Madame Célestine Arnaud
How the game names this character and what they do, chapter by chapter.
The life stories on this page were written for this wiki. They set an invented life against the real history of its years and the game's own story, and they are not in the game.
In chapter 1
Chapter 1 The Gilded Cage 1783 to 1789
Madame Célestine Arnaud
Célestine Arnaud was widowed at thirty by a magistrate who left her a house on the Rue Saint-Honoré, a library and no illusions. She has turned the house into the most useful dining room in the city: every Tuesday she serves supper to writers, lawyers, a chemist or two and whoever is about to be famous.
She writes almost nothing herself and corrects almost everything that is written at her table. She lends money without asking when it will come back, keeps the letters she is sent in a locked cabinet, and has a rule that nobody may speak of the king before the cheese. The Philosophes' lodge meets in her back room, and the police know it, and have so far found it wiser to watch than to knock.