Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution

by James Tipton

  The Key

  “So you see, my dear,” the count said, “that I do earn my money after all.”

  We were in a small dining room reserved for the lawyers in the Town Hall. It only had two pillars and one chandelier. Because of Citizen Carrier’s speech, we were late, and only a pair of men talked at a far table by the window; we sat in a corner on embroidered chairs that must have once known bishops’ velvet robes.

  “The man’s quite insane; he should be in an asylum,” I said softly.

  “He is the threat to the security of the nation.”

  “He has the force of the government behind him,” the count said.

  “What I think you don’t realize is—” He paused as a waiter brought in the bread. The waiter poured a glass of red wine for the count and me, and left. The count sipped his wine and made a face. “The new order doesn’t know about wine,” he said.

  I thought the bread was good. Bread was, once again, becoming increasingly scarce. “For the true Jacobin,” the count continued, “politics is a religion. Perhaps that is why they hate priests so. They want to be the only priests. Only the Jacobins can claim the right now to regenerate mankind, as Carrier put it. And you know, my dear, you and I, all those poor people on the benches—we are as nothing before the will to change the world. Any nonbeliever must be purged.

  Carrier and his friends would have done well during the Inquisition.

  They just would have been wearing hoods. The point is, religious zealots have always been the ones who are the most willing to kill their fellow man. Just look at history.”

  The waiter brought in our lunch of eels with mushrooms and prunes. “I hate eating here,” the count said. “Eels should be simmered in mature wine.”

  “Why did you invite me here?” I said.

  “To enlighten you on the future of Europe, I believe I said in my letter. The little drama of Citizen Carrier should have done that.”

  “So now I’ve seen cases that make me angry. I already know of the injustice of the new regime, believe me—”

  “And you’re already doing something about it—”

  “In a small way, thanks to you.”

  “I have nothing to do with it and know nothing about it. Do you care about the fate of these people today?”

  “Of course. They do not deserve to die for their non-crimes.”

  “Would you be willing to do something about that, too?”

  I paused with a piece of eel flesh on my fork.

  “Would you be willing to risk more than taking a ride on your horse at night?” the count said. “If you say no, that is fine; we will just enjoy our eels and prunes and you can say how splendid I was in my useless capacity of magistrate.”

  “How long has Carrier been here?” I said.

  “Almost a week, and he has undermined every case I have heard since then. I might as well stay in my slippers in my château. You see, it is partly revenge against Carrier that I want.” He glanced over at the two men, who were leaving their table now. “Sip your bitter wine,” the count said, “and don’t be hasty in your response.”

  “Can you tell me more about what you are referring to?”

  He leaned over his plate. “I’m talking about releasing them all from prison. Illegally. At night. In a plan of genius. My motives are simply revenge, as I said, against the mockery of justice that is flooding this nation. It will be amusing, if it works. They will see they are not invincible. That people can resist them. Carrier and his crowd will be publicly embarrassed. I, of course, will be comfortably at home. I know you have taken risks before, and they don’t seem to bother you.

  You are really just as mad as your Englishman, who tried to oppose the Jacobins by writing sincere articles for the Girondins—”

  “How did you—”

  “Seriously, are you interested?”

  “Let me judge the level of ‘genius.’ I don’t have an army for a prison break, Count. I have a horse and sometimes a groom with a limp.”

  “That is quite satisfactory. Only you’ll need a boat, and Edouard, my exquisite valet, will conjure one up, with the help of a couple of royalist sailors in need of money and a noble mission. They will have contacts downriver, part of a network with which I believe you’re familiar.”

  “You’re a royalist spy,” I whispered.

  “No, nothing that romantic or dangerous. By being magistrate, I merely gain security from the new order and some soothing of conscience by occasionally helping the old. I can’t do much. It was your asking the use of the lodge that put me in this frame of mind. You’re the daughter of my old friend who would not be afraid to act, were he here. You shamed me, my dear, so, with the help of Edouard, I have made a few contacts. But as I said, I take no risks.”

  The waiter entered the room, picked up our plates. “We will need nothing more,” the count said. “Just leave us the water,” and the waiter left.

  “You could have asked me about coffee,” I said. “I haven’t had any for months.”

  “Not even here,” the count said, “though some restaurants get it through the black market. Do you know what this building used to be?”

  “Of course. The Bishop’s Palace.” The count nodded and filled my water glass.

  “Once, deep in the old cellars, among the racks of fine vintages, when the bishop was showing me a Chinon ’65, I asked him, Where does that rusty iron door lead? He said it was an escape route, built during the religious wars—though I myself think it was really used to smuggle in a woman. It led to the cathedral crypt, so she must have been a brave or a well-paid woman.”

  I laughed. “Etienne and I discovered that door when we were kids. While our parents thought we were at confession, sometimes all of us children would play hide and seek in the crypt. One time, it was only Etienne and I, and when I found him near the door to a marble vault, he remarked that it was slightly ajar and dared me to enter it. We always brought candles for our game, so I went ahead. Once inside, I found a passageway and couldn’t not follow it, and then poor Etienne had to follow me. After that, we went to confession.”

  Now the count laughed. “You are truly the most bizarre young woman I have ever met.” He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard. “This makes it a bit easier for me. I mean, I thought I was going to have to ask you not just to free prisoners but to enter a crypt. You know, then, that the door at the end of the passage is now behind the bars of the new holding prison in the cellar of the Town Hall, the wine being long gone—”

  “I didn’t know that. I thought that door led to the Underworld. I thought the River Styx flowed on the other side of that door.”

  “Just a pack of helpless prisoners, I assure you.” He was speaking softly now, and anyone peeking in the room would have supposed he was trying to inspire me to acquiesce to a rendezvous—which, of course, in a way, he was. “Do you know that the key to that door is in my possession, is even on my person at this moment? That Edouard located it, secured to the back of a painting of the Madonna and child that the boors had placed atop a pile of the palace’s useless, decadent items they were about to burn? That Edouard saved the painting, discovered the key; that I pondered its use; that my valet satisfied my curiosity by trying it out on a number of doors on a pretext of looking for files for me—the endless bureaucracy of the Revolution—and as he pretended to interrogate prisoners in the old cellar, he found its home? Edouard is the true genius. He will now need to do further questioning for me, tomorrow night. That is, before the prisoners are sent on to the guillotine at Orléans.”

  “At what hour would he be doing this questioning?” I asked.

  “At midnight, when only two guards are left on duty. And their post is at the head of the stairs leading to the cellar, not actually in the cellar itself. He will tell the guards, as he has before, that the prisoners are tired and vulnerable and easier to interrogate at that hour. He will also bring, as a present, two bottles of one of the fine vintages that use
d to be in that cellar. Instead of interrogating the prisoners, he will tell them of their immanent escape and to be calm and quiet and remove the empty barrels in the corner, in front of the ancient door. By three that door will open, Edouard will tell the prisoners, and the guards should be dutifully sleepy themselves, and I myself will be surprised if they have not sampled the wine. So the wine, the hour, and the smell and filth of the place that once aged some of the best wines in the Loire Valley should keep the guards from checking the cellar too often.”

  “Won’t someone know,” I said, “that someone inside engineered the escape? That your valet was there?”

  “It’s an old, rusty door. They could easily have forced it. No one knows a key exists. And Edouard will have left long before the escape happens; that is, if you decide to do it at all.”

  “Why me? Why not one of your contacts in the network?”

  “I have never met any of those contacts. I only—and very occasionally—send information as to when representatives-on-mission will be visiting certain villages, to give the people time to hide. I don’t know anyone. I certainly wouldn’t trust someone to whom I had only and very indirectly delivered a note. You have proved yourself a number of times to be prudent and discreet—”

  “My mother’s favorite words again—”

  “And resourceful and courageous, like your father, who went to help others even when a riot was in fury all around him—”

  “Put the key on my knee under the table,” I said. “If anyone looks in, they’ll think you are just getting friendly.”

  I felt its weight suddenly on my leg, and I reached my hand under the table, felt the old bigness and heaviness of the key, and slipped it into the pocket of my dress under the cockade.

  “Those were good eels, Count,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re so fussy.”

  “You’re brave to eat them all,” he said.

  “What really takes courage,” I said, “is to enter that crypt at night.”

  When I left the Town Hall, the cobblestones were wet from the first September rain and the air smelled fresh and sweet. The old cathedral seemed to stand out boldly against the afternoon sky, lit behind it. Caroline would be safe with Claudette. William was safe in England. I breathed the air in deeply. I felt some strange mixture of dread and excitement.

  The Crypt

  I crossed the bridge well before the evening curfew and sat at the Café de Liberté at Saint-Louis Square, across from the cathedral. I drank a glass of cider and read from a small book that contained part of The Romance of the Rose, which always reassured me, and which I kept in one of the large pockets of my riding cloak. When the café closed and curfew was about to begin, I crossed the square and entered the cathedral through a small door in a side chapel, which the ubiquitous Edouard had left unlocked. I sat in the dim silence of the huge cathedral and waited for Jean and the appointed hour to arrive.

  Like all cathedrals now, Saint-Louis was officially called a “Temple of Reason.” But few people, I think, sitting in a cathedral at night, staring into the vast, empty nave, with its large arches disappearing into a darkness of infinity, could take its new name seriously. I was not disturbed by what William would call a Presence, palpably, in the silence that loomed around me, and I welcomed it and prayed quietly to Lucette. I closed my eyes and rested now in a dark, luminous space that knew nothing of the dangerous expedition on which I was about to embark, nor about Committees of Safety, nor even about English poets.

  I finally heard the chapel door open and close, and the slightly unsteady gait of Jean, with his old limp, making its way across the nave. He had walked all the way down from chez Vergez after curfew, keeping to the shadows. He had become quite fond of intrigues. I whispered his name: “Monsieur Verbois,” I said, and Jean, groom to my father, a symbol of the security of my old family, grinned a gap-toothed grin before me in the semi-dark. He had taken his hat off when he entered the cathedral, and his bald pate shone. “Madame,” he whispered, “Allons-y,” the same phrase I whispered to La Rouge to make her go.

  I rose, and he followed me to the door that led to the crypt. But when I opened it, and it creaked and broke the silence I had become comfortable in, I suddenly wanted to turn back. I had never felt that before on an intrigue. This was not, I thought, like letting tired people into a secret room that was once the assignation place for your mother and her lover. Nor was this like riding through the moonlit night to an old hunting lodge and providing soup for hungry people. This was entirely different. This was the stuff of dares: enter a crypt, go into the mouth of a tomb, and free prisoners of the state. Well, Etienne and I had done the first two things long ago. I had tapped then on a tomb for good luck because I liked the name on it—Chevalier Destigny—then went down a tunnel that I thought was leading me on a winding path to hell.

  I kept going now, down the dark and even darker stairs, partly because Edouard had presumably been in the cellar tonight and had raised the prisoners’ hopes, and if those hopes were destroyed and those prisoners led to an undeserving end at the blade of a guillotine, all because of my timidity, that would not do. That would not do at all.

  Jean and I now lit the candles we carried in our pockets and proceeded into the crypt. It had the same cold, dead air as any time of day or season. What are hours or months to the dead? The smell of dust was strong, and Jean sneezed, which resounded in the crypt like Jove’s thunder. We stood still a moment, and Jean, who had never been here before, followed me around the broad tombs. I remembered to pat the dust of Chevalier Destigny’s as I passed it. But I hated it down here.

  Jean could not show fear because he was a man in the presence of a woman. I could not show fear because I was the leader—and because I was a woman leading a man. Nevertheless, it was not with great joie de vivre that I stood in the oppressive darkness of an ancient crypt, stared at the door, slightly ajar, of a marble vault, and told myself that I was going to open that door again and walk right in. Jean shook his head.

  “Courage,” I said, as we pulled opened the door of the vault.

  “Something to tell your grandchildren.”

  I went first by the corpses of the bishop and his wife. They hadn’t changed since I saw them last. What was six or seven years to them?

  Jean stifled a gasp. We went past her ragged blue velvet gown, the remnants of his red robe and a glimmer of his silver chain. I had to glance at her face. I had to think of her kissing him once, or he her.

  Then we were in the narrow passage. Jean walked bent over. Maybe all the people in those days were more my height. Maybe it was just too hard to build a bigger tunnel. Jean’s shoulders almost brushed the sides. I saw the fast, sliding movement of tails, heard squeals, and felt a soft body against the toe of my riding boot and others scurrying over its top. I felt some scampering under the hem of my skirts and a tail slap my ankle. I danced a bit and kicked some. I remember I screamed here when I was a girl. Now I just didn’t want any rats up my legs.

  The passage again seemed endless. I had great respect for the courage and fortitude of Jean. It made a huge difference to me that I had been here before. Finally we saw the big iron door in our flickering candlelight. The quiet was unearthly. What if the guards had discovered the escape attempt and were waiting to arrest us on the other side of that door? Or what if there were more than one vault with a passage, and we were at a different door than the one the count intended?

  I drew my pistol from one pocket, gave it to Jean, and from another pocket of my cloak pulled the large key, flat alongside The Romance of the Rose, and inserted it in the rusty lock. The count said that Edouard had tested the key from the other side. I turned it slowly, and a scraping sound followed that echoed up the lonely dark corridor. Then the key stuck. I turned it again and nothing happened. I was about to have Jean try when I twisted it to the right once more, and the jarring sound of an ancient bolt being hauled out of its resting place tore through the silent, still air as if another vault behind us had
suddenly opened. I pulled the key out, not wanting to leave any evidence, and turned the rusted bronze knob. Jean pushed the door slowly open, with a minimum of creaking sound, and in our paltry candlelight and the dim flicker of a torch in the cellar, I saw silent, wondering faces give way before me.

  I heard a woman gasp, a man whisper, “Mon Dieu,” and someone else start a Hail Mary, and I stepped into the fetid cellar. I noticed some faces from yesterday, but many more than I had foreseen, perhaps a hundred, crowded together: all silent, all looking at me with expectant faces. Children slept or sat quietly in mothers’ laps; old, young, and middle-aged eyes returned my gaze. A black velvet coat edged with dirty lace at the cuff, or a white muslin gown whose hem swept the filthy floor, rubbed shoulders with a coarse brown wool jacket or dress. Everyone shared the same fate.

  A small, older man in a high-collared gray coat came up to me.

  “Madame Williams?” he said softly. I thought I recognized one of the aristocrats arrested for singing hymns. “We are all prepared. Notice how quiet we are, as if we are all sleeping.” He smiled. He was proud of their efficiency. “You should know that one of the guards periodically comes to chat with one of our ladies. An inopportune attraction and a reason to move quickly. The gentleman in the corner will require some assistance.” I noticed an older peasant, whom I thought was asleep, lying near the wall. “They say they will manage, though,” the small man said. “We ’ll follow you now?”

  “You’ll follow Monsieur Verbois,” and I pointed to Jean. “I will stay here until you are all out.” I motioned for Jean to hand me the pistol. “Monsieur Verbois,” I said to the cell, in a loud whisper, “will also give ten more candles to individuals on your way out. He will lead you to the quai, where a boat will be waiting. Listen. No one, I repeat, no one, must run or go before Monsieur Verbois.” His slight limp would keep them at the right pace, I thought. “The boat will not leave until you are all on it. We will use the bishop’s own escape route through the church crypt. Do not be disturbed by it. If it was good enough for a bishop, it is good enough for us. Now, proceed.”