French Passion (14 page)

For two weeks now I'd been making this trip.

The worst two weeks of my life. Other than my trips to the toolshed, I kept to my Chinese-wallpapered bedroom. I hadn't talked to anyone, or been near anyone. I hadn't gone near CoCo. My room was in front. Each afternoon Aunt Thérèse and one of the serving girls would take CoCo for a walk, and my day centered around the minute when my daughter stood in the courtyard waving her plump hand up at my window. Jean-Pierre remained at Versailles on duty, and the Comte had been dispatched by King Louis on a secret mission to King George III.

I turned at the stables, calling along the path, “Here I am!”

The windowless shed had a double door. Izette, who kept the upper part open, would close it when I called out to warn of my approach. Today the top was already shut. The rain, I decided.

I moved closer. As I set down the kettle, soup sloshed inside. “Izette,” I called, setting the round loaf and the medicine phial atop the linens. “How is he?”

“Ma'am?” she whispered. Her voice sounded weak.

“I've left some unguent. The apothecary said to smooth it on morning and evening, to heal the scabs.”

She didn't answer.

“Izette?”

Again no reply.

“I'm leaving. Take the things right in. Otherwise, rain'll soak the bread, and the linens, too.”

There was only the hush of rain falling. Every other sound was absent. Normally the neighbors' dogs barked when I rounded the stables. Today they hadn't. The stable boy usually whistled off-key, and the horses whinnied and stamped. The stillness terrified me. What lay behind that warped door?

I heard, or imagined I heard, a faint rustling murmur.

“Izette, is Joseph … is he dead?”

The only answer was that rainy hush.

Cautiously I moved along the narrow dirt path, resting my hand on the door handle. Don't, I thought, don't. I withdrew my hand, pulling the shawl over my head. Rain plopped onto the woven wool. The Comte is right, I thought. I can't risk CoCo's life, Aunt Thérèse's, the servants, my own life. Go back, run.

Izette had sounded so weak. Izette, my other self. Izette, my friend, my only true friend.

I grasped the handle, pulling. Hinges protested. The door swung open.

Inside it was dark. I blinked several times before I could see, but just before my eyes became accustomed to the lack of light, I inhaled that flat, heavy odor.

Death.

Cots stood on either side of the shed. On the left the coverlet had been drawn neatly over the body and face. On the right, Izette tossed and mumbled wordlessly. From here her pocks were clearly visible. No small red dots like on Joseph's face. These great, oozing blisters covered her face, her neck, and the magnificent breasts she'd bared in her delirium. She was shivering violently.

“Water,” she mumbled.

I moved to the table, pouring water from the stoneware pitcher, holding her up so she could drink.

And then, in horror, I realized what I'd done. I'd condemned myself to become one of those statistics the Comte had given me. I had only one chance in three of emerging unscathed. Yet even as fear weakened my legs, I couldn't keep back a thought: If I were Izette, someone would have been paid enough to risk nursing me. It is only the poor who die in pestholes, or alone and unattended. I took the mug from Izette's cracked, oozing lips.

“Aunt Thérèse,” I called up at her windows. “Aunt Thérèse!”

A window was pushed open, and her linen cap poked out.

I said, “Joseph is dead.”

Aunt Thérèse crossed herself.

“Izette has the smallpox, and I've been in there, so I'm staying to nurse her.”

Aunt Thérèse, paling, held onto the window ledge. I expected her to faint, to topple onto the path near me.

“Auntie, Auntie!” I cried.

“I'm all right,” she said. “I've been expecting something like this, planning for it. Manon, don't worry. I'll hire someone, no matter what the cost, to bring you food and whatever you need. I'll find someone who's had the smallpox already. They say those who've had it don't get it again.”

“Thank you.”

“Now listen to me. This is important. You know Madame Joliot?”

I nodded, wondering where this would lead. Madame Joliot was exactly like Aunt Thérèse. Stout. Conventional. Given to fainting. And very kind.

“Well, Madame Joliot was head governess to the children of the Duke of Orléans. During the smallpox epidemic of seventy-three, the Duke and his family were inoculated. And so was Madame Joliot.”

I stared up through the rain at her. “In—what? Is that a cure?”

Aunt Thérèse shook her capped head. “There is no cure for the smallpox, and they say there never will be. This inoculation is a method of prevention. Or so Madame Joliot told me. It has dangers, but, she says, it's far less dangerous than the disease. Most of the Duke of Orleans' servants contracted the smallpox. Neither she nor his family did.”

“Do you know how it's done?”

“Madame Joliot told me. Listen carefully.”

And she held out a piece of paper, reading instructions, then she dropped the sheet and I ran to get it before rain smudged the ink.

“Auntie,” I called up, “if anything … anything happens to me, promise you'll be as good and kind to CoCo as you were to Jean-Pierre and me?”

At this she began to weep. “Manon, this is all my fault. If I'd been firmer with you, you'd have been submissive. You would have obeyed the Comte. And—”

“Aunt Thérèse,” I interrupted, “there's nobody else in the whole world that I want raising my CoCo except you.”

She was weeping too hard to speak.

“Give CoCo a big hug and kiss,” I called, and then tears were streaming down my rain-wet cheeks, too.

Aunt Thérèse must have sent immediately for the charnel wagon. No sooner had I brought in the soup and linen than two ragged, rough-looking men with kerchiefs over their faces banged loudly on the door. Unceremoniously each grabbed a wasted leg, thumping the frail, rigid corpse along the wet path. Izette, thank God, still tossed in delirium.

Before cleaning up the shed, I inoculated myself according to Aunt Thérèse's instructions.

Holding a needle over the candle flame, I waited until the point blackened. This step was easy. The next was impossible. “You must,” I told myself aloud. “You must do it.” And I bent over Izette's cot. She'd fallen into a stupor. By the light of the candle, I searched her face and chest, finding what I needed. A broken blister, oozing. I dipped in the needle, coating its blackened point with pus. Pulling up my sleeve, I quickly jabbed the point into the flesh of my upper arm, barely drawing blood. My revulsion was so great that sweat drenched me. Again I dipped the needle, again I pricked. What was I doing? Forget Madame Joliot and the entire family of the Duke of Orléans! How could this prevent the smallpox? Didn't it seem far more likely I'd just infected myself? Yet I continued until a coin-sized circle of red drops marked my flesh, then I sat on the hard-packed dirt floor, shuddering, burying my face in my hands.

After a few minutes I looked around. Izette must've been stricken quite a few days without telling me. Normally clean, fastidiously neat, she'd let the toolshed go to filth. The slop pail overflowed. A mouse had gnawed its shape through a loaf of bread.

I swept, lugged the slop pail to the cesspit, changed Izette's body and bed linen, smoothed her pustules with the unguent the apothecary had sent for Joseph. I sponged her face with cool water, using more unguent. Then I turned my attention to Joseph's cot, stripping all the coverings, taking them outside, touching them with the candle. The rain kept dousing the fire, and burning took a long time.

Inside, Izette was awake and coherent.

“Oh, ma'am,” she whispered. “You mustn't be here.”

“I already am.”

“It ain't worth it. I'm going to die anyway.”

“Stop being silly.”

“I want to die, now Joseph is gone.…” Small, odd-shaped tears oozed down her blistered cheeks. When she stopped crying, I fed her a little beef soup. Finally she slept.

Night had fallen. Wearily I put fresh coverings on the other cot. No exaltation raised me, no sense of doing a mercy. I felt only staggering guilt. If this inoculation thing didn't work, and infected me, then what? A third are horribly disfigured, the Comte had said. But what if I died? Left CoCo an orphan?

Without me, how would she survive? I remembered, too vividly, that night I'd run from the Comte's palace, those two starving children foraging through an offal heap. If I died, would the Comte support a bastard that might or might not be his? He never plays with her, I thought as I stretched out. And understood what he'd told me at the beginning. I should've lied through my teeth that she was his.

I woke in cold darkness. Izette was shouting wildly. “Men! Men! All ugliness!”

I thought of the starving children and the Comte's lack of affection for CoCo and began to cry.

The porter Aunt Thérèse had hired left hot meals, medicine, candles, fresh linens on the path. One morning he left two letters. I read Jean-Pierre's first.

Dear Little Sister
,

How I yearn to be with you in your difficult time! Alas, the unrest in Paris has worsened. Revolutionaries have persuaded decent artisans, at this time unemployed, that their lack of work is the fault of the government. They stand outside shops of their former employers
,
threateningly. Sometimes they read verses written by a poet who calls himself Égalité. These poems are the usual inflammatory stuff of pamphleteers, and King Louis fears a rebellion like that against the British in the Americas. Therefore you can see that duty to King and country keeps me with the Royal Guard, here at Versailles
.

Aunt Thérèse has told me what you are doing. I know how fond you are of Izette, and how generously you give of yourself. However, had I been with you, I should have forbidden such recklessness
.

I love you too much to have permitted you to expose yourself to the dread disease
.

But, Little Sister, know that all my prayers and love are with you
.

Jean-Pierre d'Epinay

(Captain, Royal Guard)

I folded the paper, relieved that Jean-Pierre hadn't come home. He'd always been susceptible to fevers, and his being at Versailles Palace was one weight off my mind.

I unsealed the other letter.

My dear
,

This is to let you know I remain in England on the King's business
.

Your aunt has written to me of your actions. I cannot control my anger
.

de C

He'd written to explain his absence, but couldn't he have kept his anger to himself? These days I was always near tears.

Aunt Thérèse asked our doctor to write down the course of the smallpox. Izette followed the stages closely. After I'd been in the toolshed two days, her blisters were broken pustules, and in another four days these crusted over. The scabs itched terribly. She couldn't restrain herself from scratching. Some scabs she tore off, others fell off. In either case it was the same thing. Ugly pink scars that after ten days marked her face, neck, breasts, torso.

Her fever abated.

The scabs off, according to the doctor's notes, she was no longer contagious. We stayed four days after the last scab fell.

She was still very weak. Slowly we started out of the shed. The drab nursemaid's garb hung, but even in its loose gray, her tall body somehow managed to hint of the old voluptuous curves.

Her face, mounded like the crust of badly baked bread, was a vivid pink. According to the doctor, in time these scars would fade. Bright or faded, the pockmarks were a terrible disfigurement.

At the stables, she paused.

“Ma'am, there ain't no way to pay for life. And I owe you not just what you done for me, but how you was with Joseph.”

I gripped her hand. “Stop it!”

“Don't worry, I ain't getting sloppy. I'm plain, you know that. It ain't what you did for me, ma'am, it's how you always was to my brother. Taking him in, feeding him, getting him them crutches so he didn't have to crawl like an animal. Teaching him his letters—and such pleasure he got from books! Keeping him from Hôtel-Dieu. There ain't another person in Paris that would've done any of it, especially not sending him to that … hell. From here on in, my life is yours. If you need anything, even murder, I'll do it for you.”

Chapter Thirteen

It's unhealthy, most say, to shampoo. But I washed my hair daily when I soaked in my copper tub. I felt sure I had rid myself of any contagion. And still I waited two full weeks before letting myself go in to CoCo.

She was making rumbling noises in her throat as she pushed a toy carriage the Comte had given her across the nursery rug. As the door opened, she looked up. Hungrily I stared at the small firm body, the shining pale cloud of curls. One of her white stockings drooped at the ankle. I went over to straighten it.

“No,” she said, raising her small chin.

“Yes.”

“No! No!” Her very light brows drew together as if she were about to erupt into one of her small rages. “No!”

“Mama wants to straighten your stocking, that's all.”

“Mama leave CoCo!”

“But I'm back again. Oh, baby, I'm back.”

“Mama stay?”

“Oh, yes. Always. Give me a big kiss, CoCo. Give your poor tired Mama a great big kiss.”

At this she put both arms around my neck, and I was hugging the small body, weeping incoherently. The peculiar rite of innoculation had been so repugnant that my mind blocked the use of it for CoCo.

The strikes weren't over yet, Jean-Pierre wrote from Versailles, so he must remain with the Royal Guard. And I got a note from the Comte that the King's business moved slowly, keeping him in London. There was no thought of holding my Friday soirées. The smallpox epidemic, no longer secret, raged through Paris, terrifying people into seclusion.