Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (21 page)

Marguerite reached into the deep pockets of her skirt and gave the ring to me. Captain Beaupuy delicately took the twisted reed from his waistcoat pocket and handed it to my groom, and we slipped the rings on each other’s fingers. Grandmère’s ring, of course, only fit on his little finger, but that was no matter, as it was understood that everything, from our location to a kind of church we had built around us—not just the rings—was symbolic; but isn’t a grand cathedral itself still only a symbol?

After we exchanged the rings, Monsieur William’s fingers lay lightly on mine. Then he held both my hands by the fingers, lightly and firmly, and as he did so, all the sensations of sound and sight about us merged into an absolute stillness. I felt his firm, light touch, and nothing else. I could have wept, standing in the mud by the river, but I was beyond weeping. I was not even by the river, with the captain and Marguerite nearby, in that moment. We kissed before our witnesses. Marguerite and the captain softly applauded, and the world flooded gently back. “The river is so loud,” I said in William’s ear.

“I’ve never heard it so loud.”

“It’s the longest river in France,” William answered, “and we were married right beside it. I can put you in my pocket and take you back to England now. You can hear the Derwent River—”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t.” And now I began to weep.

“Don’t what, my dear?”

“Don’t make any more promises. This is enough for today.”

Marguerite and I took the men’s arms as they led us back to the quai, and people looked at us. Some even pointed to our skirts, and the captain bowed scornfully to them, his sword at his side, and silenced them. I had to say good-bye to William, as he and the captain departed to their lodgings. I would not see him now until dinner in two nights’ time. As a foreigner, he did not want to be seen coming too often to chez Vincent. It could be imprudent for the Vincents.

As the Austrians and Prussians were threatening France, and Great Britain was grumbling at her, foreigners were often looked on with suspicion.

He knelt and brushed the mud from the hem of my skirt, and that simple deed moved me so that I could not speak to tell him thank you or to say good-bye. He told me to wait, and took off down to the riverbank again. I saw him bending over the water, and when he returned, breathless, he had in his hand another reed, which he had already made into a circle. He gave Marguerite back Grandmère’s ring and gave her the reed and nodded. On the quai, with a wagon of firewood passing, I placed the reed around his finger. “Now we ’re equal,” he said, “both bound to each other through the river itself.”

He bowed and kissed my fingers. As he rose he looked astonished.

“What shall I call you now?” he said. “Between us, Mademoiselle Vallon will no longer do.”

“You are Monsieur William,” I said. “You may call me Madame Williams. You said once that is a real English name, is it not?”

“Welsh, actually, but that will do fine.”

And I added softly, “And I am simply your Annette.”

“Until tomorrow evening, Madame Williams,” he said. “Until tomorrow, Annette.”

I liked him saying it. I liked hearing it. My husband vanished behind a cart loaded with coal, and I could just see the top of his tall head and Captain Beaupuy’s black hat as they walked briskly away.

“Did you see that big bird?” I said to Marguerite.

“Yes, I saw it,” she said, and smiled. “You don’t usually see them this far inland. It flew over just at the right time. It was a blessing, if you choose to believe that.”

“I choose,” I said, and closed my right hand over my left and felt on my finger the thin, tightly twined reed.

While the National Assembly ruled France, with the King as their puppet, two sinister developments stirred that winter: Committees of Surveillance, with virtually unlimited power to investigate and arrest anyone they thought was counter-revolutionary, and the rise of Maximilien de Robespierre and his friends, who, because they always sat on the highest benches of the assembly, were called the “Mountain Men.” Among them were Georges Couthon, the crippled lawyer, Georges Jacques Danton, of the silver tongue and the oversize head, and Louis Antoine Saint-Just, who, long before the trial of the King was even discussed, demanded the execution of the King without a trial. Their ally was Jean-Paul Marat and his hysterical journalism: Marat of the yellow face and the skin disease; Marat who, through the virulent hatred expressed in his paper, earned the undying love of the people of Paris; Marat who, when he was later murdered in his bath by a young woman, trying to keep him from denouncing more innocent people, was called a god, his heart embalmed and hung in an urn from the rafters of his club.

And Marat himself now looked up to Maximilien de Robespierre.

Robespierre was thought so absolute in his devotion to the Revolution, so pure in his lofty idealism, so above common human appetites, he was called
The Incorruptible
, though soon enough some used the title ironically, and I myself thought it was the human emotion of compassion that he was so icily above, from which he was so incorruptible.

But William at this time, and his newfound brother Michel Beaupuy, could not hear of anything but praise for the direction France was taking. They were always jolly.

“France is leading the world in the quest for freedom,” the captain announced to me.

“What about the United States?” I asked.

“Well, they have slavery, don’t they?” he said. “Even Britain, languishing with a tyrannical monarch, doesn’t have slavery on its shores, does it, William?”

“It has a slavery of the mind,” he said.

But that day the gentlemen had not come to discuss the world’s movement toward freedom. William had convinced the captain that we must all go on an ice-skating expedition.

“They have nothing else to do up in the frozen north,” the captain said.

“I cannot imagine a winter without ice-skating,” William said.

“It’s immoral. And ice-skating is probably the most egalitarian sport there is.”

“There you have it,” said the captain to me. “Are you ready? Our foreign friend has spent all morning getting our boots shod with steel.

But we need a second lady to balance our riding party. I’ve taken the liberty of asking your charming maidservant.”

“Claudette?”

“The same,” the captain said.

“Michel is nothing if not egalitarian,” William said.

We were riding through the forest of Blois west of town, with wet oak and fir scent on the wintry air, and somewhere, far off in the woods, the blows of an axe. We were on our way to a pond near Molineuf. William was going to teach us all to ice-skate now. He said it was simple, and everyone did it where he was from. He carried the newly shod boots in a sack on his horse. The captain carried his sword, and Claudette carried dinner. I took spare stockings and skirts, for I was afraid that Claudette and I would get icily wet. But it wasn’t about our expedition that the men were talking.

“Grégoire—that’s the constitutional bishop of Blois, who served in the National Assembly—says it’s the only direction things
can
take,” William said.

“But you have a king
and
a parliament,” I said. “Why can’t we—”

“Madame Williams,” said the captain, “monarchy in France is too used to absolute power. It will never abide the lessening of those powers. English kings have not held such power in hundreds of years—or if they have tried—”

“They were quickly dethroned,” said William, “which is the inexorable end to which we are going.”

“And what about the powers of your Assembly? How many Surveillance Committees does it need?” I said.

“They are protecting the people—,” the captain started.

“I thought that was your job, captain,” I said. “These committees can investigate anyone, anytime, under any pretext, under the broadest definition of possible treasons imaginable—and made up in their minds, mainly. Why, you, captain, could be investigated by them, if you were to say something disagreeable to them. William—well, a foreigner, he’s automatically suspect and cannot speak for himself.”

William laughed, and so did the captain. “I am a member of Les Amis de la Constitution club,” William said. “The captain has introduced me to the most important patriots in the town.”

“He has met the powerful Grégoire,” the captain said.

“All I know,” I said, “is that in the name of freedom from tyranny, we have set up new tyrants who have fewer restraints on them than ever before.”

“The Austrians are threatening,” the captain said.

“One can justify anything,” I said.

“Is that the pond through those trees?” Claudette said.

It was amusing: William taking me by both hands on the ice and my legs going in opposite directions, the suave captain slipping and landing on his rear, Claudette spinning with William, falling and bringing him down. I came to enjoy gliding along, but was very bad at stopping and would make in increasing uncontrolled speed for an overhanging willow branch. Claudette and the brave captain soon surrendered and started on dinner, perched on a dry log and laughing at me.

I liked seeing them there, in their funny skates, one in his great blue cloak, the other in her long brown cape, his shining boots, her wooden clogs resting beside them. Claudette peered out from her hood with laughing eyes. The captain had a tricolor cockade on his hat. He poured wine into a wooden cup and handed it to her. This is how William and the captain envision the Revolution, I thought, the man of aristocratic birth and the woman of peasant origins, sharing a wooden cup of wine. But such a vision only comes from the eyes of the truly good. It doesn’t take into account the hatred and ambitions of men.

William said the true skating experience must be at night, when the moon was reflected in the ice and one could hiss along, barely seeing the shadows of others, and fly through dark space like the stars through the heavens. I said I could fly into the willow tree no longer and joined the others on the log, while we all watched William perform curves with a grace and skill and speed that made him look, alone on a winter pond in the paling light, like some spirit from another world.

After cold roast chicken, bread, and wine, William further surprised us by taking a wooden flute from his pocket and sending haunting sounds through the forest. “I’m not very good,” he explained; “we had a minstrel in our group at school, and we ’d row him to a small island in a lake, and he would play from there and we ’d hear it echo over the water.”

William wants to help the world, I thought, but he’s not a warrior, like the captain. He’s not a politician, like their Grégoire. He’s a poet who belongs in wild nature. He sits there like Pan himself, blowing on his flute and the forest listening.

“What brought you to France?” I suddenly said.

William put the flute down. The captain poured himself more wine. No one knew what William was doing here, except, now, staying in Blois to visit me, we three presumed.

“The Surveillance Committee could say you’re a spy for England.”

The captain laughed. “They say England, not Austria, is behind all the counter-revolutionary movements. You’d better answer the lady.”

“I am running away,” said William. “Not from unjust governments or the law, just running away.”

“From what?” I said.

“From nothing,” he said. “Literally, nothing. I was doing nothing.

There was nothing I
wanted
to do. My uncles wanted me to go into the church, my older brother to follow him into the law. I told them I was coming here to study the language, which was partly true. I told friends in London I wanted to observe a new republic being born, which was partially true. I had no home. I had restless legs. I have no parents. I am a dependent who must beg his uncles for money. So I am running away from the nothing that was my life in England.”

“What have you found?” I said.

“Everything,” he said. “Simply everything.”

And he lifted his wooden flute, no larger than his hand, to his mouth, and a melody of some far-off realm, a border realm where starlight reflected on frozen lakes, filled the falling dusk.

Later, by myself, as the moon appeared above the treetops, I skated alone near the far end of the pond where a grove of bare chestnuts grew up to the bank. The forest seemed smaller with no leaves on the trees, as if one could see through it to the other side. I felt suddenly lonely then, by myself in the winter evening at the end of the pond. I felt as if William had already taken that inevitable ship back to England. What have I been thinking? I thought. In what an illusion have I been living? I skated back across the pond as fast as I could without falling. I thought every minute was precious now. I saw William cooking something over a little fire and headed straight for him.

I took my eyes off him to look at my skates, to slow myself down, and when I looked up, he was gone.

Then I heard a whisper of skates behind me, felt his warm breath and a kiss on the back of my neck, felt his hand place something in my pocket and then saw his back, the tails of his frock coat flapping, as he skated smoothly away. I reached my hand in my pocket and pulled out hot chestnuts. I watched William sail over the ice, bearing in his gloved hands his gifts to the captain and Claudette.

The next time we were alone in the quiet dark of chez Vincent, with the shadows mingling on the ceiling, I asked him about his father and how he died. I had lost mine at age twenty, William at thirteen—his mother when he was eight. “I remember,” he said, “hiding behind a low stone wall, away from a bitter wind. All I wanted to do was go home from Hawkshead School for Christmas. The horses that my brothers and I had sent for seemed to take forever to arrive. Meanwhile, my father’s business duties had called him away from home, and he got lost in the mist on his journey back and spent a freezing night out of doors. He was burning up with fever by the time we got home and died before the new year. That is one reason, Annette, I was concerned about you and your night in the snow. I felt responsible, somehow. I felt that he got lost from hurrying through a stormy night to get home in time to greet us, returning from Hawkshead.”