‘You are my Scheherazade.’
‘Your Sche – I do not think I like the comparison. Because then you must be the cruel sultan who puts his wives to death.’
‘No, no, for us the death would be to be separated and every time you put off the evil hour by telling me a story.’
‘A story! I do not much care for that either. You think that when I wrote you all those letters I was inventing my despair just to keep you on a string.’
‘No, no, those were true stories that you told me and the tighter the string binds us together, the happier I shall be.’ He could see that she was not angry exactly but fretful, as though the drift of their talk was uncovering feelings which she did not wish to admit to herself or did not like to see surfacing in him too, however indignantly he might deny them.
‘Next year we really must go, you know.’
‘Ah, next year.’ She spoke dreamily as if speaking of a date so remote as to be scarcely imaginable.
‘Mr Jefferson writes that he has a great longing to see us, he sends you many fond messages.’
‘I am sure that Mr Jefferson can barely remember which one I am from a cloud of duchesses, all equally worthless in his eyes.’
‘No, no, I assure you, he formed a particular attachment to you, he has told me so many times.’
‘It is you to whom he is particularly attached. I have seen his eyes light up when you come into the room, you are the son he never had, you have told me so yourself. Besides, I do not think he cares much for women, except silly women like Madame Cosway who flatter him.’
‘You would love Albemarle County, it is very much like the Auvergne, though the hills are not so big.’
‘Ah, well then, why should we travel so many thousands of miles if it is only to find another Auvergne with smaller hills?’
‘Oh Rosalie, at any rate let us get married. We can go to America at our leisure.’
‘I do not think I wish to be married “at any rate”. You make it sound like a mere convenance so that we shall be respectable and be received in the best society in your beloved Albemarle County.’
‘You know I meant no such thing.’
‘In the Auvergne we need have no such worries. People are not always asking whether one is married or not married.’
They spent the summer in the Auvergne, surrounded by the hills that were so much bigger than the hills in Virginia. They did not lack for company. Old friends had trickled back. Lafayette had returned to his huge estates, bruised by the knocks he had taken but not dejected. Madame de Tessé came to stay, as caustic as ever. William played billiards with florid Auvergnat squires, while Rosalie sat at cards with the ladies.
‘Don’t you ever get bored with whist?’
‘Oh William, you are so serious. Can one not amuse oneself when it is raining?’
‘It seems to rain a great deal in the Auvergne.’
‘Well, perhaps you had better go back to Albemarle County and count your slaves.’
‘Oh Rosalie, let us get married.’
‘You think that would make us quarrel less? That is not my experience of married couples. But perhaps they are different in America, everything is so much better there.’
In the autumn they went back to La Roche-Guyon.
‘Oh, this house is so big, I cannot see the point of hanging on here since I have no children. I must hand it over to my cousin Liancourt.’
‘And then …’
‘But I cannot while he is still in exile. It is my duty to stay here until he returns. I must continue to play the chatelaine.’ She struck an ironic attitude of grandeur. But his heart sank.
The next year Liancourt came back, with Talleyrand’s secret encouragement. Things were easier now. Liancourt busied himself with an account of the splendid prisons he had seen in the United States. He also began importing from England large consignments of Mr Jenner’s vaccine against the smallpox. He set up dispensaries to distribute the miraculous medicine to the poor. Down at Liancourt before he left for exile he had built a cotton mill with twenty-four of the latest spinning machines, the Jeannettes, which could turn out fifty pounds of cotton a day. On his return he found that the business had pretty well come to a halt. So he sold the Jeannettes and imported the latest Spinning Jennies from England. By the time production was in full swing, the Liancourt mills were turning out two hundred and fifty pounds of cotton per diem and employing a hundred and nineteen workers, none of them earning less than twelve hundred francs a year. Then there was his wool factory, which treated four thousand fleeces and employed another four hundred and forty workers with four hundred children working alongside their parents.
‘I fear that cousin Liancourt is too busy to think of taking over La Roche-Guyon just yet. He is a veritable electric shock, my cousin.’
‘And I am not?’
‘Oh, do not be so prickly, Will. You know I could not live without you.’
But he began to chafe. It was bad enough to be separated by three thousand miles from all his affairs and to receive such irregular and alarming tidings of how they were faring. He trusted none of his agents; Peyton and Colonel Skipwith because they were not hard-headed enough, Van Staphorst and the Willinks because they were so hard in the head they might knock him out entirely if he was not on hand. And Mr Jefferson? Well, Mr Jefferson was about to become President of the United States and his head for business, always on the shaky side, was liable to be distracted by other matters than the rent from Indian Camp or the bookkeeping at the nail factory.
Then there were his many French acquaintances. When he had been chargé d’affaires, he had been the coming man, in formal terms the first American in Paris. Later on, when he was passing through the city as Minister to The Hague or Madrid, he was negotiating the business of two continents and still only in his early thirties. But now he was merely a private citizen adrift in a foreign country like so many others who had been left behind by the fortunes of war and revolution. And he was – what was the phrase he had sworn to avoid even in his innermost thoughts, but the phrase that could no longer be avoided? – he was dancing attendance, he was a cavaliere servente, almost a cicisbeo. There was one way and one way only to restore his position and his self-esteem.
‘Rosalie, I must talk to you.’
‘My darling, we never stop talking. We chatter like starlings to one another.’
‘No, seriously, we cannot delay—’
‘You will come with me to look at Reuil, will you not? Everyone says it is just the place for me, in pretty country and half the size of La Roche.’
‘Rosalie, we must get married.’
‘Indeed we shall and then we shall go to America.’ She spoke like a child repeating a lesson, making no effort to pretend that she meant it.
‘But—’
‘But not today, today we must go and inspect this delightful residence at Reuil. I really think that quite soon either François or Alex will be thinking about moving in here while their father stays on at Liancourt. You know Alex’s wife is a cousin of Madame Bonaparte’s and is probably going to be her dame d’honneur, and I was thinking that I might offer my services too. Her first husband, Madame Bonaparte’s I mean, was a poor relation of my husband’s and used to spend his leave here when he was a young officer, so we are quite closely connected.’
William gaped in amazement. Any thought of pursuing the marriage question fled from his mind. ‘You would work for that little Corsican bandit?’
‘For his wife. In any case he is not much shorter than you are and I am no giantess myself.’
He looked at her, still astonished as though she had been spirited away and replaced by a complete stranger. ‘Well, I do not think your husband would have approved,’ he said.
‘I do not think I would wish to be your wife if that is going to be your attitude. Are you coming to see Reuil or not?’
‘Another time, another time,’ he said.
It grew upon him quite slowly, this conviction that he
was no more set upon the marriage than she was. Most of the time he loved her still. They always made it up after the bickering. And he renewed his proposal whenever he saw an opening. But now when she deflected him with some charming irrelevance or some fresh practical objection, he became aware that he was experiencing a new sensation and that sensation was relief.
But he lingered. In those queer, uneasy days after the Directory had been chased out and the little Corsican was spreading his wings, Paris was still delicious. There was a gaiety which might be febrile but was also irresistible as they greeted old friends and resumed old pleasures. And in the Auvergne it did not always rain. He began to delight in country pleasures too – the boar hunts in the scrubby woods at the head of the valley, driving in Rosalie’s gig at high speed over the stony country tracks, stalking the partridges across the stubble at the end of the summer. When he came back to Verteuil as the sun was going behind the green hills and tossed his straw hat on the old walnut table in the hall and shouted up to Rosalie that he was back, he forgot his restlessness and felt that he was at home. And in winter when he stamped the mud off his boots and warmed his hands at the great fire in the salon at La Roche (for the Liancourts were still being slow about taking over the place), he could fancy himself the French squire.
But then one day at the end of May, quite soon after they had moved down to Verteuil for the summer, he was walking through the market in the local town, a backwoods place with one decent saddler’s where he planned to buy a new driving whip. As he passed through the crowd of idlers under the arcade, he heard an old man say, ‘Oh, him, that’s madame’s little American. They say she can’t wait for him to go back home.’
He said nothing to her that night. But the next day he told her he had to go to Paris to talk to his bankers.
Which was true. He transferred all his assets in France to his agents in America and engaged passage on the next convenient boat, which was the Activité, bound for Norfolk out of Le Havre at the beginning of July.
She was in tears all that day and most of the next. But then the following day, when he was to depart, she was strangely quiet, seeming almost detached from what was happening. And he felt the same. It was as though, quite suddenly and by mutual consent, although not a word was spoken to that effect, they had come to an end. Not the end of their physical love – he fucked her tenderly that last night and she clung to him as tightly as she had ever clung to him – but to the end of the conviction they had shared so long that their love was the only thing in the world that mattered.
He even had an odd sensation – he reassured himself that it was probably no more than a fancy consequent upon his disordered state of mind – that they were not the only ones who had come to this terminus. It was as though, all over the world, the conviction that love was all that mattered had, by some brusque dictate of providence, become impossible to sustain. Some heartening light, some warming glow, had disappeared and everything was left cold and grey, and the only sound in the universe was a voice whispering that it was all an illusion, each man (each woman too) was alone in this world, always had been, always would be.
And her letters that he kept so carefully in the cherrywood writing box his father had given him when he graduated, what earthly use were they? Posterity would marvel that grown men and women should write such stuff and spoon over it for years afterwards. He should have burnt them, just as that unknown person had, quite rightly, burnt most of the nonsense he had written to her. Ashes to ashes, that was the right way. Why should only our illusions survive when the rest of us was gone?
They said goodbye in a sober loving fashion almost as if they had in fact been married all the time and there was nothing to fuss about.
‘And, after all, you will be back so soon,’ she said.
‘You know I will,’ he said and he wondered which of them believed it less.
In two days’ time he stood on the deck of the Activité – what a strange name for a boat, how it mocked his frittering of these last four years. He had lolled too long on the foredeck of that pleasure yacht, the Inactivité. And his mind turned with a remorseless slow curl, like the curl of the ship’s rope slipping from its capstan, to the reproving words that Mr Jefferson had written to him thirteen years before when he was scampering back to Paris from his Grand Tour:
A young man indeed may do without marriage in a great city. In the beginning it is pleasant enough; but take what course he will, whether that of a rambling or a fixed attachment, he will become miserable as he advances in years. The only recourse then for durable happiness is to return to America.
After he had gone, she began to weep again, all that day and half the night off and on. She slept for half an hour at most and woke red-eyed, not caring who saw her in such a ravaged state. She stumbled across to the window and looked down into the street. Usually the clatter of the rue Faubourg-Saint-Honoré was enough to shake her out of a gloom but now the heedless comings and goings only reminded her of her desolation. How quickly William had come back from Le Havre when Maman had died, so that she should not have to pass more than a few hours without the comfort of someone who loved her more than anyone else in the world. Now – but she was shaken with such sobbings that she could not think.
For days she was lapped in misery, unable to go out or to give the simplest command to her maid or to the cook, who had to guess at what simple soup or junket she might be able to swallow. The whole apartment was in mourning. Monsieur had gone and it was somehow universally understood that he was not coming back.
Yet there was one regret that she did not have, one thought that never occurred to her. She never wished that she had gone with him. Over and over again she wished that he had been made Minister to Paris, and then they could have been married and as happy as they deserved to be after waiting so long and suffering so much. To please him she had toyed with the idea of the charming villino they would build together within hailing distance of Monticello, of the vines they would plant and the cotton they would spin (she liked the project of building her own cotton mill as her cousin Liancourt had done), but though she did not care to admit it to herself it was all play-acting. She could not leave Europe, she could not abandon the only world she knew.
The first sharp grief faded into a duller misery. Then one morning – it must have been three or four weeks after William had gone – she woke up and felt that she could begin to … no, not live again, for if life was to include any real hope of happiness her life had ended the day William went. What she felt was that she could carry on, that she had to carry on just to show that she could, to spit in the face of fate. So she put on the gown of green sprigged muslin that Wm had admired (though what was that to her now?) and she went to call on her cousin Adelaide.
Strictly speaking, Adelaide was not her cousin, being only the wife of her cousin Alex. But Adelaide genuinely was a cousin of someone rather more to the point, namely Josephine de Beauharnais. They had both belonged to that raggle-taggle planter society out in those steamy islands whose wealth was so relentlessly squeezed out of the cane stalks, the Taschers and the Pyvarts and the La Pageries, families of mixed morals and some said mixed blood, sprawling across the French islands, Martinique, Santo Domingo, anywhere the sugar would grow. The difference between Josephine Tascher de La Pagerie and Adelaide Pyvart was that Josephine was penniless and had nothing to recommend her except ringlets, a pretty face and a delicate touch on the guitar, whereas Adelaide was sole heiress to some useful acres on Santo Domingo and – although short, verging on the plain and with a curious stoop – had accordingly netted Alex, the younger of the Liancourt boys.
But now the tables were turned, rather violently. Josephine was married to the First Consul, while Alex who had fled France in ’92 to manage his wife’s plantations was now back (some said he never got the hang of sugar) and looking for employment. And so was his wife.
How delicious, then, for Josephine to be able to take on a duchess as her dame d’honneur and to murmur t
o that duchess, ‘Ah, my dear cousin, would you be so kind as to …’ And if one duchess, why not two?
At the start, though, the family name proved a hindrance rather than a help.
‘Who shall I say, madame?’
‘The Duchesse, I mean Citoyenne La Rochefoucauld.’
‘No, no, madame, I meant: who shall I say you are.’
‘Citoyenne La Rochefoucauld.’
‘You can’t be, she’s here already.’
‘I’m her cousin.’
And then in a minute she was enveloped by warm plump arms and an overwhelming fragrance of patchouli and garlic, and the Citoyenne Bonaparte was laughing into her ear. ‘Oh, it’s too funny, you cannot expect poor Roger to cope with two duchesses at once. Come in, my dear, Adelaide has told me so much about you. And we have such a great deal in common, you and I. After all, both our first husbands were murdered, though I’m sure yours was a better lot than mine.’
Rosalie was captivated. Everything about Josephine was so different, her breezy candour, her casual extravagance, the litter of discarded clothes all over her apartment and the little dogs pawing them, the card tables set up with the cards scattered across them.
‘Adelaide is so brilliant at telling our fortunes. She learnt the art from an old Creole woman we knew when we were girls and she is as good at it as Madame Le Normand who is positively the best clairvoyant in Paris and who promises to write my biography some day because she understands me so well. Tell me, Addie dear, how is the Consul this morning? It is the most extraordinary thing, you know, the last time he had a stomach-ache she told me the exact moment it started, two days before his letter arrived and he was hundreds of miles away at the time.’
The little figure was bent over the cards, so stooped that she seemed almost to be knocking her head against the green baize.
‘Oh, this is a bad morning, the queen of hearts is next to the ace of spades. I fear that the Consul has met with an accident.’
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