The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (47 page)

Near the rue Montmartre a pile of paving stones dug up from the street stood in a tumbled pyramid. A tattered red strip tied to a stick had been stuck in the top of the pile, fluttering in the bare breath of spring. I climbed down from the cab because we were not able to pass. The driver gestured to it; he growled through his pipe.

“That's right,” he said. “We were not beaten; we were sold.”

And Paris could not accept the terms imposed, negotiated by Thiers, a man most of Paris had not elected. It was the provinces that had gone for Thiers. A people's army; walking ghosts of the capital, those who had starved on behalf of their country now refused the proposition of the failed Government of National Defense, and the newly constituted assembly. Ranks of fathers and mothers, battalions of daughters and sons, nurses and cooks, gardeners and children—an army of the hungry, of gray beards and no-beards, furies of the siege clubs and barricades and taverns lined up behind the sons of the “true Paris” to throw themselves upon the enemy and their own false protectors. Their ranks were swelling, quietly and after dark.

It began to feel as though not only the Communards were the Commune. The landlord's demand was a rallying cry, as were the officious clerks at the Mont; and the neighborhood boys who guarded the cannon, who patrolled the neighborhoods and gathered in certain cafés, defying the occupiers with their looks, seemed our defenders. We who had lived through the siege, who had seen the bodies floating down the Seine after the first sortie and then read with incredulity what the papers said about victory, felt a collective shudder of fury. We looked around and saw what propped up the Versailles government—from the banks and the Bourse to the
tolérances
. We remembered the ways so many of us had to scrabble for a living under the empire; what it had been like to do what survival required—coerce acts from our most cynical selves. Under direct Prussian fire we had come together at last, opening our doors to one another as the shells fell. I understood the revulsion and contempt for the profiteers; for the government that turned its back on us and then with relish served up our thin bodies and souls to the enemy. Then grabbed their hats and coattails and mistresses and fled to Versailles so as not to suffer the consequences. But we could be more fiery and harrowing than they understood.

This was an old anger. Fathomless, tribal.
Order without bloodshed is possible,
said the Commune. But at night we heard the roll of cannon down the cobbles; in the morning, fresh barricades and knots of whisperers on the corners.

It was early spring. The melting of the snow; a few brave buds appeared on the few remaining trees; one or two cautious birds sang in the upper branches. The German soldiers had retreated from sight, after a two-day occupation agreed upon by the governments. When they left, people scrubbed the pavements. Removing the Germans from our minds was more difficult: Prussian troops were stationed outside the
enceinte,
occasionally making their presence known with volleys of gunshots. Daily more provisions appeared in the shop windows and on the shelves. The post was delivered: bags of letters from the outside world, dating back to October. One of these was a letter from Rome, from Sidonie, Giulia's Paris maid who had gone back with her to Italy. At my little desk, my eyes blurred with tears. Giulia had died of consumption shortly after the siege began; that is, very soon after I had seen her last, shivering under a torrent of ice and champagne. And her little girl had wanted to take care of her mother better than Giulia wanted to care for herself.

 

I drove across town. The boulevards were in an upheaval again, and my driver did not know the reason—some kind of hubbub, a flurry of running boys and mobs on the corners. Some sort of altercation up on the Montmartre buttes, but we did not stop because I was in a hurry to pound on the door of my sometime lover . . . My foul-weather friend who arrived when things turned bad and Giulia was put in mind to kill herself for Russian gold. I had not heard a word from him—no thanks for the supplies, no indication of his plans, given the reconfiguration of Paris. On the other hand, my own thoughts strayed more and more to Henri.

After banging at the door I heard Mitra's voice; then the boy unlocking many locks and opening it on creaking hinges. Now that the shelling was past, and Germans in the streets vivid in our minds, doors were locked again. In his bedchamber Stephan was flopped down in his sandbagged fortress, asleep. Mitra stood to the side, alert and guardlike, looking more like a man than his father did at that moment.

“Stephan, wake up!
Monsieur le comte,
it's nearly noon!” Stephan groaned and flung an arm over his eyes. I turned up Stephan's palm and tickled it, a most unpleasant sensation for a sleeping person. Palm of narrow escapes, indeed.

A pile of mail lay scattered to the side; thin envelopes with foreign postmarks. Indian letters, and thicker ones with seals. Stephan stirred and hoisted himself up on a sandbag.

“Mitra, coffee!” Glanced at me, sullen. I knew that look. I had brought apples with me, and tossed one at him now.

“Your post has come, I see. Mine came. Giulia is dead of the grippe.”

“I'm sorry. Truly,” muttered Stephan. “And Paris gossip has traveled quickly as ever, so you may as well hear it from me. My family intends to press forward with the lawsuit. They are sending their man to me today.”

I stared at him, not quite in surprise. “Your actions toward me haven't made their claim any easier to prove, monsieur.”

“But lent it urgency, I'm afraid.”

“And where do you stand?”

“I am not standing, at the moment. I am lying down in bed, about to expire for want of a decent cup of coffee. Mitra!”

“Stephan. Are you going to Versailles?”

“I don't know. But you should, if you want to. Your business affairs will have moved there, I daresay.” It took me a moment to think of what he meant.

“I have not come to ask your permission! But I am not in spirit for Versailles.”

“So much the worse. But. Eugénie, you and I must communicate through intermediaries now—otherwise it will simply be a wreck. I will mediate with the family, I promise you.” He sighed. “My mother is not well. My sister is not married. I have been hunting neither Bengal tigers—nor heiresses, as is my filial duty—”

“No heiresses! And why might that be?”

He sent me a cryptic glance. I sat back, stared at him. Could I possibly still love this man? Something in me had changed; it had begun on those dark nights of the siege. A silent passage, laid stone by stone. My “business affairs” indeed. How dare he.

I said, “Your family can act as they like. But their suit is useless, as will soon be proved in a republican court—or perhaps they would prefer a judge under the auspices of the Commune. Which will have been advised by the Women's Union.”

“The Commune! Now you are ridiculous.”

“And one day—quite soon—I intend to retrieve Berthe and help her as best I can. I am not going to throw her away because of them. Or because you are a coward.”

“The suit happens to be based in the law, which is on the side of my family's interests and its honor.”

“Bah! And it is a convenient sandbag for you, monsieur.”

“Eugénie, there is no winning this argument. Even if you had the girl—if she is alive—”

“She is alive.”

“How, under what circumstances, would you intend to raise her? As Giulia brought up her daughter?”

“Please. Giulia died trying to cover Giulietta's school fees.”

“You see? It's preposterous.”

“Own up to the situation you helped to create, Stephan.”

“In another world I'd marry you, Eugénie.” The man looked miserable. “But I cannot abandon my mother and Sophia, or divide myself from my family in that way—don't you see that I am trapped as well? And besides, you would not understand India.”

And I would not have a “dictionary of the bed” to explain it to me, I thought, but I said only, “Very well. My lawyers will take it from here.”

“All right—all right. Perhaps I have not entirely thought it through; I need more time.”

“What else have you had to do these past three months?”

“Perhaps I can break with the family, with indigo and all the rest of it. Perhaps I do want the girl. Perhaps I do want us to—I don't know. What the hell would we do? Go to America? Australia?”

I turned impatiently, went to his window, and looked out at the rooftops, at the place de l'Étoile—down at the avenue d'Eylau, where Haussmann's construction remained incomplete even now. The avenue was divided, with half of it twenty feet above the new street level. Residents had to climb stairways, built along a “temporary” retaining wall, to get to their doors. There it had been left when the empire fell; and so it remained.

“Do you love me, Stephan? Do I love you? What obligation do we have, not under the Code, but between ourselves? I don't have the answer; I have not asked you for a wedding ring, but why is it that we can never speak of—of what is important?”

The question went unanswered, for at that moment Mitra stepped into the room, turbanless and barefoot, balancing a tray with a silver pot on it, cups and spoons; he was wide-eyed, looking as though he was about to jump out of his skin. A sheaf of paper under his arm.

 

“Ah, Mitra. Coffee, thank you. And the papers; you are a prince among young men . . . Good Lord. What is happening out there this morning?” I peered over his shoulder—not at a newspaper, but at a hastily printed broadsheet. For a few moments, not a breath between us; just the rustling of the page.

Free of the tray and unable to contain himself any longer, Mitra hopped on one foot and shouted gleefully, “The government's army has surrendered to the Commune!”

Stephan was pale, as if he had seen a ghost. “Mitra, do you know what that means?”

“Yes!”

“Then you are the only one in the capital who does.”

I said, “I may not understand India, but Mitra understands France.”

 

Early that morning of March 18, 1871, two brigades of the Eighty-eighth Regiment of the regular army had been sent up to the buttes, where Henri and I had kissed, to retrieve the cannon held by the the Fédérés, the so-called insurgents—or the Commune, depending on how you saw it. In advance of the move to Versailles, Thiers and the assembly wanted assurances that Paris was under control; that it was not a powder keg controlled by the Reds and the rabble. They roused the troops at three in the morning and, in a chilly rain, without coffee or breakfast, sent them to retrieve the cannon. But there were not enough horses in harness to pull down the guns, and the troops of the Eighty-eighth had to wait while runners were sent back down to get them. Another runner went down the hill as well, I would later learn. Louise Michel, our former companion of the supper table and woman of no second thoughts (would she have had them if she had known what was to come?) bolted down from Montmartre with a gun on her back, rallying half of Paris to support the Fédérés.

Dawn was breaking just then, and up on the buttes only the milkmaids and a few guardsmen were out. Some of the women walked in front of the cannon and offered the soldiers of the Eigthy-eighth Regiment fresh milk; a few café girls from the dance halls stood by and flirted. More women and children came out to see what was happening; there was a lull, a suspension. The general in charge gave an order to fire, but the stars and planets changed position, perhaps; the first brigade turned up the butts of the guns, and refused.

“We don't have to kill one another!” someone shouted, and the second brigade too turned its guns butt-up. No one let off a shot, but rather everyone put down their arms and began drinking milk, the troops of the Eighty-eighth and the National Guard together. It was a bloodless coup up on the buttes on a quiet morning in March, where Henri and I had been—the place Chasseloup used to stare at, brooding, from his atelier. (
Almost
bloodless. But all details of the event did not come out until later.) The broadsheets that Mitra brought told the story their own way.

We might be “thin as keys,” as someone later wrote, but our keys had unlocked a door and on that fine March morning we walked through it. By evening, the troops of the regular army had surrendered, deserted, or disintegrated, unwilling to rally on behalf of their generals and the assembly. The red flag flew over the great clock at the Hôtel de Ville. The next day, the weather turned bright, and everyone came out onto the boulevards, promenading in their best clothes as if it was a holiday. Henri, exhilarated and wearing a new and spotless National Guard coat, came to gather me up at the rue du Mail; and we rode through Paris together, to the roll of drums of the Fédérés, before he had to go back on duty. Finette stopped by, after work at the
café chantant
where she was employed—to tell us with shining eyes how it had been, up on Montmartre that morning, how the girls had moved through the ranks of soldiers with flowers and cups of milk, “not at all afraid even though there were guns!” It had already become a myth, a beautiful story people wanted to believe. Over the next few days—which were quiet—the streets were swept clean for the first time since the empire had ended, and flags sprang up like fields of poppies.

W
HEN DO THE EDDIES
separate ship from shore; when do you notice, with a hole in your heart, the widening distance between what you have been and what you will become? You might be able to string act to event, cause to consequence, but still you search for the moment when one substance becomes another. When color becomes image, or clay, flesh. Field corn is transformed to foie gras; the red dress becomes the red flag; an empress becomes a commoner, leaving behind her boiled egg. The awl slips and shatters the ivory, the paper is torn into shreds; love is broken like a crystal bowl. A woman's body, once beloved, becomes a draining trough, a gutter. She has taken a turn in her life from found to lost. Or from lost to found again.