Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (39 page)

“I am not of the aristocracy,” I said. “My family has no title. My father was a doctor.”

But the woman’s voice was changing again. I felt unafraid, sitting there against the wall with the baby at my breast, as if Caroline were feeding me strength, not I her. Her eyes were closed.

“I have a husband,” the woman was saying. “He is away, in the army at the frontier. He must not know his child died. That would be too horrible, coming back from these terrible wars and finding his child died. He would blame me. You must give her back, now. See, my breasts are ready for her and are asking for her. I carried a child and deserve her. God brought me this one. He took it away from you and gave it to me.”

“My stepfather, Monsieur Vergez, and not God, had my Caroline taken away from me and given to that priest. But I must have my child. You know that. I am truly sorry you lost your child, but you cannot make up for it with mine. You cannot do to me what fate has done to you. You would not wish that upon another woman, would you?”

The woman’s eyes were watery, but she was looking straight at me.

“She was mine. God brought her back to me.” She reached out her hand, and I thought she was going to kneel and stroke the baby, nursing while she slept, and the woman’s big hand looked as if it could be very soft. Then her eyes turned angry, and her hand turned into a finger pointing at me. “Then you, spoiled aristocrat who has liaisons and never pays for what she does, must pay me. You must pay me double, to take my Marie-Louise away. I will make you pay,” and she brushed her eyes with the heel of her hard hand.

My eyes met Angelique, leaning against the meat counter, and she pulled the purse from her skirt and said, “Let’s talk, Madame.”

After they had arranged the finances, dickering with some satisfaction as if they were settling on the price of a joint of beef, the woman stopped me as I was leaving her shop and rested her hand on Caroline’s head. “Good-bye, my poor child,” she said, then walked, without looking back at us, behind the counter, defiantly standing above the raw meats.

A few Orléans folk still milled around outside, hungry for more drama. One shouted “Kidnappers! You think you can buy anything.

Not anymore,” but it was with less enthusiasm than before. I hardly noticed them as Alain helped me back into the carriage and closed the door behind us. I had Caroline. I felt the carriage lurch forward down the alley, and the taunting voices were like a nightmare receding.

The three of us were quiet at first, a bit stunned, I think; then crossing rue Royale seemed to set Angelique and Claudette’s tongues free.

They chattered madly. They must have been as scared as I. Now they were laughing and complimenting each other. Then they moved on to the topic of their sweethearts: Angelique’s Philippe, the count’s son, and Claudette’s Benoît, his footman. They exclaimed with delight how they might both end up living at the château de Beauregard. This thought had never occurred to them before.

I gazed into Caroline’s face, smoothed of its grief. I still feared the reach and influence of Monsieur Vergez’s malice. I would never return to chez Vergez. They continued in their giddiness, oblivious.

“You’re a marvelous actress, Mademoiselle Angelique. You should go on the stage.”

“You’re a wild citizeness, Claudette Valcroix. You should join the men at the wars.”

Once Caroline was asleep in my room, exhaustion filled my limbs with a heaviness they had never known before. But when I lay down on my bed, rage drove out fatigue. I could not sleep for composing a letter answering the one I had received the day before.

Maman, this is our tête-à-tête: how can I say it plainly and clearly?

Prudence dictates that I banish you for life from your grandchild.

Your act, so opposed to true maternal solicitude, should incite in
you a fear of burning in the afterlife, if it were not that your overwhelming self-righteous ness prorogues such a fear to the time when
you must account for your actions. This child shall receive my blessing to the end of my days, a gift I cannot fully claim I received from
my own mother. What depths of vanity could allow you to place reputation and Vergez’s career before the promptings of your own
mother’s heart? What blind belief in propaganda could make you
invoke the name of Citizen Robespierre as a paragon of moral rectitude? What rectitude is there in silencing compassion? You asked
me to pity you, and I do. Yes, it’s a cruel world, and yes, we must all
pay the consequences of our actions. But I don’t believe we are born
to suffer. We may be born to alleviate the suffering of others, never
to increase it. Did you ever read Rousseau’s
Emile,
and his simple
exhortation to the child: the most important lesson for every time of
life—is this: “Never hurt anybody.”

Though it may hurt you, Maman, to know that Caroline’s smile is a thing you will never see.

I got up from my bed, wrapped a shawl around me, lit a candle, and wrote it all down so I could sleep. Alain posted it the next day.

The house was asleep, and my own eyes were heavy. I had been up with Caroline late at night and now had just finished brewing a tisane of
tilleul
leaves. I sat at the servant’s table in the kitchen and listened to the March wind and rain howl in the eaves of the house and in the two poplars that grew beside it. A small candelabrum lit the steam rising from my cup. Then I heard a knock. I thought it was just the wind against the shutters, but I heard it again. It was at the scullery door. Perhaps the footman had gone out to do one last chore and had locked himself out. I picked up the candelabrum, the knocking growing more insistent; it was not the knocking of a servant. Could it be William? I thought, irrationally. I put the candelabrum down on the cutting block and opened the door a crack. In the uncertain light, with water dripping from his hat and cape, I saw the lined but still handsome face of Count Thibaut. He smiled and said simply, “May I come in?”

He stood in the kitchen, hat in hand. “I saw you through the window,” he said, “and thought that my prayers had been answered.

I only wanted to talk to you. I trust you. I want no one else to know I’m here.”

“My, all this mystery, Count,” I said. “If you’re going to be so full of intrigue, let us discuss it in the drawing room. No one is up, don’t worry.”

He placed his tricorne hat on the table and his cape over a high-backed chair. I fed him some brandy for having been out in the cold and left the decanter at his disposal. He took a long sip. “I thought,” he said, “for a moment, just for a moment, that twenty-five years hadn’t passed and that it was your mother there, sitting in the halo of the candlelight. You know she was called ‘the beauty of Blois
.
’ You get more lovely every time I see you, Annette.”

“Intrigue seems to have brought out your old flattery, Count.”

I could not say the same for him. I had not seen him since Marguerite and I had visited him last September, when he was convalescing from his wound from the Tuileries massacre, and he had dark pouches now under his eyes. He said nothing and looked at his brandy, then around at the gilding of the fine carved paneling, catching the flicker of the candlelight.

“Much has changed, but not this room,” he finally said, as if to himself. “I attended many of the old fêtes at chez Dubourg.” Then he turned to me and gently said, “I hear you have a beautiful baby girl—”

“Where did you—”

“How is your Englishman?”

“Safe back in England.”

“That is good. It’s not a time for foreigners. It’s not a time for many of us.” And he laughed, a little.

“I heard that it was that old music teacher of yours who denounced him. Revenge twists men’s hearts, if he had a heart to twist. And what did he have to complain about? We merely made it uncomfortable for him to stay in Blois. Well, now he’s back preening himself with the most zealous of the Jacobins. He doesn’t care a
sou
for you or anyone. I should not have kept your father from running him through. How is your mother?”

“She’s busy being the wife of an important lawyer about to be elected to the trade tribunal. They’ve adjusted to the new order.”

“I was happy to see her well remarried. I was one of her only old friends who would come.”

“Yes.”

“You know my son has been seeing much of your sister.”

“Yes.”

“I believe he is very fond of her. Do you know if the feeling is mutual?”

“From what I know, yes.”

He looked down at his brandy. The glass was empty. “I’m afraid it must be obvious to you that I have not come here to discuss my son’s future plans,” he said and poured himself another brandy. “You know, if Angelique marries my son, she will have a title. That will please your mother. Not that titles are so important nowadays. In fact, they can get you in trouble. Which is why I dropped by chez Dubourg at this inopportune hour.”

He was becoming more like his old self, with the brandy. He twirled his sodden hat on the table. “Denouncing has become a prudent business, Annette. It serves two purposes. One gets a reward and, even more important, one looks like a patriot in the eyes of the Committee—an increasingly important reward in itself. It turns out your old friend, the dancing instructor, finished his steps by finding out from the erstwhile maidservant of the Vincents that I had been involved in the battle at the Tuileries—and on the wrong side. Like your Englishman, I was warned, by an old friend who has managed to keep his position as city magistrate—he invited me back, by the way, when this blows over, and he’s sure it will; he says everything changes every three weeks now—and when I return, he wants me to take over his situation; he has had enough of it. He says the town needs an old respected name on the bench, and he can put me there, vouch for my patriotism. I just have to disappear for a while.”

I must have looked surprised. “Didn’t you know, being the second son, I studied law before my brother died in the American war? I was not
meant
to be a count.”

“I never knew that,” I said. “All my life you were simply ‘the count.’ How could you be anything else?”

He took a long sip of brandy. “But my past and my dubious future aside,” he said, “in short, like Monsieur William, I have to flee, and like him, I need your help.”

“I can make a guest room.”

“You know they have dismantled the Committees of Surveillance,” he said. “It’s a grand thing for civilization. The Girondins made such a fuss that the Jacobins were using those committees to set up their own dictatorship that the Assembly voted to disband them.”

“That’s great news, then—”

“No, my dear,” he said. “The Jacobins merely reformed them a month later under a different name. They are now part of the Committee of Public Safety, which is part of the Committee of General Security—those committees will soon control all of France. You see, one doesn’t need a king. One just needs a committee with a good name. Just say the words ‘patriot’ or ’security,’ and everyone will follow you.”

“I’ll find you that room—”

“I can’t stay in a guest room—or the servants’ quarters. No one must know I am here.”

He looked at my face and laughed. “I will not bother you or the baby. I hear you not only aided the Englishman but helped Paul Vincent escape from prison, and his family from France.”

“Those are just stories, and stories abound now. It is a time for intrigue.”

“Yes, it is a time for intrigue, and I ask you, Annette, to help me now. It will be as nothing, if you have done these dangerous things, and if you have not, it is still nothing.”

“Where would you like to stay?”

“Annette, I must be concealed in the secret room.”

I laughed. “I thought you knew this house. We have no such room.”

“It is behind the mirror, in the upstairs hall. I’ll show you.” He draped his cape over his left arm, held his hat and his glass easily in his left hand, and picked up the candelabrum in the other. He apparently didn’t want me to carry anything for him.

He walked before me up the stairs. We paused outside the floor-length mirror in the hall. The nearest room was unoccupied now. It had always been my mother’s since she visited Madame Dubourg as a girl and had been left as she liked it. The count moved as quietly and as gracefully as a cat. In front of the mirror stood a small inlaid marble table, a pale green porcelain vase on it. Beside the mirror stood the grand clock of veneered violet wood, mounted in gilded bronze.

“It has been a long time,” the count said.

The candlelight was reflected dully in the mirror, as were the count, the table, and I. The clock next to it said ten minutes past three. The count placed the candelabrum on the table. With the cape hanging like a black wing over his arm and the hat and glass poised in his hand, I watched in wonderment as he reached up behind the two bronze figures, clad only at the waist, who perched above the clock. The woman figure leaned over the man, dangling a bunch of grapes. The count ran his hands behind the gilded man about to enjoy a grape. His brow furrowed.

Perhaps his secret room has lost its entrance, I thought. Perhaps he’s thinking of another house. He’s getting old. He’s been under heavy burdens since the Tuileries massacre. He cursed under his breath. “My God, doesn’t anyone dust behind clocks anymore?” he whispered. Then his fingers caressed the back of the bronze woman’s thighs. I saw a smile appear on the count’s face. “How silly of me to forget,” he said. “It’s behind the woman, of course.” He pressed a hidden lever, and the mirror swiveled inward to reveal a small chamber with a double mirror framed in curling bronze vine leaves, a carved oak armoire, a vanity table with another mirror, a triple tray table, veneered with ebony, and a carved and gilt wood bed
à la Turque
—that is, with cushioned borders on three sides. All had a thick layer of dust on them. An arched door stood on the other side of the bed. The purpose of the room seemed obvious.

The count moved the marble table aside, bowed, and gestured for me to enter. “We must be discreet,” he whispered, and he reached up and pushed the button again, and the mirror swung back. He deftly picked up the candelabrum from the table before the room closed us in. The candle flames now flickered in the shadowy, doubled mirrors.