Thornfield Hall (13 page)

Now, seeing the man who had transformed the Funambules—and also the role of the White Clown, from a mere member of the Italian commedia dell'arte to a figure renowned throughout Europe—I saw that the murder of the young man, the subsequent trial (at which, Jenny wrote, he was declared innocent), and his own gigantic fame had in turn transformed my Pierrot into a
stranger. He looked at me long and sadly as I begged him for news of Céline. His gestures, I noticed, were minimal now, and dismissive of my pleas. He knew nothing of Céline Varens: she had gone away, and that was all there was to it. Then, as if some residue of all that enormous well of sympathy shown in every lineament of the old Pierrot still lingered somewhere in this man as dedicated to silence as a Trappist monk and as conscious as a conjuror of the effect of every gesture, however minuscule, on his audience, Pierrot indicated the stage of the theater and sketched with his hands the bar of a trapeze, a horse, and a trapdoor in rapid succession. As recompense for the lack of compassion he had shown for this barely grown young woman in search of her lost mother, he offered work at the Funambules.

So it was that I entered the acting career Céline had clearly deserted, either for romantic love with her Italian musician or with the still-fervent aim of becoming a tragedienne in the manner of the great Rachel. In this theater without a license to perform speaking plays—for, as the political Nadar soon informed me, in this venue they would be considered subversive of morality and law and order—I will be a part of a spectacular show of tightrope walking, tumbling, quick change, flying traps, dancing, slapstick, and popular music—all based on the pantomime plots of the old harlequinade. I shall watch and participate in the ways ideas and feelings are shown and exchanged, when words are not permitted: and it will happen one day, I know in my heart it will, that Céline will drop by to see her old friends in the troupe and gasp with astonishment at the sight of her daughter, abandoned so many years ago, as she flies through the air on the highest trapeze.

 

I slept at Jenny's—she who had been desperate to see the back
of me now showed a grudging respect, charging rent for a trundle
bed in the corner of the boudoir and coffee and hard bread in the morning, spread with a
confiture d'abricots
with the use of a ser-rated knife that reminded me of the ancient cutlery at Thornfield Hall.

Apart from the occasional fleeting memory of those days, I passed dreamless nights with nothing of my strange experiences as a child in the country Jenny described as
Angleterre
with a look of profound contempt and a Gallic shrug to disturb or haunt me. The Hall, with its trees that dripped in summer and stood bare in winter, began to diminish for me, confirming the tales I had heard from my mother and her friends of the shock of a return in later life to a house that had been enormous in childhood and now appeared insignificant and small: as the days in Paris passed, Thornfield went down in my inner eye to the dimensions of a doll's house. The occupants, too, became no bigger than marionettes, dancing their way through simplified versions of their roles in that northern place: Madame Fairfax, with her snowy hair and cap, smiled and stirred the morning porridge; while Miss Eyre, who once had loomed so large in my jealous heart, was no more than a governess puppet, mouthing English verbs and going back and forth from the bookshelves in the schoolroom with atlases of the world and its oceans. In the upper regions of Thornfield, it was true, there were sudden true-to-life appearances—of Grace Poole in her high-windowed room, a mug of porter on the table between her red-mottled elbows, and of Leah as she ran endlessly up the secret stair with bed linen or ewers of hot water. But of any other occupant my unconscious mind provided no clue. The roof, clearly out of bounds, was never visited. Monsieur Rochester—to whom Jenny now did not refer: I might have gone through those years for no reason, bearing no relation to the Bluebeard I had known and feared and loved in the old days at rue Vaugirard—had apparently vanished from the home of his ancestors, along
with the mad Creole wife he had brought back with him from Jamaica. Of the “friend” I had longed to make my new mother, the deluded Antoinette, there was not so much as a trace. All that would come to me—this when wide awake and practicing at the theater, often hanging upside down on the bar that was my only safeguard against a death on the circus floor—was the vivid memory of my arrival at the wicket gate by the side garden at Thornfield, where my expectations of leading a sheltered and happy life with my father had been split in two as surely as the old chestnut tree beyond the sunken fence. By the time the slight figure of Jane in her gray dress appeared on the balcony outside the library and called to Monsieur Rochester, the vision had faded into thin air—the element in which I hung suspended, before turning another somersault and gliding to the post, and then down.

I was miserable, and more homesick for my Céline than I had ever been—but I was also ecstatic in my new career, neither woman nor child as I swung and pirouetted high above the crowd. I acted five years old when, in the evening performance, I watched the specialties of the Funambules from my seat in the
paradis
: the
cascades,
which were highly complex fights with clubs and punches, a kind of ballet of insult and reprisal, ending with the famous leaping
pied au cul
—the kick up the arse—in which the tall, athletically built Pierrot excelled. Or I played for my own amusement a timid woman, a young housewife in her twenties, who gasps and stifles a sob of fear when the actors do the
sauts,
the startling and dangerous jumps up and down counterweighted trapdoors. And I'd be returned to a goggling youth again when it was time for the
trucs,
the extraordinary changes of scenery, accomplished so fast the eye refuses at first to believe them: a tall wardrobe transformed into a whale with its gaping cavern of a mouth, or Pierrot's ice cream cone, turned impossibly into a spluttering candle.

Pierrot himself, I confess, was my pride and joy. I acted any age where he would single me out for praise or admiration, whether
jeune fille en fleurs
—as he had once shown me he perceived me to be by forming a bouquet with his long, eloquent fingers, lowering his whitened nose into the blooms, and sniffing the exquisite aroma they gave off—or the infant daughter of the woman he had loved above all others, Céline Varens. I wanted to be the favorite of the great Dubureau, the silent bohemian who was king of gesture and grimace, master of the wink, the sneer, the nod, the hidden amusement, and the guffaw. I, along with the
paradis,
lived only to witness Pierrot's face.

My life was too full of the theater to pay much attention to the outside world—or even to Jenny's intense existence, concerned with politics and feminism. Coming home to the Faubourg Poisonnière and climbing the narrow, fetid-smelling stairs to the fourth floor, I'd hear the voices of her women friends, Jeanne Deroin among them, who had attempted to stand as a candidate for Parliament and had been rejected on account of her sex. Jeanne's angry tones would pierce me, tired as I was from my acrobatic stints, and I cursed the tiny flat for not affording me the space to lie down and rest in peace while George Sand was quoted, worshipped, or criticized by the women's club Jenny now organized, along with serving the radical magazine
La Revue Indépendante.
Why I didn't leave and go in search of a room where I could be alone, I couldn't tell: I knew myself to be too young still, perhaps, and the sound of Jenny's and Jeanne's thick-soled boots as they tramped along the street and up the stairs to the flat was somehow reassuring. With women like these in control, the looks, growing in number, that I received daily from men could be spat at, laughed away, or ignored. Jenny and Jeanne made a barricade against the dangers awaiting young girls in Paris.

One day it became clear that I couldn't avoid the revolution of
which Nadar spoke so gravely when I went to visit him in his studio—a revolution that Jenny and Jeanne said could never take place without a transformation of attitudes toward the role of women in society. The streets were crowded; this was nothing new, to a
flâneur,
as I saw myself, one who sought out the excitement of the
grands boulevards,
the glorious thoroughfares created by Haussmann, and I kept away from the narrow alleys of old Paris. But today, as I walked in that special way, disengaged yet enchanted, a spectator rather than a buyer, I couldn't help noticing the mood of euphoria that reigned over all. Faces glowed, and people spoke of winning hard-fought rights. Light, casual dress made it difficult to tell workers from the middle class. There was a festive mood of carnival and campfires; and as I crossed the Pont d'Arcole in my wanderings, I saw columns of people with long beards and odd-looking hats marching toward me, led by a black man beating a drum. “An artist's model,” said Nadar later, and he burst out laughing when I described this along with the strange spectacles of the morning: a confectioner's shop where a caricature of Louis Philippe, the king known for his umbrella and his head shaped like a pear, was depicted as a circus performer, swinging, as I did, on a high bar above a curious mob. Then there were the small groups planting a tree of liberty, with church dignitaries joining in and giving their blessing to the republic; and the dozens of deputations on their way to the Hotel de Ville, each one demanding a cure for their complaints. “The king abdicated early this morning,” Nadar says as he pulls the wrinkled, frowning visages of the new politicians and their leaders from the developing fluid in the dark part of his long room. “Don't you pay any attention to the present, little Adèle?” And he looked at me tenderly, but with a sadness that makes me ashamed. How could I tell him I was bored and exasperated by the talk of Jenny and Jeanne and the shouting voice of the man who calls himself the Citizen, and whom they per
mitted to lie on my trundle bed all day while I am at the Funambules. “Louis Blanc is a Utopian!” “Blanqui is dangerous” “Ledru-Rollin just isn't up to the job!”—the old man's words ring in my ears long after he has been persuaded to stagger from my narrow couch and go and sit in the tiny kitchen behind Jenny's room.

“I come here to see
you,
” I say quietly to Nadar; and his eyes flicker with amusement at the ease with which I slide away from the realities of history, just now in the process of being made in the streets of Paris. “You're born to be an acrobat,” says Nadar, “but if you don't become part of the present, one day you'll fall off the trapeze right into it. Do you understand what I mean? What aren't you facing, Adèle? Why do you live the life of someone who no longer exists?”

I suppose I had always known this would happen one day. Now, as I go over the scene again and again in memory—the last twenty-four hours seeming like a month or a year, and sometimes much longer, when I appear to be with Nadar in his studio even before my departure for the grim, dark north of England—I see him standing as he so often does, by the sloping window in the long, raftered studio, a dripping photographic plate in his hand. He is smiling down at the emerging features of his latest sitter, but he is, I know, also looking hard at me; and I can feel my own face become a part of the artist's close scrutiny. In my half-dream, half-memory I go over to Nadar, and I look down at the plate and see myself there, the tears from my passionate grief pouring down into the bath Nadar keeps under the window so he can lie, as he tells me, and look out at the sparrows on the rooftops as he bathes. “Is it true?” I say in my memory-dream, just as I said it in real life only yesterday, the day the king left the throne of France and the republic was declared.

“Yes,” Nadar says. “It is true. Your mother's friends couldn't bring themselves to tell you. Céline Varens is dead.”

Of course, I imagine I'll wake up at this point. Either it's a hot
day in Nadar's studio—the sun beats hard on the roof just above, and the long room bakes in summer, so the smell of the chemicals can bring on a migraine or hallucinations—or I've fallen at last from the high bar and lie unconscious on the floor of the stage of the Funambules. In neither case does anyone come to my rescue: old Placide, surely, would have rushed to see how badly I'd hurt myself; and Nadar, used to my tumbles in the old days when he looked after me for a day or more, would hardly ignore me like this. But neither the clown who plays Cassandra nor the caricaturist who now scrumples up his recent drawings of the pear-faced king as dog or leech comes to my aid.

This is how I know it really is true: it's the unbearable truth that no one can alleviate or dismiss. The death of the child's mother—I see, as I walk slowly, arms outstretched as if trying to balance, a novice on the
corde
I have trained now to obey the slightest shift in weight—I see the stern gaze of Pierrot, in his mute refusal to break the news to me. I see Jenny, absent and distant in her own state of heartbreak: for Jenny now there is no Céline, there can only be politics, revolution, change. And as I stumble into Nadar's arms I sob at last.

Nadar told me, finally, of the death of Maman. He hadn't been with her: “I heard she was ill, in Italy,” he says, and averts his gaze from me, as we sit now at the long refectory table in his studio, where utopians and artists can still come and toast the future, and Céline never can be again. “I should have gone to her,” Nadar says, and it is the first time I have heard in his voice remorse, he who loves the
ricanement,
the sneer at the rich and pompous, and has no space left in him for pity or compassion. “But I was so busy with all this….” And he waves helplessly at the pictures of forgotten men and the caricatures of the newly famous; all, he goes on to say in a low voice, of no importance, compared to his great love and affection for Céline.