The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (40 page)

“In this turmoil? The government that lost Sedan?” snorted Amé. “Besides, what do you have to worry about?”

“I think they are better at waging war against those poor girls than against the Prussians,” snapped Francisque. She was having a morning of nerves.

“Not without Coué,” I said. “Amé is safely a milliner.”

“And I am a zebra at the Jardin Zoologique,” said Francisque. “I dare them to challenge it.”

“Household?” asked the official, now, at the ration desk.

“Myself, and one maid.”

“Profession?”

“Private secretary,” I replied.

“Too long for the line!”

“Scribe, then?”

“Better scribe than inscribed,” I joked darkly, later, to Amélie.

In late October an aurora borealis illuminated Paris with a claret-colored sky. It was a beautiful sight; the heavens avid with movement and splendor; a rush of lights and afterward the most brilliant stars. Everyone stood in the streets and watched.

“It is some devilry of the Prussians, you can count on it.”

“The heavens are cracking open to give Paris hope!”

“No, it means we'll have the coldest winter in living history.”

***

Eugénie,

I sit here in my apartments—in the American colony of the 16th Arr. with the remains of the displaced Confederates, business exiles, divorcées, et cetera, all poring over the
American Register,
with a herd of goats in the courtyard guarded by a boy of twelve with a pistol. I cannot, of course, book passage back to Calcutta. Friends and Relations have fled down to the last Hair—and I have found myself unable to conduct any business whatsoever. Would you care to dine? Brébant vows to serve dinner every night of the siege . . . Yours humbly . . . S de C

 

“Wartime lover, oldest trick in the book,
” said Jolie, over one of my shoulders.

“You must find satisfaction in the rematch!”
said Nathalie, over the other. “
Water or champagne, my dear?”

 

And so, Brébant, week three of the siege. The menu and the mood a simulacrum of what it had once been; with white clothes, mirrors reflecting a thousand lights; flicker of gas lamps on the wineglasses, the dark windowpanes. Waiters' feet feathered across the black-and-white floor; men's suits set off the ivory shoulders of their companions. Wines—from vineyards now occupied by Prussian guns—were uncorked; silver came and went, and glasses, napkins refolded in the fleur-de-lis
.
All smooth as clockwork, no clumsiness, no ragged motions here. All around, the murmur of a hundred civilized voices: the optimists, the morbid, the war diarists and siege
flâneurs,
the stenographers of suffering; elites who had not managed to escape. Meat graced our plates because the grass in the parks stopped growing when the weather turned; there was not enough feed hay within the walls to keep the animals that were to be preserved for producing milk and butter. They were slaughtered for meat and sold to the highest bidders. We were aware of these particulars, now. Where the fillet came from.

“Have you noticed?” Stephan said calmly, knife poised. “All of the women are eating instead of pushing food around the plate . . . Eating, breathing, what will be next? Walking in the street?”

“Prussians eating at these tables next week?”

“Bah! Never! Not while I am standing. But it is ludicrous. Ten years in the jungles of India, every muscle yearning for civilization, and this is what I come home to? To be a prisoner in Paris.”

“What brought you back?”

“Business on behalf of Bengal's blue devil.”

“Indigo.”

“Yes, and it is late in the day for saving French fortunes by a dark blue stain.” Stephan cut into his fillet. “And I came to face down my own devil.”

I cut into my own fillet. Tasted it cautiously. Bit into a mélange of carrot and
haricots verts,
as crisp and buttery as if they were real. “Where do you think they are getting these?”

“Jeweler on rue de la Paix has turned vegetable dealer, I believe.”

“So here we are. Dining well.”

Stephan looked up from his fillet. “I understand, Mademoiselle Rigault, that you are worth a minor fortune.”

“I've had some advice, good and bad.”

“They say that no one knows who your ‘protectors' are, you have friends in the highest offices in the city, travel the world under aliases, modeled for a famous painting—and that after this mess is over, you plan to publish your memoirs.”

“Absolutely not. You have my word.”

“My family's intention was to prosecute this—our case— through our lawyers. However, our men are, at present, sitting in an English country house, eating some partridge or a pheasant and waiting it out.”

“Is that why you have suddenly come to the table? When the case is reopened, which I will see that it is, I will countersue and the circumstances will be considered in a republican court, not an imperial one, where they may take a more appropriate view of ‘research of paternity.'”

“Any government will need to protect family and property. Why, it will take years to sort it out, even if they do want to institute changes in the Code Civil.”

“When the armistice is signed, we'll see where we are.”

“The courts will be clogged with cases.”

“In Tillac they used to say, ‘When a man cannot cross by the bridge, he will cross through the water.' But they never said what to do when there is no bridge and no water either. A woman must invent a crossing that defies physical means. Have you come with a proposal?”

He slouched back against the banquette cushions; the space between us widened, cooled. “The prosecution was initiated by my family, you know—I had enough on my plate in India.”

“That is a weak argument, monsieur.”

“Very well. They—rather, we—do not want any illegitimate claim troubling the estate, which is in enough difficulty as it is.”

“The claim is not illegitimate in any just terms. And it is not an incursion into your family's fortunes that is my interest.”

“The Code does not see it that way.”

“The Code, the Code! Even that Bonaparte invention was never intended to foster profligacy, which is all that it has accomplished. The hospice is overwhelmed. Women line up and cry in the corridors like ewes whose lambs are gone to the slaughter. If you had ever seen it—why, even you might cry. It is expensive to administer, this tenet of the Code, and the courts may well want to take a stand against it. With any luck it will be torn down completely.”

“But until they do, if they do, nothing else governs the matter. The law is on the side of the estate and I am not going to war with my mother and my sisters. God knows I have spent the past decade making amends. A penance under sweltering Bengal skies so my family would not suffer.”

“So your sister Sophia's feet would never have to touch the cobbles in Paris!”

“Now, I will not see them ruined while you swill away the hours with self-loathing Italian whores.”

“Giulia is my friend; you could not know less about her.”

“And this sanctimonious cant of motherhood—I cannot stomach it.”

A waiter appeared to clear our plates; we stared each other down over the crumbs.
Who was this man?
Amends for what, and to whom?

“I have recently hired a new maid. She fell off a vegetable cart from Saint-Denis before the gates closed. Illiterate, filthy, doesn't know a fork from a fish knife. An
abandonné,
a runaway. Terrified of being sent to ‘the coffee mill,' as she puts it; and nearly sold into traffic at the age of twelve.
That's
the sort of daughter you gave to the empire that restored your title,
monsieur le comte.
”

Stephan gave a dark laugh. “You dress like a
cocotte
and talk like a Jacobin. I'm sorry for the state of your household, but if your daughter is anything like her mother she will figure out a fork from a fish knife well enough . . . Do you want to know of misery and blighted lives? I'll tell you, it is not in France.” He leaned away sharply and stared out the dark pane, where the silk turban of his boy sat like blurred midnight, outside. “My mistake—all right—my hedonism and conceit and your benighted innocence—yes, I took advantage; I was young and human and graceless. I wanted my pleasure, and took it as offered—became drunk on it, I even believed I could not do without you, had every right to you. You were willing—as I recall.”

“I had none of the sophistications of your world, monsieur. As you were well aware.”

“But while we were dallying under the mistletoe in my uncle's house, he was collapsed over a roulette table at Nice—”

“Mistletoe! I should have boiled it up and used it as a midwife told me to. Men will never understand a woman's follies, no matter how often we repeat them before your eyes. All you can do is accuse, and rewrite the story to please yourself.”

Stephan leaned forward. “And you think the courts—even if there are new courts—will take your part? Listen. I am attempting to convey to you the facts of the situation as they occurred, ones that you do not know.”

“Oh, I can listen.”

Indeed, it had become my stock in trade. I sat back and folded my hands.

 

“After we parted, I boarded a ship to Calcutta. I was to meet my uncle. Arrived at Howrah Station, went as planned to the Great Eastern Hotel. We were to tour his investments, go tiger hunting—then return to Paris. I waited a week, two, then three before a telegraph finally reached me. He had never left Nice. Died there, at the gaming table, leaving me his fine, empire-plated title and properties stripped down to the wainscoting and so heavily mortgaged that I couldn't bail them out in a hundred lifetimes. Some time thereafter, a letter from my mother pleading with me to put his affairs to rights; to take my place as head of the family, with all that entails . . . Discharge the debts. Provide a fitting level of support for her and my sister—that was understood. And I'd had enough of dancing with heiresses at Paris balls, if you want to know the truth.

“News travels fast in India—and not by telegraph. We don't know how it does. But I could not even leave the hotel; suddenly about a thousand Hindoos had assembled in the lobby and outside, waiting for me, waving papers in the air. These were people who had been ruined by my uncle's dealings, or so they claimed. I had to explain that he was not coming; I was terrified of being engulfed; however, the news appeared to delight them. Suddenly I was not being threatened but offered help of every kind. Loans, credit, help, arrangements, servants. I was virtually a captive; and one of them had a letter that had given the name of the indigo concern in which my uncle had sunk the last of his capital. This man became my
dobachy
—of course, he had only a random claim on the letter; who knows how he got hold of it! These documents are used as currency; they are traded like scrip. He turned out to be only an underservant of an underservant of the real
dobachy.
A moneylender. From this man I learned that my household was already assembled. Cooks, lackeys, hookah bearers, punkah pullers, clippers of nose hair—
saheb le comte
certainly needed a large staff—he even assured me I would have a language teacher whom I would find much to my liking. I tried to refuse and found that I had less sway over the situation than a Bengali boy of fourteen. I was herded on a train as far as Mozufferpore and went the rest of the way by
dak
—a relay of bullock wagons, bamboo carts, and ponies. Surrounded by a horde—their train fare already charged to my ‘account'—into the mountains. I had no idea where I was, who I was with. The
dobachy
negotiated everything; it was entirely in his hands. We arrived at a series of fields, and a group of huts . . . Indigo.” Stephan paused. “I hardly knew what it was.

“The plantation's manager was an Englishman. He recognized a desperate fool when he saw one; I had no idea what I was doing. Why, my idea of life was that of a Paris gentleman who lives between his tailor, the club, his mistresses, and the theater, with the occasional adventure abroad. I had intended to follow in my uncle's footsteps, indeed—had made a good beginning.

“Instead I was hired as a factory assistant; the last one had just succumbed to some kind of galloping fever. I was lucky in one way—the position of factory assistant was viewed with such contempt that most of my “staff”—all except for a few, about a dozen of the roughest and strangest of the lot, just disappeared. I had not a rupee to pay the ones left, and no idea why they stayed. But they knew. And the Englishman knew.

“I was installed in a bungalow near a vast field of waving plants that I would not know from a sheaf of wheat, speaking not a word of the languages, and left on my own—if you can call being surrounded by fourteen Bengalis, each strong as an ox,
on one's own.
My first order of business was to take another three days' journey by
dak
to an area the planter was preparing to cultivate, and to oversee the destruction of a village's vegetable gardens. The plowing under of their rice fields. And then, the
tumnee
 . . . Of course, I did not know, either, what that was.” Stephan fell silent, then resumed.

“It is the digging that precedes the re-sowing of these areas with indigo. That was my initiation, that first
tumnee.
Everything about indigo depends on a properly executed digging. It is all done with bamboo staves by men in a line, watched over by ‘stick men' with even larger ones. If it is not done well, the plants fail, rot in the ground, succumb to blight, never mature. Much can go wrong with indigo. Sometimes you don't even know about the problem until fermentation, when dye cannot be extracted from the plants. Of course I did not know how to do it, but the men did and the stick man knew.