Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution

by James Tipton

  Suddenly I saw my father on the morning of a hunt, alive and loving life; defending Marie’s decision to draw on the floor by the fire because that inspired her; smiling at me the night I had shot the boar. And that day in front of the stable when he had given me La Rouge, when he never said a thing about my disgrace with Monsieur Leforges, and I knew he had forgiven me.

  I wiped away my tears and put on my riding habit and boots, and without seeing anyone walked down to the stables, saddled La Rouge, and was soon riding in the mist on the chalk cliffs above the river, feeling the cold wind snatch away my tears, the thundering life smoothly moving below me, and the gray river glinting through spaces in the fog.

  Etienne returned for the mass said for Papa at Saint-Louis Cathedral. He was strange and full of his new burdens of head of the household. At the mass he took our younger sister Angelique’s arm; Marguerite was on Paul’s, and my mother leaned on the arm of the count. She was stoic, but we embraced. I noticed the count’s eyes bright with unshed tears. I had no one to take my arm, so Marie and I stood and knelt and prayed together. It felt good to hear her soft child’s voice next to me and feel her small arm, firmly locked in mine. She is the one who enlightened me, I thought, that the finality of death is only for the living.

  Papa in his goodness had provided for the living—he had left substantial gifts for each child, not to be confused with inheritance, complicated as that was by issues of gender and by the fact that my mother was still alive. These were gifts to be used when needed, and, twenty and unmarried, I appreciated the security that such a gift might offer me one day.

  I repeated softly Ave, verum corpus, natum de Maria virgine and looked up at the vast arches of the cathedral. How can they make a ceiling of stone so that it doesn’t fall down, as if it’s floating far above us? There were so many things I didn’t understand.

  I felt Marie’s small hand in mine, and the touch of that hand kept me linked to the mortal world. Otherwise, I thought, I wish I could just pass right up along those arches where the incense curls and disappears, where a single, thin sun shaft comes down.

  A Safe Place

  My nephew, Gérard Vincent, learned to speak as the disturbed air of the Revolution moved about him. Sometime after his fourth birthday in 1791, he began referring regularly to demons, and I was never quite sure how much of this was his own active child’s imagination and how much was influenced by those conversations that children overhear and of which they understand not the meaning but the feeling. He had his own ways of dealing with these demons, before whom his parents were powerless. Marguerite and Paul, though, did their best to keep Gérard and his sister in their own happy world.

  I had returned to live with my mother and Angelique, but Maman’s criticisms of my riding and her insistence that I follow her advice on suitors agitated me. Less than a year after Papa’s death, perhaps out of her need for stability in the changing times, she married an ambitious lawyer in town, who came to live at chez Vallon, now chez Vergez, which was his name. It wasn’t my home anymore, and I returned to chez Vincent, grateful to be part of a family, but apart from it as well.

  I tutored and played with little Gérard as well as Marie. He was a talkative four-year-old, and we spent so much time together, he was rapidly becoming my very good friend.

  On a sunny October afternoon we made up spontaneous songs about things we saw from Marguerite’s terrace. Gérard sang first about how the sun was bright on the water and how the river looked small because it was far away, then he sang about how it would be winter soon because the grapes had all been picked. I had been teaching him about seasons. Then it was my turn, and I made up a verse about how the red roses no longer flared at the end of the vine rows, and that was how you knew the harvest was over and winter was coming.

  Gérard was telling me how his hoop, which he could not roll well yet with his stick, was actually a circle to catch demons in. I told him demons were only in the imagination and to use his imagination for good things, and he said he had two imaginations, one good and one bad, and when the bad one came it took over his whole body; that is why he needed the hoop.

  How much did he know, in his fine world of song and play, of the way the world he was growing into was falling down outside the walls of his father’s beautiful house? I was afraid that his haven would suddenly collapse in upon itself. I gave him a little hug and kissed his cheek, and he went right on singing his song about the demons.

  Marguerite joined us at the table by the small fountain, and we poured iced water into our glasses of juice squeezed from lemons, then, with gleaming silver pincers, dropped in two or three cubes of sugar. I made a third, very sweet citron pressé for Gérard, who was playing under the table and surfaced for a sip from his wooden cup, hummed delightedly at the sweet, cold taste, then disappeared again.

  But before he ducked under the table, he told us we were in a carriage. “It is going to Paris, very fast,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go to Paris,” I said.

  “Yes, you do. We ’re going to see a riot.”

  “Gérard, that is enough,” said his mother, who, even in the world of make-believe wanted to keep her son from danger. Paul made a point of reading the papers and keeping himself informed. Marguerite did not want to hear much of the news from Paris. But she knew it was there. “If you want to go to Paris, we will see the opera,” she said.

  “We are there, now. Everybody out of the carriage. Look at those people throwing that man off the tower!”

  “Gérard, go back under the table,” said Marguerite. “Take us somewhere else.”

  “Yes, take us to the seaside, Gérard. I want to see the ocean. You can build in the sand,” I said. Gérard disappeared under the table, and I could hear the clip-clopping of the horses’ hooves as he clicked his tongue.

  “I would love to go to Paris again,” said Marguerite. “I would like to give my children the same exposure to society that I received.”

  “There is plenty of society here.”

  “I think I was born in the wrong time. I would have loved to have been one of the ladies at the court of the Cavalier King.”

  “It would be stifling always to be expected to dress so perfectly. I prefer my muslin tea dress to that heavy velvet.”

  “Or perhaps I could be one of those girls in silk who flirted and listened at court and informed the queen of any intrigues. Do you know the National Assembly has closed the silk factories in Tours? Said they were decadent.”

  “We have plenty of silks.”

  “We are at the seaside, now,” announced Gérard.

  “I will stay here and watch you, for I hate getting sandy.”

  “Come, Marguerite, the breezes are fine,” I said. “You can even see the cliffs of England.”

  “The season is approaching, Annette. Will anyone be accompanying you to the fêtes in Orléans?”

  No one was accompanying me, and I preferred to stay at the beach.

  “Please don’t start on Maman’s favorite subject, Marguerite. Now what if you could be Marguerite d’Angoulême, one of the great ancient queens of the Loire?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be a queen nowadays. Marie-Antoinette is not one of the more beloved creatures in France. And I would not want Gérard to be a prince and be taken, at the point of a pike, from his château.” She clasped her hand over her mouth. “Was I talking too loud?”

  Gérard ran to the shade of the enormous horse chestnut tree that overhung the terrace and then disappeared. I had almost forgotten that he was under the table. I thought he was playing hide-and-seek, so I looked behind the tree and along the side of the terrace and couldn’t find him. Then Marguerite looked in the same places, and the littlest Vincent was nowhere. She called for him; then we both called his name.

  Finally, we heard his own impatient piping: “Find me.” We followed the voice and found him, over the short wall that surrounded the terrace. He was perched on a steep ledge with a sheer drop just below him.
Marguerite screamed, and Gérard froze and started crying. I leaned way over, had my sister hold my waist, and extended my arm down to him. My back ached, and my arm felt like lead as his entire weight swung from it; my fingers, suddenly sweaty and slippery, grasped his small hand.

  “You’re almost there,” I said to him, and his little boots scraped the cliffs. I didn’t know how he had scrambled down there.

  When he was back up on the terrace, I made out, amid his sniffles, “I am a good climber. When the demons come, I know a good place to hide.”

  It was worth having a safe place. Maman’s was with a lawyer who was able to play both sides. And Gérard, alone among us at chez Vincent, had realized the need for one of his own.

  Presence

  I was rereading Rousseau’ Héloïse s in the window seat with the coldness and the growing dark outside, while Marie drew stretched out in front of the fire and Marguerite worked on her needlepoint. Gérard played a game with a tiny carved figure of a mounted knight, prancing upon an embroidered chair. I was filled with love for this small, quiet world, with the snapping fire the only conversation. I thought that I didn’t need anybody or anything else. I just wanted it to stay like this, always. Why couldn’t it, if the Revolution settled down with the new constitution, as Paul predicted, and if I could stay away from Maman’s insistence that I marry? I was content with being an old maid at twenty-two.

  But Héloïse reminded me of the dances we would soon be a part of in the Christmas season at Orléans:

  In the evening, the whole house assembled to dance. Claire seemed to be adorned by the hand of the graces; she had never been so brilliant as she was that day. She danced, she chatted, she laughed, she gave orders, she was equal to everything.

  Now snow sifted steadily down as I watched the half-dark of the day slip into the deeper dark of the night. The servants silently lighted fifty candles. I saw the moon rise full over the bare horse-chestnut tree; its shadows twisted and curved over the untouched snow that glimmered a little in the moonlight.

  “I want you to help me make a carriage. That’s what I want you to do,” said a voice at my elbow. Gérard beckoned me to follow him, and I knew what this meant—moving some chairs together and sitting on them, facing each other, as if we were in a carriage. But I didn’t want to leave my window seat. “Come, come,” he said, and I let him draw me to the great fireplace, where he had herded Marguerite, Marie, and Nurse. I sat by my sister in the carriage and listened to Gérard jabber to himself: “Now we are going to England,” he said. I didn’t even know he knew there was such a country. I was sure he didn’t know you had to cross the Channel to get there.

  “Monsieur and Madame Varache have left France,” my sister said to me, from her seat in the carriage. “I didn’t think they’d actually do it. They’re going to England.” I stood up to walk to the fire.

  “You’re standing in the water! Get out of the water!” Gérard shouted. I sat back down. I guess he did know about the Channel. It must be a magical carriage.

  “You still hear of all sorts of people emigrating,” Marguerite said.

  “I don’t want to go to England,” Marie said.

  “Nobody’s going anywhere,” I said. “Except Gérard.”

  “Aunt Annette and I are planning what we are going to wear to the first fête of the Christmas season in Orléans,” Marguerite said to her daughter. “It will be nice to stay with the Dubourgs again.”

  Nurse ushered the children away for supper and bed, and my sister continued working on an embroidery pattern, green on white, of a tree with flowering branches, and I wrote in a little book.

  “What do you write in that thing?” asked Marguerite. “You’re jotting in it every evening.”

  “I like to keep track of my thoughts.”

  “Do you ever,” she said, and looked down at her flowering tree, “write about love?”

  “You know I tried that when I was a girl. It turned out to be rather deceptive.”

  “Well, that was one rotten man.” She paused again. “Do you ever think Maman is right, and perhaps you ought to think about it again?

  I know you’re different and always have been different—riding and hunting, and having dozens of suitors who never get anything more than a consent to dance with you. We love having you here, but it is selfish of me to rely on you to take care of Gérard. You should have a life of your own. You do know one can be happily married. Look at Paul and me.”

  “How many men are like Paul? Intelligent, honorable, kind? Your luck is rare. His sort’s not what I see, in my many conversations with clever or not-so-clever young men. No, thank you, if I may continue to take advantage of your hospitality, I’m very happy here with you and your family, and with riding La Rouge by the river. And with dancing with gentlemen without being overmastered by some sudden and uncontrollable emotion—except that excited by the music.”

  “Annette, I like you to stay here simply because I find your conversation amusing. No one I know talks like you.”

  “When I was a girl, I was a fool,” I said. “And now I prefer to watch the snow.”

  It swirled in the pale evening on the terrace and looked as if it blew in every direction at once. I wanted to ride out in it and stop in the woods along the river and watch the world transformed before me. Everything that was ordinary gained some new grace: the weight of hours of snow balanced on one twig, on the old shovel, leaning against the terrace wall.

  “Well, I hope this snow stops soon or we ’ll never get to Orléans,” said Marguerite. “And there, you see, I have forgotten all about England and Monsieur and Madame Varache,” she added.

  “I wonder if they’re happy?”

  I looked over my shoulder, and the snow had indeed stopped. The fire was a good sight and warm on my legs, but I thought this was the time.

  “I’m going out,” I said.

  “It’s the blue hour, almost dark.”

  “La Rouge needs her exercise. It will be pretty; you want to come?”

  “Ask me in the spring.”

  I put on my long English riding cloak with a high collar that was the style of a few years ago, and the rabbit fur gloves and the hat, in which Marguerite said I looked like a Cossack.

  I opened the wide old stable doors and walked into the familiar smell of hay and alfalfa, of manure, and the earthy smell of the horses themselves: the realm that stayed the same no matter what went on outside those stable doors. La Rouge nickered at my approach. I talked softly while I saddled her, and we rode out onto the fresh snow.

  We walked down the steep, narrow street, cantered the quai on which lumbered only one late cart, laden with wood, and I let her out farther down the left bank. I rode and rode, until the heavy cares of past, present, and future had dropped off far behind.

  I sat still and allowed La Rouge to paw through the snow for a mouthful of grass, and as dark descended and hardly a breeze whispered and a new set of flakes fell, I felt a peace that rose up out of the winter earth and enveloped me. I felt a presence of something vast and intimate, of which I was a small yet conscious part. I had felt it before, when I paused by the river or at the edge of the woods.

  I called it the presence of the Virgin, for I was taught to give it that name, but one could, I suppose, just as easily give it the pagan name of some spirit of the water or the trees.

  I thought, then, that I could only feel this presence by myself. If anyone else were here, I would be thinking about that person and would miss it all.

  And yet I wanted to share, deeply. I yearned for a day, far in the future of a peaceful France, when I’d ride here with a man who himself knew the vast and intimate presence suddenly felt in solitude by a rushing river. I dreamed that we ’d talk and ride and not have to talk at all. I shook my head. I cherished my contentment by the fire with my niece and nephew and book.

  I thought, therefore, of my dream of writing. I’d fill my journals with thoughts and descriptions, and one day, perhaps as an old woman, I’
d publish them under the name of a man.

  I watched the moonlight on snow and water. I knew of few things as beautiful. The earth became a map of light and dark. Orion and Canus Major glittered in clear coldness. Above and below stretched a shining world. I dreamed, too, that the peace that dwelt here, just beyond my fingertips, I could know and carry with me as I carried my own limbs, and pass it on. What else was life for?

  I was getting cold, standing still with my thoughts. I mounted La Rouge and rode swiftly, the snow and moonlight-bright sparks shed from her hooves.

  Luxury

  It was the third Christmas without Papa, and each one passing did not make it easier. Part of me did not want to make the traditional journey to the Dubourgs in Orléans, where we always had fine parties and dances. Part of me didn’t even care that Etienne would be there; that Angelique was already there, and the family would be together again. Part of me just wanted to stay with my two quiet friends: La Rouge and the river.

  It was still considered bad manners to talk about the Revolution in social gatherings where one was supposed to be happy, and many of my parents’ friends kept up the pretense that the Revolution had never happened.

  The first Christmas after Papa was killed and the Revolution began, no one discussed how, in October of that year, the royal family had been rousted at pike’s point from their palace in Versailles by a mob led by market women who had walked all the way from Paris. Marie-Antoinette only missed being hacked to pieces in her bedchamber by escaping through a secret passageway designed for the King’s assignations with her when they were trying to produce an heir. Now, in the storming of the palace she ran to meet the King and her two children, huddling with their nurse in his chamber. Once they had arrived, the mob shunted them into a carriage, and they left their home and began a long, slow, ignominious ride to Paris. The crowd marched on all sides of the carriage, shouted insults to the King and Queen, and proudly carried, bobbing on pikes that they regularly dipped beside the windows, the bloody heads of the royal family’s personal Swiss Guards. The family was then immured in the Tuileries, an unused, rat-infested palace along the Seine, where the people of Paris and the new National Assembly could keep a close watch on them. That seemed worth discussing, but no one mentioned it that year at chez Dubourg. No one could do anything about it anyway.