Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (41 page)

“I don’t know,” I said. “But we will keep your sons safe.”

“They burned our barn where the boys were hiding,” Claudette’s mother said, “took our animals, destroyed our crops. The land that your grandfather worked on—”

Claudette embraced her mother and told her to rest now, that it was time for sleep, that she should fear nothing now.

It was a long way from Tours, in bad weather, on foot. A network of resistance had already started, and they had been shunted from barn to barn, living with fear and hunger and fatigue. Claudette kissed her father on the brow, and we closed them in the secret room.

A few days later, just before they moved on to a location in Normandy, Claudette’s father came up to me. “That bell,” he said. “That is what I miss, more than my land, my animals—it was as if that bell rang beneath my window, though it was all the way in town. The wind would bring it to my window.”

After Claudette’s parents left, we did help her brothers, and after them, somehow, the word had gone out that there was some safe haven in Orléans, if one went late at night and only a few at a time.

The Vendée was already beginning to get bad. The Committee of Public Safety was sending additional troops. It was ironic. Now the royalists were called “the rebels.” Claudette, Angelique, and I went to market to buy supplies for the hungry refugees who would discreetly wait in the stable and send one person to stand in the shadows near the kitchen door, which we regularly checked now after the house was asleep. Once the footman woke up at the sound of voices in the kitchen, and I bribed him to keep silent, though I think he wouldn’t have talked anyway. The servants were loyal to chez Dubourg, and chez Dubourg was quietly a royalist house. Monsieur or Madame Dubourg may even have known, but thought it prudent to pretend that they didn’t.

I loved helping those who came. They became fond of Caroline, and some would even arrive already knowing her name. Claudette told me they called me “the Mother of Orléans,” as a play on the maid of Orléans, Joan of Arc, but I never heard them call me that. They all only stayed for a few days and had destinations to walk on to. But they hadn’t slept indoors, in a room with a bed, for who knows how long.

General Dumouriez, head of the Revolutionary Army, had won a series of victories since Valmy last September. But by the spring of 1793 it became clear to him that he had been winning them only so Robespierre and his committees could gain and maintain more power.

They had now declared war on Spain as well as Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain. The general closed the Jacobin clubs, declared himself in open opposition to Robespierre, and planned to march on Paris himself and establish a more moderate government. But his troops refused to move against France, even if it were against an extremist regime that rarely paid them and overstretched their limits in the field, keeping them constantly at war against the increasing numbers of allies. The general had no choice but to defect, leaving Robespierre and his committees now to run the government virtually unchecked.

Now it was the Jacobins’ time to act against the Girondins who had spoken out against them so articulately, courageously, and unwisely for so long. First the Jacobins smashed the rest of the Girondin printing presses, their voice of opposition, for which William had written. Then the Jacobins put their own man, Hanriot, in charge of the National Guard, who, on a fine spring day, surrounded the National Assembly with cannon and fixed bayonets and demanded the arrest of the Girondins, on the grounds that they were all intriguers, or counter-revolutionaries. Some managed to escape later, but went into hiding throughout France. One was found at the bottom of a well in the Dordogne Valley near Bordeaux. A farmer and his wife had been bringing him food for a week. The Jacobin control was now complete. I thought how sad William would be—the ideals he believed in sacrificed for power for a few and for the illusion of security for the many. And these Girondins, in prison now or in hiding, were his friends, his comrades. Once again, for his own sake, I was glad he wasn’t here.

By my birthday on the fifteenth of June, when I became twenty-four and Caroline six months, I had become increasingly afraid of chez Dubourg getting visited by the Committee of Public Safety. It was time, I thought, to move back to Blois. And Claudette wanted to see Benoît; Angelique, Philippe. She had written to Philippe and told him of my idea about the cottage, and since there are many of that description in the Loire, he and his father had found Claudette and me just such a home in Vienne, across the river from Blois, not far from where chez Vincent once was. But Angelique would not move there with us. She would rather live in a fine home than in a crowded cottage. “It’s easy to avoid Vergez,” she said; “it’s a big house.” Monsieur and Madame Dubourg loaned us their family carriage for the
voyage.

If there wasn’t wisteria growing on the chimney, I would plant some, I thought. No one could get across the Channel either way now, but William could live with us there, when the war was over. A humble cottage would be just the right place for him to work.

It had a blue slate roof, like the houses in the city, plaster-covered walls of flint and stone, a huge oven for baking bread attached to the south wall, and a stairway that curved by the oven up to the bedrooms. A rambling rose, rather than wisteria, meagerly bedecked the front of the cottage, facing the rising sun. It had a small barn in the back, where Claudette and I planned to keep chickens, rabbits, a pig, and of course, La Rouge. We would plant a kitchen garden in the space between the cottage and the barn. Two walnut trees and a chestnut grew beside the cottage, as did a pear, an apple, and an apricot tree, which all bore green leaves of summer in the breeze that blew softly in from the river, just to the north. We could see the spires and towers of Blois across the river. Jean had brought some of my old things in a cart from what was once chez Vallon. All that was missing was William, working on his poems in an upstairs bedroom or out under the chestnut tree, or working with us in the garden. Claudette, raised on a farm, was buying rabbits and chickens today at the market. Jean had loaned me Vergez’s cart horse, and I rode it now to visit the count, to retrieve La Rouge.

At the château de Beauregard, Edouard, as silent as the flight of an owl and dignified as only a valet born and bred into service of a count can be, served his master and me white wine from the old cellars. “I’ll be drinking cider now,” I said to the count. “It’s cheaper. It was very strange, though, when I went to pay the agent, he said the cottage was already paid for.”

“You’ll need all of your father’s money, now, believe me.”

“That was very kind of you, Count. You’ll have to come to a dinner of rabbit with onions and mushrooms from our garden,” I said. He nodded. “But how is it—just over three months since I saw you?—and you’re comfortably back at the château de Beauregard.

Why isn’t the Committee of Public Safety pounding on your door?”

“The dance instructor,” the count said, “the smiling serpent, has, in the present dearth of officers and his position with all the right people, got himself a commission as lieutenant in the Revolutionary Army. He just might get himself blown up, although the world seems denied such luck nowadays. I suspect he was really after the uniform—he ’ll look more impressive that way when he teaches the wives of the Jacobins how to dance like ladies. With Monsieur Leforge’s strident and persistent voice gone, my old friend the magistrate found me in Tours, invited me back, and, as I said he would, he has handed his position over to me.”

I gasped.

“Yes, Madame, respectability has come to the new regime, and the new regime has come to the count. And it’s a lot safer for me that way, to be playing their game. There’s a lot of old aristocrats among them, even in the National Assembly—they just have to make their sympathies clear—”

“But you’ll have to support all the unjust new laws.”

“Ah, but I will temper justice with mercy. And besides, they are right—it is time we aristocrats did an honest day’s work—not that being involved in law is necessarily
that
. My old friend said he had some interesting cases in which he was able to help some innocent people—one, he said, was that girl who shot the boar. I’m supposing there is only one of those in all of France, but I also suspect that’s another story...”

“Count, besides thanking you for finding—and now for buying—the cottage for me, and for keeping La Rouge—”

“Benoît exercised her when I was away, but he had to be careful of the National Guard—she’s a pretty horse for a cavalry officer to requisition—you’ll want to keep her hidden in the barn and be chary where you ride her—”

“I will. There’s another thing—I used the room—”

He burst out laughing, a deep resounding laugh such as I hadn’t heard since William. “No one laughs like that anymore,” I said.

“More’s the pity.”

“And I didn’t use the room in the way you think—”

“That was not ribald laughter; it was laughter of delicious irony.”

“Well, the irony stops there. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, now, with your new
situation
—but I used the room to hide refugees from the Vendée—Claudette’s family, others who have lost everything—the type of wonderful cases you’ll get—”

“I knew your heart could not let such a valuable piece of information as that room go without using it for some good—even if only a place for Caroline to nap in peace. So all went well—no one is under surveillance?”

“I believe we kept it all discreet—that’s the key thing about that room, yes?”

“Yes, my dear.”

“And there’s one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“I liked doing it. I liked seeing the expression on their faces grow from fear and helplessness to some calm and hope.”

“I always said you have a noble soul.”

“There’s one more thing.”

“How did you fare in mathematics in that convent school? I think we must be up to three or four things by now.”

“They’re all the one thing.” The count waited, sipped his wine, looked out his windows at his lawn.

“The hedges never came back after my absence,” he said. “That will be a failure of the new order—no one will keep well-clipped or shaped hedges anymore.”

“I would like, please, the use of the old hunting lodge to help protect more refugees. When I left Orléans, they asked me, was there a way I could continue to aid in their plight? There are more of them coming every day. It’s just getting worse there.”

“Helping others, my dear, has a beginning but no end. It’s a dangerous business to get into. Especially nowadays. Why don’t you stop with your success with the room, transforming its...purpose.”

“I can’t, though, not just yet. I will, soon, when the trouble in the Vendée has subsided—”

“Trouble will only continue now. Look at who’s running the government—the Committee of General Security; that can only bring danger.

Oh, my, look at your face. Anyone would think you were denied an apple pastry for dessert. I’ll have to talk with Edouard about that.

Come, have lunch with me of a simple casserole of chicken in a cream sauce—what you need is a goat, to provide you with milk and cheese.

I’ll buy you a goat for looking so pretty and being so sweet and stubborn, when all the world is ugly and mean and easily compromised, like myself. We ’ll do anything for security; you’ll risk anything for—”

“Oh, hush, you old flatterer—will you let me use the lodge or not?”

“Use it, my dear—no one has for a long time. Just be chary, as I said before, only late at night—no one shall know; I myself have already forgotten. If you come before my bench, I will spank you and send myself to the guillotine for being so indulgent to your childish whims. Now, lunch? You didn’t have to kill this bird out in your barn. You couldn’t do such a thing, could you? And all those fluffy rabbits?”

“Claudette said it’s all in the wrist motion, at least the chickens are,” I said. “Count, I don’t want the world my daughter just entered to be the world she grows up in.”

“I understand. You just frighten me, that’s all.”

The bridge into town had sentries now, especially curious at night, but the location of my new cottage eliminated the problem of crossing it to get home—the cottage was already on the other side, on the way toward the château de Beauregard and the lodge. I walked La Rouge with very little trotting, leading Vergez’s cart horse, and it was dark when I saw the cottage, its windows lighted.

With the help of a few discreet words from Claudette at the market to a woman who sold pigs to a woman who sold cotton scarves, the resistance network had already passed on that the Mother of Orléans (or Madame Williams, as Claudette said I was called) was now arranging a safe place for more refugees from the Vendée, that this place would house more—maybe twelve at a time—and that the meadow near the lodge was the meeting place. The lodge itself was isolated, and the meadow well set off from even the quiet road that went through the forest.

At chez Dubourg I had sometimes leafed through the
Journal of Style and Taste
—that is, before the Jacobins shut their presses down in the spring. And that bastion of French fashion had recommended a
costume Catholique
to show sympathy with the priests who would not take the government oath. So to make sure the refugees recognized me as a friend, I wore part of that costume: pinned to my hair, a bonnet of black satin trimmed with a white-and-gold ribbon and a white-feathered aigrette. Among the things that Jean brought down in the cart from my old room was the hunting pistol that my father had given me long ago, and it was now safely tucked in the pocket of my coat.

I kissed the sleeping Caroline on the forehead and told Claudette not to worry and that I would be back before dawn.

“Oh, I’ll not worry,” she said. “I’ll just think about thousands of soldiers and my mistress dodging them all.”

“I do have La Rouge back.” I smiled.

“As if one horse can protect you from all the National Guard. A secret room was one thing. You didn’t have to leave the house. You’re courting danger now.“