They went haymaking together in the meadows a little upstream where the cliffs began to fall away from the river. Pierre went on ahead with the hay cart while they walked behind, carrying their pitchforks on their shoulders. Manual labour was all the fashion now. Marie Antoinette had never actually milked the cows or the goats at her model farm, but the King was helping to clear the stones off the Champs de Mars to make a level playing field for the festival to mark the first anniversary of the Revolution. His Most Christian Majesty only turned a sod or two, though, but Rosalie was serious. Wm watched her compress her lips with the effort as she piled up her haycock. She paused only to wipe the dew of sweat off her forehead and to admire Wm’s deft turn of the fork. Half an hour later she removed her little lilac broderie waistcoat and her bosom heaved so delightfully that he had to stop and lean on his fork.
‘Ah, monsieur, slacking again.’ This was Pierre with his melon grin coming past with the cider flagon for the rest of the workers. Wm had never heard him utter a word before. Now here he was, the village wag.
‘Are we not to have any of that cider?’
‘No, madame, this is reserved for the real workers.’
He passed on, chuckling, while she shook her fist at him in mock indignation.
‘I still love you, you know. More than ever,’ Wm said after Pierre had gone on down to the corner of the field where the rest of them were sitting in the shade of a chestnut tree.
‘You can’t, not after the way I have behaved. In any case it is impossible, as you know.’
‘I do, that’s all there is to be said and you cannot make me unsay it.’
He squinted into the sun at her and could not quite make out her expression. Was she perplexed or upset or what?
‘We’d better go back to the house,’ she said.
They shouldered their pitchforks and walked off to the gate in the hedge, moving rather quickly as though they were escaping from a bull in the field but trying not to look frightened.
When they were on the other side of the hedge he kissed her and she kissed him back, losing control of her fork so that it clanged against his and they both had to jump out of the way as it fell. He put his fork down too and they embraced, standing between the two forks like a couple performing some traditional country dance.
‘This is no good, you know,’ she said. ‘You cannot mean it.’
‘I do and you know I do.’
She bussed him, but this time lightly on the cheek as though congratulating him for some minor achievement, like winning a medal in her cousin Liancourt’s agricultural show.
That was the end of it for that day. She seemed rather solemn all through till the evening, not downcast but thoughtful. When he came into the salon as they were lighting the candles, he saw her sitting beside her grandmother at the end of the room and she looked up at him with that same perplexed, solemn look.
The next day she insisted they take the canoes out on the millpond beyond the meadows.
‘But the first thing I ever told you was that I know nothing about canoes. I am not a Canadian.’
‘And the first time you saw me was when we were making such fools of ourselves in that canoe, Ariane and I. So it is high time we both learnt.’
Pierre drove them upstream with the canoes on the cart, three or four miles from the house. The little blue canoes slid into the water through the straggles of white duckweed. Several young boys were already paddling around in the middle of the pond and splashing each other with their paddles.
William and Rosalie floated sedately around the side of the pond, now and then bending their heads to avoid the overhanging willow branches. The splashing and the cries of the boys out in the middle made their own gliding side by side seem all the more silent and graceful.
‘I feel like a swan,’ Rosalie said.
‘You don’t look much like a swan.’
‘What do I look like, then?’
‘More like a moorhen, a very pretty moorhen.’
‘A moorhen is not a pretty bird.’
‘These days you would be much better off as a moorhen. Swans who have renounced their titles probably turn into moorhens anyway.’
‘No, I shall be Citizeness Swan,’ she said and dug in her paddle with a thrust that sent her shooting past him out into the middle of the pond. He followed, watching the neat flub-flub of her paddle. Just then the cries of the boys suddenly changed into a shrill cry for assistance. Wm turned and saw a red canoe floating towards the weir with the boy in it desperately beating the water with his hands, having lost his paddle. Wm rowed as close to the boy as he dared, then dived into the water, his clothes billowing as he sank into the duckweed. He could see the red canoe only a few yards from him, and swimming frantically managed to grab hold of its rim and tow it back out of the current. The other boys seized the red canoe and pulled it away toward the shore, keeping hold of the boy who was shivering with fright. But as Wm started to swim after them the weight of his clothes began to drag at him and he found himself being pulled back into the faster current. In an instant he was plummeting head down in eight or nine feet of water, paralysed by cramp or fear. For a few seconds he felt utterly lost, almost reconciled to drowning, then his will came back to him and he began to kick his way out of the millrace and struggled into slower water again and so laboriously to shore, where he lay face down exhausted in the chalky mud.
With the help of one of the boys Rosalie turned him over to regard him daubed like a clayey Lazarus but breathing and spouting like a whale. She began to scrape the mud and weed off him as best she could. He felt her little hands scrabbling all over his body, much like Gulliver being swarmed over by the Lilliputians. When he finally staggered to his feet, water sluiced off him in torrents. As he squeezed out his shirt-tails, he was not too sodden to notice that this was the first time she had touched him so intimately.
At dinner in fresh clothes, fortified by great draughts of Malmsey wine, he was the hero of the hour and she was licensed to look at him with open admiration because everyone else was looking at him too, including the old Abbé who had formerly been surly towards him, as old guests often are to new guests who they fear may supplant them. After supper, at Madame d’Enville’s order, he played chess with the old Abbé and beat him inside a dozen moves.
The next day he had to go back to Paris and she cried as he left but tried to hide it, because she could hear Madame d’Enville hobbling up behind her. Her grandmother found Paris a frightening city now and she expected Rosalie to stay at La Roche. So he wrote to her there, renewing his love in the clearest and tenderest words he could think of. She wrote back the day she received his letter:
I received your letter as soon as I awoke. It was my first task of the morning and I shall spend part of the evening answering it, so you see that my whole day is devoted to you. I have had such pleasure in knowing that you are thinking of me and you know how much I love to have the proof that you are, but how can I possibly reply to all the nice flattering things you say about me? I can think of a thousand reasons to prevent my heart responding to yours, and you surely cannot blame me for seeking to prevent feelings arising in me which will be dangerous for both of us. Use your reason, which exists to have some control over us, to consider how much you risk making yourself unhappy in giving yourself over to your attachment if it really is a deep one. Think what your fate must be and how strongly the natural order of things must stop you from forming an attachment in this country without compromising your happiness. Besides, I care too much about what might happen to you to ignore the clouds. If your own interest by itself is not enough to make you pay attention to what I am saying, then think a little about my situation, and about what we would both be exposing ourselves to if I let myself be carried away by feelings that would have to be destroyed and broken at the very moment when it would be most painful. You know the way I think and how the ordinary tenor of my life has been removed from any constraint or falseness. So you must believe that I could only
obtain any tranquillity by never deviating from the duties that are prescribed for me. I know that this language is very different from yours. All the same, I think I owe it to you to speak like this, because of the concern for you that you have inspired in me. Forgive me if this letter causes you pain.
It caused him no pain at all. On the contrary, it was the first letter he had had from her that betrayed how strongly she felt about him. Behind those graceful formal sentences (like Racine’s alexandrines, he thought) he could sense the flutterings of her heart.
Even so, he had not expected to hear so soon that she was coming up to Paris after all. Only the thought of seeing him, she wrote, could bring her to enter those grim walls and suffer the stifling heat of the streets and the sullen crowds swirling round the Tuileries. She did not tell him the exact day of her coming (perhaps she did not know it herself yet) and he was out at the Assembly when another note was delivered to the Hôtel de Langeac: why had he not come to see her? How could she survive another day of this wretched stay in Paris without seeing him? It was a brief scrawl, nothing like Racine at all, this one.
In the event, she came to him (for once Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld was at home), to the big oval room at the Hôtel de Langeac and sat in the upright chair opposite him as though she were applying for a passport. He said again how much he loved her and there was no purpose in him not saying so. He was not sure afterwards which of them it was who rose first. But somehow there they were sitting side by side on the little chaise longue which Mr Jefferson had bought from Reisener’s shop and nearly taken back to Monticello with him.
‘No,’ she said at the same time as she lay down with him, ‘no, we cannot.’
But she let him stroke her there, and then she reached out to him and found the buttons of his breeches and rubbed him with a fierceness that finished him off in less time than he thought possible. Her white skirts thrown up and his fingers inside her and her fingers curled round him and milking him dry – with all that was to come he would never forget a moment of it.
‘There,’ she said, holding up her hand with the little creamy cupful she had gathered, ‘vous êtes tellement chargé, monsieur le chargé.’ And she laughed at her joke before he understood it. Chargé – what was that? Oh, loaded, yes, the Rutter had said something when he couldn’t perform – in Naples was it? – about his musket not being loaded and the girl had been angry.
They lay silent side by side, as silent as figures on a tomb.
‘Are you … were you fearful of having a child?’ he asked.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘There is nothing I want more. But it has not happened. Didn’t you understand why I wished so much to go to Dr Mesmer’s?’
‘No, I did not.’
‘I pretended it was for a joke, but I hoped it might work somehow, perhaps through the soul rather than the body. It was my last hope.’
‘What did he say when he spoke to you privately?’
‘He said there was no reason why I should not become pregnant, but it would need a longer course of treatment.’
‘Hm.’
‘You are sceptical. Perhaps you are right, but I wanted so much to believe him.’
‘And your husband, does he long for a child too?’
‘Of course, it is only natural.’
‘But that is why you would not, just now, because of him?’
‘Yes.’
The next day he went to the rue de Seine and they sat in the garden behind the stables in the shade of the trees that kept out the noise of the street. It was four in the afternoon. The servants were asleep in their attics. The Duke was somewhere between the National Assembly and the Paris Directory of which he was President. He was in meetings all day, she said, he came home hoarse and white in the face.
There was a small round pool to one side of the trees, not more than six feet across. He got up from the stone bench with its feet in the shape of some classical beast and went over to the pool and splashed his face with water. Then he came back to her and gently stroked her warm cheek with his wet hand. ‘Wait there,’ he said.
He went round the pool to the thickest of the lime trees, took out his penknife and began to carve their initials on the tree. He was only halfway through the R when she got up to see what he was doing. No, he said, wait there till I have finished. When he had rounded off the W with a flourish on the final stroke, he beckoned her over and she laughed when she saw.
‘It’s what we do in Virginia, lovers do, I mean,’ he said, suddenly embarrassed.
‘Oh, they do it here too in the villages, it is so sweet.’
She put her lips to the W and kissed it. ‘Perhaps I shall turn into a tree, like Daphne.’
‘That would be sad. I would not want to spend my life embracing a tree trunk.’
‘Oh, I am sure you will carve many more initials. I expect there are already forests in America with the whole alphabet on them.’
‘Not one, I promise you.’
‘Come.’
She seized his hand and went on ahead of him through the little door that led up the back staircase to her private apartments. He had not been that way before. At the top of the stairs there was a side door into a small cabinet, a sewing room for the staff by the look of it – there were coats in the La Rochefoucauld livery heaped up on an ironing table and a pile of crumpled linen in a big wicker basket. She took him to the shabby toile-de-jouy sofa by the fireplace and pulled him down towards her. Yes, now, she said. He saw her white thighs for an instant and the dark hair – or perhaps he did not see all that, or not then, for she was so quick in everything and in this too. She told him what to do, he had not expected that. He had not imagined how much she would desire him. Do I please you, she said, do you like my body, except she did not say body. He certainly had not expected that. He told her he loved every inch of her.
‘You are shy, I think, after all, William.’
He had not thought of himself as shy and did not know why she should choose this moment to say so, but he did not care. They lay in a moony languor, all tangled up together, his breeches caught somewhere in her shift, with the afternoon sun slinging dusty beams across them and the noise of the small birds outside and the acrid smell of the starch the housekeeper used for the shirts, and mixed in with it the fragrance of rotten lime blossom from the trees outside or perhaps it was from their own bodies – Apollo and Daphne were probably just as confused. Perhaps Daphne had asked whether Apollo liked her cunt, or … but by then he was dozing off and she had to wake him because the servants might be coming down about now.
La Roche-Guyon, seven o’clock in the evening
It is just at the moment when I would probably be seeing you if I were in Paris that I want to write to you and fill the same moments with the same subject. I am very sad to have left you and my first feeling when I woke up this morning before leaving was very painful when I thought that in half an hour’s time I was going to go away from you. The only pleasure my journey offered me was to leave me free to think of you the whole time without being interrupted. Madame de Postulard was alternately reading or sleeping and left me in peace to my reflections, which went to and fro, for sometimes I let myself jog along in the sweetness of loving and being loved (for the movements of the carriage reminded me of it) and other times I foresaw a tragic future caused by the very same sentiment. I’m not telling you this to torture you but just to communicate all my thoughts. It is too pleasurable to open my soul to you not to hope that you will not despise the way my mind was going. I hope that you have thought of me a little since my departure and that I will soon have news of you. My God, should I be rejoicing or lamenting that I ever met you? In the bottom of my heart I cannot regret it. I have had so much happiness and it grows whenever I think that you feel the same.
The next day he went to the town hall, where he reassured Mayor Bailly about the American grain shipments and Bailly reassured him that the disturbances in the Tuileries were under control at last. Going home he fell
in with Gouverneur Morris stumping along towards the Louvre.
‘Ah, Short, I am just about to call on Madame de Flahaut. Are you on the same mission? I fancy I have seen you sniffing around her skirts before.’
‘Certainly not, I hardly know her.’
‘I am glad to hear it. The list of her admirers is quite long enough already. We have not sacrificed to the Cyprian Queen for a full week and I fear she may make other arrangements if I do not attend to my duty.’
‘Ah, you …?’
‘We fuck like donkeys,’ Mr Morris said. ‘It is extraordinary to think what a bother I had to persuade her to come up to the scratch in the first place. She told me that she was married in all but name to Monsieur de Talleyrand and I believed her. But it seems the good bishop cannot celebrate Mass at her altar often enough to satisfy her.’
‘I always knew no woman could resist you in the end,’ said Wm.
‘My dear William, you are too kind. But I fear that I cannot ascribe my little successes in the Paphian mode to my personal qualities. It is the temper of the times. Love is in the air. We have much to thank the Revolution for, you know. The moment the Bastille surrendered, so did every woman in Paris. Take me and La Belle Adèle: 12 July we discuss art and philosophy; 13 July we swoon over something by Monsieur Rousseau; 14 July we discuss Monsieur de Lafayette’s declaration of human rights; 15 July, boom, boom. She’d have gone on all night if I’d been capable, I promise you. Since then we’ve done the needful everywhere you can think of, in my carriage, in her apartment while her husband was dressing across the corridor. We even did it in the waiting room at the convent when we went to pay a call on her old governess.’
The big New Yorker’s face was gleaming with carnal recollection. His fleshy lips sucked and pursed as though at that very moment engaged on some amorous exercise. ‘Ah, what bliss it is to be an American in Paris just now,’ he said.
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