I gazed at the flock of sparrows picking at horse apples. “Sir Robert, there is no reason to hope.”
He glanced around in that gesture of secrecy that was becoming routine in Paris. In a low voice he said, “Comtesse, I didn’t mention this before. I feared you wouldn’t let me accompany you home safe to your brother. However, I would have returned here immediately.”
“But why?”
“The letters I wrote, remember them? They were to Pitt.”
He meant Sir William Pitt, and as everyone knew, it wasn’t King George who ruled England, but his Prime Minister, Sir William Pitt.
Sir Robert was whispering, “He’s sent a message that I’m to remain here in France and report directly to him, especially regarding the imprisonment of their French majesties. So you see, I am remaining. A kind of spy, what?” The Saxon blue eyes were bright with anticipation of adventure. “I have need for a cover, Comtesse, and that’s where you can help. Nobody will suspect me if I court a lovely French lady.”
“A subterfuge, no more?”
“Comtesse, you can’t stop a fellow from hoping.”
Iron wheels of the hired carriage clattered into the yard. As I left, Sir Robert was loudly explaining to the driver that he must remain, arumph, certain French ladies hold out exceptionally long.
As I walked to Rue Grand, my heart filled with love for André, my mind churning with the difficult words I must say to him, certainly I never considered that each step I took was leading me into a circle of danger.
Chapter Seven
I climbed the worn stairs. From behind numbered doors came odors. On the lower stories the expensive aroma of chicken simmering and beef à la mode, kidney beans and bacon as I rose higher. Though determined to conquer André, determined to forge a relationship of some kind with him, as I rose into the smells of cheaper food, my fears increased. What if he shouted at me to leave? What if the sight of me sickened him? Worse, what if he were totally indifferent? Worse yet, what if another woman answered the door?
The last question was one I didn’t have to worry long over. The porter’s wife, visibly disapproving of my white summer dress and large leghorn straw hat trimmed with broad emerald ribbons, had told me that André lived on the top floor. I rapped and got no answer.
So I perched, waiting, on the top step. A slant of dusty sunshine from the skylight bathing me, I nervously folded and refolded his Open Letter.
My fingers were black with printers’ ink when footsteps jogged up the stairwell. I rose, smoothing my skirt, using the backs of my hands to avoid dirtying the silky white muslin. I wished my clothing more austere, less reminiscent of elegant women strolling in perfumed gardens. And for the first time, I realized that regretful misery for the Comte had numbed me to the conventions of mourning. I’d never once given a thought to widow’s weeds.
André saw me. He halted. As he gazed through dusty sunlight at me, his face seemed to turn to marble. I could scarcely breathe, much less speak. At the window overhead a dove fluttered, darting shadows over us.
André was changed. Oh, he still had the small scar above the arched, narrow Roman nose, the same look of fine breeding. But from his deep-set gray eyes radiated small lines, and below were deep, almost purple shadows. He was different from the poetic boy I’d loved to desperation. He was leaner, harder looking. A strong man with wary and tormented eyes. My emotions were so intense that I went faint.
He broke the silence. “What are you doing here?”
I held out the sharply creased paper. “I read this.”
My calm voice might have come from another, far more poised woman. My heart, though, lurched.
“I heard you were in Paris. Goujon mentioned that you’d reconciled with your husband—in time for his well-earned execution.” That odd, atypical jealousy toward the Comte tinged André’s cold voice.
The numb shock of seeing this altered, tormented-looking André left me. Raw grief ached in my chest. “There are some,” I said, and my tone was icy, “who consider the Comte a great man. Or haven’t you heard of his death? His soldiers risked much to give him a last cheer. And whatever happened between the Comte and me is none of your concern.”
André’s expression altered subtly. “I go further than that,” he said. “None of your affairs are my concern, Comtesse.”
That grief aching in the nerves around my heart reminded me that time and life are fleeting. “I’m Manon,” I said in a muted tone.
The dove fluttered more shadows. “I’ve been at the printer’s all night,” André said. “This afternoon I address the Assembly. So what do you want?”
“Can’t we talk in your rooms?”
“Five minutes is all I can spare,” he said. His eyes were colder than I imagined they could be. I shrank back as he passed to unlock his door.
One wall slanted sharply with the roofline and the window overlooked a narrow brick courtyard. André stepped forward to pull a skimpy velour curtain, hiding another room, but not before I glimpsed a narrow wooden cot of the type used by servants.
He turned, studying me. “So you’re living with the Englishman.”
His tone was coldest metal, but my heart gave a small lurch. This was his second sign of jealousy, and jealousy meant his indifference was feigned.
“He’s not my lover.”
“Well, either way, it’s not my business.” He sat at a desk piled with letters, papers, books. He occupied himself with straightening the mess. “What did you wish to say to me?”
“The Open Letter’s beautifully written. And brave.”
“Brave? Over four thousand human beings, most of them innocent of any crime, are slaughtered, and you call publishing a letter about this fact brave?”
“You’re the only one who’s made a protest,” I said.
Abruptly André asked, “Why did you leave him, the Comte?”
My expression changed as I remembered the vast empty salon with its lovely panels painted by Fragonard and Goujon’s deep voice telling me that my presence in France endangered André’s reputation.
“You tired of your husband, is that it? You craved lovers from another country?”
“I was pregnant,” I said in a flat, dead voice. “I still had mental blanks and we, the Comte and I, felt it safer for the child to be born in England. I miscarried on the Dover-Calais packet.”
“And then decided to remain with your English protector?”
“Jean-Pierre was ill. The doctor feared consumption.”
“I keep forgetting. Your brand of harlotry has to hide its name.”
“André, there’s only been you and the Comte.”
He held up his hand. “At least spare me the lies. No woman as beautiful as you leads a nun’s life.”
I twined my fingers. André’s cruelty sprang from far deeper wounds than I’d inflicted.
“You’ve congratulated me on my writing skills, so our business is done. And I have work.” He picked up a quill, opening the ink bottle. “Shut the door after you.”
I didn’t move. Taking a deep breath, I said, “André, I came here because I love you.”
He glanced up.
“I know my marriage hurt you,” I added.
“Your marriage is a matter of indifference to me. Now go back to your English lover.”
“I’ve told you. Sir Robert isn’t that” Desperation cracked my voice. “André, you care for me, in some way. I don’t know how, but you care. Else you wouldn’t take the trouble to be cruel.”
“Trouble? Cruel?” He gave a laugh. “You arrive in my rooms dressed and perfumed like what you are, an expensive trollop. It’s been long since I had a woman. I’m no more cruel than any man in need of a body.”
“Once you loved me.”
“Love is as great a lie as this Revolution. Men pretended to believe in the Rights of Man and decency. What they really wanted was to take the King’s powers for themselves. We said we loved each other, but from the moment I got in the coach, we lusted. No mo
re.”
Not true, I thought, drawing a deep breath. Not true.
“And now, as I told you, I need a woman. So let’s get down to it without the pretty lies.”
He stared at me as if I were selling myself in some loathsome, perverted brothel.
Tears stung behind my eyelids, but I refused to let myself weep. Hadn’t I told myself I’d accept any terms that André chose to dictate? Slowly I undid the top tiny satin button at my ruched gauze neckline.
Tilting back in his chair, André thrust his balled fists in his pockets, watching me. “Let’s see what the Comte de Créqui paid for with marriage.”
At the Comte’s name, my fingers stopped moving.
“Go ahead,” he ordered.
“No,” I replied. “André, I love you. But the Comte commanded respect and admiration. He’s not to be cheapened. I’ll play the prostitute, if that’s what you want. But I have my price, and that’s not talking about the Comte.”
André’s coldness faltered. He looked at me with those tormented eyes. I stared back. After a long minute he said, “Cheap enough. Now display your wares.”
Again I reached for the tiny buttons.
“Come here,” he commanded.
“Please, André, not this way. It was always sweet and loving for us.”
“I want you now,” he said harshly. As he strode across the room, he had to bend for the low ceiling. He pulled at my leghorn hat, the hatpin caught in my loose curls, and I winced as he yanked the hat free. He had the look of a man on the rack. Grasping my hair, he jerked my head until my breasts arched up. His hand tore at my bodice.
Despite his violence—or maybe because of it—I burned at his touch. My muscles trembled, and a wild need filled me. Never in my life had I felt such desire.
“Tell me how much you want this,” he muttered in a hoarse voice.
Looking into his shadowed eyes, I remembered how sweet and simple it used to be with us. A hurt deeper than my marriage to the Comte had changed André. His poet’s heart had been betrayed.
“I want you more than I need to breathe.” My arms encircled him.
He crushed me to him, his hard thighs pressing through my petticoats on either side of my legs, his body molded to mine. I caressed his shoulders, his firm back. He muttered purposefully obscene commands, André who never used foul language, and not waiting to undress me or himself, he caught me up in his arms, carrying me past the velour curtain. I gave a low, passionate moan. The narrow bed squeaked violently as he threw me down. Wordless, he pulled up my petticoats, yanked his breeches around his thighs and fell on me.
The act resembled one of his brief, furious rages.
André, whose noble dreams had bloomed into blood-drenched violence, used my body as a receptacle for his disillusionment. He thrust into me angrily, as if he were beating me. My hand flailed at his jacket, as if I were fighting back, but in reality the sensations inside me were too exquisite to bear, growing and swelling with each hard stroke, my frenzy increasing until even the arrival of a mob couldn’t have stopped my passion, and I was clutching at him, falling, tears at the corners of my eyes, falling, my body drenched in sweat, falling, crying out his name inarticulately, falling.…
We lay breathing loudly. He rolled onto his back, touching my side only because the cot was narrow.
After about ten minutes he recovered enough to say in a purposefully remote voice, “I’ll send for you whenever I need you.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll come here?”
“Yes.”
“And behave as you did now, as an ordinary trollop?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
I couldn’t believe either of us had spoken. For I knew as surely as I’d ever known anything that, whatever terms had been defined on this narrow bed, there was no way for either André or me to annul a fierce and unquenchable love.
That autumn life in Paris continued with the unease that comes after a violent earthquake. Food was scarce and difficult to buy. Arrests continued, and the guillotine gathered more victims. Jewelers now sold tiny replicas of the guillotine rather than crucifixes. There were rumors of spies. And, in the Assembly, the Jacobin Club grew more powerful.
The Théâtre Française continued to put on plays, there were performances at the Opéra, and park booths were set up for jugglers, acrobats, Punchinello and his puppet buffoonery. For a brief time audiences lost their expressions of fear.
Izette and I took lodgings on Rue St. Antoine, a large bottom-story room with two windows overlooking the vegetable garden. The previous tenant, a tutor who had emigrated with the family he served, had left his books, and Izette and I read when we had the time. Alas, not too often. We took turns standing in line for food. Izette laundered. I found work painting china.
Izette’s matter-of-fact friendship helped ease my grief, still raw, over the Comte’s death, and her common sense alleviated my anxiety at the sense of impending disaster that hovered everywhere in Paris.
Sir Robert, of course, protested that I must not live in such mean quarters, nor pursue so humble an occupation. He offered financial help. I, of course, refused. It came as a relief, however, to hear that Lady Gill had invited Jean-Pierre to live at Foxwarren.
“On the pretext of boning up on her French,” Sir Robert chuckled. “But I know Mother! She jumps at any chance she gets to fatten up a city dweller on Foxwarren cream and butter.”
“How good she is!” I cried with sincerity.
We were sitting on the window ledge. Izette was delivering laundry, and outside, the landlord’s wife picked leeks.
“Next time you send a secret pouch, will you enclose a letter from me to Jean-Pierre? I prefer not drawing attention to myself by mailing letters outside the country.”
“Of course I will. And you’re very wise.” He cleared his throat. “Manon, you mustn’t take this amiss. I’ve requested Pitt for English papers made out for Manon, Lady Gill.”
“Sir Robert, I can’t let you do that,” I cut in hastily.
“Nothing to do with, arrumph—still, a fellow can’t give up.” Sir Robert’s face burned crimson. “Think of the papers as a disguise hanging in my wardrobe, no more. The way this country’s going, you might be glad of English papers.”
“Sir Robert, you’re so very kind.” Touched, I spoke thickly, halting before I could say, “And Lady Gill has my deepest gratitude.”
“I shall write her so.”
That night as I lay beside the gently snoring Izette, I thought about Sir Robert. The big, hearty Englishman was openly offering me Foxwarren and a house in Leicester Square as well. He offered me his safe, sane country, he offered me his heart and his name. Despite his too boyish pleasure at intriguing in my poor, wracked land, he was a good, decent man. Most people would consider me quite mad for refusing him. And even madder for choosing a left-handed affair with André.
Leaves turned gold, brown, russet, and purple, and then quite suddenly the trees were bare. Icy drafts curled into our room.
I painted rococo flowers on soup plates, keeping close to the fire on which Izette heated her irons—and often it seemed incredible to me that Parisians still had fine linens to launder, still desired to buy painted crockery.
China decoration being a repetitive task, my mind was free to brood over André.
He remained utterly decent. Cruelty and deceit were alien to him, and he quickly forgot his anger-inflicted pretense that I was no more than a trollop to him. He never came to my lodgings, he never hinted at marriage, he never said he loved me. Yet, when we lay entwined on his narrow cot, he never denied that the wild sweetness between us had grown more powerful.
Out of bed, though, he was brusquely aloof.
In part I was able to attribute his remoteness to the intensity of his political life. In the Assembly André was leading the fight to permit the royal family to emigrate. This took enormous moral and physical courage, for now the Extremist deputies included some who could only be classified as
criminally insane. They screamed for royal blood. Furthermore, public sentiment ran high for the King and Queen to remain in France: many people, horrified by the September Massacres, clung to the security of their past; to them, the monarchy most deeply represented the old days, and so, like sacred relics, the King, the Queen, their little son and daughter, as well as Madame Elizabeth, the King’s younger sister, must be kept locked in the Temple. Attempting to free them, André worked obsessively among the deputies, who for the most part were reluctant to anger either the Extremists or the people.
The heightened sensitivity of love, though, told me that some of André’s aloofness came from deeper roots. To me, he was like a man suffering from a virulent form of leprosy that, rather than wasting the external body, eats away at the vital organs.
Once, lying snug in his arms, the fire in the other room casting a reddish glow over us, I asked, “André, can’t you tell me what it is that gnaws at you?”
“Isn’t that too obvious? I’m the worst kind of fool there is. The one who sets sail with high principles and then discovers himself unable to navigate the sea of reality. Before the Revolution I had a stupid dream of how it would be, a Constitution that proclaimed all men equal and free—I thought everything would be wondrous beautiful. And here I am, faced with a group of opportunists who for their own ugly ends wish harm on a kindly man and a foolish woman.”
I touched his chin. “It’s more than that.”
“That’s enough, isn’t it? I helped put them inside the Temple. And now, God alone knows what’ll happen to Louis and Marie Antoinette!”
His voice rang desperately. I turned to stare at his profile, sharp-etched as a Roman cameo.
“Let me stay tonight.”
“No,” he said.
“But why?”
“It’s dangerous for you.”
“How?”
“Most arrests are made at night.”
Chilled, I wrapped myself tighter around him. “André, can the Jacobins have you imprisoned for disagreeing with their policy on King Louis?”
“They haven’t come to stilling the voices of dissenters.”
French Passion Page 32