Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution

by James Tipton

  “He’s English,” I said.

  William reached in his pocket now and handed the lieutenant his papers. Everyone nowadays carried their papers on their person, as soon as they left their house.

  “These don’t prove you’re not a spy,” the lieutenant said. “Many, most, spies have perfect papers. Yours, Madame?” He kept William’s.

  I fumbled in my pocket, pulled out a poem, then another poem, then reached in another pocket, pulled out a poem and my papers.

  I handed the papers to the officer. “Rather a lot of writing there,” he said. “And some of it, I see, is in a foreign tongue.” I had William write out all his translations also in the original, so I could try to sound out the lines.

  “My husband is a poet,” I said. “An English poet who loves France.”

  He gave my papers back to me. “What do you have in that cart?”

  “Vines,” I said. “We are transporting vines, of the cabernet franc variety, from Vienne to Vendôme. Our employer intends to start growing his grapes there, too.”

  “A poet hauling vines at dawn. A foreign poet who loves priests. I’m afraid, Madame, that this matter is decided.”

  William, though held by two soldiers, struggled to step in front of the officer. “I have friends in the National Assembly,” he said. “I know Citizen Brissot. I have a letter signed and sealed by Brissot.”

  “And you’re transporting vines,” the lieutenant said.

  “A poet must eat somehow, Lieutenant,” William said, and almost smiled.

  “I would like to see that letter,” the officer said. No one wanted to offend someone in the National Assembly.

  “It’s in my rucksack, in the wagon,” William said.

  “Go with him.” The officer ordered one of the soldiers.

  The three of us walked up the little hill, and I prayed to Sainte Lucette that this letter would convince the lieutenant to leave William alone. The other National Guardsmen stayed with their prisoner. A soldier stood him up and roughly tied the hands of the priest behind him. The priest swayed as if he were drunk. Blood ran from the top of his head in several lines down his face and onto his robes.

  La Rouge looked up as we approached, then continued nibbling the grass on the verge of the road.

  William told the soldier he had to get in the wagon, and as he brushed past me, he gave me another look. Almost a smile, almost a twinkle in the eye, accompanied the look. I put a hand on La Rouge’s side to alert her. I thought I heard him whisper, “Vendôme.” He was standing on the seat of the wagon, going through his rucksack.

  Quickly he leaped onto La Rouge’s back. I said “Allons-y.” William grasped the lead rope and kicked her sides, and they rushed off through the apple orchard.

  It was all confusion for the soldiers. They didn’t know whether to stay with the priest or mount their horses and pursue their new suspect. The officer cursed the soldier who ran back down the hill from the wagon, then ordered two of his men to follow the Englishman.

  He himself stayed with his charge. He and his three soldiers mounted their horses, and the priest, attached to the last soldier by his rope, came behind. I saw La Rouge far away in the orchard and the other two horses running under the boughs bent with fruit. Dust rose there into the morning air. The lieutenant walked his horse up the hill to the main road.

  “You’ve lost your husband,” he said.

  “You’ve lost your prisoner,” I said.

  “I have got mine,” he said. “My orders were for this one,” and he jerked his head back toward the priest, following them up the hill. “You’ve also lost your horse.” He laughed. “It’s a long walk to Vienne.” He gestured for one of the soldiers to ride to the farm-house. “That farmer may have had nothing to do with the hiding of the priest,” the officer said, “but now he and his neighbors will learn it is wrong just to have a counter-revolutionary on one’s property. He won’t have much strength left to help with his harvest. The same could go for you. I don’t know why I’m not arresting you along with this priest and your fleeing husband. Associating with counter-revolutionaries is a crime. Maybe I believe his story of Citizen Brissot. Maybe I’ve fulfilled my duty and am feeling magnanimous. Maybe I’ve noticed your state and for some reason don’t want you to think we are monsters. I don’t know, Madame, but it’s a lucky day for you. Think of my mercy on your long walk home,” and he commenced his horse into a trot and resumed his place before his soldiers and the tottering priest.

  I contemplated the lieutenant’s words and silently thanked Sainte Lucette, then prayed again for William.

  I myself didn’t know what to do. I stood there for several minutes, staring in the direction of the orchard and now seeing nothing, nothing at all. I sat down on the grass at the side of the road. I looked at La Rouge’s hoofprints in the grass. After a while I got up, climbed into the wagon, and retrieved William’s rucksack and the basket of food and water.

  If I were correct and he had whispered “Vendôme,” he would need his rucksack and his food. There were poems in the rucksack, a notebook full of notes for the long one he had been working on he was calling simply “Descriptive Sketches.” He would definitely need the rucksack, or I, too, needed to eat. I’d have to leave the wagon.

  I drank from the jug. I looked toward Vendôme. It was not too far to walk. I would find a diligence there that could take me back to Blois.

  I had some coins in my pocket, under the poems. I could pray all the way to the gates of Vendôme that Lucette would guide La Rouge as she had before. How could any National Guard horse hope to catch her? With what audacity they attempted it! And William looked fine riding bareback on La Rouge, leaning forward over her withers, his legs holding fast, his long hair flying. He looked fine jumping onto Rouge’s back. That was a good spontaneous decision. I laughed a little, there by myself, walking along the dusty road carrying a basket and with a rucksack on my back. He surprised me, I said to myself.

  I sat down by the side of the road and held my head in my hands for a minute. Would I see him in Vendôme? What would become of us? Could he ever get this all worked out with his friend in the Assembly whom the Jacobins hated? It was all impossible to think about. I wouldn’t think about it. I would walk to Vendôme. That was enough for now.

  I got up, adjusted the rucksack and started walking again. The bell tower of the Abbaye de la Trinité glinted above the city. The road, white with dust, stretched out toward the bright spire of the tower.

  Now a morning line came to me,

  The tall sun, pausing on an Alpine spire,

  Flings o’er the wilderness a stream of fire.

  The morning sun paused on the bell tower and flung out in my direction a stream of fire. I made for that tower. The road seemed longer than it looked. I had to stop several times before I arrived at the gates of the city.

  The Holy Tear

  I crossed the bridge into Vendôme and stared back at the gargoyles that lined it, protecting the town from dangerous intruders like me, or English heretics like William, and paused, leaning on one leering face, to look at the light gleaming on the Loire, which divides here into several different streams, each with its bridge, so it seems that one is always recrossing the river and never really gets across.

  I arrived at the Porte Saint-Georges as the bell tower tolled ten, dust coating my skirt and flouring my face and fatigue weighing down my body. Beyond the town, on La Montagne, the steep hillside, was the old château, the sun from the east on its ancient earthen walls.

  How could they make something out of earth to last for so long? I thought.

  I waited by the huge towers of the porte, as an old gendarme stared at my papers and at me, until I grew uncomfortable and afraid that the National Guard officer had included me in their reports after all. He finally gave my papers back and nodded. I was free to proceed into Vendôme with my basket of food and rucksack of poems.

  I proceeded to the center of town, thinking that’s where the stage relay might
be, and walked along rue de l’Abbaye past Trinity Abbey, which still housed the Holy Tear, perhaps waiting for happier times that would produce more innocent hearts that once again could believe in mysteries and miracles. I stopped before the bell tower, which had been the destination of my own recent pilgrimage here. I liked it better from far away, though, for here more gargoyles stared down at me silently, like the old gendarme at the porte, the stone masks and monkeys forming their own mute, ancient Committee of Surveillance.

  I finally asked directions of a strawberry vendor, who, noting my state, put a few berries in a twist of newspaper and gave them to me.

  I learned that the depot lay across another bridge, in the Place de la Liberté. I carried my burdens through the rest of the town and vaguely remembered riding down that street in the family carriage with my father, after he had visited the Holy Tear. He had been very jolly, I remembered. He took his monocle off and pointed out Ronsard’s house. “You should read his sonnets to Cassandra,” he said.

  “Yes, I think you’re old enough for that.” I finally entered the Place de la Liberté and remembered it as the Place de Geoffroy Martel, the knight who brought back the Holy Tear. Everything had a new name now.

  I saw two diligences being prepared, and I was so tired and disoriented that when I spoke to the driver, it seemed that he himself spoke as if in a dream, his words and gestures not quite matching his lips and voice. I scolded myself to concentrate: one diligence was leaving immediately for Chartres and on to Paris, and one would be leaving for Blois and on to Tours, at noon. I had time to wait for William.

  That is what mattered.

  I counted my money and bought my ticket. It is amazing the things one can do when one is not really there, I thought. The world does not know, nor does the world care. How many other people were walking around like me, numb but operable?

  Everything seemed normal. The drivers of the diligences were changing horses, a man was weighing a sack of flour at a nearby booth, and a vendor was calling out about his low prices for used hats. The old hats made me think of William. He needed a new hat of a more modern shape, even if it were a used one.

  A man walking past me was saying in a loud, grating voice to his friend how, in the battle at the Tuileries in August, the Swiss Guard had invited the fédérés into the courtyard, fraternized with them, then opened fire on the innocent patriots. “The King’s to blame,” his friend said, who stared over at me, alone, with protruding belly, walking like a pilgrim with my bundle.

  I wanted to be away from people, not to be obliged to talk to anyone, and also not to be gawked at myself, and remembered a public garden that my father had taken me to years ago, and crossed another, more narrow bridge of gray stone and found a bench by some towering hydrangeas. An old man, kneeling in the dirt, was pulling weeds.

  He wore a battered straw hat, looked up at me briefly as I sat down, then went back to his work. He had probably been here when I visited before, I thought, the eternal gardener, working the soil, making things grow independent of history, like the Holy Tear in its vial.

  I rested on the bench and looked at the deep blues of the huge hydrangeas and took some small bites of the bread I was saving for William. I drank some of the water, closed my eyes, and felt the sunlight on my shut lids. It seemed no time had passed when I heard the belfry toll eleven-thirty. I shouldered the rucksack again, picked up the basket, and thanked the old man as I passed for his beautiful garden. He looked up, surprised, and grinned a gap-toothed grin.

  Standing in the shade under an arcade on the square, I heard the driver call for the diligence to Blois and Tours. Another coach had just arrived and was in the process of changing its horses. Horses were being led across the square. At the edge of the relay station I saw a sorrel mare, standing alone with its halter on.

  I left the protection of my arcade and walked straight over to it, and it whinnied softly. I took La Rouge’s muzzle in my arm, and tears were in my eyes as I stroked her. “Where is your rider?” I said softly.

  “Did you save him as you did me? I didn’t know if I would ever see you again.”

  “Here,” I heard an English accent say, and I looked over La Rouge’s back to see William’s face smiling under the eaves of the relay station.

  It was as though I saw him through a cut of clear sunlight in the haze between the world and me.

  “Do you have anything in that basket? I am a bit hungry,” he said.

  I walked over to him and stood there, looking at his face. I wanted to throw my arms around him but feared attracting any attention.

  He took my hand. “I had quite a ride. La Rouge never could be caught, could she? I thought this is where you would be finding your way to Blois, without a horse. I said I’d meet you in Vendôme.”

  I couldn’t say anything but took his arm.

  “You have my rucksack,” he said excitedly. “You are a marvel.”

  And he took it from me and placed it on his back.

  “Don’t talk here,” I finally said. “Your accent could arouse suspicions.”

  “I have a perfectly good accent,” he whispered.

  He held the halter of La Rouge, and I led him back to my shady place, away from glaring sun and curious eyes or ears.

  “May I talk now?” William whispered.

  “Aren’t there soldiers looking for you?”

  “I had to see you before I left. Could we open that basket?”

  There was nowhere to sit, and I handed the basket to him and took La Rouge’s lead, and William drank and tore off a hunk of the bread.

  “You must have the chicken for your long walk,” I said. I thought, that was a ridiculously banal thing to say—but aren’t one’s last minutes before parting with a loved one often taken up in such trivialities? As he finished his bread and took another drink of the water, I took the basket, gave him La Rouge’s rope, moved behind him, and opened the rucksack. I packed the items from the basket on top of his thick, leather-bound notebook, a clean shirt, and a pair of stockings.

  “Thank you,” I said as I worked. He gave me the water jug. “Thank you for the mare. Thank you for coming into Vendôme when you didn’t have to.” I tied up the rucksack tight. “Just be careful,” I said.

  “Don’t come back to Blois if it’s dangerous.” I moved in front of him and took La Rouge’s rope. “Tell me about something we ’ll do in England when you take me there.”

  “First, you will need a good English tutor.” He laughed, and I smiled with him.

  “He will take you to the great English theater to reward you for learning so quickly. You will see Shakespeare, perhaps a play by Sheridan, but it is silly stuff, after Shakespeare.”

  “I like silly stuff.”

  My eyes were watering, in spite of myself. I looked down at the basket, empty except for some knitting wool and needles of mine.

  William looked out at the square. The driver of the diligence called out for everyone to board the coach for Blois. William stepped out of the arcade.

  “No, don’t go,” I said. “The driver will make one last call. Don’t move. I just want to see you there. I want to memorize you, with that half-light on your face.” La Rouge snorted behind me, and I brought her up beside us and stroked her neck. William patted her shoulder.

  “Thank you, La Rouge,” he said. “Thanks, girl.”

  I leaned my head against her and cried silently in her silken mane.

  The driver made his final shout for the diligence to Blois. The bell tower was striking twelve. William led La Rouge to the coach, and I asked the driver if she could be hitched behind. He looked at me as if that were an odd request. I explained to him that because of my condition I couldn’t ride her. He secured her rope and asked me if I had any luggage and looked at me strangely again when I said the basket was all. William and I stood near the door of the diligence as people were getting on.

  “I didn’t tell you,” I said. “I’m knitting a cap for our child. It’s in the basket. I can
work on it now. On the way back.”

  “Let me see it,” he said.

  I opened the basket and lifted up a scant half-inch of soft wool. I shrugged.

  “It’s pink,” he said. I shrugged again.

  He took my hand and held the scrap of fabric briefly to his lips.

  “Just in case,” he said. “Now I’ve touched something that will touch her.”

  “You already have,” I said. “You already have.”

  William was looking at me, and I could see some water forming in his eyes. I was in control of myself now.

  “William.” He stared at me and said nothing. I think he was afraid to speak. It was bad there, with all the people around. The driver was looking at us, and the people in the coach were looking at us through their open windows, waiting for me to get on. I had forgotten what I was going to say. “Cher William, we never decided on a name,” I took his hand and led him a little way from the coach.

  “Madame, everyone aboard,” the driver said.

  “You decide on a name,” William said. “It will be beautiful.”

  I kissed him on the cheek. I whispered, “I’m so glad you came to Blois.”

  “So am I,” he said softly, and his chin trembled.

  He helped me into the coach and I sat on the seat facing straight ahead, in the middle, between an older, wealthy-looking man and a plump middle-aged woman with a fat yellow cat on her lap. I don’t know who was sitting across from us. I never looked at them the whole trip.

  I leaned forward to see William standing alone, watching, in the middle of the square. I wanted him to get back under the arcade, lest someone recognize him. But I waved to him from the window as I leaned over the man. The man made a sound of disapproval as my body touched him, and I could feel him looking at me as I waved, then felt him surreptitiously pat my behind.

  I turned to see the plump lady slapping him on the hand and saying, “She is saying good-bye to her ami. Have some decency.”

  I watched until the coach turned down a side street, and suddenly I was staring at a stone wall. William was just gone, and that was it. There was an old half-timbered house, with geraniums in a window box, then a studded door of a medieval church. And Monsieur William, who had filled my days since Christmas, was simply gone, replaced by a wall, a window box, and a closed church door. He had vanished with the flick of a coachman’s whip, with the clopping of hooves on cobblestone and the turning of a coach into a narrow street. I feared that I would never see him again. I sat back and put my hands on top of the basket and studied them.