by James Tipton
The count stayed five days, and the Committee never returned.
I brought him Les Liaisons dangereueses and Montaigne’s essays for him to read in his lonely room, which I only visited late at night.
Then he left on a journey to Tours, where his estranged wife lived.
He did not want to burden us.
Intriguers
Caroline was over three months old and smiled regularly.
Those are, perhaps, the most beautiful smiles of a person’s life: innocence beyond an adult’s comprehension. Later, William would write that a child entered the world trailing clouds of glory.
That certainly seemed true of Caroline. She had just laughed at some expression I had unwittingly made, and now I was making the same expression purposefully and getting the same reaction—blissful belly laughs that made me laugh in turn. When Claudette knocked, I singingly told her to enter, then looked up and saw her face.
“My parents,” she said. She looked shocked and frightened.
“They’re here, in the stable.”
“All the way from near Tours? What—? Tell them to come in; I’m sure Monsieur and Madame Dubourg won’t mind.”
“They’re hiding, Madame.”
“What have they to hide from? They are not aristocrats, like the count.”
“My father would not let my two brothers be taken by the levée en masse. He hid them when the men from Paris came. They want all unmarried men, between eighteen and twenty-five, Madame. There are others like my parents, many others. They are tired of their priests being taken, now their sons and husbands too. It’s happening throughout the Vendée, my parents say, and in Normandy, Brittany.
The Committee of Public Safety will soon have a civil war on their hands. I have brought my parents food, but—they need a place to stay, and I am afraid for chez Dubourg if we shelter them here. It is not my decision.”
“We will tell no one—except Angelique,” I said. “No servants; they might talk. Tell Angelique to help you fetch fresh sheets—several pairs—and extra blankets, and meet me by the clock down the hall in a few minutes.” I tried to put Caroline down, but she was not sleepy and was insulted at the gesture, so I carried her.
It was with some pleasure that I reached up on tiptoe behind the gilded couple and glanced back at my two conspirators with wide eyes, then dropped jaws, as the mirror swung open. I quickly ushered them in and closed it again. “Angelique, please cover those mirrors with the extra sheets. Claudette and I will change these sheets and make up the bed.”
“But how—,” Angelique began.
I didn’t like lying to them, but it wasn’t the time to explain the history of Maman and the count—I might never tell Angelique—nor was it the time to reveal that the count had recently stayed here. As much as I loved Angelique, she wasn’t the most discreet person.
“I’m sorry I never told you,” I said. “It was one of Marguerite’s and my secrets—the mean older sisters. She found out about this room when we were children. It was built long ago for parties, and no one ever used it anymore. That is why you and Etienne could never find us when we played hide-and-seek. This is where we were.”
“You scheming girls. To keep a room like this from me! We could have had our own parties. This is wondrous! I would like—well, never mind what I would like.”
“It’s a strange room, if you ask me, Madame,” Claudette said. “I don’t think my parents will feel comfortable here. It has a flavor of ancient liaisons.”
“That’s why we ’re covering up the mirrors.”
“I want to look in that armoire,” Angelique said. “What kind of gowns are in there?” She finished hanging up the sheets and opened it. I had never looked inside when I brought meals to the count. Caroline was lying on the bed, and we had to work around her. I kept glancing over at Angelique, at the open door of the armoire.
“Look at this,” she said. “Look at this nightdress. It’s lovely.” She held it up to her. “It just fits, even if it is old. But how can négligés go out of fashion? It suggests everything but actually reveals little. It would be quite comfortable. What a shame it’s the only one in here. What parties they must have had in the old days. Why couldn’t I have been born then? Did you and Marguerite ever try this on when you hid in here? Tell me the truth.”
“I’ve never looked in that armoire. That’s the truth.”
“You prude.”
“I think,” Claudette said, “that you should leave that old gown alone. There’s something very strange about his room. I would like to put some painting of the Virgin in here for my parents—but I’ve never seen any paintings like that at chez Dubourg. And it’s strange,” she said, looking around, “that the layers of dust are not even. And,” she said, squatting by the grate, “that these ashes are not old.”
“Perhaps some of the servants know about this room and had their own parties,” I said.
“Well, it must be a secret now,” Claudette said. “No one must know my parents are here.”
“This room is cut off from the world,” I said.
The spring weather we had waited so long for had not arrived, and late that night Claudette led her parents in through the never-ending rain. “I do not like this,” her father said softly in the kitchen. “We should have permission of the master of the house.”
“Madame Annette has invited you.”
“But she is not the master,” he said. “I want to see the monsieur and ask him. I am not a criminal.”
He stood there, defiant. The candelabrum I held flickered over his broad face and weather-beaten cheeks, and the black hair coursing down over his forehead. He was tall and broad and straight-backed.
His long wool coat had patches at the elbows, and his brown trousers were tucked into working boots. “You best take those boots off here, Monsieur Valcroix. We must not let Monsieur Dubourg know you are here to protect him, not to hide information from him. That is a sacrifice to one’s honor that one must make in these days.”
He grunted and sat down at the kitchen table and took his boots off. His wife wore a long cloak with big pockets and the hood still up.
Underneath that she had scarves around her head, and I couldn’t see her face clearly. She was small, about my height. But I noticed her kind eyes, under the dimness of the hood and her scarves. “Thank you, Madame,” she said. “Claudette has always told us how happy she is in your service.”
“I am mainly in her service, Madame. I could not live without her.” It was true.
They followed me quietly up the stairs, but I heard them behind me as the mirror opened. Claudette’s mother gasped, and her father invoked the Virgin.
“This is an unholy room,” he said when he walked in.
“It will have to do, Papa,” Claudette said. “If you’re going to defy the Committee you’ll just have to sleep where you can. It’s a very nice bed. It has fresh sheets for you. A fire is in the grate. A pitcher of water is on the top tray. Cold mutton is on the second tray, which slides out. Bread, cheese, and apples are on the bottom tray. You will be very comfortable here. You will live like kings.”
“There are no kings,” her father said. “They have killed him.”
“Well, dukes then,” his daughter said and threw up her arms.
“Good night, Papa, Maman; I will visit you tomorrow.”
We started to leave. I was about to press the lever, nestled in the center of a wallpaper rose, that swung the mirror open from this side.
“Your brothers,” Claudette’s father said. “I am sorry, but your brothers are pursued. I told them to come here too. Your mother said that you, ma petite, always said that Madame Annette could do anything. We had nowhere to go. There are those in Normandy who can help if we can get there. We are really very grateful. We will not stay long. We will find our way to those Norman houses, and we will work there. I do not like not working. Your brothers will come in a few days. After we leave. Then they can go on to Normandy and work again too. They
are good lads. They did not want to fight for the Parisian government. Do you know the men from Paris came and took the bell from our church? After they arrested our priest. Then they wanted our boys to fight their wars. Who are these people?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But we will keep your sons safe.”
“They burned our barn where the boys were hiding,” Claudette’s mother said, “took our animals, destroyed our crops. The land that your grandfather worked on—”
Claudette embraced her mother and told her to rest now, that it was time for sleep, that she should fear nothing now.
It was a long way from Tours, in bad weather, on foot. A network of resistance had already started, and they had been shunted from barn to barn, living with fear and hunger and fatigue. Claudette kissed her father on the brow, and we closed them in the secret room.
A few days later, just before they moved on to a location in Normandy, Claudette’s father came up to me. “That bell,” he said. “That is what I miss, more than my land, my animals—it was as if that bell rang beneath my window, though it was all the way in town. The wind would bring it to my window.”
After Claudette’s parents left, we did help her brothers, and after them, somehow, the word had gone out that there was some safe haven in Orléans, if one went late at night and only a few at a time.
The Vendée was already beginning to get bad. The Committee of Public Safety was sending additional troops. It was ironic. Now the royalists were called “the rebels.” Claudette, Angelique, and I went to market to buy supplies for the hungry refugees who would discreetly wait in the stable and send one person to stand in the shadows near the kitchen door, which we regularly checked now after the house was asleep. Once the footman woke up at the sound of voices in the kitchen, and I bribed him to keep silent, though I think he wouldn’t have talked anyway. The servants were loyal to chez Dubourg, and chez Dubourg was quietly a royalist house. Monsieur or Madame Dubourg may even have known, but thought it prudent to pretend that they didn’t.
I loved helping those who came. They became fond of Caroline, and some would even arrive already knowing her name. Claudette told me they called me “the Mother of Orléans,” as a play on the maid of Orléans, Joan of Arc, but I never heard them call me that. They all only stayed for a few days and had destinations to walk on to. But they hadn’t slept indoors, in a room with a bed, for who knows how long.
General Dumouriez, head of the Revolutionary Army, had won a series of victories since Valmy last September. But by the spring of 1793 it became clear to him that he had been winning them only so Robespierre and his committees could gain and maintain more power.
They had now declared war on Spain as well as Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain. The general closed the Jacobin clubs, declared himself in open opposition to Robespierre, and planned to march on Paris himself and establish a more moderate government. But his troops refused to move against France, even if it were against an extremist regime that rarely paid them and overstretched their limits in the field, keeping them constantly at war against the increasing numbers of allies. The general had no choice but to defect, leaving Robespierre and his committees now to run the government virtually unchecked.
Now it was the Jacobins’ time to act against the Girondins who had spoken out against them so articulately, courageously, and unwisely for so long. First the Jacobins smashed the rest of the Girondin printing presses, their voice of opposition, for which William had written. Then the Jacobins put their own man, Hanriot, in charge of the National Guard, who, on a fine spring day, surrounded the National Assembly with cannon and fixed bayonets and demanded the arrest of the Girondins, on the grounds that they were all intriguers, or counter-revolutionaries. Some managed to escape later, but went into hiding throughout France. One was found at the bottom of a well in the Dordogne Valley near Bordeaux. A farmer and his wife had been bringing him food for a week. The Jacobin control was now complete. I thought how sad William would be—the ideals he believed in sacrificed for power for a few and for the illusion of security for the many. And these Girondins, in prison now or in hiding, were his friends, his comrades. Once again, for his own sake, I was glad he wasn’t here.
By my birthday on the fifteenth of June, when I became twenty-four and Caroline six months, I had become increasingly afraid of chez Dubourg getting visited by the Committee of Public Safety. It was time, I thought, to move back to Blois. And Claudette wanted to see Benoît; Angelique, Philippe. She had written to Philippe and told him of my idea about the cottage, and since there are many of that description in the Loire, he and his father had found Claudette and me just such a home in Vienne, across the river from Blois, not far from where chez Vincent once was. But Angelique would not move there with us. She would rather live in a fine home than in a crowded cottage. “It’s easy to avoid Vergez,” she said; “it’s a big house.” Monsieur and Madame Dubourg loaned us their family carriage for the voyage.
If there wasn’t wisteria growing on the chimney, I would plant some, I thought. No one could get across the Channel either way now, but William could live with us there, when the war was over. A humble cottage would be just the right place for him to work.
The Mother of Orléans
It had a blue slate roof, like the houses in the city, plaster-covered walls of flint and stone, a huge oven for baking bread attached to the south wall, and a stairway that curved by the oven up to the bedrooms. A rambling rose, rather than wisteria, meagerly bedecked the front of the cottage, facing the rising sun. It had a small barn in the back, where Claudette and I planned to keep chickens, rabbits, a pig, and of course, La Rouge. We would plant a kitchen garden in the space between the cottage and the barn. Two walnut trees and a chestnut grew beside the cottage, as did a pear, an apple, and an apricot tree, which all bore green leaves of summer in the breeze that blew softly in from the river, just to the north. We could see the spires and towers of Blois across the river. Jean had brought some of my old things in a cart from what was once chez Vallon. All that was missing was William, working on his poems in an upstairs bedroom or out under the chestnut tree, or working with us in the garden. Claudette, raised on a farm, was buying rabbits and chickens today at the market. Jean had loaned me Vergez’s cart horse, and I rode it now to visit the count, to retrieve La Rouge.
At the château de Beauregard, Edouard, as silent as the flight of an owl and dignified as only a valet born and bred into service of a count can be, served his master and me white wine from the old cellars. “I’ll be drinking cider now,” I said to the count. “It’s cheaper. It was very strange, though, when I went to pay the agent, he said the cottage was already paid for.”
“You’ll need all of your father’s money, now, believe me.”
“That was very kind of you, Count. You’ll have to come to a dinner of rabbit with onions and mushrooms from our garden,” I said. He nodded. “But how is it—just over three months since I saw you?—and you’re comfortably back at the château de Beauregard.
Why isn’t the Committee of Public Safety pounding on your door?”
“The dance instructor,” the count said, “the smiling serpent, has, in the present dearth of officers and his position with all the right people, got himself a commission as lieutenant in the Revolutionary Army. He just might get himself blown up, although the world seems denied such luck nowadays. I suspect he was really after the uniform—he ’ll look more impressive that way when he teaches the wives of the Jacobins how to dance like ladies. With Monsieur Leforge’s strident and persistent voice gone, my old friend the magistrate found me in Tours, invited me back, and, as I said he would, he has handed his position over to me.”
I gasped.
“Yes, Madame, respectability has come to the new regime, and the new regime has come to the count. And it’s a lot safer for me that way, to be playing their game. There’s a lot of old aristocrats among them, even in the National Assembly—they just have to make their sympathies clear—”
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“But you’ll have to support all the unjust new laws.”
“Ah, but I will temper justice with mercy. And besides, they are right—it is time we aristocrats did an honest day’s work—not that being involved in law is necessarily that. My old friend said he had some interesting cases in which he was able to help some innocent people—one, he said, was that girl who shot the boar. I’m supposing there is only one of those in all of France, but I also suspect that’s another story...”
“Count, besides thanking you for finding—and now for buying—the cottage for me, and for keeping La Rouge—”
“Benoît exercised her when I was away, but he had to be careful of the National Guard—she’s a pretty horse for a cavalry officer to requisition—you’ll want to keep her hidden in the barn and be chary where you ride her—”
“I will. There’s another thing—I used the room—”
He burst out laughing, a deep resounding laugh such as I hadn’t heard since William. “No one laughs like that anymore,” I said.
“More’s the pity.”
“And I didn’t use the room in the way you think—”
“That was not ribald laughter; it was laughter of delicious irony.”
“Well, the irony stops there. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, now, with your new situation—but I used the room to hide refugees from the Vendée—Claudette’s family, others who have lost everything—the type of wonderful cases you’ll get—”
“I knew your heart could not let such a valuable piece of information as that room go without using it for some good—even if only a place for Caroline to nap in peace. So all went well—no one is under surveillance?”