by James Tipton
“This is as lovely as any description I read in Romance of the Rose.”
“You are very kind. But it’s only four lines; the Romance is thousands.”
“Was not translating your work an excellent lesson?”
“Mademoiselle Vallon, I have inquired of Monsieur du Vivier if he knew of a language tutor—”
Just then the tall doors to the dining room swung open, and Maman stood there, regarding us quizzically, then glided toward us, with a faint rustling of a silk underskirt.
“Maman, this is Monsieur William, who has come from England. He brought me a Christmas present.” I realized I made it sound as if he had come all the way from England to deliver me a present. I felt like a little girl who couldn’t get her words right.
“I am honored,” Monsieur William said and bowed slightly.
“My pleasure, Monsieur.” Maman nodded.
“He brought me this poem, Maman. He wrote it himself. And translated it into French.” I showed it to her. She looked at the four small lines.
“That’s very charming,” she said.
Monsieur William twirled his hat in his hand.
“Would you take a drink, Monsieur?” I asked again, so Mama would get the idea. “Chez Dubourg is famous for its fruit liqueurs.
Maman, Monsieur William has walked from—”
“Rue Royale,” he said. “Above a hosier and hatter’s shop.”
“I wanted to stop at one of those shops on our way here,” I said.
“Perhaps I would have met you earlier.” I thought that that was also a stupid thing to say. I wanted Maman to invite him to stay.
“Thank you, I just came to give you this. I must leave before it starts to storm again.”
Maman, as if suddenly remembering her manners, said sweetly, “Monsieur, perhaps you would like to sample one of our Christmas madeleines.”
“May I have another madeleine?” we heard Gérard shout from his door at the top of the stairs. It was amazing how sharp his ears were when it came to delights, or terrors.
“That is very kind, but I already have one,” Monsieur William said. Maman looked completely nonplussed. “I must go. Goodnight. Joyeux Noël. ”
And he was out the door in a gust of cold wind.
“Maman, how can you be so cold?”
“I invited him for dessert.”
“Only when you knew he was going.”
“What was he doing here unasked?” She spoke as if she were keeping the Revolution itself from her door.
“He is not so formal as we are, Maman.”
“These are the changed times.” She looked fiercely at me.
“I will invite him next time.”
“You know nothing about him.”
“I know a good deal.”
“Marie-Ann...Annette, come here.” She led me into the front salon.
She sat beneath the half-lit chandelier, and I perched on a nearby ottoman. I wanted now to be back in the dining room with the rest of the family.
“Annette, there is something I have been trying to tell you since you were sixteen, and you didn’t understand it then, but with more maturity, you may grasp it now. I will try one last time, and I will make it brief.”
“Maman, I know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you? Do you know that to live properly in the world, in any capacity, demands sacrifice, and of women are demanded the greatest sacrifices?”
“Of what sacrifice do you speak, Maman?”
“Even the most honorable of men know nothing of what love means to a woman. They feel pleasure, and that is their aim. A woman believes that love itself is her whole aim and pleasure merely one branch of a vast tree, deeply rooted in her heart. She believes it is her profound duty to care for this tree, nourish it each day, and give all of its fruits exclusively to one man and to her children. This in itself demands a sacrifice that men cannot comprehend.”
She sounded like one of the righteous characters from Les Liaisons dangereuses, but all the same, I had never heard her talk like this.
Maman went on, “But believing in that tree of perfect love and happiness can be a chimera for unsuspecting women. Therefore I’ll speak to you of another, even more virtuous sacrifice: the belief in that tree with its ever-blooming branches must in itself be sacrificed if prudence demands it. A woman gives happiness rather than delights in it, and if she must give it contrary to the direction she herself would choose, then her greater pleasure is in following that duty, since her own happiness was not her aim in the first place. Are you following me? It seems to me that you are still attached to the fancies of youth, that in your mind you have fallen prey to that chimera. But at twenty-two, there is no reason for you to be such a child.
“A man must be well-born, have a fortune and the advantage of birth. Do not scoff at these requirements; they are more necessary now than ever; life can be ruinous, and prudence dictates that above all, in times of misfortune we cling to the values that have always served us well and do not abandon them for the fallacious ones springing up; for instance, that one’s station in life is not of consequence. Now to the point: a young man’s character one can never be wholly sure of, but a foreigner’s, even if he is well-educated? One who can only afford to live above a hosier and hatter’s shop; one whose notion of self-advancement is to write poetry?”
I said nothing, and her tone was softer when she spoke again. “So I say to you, my dear, be careful of the belief in that tree that exists only in one’s imagination; know that one can derive the purest happiness from sacrifice; and never allow the passing fancies of the heart to vanquish prudence, or you will be left with nothing.” She sighed, and her tone changed back. “Now it is high time to return to our coffee.”
She rose from her chair.
“What about Papa?”
She slowly sat down and regarded me, then continued in her soft tone. “Your father, ma chérie, was an honorable man from a good family whose social level matched mine. He worked from a sense of social duty, not from necessity. We had a mutual respect, an affection-ate regard that forms the basis of lasting happiness in marriage. You think, Annette, it is nothing to be without love. I tell you it is nothing to be without fortune or a good name. If it is nothing either way, you must make your choice.”
She suddenly extended her hand out to me, and I grasped it. I don’t think she had touched me for years.
“Don’t be left with nothing, my girl.”
I didn’t want to disagree with her. I didn’t know when the last time was that she had talked to me softly, and I didn’t know when she would again.
The Serpent
When the vicomte and vicomtesse de Fresne d ’Aguesseau invited the Dubourgs for an Epiphany soirée, they included—or should I say deigned to include—their guests from Blois. I had not seen their mansion for five years and was looking forward to sitting on a certain carved couch, embroidered with a scene of a white horse, the hooves of its back legs raised and in the act of kicking a wild boar, cowering beneath them. In a meadow behind it, another boar runs away.
Etienne had an appointment with a friend in Orléans from the Sorbonne, and Marguerite and Paul wished to spend Epiphany, the climax of the Christmas season, with their children, so Angelique and I joined Maman and Monsieur Vergez at the vicomte’s soirée.
Now I again sat across from my stepfather in our family carriage, and he opened his engraved silver box and took a pinch of snuff, and I glanced out the window at the huge triple doors of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, rose windows above each door. The problem with a rose window, however, is that it needs light to make it truly beautiful.
This was a particularly gloomy January evening; even though it was the day on which the Magi arrived at Bethlehem, no such bright star lit the glorious windows of the Holy Cross; the only light was in the corner of the square, where a group of beggars stood around a small fire.
Nor was there any star above the brick mansion of the vicomte, one of many
across from a larger mansion in which kings have stayed on their visits to Orléans, before the current days when they were exiled from Versailles and confined to a dilapidated palace along the Seine. I noticed that, over the doorway, the ancient coat of arms of the Fresne d ’Aguesseau family had been discreetly painted over.
Angelique and I passed through the vestibule behind Maman and Monsieur Vergez, surrounded by women’s rustling silks, gold or silver braid glinting on gentlemen’s culottes, knee-breeches, buckles shining on shoes. It had been years since I had seen so many beautiful people. And there was the short and jolly Monsieur Dubourg, gesticulating with the vicomte, a slim taciturn man in black and white silk, and Madame Dubourg, her height putting her on the level with the vicomtesse’s old-fashioned tiered coiffure, leaning down and listening to the vicomtesse, in her royalist dress of white taffeta, the mode the Queen had made famous.
When we passed the dining room I glanced through the open gilded doors at the tapestry of Joan of Arc, sword in hand, light on her face, attacking the English where Monsieur William’s aspens now whispered. We heard music playing from one of the salons and followed the sounds into a crowded room. Two elderly ladies with powdered hair and rouged cheeks sat rigidly on my couch of the stallion and the boar. I could see one of the white hind legs raised behind one of the tight blue bodices. The ladies looked brittle, as if should one of them fall off the couch, she would break.
The music sounded Italian, not French, perhaps that of Niccolò Piccinni, and in spite of the crowd, Angelique and I, arm in arm in our white muslin dresses with long tasseled waist sashes (hers gold, mine blue), promenaded around the edge of the room. I liked the new flat pumps that had come into style in rebellion from high heels and after Rousseau’s statement that clothes should be useful, not luxurious. We looked at the beautiful people and nodded at a few ladies we had met in Orléans in previous years. They wore little jewelry now—and what they wore was clearly paste.
The National Assembly had issued an edict that all women were to give their jewelry to the government, as proof that their values had shifted from vanity to patriotism. It could then be used to help pay to build a new army. Of course, the men in the assembly who created the edict were not about to donate their silver snuff boxes. I was sure most of these women’s jewels, though, did not go to make new cannon.
They were probably hiding discreetly in the back of a drawer, waiting for a more felicitous time to dazzle the world once more.
Angelique and I each took a glass from a servant standing, still as a statue, by the wall, seated ourselves by a small tulip wood table, and sipped the chilled, sparkling Vouvray, which tasted fine in the warm, full room with a fire burning high in the huge hearth. I looked around the room for Monsieur William, thinking that his royalist landlord would invite the foreigner to see the best society in Orléans. But perhaps Monsieur William was not interested. He was probably writing in his room.
The music stopped, and it wasn’t long before I saw a gilt-wood chair beside me pulled close to my own by a black silk arm, and suddenly it was not the frank face of the Englishman but the smiling facade of Monsieur Leforges, under a tightly curled wig, that looked into mine.
I almost gasped and caught myself. I wanted to leave immediately, but before I could say anything, he asked us courteously if he could join us. Angelique, who was only twelve six years ago and didn’t know him at all, and who always appreciated the company of handsome and polite men, said, Yes, of course. He presented himself as Monsieur Leforges of Orléans, the conductor of the small orchestra we had just heard, and sat down.
He gave me a sardonic smile, lost on Angelique, patted my knee under the table, and rested his hand there until I pushed it off. His arrogance knew no bounds. I knew he was going to play a game now, in front of my sister, as if he and I had never met. He knew that I did not want to introduce him as my old ami.
I had often wondered, since I was sixteen, what would be my response if I should ever see Monsieur Leforges again. I had created a thousand clever and proud things to say, and now I could not remember one of them. Angelique gave her name and said we were from Blois, and when I failed to give my name, she looked strangely at me.
She went on to say that the music was charming, and that it seemed that all the fashionable society of Orléans had come. He said that was always the case at a soirée chez Fresne d ’Aguesseau. I could feel his eyes on me, and I wouldn’t give him the pleasure of my looking at him, or of thinking he had made me uncomfortable.
I said, “Angelique, we go to many such soirées at the château de Beauregard, do we not?” Which wasn’t true, for the count hadn’t held any since my father died—or since the Revolution started, for those events happened at about the same time.
Angelique was silent, and our self-invited guest answered that he had once taught music and dancing in Blois, at which Angelique clapped her hands together. She said, “If you were at the château de Beauregard,” she said, ”perhaps for a moment, as you changed partners in a contredanse, you danced with Annette, or with my other older sister, Madame Vincent.”
“Very unlikely,” said Monsieur Leforges, “because I would have remembered anyone as charming as your sister here, and if your other sister had any resemblance to the two before me, well, I would have remembered her too.” He then said that an unfortunate incident, however, forced him to retire from Blois and kept him from returning.
I realized I had neglected my Vouvray, but the silence at our small table, as we awaited Monsieur Leforge’s explanation, made me place the glass soundlessly back on the veneered tulip wood.
“It actually had to do indirectly with your count,” he said. “He may not be as kind a man as you may think. I won’t go into the unpleasant details here, but suffice it to say that a rival instructor, in whose best interests it was to stop my growing success in that town, spread salacious rumors about me. The count, who prided himself on his noblesse oblige to the town, believed the slanders and publicized them, he thought, in his hasty judgment, to save other pupils from being ‘ruined ’—as he put it”—here Angelique gasped and waved her fan painted with butterflies—“so I lost my pupils, my reputation, and even had to leave Blois, a town of which, in my short time there, I had grown rather fond.”
He had put his hand back on my knee. I tried surreptitiously to push it off, but through the fine fabric of the muslin, he pinched the flesh above my knee so hard I almost cried out.
“How horrible,” my sister said.
“It was very humiliating,” he said. He kept pinching hard. I had to bite my lip. “A certain young woman, it seems, out of jealousy of my attentions, purely professional of course, to another female pupil, was implicated in this crime to my honor. My rival instructor never used her name, naturally, but spread the rumor that I had ruined ‘a certain young lady.’” He pinched extra hard, then let go. “You know how people are eager to listen to vile gossip, quick to believe it, and deaf to the voices of justice or reason.”
“Yes,” said my sister, “that’s always the case.”
“Well, I’ve built my reputation back here in Orléans: witness, I am invited to play at the best soirées local society has to offer. But next autumn I have been invited back to Blois to instruct a new generation, and, I tell you charming ladies, if I ever meet that man who slandered me or the lady who helped him, my revenge will be swift and sure.”
“I’m afraid they would deserve it,” Angelique said.
“I recall my humiliation in Blois only with extreme pain, and as it is indelicate to discuss such a matter with strangers and with ladies, I beg your forgiveness for my having made it a topic of conversation; it was only because your native town reminded me of memories I would rather forget.”
I finally looked again at my lover of six years ago. He seemed older, with a few lines near his eyes. The smile that played about his lips seemed to be stretched tight, like a mask that is too small. “Monsieur Leforges,” I said, “as it is not ours to judge, is
n’t it also not ours to exact revenge? Isn’t the desire for revenge the most degrading of emotions; shouldn’t you, as a conductor of sublime music, try to raise yourself above such pettiness?”
“Mademoiselle, you speak as one pure as divinity itself would speak, but alas, I am a mortal man and susceptible to all his weakness.”
“What if one of his weaknesses, Monsieur,” I said, “is to deceive others, to speak as guilefully as the serpent in the garden itself?”
“Then, Mademoiselle, a certain young lady would pluck and eat of a fruit she never should taste. And whose crime is that? Who must be punished for that? Not the serpent, surely.”
“Your conversation has become entirely too metaphysical,” said Angelique. “And I apologize, Monsieur; my sister is not in the best of humors tonight. May we return to the intriguing topic of supposed slanders?”
“I regret, Mesdemoiselles, that I must return instead to my orchestra, for our pause for refreshment is over.”
And he vanished behind a lilac taffeta dress, and soon we heard the strains of his musicians again.
“Well, you were rude,” my sister said.
Plato’s Cave
I didn’t say anything, and Angelique regarded me for a long time. “That was either very rude,” said my sister, “or”—she let the silence hang there—“or...did you know him, Annette?”
Angelique was young and flirtatious but not stupid.
“He was my ‘disgrace’ that I’m sure the servants whispered about around the house years ago—or still do.”
“Then he’s just a big liar.” She laughed a small, discreet, but delicious laugh. “And I just thought you were misanthropic or too proud where men were concerned. I am impressed.”
“Angelique—”
“Well, I shall defend you in all things now, Annette. Now that I know how the world has mistreated you.”
“It wasn’t the world—”
“Excuse me, Mesdemoiselles, may I—?”