The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (48 page)

A singular moment, at the corner of the rue Montmartre and the rue du Mail. A plain moment, when one thinks,
Someday I will look back at that street corner, at that woman in the green dress, with the umbrella: very ordinary except for the fact that there is a war on—but who was she, and what is she to become? Is there any hope for her?
Moments ago she exited the corner building, a structure like many others, with shallow balconies onto the street. The sort of building where the mattress men stopped to drop and collect their rentals during the empire. It was the first thing she noticed about the place. She walks down the rue du Mail to the rue Montmartre. Above the Bakery Saint-Claude is a bold sign:
SALONS, CABINETS. PRIVATE ROOMS.
Over the entrance, marble cupids tease one another with garlands. And a round lozenge says
GAZ:
a restaurant's proud advertisement of illumination within. All signs, now, of an era past . . . Something about the desultory tilt of her umbrella and the way she blinks in the weak April sun. But she is not headed for the teahouse that, during the siege, was known for black-market items other than tea; nor to the
boulangerie
that only intermittently displayed round loaves and long
ficelles
and braids of bread; and for some time, only ship's biscuit. No, she is ringing the bell, then opening the door, for Maison Gellé at number 4, Impasse Saint-Sauveur: dyes, cleaning, and finishing. specialité: black for mourning. The clock's hands stand at ten before ten. Because of a shortage of German clock winders, the clocks have not been reset, and all over the city, their hands remain askew.

 

I was at my desk again, sorting mail. More of it trickling in, months old. Solicitations, invitations, events from another time and a different world. Among them was one envelope of heavy paper; brown ink. Angular, pointy, old-fashioned script I had not seen often, and not in a very long time. A postmark from Auch. My stomach knotted, but before I had a chance to break the seal, Amélie, still in a morning dress and half-corset, appeared at my door.

“There is fighting in the place Vendôme. A group calling itself the Friends of Order has marched down the rue de la Paix in their top hats and canes, but shots were fired and the National Guard on the
place
has responded—or—”

“Who are these Friends of Order?”

“They marched yesterday, unarmed—today they are back. They want some kind of treaty with Versailles, or some further assurances from the Commune.”

“The chief of police has just been slapping too many rich men in jail . . . I just heard cannonade from the forts.”

“They say the Prussians are firing blanks to celebrate some kind of anniversary. But I don't think I'll go out. Are you seeing the Communard tonight? Or is something else up your sleeve?”

“Henri is a revolutionary. He doesn't make firm plans. If there is fighting on the place Vendôme I hardly think he'll be taking me to dinner.”

“Hard to keep up with you these days, Rigault. And
are
you related to the chief of police? Everyone is asking. I'd like to know which way the wind's going to blow next.” She sighed.

The new chief under the Commune had long been an agitator on the Left; he had achieved his greatest fame by using a spyglass from the Seine bookstalls to look in on the former empire's Préfecture—at all of the Noëls and Coués and their henchmen and superiors—then publishing his scandalous findings. Long before the coup of March 18, he had dubbed the police the Ex-Préfecture. So it was still called the Ex-Préfecture, although he was now the head of it. He was also a rake, notorious for believing that female favors should be granted for free; and he had no fond eye for priests. With his coarse black beard and cynical eye, he seemed to be trusted by no one. Oddly, I shared his name—Rigault.

“I can't help you there. I may need to change my name. Everyone seems to hate the man.”

 

The letter was from my Uncle Charles. My mother's brother had always prided himself on a dispassionate, full, and objective setting out of facts, and his crabbed and pointy script covered several pages. The letter recalled his voice, flowing with precision—dull to an impatient child; but now I devoured every word like the produce that had rolled in from the countryside, though I wasn't sure it wouldn't make me just as bilious. I looked up from the page to the ticking clock on my desk, the little porcelain-and-gilt one with filigree hands, a gift from Beausoleil. Its hands told the hour because I wound it myself, with a small gold key.

The occasion of his writing was to inform me about Berthe: my mother. She had been ill for some time, he wrote. She was confined to bed and in and out of consciousness; the medical men had given up bleeding her. Weak and jaundiced, she could not stand any coverings on her feet.
“To a man, not one of the doctors has seen such feet .
.
 . You will recall her willfulness.”
Several times she had been near death, and Charles had gone through papers to settle personal matters while she was able to state her preferences. It was in these papers that my uncle had located my present address. All of my previous residences had been struck off, save the last, he wrote. A meticulous record keeper, my mother. She had kept track of it: through the Auch Préfecture. Reading that, I felt ill and stopped to take some bismuth and quince.

 

Berthe had never spoken about the documents that she received during the winter of 1861; and it was since that date that she refused to hear your name spoken in our home. But it is these documents that I have found among her papers.

. . . Her very great unhappiness, and blaming of herself for your situation, I believe, caused her to descend to her current state. It is the case that over a course of years under these conditions the feminine liver will collapse.

If history permits it, consider traveling to see her.

 

The letter closed with my uncle's certainty of the victory of France in battle. I glanced again at the date: December—around the time true hunger began, with famine not far off.

 

Berthe. She had made only perfect things. Loved what was unsullied and beautiful: dowry sheets kept folded in the chest; china never used. Tiny, exact miniature portraits; the first immaculate radishes in the spring, rinsed of garden dirt, ruby-throated, white-tipped, arranged in a wooden bowl for her to paint. She was an artist, a creator of the unblemished surface. Except, of course—for her daughter, whom she had had to trace through the Préfecture, that pustulent wart on the rue des Fèves.

 

Bad currents in the air that night; a chunk of moon like a moldy Camembert. It had been more than a bit of trouble at the place Vendôme—it had been an outright and brutal massacre of the unarmed or barely armed. There had been a pistol or two among the banners of the peaceful “friends” that afternoon, and no one knew who fired the first shot—but sentiment went against the Commune. The boulevards filled with anxious faces, then emptied, so the capital looked once again like it had during the siege; and for the first time since the coup, we felt the heaviness of dread.

Under the Commune's administration, the streets were clean. Water played in the fountains. The Communards had cleaned up the boulevards, abolished petty fines, remitted rents, allowed reclamations of the tools and cherished items that had been pawned at the Mont. (Even at the rate of thousands of items returned each day, this would take a year, we were told.) They had opened the question of women working for fair wages in the professions, and with these acts they had captured a degree of popular support. Not a murder had been committed in the capital since March 18; and citizens were permitted to walk in the Tuileries.

But. A great deal of fresh air was wanted, to blow out the ghastly memories of winter; and we had only a gust of spring. People felt they were too quick on the trigger, hotheaded, these Communards. As gluttonous for retribution as the empire had been for stuffing itself on foreign wars and the working man's labor. Public opinion went against them on the darker matters of March 18: the execution of two government generals up on Montmartre. To govern, to win over public sentiment, required reason, nuance, the ability to become attuned to the body politic; to speak with an undivided voice and yet to mediate, to compromise, to negotiate—the Commune faltered here; and a few of them were outlaws or worse. Meanwhile, the assembly at Versailles consorted with the Prussians (so it was said); for them, the menace in Paris was kept at a distance.

But between Paris and Versailles, how was the thing to be settled? . . . When would life as usual resume? What
was
life as usual; for whom was it usual? So the arguments circled, turned back on themselves, as the cannonade rumbled ominously from the ring of fortifications outside the capital, just beyond the Paris walls.

In my own case, if the Versailles-based government came back to power, I supposed they would reestablish Regulation; the Préfecture would reconstitute itself and my desk would again be covered with offers and enticements, solicitations to business. It seemed as odious as drinking rum or eating horseflesh: a retreat to an impossible past. At present, Chief of Police Rigault's tolerance of unregulated debauchery was at odds with the Commune's principled stand against it. The upper echelons of the business had left town and the tolerated houses were officially closed. Stray boulevard girls were periodically rounded up and sent to sew sandbags or pack cartridges, as Sylvie had predicted.

A shifting uneasiness hung over the city like a fog. Day by day, the circle tightened; and once again we lined up to stock our larders. Similarly, people waited for hours at the Préfecture to apply for the
laissez-passer
—though not males between the ages of seventeen and forty, who were ripe for conscription into the National Guard.

Word came down that the Commune particularly welcomed issuing the exit paper to any girl who carried a
carte
from the empire's Préfecture. They did not know what to do with us—never mind that it had been
les inscrits
who had defended the cannon on Montmartre on March 18 and initiated the mood of “fraternization” with the army. No language existed to credit such girls and women for any of the events that transpired that day.

Henri believed that the Commune's battle with the Versailles army would be efficient and decisive. He sketched a picture of columns of citizens, a
levée en masse,
marching out to the fortifications to confront weak and depleted battalions; he was confident in a general who had fought in the American Civil War, for the Union side. Cluseret.

“And Jolie goes to the barricades too?” I asked him.

“Dissuade her if you can. She wants to fight.” He sighed. “For Louise.”

Increasingly militant since Strasbourg, and a Commune hero for rousing Paris at the crucial hour, Louise had practically marshaled a battalion of her own. She went to the former fairgrounds for target practice and made fierce anti-Versailles speeches. Jolie was among her closest allies.

Henri wanted me to obtain the
laissez-passer,
however, and to leave Paris when the battle began—not to go to the barricades with a rifle. Henri, I was learning, was a man of some principled contradictions.

 

I did not know what kind of reception I might receive at the Préfecture but took a place in line and toiled my way to the front. The officer issuing the document took one look at the name Rigault, assumed I was some relative of his new chief, and stamped the papers in a hurry, without even checking the Register or asking me to produce my
carte.
I had to laugh in spite of myself at the look on the poor man's face as he slid me the
laissez-passer.
Rigault must be terrible indeed.

“Manille, manille,”
chuckled Amélie, when I told her about it later. “Are you going to leave?”

“No, it's just a precaution, and to stop Henri from worrying. What about you, Amé?

“The women are going—some hundred of us—to the Hôtel de Ville to request protection; then we are going to Versailles to demand a peaceful resolution between the Commune and the assembly. These men must begin to speak sense to one another.” Her eyes shone as she described the delegation of siege housewives from the ration lines, balloon workers, laundresses, factory workers, café keepers. “Our captain is a lacemaker and café singer. Why don't you come?”

“Maybe I will.”

“If Versailles prevails, they will clap us back into Regulation so they can pay the reparations to Germany off our backs. Or the Commune will take what they want and claim to be pure as Spartans. These men have got to compromise with one another, and we women need to stand our ground. They have made a hash of this; for once, it would do them good to listen.”

 

Palm Sunday dawned dull and gray as though forces had amassed against spring. Under our windows, little girls were calling up, trying to sell sprigs of boxwood for a sou; but the cannonade boomed out at ten o'clock from the direction of Courbevoie: an utterance so profound it rattled the teacups, or maybe it was my shaking hand that set them shuddering.

“It sounds like thunder,” said Amé shakily.

“It is not thunder; it is civil war,” said La Tigre, who had rushed in, and over to the windows to peer out. “Your ladies' march will be shipped back through the walls by the cartload to be buried like the casualties,” said our fierce concierge, no sentimentalist. La Tigre had no traffic with the Versaillais, but she was not Communard either. She thought they were rabble, although she liked Henri.

“I've got to go out,” I said.

“Now? Are you out of your head? Wait until order is restored, at least,” said La Tigre.

“Order restored by whom?”

No one had an answer.