The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  They were not alone on the road. A large company of gendarmes – twenty or thirty of them, Rosalie thought – marched alongside the coach, not to mention twice as many fédérés who looked every bit as rough as their reputation, and behind them a ragged tail of idlers, urchins and drunks.

  They were close pressed in the carriage with the chief commissioner, Rosalie and the Duke, Madame d’Enville and Madame d’Astorg. Following on was a cabriolet containing Raffron and some of the luggage, and a very tall thin gentleman who was never introduced but seemed intimately connected to their arrest. It was nearly midnight before they reached the little town of Gournay.

  The women were not guarded that night, but again they were told to be ready to move off at four o’clock, this time to avoid the dangerous commotion of Gournay market. Once more the commissioners were delayed and did not appear until eight o’clock, and they did not start until nine. The delay allowed time for a huge cortège to gather, determined to accompany them all the way to Gisors.

  They reached Gisors at around noon, in the midst of a huge, steaming, thirsty mob of fédérés shouting threats and insults as they milled around the carriage. Even with the gendarmes smacking them with the butts of their muskets, it was a struggle to get down from the carriage and escape into the inn.

  ‘Citizen, I think you had better show yourself at the window, just so they know we haven’t spirited you away.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘They’ll burn the house down if you don’t.’

  The Duke walked to the window, which was already open, and gingerly put his head out. His tall stooping figure remained poised there for a moment. There was something tentative and enquiring about his posture, as though he were testing the weather. But the horrible cries drove him back inside and he turned towards his wife and his mother with a stricken look.

  ‘We’ve got the city guard coming, citizeness,’ the commissioner said, trying to sound controlled, ‘but if we don’t look sharp about it we’re all dead men. Look, I’ll take him on ahead on foot so they can see we’ve got him and that will give you time to get back in the carriage while they’re looking the other way.’

  So the men trooped down the rickety stair of the Ange d’Or, the nearest thing Gisors had to a decent inn: the Duke, the commissioner and the tall thin gentleman who had not been introduced. Rosalie began to count out seven minutes as the commissioner had recommended, but before she had got to three, the shouts and curses from the street were so loud that she could not hear herself.

  She gave the signal and they ran down together and found the carriage drawn up outside the door of the inn, with the coachman ready to move as soon as they had pushed Madame d’Enville into her seat (the old lady almost lost her footing as they dragged her inside).

  They clattered off down the street, pursued by the hideous noise of the crowd. Rosalie and her grandmother huddled together into the depths of the carriage, keeping their faces turned away from the window.

  A few minutes later there was a huge whoop of delight from behind them and Madame d’Astorg put her head out of the carriage. ‘We’ve done him, lads,’ she heard them cry and a minute later there was a whole crowd of them running past the carriage with three or four them carrying the Duke’s body as they ran. She saw blood gushing from his temple all over his long pale face and down his buff waistcoat, and she could see too his dark tripes spilling out over his breeches, then she was deafened by the song she had heard the feds from Marseilles singing when they came down the rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré a few weeks earlier.

  She turned back into the carriage and realised instantly that the other three (Rosalie’s maid Raffron was there too) had seen nothing of what happened. She was unable to speak and sat white and upright as the coach rattled on out of the town.

  Then somehow the moment had passed at which she could say what she had seen. When they were out of the town and in the hot dusty countryside they had to stop to water the horses in a small village (she could not remember the name of it) and there they began to talk again, but very cautiously as though the slightest false word could bring out the news they dreaded most.

  ‘Where do you think they will take him?’

  ‘Oh, Vernon I should think. Yes, Vernon.’

  ‘And will they try him there?’

  ‘I should think so, yes,’ said Madame d’Astorg vaguely.

  It was only the following morning that Madame d’Astorg ventured to say, in slow broken sentences, what she had seen, prefacing and ending her account with the proviso that she could not be sure, although in truth she was as sure of it as of anything in her whole life. Poor loyal Madame d’Astorg (she was as poor as she was loyal and loyal because she was poor ever since her husband had left her with two small children) feared that they might reproach her for not speaking out straight away, at a time when they might have thought that something could yet have been done to save him (but what?) and indeed she reproached herself. But they had no energy for reproaches, they were sunk too deep in shock and grief.

  William sat in the gathering gloom (it was the last week in October by the time he had Madame d’Astorg’s letter and the leaves were already gathering in grubby swirls at the corners of the canals) and thought of the scene as she described it in her sprawling hand, so unlike Rosalie’s neat exemplary script: that long broken body with the guts spilling out of the buff waistcoat he always wore and the blood from the temple spouting over those sad beaky features, with Rosalie and her mother shrinking into the recesses of the carriage to avoid the shouts and curses, and only Madame d’Astorg looking resolutely out of the window and seeing the laughing murderers carrying the body past her with no more care than if they were carrying a bag of rotten apples to the dung heap.

  How odd, he thought, that he could now write to Rosalie as openly as he liked. All those elaborate precautions were as dead as, well, as dead as the Duke was. Then he blushed to think that he had thought such a thing and devoted a moment or two to praying for the soul of his kindly stammering host, who had never thought a callous thought and who had always striven – how earnestly and, yes it had to be said, how blindly – to do the right thing. And he thought too how strange it was that he who thought so little of religion should be praying for a man who might be best remembered for dethroning the Catholic Church from its privileged position. Each letter from Rosalie clutched more fiercely at his heart and made him long to see her that minute.

  My health is not too bad, but my ordeals have struck at my nerves so that I cannot bear the slightest unexpected noise without extreme terror. My head is aching all the time and my memory often fails me, but the memory of those I have loved and those I love still will always remain in my heart. One day I hope we shall all be back together, and if you are ever free you will see how my family considers you as one of their closest friends. You already were that and would have been even more so if only my poor Charles … dear child, with what pleasure I watched the friendship between you two and how sure I was that it would grow closer still! Always cherish his memory, love him for himself, love him for me, in your mind think of him in our midst!

  Was it from tact that she spoke so little of her husband? Perhaps there was little she could say, to Wm anyway. She might prefer to keep private from him the real affection and respect he knew she had had for the Duke. He could not blame her.

  He asked her to describe how she spent the day so that he could think of her at each moment. She got up at half past eight, wrote and did her domestic duties until eleven or half past, then went in to see her grandmother for an hour or an hour and a half. Maman talked incessantly of her son and her grandson. She blamed herself for encouraging both of them in their radical ways, she blamed herself above all for encouraging Condorcet. He it was who had uncaged these cannibals. How foolish she had been to be led astray by the brilliance of his mind, not to see that he had no heart and, what was just as bad, no common sense. Sometimes Rosalie feared that her grandmother was becoming distracted by age
and grief. Then at other times she seemed the firmest of them all.

  They dined at three. Then they sat together until seven working at their little tasks. Rosalie was knitting waistcoats and vests for the children on the estate, which she liked doing because it did not tax her powers of concentration. The great rooms had all been shut up. They sat in her grandmother’s sitting room and ate in her bedroom with no one serving at table. Rosalie’s own rooms were too remote, so she had moved her things into a little lodging just above the library, which suited her much better.

  It was the middle of December before all the business in The Hague was settled and William had his congé and could go back to France en route to Madrid, or rather Aranjuez where the Spanish court was and which was to be his new posting. Every minute of his journey across that mournful, muddy landscape, clattering through icy puddles and rumbling over the rutted old bridges, he pictured to himself the sad little group sitting round the sewing table or talking in hushed voices as they played cards while the old servant came in to draw the heavy curtains. Yet his spirits did not sink at the thought of intruding upon a household so lapped in grief. On the contrary, he longed to join with them in their sadness and demonstrate the depths of his love, like a pilgrim to some dolorous shrine. Right at the end of the journey, as his coach swung round the bend in the village street, he experienced an overwhelming, almost shameful sense of exhilaration, as though none of the horrors had really happened and he was as he had been before, a lover who had nothing more complicated in mind than to see his girl.

  ‘Oh, but you look so well; you said you had grey hair and had become an old man.’

  She had clutched him to her without hesitation or thought of propriety while the coachman was still unloading his baggage. It was dusk now and there was a light rain falling in the darkening courtyard, and her hand wiped away the raindrops when she caressed his cheek as though she were wiping away tears.

  She took him up to her grandmother’s sitting room where the little party was already assembled. He was taken aback by how warmly they all greeted him: Dolomieu the mineralogist whom he hardly knew and the Breton military man whom he did not know at all and whose name he did not catch, and the old Abbé, the one who liked to shave in the open air on the parapet and who was much aged. And Madame d’Enville, also much aged as Rosalie had warned, but still with something of the old bright look in her eye as she held out her hands to him from the high-winged chair that had been moved from its place in the salon.

  ‘Oh Monsieur Short, how could they take you away from us? I have written to Monsieur Jefferson to reproach him, it is such a mistake for your country and such a tragedy for us. Mr Morris is not a patch on you, everyone says so. And now I hear that you are to be on your travels again. You must stay as long as you can. We shall not let you go until the last possible moment.’

  He took her hand and kissed it, just as on the first occasion they had met, when this Frenchified habit had so irked Mr Jefferson. Then he looked around at the little group. They had welcomed him as a party marooned on a South Sea island might welcome a mariner who had strayed on to their shores. And he had a weird feeling that these were in some sense his true family in a way that all the Shorts and Skipwiths and Eppses back in Virginia were not.

  After supper Madame d’Astorg read to the company from the Travels of Young Anacharsis in Greece. She read coldly without expression as though she would rather be somewhere else. Indeed, of the whole company she, who had been so bright and merry on their first meeting with the canoes, was the only one to show reserve, even hostility. Wm remembered that Rosalie had twice complained of this coldness in her letters to him. Ariane seemed not to appreciate the depth of Rosalie’s grief or at any rate she was unable to respond to it, and Rosalie felt betrayed, for surely it was the touchstone of friendship to know how to comfort someone in the depths of their affliction.

  ‘Did you not notice it? Do you see what I mean?’ Rosalie said as he escorted her through the library.

  ‘Oh, you do not think that she is perhaps still too shocked by … she was after all the only one who witnessed the …’

  But Rosalie was having none of it. Madame d’Astorg had lost no one in her own family, unless you counted her runaway husband and she was well rid of him. Wm was glad to see the spark flare.

  ‘No,’ she said at the top of the little stairs when she thought he might be turning to go back down again, though he had no such intention, ‘now you are here you must never leave me for an instant.’

  As he had been jolting over the dykes and swamps of the Low Countries, he had wondered about this moment, whether he ought to go carefully or she might shy away, whether it would be too unfeeling to make love directly without first leading her through her sadness into a calmer, freer state of mind. But they had been through so much and said so many things to each other in their letters. And now all she had in her was a kind of wildness, a hungry desperation. Even before she was finished she was convulsed with a sobbing that would not stop but she wanted to stop so that she could tell him that all the terrible things that had happened had never shaken her love for him. The opposite, in fact, he was all she had in the world now and he was ten times as precious to her as he had been before.

  He slept for a couple of hours, he could have slept for twelve he was so tired, then she woke him and he had never known such pleasure, had never been carried so deep. Her grief had been swept up in her desire. In an unholy way, it was as if they were doing it for Charles’s sake. And just at the last moment he could not help thinking what Gouverneur would think of this fancy. His supplanter probably had some coarse axiom ready minted – the time to fuck a woman is when she has just lost her husband – and yet even this grossness seemed consumed by their love, the way the bright flames burn away the vilest rubbish.

  They had only eight days together. On the sixth day he did what he knew he had to do, what he had resolved to do even before he left The Hague. He chose to do it just after the ladies had returned from Mass on Christmas Day. The rest of the party were falling upon a japanned box of preserved fruit that Liancourt had sent them from exile in Boston.

  He led her away from her grandmother’s room through the dark and shuttered salon with the dust sheets draped over the furniture. They came out on to the loggia and looked out over the wintry valley, the Seine scarcely visible for the mist still clinging to its waters. It was quiet and chilly, no sign of movement anywhere.

  ‘You know what—?’

  ‘What you are going to ask?’ And for a moment he was strangely reminded of her husband’s vexing habit of finishing your sentences for you. She did not do it so often, but in her it was always beguiling. ‘Yes, I think I know, though it is presumptuous of me to think so.’

  ‘You must let me ask it all the same.’

  ‘Oh, I shall, though I cannot pretend it won’t make me tremble.’

  ‘Will you marry me, please will you marry me?’ The words came out in a rush because he was so nervous and he was afraid they sounded mechanical, not coming from the heart. But she did not seem to think anything of the sort because she threw her arms at him more than round him and kissed him and burst into tears all in the same moment, or so it seemed to him.

  ‘Oh, you are kind, you are the best, but you see I cannot, you must know I could not think of any such thing at present. You have seen the state Maman is in. She cannot possibly manage without me. I could not dream of leaving her now and going even to Spain, let alone to America. It would be like running away.’

  He persisted but with increasing gentleness and she said, with a smile that was all the more bewitching because it started out serious and broke into a touch of mischief, that she could not prevent him and she could not deny that his proposing it gave her the most intense pleasure, as though he were making love to her at that minute in broad daylight – and she reddened, realising that she had said more than she meant. She was wearing her black widow’s dress and a little black hat for going to Mass in.

/>   When he left two days later, she clung to him as though she was drowning. Later as he drowsed in the coach, he fancied he could still feel the impress of her body grinding against his and hear her quick breath in his ear. But then as he finally fell asleep, he seemed to be in another coach altogether with Madame d’Astorg’s plump cold face peering out alongside his own and men running alongside carrying a hideous bloody object, and he was turning away in disgust but Madame d’Astorg was saying, no, no, you must look, you must always look.

  There was blossom on the orange trees at Aranjuez and he liked to take his morning chocolate in the little walled garden at the back of the Minister’s lodgings. In among the official diplomatic correspondence he came upon the hand he knew best in the world after Rosalie’s. It was the first he had heard from Mr Jefferson for months. He had expected for some time now to receive further instructions on how to pursue with the Spanish authorities the matter of the Spanish claim to the territory of the Creek Indians. But Mr Jefferson had nothing to say about the Creek Indians. All of a sudden he had decided to return to the question of France, that question which he had shown such reluctance to address, ever since he skipped off from that country almost the minute the Bastille fell. Now he returned to the subject with a vengeance:

  The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain, on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins in France. In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as anybody, and shall deplore some of them until the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying that very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but, rather than that it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated; were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it now is.