Anna (17 page)

As soon as Anna reached the boulevard she hailed a fiacre. The address that she gave was in Montmartre. Madame Latourette's worst fears, it seemed, were already being realised.

On the ride, Anna kept glancing at the strip of paper in her hand. She had torn it from a newspaper. The letters were smudged and inky but the message was clear enough. “Madame Sapho, Seer and Fortune Teller,” it ran. “Divinations, Palmistry, Occult Sciences, Astrology. Strictest confidence. Both Sexes.”

It was to Madame Sapho that the driver was now taking her.

Anna found her on the fourth floor of a block of mouldering apartments. When she rang the bell, the servant at first pretended that Madame Sapho saw her clients only by appointment. But when Anna turned to go away again she heard a voice, as low and husky
as a man's, instructing the servant to call her back again. Anna followed the servant into a half-lit room in which incense had been burning.

When her eyes had grown used to the gloom of the place she saw Madame Sapho sitting in front of her. Her first impression was of a fat woman dressed in black. But she realised almost immediately that such an impression was inadequate. Madame Sapho was enormous. Her bosoms defied imagination. She had not spoken, because she liked to see her clients a little embarrassed at first: when embarrassed they so often betrayed themselves and made it easier for her. And she had not risen because her legs were not strong enough to bear the weight of that vast body. She simply sat there in the odour of stale incense, among her globes and charts and crystals, and waited for Anna to speak.

“I wish you to read my palm,” Anna told her.

She despised herself as she said it. “To think,” she reflected, “that my despair should have driven me to this.”

Madame Sapho inclined her head a little.

“I shall tell you only the truth,” she said. “I know more palmistry than any one else in Paris. But first I must know if you are entirely serious.”

“How can I prove it?” Anna asked.

“My fees are higher than most palmist's,” Madame Sapho answered. “You can get a charlatan to read your hand for ten francs. I shall charge thirty.”

“I am ready to pay you,” Anna told her.

Madame Sapho inclined her head again, and pushed a small earthenware bowl towards Anna.

“Place your money in there,” she said. “The bowl is pure. It belonged to a Brahmin. My servant will empty it. I never touch money before a séance.”

The dark eyes of Madame Sapho followed every movement of her hands as she placed the coins in the bowl. Then, when she was satisfied, she opened a black, velvet cloth that was lying on the table and invited Anna to place her hand on it. The cloth had the signs of the zodiac and other cabbalistics embroidered round its edges. Madame Sapho lit two tall candles that stood on the table and dropped the end of the fusée into a saucer of joss-sticks, which began to smoulder.

“She's a fraud,” Anna told herself. “I have thrown away my money.”

And she shuddered a little as Madame Sapho's fat, shapeless hand took hold of hers and seemed to fondle it. Madame Sapho's
hand was cold and clammy and seemed to be quite boneless. But, when she looked at her, Anna saw that Madame Sapho's eyes were closed already. Only a thin streak of white could be seen between the drooped lids. Her breathing, too, had changed. It was slow, stertorous. And when she spoke, her voice was indistinct and mumbling. With the tip of her pudgy finger she was following the lines of Anna's palm.

“You have come on a journey,” she was saying, “and you are unhappy.”

“She knows from my accent that I am not native here,” Anna reflected. “And if 1 had been happy I should never have come to her. I was right: she is a fraud.”

But already Madame Sapho was speaking again.

“I see many things plainly,” she said, still in the same quick, muttered voice. “Strange things. Some of them terrible. I see rewards and sudden deaths. I see happiness and disaster. I see you at the hour of your death.”

A wave of fear ran through Anna at the words. She was compelled to admit that Madame Sapho was a very competent actress.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me more. Tell me something definite.”

“You are thinking of your marriage,” Madame Sapho answered. “I see a soldier on the battlefield. He is in the midst of danger, but he is safe. You will marry him.”

“He is safe?” Anna repeated. “You are sure that he is safe?”

Madame Sapho paused.

“I see that he has been hurt,” she went on. “But it is nothing. He is binding up his leg. It no longer troubles him. He is smiling.”

“And …and I marry him.”

“He is your destiny,” Madame Sapho replied. “Fate has given him to you.”

Anna started to withdraw her hand.

“You have told me all that I want to know,” she said.

But Madame Sapho would not release it: her fingers tightened around the wrist.”

“I see much else besides,” she said. “I see you sleeping in a bed with a coronet over it. The bedroom is panelled with gold and there is moonlight on it. The whole château can be yours if you ask for it.”

Anna shrugged her shoulders.

“She is inventing,” she told herself. “Even now she does not believe that I am serious.”

“And I see the Mediterranean,” Madame Sapho declared. “A
villa set in a hollow of the cliffs. You have a child in your arms.”

“Is it my child?”

“It is your child. It is a tiny baby.”

“Charles always told me that he loved the South,” Anna remembered. “He said that we should live there some day.”

But Madame Sapho had stopped abruptly.

“I cannot see the villa any more,” she said. “It has vanished.”

“And do you see anything besides?” Anna asked. “Is there anything else that you can tell me?”

“I see the walls of a convent,” Madame Sapho answered. “And I see men duelling. I see famine and I see jewels. I see a priest and I see an English milord. But it is all confused now, and I see nothing distinctly. There are mists in front of my eyes. All that I can tell is that you will be driven across the face of the world against your choice, and that when you have discarded all vanities you will be happy. If I told you more I should lie to you.”

Madame Sapho sat back exhausted. Gradually her eyes opened and Anna saw that she was smiling at her. Her breathing had become normal again.

“Leave me something that you have worn,” she asked. “A glove will do. If I can see more I will tell you.”

Anna hesitated for a moment, and then drew off one of the black lace gloves that she was wearing, and pushed it forward. Madame Sapho took it tenderly.

“And your address?” she asked. “So that I may write to you in case I see that wounded soldier again.”

Anna felt her heart hammering.

“123 bis rue d'Aubon,” she said in a whisper.

“And your name, my dear?”

“Anna. Anna …Latourette.”

The French were claiming a victory. There was cheering in the streets and some kissing. Near Vionville, it was asserted, 16,000 Germans had been lost in one glorious encounter. Bazaine had rallied his men, so the story went, and had passed a sword of terror through the German ranks.

But the excitement was short-lived. The real news, the unpleasant facts, gradually filtered through. It became known that approximately that number of
Frenchmen
had been lost too. And among the sixteen thousand who had been lost was No. 237854, 2nd Corps, Charles Henri Etienne Latourette.

But his death among such numbers had a terrible negligibleness. It was scarcely a death at all but a digit. And it was a digit which the clerks in the war-office would not be able to enter into the debit columns of their ledgers until the true profit and loss account of the battle became known. On the face of it, at the moment, the whole affair was merely a draw.

But it seemed only a temporary draw. Bazaine and MacMahon were no longer fighting side by side. The main body of the German Army was now between them. And apparently the two Marshals had abandoned all hope of reuniting. Instead, they were each pursuing a strenuous retreat, deeper and deeper into the sanctuary that was France.

It was the constancy of this retreat that struck a chill into the heart of Paris. On the outbreak of the war, Paris had seemed so secure, so remote from the frontier; no one had even imagined that the wounded would be much seen there. And now—so a fresh batch of rumours went—they were strengthening the defences of the City itself. People with valuables began packing them up and sending them to Orléans and Bordeaux for greater safety.

In the meantime, other names were being added to the growing list of French disasters. At St. Privat the French troops, surrounded and with their village-fort in flames around them, had surrendered. At Gravelotte, the French line of retreat itself was turned: it was as though this last remaining tactic of the French Army—retreat—were now to be taken from them. That the Germans had lost nearly 20,000 men and the French scarcely more than half this number seemed, among the general wastage of war, a poor consolation for the fact that the German advance continued, unimpeded.

And there were now people to be met in the streets and cafés who had actually seen the French Army in retreat, in rout; people who had been in Belfort or Châlons. To Belfort General Douay's army had retired in wild confusion without the firing of a single shot, without in fact having seen the enemy. But though his men, all 12,000 of them, were safe, they were no longer an army. In the mad retreat, during which knapsacks and equipment had been cast aside to lighten the men in their flight from the invisible, nonexistent enemy, something else had been thrown away besides— their courage and respect as soldiers. They had entered Belfort, a hungry, drunken rabble.

It was not until the Belfort garrison was trundled off to Châlons that they made any preparations to take up battle lines again. But by the time they got there the camp at Châlons had already been
broken up, and that army was in retreat on Rheims. They found themselves in a blazing, desolate camp.

In the urgency of the decision to retire still farther, there was no time to arrange for transport. Fodder and equipment were being flung on to one vast appalling bonfire, so that they should not fall into German hands.

It was sad, the Emperor reflected, that they should have had to leave Châlons so soon. So much had happened there that had shown him up in the most favourable light. He had been firm, high-principled and of instantaneous decision. It was at Châlons that he had appointed MacMahon to the command of the Army. And it was at Châlons that he had agreed on the far more difficult question as to what MacMahon should do once he had been appointed.

He asked himself, as he always did at moments of crisis, what his illustrious ancestor, the other Napoleon, would have done in such a position. And he had been forced to admit that he could not imagine Bonaparte ever having allowed himself to get into such a position. He realised, now it was too late, that he had been poorly advised by most of his Generals. They had deliberately deceived him as to their merits. But what was he to do? If he led the Army himself, and rode out to meet the Germans, he was—in the not unlikely event of the enemy's contriving to slip round the flank— leaving the whole heart of his country ready and exposed for the knife that was waiting to be thrust into it. Besides, he had never studied the actual tactics of battle. He had left that to the General Staff, whose job it was. It was the larger strategy of wars that fascinated him—great sweeps with a ruler across the maps of continents.

And so, after the agony of mind that only a monarch can know, he had resolved upon a retreat to the capital, to Paris itself. He prayed frantically that events would vindicate and that history would forgive.

Having made up his mind, he felt stronger, more master of himself. He and his Empress would somehow ride this whirlwind of generals and politicians. They would ride it to victory.

And then, just as he had decided, came a dispatch from the Empress in Paris, demanding that the retreat should be stopped and that the Army press forward to relieve Metz.…

The retreat as far as Rheims was thus a happy compromise:
the army had done neither one thing nor the other. There were a few more days of grace in which the Emperor could arrive at a final decision.

MacMahon meanwhile was stretching out his hand, like a mother groping in the dark for her child, to try somehow, somewhere, to re-establish contact with the other half of his army, Bazaine's half. But Bazaine, for his part, with one foot always in the safety of the fortress of Metz, did not stretch out far enough. The messages which he was able to send to Châlons, via Paris, only seemed to emphasise his isolation. It was as though from a distance he had waved to them, but been too far away to speak.

So France for the time being had not one army, but two, and Metz seemed almost as far away from Paris as Moscow. The people of the capital were not reassured when the newly-appointed military governor of the City ordered the immediate destruction of all high buildings which would interfere with the field of fire of the fortress batteries.

Madame Latourette was in a state: she was prostrate. She lay in a darkened room with a bandage soaked in eau-de-cologne across her forehead, and a crucifix clasped in her hand. She rose at times and, with her hair in great disorder, went down the passage to Charles's room. It was just as he had left it. His suits were there in the wardrobe; and his shoes. For some reason his shoes recalled him to her more than anything else, and she could not bear to look at them. In a corner lay his violin-case and his fencing-foil.

“Of course, he will come back,” she told herself. “He will come back and play to us again, and I shall be able to take care of him. He was never strong enough to be a soldier. I shall have to feed him up when he gets back: put some flesh on him.”