Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (6 page)

“Would you like some water?” I said to Marie. She nodded.

Every one of my movements, even the slightest, now required a great effort. I wanted to curl into a ball in my bed for months, for years. Someone though, for now, needed to sit with Marie. I could hibernate later.

I poured Marie, then myself, some water from the porcelain jug. I stared at the Chinese-style drawing of plum blossoms, poised forever against a blue sky on the jug, as I lifted it. I felt the coolness of the water through the fine porcelain of the handle, the sound, as of snowmelt racing down a hill, filling first Marie’s glass, then my own.

“You could continue your drawing,” I said, my voice sounding strange. “It’s a good drawing.”

“You think so? I could do another one.”

“What of?”

“I could draw the bird as we saw it, by the yellow leaves. Will Grandpère die, Aunt Annette?”

“He is already gone.” It was not easy to say it. I really did not believe it.

“I knew it.” She paused, and we sipped our cool water. “Aunt Annette, is death when you can’t see the person anymore?”

I nodded.

“Then it’s like the fog covering the river.”

I nodded again.

My own words coming back to me shocked me. Her interpretation of my simple lesson about the senses was so much more clear and to the point than any theological dogma I could use to comfort her or myself. It comprised all the loss and all the certainty of a life continuing completely out of our realm.

“Thank you,” I said. “You are very wise. Now you must comfort your mother, just as she has comforted you many times.”

Marie nodded.

“And now I need to rest, myself,” I said.

I held her hand and went back to the drawing room. Marguerite held her arms out to her daughter, who let go of my hand and ran to her mother. I brought a cushioned chair over for Marie to sit on, beside the chaise longue. Françoise, keeping an eye on her mistress, was knitting by the fire and didn’t look up, as if it were rude to intrude.

I handed my sister a glass of the cool water. “Thank you,” she said.

“You take care of both of us. How are you?”

“Marie took care of me. You have a wise daughter.” Of my own feelings, I didn’t care to speak. The only one who understood me had crossed the river that morning in the fog. I will go to the old Bishop’s Palace later today, I thought, and wash his wounds.

I pressed my sister’s hand and left mother and daughter and slowly climbed the curving staircase to my room. It seemed to take a long time to reach the top, and I had to stop more than once and hold on to the walnut banister. I forced myself to take one step after the other up the steep stairs and then down the long hall to my room and flung myself on the bed and wept. I could hold myself together in front of Marguerite and Marie, but now the loss flooded in.

The room around me seemed to have such a passing existence as to be entirely illusory. I clutched the bed curtains to feel that they were real. What was the purpose of anything? I thought. Papa’s death had revealed how thin the fabric of life is. Everything seemed trivial and absurd. Why teach a child dance steps, or even logic or art? And for me, the foundation of my world, the source of understanding and love, had just been reft from me like a cold wind whipping through fog, and I was left alone in an emptiness that knew no end. That wind was blowing everywhere through the universe, revealing our shadow world for what it was: the field of death. I should have been there to help him, I thought. Then the vanity of my thoughts seemed as absurd and trivial as everything else.

Suddenly I saw my father on the morning of a hunt, alive and loving life; defending Marie’s decision to draw on the floor by the fire because that inspired her; smiling at me the night I had shot the boar. And that day in front of the stable when he had given me La Rouge, when he never said a thing about my disgrace with Monsieur Leforges, and I knew he had forgiven me.

I wiped away my tears and put on my riding habit and boots, and without seeing anyone walked down to the stables, saddled La Rouge, and was soon riding in the mist on the chalk cliffs above the river, feeling the cold wind snatch away my tears, the thundering life smoothly moving below me, and the gray river glinting through spaces in the fog.

Etienne returned for the mass said for Papa at Saint-Louis Cathedral. He was strange and full of his new burdens of head of the household. At the mass he took our younger sister Angelique’s arm; Marguerite was on Paul’s, and my mother leaned on the arm of the count. She was stoic, but we embraced. I noticed the count’s eyes bright with unshed tears. I had no one to take my arm, so Marie and I stood and knelt and prayed together. It felt good to hear her soft child’s voice next to me and feel her small arm, firmly locked in mine. She is the one who enlightened me, I thought, that the finality of death is only for the living.

Papa in his goodness had provided for the living—he had left substantial gifts for each child, not to be confused with inheritance, complicated as that was by issues of gender and by the fact that my mother was still alive. These were gifts to be used when needed, and, twenty and unmarried, I appreciated the security that such a gift might offer me one day.

I repeated softly
Ave, verum corpus, natum de Maria virgine
and looked up at the vast arches of the cathedral. How can they make a ceiling of stone so that it doesn’t fall down, as if it’s floating far above us? There were so many things I didn’t understand.

I felt Marie’s small hand in mine, and the touch of that hand kept me linked to the mortal world. Otherwise, I thought, I wish I could just pass right up along those arches where the incense curls and disappears, where a single, thin sun shaft comes down.

My nephew, Gérard Vincent, learned to speak as the disturbed air of the Revolution moved about him. Sometime after his fourth birthday in 1791, he began referring regularly to demons, and I was never quite sure how much of this was his own active child’s imagination and how much was influenced by those conversations that children overhear and of which they understand not the meaning but the feeling. He had his own ways of dealing with these demons, before whom his parents were powerless. Marguerite and Paul, though, did their best to keep Gérard and his sister in their own happy world.

I had returned to live with my mother and Angelique, but Maman’s criticisms of my riding and her insistence that I follow her advice on suitors agitated me. Less than a year after Papa’s death, perhaps out of her need for stability in the changing times, she married an ambitious lawyer in town, who came to live at chez Vallon, now chez Vergez, which was his name. It wasn’t my home anymore, and I returned to chez Vincent, grateful to be part of a family, but apart from it as well.

I tutored and played with little Gérard as well as Marie. He was a talkative four-year-old, and we spent so much time together, he was rapidly becoming my very good friend.

On a sunny October afternoon we made up spontaneous songs about things we saw from Marguerite’s terrace. Gérard sang first about how the sun was bright on the water and how the river looked small because it was far away, then he sang about how it would be winter soon because the grapes had all been picked. I had been teaching him about seasons. Then it was my turn, and I made up a verse about how the red roses no longer flared at the end of the vine rows, and that was how you knew the harvest was over and winter was coming.

Gérard was telling me how his hoop, which he could not roll well yet with his stick, was actually a circle to catch demons in. I told him demons were only in the imagination and to use his imagination for good things, and he said he had two imaginations, one good and one bad, and when the bad one came it took over his whole body; that is why he needed the hoop.

How much did he know, in his fine world of song and play, of the way the world he was growing into was falling down outside the walls of his father’s beautiful house? I was afraid that his haven would suddenly collapse in upon itself. I gave him a little hug and kissed his cheek, and he went right on singing his song about the demons.

Marguerite joined us at the table by the small fountain, and we poured iced water into our glasses of juice squeezed from lemons, then, with gleaming silver pincers, dropped in two or three cubes of sugar. I made a third, very sweet
citron pressé
for Gérard, who was playing under the table and surfaced for a sip from his wooden cup, hummed delightedly at the sweet, cold taste, then disappeared again.

But before he ducked under the table, he told us we were in a carriage. “It is going to Paris, very fast,” he said.

“I don’t want to go to Paris,” I said.

“Yes, you do. We ’re going to see a riot.”

“Gérard, that is enough,” said his mother, who, even in the world of make-believe wanted to keep her son from danger. Paul made a point of reading the papers and keeping himself informed. Marguerite did not want to hear much of the news from Paris. But she knew it was there. “If you want to go to Paris, we will see the opera,” she said.

“We are there, now. Everybody out of the carriage. Look at those people throwing that man off the tower!”

“Gérard, go back under the table,” said Marguerite. “Take us somewhere else.”

“Yes, take us to the seaside, Gérard. I want to see the ocean. You can build in the sand,” I said. Gérard disappeared under the table, and I could hear the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves as he clicked his tongue.

“I would love to go to Paris again,” said Marguerite. “I would like to give my children the same exposure to society that I received.”

“There is plenty of society here.”

“I think I was born in the wrong time. I would have loved to have been one of the ladies at the court of the Cavalier King.”

“It would be stifling always to be expected to dress so perfectly. I prefer my muslin tea dress to that heavy velvet.”

“Or perhaps I could be one of those girls in silk who flirted and listened at court and informed the queen of any intrigues. Do you know the National Assembly has closed the silk factories in Tours? Said they were decadent.”

“We have plenty of silks.”

“We are at the seaside, now,” announced Gérard.

“I will stay here and watch you, for I hate getting sandy.”

“Come, Marguerite, the breezes are fine,” I said. “You can even see the cliffs of England.”

“The season is approaching, Annette. Will anyone be accompanying you to the fêtes in Orléans?”

No one was accompanying me, and I preferred to stay at the beach.

“Please don’t start on Maman’s favorite subject, Marguerite. Now what if you could be Marguerite d’Angoulême, one of the great ancient queens of the Loire?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be a queen nowadays. Marie-Antoinette is not one of the more beloved creatures in France. And I would not want Gérard to be a prince and be taken, at the point of a pike, from his château.” She clasped her hand over her mouth. “Was I talking too loud?”

Gérard ran to the shade of the enormous horse chestnut tree that overhung the terrace and then disappeared. I had almost forgotten that he was under the table. I thought he was playing hide-and-seek, so I looked behind the tree and along the side of the terrace and couldn’t find him. Then Marguerite looked in the same places, and the littlest Vincent was nowhere. She called for him; then we both called his name.

Finally, we heard his own impatient piping: “Find me.” We followed the voice and found him, over the short wall that surrounded the terrace. He was perched on a steep ledge with a sheer drop just below him. Marguerite screamed, and Gérard froze and started crying. I leaned way over, had my sister hold my waist, and extended my arm down to him. My back ached, and my arm felt like lead as his entire weight swung from it; my fingers, suddenly sweaty and slippery, grasped his small hand.

“You’re almost there,” I said to him, and his little boots scraped the cliffs. I didn’t know how he had scrambled down there.

When he was back up on the terrace, I made out, amid his sniffles, “I am a good climber. When the demons come, I know a good place to hide.”

It was worth having a safe place. Maman’s was with a lawyer who was able to play both sides. And Gérard, alone among us at chez Vincent, had realized the need for one of his own.

I was rereading Rousseau’
Héloïse
s in the window seat with the coldness and the growing dark outside, while Marie drew stretched out in front of the fire and Marguerite worked on her needlepoint. Gérard played a game with a tiny carved figure of a mounted knight, prancing upon an embroidered chair. I was filled with love for this small, quiet world, with the snapping fire the only conversation. I thought that I didn’t need anybody or anything else. I just wanted it to stay like this, always. Why couldn’t it, if the Revolution settled down with the new constitution, as Paul predicted, and if I could stay away from Maman’s insistence that I marry? I was content with being an old maid at twenty-two.

But
Héloïse
reminded me of the dances we would soon be a part of in the Christmas season at Orléans:

In the evening, the whole house assembled to dance. Claire seemed to be
adorned by the hand of the graces; she had never been so brilliant as she
was that day. She danced, she chatted, she laughed, she gave orders, she
was equal to everything.

Now snow sifted steadily down as I watched the half-dark of the day slip into the deeper dark of the night. The servants silently lighted fifty candles. I saw the moon rise full over the bare horse-chestnut tree; its shadows twisted and curved over the untouched snow that glimmered a little in the moonlight.

“I want you to help me make a carriage. That’s what I want you to do,” said a voice at my elbow. Gérard beckoned me to follow him, and I knew what this meant—moving some chairs together and sitting on them, facing each other, as if we were in a carriage. But I didn’t want to leave my window seat. “Come, come,” he said, and I let him draw me to the great fireplace, where he had herded Marguerite, Marie, and Nurse. I sat by my sister in the carriage and listened to Gérard jabber to himself: “Now we are going to England,” he said. I didn’t even know he knew there was such a country. I was sure he didn’t know you had to cross the Channel to get there.