It was a rainy morning in Paris, and the sound of the rain tapping on the window had not stopped since last night. From the top floor of the History Department at the University of Voltaire, I looked out the window at the peaceful campus. Paris seemed to be in a perpetual state of misty rain, much like Shanghai during the plum rain season.
Originally, I had planned to visit Place de la Concorde and Champs-Élysées today, but the April weather in France disrupted my plans. Instead, I found myself cooped up in the old, supposedly haunted house, waiting out the beautiful Parisian spring. Yu Li didn't come to find me this morning, so I went down to the restaurant alone for breakfast. The English level of the French people was just as bad as mine, so we communicated better through gestures than words.
Yu Li and Professor Orleans were still studying the parchment book together. Left with nothing to do, I decided to open my laptop and connect to the internet using the phone line in the room. The first thing I did was check my email, and I had received more than a dozen new messages in the past few days. Most of them were spam, but one email caught my eye because it was from Lin Hai.
I immediately opened Lin Hai's email, which was several hundred words long, detailing his recent bizarre experiences. After reading this email from China, I was silent in front of my laptop screen for a long time - Lin Hai said that he had entered the Western Art Museum again and Margaret, the protagonist of the painting, had escaped from the painting. He had brought the French princess from four hundred years ago back to his old house, and there was also a ghost named Nochadamas that threatened him at any time.
So many "miracles" happened to him within a few dozen hours after I left Shanghai. Was this real? I was certain that only the best novelist in the world could have come up with such a story.
However, Lin Hai was undoubtedly convinced that all of this was real, witnessed and experienced by him. Although he was aware that his experiences were so unbelievable to outsiders that they would consider him mentally ill or delusional.
Margaret escaped from the painting?
Of course, this was the most unbelievable part. If such a significant event had occurred, the news media would have reported on it. Yes, I could check the news to find out. I quickly accessed a domestic news website and searched for news about the Western Art Museum. Soon, I found several news headlines with the same title: "Queen Margaret's strange disappearance, French paintings encounter 'Metamorphosis'."
The news reads as follows:
"On April 11th, a strange incident occurred at the West Gallery in our city during the exhibition of "Masterpieces from the Musée Saint Louis in France". The 16th-century French court masterpiece "Margaret", which was displayed in the exhibition room, underwent a peculiar transformation. The protagonist of the original painting is Margaret, the famous queen of France in the 16th century. However, on the morning of the 11th, the staff of the West Gallery accidentally discovered that the protagonist of "Margaret" in the oil painting had disappeared. The original location where Margaret should have been in the painting turned into a black mass, and the outline of Margaret in the original painting happened to be the outer edge of the black pattern. It looked like Margaret had walked out of the painting, leaving only a black shadow in her place. The director of the West Gallery expressed disbelief and called it an unprecedented case of a "face-changing" masterpiece in the history of world art. Experts are conducting in-depth research on the painting, and no reasonable explanation has been found yet. This newspaper will continue to report on the "face-changing" incident of the masterpiece."
After reading this incredible news, I was stunned for several minutes. Many media outlets had reported on this news, and it had even become a hot topic of research in the academic world.
Could everything Lin Hai said in his email be true? Did the French princess Margaret from four hundred years ago really walk out of the oil painting and now hiding in Lin Hai's old house?
I left my laptop screen and went to the window to look at the gloomy sky of Paris. I wondered what the weather was like in Shanghai now. I opened the window and listened to the sound of rain outside. I took a few deep breaths. In my writing experience over the past few years, I had encountered several incredible and mysterious events, but this one was just too unbelievable. I had never even heard of the concept of "ghosts in paintings".
I didn't know how to reply to Lin Hai, and I kept pacing in my room until Yuli arrived for lunch.
Yuli took me to the restaurant for lunch, and seeing my troubled expression, he tentatively asked, "Are you upset? Is it because I didn't accompany you out to play?"
Although I was indeed somewhat unhappy, it was mainly because of the email I received in the morning. I shook my head and said, "No, it has nothing to do with you."
Yuli was clearly hungry, and he ate his steak heartily while asking, "Then what's the matter?"
But I didn't answer Yuli. I didn't want him to know what had happened. The matter was too complicated, and I didn't want to involve too many people.
I had said that I didn't like Western food, but Yuli was already accustomed to European life. He skillfully used his knife and fork to eat his medium-rare beef, looking more and more like an ancient Gaul who ate raw meat. I could only order a plate of spaghetti to fill my Chinese stomach, which was said to have been brought back by Marco Polo from the Yuan Dynasty.
After we finished eating, we were silent for a while. I suddenly couldn't help but ask a question, "Yuli, do you believe in ghosts in the world?"
"Ghosts?" Yuli was clearly frightened by my words. "What do you mean?"
"I'm thinking about something now. Can a person travel through four hundred years of time and reach another time and space through some medium?"
"Are you talking about time travel?"
"No, I'm just talking about a phenomenon. Suppose this phenomenon really exists."
Yu Li suddenly lit a cigarette, and the blue smoke swirled around his bare head, as if there were bearings turning inside. He furrowed his brow and said, "I'm sorry, I can't think of it. Why are you asking these questions? Is it related to the parchment manuscript?"
"I can't really say," I turned my head and looked outside the restaurant. The Parisian drizzle was still falling, and from time to time, French girls walked past us in the rain. It was time to bring up the question, "Yu Li, can you do me a favor?"
"Sure, what do you need? Aren't we good friends?"
"Please help me find a painting. It's a work by a French court painter from the 16th century, called 'Margaret,' and the figure in the painting is the Princess Margaret of France at that time."
"Princess Margaret? You mean Queen Margot from Alexandre Dumas' novel?"
"Yes, that's her."
"Well, she was a famous figure in French history. She was the daughter of Queen Catherine de' Medici, the sister of King Charles IX and Henry III, and the queen of the Bourbon Dynasty founder Henry IV. Margaret was notorious for her dissolute lifestyle, but her tragic love affair with the writer de La Mole made countless French girls weep in later years," Yu Li said with a sly smile.
"I know all that, but what I want to find is the painting called 'Margaret.' The author is unknown, but I guess it should be a court painter from the time of Henry III. The painting is in the collection of the Saint Louis Museum in France and is currently on display in China."
But I didn't tell Yu Li about the "transformation" that the painting is currently going through.
"Since it's a 16th-century court oil painting in the Saint Louis Museum, it must be a famous painting in history. Our Voltaire University's art database must have a record of it. I can help you look it up," Yu Li said.
"That's great! What about Professor Orléans?"
"Professor Orléans went out to look for information this afternoon. There are some words in the parchment manuscript that are difficult to decipher, and they haven't been completely deciphered yet. So the professor went to a research institute in Lyon, and he needs some medieval documents from there to compare with the parchment manuscript and hopefully decode the remaining words."
Then, Yu Li took me to the art database of Voltaire University, a brand-new three-story building with a post-modern style that looked extremely out of place among the 19th-century buildings nearby.
Here, detailed information about most of the artworks from ancient Egypt to the present day is collected, and finding a painting here is like finding a needle in a haystack. Yu Li and I searched through the database on the computer, changing more than a dozen keywords, and each time hundreds of pieces of information appeared. We spent a whole afternoon like this, and finally found a record of the oil painting "Margaret."
Yu Li translated the French passage into Chinese for me to hear.
"The oil painting 'Margaret', believed to have been completed around 1574, has an unknown author and is thought to have been painted by a court painter during the reign of King Henry III of France. The painting left the court early on and was recorded to have been held by a certain family in southern France until the French Revolution. During the Robespierre period, the family, who belonged to the Royalist Party and participated in the Southern Royalist Rebellion, was suppressed by the revolutionary party. The painting 'Margaret' was confiscated by the government and later became a private collection of Napoleon Bonaparte, hung in the Fontainebleau Palace. It is rumored that this painting was greatly loved by Josephine, Napoleon's empress. In 1815, Napoleon was defeated in the Battle of Waterloo and exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic, and this painting became a collection of the restored Bourbon royal family of France. In 1830, the July Monarchy replaced the Bourbon dynasty, and the painting was collected by the new King Louis-Philippe. In 1852, the Second French Empire was established, and the painting was collected by Napoleon III. In 1871, during the Paris Commune uprising, the painting left the court and has been held by the Musée de Saint-Louis ever since."
"After listening to this, I remained silent for a long time and nodded my head, 'So the painting's history is so complicated, and even Napoleon's empress Josephine loved it.'"
"Hmm, there's also a picture here."
It turned out that the computer also stored image data of the oil painting 'Margaret'. Although the image in the computer was not very large, it was enough for me to see Margaret's face clearly - this was the first time I had seen her.
Both I and Yuli leaned over the computer screen, looking at Margaret sitting upright in the painting. After a few tens of seconds, I suddenly took a breath and said, "She is indeed a beauty, no wonder three French kings bowed to her."
At this point, Yuli's eyes suddenly became strange, and he said coldly, "I think there's something strange about this painting."
"Where is it strange?"
"I can't explain it clearly, it's just a sensitive intuition. Perhaps it's because I've been with Professor Orleans for too long, facing ancient documents and artworks all day, and have developed a certain spiritual response. In this painting, there seems to be a hidden secret."
"A secret? How do you know?"
Yuli didn't answer immediately, but stared into my eyes for a while. "Why did you look up this painting? Does it have anything to do with the parchment book?"
This sentence immediately stumped me, and I really didn't know how to answer. I could only stutter, "No, I don't know."
Fortunately, Yuli didn't continue to ask. He looked at the computer and said, "Okay, that's all the information about this painting in the art database. Let's go."
We had dinner at the school cafeteria again. I was completely disgusted with the Western food here, so I asked Yuli if there was a Chinese restaurant nearby. He replied that there were several Chinese restaurants nearby, but the food was worse than boxed meals in China, and the prices were equivalent to a three-star hotel in Shanghai. This immediately dispelled my desire to go out and eat Chinese food, and I could only accompany Yuli to eat the undercooked beef.
Finishing the meal as if it were a punishment, I looked out at the endless Parisian night rain and suddenly thought of a certain name. So, I turned back and hesitantly asked, "Yuli, have you heard of this person - Nostradamus?"
"Nostradamus? Of course, I even wrote a paper about him. Nostradamus was a famous 16th-century French prophet who wrote a book called 'Centuries,' which accurately predicted many significant events in history," Yuli replied.
"Do you think it's possible? I mean, the ability to predict the future," I asked.
Yuli frowned again, "Your question really makes it hard for me to answer because when we evaluate so-called prophecies, we must first do two things: judge the authenticity of the recorded prophecies and confirm the era in which the prophecy was made. If the so-called prophecy was forged by later generations, then it is meaningless."
"Is Nostradamus' 'Centuries' a forgery?" I asked.
"There must have been an original version of 'Centuries,' and the predictions in this version were later confirmed by later generations. But then many forged 'Centuries' appeared, or prophecy books falsely attributed to Nostradamus. Among them were many malicious individuals who arbitrarily altered the original text based on their own needs, hoping to use Nostradamus' reputation as a prophet to serve the conspiracies of certain groups."
"Why does this always involve conspiracy theories?" I shook my head.
"For example, Hitler valued Nostradamus' 'Centuries.' It is said that this was because the infamous Nazi propaganda minister, Goebbels' wife, read a four-line poem by Nostradamus, which aroused the strong interest of Goebbels and Hitler. During World War II, the German army dropped a lot of so-called Nostradamus' prophecy poems, claiming that Nostradamus had predicted Germany's victory long ago. In fact, all of these so-called Nostradamus' prophecy poems were forged by Nazi Germany for psychological warfare against the French."
"I still don't understand. Is Nostradamus a real prophet or a fraud, or some wizard with magic who lives forever in the darkness?" I asked.
"No one can easily deny or affirm Nostradamus," Yuli replied.
At this point, almost everyone in the restaurant had left, leaving only me and Yuli, two Chinese people.
After a long silence, I suddenly asked, "Is there a possibility that when Nostradamus predicts someone's death at a certain time, he secretly performs magic to make that person die at that time, thus making his prophecy 'come true'?"
"I understand. For example, I predict that you will have bad luck in the next minute, because I am ready to punch you in the next minute," Yuli shook his head, "But this is not correct. Most of the prophecies in 'Centuries' were basically realized after Nostradamus' death. Can he still intervene in history after his death?"
"Maybe he never died - he was not the same as us humans, but a different species with magic! He is immortal, ruthless, and always hovering between the human world and hell, constantly intervening in human history for hundreds of years to fulfill his shocking prophecies?" I said, feeling a little out of control. This made me feel embarrassed and made us both silent for a while.
Yu Li kept shaking his head, and his head became brighter under the restaurant's lights: "What you said is just one possibility, assuming that ghosts really exist in the world. But if you understand it from a philosophical perspective, you will have new discoveries."
"I'm sorry, I was a bit excited just now, please tell me your understanding," I said.
"Everlasting now..." Yu Li seemed to have thought it over, "Do you believe in the everlasting now? Einstein acknowledged the everlasting now, and the mystics of ancient East and West also believed in the everlasting now."
Although he only reminded me with one sentence, my mind seemed to have an epiphany in an instant: "If 'now' is everlasting, then we are sitting in this restaurant now, no matter how long time goes forward, we may return to this place again because there is an 'everlasting now.' Therefore, there is also an 'everlasting now' for the future. In other words, the past, present, and future may exist simultaneously."
"Yes, running parallel to each other, multiple possible futures to choose from, that is the concept of multiverse," Yu Li said.
Suddenly, I thought of the forest thousands of miles away, where Lin Hai saw Margaret from four hundred years ago. Is it also a "everlasting now"? If so, the oil painting is a multiverse, and Margaret can choose her own future from it... Oh my god, this assumption is too bold that I dare not even say it.
Yu Li didn't notice my inner turmoil, and he continued, "Although we all have our own will and can change our own destiny, from the perspective of the objective world, there is a mathematical probability problem. When combined with the so-called mystical prophecy, it is difficult to explain it all at once."
"But at least it can provide a direction of thinking." I sighed and walked to the window, looking at the campus in the night rain. The rain was splashing on the glass. "Thank you, Yu Li, for answering so many questions for me today. Let's go."
When we parted ways, Yu Li seemed to have something else to say, but he didn't say it in the end and hurriedly ran into the rain.
I ran all the way back to the old History Department building in the rain and became the only person left in the whole building. The sound of rain and the sound of footsteps on the wooden floor mixed together, accompanying me back to the room on the top floor. This is a trick that many horror movie directors like to use.
I wonder what Lin Hai and his Margaret are doing thousands of miles away in China right now?
Nochadamus didn't show up.
In the dim light of early morning, Lin Hai slowly opened his eyes and saw the grid of the tiger window and a few pigeons flying outside the window.
"I'm still alive!" Lin Hai whispered to himself. He took a few deep breaths and felt like he was reborn from the grave.
He quietly opened the attic door and looked down. Margaret had changed into a white nightgown and was holding her knees, curled up on the bed like a shrimp.