French Passion (26 page)

He slipped it on my third finger. It was too loose. As he moved the gold over the knuckles of my middle finger, I wondered if not fitting were an omen, then dismissed the unhappy thought.

“How beautiful,” I said, extending my hand to the fire. Initials were intertwined. “Who are
L
and
J
?”

“My parents,” he said. His face stiffened into the tormented yet angry expression he always got when the subject of his parentage came up.

“I didn't mean to pry.”

“Someday I'll be free to tell you,” he said. “In the meantime, we
are
betrothed?”

“Unless you're afraid my hipbones'll puncture you.”

“Stop worrying,” he said. His hands trembled on my shoulders. “Oh, God, Manon, you don't know how much I've wanted you.”

He bent to kiss me. As his lips touched mine, my blood leaped. No innocence in this kiss; our bodies responded with unbelievable madness, and for a timeless time we clung, fierce and primitive, seeking to become one.

Outside the window a man's voice shouted, “Hail to the released prisoner of the Bastille!”

And another drunken voice was ordering, “Let's see you. Show yourself.”

I pulled away from André.

I lived in a kind of fishbowl: every passerby gaped up at my mullioned windows, calling out for a glimpse of me, as if release from that terrible pile of stones had altered me from “prisoner of the King” to “property of the people.”

“You're shaking,” André said. “I'll tell them to go away.”

“Don't let them see you!”

“But why?”

“Don't!” I said, moving a little away from him so our bodies wouldn't distract me from what I must say. “Listen to me, André. Goujon's right. You're a moderate voice in the Assembly, stopping bloodshed. Everybody respects you because you're incorruptible.” I gazed down at polished, warped floorboards. “And I … well, I'm not just a released prisoner of the Bastille. There used to be so much ugly gossip printed about me, slander whispered. I attracted more attention than the other … courtesans. I don't know why, but I did.”

He said in a low voice, “You have a kind of magic beyond your beauty and liveliness and grace. Every man who sees you wants you in his bed.”

“Anyway, that's not the point. The point is I became the demimonde's Marie Antoinette. Extravagant and talked about.” I looked at him with a small painful smile. “You mustn't be linked with me.”

“We're going to be married as soon as possible.”

“No.”

“Why not? Something to do with the Comte de Créqui?” His voice was stiff, angry.

“You can't possibly be jealous!”

“Damn right I'm jealous, Manon, I'm human.”

“He's no longer part of my life.”

“He better not be.”

“André, this only has to do with us. If I ruin you in the Assembly, what sort of chance do you think our marriage would have? You'd blame me. And what do you think I'd feel if I let my ugly past ruin your hopes?”

His gray eyes struggled between love and that bewildered anger.

“We'll be together. Privately,” I said, urgent.

“Prisoner released from the Bastille!” two drunken voices clamored.

André started to the window. Swiftly I moved by him and with quaking hands opened the shutters a slit so only I could be seen.

A pair of thin workingmen leaned against each other, gazing upward. As the shutters opened, they took off their caps to bow. “Hooray,” they cried, then moved unsteadily up the street toward the dim light in front of the bakery. The line had already formed—men, women, and children waiting all night for their daily bread. From here I could make out Fido's hunched shoulders. The idiot waited the long night to buy bread for the Inn of St. Antoine.

I closed the shutters.

“Why should you be at some drunks' beck and call?”

“André, that's what I'm trying to tell you.” My voice rose. “I'm conspicuous. We must keep what's between us secret. Please … Please …?”

André stopped arguing. He took me in his arms, smoothed my tumbled hair until I stopped shaking. I still wore the frock Monsieur Sancerre had given me, and André's hands moved on the cotton. After a minute my body again responded. Pulses racing, I turned trembling lips up to his.

We kissed a long, delicious while before undressing. In the light of the rosy flames my breasts looked so tiny and defenseless. My hips were too narrow. Pulling at my long, silvery-gold hair, I attempted to veil this meagerness.

“I'm a physician's skeleton.” I giggled.

He held my naked body to his own.

And my nervous little laugh faded. Embarrassment left me. There was only the shaking warmth of him, his odors of wine and love. And we were moving to the bedroom, sinking into the deep embrace of the featherbed. He made love to me with unhurried, strong passion, as if we'd been lovers for many years. Married lovers.

Banns and public ceremony meant nothing. André made me feel married. His ring made me feel married, heavy ancient gold with intertwining
L
and
J
gleaming on my middle finger.

The next few weeks I felt even more married. This despite my insistence that he come to me in private. Despite our having only the few brief hours he could snatch from his duties on the floor of the Assembly.

Our passion grew. We were able to explore each other's bodies, giving exquisite consideration to every nuance of pleasure.

It wasn't only bodies. Just being with him was enough. We would sit in the tiny room, André at the round table, his dark, tousled head bent as he wrote pamphlets or his speeches to the delegates, his rapidly scratching quill pausing only for ink, me on the window seat taking advantage of the light as I watercolored gown sketches for Monsieur Sancerre.

From time to time André would look up and smile at me. Here I must confess that being in the same room was not always dispassionate. Often he would come to put his arms around me, or I would kiss his dark hair, and we would end up in the bed that filled the adjacent cubicle.

He kept persisting that we marry, and I was forced to reiterate that he would be smeared by my past, the extravagant salon, the scandalously-worded
libelles
reporting my “orgies.” Inevitably this brought us to the Comte. André's cheeks would burn, and each time his anger would catch me by surprise. How could André possess such a common failing as jealousy? I suppose it's normal for a girl to see the man she loves as faultless. André, though, was famed for his generosity and decency. The incorruptible poet. How could
he
be jealous?

Not that jealousy permeated our relationship. No. André's was very specific, directed only at the Comte. No matter how often I explained that the Comte had no part in my not wishing marriage, André refused to believe me. His temper flared like the stars of a firework display.

His brief, hot rages were a minor flaw.

The inn was happiness.

Outside, though, life grew more difficult. Now it wasn't only bread that one had to line up for: other foods had to be sought out. One never knew when farm wagons would arrive. I started going several times a day to the herb market, helping to pay my board by procuring the inn's vegetables. I would return with a wilted lettuce or a few gnarled carrots, the most anyone could hope for.

The market women of Paris took matters into their own thin hands. On October 5 thousands marched through rain to Versailles to personally tell the King how short food had gotten in the city.

Late on the afternoon of October 6 Izette ran up the steep staircase, her hair wet, her voluptuous bosom heaving. Her usually level voice high, she told me she'd marched with the women.

On the road to Versailles everyone had been good-natured. “We'll tell the baker himself,” they said, referring to King Louis. Patiently they waited outside the high iron fence of the palace courtyard for the King to appear. That night rain poured down and husbands and brothers arrived from Paris to join them. “The King, though, he never came out,” Izette said. She wasn't surprised, therefore, in the morning when a drenched, hungry, furious crowd stormed through the courtyard. She was horrified, though, by the cruelties. Palace guards and servants were slain, their heads stuck on pikes. “The men done all that,” she asserted. In the end King Louis emerged on the palace balcony, agreeing to return to Paris and live in the Tuileries Palace, where he would be more in touch with his subjects. Izette rode back on one of the wagons carrying flour from the royal warehouse. Ahead of her was the long gilded line of royal coaches. At Sèvres, she said with a tremor, the procession halted while the skewered heads of the guards were coiffed and powdered.

Needless to say, while she recited this, I kept asking frantically about my brother.

“Oh, Izette, why didn't you look for him?”

“I told you. Look for Captain d'Epinay was the first thing I done.” Her plain, pitted face was hurt. “I never did find him. But a soldier come up and shoved this in my hand.”

She reached under her bodice for a folded, crumpled scrap of paper.

“Is it from Captain d'Epinay?” Izette asked.

I nodded.

“How did the soldier know me to give it to?”

I didn't even try to answer her question. I was reading:

Dear Little Sister
,

The mob and its actions have made me realize that being an officer in the Royal Guard is meaningless to King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette. It is in London that I can best serve their majesties. In London I can rouse sympathy for their cause, enlist men to come to their aid
.

I dare not sign my name lest this compromise you, but I am

Your loving brother

“Well?” she asked.

“He's emigrated. To London.”

And the two of us were silent, listening to church bells chime six.

Izette rose, taking her shawl from the fire screen where she'd draped it to dry. Hot wet wool gave off ripples of steam and acrid odors. “Some of we women're meeting in Place de St. Antoine,” she said.

My goodbyes were dull and absentminded.

Jean-Pierre's an émigré I was thinking. And in the chill, wet October dusk, I held the letter to my breasts, trying to bring my brother's fine features and delightful tenor voice closer. How much he meant to me, how very much. I was glad he would be safe. Yet already my heart ached with loneliness for him. Jean-Pierre, brother, blood of my blood, my only kin, gone. Feeble lantern light showed thin slants of rain and this poor neighborhood, gloomy enough at any time, was unbearable.

The bells were chiming seven when I heard André's step on the narrow stairs. Usually I flew to greet him. Tonight I stayed in the dark, cold window seat.

“Manon?” he asked.

“I'm here.”

Closing the door, he picked his way across the small room. “Darling, what is it?”

“Jean-Pierre,” I said, clutching the note. “He's emigrated.”

André sat next to me. “After the march on Versailles. Yes. Where is he?”

“London. He says he can be of more use there. He'll raise men to help the King and Queen.”

“Foreign armies never come to help,” André said firmly. “They come to conquer.”

After a long pause I said, “Izette marched with the market women.”

“She did?”

“Yes. They stuck people's heads on pikes. It was like at the Bastille. That was a prison, though, and the heads were prison guards. Most of these were just servants and Royal Guards. Is that how the people will rule? Massacre men like my brother and helpless lackeys?”

“Of course not.” André put his arm around me. “Listen, Manon. Today King Louis accepted the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Now the Assembly must write a Constitution legalizing all we've gained. Then there'll be freedom for everyone. Law, and equality under the law, for the King down to the humblest peasant.”

His words rang, honest and compelling. He was right. This was the end of injustices and inequities. Yet … those freshly combed and powdered heads.… I stared out the window. The dark rain was filled with unknown terrors, the mystery of explosive violence. Jean-Pierre had exiled himself across the sea, to an alien land, and I wanted to keen and wail my loneliness.

“Manon,” André said, his hand tightening on me, “as God is my witness, you have nothing to fear.”

I peered at the oval of his face and made out misery. All at once I was desperate to break the gloom.

“I keep forgetting you're so much more than my André,” I said. “You're Égalité, our noble poet, dedicated, farseeing and incorruptible.” I was parodying a news sheet's words about André, yet I meant every word.

Chapter Nine

One month later, in November, on another chill, rain-drenched afternoon, I pulled on a green knitted shawl before wrapping myself in the heavy black shawl. I was readying myself for the herb market.

As usual, I was worrying about Jean-Pierre. I hadn't heard from him. I knew only what I'd read a month ago in that brief unsigned note. My loneliness had deepened to anxiety. Had he gotten out of France safely? Was he in some French or British jail? Or was he, my brother with his precarious health, coughing out his weak lungs in a city known for its foul and foggy climate? I locked the door behind me, a precaution I generally forgot, and one that Izette had begged me to remember. Floorboards creaked as I went along the uneven corridor and down the narrow dark stairs.

In the courtyard shelter an old man hunched against the wind, holding on his three-cornered hat. There was something familiar about the bent shape, the long knitted muffler.

It was Old Lucien.

I gripped the wicker handle of my basket, a hundred conflicting memories rushing at me. Old Lucien, friend of my childhood, judge of my dishonor, spy, and betrayer. Old Lucien's gnarled hands lifting Jean-Pierre and me, two wiggling little bodies, onto a fat plow horse, Old Lucien's spitting tone as he begged me not to employ Izette, his high complacent laughter as I entered the Bastille.