N o royal family, not even today's Mountbatten-Windsors engaged in their
current undignified scramble for media coverage, has rivalled the Bonapartes in the field of self-promotion. Launching his Second Empire, Napoleon III had evident- ly learned a thing or two from his celebrat- ed uncle, whose absolute mastery of hype on a Wagnerian scale kept the mills of self- publicity grinding even in the melancholy remoteness of exile on Saint Helena. Yet after reading the early chapters of Rupert Christiansen's savagely witty account of imperial collapse, Franco-Prussian War, Siege, Commune and recovery, you wonder how anybody, let alone a nation as habitu- ally cynical as the French, was able to take the second instalment of Bonapartism, a grotesque amalgam of window-dressing and amateur dramatics, so seriously for nearly 20 years. While the Emperor, secretive, morally opaque and sexually insatiable, and his consort, frigid, Worth-upholstered Eugenie, flattered a parvenu court at Compiegne with massive hunting parties a la battue, charades, spelling-bees, dictees by Merimee and microscope demonstrations from Pasteur, the illusion of imperial achievement was more compellingly sus- tamed by Baron Haussmann's phenomenal essay in social engineering through the recreation of Paris as a thoroughly modern metropolis. In less than two decades the city had been ringed with railway termini, dotted with Brands magasins, chain-stores, self-service restaurants, new bridges, new schools, new squares, and overscored with 85 miles of boulevard. The effect of Haussmannisation, as Christiansen darkly points out, was not simply to introduce a traumatic boredom into the lives of Parisians satiated with con- tinuous urban upheaval, but to make the dimensions of Paris itself intolerable to all but the British and American tourist armies arriving to sample the salmon may- onnaise at Velour, the leg-show of the Opera ballet and a rendezvous with a grisette, an insoumise or a grande horizontale. As the perfect embodiment of Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish and his team are called in to investigate the death of Gerard Etienne, the good-looking, hard-nosed chairman of the old-fashioned, privately owned publishing house, Peverell Press. It is not initially clear (except to the reader who can see it coming) whether Gerard's death is murder or accident, although Dalgleish does know that the firm is already contending with the suicide of one of its editors and a malicious practical joker out to embarrass the company and make it look incompetent. To temporary secretary Mandy Price (who is the unlucky discoverer of two of the four bodies that punctuate the narrative), her fellow employees seemed an odd bunch right from the start. The Peverell Press, founded
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