by James Tipton
While we were at Calais, Napoleon declared himself First Consul of France, and the war soon commenced again. The Vincents never had time to visit.
In November of 1804, more than two years after my stay at Calais, and a month before Napoleon crowned himself emperor, a long, tube-shaped package arrived at our cottage. When I opened it, I saw it was an oil painting of a river winding through steep bluffs, with green forests extending on both sides of the river. The river disappeared in the background amid endless forests. There was nothing striking about the painting except for the color of the water and the sheer vastness of the landscape. One could notice a little figure on the shore of the river, perhaps fishing. The painting was not signed.
The next day Angelique appeared with her new ami, Marc, as he simply called himself, whom she had met in the Chouans. He had been marooned when Napoleon abandoned his army in Egypt and had made it back across North Africa. His father ran a sugar import business in Blois whose barges traveled upriver from Nantes. But the ships that unloaded onto those barges had to run the British blockade.
Besides his own bitterness at having to make a rather long walk home, Marc also wanted to end the war for business reasons. He worked at a warehouse during the day and often with the Chouans at night. If he and Angelique married, I thought, Maman could have her sugar merchant son-in-law after all.
Angelique came in with a new green cloth ribbon in her hair, kissed Claudette, twirled Caroline around in a simple dance step, and said, “A gabare from Nantes docked near Marc’s warehouse yesterday. It brought something from far away.”
And behind her, through the open door, strode the marquis. He didn’t have his old cloak and sword dangling and pistols at his belt, but wore a fashionable double-breasted coat with long tails. He doffed his tall hat, bowed, and kissed my hand.
“I apologize,” he said, “that I have no venison to bring you, or even a wild lily. But I did send you a painting.”
We all gathered around the landscape that I had left on a chair, not knowing what to do with it. “That’s how vast America is,” the marquis said. “But do you see that little figure beside the river?” We all assented that we saw it, but could not make it out clearly. “That is I, pondering what to do in all this vastness, wondering why I am so far away from another river, which I love. This one in the painting is called ‘the Hudson.’ What kind of name is that? Is that the name of a noble river?”
“So what brings you back?” I asked, “when you had all that land to paint?”
“I have so many paintings,” he said, “ I filled my rooms with them.
I couldn’t go out my door without bumping into paintings. I finally got tired of them. Gave almost all of them away, except this one and one that is now hanging in the château de Beauregard, if I may say so. But it wasn’t having too many canvases of rivers and woods that made me leave.”
“He was back to his old tricks,” Angelique said to me. “I didn’t know who the Marquis de La Roques was during the Terror, but I had heard of him. Apparently he had something to do with the creation of the Blonde Chouanne.”
“But who’s there to fight in America?” I said. “Indians?”
“No, they were my friends, and they’re all dying off. A tragedy right there. One of them, though, brought a black man to my back door one night. Without a lantern, they just stood there in the dark with my candlelight on them. The Indian in a waistcoat with his sleeves rolled up, who helped at the farrier’s now, and a tall black man in tattered clothes, with bare, bloody feet and frightened eyes. He had come hundreds of miles on those bare feet, helped by others like my friend. Now I became an outlaw again, by aiding him. Then my rooms became a regular stop for others. I even went south to a place called Kentucky and helped people cross a river. It was called the O-hi-o; that’s a little better than Hudson, I suppose. But that’s where I got in trouble. Angry men who had lost valuable investments followed me up the Hudson. I gave my paintings away, went downriver and across the sea and so to the door of—who is this lovely lady?”
He bowed and kissed Caroline’s hand.
They all stayed for dinner of cabbage, onions, roast chicken, and fresh bread that Caroline had baked.
“I always thought you were a pirate,” Claudette said to the marquis.
“I’m now a civilized gentleman,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“The distinguished Edouard finally retired from the count’s service. I’m the new valet of the château de Beauregard. I’ve had experience. Everyone in America works, so I became the butler in the household of a man who owned a shoe factory. Can you imagine? They liked my accent. He made very nice shoes, and I got a free pair for working there. So you’ll have to call me ‘valet,’ and not ‘marquis,’” he said and laughed.
We all laughed. It seemed so absurd.
“His château and lands were confiscated long ago,” Marc said to me.
“I was never a very good marquis.”
“What was your château?” I said.
“Poncé sur la Loire,” he said nonchalantly.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“You’ve seen it?” the marquis said. He poured himself some tea made of mint from our garden. “When?”
“Years ago. My father and I were returning from his pilgrimage to Vendôme. He had had me read all the Greek myths that year and now wanted me to see paintings of them done on ceilings of a giant stone staircase. So we asked permission at the château and soon were looking up at Perseus holding his shield in front of Medusa’s ugly hair; at Jason slipping the fleece from under the sleeping dragon. I loved them. But then we paused on the next landing, and do you know what we saw? Pegasus,” I said, “drinking from a well by a young man holding a golden bridle, then flying, his white wings spread wide over the blue sea. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”
“They were on their way to kill a monster,” the marquis said.
I suddenly remembered something else. “There was a young man, a boy, really, sitting on the floor, painting the Pegasus.”
The marquis had lifted his cup and he put it back down. He stared at me. “That was you?” he said, “the little girl who peered over my shoulder and asked, ‘What are you drawing?’”
“You were rather rude. You didn’t answer.”
“I was working. I saw you later, wandering back and forth in the maze. I heard you finally calling for your papa.”
Angelique and Marc laughed.
“You were the one who showed me the way out, who shouted down from the window and pointed,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”
“I haven’t thought about the château for a long time,” he said. “In ’89 they burned it. Left my father’s body there before his own door.
The gardener and I put out the fire, finally. I think we may have saved about half the château. But I didn’t care anymore. I haven’t been back.”
He drank from his clay cup of tea. Caroline and I had made that cup. If the marquis noticed it was an odd shape, he didn’t say. I had never heard him talk about his personal life. I didn’t even know he had a personal life. He was always just “the marquis,” the head of the Philanthropic Institute.
The table was silent. He looked at his cup a moment, then smiled at me.
He wanted to let me know that it was all right, I think.
“The château de Beauregard is the place for me now,” he said. “It’s more grand. More things for a valet to do.”
“Well, what shall we call you besides ‘valet’?” I said. “We don’t even know your Chris tian name.”
“Call me Jean-Luc,” he said. “My name is Jean-Luc. I hear we ’re getting an emperor soon. We ’ll be like a lot of ancient Romans.”
“But haven’t we been stupid?” Marc said.
“What?” said Angelique.
“Look who’s staying at the château de Beauregard regularly. Top marshals of Napoleon. What better way to find out information, to pass it on? All one has
to do is keep one’s ears open while one glides down the hall like the perfect valet. I think our marquis hasn’t retired at all.”
We all looked at him.
“I’m just a humble valet,” he said. “Why would I want to be anything else?”
No one said any more about it. I thought perhaps Marc was right, but I liked the marquis now simply as Jean-Luc.
After dinner the gentlemen built the fire up, and Jean-Luc told more stories of America, then Angelique and Marc left, and Claudette and Caroline went to bed, and Jean-Luc and I told stories of long ago.
He wanted me to start, so I told him of dances, and of hunts, and of meeting a forbidden lover in the steep dark streets, and of fleeing enemies through snowy forests, and of a priest who never stopped telling his beads for the five days I hid him, and of a marquis turned outlaw, who was a friend in a friendless world. Then he told of bribing prison guards with money I had stolen, of Chouans singing, of a green mask that, on a whim, he had placed at the bottom of a sack, and of a fast horse.
“I saw her,” he said, “grazing peacefully at the château de Beauregard. She’s eternal.”
“I’d like to see her again,” I said. “I never get out to Beauregard without a horse.”
“I’ll arrange it,” he said.
And he did. I went often to Beauregard, where he was a splendid valet to the aging but lively count. Jean-Luc also came often to our cottage. He became my very good friend.
He supplied me with a mare sired by Le Bleu, and together we used the old caves in the tufa cliffs as well as, occasionally, the lodge in the service of the Chouans. But we went on no more raids. “A valet is a more dignified person than a marquis,” he said. “He cannot also be a pirate. Besides, you and I, Madame,” he said to me, “when I came back, I found out they had made legends out of us. It’s quite amusing. There are all sorts of things I didn’t know I ever did, or you—now you may have done them. But don’t you think it’s better to keep some things in legend?”
Wait
Several times I wrote to William regarding prisoners of war who were kept in the north of England, not far from where he lived. These prisoners were sons or husbands of people who, looking for their loved ones, had contacted the Chouan network, and William used his influence as, now, a respected postmaster, to free these men and send them back to France. Each time he asked them first to come and pay their respects to Caroline and me.
One was already known to me, or, rather, especially to a dear friend of mine. Benoît appeared at our door, looking a little older after years of imprisonment, first in the southeast, then in the north of England. Like Marc, he had been stranded in Egypt, but his general had eventually surrendered to the British. Claudette almost fainted, then couldn’t talk, and Benoît couldn’t believe that she had waited all this time for him, believing in her heart that he was still alive. Now we had another reason to visit the château de Beauregard, for the count immediately gave Benoît back his old position as groom. It wasn’t long before Claudette married him and moved there.
That was a blow for me. I had never lived on my own without Claudette. Caroline had learned everything that Claudette could teach her and was more adept at caring for the animals, and certainly at cooking, than I. But I had got used to Claudette’s greeting me in the morning, sunny or cheerless. Or, after checking on the animals at night, one of us first saying good night to the other. How does one live without someone who has become such a part of one’s life?
In the summer of 1812 a young cavalry officer, recently released from prison in England, came to our door with greetings for a Madame Williams from a Monsieur Wordsworth. His name was Eustace Baudouin, and he had a locket with a miniature portrait of William, looking older and very serious, his hand against his head, for Caroline.
He also had a handsome younger brother, Jean-Baptiste. They both kissed Caroline’s hand. Jean-Baptiste couldn’t stop staring at Caroline. When they left, I asked Caroline if she thought he was rude, staring at her like that. She said she hoped he would never stop staring at her. And so, indirectly through her father, Caroline met her future husband. I’m not the first one to say that it’s a strange world.
It was at that time that Napoleon, full of his own hubris, invaded Russia with his Grande Armée of 400,000 men, and the Russian general wisely drew them further and further into his heartland, finally battled him before Moscow, then withdrew again, burning his own city and his people’s land, so the Grande Armée had nowhere to stay the winter and nothing to eat and had to turn around and walk thousands of miles back: and so Napoleon was finally defeated not by an enemy but by nature herself, who had decided to pay him back through a Russian winter.
As Napoleon fought his way back across Germany with a small and hungry army, Jean-Baptiste and Caroline courted, and after Cossacks did not stop their horses until they reached the banks of the Seine, and Paris fell and Napoleon was exiled to Elba, the young lovers decided to marry. That was the spring of 1814, after twenty-two years of war. Caroline would be twenty-two in December.
I wrote to William and Dorothy to come to the wedding in the fall, and Dorothy answered that William was still in mourning over the loss of two of his children, just over a year before. Could we possibly wait until the next spring?
Caroline decided to wait. Jean-Baptiste worked as a clerk in a local law office, and he would dine with us, then I would hear the lovers talking or laughing downstairs until late at night. It made me feel old, and one evening I saddled La Noire, the mare Jean-Luc had given me, and rode to the château de Beauregard to stay with people more my age, and the count, who always made me feel young.
But when the spring of 1815 came, any wedding was out of the question, especially with foreign guests. Napoleon had escaped from Elba. What we thought was over forever had suddenly returned and overturned our lives.
The emperor had to raise an army, quickly, and Jean-Luc and I created many posters that told the young men, eager for some glory, that France had given enough of its blood. They didn’t need to add themselves to the sacrifice. We put these posters up before dawn, in outlying villages and in the market squares of Blois. One early morning, as market began in the old Saint-Louis Square, I waited for Jean-Luc and lingered in the square, watching some people idly reading the posters.
Then I suddenly stood up on the Louis XII fountain, which still hadn’t been rebuilt. Just in case I needed to hide my identity again, before setting out that night with Jean-Luc I had put on the old blonde wig. I stood on the ruins of the fountain now and called out to the people that when the conscription officers came this afternoon, they should not cooperate with them. They should leave the town, hide, defy the officers openly if they dared. “You, parents,” I said, “do not let your sons be carried away by dreams of glory. That glory is a chimera. We must call it so to its face and refuse its lure, when it calls us.”
A small crowd had gathered. One older man even shouted, “It’s the Blonde Chouanne!” and the man next to him laughed, but others didn’t laugh. And the faces of women looked up at me and nodded.
Then Jean-Luc, who had been putting posters up on the hill, in the small square in front of the church of Saint-Vincent, suddenly took my arm and led me from the fountain. “Remember what she says,” he shouted as we left, “for this woman is a prophetess!” We mounted our horses and rode toward the château before any new representatives of the emperor could arrive. “You’re incorrigible,” he said to me as we rode. “Something about that square makes you reckless. Jeanne Robin told me about a speech you made there long ago.”
I listened to the rhythm of the hooves crossing the stone bridge, the spring river swirling high beneath us. “When will they learn that it’s all a waste?” I said, “just a terrible waste?”
In mid-June, a few days after my forty-sixth birthday, I heard children playing in the morning in the road that ran by the cottage. I thought how strange it is that children play when there is a war going on, that marvelous obliviousness tha
t lovers also share. Lovers often have the pressure of the world right behind them, though, just out of earshot though ignored, but children genuinely do not know another world exists. I was thinking this while savoring the sound of the children, which I have always loved, when I realized there were adults screaming.
I ran outside and grabbed an older man by the arm, “What is it?” I asked.
“The emperor is defeated!” he wailed. He and the fellow with him seemed to be self-appointed town criers, although perhaps it was really that they couldn’t bring themselves to believe it, and they were releasing their grief and shock to the world.
“C’est la fin de l’Empereur,” the other man cried, in a lamenting voice that I will never forget.
Then market women came by in a panic, saying that Prussians were burning and pillaging Paris and raping the women. Their cavalry would be in Blois by tomorrow. Then a man said that the English had captured Paris and that the emperor had surrendered to them.
The man had only one arm. I thought I’d believe him.
It was all over, in any case, all over again. I wondered how many of the men who died had come from Blois.
British soldiers were bivouacked now in the Bois de Boulogne, and the English were not popular. It was not a time for English tourists.
We postponed the wedding again, until the new year.
To Thank Her
February of 1816, with the muddy or icy roads of winter, was not a good time for travelers from the north of England to make it to Blois, but some from the south could.
All the Vincents were coming to the wedding. William sent enough money to provide for ample food and drink, and the count supplied any reserves of nourishment that anyone could need. The wedding itself was held in Saint-Vincent, the church on the high hill, with its broad steps down which Caroline’s train flowed. Guests who desired to make the short journey to the château de Beauregard would be fêted there far into the night.