The Marble Head

Catherine the Great inherited the archives, and the secretaries and file clerks who were bound to those pages for life went with them. I didn’t want that fate and returned to Paris, with Voltaire’s heart among my belongings.

I worked in the mornings as a calligraphy expert at Siccard House (the second-floor activities had been shut down) and spent my afternoons looking for Clarissa. There was no trace of her or her father anywhere in the city. To a certain extent, I’ve never abandoned the search: even here in this faraway port, whenever newcomers have passed through France, I find them to see if they’ve heard the name Von Knepper.

I only ever came across one witness, and that witness I lost. The night before I left, I was walking along the Seine when a bearded man in rags stepped out in front of me. I had seen him from afar on other occasions: he would stop passersby, show them something he carried in a bag, and let them go. But this time he startled me: for a moment I thought he was going to kill me, so I drew my only weapon, the quill I had used to kill Silas Darel. Despite the beard and the darkness, I recognized Mattioli, but he didn’t seem to know who I was. Showing me the contents of a bag he could barely lift, he asked:

“Have you seen this woman?”

“No,” I replied, in barely a whisper.

“It’s all over then,” the sculptor said, as if his last hope had died with me and there was no one left in the entire city to ask.

He climbed up onto the railing with a familiarity that obviated any sense of danger. Before securing the knot that tied the bag around his neck, he looked at the marble head one last time. I ran to stop him: I too wanted to kiss those icy lips. He didn’t give me a chance. Mattioli embraced the head and jumped into the dark waters. The last image of Clarissa drowned with him.