Authors: Lorena Dureau
As for Vidal, he poured himself another glass of wine and
sat back down in the parlor to wait for his imaginative little ward to
repair her toilette, while he continued making occasional comments to
help soothe poor Grandmother Chausson's ruffled nerves.
But between the sips of wine and those soothing phrases,
Miguel was anything but calm himself. He knew it wasn't the liqueur
warming his blood and swelling the desire in him at that moment as he
savored the memory of how the soft white silk of Monique's loosely
hanging gown had marked all the more the firm roundness of those high
young breasts and the tantalizing outline of those softly curved thighs
and buttocks in motion. Try as he would, he couldn't stop wondering how
it might feel to have those magnificent young breasts pulsating in his
hands and those softly undulating hips stirring passionately beneath
him.
Qué barbaridad
! It was becoming increasingly
difficult to continue thinking of Monique Chausson as nothing more than
a capricious child. Her actions might be immature at times, but his
impetuous little ward had certainly looked every inch a woman as she
had come down those stairs that night, and he could no longer deny that
he wanted her with every fiber of his being.
Miguel
Vidal slumped back in the box that the Baron de Carondelet
had so graciously permitted him to use for the evening in the Salle de
Com
é
die. He had resigned himself to a dull couple of hours. There was
only one actor in the cast from the Cap-Français, and the leading lady,
a rather attractive quadroon whom Monique recognized as a milliner
around town, wasn't too bad in her part, but the rest of the performers
were rank amateurs.
Fortunately, however, from the way his young wards' eyes
were glowing in their flushed faces, it was evident they were quite
fascinated by everything they saw and were in no mood to criticize
anything. After all, thought Vidal, it shouldn't take much to please
them. The year-old theater they were attending was not simply the only
one in New Orleans, it was also the city's first.
It was hard for him to realize sometimes just how
sheltered and unsophisticated the girls' lives had been until now.
Despite their lack of discipline in certain things, they had really
lived so little. He had to keep reminding himself that only a few
blocks away lay vast stretches of untamed wilderness and that little
Monique and Celeste were seeing a theatrical performance for the first
time in their lives that night.
He looked at the two girls sitting there beside him in the
box, so prim and proper now in their voluminous skirts and black lace
mantillas perched atop mountains of carefully piled curls, and decided
that the radiant look on their faces made the boredom of the evening
worthwhile.
He almost chuckled aloud as he recalled once more the way
Monique had looked when she had made her entrance earlier that evening
in her makeshift chemise, wanting so desperately to be "classic", as
she had phrased it. What an adorable little doll she was, with her huge
gray eyes and pale spun-gold hair! Part of her charm was that she
didn't seem to realize how truly beautiful she was, or how
devastatingly provocative just the sight of her could be. His desire
for her was a constant knot embedded in his loins. He knew it shouldn't
be that way, but what good did it do to deny its existence, when that
knot continued to grow with each passing day? Neither her contempt for
him nor his common sense could melt it.
He looked at her doll-like profile as she sat there caught
up in the spectacle. She seemed completely enthralled by the
performance, the earlier skirmish completely forgotten now. There were
so many things she didn't know… a whole world of concepts
and sensations yet to be explored. How he wished he could be the one to
take that little hand and lead her through those new
experiences… sharing them with her… awakening her
to the warm, sensuous woman he sensed she could be!
The night was warm and sticky, and the small, narrow hall,
though decorated lavishly enough, was poorly ventilated. As he dabbed
at his forehead with his monogrammed handkerchief he wondered why the
citizens of New Orleans persisted in using wood for their buildings
instead of the bricks and tile recommended by the authorities,
especially after the disastrous experiences the city had already had
with fires. What a firetrap the theater was!
Although the play had been billed as Molière's
Tartuffe
,
it bore little resemblance to any performance Vidal had ever seen of
that work. It soon became a hodgepodge of sudden quotations from
Voltaire, Locke, and Rousseau to generous rounds of applause and
shouted interjections of "Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood!" from the
more demonstrative spectators. The audience was obviously as
anti-Spanish as the actors.
Miguel never ceased to marvel at the laxity of the
authorities there in the colony. Why did they permit such open
expressions of hostility and downright treason to go unchecked? How was
it possible that the words of the most radical philosophers of the day
could be spouted publicly from the officially recognized theater of the
town, while in Spain and the rest of its colonies they were forbidden
by both the Crown and the Church as being too "dangerous and
inflammatory" even to read in the privacy of one's own home, much less
express aloud?
He remembered how he himself had wrestled with his
conscience when he had finally succumbed to reading some of the works
of those popular French leaders of the Enlightenment while he had been
traveling around Europe. It had been hard for him at first to ignore
the years of strict upbringing in his native land, where such books
could only be circulated clandestinely, since they were on the
ever-growing list of hundreds of similar works banned by the
Inquisition. Even now he didn't dare admit to anyone that he had delved
into such prohibited literature for fear he might be thought a heretic
or a traitor. For one never really knew. The powerful tentacles of La
Suprema stretched out even to the remotest corners of the world. No one
was too far away from the all-knowing eyes and ears of the Holy
Tribunal. Once its interest was aroused, it could be relentless and
pursue a prospective victim for a lifetime, even beyond the grave.
In his opinion, such zealous persecution was absurd. It
was ridiculous to try to control a man's thoughts. What was in his
heart would always win out in the end, no matter how suppressed he
might momentarily be.
Miguel was soon roused from his musings. The mood of the
audience was becoming restless. The boisterous slogans and ready
applause that greeted every florid speech made against "tyranny" and in
praise of "freedom and democracy" seemed to inspire the actors to even
greater heights of oratory, and more and more they deliberately added
impromptu lines.
Of course, Vidal's two intensely French cousins were also
among those who were being swept along on the emotional current of the
moment, and once Monique even let the cry of "
Libert
é
!"
escape from her lips as she joined heartily in the applause of an
especially moving speech, but her guardian had quickly put a
restraining hand on her arm and motioned with a discreet finger to his
lips that she should be quiet.
The atmosphere, however, was beginning to be so rowdy that
Vidal considered walking out on the performance. He hated to cut short
his wards' first theatrical experience, but he could see the
emotionally charged atmosphere was already beginning to affect his
impressionable little cousins, especially Monique, who obviously was being increasingly carried away
by the inflammatory speeches. Most certainly she didn't need anything
else to make her more rebellious than she already was!
He bent toward her, hat in hand, and whispered that they
had best be leaving, but she turned an elated, shining face
breathlessly to him and protested vehemently.
Suddenly one of the actors, completely out of character
now, took a step forward to the edge of the stage and, his face ruddy
in the glow of the blazing candles of the footlights, extended his arms
dramatically toward the audience and boomed out in his most resonant
tones the first lines of the new French anthem:
"Allons, enfants de la patrie!
Le jour de gloire
est arriv
é
!"
A thunderous response greeted the declamation. With cries
of "Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood" many of the young men in the
audience rose instinctively to their feet.
A small voice off somewhere below began to intone "La
Marseillaise", picking up the words of the song from where the actor
had left off reciting it. Soon others were joining in.
"Contre nous de la tyrannie
L'entendar
é
ranglant
est lev
é
!"
Like wildfire, the impromptu song spread across the hall,
sweeping along with it everyone in its path.
Completely transported now, Monique suddenly jumped to her
feet and joined that exhilarating wave of patriotism, her high, lilting
voice singing enthusiastically along with the others as the theater
literally reverberated to the rafters.
"Aux armes, citoyens!"
Vidal rose angrily and tugged impatiently on Monique's
arm, ordering her to behave herself, his voice barely audible above the
din. "Come, Monica… Celeste… we must leave."
But Monique only turned wide, glazed eyes toward him, her
flushed cheeks streaming with tears of emotion, as she stubbornly held
her ground and continued to sing ecstatically along with her "fellow
Frenchmen".
"
Marchons! Marchons
! …"
The occupants in the neighboring loge had long since
abandoned the theater, and Vidal, sensing a riot in the making, decided
that he should get his wards out of there, too, as quickly as possible.
Literally dragging Monique along with him, even while she
continued to sing fervently at the top of her voice, he made his way
out of the box and down the stairs to the exit.
Although the song died from her lips as the warm, humid
night air hit her face, Monique still had a lightheaded feeling, as
though she had drunk too much wine. Even as they turned off St. Peter
Street into Rue Royale, they could hear the singing and shouting
emanating from the brightly lit second-story theater.
Ironically enough, as they walked along that street behind
the Plaza de Armas, they were just passing the calabozo, which, flanked
by the arsenal, stood directly behind the guardhouse on the square, to
the left of the cathedral.
"This is where those fools are going to end up!" he
grumbled while he dragged his highly elated wards along with him. It
was too early for the carriage he had ordered to be waiting for them,
so he decided to walk back home.
Like an ominous giant crouching in the shadows ready to
spring, the two-story calaboose lay far back from the street behind the
massive brick wall that surrounded it, a huge blob barely glimpsed in
the moonlight behind the ponderous wrought-iron gateway.
Vidal was doubly glad he had decided to abandon the
theater when he had, for at the final notes of that extemporaneous
rendition of the "Marseillaise", someone could be heard
enthusiastically beginning a chorus of the offensive "Ça ira", that
song of many verses, set to the air of "La Carmagnole", which the
French revolutionists and their sympathizers especially liked to sing
to taunt the royalists.
"
Ça ira… Ça ira,
les aristocrates
à
la lanterne
…"
Now they were asking for trouble, thought Vidal. The guard
will soon put an end to that boisterous performance, for they were
going too far. The Baron de Carondelet was a proud man, and much as he
might want to be lenient with the colonists, he was not to be provoked
lightly. He could hardly overlook it when they were calling him a
"suckling pig"… a clever play on words with the governor's
name when pronounced exaggeratedly in French. Even from a block away,
Vidal could catch the innuendo when they sang the words.
His rebellious young wards, however, still filled with the
emotion of what for them had been an uplifting moment of pure,
unadulterated patriotism, walked along reluctantly beside him. Although
Celeste wasn't resisting him as Monique was, he nevertheless had to
pull the girl along with him, too, for it was more than she could do to
keep up with his long, angry stride. Even the usually docile Celeste,
it seemed, had been moved by the demonstration, and although she hadn't
participated in the vocal part of it, she, too, had obviously been
quite impressed by it all.
"Oh, Cousin Miguel, wasn't it exciting?" she exclaimed
breathlessly. "I had no idea a performance in a real theater was going
to be like that!"
"Nor did I!" mumbled her guardian with open annoyance. It
was evident, however, that the young girl hadn't caught many of the
more delicate aspects of what had happened.
"Oh, I hope you'll take us again soon. What a pity we
couldn't stay to see how it ended!"
"I know very well how this particular performance will
end!" snapped Vidal. "The gendarmes will see to that!"
"But it was all so thrilling! I've never seen anything
like it before in my life!"
Monique, who had been completely caught up in her own
exhilarating thoughts, suddenly called out to her sister from the other
side of Miguel's formidable figure as he dragged the two of them along,
one on each side of him.
"You see, Celeste, I told you, I told you!" she exclaimed,
her voice still tremulous from the recent excitement.
"Oh, yes, it's just the way you said!" agreed Celeste. "It was all exactly like the leaflets, even down
to the same words!"