by Perrat, Liza
The inmates’ breathing slowed to gentle snores but, as small things crept and gnawed through the straw beneath me, my eyes stayed wide open, staring into the blue slice of light.
To remain in the dungeons would have meant certain death, but survival here in the prison seemed hardly possible either. I knew, like crops struck by drought, I would quickly wither and die.
***
The chapel bell clanging through the fog signalled the end of Mass. The chill November morning hovered between dawn and day, as two keepers took me to the kitchens for my first working day.
Up to the end of my time in the dungeons, I’d been too ill to contemplate escape; too sick to think of anything besides surviving. Now, outdoors once again, thoughts of fleeing the asylum flitted through my mind.
I glanced around, my brain spinning with ideas to get past the asylum’s guard of soldiers and corporals. Perhaps to the left of the main courtyard, via the workshops and housing for the wheelwrights, locksmiths, cobblers and carpenters. Or the lodgings of those who watched over us — the keepers, guards and sister officers. Was there was a way out through the stables or the wheat granaries? Or could I hide in a cart that transported sick women and children to and from the city hospital?
The carts came every day, full of young girls with labels attached to their bonnets, stating their name, age and dormitory. Older women too, were aboard, their labels attached to their right sleeve. In the split second the cart governess might turn her head, I would jump down, unseen, into the crowded Paris street.
I shook my head. The cart governess would never turn her head, constantly watching for women exchanging their labels, ripping them from sleeves, or jumping from the cart. Despair wracked me. For the poor with no money, no connections, escape was unthinkable.
The smell told me we’d reached the kitchen, and I dismissed all notions of fleeing the asylum.
‘Peel those vegetables,’ a stout woman barked, wielding a knife. ‘Then you can stuff the chickens.’
‘Marinade the beef!’ another barked at me.
‘Non, non, imbecile, cabbage is not cut like that,’ a beak-nosed woman snapped.
More people began shouting orders at me, all at the same time so I could barely understand any of them. The noise was worse than all the bells of Paris clanging at once. I flinched against the din, trying not to retch on the smell of boiled cabbage and mutton fat, or to faint with hunger, which seemed even worse surrounded by food.
‘And don’t be tempted to eat the slightest morsel,’ a sister officer said. ‘I’ll be watching you, and if one crumb passes those lips, your punishment will be the dungeons for twenty four hours. Understood?’
I nodded. ‘Oui, madame.’
I learned quickly how to make the daily gruel — thin and bland with much the same odour as the drains and the barnyard located next to the asylum orphanage. Once the food for patients and prisoners was prepared, I helped cook the meals for la Salpêtrière personnel, who ate in a vast dining room, and for the few wealthy prisoners who could pay for decent food and water.
Blasts of muggy air and hours of inhaling the smells of untouchable food made my heart beat quick and thready, and many times throughout the long day, my legs trembled and I feared I might collapse. That sister officer’s eyes never left me.
***
‘Allez, lazy whore,’ the keepers said when my kitchen day was finally over. ‘Back to your cell.’
The scent of woodsmoke prickled my nostrils; the food smells lingering in my clothes taunting my taste buds. I licked my numb lips as I slithered across the icy cobblestones under the keepers’ firm grip.
Back in the dormitory, Agathe was beside me again.
‘What did you bring me from the kitchen, chérie?’ she said with her cracked grin.
I shook my head, opening my empty palms.
‘What, nothing? Hold the bitch, Marie-Françoise.’
As the tall, God-cursing woman restrained me, Agathe pinched and twisted my nipples again.
‘Stop, please, stop!’ I begged.
‘Next time you’ll bring me something nice, eh, Victoire?’ Agathe said, pus leaking from her lip sores. ‘A slice of beef or a plump chicken breast, perhaps?’
‘Surely you could hide some leftovers?’ Julie said, her gypsy face locked in a nest of black curls.
‘Anything?’ Catherine, one of the poisoner women, said.
I shook my head. ‘Please, leave me alone. I cannot get you anything. They watch me constantly. All the food, even the scraps, are checked and recorded in the register. I’m s-s-sorry.’
‘What a shame,’ Agathe said, ‘because s-s-sorry isn’t good enough.’
I closed my eyes and let her blows batter my body, undefended. Until I could think of a way out of la Salpêtrière, it was easier not to fight.
23
The tawny November fog lifted but the clear, more frigid air of December seemed to freeze in my lungs. Vicious as a keeper’s whip, snowstorms beat against the austere walls of la Salpêtrière’s vast buildings and outhouses, their grime staining the snow brown.
Throughout that icy winter in the asylum, the mournful nocturnal cries of the desperate grew louder as the cold claimed its victims. They removed the multitude of women and girls who perished, their bodies shovelled together in the foetid necropolis of Paris, like old dogs. I hugged myself and prayed for their wretched souls.
As I diced vegetables, stirred soup and baked meat, fish and dark bread, I often recalled cooking at L’Auberge des Anges. I saw my beloved Armand laughing with the inn guests, pouring his wine. ‘A toast to our good health!’ he said, raising his beaker.
I smiled as tiny twin footsteps, and those of their sister, Madeleine, scurried about, their shrieks of glee drowning the older voices of Léon and his siblings. I hoped somehow, they had rekindled the spark of L’Auberge des Anges.
What had become of Léon? Remarried, no doubt. Grégoire and Françoise’s children — Emile and Mathilde — must have grown so. There would be more children by now. I prayed they were taking good care of my little Madeleine — that she was so entranced with my brother’s tales she wouldn’t be suffering my absence.
I blinked away the pain that scissored my head when I let myself reflect on all I’d been forced to leave for this prison life.
As I moved through my day, from Mass to the kitchen, then back to the dormitory for evening prayer and Agathe’s hell, I wondered how much longer I could continue such an existence.
***
The snow finally melted. I had survived the winter. The distant sun moved closer and cast the asylum buildings in an insipid yellow. From my barred existence I heard no spring birdsong though, as if the birds avoided this forgotten place where trees barely grew, where flowers struggled to blossom and where, behind its sombre facade, the women were abandoned to die.
Most mornings, as the keepers herded us to the chapel, I wrenched my eyes from the grim dormitories that housed la Salpêtrière’s orphanage and the school for poor and abandoned children. I feared, amongst the knot of orphans, I might perceive a girl — a lovely child with the same green eyes and cinnamon hair as mine. A girl who was six years old, by the name of Rubie.
That sharp March morning, from my place in the pews of the Saint-Louis Chapel, I couldn’t stop my eyes from straying to the lines of children, and their governesses, leading them into the great domed building.
The two ordered ranks, all dressed in white — child brides from la Salpêtrière and child grooms from la Pitié — slowly advanced towards the altar, coming together for la bénédiction nuptiale. Against the noise of hymns, the deep stride of organ music, their weak ‘oui’ spiralled with the incense smoke, evaporating into nothingness.
In that single morning, I witnessed about sixty such “marriages”, and as the newly-wed children departed for the boat at Le Havre, I looked into their frightened eyes, wide with the helplessness of young victims.
No, no, my Rubie cannot be among them, I kept t
elling myself. She is not being brought up to be placed for work, or married off to populate some far-off colony in Madagascar, Louisiana or Canada.
That afternoon, perhaps because my thoughts were full of Rubie, I yearned to feel the soft innocence of an infant.
‘I would like to help out in the nursery,’ I said to the sister officer. ‘For the break after prayers, until my kitchen tasks resume.’
The sister officer agreed, of course. Continually short of hands, the nourrices were not fussy about the help proffered — even that of a woman imprisoned for child murder.
I stood before hundreds of barred cradles aligned in numbered rows. Not a soul cared for these motherless bundles whose wails and whimpers echoed off the bare stone walls. I gaped, too stunned; too sad to speak. I wanted to hold, to love, all of them — these babies of girls who had no money, no standing. No choice.
Moving down a line, from one bundle to the next, I began changing their soiled nappies. The dried excrement and their raw, blistered skin told me the infants were rarely changed.
A nourrice instructed me to feed several, from a bottle of milk, which I did, holding them close, cooing soft noises at one nameless cherub face after the other.
‘No point getting attached,’ the nourrice said. ‘We only keep them for a week. Then they’ll be shipped out to the country.’
‘The country?’ I said. ‘But why?’
‘Farmed out to wet-nurses,’ she said. ‘Though most won’t survive the journey — five or six to a basket stuffed with straw, and hitched to a mule.’
I thought of Rubie on those church steps and how I’d imagined matron would simply take her to her foundling hospital and raise her there, and find good parents for her. I knew nothing of this farming out to the country.
My poor Rubie. Never would I have left you in the basket, but what was a penniless, sullied scullery maid to do? No, no, stop. Don’t think like that. Rubie has found a good home, a loving maman and papa who dress her prettily on Sundays for Mass and let her wear my angel pendant.
After I fed the babies, I wrapped and lay them back in their stained cots. Some screamed, some cried weakly, others lay still, too feeble to make any noise at all. From the smell, I also knew that several were dead, though nobody had bothered, or had the time, to remove them to some common grave.
I picked up the next baby, a little girl. One arm had wriggled free from the cocoon wrapping. As I touched the hand, tiny fingers closed around my thumb, gripping it with surprising force.
‘Petite chérie,’ I crooned. ‘You cannot be much more than a day old.’
As I stared into her perfect face, the unsuspecting eyes, the unbounded sadness of my own past, and the terrible assaults of prison life, clogged my brain.
I rocked her gently and shut my eyes. The river washed over me, its force sweeping my feet from the murky bed. I tried to clutch at ferns, a rock, a sprig of leaves, but my hands kept slipping, the current dragging me downstream. In their little white shifts, Blandine and Gustave swirled with me.
As my babies disappeared, my eyes flew open and a horrible light broke inside me — a flash so fierce it both terrified and calmed me.
Darkness snuffed out the light — the same creeping darkness that had brought me to the asylum; a sadness so familiar it had seemed almost like a friend I’d clung to in those first terrible weeks of the dungeons. It had somehow been easier, sheathed in madness, than to be lucid, and comprehend the terrifying reality of les cachots.
‘Poor child,’ I whispered to the infant I cradled, seeing at once its destiny laid bare. ‘Misery only, watches over your cradle.’
I looked around. The nourrices were busy. Nobody paid me the slightest attention.
‘How simple it would be,’ I murmured, ‘to lift the length of my dress and press it over your beautiful face.’ I surged with gladness. ‘Would it not be simpler to relieve you of your suffering now, before it only gets worse?’
A sister officer marched up to me and snatched the baby from my arms. ‘Time to get back to the kitchen, you.’
***
On that first day of June, the cobblestones trapped the heat and threw up the stench of putrefying food, diseased flesh and unwashed bodies. The whole of la Salpêtrière stank like one great rotted mass.
As they escorted me from the kitchen back to my cell, I watched old scabies-ridden women scraping up scraps of onions and cabbage from the courtyard. The keepers’ foetid odour snagged in my nostrils and sweat dripped into my eyes. I ran my furry tongue over dry lips.
‘That Diamond Necklace trial is over,’ the fat keeper said.
‘What happened?’ asked the other, thin one.
‘It’s all here,’ the fat one said, flapping the newspaper about with the hand not restraining me. ‘Front page news!’
‘Well, read it to me, man,’ the thin one said.
The fat keeper thrust his newspaper at him. ‘You read it.’
‘I can read,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you what it says.’
The fat one shoved his paper at me. ‘Go on then, smart whore.’
‘“In a sensational trial the thirty-year old con artist and brains behind the Diamond Necklace Affair, Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la Motte, was condemned to be whipped and branded in public, then interred for life in the Prison Quarter of la Salpêtrière”,’ I read. ‘“After having accepted the Parlement de Paris as judges, the Cardinal de Rohan was acquitted, and exiled by the King. The prostitute Nicole Leguay d’Oliva and the charlatan, Cagliostro, were also acquitted. In his absence, after his probable escape to England with the necklace, Jeanne’s husband, Count Nicolas de la Motte was condemned to the galleys for life.”’
The following day, the asylum quaked with two pieces of news. Firstly, a new Sister Superior had been appointed.
‘Some rich old bitch,’ Agathe said.
‘Only the wealthy and well-connected get that position,’ Marie-Françoise said with a sneer.
The other news rippling through the dormitories was of the famous Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, and her pending imprisonment in la Salpêtrière’s Prison Quarter.
‘They say she fought so hard when they whipped her that five torturers had to hold her,’ Julie said.
‘And she writhed about so, the hot iron slipped and they burned the voleuse “V” into her breast instead of her shoulder,’ Toinette said.
‘Bet she’s still got them diamonds,’ Agathe said. ‘I don’t think she’ll mind sharing some with me, n’est-ce pas, Victoire?’
‘Or she sold them and we’ll get a load of sous out of her,’ Marie-Françoise said. The two women cackled and Agathe hacked a gob of green phlegm at my feet.
But none of my fellow prisoners got to meet la Comtesse de la Motte. Two keepers came to our dormitory and hauled me away.
‘Where are you taking me?’
The men remained wordless as they hurried me across courtyards into another part of the vast prison, and pushed me into a private cell.
Clothed in a black silk dress, a woman sat on the blanketed bed. How regal she looked, trying to hold her back straight when I knew it must be stinging from the whip burns.
From beneath a dark lace net that covered most of her face, she smiled, stretching one hand out to me.
‘Sister Superior informs me you are an intelligent, literate woman, just as I requested. I am very happy to welcome you as my personal maid, Victoire.’
My hand clamped in the warm grip of the most-talked about woman in the country, I sensed a confidence; a subtle power. Bathed in the dark luminous eyes, I glimpsed a hint of the enigma that shrouded Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy.
24
‘Why have you never told me of this scandal, ma chère?’
I was still far from discovering everything about Jeanne de Valois, but I had learned much about her in the three months as her personal maid. I knew this look, reflected in the mirror, and the way the vein bulged in her temple — the signs that belied her mute rage of all
the violations, every malfeasance occasioned against a commoner, which Jeanne seemed to suffer as her own.
As she twisted about to face me, her swathe of dark hair knocked the hairbrush from my hand. The brush clattered to the floor. I bent to retrieve it and began brushing Jeanne’s hair again, my strokes charged with rhythm and purpose.
Jeanne clasped my free hand. ‘Don’t tell me you never said anything because you felt ashamed, Victoire? That you believe the behaviour of this marquis was your fault?’
‘Perhaps I never spoke of it,’ I said, still brushing, ‘because I was trying to forget. I had hoped it would fade with time, but whenever I let myself think back, the memories of those nights are as fresh as ever.’
Barely pausing for breath, I told Jeanne the rest, my voice faltering only when I reached the part about abandoning Rubie.
‘I wrapped her in kitchen rags.’ I put the hairbrush aside and folded my arms. ‘I left her in a basket on the church steps.’
I felt Jeanne’s hand on my shoulder. ‘I am glad, ma chère that you have shared this with me. Now, give me the name of the vile libertine.’
I shook my head. ‘Claudine — that’s Cook, my friend — said I must not think of vengeance, but how can’t I? He strangled a girl. Perhaps if I’d spoken up that maid would still have her life.’
‘I understand why you said nothing, Victoire, you needed to keep your position, but that’s no longer the case and this depraved man must be stopped,’ Jeanne said. ‘I am certain you don’t wish him to go on murdering innocent girls. Now you must tell me, who is this so ignoble noble?’
‘Alphonse Donatien Delacroix, Marquis de Barberon,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘I despise him; I hate all nobles, and what they stand for, but as much as I crave revenge, I fear it is impossible. Claudine says commoners will never triumph over powerful nobles.’
Jeanne tossed her head. ‘Ppfft. Times are changing, ma chère. Those aristocrats will soon topple from their mighty pillars, and I am sure, like me, you will be there, laughing when they fall flat on their powdered noses. Besides, there is none more powerful in this country than la Comtesse Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy!’