Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (7 page)

“Monsieur and Madame Varache have left France,” my sister said to me, from her seat in the carriage. “I didn’t think they’d actually do it. They’re going to England.” I stood up to walk to the fire.

“You’re standing in the water! Get out of the water!” Gérard shouted. I sat back down. I guess he did know about the Channel. It must be a magical carriage.

“You still hear of all sorts of people emigrating,” Marguerite said.

“I don’t want to go to England,” Marie said.

“Nobody’s going anywhere,” I said. “Except Gérard.”

“Aunt Annette and I are planning what we are going to wear to the first fête of the Christmas season in Orléans,” Marguerite said to her daughter. “It will be nice to stay with the Dubourgs again.”

Nurse ushered the children away for supper and bed, and my sister continued working on an embroidery pattern, green on white, of a tree with flowering branches, and I wrote in a little book.

“What do you write in that thing?” asked Marguerite. “You’re jotting in it every evening.”

“I like to keep track of my thoughts.”

“Do you ever,” she said, and looked down at her flowering tree, “write about love?”

“You know I tried that when I was a girl. It turned out to be rather deceptive.”

“Well, that was one rotten man.” She paused again. “Do you ever think Maman is right, and perhaps you ought to think about it again?

I know you’re different and always have been different—riding and hunting, and having dozens of suitors who never get anything more than a consent to dance with you. We love having you here, but it is selfish of me to rely on you to take care of Gérard. You should have a life of your own. You do know one
can
be happily married. Look at Paul and me.”

“How many men are like Paul? Intelligent, honorable, kind? Your luck is rare. His sort’s not what I see, in my many conversations with clever or not-so-clever young men. No, thank you, if I may continue to take advantage of your hospitality, I’m very happy here with you and your family, and with riding La Rouge by the river. And with dancing with gentlemen without being overmastered by some sudden and uncontrollable emotion—except that excited by the music.”

“Annette, I like you to stay here simply because I find your conversation amusing. No one I know talks like you.”

“When I was a girl, I was a fool,” I said. “And now I prefer to watch the snow.”

It swirled in the pale evening on the terrace and looked as if it blew in every direction at once. I wanted to ride out in it and stop in the woods along the river and watch the world transformed before me. Everything that was ordinary gained some new grace: the weight of hours of snow balanced on one twig, on the old shovel, leaning against the terrace wall.

“Well, I hope this snow stops soon or we ’ll never get to Orléans,” said Marguerite. “And there, you see, I have forgotten all about England and Monsieur and Madame Varache,” she added.

“I wonder if they’re happy?”

I looked over my shoulder, and the snow had indeed stopped. The fire was a good sight and warm on my legs, but I thought this was the time.

“I’m going out,” I said.

“It’s the blue hour, almost dark.”

“La Rouge needs her exercise. It will be pretty; you want to come?”

“Ask me in the spring.”

I put on my long English riding cloak with a high collar that was the style of a few years ago, and the rabbit fur gloves and the hat, in which Marguerite said I looked like a Cossack.

I opened the wide old stable doors and walked into the familiar smell of hay and alfalfa, of manure, and the earthy smell of the horses themselves: the realm that stayed the same no matter what went on outside those stable doors. La Rouge nickered at my approach. I talked softly while I saddled her, and we rode out onto the fresh snow.

We walked down the steep, narrow street, cantered the quai on which lumbered only one late cart, laden with wood, and I let her out farther down the left bank. I rode and rode, until the heavy cares of past, present, and future had dropped off far behind.

I sat still and allowed La Rouge to paw through the snow for a mouthful of grass, and as dark descended and hardly a breeze whispered and a new set of flakes fell, I felt a peace that rose up out of the winter earth and enveloped me. I felt a presence of something vast and intimate, of which I was a small yet conscious part. I had felt it before, when I paused by the river or at the edge of the woods.

I called it the presence of the Virgin, for I was taught to give it that name, but one could, I suppose, just as easily give it the pagan name of some spirit of the water or the trees.

I thought, then, that I could only feel this presence by myself. If anyone else were here, I would be thinking about that person and would miss it all.

And yet I wanted to share, deeply. I yearned for a day, far in the future of a peaceful France, when I’d ride here with a man who himself knew the vast and intimate presence suddenly felt in solitude by a rushing river. I dreamed that we ’d talk and ride and not have to talk at all. I shook my head. I cherished my contentment by the fire with my niece and nephew and book.

I thought, therefore, of my dream of writing. I’d fill my journals with thoughts and descriptions, and one day, perhaps as an old woman, I’d publish them under the name of a man.

I watched the moonlight on snow and water. I knew of few things as beautiful. The earth became a map of light and dark. Orion and Canus Major glittered in clear coldness. Above and below stretched a shining world. I dreamed, too, that the peace that dwelt here, just beyond my fingertips, I could know and carry with me as I carried my own limbs, and pass it on. What else was life for?

I was getting cold, standing still with my thoughts. I mounted La Rouge and rode swiftly, the snow and moonlight-bright sparks shed from her hooves.

It was the third Christmas without Papa, and each one passing did not make it easier. Part of me did not want to make the traditional journey to the Dubourgs in Orléans, where we always had fine parties and dances. Part of me didn’t even care that Etienne would be there; that Angelique was already there, and the family would be together again. Part of me just wanted to stay with my two quiet friends: La Rouge and the river.

It was still considered bad manners to talk about the Revolution in social gatherings where one was supposed to be happy, and many of my parents’ friends kept up the pretense that the Revolution had never happened.

The first Christmas after Papa was killed and the Revolution began, no one discussed how, in October of that year, the royal family had been rousted at pike’s point from their palace in Versailles by a mob led by market women who had walked all the way from Paris. Marie-Antoinette only missed being hacked to pieces in her bedchamber by escaping through a secret passageway designed for the King’s assignations with her when they were trying to produce an heir. Now, in the storming of the palace she ran to meet the King and her two children, huddling with their nurse in his chamber. Once they had arrived, the mob shunted them into a carriage, and they left their home and began a long, slow, ignominious ride to Paris. The crowd marched on all sides of the carriage, shouted insults to the King and Queen, and proudly carried, bobbing on pikes that they regularly dipped beside the windows, the bloody heads of the royal family’s personal Swiss Guards. The family was then immured in the Tuileries, an unused, rat-infested palace along the Seine, where the people of Paris and the new National Assembly could keep a close watch on them. That seemed worth discussing, but no one mentioned it that year at chez Dubourg. No one could do anything about it anyway.

This present Christmas saw the royal family truly
imprisoned
in the Tuileries. They had tried to escape in June, but had bungled it and were caught close to the border near a town called Varennes. The National Guard escorted them back to Paris in shame, disgrace, and utter mistrust. If the King had any credibility left, it was gone after the flight to Varennes. It would be improper to discuss this final blow to the sham authority of the King, though, among the people in silks and velvets at chez Dubourg. Nevertheless, my family, in private, had gone over the what-ifs of the aborted escape many times.

Paul held out hope that things could settle down now. He thought we could have a constitutional monarchy, like Great Britain with their king and parliament. He said
that
would be the most stable government, for struggles were already rife within the National Assembly that ruled France, power shifting almost monthly between different men, like a ball they kicked to or stole from each other.

Anyone who still believed in having a king of any sort was called a royalist. But there were different types of royalists: those like Paul, who wanted a peaceful transformation; those, like the Varaches, who, threatened by the instability, simply emigrated; and those who secretly accepted no change and quietly waited for the King’s restoration to power, to be brought about by his brothers and their émigré armies forming abroad. Chez Dubourg was a royalist household, perhaps of the third category.

The greatest change for me, though, on our way to Orléans, was that Monsieur Vergez, a poor substitute, was sitting in Papa’s place in the old family carriage in which Vergez had installed new velveteen curtains. He said he wanted to keep out the glares of the commoners.

As a lawyer, though, he supported all the new laws that supported them.

Vergez became garrulous about business matters regarding Grégoire, the new constitutional bishop of Blois. Grégoire had secured his title by taking an oath that his first priority of allegiance was to the republican constitution and not to his religion, an oath any self-respecting priest would not take and which would, in the near future, cause much strife throughout France. Vergez said he planned to please Grégoire in a case involving a priest who would not take the new oath, though Vergez loathed Grégoire for being a revolutionary.

My stepfather was also planning to ask the bishop to recommend him, Vergez, to a seat on the new trade tribunal. My mother seemed untroubled by this hypocrisy.

I opened the
Romance of the Rose
:

I bathed my face in clear water,

The bottom paved with shining stones

and Maman took that moment to enumerate to me the young men I’d meet in the coming season in Orléans. I reflected, not for the first or last time, that when you are reading, others think they can disturb you because you are not
doing
anything.

So I asked, in my own non sequitur, had she noticed that we were traveling the same route, north along the river, that Joan of Arc’s troops had taken in 1429 to end the siege of Orléans? She didn’t seem interested in my historical allusion. His own speech finished, Vergez was asleep, his head against the velvet.

I peeked out the heavy curtains at the endless brown and white, stubbly wintry fields and bare poplars that marched up long narrow roads to isolated farms and searched out the two towers of Sainte-Croix Cathedral that would signal that we were approaching Orléans.

Finally we arrived, driving down the rue Royale. After the long hours of empty road the street was suddenly crowded with carts and carriages, its shops lit in the wintry dusk, and men and women hurrying home in their long coats with high collars or in billowing capes. I was impatient to get out of the carriage.

Slowed at times to a standstill by the traffic, we finally turned left on the rue de Bourgogne, which led to the old
porte
through which Joan had entered to the cheers of the people. We stopped in front of a large stone house with two lanterns lit outside, and the Dubourgs’ footman rushed out to greet us. Soon we were in the lit vestibule, enfolded by the embraces of the Dubourgs and of the Vincents, who had journeyed in their own carriage.

Monsieur Dubourg, small and portly, with a powdered and curled wig, bent over my hand and smiled with real affection. His tall, thin wife, with a heaped-up coiffure that made her still taller, loomed above him and lowered herself, giraffe-like, to bestow on me two kisses and a lavender scent, and the words that I still looked as young and pretty as ever. Twenty-two and unmarried, I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment. She was my mother’s best friend, and they disappeared into the front salon, already lost in low and urgent gossip.

Monsieur Dubourg took my arm and led me into another room, firelit, with a couch embroidered with Chinese-style boughs. I took my perch on a branch with Marie and Gérard on either side, and Monsieur Dubourg offered me a glass of eau-de-vie. Angelique had arrived at chez Dubourg to start the round of fêtes a week early, and now she and Etienne entered together with delight at our reunion.

The Christmas season had arrived, and the first dance would be here, tomorrow night, in chez Dubourg’s small but elegant ballroom, walls festooned with ribbons and gilded flowers, as real as if they were alive.

Etienne pulled a small box, tied in saffron silk ribbon, from his pocket and insisted that I open it straightaway. It was a watch on a gold chain, and inside it I beheld a painted miniature of a sorrel horse—the likeness of La Rouge. My brother laughed. “I thought you would rather look at a portrait of your horse than of me,” he said.

“La Rouge does have smaller ears.”

“So you like my longer hair,” he said, and I stood up and kissed him on both cheeks. It was good, after all, to be together again. One could almost imagine Papa, shedding his cloak in the vestibule, hastening to join us. I could hear his deep voice as he entered the room.

I could see us all rushing up to him.

I sat there on an oriental bough, with a golden bird behind me, and allowed myself the luxury of imagining, for a moment, that our world had not changed, not changed at all.

The harpsichord music chimed pleasantly through the drone of voices. I sat sipping Monsieur Dubourg’s felicitous Poire William and enjoying its warmth when I accidentally caught the eye of a young man in dark green silk stockings. He asked if he could sit down, and I was angry that now I would not be alone with the music and the taste of the wine. A servant came by. “What are you drinking?” asked green stockings.