Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution

by James Tipton

  “I never let it leave my pocket,” William said. I reached over Caroline toward the inside of his waistcoat, and he held my hand and I shot out the other. Caroline watched in amazement at this sudden and unknown game at the breakfast table, and this time I pulled out the sacred paper, unrolled it, and read it.

  “It is true,” I announced. “This is a Civic Certificate with the seal of the mayor of Paris on it. Only it is good from August 30 to Septem-ber15,1793. It is now the twelfth of October. Monsieur William, this is an invalid document, and traveling with improper papers can be even more dangerous than traveling with none. If you don’t have papers, you may be illegal but not counter-revolutionary; if traveling with false papers, you are immediately seen as an enemy of the Republic, and”—I looked at Claudette—“that is how my brother died.”

  “Etienne?” William said, shocked. “I—”

  “I wrote to you about it,” I said. “William, how did you avoid anyone checking your papers?”

  “I walked, looking, I suppose, like any lone person minding his own business, hid when I saw any troops. One man walking does not excite a lot of attention, and he can easily step behind a hedgerow or—”

  “William, you’re foolish. You don’t know what kind of a world we live in.”

  “I had to see you,” he said. “After war was declared, I received no mail. I was desperate. What was I to do? All I heard was news of terror coming from France. I had to know if you and Caroline were all right. I had to see you,” he repeated.

  “William, you wonderful imbecile,” I said, and I threw the letter back at him, stood up, and placed Caroline alone on the chair. I picked up my plate. “Have you finished?” I asked him.

  “This is the first decent meal I have had for weeks,” he said. “I’m going to eat every bite.”

  “Caroline and I need to go visit the barn,” said Claudette. “Emilie needs milking, and everybody else needs feeding. And Horace can take anybody’s unfinished portions.” And she picked up my plate from the kitchen and carried it and my daughter out.

  “You are an intelligent man,” I said. “I can’t believe you did such a thing.”

  “I am sorry about Etienne.”

  “He was trying to get to England.” And I started to cry, standing in the kitchen, and William stood up and put his arms around me.

  “I’ll be careful,” he said. “I’ll be very careful.”

  “You’re such an imbecile,” I said. “Thank you for being such an imbecile.”

  And he took my hand and led me back to the table.

  “You received letters?” he said.

  “None for months and months, and then suddenly two—perhaps because they came from different places, arrived at different ports, than the others. I don’t know. One said you were about to leave to France, and the other that you had almost been killed trying to get here and were, wisely, going to Wales.”

  “I did. And my old friend Jones, whom I talked to you of, listened to me endlessly explain my dilemma as we walked among the misty mountains of his country, and when I said simply, I had to try again, he loaned me money and told me Cornwall was the ancient seat of smugglers.”

  “William, you’re a criminal in the eyes of two countries.”

  “And you? I must tell you, I saw a strange sight. I arrived around dawn, after walking much of the night. Once I had made it to Orléans, and you weren’t there, I had to push on. The cottage was dark. I thought everyone was asleep. I went to rest in the barn—barns have been very helpful to me lately—met Frederick the Great as heretofore mentioned, and, deciding to rest under the eaves, I saw La Rouge ride up—strange, arriving at dawn, but more strange, a blonde lady with your cloak, and a white feather in her hat, dismounted and proceeded to lead Rouge into the barn and open up a hidden stall. This lady had your features and figure, even in the dim light, but I had never seen her before. Do you know where she came from?”

  “There are three women, William, whom I will tell you of. You know the first two: the woman who lives for her infant daughter and grows vegetables and fruits for market; another who loves a poet whose country is an enemy to hers, and they must live exiled from each other; and a third, who secretly tries to help others in great need.”

  “And what if something should happen to the third woman, in this uncertain world, and she dies and leaves her infant daughter behind her?”

  “She has made plans with a very reliable person who also loves the child.”

  “Is it worth it?” he said. “And what about that lover in exile?”

  “She does not know fully why she undertakes her minor adventures,” I said. “I think she feels she owes it, somehow, that it is a debt of honor.”

  “To what?” William said. “To whom?”

  “To a little girl she saw once,” I said, “who no longer had any parents, and who was hungry and scared and alone. And, I believe, to the memory of her father and brother.”

  William filled his cup from the jug of water and looked at me, as if studying me again.

  “For a year I’ve thought of you as the playful person I first met,” he said, “isolated in my memory as you were, untouched by the catastrophic events of the world around you. And all the time you were becoming someone else, someone I could not possibly know because I have not lived as you have lived, in a country at war with itself.”

  “I am still Annette,” I said, “your Annette.”

  “This other person,” he said. “Does she have a name, too?”

  I laughed. “It’s embarrassing. She’s called—the Fearless Chouanne of Blois. I’m not fearless, William—”

  “I’ve heard of the Chouans,” he said. “They’re brigands—”

  “And where did you hear that from?” I said. “They are the only ones successfully and tirelessly resisting the intrusion of the government of Paris into their lives. I heard a man singing a song they had made up. You might like it; it’s poetry of a sort:

  You’ve killed our priests and killed our king,

  And stolen our church bell;

  You want our men for wars you’ve made—

  We say, just go to hell.

  “And I thought you hated politics,” William said.

  “I do” I insisted. “I hate it more than ever.”

  William looked away, ran his hands through his disheveled hair, and said, “I saw it, Annette, when I was in Paris. I saw the Terror. I thought what we heard in England could have been exaggeration. It was not.”

  “What did you see?”

  “The machine itself.”

  I shuddered and tried to push out the picture that suddenly came into my mind of my brother, standing there, or kneeling there. It was rainy September in that picture. I had seen it before. It felt cold now, in the room in the fall morning, with the breakfast fires waning. That machine was always waiting, an invisible presence in the homes and hearts of so many people. “Did you see—?” I said.

  “A journalist I knew, Gorsas, I saw him led up to the scaffold, his hands tied behind his back—I had lodged with him in Paris, Annette. I knew him. He wrote for the Girondins, and we argued sometimes over his more extremist positions—but it doesn’t matter now. I heard all my old Girondin friends are on trial. I wanted to go see some of it, but to witness Brissot in his eloquence rip the prosecution’s flimsy case to shreds and have his fine words ignored by a judge who has already made up his mind would be too sad to see. They have actually accused the Girondins of being in league with the prime minister of England! It would be laughable, if it weren’t so tragic. Anybody can say that someone else is ‘not a true patriot,’ and that person is destroyed. That is the real Terror.”

  “And here are you,” I said, “with a false Civic Certificate, and think you’re not tempting fate?”

  “For a mission such as mine,” he said, “to see you and my daughter—the gods protect such a one.”

  “What if you were to climb trees and help a couple of helpless women pick some pears and apple
s for market this afternoon?” I said.

  “Is that noble enough of a mission to merit the protection of those gods?”

  “If you are referring to you and Claudette,” he said, “I’ve never known either one of you ever to be helpless, but I’d be happy to harvest some fruit for you. On one condition—that I then get to accompany you to market, and see one of those three women you told me about at her work.”

  The rest of that morning William stood perched precariously on various boughs and stretched himself as far as his long arms could reach, risking his life for a single isolated pear or for an impertinent apple that swung just out of his fingers’ touch, until he lunged for it and grasped it, and I shouted up that it wasn’t worth it. From below, he was half lost in the leaves and intertwining branches. I could just see his legs and hear his voice from another world. I loved having him working there: my husband and friend and Caroline’s father, as she watched his movements far above her.

  That afternoon he accompanied us to market, carrying baskets of ripe pears and apples. He stood beside me at our table now and said we had the best fare at the market, with our fruit and vegetables, goat cheese Claudette had made, and a few rabbits in a makeshift wooden cage. We did well that day, and I smiled at Jeanne Robin, at her table behind us at the opening of an alley behind the square, at the edge of the market.

  Then I noticed Citizen Gauchon weaving up to us. I thought he had left to collect church rents throughout the Loire Valley long ago, with Lieutenant Leforges. He looked as if he had been drinking. He still had his red cap and pipe. He came straight to our table.

  “Do you have a permit to sell here?” He sounded as if he had been drinking.

  “Yes,” I said, “would you like to see it?”

  He grunted, and I took the paper from my pocket and unfolded it in front of him. I kept it in my hand. I saw him looking at the seal of the town of Blois on it. Then he looked back at me.

  “You look familiar,” he said. “Little baby with you, told everybody in the square that the Holy Tear of Vendôme was real. The real tear of Christ. Are you some kind of idiot or just a counter-revolutionary wench?”

  “I think you must have me confused with someone else, Citizen. Excuse us, we must serve our fellow citizens here. You’ve seen our seal. We have a right to be here.”

  “What about this one?” and he pointed to William. Now I felt like the imbecile. In my bliss at having William with me, I had forgotten that, of course, most of the men his age would have been conscripted.

  Benoît was gone now from the count’s service.

  “He helped us pick the apples,” I said. “He’s not clever, just tall.”

  I didn’t want William to speak and betray his accent.

  “Where are you from?” Gauchon said. “Why aren’t you in the army?”

  “His mind is slow,” I said. “He can’t follow orders or talk right. The army didn’t want him.”

  “The army wants everyone,” said Citizen Gauchon. “Why doesn’t he talk? Hand me your papers,” he said to William.

  William unfolded his invalid Civic Certificate in front of Gauchon, as I had done. I could only think of Etienne’s fate with his false papers. Again Gauchon looked at the seal.

  “This isn’t proper,” he said.

  “Why?” I said.

  “This is the seal of Paris. We are in Blois.” Citizen Gauchon was not too drunk to forget the Revolution’s obsession with official seals.

  “But this seal allows him to be anywhere in France,” I said. “He just comes from Paris. He travels, picking apples and pears in the fall.”

  “Then he must get new certificates from the towns he is in.”

  I realized that Gauchon had only looked at the seal. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t see that the dates were wrong and the purpose of doing research on constitutional reform was absurd for someone picking fruit. He only saw that the seal was wrong. But that was bad enough.

  “I will have to bring this matter up with the representative-on-mission from Paris,” Gauchon said. “A man must have the seal from the town he is in. Come with me.”

  Just then, as he was about to grab William’s upper arm, Gauchon’s bleary eyes left us, and he looked over our shoulders. I followed his gaze to where Jeanne Robin, behind her table but in full view, was squatting down, lifting her skirts and baring her bottom. She seemed to be about to relieve herself.

  “Holy mother of God,” said Gauchon, “what a sight,” and he immediately half-stumbled on, in a hurry not to miss the view. Jeanne seemed to be taking her time.

  “Leave now, Madame,” Claudette said, “I can take care of the table,” and I lifted up Caroline and hastened William away from the market. If we were lucky, I thought, Gauchon would be too drunk to remember the encounter. If he asked Claudette where we were, she would say the right thing.

  “Don’t you know,” we heard Gauchon saying loudly to Jeanne Robin, as we left, “that women can’t do that?”

  We were almost back to the cottage when William said, “France is a strange place.”

  “That woman behind us, she’s a Chouanne too,” I said.

  “I see. A singular distraction, but it worked. That fellow seemed to recognize you, wig or no.”

  “That was before I had the wig. My one indiscretion, for which I will not be able to go to market now until that citizen goes back to Paris.”

  When Claudette returned that night, she said that Gauchon had followed Jeanne into the alley behind the square, and Jeanne had returned alone.

  After supper I asked William to sing to Caroline, and while she lay in my arms he sang the ballads of his country in the north of England.

  “Sing the Annachie Gordon song,” I said. “She knows that one, only in French, with happier words.”

  I was glad he had come. He had seen his daughter. He knew I still loved him, even if the I was different from the one he had known and loved. And I knew he had risked his life just to see me.

  Late that night, in the quiet of the house and of his soft breathing next to me, as he lay near sleep, he said, “But Chouannes are wild people. Are you really a Chouanne?”

  “May I be a Chouanne with a romantic heart?” And he was asleep before I had my answer.

  William stayed for two more days. The second evening after dinner he said, “Annette, I want to show you something.” He pulled a slim book out of his rucksack and handed it to me. I noticed his name on the cover.

  “Is this—?”

  “It’s for you,” he said, “I carried it all the way from London. I didn’t want the Committee of Public Safety to get their hands on it. There ’re not many copies.” His voice was nonchalant, but he couldn’t stop smiling.

  “And you’ve waited all this time. Why didn’t you show it to me the first day? This is exciting.”

  “I was saving it.”

  “Read the title to me, in English,” I said. “I want to hear how it sounds.”

  “An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, by W. Wordsworth, B.A. of St. John’s, Cambridge,” he said. “That is I. Open it; I wrote something inside for you, in French.”

  Caroline was just getting used to William when he had to leave. He had stayed as long as he could, and I was anxious for him. On the third morning I wrapped my worn velvet dressing gown around me and went with him in the dark and held his hand by our little gate.

  His face was in shadow, and the faintest line of light lay behind the dark trees beyond him. It was still cold from the autumn night. Dew coated our garden with silver. You could smell the river. He pressed my hand, shouldered his old rucksack, and went down the deserted road. He was already lost in the dark. It was a long way to the Normandy coast.

  When I came back inside, I noticed the whiteness of a sheet of paper slipped under the porcelain water jug on the table. I took the paper over to the window and stood in the pale light and read the lines William had left for me. Translating his poetry was always a slow process for him, and I wondered when he
had composed these.

  Tonight, my Friend, within this humble cot

  Be scorn and fear and hope alike forgot

  In timely sleep; and when, at break of day,

  On the tall peaks the glistening sunbeams play

  With a light heart our course we many renew,

  The first whose footsteps print the mountain dew.

  He wrote that these next lines were a fragment from a work in progress,

  ...He who feels contempt

  For any living thing, hath faculties

  Which he has never used.

  True knowledge leads to love.

  At the end of the month all of William’s Girondin friends were executed. Journalists at the trial wrote of the Girondins’ passionate extemporaneous speeches in their own defense, but the verdict, of course, had already been decided. I could only think that William so easily could have been among them. They sang “La Marseillaise” as they rode through the streets of Paris in the tumbril, and each shouted “Vive la République!” before he stepped valiantly up to the guillotine. But Paris had turned against them. The Jacobins had convinced the people that the Girondins were, after all, traitors: propaganda, for the most part, works. One of the Girondins, upon hearing the verdict, had stabbed himself rather than give the Jacobins the victory of his death. But the Jacobins insisted upon the letter of the law: his corpse stayed in the cell all night with the condemned Girondins, accompanied them to the scaffold, and was beheaded along with them. The twenty-two leaders were killed in forty minutes.

  And on October 16, 1793, one day after William left, when, even with his sturdy legs, he was probably still in France, the Queen was brought to what was now called “Sainte-Guillotine,” all witnesses commented on her composure, her hands tied behind her back (unlike the King), and in an open cart. She even apologized to the executioner for stepping on his toe.

  It is true that if one says a thing enough times, it comes to be believed. The gossip that had sold pornographic pamphlets since long before the Revolution, which depicted the Queen as a depraved, licentious monster, now became the spurious lies that made up the bulk of the prosecution. Antoinette was not tried before the National Convention, as was her husband, but by the extremist prosecutor Hébert and the Revolutionary Tribunal, hastily and righteously disposing of their political enemies.