Sepulchre by Kate Mosse Page A

park, tawny ponies roped in a line carried excited children up and down the gravel.
    Meredith took plenty of photographs. Apart from the clothes and the cell phones, the Parc Monceau seemed hardly changed from the photos she'd seen of a hundred years ago. Everything was so vivid, so clear.
    Having spent half an hour wandering in contented circles through the park, she finally made her way out and found herself at the subway station on the north side. The sign MONCEAU LIGNE NO. 2 above the entrance, with its elaborate art nouveau design, looked like it might have been there since Debussy's day. She took a couple more shots, then crossed the busy intersection and walked into the 17th arrondissement. The neighbourhood seemed drab after the fin de siecle elegance of the park. The stores looked cheap, the buildings unremarkable.
    She found the rue Cardinet easily and identified the block where, more than a hundred years ago, Lilly and Debussy had lived. She felt a prick of disappointment. From the outside, it too was plain, nondescript, dull. There was no character to it. In letters, Debussy talked of the modest apartment with affection, describing the watercolours on the walls, the oil paintings. For a moment she thought of ringing the bell and seeing if she could persuade anyone to let her in to look around. It was here, after all, that Debussy had written the work that had transformed his life, his only opera, Pelleas et Melisande. It was here that Lilly Debussy had shot herself, days before their fifth wedding anniversary, when she realised Debussy was leaving her for good to set up home with the mother of one of his piano pupils, Emma Bardac. Lilly survived, but the surgeons never got the bullet out. Meredith thought the fact that she had lived the rest of her life with a physical reminder of Debussy lodged inside her was, somehow, the most poignant - although awful - part of the whole story.
    She raised her hand to the silver intercom, then checked herself. Meredith believed in the spirit of place. She bought into the idea that, in certain circumstances, a kind of echo of the past might remain. But here in the city, too much time had passed. Even if the bricks and mortar were the same, in a hundred years of bustling human life there'd be too many ghosts. Too many footsteps, too many shadows.
    She turned her back on the rue Cardinet. She got out the map, folded it into a neat square, and went in search of the Square Claude Debussy. When she found it, it was, if anything, a bigger let-down. Ugly, brutalist six-storey buildings, with a thrift store on the corner. And there was no one about. The whole place had an air of abandonment. Thinking of the elegant statues in the Parc Monceau celebrating writers, painters, architects, Meredith felt a spurt of anger that Paris had honoured one of its most famous sons so shabbily.
    Meredith headed back to the busy Boulevard des Batignolles. In all the literature she'd read about Paris in the 1890s, Debussy's Paris, it sounded a pretty dangerous place, away from the grand boulevards and avenues. There were districts - the quartiers perdus - to be avoided.
    She continued on into the rue de Londres, where Gaby and Debussy had rented their first apartment in January 1892, wanting to feel something, some nostalgia, some sense of place, but getting nothing. She checked the numbers, coming to a halt where Debussy's home should have been. Meredith stepped back, pulled out her notebook to confirm she'd got the number right, and then frowned. Not my day.
    In the past hundred years, it looked like the building had been swallowed up by the Gare Saint-Lazare. The station had grown and grown, encroaching on the surrounding streets. There wasn't anything here to link the old days with the new. There wasn't even anything worth photographing. Just an absence.
Meredith looked around and saw a small restaurant on the opposite side of the street, Le Petit Chablisien. She needed food. Most of all, she needed a