The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (49 page)

 

A ragged energy swelled and gusted, thick in the air, like a cloud of soot, heavy and stinging, as my cab zigzagged through the streets. The soldiers at the checkpoints all wore coats and insignia of the National Guard; they motioned—with the points, not the butts, of their guns—for me to step down. “Stop, in the name of the Commune!” Ragged urchins begged from the passing conveyances during these forced halts. Everywhere, paving stones were piled up, as were barrels, ladders, ropes, carts . . . Posters plastered on any available wall—white, as the Commune had declared it would print now only on white; the older red ones hung in strips underneath. An omnibus had been upended at one corner and become part of a barricade. “Drive on,” a guardsman said, once I showed my
laissez-passer,
signed by Rigault.

The sky had dulled; it was beginning to rain. We stopped again; my cab's horses shied this time at the line of cannon pointing outward, and as many mortars, behind piles of cobbles and rubble, and two more soldiers with their
tabatières.

“How do you feel toward the Commune?” asked an awkward boy, stepping up and peering into the window, which I had pulled down. He was pale, with a two-day beard and weather-roughened skin. Squared shoulders and a cutaway coat with a belt, his
tabatière
strapped over his shoulder. Scuffed boots that had walked a thousand miles.

“I support the Commune.” I showed my
laissez-passer.

“Very well, but—madame—I say only for your well-being, do not go into the center unaccompanied.”

And so we turned around before reaching the Seine. However, my foray had served its purpose. I could see how to do it, now.

 

After the first assault, a reprieve. We learned that the Versailles troops had pushed into the Neuilly suburbs on the western edge of the city, defeated the National Guard, and taken the bridge. A funeral procession to Père Lachaise was held. Commune caskets were draped in black, with red flags at each corner; drums were muffled and sounded very grave and the marchers kept faces cast down. Relatives and friends of the dead formed a long tail to the procession, and crowds lined the boulevards as they passed. Many shops were closed. At Neuilly the fighting continued, but the Versailles troops did not breach the
enceinte.

What we did not know was that the quiet was one of retrenchment. That what would come to be called the second siege would begin, and it would be worse, much worse, than the first.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
my first attempt, with a deft driver and a red ribbon around my wrist, I made my way again past stripped trees, army canteens, and bivouacs; through interminable traffic and delay and the barricades at Montparnasse. I was clad from heel to crown in widow's black, an acceptable camouflage these days. Veiled I had entered the capital, and so I would leave it, I thought, fastening the gauzy thing. If it came to that. My stays and the lining of my brocade going-away coat were sewn tight with bills, more fortifying than baleine. A good half of Paris was walking around with their money stuffed and stitched into their clothes.

At the mouth of the rue d'Enfer, fresh cobbles had been pulled up for a barricade, with ranks of sandbags and holes for the muzzles of cannon. Pockmarks, scars, and powder burn from the earlier Prussian assaults showed on the buildings' stone walls. At the hospice's entrance, a long line of gray-and-white-clad
nourrices
twisted up from the steps and around the drive. Some just in from the countryside; others showing siege pallor and thin as rails. A fleet of wagons waited, staves resting on the ground, and as a few straggling old mares were let through the barricade, the women began to organize the children and infants, hitching up their skirts and climbing into the wagons. Inside I could see narrow benches and hammocks, and children, each one in uniform, with a shorn head, teetering like birds on a wire. The air was filled with wails.

The director and his wife had been hailed for staying in Paris through the siege, but now an evacuation was underway. A National Guard on a black horse, uniformed in a blue Zouave jacket belted with the red sash and tall well-shined Hessian boots, inspected the barricade and barked orders. It was Lisbonne, the actor-turned-soldier, the Commune's brash “d'Artagnan” whom I'd met up on Montmartre with Henri; the two of them had saluted each other. If names were portents, this street might yet justify its designation as the street of hell. But Lisbonne was among the most bold of the Commune's warriors, Henri said—so perhaps he would save it.

 

A plain-skirted woman answered the hospice's private-entrance bell. Her neck was bare of any crucifix and her hair bundled into a swatch of crochet; she hurried ahead on floors that today were less than polished. She knew me as a “friend of the widow Chateaubriand.” She had accepted the friends' packets during the siege; our blankets and food supplies and little bundles of sticks, what kindling we could find. Over the course of those bitter months, this emissary and I had come to know each other a little. I did not tell her the nature of my mission; she knew enough to hold up her hand when I began to speak of it.

Conditions at the hospice were much changed from before the siege. The Commune had removed the religious from their positions in the hospitals, but here, unlike the military hospitals, few replacements had come. The director was now negotiating with the Commune about the barricades on the rue d'Enfer, as he wanted to ensure the transport of all of his charges to an orphanage outside the
enceinte
before the fighting began in earnest. The daily running of the place had fallen to madame.

From a ring of keys, my friend lifted one and unlocked the door of the hospice archives; allowed my entrance and hurried off to more pressing concerns. From within, the musty scent of old paper and mildew mingled with the sour metallic and sulfurous odors of the corridor, and my eyes adjusted to the dimness enough to descry banks of wooden cabinets with drawers. My heart began to pound; my palms perspired inside my gloves. But otherwise it was drafty and cold, and my time limited, so I set aside gloves and veil but did not take off my coat.

 

The files were arranged by year and catalogued by number. The first bank held the hospice's massive leather-bound record books, marked by the year. Each was lined with entries, one for each child left in its care. The first admitted on New Year's Day of any given year was given the number one; the year and number also were inscribed on the medallion each child wore from the date of abandonment to that of majority, at age twenty-one. Within this lined record was listed too the name at entry and the new name provided, first and last.

Further on in the archive stood rows of shelves and cabinets. Banks of files and within them, black file boxes and mud-color ones. Jammed together, glued with some unknown substance; some thin and seemingly not touched for years. These, I discovered, contained birth certificates and identifying articles left at the time of abandonment—scraps of linen; misspelled notes and small charms: a thimble, a ring, glass baubles bound with thread. A lock of hair in an embroidered pouch. A tiny padlock with a key; a brass label from a café bottle marked simply
VIN
.
Original birth certificates, copies, or nothing; pleading letters. Requests for children to be taken in and cared for; to be returned to a mother, “made legal,” or simply—stories.

Too much life had been pushed helter-skelter into these files. And all of it retained; locked away, never passed on to the children. These vestiges of their history were, for them, erased. As they themselves were. It was too much to take in, to know; and certainly—too much to sort through in the time I had. I sighed, then breathed in dust. And returned to the ledgers, which appeared to be in some kind of order. From the shelves I selected the record book of 1861.

I understood now that in my earlier ignorance and rage, I had misjudged the directors to some extent. I may not have agreed with their principles, but at least they had applied them with constancy, laboring under every condition of war and peace, strained funds, understaffing, and an overload of cases to record assiduously the abandoned of Paris. The sheer weight of their conviction was impressive. At administration, that strange human ability, they excelled. I could only hope that genuine care for newborn persons had not lagged behind too far.

Even before entering this archive I knew that if abandoned infants survived the hospice and its poxy wet nurses; its filthy
biberons,
the communal wheat-paste sucking cloths; its stagnant air and close-packed cribs—if they passed through these walls intact, they often perished on the journey to the countryside. Once there, some suffocated by smoke or on smoldering straw mattresses; were burned by a hot brick in a cradle; or wandered too close to a fire. Unwatched and ignored, they fell into rivers and streams; succumbed to diseases of the gut and the lungs; and though precautions were taken against it—the syphilis passed on by their nurses. Inspectors skipped visits due to bad roads and weather and overlooked breaches of conduct; in the worst cases, they trafficked in their own charges.
Nourrices,
even the honest ones, stretched layettes to cover their own children's needs; favored home remedies and postponed doctors' visits for fear of penalties for neglect. The
abandonnés
were often transferred, and with each move came a new set of hazards. I had read about all of it in newspaper accounts and from documents to which my solicitors had gained access. Over the course of my years of hospice visits, I had spoken to midwives like Mathilde, wet nurses who worked for the state, knowledgeable mothers, and anyone else who would talk. Thus I had traced many of the possibilities for Berthe's fate. I was in some way resigned to them.

I paged through 1861 to June, to July. Mortality rates had not been too bad at that time, though the drop-offs at the
tour
had been high, and turnover to the
nourrices
rapid. Inspection visits, at least on paper, seemed to be in order. My heart beat faster and my stomach clenched as I paged past August, then September. Impatient, but reluctant too; once this page was turned I would know what I had never known. Even if no entry existed—which seemed possible—this too would alter my course. But at last I did turn to October, and there it was, in a crabbed and faded brownish script, a careful ledger-book hand.

 

Ledger No. 3568. October 10, 1861.

Mother:
Eugénie Louise Rigault.

Father:

 

The identity of the father had been struck out; written above it, the word
Inconnu.
But unlike the illegibility of the birth certificate shown to me by the director of L'Assistance Publique, on this document Stephan's name could still be made out; some administrative hand had failed to efface it entirely.

 

Name Given:
Berthe Sophia Louise Rigault.

Health at Arrival:
Fevered but otherwise good.

 

Two days after her admittance, the record had been marked, “Fever abated. Taking nourishment.” On the fifteenth Berthe was transferred to Avallon, in Yonne, and again the recording hand had noted that she had survived the two-day journey by train and post wagon, “despite rains.”

So there it was. But of course it was; this was France, and this keeping of records had been in place since Napoleon I. I myself had set the system in motion on Berthe's behalf. Still, it was a revelation to see the document in black and white.

Yonne was one of the better places; the area's wet nurses, even the poorest ones who worked for the state, were better fed and healthier than most. I did not have time to linger over this scant record, however. If I had any hope of learning more, I must confront other files.

The hospice records dated back to 1801, and though they represented a valiant attempt to catalogue more than half a century of abandoned children, they showed signs of age and entropy. The files were sticky; massive piles of “undetermineds” were stained with grease and water; caches of documents had been left unfiled by some harried or lazy clerk. I began with a warped wooden drawer marked 1860; it squeaked under the weight of its contents. I culled through small abandoned lives, file upon file of them. But I was hundreds of lives too early; then another thousand too late. I sifted through the mess, records with cross-filed papers, missing documents, half-lives. Beginnings with no endings, middles with no start or finish—the scars and gaps on these pages not even beginning to tell the tales to which they referred: histories of children scattered to the winds as the force of administration marched on. Mildew tickled my nose, and I began to feel overwhelmed by the gloom and sadness of the place; the hopelessness of this quest. My time here was short; the Commune had imposed a curfew for the general safety of the citizenry; very soon it would be unwise to travel the streets.

Once, idly at cards on the rue du Mail, Lili had explained the principles of clairvoyance, the trade she had briefly and unsuccessfully practiced—or too successfully, as she said wryly, because the information she conveyed, while accurate, had often discomfited her clients.

“In addition to the clairvoyant information, one must accurately read the human nature and communicate with it, and that was the difficulty,” she had said, shaking her head. “Teeth are easier.”

“But the information, Lili, how did you obtain it?”

“Follow a thread,” she had said. “Use your mind like a dart; focus as though an invisible filament exists between you and what you want to know. Pass by everything else—all distractions.” As a game, we had practiced on hidden objects—rings and cards and teaspoons (with limited success). Lacking any better method now, I closed my eyes and thought of Berthe, of the umbilicus that had bound her to my womb; surely a stronger connection than a mere teaspoon. I allowed my mind to gather in the many steps taken and the invincible desire that had brought me, despite every obstacle, to this mortuary of information, where some fragment of my daughter and of my former self surely lay. Some clue to the present; some stitch to the future.