French Passion (42 page)

“Once you loved me.”

“Love is as great a lie as this Revolution. Men pretended to believe in the Rights of Man and decency. What they really wanted was to take the King's powers for themselves. We said we loved each other, but from the moment I got in the coach, we lusted. No more.”

Not true, I thought, drawing a deep breath. Not true.

“And now, as I told you, I need a woman. So let's get down to it without the pretty lies.”

He stared at me as if I were selling myself in some loathsome, perverted brothel.

Tears stung behind my eyelids, but I refused to let myself weep. Hadn't I told myself I'd accept any terms that André chose to dictate? Slowly I undid the top tiny satin button at my ruched gauze neckline.

Tilting back in his chair, André thrust his balled fists in his pockets, watching me. “Let's see what the Comte de Créqui paid for with marriage.”

At the Comte's name, my fingers stopped moving.

“Go ahead,” he ordered.

“No,” I replied. “André, I love you. But the Comte commanded respect and admiration. He's not to be cheapened. I'll play the prostitute, if that's what you want. But I have my price, and that's not talking about the Comte.”

André's coldness faltered. He looked at me with those tormented eyes. I stared back. After a long minute he said, “Cheap enough. Now display your wares.”

Again I reached for the tiny buttons.

“Come here,” he commanded.

“Please, André, not this way. It was always sweet and loving for us.”

“I want you now,” he said harshly. As he strode across the room, he had to bend for the low ceiling. He pulled at my leghorn hat, the hatpin caught in my loose curls, and I winced as he yanked the hat free. He had the look of a man on the rack. Grasping my hair, he jerked my head until my breasts arched up. His hand tore at my bodice.

Despite his violence—or maybe because of it—I burned at his touch. My muscles trembled, and a wild need filled me. Never in my life had I felt such desire.

“Tell me how much you want this,” he muttered in a hoarse voice.

Looking into his shadowed eyes, I remembered how sweet and simple it used to be with us. A hurt deeper than my marriage to the Comte had changed André. His poet's heart had been betrayed.

“I want you more than I need to breathe.” My arms encircled him.

He crushed me to him, his hard thighs pressing through my petticoats on either side of my legs, his body molded to mine. I caressed his shoulders, his firm back. He muttered purposefully obscene commands, André who never used foul language, and not waiting to undress me or himself, he caught me up in his arms, carrying me past the velour curtain. I gave a low, passionate moan. The narrow bed squeaked violently as he threw me down. Wordless, he pulled up my petticoats, yanked his breeches around his thighs and fell on me.

The act resembled one of his brief, furious rages.

André, whose noble dreams had bloomed into blood-drenched violence, used my body as a receptacle for his disillusionment. He thrust into me angrily, as if he were beating me. My hand flailed at his jacket, as if I were fighting back, but in reality the sensations inside me were too exquisite to bear, growing and swelling with each hard stroke, my frenzy increasing until even the arrival of a mob couldn't have stopped my passion, and I was clutching at him, falling, tears at the corners of my eyes, falling, my body drenched in sweat, falling, crying out his name inarticulately, falling.…

We lay breathing loudly. He rolled onto his back, touching my side only because the cot was narrow.

After about ten minutes he recovered enough to say in a purposefully remote voice, “I'll send for you whenever I need you.”

“Yes.”

“You'll come here?”

“Yes.”

“And behave as you did now, as an ordinary trollop?”

“Yes,” I agreed.

I couldn't believe either of us had spoken. For I knew as surely as I'd ever known anything that, whatever terms had been defined on this narrow bed, there was no way for either André or me to annul a fierce and unquenchable love.

That autumn life in Paris continued with the unease that comes after a violent earthquake. Food was scarce and difficult to buy. Arrests continued, and the guillotine gathered more victims. Jewelers now sold tiny replicas of the guillotine rather than crucifixes. There were rumors of spies. And, in the Assembly, the Jacobin Club grew more powerful.

The Théâtre Française continued to put on plays, there were performances at the Opéra, and park booths were set up for jugglers, acrobats, Punchinello and his puppet buffoonery. For a brief time audiences lost their expressions of fear.

Izette and I took lodgings on Rue St. Antoine, a large bottom-story room with two windows overlooking the vegetable garden. The previous tenant, a tutor who had emigrated with the family he served, had left his books, and Izette and I read when we had the time. Alas, not too often. We took turns standing in line for food. Izette laundered. I found work painting china.

Izette's matter-of-fact friendship helped ease my grief, still raw, over the Comte's death, and her common sense alleviated my anxiety at the sense of impending disaster that hovered everywhere in Paris.

Sir Robert, of course, protested that I must not live in such mean quarters, nor pursue so humble an occupation. He offered financial help. I, of course, refused. It came as a relief, however, to hear that Lady Gill had invited Jean-Pierre to live at Foxwarren.

“On the pretext of boning up on her French,” Sir Robert chuckled. “But I know Mother! She jumps at any chance she gets to fatten up a city dweller on Foxwarren cream and butter.”

“How good she is!” I cried with sincerity.

We were sitting on the window ledge. Izette was delivering laundry, and outside, the landlord's wife picked leeks.

“Next time you send a secret pouch, will you enclose a letter from me to Jean-Pierre? I prefer not drawing attention to myself by mailing letters outside the country.”

“Of course I will. And you're very wise.” He cleared his throat. “Manon, you mustn't take this amiss. I've requested Pitt for English papers made out for Manon, Lady Gill.”

“Sir Robert, I can't let you do that,” I cut in hastily.

“Nothing to do with, arrumph—still, a fellow can't give up.” Sir Robert's face burned crimson. “Think of the papers as a disguise hanging in my wardrobe, no more. The way this country's going, you might be glad of English papers.”

“Sir Robert, you're so very kind.” Touched, I spoke thickly, halting before I could say, “And Lady Gill has my deepest gratitude.”

“I shall write her so.”

That night as I lay beside the gently snoring Izette, I thought about Sir Robert. The big, hearty Englishman was openly offering me Foxwarren and a house in Leicester Square as well. He offered me his safe, sane country, he offered me his heart and his name. Despite his too boyish pleasure at intriguing in my poor, wracked land, he was a good, decent man. Most people would consider me quite mad for refusing him. And even madder for choosing a left-handed affair with André.

Leaves turned gold, brown, russet, and purple, and then quite suddenly the trees were bare. Icy drafts curled into our room.

I painted rococo flowers on soup plates, keeping close to the fire on which Izette heated her irons—and often it seemed incredible to me that Parisians still had fine linens to launder, still desired to buy painted crockery.

China decoration being a repetitive task, my mind was free to brood over André.

He remained utterly decent. Cruelty and deceit were alien to him, and he quickly forgot his anger-inflicted pretense that I was no more than a trollop to him. He never came to my lodgings, he never hinted at marriage, he never said he loved me. Yet, when we lay entwined on his narrow cot, he never denied that the wild sweetness between us had grown more powerful.

Out of bed, though, he was brusquely aloof.

In part I was able to attribute his remoteness to the intensity of his political life. In the Assembly André was leading the fight to permit the royal family to emigrate. This took enormous moral and physical courage, for now the Extremist deputies included some who could only be classified as criminally insane. They screamed for royal blood. Furthermore, public sentiment ran high for the King and Queen to remain in France: many people, horrified by the September Massacres, clung to the security of their past; to them, the monarchy most deeply represented the old days, and so, like sacred relics, the King, the Queen, their little son and daughter, as well as Madame Elizabeth, the King's younger sister, must be kept locked in the Temple. Attempting to free them, André worked obsessively among the deputies, who for the most part were reluctant to anger either the Extremists or the people.

The heightened sensitivity of love, though, told me that some of André's aloofness came from deeper roots. To me, he was like a man suffering from a virulent form of leprosy that, rather than wasting the external body, eats away at the vital organs.

Once, lying snug in his arms, the fire in the other room casting a reddish glow over us, I asked, “André, can't you tell me what it is that gnaws at you?”

“Isn't that too obvious? I'm the worst kind of fool there is. The one who sets sail with high principles and then discovers himself unable to navigate the sea of reality. Before the Revolution I had a stupid dream of how it would be, a Constitution that proclaimed all men equal and free—I thought everything would be wondrous beautiful. And here I am, faced with a group of opportunists who for their own ugly ends wish harm on a kindly man and a foolish woman.”

I touched his chin. “It's more than that.”

“That's enough, isn't it? I helped put them inside the Temple. And now, God alone knows what'll happen to Louis and Marie Antoinette!”

His voice rang desperately. I turned to stare at his profile, sharp-etched as a Roman cameo.

“Let me stay tonight.”

“No,” he said.

“But why?”

“It's dangerous for you.”

“How?”

“Most arrests are made at night.”

Chilled, I wrapped myself tighter around him. “André, can the Jacobins have you imprisoned for disagreeing with their policy on King Louis?”

“They haven't come to stilling the voices of dissenters.”

“Then how am I endangered?”

“The mistake was mine,” he said. “I never should have let us start meeting again.”

This was the kind of infuriatingly oblique hint that the Comte had once tossed at me. I fingered the two rings, the ruby wedding band, the heavy antique gold, that hung on a thin chain around my neck. I traced the ring André had given me. And all at once I knew something. The knowledge came intuitively, without thought, and yet I knew that it was the truth.

These engraved initials,
L
and
J
, the heart of the mystery of André's birth, were also the root of his anguish. His long-dead parents in some unknowable manner caused his inner pain.

“André—” I started.

He cut me short by placing two fingers over my lips. “Darling, all day I argued before the Assembly that King Louis and his family be allowed to seek haven in Austria. I don't want to argue with you, too.”

I left the narrow warm bed, moved to the red glow of the living room fire, and dressed slowly.

In December the Jacobins, headed by Goujon and Robespierre, demanded that Louis Capet, as the imprisoned King was known, be brought to trial. André increased his efforts, working day and night in his determination to rouse opposition. He visited deputies in their homes, he drank with them in cafés, he buttonholed them on the streets.

As Christmas neared, the Jacobins turned virulent, petitioning the Assembly for a decree to execute King Louis without a trial.

André, the Monarchists, the Gironde, and all the other moderate factions were forced to insist there be a trial. Thus they fell into a shrewd trap. I couldn't help wondering whether Goujon, clever at maneuvering people, had engineered the plan. For the Jacobins never had wanted a hasty execution. They desired the publicity of a trial.

For two bleak January days, while the King of France answered his accusers, people fought to get inside the Palais de Justice. Those outside tore at news sheets. And many wept forbidden tears when the Assembly found King Louis guilty.

Sentencing took all night.

That night, January 16, I went to André's rooms, for I knew that whatever the sentence, he would be revulsed. Miserable. I built a small fire, set out a loaf of bread and his favorite Brie cheese, a pitcher of white wine. I had added logs twice and the birds had been up and chattering for an hour when footsteps sounded on the wooden staircase.

At first I couldn't believe this tread could be André's. Normally he moved with quick, easy grace. These dragging footsteps belonged to an old man. Yet the key was being fitted in the lock. I ran to open the door. André moved past me, hunching on the fire stool, gazing bleakly into the flames.

“So it's death,” I whispered, and my shoulders, too, bowed with a sense of dread. The Comte had told me all about King Louis. Unregal, clumsy, nearsighted, vacillating. Kindly and generous. Enjoying food and the craft of locksmithery. Louis was a man like any other man. Yet he was also our King. And the crime of regicide seemed so awesome that the earth must open up and swallow all of us.

André said, “He'll go to the guillotine within twenty-four hours.”

Remembering the Comte, I made an inward prayer that King Louis would mount the scaffold with his minister's bravey. “How cruel it is,” I said.

“Killing is the ultimate evil.”

“André, you did all in your power to stop this. You've barely slept in weeks.”

“My blood guilt,” he said, gazing up at me with an expression of horror. “We didn't start to vote until long after it was dark. There we were, like men in a great, shadowy purgatory. Some slept. Others huddled in their coats or drank brandy against the chill. Each deputy took his turn, walking up to the pool of light where the Tribunal sat. The President would call out, ‘What sentence has Louis, King of the French, incurred?' And most were so terrified that they could barely get out the one word, ‘Death.' A brief moment in the light, one frightened man condemning another man for the accident of his birth, then scurrying again into the shadows.”