-room cabin. Most of the hard-packed dirt floor of the front room was taken up by what looked like a small racetrack. Against one wall were two cages, each about knee-high. One was full of mice, the other rats. There were perhaps a dozen of each species.

“Horses and charioteers,” said the Professeur.

“Rats,” Lucien said with a shudder. There, in the cage, they seemed much smaller, less dangerous, less likely to rape and kill him than the ones he’d encountered in the wild.

“I’m training them to perform,” said the Professeur. He reached into the larger cage and retrieved one of the rats, who seemed completely unbothered by being handled and simply sniffed at the old man’s hand as if looking for food.

“I am going to teach them to perform the chariot-race scene from the novel Ben-Hur,” said the Professeur. “The rats shall be my horses and the mice my charioteers.”

Lucien didn’t know what to say, but then he noticed that there were, indeed, six little chariots lined up along one side of the oval track.

“I will train them and then take my spectacle to Place Pigalle and charge people to watch the races. There may even be wagering.”

“Wagering,” Lucien repeated, trying to mimic the enthusiasm in the Professeur’s voice.

“You have to reward them when they do what you want. I tried punishing them when they misbehaved, but the hammer seemed to crush their spirit.”

Lucien watched as the Professeur hitched the rat to a chariot, then set him down and retrieved a mouse from the other cage and placed him in the chariot. The mouse immediately wandered off and started looking for an opening in the wall around the track. Soon there were rats and mice running all around the little arena, and two rats had even crawled over the wall and were dragging their chariots around the outer walls of the house, looking for an opening to the outside. The Professeur engaged Lucien’s help, and they chased and replaced rat horses and mouse drivers until the two of them were kneeling over the tiny hippodrome, gasping for breath.

“Oh, they mocked me,” said the Professeur. “Called me a loon. But when I achieve the spectacle, I shall be hailed as a genius. I have eaten Foucault’s snails as well, you know?”

“Pardon, monsieur, but they may call you a loon anyway.”

“Do you think me a loon, Lucien?” the Professeur asked with the same schoolmaster’s tone with which he had asked every other question.

Fortunately, he was asking the baker boy of Montmartre, a place where loons tended to congregate, and whose father had taught him that great men were often eccentric, unpredictable, and enigmatic, and just because we did not understand the path they chose, we should not doubt their vision.

“I think you are a genius, monsieur, even if you are a loon.”

The Professeur scratched his bald head with a rat as he considered the answer, then shrugged. “Well, I have my medal anyway. You should get your snails to Madame Jacob. Tomorrow you can return and help me teach the mice to hold the reins. Come, I’ll show you where to catch meat for your father’s pâtés.”

MADAME JACOB HAD NOT BEEN IMPRESSED THAT LUCIEN’S SNAILS HAD FED ON the souls of geniuses, but she did give him the three rat traps she promised, as well as a braid of garlic for his father. The traps were actually little cages, cast in bronze, with a round port in the side where a rat might enter and a spring mechanism that snapped the port shut when the rat stepped on a plate inside. A brass chain with an anchor ring was attached to each trap.

The Professeur had shown Lucien the entrance to the old gypsum mine, concealed beneath a thicket of laurel bushes just above the Maquis. Lucien often played in the Maquis with his friends, and he knew the bushes, and that there were blackberry brambles with vicious thorns woven through the laurel. The thorns were probably the only reason the bushes hadn’t long ago been hacked up for fuel and the mine filled in like the others.

“You’ll need to go far enough into the mine for it to be dark,” said the Professeur. “Rats are nocturnal and prefer to move in the dark. But don’t go too far in. It may not be safe from cave-in. Just past where the light reaches. That is where I caught my charges.”

The next morning, Lucien carried his heavy traps into the mouth of the mine and when the light stopped, so did he. While trying not to look at the spiderwebs overhead or stare into the pitch-black of the mine, he baited each of the traps with a tiny strip of rind from a wheel of camembert cheese, then closed the lids and wound the clockwork mechanism that set the trap, just as Madame Jacob had taught him. He pushed each trap into the dark against the mine wall, at which point the panic overcame him and he ran out of the mine as if pursued by demons.

He resolved that the next day, when it came time to retrieve his traps, he would bring a candle, and perhaps Father’s butcher knife, and maybe he could borrow one of the cannons from the church if they weren’t using it, but instead he brought his friend Jacques, lured him with a slight exaggeration of the value of what they would be retrieving from the mine.

“Pirate treasure,” said Lucien.

“Will there be swords?” asked Jacques. “I would like a sword.”

“Just hold the candle. I have to find my traps.”

“But why are you looking for rat traps?”