Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (2 page)

“Why wouldn’t dear Madame Dupin allow us this year to drive our carriages to the door? This is not in good taste or style,” Maman said.

I was teetering on my heels, trying not to look gauche.

“Man was born to suffer,” the count said.

“Oh, you can say that,” said Maman, “with your buckled shoes and walking cane. I think it’s most inconsiderate of Madame. As if we ’re peasants. Who’s ever heard of
walking
to a ball?”

“It
is
just the entryway, my dear. We will all deserve our refreshments. And you know what an old eccentric Madame Dupin is.”

Just then I thought I saw something coming toward us in the woods to my right. I looked on the other side of the drive and saw it there too: a flicker of a shape, darting swiftly between the trees, then hiding behind them. We were almost to the entrance of the château.

In a sudden flurry of movement, figures leaped from behind the trees and surrounded us. The light was dim now, and I could only make out that they didn’t look quite human. They had horns on their heads, were bare-chested, and, as they pranced around us, appeared to have hooves. The count drew his sword. The creatures were wailing in a demented way and leering at us, especially at me. One tugged at the long sash on my dress. I slapped its hairy hand. Another leaped by and wisped his fingers through my hair.

“Get away. Get away,” Maman cried, waving the back of her hand at them. The count set himself in the
en garde
position, his cane balanced in one hand and the sword in the other, ready to lunge against the beasts from another world. Then he laughed and sheathed his sword. “They’re in costume! The fools we are. This is Madame Dupin’s way to usher us to the party.”

As if in assent, one of the satyr-like creatures motioned us to follow him toward the château. Maman and the count started, and I held back. “Annette, don’t be afraid,” Maman said. “These are
Madame
Dupin
’s satyrs; they won’t hurt you.”

Then one pranced by my side, nodded his head, bent down, and lifted my silk dress and underskirts well above my knees, and ran off.

But Maman had turned her back and didn’t notice.

“She always does something strange for the last fête,” she said to the count.

The satyrs leaped ahead of us now in the dusk. At the moat they melted into a crowd of waiting guests, bobbing among them, pinching and dancing. Torches hung in sconces set in the château wall. Everyone was staring down into the moat. I heard lovely pastoral music.

I am small and couldn’t see over women’s ostrich plumes, palm-like feathers, or hats with lace brims.

Not walking on my feet but balancing on the heels, I must have said “Pardon me” a hundred times, weaving my way through a sea of satin-covered hip pads or long trains falling on the ground.

Then I saw it too: a small barge with an orchestra on it, coming gently toward us on the current of the river Cher, diverted here into the moat. Silver candlesticks sat on veneer wood tables beside the musicians. As if we were one person, the crowd sighed in appreciation. A gentleman shouted, “Bravo!” and we all applauded. Then we gasped. From a door in the wall just above the level of the moat, six young women dove, one after another, into the water and swam around the raft. Their gossamer-thin muslin gowns, once wet, made them appear naked. Their slender arms, dipping in and out of the water, shone in the torchlight; then they floated directly below us, their faces upturned, and every one of them was beautiful.

They began to sing—something I vaguely recognized from an opera Papa had taken me to long ago—

The denizens of our sacred groves

Have prepared for you a glorious festival!

And already their sweet pipes

Announce the happy moment

When you shall reign over them.

At the end of the last phrase, six satyrs jumped into the water and proceeded to caress or kiss the lovely maidens. “The nymphs and the satyrs!” a gentleman cried. “Bravo, Madame Dupin. You have out-done yourself.”

We all applauded again, and the crowd swept across the drawbridge to the terrace as the barge and the nymphs floated around the bend in the moat. I was glad for the swimmers that it was such a warm night.

And four years later, when the Revolution began, I was often glad that, because the villagers loved old Madame Dupin, the château de Chenonceaux was not sacked or burned.

Be careful, reader: my troubles started because I read novels. Rousseau was my favorite author—not necessarily
The Social Contract
, but his fiction, especially the one about Julie and her true love. So that was my problem.

Novels had ruined me by the age of sixteen, when Maman invited me into her salon and told me in a hushed and solemn manner, as if she were imparting to me my catechism, that she was arranging for me a
mariage de raison
with a wealthy sugar merchant from Tours.

Instead of thanking her and being blushingly excited, as was proper, I merely said that I was honored by her consideration, but I would wait. I was waiting for true love, you see, for my novels had told me that it existed, somewhere. They had also given me a suspicion that maman’s
arrangement
had more to do with money and position and less to do with love—in fact, she hadn’t even used that word when she outlined for me my future happiness. My novels had also told me that true love rarely had an auspicious ending, but that seemed of little importance to me at the time.

So my wise mother said, “Very well, then, I will prepare you for society, to meet your perfect mate.” I thanked her profusely. I knew I was a gauche girl, so I welcomed this opportunity, especially when she told me the next day that she had hired me a tutor. Now tutors figured prominently in two of the novels I had read. It seems gauche girls couldn’t refuse them, and well-intentioned mothers kept hiring them. I half hoped mine would turn out to be an old music master, whose hands trembled when he turned the pages of the music, whose voice was dry and crackly when he sang. Yet I also knew my teacher would be nothing of the sort and that, as in my favorite novels, my destiny was laid out before me.

My tutor was an accomplished music and dance master from Orléans, who, Maman pointed out, only came to the finest houses. His name was Raoul Leforges, and when I met him he was dressed fashionably in black silk, from the ribbon on the queue of his powdered wig to his high-collared coat to his knee breeches and black-and-white-striped stockings. He held a black beaver-skin hat in his left hand and bowed graciously to me. No one had ever bowed to me before, and I thought I had never seen a more handsome or a more striking man.

Rousseau’s
La Nouvelle Héloïse
had prepared me for such a thing, and so had other novels that we circulated in secret at the convent school, especially the one reserved only for girls in their last year: Laclos’s
Les Liaisons dangereuses.
Even then, to read it you had to be
approved
by a committee of head girls and swear oaths that could send you straight to hell, and you could only have the book for twenty-four hours at a time.

The first lesson started with Monsieur Leforges presenting his hand, without saying a word. He nodded, and I stepped back, thinking we were going to dance, and stopped.

“No, no,” he said, “look at your feet.”

I did, and was embarrassed for them.

Monsieur Leforges had Maman’s permission to break the gaucherie out of me all summer, and he did it through chastisement, rigorous hours, and occasional encouragement. More than once, as I performed a particularly shameful step, he tapped me firmly on the behind with his bamboo cane, and I glowed beneath and above my muslin.

He was preparing me for my first ball, which would be at the château de Beauregard, the home of the count. As well as my entrance into society, it was the first fête of the new season, and the count wanted to make sure no one wanted for anything and that his fête would set the standard for all the rest to come. That warm September night, as the orchestra played some gentle Lully and before I had to hasten up the marble stairs so I could descend them in slow, graceful steps, I lingered by the refreshment tables. I was too nervous to sample anything, but I swore to myself I would have my fill after I danced my first dance, which I was sure would be in a kind of daze.

Then I would retire here for most of the night.

On a table that stretched the length of the room lay rows of
corniottes
, little three-cornered hats made out of cheese pastries;
religieuses
, also known as nun cakes; almond pastries in the shape of yellow, green, and red fish; puff pastry with almond filling (which I loved when I escaped from convent school and sat in a
pâtisserie
in Orléans last winter); plum, lemon, and strawberry tarts; pear cake with red currant jelly; and pears cooked in wine, lemon, and sugar.

I leaned over the bowls to breathe in the fragrant syrup. And then, in a hundred glasses set in bright silver cups, gleamed strawberry ices. At the end rose a pyramid of candies: dark chocolate, sweet lemon, almond macaroon. And at every pillar, under every arch, stood a sober servant holding a silver tray of tall glasses of sparkling white wine.

I had worked harder than I ever had in my life all that summer to become a lady; to play piano passably; to know how to curtsy with subtle nuances of difference to a marquis, to a count, to a father; to talk to servants in a firm yet gentle tone; to walk with grace and dignity; to converse by asking questions and by making witty interjections; to sing somewhat respectable duets; and especially, to master the art of the dance. And Monsieur Leforges, the nonpareil of style and taste, had been my taskmaster in all of these. I deserved all the rewards I could reap now of pastries, tarts, ices, and wine. But I had grown to worship my stern and handsome tutor, who said I dare not lose my concentration through even one taste or sip until I had proven myself on the ballroom floor—and through those curtsies that I would bestow on the crowd first, which we had worked on all of a particularly sultry August afternoon. He said he deserved his reward too, although I was sure Maman was paying him well.

Then before I knew it the count had me by the arm, had guided me past the perfumed pear bowls and to the top of the stairs. I was afraid for a moment and thought I might dash into the corridor behind me, which led, in flickering light, to a long hall where loomed tiles of marching musketeers and portraits of every king of France and his queen up to Louis XIII. It wasn’t an attractive thought to run in the half-dark in that direction, and the count still held my arm, as if he intuited my fear.

The music stopped. The count whispered, “May the Virgin be with you,” though I never thought of him as a devout man, and we began the slow descent, then paused halfway, so everyone could regard me.

Now it was disconcerting and wonderful at once, hovering as if in midair in a gauze gown and white taffeta skirt with tiny red roses.

All the silk-clad crowd looked up at me, a hundred candles lighting their faces, powdered wigs, and coiffured hair, their smiling, expectant faces, the proud faces of my parents. Everyone I loved was there, with a soft glow over them all.

My nervousness melted, and I felt ready to enter their world, to be one of those who moved with grace and dignity and beauty under crystal chandeliers and marble stairways. The gauche girl had suddenly dropped away, and now I, too, would lightly touch gloved hand to gloved hand, a fan dangling from my own wrist, my satin-slippered feet gliding over the bright floor to the beauty and order of Rameau’s music, which dictated the orderly and beautiful movements of the dance. The music started again, and I descended.

It’s a marvelous thing to be young and at the radiant center of one’s world. The problem, of course, is that so often that radiance is purely of one’s own imagination, and its light of such short duration.

One thinks differently when one is young, if one thinks at all. It seemed to me that Monsieur Leforges was the world of charm and grace. I gave my heart to that world. My tutor religiously followed Rameau’s
Art of the Dance
, and I religiously followed him in everything, and by the end of that evening I had followed him too far.

I never made it to the tables waiting for me with their sweet rewards. After I had been the center of all the world and had danced with ease in a circle of taffeta and perfumed lace cuffs, Monsieur Leforges claimed his own reward. The night of my triumph I was vanquished by my tutor in the small room built for a secretary of state in the Renaissance, at the end of the portrait gallery of kings and musketeers. The tiny red roses on my taffeta skirt were crushed. I stared at the gold bells in the coat of arms of the lords of Beauregard that hung from the gilt ceiling. Monsieur Leforges abruptly got up, saying he had to return to the ballroom. He had to dance late into the night, he said, with the guests. As a professional dancer, that was his
duty
. He did not ask me to go. I didn’t know whether to follow him or wait for him to ask me, and all of a sudden I was alone. At first it seemed intolerable, and I couldn’t move from my position on the Turkish carpet. Then it seemed a relief to be alone in the dim room, with the glow of one wall sconce reaching up to the Beauregard coat of arms. I stayed a long time with the golden bells. They seemed, in the sagacity of their silence, their ancient age, and their loftiness in the shadows, mildly comforting.

A fortnight later I made my way down the steep streets and the old stone stairways in the falling dusk. I pulled my collar high and my broad hat down as the first, fine September rain made slick the cobblestones and softened the dusty streets. Maman had put a date to my marriage now with the sugar merchant, and I would lay the matter before Raoul.

He always had an answer.

I had left my chaperone, the stern Agnès, at the market and went early for a lesson at my tutor’s. Feeling the urgency of the situation, I walked past his protesting valet, opened the tall doors of the salon, and saw my dance master on the settee on the far side of the piano, engaged with a wealthy widow of the town. Yards of velvet skirt lay crumpled about her hips, revealing fine legs (far longer than mine).