“I thought you said you weren’t planning on renovating it,” Cady teased.
He gave her an enigmatic smile and a subtle shrug.
Guido joined them. “I keep telling him, he has to work on that place himself, with his own hands.” He held his own meaty hands up as examples. “That’swhat will bring a place like the château back from the brink.”
Jean-Paul kept his eyes on the book, a thoughtful look on his face.
When they returned to the darkroom to study the negatives, a surprising number of the images seemed to have come out.
“Now comes the fun part,” Cady said. “Hit that light switch, will you?”
The red light came on. Using the enlarger, she projected the images onto photographic paper.
The pans were all laid out in order, their appropriate chemical baths within. Cady showed Jean-Paul how to use tongs to gently dip the first page in the developer, and watched the magic of the photograph appearing.
The first several images were of workers in the fields. The edges had been compromised, but the imperfections added to the sense of history.
“This reminds me of playing with lemon juice when we were kids, and calling it ‘invisible ink,’” said Jean-Paul, as he brought another print out of the bath.
“It really is astonishing. It still takes my breath away. In early photography they figured out how to make the images appear, but not how to keep them fixed. So photos would appear only briefly before fading away. Imagine how frustrating.”
She hung the photos up on the wire overhead, where they dripped into a shallow pan.
“Memories from a hundred years ago, or more,” Jean-Paul said, perusing them.“Merci beaucoup,Yves Clement.”
“Check out this one,” Cady said. She held a print of a handsome, dark-haired man leaning back against a carousel cat.
“That must have been the apprentice named Léon Morice,” said Jean-Paul. “He was identified in some of the other photos we have, though this is the only close-up I’ve seen.”
“I thought it was a young Fabrice, at first,” said Cady.
“Fabrice was blond—that’s one thing that saved him in World War II.”
“I don’t mean in coloring, but in facial structure.”
Jean-Paul studied the photo over her shoulder. “I don’t see it.”
“It’s not the way he looks now, of course,” she said, trying to ignore the electric feeling of Jean-Paul pressing, just barely, against her back. “But the photo on his book jacket looks a lot like this. I’ve got the book at the château; I’ll show you when we go back.”
The next several photos showed half a dozen workers laboring over the carousel, including a woman who looked like a chubbier version of the woman in the photo Cady had found in Gus-the-rabbit.
“I wish there could be a way to figure out who she was. It’s driving me crazy.”
Jean-Paul shook his head. “There was no listing of a woman working for Bayol. I checked. She might have been a servant of some kind, or a maid at the estate who pitched in.”
“Maybe,” Cady said, still wondering as she moved on to the next picture, which was taken from a different film cartridge.
“Oh, look, do you suppose this is Marc-Antoine as a teenager?”
“That’s Josephine, for sure, so it probably is. These must have been photos from much later.”
They were smiling, and the first few looked like they were fooling around; the last two were more formal portraits of mother and son.
“These are great,” said Jean-Paul. “Up until now we only had earlier portraits of Josephine, and none of Marc-Antoine past the baby stage.”
“Maybe these will interest Fabrice; they’re his father, after all.” Cady slipped the next piece of paper into the chemical bath. “Jean-Paul, check this out. It looks like a fire in the carousel building.”
Three sequential photos seemed to have been taken from an upper-floor window of the château, looking down over the building. The first showed just a subtle glow, but in the next two the fire had grown.
