French Passion (48 page)

“Beautiful little whore … orgies … nobody much.…”

“De Créqui's mistress, faithless 'tis said.”

Tears stung behind my eyes, and I moved away. I couldn't force myself to go inside and leave André completely, so I went to an empty spot near the slimedampened stone wall. In the distance a flock of pigeons swooped toward the spire of Sainte-Chapelle, roosting in the crevices. The horrors of the past months hadn't inured me. Here I was, with André and these others, in the antechamber of death, and shouldn't all else be as naught? Yet my pain and humiliation were as great as ever, and I was foolish enough to want to hide them.

I stared up at the shadowy pigeons.

“Comtesse,” André called. He had moved along the rail near to where I stood. His anger gone, he called tenderly—and too loudly. He must have heard the whispers and realized what he'd done. Using my title was his means of setting matters to rights.

His pity was the last thing I could bear. I continued gazing upward at the slender spire.

“Comtesse de Créqui.” He called the name of his old rival with obvious difficulty.

The whispers rose, lowered. And all at once it came to me how utterly ridiculous, now, were such goings on. Why was I letting a stupid and shallow pride keep me from André? I went to the railing.

He reached between iron bars for my hand. At the touch of his warm breath, his lips, on my naked palm, a weakness overcame me and I leaned toward him. Cold iron pressed on each side of my forehead. The tears I'd struggled to hide were falling.

“Don't,” he whispered huskily. “Darling, please don't.

“I'm happy.”

“I never intended to speak to you like that. But do you know how I hoped I wouldn't see you in this yard? I could scarcely bring myself to come outside.”

“But I was hoping even harder to see you.”

We stared at each other, mutely acknowledging the reason behind our differing hopes. Instead of releasing my hand, he held it to his stubbled cheek, and for a minute we were oblivious to the others around us, and to the slender iron bars separating us.

“Why in the name of God, darling, did you stand up like that? You must have known you couldn't save me.”

“On the contrary,” I said, managing a smile. “I believed I had.”

“So I've destroyed you, too,” he said bitterly.

“The charges against me have nothing to do with you, or your trial. I'm a returned émigré. I mourned my husband.”

“If you'd left the country before the trial—”

I interrupted, “We both know I returned to be with my husband. Now stop flattering yourself.”

Again his lips pressed into my palm, and again I felt that melting thrill so at variance with our situation.

“André, we've always been so open with each other,” I said, my voice, I hoped, too inaudible for our audience, which kept at a respectful distance. “Why did you never tell me?”

“Isn't it apparent? It's always been a shame too deep to speak of—can you imagine having a father so debauched as to enslave little girls, and have them trained for his pleasure?”

“But he loved your mother.”

“Love! My father was a monster!”

“Just a man, aging, lonely, afraid.”

“I've spent my life trying to right his evils—and in the end I've brought about evils just as great. Our blood is accursed.”

“Don't be silly,” I said. “The Comte told me that the late King—your … nephew—was a good, most ordinary man who loved his own wife, and sent much money to aid the Americans in their War for Independence. And as for your father, he was able to love your mother, and acknowledge her son as his own.”

André's lips softened. “You've always seen people as better than they are.” He looked more cheerful. “Manon, you were magnificent. When you threw your arms out toward the gallery, I wanted to throttle you. And also I wanted to jump from the platform, take you in my arms, and yell, ‘She's mine!'”

“That would have been a fine and poetic gesture—the second, not the first.”

We both laughed. Others around us smiled. Marriage had cloaked my past with respectability, and I was, in their eyes, one of them, a Comtesse loved by the Duc de la Concorde, son of Louis of France. Beyond these Gothic walls and towers, France saw us as a tyrant and a traitress. To ourselves, we were a poet who'd dreamed of freedom and a girl who'd grown up in a leaky farmhouse.

Though the day was cold, and clouds had swept over the sky, everyone remained outside to dine. The food, purchased by the women at exorbitant prices, was laid out on stools set close to the fence. The dark bread was stale, the wine thin and sour, some of the cheese green and the rest maggot-infested.

The conversation, however, was sharper and more witty than any in Europe, for conversation had been a high art at Versailles, and the flower of the Court was imprisoned here. Nobody alluded to the Conciergerie. The Revolution was ignored. Jokes were thrown subtly. Laughter fell in showers.

After we dined, André and I stood by the fence, unashamedly holding hands. The cloud-mottled sky grew dark. We clung together, not parting until a weary guard strolled over to inform us exercise time was over.

André said, “I'll see you in the morning.”

“Tomorrow, yes.”

I kissed each knuckle of his hand, wondering if he would be here tomorrow. He, doubtless filled with the same agonizing question, raised my palm to his lips.

Inside the doorway, a pair of jailors awaited me. Assuming they were taking me to Goujon, I willed a curtain of numbness. I'll procure us another day of happiness, I thought, following one of the armed men as closely as his partner followed me.

We echoed through empty halls of the Palais de Justice. A guard opened one of the numbered doors. “Inside,” he said.

I found myself standing behind a waist-high wall of varnished fruitwood. On a low dais opposite me sat the Tribunal, five men in plumed hats.

I'd conferred with no lawyer, there was no public prosecutor, no jury. The stenographer was a narrow-shouldered rabbit of a man. The candle that shadowed him and threw elongated replicas of plumed hats onto the walls.

The President of the Tribunal asked was I the Comtesse de Créqui?

I was.

Had I committed the crime of grieving for my traitor husband?

I had. As had soldiers who had served under him.

The last was irrelevant. The stenographer was not to record it. Had I emigrated?

Yes. To England.

Therefore the charges against me were correct?

The charges were correct.

They leaned toward one another. The flame danced and shadows moved wildly, enormous. Fingers were raised, and this, I knew, was the prison signal that meant death.

The President rose and in a tone of bored weariness said, “According to Article One of the First Chapter of the Penal Code, you are condemned to death in the Place de la Révolution. Long live the Republic.”

The darkness closed around me, and I grasped varnished wood. I was stunned. There is no logical explanation for my absolute surprise. Since Goujon had ordered the soldiers to take me to the concierge, I'd known I would die. Indeed, I intended to die with André. All day the shadow of death had hung over him and me, and the witty, malicious, brave prisoners.

Yet knowledge of the sentence and hearing a hasty disinterested voice say the words are two entirely different matters. The men at the long table stood, one casually raising his hat to scratch his head, another pulling on a tiered greatcoat, the rabbity stenographer shuffling together his papers. Dots jumped before my eyes, and all at once I was falling. One of the guards gripped me around the waist.

“Is she all right?” asked one of the Tribunal, querulous.

“We best let her sit a minute, Citizens.”

“A minute, no more,” replied the querulous voice. “Deputy Goujon wants to question her on behalf of the Executive Council.”

A chair grated. Hands lingered on my torso as my shoulders were eased forward and my head was bent between my knees. And then I was being led down endless corridors and up a circular staircase to the room where I'd been with Goujon.

There was the smell of ripe winter pears. Goujon, sitting by the coal fire, rose, facing us.

“Wait outside,” he ordered the jailors. “I'll call when I'm finished.”

Chapter Fourteen

I leaned against the scarred table, my every muscle trembling. “They took me before the Tribunal,” I said with dull astonishment. “They sentenced me to death.”

“I sought to avoid this,” he said.

“You had me arrested.”

“Only after you made it inevitable,” he replied with complete and honest regret.

After a second or two I asked, “They usually order the execution within twenty-four hours. No time was set.”

“Yours is a special case.”

“Why?” I asked without curiosity, gazing down at my hands. They trembled.

“Because of the public testimony you gave for the Duc de la Concorde.”

“Oh.”

“The time and day will be set by the Executive Council.”

“That means you?”

“In part,” he said.

“May I go with André?”

“It's already been decided. Yes.”

“What day?”

“I told you last night. As long as it's in my power to stave it off.” He leaned toward me. “In this case, you see, a postponement will help rouse the crowd.”

My muscles still quivered, yet I had no real interest in our conversation, beyond a peculiar numb satisfaction that André and I would die together. Goujon and I were speaking in the same conversational tone we might have used to discuss going to a café.

“I brought you some pears.”

I'd noted as I came in a small mound of ripe fruit on the table behind me. “Thank you.”

“You can eat them later,” he said. At the word
later
, his voice deepened, coming like a growl from his throat.

He crossed the room in two strides.

As the night before, he undressed me, keeping on his own clothes: this time, however, rather than using the table, he pushed me on the floor, his great, bull-like body pounding mine into the boards until my muscles were pulp and my very bones ached. Afterward, he rose to sit in the chair. I pushed up with quivering arms.

“No, stay there,” he ordered. He'd unfastened his shirt band. His massive neck glinted with sweat, and firelight burnished the coarse, damp hairs of his chest. “You're exquisite,” he said. “Manon, as long as I live, two things I'll never forget. The way you fought for the idiot's life at the Bastille. And this.”

As I lay on the floor a weak self-hatred rose like vomit through me. I wore only the fine chain with two rings, the Comte's ruby band, André's initialed gold. They burned into me. How could I permit Goujon to degrade me? Even at the price he paid?

“May I get up?” I asked in a cold tone.

“Not yet. I like looking at you.”

Raging inwardly, I lay in the fire's warmth, my eyes tight shut. Yet I sensed his eyes on me. Squirming, I covered myself with my hands.

The modesty must have aroused him. He was again on me, and though I acquiesced, the act was as brutal as rape, more battering. He had to help me up. Then, gentle as a child's nurse, he handed me bits of my clothing.

And the odd part was, I knew his kindness to be as genuine as his brutality.

His huge hands tied a petticoat string. “You're wondering how I can let you die, and yet still be good to you?”

Good to me? Did he mean this kindness? No. The smile in his bearded face was explicitly sensual. He must imagine the shattering effect on me of his brutal joining meant I enjoyed his famed “virility.” Good? I shuddered.

“Manon,” he was saying, “a revolution is like farming. One has to be tender enough to nurture the yearlings and yet strong enough to slaughter the useless animals.”

“If some more extreme group comes to power, mightn't you be … useless?”

“Possibly,” he said, handing me my dress. “I'll accept what serves the Republic.”

His reply, utterly sincere, darted me with shame. He'd dedicated himself completely to a cause. I knew I couldn't lay down my life for anything other than sweet and mortal flesh, and this lack of philosophy seemed as weak as permitting him to rape me.

He touched my breasts, trailing his hand down my open bodice. “We have at least two more nights,” he said.

That means two more days, I thought as the jailors led me through the maze of locked doors and guarded corridors. I tottered past the candlelit table and fell, breathing audibly, on my cot. The ladies of a vanished Court brought me water to sip, pressing damp rags on my neck, murmuring sympathy. On my part, I told them I'd been sentenced and then questioned by the Executive Council. I could smell Goujon's sweat on me.

Three evenings later, after another session with him, I lay on my cot, shaking and filled with a killing rage at myself for doing what I must to stay alive, to keep André alive. The soft voices were muted by the pattering of rain. It had drizzled most of the afternoon, yet André and I, as well as several other amorous couples, had remained at the fence, holding tight to the sliding hours of our lives.

Wincing, I rolled over and clutched a dampened, scented kerchief to my throbbing forehead. When, I wondered, would my searching heart be able to accept death? I knew the answer. Never.

Some deep fountain of willful life bubbled within me. I could neither ignore death, as these aristocrats reared in formally rigid etiquette managed to do, nor could I find true Christian resignation in dreams of the hereafter. Every fiber of my being clung to the transitory flesh. Every beat of my rebellious heart affirmed the sweetness and pain that is life—and love. Those hours with André' in the grim courtyard were everything. I knew I would keep to the bargain I'd struck with Goujon.