Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (43 page)

The gentlemen poured themselves cups of water from the porcelain jug that had stood atop my dresser at chez Vallon.

Claudette had gained knowledge of cooking from her years of friendship with the cook of chez Vallon, and this afternoon my wise maidservant and friend had already combined shallots and thyme with stems of parsley and tarragon, added walnut oil and lemon juice—all ingredients grown on our own property—and poured the mixture over a large pike that she had bought at market. The pike had been marinating for six hours, and she was now frying it.

My job was to work on the sauce, which was to chop twenty-five walnuts, plus parsley and tarragon leaves, and add them to some precious melted butter, it being a scarce commodity now too. I had never cooked before and wasn’t very good at it, but I liked it. Claudette and I would talk as I helped her, sometimes with Caroline tucked under my left arm.

Because we had no drawing room, the men now sat at table on hard wood chairs in what we called the dining room, which was really just an extension of the kitchen. Etienne’s manner was the same as if he were at the large mahogany table at chez Vallon. He continued to talk about the politics of Paris, of which he said we were woefully uninformed.

He was the authority, and he would enlighten his big sister. I loved to hear him talk, and I wanted to hear more because it was what William would be interested in too—in a way, we were also talking about him.

“The Girondins’ biggest mistake,” he said, “wasn’t just that they voted against the verdict of death for the King—they wanted the
people
to decide his fate, not just the National Convention—the mistake was when they tried to arrest the madman Marat, whom the Parisians love. The Jacobins, in turn, printed pamphlets with absurd accusations that the Girondins had really created the whole revolution to destroy France and have it taken over by England. It is amazing that people tend to believe what they read in the papers. Jean-Claude and I were actually in the crowd behind the National Guard when they pointed their cannon at the National Assembly and drew their swords to arrest the Girondins. No one knew what was going to happen. I tell you, Paris is the most exciting place in the world to live.”

I served Jean-Claude dinner and said, “And what do you think, Monsieur Marché?”

He smiled. “I think your brother is right, as always, since he is the
wise
one. But whether Paris is or is not the most exciting place to live is really of no concern to me. I leave in September to join my parents and younger brother and sister, who emigrated to England two years ago. Etienne hasn’t told you. They’re suppressing the university. The spreaders of propaganda need hysteria, not science, to bolster them.

The last thing they want is for people to
think
. But I’ve finished my studies. Etienne the Wise has another year.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“You started before me,” my brother said to his friend, ignoring me. “There are still medical schools,” he said to me. “But the most prominent ones in this country now are in the field, that is, the battlefield.”

“You could have finished,” said Jean-Claude. “But you are always so slow and careful.”

I served my brother now. “What are you going to do?” I asked him again.

“I’m not slow and careful,” he said to Jean-Claude. “Just prudent, like my sister Annette.”

“Not always prudent.” I gestured in the direction of Caroline, sleeping upstairs. Etienne understood.

“Ah, but you refer to
love
, dear sister,” he said. “One has a duty in love not to be prudent, or one loses the love.” The gentlemen now stood as Claudette and I took our seats, then they sat again. I asked Etienne to say grace, and he mumbled something.

“And what do you know of love?” I asked.

“I’ve been to the opera.”

“Well, the opera will explain everything,” I said.

After a pause for serious eating, Etienne said to the table at large, “So when are we going?”

“Where are we going?” Claudette asked.

I thought he was referring to some local opera.

“Despite this fresh and excellent food, which one can only procure in the French provinces,” said Jean-Claude, and bowed to Claudette and me, “I’m afraid Etienne is referring to the
levée en masse
of 300,000 in the spring, which, as students, we managed to avoid; but now, as I said, they are suppressing the university. There is talk now of another
levée
, a larger one, which no able-bodied unmarried man under twenty-five will be able to avoid, and while Etienne is so knowledgeable about love, I don’t think he has plans to marry, and I certainly do not intend to cut my hair. And your brother must complete his studies—”

“Etienne,” I said, “you, too? After Marguerite and—”

“And you, too, dear sister. And Caroline—she’s half English.

And you, Claudette. And Angelique, if she wants to flirt with cold-blooded Englishmen—sorry,” he said to me, “not all Englishmen are cold-blooded—isn’t yours waiting in London?”

“I believe so—”

“Then it’s settled,” Etienne said. “Two gentlemen full of the latest French medical science, two lovely young ladies, one with an English fiancé—what more could the waiting British public ask?”

“Dessert?” I asked. “An apricot tart made from apricots from our own tree?”

“We ’re not leaving till September,” Etienne said. “You have the whole summer to think about it.”

“You and your prudence,” I said. “Where are you going to get the papers?”

“There are means,” Etienne said.

“People get arrested all the time for traveling with false papers,” I said. “I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

“I’ll write to you from England,” said Etienne. “Until then, may I help you with the tart?”

The rest of the evening passed agreeably, with Etienne even bringing out some cards, for old times’ sake, until Caroline woke up, and that was the gentlemen’s signal to part. I didn’t want Etienne to leave.

I wanted him to spend the summer here, picking apricots and making jam with me in the day. But there were other things I needed to do now—things that I didn’t want him to know anything about. He was still my little brother, and I didn’t want him to go near any danger.

He kissed me good-bye. “You have a loving home,” he said, “worthy of your excellent heart,” and he pulled out his watch I gave him and popped it open to my likeness.

“I don’t look like that anymore,” I said.

“Then you’ll have to supply me with a new one,” he said. “And I check the time quite often.”

And the men were out our little gate, and I heard my brother’s steps recede into the dark.

I liked working in my kitchen garden. It was a new experience for me, to have my knees on an old cushion and my hands in the soil, weeding, as now, or, in the late spring after we had moved in, planting squash, aubergine, courgettes, tomatoes, potatoes, beets, cabbage, and herbs—including lavender for a sweet smell that lingered over the whole garden. Caroline lay on her blankets in the shade of one of our three fruit trees, and her wide eyes watched the stream glistening and falling from the watering can as I stepped gingerly from one young plant to another. I liked the magic and mystery of the garden—suddenly, as if overnight, a spear of green courgette would appear under its wide leaf and splendid orange blossom, or a plump purple aubergine would bulge out from its hiding place.

I sang to Caroline as I worked, mainly just to keep her quiet, spontaneous lyrics about the names of the plants and their colors. I gave her a big squash blossom to play with (although these were also delicious sautéed lightly, and rolled up as crêpes), and glanced at her under my wide-brimmed straw hat, and moved her, as my work and the morning progressed, from pear to apple to apricot tree. Caroline also liked to watch me feed the rabbits (she was too young to pet them), and Claudette milk Emilie, the goat, and Caroline looked out from a sling around my neck as I talked to the chickens and spread feed for them as they bobbed and clucked at my ankles.

It was also good to work in the garden after riding out to the count’s lodge the night before, for, despite their victories in July against the army from Paris, many people of the Vendée still fled the region, and after their defeat at Luçon in mid-August, some still managed to come this far east to avoid capture. There was a regular network set up now; one only knew the next station to send people, and the Mother of Orléans, with her white feather in her black bonnet, her green riding cloak, and her fast sorrel mare, was definitely part of that network. The trick, for now, was never to use the lodge more than once a week and never to have more than twenty people at a time. These were conditions I sent on to the network itself, which now was calling itself the Chouans—after the call of the owl,
chat-houant,
which we used in the woods at night. Their leader, whom I heard was an ex-salt smuggler, had even taken the pseudonym Jean Chouan.

I myself was aware that I was developing—and thought it would be prudent to cultivate it more—a double identity. I was at once an ex-upper-bourgeoise, now a simple citizen and hardworking young widow, who lived with her one servant and her infant daughter—and who had already brought apricots, summer squash, goat cheese, and rabbits to sell at market—and the secret member of the Chouans, who rode out at night with a white aigrette in her hat. These two identities were only contradictory to others, whom I wanted to deceive.

To me they were both true, but different, aspects of myself, just as I kept secret a third identity that slumbered beneath the other two: that of a lover of a poet, whose nation was an enemy to mine.

A little before noon I was weeding around an aubergine plant, with its tiny, deep purple blossoms, when I saw the garden before me darken as a cloud drew across the sun. Then Claudette came running from the house. “Look, Madame!” She was pointing to the sky. It was cloudless, yet a sudden evening had fallen over the world. “Look at the sun,” Claudette said.

“Shield your eyes,” I said, for the glare was sharp, though a dirty brown gauze was being drawn, or was drawing itself, over the sun’s disk. The yellow was rapidly being eaten up. Noon became twilight.

“It is like the end of the world,” Claudette said.

“They used to think so,” I said. “It is an eclipse of the sun. The moon has moved between the sun and the earth, that is all.”

“That is not all, Madame. It is an omen.”

“That is indeed what even the wise Romans thought,” I said. I didn’t want to admit it, but I agreed with Claudette and the Romans.

Rational explanations are all very fine, but they cannot replace the feeling one has when the source of life is taken from you before your very eyes. I heard screams from other houses. Science can be true, and myth also. Why not? Everything was a great mystery—how my aubergine grew, how Caroline lifted her tiny hand and grasped the squash blossom tightly; how La Rouge’s alfalfa transformed itself into thundering strength. I knew William would agree. He had called the mystery “Presences” in nature and said one of his goals was to reveal their power and life in his poetry. These unknown Presences were now showing us that the source of light and warmth could be drawn suddenly from us, without warning. Hadn’t we seen that in the last several years? Hadn’t I felt it with the sudden death of my father?

And now, if one followed the indications, more of it was to come.

I knew the men in Paris who sent the armies of shopkeepers to plunder and terrorize the provinces—the men who decided that ideas were more important than individuals; who manipulated people’s fears to further their own ambition and rid themselves of their own enemies by proclaiming that these enemies were dread “destroyers of national security”—these men, I was sure, would look at the twilight skies over a Paris noon and laugh at what fools the Romans and the medieval peasants were. The irony was that they themselves otherwise tried to emulate the Romans in all things, from their style of government to their dress. And that they did not know that they, too, were standing beneath this same sun—they too were unknown characters in the tales that were to unfold from its untoward vanishing—they too, as confident as they were in their hubris, would be victims of the disappearance of light.

This day, the fifth of September, was the day that a delegation of Jacobins in the National Convention righteously exhorted that all the legislators place “Terror on the order of the day.” This was the day that brought so much darkness for the next year.

It was also the day that finally brought me news of William. That afternoon after the eclipse I walked past the cloisters of Saint-Saturnin to the little tobacconist shop that also served as the post office, and the general center of gossip. I always brought Caroline because she was popular with the man who ran the shop and his wife, and with anyone else who was standing around talking with them, and Caroline also deflected interest away from my asking for mail. I often bought something there, for it was a type of general store—leaves for tisane, paper and ink for writing—to make my visit seem more credible. They always said, “Oh, nothing for the little mother again today. Oh, look how the baby’s grown.” But today they were all in a dither when I came in. First it was about the eclipse, then, “There’s something for you, Madame, forwarded from Orléans. Two—
two
letters from England. They must let the mail through twice a year. Whom do you know in England, dear?”

“Oh, my father’s brother,” I said, “who married an English lady and moved there years ago.” And they put two letters in William’s handwriting in my hand. I tried to keep my agitation to myself and left the shop. “Don’t you want any of that tisane?” I heard behind me.

Where was I going to open them? To walk all the way back home past the somber cloisters was unthinkable. The quai was right here. I sat on a low stone wall facing the river and propped Caroline in my lap. “These are letters from your papa,” I said. “Now let me read, and be a good girl.” I ripped open the seal of the earlier letter. Caroline started to grab it, and I took off Etienne’s watch and chain from around my neck and gave it to her to play with.