Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (3 page)

A few days earlier I had been so naïve as to believe that settee was reserved solely for me.

“Oh, it’s your little convent-school girl, Raoul,” the widow said languidly, not shifting her position. “
She
must have been quite a challenge.”

Monsieur Leforges’s game with me was up, and he ended it with a cold panache all his own. “Madame Lambert,” my tutor said evenly, not taking his arms from around her, “is having her lesson. You may return at your proper time.”

I will never forget how then, without lifting her head from a silk pillow, Madame Lambert let loose a lazy peal of humiliating, vulgar laughter.

Monsieur Leforges chuckled too.

My father taught me to ride to the hunt that autumn.

He had found out about my liaison with the dance tutor through a letter I had lost at the count’s château. The count had informed him. I never knew what Papa went through then, but the count’s discretion and Papa’s forgiveness kept a foolish girl from social disgrace. My father didn’t let Maman know, but made her abandon her plans for the
mariage de raison
with the sugar merchant. He told her I wasn’t
ready
, and Maman declared to me that because I wanted to choose my own husband like a butcher or a baker’s daughter, I was decidedly
common
.

She had reserved for me her worst insult, and the matter was closed.

She had made a success with her first daughter’s marriage and had one more daughter besides me with which she could make another success. Maman had washed her hands of me, and she handed me over to my father. He told her he was going to drive the silliness out of me by teaching me to hunt. That was fine with me. I had had enough of dancing instruction.

The hounds were kept in a kennel at the side of the hunting lodge and fed a huge slab of very red deer carcass every evening at five o’clock. The count’s young groom, Benoît, stood between the meat and the lean, even emaciated hounds and kept them at bay with a whip. He finally let them at the meat, and they tore at it and fought and jumped on each other to get at it. It was not a big enough piece of meat for all the hounds. I always felt sorry for the ones that could not make it in for their dinner.

That autumn the Revolution was still years away. The gold leaves fell from the chestnut trees, and my father taught me to shoot. In the morning we gathered outside the count’s hunting lodge. It was well off the main road, buried in the woods on the grounds of his château. You could smell the forest of pines and chestnuts as soon as you walked out the door.

The hounds, tails wagging, barking in anticipation, milled about the legs of the horses. We sat on horseback in a circle now, an odd assortment: my father, tall and gaunt in an old cloak; the count, of perfect physique with gold braid on his coat; the baron de Tardiff, short, portly, and dark; my brother-in-law, Paul, tall, slender, and fair; Philippe, the count’s son, a year younger than I, skinny, swimming in his coat; and I in my riding cloak, three-cornered hat, and jockey boots, all in the English style, as my maidservant, the wise Claudette, prescribed.

I was on the horse that my father had given me, a three-year-old sorrel mare I named La Belle Rouge, shortened to La Rouge, after my father’s stallion, Le Bleu. (He wasn’t really blue but a dappled gray.) The men’s grooms sat on horseback just behind them, each with a pistol and a musket just in case one had a problem with a wounded stag or wild boar or a horse with a broken leg.

The count’s horse took the lead down the narrow track to the meadow, our customary starting point. The horses grew more excited as we approached it, La Rouge’s ears forward and Le Bleu, in front of me, wanting to break out, stepping to the side of the path. Then we heard the hounds.

When they reached the meadow, the men let the horses have their head. From the cold shadow of the forest I saw the count’s stallion streak out in the early sunlight, followed quickly by the others, their servants bouncing faithfully behind them. Now, my father and I together at the dividing line between shade and light, we let Le Bleu and La Rouge go. I had raced my mare against stallions along roads that summer and had felt her speed, but she was young and uncertain and followed Papa’s lead. Yet she was running flat out now, and my boot heels skimmed the meadow, and I could smell the grass, fresh with the morning, as we flew through it. It was as smooth as walking, twirling my bonnet in my hand, but a thousand times more exhilarating.

The leaders were nearly across the meadow when a stag bounded out of the grass in front of them; it hung in the air for an instant and disappeared into the thicket on the other side of the meadow. They took off after it. Papa and Jean, his groom, plunged into the thicket after the others, and La Rouge continued her pace, unslackened, so I pulled hard at her reins to turn her left, to slow her down just at the thicket’s edge. I was still not far behind Papa when I heard him curse as a low branch swiped his cheek. But following Papa’s groan was another squealing sound in the brush.

The commotion of the hounds and horses had flushed a boar, who now charged through the thicket with Papa after him. La Rouge heard the sound too, and its shifting unfamiliarity, as if the brush itself were squealing, frightened her. She bolted back toward the meadow, and I reined her in there and had just calmed her down when I heard a shot from the direction in which Papa and Jean had gone. La Rouge whinnied but got no response from the other horses. We rushed through the thicket in their wake; both Rouge and I could sense where the others were. She dashed headlong down a gulley; I was obliged to stand upright in the stirrup, her rump above me, it was so steep. Ahead of us lay a dry streambed, strewn with leaves under a sheer rock face.

Le Bleu, riderless, stood under the lee of the rock.

On the ground, amid copper leaves and stones, lay Papa. Le Bleu must have bolted and thrown his master when the boar, cornered in a rocky gulley, turned on its pursuers. Jean had shot his musket, wounding the boar and increasing its desperation, and was now reloading.

The hounds leaped and barked at the boar; it grunted, lunged at them, hating them, its tusks thrusting in the air and the hounds leaping back.

Then the boar went after the source of what had caused him pain and, before Jean could fire again, charged through the dogs and gored him in the ankle. Jean dropped the musket on the rocks.

Jean’s scream, the boar’s fierce grunts, the hound’s howling, and the horse’s whinnies filled the gulley; then the boar paused, the dogs keeping back, and it turned toward my father, a welcome quarry down on its level among the stones. In the seconds that the boar paused to consider its second prey, I pulled as hard as I could at Rouge’s bit, and we reached the bottom of the gorge. As the boar charged my father, I jumped down from my saddle, snatched up the musket, and shot into the nape of its tough neck. The boar lay still among the leaf-littered stones, a few inches from my father’s chest. The hounds were on it in an instant.

That night at the count’s table we enjoyed boar’s head along with haunch of venison in chestnuts, though I myself did not partake of the boar. Above us hung a tapestry of the hunt: a man in a red-and-blue cloak on a white steed leaping over a log, in the grasses a white hart not far before him, about to disappear into a forest of a hundred shades of green. I always preferred to think he got away, across the meadow strewn with the
mille-fleurs
, the thousand flowers, into the woods out of which rabbits peek: the hunter still has his crossbow slung across his back. The joy is obviously in the chase. The enormous hearth flames licked massive logs; light and shadows flickered across the oak paneling.

My father had attended Jean’s wound and said Jean might always walk with a slight limp. Papa himself had a twisted ankle from his fall, and he had his foot up on an embroidered cushion and was in jovial spirits.

He insisted that I sit at table with the men. The count’s son had retired early; Paul had gone home to spend the evening with my older sister Marguerite and their little daughter, Marie, and the men of the château de Beauregard were toasting me now.

“To Annette, a huntress the likes of whom haven’t been seen since the days of Diane de Poitiers,” the baron said, which made Papa beam. Diane was his heroine from the days when the kings and queens hunted through these forests.

“To the huntress!” they cried.

Everyone laughed and drained their glasses, and with my father glancing proudly over at me, I felt I belonged just as much here, with the huge fireplace and the wine and laughter, as in the ballroom under a thousand tapers of shining chandeliers and the carefully timed movements of hand and leg and foot, the fan swinging or lifted for coy messages.

What else might I do now? I was glad now Raoul Leforges had his rich widow and dozens of other naïve or not-so-naïve girls, and that I was free. What a purgatory to live only through another—him or a sugar merchant in Tours. How odd life was, with its twists and turns.

I was not sure it was proper in a woman to do, but I raised my glass, and in a voice that sounded strangely high, I proposed a toast of my own.

“To my father,” I said, “who taught me to ride, to hunt, and who would have stared that old boar down if I had not made that unnecessary shot.”

“To Jean-Paul Vallon!” they sang out, and the firelight flickered on the hunter’s white stallion and on the oak beams high above.

That was the autumn of my sixteenth year, when there was nothing more frightening than difficult dance steps, untrue lovers, ambitious mothers, and wounded wild boars.

Other nations can live on rice or pasta or potatoes. The French need their bread. For two seasons the harvests had been bitter failures, and in the summer shortage the grain prices rose so no ordinary citizen could afford to pay them. You can read what you like about the political and social causes for what happened that July of 1789, and those books will all be right, in their way. But the Revolution started over bread.

We had heard that a city magistrate in Orléans, who himself had no children, remarked that if all the little girls died, there would be plenty of bread. This comment especially disturbed my younger sister, Angelique, who at fifteen wondered if she still fell into the category of
little girl
. (I, at twenty, felt exempt.) That complacency only lasted a night, though. The next day the rumor was corrected: the magistrate had actually said, “
All
children should be thrown into the river because bread is too expensive.”

Throughout that summer the grand châteaux of the Loire were looted and burned. The grandest château, Chambord, with four hundred chimneys and a double spiral staircase on which I had once played hide-and-seek, was one of the first to go. Every velvet armchair and rich tapestry was dragged down that staircase and piled below it and set alight. The fire spread rapidly, and soon even the coffered ceiling and the sun rays painted on the shutters of the room where the Sun King himself had stayed were scorched beyond recognition. Such was the fate of all the châteaux where kings had stayed.

And the Loire Valley had been the playground of the kings.

We lived in the town of Blois, just north and west from Chambord, along the river Loire. There were riots in town whenever a grain barge arrived at the quai, and by the end of the summer the château de Blois, too, had been sacked. No one went out at night. No one knew how it had got out of hand so quickly, nor when it would ever end.

But I had never seen any of the effects of the Revolution myself.

I had only heard about them. The Revolution as conversation topic was considered impolite, so we never talked about our fears and lived almost happily in this way through that summer.

My father, a respected doctor in town, still visited patients, riots or no. His friend the count also remained unfazed that the world we had always known was changing before our eyes. The count himself had inherited the château de Beauregard, but since it was one of the lesser châteaux of the Loire and since he always provided his peasants and tenants with bread, he was not worried. My own parents thought it actually safer to be out of the town, and my younger brother Etienne and I were staying now, at the end of the summer, with the count.

I had known him as a type of uncle most of my life. When my father taught me to ride to the hunt, the count was there. When I had the liaison with the dance tutor, it was the count who kept my father from challenging the musical Casanova to a duel, who used his influence so that the tutor’s reputation was ruined and not my own, and made him quietly and permanently leave town. It was at the count’s château that the finest dinners and dances had always been held. So when the streets in town weren’t safe, and beautiful châteaux went up in flames, I was happy to visit the count.

In the fall Etienne was to start at the university in Paris, at the Sorbonne. Revolution or no, it was continuing; in its many centuries it had known worse than the fall of the Bastille. So my brother and I had this time together. He was a good friend to me, and I did not look forward to him going away. That September he and I rode through the count’s fields and woods and raced through the meadow where the hunts had always started. The count was not continuing them this year. There was never a year in anyone’s memory that the château de Beauregard did not hold its autumn hunt and ball. But the extent to which the Revolution had turned the world upside down was not fully made clear to me until one day when Etienne and I were returning from a ride in the meadow. Those days we always went armed.

We saw peasants walking on the road toward the château as if they were going to a fair. A young man had a drum; many carried rakes or scythes like muskets on their shoulders. Young women picked poppies and put them in their straw hats. They all seemed happy and as if on holiday, and indeed, they were not harvesting the count’s fields that day. “We ’re going for dinner at the château,” they shouted to us.

“The count is waiting.” But we had heard of no general invitation for dinner to all peasants on his lands.