Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (42 page)

“Claudette, I’m doing this for your region, for people perhaps from your old village.”

“
We
are your village now, Caroline and me.”

“Yes, you’re my family. And these people I don’t know are also my family. I can’t explain it. I don’t really understand it.”

“Just don’t die and leave me alone with this baby.”

“I have to go,” and I kissed her on the cheek and quickly left.

I was glad that Jean had agreed to be my escort, and he was happy to be away from chez Vergez. The pines and chestnuts made long and shifting shadows across the road in the moonlight. The wind rushed through the tops of the trees. I was out again on La Rouge, going toward the old forest where I had hunted with my father. Deep-throated frogs sung out from the darkness. Our saddlebags were bursting with potatoes, carrots, onions, and mushrooms for a stew we would make at the old lodge for the refugees. William would enjoy this adventure, I thought, but I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world, right now. An owl on silent wings suddenly emerged from the dark trees and passed over my head, the moonlight just catching his white feathers.

I didn’t know how many there would be waiting for us, but I thought about a dozen. We were off the road now, past the lodge, on the narrow track at the edge of the meadow. I was in the lead, and the hooting of an owl made me slow La Rouge. I heard it again and stopped.

Suddenly, out from under the trees I saw in the moonlight a man’s bearded face under the low brim of his hat, then another face, which appeared to have only one eye, though this could be the trick of the shadows. The bearded man took the bridle of Jean’s horse; One-Eye took La Rouge, who snorted and stepped back. I checked her. More shapes of men appeared behind these two, and I saw distinctly two muskets, their owners in darkness, pointed at us.

“Madame Williams?” said One-Eye.

“Yes.”

With one hand still holding Rouge, he stepped directly to the side of my saddle, where my leg was tucked, and stared at me. I hoped he was taking in my white aigrette. He slowly raised his arm, and as he did so, dark heads and shoulders appeared out of the silver grasses.

My new escort led me into the meadow now, where I saw gathered about fifty people. “But—”

“Something wrong, Madame?”

“It will just be a bit crowded in the lodge.”

He grunted. “We have been sleeping in ditches, among cattle, even in trees; what is a crowded house?”

“May I show it to you? We ’re going in the wrong direction.”

He gestured for me to be silent and led me to the center of the meadow.

Someone had lighted a torch, and I could clearly see the crowd around us now—as many women as men, and most of the women had one or two children with them. They were all waiting for something.

Then the one-eyed man took a stole from his pocket, unfolded it, kissed it, and put it around his neck. With a sudden soft swish, the people knelt in the grass.

“I am going to perform mass now,” the man said. “Ever since they passed a law forbidding outdoor worship, I do it every night. Would you care to join us?”

“Let one of your sentries come. I’ll ride over to the road and keep watch.”

“As you wish,” and he whispered words to the bearded man, who departed into the darkness.

“Forgive me,” I said. “Are you a priest?”

“I’m a cobbler,” he said. “They killed our priest.” And in the torchlight he smiled a rather eerie smile, with missing teeth and sunken cheeks and, clearly, one eye.

I told Jean to unlock the lodge, find the cooking pot, and prepare the biggest pot of soup he could manage with the supplies we had brought. I would join him soon. I glanced at the bowed heads, the torchlight flickering over their ragged breeches, coarse woolen dresses, and tired faces, young and old, and felt embarrassed in my satin and ribboned bonnet. I dismounted and walked Rouge softly out to a vantage point at the edge of the wood where I could look down on the road and back at the meadow, at the flitting shadows of the mass of the cobbler priest. It went on in silence.

Then I heard the unmistakable sound of hundreds of marching feet. I held my hand over Rouge’s muzzle so she would not call to the officers’ horses. I hooted like an owl twice, heard my call answered, and immediately the torches were out and the meadow lay silent and still except for the breeze in the grass.

It seemed to take the soldiers a long time to round the bend in the woods and come into sight. The clomping of boots echoed up the timbered hillsides and surrounded me so that I couldn’t tell from which direction they were coming. Then I saw a glint of moonlight on bayonets to the south. They were marching toward Blois.

Finally a column of men came into view, black on the white road, curling around the bend like an undulating snake. They kept coming and coming; one cry of a child, one whinny from Rouge or from Jean’s horse, would betray us all. I couldn’t see any faces—just a dark blur with the outlines of hats and muskets, faintly moving legs, light catching on the white breeches of the National Guard; officers on horseback alongside, the constant rustling and jiggling of the packs on their backs and ammunition at their waists and the earth tremor of their boots—as if they were all one entity, let loose on the forest at night; then the last of them was gone: their sound faded and the forest swallowed up their noise and movement into its own silence, as if they had never been.

Then I heard crickets again, and the stream at the edge of the meadow. I gave the owl call and saw shadows moving in the grass.

I mounted Rouge and rode fast back to the lodge. Jean would need help with that soup. He had already gathered buckets of water from the stream and fortunately hadn’t lit the fire before the soldiers came.

The cobbler priest had found the path to the lodge, and now women were slicing fast, throwing handfuls into the huge kettle under two torches, set in the rafters of the lodge. I gathered sprigs of thyme and rosemary from my saddlebags, and Jean tossed salt and dried pork into the brew. I rummaged through dusty cupboards and found about eight porcelain bowls and some pewter mugs, and soon I was standing by the steaming kettle, ladling out soup to a quiet procession of very hungry, if not starving, people. The families came first. Some brought their own bowls; others waited patiently for the bowls and mugs of those who had gone first. Each one of them thanked me.

I saw one girl of seven or eight, sitting in the shadows by herself; and I brought her a bowl and placed it in her hands and placed my hands around hers. I could feel the warmth of the bowl through both our hands. She looked up at me and said in a shy voice, “Are you the Mother of Orléans?” I nodded. I felt I could put bowls of steaming soup in the hands of hungry little girls for the rest of my life and be happy, just doing that.

“They grow on you, Madame.”

I turned and saw a young man, of about Etienne’s age, smiling.

I hadn’t noticed him among the crowd, but he was well dressed, although his clothes were shabby too. He wore a cloth frock coat with a faded velvet collar and large buttons, with dirty lace at the sleeves, a silk waistcoat, leather knee breeches with silver buckles and jockey boots. He doffed his worn bicorne hat and bowed, saying, “Chevalier de Montivault at your service, Madame.” I curtsied, in the appropriate manner for a chevalier. He smiled again. “It is a good thing you do here. Not many would do it. These people have so little hope. Ah, it is my turn for soup. Would you care to join me?”

“No, thank you, Chevalier.”

“Then pardon me.”

He ladled himself some broth from the bottom of the kettle and shrugged. “Families must eat first,” he said. He looked around. There was nowhere to sit.

“Would you care to step outside? I live out-of-doors, these days.”

I followed him, and we stood near the entrance, above the clearing where we had gathered in a circle before the hunt.

“This is your land?” he said, and sipped from his bowl.

“It belongs to a friend of my family. I knew it in a happier time.”

“Ah, the happier time,” he said. “These people”—he motioned to the lodge—“they remember a time too when they were free and could hunt where they wanted and raise their crops, before the army from Paris came and took their men off to war and imprisoned their priests. But a good thing has come from all of this.” He took a long drink from his broth and delicately fingered out a soggy potato and ate it. “Some of these villagers,” he said, “didn’t even talk to each other—had some old feud and didn’t know why—and now they would die for each other. And they would never have cause to talk to me nor I to them—and now we walk side by side. Fate and danger have made us all like old friends—even those we have just met.” He bowed slightly, and there was a sudden awkwardness about him, after the expression of such sentiment.

I looked toward the meadow that glimmered in the moonlight through the trees.

“What will become of these people?” I said.

“Most of them will cross the Loire, look for work in farms and villages in Normandy and Brittany. They have friends, like you, who risk their lives to help them. They have nothing to go back to but civil war and destroyed villages; all their livestock and property have been confiscated.”

“And what about you?”

“I? I am bound for England, to join the émigré army.”

“Ah, England. It is a popular destination.”

“You want to go too, Madame?”

“Maybe later. I have an infant. And work to do here.”

He gestured to the lodge. “They are all fed and will sleep soundly tonight, for once. Thank you, Madame, so much,” he said. “May we meet again”—he paused—“in happier times.” He bowed again, and we returned to the lodge, where most of the people were already asleep, curled up on the floor and in nooks. Jean and I prepared to ride home, well behind the column of National Guard.

From that night on, we rode out to the lodge about once a week throughout the summer. One night Angelique caught Jean coming in late and asked him, By any chance are you helping Annette in some intrigue again, as you helped her deliver Monsieur Vincent from prison? (I told her about that when we stayed in Orléans and asked her never to repeat it—that was my mistake.) Jean, an honest old fellow, gave in, and the next week we had Angelique riding beside us.

That was the night we heard a patrol of National Guard coming in our direction. We rode into the brush, muzzling our horses, hoping the patrol hadn’t heard us leave the road quickly and couldn’t now see us through the trees. Angelique said the whole time she just wanted to be home safe and warm in her bed, and that risking one’s life to serve stew to a lot of dirty refugees wasn’t her idea of fun. She vowed to keep quiet, and Jean and I could keep our intrigues to ourselves.

Besides, she said, I never did like horseback riding, especially at night. I was glad, because I did not want Angelique to run the risks I did—and she wasn’t as discreet in a dangerous situation or in her daily conversations as I would like.

One night I asked Claudette to ride out with me, while Angelique watched Caroline. Claudette was in tears as she herself placed the bowls of mere broth—shortages in the market now limited the supplies we could bring—into the hands of people like her parents, who had fled her region. After that night, she never again opposed any of my “intrigues.” She even had me put in writing that, should anything happen to me, and until Monsieur William returned or sent for his daughter, she, Claudette, would take full responsibility for the raising of Caroline. We both signed it.

That night I lay awake, Caroline asleep in her crib across the small room. I recalled her laughing that afternoon—the eighth-month-old-child laughter that dares the world that anything be wrong. I had carved a small wooden horse that looked more like a duck, painted it red, and attached to it a leather string. Every time Caroline pulled the duck-like horse to her and it touched her bare feet, there in the shade of the pear tree, she laughed. Hard green fruit hung from the branches above her. She stared at the light through the leaves with the same innocent and intense gaze as her father, and suddenly I wept that he could not hear that laugh, nor see that gaze. Now, as I lay in the dark, I felt a double loss engulf me: that I had signed that form, and that I was alone. I had got the cottage, tended the garden: Where was William?

That summer my brother and his friend from university, Jean-Claude Marché, became our first guests in our new home. For a housewarming present, they brought candles and soap, increasingly hard to come by. Etienne and his friend mirrored each other; they were the young men from Paris—tailcoats, high-crowned hats, English jockey boots, and canes—except Etienne wore beige breeches and cropped hair, his friend green breeches and hair that fell to his shoulders.

“What happened to your hair?” I asked my brother.

“You don’t know much about what goes in the world, do you? This is the Titus cut: from that Roman play by Voltaire. A week after it opened, all the young men cut their hair to look like the character Titus. Really they did it because the ladies love the actor who played the role, but then everything is political now, so all Paris says it’s manly and revolutionary to have your hair cropped, and effeminate and counter-revolutionary to grow your hair. What do you think, Annette?”

“I think it is wise for you to appear like a Republican,” I said. “And what about Monsieur Marché?”

Etienne’s friend cut himself a slice of bread and said, “But I am not wise, Madame.”

Etienne laughed and said, “Jean-Claude is a bold one. You won’t see me wearing royalist green or growing my hair. He has had to use his stick more than once for protection against sans-culottes who tell him to cut his hair like a good Republican.”

Jean-Claude shrugged.

“I draw the line at wearing dirty shirts, though, Annette.” He pointed to his white neckcloth. “It’s almost treasonous to appear in public in a clean shirt”—and he laughed again. “You think it probably wasn’t
wise
to attend the demonstration in May—we joined the Girondin supporters and shouted, ‘Down with anarchy! To the devil with Robespierre, Marat!’ Not that it did any good.”