Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (54 page)

“Don’t you know,” we heard Gauchon saying loudly to Jeanne Robin, as we left, “that women can’t do that?”

We were almost back to the cottage when William said, “France is a strange place.”

“That woman behind us, she’s a Chouanne too,” I said.

“I see. A singular distraction, but it worked. That fellow seemed to recognize you, wig or no.”

“That was before I had the wig. My one indiscretion, for which I will not be able to go to market now until that citizen goes back to Paris.”

When Claudette returned that night, she said that Gauchon had followed Jeanne into the alley behind the square, and Jeanne had returned alone.

After supper I asked William to sing to Caroline, and while she lay in my arms he sang the ballads of his country in the north of England.

“Sing the Annachie Gordon song,” I said. “She knows that one, only in French, with happier words.”

I was glad he had come. He had seen his daughter. He knew I still loved him, even if the
I
was different from the one he had known and loved. And I knew he had risked his life just to see me.

Late that night, in the quiet of the house and of his soft breathing next to me, as he lay near sleep, he said, “But Chouannes are wild people. Are you really a Chouanne?”

“May I be a Chouanne with a romantic heart?” And he was asleep before I had my answer.

William stayed for two more days. The second evening after dinner he said, “Annette, I want to show you something.” He pulled a slim book out of his rucksack and handed it to me. I noticed his name on the cover.

“Is this—?”

“It’s for you,” he said, “I carried it all the way from London. I didn’t want the Committee of Public Safety to get their hands on it. There ’re not many copies.” His voice was nonchalant, but he couldn’t stop smiling.

“And you’ve waited all this time. Why didn’t you show it to me the first day? This is exciting.”

“I was saving it.”

“Read the title to me, in English,” I said. “I want to hear how it sounds.”

“
An Evening Walk
and
Descriptive Sketches
, by W. Wordsworth, B.A. of St. John’s, Cambridge,” he said. “That is I. Open it; I wrote something inside for you, in French.”

Caroline was just getting used to William when he had to leave. He had stayed as long as he could, and I was anxious for him. On the third morning I wrapped my worn velvet dressing gown around me and went with him in the dark and held his hand by our little gate.

His face was in shadow, and the faintest line of light lay behind the dark trees beyond him. It was still cold from the autumn night. Dew coated our garden with silver. You could smell the river. He pressed my hand, shouldered his old rucksack, and went down the deserted road. He was already lost in the dark. It was a long way to the Normandy coast.

When I came back inside, I noticed the whiteness of a sheet of paper slipped under the porcelain water jug on the table. I took the paper over to the window and stood in the pale light and read the lines William had left for me. Translating his poetry was always a slow process for him, and I wondered when he had composed these.

Tonight, my Friend, within this humble cot

Be scorn and fear and hope alike forgot

In timely sleep; and when, at break of day,

On the tall peaks the glistening sunbeams play

With a light heart our course we many renew,

The first whose footsteps print the mountain dew.

He wrote that these next lines were a fragment from a work in progress,

...He who feels contempt

For any living thing, hath faculties

Which he has never used.

True knowledge leads to love.

At the end of the month all of William’s Girondin friends were executed. Journalists at the trial wrote of the Girondins’ passionate extemporaneous speeches in their own defense, but the verdict, of course, had already been decided. I could only think that William so easily could have been among them. They sang “La Marseillaise” as they rode through the streets of Paris in the tumbril, and each shouted “Vive la République!” before he stepped valiantly up to the guillotine. But Paris had turned against them. The Jacobins had convinced the people that the Girondins were, after all, traitors: propaganda, for the most part, works. One of the Girondins, upon hearing the verdict, had stabbed himself rather than give the Jacobins the victory of his death. But the Jacobins insisted upon the letter of the law: his corpse stayed in the cell all night with the condemned Girondins, accompanied them to the scaffold, and was beheaded along with them. The twenty-two leaders were killed in forty minutes.

And on October 16, 1793, one day after William left, when, even with his sturdy legs, he was probably still in France, the Queen was brought to what was now called “Sainte-Guillotine,” all witnesses commented on her composure, her hands tied behind her back (unlike the King), and in an open cart. She even apologized to the executioner for stepping on his toe.

It is true that if one says a thing enough times, it comes to be believed. The gossip that had sold pornographic pamphlets since long before the Revolution, which depicted the Queen as a depraved, licentious monster, now became the spurious lies that made up the bulk of the prosecution. Antoinette was not tried before the National Convention, as was her husband, but by the extremist prosecutor Hébert and the Revolutionary Tribunal, hastily and righteously disposing of their political enemies.

But most of the people I talked to in Blois were still surprised.

They thought the queen would be ransomed and sent to Austria. But the regicide had to be complete. I will not repeat here Hébert’s vicious and obscene accusations, which the queen would not lower herself to answer. She appealed to the mothers of France, and some of the market women in the courtroom even called for the trial to stop. But Hébert wanted her head as his own political trophy. When he himself mounted the scaffold six months later, his screams were far different than the quiet dignity with which Antoinette lightly stepped up onto it. Perhaps they both knew where they were soon bound.

That October we heard distressing news from the Vendée. The Royal and Catholic Army, about 40,000 strong, and with at least as many women and children in tow, had crossed the Loire, north, into Brittany. They were on their way to meet British troops and an émigré army from England that would land on the coast. Their new leader, the twenty-year-old Count Henri de La Rochejacquelin, inspired them. They had marched all the way to Granville by mid-November, in harsh weather, and found no trace of the British—some said the fleet was detained by contrary winds, others that the British had never intended to meet them. Then the huge, hungry army headed back south. Once out of the hedgerows and woods of their home territory, they lost the advantage and suffered loss after terrible loss, as Count Henri tried to attack cities. By Christmas, the remains of the 40,000 were starving in the marshy lands at the mouth of the Loire. The freezing river was now a barrier against their return home. By New Year’s we had heard of their final defeat near Nantes. The Republic was publicizing it as a great victory.

It was on the night of Epiphany, the sixth of January, that the marquis paid another visit to the cottage. He made his owl call, more as a greeting than anything else, and the next minute, as soon as I opened the door, he stepped out of the darkness with a bundle in his arms.

When he had seated himself at table and accepted some hot tea, he unfolded his package and showed us his gift of venison, ready for the cooking. “My Twelfth Night present,” he said.

“This is extremely kind of you, Monsieur le Marquis,” I said, “but we have nothing to give in return but our tea and what’s left of the
Gâteau des Rois
, the Three Kings Cake, that Claudette baked today. Who knows, perhaps you will be the one to get the elusive bean in his piece; we have not found it yet.”

“Thank you; I would be more than grateful. And the company of two civilized ladies is more than enough reward for bringing you this lean deer. I was hoping to bring you a
wapiti
—that’s a very big deer, in an Indian tongue.” I served him a piece of the cake, and he did find the bean.

“I think, with all your exploits, you could use the luck of the bean this year,” I said.

“It is on another matter that will require luck—but not mine—that I have come to talk to you.”

“Ah, no mere social visit from the busy marquis.”

“I’m afraid the news from the Vendée is taking up all my time. You’ve heard of the defeat at Savenay?”

“If one goes into town, one hears little else—‘Brigands defeated! Royal and Catholic Army destroyed!’”

“Well, they are not all destroyed, though their victors were ruthless, using their bayonets and the hoofs of their horses, but they could not stab or crush all of them—including, of course, many women and children—though they shot prisoners by the thousands in the next several days. Still, there are many left who now crowd the prisons in Nantes. That is what I have come to talk to you about.”

“Not to manage an escape from Nantes! That’s a hundred miles away, and one would need an army, more than an army—”

“Peace, Madame Williams; you do not have all the facts. The facts are not agreeable, and I will lay them before you plainly: Nantes was not made to keep thousands of prisoners, nor can the Republic afford to feed them, even though prisoners in Versailles were dining on rats. Word got out about the mass executions, and as that didn’t square with the professed morals of the government, they had to stop them. The representative-on-mission there, one Carrier—”

“Carrier! He’s the one who ordered the deaths of the people whom I helped escape from the Town Hall!”

“An enthusiast, this Carrier. He apparently has devised a new plan, a creative one, I’m sure he thinks, that would, in one stroke, empty the prisons, rid the Republic of deadly enemies—remember, many of these are still women and children—and do so in a manner that would not tarnish the principles of the Republic, for it would be done in secret.”

“How do you know about it?”

“We intercepted a messenger from Carrier to the Committee of Public Safety; his note referred to solving the problems of the prisons through cargoes. This was curious enough to lead us to make sure the next messenger, a week later, didn’t get through. Now Carrier was more specific. He had grown bold from his success. His plan uses nature itself as a means of solving his ‘problem.’ His letter read: ‘The miracle of the Loire has just swallowed up 360 counter-revolutionaries from Nantes. Others are going to follow them. Oh, what a revolutionary torrent is the Loire.’”

The marquis paused, but Claudette and I were silent. This was my beautiful river, which I had loved since I was a child. The Revolution had now invaded even its waters.

“There are a few witnesses,” the marquis continued, “even though it is done in the dead of night. It seems they bind the prisoners and take them out in old barges, which they then scuttle and let their ‘cargo’ sink.”

“What do you want me to do, Marquis? As I said, Nantes is a long way away.”

“I would not mention this to you, but if we are to do anything about this new terror—and nightly, I fear, more people are lost—we are in a desperate situation. Most of the Chouans of the West joined Count Henri’s expedition and are themselves dead or in the Nantes prisons; the ones who didn’t cross the Loire are hunted by the Revolutionary Army, and my men and I—have you heard of the Hell Columns, Madame?”

I shook my head. I hardly wanted to hear of more horrors tonight.

“In short, they are what they say they are. They march across the Vendée, killing all locals they come across as counter-revolutionaries—and this means largely widows, orphans, and the elderly, and even some republicans, but the Hell Columns have gone mad with killing and then burning villages and lands. Whatever one column doesn’t destroy, the next one will. I read one report. It ended, ‘Pity is not revolutionary.’

“So my Philanthropic Institute will try to save and hide villagers before a column comes, or, if we are late, between one column and the next. I cannot spare the time to go all the way to Nantes to rescue prisoners.”

“How can I? I cannot ride that far. I am only one person—”

“You are two, or more than two, with the formidable Jeanne Robin. And you would have a barge, fitted with hay and even some livestock, to make your journey downriver credible. That is, should you decide to do it at all. Your work for the Chouans of Blois has been fearless and constant. You do not need to do work outside your region for those who perhaps cannot be helped. But please think on it. I wish you good Day of the Kings and will await your answer tomorrow night, when I will pass by your gate.” The marquis rose, and I thought even he looked a little tired and worn. I walked him the few steps to the door, and he bowed deeply to us both.

“Thank you for the venison, Marquis. That was very thoughtful.”

“I wish I could do more. And I apologize for bringing you this news. It is an unnecessary burden. In retrospect, it was wrong of me to ask.”

“You were wrong, Marquis, when you said that Nantes, as far as it is, is outside of my region. I think wherever our river flows may be part of my region. An American, whom you fought for without knowing it, once told me, when I was a girl, to remember to be true to my own land. I’ve thought of that often lately. It is winter. I will need scores of blankets—all you can steal—and I suppose you have a crew—”

“I’ll find a bargeman or two.”

“And, may I ask, how would one return upriver?”

“There is a group of
gabares
, sailing vessels, leaving Nantes in about a week. I can arrange passage for you and Jeanne Robin in the cabin of a barge.”

“And the prisoners? Once they are free?”

“If they can be ferried safely to the south bank, by the time you get there I can have Chouans who can emerge at night take them to safety. They are mainly local farmers who are willing to hide refugees, but not to ride a barge through Nantes and rescue the prisoners themselves. What happens to the prisoners is not your concern. Your task is to get the prisoners, bound and guarded, off a sinking barge in a freezing river, and onto your own healthy boat.”