Lola Montez and the Poisoned Nom de Plume (31 page)

But how could it be de la Vega, I argued with myself, disbelievingly. You’re drugged, you’re feverish, you’re in the middle of a nightmare. De la Vega is in prison in London for murdering young women. Or… Could they not make that stick? Could he have wriggled out if they couldn’t prove it, if they’d believed his Jesuitical lies? No! He’s in prison, for certain, for assaulting a police officer, that’s a serious offence. But how long are such sentences? It happened more than two years ago. But once again, no! It
cannot
be him, this man tonight had only one leg! But—which leg was missing? I dithered and maundered, trying to recall. The right trouser leg was the one that was empty. Which leg had I hit, in Spain, leaving a bullet in the
fanático’s
thigh? I had no idea.

I stood there, out in the open like a frightened rabbit, trembling, dizzy at the sheer audacity of wickedness in the world… The Society of the Exterminating Angel with its demonic ideas and insane followers… Dr. Koreff and his poisons, safe behind the name of science—what’s another courtesan? Dime a dozen, they are, even the pretty ones. Get under cover, you foolish thing, I gibbered to myself, careening towards the nearest darkened doorway. There I fell and lay in a heap, the potent and deathly drug still moving through my limbs, causing them to twitch and jerk.

“Fräulein?” I heard, a soft male voice whispering in German. I was about to try to dash up and away when a stout fellow with a fringe of white hair around the ears and back of his head leaned gently towards me. “Please don’t scream or make any noise. You must be terrified, but don’t fear me.” He looked around, seemingly terrified himself, then back at me. “Can you understand me?”

I nodded and said in my halting German, through my vise-tight jaw, “I have school-girl knowledge. More than that, no.”

He switched to French. “I must make you safe—he is fatally misguided. Evil has come among us, he has let evil in…” He checked the street again, then back to me. “Our science should only be used for healing, for quiet cures. Not this, not like this… My poor, dear creature…”

At that moment, a cabriolet came around the corner, the driver allowing the horse to move at its own slow pace and himself seemingly almost asleep, swaying to the rhythm of the cloppety-clop.

“Ah! Fortune smiles!” the ring-haired German breathed, and he raced across the street to accost the carriage. A few words were exchanged, then they all moved towards me. The stout man helped me up, and then to step inside the empty cab. At first I was terrified again, not believing I should trust him. I heard him say to the driver, “Take this,” and he handed over what seemed to be an enormous wad of bills. In the near distance, both of us could suddenly hear an alarm being raised—male voices calling to each other. Oh dear God, was it them? Were they searching for me?

The German turned back to the driver, saying something like, “This young woman is in great danger. Take her as far and as fast as you can—to the border at least, or on to Liège if it’s possible. Say nothing to anyone, and do not stop for anything—anything at all, do you hear me?” The driver nodded, astonished; my head spun from trying to understand.

“One moment, then.” The stout man turned to me and spoke in French, his gentle voice sad. “If I am able to do it, I will go to your hotel and send your belongings on. Where can I send them?”

I couldn’t think. Then, “Countess Dudevant, Nohant, France.”

“A safe haven?”

“I hope so.”

“Evil deeds in our streets—evil times. Go, dear.” He closed the cab door and gave it a thump. The driver whipped up and we were off like the wind. I craned around to look back at my benefactor, but he was already gone.

*

So much about this series of traumatic events I seem to have put together for myself after the fact, and through the fantastic haze of the drug Koreff had slipped in my drink. So—how does that make it true? How could I possibly prove any of these things, even if I somehow managed to produce evidence? Was it all a horrific figment of my imagination?

The driver and his cab earned the bundle of money he’d been given. We galloped swiftly out of Bonn and onto the moonlit road towards the Belgian border. I thanked the stars when I discovered the little flick knife still safe in its sheath inside my waistband: a small comfort. But two lovely pistols lay in my hotel room, along with clothing, hats, my pack of cards… Forget all that, I told myself, I have my life. At least for the moment.

By morning, we were resting and the driver agreed to take me to Liège, from whence I could continue on my own way. I talked him into buying me a pack of cards from a coaching house—with this I hoped to earn what I’d need. With some more of my benefactor’s money, he also talked a maid into selling him a skirt she’d outgrown—I didn’t ask how, I was simply grateful. My limbs were incredibly stiff, my face and jaw as well, but other than that and the shuddering within, my brain was clearing enough to escape under my own agency.

And so, in short, within a number of days I arrived by delivery wagon at George’s mansion in Nohant. She was there for the summer, as I’d hoped she would be, and she took me in immediately, as I’d hoped she might. She could see that something was horribly wrong; she gave me my own little room in a quiet wing, and came to see me often as I lay, recuperating.

“Stay and hide away until the trial,” she counseled, “which I read will take place in Rouen. Perhaps in March.”

“But that’s six months!” I protested.

“Yet it’s coming. Rest, ride in the Forest of Fontainebleau, play billiards with Le Chopinet and me—our latest craze!—and keep me company when I’m not writing. What is so difficult?” Then she gave me a kiss on the forehead. “But that sounds insensitive. I know the real difficulty, believe me, my dear. In love, we recognize our inability to be self-sufficient. You’ve been cleft in twain; your heart is attempting to recover.”

Thank God for George. I did as she suggested and nothing more, though several things happened whether I liked them or not. First, I read one morning in News in Brief of a recent murder in the city of Bonn. An eminent physician from the Black Forest—a practitioner of magnetism—had been found garroted in the early hours following the last day of the Beethoven Festival. My mystery benefactor, I was sure. Poor, kind man; I mourned for him and for his wife and family.

Then I was sent, by George, to their family physician, Dr. Gustave Papet, an elderly provincial doctor who had brought George, then named Aurore, into the world. He was to check me over and make sure all was well. I didn’t tell him everything that had happened, just that I was almost positive I had been given a dose of something infinitely bad.

“Do you have a heart complaint?”

I thought to myself, yes I do, but not the sort he meant. “No.”

“Mm. Too many physicians may be counting upon the stimulant effect of miniscule doses of St. Ignatius’ nut—or strychnos nux-vomica, to give it its Latin name.” He looked like a small grey owl with its head tipped to the side. “Strychnine.”

“My God.” It was true.

“It is a heart stimulant which can give an ill patient a warm and hopeful feeling, when strictly administered.”

I remembered Merci telling me that Koreff’s powders gave her courage.

“It has, however,” he continued, “a cumulative effect over time that is difficult to control. Or even to prove its existence in the system. The effects stay in the body for months, even after discontinuance. It is easy to abuse, in other words.” The owl cocked its head to the other side. “You’ve been lucky. Little by little, you will recover your strength.” He nodded kindly and tapped a finger on the desk. “The minimum lethal dose is anywhere from fifty to one hundred milligrams for an adult, depending upon the state of health. Can you imagine the minuteness of that dose, mademoiselle?”

I could, and shuddered.

“I would never prescribe it.”

George and Chopin departed for Paris just before Christmas so that Chopin could again begin his season of teaching, leaving composing until the following summer. This was his ritual, and he never altered it. George had told me that their relationship was increasingly under strain and—secretly—that she’d had a very discreet affair the winter before.

“I’m starting to feel the weight of responsibility and of my age,” she sighed. “I’m no longer a boy having fun. Mind you, the title of countess helps immeasurably. We all need something solid to fall back on, don’t we?”

I nodded. Not that I had any such thing.

In the middle of January, George wrote from Paris to say that the final installment of
The Count of Monte Cristo
was being published on the 15
^th
of January, and would I like to come along with her to Dumas’ enormous celebratory dinner at his newly-completed chateau? I declined, with thanks—but devoured those final chapters with amazement. By the end, his hero’s lifelong pursuit of vengeance had encompassed almost every crime known to man: dishonest murder by duel, many ugly poisonings, conspiracies, false accusations, seductions and rapes, the lot. If I didn’t know better, I would swear that Dumas made it all up out of his own monumental imagination. But I
did
know better. I knew such wickedness existed, just waiting to strike. Through accident or design, did Dumas’ friends and enemies provide him with his inspiration? Or, worse, did he set them up, so he could watch them tumble like dominoes, or use their misfortunes as building blocks for plot lines? Did he set up Henri, egg him on to fight Beauvallon “as a baptism,” without thinking through the possible outcome? I had no idea. As I finished the final chapter of
Monte Cristo
, I did know that—through my year and a half with the angry Dantès, and my own tragic experiences—I too had grown to understand the thirst for revenge. It could eat you up, if you let it.

January came and went. I still lay many hours upon the bed, dreaming—sometimes horrible nightmares. Once, Henri’s head lay inexplicably on the ground, smiling up at me—just his head, blinking back tears and telling me that he was so sorry. Other times, I would lie in the weak shafts of winter sunlight, reimagining our hours of love-making, the smell of his skin and his wonderful, thick hair. His hands grasping my bare hips as I braced against him on hands and knees, turning back to smile at his head thrown back, his mouth open and yelling his delight. Then lying together and making our plans: for where we would live and where we longed to travel, for all the things we hoped to do and the love that would grow old around us… God, I couldn’t bear it…

Mid-February came. Carnival time, when Paris was a wild, merry tumble of riotous behaviour. George wrote again to say that Merci was dead. It had happened on one of those carnival afternoons, when she could hear the jostling, laughing crowds from her bed. She’d died coughing blood, but almost too weakly to clear the phlegm from her throat, so she’d choked in the end. There would be a big funeral, and burial was to take place in Montmartre Cemetery, paid for by her final lover. Did I wish to attend?

Again, no. The girl who spent in excess of one hundred thousand francs a year—as she’d confessed to me once with a laugh and a merry shrug—was no more.

With this sad news, I was galvanized into action. I rode every day in the Forest, vowing to get strong. Maurice, George’s son and now a young man, was learning to paint under the sometime-tutelage of family friend Eugène Delacroix; he’d left behind quite a nice pistol, which I appropriated, and I set up a target for practice. There was also Maurice’s epée and rapier, with which I occupied myself and regained my strength, feinting and thrusting at shadows. A new fear of food and drink made me thin. I was always on guard, keeping a low profile within the village and surroundings. My belongings, left behind in the hotel in Bonn: would anything in them lead de la Vega to me, I wondered, but tried not to dwell on it or my spirit would quail.

At the beginning of March, I returned quietly to Paris. Pier-Angelo had organized a benefit—keeping the invitations strictly amongst friends and well-wishers—to help me get back on my feet. I danced several cachuchas and a fandango. Giggling Théo Gautier had to remove his monocle as we spoke together later, to wipe tears from his eyes, so sad was he still at the death of his employer and friend. Money was raised, enough that I insisted George have some, with my most grateful thanks; I’d seen her struggling hard with the bills at Nohant, which cost far more to run than her apartments in Paris. She turned me down but smiled and said perhaps some other time, when my star had risen again.

Finally, the long-awaited and nerve-wracking ordeal: the trial of Beauvallon. The date: March 26, 1846. One year and two weeks after the fatal duel.

Nothing would bring Henri back. But Beauvallon should not be allowed to walk away and do it again to some other sweetheart’s beloved or mother’s only son.

It was as if I was being forced to relive everything: the mistakes and misunderstandings, the wilful arrogance and belligerence of combative males, the inability—as if churning through quicksand—to turn fate around. To be clenched like a fist and yet fear in advance that it would be almost impossible to prove anything or to make the charges deliver any sort of justice. Five excruciating days.

Rouen is a small provincial town, completely unused to the demi-monde of Paris—the looser morality, the men-about-town, the hangers-on and spongers. Then add to that the colourful dresses and frockcoats of the dancers, writers, actresses, journalists and others who arrived in the town for the crucial and still-scandalous courtroom event: all very shocking! The prosecution—led by Monsieur Duval, representing the Dujarier family—had called forty-two witnesses, of which I was one; of course I knew that Dr. Koreff would be another. Henri’s mother, a tiny bird-like woman, was there, along with his dark-haired sister and her husband. Henri’s seconds, Bertrand and de Boigne, were ready to take the stand; so was Beauvallon’s second, d’Ecqueville. The other mysterious second for Beauvallon—in the black cabriolet—had vanished, though I now more than suspected who it might be and thanked God that he was nowhere in sight: I kept Maurice’s pistol handy in my reticule, just in case.