French Passion (52 page)
Authors: Jacqueline; Briskin
“The Count supposed that would be your reply.” The dry little man coughed. “He had me insert a clause not couched in strictly legal terms. âMy dear, you are to take what I leave to you. An equal sum goes to your husband. It is my command that you live a happy life, both of you.'” Again Mr. Camberwell coughed. “The estate therefore is divided between you and any man you choose to wed.”
I stepped away a few feet, staring at the
Joanna Lee
as she bobbed in the choppy waves. The Comte's passion had outlasted life itself. Knowing me utterly, he'd been aware that André was the man I'd choose to wed. And he had endowed this manâAndréâwith half his estate. I wondered at the mysterious laws and mysterious changes of the heart that leave us sometimes inadequate, sometimes unpredictable, yet always completely human.
André came to me. “I refuse his money. He never intended me, of all men, to have it.”
“He thoroughly intended you to have it. He knew from the beginning how much I love you.” I paused. “He had no children, and I believe he saw this will as his last chance at immortality. We must take what he left us.”
We gazed at each other. We had inherited a fortune, and in neither of our eyes was the faintest pleasure. Mine were damp with grief, André's inscrutable.
The first mate shouted through cupped hands, “We're casting off!”
And we were hugging Lady Gill, shaking Mr. Camberwell's dry hand.
In twilight the wake bubbled, luminous and iridescent as a gulf stream of pearls. I gripped the rail, watching the black rim of land fade into night.
André and Jean-Pierre were below, arranging with Captain Russel to perform the marriage ceremony. I had stayed up here. Sails flapped, gulls screamed, and my hair, cut to short boy's length, whipped about my face.
As I tried to make out the dark traces of land, I remembered how I'd watched the Comte, his sable-lined cloak billowing about him, that first time I'd left France. My pregnancy had bound me to him, his love had bound me to him. Even now his love reached forward to envelop me in a new continent, a new life.
And then I was remembering the others, irretrievable save in memory. Aunt Thérèse, a warm, comforting kindness that smelled of vanilla. CoCo, with her few very white teeth. Izette, sister in the deepest meaning, who had repaid her debt of life. There were so many others, now dead or scattered. Even Goujon I could see, on balance, as the huge educated peasant who had borne me from the Bastille. Gone, I thought, they're gone forever.
“So you're still up here,” André said.
“Saying my goodbyes.”
Any other man would have replied: Why grieve for the past when the future lies ahead? André, though, was a poet He understood. He said, “The past will always be part of us.” His tone was sad. He'd left behind so many dreams and hopes, the tormenting secret of his birth.
“Yes,” I sighed.
After a pause, he said, “Manon, you'll be happy, I promise.”
“And so will you,” I replied. “Is Captain Russel ready to do the deed?”
“In ten minutes,” André said, taking me in his arms. From the first, we had only to touch for passion to ignite us; yes, even facing the guillotine within the hour, I'd ached for him, and now we clung together, exchanging hungry kisses.
Far overhead, amid flapping sails, a seaman shouted. We pulled apart. Night had hidden the land. André's arm about me, we moved across the dark, slanting deck.
“Look,” he said, pointing.
Westward, the horizon drew a curve of brightness.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The eighteenth-century French wrote voluminous letters, memoirs, and journals. These first-hand details helped me to reconstruct the textures of that age: liveried servants shivering behind the coach of a great lord, the scented bouquets held by ladies strolling in the Tuileries Gardens, the rouged and impassive cheeks of a countess on her way to the guillotine.
The epic sweep of time belongs in history books.
Briefly, however, before the revolution the twenty-two million people of France were divided into three rigid classes. The nobility numbered some four hundred thousand, the clergy consisted of one hundred and thirty thousand, and the Third Estate included everybody else from the greatest of merchant bankers to the malnourished peasants whose taxes supported church, aristocracy, and state.
Louis XV was an indolent King given to veneryâhis Pare aux Cerfs is historic fact.
His grandson and heir, Louis XVI, ascended a near-bankrupt throne. Well-meaning, clumsy, stout, indecisive, he was a kindly man. Two major blunders contributed to his undoing.
The first is of especial interest to Americans. Louis was sympathetic to the colonists: despite his near-empty treasury, he gave the huge sums that enabled us to win our War for Independence.
His second mistake was to adore his Queen.
Marie Antoinette, a vivacious blonde with sparkling blue eyes, was recklessly generous and had a passion for jewels and fashionable clothes.
The marriage remained unconsummated for seven years, until surgery corrected the tightness of the royal foreskin that had made sexual intercourse impossible. By then Louis had become a guilt-ridden, hesitant spouse. With uxurious passion, he continued to indulge Marie Antoinette's extravagances and to give her self-serving, frivolous companions positions of great power.
France, already tottering on the brink of fiscal disaster, was dealt a merciless blow by nature. The winter of 1788-89 was the coldest in almost a century. Famine and poverty stalked the land. To solve the numerous problems of his kingdom, Louis made an unprecedented plea for help. He called an Estates-General. This assemblage, made up of deputies chosen by the three Estates, first met on May 4, 1789. The King, backed by clergy and nobility, refused to accept certain of the reforms demanded by representatives of the Third Estate.
The people of Paris took matters into their own hands. They stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. To the surprise of most, there were only seven prisoners. Yet the ancient fortress long had symbolized royal despotism and with its fall the Revolution began.
In those early days the Assembly wrote that remarkable document, The Declaration of the Rights of Man, and Condorcet published a pamphlet containing the startling idea that women deserved these same rights. Women's clubs, patterned after their masculine counterparts, came into being.
Humanitarian sentiment diminished as enemy armies gathered at French frontiers. And when war broke out, politicians, fearing internal aid to the invaders, began a wave of repression that unleashed the Terror. The land from which André and Manon escaped sank into mass bloodshed. After poor, vain, tragic Marie Antoinette followed her husband to execution, more and more aristocrats, clergy, bourgeois, peasants, and deputies went to the scaffold until the earth around the guillotine was so steeped in blood that cattle refused to enter the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde).
Carnage aside, though, the Revolution gained France many positive results. The peasantry was emancipated, the bourgeoisie was permitted to rise to political power. With democracy came freedom of religion and equality before the law. Slaves in French colonies were freed. A national school system was founded. The metric system came into being.
The Revolution ended in 1799 when Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul. After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, a cycle was completed. The younger brother of Louis XVI returned to become King of France.
Diane du Pont
About the Author
Jacqueline Briskin (1927â2014) was the
New York Times
âbestselling author of fourteen historical novels that reflect the tumultuous changes in American society that she witnessed over her lifetime. Complete with dynamic storylines, vibrant characters, and passionate romantic relationships, her novels have sold more than twenty million copies worldwide and have been translated into twenty-six languages.
Briskin was born in London, England, the granddaughter of the chief rabbi of Dublin, Ireland. Her family moved to Beverly Hills, California, to escape Adolf Hitler and religious orthodoxy. A few years later, she married her best friend and the love of her life, Bert, whose family was deeply embedded in Hollywood and the movie business. When Briskin's three children were little more than toddlers, she attended a class at UCLA entitled “The Craft of Fiction.” To her surprise, it was a class about writing fiction rather than reading fiction. And so her career began.
Over the next forty years, many of Briskin's books topped the
New York Times
bestseller list. Her adoptive home of Los Angeles and her husband's old stomping ground of Hollywood often play a prominent role in her meticulously researched books.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1977 by Diane du Pont
Cover design by Mimi Bark
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9367-6
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
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