Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution

by James Tipton

  “William was almost dead inside,” Dorothy went on, “from disappointment, from heartache, from guilt. I gave him his life back. He is an amazing man,” she said carefully, “but he must, he must, have the proper conditions to show his genius to the world.”

  “‘True knowledge leads to love.’ That’s a beautiful line he translated for me.”

  “It is hard to appreciate his poems fully in translation, though,” said Dorothy, “and I am afraid our French is not good enough for you.”

  “On the contrary, your French is very good. I can understand everything you say, without straining in the least.”

  I understood that Dorothy was asking me—no, telling me—that I must give William up once and for all. But what did she know, what could she know, of William’s and my life together?

  “William always prized his independent mind,” I said, “his freedom of spirit.”

  “I think what he most values now is his tranquility,” she said. “He needs peace to write. Peace and his long walks.” She had a tight black bonnet that shielded her face from the glare, and she pulled on one of its long strings with her hand. It tightened the bonnet even further.

  “He was happy with me,” I said. “You didn’t hear him laugh or sing or—” I summoned up my courage as if I were on an intrigue. I must face this little woman. “Love like his doesn’t go away,” I said.

  “If you knew anything about him, you’d know that. It can be covered up by new friends and the tranquility of your cold hills, but it doesn’t pass. He has had just as fine walks along our river as along your lakes. He has said so. You didn’t hear him, but he said so. He needs peace to write, sure, but he needs something else that you or your friend Mary can never give him as I can—he needs passion, Mademoiselle. Do you know what I am saying? Can you understand me? Is your French good enough?”

  “You will never take him away from me again,” she said. “He was carried away by the emotions excited by the Revolution. Everyone knows that. That is why it is forgivable. He wasn’t in England. He was in a world gone insane. That never would have happened in England. William is a man of self-control.” Her chin was trembling, and she pulled at her bonnet string again.

  Suddenly I laughed. “You’ve got a poet whose spirit ranges beyond the mountains in control, you think, but you don’t. You control him through fear. If he leaves you, he will fall into the abyss again. If he leaves you, you yourself will fall apart, so he will stay. But his spirit is beyond you, beyond both of us. You don’t know what it is like to face uncontrollable forces, Mademoiselle. And you’ll never, never know what William and I shared. What we still share, if we could walk alone. Have him walk alone with me, this evening. Or are you afraid?”

  “I understand William, and you do not. That is clear. You may walk unchaperoned if you like. He has things to say to you.”

  “Very well.”

  “But Mademoiselle Vallon—we know in England about French girls. We know that—what happened—was not William’s fault. We know that, most likely, William was not your first, and will not be your last. William is beyond French temptation now.”

  “It sounds to me,” I said, “as if the war between our nations is still ensuing. I think it is time to enjoy the peace, Mademoiselle, that you so highly extol.”

  I looked toward the sea and saw William lifting Caroline, effortlessly, high over a wave, and dipping her feet down into its foam. I heard her scream with delight, over the happy screams of the other bathers. “Everyone is enjoying the peace out there. I’m going to wade now, dear sister. It is getting far too hot here.”

  I took off my shoes and stockings, scooped up the length of my skirts over my left arm, and started down the hot sand.

  “There’s one other thing, Mademoiselle,” Dorothy said to my back. I turned and stood in front of her black-clad self, my ankles bare. I could feel her disapproval. “You don’t know poetry, as we do,” she said. “William asks Mary and me our opinions on his work.

  He may argue at first, but he always takes our advice. He couldn’t write without us. He knows that. Coleridge’s wife, for instance. She doesn’t understand, doesn’t appreciate literature, and she doesn’t fit in our circle. But Mary’s sister, she does, so Coleridge prefers to be with her. So we have a complete circle, Mademoiselle. You wouldn’t want to feel left out, like Coleridge’s wife. You wouldn’t want to deprive the world of the great poetry William can create by thriving within our circle.”

  “I think,” I said slowly, “that he created great poetry before that circle existed. He asked my opinion of his poems long before he ever asked yours. I am working on a prose version of The Romance of the Rose, Mademoiselle. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s 22,000 lines long. I know literature. I have faced the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Army. Don’t think you can intimidate me so easily. Whatever happens here will be because William and I will it so, looking at fate full in the face and taking stock of our respective situations. Not because it’s part of your plan.”

  I waded out. The cool water was a delight, and I thought, I should have joined them from the start. I called, “Caroline, William!” It felt good to say their names together. I wanted to kidnap him. He would make a good father. There he was, with Caroline, giggling.

  “Watch, Maman!” she shouted. They turned and faced a wave that was over her head. She screamed, and William did not pick her up. I gasped. At the last fraction of a second, William snatched her up and held her over the top of the wave. She squealed.

  I said in a voice which the sound of the waves covered, “William, your sister is in love with you! Your sister wants to marry you! Do you know that? I, though, am the cause of your family almost dis-owning you! I am no good! I am a whore!” A wave, when I was not looking, flung itself over my knees and got up to waist. “What do you want, mon cher?” William turned and walked through the water, with Caroline holding his hand.

  “You should join us,” he said.

  “Papa rescues me just in time.”

  “Your dress is wet,” he said.

  “I might as well not have worn it.” It was a bizarre thing to say, but I was beyond caring.

  William laughed. “Caroline is a delight. Can you hold her hand a minute? I want to swim out beyond the waves. I will be right back.”

  I watched him dive into two waves that collided together and swim out. Caroline and I played in the waves ourselves, for a while.

  We jumped when they came and fell back in the hissing foam. We laughed. William was still out beyond them. We were thoroughly soaked when we walked back to the beach, where Dorothy stood, waiting for us all.

  Let Us Dance

  Other people strolled by us, some arm in arm, and three old fishermen leaned on the rail, smoking in the twilight and looking down at the water.

  “It’s pleasant to walk in the evening after a hot day,” William said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  I suddenly felt as though I had nothing to say to the man I had waited so long to be with. Here he was walking beside me in the twilight on the beach, and I had nothing to say. Or I had so much to say I did not know where to start, so I said nothing. I felt he wanted to speak, and I waited. I didn’t know, though, if I wanted to hear now what he had to say.

  “The air is so still,” William said.

  I decided to help him.

  “When I was a girl, going to school at the convent, we called this the ‘holy time,’ because it was the time of evening prayer.”

  The evening was so calm, the waves coming in sounded like an intrusion. I looked back, and the pier was a speck, with the bulk of the fort seemingly just on the other side of it.

  William finally spoke again. “Except for the sea, the evening, then, is as quiet as a nun.”

  “Nuns are not always quiet. Sometimes they can be quite noisy, singing, laughing, yelling at one to do this or that. They are only quiet in prayer.”

  “As quiet as a nun in prayer, then.”

  W
e were silent again.

  “Caroline loves the seashore,” I said.

  “Caroline, like Dorothy, has a deep love for the things of nature.”

  We kept walking. William was not looking at me but at the sand at his feet or out to sea when he spoke. He continued where he had left off. “Caroline’s excited joy is like what I used to have—a joy arrived at not through contemplation, but through innocence.”

  “You had that when I knew you.”

  “You have that; Caroline is like you in that respect; my sister has that.”

  He stopped and looked out to sea, toward England. “Dorothy and I were separated, you know, after my parents died. So in seeing her again, I was seeing another soul that had been lost to me. She became my best friend. She has a brilliant mind. Coleridge calls her my ‘exquisite sister . ’”

  I thought of mentioning to him something about Dorothy’s and my conversation that afternoon, but decided it wasn’t the time. “You have been happy together.”

  “In our humble way, yes. Growing peas and carrots, so poor we are living on air, walking in the country in all weathers with Coleridge, and the three of us rowing on the lake at night and reciting poetry, or fishing for pike.”

  “It sounds idyllic.” Then I couldn’t help myself. “Your sister’s very attached to you.”

  “Yes, she is. She’s very protective of me. She ought to be. She’s taken care of me long enough. I don’t even have to say something, at times, and she knows what I mean, or what I’m wanting. But she’s not as strong as she seems. She has headaches that put mine to shame, that debilitate her for a week. She can walk in the cold rain up steep hills; then for no reason one day she is in bed, can’t get up to heat water for tea. We help each other.”

  I thought I knew the reason for the headaches, but it wasn’t mine to say.

  We started walking again and were on sand that was still hard from being wet at high tide, but was now dry. Near us, as the waves washed up, stars were briefly reflected in the thin film of water over the sand, then it would go dry, then another wave would come up. “Do you think this peace will last?” William asked, and looked at me, then away.

  “I don’t trust Bonaparte,” I said. “What has a man like him have to do with peace?”

  “I don’t trust Pitt. Even though he is out of office, he will try to get back at Bonaparte.”

  “You don’t trust your country; I don’t trust mine. What will we do, cher William, if the peace does not last?”

  “What will we do? Let us walk up to the dunes.”

  We walked up to the dunes, and he spread his coat on the sand for me to sit on. The dune in front of us was high, and you could not see the beach, but over the top of it, far across the water, you could see two little lights glimmering on the English shore.

  “Sometimes I feel that so much has passed from my life that I cannot retrieve,” William said. “I feel old, as if I’ve lived more than one life.”

  “You’re only thirty-two.”

  “Part of my life died when I left France.” He sat close beside me on the edge of his coat, but without touching. He hugged his knees and stared straight ahead. “I overcame that death in our brief reunion when I walked across Normandy to your cottage. Then it engulfed me again.” He glanced at me and held my gaze. “I was happy coming here,” he continued. “I rode atop the coach, and as we passed through London in the early morning, I composed a sonnet sitting up there watching the river, the great city about to awaken. I was happy, Annette. I was coming to see you. But I had completely forgotten why I was coming to see you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I was thirty-two—what was I waiting for? my family asked me. No one knew what I was waiting for, except Dorothy, and she did her best to have me forget it for my own sake, for my own happiness.” He kept glancing across at England, to me, intensely, then away again.

  He had something to tell me, and he would do it in his own time. I could wait. I could wait all night. I had been waiting nine years. “Suddenly, there was your voice again, in the letters. It was a shock. We had been isolated up there in the Lake Country, on our own happy island, so to speak. Have you been happy, Annette?” He rephrased the question. “In spite of the war, have you been content in your own life?”

  “I suppose I have, with Caroline, with Claudette, with our cottage and my garden, with my...work with the Chouans.”

  “Are you still helping those dangerous people?”

  “It makes me feel I can do something. So often I feel that I can do nothing. I also write.”

  “Those pages you sent me from your prose version of The Romance of the Rose, even with my inadequate French, were most wonderful.”

  He touched my hand and seemed to forget whatever it was he had been trying to say. “I’m so proud of you,” he said. He was holding my hand now. “That’s what France needs, what the world needs.

  A renewal of the hero’s quest, to put things in perspective in these modern times. I told you I’m doing one about my youth—it’s really just for Coleridge; I don’t think anyone else would be interested—the quest is the growth of a poet’s mind. I put in it the love poems I wrote to you in France, only fictionalized the situation.”

  “So no one will know.”

  He laughed. He was himself again, discussing writing. “Even a work about oneself is still a fiction, once one puts pen to paper, is it not?” he said. “What one chooses to say, what one chooses not to say, how one says it? It is all a fiction.”

  “I will remember that if I ever write about my life.”

  “I created my own fiction about you,” he said, “living so far away. I would see you, sometimes, up on Helm Crag, or Hammer Scar, or Loughrigg.” He recited the names of the mountains as a type of litany.

  “I’d be hiking with my sister or by myself, then suddenly I’d see your shape, your face even, with the wind blowing your hair, up on a peak. You’d be looking at me. I’d get dizzy. I’d have to steady myself with my hand on a rock. Then I’d go on, ignore it, but I’d look back and see you. It got so I became afraid, if I took off toward a peak—Dove Crag, it happened once there—that I would see you. Then I’d be silent the whole rest of the way, thinking about you and what I had lost. My sister thought I was just being meditative.”

  I looked into his intense blue eyes. I was a myth, a woman on a mountain.

  “And I had dreams. In all of them I was looking for you. Sometimes revolutionary tribunals would catch me and put me on trial, and I couldn’t speak a word of French. In others I’d find you briefly and talk to you, hear your voice clearly. I could smell the river and hear it moving behind you. And then I would have to leave in a hurry; it was always a life-and-death matter. I’d wake up well before dawn. Sometimes I’d be in a sweat from the tribunal. Sometimes I’d just lie there and listen to your voice, still in my mind. It was my secret, waiting for it to get light, letting my heart calm down, listening to your voice. Once the day got started, I’d forget the dream. A few months later I would have it again.”

  William was weaving a narrative together for me, like a long poem.

  It had side paths, but I knew it was all leading to a place he had in mind. I thought I knew what that place was, now. He was sometimes slow with his French, but he was certain. I was silent and followed him. It felt like my heart was beating very slowly.

  Then he put his hand on my walking shoe, which, with my knees bent on the sand, was next to him. He let his hand rest on my foot. I looked up, and there was this new moon, just a thin crescent, luminous, with nothing around it but the violet sky.

  “When your letters came,” he said, “they reminded me of what I had forgotten, of what I had to forget, except in my dreams or in a vision on a mountain. I had created my life again, with Dorothy’s help, in the land that I loved. I prayed that you be well, nightly, you and Caroline. I prayed that God keep you. And I made adjustments to go on with my life. I didn’t realize what I was doing, but I wrote a series of
poems, about a fictional character. She has the name of your patron saint, only in English. Of course, in one of the poems she’s English and represents all that I missed about England when Dorothy and I lived in Germany—but symbols can shift.”

  He scooped up a handful of sand. His other hand still rested on my foot. It felt good there.

  The stars of midnight shall be dear

  To her; and she shall lean her ear

  In many a secret place

  Where rivulets dance their wayward round,

  And beauty pass into her face.

  He spoke the verses as if they were just part of his natural conversation, when in truth he must have worked long at their translation.

  Had he prepared, then, for this speech? I looked out at the Channel and thought I saw a British ship, still patrolling. “How are those lines an ‘adjustment’?” I said. “They sound like part of a love poem, to me.”

  “They are. But she unexpectedly dies. No one knew what she meant to the narrator of the poems.”

  She lived unknown, and few could know

  When Lucy ceased to be;

  But she is in her grave, and oh,

  The difference to me!

  “Your beloved dies?”

  He did not answer me, but with one hand let the fine sand pour, like a fast hourglass, from his palm to the beach. Then he scooped up another handful and did it again. He seemed totally occupied with that. But he continued. “She lives on, of course, in a song in the wind, or as part of ‘rocks, and stones, and trees.’ In that way, she is always around the narrator. But sometimes she’s only ‘the memory of what has been, / And never more will be.’”

  “I never ‘adjusted’ like that.”

  “Didn’t you? What did you do, again and again?”

  “I faced death—” I said. I felt a cool wind from off the Channel and shivered. William noticed it. I hadn’t expected it to be like this. I had expected him now to talk about Mary, but not about death, about us both adjusting to “the memory of what has been . ” I saw that ship out there, blocking the Channel. It had no business to do that. We were in the middle of a peace. Then I saw the thin moon above it.