Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (14 page)

“The émigré army is the only place to be now,” Captain Alivons said. “With the King’s own brothers, the comtes of Artois and of Provence, having fled, where does that leave the rest of us?”

“Well, I shall never leave Blois,” Angelique said.

“You’ve left it now,” the captain answered, and they laughed.

“Do you know that the
Journal de Paris
,” he said, “daily advertises possessions the émigrés wish to sell before fleeing—carved couches, veneered desks, oak armoires—and for so little? It makes a fellow want to stay here and gather fine furniture.”

“That’s so sad,” Angelique said.

“In Paris one sees in cab lines fine carriages with white clouds on their doors—and one knows that those were once the carriages of noble families, whose coats of arms have been painted over.”

I caught the eye of a somewhat lost-looking gentleman at the door.

Among all the ribbon-tied queues beautifully powdered, Monsieur William’s hair looked windblown; his brown cloth coat seemed out of place, and his boots looked dirty.

“Monsieur Guillaume, do not tell me you walked all the way here?” the captain called out to him.

William hesitated, then strode up to our table. “Indeed,” he said.

“It enabled me to see Orion over the towers of the cathedral. And it’s the same distance to the river, and I walk that every day.” He glanced at me and smiled. Despite Maman’s well-meant advice, through a series of happy accidents, I had met him almost every day since Christmas at the end of the Bridge Royal. I would have gone when it was storming, too, for I don’t mind the weather, if walking out in driving rain were not behavior just too odd for my family or for the Dubourgs to accept. Monsieur William had even translated more lines for me, and I had corrected his French as we strolled. His most recent lines were from his trip to the Alps—about some Italian peasant girls with ringlets, sparkling eyes, and smiles, whom he had seen dancing. I wondered why he had chosen those lines to translate.

“You would be a credit to the infantry,” the captain said. “So old Vivier procured you an invitation too, eh? He ’ll do anything to impress on you foreigners that not all the country is in the hands of lunatics.”

“How do you know that there is not lunacy, also, here?” Monsieur William replied.

The captain introduced him to my sister, who managed to sneak me an unnecessarily knowing smile, then to me he said, “But I hear you met—”

“At chez Dubourg,” I said.

“I
would
like to walk more,” said Monsieur William. “That is the correct use of the conditional tense, Mademoiselle Vallon, is it not?”

“Your French is improving each day, Monsieur,” I said, then realized I should not have said, “each day.”

“—If Mademoiselle would care to walk briefly around the room with me?” he continued.

“I would very much like to promenade, Monsieur,” I said.

Monsieur Leforge’s music was actually very good to walk to. I did not take Monsieur William’s arm, but just walked by his side, as we did by the river, the ebbing and flowing of dancers on either side of us. I fluttered my fan between us, for the room was stuffy. “Do you like to ride, Monsieur William?”

“I love it. I just cannot afford it. When I was a boy, though, we rented horses at an inn and went on expeditions to an abbey, more than twenty miles away, and back by nightfall.”

“That’s about the distance I’ve ridden from Blois to the château de Chambord and back.”

“Is that the château where Rousseau stayed?”

“That was Chenonceaux. Do you like Rousseau?”

“A good deal better than most of our English philosophers. They recognize the importance of reason. Rousseau recognizes also the importance of sensibility, of simplicity, and of nature to an enlightened life.”

“A lot of people do not like Rousseau. The King himself said that if so many people hadn’t read Rousseau, then there never would have been a revolution.” I said the last word quietly, so as not to be guilty of bad manners.

We were nearing the hearth, where a circle of men, including Monsieur Vergez, were gathered around the vicomte.

“That sounds typical of Louis’s oversimplification of things,” said Monsieur William, “but one can’t underestimate the power of literature to change the world. ‘Man is born free—,’” he started to quote from Rousseau.

“‘And everywhere he is in chains,’” I finished. “And there are many types of chains, Monsieur, not all wrought by society, or one’s form of government—the most binding chains being those of our own minds—as in Plato’s
Myth of the Cave
. What is outside the cave, Monsieur? I assume, as a poet, you have been there.”

He stopped, and a group of dancers almost bumped into him. I took his arm, and we went on. “The whole world,” he said. “All of wild nature is outside that cave, and in Plato’s story all the people are stuck back there in their chains, and they think
that
is reality. They’re even comfortable in it and don’t
want
to change. I don’t know whether it makes me laugh or weep.” He looked about the crowded, lively room. “There’s something else,” he said. “The sun is outside that cave. The blinding light of the sun. Plato calls it the Good. I simply call it a Presence. Something that runs through all things.”

“And is in us,” I said.

He looked excited, more even than when he had been talking about the four tasks of being a poet.

“I have never met anyone who has understood what I was just talking about—except, perhaps, my sister—when I...would come in from a walk at Cambridge, all ecstatic, my friends...would think I was crazy.”

“They were still in the cave. Plato says the people in the cave never do understand one who has been outside to the light. They ridicule him.”

“I feel as if I’m talking to myself. Where have
you
felt such a Presence?”

“While riding in the woods, or beside the river—or playing with my little niece and nephew.”

“The child lives in it; we forget it as we grow older. Hence, the importance of Nature: she helps us remember it.”

Now, passing by the orchestra, we had come full circle, back to our tulip wood table.

“You are a good companion on a promenade, Monsieur; you speak of things far more interesting than one usually encounters at a vicomte’s soirée.”

“The captain had to leave,” Angelique said wistfully to me. “I suppose he’s on his way to England.”

“All dressed up with his plume,” I said.

Then my sister whispered behind her fan, “You look excited.

You’re glowing.”

“It was warm walking around the room.”

Still whispering, she added, “You’re not going to get yourself in trouble again, are you, Annette?”

Monsieur William asked if he could join us and sat quietly.

Angelique sipped her wine. Our guest didn’t have a drink, and I wanted to offer him some of mine. Instead I asked, “Have the ‘four tasks’ proved felicitous for you, Monsieur?”

“I’m working on a new poem,” he said, “about a place called Windermere.” I liked the sound of the name. He looked at me with an intensity in his blue eyes that made it impossible for me to look anywhere else. Angelique and the room itself fell away outside the radius of that glance.

“What’s it about?” I said, from well within that radius.

“A packman I knew when I was a boy.”

“A what?”

“Someone who packs goods on wagons or animals. There is quite an art to it. He packed things in like a puzzle. No one...could pack as much in a wagon as this man.” I almost laughed again but smiled instead, and he continued. “He had the greatest stories. We roamed the hills together.”

“What would you talk about?” I asked.

“He talked about his travels. He had seen everything. I wanted to be like him.”

“Like a packman?” Angelique said.

“You would have loved him, Mesdemoiselles. Whenever I asked him to sing some of the old ballads he had learned on his travels, he”—Monsieur William searched for the right verb—“rolled them out as we walked along into the evening. He taught them to me, and I still sing them on my walks.”

“I would like to hear them,” I said. “What would you write about a packman?”

“About his true goodness.” It was a quick answer. “He knew nothing of elegant society”—Monsieur William gestured to the room around him—“and everything about what does matter: honest speech, a few good books, absolute independence of character.” Monsieur William was speaking deliberately, getting each word right.

“Pardon me, but who has ‘absolute independence ’?” We all looked up.

Monsieur Leforges suddenly hovered above us, like a bird of prey.

“Monsieur William is talking of a packman he knew as a boy,” I said. I reluctantly made the introductions.

“A what?” Monsieur Leforges said.

“He packs things,” I said.

“Oh, I am sorry,” said Monsieur Leforges. “I thought he was talking about a saint.”

“He admired his true goodness,” Angelique said.

“I always mistrust people when they start to glorify the peasantry,” said Monsieur Leforges. “They do not know what they are talking about.”

“I knew this man quite well,” Monsieur William said.

“Perhaps the vicomte has made a mistake in his invitations,” Monsieur Leforges said.

“In what way?” Monsieur William asked.

“I tried talking to a handsome peasant who was packing Papa’s wagons one time,” said Angelique, “but he had nothing to say and wouldn’t look at me.”

“Perhaps they have more intelligent packmen in England,” Monsieur Leforges said.

“Monsieur Leforges, perhaps in England they have not been made quite so afraid of their employers,” Monsieur William said.

“It is not always wrong to employ fear,” Monsieur Leforges said.

“And now who is afraid of whom?” Monsieur William said.

“I am not afraid of a pitiful revolution that doesn’t even know who its leader is, if that is what you mean,” Monsieur Leforges said.

“And your King?” Monsieur William said. “He isn’t afraid?”

“How would you use the packman in your poem?” I asked.

“A poem for the uneducated. That is a very good idea,” Monsieur Leforges said. They were raising their voices, and people near us were looking at us.

“This packman sang because he was not afraid,” said Monsieur William. “And from him I learned the songs that are the very stuff of poetry. Even his simple way of speaking is poetry.”

“Now the Revolution enters the arts.” Monsieur Leforges would have continued, but at the mention of a certain word, more heads turned toward us. The conversations near us stilled. The vicomte himself suddenly walked over from the fireplace with a glass of deep red wine in his hand. He stood above Monsieur Leforges and said softly, “Either you talk about something polite or we settle the matter later.”

“Pardon me, Vicomte, but this foreign gentleman has strange ideas.”

“That is why he is a foreigner. Now be a French gentleman and talk with the ladies.”

“I regret, Vicomte,” the Englishman started, but the vicomte had already turned back to his bastion at the hearth. I wonder if Monsieur William had understood all that had passed.

Monsieur Leforges still loomed above us. “Many Frenchmen see foreigners as spies,” he said. “As much we may find the present government disagreeable, it is still preferable to a foreign one. Be careful, Mesdemoiselles,” and he lost himself among the other guests.

I wondered if his “Be careful” meant something else, along the lines of the revenge he was talking about. Would he denounce Monsieur William as an English spy just to have revenge on me? I didn’t think so, but Monsieur Leforges disturbed me. Damn him for returning to my life after all these years.

Yet Monsieur Leforges was mostly words, after all. Words that didn’t mean anything. Not like Monsieur William, for whom every word, even
packman
, had significance.

The soirée was breaking up. I had to change the subject, to free ourselves from Monsieur Leforges before we left. “Angelique, would you like to promenade with Monsieur William and me across the Bridge Royal to the quai des Tourelles tomorrow?” Monsieur William smiled. We usually met there fortuitously.

“I would like that very much,” she said.

As we left, I heard Monsieur William apologizing to the vicomte at the hearth. The Englishman had courage. Many Frenchmen were too intimidated to address the vicomte directly, let alone apologize to him.

In the carriage on the way home we were all quiet, and the wheels were loud in the still night. We rumbled down deserted streets and took up almost their whole width. The glasses of Vouvray had made me feel that everything was fine after all, and I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I could feel the carriage enter a smoother street, and I knew we were on the broad rue Royale, on which Monsieur William lived. But he would be walking home, far behind us.

I was enjoying the ride and the silence. I was thinking of Monsieur William’s eyes in the noisy room and under the light of hundreds of tapers, how the rest of the room dropped away when he looked at me and how his eyes seemed now, in the memory of that glow, to be a strange and enchanted realm from which, once entered, one might never return.

Maman suddenly broke the silence. “Bernard has told me of the disturbance, Marie-Ann. It is regrettable that someone of our family was part of it. Especially when we are guests in this city. You shouldn’t speak so long with foreigners, both of you.”

“It’s not Monsieur William or Annette’s fault,” said Angelique.

“It was that—”

“I was there,” said Monsieur Vergez. “This Monsieur William was talking about something he should not talk about. And at the home of the vicomte, of all people.”

I returned from the possibilities of entering an enchanted land and said, “He was talking about a poem.”

“What kind of poem?” said my stepfather. “I know about these new ideas from the universities. Etienne has enough of them.”

“He was talking about a packman, Beau-père,” said Angelique, “about how he admired him.”

“He was glorifying a peasant, then,” said Monsieur Vergez. “Rousseau started all that nonsense that has become dangerous now. Does Monsieur William not know politics is a forbidden topic in polite society?”