By the first of July, stirred by the song Tout ira bien ensemble ("All Will Be Well Together"), more than two hundred and fifty thousand citizens had joined the voluntary labour at the site of the National Altar. Craftsmen, peasants, soldiers, and the men and women of Paris all bore their shovels and picks, streaming from every quarter of the city toward the Champ-de-Mars in the southwest. Under the patient direction of gendarmes and policemen who had chosen to work overtime without pay, they elected provisional captains, formed themselves into three orderly columns, and marched in batches toward the site.
Every patriot worked to exhaustion, digging through the hardened earth and carting it away by wheelbarrow. Children came too; since no one under ten was permitted to dig, they busied themselves distributing drinks, fruit, and food donated by local merchants to the labourers.
Mayor Bailly came—he and his secretary hauled five barrels of water in one go.
General Lafayette came—together with a soldier he raised thirty-five logs upright.
Even the King and Queen came, bringing five hundred bottles of wine and champagne for the thirsty workers.
Every visitor to the site, regardless of rank, laboured for at least an hour. None were exempt. Only when sweat soaked their garments and earth covered their sleeves did they leave, smiling with satisfaction.
André came too. As the instigator of the whole affair, he had been "escorted" by Robespierre and Prieur from the very first day, compelled to work three hours daily. For an entire week—until the seventh of July—the main structure of the National Altar was miraculously completed ahead of schedule.
"I'm going to die," was André's habitual declaration each time he returned home, after which he would collapse on the sofa and sleep soundly until Meldar, after much effort, managed to rouse the tax prosecutor for supper.
After two days and nights of rest, André finally felt his strength returning. It was then that he received two invitations to salon gatherings.
The first came from the ladies—a society of noblewomen—conveyed through the wife of a magistrate on her own behalf. Since that spring night in May when passion had first united them, André had often met her in secret, one or two times each week. The vigorous young prosecutor had thoroughly revived what had once been a languishing heart; their encounters ranged from the fashionable tryst in carriage, on horseback, or aboard a boat, to wild forays in the woods of Boulogne and Vincennes.
The salon met on the Île Saint-Louis, in the garden villa of Judge Vinault. The judge himself was a dull, unpoetic man who never intruded upon such gatherings, and André conveniently filled the vacancy of the absent host. The women of this circle were wives or sisters of judges, prosecutors, and lawyers from the Palais de Justice. Their pleasures were poetry and prose, fashion and cuisine; politics seldom entered their talk.
When André entered the magistrate's wife's bedchamber, the room was full of laughter and compliments for the hostess. A young man, lively and handsome, was recounting scenes from the Champ-de-Mars in playful tones, provoking bursts of amusement. Sunlight pouring through the windows caught on the Bohemian crystal chandelier, scattering into prismatic colours.
"I saw a black-robed tonsured cleric and a wig-maker in a tailcoat lift a water barrel together; a soot-covered coalman fought with a pale-faced notary over the use of a shovel. Though Bishop Sieyès and Father Maury refused to speak to each other, they nevertheless hauled five cartloads side by side. Yet what impressed me most was the most beautiful goddess of them all, draped in a gown light as gossamer and a tricolour sash—the loveliest woman in Paris, who now sits before me." As he spoke, the young man reached for the lady's delicate hand to kiss it, but caught only air.
The magistrate's wife had already noticed her lover's faint smile. She rose at once, and amid glances of envy and resentment, enveloped in a breath of violet perfume, gently embraced André.
Since taking the prosecutor as her lover, the lady had inspired him to write over a dozen poems in three months—To the Sea, The Late-Blooming Flower, You and Thou, When I Enfold You in My Arms, Enough, My Dearest, My Name, My Friend, Time Waits for No One, and If Life Deceives You.
Though few in number, André's poems were exquisite, and swiftly circulated among the salons of Parisian women, then throughout France itself. The last of them—If Life Deceives You—even crossed the Channel and the Rhine, sung in noble circles from London and Rotterdam to Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.
The time-traveller had chosen Pushkin's verses for practical reasons: first, many of them had been written in French originally, saving him the trouble of translation and rhyme; and second, such romantic melancholy suited perfectly the languid souls of secluded wives—a weapon unfailing in affairs of seduction.
"Monsieur Franck, the ladies await your new work," the same young lawyer said challengingly. He was an elegant creature with small red lips. Though the hostess had rebuffed his advances repeatedly, he persisted, now casting a jealous glare at André.
Such pests André rarely deigned to notice—but when provoked, they had to be crushed. He gave the lawyer a cold glance. "And who might you be?"
"Merlin-Hill, of one of Lyon's oldest families, Monsieur le Procureur," the young man replied proudly.
"Oh? Never heard of it. What rank of creature would that make you?" André's disdain was so open that Merlin nearly called for a duel. But reason restrained him: he knew the prosecutor's infamous habits. Any challenger found himself within ten minutes arrested by the patrol for "disturbing public order" and sent to break stones for a month.
"André, let us hear your latest poem," the magistrate's wife interposed, rescuing the moment. With her arm lightly draped over his shoulder, her eyes traced the sculpted lines of his body, her silver earrings trembling in the sunlight.
André nodded, glanced about the room, and noticed upon the rose-coloured wall a vase of fresh French daisies—marguerites, sharing the lady's name.
"To Marguerite," he began, picking one of the still-living blooms and breathing in its scent before presenting it to her:
"I love you, and say nothing; I only watch you smile from afar.
I love you, and need no proof of what you feel for me.
I cherish my secret and the sweet sadness that is not pain.
I swear: I love you while renouncing you—without hope, yet not without happiness.
For to remember is itself a joy."
This poem, titled Marguerite, was adapted from Musset's À Ninon—the kind of tender melancholy that pierced straight to the heart of a restless woman.
As André's voice fell, the lady's eyes glimmered, near tears. When his arm brushed her shoulder, she could no longer restrain herself. Before the stunned assembly, she rose and left the room with him, ascending together to a cluttered attic.
Moments later, the air above the salon filled with the heavy breathing of a man and the soft sighs of a woman.
…
In his former life, someone had once calculated that a single act of love equalled twenty minutes of running; the traveler (André) swore he had just run for over an hour. Remembering another engagement, he hastily kissed the lady farewell and descended to his carriage, instructing the driver to head for the Left Bank—toward a café near the Jardin des Plantes and the Library of the Academy.
That afternoon, Fourier, newly appointed as lecturer at the Sorbonne, was hosting a scientific salon to thank the academicians who had supported him. André had not wished to come—his ferocious prosecutions of the tax-farmers had alienated many learned men—but Fourier's earnest request left him no choice. He promised to arrive promptly at four.
When the prosecutor entered the library café with Fourier at his side, only a few—Laplace and Fourcroy among them—rose to greet him. Out of scholarly restraint, none were openly hostile, yet they kept to their groups around a large blackboard, debating a mathematical problem.
Fourier, as host, grew visibly awkward. He tried to present his patron to the most eminent figure present—Condorcet—but the academician merely gave a cold glance and, without a word, turned his back on André's outstretched hand.
"Bloody fools, think I'm a tame cat?" André cursed inwardly. Then, emboldened by irritation, he thought: You may outstrip me in calculus or geometry by a century, but in the art of spectacle, I can shame you for two hundred years to come.
Without hesitation, he strode into the mathematicians' circle, seized a piece of chalk from a professor about to demonstrate an algorithm, and sketched a rough map of Paris upon the blank board—forty-eight districts outlined and numbered one to forty-eight.
Raising his voice above their protests, he said, "The ignorant André has a small mathematical riddle for you. I discovered it while studying at the University of Reims and have failed these six years to prove it logically. I call it the Four-Colour Problem.
That is: on any map, four colours suffice so that no two adjacent regions share the same colour. In other words, four colours are enough to mark every district without confusion."
Taking white, red, blue, and yellow chalks, André began colouring the districts. At first, the scholars watched with mild contempt. By the twentieth region their expressions grew serious; by the thirtieth, each was silently calculating. When the last district was filled, the hall had fallen utterly silent. Every man bent over paper, scribbling furiously, trying to frame a proof.
The Four-Colour Problem—later called the Four-Colour Theorem—would become one of modern mathematics' great unsolved riddles. First proposed in 1852 by an English student, it would resist solution for over a century, its eventual "proof" dependent on computer verification that still failed to satisfy the pure logicians.
For André, the time-traveller, it was the perfect instrument of intellectual mischief—simple, devastating, and guaranteed unsolvable for at least another hundred and sixty years.
Dusting his hands, he spat lightly toward the quiet hall and glanced around with smug amusement. No one looked up. With a shrug, he turned and left—leaving no cloud behind.
As his carriage waited outside, Fourier came running after him, breathless with apologies. André smiled, hesitated, and then confessed:
"After today, you and your friends mustn't torment yourselves with that problem. I admit, my years of study have proved one thing—it cannot be solved. Not this, nor Goldbach's Conjecture either."
But André had underestimated the mathematicians' obsession. Within three days, all of Paris was seized with mania. Scholars and amateurs alike laboured night and day over the "Four-Colour Problem," while a tax-farmer, nursing hatred for André, publicly offered a reward of fifty thousand livres to anyone who could solve it.