The General's Mistress

by Jo Graham

  His arm tightened around me for a moment, but his voice was still light. “Marriage is a failed institution, my dear. People should stay together only as long as they wish, for whatever reasons they wish.”

  “That isn’t practical,” I said, “if women have no place to go, and no way to make their way in the world without men. There is no way not to belong to men.”

  “You don’t belong to me,” he said.

  “Don’t I?”

  Victor spread his hand on my naked hip. The rags of the chemise were bunched around my waist. “Do you? You could leave at any time. There are no walls or locks to stop you. You have ample funds and the ability to travel. There is nothing that prevents you from simply walking away. Except, of course, for your desire. There are no chains that are stronger than desire.”

  “Even desire wanes,” I said.

  “So it does.” His hand slid down my leg and around, into the warm cleft of my buttocks. “And whether yours or mine will cool first, I don’t know.” He lifted one of the shredded ribbons. “But you will not be the worse for having known me.”

  He sat up and lifted the torn chemise over my head and pitched it on the floor. “I don’t think I care for that game particularly. That is enough of that.”

  We never played that again.

  Three months might have been the limit of my patience with this life, but just short of that time, war intervened. After all, Moreau had more to do than sit in garrison and enjoy his mistress. He was reckoned one of the Republic’s best generals, both decisive and brutally swift, and it was a reputation he richly deserved. Keeping the Austrian army on its toes was something at which he excelled.

  And so we moved. I did not then understand what he was doing, the continual movement and feints through the summer months, designed to keep the Austrian commanders busy and guessing, without allowing them to draw him into a decisive battle. I thought Moreau’s men were splendid. But he knew how outclassed they would be if the Austrians ever brought their numbers to bear. He knew how many more artillery pieces the Austrians had, and how little chance we had of taking any fortified place. But as long as he had a substantial army in the field, capable of bringing off controlled engagements, there would be no general Austrian advance.

  It was a very tricky chess game, and he was the person to play it. It was about nerve and discipline, knowing when to give ground and when to take it, knowing the measure of his officers and of the enemy. I simply enjoyed the freedom of the marches, of riding abroad in my man’s clothes, sticking with the column and the baggage train. I liked staying somewhere different each week, the loud, impolite company of the army, the revels and cheap company in each town. I did not mind the rain or the mud.

  Sleeping rough was of little consequence to me, or at least I thought it so. There was never a night when Moreau did not have a tent over his head or me to warm him. I rather preferred that, because in the camp he did not send me away when he was done. And if love was quicker and less elaborate than formerly, it was sharper too, seasoned with the scent of danger.

  One night at the end of the summer, we had won a fairly substantial skirmish. Some hundred prisoners had been taken, and several hundred of the enemy slain, while our casualties numbered fewer than fifty. Moreau was in high spirits, and so were his men.

  As was so often the case after a battle, he could not retire until the wee hours. There was too much to do, reports to be written and dispatched to Paris by courier, captured papers to be examined, supply to be considered. I sat alone in our sleeping tent for many hours. Outside, I could hear a great deal of revelry. I was wearing my riding costume, the buff breeches and blue coat that, in the right light, might look like our uniform. My hair was pulled back, and I wore stout boots.

  I waited and I waited and I waited. I thought of simply going to bed, but the noise was too great. There were loud songs and laughter, shouts and swearing and stamping of feet. I should never sleep in this din. It occurred to me that I could go to his day tent, the large one that he used for his headquarters, and find him. Surely he must be nearly done with his paperwork by now. Passing his servant and the sentries at the door, I set out across the camp.

  Men were spilling out of pitched tents, going from one gambling game to another, tankards in hand. There was the reek of hard spirits everywhere. In the light of various fires, I could see those who had imbibed too much lying in corners, or sometimes being robbed of their valuables by their fellow soldiers. Drunk men pissed against the sides of the officers’ tents or wherever else they chose. I pulled my hat lower over my eyes and walked more quickly.

  I was nearly to Moreau’s tent when a scream rent the night behind me. I turned. Three men had grabbed a cantinière, a girl scarcely older than I, and were hauling her behind one of the tents. She was flailing and shrieking, trying to ward them off. One of them laughed and grabbed her bodice. I heard the ripping of cloth.

  I ran into Moreau’s tent, past the startled and bored guards who did not react in time to stop me. He looked up from his papers in astonishment.

  I grabbed at his arm. “Victor, you must come. There is a girl being raped not a hundred meters from here.”

  “The scream I heard?”

  “Yes,” I said, pulling at him. “A cantinière. Come, Victor.”

  He looked at me and one eyebrow quirked. “What would you have me do, my dear? Go charging in like a white knight?”

  I stared at him.

  “If it is a cantinière, then she’s used to it. That’s what they do, my dear.”

  “But . . .”

  He took my hand off his arm and held it between his own. “My dear, I told you not to go about the camp at night by yourself, and I am sorry that you had a fright. But these things happen.”

  “They happen because—”

  “They happen because men are men,” he said harshly. “You have no idea what you are talking about. These men are volunteers, rabble from streets and farms from one end of France to the other. Some are criminals released when the Republic opened the Bourbon prisons, and others might as well be. They are what I have with which to defend the Republic. I am here to make them a fighting force that can hold, not to make them morally exemplary.”

  My confusion must have shown on my face.

  He took my arm gently. “Now, my dear. Calmly.” He looked over the paper-strewn table. “You are frightened. I suppose I can complete this paperwork tomorrow.”

  Moreau escorted me back to his tent. I did not look in the direction they had taken her. And I did not hear anything over the general uproar.

  At dawn, the camp was finally silent.

  I lay quiet beside him, not sleeping. I should put it from my mind, I thought. What could I have done? What could I be expected to do? These things happen, as I know all too well. What is one more rape, one more prisoner ill-treated, one more complaint from a local?

  Men will be men, and these things happen.

  I turned, and Victor curled a little closer to my warm back, affectionate in sleep as he was not when awake.

  And what should I expect? Some Paladin of Charlemagne? A white knight wading in with moral fury, an angel of righteousness at his shoulder? This was the age of reason, and he was no more than a man, a general with a nearly impossible task ahead of him, defending the Republic as best he could with the tools he had to hand.

  Better to put the entire incident from my mind. I must grow callous if I was to travel with armies. I must grow a thicker skin. I closed my eyes on the tears behind them. This was all there was. I was a fool to imagine anything else.

  In the morning, I took breakfast with Moreau in his tent. The flaps were spread wide to catch the early breeze, for it was early September, and the days were hot.

  He looked up from his coffee. “My dear, I have been thinking that this is not the place for you. It’s too rough and too dangerous. I know you were upset last night. There’s a reason why army camps are no place for a woman of sensibility.” He laid aside his silve
r knife. “I should send you ahead to Paris. I may not go into winter quarters and be able to return to Paris for several months yet, but there is no reason that I should risk you by keeping you here.”

  I looked down at my plate, at my buttered bread untouched. “Victor, I do not want . . .” I couldn’t continue.

  “Do not want what?” he asked softly.

  “To end it,” I said.

  “Because you have nowhere else to go?” The cynical note in his voice stung me and I looked up.

  “I could go to Paris alone,” I said hotly. “I have the money you have given me. I don’t need you.”

  He stood up smoothly, stepping behind me and gently gathering up my hair. I could not see his face. “I don’t want to end it either. That is not what I am proposing.” His hands were quiet and methodical, sweeping my hair up into my pins. “I am suggesting that you go ahead to Paris, to a property that I own there. I expect to return in November or December, so if I can trust you in Paris on your own for two or three months . . .”

  I rose and turned to face him. “Do you mean it?”

  “You know that I do.”

  I leaned in and kissed him gently on the cheek. He was freshly shaved, of course, and smelled of sandalwood and oranges. “I will miss you,” I said. “So very much. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

  He smiled against my brow. “I shall hope that you continue to believe that.”

  I left for Paris on a sunny morning in mid-September with quite a cavalcade. There were convalescents on their way to Paris to recover from their wounds, twenty or so transfers who were on their way to other units, and several couriers. I was entrusted to one of these, who was to see me safely to the home of Madame Duferne in the Rue Saint-Dominique before he took his papers to various people. This lady was the widow of some friend of Moreau’s, and acted as housekeeper at this property of his. I hoped she was not young and beautiful.

  It was September, and the roads were busy. We had scarcely started when we had to halt to let a column of cavalry pass on their way to join Moreau’s camp for the last campaign of the season.

  At their head was a magnificent mount, a tall bay stallion with two white socks. His coat was almost blood-colored, and brushed to a high sheen. His rider was similarly red-haired. He wore tight white trousers that displayed his physique accordingly, and the corded muscles in his thighs were plainly visible. His poise was superb. He rode carelessly, yet straight as an equestrian statue, the reins held lightly while he looked about. His shoulders were broad in his tailored coat, which was open in the heat. His face could have been graven in bronze, I thought, for the one moment I saw it, alert and solid, the face of a Roman statue. And then he was past. I admired his posterior as it vanished into the dust of the marching column.

  The courier at my side chuckled. “Like a well-turned-out fellow, do you, Madame?”

  I had the shame to blush. “I do. I can look, can’t I?”

  He nodded good-naturedly. “Lots of people look at Colonel Ney.”

  “Ney?” I squeaked.

  The courier nodded. “That’s old Red Ney. He’s a bastard and a martinet, but a good fellow all the same.”

  The White Queen

  I arrived in Paris on my twentieth birthday, September 28, 1796, and went directly to the house Moreau owned. It was a small townhouse on a quiet and unfashionable street, the kind of house owned by lesser merchants and clerks, professors and junior deputies. Three stories, with no yard at all, it had three bedrooms on the second floor, with a nursery and two tiny servants’ rooms on the third floor. The kitchen was in the cellar, and the first floor consisted of a drawing room, a dining room, and a tiny study on the back of the house. The furniture was Louis XVI, in good condition but far from stylish. I wondered how in the world this had come to be Moreau’s house. Nothing about it reminded me of him at all.

  Madame Duferne explained that the first evening. Not the young, beautiful woman I had feared, she was fifty and cheerful, with a white cap on her unruly dark curls. While the housemaid set dinner on the table, she explained.

  “General Moreau has never lived here, Madame. He has a lovely new house in Passy. This is one of the houses he bought up for almost nothing during the Revolution, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “Oh?” I said. The beef was well cooked but utterly bland, without a seasoning on it. The cook was obviously no great chef.

  “At first, the general made offers to aristos and others who wanted to flee the country. He gave them cash for their homes and furniture, at a greatly reduced price, of course. After all, what good did property do them if they either had to flee and abandon it or go to the guillotine? So he bought a number of properties in nice parts of town for almost nothing. And then some houses, like this one, were seized by the Committee when their owners were executed for treason. The general made offers to the Committee that were accepted. After all, they wanted cash, not houses.”

  “I see,” I said. The table I sat at, the china that held my dinner, had been chosen by some poor woman who had been guillotined. White china with a pattern of roses. Perhaps the wedding gift of a couple now dead.

  “After my husband, Antoine, was killed, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. The general rents out houses all over town, but this one didn’t bring much in because it’s not very fashionable. So the general said I could stay here for absolutely nothing if I would keep house for him and host any of his friends who needed to stay here.” She smiled at me across the table. “And I do a very good job, as you can see.”

  I nodded. “Everything is impeccable, Madame.”

  I took a drink of my wine. It was decent table wine, sweeter than I liked, but not bad. And I asked the question that I wanted the answer to badly. “Any women, Madame?”

  She laughed. “Oh, you want to see if you have rivals! Not many. Once in a while he has had someone stay a day or so, but no one as beautiful as you, and not in some time. Married women, I suspect. Who cannot, of course, be seen at his house in Passy. When they come, I go out, and don’t return for hours. But I imagine you have nothing to worry about. You are so very lovely, and he’s sent you here from his camp. He must be madly in love with you.”

  “I doubt that,” I said.

  Upon retiring, I searched the master bedroom quite closely. The windows were small and hung with thick drapes, and the huge four-poster was very comfortable. The bureau contained several more pamphlets of a “political” nature, as well as a polished wooden box. I opened it and was not surprised to see a pair of soft leather cuffs with silver buckles, a bottle of oil, and an ivory phallus.

  I closed the lid, then opened it again and examined it closely. This was more like what I had expected, much more so than this grim decorum. An unlikely love nest, and one where games of passion were hardly to be expected, in a respectable neighborhood where a respectable woman could go in perfect propriety.

  No, I had no rivals.

  I woke in the night wondering if they had guillotined the children, the ones whose nursery was upstairs with their toys still there, or if the children had been spared to beg in the streets and look up at lighted windows like the ones they had once had.

  I closed my eyes and buried my head in my pillow.

  The house was absolutely silent.

  I had not prayed since I was a child myself, but I found myself whispering words that might have been from my childhood in Italy. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, watch over those children if they live. And if they do not, please take them to your peace.”

  It was fall in Paris, and the weather was lovely. Unfortunately, I knew no one and had no friends. I had nothing to do. In camp, at least there had always been bustle and excitement. I did not want to stay in the house all day, so each day I hired a carriage and did too much shopping. It was easy to spend time in the shops.

  Fashion had changed dramatically in just a few years. All the heavy panniers of my girlhood were gone, exchanged for diaphanous cotton gowns so thin th
at the shape of the body showed through quite clearly. Some of them were lavishly pleated like those of ancient Egyptian goddesses, worn with little sandals of gilded leather and no stockings at all. To make their feet look beautiful, women had them scrubbed with pumice or sea salt, then rubbed in oil, and had their toenails polished and painted.

  By the time Moreau returned to Paris, it was too late in the year to wear those sort of clothes abroad. December had already begun, and the weather had turned rainy and gray.

  A message arrived late one night that he had just that moment returned to town, and that he would visit me the following evening. I spent all of the next day in a state of excitement. Would passion have survived a separation of two and a half months? He had been in the thick of war, while I had been reading books and shopping, engaged in perhaps the most useless days of my life.

  And the loneliest. When I was brutally honest with myself, listening to what I was beginning to term my Inner Moreau, I could admit that. I had no companions, and Madame Duferne was incredibly boring. I had no responsibilities. I had no occupations, not even bookkeeping. There was, in short, absolutely nothing to do from sunup to sundown except read, shop, and tend my beauty. If this was the life of a grand courtesan, it was dull in the extreme.

  So I awaited Moreau’s arrival with the breathless anticipation of a harem girl, for whom her lord’s summons might be the only event of note in half a year, a lofty fate that might be attained but rarely in a lifetime. For that reason, I chose for our intimate dinner a costume I had had made up, a pair of gauze pantaloons in the sheerest of blue shades, with a bolero jacket of dark-blue velvet embroidered with gold. Beneath the bolero I wore nothing, and only a frog of gold braid held the bolero closed. I did not expect it to last the night.

  Instead of greeting me as I had expected, with harsh words and a command or two, Moreau instead came in quietly, divesting himself of his soaking cloak and hat and putting them before the fire. His face seemed heavily lined in the firelight, and his clothes were black. I lit the candles on the table and went to him.