by James Tipton
Out of the carriage stepped a citizen in a white silk cravat, a loose gray jacket with wide lapels, yellow leather pantaloons, and a round hat trimmed with a feather. He had a lackey behind him who carried a bulging leather satchel. The lackey ordered two of the guards to fetch boxes out of the carriage. The guards walked by us, carrying boxes filled with papers into the Town Hall. One of the guards returned to the court, went over to a barrel in the corner, took its lid off, and poured water from a dipper into his mouth. It looked like an act reserved for the gods.
My own thirst now became unbearable. All I wanted was a cup of that barrel water. I asked one of our own guards, a big man with a fixed bayonet who stood just to my right, if he could please ask one of the others to bring the prisoners a dipper full of water. He did not look at me.
“I’m very thirsty,” I added. My voice was husky from lack of use.
He continued looking straight ahead. “You’re a very good soldier and will be promoted soon. I know that. But it would not hurt your chances if you asked one of those men to get us a drink of water from that barrel. It will show the sympathy and the reason of the new order if you were to offer a pregnant woman and other prisoners some water. You must agree that one of the worst things about the old regime was its unjust treatment of prisoners. The Bastille was chosen as the site to start the Revolution for precisely that reason.”
He looked at me. “If you talk, you will become more thirsty.”
“Monsieur, do you have a lover?”
“I will not engage in conversation with you.”
“I just wondered if you had a lover.”
He stared straight ahead. He was right; it was none of my business.
“I just wondered if you had a lover, because if you did, you would know what it is like to do things for someone to make them happy.”
Someone called out from the building to send the prisoners in, and my guard led our pathetic band, with me first, hands tied, a big guard before and after us. We walked invisible through the high halls of the old palace. Well-dressed citizens mixed with National Guardsmen, even some fédérés, in dress uniform. They all walked briskly by us, intent on some bureaucratic task. I glimpsed through a half-open door a tapestry somehow left from the days of the bishops, angels carrying a cross down the sky to a hill strewn with soldiers. We were taken into a large room with cherubs painted on the ceiling, their puffy cheeks emerging out of rosy clouds. The guard who had refused me the water told us to sit on a bench. An older man in a powdered wig, whom I vaguely recognized, and a younger man, the one with the gray wide-lapelled coat and the yellow pantaloons, sat in the middle of a long table, facing us. The magistrate and the young lawyer, I assumed. The fashionable lawyer’s lackey sat next to him and shuffled through papers and spoke softly to his superior.
The magistrate told my guard to untie all our hands. The sudden freedom was delicious. I rubbed my arms and then my hands. The skin of my wrists was raw where the rope had chafed against them.
The younger man stated the charges, and after a few words from the prisoners, and asking for witnesses, of which so far there were none, the older man gave the verdict. Occasionally he dismissed the charges, almost at random, it seemed to me. Most of my fellows were sent back to the Beauvoir Tower, with terms of three months to a year.
We were all weak from hunger and looked wretched, I am sure.
The young lawyer called, “Madame Williams, born M. A. Vallon,” and I stood up, more than ever feeling the dryness of my throat. He started listing my crimes, and the older man looked up from his list, regarding me, as if trying to place me.
“I knew a Dr. Jean-Paul Vallon,” he interrupted. “He was a credit to this city.”
“That would be my father, Monsieur,” I said.
“Then this is a personal tragedy to me,” he said.
“May I continue?” the man with the yellow pantaloons said.
“I knew a little girl who sometimes would accompany her father on his rounds.”
“That would have been me, Monsieur.”
“Your father would not have betrayed his nation.”
“No, his nation betrayed him. He was killed in a grain riot, while attending one of the rioters who was hurt.”
“Enough,” said the lawyer in the yellow pantaloons. “These are her charges...” And besides consorting with counter-revolutionaries, helping a foreign spy flee the city, and arranging a prisoner’s escape, there were a few others of which I was unaware.
“You are accused, Madame Williams, of being a traitor,” the magistrate said. “What more disgrace could a family have?”
“I submit to you, Monsieur, that these charges are all hearsay and slander. My husband is an Englishman, but he was a member of the Friends of the Constitution club, the intimate friend of Captain Michel Beaupuy, who would speak for him except that the captain is now defending his nation on the Austrian frontier. My husband is also the friend of Citizen Brissot, and is at this time meeting with that powerful member of the Assembly, who was not himself afraid to speak up against the excesses of the September massacres, and perhaps that is why I am having a trial now, and not a summary execution by Parisian sans-culottes. The prisoner who escaped is my brother-in-law, Monsieur, and is no counter-revolutionary, but merely acted out of loyalty to an aged servant who was being mercilessly beaten by recalcitrant fédérés for their own amusement. Whoever freed him only freed him from injustice.”
“She just confessed, Citizen,” Yellow Pantaloons said to the magistrate. “This trial has gone on long enough. There are others—”
“Let us hear all the evidence,” the magistrate said.
“After her confession, there is no need—”
“She did not confess. Oblige me.”
“Very well,” Yellow Pantaloons said. “We have a witness.”
And the shop owner, a little man who had been sitting at the back of the room, was brought forward and asked about the rope and to produce the bill of sale, which he did.
“What have you to say, Madame,” said the magistrate, “to the serious charge of the rope used in the escape of Paul Vincent, and of the testimony of the clerk?”
“That if you check my room at chez Vincent, you will find that rope the clerk sold to me. It will not have been used.”
The lackey looked up at this.
“The evidence against me is circumstantial. Find that rope, and you will know I am innocent,” I said. “What woman of sound mind would attempt to help a prisoner escape, especially when she is carrying a child? It is absurd.”
“More absurd things have been done, by fanatical counter-revolutionaries,” the young lawyer said.
“I am no fanatic. In fact, I have very little feeling about politics. I believe in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as you do, but I am just a woman and want to raise my child in a world where people are not indiscriminately arrested. That is one of the ideals of the Revolution, that no one should be arrested and sentenced without due process of law, is it not? No one can be sentenced on merely the word of another?
“My father raised me to feel that politics and law are a man’s concern; therefore I ask you, Monsieur Magistrate, to relieve me of this weary thinking and speaking, for I am very thirsty and hungry and would like to sit down, and please to consider my assertion that the rope the clerk speaks of is still in my room and has never been used.”
“Bring her a cup of water,” the magistrate said to my guard. Then to me, “And what were you going to do with this length of rope?”
“I was going to use it in training horses. Anyone who knows my family in Blois knows that I am a horsewoman. I used to hunt with my father, and I was going to help train horses for Monsieur Vincent.”
“In your state?”
“They are yearlings and only ready for ground training.”
“You may sit down.” I told him the location of my room, and he sent two guardsmen to chez Vincent.
“Meanwhile, you are a prisoner of the st
ate,” the young man said.
“If no rope is found, or if one is found that is of a different description than the one the clerk reports having sold you, I will personally see that you will be sent to Orléans for further trial or locked in the dungeons of the Beauvoir Tower.”
The guard I had spoken to earlier entered with a wooden cup and handed it to me. I looked at him and thanked him, and his eyes were flat.
“If you please, Monsieur Magistrate,” I said. “I cannot drink this unless my fellow prisoners, who are just as thirsty as I, may also be granted the same boon. The water in the Beauvoir Tower is not—”
“Yes, yes. Guard,” the magistrate said, “show mercy and bring them all water.”
“Thank you, Monsieur,” I said, and my guard departed.
The drink was paradise. First, I took a sip and felt my raw mouth moisten and my throat open. I wanted to savor this cup. Then I took a deeper drink and let it stay on my tongue and felt it deliciously cool against my teeth and the roof of my mouth. I closed my eyes, to block out the room and taste the water.
When I sat down, I found my knees were trembling. Now they were still trembling, and my legs were stiff, as if all my fear and effort to talk well had gone into my legs. I wished for William and his gentle, intelligent hands. I could think of him now, because I felt it was going to be all right.
An hour later, I had listened to the young lawyer and the magistrate mete out justice in three more cases. One was sent on to Orléans; one was sent back to the Beauvoir Tower, and one was dismissed. It almost seemed a pattern.
When the two guards returned, one carrying the rope, and testified, with some disappointment it seemed to me, that it had tallied with the measurement of the clerk and appeared unused, I suddenly felt lightheaded. The magistrate told me to stand. I felt my knees could give way any second, and felt the reassurance of the bench behind my ankles.
“The State chooses to be merciful in the case of one Madame Williams and to dismiss your charges, though with a stern warning to be extremely circumspect with those with whom you consort, young woman.”
“I give you my word, Monsieur.”
“You are free to go.” In my filthy dress, I curtsied as befitting a magistrate. I turned to leave, then paused. “May I ask, Monsieur Magistrate, how is your gout? It was for that, I remember now, my father called on you. He often told you our hunting stories.”
“My God, you’re the girl who shot the boar.”
I curtsied again, and Yellow Pantaloons threw up his arms, and I left the room of the cherubic clouds.
I couldn’t believe my freedom. I went again down the busy halls, now with no escort, and again no one noticed me. The door to the tapestry room was now closed. I stepped past sentries at the door, and outside the sun slanted down through spent rain clouds and danced around on the puddles in the square. Everyone who is not in prison, I thought, ought to be happy simply because they are not in prison.
This thought seemed profound and logical to me at the time, but I daresay no one will understand it unless they have had my experience. People will continue to be unhappy when they can actually walk where they want and drink water when they want.
I had a new problem, though. Where to go? I only had one answer, and in spite of what I was afraid would be my mother’s reaction to my pregnancy and to her favorite daughter’s leaving and to my arrest, I wanted to see her. And I wanted to see Angelique and Claudette. And La Rouge was home, too—La Rouge, who always understood. So I walked up the long hill.
A Triple Disgrace
My looks did not inspire confidence. Claudette, who answered the door, immediately thanked Mary and Joseph that I had indeed arrived there, then really looked at me and said, “My God,” before quietly ushering me up the stairs, where—let this be said with no exaggeration and with utter seriousness in my chronicle of these years—I took the most blissful bath of my life. Claudette scented it with lavender, and the steam enveloped me, and the Beauvoir Tower I scrubbed forever off me.
I dressed in a plain chemise gown and cotton kerchief, while Claudette prepared the others for my presence. I descended in time for supper. Angelique embraced me and cried about Marguerite. Maman, whom I had never told of my pregnancy because I was waiting for the right time, now took in the sight of me. I kissed her and said, “I am going to follow Marguerite to England and marry Monsieur William. It is all arranged. Do not worry.”
She shook her head. “There is a lot to worry about, Marie-Ann,” she said. “Don’t be naïve. But for now, I am glad they let you out of—” and she couldn’t say the word. I kissed her again and thought that her mother’s heart had got the better of her. I also felt terribly sorry for her about Marguerite, whom I knew she dearly loved.
Angelique had a hundred questions for me during dinner, about the Vincents and about Monsieur William. Monsieur Vergez looked sullen over his stuffed bream and said nothing, not even bonjour, to me. He murmured some words to Maman. Then she said quietly, “I had that letter from Marguerite, and it broke my heart. I still don’t know why they had to go. Since Paul was innocent—”
“That didn’t matter, Maman,” I said.
“Then Madame Tristant came to visit her,” Monsieur Vergez added. I didn’t see the connection. “And her daughter.”
“Isabelle, my friend from convent school?” I said.
“Yes,” Maman said. “Isabelle, a well-brought-up girl. As tractable as can be, and very pretty. Never concerns herself with politics. Has suitors who are both republicans and royalists. What’s it to her? As long as they are from good families. Well, Madame Tristant is one of those women who always knows everything. She informed me over coffee and apple tart that Paul had been arrested. Can you imagine? I couldn’t say a thing. She also said that rumor had it that you were regularly seeing an Englishman, who now had been implicated in a counter-revolutionary plot, something about Britain’s interest in gathering an émigré army on her shores. Then she said the Committee of Surveillance had learned of his spying, and the man had to flee. Think of it! All in a few minutes, as I myself put sugar in my coffee and complimented Isabelle on her matching sash and bandeau.
“I couldn’t eat a bite of my own tart, but they devoured theirs. I told them she must be mistaken, her sources must have meant another Monsieur Vincent, and that I had warned you about the Englishman and that you had taken my advice. That from your short acquaintance with the man, you had gleaned the true lesson that one can never trust foreigners. Madame Tristant confirmed that that is indeed an important lesson, and we went on to discuss how the elaborately curled hairstyles of our youth are unfashionable now and how hard it is to keep up, but the damage had been done.”
“I am sorry it was all so distressing for you, Maman,” I said, “but you must know that both Paul and Monsieur William are no counter-revolutionaries. As for Monsieur William, he is rather the contrary, which I thought was your complaint against him. I am a bit confused.”
“To be counter-revolutionary now is to be against the law,” she said, “and, as Bernard is a lawyer of some recognition in this city, it is important that, whatever the new laws are, we follow them with the respect due from peaceable citizens.”
“Then you ignore your past convictions, and those of my father, for the sake of expediency?”
Monsieur Vergez placed his glass a little too vehemently on the table, and some drops spilled out, which his servant André wiped clean before his master even glanced at his presence.
“I think it is a time of rejoicing,” Angelique said. “Annette is here, and she is safe. And Paul is not in prison, and—well, I’m glad their family escaped—at least, I hope they did. We should all give thanks.
Annette’s by my side. At least one of my sisters is.” And she started to sniff again.
“I give thanks for this lovely dinner,” I said. “It is heaven.”
I couldn’t believe that in one day I had gone from a worm-filled biscuit in the Beauvoir Tower to fresh asparagus and st
uffed bream.
I was used to eating so little, though, that I could not finish my portion.
Then over the poached pears Maman said, “Madame Tristant came again the next day, and I admit that, though it was my visiting hour, I was not keen on receiving her. This time she came without her sweet daughter, which I took as not a good sign. By now I had received Marguerite’s letter, which, as I said, was a great blow. You were included in the letter as escaping with them. Madame Tristant proceeded, after she had finished the Tours pastry, a recipe that your little Claudette brought with her, to say wasn’t it a great shame that my first daughter had now fled from Blois and my second daughter had been arrested.
“I nearly collapsed this time, but I held on to the arm of my chair and didn’t give Madame Tristant any pleasure that she had shocked me. I said, ‘Things like that happen in these unfortunate times. We must trust in Providence.’ Madame Tristant had the temerity to correct me: ‘In the Supreme Being,’ she said . It’s all from knowing that Englishman, I say to you now, Marie-Ann. Bernard and I knew it from the start, but you didn’t listen. Now my sweet Marguerite is gone. And my grandchildren. And Madame Tristant said that you were taken to the Beauvoir. That’s where the worst people go. My own daughter, whom I held next to my breast as a child. It’s unimaginable.”
“I was hoping someone would visit me,” I said. “I don’t even know how long I was there.”
“I wanted to go, Annette,” Angelique said, “but I couldn’t go alone—”
“I wouldn’t let any of them go,” Monsieur Vergez finally spoke to me. “It’s a triple disgrace. A daughter fled. Another one arrested.”
He held up a finger with each disgrace. He kept the two poised above his wineglass. I was waiting for the third. “Now I am about to be elected to the Trade Commission of this city,” he said. “One must be elected now by city officials, not appointed. Do you know what that means? What they will say? ‘He married into a family of counter-revolutionaries,’ they’ll say, and”—he held up the third finger now for his coup de grâce—“of women of low morals. ‘The decadency of the old upper bourgeoisie,’ they’ll say, and they’ll be right.”