by James Tipton
“Would it include the pleasure of your company?”
“I am going to dine at a nearby château. He may be expecting more of my family than just me, so I’m sure you’ll be welcome. He’s a magnanimous fellow. He’s a count.”
William laughed. “You’ll start me with the Blois aristocracy?”
“Certainly. If you’re guiding English gentlemen, they need to know whom to meet. I was going to ride alone, for it is only six miles, but—would you be so kind as to be my escort?”
“I would be most honored.”
“You said you liked to ride. My father’s horse is a very fine animal. It is good you have long legs, for we won’t have to adjust the stirrups much. I know you will treat him with kind hands.” I entered Le Bleu’s stall, who shook his head excitedly, and Monsieur William followed me.
The sky was stark blue with dark clouds massing to the west, and the air was fresh and cold. We rode slowly down the steep winding streets and passed the little church of Saint-Vincent. “You have procured lodging, then, Monsieur William?”
“Yesterday afternoon; a fine apartment at a good rate, and an interesting captain of a regiment stationed here in town as a fellow lodger.”
“You know your display with that orchestra leader made you rather unpopular with my parents.”
“That was not my fault.”
“I know. I was there. Nevertheless, you are seen as a dread revolutionary and as a disturber of a young woman’s mind.”
“I would think your mind was already formed enough to listen to different opinions.”
“You mean it’s already disturbed enough?”
“Plato can disturb anyone.”
We rode down to the bridge, where we picked our way through a tangle of slow carts and carriages and pedestrians. We began to trot as we crossed the bridge, the water below gleaming in the winter sun; then we were across, and the road was freer and the trees began.
“Have you written any new poems, Monsieur William?”
“I composed more lines of my Swiss adventure as I walked here.”
I pictured him walking briskly from Orléans—he must have set out impulsively, almost as soon as we left. That was a wonderful thought.
“I translated some as I walked, just for practice,” he said. “I thought I’d try something different. I am always interested in old folk stories of the people, and my landlord in Orléans told me one of an unfortunate couple—”
“A love story?”
“Yes, if you will. As I said, I wanted to try writing something new, for me. Obviously, the season had to be the spring—”
“Obviously.”
“So it starts like this—
Earth lived in one great presence of the spring.
Life turn’d the meanest of her implements
Before his eyes to price above gold,
The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine.
That’s all I have now.”
“‘Before his eyes’; I like so much that everything around him is transformed by his love. The presence is not just the spring, is it? Shall we try these horses out, ‘Monsieur’ William? Show me how an Englishman rides.”
I urged La Rouge into a gallop and rejoiced at the gliding movement. I could hear the eight hooves beating in unison and see rider and horse just behind, at the edge of my vision, and the steam huffing out from Le Bleu’s nostrils. He thrust his head closer, eager to lead, and I looked over and saw his eyes, alive, as at a hunt.
The thundering behind me quickened, and Monsieur William was beside me, smiling from under his cocked hat, his fair hair blowing behind him, his blue eyes catching mine for an instant. He was showing me how Englishmen can ride. He was also on one of the finest horses in the Loire Valley.
Monsieur William sped past and vanished around the bend before one comes to the village of Chalettes. I heard a shout, and when I rounded the curve, Monsieur William was on the grass on the side of the road, and the driver of a cart was cursing at him. The driver was standing up in his cart and had dropped the reins, the better to wave his arms about. I was mildly amused. Monsieur William was quiet, which enraged the driver more, and when the Englishman apologized in a foreign accent, this drew more curses. The driver could not tell whether Monsieur William was an irresponsible youth who should be whipped, a bourgeois who should keep off the road, or a foreign spy who should be arrested.
Le Bleu cropped the stiff, short winter grass. Monsieur William kept his silence and looked bemused. The cart rumbled on, and the driver gave a look that possibly included me in his list, as a witch, a woman who should not clutter public roads, and a prostitute. I was smiling as I drew La Rouge up beside her friend, the horses calm and familiar in each other’s presence.
“I couldn’t understand most of what he was saying. He was speaking so quickly,” Monsieur William said.
“It’s better. He enjoyed the cursing.”
“I did not see him until I was right in front of him. He did not have to stop. I leaped immediately over the ditch at the side of the road, and that is when I fell.”
“One must make allowances,” I said, “for the unexpected around the bend.”
Monsieur William mounted Le Bleu, and we were walking the horses. “Do all young women of the upper bourgeoisie ride horseback so well?”
“I’m not sure what classification I am, but I think most prefer carriages. I know my mother and sisters do. But even in a small open carriage, the man always drives, and this I do not care for.”
“What else do you like to do that’s different?”
“I like to hunt; no, that is not exactly true; I like to go hunting; I like the adventure.”
Monsieur William laughed. The laugh seemed to resound in the empty forest.
“You have a sense of adventure as well as a keen eye and wit?”
“My father taught me to hunt and ride.”
He grew serious again. “I would have liked to have met him. I am sorry he was lost so early to you. We have that in common.”
“I want to show you something before we come to the château de Beauregard,” I said. “Can you keep up with me?” And I dashed off the road, drawing in the sharp delicious smell of the pines, and followed a narrow trail, hardly noticeable under the forest duff. It had been years now since I had ridden here. The count had shut the lodge down. He still went hunting now and then, but after Papa died, he said he had lost the heart to have the old gatherings, the suppers in the lodge the night before, meeting in a circle outside in the frosty dawn.
I could hear Monsieur William right behind me now, plunging deeper into the forest, following me blindly. We scrambled down one small ravine and up the other side, and there it was, blending perfectly with the woods.
“Why are we stopped here?”
“Look, through the trees. There.”
“How strange! Such as I saw in Switzerland.”
“It’s the count’s hunting lodge. Some of the best times of my youth were spent there, with my father and the count’s friends. It’s all shut now.”
“Do you want to ride closer?”
“No, I’ll leave it in the past. I just wanted to see it. There’s a lovely meadow just beyond that stream. We can get back to the road that way.”
The two horses recognized the meadow, even with the snowy patches. The sky seemed to lower itself above us, now, as if a storm were due. I led Monsieur William through the brush to the road, and we raced back along it to the count’s tree-lined entryway, up the winding route where the peasants had led Etienne and me—all that tumult seemed a million miles away now—and to the Beauregard stables, a second home to the horses. I won by a length, but only because I knew the way.
We brushed down the horses and went along the side path to the great doors of the château. The impassive Edouard almost smiled when he saw me, and I smiled back. “He wasn’t sure anyone would come,” Edouard said softly to me. “Last year no one came.” He took our coats and gloves. “The count occupies himself mostly in the
library these days.” We were passing the ground-floor arcades.
At an inquisitive look from me, the valet ventured upon more information. “He is obliged to answer letters from his acquaintances in exile.” Edouard announced us at the open door. The count was writing by the fire. I saw his sheepskin hat, such as Rousseau had on in his famous portrait, over the top of a high-backed chair. He had moved the Beauregard coat of arms down from the study upstairs, and the gold bells that had meant something to me on a night long ago flickered in the firelight above him. They were pinioned on deep azure and looked more stately in this larger room. When the count stood, he still had on his reading spectacles, and they made him look older.
He took them off and lay them on the writing table.
“Ma chère Annette!” he said, and came toward me with his big arms outstretched and embraced me. “Are your maman and Angelique behind you?” He did not say, “Monsieur Vergez.”
“They are still in Orléans. So I came myself.”
His face fell a little, then he smiled all the way up to his eyes.
“You’re a true believer in tradition,” he said.
“But I could not come alone. This is my escort, Count. A gentleman and a scholar from Cambridge, England, Monsieur William.”
My guest bowed his head.
The count faintly raised his eyebrows at me, as if to say, No chaperone; no stern Agnès, or even Benoît? And he immediately shrugged, as if again to say, You are twenty-two; the Revolution has changed so many things; who am I to say?—or at least that is how I interpreted his gestures.
“Monsieur William is also a poet,” I added.
“I, myself, am unsure on that matter,” the poet said. “A title is a difficult thing to bear.”
The count laughed. “That is so true,” he said. He extended his hand. “Welcome, scholar from England,” he said. “I can’t remember when we last had a poet here. We were mainly dancing or hunting, eh, Annette? By the by, you didn’t...encounter anyone on the way here?”
“Whom do you mean? We met only a cart-man who was quite upset at Monsieur William.”
“Oh, that’s fine, then....There’s been some complaint about people on the road, that’s all. I’ll go rile up Cook; tell her we ’re having that dinner, after all. Show him around, Annette. Hope you like the improvements since the last time you were here,” and he disappeared toward the kitchen.
I had only visited once since the looting, and that first Epiphany after father’s death, before Maman remarried, the château was still bare. There were scarcely enough chairs and plates for those of us at table, just one new couch (not of the quality of the old ones), and the walls were still naked. Now in the front salon I saw that the Turkish couch had returned, even the firescreen with the little semi-nude Grecian figures. In the hall the old gilded clock sat on its place atop the ebony commode. In the second salon, the velvet couch embroidered with peacocks had taken up its former position. And in the dining room my favorite tapestry—the huntsman leaping over the log in a meadow of mille-fleurs and the white hart disappearing into the rabbit-filled forest—hung again, though the stag and hunter in the background had been raggedly cut out.
When the count returned, he was beaming. “How did you—?” I said.
“It was simple. I paid for it. Bought them all again. Most of those looters had lived here all their lives; some had even worked for my father. It was a bit of fun for them, the looting day. They went back to harvesting for me; I never said anything about it, then last year I sent an agent around to all the cottages to ask if they had anything they cared to sell, and I got much of my furniture back, even some porcelain plates and cups—a few are chipped, but what of that? No draperies, though—those are new—and no silverware. All that I got back I had cleaned—it was more filthy than you can imagine—and some of it’s better than it was before. Come, sit down. New tablecloth.”
Edouard glided in with three marcs . Another servant was building up the fire in the huge dining room hearth. This had been the main hall of the original château.
“I always felt time stood still here,” I said, “and then the looting came, and I felt as if part of my own past had been ransacked along with the château. Now—”
“Beyond the reach of time, that’s the château de Beauregard. I always deemed it symbolic that the coat of arms wasn’t stolen—I suppose they had enough to loot down here without getting up to the ceiling,” the count said.
“I understand many of the châteaux were burned, also,” said Monsieur William. “You were lucky, then, Monsieur le Comte.”
“Lucky. Yes, I suppose I was.”
“You were not here that day, Monsieur William,” I said.
“You were?”
“Yes, we made omelettes for them all, didn’t we, Count?”
“For looters?” Monsieur William said.
The count laughed and proceeded to tell the story, filled with horror and humor, as if it had all happened to someone else.
He had got his things back, which he had said had no meaning in themselves, and yet, as I looked around, I felt it could never go back to the way it was, even if he ransomed every gilded and needlepointed piece of furniture back, even if the missing hunter and stag were miraculously woven back into the tapestry. The man now leaping over the log was forever alone. Without my father the château de Beauregard can be dreadfully cold and dull, I thought, and now, with its things returned, it may miss him even more, for he is not here to enjoy them.
Then I realized it was I who had changed. The times that hovered outside the thick oak door, and which had burst through it once, had left me more uncertain; I felt no firm foundation to my life like the foundation of this château. Marguerite was right to fear that we would all end up like the Varaches, fleeing to foreign parts.
And yet there was something else too, and as I glanced over at Monsieur William, laughing at some silly joke of the count’s, I perceived that the difference also lay right here, in this wonderfully odd foreigner, the sleeve of his plain brown frock coat on the gilded arm-rests, his long legs stretched out before him.
The château de Beauregard had never seen such a man. And he was so different than any man I had ever known: the way he broke out in sudden laughter—laughing, yes, I had often heard, even guffawing, but not a spontaneous peal that rang though a forest. And through his poems I saw an eye for nature that I had never encountered—that remembered blue patches in the icy water and kept details of faraway places pure and clear in his mind. Everything he did was frank and full of meaning—the opposite, for instance, of Monsieur Leforges’s charm and guile—and he seemed to love the world, as I did, not things, not abstractions, but the world itself. I think that is why I had loved poetry—not just its romantic stories, but the way it took seriously the small things that people overlook.
I bathed my face in clear water,
The bottom paved with shining stones
“This is the vast forest of Boulogne,” the count was saying; “from just riding here, you have no idea how far it stretches. There are wild places in this forest Annette herself doesn’t know exist. This is the ancient hunting ground of the kings of France. You have just skirted along its edge.”
Edouard entered and said something softly to his master. “Dinner will be ready in half an hour,” said the count. “Would you like to see something of the gardens?” Monsieur William jumped up, and the count drew back the heavy curtains and opened the French doors onto the terrace, with its view of the manicured hedges and the crisp geo-metrical paths radiating out. We walked down the stone stairs toward the lawn. Mist wound through the alley of cyclamen. In the distance we could see the small lake, set like a pearl between lawn and forest.
It was bitter cold now, but Monsieur William didn’t seem to mind. It was probably much colder than this all the time in England.
“Those paths,” said the count, holding his drink with his left hand, gesturing grandly with his right, “were laid out almost two centuries
ago, as was that wing there, but the dining room, the front salon with the coat of arms—have I shown you the Beauregard coat of arms, Monsieur William?—they were built in the mid-sixteenth century, when Henri II hunted nearby with the great huntress Diane de Poitiers.”
“The woods here still have much game, Monsieur le Comte?”
William said.
“The most game-filled forest in France.”
“Do you have much poaching, Monsieur? Especially since the Revolution?”
Monsieur William still had not learned about mentioning politics in polite society.
“I allow some.”
“That is very generous of you, Monsieur. Landlords in England do not do that.”
“It’s best to overlook some things—certain people, fathers providing for families, for instance—even though I make certain, if they work for me, that their wages are fair and they always have enough bread. A band of brigands have been lurking round here off and on since the Revolution began. They’re likely responsible for what happened at the château de Chambord and perhaps even instigated what happened here. Sometimes they drift down from their permanent residence in the forest near Orléans. If they want to take a deer, it is prudent that I do not alert the National Guard; the brigands would just hide out, then take their revenge on the château. And I have had one raid here. I will not tolerate another.”
“You know of the existence of brigands, Monsieur le Comte, and the local National Guard does not?”
“It is a vast forest, as I said; it has room for a few villains tucked away under its branches.”
“You are a tolerant man, Monsieur.”
“No, only a cautious one. In all these changing times, I have one absolute: that which has stayed in my family for centuries, that which has seen intrigue and conspiracies come and go as kings came and went with their courts at Blois. My one object is this château. It will stand; I will repair every injury to it, and my son will inherit it.”
“How is Philippe?” I asked.
“Your sister Angelique was visiting with him here, before you went to Orléans. Didn’t she tell you?“
“No, she didn’t,” I said. “I suppose she’s old enough to have her own little secrets.”