The room smelled of old paper and new money. Both, in Édouard Maillart's experience, were easy to fabricate.
"Shall we begin?" said the curator, a man whose name Édouard had already forgotten. He laid the letter on the table with the reverence people reserve for things they cannot afford to have be worthless.
Édouard adjusted his glasses. Across from him, Claire Fontaine — Doctor Fontaine now, he supposed — opened her notebook. She'd been twenty-three when he'd last seen her, cataloging his reference library without knowing what it was really for. Now she was the foremost Napoleonic handwriting analyst in Europe. He'd read her monograph. It was excellent. It was, in several key passages, built on principles he'd taught her while pretending to teach her something else.
The third panelist was the problem. Nadia Berger, twenty-eight, employed by the Bibliothèque nationale, with the kind of quiet intensity that suggested she slept poorly and read constantly. She had not yet spoken. She was looking at the letter the way a cat watches a door it hasn't decided to walk through.
"The provenance chain is documented in your packets," the curator said. "Pages four through nine."
"Yes," said Claire. "Rather convenient, isn't it? An unbroken chain from a Corsican estate sale in 1987."
Édouard said nothing. The estate sale had been real. He'd attended it himself, bought three unremarkable documents, and returned one remarkable forgery to the collection through a dealer who asked very few questions.
"The hand is convincing," Claire continued. "The pressure patterns are consistent with Napoleon's late-period correspondence. The emotional register is — unusual."
"Unusual how?" asked the curator.
"It's too good," said Nadia Berger, speaking for the first time.
The room paused.
"Too good?" the curator repeated.
"Napoleon wrote to Josephine with urgency. Possessiveness. Even desperation. But he was not —" She hesitated. "He was not eloquent about tenderness. This letter is."
Édouard felt something tighten behind his ribs. Not fear. Recognition.
"That's a subjective literary judgment," Claire said carefully, "not a forensic one."
"No," Nadia agreed. "It isn't forensic. But it's true."
Claire turned to Édouard. "You've been quiet, Professor Maillart. You authenticated the Talleyrand correspondence in '04. What's your initial read?"
He looked at the letter. His letter. Thirty years ago, he had sat in a rented room in Lyon with period-appropriate ink he'd mixed himself, paper he'd aged with a process involving weak tea and patience, and he had written what Napoleon should have written. What Napoleon, had he been a slightly different man — less vain, less strategic, more willing to be destroyed by what he felt — would have written.
It was the best thing he'd ever made. Not because it was undetectable, though it was. Because for three pages, a man who'd conquered Europe finally learned how to surrender.
"The ink oxidation is correct for the period," Édouard said. "The paper stock is consistent."
"We know that," Nadia said. Not rudely. Precisely.
"The fold patterns suggest storage conditions typical of early nineteenth-century personal correspondence," he continued.
"Professor." Nadia leaned forward slightly. "Do you think it's authentic?"
Claire was watching him now too. Her pen was still.
He could authenticate it. He had built it to withstand exactly this. Thirty years of scholarship had failed to touch it. Claire's own methodology, descended from his, would confirm it. The letter would enter the canon. Napoleon's most beautiful letter, written by a man who understood longing better than Napoleon and expressed it better than Édouard ever could under his own name.
Or he could break it. One observation about the ink mixture — a flaw only he knew existed, a single trace element he'd been unable to source in 1993 — and the letter would unravel. His masterwork. The only love letter he'd ever written, dressed in another man's hand because he'd never trusted his own.
"I think," Édouard said slowly, "that we should consider the possibility that authenticity is not binary."
"It is, actually," said Nadia. "Either Napoleon wrote it or he didn't."
"Yes," Édouard said. "Of course you're right."
He looked at the letter one last time. The passage about Josephine's hands. The closing line he'd rewritten forty times until it carried the precise weight of a man who knows he will not be forgiven but cannot stop asking.
"It's genuine," he said.
Claire nodded and wrote something in her notebook.
Nadia said nothing. She studied him for a moment with an expression he couldn't quite place, and then she turned back to the letter and initialed the authentication form.
The curator exhaled.
Later, outside, the autumn air sharp against his face, Édouard realized what Nadia's expression had been.
It was the same look Claire had described in her monograph — the tell she'd identified in Napoleon's authentic letters, the thing that separated the real from the fabricated. She'd called it, in a phrase Édouard had once used in a lecture he thought no one remembered: the unmistakable residue of a man who knows he is lying to himself.
She had seen it. Not in the letter.
In him.