The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment

by Therese Doucet

  I told Aurore about the bookshop in Annecy and the philosophical evenings the pastor used to organize there, where only men were allowed and most of them dressed in dark sober suits and smoked and talked of theological disputes. I still wasn’t sure whether she would consider it “going too far” that I had come to live with the Marquis in the way I had, so I told her only about how I had fallen in love with the Book of the Rose and hidden my poems in its pages, and how I had thought them lost when the shop was sold, but then they were recovered in the Marquis’s library, which had led to my invitation to Boisaulne.

  “Ah, I wondered if you might be one of Ulysse’s protégées.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ulysse. He’s my friend who also writes poetry, as I mentioned. He has a bit of a habit of finding young women of talent and taking them under his wing. I don’t inquire too closely about what else he does with them. But he rescues them from whatever poor circumstances they’re struggling in and launches them into the world.”

  “Really? And do the young women succeed?” This sounded suspiciously like what my Marquis had claimed he intended to do with me.

  “Well, he’s very well-connected. Ulysse knows everyone worth knowing, which makes it rather impressive that he’s managed to keep quiet about the secret of Boisaulne. So, yes, I’d say they’ve gone on to be successful. There was a stunning actress from Genève whom he helped onto the Paris stage. Then there was a girl from Lyon who painted the most delicate and intricate designs on silk. A dancer from the Paris Opera … and before her a rather odd girl who sang in the chorus but had taught herself to compose music. Ulysse helped her get some of her work performed at court under a pseudonym. It was quite the little drama.”

  “What happened to the girls afterwards?” I asked, as we paused at the side of the path to admire a rosebush with flowers of an unusual lavender shade. “I suppose he didn’t marry any of them?”

  “No. They went on to other lovers, or they found rich husbands. They generally ended happily, except for the dancer, who was taken with consumption and had to retire from performing. I do wonder – in fact, I remember it was Harlequin who introduced Ulysse to a few of the girls. He invited the actress and the silk girl here, specifically for Ulysse to make their acquaintance. Perhaps he intended you for Ulysse as well? It’s possible.”

  I thought back to the words of Madame Jacquenod in the village of Maisnie-la-Forêt, “It’s a long time since I saw him bring a woman through here.” Perhaps those were the women she had spoken of, women for this gentleman Ulysse, rather than for his master the Marquis.

  “Aurore, can I ask you something? Do you know if there’s a back way that goes out from the manor? When you came here, did you arrive by way of the village?”

  “Yes, there’s a back way. If you come from Genève, or from Grenoble, as I did one summer, you might come through the village. But to go to and from Paris, there’s a shortcut that goes out from behind the stable. It goes around behind the house and then down into a little grotto under the spring that feeds into the fountain, though you can’t see it from the garden. You’ve seen how there’s magic here, so perhaps you’ll believe me that it only takes a few hours to reach Paris with the Marquis’s horses. Inside the grotto, there’s an entrance to an underground tunnel. If you ride through the tunnel for an hour or two, you end up in the old abandoned quarries under the streets of Paris. The exit from the quarries at the other end is hidden behind a stable at the back of Harlequin’s property near the Luxembourg Gardens. Of course, on the ordinary roads, in an ordinary diligence or carriage, it might take as long as a week to reach Savoy.”

  “How extraordinary,” I murmured, half to myself.

  We returned to the manor and parted ways, Aurore to rest and write letters and I to read in the library.

  

  As many rooms as there were in the manor, the library was my favorite, for through the books even more rooms opened in my mind, and I felt the least confined there of all the corners in my great gilded prison, curled up on a sofa before the fire with a book. After a couple of hours of reading, though, I wanted to stretch my limbs. I went into the music room to take a turn around it, and my eye was caught by small lovely details I hadn’t noticed before in the antique instruments and paintings on display. There was a mandolin I hadn’t realized was inlaid with a design of flowers in different colors of wood, with mother-of-pearl petals that glowed in the dim afternoon light. I touched its strings, the smooth taut sinews pressing lines into my fingertips. When my eyes had taken their fill of it, I returned to the library. I was no longer alone there. A man stood at one of the windows, pushing the muslin shade aside to gaze out at the view over the garden and mountainside.

  My heartbeat quickened. Could it be M. du Herle who had returned? But why did I tremble so at the thought of meeting him again? Perhaps it was that I hadn’t laid eyes on a man in weeks, in spite of Thérion’s visits in the dark.

  I was almost beside him before he heard my soft footsteps on the rug. He stood up from his position of leaning over the windowsill, turned to face me, and leaned back against the sill in a languid manner, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world for him to encounter strange women in remote châteaux in the forest. I ought to have known at once it wasn’t M. du Herle, for I remembered then that M. du Herle had dressed in dark and sober clothes. This gentleman wore a suit of pale lilac embroidered with gold threads and had clearly lavished some attention on his appearance. He raised an eyebrow as I approached and quirked up a corner of his mouth in a half-smile. Though he must have been five or ten years older than I was, his face had a softness and feminine beauty to it, fair and slightly fey, that made him seem young.

  “Are you Belle-me?” he asked. He looked me up and down. “I think it can only be you.”

  “Monsieur?” I wasn’t sure whether to feel offended or not by the way his eyes lingered over my figure.

  “Donatien, at your service.” He bowed. “I saw Aurore earlier, and she said she’d christened you with that nom de guerre. I should have said simply Belle, myself. You are the Savoyard girl, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m Savoyard.”

  “So Harlequin’s lured a mountain poetess to us. Well done. Enchanting. I’ve been known to indulge in the occasional bit of verse myself.”

  “Oh, have you published any books?”

  “Me? Oh no. It wouldn’t do for someone in my position. That looks too much like work. It’d spoil my reputation, you know.”

  So he was an aristocrat. Since he already knew my origins, I decided I might as well speak openly. “I don’t have a reputation to worry about, but I think I should feel embarrassed to have my poems published. It’s not that I’m ashamed of them – well, not of all of them. It’s only, I’ve put so much of myself into some of them. I’d feel … exposed, I think.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Exposed? They bare your soul, you mean. Luckily I’ve no soul to worry about being revealed through my writing. What I seem on the surface is exactly what I am. But I write my verses chiefly for the amusement of my friends, whenever I’m struck with a fit of thinking myself witty.”

  We talked about our favorite poems and strolled around the library, pausing at volumes that one or the other of us had read. He favored light and humorous verses and was a great admirer of Molière’s comedies. As we moved on from one of the bookcases, he placed a hand on the small of my back. I didn’t know the habits of aristocrats, except from books in which they tended to be always either debauched or else romantic heroes. Thérion, with his nocturnal habits, could hardly be a typical example of his class. But it seemed to me Donatien was taking a liberty, so I moved away.

  An inscrutable expression came over his face. Then an instant later he was pleasant again. “What do you think so far of the Castle of Enlightenment, our Forteresse des Lumières?”

  “The … what? You mean Boisaulne?”

  “It’s my own little nickname for the place, the Castle
of Enlightenment, because the intellectual lights of Paris come here to take in the mountain air. It’s a funny place. I’ve heard the most rational talk here in summers past. It makes me think of what Saint Paul says, When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

  He quoted the passage in Latin, and I translated it out loud into French to make sure I’d understood.

  “Very good,” he said. “Why, you’ve studied. I’ve an uncle who’s an abbé, who insisted I learn. It wasn’t entirely dull, reading in the Vulgate. Extraordinary what licentiousness some of the men and women of scripture get up to. But at any rate, I think of what Saint Paul said, since children and families and all the irrational business that goes along with them are non grata here. And there’s the other rule, that we don’t speak during the day of the things we do in the night.”

  “I hadn’t heard that one.”

  He waved it off. “You’ll hear it. The point is, none of our talk is supposed to be shaped by the accidents of birth or fortune, or the vagaries of fate, since we leave our names and identities behind when we come here. We’re stripped down to our naked ideas and intellects – ‘exposed,’ as you say. And yet, and yet …” He shook a reproving finger at the fireplace across the room. “There’s so little that’s rational about the fact that this place exists at all. It’s mad and magical. We have these odd rules, and none of us has ever seen the Marquis. He could be any one of us in reality. He could be me, couldn’t he? And no one would be any the wiser. So despite the idea that our talk should be enlightening, our ideas all brought out from obscurity and examined pitilessly from every angle, the place and the people in it are shrouded in mystery. There’s a dark side to the Castle of Enlightenment. It’s my sense of irony that makes me take pleasure in calling it that. You see?”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Never mind.” He laughed. “It’s not important.”

  I examined Donatien anew and tried to imagine him as Thérion, my Beast who came to me in the night. But his voice was different, more purring than Thérion’s. Somehow, too, I realized I had been picturing Thérion with an ugly face, nothing like the fair, angular one before me. I excused myself to go back upstairs to my chambers to rest before dressing for dinner. At least now I would have company to dress for.

  VIII

  Aurore had told me she would be in the great hall at eight o’clock. In Paris, people often dined later, she said, but she was an early riser and preferred to dine at a more reasonable hour. I didn’t tell her how in the village we often went to bed just as her Parisian friends were beginning their suppers.

  I changed my mind repeatedly about what to wear and how to do my hair. At first I put on the most formal dress in my wardrobe, a dark maroon velvet affair with a stiff, narrow bodice and a wide skirt with a train, elevated by paniers on the sides, so beautiful I imagined one might wear it to meet the King of Sardinia or to be presented in the court of France. It set off my dark hair dramatically, but I felt ridiculous and could barely breathe or sit down in it. I would be overdressed, and they would think I was trying too hard. Instead I picked out a green silk gown à l’anglaise with a narrower cut that flattered my figure and brought out the green in my eyes. Then I remembered Donatien’s hand on my back and how uncomfortable it had made me, and I was afraid of seeming to want to attract further attention from him. I tried on and rejected other ensembles for being too flowery, too plain, and too severe. At last I returned to the one I had worn the most often to my solitary dinners, a comfortable dress in the loose deshabillé fashion, in cornflower blue, embellished with silk flowers in pink and cream.

  My indecision nearly made me late, and by the time I reached the great hall there was a whole company of people in it, just sitting down to eat. An empty place was set at the end of the table and I hastened toward it.

  “Belle-me, you’re just in time,” Aurore said from her seat in the center of the group.

  “Belle-me? Is that her surnom now?” asked a deep voice to my right. I turned and registered that I was sitting next to M. du Herle.

  “It wasn’t my idea,” I said. “It was Aurore’s compliment to me after we made each other’s acquaintance this morning.”

  “It suits you well, I think. It’s good to see you again. You’ve settled in properly here now it seems.”

  “Yes, thank you, I’ve been very comfortable.” There was so much I wanted to say to him. You didn’t warn me about how it would be here. You didn’t tell me I’d be surrounded by magic and luxury, waited on by invisible servants. You didn’t tell me I’d be so strangely alone and yet not alone, wooed by a lover who comes to me like eerie and marvelous dreams in the night. But it seemed out of place to say such things to him then and there. “Were you in Paris most of the time, ever since I saw you last?”

  “I’ve been a little bit here and there and all around.”

  A gentleman seated across from me cleared his throat, and M. du Herle said, “But of course, there are introductions to be made. Everyone, this is Belle-me.” The chatter around the table died down as the others turned to listen. “She was discovered in a marvelous antique copy of the Book of the Rose in Annecy. She’d placed her poems in the book’s pages and then I acquired the book for the Marquis’s library.”

  My cheeks burned as this announcement was met with smiles and nods around the table. He went on to introduce the others. The ugly gentleman across from me, his wig disheveled and his clothes ill-fitting, was a Scottish historian and philosopher. His pasty face and beaked nose were stamped with the deep lines of an imp’s features.

  “Everyone just calls me the Scotsman,” he said. “Makes things easier since there’s no mistaking me, and I’m proud enough of my country I take honor in it.” He spoke mostly-correct French, but with harsher consonants and longer vowels than ours.

  The woman next to him was Séléné, the friend of whom Aurore had spoken. I regarded her with keen curiosity. Her body was shorter and plumper and her face had plainer, harsher features than I had imagined. Her coiffure of short black curls framing her face accentuated the severity of her looks. She had also rouged her cheeks, lips, and eyelids to a degree that seemed gauche to me, though for all I knew it was the fashion in Paris.

  Donatien sat next to her, his lips and cheeks rouged as well, and across from him was Aurore. Donatien and Aurore could almost have been brother and sister. Both of them were blond and blue-eyed, though Donatien’s relaxed posture gave an impression of coiled strength, while Aurore seemed so delicate it was a wonder her hands didn’t drop from her slender wrists like petals from a rose. On Donatien’s other side was a pretty, sturdy-framed girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with long, wavy red hair pulled back in a loose arrangement of ribbons and flowers. Her smile was sweet and entreating, as though she were about to cajole a bird from its cage to sing. Her green eyes were large and bright and her round cheeks freckled and pink. M. du Herle – but I recalled again that I must accustom myself to calling him Harlequin – introduced her by the surnom of Clio.

  “Clio’s the daughter of a fan painter in Paris who created some fine pieces for a woman friend of mine. Her father taught her painting, and as it turns out, she’s an exciting talent, even at her young age. I’ve no doubt that in a few years, if she works hard and has the proper backing, she could well merit being admitted to the Royal Academy.”

  “La, a new woman painter in the Academy!” said Séléné. “Wouldn’t that be a fine thing? It’s enchanting to make your acquaintance.”

  Clio sat across from a gentleman of perhaps five and thirty with a sad, sensitive expression and beautiful deep-set eyes. He wore a short tradesman’s wig and dressed simply, without ostentation of any kind, though even from the other end of the table I noticed that his linen shirt was of fine material and had been carefully washed and pressed.

  “Here we have a true Renaissance man,” Harlequin said. “Not what he does, b
ut what doesn’t he do, that’s more the question. A composer of ambitious musical works. An inventor of a novel form of musical notation. A student of the science of botany. The author of several influential philosophical essays and a novel. Since this is his first time at Boisaulne, it’s still necessary to choose a name for him.”

  “You’re far too kind,” the man said. “I try my hand at many things and I’m not particularly good at any of them. I think I’d like to be called Tristan. The legend of him and Iseult was my favorite as a boy, and I always used to think I’d been born in the wrong time and ought to have been a knight.”

  “I like to think there’s no better place than Boisaulne to try being whatever legendary figure one’s always wanted to be, at least for a few weeks,” Harlequin said. “Last but not least, we come to Ulysse, who’s a legendary figure whether he wants to be or not. Aside from being a fulsome, and often fulminating, man of letters, he writes more letters and knows more people to write to than anyone else I know.”

  So this then, was Ulysse, the man in the crimson coat with the black mustache, long dark wig of curls, and thick black eyebrows. His animated expression reminded me of an actor in a traveling theater, like those I used to catch glimpses of sometimes in the market at Annecy.

  Ulysse laughed. “Thank you, my friend. And since you’ve announced everyone else but characteristically neglected to introduce yourself, I claim that honor.” He stood up and recited a poem in a flawed, uneven poetical meter with rhymes that didn’t quite work: