Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution

by James Tipton

  We had arrived now at everyone’s favorite conversation topic: the royal family’s aborted escape to Varennes last summer.

  “They were so close to the border,” said Maman. “They could have made it. Everyone agrees on that. I hate to think of it.”

  “If they had not had an escape party that could only fit in a berline and moved at a turtle’s pace, and that conspicuous huge carriage also, because of its load, had not made the horses stumble and break a harness, they’d be across the border now, and we ’d have a different world,” Paul said.

  “I think it was brilliant, the way they dressed as servants—the young prince in girl’s clothing—and slipped out from under the nose of Lafayette and his National Guard,” Angelique joined in.

  Monsieur Vergez concentrated on his stuffed eels, and for once, I agreed with him. They were simmered in good wine with mushrooms and onions. I sipped the chilled white wine brought upriver from Vouvray, caught Marguerite’s eye, and silently raised my glass to her.

  I had heard all this before. While I agreed with Maman that it was very unfortunate, I personally wondered why they hadn’t just tried to go to Belgium instead of all the way to the German border—they would have made it easily. But with that thought I was guilty of the “What if...” conversation I was so tired of. So, like my stepfather, I enjoyed the dinner that was prepared with such care, and half-listened to the old litany.

  “Oh, yes, it was all very brilliant,” rejoined Paul. “They had to fit the Queen’s friend the Marquise de Tourzel in, and Louis’s sister, and the children’s nurse, and two waiting women, as if they were going on a summer outing to Saint-Cloud.”

  “I love that they even adopted false names,” said Angelique. “The King was Monsieur Durand, a valet; the Queen was the baronne de Korff, a delightful German name to explain her accent. And you must admit, Paul, it is impressive how they sneaked at different times out of the Tuileries, even if the Queen did get a little lost, and then went through side streets of Paris in a plain carriage driven by that handsome Swedish count.”

  “I will admit,” said Paul, “that he—Count Fersen, no stranger to intrigues—was the only one among that crowd in the berline capable of taking charge if things went wrong, and he was not permitted to drive the coach past Paris because he was a Swedish officer and they wanted this to be a French escape.”

  “It could have worked,” said Maman. “It was that silly man who recognized the King’s profile from a stamp and rode to alert the National Guard—what a busybody—his own towns people hated him.”

  “They did stop for soup, Maman,” Angelique said.

  “It wasn’t that,” said Etienne. “It was the inexperienced colonel leading the dragoons who were waiting to escort the King. He got nervous after two hours of waiting for the slow coach and, all on his own, decided that the escape was aborted and told his men to stand down.”

  The Dubourg’s servants served white asparagus, then the rabbit, and poured Paul’s cabernet franc in our second, waiting glass. Since the children had eaten earlier, I wasn’t able to talk to Gérard about the rabbit we had seen being prepared. I looked at the others in the pause that always ensues for a moment between courses.

  My family had dressed for the occasion: Marguerite and Angelique, one dark and one blonde, lovely in patterned silk dresses of pelouse green and duck-egg blue; I myself wore a robe à l’anglaise ; Marguerite’s green silk mantle edged with net was draped over her arm and the back of her chair; Angelique was looking very modern, with a white sash that matched the bandeau in her hair. Maman had spent most of the day on her frizzed and curled coiffure of the eighties.

  The older gentlemen had on their powdered wigs; Etienne tied his long hair in a ribbon. This would be the last dinner in which all of us—minus Papa—were together.

  “It’s a pleasure to see everyone looking so charming,” I said, and Monsieur Vergez looked up at me as he lifted a forkful of minced rabbit to his mouth.

  “I love your robe à l’anglaise,” Marguerite said.

  “It matches the gentleman anglais, that foreigner, with whom she talked so long at the ball,” Angelique said.

  “Well, I noticed you wasted no time getting to know that bore from Bordeaux,” I said.

  “At least he can dance,” said Angelique. “The Englishman doesn’t even know how to participate in the most civilized of the arts.”

  “He’s just received his degree from Cambridge University.”

  “What is his business here?” Monsieur Vergez said.

  “He wants to learn our language better and become a gentleman’s tour guide.”

  “It’s hardly a time for that,” Maman said.

  “He likes to travel. He walked all the way from Calais to Lake Como and back.”

  “If he walks, he cannot afford to ride,” Maman said.

  “I think he seemed a very polite, if reserved, gentleman,” Marguerite said.

  “All English are reserved,” said Angelique, “but he seemed to talk enough to Annette. Madame Dubourg told me his French was atrocious.”

  “It’s not. It’s just slow. Yesterday he told me all about—”

  All the eyes turned toward me now. I’m afraid I blushed. “I accidentally met him when I was walking along the quai—”

  “Marie-Ann,” my mother said. She used my given name, which she knew I disliked, whenever she was upset with me. “I’ve told you not to go out walking alone. You insist, always, in disobeying me.

  What have I done to deserve this punishment? Your imprudence knows no bounds. You could have been seen and disgraced our hosts in their city—”

  “Maman, I really don’t think—” started Marguerite.

  “There’s only uncouth bargemen out on the quai,” said my stepfather; “no one’s going to see her there who matters.”

  I almost said, “Thank you.”

  “This foreigner, in these times, could be a spy,” Maman said.

  “Then he would be for the royalist cause,” said Paul, “and hence, one of us.”

  “Far more likely he’s a foreign agitator, come to swell the ranks of the revolutionaries,” Monsieur Vergez said.

  “In Paris,” said Etienne, “English, German, Russian, American—à la Franklin—they’re thronging. They want to see what this Revolution is all about.”

  “That’s as I said,” Vergez said sternly.

  I gave my little brother a look as if to say, Et tu?

  “He’s a poet,” I said.

  That seemed to silence everyone for a bit. No one knows how to respond to poetry. Then Angelique said helpfully, “François Villon was an outlaw and a poet.”

  Now the servants quietly removed our dinner plates and, starting with Maman, we passed the cheese plate, with the wedges of Vendôme and the crémets that went so well with Paul’s wine.

  “Nunc est bibendum,” Paul said to me, and raised and drained his glass. That was the ancient phrase of the Wine Grower’s Brotherhood, of which he was a member, and into which, he said, he had initiated our famous American visitor of long ago, Monsieur Jefferson.

  The phrase means, It’s now time to drink.

  “Nunc est bibendum, ” I said back to him and took a long sip. I was grateful to him for changing the subject. “Paul,” I said, have you ever read Rabelais’s satire on the Wine Grower’s Brotherhood, when the hero goes on a quest for the Sacred Bottle?”

  “Have I not?” Paul said. “The most important quest in literature.”

  “Satire,” Maman said, “is not a proper conversation for a Christmas dinner.”

  “The sacred bottle,” Etienne said, “I’d like to go on a quest for that.”

  “Tell us about the horses, Annette,” Angelique said, “the real reason the flight to Varennes failed. It’s so absurd.”

  “I’m tired of the flight to Varennes,” I said.

  “I don’t know that story,” Etienne said. “Does it have a sacred bottle in it?”

  “This is your King you’re jo
king about,” Maman said.

  “Not anymore,” Paul said. “He may be imprisoned in a rotting palace, but he’s still imprisoned.”

  “In the Tuileries,” said Etienne, “if any of the royal family so much as show their face now, someone spits at them. Crowds gather outside just to have the chance to spit on a royal. It’s quite a distinction in Paris.”

  Vergez threw his crémet against the wall. It landed on a blossoming branch of the wallpaper, like a fat white egg.

  “We ’re not a pack of peasant rabble here,” he boomed, “who delight in such gossip. Tell the story of the horses, Annette, and make it a tragedy; no irony, no satire, just tragedy.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. I noticed the servants quietly cleaning up the cheese on the floor and washing the stain on the wall. “Well, the royal family stopped at Varennes for fresh horses. But there were no horses anywhere to be found. The carriage driver and even the King himself knocked on doors in a panic. Meanwhile, the National Guard rode up.

  A retired soldier in the town who tried to defend the King raised his sword and was shot down before he could use it. They packed them all back in the berline, with a couple of National Assembly members to keep an eye on them, and drove them ignominiously back to Paris.

  All the while, at the other end of town, across the bridge, waited a groom with fresh horses.”

  “That has irony in it,” said Vergez.

  “It’s hard to separate tragedy and irony,” Paul said.

  “I think it’s tremendously sad,” Maman said.

  “No one,” said Marguerite, “with all the vicious lies about the Queen, remembers that she is a mother. Think about her being a mother. A child on either side of her, soldiers out her window. Can you imagine it?”

  “Ah, the poached pears and madeleines,” Paul said, as the footman moved among us.

  I don’t think Paul said that last word in a particularly loud voice, but one of the tall doors suddenly opened a crack, and Gérard, who had been put to bed over an hour ago, poked his little head in beside the white petals on the spring boughs.

  “May I have some madeleines?” he asked. His father motioned for him to enter, and Gérard scampered over the shiny parquet floor, soon followed by his nurse.

  “I’m sorry, Monsieur Vincent,” she said, “he couldn’t sleep and said he wanted to come say good night.”

  “Quite right, too,” said his father. “Here’s a madeleine, my boy; here’s two, and here’s two for you not to forget to give your sister. I’ll ask her tomorrow.”

  “She’s asleep,” Gérard said.

  “Then you give them to her for breakfast,” said Paul. “Now go and kiss your mother good night. Again.” And Gérard ran around the long mahogany table to where his mother sat opposite his father and kissed her, my sister leaning her head down and her son rising on tiptoe, his cookies clutched in both hands. Nurse followed him out, silently enclosing us within the orchard of the Chinese emperors.

  Then, just as Monsieur Dubourg’s fruit liqueur was poured, and I had taken my first sip, we heard Gérard’s voice again, sounding genuinely afraid. “I can’t go,” he said.

  Marguerite started to rise, and I said, “No, I’ll go.” I wanted to escape from the political conversation, which Gérard could have overheard, standing outside the door. The boy stood beneath the stairway now, his feet rooted on the marble floor, with Nurse trying to pull him up the stairs with one hand; her other held a small brass candelabrum.

  “He’s being most unreasonable,” she said. “I think he’s just making up an excuse not to go to bed.”

  “What’s the matter, Gérard?” I said.

  “It’s the demons,” he said. “They’re at the top of the stairs.”

  Chimera

  We stood under the chandelier in the vestibule and looked up into the darkness. The servants were enjoying their own Christmas dinner and had not lit the sconces upstairs. “I’ll go first,” I said. “You and Nurse right behind.” Then I thought of something. “Where’s your hoop?”

  “In my room,” Gérard said in a small voice.

  “We will put it by your bed, and nothing will get past it,” I said.

  “But it’s upstairs.”

  We took our first steps. I could hear the branches of the poplar by the side of the house scraping the window at the top of the stairs, and even I felt a little frightened by the dark. Fear, like courage, is contagious, so I proceeded up the stairs, Nurse’s candelabrum raised high behind us, in our soft moving sphere of light.

  Then we heard a knock below us at the door. I turned and stood still. Then we heard it again. Three taps, then silence, then three more taps. Neither the Dubourgs nor we were expecting anyone, but why was I suddenly afraid? Had a four-year-old’s mood infected mine?

  Nurse, perhaps thinking that it wasn’t her duty to open doors, stood there, and Gérard followed me to the door. I opened it a few inches and saw Monsieur William standing there, a hat under his left arm.

  “I wanted to wish you Joyeux Noël,” he said. “I have brought you a little present.”

  “You should not come to chez Dubourg uninvited, but come in; it’s cold.” Monsieur William closed the big door behind him, and Gérard held on to my dress and looked up at the tall stranger. “Monsieur William, this is my nephew, Gérard. Gérard, Monsieur William is from England.”

  The foreigner bent over and said, “Do you know the game of hitting horse chestnuts against each other?”

  Gérard shook his head no.

  “It is done with string tied to the chestnut and a stick, and you swing the nuts against each other.”

  “Why?”

  Monsieur William squatted so he could be at the same level as Gérard.

  “To see which one is the stronger. The weaker one cracks. But one must find the right horse chestnut. I have seen some excellent ones near here.”

  “There is a chestnut tree at my house,” said Gérard. “I have a secret hiding place near it. No one can ever find me there.”

  “Well, I am good at hide-and-seek. Perhaps I can play it with you there.”

  “Could play,” I said. “You don’t know if you’ll ever go to Blois.”

  “Your wise aunt is helping me learn your beautiful language.”

  “You don’t know how to talk?”

  “Not very well. Often, others misunderstand me.”

  “Me too,” said Gérard, and he reached into the pocket of his dressing gown. “Would you like a madeleine?”

  “That is very kind of you.” Monsieur William looked at me. “May I?” he asked me.

  “If that is not one of his sister’s.”

  “Hers are in my other pocket,” Gérard said, in a somewhat insulted tone.

  “I must give you something in return, then,” Monsieur William said. He rummaged in the deep pocket of his English cloak. “Here.”

  He held out his rock. “This is a stone that has a lot of stories to tell. I showed it to your aunt, but she...wasn’t interested in it.”

  Gérard held it and examined it. “What kind of stories?”

  “Do you know the word imagination?” Gérard nodded. “It’s a big word for me too,” Monsieur William said. “If you use your imagination, that rock can tell you stories about a new and better world.”

  “You will need lots of imagination,” I added.

  “I can do it,” Gérard said, again rather offended at my words.

  Nurse was looking down at the Englishman and her charge.

  “Well, now that we have found that the darkness holds nothing dangerous, only Monsieur William, Nurse can take you back to your room. Remember to put the hoop by your bed.”

  “I think this is a magic rock,” Gérard said. “I’ll put it in the hoop to frighten the demons.”

  “It may bring more,” I whispered to Monsieur William. “Good night, Gérard.”

  He turned and looked at us as Nurse led him up the stairs, his feet finding their own way, and he forgot about the darknes
s.

  “You sacrificed your precious rock,” I said to Monsieur William.

  “It’s for the future generation.”

  “You’re really incorrigible. You do know this is a royalist household.”

  “I figured as much, as Monsieur du Vivier is of that persuasion. I apologize. I have a grave weakness for speaking my mind.”

  “The English must be a frank race.”

  “I hope I have not given offense.”

  “Not to me. I hate politics. And I love Gérard, and I’m glad you’ve given him a present that can help take his mind off the demons.

  Though I think the demons are caused by politics. That’s one of the reasons I hate it. But my manners are terrible—would you like something to drink, Monsieur William?”

  “No, thank you. I have just come to bring you something. I’m afraid I was a bit excited about it and wanted to give it to you straightaway. I am not a patient man. May I?”

  I nodded, and he reached into an inner breast pocket of his cloak and pulled out a scroll, tied with a red cloth ribbon. He presented it to me with a slight bow. He looked excited, like a child himself. “Open it,” he said.

  I unscrolled it. It was a poem, in French, titled “By the Loire.”

  “Did you write this?”

  “And translated it into French. I’m afraid my dictionary is weary of my company.”

  No one had ever written a poem for me before; or rather, translated one for me. “Thank you, Monsieur.”

  “You haven’t read it yet.”

  “Was it what you were writing yesterday?”

  “I started writing about Switzerland, and after talking to you, my thoughts moved to France.”

  “I hope I didn’t disturb your muse.”

  “Read the poem, please.”

  And so I roamed where Loiret’s waters glide

  Through rustling aspens heard from side to side,

  When from December clouds a milder light

  Fell where the blue flood rippled into white.

  “It’s beautiful. The blue flood did ripple into white. Even though the aspens were across the river.”

  “I crossed the bridge and walked where you envisioned Joan of Arc defeating the English.”