Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (11 page)

“It is just the head of the mouse,” I said.

“The mouse is eating potatoes. These are the potatoes,” Gérard said.

“He is getting bigger as he eats,” I said.

“Louise said we ’ll all have to go to England sooner or later,” said Marie. “It’s not far away.”

I had nothing to say to that, so I said, “Your horse looks as if it’s galloping across a meadow.”

“But its mane would be flowing in the wind, wouldn’t it?” I had taught her to ride last summer, and she already wanted a horse for her next birthday. She looked over at my figure of dough. She laughed.

“Aunt Annette, I’m afraid yours looks a bit like a cow.”

“Cows can gallop fast,” I said. “Shall my cow and your horse have a race?”

“Now it is a man hopping on his bottom,” Gérard said.

“Where are his legs?” I asked.

“He doesn’t need them. He is hopping,” Gérard said.

“Do they still celebrate Christmas in England?” asked Marie, “even if they are Protestant?”

“I believe so,” I said. “They just have different songs.”

“Let’s sing,” Marie said.

And we sang “
Il est né le divin enfant,
” and I took the alto harmony.

Now Gérard was pounding the dough on a mat with a small mallet used for beating cutlets flat.

“This next one is a horse, but it is not real good,” he said.

“I see its tail. It’s running fast,” I said. He continued to pound the dough.

“I liked that one,” I said.

“It was not real good. I’m putting it away.”

“You never do anything for very long, Gérard,” his sister said.

“Just make it better. I’m working now on my horse’s mane. See?”

Gérard glanced at hers. “I like my mouse,” he said.

“I will add my swimming dog and my galloping cow to your pile,” I said to him.

“Thanks,” he said, for that meant more cookies for later, and as Marie kept working, I helped her little brother gather his mat and mallet and put them in the cupboard.

We walked by the great chopping block in the center of the white-tiled kitchen. There lay three freshly killed rabbits, their pelts still on. The room now smelled of cognac and the seasonings in which Cook would marinate the joints of rabbit. Gérard was stroking one of them.

“Why are rabbits’ ears so long?” he asked.

“So they can hear who is coming,” I said.

“Can he hear us now?”

“No. He is not alive.”

“Why is he looking at me, then?”

“He’s not, really. Let’s see what Cook is doing.”

“Don’t get in my way,” Cook said. “Or you’ll end up stuffed.”

We watched her mince the smaller pieces that she was not marinating. She cut them with quick, even slices. She was so quick, I wondered how she did not cut off her own fingers. She then beat the minced pieces with the flat side of the butcher knife into the stuffing mixture. “This is for your dinner, Master Gérard.” He smiled up at her, the soft fur of the ear in his small fingers.

Marie and Gérard dined early with Nurse. Their parents and I joined them for dessert, when the children each proudly offered their parents one of their Christmas cookies, with red silk ribbons tied around it, and made their parents guess which animal they had received as a gift. Marie gave her mother her horse with the flowing mane, which Marguerite had no problem in guessing, and she gave me another of her horses. Gérard had eaten his rabbit and my dog and cow, and he placed his last cookie in his father’s hands. “This one’s for you,” he said. Paul looked a little bemused, so I said in his ear, “Something cats like to chase.”

“It’s a mouse,” he said, “a splendid, fat, happy mouse, like ones we probably have at home, right now.”

Since we had arrived at chez Dubourg, we had dined often with that affable couple (who themselves had no children), so we made it clear to them they were not abdicating their responsibilities as host if they accepted a recent invitation to dine with the vicomte and vicomtesse; an invitation that would be imprudent to refuse, from the standpoint of Orléans society. Thus it was just the adults from Blois enjoying the second sitting of Cook’s fine Christmas dinner, in a room wallpapered with cherry blossoms.

We had arrived now at everyone’s favorite conversation topic: the royal family’s aborted escape to Varennes last summer.

“They were so close to the border,” said Maman. “They could have made it. Everyone agrees on that. I hate to think of it.”

“If they had not had an escape party that could only fit in a
berline
and moved at a turtle’s pace, and that conspicuous huge carriage also, because of its load, had not made the horses stumble and break a harness, they’d be across the border now, and we ’d have a different world,” Paul said.

“I think it was brilliant, the way they dressed as servants—the young prince in girl’s clothing—and slipped out from under the nose of Lafayette and his National Guard,” Angelique joined in.

Monsieur Vergez concentrated on his stuffed eels, and for once, I agreed with him. They were simmered in good wine with mushrooms and onions. I sipped the chilled white wine brought upriver from Vouvray, caught Marguerite’s eye, and silently raised my glass to her.

I had heard all this before. While I agreed with Maman that it was very unfortunate, I personally wondered why they hadn’t just tried to go to Belgium instead of all the way to the German border—they would have made it easily. But with that thought I was guilty of the “What if...” conversation I was so tired of. So, like my stepfather, I enjoyed the dinner that was prepared with such care, and half-listened to the old litany.

“Oh, yes, it was all very brilliant,” rejoined Paul. “They had to fit the Queen’s friend the Marquise de Tourzel in, and Louis’s sister, and the children’s nurse, and two waiting women, as if they were going on a summer outing to Saint-Cloud.”

“I love that they even adopted false names,” said Angelique. “The King was Monsieur Durand, a valet; the Queen was the baronne de Korff, a delightful German name to explain her accent. And you must admit, Paul, it is impressive how they sneaked at different times out of the Tuileries, even if the Queen did get a little lost, and then went through side streets of Paris in a plain carriage driven by that handsome Swedish count.”

“I will admit,” said Paul, “that he—Count Fersen, no stranger to intrigues—was the only one among that crowd in the
berline
capable of taking charge if things went wrong, and
he
was not permitted to drive the coach past Paris because he was a Swedish officer and they wanted this to be a
French
escape.”

“It could have worked,” said Maman. “It was that silly man who recognized the King’s profile from a stamp and rode to alert the National Guard—what a busybody—his own towns people hated him.”

“They did stop for soup, Maman,” Angelique said.

“It wasn’t that,” said Etienne. “It was the inexperienced colonel leading the dragoons who were waiting to escort the King. He got nervous after two hours of waiting for the slow coach and, all on his own, decided that the escape was aborted and told his men to stand down.”

The Dubourg’s servants served white asparagus, then the rabbit, and poured Paul’s cabernet franc in our second, waiting glass. Since the children had eaten earlier, I wasn’t able to talk to Gérard about the rabbit we had seen being prepared. I looked at the others in the pause that always ensues for a moment between courses.

My family had dressed for the occasion: Marguerite and Angelique, one dark and one blonde, lovely in patterned silk dresses of
pelouse
green and duck-egg blue; I myself wore a
robe à l’anglaise
; Marguerite’s green silk mantle edged with net was draped over her arm and the back of her chair; Angelique was looking very modern, with a white sash that matched the bandeau in her hair. Maman had spent most of the day on her frizzed and curled coiffure of the eighties.

The older gentlemen had on their powdered wigs; Etienne tied his long hair in a ribbon. This would be the last dinner in which all of us—minus Papa—were together.

“It’s a pleasure to see everyone looking so charming,” I said, and Monsieur Vergez looked up at me as he lifted a forkful of minced rabbit to his mouth.

“I love your
robe à l’anglaise
,” Marguerite said.

“It matches the gentleman
anglais
, that foreigner, with whom she talked so long at the ball,” Angelique said.

“Well, I noticed you wasted no time getting to know that bore from Bordeaux,” I said.

“At least he can dance,” said Angelique. “The Englishman doesn’t even know how to participate in the most civilized of the arts.”

“He’s just received his degree from Cambridge University.”

“What is his business here?” Monsieur Vergez said.

“He wants to learn our language better and become a gentleman’s tour guide.”

“It’s hardly a time for that,” Maman said.

“He likes to travel. He walked all the way from Calais to Lake Como and back.”

“If he walks, he cannot afford to ride,” Maman said.

“I think he seemed a very polite, if reserved, gentleman,” Marguerite said.

“All English are reserved,” said Angelique, “but he seemed to talk enough to Annette. Madame Dubourg told me his French was atrocious.”

“It’s not. It’s just slow. Yesterday he told me all about—”

All the eyes turned toward me now. I’m afraid I blushed. “I accidentally met him when I was walking along the quai—”

“Marie-Ann,” my mother said. She used my given name, which she knew I disliked, whenever she was upset with me. “I’ve told you not to go out walking alone. You insist, always, in disobeying me.

What have I done to deserve this punishment? Your imprudence knows no bounds. You could have been seen and disgraced our hosts in
their
city—”

“Maman, I really don’t think—” started Marguerite.

“There’s only uncouth bargemen out on the quai,” said my stepfather; “no one’s going to see her there who
matters
.”

I almost said, “Thank you.”

“This foreigner, in these times, could be a spy,” Maman said.

“Then he would be for the royalist cause,” said Paul, “and hence, one of us.”

“Far more likely he’s a foreign agitator, come to swell the ranks of the revolutionaries,” Monsieur Vergez said.

“In Paris,” said Etienne, “English, German, Russian, American—
à la Franklin
—they’re thronging. They want to see what this Revolution is all about.”

“That’s as I said,” Vergez said sternly.

I gave my little brother a look as if to say,
Et tu
?

“He’s a
poet
,” I said.

That seemed to silence everyone for a bit. No one knows how to respond to poetry. Then Angelique said helpfully, “François Villon was an outlaw
and
a poet.”

Now the servants quietly removed our dinner plates and, starting with Maman, we passed the cheese plate, with the wedges of Vendôme and the
crémets
that went so well with Paul’s wine.

“Nunc est bibendum
,” Paul said to me, and raised and drained his glass. That was the ancient phrase of the Wine Grower’s Brotherhood, of which he was a member, and into which, he said, he had initiated our famous American visitor of long ago, Monsieur Jefferson.

The phrase means, It’s now time to drink.

“Nunc est bibendum,
” I said back to him and took a long sip. I was grateful to him for changing the subject. “Paul,” I said, have you ever read Rabelais’s satire on the Wine Grower’s Brotherhood, when the hero goes on a quest for the Sacred Bottle?”

“Have I not?” Paul said. “The most important quest in literature.”

“Satire,” Maman said, “is not a proper conversation for a Christmas dinner.”

“The sacred bottle,” Etienne said, “I’d like to go on a quest for that.”

“Tell us about the horses, Annette,” Angelique said, “the
real
reason the flight to Varennes failed. It’s so absurd.”

“I’m tired of the flight to Varennes,” I said.

“I don’t know that story,” Etienne said. “Does it have a sacred bottle in it?”

“This is your King you’re joking about,” Maman said.

“Not anymore,” Paul said. “He may be imprisoned in a rotting palace, but he’s still imprisoned.”

“In the Tuileries,” said Etienne, “if any of the royal family so much as show their face now, someone spits at them. Crowds gather outside just to have the chance to spit on a royal. It’s quite a distinction in Paris.”

Vergez threw his
crémet
against the wall. It landed on a blossoming branch of the wallpaper, like a fat white egg.

“We ’re not a pack of peasant rabble here,” he boomed, “who delight in such gossip. Tell the story of the horses, Annette, and make it a tragedy; no irony, no satire, just tragedy.”

“I’ll try,” I said. I noticed the servants quietly cleaning up the cheese on the floor and washing the stain on the wall. “Well, the royal family stopped at Varennes for fresh horses. But there were no horses anywhere to be found. The carriage driver and even the King himself knocked on doors in a panic. Meanwhile, the National Guard rode up.

A retired soldier in the town who tried to defend the King raised his sword and was shot down before he could use it. They packed them all back in the
berline
, with a couple of National Assembly members to keep an eye on them, and drove them ignominiously back to Paris.

All the while, at the other end of town, across the bridge, waited a groom with fresh horses.”

“That has irony in it,” said Vergez.

“It’s hard to separate tragedy and irony,” Paul said.

“I think it’s tremendously sad,” Maman said.

“No one,” said Marguerite, “with all the vicious lies about the Queen, remembers that she is a mother. Think about her being a mother. A child on either side of her, soldiers out her window. Can you imagine it?”

“Ah, the poached pears and madeleines,” Paul said, as the footman moved among us.

I don’t think Paul said that last word in a particularly loud voice, but one of the tall doors suddenly opened a crack, and Gérard, who had been put to bed over an hour ago, poked his little head in beside the white petals on the spring boughs.