Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Lyonnaise Cipher

The Lyonnaise Cipher

Delacroix, Marguerite

Paperback

Mystery & Thriller

ISBN10: 3306858544
ISBN13: 9783306858544
Publisher: Ottavio Ferrante
Published: Oct 12 2026
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.58
Height: 0.41 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

The manuscript arrived on a Tuesday, in a crate that smelled of damp stone. Camille Perrin had been at the Municipal Archives of Lyon for eleven years, and in that time she had opened perhaps four thousand boxes. Most of them disappointed her. Provincial registers, notarial acts, the yellowed marriage contracts of people who had lived and died without leaving so much as a memorable vice behind them. She had learned to love the boredom. Boredom was honest. Boredom did not lie about what it was. This crate was different, and she knew it before she had even lifted the lid. For one thing, it had come from the reserves of the old printing museum on rue de la Poulaillerie, a building she had visited exactly twice in her life and both times with the uncomfortable sense of being watched by the walls. For another, the accession slip was handwritten, and the handwriting belonged to a man who had been dead since 1974. She read the slip twice. Brother Anselme Vaugirard. The name meant nothing to her. The date on the slip was the ninth of March, 1961. The date on the stamp, in a different and much newer hand, was three days ago. Somebody's been sleeping in the archive, she said, to nobody. The reading room was empty. It usually was, at half past four, the hour when the heating gave up and the students went home to their apartments and their cheap wine. Camille worked in the cold. She had a wool cardigan the colour of oatmeal, three sizes too big, that she wore like a suit of armour. She pulled it tighter now and slid her fingers under the lid of the crate. Inside, packed in tissue paper that had gone the colour of weak tea, lay a single volume. It was not beautiful. That was her first thought, and it stayed with her, and it would stay with her for a long time. A codex, quarto, bound in a limp vellum that had once been cream and was now the grey of a winter sky. The spine was broken in two places. The clasps were gone, leaving only the small rusted marks where they had been. Somebody, a century or two ago, had written on the cover in a brown ink that had eaten into the vellum: CHRONIQUE DE LA CONFRERIE - LYON -- 1543

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