The Porcelain Dove (37 page)

At the sound of his bird-handler's name, monsieur's brow began to cloud again, but Noël Songis had very wisely removed himself and his one china dove from the forecourt of the château Beauxprés. While M. Léon postured and declaimed, I'd watched him slip away around the north wing past Linotte, who touched his arm and smiled. That is the last any of us saw of him.

I've often wondered what became of Noël Songis. Nothing bad, I think. He was a man who knew what he wanted, and taking care of birds is not a hard thing to achieve. There were at least five men and one woman in France alone who would have accepted his china dove as a more than sufficient letter of character.

Though the scene in the forecourt was clearly at an end, the principal actors seemed reluctant to quit the stage. I loosened madame's waistcoat and sent Artide for her salts-bottle, and still father
and son lingered by the fountain as if waiting for a prompter to give them their lines. As I chafed my mistress' cold hand, I saw Reynaud raise the vicomte from his knees and chivvy both him and his father in the direction of the aviary. I suppose they were going to look for the nets.

Jean took no notice of them, or of me, or of madame insensible on the ground. Slowly he descended the steps, squatted amid the pathetic remains of his Eastern quest and, taking up a broken cage, extracted from it a handful of bloody feathers. Linotte went to him and put her hand on his shoulder. "Did you love them very much?" she asked.

"No, mademoiselle. But I worked very hard to get them, and sometimes it amounts to the same thing."

CHAPTER THE TWELFTH

In Which Accounts Are Cast Up

So the vicomte de Montplaisir rode away upon monsieur's best horse with monsieur's most expensive sword at his side and a hundred golden louis in his purse. Shortly thereafter, the aviary furnaces broke down, the bird-handlers demanded their wages, and the roof over the Alchemical attic began to leak. To meet these expenses, monsieur desired Jacques Ministre to levy a tax on his tenants under the ancient feudal law of guet et garde. The peasants refused to pay, and led by Just Vissot, took monsieur to law over the matter. Monsieur raged that he'd burn the village to the ground, but settled for hiring a lawyer expert in the ways of legal rebellions. Although the peasants would of a certainty pay up in the end, monsieur expected to be considerably out-of-pocket over the affair.

"You must write to Mme Eloffe for me, Berthe," said madame, "and tell her I'll not be requiring the brocade caraco. Monsieur has told me we must make economies. To be sure, 'tis no more than the queen herself must do, yet I protest the price of one new caraco could make little difference to the coffers of either France or Beauxprés."

"No, madame."

"Little frivolities like new caracos add up, he says, so that there's no money left for necessities."

"Yes, madame."

This sounded like excellent sense to me, and more like Jacques Ministre than monsieur, who'd squander his last sou on corn to feed
his birds. As for madame, why, the idea that caracos must be paid for at all was as foreign to her as idol worship. In her world, one attended Mass and put off one's creditors, who, enjoying the patronage of the nobility, ought not to expect silver as well. And if a time came when they must be paid, one could always borrow.

I can't swear I thought all this then, yet I do remember that something—perhaps the thought of debt—put me in mind of M. Léon, so that the next words from my mouth were: "Has madame any word of the vicomte de Montplaisir?"

She stared at me, startled, then rummaged among the papers on her écritoire and handed me a letter bearing the stigmata of a cheap tavern. Who can tell why I saved it? Yet here 'tis, with the ink all faded into the winestains so that I can barely make out the message.

November 1782

Chère Mme ma mère la duchesse de Malvoeux—

       
I have found a type—a villainous ugly man, but honest as a butcher, I vow. He's seen the Porcelain Dove with his own eye (he has but the one) and has promised me a map to the Fortunate Isles and a letter of introduction to the king of the place, but the Devil's in it that he wants 100 gold louis for 'em. M. my father has already been so generous that I cannot ask them of him. Do you, mère adorée, act as the agent of your loving, your most dutiful son. The "Lion d'Or" in Marseilles will find me.

Léon Philiberte Jorre Guillaume Maindur, vicomte de Montplaisir

"One hundred gold louis!" I said. ''The vicomte requires madame to ask M. le duc for one hundred gold louis? He's not lacking in gall, he!"

"I've already asked him," said madame with simple pride. "Monsieur says the vicomte must have anything he wants. Jacques Ministre is to sell a meadow or some such to raise the sum, but we shall lose the income from it, so I must frump about in last year's gowns and tell Eveline Réverdil that she cannot break her journey to Paris at Beauxprés as she intended, for we can't afford to feed her. A noble of sixteen quarterings, and can't afford to feed a guest! There's no
accounting for it, Berthe. Unless Ministre has been stealing monsieur's feathers to soften his own nest."

Bah! As well suspect a turtledove of infidelity as Jacques Ministre of false accounting. And so I told madame, who laughed and said that I must then be wiser than her husband, who had demanded of that same faithful Ministre a strict accounting of all the duchy's wealth, both income and expense.

The compte rendu of the seigneuries of Beauxprés and Malvoeux made nearly as bulky a document as M. Necker's, for Ministre took a bitter joy in tracing the fate of every sou for ten years past. Here were the profits from selling monsieur's cattle and corn in the markets of Besançon; there were the peasants' payments for the use of monsieur's mills, his ovens, and his wood. There were whole pages for tolls, more for magistrate's feés, more for the interest from certain loans monsieur had made to the king. Set against these sources of income were the expenses of the estate, covering page after page of closely written lines. Meat, wax candles, linen for sheets, a new bull to serve monsieur's small herd of milk cows, seed corn, glass, salt, sleigh-runners, harness, oil, rope—oh, the list of things needed to keep Beauxprés from crumbling about our ears was endless.

As monsieur himself had predicted, his income was indeed sufficient to pay for all, including the upkeep of the hôtel Malvoeux, but only just sufficient, and only when times were good. Taking into account the recent bad harvests, M. Fleury's new taxes, the fees for Einsiedeln and L'Epieu, and the vicomte's allowance, not to mention four—no, five—birding expeditions, Jacques Ministre's figures revealed M. le duc de Malvoeux to be teetering at the edge of noble penury.

Monsieur's response to this news could not, perhaps, be heard all the way to Besançon, but 'twas more than loud enough to penetrate the library door to the ears of Artide standing without.

"Impossible? By hell, Ministre, I do not believe it. Beauxprés is a rich domain. Its cheeses are famous and its cows are fat. My father was too easy on his peasants, yes, and my grandfather, too."

Artide could not make out Ministre's answer. He must have been standing across the room by the window.

"Dismiss two bird-handlers? Shut up the glasshouses? Ten thousand thunders, Ministre! I'd sooner dismiss my wife and my daughter and shut up Beauxprés."

Jacques Ministre's voice again, in the cadence of a man pleading
the case of reason. Monsieur interrupting, further from the door now, so that only some detached words and phrases reached Artide's straining ears: " . . . Mareschal . . . a hundred livres . . . hanging offense . . . "

"No, M. le duc." Ministre spoke so near and loud that Artide scraped his ear on the doorhandle in his fright. "No, I cannot do what M. le duc asks of me."

"Cannot? Will not!"

"Very well, monsieur. I will not. It does not make good sense for monsieur to hang Claude Mareschal for his father's bad debt. The land would revert to monsieur, bien sûr. But who would monsieur find willing to farm it for him, hein? And if no one farms it, where then is the profit? If monsieur insists upon every tithe, right, and levy duc him as seigneur of Beauxprés, monsieur's tenants will starve. How will a full churchyard further monsieur's quest, eh?"

"Pah!" says monsieur. "Let them starve. I care nothing for them, lazy dirt-eaters."

The handle dipped. Artide leapt back from the door like a flea just as Jacques Ministre threw it open. "I am no philosophe, monsieur," said Ministre. "Yet I believe 'tis the part of a legitimate government to respect the rights and the needs of the people it governs. You, monsieur, respect nothing." And then he stalked away, and Artide said that his jaw was so bunched with fury he might have been storing nuts in it.

That same night Jacques Ministre left Beauxprés. He embraced us all in farewell, and we all wept. All except Menée, who caroused to his ancient rival's rout and pranced unbuttoned in the kitchen, waving his pizzle before the servingmaids and inviting them to pay his scepter homage—one at a time or all at once, he cared not which. To be sure, their virtue was in little danger, an excess of brandy having soaked him quite limp. Yet after several weeks of similar scenes, we were overjoyed to hear that monsieur had engaged a new steward.

Our joy was shorter-lived than a whore's bastard. Never have I clapped eyes on a stingier, stringier man than Gilles Sangsue. His eyes were close-set, the better to peer into ledgers and rent rolls; his fingers were long, the better to pry into pockets and purses. He'd been a collector of taxes in the north.

What a horror the man was! Bien sûr, I've seen greater evil at Beauxprés—M. Léon and mère Malateste, why, even Menée was more
wicked than Sangsue, his misdeeds more open and shameless. But if the sins of lust, anger, gluttony, and pride are no less mortal than avarice and envy, they are at least sins of passion, and therefore more easily forgiven—by man, if not by le bon Dieu. Avarice and envy are cold sins, and the men who commit them, like giants, have no hearts.

Sangsue's first act as M. le duc's steward was to sack the greater part of M. le duc's domestic staff. When I complained of this to madame, she recalled to me one of Mme Hortense's letters of the previous year, in which she had described Necker sweeping through the king's household like Samson through the Philistines, felling battalions of royal cup-bearers, companies of royal stocking-folders, divisions of tax-collectors, and legions of venal office-holders of every rank. She reminded me how I'd laughed and sworn it served them right, the overdressed do-nothings. Now, watching lackeys and servingmaids turned out—and just before the first snow, too, when field work was impossible to come by. . . . Well, I found myself close to pitying those unemployed hasteners of the royal roast.

The economics of the case were undeniable. The duc de Malvoeux employed many more servants than were needed to run Beauxprés. The lackeys especially worked too little, ate too much, and were plaguey arrogant besides. Fewer servants cost less, eat less, work harder, and have no time for arrogance. I suspect that in the depths of that withered purse he called a heart, Gilles Sangsue cherished the image of a household trimmed to a single servant, infinitely hardworking, infinitely thin, infinitely humble.

Bread, onions, gruel and vin du pays—that's what he fed us, who'd been accustomed to share monsieur's sauced meats and fine Burgundies. Menée took these economies as a personal affront, threatened Sangsue with mayhem and murder, and died of an apoplexy just after the turn of the year. M. Malesherbes, who'd been melancholy as an owl, grew more melancholy still, until his entire conversation came to consist of belly-deep sighs and wistful moans. As for the rest of us . . . Well, we grumbled mightily, but ate what was set before us. The villagers would have been glad to have had so much.

I remember Mme Pyanet standing in the bakery door, glancing over her shoulder at her husband within, whispering that she didn't know how they'd pay their taxes, she didn't indeed.

"M. Pyanet, he has a big heart. The blacker the loaves he's brought and the worse they smell baking, the more eager is he to extend credit.
They're our neighbors, he says, we pray with them and we drink with them. Let them keep their copper for their tithes, he says. What about
our
tithes, that's what I want to know."

I gave her the basket I'd brought, packed with pork rind and scraps and a few pieces of silver wrapped in a rag at the bottom. Well, I'd no need of silver, stuck out in the high meadows of the Jura with nothing to spend it on save some rags of coarse lace when the peddler chanced by, and no one to see me wear them save monsieur's birds. And I had always liked Mme Pyanet.

In early spring, the vicomte de Montplaisir wrote saying he'd procured the one-eyed sailor's map, and 'twas all he'd hoped. Now he needed fifty livres to defray the immediate expenses of the journey. The letter's gone, but I remember its being more sober than the last, more neatly penned, more respectful: Reynaud's work, of a certainty. It inspired monsieur to send straightaway to a bank in Besançon for a loan of fifty livres, which he dispatched posthaste to Marseilles. While he was borrowing, he borrowed a second fifty livres to buy a pair of rare African birds-of-paradise that he'd news of from a southern bird-seller. They were very beautiful—like phoenixes, white with breasts so pink you'd think the magic flame burned them still. Madame was in ecstasies over them. The rest of us found them a poor enough substitute for our wages.

'Twas at about that time, as I remember, that Justin returned to Beauxprés.

After five years' absence, I'd all but forgot that madame's younger son was still alive. I suppose he had been dead, in a manner of speaking—dead to the world and sepulchered, first on the heights of Einsiedeln and then in the gray valley of Baume-les-Messieurs, two days' ride west of Beauxprés. Jean, who has been there, says that Baume-les-Messieurs is a sight to behold, a rocky, chilly place down at the bottom of a gorge with the wind whistling down from the heights above like the wrath of God. Just the place for a Maindur monk whose taste ran to the ascetic.