Baisemeaux's Books

The governor of the Bastille kept his accounts in a hand so neat it might have belonged to a notary, and he took true, private pride in the neatness, since it was, in his own estimation, the one unimpeachable feature of an office that required him, on a fairly regular basis, to do things he preferred not to examine too closely in any other light.

Baisemeaux had purchased his position, in the ordinary fashion by which such positions were purchased, and had spent the years since discovering that the purchase price was merely the entry fee to an ongoing and considerably more expensive game. A governor of the Bastille was expected to maintain the fortress, feed its prisoners at a standard commensurate with their rank, entertain the occasional visiting dignitary, and do all of this on an allowance from the crown that Baisemeaux had calculated, with the same careful arithmetic he brought to everything, fell consistently and predictably short of what the office required.

He had discovered, fairly early in his tenure, that the shortfall could be managed, discreetly, through a practice he preferred to think of as flexible accommodation rather than what a less charitable observer might call it. A prisoner of sufficient means, housed under conditions somewhat more comfortable than his official allowance strictly authorized, could be persuaded to contribute toward the difference: a private arrangement, conducted with the same careful courtesy Baisemeaux brought to every transaction, that left the prisoner better fed and better lodged than the crown's own allowance would provide, and left Baisemeaux's ledgers, both the official one and the private one he kept folded inside it, considerably closer to balanced than they would otherwise have been.

He did not consider this corruption, exactly, in the moments when he considered it at all. He considered it a reasonable private solution to an unreasonable public problem, no different in kind from the countless small accommodations every officeholder in France made to bridge the gap between what the crown authorized and what an office required to function. He kept the two ledgers with equal, scrupulous care, and he had trained himself, over years of practice, not to dwell too long on the specific quality of arithmetic that let him hold both simultaneously in his own conscience without apparent difficulty.

What troubled him, and it troubled him more than he generally permitted himself to acknowledge, even in the privacy of his own study late at night, with the second ledger open before him and a glass of wine he'd told himself, an hour earlier, would be his last, was not the arrangement itself but the widening gap between the prisoners he was accustomed to accommodating and the specific and increasingly urgent requests now arriving from a source Baisemeaux had learned, through years of careful self-preservation, not to question too closely.

An old friend from his soldiering days, now risen to considerable ecclesiastical eminence, had begun making requests of a nature Baisemeaux found himself unable to categorize using his usual private accounting. Not the ordinary comfortable accommodation of a paying prisoner, but something closer to direct interference with the fortress's most carefully guarded operations: questions about a particular cell, about a particular prisoner's exact routine, about which guards could be relied upon for which hours, delivered with the easy confidence of a man who had never once, in his long friendship with Baisemeaux, been refused anything he'd asked for.

Baisemeaux told himself, each time a new request arrived, that he was merely extending to an old friend the same reasonable accommodation he extended to any sufficiently motivated party, and that the specific nature of what was being requested was not, strictly speaking, his concern so long as the fortress's official records remained in order. He told himself this with less and less conviction each time, and he noticed, with the same scrupulous private attention he brought to his ledgers, that his hand had begun, of late, to shake very slightly when he made the entries recording his friend's visits, entries that grew, month by month, more carefully vague about their actual purpose, until Baisemeaux found he could no longer entirely reconstruct, from his own records, precisely what had been discussed or arranged on any given occasion.

He did not ask his old friend, directly, what was actually being planned. He told himself this restraint was discretion, the same professional discretion that had served him well across two ledgers and many years of careful accommodation. He suspected, in the honest hours before dawn when the wine had worn off and sleep had not yet arrived, that it was something closer to cowardice: a governor who had built an entire career on not looking too closely at his own arrangements, now presented with an arrangement large enough that not looking too closely might, for the first time in his tenure, carry consequences considerably graver than a discrepancy between two private ledgers.

He kept both books anyway, with the same careful hand, and told himself, each night he closed them and locked them away, that whatever his old friend was ultimately planning, a governor's job was to maintain his fortress and balance his accounts, and that the larger questions, questions of loyalty, of conscience, of what exactly he was helping to make possible within walls he had sworn to guard, belonged, properly, to men with the standing and the courage to ask them. Baisemeaux, by his own careful private accounting, had never claimed to be such a man, and he found, in the years that followed, that this admission cost him considerably more sleep than either ledger ever had.