The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (42 page)

I could only hope that outside Paris, wherever Berthe was, she had better fare than this; but because of her—and since the fall of Strasbourg, and then of Metz, where so many infants had starved—I had been quietly reserving small packets of food and delivering them to the hospice. The
nourrices
watched for us and sent an emissary, unbeknownst to the director. It was against the rules to accept such packages, but the Paris
nourrices
were starving; and of course, there was no transport between Paris and the countryside.

At the stations, those great iron-and-glass structures erected by the empire, the trains were stopped in their tracks. Ghostly waiting rooms, piled with cushions; a fine black dust covered everything. On the walls, peeling posters of vaunted holiday trips to the Vosges, to Alsace, to Nancy. To Trouville: to the beach, where papas had once forgotten workday propriety and hoisted their children in the air, indulging their freer, kinder selves. Trouville . . . where I had lost Jolie. Antique journeys now; every one of them.

Stephan joined an elite National Guard battalion, looking very fine in his uniform, and made himself popular with Finette and La Tigre by bringing them cans of potted horseflesh, army provisions. And finally the proclamations went up on the walls, the announcement for which we had all been waiting, the only solution—for Paris to gather as one and with a great shuddering effort of collective will, throw the enemy off our backs.

***

Dream: I was a woman, living well beyond my own station in life, in a great house with gardens like those at La Vrillette. The sky was dark, as though a storm was coming, and I paced among the roses, anxious for my lover to return. We had argued, Stephan and I. He told me that he had loved another woman, loved her even now. Her name, he said, was Aurore: Dawn. I was alone; yet still waiting; waiting, though betrayed, and I cried; long, wrenching sobs. For love wasted, badly spent; for passion reaping pain that could not be undone. It was not so much an argument as an evil thread laced from my belly to my lover's and back. I wanted to tear at the thing that I could not reach, the cord of misery between us.

 

I woke up delirious with fever, Finette standing over me.

“Has the sortie begun?”

“Yes, madame! And we are winning!”

“Has monsieur sent any word?”

“Nothing I have heard, madame.”

“And you, Finette, you look well—”

“I have eaten your rations while you were ill.”

“Good. No horseflesh for me. Just water.”

When I could finally lift my head, my neighbors came in and told the truth in low tones. The Great Sortie had been a colossal and tragic disaster; Francisque and Amélie were working as nurses. They said that a hundred times we had believed ourselves saved—had again been told of victory—only to realize later that we were lost. They described how the dead and wounded were carried in on carts and borne by
bateaux-mouches
to the Seine docks. The undersupplied
ambulances
could not handle them; the losses were unstinting; unspeakable. Gambetta's progress too had been halted. And the government had no solution; could not capitulate for fear that all guns, purchased by local subscription and kept by the people, would be turned against their leaders. Affairs proceeded in a disjointed, arbitrary fashion; and we remained as we had been: surrounded.

“Monsieur de Chaveignes?”

“Oh yes, he is back, and all in one piece. Has asked for you every day since his battalion was sent back. He has been bringing provisions. I don't know how he gets hold of things, that man.”

“Mine is a palm of narrow escapes!”
I heard Stephan's voice again, from long ago.

“He's been doing it for a very long time,” I replied.

Menu for Day 98 of the Siege

Cheval à l'indienne
(gray mare, “best possible flavor,” curried)
Pigeon egg omelette with lark's tongues and field mushrooms
Petits pois
(Potin's, black market )
Chou-fleur de Fort Courbevoie
(from a farmer's mattress near there)
Rice pudding with rum and currants
Surprise dessert for true patriots
Wine, rum, green tea
Arsenic

 

N
IGHT FULL OF HOLES;
the air so cold it could crack. My guests arrived at the rue du Mail with tallow and candles, green wood and coal, sticks of old furniture and fingers of tree bark to burn; they had collected morsels of food and drops of drink, along with tales of gastronomic daring. Wood, food, drink, and weapons—ivory-handled dueling pistols, kitchen knives, a
tabatière
or two—a bottle of vitriol and one of petrol, just in case one required protection. Jolie—in from Belleville, which she now called home—collected all the armaments and locked them in an armoire downstairs. La Tigre had decamped to her sister.

Clio (who had been reunited with Jolie when she moved) jumped out of her basket and prowled her old haunts, whiskers alert, directing her pink nose to every corner, as if she knew that the menu was finally secure and the dog-and-cat cart long gone. Jolie crowed: “She has been almost invisible—absolutely circumspect, especially around small boys, and never sits inside boxes or bowls, to play
poulet
anymore . . . thus far she has evaded the butcher's cart. Have you noticed that even the mice have left?” It was one of the siege's mysteries; people said they'd gone over to the Germans.

 

The party was a masquerade. La Morte arrived wearing black velvet, with a red sash bearing the date
1871,
and carrying a papier-mâché scythe; her friend La Résistance was draped in white, with a
tricolore
sash, and bared a pink-tipped breast. The Red Virgin was not, in fact, Jolie's increasingly infamous Louise—for which I was grateful. The Louise impostor wore a wide red belt and a rifle slung over her shoulder (she insisted it was part of her costume). La Liberté was a girl with tumbling black hair, draped in white; her escort a
sans-culotte
of the last revolution, carrying a mustachioed puppet head of Louis Napoleon. Jolie was dressed as Saint Joan in a short tunic and blue sash, her long legs in high boots.

“La Liberté is a bookseller on Rambuteau. La Morte I met at a meeting at Jean-Baptiste—they never say
Saint
Jean-Baptiste anymore and the confessionals are used as
pissoirs.
”

“And Louise?” I said. “I mean, the real one?”

“She has been arrested again,” said Jolie. “The first time was for organizing a resistance for Strasbourg. Now—I'm not sure, but—the police don't like her. They can't predict what she'll say, or who will listen.” Jolie propped her feet up on a pillow and began telescoping the buttes for Christmas balloons. She was thin, her skin almost transparent, as though lit from within.

“Are you worried about her?”

“
Louise?
Never.”

Amélie, just then, made her appearance as Madame Roland. (Francisque was at the Jockey Club, dining with her remaining gallants.) Stephan arrived from across town, wearing a black mask and a working man's
cotte,
slipped his arms around me for a distracted kiss. He had not been himself since the Great Sortie, I thought. Mitra, on the other hand, seemed more and more at home in Paris.

“What do you think Odette is having tonight?” I asked, settling next to Jolie. “Jellied wing of peacock, Devon clotted cream?”

“Where did you get lark's tongues, of all things?”

“Abatem—the deaf-mute boy from Deux Soeurs.”

“Now there's an enterprising soul. Old Madame B's henchman.”

“He has turned scavenger; he goes out to the scorched earth between the fortifications and the Prussian lines.”

“Guess what surprise I have tonight? You are destined to meet my brother at last.”

“Henri? Is he in Paris?”

La Liberté had taken to the floor with her violin and was performing a musical inventory of the empress's furs, recently “liberated” from the Tuileries.
“Twelve yards of otter,”
she began, with everyone clapping and stamping feet.
“Eleven silver fox—ten Spanish lamb, nine sable tails, eight yards chinchilla, seven marabou—”
Finette had taken off her serving apron and begun to dance, lively and fluid, her movements practiced and correct. She really was a dancer. Mitra sat nearby watching her; the two had, during the time I was ill and Stephan was at the front, become friends.

“There is the bell,” Jolie cried, dropping her telescope and running to the balcony to hang over the rail. A gust of frigid air—then a man in a gunner's coat called up from below. “It's Henri!”

 

He and Jolie were twinned in height, Henri lean and muscled and not as thin as the rest of us. The planes of his face so defined they made the others look soft as brioche. Callused fingers. Fine boned, powder blackened.

“It's from the
tabatière.
Target practice.” He wore no mustache or beard, unusual for a man. Clean, and hard. Clear, like cold, rushing water. Henri's eyes were Jolie's: green, like pebbles in a stream, but his hair was coal black. Under the coat, he wore a National Guard uniform and slung over his shoulder was an enormous sack.

“Where did you get—all of
that,
Père Noël?” From it he pulled items not seen in the capital for a month, not even at the blackest market: a cache of potted, smoked, and salted meats; Italian and Dutch cheeses, a macaroni-and-ham pie with wheat crust. Jellied pigs' trotters, apples and plums. Sugar-dusted butter pastry for dessert.
Sugar.

“Do you have any idea what's rotting beneath the streets in this city?”

“Henri knows the catacombs like the back of his hand; he learned them when he was a boy. Everything the war speculators bought and hang onto while people starve,” said Jolie.

“It's called ‘revolutionary requisitioning,'” said Henri, breaking into a grin. “Is there any coffee?”

“We haven't seen it in weeks,” I said. “Brandy?”

“I don't take spirits.”

“Wine? No shortage there, the National Defense has allotted a hundred liters per citizen . . . No? Green tea, then. Excellent for the health.”

“I heard you were a prisoner,” La Liberté said. You could see she was a bookseller; they were all flirts.

“Yes. Near Strasbourg.”

“How on earth did you get through the lines?”

“Friends.”

“Ha!” said La Morte. “Prussian friends?”

 

Hours later La Liberté and a
sans-culotte
were on a sofa with a bottle of rum; La Morte was at the telescope. The Red Virgin had disappeared, hoping to buy cigarettes off a guardsman. Clio had come out of hiding and scouted for crumbs, which were few, under the banquet table. Rag ends of the party remained; all of Henri's contributions consumed as well as ours; not a morsel of piecrust or rice pudding remained, although the mousse of osseine stood untouched.

Henri stretched his legs. Long, and lean. High, polished black boots. “What is this surprise dessert? It tastes like chocolate-flavored dirt.”

“Osseine au chocolat.” Osseine was a government-distributed food substance made from slaughterhouse bones. It was supposed to contain four times the nutrition of fresh meat.

“They ate bone-bread during the siege of Paris of 1590, and died of it. Who can promise that a government recommending arsenic for health is not making osseine of human bones?”

“
I've never seen a boot like that on a French soldier. You'll be arrested for a spy,” said La Morte, prowling over with her scythe.

Henri looked bemused. “Do you know how they sleep, in a Prussian camp? They dig out a flat, broad cone-shape in the earth, and a bonfire is built in the middle. Each man sleeps with his boots toward the fire, head pointed outward, his gun above his head. Thus he is warm all night. And the French soldier? Sleeps like a hunted dog, each one for himself on the frozen ground, or huddled together for warmth . . . No tent. No fire. As often as not, no ration. Everything the Prussian does is managed this way and Trochu knows it very well . . . Which army do you think will win this war?”

“Let me guess. The Reds,” said Stephan, lighting a cigarette, offering one to Henri.

“What
is
this Commune anyway?” pouted La Liberté, back into the mix of things and trying very hard to fasten her costume. “Now it's like the new religion.”

Stephan said, “It's a collection of mercenaries, nobodies, wild-eyed Blanquistes, refurbished Saint-Simonians, Americans who need a new war—and women. In trousers.”

“All rather outnumbered by the National Guard in Paris itself, our own brave citizens . . . Have I had the pleasure, monsieur?” said Henri, turning to him.

I murmured introductions.

“He looks like a sheep in that carpenter's garb, but he isn't one,” said La Morte
,
charmingly. “He's an aristocrat. Show us, monsieur, what you are wearing underneath.”

Henri leaned back. “You think that the Commune is so easily dismissed, that you can safely ally yourself with those currently in power—the general with a ‘Plan' to betray his army?”

“You are calling Trochu a traitor?”

“No, I am calling him a man caught in the web of his own negative intelligence; who cannot help but see the faults in his own people; an individual without hope and too much control over the destinies of others. He represents the worst in us. Thus he is starving us out.” Henri turned to La Liberté. “There are those, you see, who would have us take charge of our own destiny rather than be bombarded into submission. That is the Commune, and it sounds like religion because it is about faith in ourselves.”