Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (66 page)

“Did their love survive?”

“They belonged to each other, but they couldn’t be together.”

“Other people owned their life; that wasn’t fair. I don’t see why the old woman with the bees couldn’t own all of her bees. They belonged to her. She knew that. She cared for them and nurtured them and led them away to other ground.” I suddenly started to cry and looked down at the gravel path and a puddle there, reflecting some of the red and orange leaves of the ancient tree above us. The puddle grew blurry. I thought I was beyond all this.

“I can’t help it,” I said.

“Let’s walk to the river,” said William. “But not past the animals in cages.”

We walked, without touching, but close beside each other, silently down a wide, smooth avenue now, lined with thinning and flaming trees.

“There’s the herb garden,” I said. “They say there are cures for all ailments in those plants.”

“Perhaps just walking by it will help us,” William said. “I’ve a heaviness in here that I need a magic plant to cure.”

“It’s not magic; it’s simply the knowledge of the plants.”

Then we were by the river. We followed it back, until we found a bench looking toward the Ile Saint-Louis. We looked at the river.

“It was very hard on Mary and me when Catherine, then Thomas, died in the same year,” William said. “I think part of our love died then. We had seen ourselves as lucky, as blessed even, then
that
—and ever since, but perhaps even before that, I have been sort of dying, Annette, slowly dying, for the lack of the powerful feelings that I felt up there in the Alps. There are only three new poems in my new collection—which, by the way, will be translated into French—I would especially like Caroline to see it, to be proud of me, I suppose. I have written that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that are recollected in tranquility. I have the recollection, the tranquility, but no longer the powerful feeling. I have been dying—from that—not literally, my health is fine, but no longer anything to overflow. I translated this for you, to try to explain—

Now, for that consecrated fount

Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,

What have I? shall I dare to tell?

A comfortless and hidden well.”

“But it came back in the Alps,” I said.

“Yes, that’s why I was so excited, jumping around like a child.”

“And you found the overflow in the forest of Fontainebleau—the Healing Well that’s always full. I liked Caroline’s idea of going on a pilgrimage to the Healing Well.”

“I already have,” William said, and he looked at me, and it was the face that helped me into the carriage at Vendôme and tried to smile, when his chin quivered slightly, and when I looked back, he had been standing alone in the square. When I saw him again, he had traveled with invalid papers during the Reign of Terror to see me.

“So have I.”

I put my hand on his, on his knee. There were yellow leaves scattered at our feet, and I watched one slowly spin down and land on William’s shoe. The river looked full from the rain and was very blue and fresh-looking after the storm. Even a dirty barge, full of refuse from the city, looked clean.

“The air tastes like spring,” I said.

He put his other hand on top of mine on his.

“Annette—”

“Don’t talk. You don’t have to talk.”

He finally said, “Let’s walk back; the others are waiting.”

He managed a smile at me, as our feet crunched on the gravel and the large grayness of Notre Dame approached.

“I must not talk now,” he said.

William decided to extend their stay to a month again, and we saw them almost every day. He spent much time with his daughter and granddaughter, and they walked together to the river. Once a friend of his, a writer, Crabb Robinson, came to dinner. He took me aside in the hall between courses and said, “Madame Baudouin—”

“I am Madame Williams; my daughter is Madame Baudouin.”

“Madame, excuse me, but isn’t it indelicate for the young Madame Baudouin to continue to call Monsieur Wordsworth ‘Father’?”

“I think it would be indelicate for her not to, Monsieur Robinson.”

That ended our conversation, and Monsieur Robinson did not return to chez Baudouin.

At the end of the month, William said simply, “I will return to Paris; I will see you all again.”

It was evening, and one could feel that it was the end of October.

A soft autumn rain fell. William stood by himself outside our front door, and the light from the hall shone on his face. In that light he looked older than I had ever seen him.

“Until then,” Caroline and I said, and he turned and went down the steps of chez Baudouin, opened and carefully closed the gate, then walked slowly down the dark rue de Charlot toward his lodging.

We saw his dim figure turn and wave once, and we waved back, but we couldn’t see his face any longer. I closed the door and went back into the warm, lighted parlor with Caroline.

I felt a hush settle over me that heightened other sounds: the rain in the eaves, Louise on the stairs singing in her high soft voice to her doll. Caroline sat on a footstool in front of me and took my hand. We said nothing. I sat in my chair by the lace curtains of the dark window and played with the patterns of the lace as they lay along the arm of the chair. The intricate lace pattern felt good between my fingers, and I understood how Louise must enjoy still holding her blanket, tattered now, that she had held and enjoyed since birth.

A month ago, in the
jardin
, along the Seine, even in the Louvre, William told me something that was not easy for him to say, something that I know to be love, about things not changing in the green high Swiss valley he had seen as a young man, and I saw a man now, young again, running to the banks of the Loire to fetch me a reed for a ring. Things were the same in a place where they could not be touched by anything else, a place we knew to be true. And I understood that place to be where I was, now and always.

I did not know if I would ever see William again, but I could hear his voice saying nothing had changed, and see his shining fifty-year-old eyes, and thought I truly knew what he meant now, and I suddenly laughed for the obvious joy and absurdity and sorrow of it all.

Only the joy mattered now.

I let my hand drop from the lace pattern to the top of Caroline’s head. It rested there. She leaned her head against me. We sat there like that. Louise continued to sing on the stairs.

One could tell by the morning air that it was early summer, and at the end of a double row of overgrown lime trees, we saw the dark façade of the charred château.

My hands were clasped in the crook of Jean-Luc’s arm.

“Poncé sur la Loire,” he said. “Most of it may be burned, but it’s all mine again.”

We walked toward the staircase tower now. It alone had remained untouched by the fire.

“I want to see if I can still draw it,” Jean Luc said, and he took paper and a pencil from inside his coat and sat down on the floor where I had first seen him. “What do you think about rebuilding this pestilential monster of a home?” he asked as he drew.

Outside the narrow window, the winding paths of the maze in which I had got lost were now lost themselves in the hedge run wild. “It’s good to be here,” I said. “More than you thought remains intact.” I heard the coo of a dove. “That vast dovecote is still here. Not one of the trees was burned.”

I glanced over at Jean-Luc’s sketch. His quick pencil strokes already conveyed the moment when Pegasus lifted off the ground.

I looked up. On the ceiling, as when I first beheld it as a girl, the great horse still flew, unimpeded, powered by the beat of his own bright wings.

This story is fiction, yet based on the lives and times of known people, especially concentrated on a year that William Wordsworth spent in revolutionary France. I have taken liberties, as is the wont of a novelist, but tried to be faithful to what we know of the young Wordsworth, to the little we know of Annette Vallon, and to the complex array of facts and of interpretation of facts known as the French Revolution.

There are many sources on the French Revolution, on the life of William Wordsworth, and on the Loire Valley. These are the ones I found most useful:

David Andress, The Terror, Civil War in the French Revolution (2005); Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette (2001); Stephen Gill, Wordsworth: A Life (1989); Jacques Godecot, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804 (1971); Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth (2000); Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789 (1989); Émile Legouis, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon (1922); Colin Lucas, The Structure of the Terror (1973); R.R. Palmer, The Twelve Who Ruled (2005); La Nuit de Varennes, French film (1983); Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution (1988); Simon Schama, Citizens (1989); Elisabeth Scotto, France, The Beautiful Cookbook (1989); Jason T. Strand, Chateaux of the Loire, Michelin Guide (2006); Donald Sutherland, France, 1789–1815: Revolution and Counter-revolution (1985); Jack Tressidor, Eyewitness Travel: Loire Valley (1996); Dorothy Wordsworth, The Journals, edited by William Knight (1930); William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, edited by Ernest Selincourt (1936) and The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (1979).

I would like to thank my brilliant editors, without whom this novel would not be in its present form: Courtney Hodell, for her faith in the story and for leading it into a new incarnation, and Alison Callahan, for her support and vision of the whole.

I would also like to thank my insightful editors at home: my wife, Lorraine, especially for her knowledge of horses and of a woman’s perspective, and son, James Devin, for his poetic ear.

In addition, I would like to thank the following people (in alphabetical order) for their help and encouragement: Candance Cafferty, for her unexpected enthusiasm for the first draft of the beginning chapters; Juanita Hoffman, for telling me Wordsworth needed me to write this book; Dr. Terry Fairchild of Maharishi University of Management, for finding me a copy of Legouis’s book on William and Annette in the University of Iowa library; Susan Keller, Janet Mackintosh, and Allan Mosher, for reading the entire first draft and encouraging me; Professor Ted Margadant at University of California, Davis, for his suggestions for research material; Jeannette Perez at HarperCollins, for her friendliness and efficiency; Karen Perrin for her assistance with things French; intrepid research librarian Linda Perkins; my parents, Elizabeth and James L. Tipton, for their support; and John Watanabe, for his faithful reading of early chapters. I would also like to thank Tracy Chevalier for her mentioning lavender in a kitchen garden in The Lady and the Unicorn.