The Black Tower (21 page)

3 G
ERMINAL
Y
EAR
III

 

Charles has repeatedly asked after his sister. Ive explained that Mme Royale’s welfare is not w/in my sphere of responsibility, but of late, his inquiries have grown mr urgent. It occurs to me that happy tidings fm his sister cd be of
great
use in improving his spirits &
health
.

 

Asked Leblanc this
A.M.
if we might obtain audience w/princess. Impossible, he said, w/o express consent of Comm for Public Safety. Perhaps I might petition them directly? My previous experiences with Comm (esp. Citizen Mathieu) being unpleasant, I resolved to take matter directly to Genrl Barras, who has often looked favorably on my petitions.

 

This very day, I visited him at his quarters. Was surprised to be granted immediate audience—and to find Genrl
well disposed
toward my request. He asked if I might like to join him for supper at his private apts—tomorrow eve—for purposes of discussing matter further. I readily consented.

 

5 G
ERMINAL

 

Have now some cause to regret Barras’ invitation. Details of our encounter too vulgar to recount. Suffice it to say his protestations excited no small disgust in me. For holding my peace, however, I now have letter, personally signed, allowing me to visit Mme Royale on reg basis.

 

At what cost to scruple! It is true what my friend Junius says: We live in flexible times.

 

6 G
ERMINAL

 

1st interview w/princess took place immediately after visit w/Charles. She lives on 3rd floor of tower—apts prev shared w/mother & aunt. Leblanc & I found her seated on sofa alongside window, embroidering. This, I’m told, is one pastime permitted her.

 

Mme. Royale is now 16, by our calculations—still very much a maiden. Her hair is worn w/o powder, tied in knot. Headdress = handkerchief, tied in rosette. She has but one dress, of puce silk. She is permitted no hat.

 

In good health, genrlly, but her expression is
extrmly grave
. Upon seeing us, she made no sign or word of welcome. To our repeated questions, gave no reply.

 

As Leblanc reminded me, princess has been imprisoned for more than 2 yrs, w/o fire or light…daily diet of verbal abuse from guards…thrice-daily searches, often in middle of night…no comforts. Cards, even
books
are withheld, for fear she will engage in coded communications, absorb royalist propaganda, etc.

 

These reflections moved me twrd deg of pity. Upon withdrawing fm her room, I made pt of bowing low. Leblanc, w/o hesitation, followed my lead. This, I cd see, astonished her. It has been
many months
since anyone did her this honor.

 

7 G
ERMINAL

 

2nd interview w/princess likewise wordless. By certain movements of her eyes, however, I concluded her silence has proximate cause: She fears being overheard by guards (who are under orders to listen in on all conversations). I therefore took advantage of our departure to whisper in her ear:

 

Perhaps you cd tell us if you require anything?

 

From my pockets, I withdrew paper & pencil. She regarded these articles for some time. Then, taking them from me, she hastily scribbled….

 

Some chemises, & some books.

 

9 G
ERMINAL

 

Commissioners will not disburse funds for new clothes. Ive accordingly borrowed 2 chemises fm my wife, Béatrice. Princess seemed pleased enough w/them. Some
awkwardness
over book. Voltaire’s Micromégas: partic favorite of mine & in keeping w/current pol climate. W/manifest regret, she shook her head & handed it back (politely).

 

I apologized for my thoughtlessness, vowed to bring more suitable vol tomorrow. (Will ask Junius for suggestions.)

 

11 G
ERMINAL

 

At close of todays interview, Mme Royale spoke her 1st words to us:

 

How is my brother?

 

19 G
ERMINAL

 

Leblanc (excellent fellow!) has made signal discovery. NE quad of princess’s cell, due to some concatenation of furniture & wall, is acoustically “null”—i.e., we may speak there, in low tones, w/o being overheard by guards. This has had most beneficial effect on our conversations. Princess now speaks openly. Is most grateful for audience.

 

Leblanc & I remain seriously constrained in what we can tell her. No details of Charles’ condition. No news of outside world. We cannot even tell her that her mother & aunt are dead!

 

This
A.M.
, Mme Royale told me she wished to nurse her brother. I said Id be too happy to oblige, but was expressly forbidden to reunite them. Commissioners do not even allow them to see each other when they are taken outside for walks.

 

Princess was insistent. Her mother, her aunt Élizabeth begged her to look af Charles, she said.

 

They cd not expect you to burrow thru stone walls, cd they?

 

She made no reply. However, was
in no way
deterred fm her course.

 

28 G
ERMINAL

 

This
A.M.
, Mme Royale drew me into our usual corner. W/o any preliminaries or greetings, she whispered: We must get Charles out of here.

 

Endeavoring to be calm, I explained to her why such a thing cd nv happen. Hundreds of soldiers, certain death for anyone who assists royal family, etc. I expressed hope that negotiations w/foreign govts might yet secure his release if cert conditions can be…

 

W/no small brusquerie, she cut me off. We don’t have time for negotiations, she said. He’s very ill, Doctor. No, don’t deny it, your eyes tell me everything. If we don’t get him out of this hellish place, he’ll die. Tell me, then.
What are we to do?

 

A good question, alas. What are we to do?

 

We can no longer depend on authorities to do right thing. It is up to us to arrive at course of conduct. This I have
resolved
, & Leblanc has seconded me. God help us all.

 

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Charles and I take up what has become our daily routine. We wake at eight. We eat a concise breakfast. We go out through the rear courtyard and put on our costumes and start walking.

Passing down the Quai des Augustins that first morning, we are set upon by a seagull, roaring in from the river and, with a cry of pure obscenity, snatching the powdered locks straight from Charles’ head. Stunned, Charles watches his wig disappear over the Pont Neuf. Puts a hand to his naked locks.

“Do you know I think I like it better without?”

“So do I.”

Off comes
my
wig. Off go
his
eyeshades. At the very next clothes dealer, we splurge our Ministry of Justice funds on new boots. And now, for the first time, a note of larkishness clings to our enterprise. We walk more quickly, we laugh more readily. We nod our heads to the ladies and we compliment old gentlemen on their three-cornered hats and we lose any sense of having to be anywhere in any order at any time.

The Tuileries, the Louvre, the Conciergerie…these provoke not a whisper of recognition in him, so I very soon abandon any itinerary, and we simply walk. From the Hôtel de Ville to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, from the Barrière du Maine to the Quartier Saint-Antoine, from the Place Louis XV to the Place Vendôme. Day after day, miles and miles in every direction, steeping our cassimere coats in coal dust, plastering our new boots in mud and night soil—and moving always according to the most contrary of compasses. North on the Pont Notre-Dame…south on the Pont-au-Change…north again on the Pont d’Iéna…

Paris shrinks before us, and Charles takes it in like a man sent to wander through the moon’s lost realms. He regards the silk-stockinged
vicomte
in the same fashion as he does the chemical-factory worker with the blackened face. He surveys Napoleon’s half-finished arch on the Champs-Élysées and decides that it should be left “just like that.” He declares that he’s never seen anything quite so lovely as the rotting, rat-infested plaster elephant in the Place de la Bastille.

“But whose idea was it?” he asks.

“Just some fellow. Who’s not here anymore.”

“You mean Monsieur Bonaparte,” he says, unexpectedly.

“The very one.”

“I saw him once.”

“Did you?”

“On a five-franc ecu. He was turned sideways.”

In the next instant, I am myself turning sideways and seeing a flash of scarlet, disappearing round the Rue de Charenton. No more substantial than it was the other night, when I glimpsed it from my garret window, but more vivid somehow for being so fleeting.

“Come on,” I say.

“But where are we going?”

“To the boulevards.”

I
T’S THE SAFEST
place I can think of. On the boulevards, the line between pursuer and pursued collapses because nothing stays in place. The turbaned girl playing the hurdy-gurdy becomes, in the next step, a sword swallower. The pantomimist becomes a ballad singer or a Racine tragedian or a woman spinning silently in a vat of water—or just a milliner, strolling by with a bandbox.

From the Madeleine to the Bastille we stroll, Charles and I, past a million coffeehouses, past baths, restaurants and
pâtisseries
, past theaters and billiard rooms, keeping a steady pulse against all those counterpulses, stopping only to refresh ourselves or duck out of a passing shower.

And if, now and then, a familiar flash of scarlet registers on the edge of my retina, I just take Charles by the arm and disappear into a crowd of vendors.

Apples, monsieur!…Ah, messieurs, buy my potatoes!…Old clothes!…Rabbit skins!…Petits pains au lait! Hot! Hot!

One afternoon, we are stopped on the Boulevard de la Madeleine by a cortège of great solemnity. The street itself falls silent before the spectacle. Seven wagons. And in each wagon, twenty-four men, sitting back-to-back, their feet in wooden shoes, their necks secured by iron collars, their arms bound, like vertebrae, by a single chain.

As they pass, we hear a gourdlike rattle and the crack of lashes, and the men themselves, shivering in the sun, give off a hum like plainchant, in which you can hear fragments of obscene tavern songs.

“Who are they?” Charles whispers.

“Convicts.”

“Where are they going?”

“To the galleys.”

The lucky ones,
I might add. The others…

Well, one need only scan the men lying in that final wagon: baled like hay, glossy with fever.
They
won’t last another day. More than half their company will die, too, before the journey is done; those that survive will wish they hadn’t. Chained at the ankles from dawn to dusk…set to toil in pestilential heat…flogged, spat upon, beaten, sodomized. And their reward at the end of the day? A wooden plank to set their shaved heads on—and the ever-receding prospect of freedom.

“Hector!”

Charles’ nostrils recoil, as if an invisible hand were pressing against them.

“That smell,” he says. “It’s just like your friend.”

And he’s right.

Amazing to think a smell could adhere to a man fifteen years after he left the galleys. My gaze, untethered, wanders from wagon to wagon until it lights on a haggard, toothless, string-thin fellow, bobbing in and out of sleep—and at last giving way altogether so that, in the very next second, he’s tumbling straight out of the wagon and taking with him the rest of his comrades in chains. One by one, they topple onto the cobbles, like sparrows falling from chimneys.

At once, the marshals and guards spring on them with cudgels and horsewhips and the flats of swords. With great effort, the bound convicts stagger to their feet and totter back to the wagon—shuffling as they go, for though their ankles have been left free for the journey, the sheer
memory
of those shackles causes each man to drag his right foot after him.

Just like Vidocq,
I think, dazzled.

And now, by common impulse, Charles and I take flight. We leave the convicts, we leave the boulevards, and we dash away, in no particular direction, simply following the city’s own declivity. Around us, the air begins to seethe and crackle, but we keep walking, and it’s the river that stops us finally.

We look round in a stupor and find ourselves under a dark mass of chestnuts, peering down a long promenade.

The Tuileries gardens.

A hard northwest wind is thrashing the orange trees, bending back the topiary globes, scooping the water straight from the fountains. To the south, the Seine is churning like surf, and to the east, candles are winking on at every window, as the palace bundles down for the coming blow.

All the promenaders have long since left—their rented chairs lie tipped over, their abandoned newspapers kick up like sails—but Charles refuses to move. And as the first heavy drops of rain strike his bare head, he blinks twice and says:

“Wait.”

He walks, very slowly, toward a lilac bush.

He kneels down. He fumbles through the bush’s lower branches, gropes all the way to the root. Then, after several seconds of concentrated effort, he draws out his trophy. Holds it out to me in his palm.

A ribbon. Of Bourbon white.

Dirty and torn and half-unraveled—and still luminous, as though the rain were washing away the years. And washing Charles into—someone else. Someone I’ve never met before.

I kneel alongside him. I talk straight into his ear.

“Did you know this ribbon was there?”

After several seconds, he nods, very slowly.

“Did you put it there yourself?”

Another pause. Another nod.

“Did it happen a long time ago?”

Only a foot separates us, but I have to raise my voice, simply to be heard above the wind and rain.

“Were you a
boy
when it happened?”

To this he makes no reply, except to close his hands once more over the ribbon, as though he could squeeze the memory from it.

“
Why
did you hide it, Charles?”

“So they wouldn’t find it,” he answers, his own voice rising.

“Who?”

“The bad men.”

The rain is rivering down his face now.

“They…” He wipes his mouth with his forearm. “They took away my garden. They said I couldn’t keep any of my flowers. So I took my lilac and I planted it
here
and I put the ribbon where they…where they…”

He puts a hand to his face.

“No,” he says. “That was a dream.”

Very gently, I put one hand under his jaw. He doesn’t recoil. I put the other hand alongside his temple. By degrees, I tilt his head toward the west side of the Tuileries palace—the one angle I never thought to afford him—the one angle that Louis the Seventeenth would have seen every day, coming back from his outings. The one he would have remembered best. If he were still alive.

For what seems like an eternity, Charles studies those pavilion roofs, and I study—
him
. Which means I am watching in the exact moment when he opens.

Yes, that’s the best word, I think. A world of light rushes into him. The lilac bush…the ribbon…the cornices and columns of that ugly palace…they all gather into meaning. With such force that he’s literally thrown onto his back.

“I have this dream sometimes,” he moans. “I dream I was…”

“You were,” I say, surprised at the assurance in my own voice. “You
are
.”

His eyes glow white amid the rain and mist. His mouth opens….

“What?” I say. “I can’t hear you.”

“Is it too late?”

“Too late for what?”

“To go back?”

N
OW IT MIGHT
be he simply wants to get out of the rain. But when I look back on this moment, I will see our fates twining themselves more tightly round us, as a vine hugs a trellis. Why else would I answer as quickly as I do, without a thought for any other answer?

“I
T’S TOO LATE
.”