The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (51 page)

“I have aced the
tabatière.
If I run into any of my old friends, I'll show them what I really think!”

These two did not know doubt; neither ever had. Doubt was my province. So I uncorked the wine and while Henri was moodily staring out at the street, told Jolie about the hospice archives and finding Berthe's records. Stephan having transferred Berthe to Lourdes. And even she gasped in incredulity.

“Oh, Eugénie! It would have to be something with that man—but this trumps it.”

“I want to go and find her, but perhaps that is what he intends as well—or maybe he just felt guilty and transferred her to a convent,” I said in a low voice. “But it seems he has had something in mind since July.”

“He let on nothing?”

“No.”

“Do you think you should—confront him directly?”

“Jolie, he was my lover for three months—”

“Wartime lover, oldest trick in the book.”

“I know, I know.”

 

Henri turned back to us, saying that he needed to go on patrol. Jolie said, “Henri, do you think an able-bodied aristocrat of thirty-two can leave the capital? Get past the checkpoints, onto a train?
Monsieur le comte
is up to his old tricks. Maybe you could battalion the man.”

“I'd be delighted to. I shall head over to the
sixteenth and conscript him myself. But what now is the crime?”

“Never mind that. Do you really want to go all the way to Lourdes, Eugénie?”

“It is the only thing I want.”

Henri stared, apparently finding me inscrutable.

“Then,
chouette
—you must,” said Jolie.

“Lourdes?” asked Henri.

“Eugénie has family there.”

“Well, don't go for the claptrap miracles. But you will be safer out of the capital.”

“Could you really detain de Chaveignes?”

“With pleasure. Time enough that he should pay his debt to the working man.”

“ And woman, and child,” added Jolie, full of mischief.

 

Henri was fixed on my traveling with a companion, suggesting everyone from Finette (if she could be tracked down) to La Tigre. I insisted that I had entered Paris alone and would navigate this exit in the same manner. I would travel as a widow; and be safe. He finally settled for giving me his knife and a lesson on how to use it, resting his hand on my own as he did. I looked up into his eyes. So much about the man I did not know. Then over to Jolie, on the balcony, peering out at the street. I had loved her; and had come close—so close—to loving him. Would I see either of them again? . . . Another time. Another place, another lifetime—I might know Henri better; and he me. I'd heard of such things. Other lives, lived long ago. And lives to be lived, future lives. Better ones, perhaps. Mitra and I discussed such things during the long nights of the siege. After the strangeness of the idea wore off, I found curious comfort in it.

Then we took out the maps and he sketched out a possible route—a long one that embarked from Saint-Lazare; passed through Courbevoie near the forts and the Commune's terrible battle; and traveled west past Versailles before curving south.

 

It was not for another two weeks that circumstances permitted exit. Fighting was heavy in the ring around the capital, with casualties coming into our reopened, now undersupplied
ambulance
at the rue du Mail. Francisque and Sylvie were still at Versailles with their past-season dresses, so it was left to La Tigre, Amé, and me to nurse and tend to the men as best we could. From them we heard of the increasing despair and disorganization of the Commune's forces; of the loss of morale following the defection of the once-heralded Cluseret to the side of Versailles and the assembly. They were angered by the current attitude of the leaders of the Commune, who favored appeasing the Prussians, still installed menacingly around the eastern perimeter. Some of these men had joined up to avenge the honor of France; others were true-blooded for the Commune; no faction had been presented with an effective leader or the desired enemy. The plan to free Blanqui was a failure; Thiers held fast to his prisoner and would accept no terms.

Although the air was full of betrayals, the gaiety of spring nonetheless strangely infused a city longing for reprieve, and Parisians rallied around a new project: tearing down the enormous Vendôme column, erected by Napoleon I and the icon of his departed nephew. This effectively shut down traffic, as did the razing of Premier Thiers's mansion in the place Saint-Georges—with great fanfare its artworks were shuttled off to the museums; its linens were sent to the hospitals. And the true life of Paris went on. Gardeners gardened; spring flowers came up and consoled us for the lack of trees. Fishermen fished the Seine and street hawkers came out with their chestnuts, bouquets, birdcages, and window glass. Theaters were lit; the Salon of 1871 was announced, and Parisians promenaded in Sunday attire even as wagons of corpses rattled by. Amid this hubbub and chaos, Finette came down from the Red Cat with a sprained ankle, begging to be taken back.

And so it was the middle of May, during a brief cease-fire lasting only a few hours, that I boarded the train, alone, out of Paris. The
Aurore,
the night train, headed south-southwest.

M
AKE WAY FOR
the
malades
!” the porter called, and at that, the railway men took off their hats and stood still. Limoges station was bright and sunny—an echo of Paris, without the surrounding ring of Prussians. “The Red City of France,” Henri had called it, because its porcelain workers had pushed for recognition of the Commune. This had plunged the city into a maelstrom of civil strife; soldiers who had been marshaled to support Versailles refused to board the trains to travel to the capital. Some stacked their rifles at the station; others, when the train was stopped some distance outside the city, disembarked and marched back home, singing “La Marseillaise
.
” On Henri's railway map, a firm, blue-inked artery flowed with confidence to Limoges.

After that, it was crossed with hatch marks. At Agen, a pale green thread indicated a change to a line that continued on to Auch, but in the station key there was no mention of Auch as a stop. The map may have been one of railway optimism rather than actuality—at any rate, it was printed before the war.

Thus I was uncertain what I would find by way of rail accommodation to Lourdes; and I wondered if the anticlerical sentiments of the Commune had penetrated its sister city and the way to the shrine of Our Lady would be barred. However, the reverse was true—at Limoges I was issued a ticket without question. In a city of divided sentiments, the law of contraries was in force. At the rail station, piety prevailed: for what soldier would prevent the dying one last chance at a miracle?

When I stepped aboard the train, there were no compartments, no superior classes of service, no baggage racks, and no seats. Only stretchers, nuns, rosaries, and raised hands; keening wails and sights better left undescribed. It was the White Train, the train of pilgrimage. And as was obligatory for ambulatory passengers, I accepted a smock, a tin cup, and a water pitcher. Began with the first stretcher in front of me, and looked, dismayed, down the long carriage.

“Everything is for the best; we are praying,” a nun said to me, seeing the look on my face. “There are no more remedies here.”

Lourdes was not far from the place of my birth, but then, roads hardly went directly from one place to the next and never when the terrain was as difficult as this passage toward the Pyrenees. Those mountains were our distant watchers; portents of weather, of the local mood—loftily unapproachable. After Bernadette had her visions at the Grotto Massabielle, Lourdes had gone from stone to gold, and not by plowing and planting, or mining, or any other recognized means of human progress: but for miracles.

I assumed that Berthe had been sent to Lourdes for pragmatic reasons, though; because it was the nearest large convent that would take her after her transfer out of the hospice system. As to why Stephan would have wanted it and what exactly he intended—that I could not know.

I filled my cup with water and turned to the first cot.

 

It was morning when we arrived, and as the train dropped down into the valley, I could see the processions, the long winding lines of pilgrims. As the White Train disgorged, and one by one, my fellow passengers fell to their knees or their stomachs, or raised their hands in the air if they were on their stretchers—as they wailed and shouted and prayed, called out for hands to carry them, the porters and lay brothers and sisters prepared for the passage, joining the thousands already converged. Lourdes, during pilgrimage season, is not a place to search for someone you have never seen.

Walking uphill from the station and into the center of town, my head went light and dizzy; my limbs ached, and my lungs and chest, as though my entire being was attempting to expel a vicious poison but was too weak to do it. It was the altitude, but more than that. I shouldered past the stretchers and wheeled chairs and carts; swept along in the crowd but solitary. How was I ever to find Berthe here? I felt entirely alone, and resentful. I was not ill or dying and had limited curiosity about the miracles of Lourdes. After all that we had witnessed during the siege, I did not want to confront more piteous sights of illness and death. Was humanity never to be healed? Was it never to fight? But they were fighting in Paris, brother against brother, and what good was it doing? Piteous we were, with every form of human malady on full display under the beating Pyrenees sun. No remedies, indeed.

It was a southern sun, and too hot for the uphill trudge to the center of Lourdes, which was a humble sort of place like a thousand others, except for its gigantic fairground of promised miracles. I kicked at my long, full skirts; tugged askew the lace and embroidery going-away cape in black silk; ruffled across its hem, its small criss-cross embroidered buttons undone in this heat—the cape was meant to cross in front and required the hands of a maid to tie properly, but I was not traveling with a maid. The view-obscuring veil and kid gloves tightened around my heat-swollen fingers. And here I was, in a place very similar to the one in which I had once worn a skirt and chemise as simple as Bernadette's. My old wooden sabots would have been superior to the Paris ladies' boots manacling my feet, mincing between the gaps in the cobbles. I picked up a religious flyer that stuck to one of my heels, tossed it aside. The Grotto was not my goal nor my intention. My pilgrimage was of a different kind.

The streets of Lourdes were clogged. At cafés, crutches were propped against the walls. Jugglers and fire eaters gathered in the square; hawkers offered tours and sold souvenirs: plaster virgins and medallions, water bottles and everything Bernadette. I waited in a long line for a café table, and when finally blessed by a chair, ordered
vin ordinaire.
My eyes had begun to blur, to search, to well with tears. Tears began to stream amid the cacophony of the marketplace of saints' bones, splinters of the True Cross, vessels for holy water. I was more tired than I knew. Out of place, left out of the general miracle seeking—and yet I wanted a miracle too, just not the sort advertised.

 

My eyes followed a girl across the square; swept her for signs, marks of the abandoned
—you will see Berthes everywhere—
stooped shoulders, a limp, a lead medallion—any of a thousand consequences of neglect. Did this one look like my mother when she was young, or like me? But it was merely a girl's body; hips just beginning to curve out below the drawn-in waist; a face that could be lovely, or dull as lead; one of those faces that changed with the weather. A girl's body, before she has lived in it many years.
What is my fate today? Which clouds will tumble across my sky?
And would she be overcome, one day—wake like a sudden storm—to that roaring in the ears that led to leaving everything behind to follow her desires to the nethermost; would she find herself gripped by the passions of her foremothers?

I pushed aside the wineglass; the liquid tasted cheap and bitter; then changed my mind, drank the dregs, and worried about my soul. I did not consider myself hardhearted; so why did the sights and sounds around me not arouse compassion?
Must my hand be worn and callused in order to appear innocent? Must I brandish my wound to feel it
. . . Who were they, the religious, the authorities—to judge my own harm? How long had my own wounds been effaced, silenced; never touched, never seen? For as long as ever was. As long as Eve's day, after the serpent slid away. A day that lasted forever. These and other inchoate ideas occupied me as I made my way over the bridge, toward the convent. The way was not difficult; all roads ended at the hospice, and at the Grotto
.

 

“Yes, it was a gentleman who came for her,” said the sister to me, the one I found nearly without looking. Her skin luminous as parchment, her voice low. “Accompanied by a dark-skinned boy, a servant. He prayed at the Grotto and then he came here to speak to us. He presented papers attesting to his name and estate; apologized for the unholy chaos in Paris and for his boy, who he said was Hindoo but studying the Bible.” The sister paused and almost smiled. “He came by permission of the director of the Hospice des Enfants Assistés in Paris. The girl was his daughter, he said.”

“Of course we hesitated. Berthe Sophia was very special to us; she had been with us such a short while. But she worked right along with us, from the first. So old for her years, that girl. No matter how hard or difficult the chore, she never flinched; whether she was attending us at the baths or meeting the White Trains. She had the mark of the abandoned on her, but she hid it very well . . . Oh, no, my dear—not last August. It was only last week!”

I gasped. My heart dropped to my feet; my head into my hands.