Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (56 page)

Then someone shouted, “What about those below?” My God, I thought, there’s more. Jeanne ran first to the hatch that led below, and as she did so, a guard emerged out of it, his pistol pointed at her. Before he could pull the trigger, her long, sharp sword had sliced him from his mid-chest up to his neck. Mademoiselle Robin was a strong woman.

To avoid people tripping over him, she rolled him into the river.

I finished cutting the ankle bonds of the ones on deck, and now we were both below, and I couldn’t speak any reassuring words to them because their screams filled the hold. Many were sitting with their knees up in three feet of water. Mothers, or surrogate mothers, had scooped children onto their laps or their knees, but the water was rising every minute. The guard had left a torch burning on the wall, and by its dim glow Jeanne and I sloshed along through the hold, cutting bonds again, first the mothers, who could then help the children. These people were also desperately cold, for, like those on deck, all their jackets, waistcoats, dresses, and skirts had been taken by their captors (whom, I learned later, got good money for them): women in thin shifts, men in cotton shirts, often without any trousers, children in underclothing; all of them without shoes and most without stockings.

Suddenly the barge lurched, and all the people sitting in the stern had the Loire up to their chins. They lifted their legs above water for me to cut their bonds, then waded out with their hands still tied.

I finally got to an old man and woman in the corner, who, somehow, had survived the long march, the battle, and the massacres, and leaned peacefully against each other, now entirely underwater. I lifted them up and saw that they had left, together. Then I heard a soft humming sound, and, the river up to her lips, a woman sang to her little girl, poised on top of her knees. The girl was still asleep. “I thought,” the woman said, as I approached her, “that if I sang the song she’s used to, she wouldn’t notice anything.”

Then the water suddenly poured into the hold. I cut the bonds from the woman’s ankles. She held onto the waking, crying girl, and I swam, pulling the mother with one arm, the stiletto between my teeth.

I shoved the mother with her girl up the hatch. The torch went out, and the water flowed over my head. I was under the numbingly cold, black water now, and I couldn’t reach the hatch. Through it the river was pouring in on me and pushing me down and back into the hold. I swam with all my might and bumped into the side of the barge. I had gone in the wrong direction in the dark. My lungs were burning. I pushed myself once more hard against the current and reached up toward where I thought the hatch was. I only felt air. I sank down, then kicked and reached again. I felt a strong grip suddenly grab my flailing hand, and Jeanne Robin pulled me up, and I felt the hail again, like pebbles on my face. “Look at you,” Jeanne said, “a knife in your teeth.”

“Holy Mary,” I said. “Holy Mary.”

The deck was well underwater now, and tipping violently. Jeanne strode across, helping the mother and child onto our barge, and I jumped behind them onto our deck, crowded with hundreds of wet, confused, relieved, and frightened people. Jeanne and I made our way through them, and I disappeared down our hatch and started to hand up piles of wool blankets that the marquis had stolen from a barracks when the regiment was out looking for him. Jeanne passed the blankets out, women and men soon coming to her aid, until all of the prisoners either had a blanket around them or one to share.

I realized I was shivering myself now, and went into our cabin to grab the blankets I had stayed under all day. There I bumped into two people standing under one blanket, taking up most of the room in the cabin. I asked them could they please stand outside, that at least the hail had stopped, and I heard, “Annette, this is Michel, my brother,” and the two people turned around, and I saw Jeanne, her eyes wet and shining, and the young man who had asked me who Jeanne and I were. They couldn’t believe their luck, and neither could I. Out of the thousands of people killed at Savenay, the thousands executed afterward, the thousands probably already drowned in the
noyades
, here was her brother on the one barge we saved. It was a miracle. But if the Virgin were to smile on anyone in this war, if any one deserved a family member to be brought back from the dead, it was Jeanne Robin. Her fiancé, I learned later, had been lost in the attack on Angers.

I left the cabin and directed the bargemen to take us about three miles downriver and pull in to the south bank. I hoped the marquis’s men had made it through to the local Chouans, or we would have a lot of helpless people on the banks of the Loire. The rain had stopped now, and when we landed, with the white feather again in my hat, I jumped ashore and gave the owl call into the trees along the bank. Within a minute, a dozen armed men surrounded me, and in less than half an hour, they had a dozen wagons, covered with canvas, driving in two different directions into the night. One middle-aged man wrapped in a blanket and passing by me toward a wagon asked me, “Are you the one they call Madame Williams, the Mother of Orléans?” I said yes, and he clasped my hands and said he was Count Dufort, and that he would make sure that someday, he would thank me properly.

They did not tell me where they were going, but I found out later that the Chouans ferried the refugees before dawn to two locations, one in the woods by a lake south of Nantes, and the other at a farm just west near Bonaye, where the Philanthropic Institute, living up to its name, would hide, feed, and clothe them, and gradually ship them off to safe homes.

Jeanne and her brother planned to stay together and eventually rejoin their mother and surviving siblings at Azay-le-Ferron, where Jeanne had taken them, about twenty miles south of their hometown of Loches, but out of the fighting. Jeanne said her days as a Chouan were over now; she had fought for her family, and now they needed her more than the Chouans did. Once her brother had been brought back to her, they would never be separated again.

I was loaned a Chouan horse, and two stern and silent older men conducted me, shivering embarrassedly under a blanket, the fifteen miles back to La Chebuette, east of Nantes. They waited with me, had hot tea and cold biscuits at daybreak. I drank the tea gratefully.

Snow started to fall in the vague dawn, and I felt that I might never be warm again, while my guardians sat mute and still until the
gabare
, with its convoy of small boats, sailed up from Nantes. They made sure that a dinghy detached itself from the convoy and picked me up before going on to perform some other secret, philanthropic task.

The efficiency and the thoroughness of the marquis’ institute again impressed me. Everyone knew what their task was, and everything had been planned and communicated, although it took days to get information from Blois to Nantes. I didn’t doubt the communication system of the Chouans, which had a voice in every village and hands in every harbor along the river.

My new host was a round-faced, rough, and cheerful bargeman in a round black hat who wanted to wait on me as if I were royalty, but soon found out I was not an appreciative guest. By nightfall I was in a high fever. All I remember about the voyage upstream was shivering or sweating under blankets, the round-faced bargeman scolding me for throwing them off, him forcing me to drink hot broth and, at night, singing me river songs. His voice somehow reminded me of William; I asked him several times where in England he had learned such old French songs, and he told me that he had never been in England, that he grew up on the river, and that it was his only home. He cared nothing for republic or monarchy, just for the river itself, which was much, much older than either of those governments and would be here when kings and revolutionaries had all rotted and become soil washed into the river. At least, that is what I remember him saying.

I asked him if he knew Jeanne Robin, for I missed her, and he said he didn’t know that song. On a fifteen-day journey upriver, he was my father, mother, and best friend, some benevolent spirit that chose to hover by my bed and put cool rags on my forehead or another blanket over my feet. When I was able to stand and walk on deck the last day, suddenly I saw the Beauvoir Tower and the spires of Saint-Louis Cathedral, and there was so much hustle and bustle as he unloaded the barge that, in my dazed state, I disembarked and never thanked him properly. I never learned his name.

When I had recovered, like Jeanne Robin, I found that after Nantes my taste for intrigues had waned. With no exaggeration, perhaps the most blissful moments of my own life occurred when, just a few days after my return from the barge in the pelting hail, Caroline took her first steps—or, I should say, raced her first steps. She never really did cautiously walk but went straight from crawling to a type of blundering running. Claudette and I sat facing each other, about six feet apart on our thin hearthrug, and Caroline stood in front of Claudette, with her help. Then my daughter looked at me and suddenly took off, running with the biggest grin possible on her little face, accompanied by her bubbling laughter, and didn’t stop until she had run right into my arms. I wanted to take no more risks that she lose her mother, and I slowly curtailed my intrigues with the Philanthropic Institute.

I did not go with the marquis on any of the daring rides that he made throughout January to save towns between the Hell Columns.

I did help stop a few more carriages in the winter woods, but the rent collectors were getting more and more wary, so I needed a patrol with me, and I mainly went because the men said I was good luck. On one memorable raid, without a shot fired, a patrol was disarmed by about two hundred Chouans around me, surrounding the patrol and singing the song that I had quoted to William.

Another memorable night occurred when Angelique came to dinner in a green cloak and a white-feathered bonnet. She said it was all the mode now to dress as the Blonde Chouanne at fêtes.

Philippe had taken her to a ball in which perhaps thirty women, she said, showed up in blonde wigs and green masks. Some even had stilettos embroidered on their sleeves. One woman, though, not in Chouanne costume, took Angelique by the arm and told her that she had really seen the Blonde Chouanne, who had ambushed her carriage, that the Chouanne was as cold as ice and had a pistol in each hand, and that it was uncanny how much she, Angelique, looked like her. “I told her not to worry, that I had enough jewels,” Angelique said. “Now isn’t that a story?” she said. “Isn’t it?” I agreed, and we left it at that.

After dinner Angelique looked at her teacup and said softly, “Philippe said that the Blonde Chouanne’s last fête will be on the guillotine. Don’t you think she should be more careful?”

“Perhaps she should wear a red wig, or take a holiday,” I said.

She didn’t take a complete holiday. The Royal and Catholic Army had been destroyed at Nantes, but no one could stop the Chouans.

No patrols of the Revolutionary Army or visiting sans-culottes from Paris were secure on the roads in the Loire Valley. For many months now, despite all their efforts, the officials had not arrested a single draft escapee or deserter between Blois and Nantes—they had just gone to swell the ranks of the Chouans.

Things were changing in Paris. The ones who loved to call themselves patriots, who had exulted over executions and been intoxicated, insatiably, by them, slowly grew tired of head after head falling into the wicker baskets on the scaffolds of France. One can even get tired of Terror.

And they turned against its architect, the Incorruptible, Robespierre. He sent his friend Danton to his death in a last effort to save his own head, but by July Robespierre himself went the way he had sent so many. The only difference was that, when so many had gone quietly, or, like the Girondins, singing, Robespierre, already wounded in the jaw from an attempted suicide, screamed in pain when they ripped off his bandage so his head could fit in the guillotine. His leaders followed, the crippled and now injured Couthon dragged to the platform, Saint-Just as haughty as ever.

And with Robespierre gone, attitudes shifted in the National Convention. In August, the Convention promised amnesty to all Chouans and twenty livres in silver to all who handed over their muskets, though even that was not enough of an incentive for most.

By the end of October 1794, Citizen Carrier himself was brought to trial. I had been in correspondence with Gilbert Romme, whom, I heard from the marquis, was the head of the internal commission indicting Carrier. Here there was no hasty tribunal, like the one that had condemned my brother, but a lengthy process where justice was emphasized. If they wanted justice, I would give them first-hand accounts as a witness of the
noyades
. Carrier defended himself as a patriot dedicated to his duty to protect France, but no one was convinced anymore that the drowning of women and children was protecting the nation. The selling of their clothes added to Carrier’s turpitude, and in the end the Convention ruled that the
noyades
were not a “pure reflection” of the Republic’s ideals, and Carrier and two others found their way to the guillotine, though twenty-eight others who were complicit in the
noyades
were acquitted. I wondered if they were more “pure” than Carrier.

That winter the Convention also had to deal with complaints from the public: people were dying from starvation, even near the statue of the Goddess of the Republic in Paris. The winter was harsh, and since farmers had only grown about half of their usual crops because they didn’t want the government to take any surplus away, food was scarce, especially in the cities.

We had our chickens and winter vegetables, though bread was hard to come by, and one night, again we heard the owl call, followed by a knock, and Monsieur le Marquis was there with his venison, and this time also with a large sack of flour.

He sat in his usual place at the table and poured himself water from the porcelain jug. “The Philanthropic Institute wishes to practice some philanthropy,” he said, “close to home, to the Fearless Chouanne of Blois. I also have news, ladies, that the National Convention itself is frustrated in dealing with the Chouans and wants to deploy their forces elsewhere, and we might finally have peace at hand in our region.”