Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution

by James Tipton

It was a cold, sunny day. My daughter, whom I had spent almost every day with since her birth, took her vows under her white veil, under the high ceiling, vaulted to heaven, and Jean-Baptiste lifted her veil, and I beheld her radiant face.

  I can tell you that Marguerite did not look at all twenty-four years older, and Paul, with his gray hair, still had his discerning eyes and ready smile, and that I didn’t recognize Marie, who had a daughter by the hand and an English doctor on her arm, nor Gérard, in the uniform of a British lieutenant in His Majesty’s navy. When I exclaimed at that, he said, “I always liked knots, Aunt Annette, I liked tying you up.” His ship had been part of the British blockade, and he spoke French with an English accent. We embraced, and I cried like a baby. He kissed my cheek once like an Englishman, until his mother reminded him.

  At the château de Beauregard, I danced first with Paul. “In his letters home from the navy,” he said to me, “Gérard said he was loath to fire on any boat coming from France for fear it was his aunt, escaping. He did not forget you.”

  I danced with Gérard, and asked him about it. “It is true,” he said, “every French woman is my aunt. I want to protect them all. I’m afraid I’ve told the story many times of my aunt who risked her life to save me and my family. I’ve impressed young ladies with it. Though I’ve frightened some away, I believe. I’ve embellished a bit, for drama. Told them my aunt was guillotined. I think they’re afraid I would expect such a sacrifice from them, if the time came. I make it sound like you’re the most fearless woman in the world. How could they possibly compete?”

  What would he say to them if he knew what I had actually been doing all these years? I thought. “I loved the version of Romance of the Rose you sent,” he said, “though my French is a bit rusty and it was tough going. When will you finish it? I read Chaucer’s version in school, you know. It wasn’t as good.”

  I smiled. “I’ll finish it someday,” I said.

  I glanced past Gérard’s tall shoulder at my mother, dancing with the old count. They looked very well together. Monsieur Vergez had died the year before.

  Angelique had married Marc, and their son, Charles, scampered under tables laden with breasts of duck in apricot sauce on little white-and-gold china plates, with cheeses, with fountains of fruit, bowls of nuts, and wines and champagne and cakes. William couldn’t have paid for all that, I thought. And little Charles sat there under the table eating cakes while his mother and father danced.

  Gérard showed me a two-handed card game as we sipped champagne, and I watched Caroline and Jean-Baptiste glance in secret happiness at each other as they each talked with separate guests. Caroline wore the locket her father sent her from England, but it was Paul, whom she had never met, who had walked her down the aisle.

  Caroline greeted Claudette, her second mother, and held both Claudette’s hands in hers. Claudette was talking fast and crying at the same time.

  Now Marguerite clapped her hands together, saying something to Caroline. My older sister had escaped living in a country of war for more than twenty years; she had always lived a charmed life, I thought. I had never told her of my work, for fear of discovery, and the whole Vincent family, as well as myself, was surprised at what soon followed.

  * * *

  The count stopped the small orchestra. He waved to get everybody’s attention. I thought he was going to give another toast, but we had already done that. Perhaps the old count was a little drunk. But he didn’t look drunk. He said a few words about the auspicious occasion.

  And then he said, So, it is high time Caroline’s mother be honored.

  What did he mean? Everyone looked at me, and I felt embarrassed.

  “And a few others would like to say some words on this matter,” he said.

  Jean-Luc stood now beside the count. “Some of you know,” he said, “that I was engaged in resisting the Paris government’s interference with our own lives. But many of you don’t know that I had a secret partner, who continued in the work long after I retired to America to paint landscapes, which only a few of you have had the misfortune to see. If I wanted any task to be done, the one person I could count on, no matter how dangerous the mission, was the one who became known throughout this region as the Blonde Chouanne.”

  He looked over at me. There were some stirs at this.

  “Needless to say, she wore a wig and a green mask, and I heard this way of dress even became the mode at parties!”—some scattered laughter followed—“among those who had no idea into what dangers the Blonde Chouanne rode. I will not recount for you her adventures, better left in the long years of strife, but you don’t have to take my word for all this.” And he withdrew now a paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “This police missive somehow found its way into my hands a long time ago—” More laughter here. “I have kept it for posterity’s sake. I quote from Corbigny, Prefect of Police, Blois, March 16, 1804, responding to a summons from Napoleon’s secret police, March 8, 1804, ‘to have the conduct carefully observed of the demoiselle Vallon...married to an Englishman named William.’”

  He read that last phrase quickly. “‘The woman Williams’, Napoleon’s police say, ‘is particularly known as an active intriguer.’ Now, they are a bit slow, and that’s a good thing, for at this time Madame Williams had been an ‘active intriguer’ for over ten years!

  “The new prefect of police of Blois, Guillemin de Savigny, gathered some information for us in preparation for this our moment of honoring her. He writes, ‘Madame Williams, born M. A. Vallon, she it was who saved the head of Monsieur Delaporte, reported by informers to the Revolutionary Tribunal, by hiding him as well as Chevalier de Montlivault; she also who got Count Dufort out of prison, and others....Blois was known to be the haven of the unfortunate outlaws. To her they were directed from everywhere.’” There were some mumblings of awe among the guests, and I felt acutely embarrassed. Why had Jean-Luc decided to do this now? This wasn’t my night. And I didn’t want any recognition. People knew of the Blonde Chouanne. They didn’t know of me.

  At this point Paul stood up and said it was I who had engineered his escape from prison and enabled his whole family to flee the country.

  I wished all this would stop. Then I saw Marguerite crying. Marie’s face was pale. Gérard was looking at me with a worshipful gaze.

  Then the baron de Tardiff, the old hunting friend of my father, whom I had met again in the escape through the crypt, emerged from behind Jean-Luc. With him were others, some who looked vaguely familiar. I didn’t know where they came from. They weren’t at the wedding. “On one side of me is Count Dufort,” the baron said, “whom Madame Williams saved from drowning in the infamous noyades. On my other side is the chevalier de Montlivault, whom she helped to safety by hiding him.” A sound escaped my lips and I put my hand over my mouth. It was the nineteen-year-old chevalier whom I had talked to the first time I had used the lodge. “Others whom she saved stand behind us now. Some have come long distances to thank her. They are but representatives of many, many more who owe her their lives. Her daughter and new son-in-law have helped arrange this happy reunion.” Caroline beamed mischievously at me. So it was she who had engineered this. Jean-Luc must have had a hand in it. “And we want to present her with this.”

  The count came forth again. “In response to a petition that we here have written and signed, King Louis XVIII has granted a lifelong pension to Madame Williams for her service to the people of France— this, ladies and gentlemen”—and he pointed to the parchment in his hand—“is the seal of the King of France—and I quote, ‘Madame Williams has hidden and helped a large number of emigrants and persecuted people. She has aided in escapes from prisons and by her devotion, selflessness, and courage has saved many subjects from death.’” The count ceremoniously walked over to me and placed the parchment in my lap. He made a little bow. Everyone applauded.

  I stood up and waved them to stop. “Thank you very much,” I said.

  “But what I did I could not have done alo
ne. You must thank Jean Verbois,” and I pointed to the old groom, his foot up on a cushion, for his limp was worse in his old age. He grinned his marvelous gap-toothed grin. He had a cup of wine and a large slice of cheese in his lap. “My sister, Angelique”—she hid her face behind Marc’s shoulder—“the bravest woman I’ve ever known, Jeanne Robin, who, unfortunately is not here today; and of course, the great Marquis de La Roques, now simply known as the valet of the château de Beauregard—my gratitude to you all.” And the room filled with applause again.

  Before I could sit back down, I was surrounded by many faces, some with tears in their eyes, which I remembered as in a dream. They all thanked me, and I felt that they were not thanking me, exactly, but someone else who had done those things. Suddenly my mother kissed me and said, “You never did as you were told.” She added, “I wish your father and Etienne were here,” and then I cried.

  That was when Jeanne Robin came up, with a mischievous glint in her eye. Where had she been? Where had they all been? “An ambush, as always,” I said. I hadn’t seen her since the noyades, twenty-two years ago. I recognized her immediately. Perhaps it was her black eyes.

  Her brother was with her, and she, like Angelique, had a husband and a charming son. I spent the rest of the afternoon with Jeanne. She and her family had come all the way from the village of Azay-le-Ferron, to the southwest, and had to return the next day.

  The Vincents stayed for two weeks, and we rode through the old forests and talked until there was no end of talking. Marguerite gently scolded me for risking my life, and Gérard said he only hoped he could be as brave as I. Paul talked politics with the count, and Marie and Jean-Luc discussed painting and went out together to draw the light and shadow of the winter woods about the château de Beauregard. In the evening we played cards with Maman and with Dr.

  Thompson, Marie’s husband.

  Then all of a sudden the flurry of reunited family faded, and I found myself watching the Vincents’ carriage disappear. It went down the long entryway, around the bend toward Blois, and the road was empty between bare chestnut trees. Caroline, back from her honeymoon to the seashore in Normandy, took my arm.

  Though the Vincents did visit us once a year now, I never went to England, and they never moved back to France. And whenever they came to Blois, Marguerite made it a point not to go by what had been chez Vincent.

  By the end of the year I was a grandmother. Naming her child partly after her aunt was also, I believe, the closest Caroline could get to including her father in the name: Louise Marie Caroline Dorothée.

  We all lived together in the cottage now, but in 1819, the law firm for which Jean-Baptiste was a clerk offered him a promotion to their Paris office. He and Caroline invited me to move with them, so I left my beloved river to live near another one. Jean-Luc promised to visit regularly, and he did. I missed my garden.

  Holding her little hand tight in mine or carrying her, I took Louise through the narrow, crowded streets of Paris out to the Seine, and we watched the light on the water and the slow barges and waved to the rough-voiced bargemen. It was important to me that a river ran near to my door, and I wanted to pass that on to Louise.

  Then it turned out that the voyage of William and Dorothy to the Continent had only been postponed after all. With hostilities between the nations well in the past, the Wordsworths were traveling through Switzerland and wanted to stop in Paris. Jean-Baptiste arranged for them to stay in our quarter.

  It was October of 1820, and I was fifty-one. We were to see them at the Louvre, at one o’clock. William would meet his granddaughter, and I would meet his wife.

  The Healing Well

  I was not afraid, as at Calais. What was left that could happen between us? Dorothy held no surprises for me either. But I was excited to see William, a luxury I could not have felt eighteen years ago. And my heart lurched when I actually did see him, and I surprised myself.

  We were strolling now through a grand room with huge paintings.

  Louise had my hand, and Caroline my arm. Her other arm was linked in her father’s. Dorothy walked on his other side, then Mary. William had been going on and on in slow French, with Caroline straining to understand him, about how he had felt so young because he had found the most important place in his life, again, in the Alps. I kept smiling.

  William was trying to explain an experience in wild nature. The two women with him were talking among themselves. The person he was conversing with could hardly understand him.

  “What?” Caroline said. “You felt what?”

  “He’s saying he felt the same,” I said. “Thirty years were nothing. They all vanished.”

  “That’s exactly what I was saying,” the great poet said.

  We stopped to rest on a bench, and Louise was tugging at her mother’s dress to go on. She then looked up and pointed to a painting of the revolutionary extremist Marat’s murder in his bath. The artist, David, had done a fine job of making the madman into a martyr.

  “Oh, look what we ’ve been sitting under,” said William. “That was the death of the Girondins, that murder by the well-meaning Charlotte Corday. They were all hunted then.”

  Dorothy looked at him, and he looked directly at me. The painting seemed to shake memories in him, not just of the Alps thirty years ago, but perhaps of fleeing with me in the dark twenty-eight years ago.

  “Let’s leave this room,” he said.

  “I think Louise would agree with you,” Caroline said. Louise was running ahead.

  “She’s like you, William,” Dorothy said. “You kept running up those hills in Switzerland like a mountain goat.” She said something to Mary, and they laughed. Mary had not spoken at all, except quietly to Dorothy. But that was all right; I had hardly said a word myself.

  Then Caroline walked fast to catch up with Louise, and William followed. I was suddenly next to Dorothy. We passed ancient Egyptian kings and queens, wrapped up in gauze.

  “You got a bit wet waiting for us outside the Louvre,” Dorothy said.

  “We were just coming in because of the rain.”

  “Parisian women are very adroit at avoiding splashes on their dresses,” said Dorothy. “I have seen many colored garters.”

  “Did you see ours?”

  “I think yours were a gold color, and Caroline’s red?”

  “Our stockings are splashed, and our dresses are perfectly correct.”

  “It is an art in Paris, I believe,” Dorothy said.

  William turned back to us. “Let’s leave these relics and see another room,” he said.

  We finally found some Fragonard paintings, which pleased me, with ladies swinging high on swings, all their petticoats frothing, and gentlemen below them, playing guitars and flutes. Dorothy pointed to the lady on the swing.

  “You see, it is an art in Paris,” she said and smiled.

  I tried to see Mary’s face and couldn’t. When we briefly met, I thought she had a very kind face. Now she looked down or off at a painting near her.

  We met Jean-Baptiste at a café just outside the Louvre; the rain had stopped, and the streets were bright with the sun on the wet cobbles.

  Jean-Baptiste tried talking in English, but he was very slow, and William was obliged to help him translate, so we talked in French after a while.

  The Wordsworths wanted tea, and there was none, and William started to tell the waiter they should have tea, and his wife put her hand on his arm. She looked tired now, from the traveling, or the walking. She caught me looking at her once, and she looked down.

  She truly looked like a sweet soul, as William had said. She was fair-haired with lots of gray, and I felt sorry for her, for her lot as a mother had not been easy; she had lost two children in the same year; perhaps it was because they lived in the cold north of England. But now the other children were grown or off at school; it was her first time on the Continent. She sipped coffee and looked as if she would rather be resting at their lodging. Our eyes met again, and for a moment I loo
ked at the woman who had been the wife I had never been, and she looked at me. I think there was more curiosity in her eyes. I smiled, and she looked down at her small cup of coffee and lifted it. There was nothing in it. I looked away, so she would not be embarrassed. I liked her immensely in that moment, and I could feel how she and William had been such good friends over the years.

  The men were talking about the forest of Fontainebleau, about a wild and lonely spot William had found, called the Healing Well.

  “You drank from it?” Jean-Baptiste said. “People used to go on pilgrimages to it. I hear it’s not a well, actually, but just a broad, bowl-shaped rock that’s always full of water to the brim, no matter what the season, or during drought. It’s not a spring. It’s supposed to bring you good fortune if you drink from it, even a small cup.”

  “I think we should all make a pilgrimage to that well,” Caroline said.

  “We got lost, looking for it,” William said, “and as soon as I drank from it, an old woman, a beekeeper, came up and showed us the way out of the forest.”

  “That was not a beekeeper,” Jean-Baptiste said, “that was an enchantress. But the office and duty call; I must get back.”

  Jean-Baptiste was gone. Louise put her head in her mother’s lap.

  Everyone seemed tired.

  “Would anyone like to go to the Jardin des Plantes?” William said suddenly. “The sun is out, and I’m tired of walking indoors. I’ve always wanted to see the Jardin des Plantes.”

  “I will show you,” I said.

  * * *

  It was autumn in the jardin. “Whichever way you turn now,” I said, “there are golden leaves.”

  We sat on the bench under the oldest tree in Paris and were silent.

  William picked up a twig fallen from the tree and made designs in the path. “Do you know what sort of crop they grow in the forest of Fontainebleau?” he said.

  “I didn’t know they grew any crop.”

  “We thought they were sheaves of corn. They’re placed side by side, in an open space in the forest.”