Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (9 page)

I had heard of him, informed of political events through Paul.

Brissot had recently proposed a decree by which property of families such as the Varaches, who had emigrated, was to be confiscated. Why had Monsieur William gone to the Jacobin Club, that revolutionary hotbed? I wondered. These are not sights for the casual tourist. Nor were these the times. “What made you want to travel to France?” I said out loud.

“I want to learn your language better and become a tour guide for gentlemen. I liked France when I was here before.” Some of the candles had guttered and gone out, and Monsieur William’s face was partly in shadow. It made his eyes stand out. They held me.

“When was that?”

“I arrived at Calais on the night of July 13, 1790, the eve of the first anniversary of the Revolution.”

His long, fair, reddish brown hair caught the light from candles still lit on the table behind him. I could hear the music calling from the ballroom.

“Everyone was dancing. When my friend and I walked south, through the villages, people danced in the streets at night. The celebrations went on for a week. At one town they invited us for dinner, and toasted us, as free Englishmen, and we toasted them as
citizens
. Then they took our hands and led us, dancing, back out into the street.”

Didn’t his landlord tell him he is not supposed to talk of such things here? “How far south did you go?” I asked.

“Save for a few boat rides, we walked all the way from London to Lake Como and back. About thirty miles a day.”

I had never been farther than Nantes or, once, Paris.

“We...had to be back in time for university. My family did not want me to go on that trip because they wanted me to study for exams.

My friends did not want me to go because they thought France was dangerous.”

“Was it?”

“Only the Italian mosquitoes.” He stretched his arm to its full length and with his finger mimicked a mosquito coming at him. He made a high-pitched whine, hit his face several times quickly from different directions, and laughed. It was a good hearty laugh and made me laugh too.

“What did your family think of you going to France this time?”

“My parents are dead. I refer to my uncles. They did not want me to go. They wanted me to find a job. So I am looking.” He laughed again.

“Tell me about London.”

“More people than Paris. I can pass the whole day just looking at all the people. But two things I do not like. The many people who come for executions, as if it’s entertainment, and the many...women of the streets. They seemed more sad than those types of women in Paris.”

“How do you know?” I was shocked, though, that the foreigner had talked in polite society of women of the streets.

“How long do you intend to stay in France?”

He smiled. “Is this how you teach me French? Ask me questions?”

“Who else here would listen to you talk so slowly?”

“I will stay here until I have learned more French, until I have no more money, until I have seen what I have come to see.” I had never seen eyes like his in an adult. They were so excited and so innocent.

Their frankness could disarm anyone, I thought. He pulled something from his pocket and put it on the empty table. In the dim light I could not see it clearly, but it looked like a rock. He rolled it in his hands and threw it up in the air a little and caught it and put it back down on the table. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.

“It looks like a rock.”

“Here, touch it.” It felt like a rock.

“Is it from your homeland?”

“It’s from your homeland. It’s from the rubble of the Bastille. It’s a symbol of great change.”

“It’s a rough and ugly rock. There are more beautiful ones along the banks of the Loire.” Someone stood in shadow at the doorway in front of the light from the hall.

“There you are, Annette. We have been looking for you.” Paul looked inquiringly at Monsieur William.

“Madame Dubourg instructed me to help her foreign guest practice his French. May I present Monsieur William.”

He stood and, picking up the rock, put it back in his pocket.

“Monsieur William, Monsieur Paul Vincent, the husband of my sister.”

“Annette, they are going to start the last dance. Would you like to come? And you, Monsieur.”

“I prefer to watch. Thank you for the lesson, Mademoiselle Vallon.”

“It was nothing.”

My brother-in-law took my arm, and we walked into the ballroom for the last dance. It seemed very bright and loud. I noticed that outside the glass doors it was beginning to snow. “You have been gone a long time,” he said to me with a teasing smile. Over his shoulder of mouse-colored velvet I saw Monsieur William leaning against the wall at the entrance of the ballroom and regarding me with those sharp and innocent eyes.

Late that night, after all the guests had left chez Dubourg, Paul accompanied me to my room. The upstairs hall was deserted, and we walked past the children’s rooms and stopped outside my door at the end of the corridor. Paul almost spoke and stopped himself. His eyes seemed tight and tired. I waited.

“We are all pretending,” he said.

“Pretending what?”

“Things have changed, Annette. Cultivate a friendship with the Englishman. We all may follow Monsieur and Madame Varache.”

“What more has happened?”

“Just the tenor of the times. Things seem set against us. After the royal family’s flight in the summer, a more severe reaction has set in against them, and against anyone who sympathizes with them. If you are for the King, you are for the Austrian Empire, since the Queen is Austrian. Now the emperors of Austria and Prussia have threatened armed intervention in France if there’s any further outrage to Louis and his family. That is just what the extreme revolutionists want—an excuse to accuse us all of being in league with the enemies of France. That includes the priests: any who do not take the new oath of allegiance to the constitution are declared in conspiracy against the nation. I do not want to tell Marguerite any of this. She worries so about the children. I know she doesn’t want to leave Blois. When I do talk about it, she points out correctly that we ourselves are not threatened in any way. But I can only think it will get worse.”

Paul took off his powdered wig and leaned against the wall. He ran his fingers through his cropped blond hair. He must have been pretending all night.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t burden you with this.”

“Do. I know Marguerite cannot bear to talk about it. I thought you said things would settle down with the new constitution.”

“Yes, but there are those now who want more. They want first to strip the King of his last vestiges of power, then—they want to kill him. I know they do. I misjudged the hatred, Annette. Anyone who is considered a royalist can be called a conspirator against France. And one can do anything to conspirators. I misjudged the violence this whole thing has unleashed. I don’t know what kind of world we ’re in. In September, in Provence,
moderate
aristocrats
and their families
were murdered in prisons by a band whose leader they call ‘Cut-Head Jourdan.’ That’s the name they give to their local hero. If in Avignon, why not in Orléans, even in Blois?”

He saw my face. “They were probably just fanatics in the south in hot September. The Loire Valley is different. It was a wonderful party tonight. Angelique had more than one dance with your Monsieur Letour.”

“Now you’re pretending again. And I never cared for green silk stockings.”

“Thank you for letting me unburden to you, Annette. You are a good friend, and a good aunt to Marie and Gérard.”

“They are so charming I don’t have to try.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.” I watched him walk away down the hall and pause slightly before he opened the door into the room where my sister lay, probably already asleep.

Our personal servants had stayed behind in Blois, for the Dubourgs supplied us with all our needs, including servants to look after us.

But I did not ask for one for my room. I missed my maidservant, Claudette. She would have had something funny to say about Monsieur Letour, something insightful to say about Monsieur William, to take my mind off Paul’s news. The fire in my room was low, and as I undressed I looked out the window at the new snow on the roofs of the old half-timbered houses of Orléans. I suddenly wanted to be in my hometown. I always liked Orléans and our stay here, but now everything felt unfamiliar and cold. I shoveled hot coals into the bed-warmer and thrust it deep under the covers, then jumped in after it and reached my bare feet down until the soles were almost touching it and were as hot as I could stand. The rest of me was still chilled.

I was tired. My eyes and feet ached. I looked forward to sleep and closed my eyes and involuntarily pictured families helpless in prison in Avignon, and the faces of those who murdered them, led by a man they called Cut-Head Jourdan. I heard their cries and tried to think of ways I could help them escape.

Then I thought of Monsieur William and the rock. I wasn’t against all the rock symbolized as much as I was against the violent emotions it let loose, of which Monsieur William, as a foreigner, seemed blatantly unaware. He had visited the Jacobin Club, that seat of revolutionary fervor, but I thought of him, and the tightness in my body that went with the other thoughts relaxed and I heard his voice, speaking slowly and deliberately, saw his eyes looking at me in the half-dark room, and I fell asleep.

Every year, for a little present for Madame Dubourg, Marguerite brought a few pots of jam made from the apricot trees that lined the warm brick wall at the back of the garden at chez Vincent. At breakfast, I sipped the hot coffee from the West Indies, where Monsieur Dubourg’s company did a brisk business in the sugar trade: from Martinique and Guadeloupe to Nantes, upriver to Orléans, and from there to Paris.

I spread last summer’s jam on my roll; little Gérard and I had picked many of these apricots. It had taken all afternoon, and I had held Gérard up so he could pull some off the branches above his head.

The apricots were beautiful: softly furred, orange, and round in the thick green leaves with specks of blue sky showing through. It had been hard hot work, and we were proud of the basketfuls we had brought back to the kitchen. I was making a good citizeness. I helped Cook make the apricots into the jam the next day and sat Gérard up on the counter to watch. I held the boiling wax too close to the curtains by the window, and the curtains caught fire and Cook and I threw bowls of water at them and hit them with towels, laughing as hard as we could. Gérard did not know whether it was scary or funny, and neither did his mother, when she walked in. She always thought of me, fondly, as a bit of a fool.

Now I scooped the golden jam out of the pot and smoothed it over my just-warm roll and tasted the sweetness of summer, and looked out the window at the new snow below, lining the busy rue de Bourgogne, carts and wagons rattling along already, east-west, as they had done on this road since before the Romans came and will do long after us. What was one more summer or winter to the ancient road? What was a revolution; what were kings?

And I thought now of a young Englishman walking the roads across France. “Marguerite, do you think men are mostly liars when it comes to their physical feats and adventures?”

“You always say things out of nowhere.”

“This is not out of nowhere. It’s very logical. I am referring to a conversation I had last night.”

“With Monsieur Letour?”

“Why would I remember anything that bore said to me? Marguerite, would you believe it if a man told you he had virtually walked all the way from London to the other side of the Alps and back?”

“Oh, the Englishman. All men are hiding something.”

“What would Monsieur William hide?”

“Why is he here?”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“I would believe that he was trying to impress you. Whether it’s true or not isn’t important.”

“He probably walked here from Paris.”

“And walked from London across the Channel.”

I got up from the table. “I am going on a walk this morning.”

“In this weather, and by yourself? Don’t be foolish.”

“The sun’s coming out. And I haven’t visited the quai du Châtelet in a year. I’ll be back at noon.”

After breakfast, I put on my fur-lined cloak and, my hands lost in a large muff, joined the current of pedestrians going west on the rue de Bourgogne; then I turned south along a narrow alley lined with half-timbered houses almost leaning over me. I passed Saint-Pierre-le-Puellier, the dark little church built six hundred years ago, when they didn’t know how to make grand cathedrals yet. I liked to go there for Christmas mass rather than to the colossal Cathedral of the Holy Cross that they were still rebuilding, where one was dwarfed by the statues of the four apostles as soon as one reached the door. Soon I was out of the narrow alleys, the river gleaming suddenly before me in the winter sun.

Gabares
, with their huge sails, and their smaller, attendant vessels, each pulling a yet smaller one upriver, lined the quais. They had just made the long trip—over a fortnight—up from Nantes, even in December frost. Men without gloves unloaded wood and coal from a barge. Others herded livestock and carried hay onto a barge without rigging, headed downstream, perhaps just to Blois or Tours. Behind the busy ships lay the Bridge Royal, on the spot where Joan of Arc’s troops had charged across the broken arches of a bridge, the spring water swirling beneath them, to drive the English out of the boulevard des Tourelles just across the river. There, leaning against a post of the bridge and writing in a small book, seemingly oblivious to bargemen shouting at each other nearby, was the tall Englishman I had met the night before.

Affected gentlemen never used to
wear
hats, but only hold them under their arms so as not to disturb their powdered wigs. Yet this Englishman had his hat under his arm, but no wig to put in disarray.

His long fair hair blew in the crisp breeze, and he brushed it out of his eyes as if without noticing it had got in his way, as he didn’t notice me when I walked past, staring at the strange, unmoving figure with the tide of the world moving around him and the river, brightly, before him. I walked on.