“I don’t know where he is.”
“But this house girl might? Is the family wealthy?”
I put up my hand. “I’ve already said too much.”
“You can put me down as dying of curiosity, then.”
I looked off into the distance, at the colorful array of carriages.
“Any news of Jolie?” I said. Even saying her name made my heart ache, caught me in a sticky tangle of emotion.
“Just that she left Deux Soeurs and went to Chevillat.”
“Oh! She has left Nathalie, then? I’ve written to her a few times—but not a word. I’ve missed her terribly. I wish—”
That it had all gone differently; that I was not possessed by an inchoate guilt—
“Try Chevillat. How is Clio?”
“La Tigre’s favorite; she dines on mackerel and herring every night.”
“Everyone has moved up in the world, then! You must introduce me to the infamous Giulia. La Barucci. Perhaps she will emerge from her dress.”
When we finally reached the cascade, we were surprised to see sparkling water pouring over the gray rocks, a verdant mist and a happy crowd milling in the moss-scented air. Every droplet available to the empire must have gone to create this artificial tumble.
19. Recherche de la Paternité
THREE MONTHS LATER, I stood on the Turkish carpet of the office of monsieur le directeur of L’Assistance Publique, my ivory-handled umbrella dripping from the rain. First I had been summoned to the hospice director’s office, then redirected to L’Assistance Publique, and then the rain had arrived all at once. A set of small bronze-plated shoes stood on the desk, and enshrined on the wall was a portrait of Madame holding an infant in her arms, which, I suppose, elevated her to sainthood. Berthe’s second birthday had passed, and in the weeks since, I had been nervous as a cat. If we were reunited soon, she might not remember that we had ever been parted; but this illusion could not be sustained much longer. My appointment had been put off for a week, then another—the reasons, as usual, unexplained, while I waited in the hospice corridor. Then, without warning, I received the summons.
My documents were ready; triplicate copies. Beausoleil’s friends and my persistence had nagged my petition from the nether end of a bottomless pile; the directeur himself had been blizzarded with supplications: from friends of the comtesse (the hospice’s patron and the author of the Justine tract), American doctors, Baptists of good standing, even a famous chanteuse for whom—as we learned—monsieur le directeur had a particular fondness. I had run a gauntlet to get here, a flurry of favors traded, outright bribes, and had been run ragged between administrative offices. Exceptions could be made—harlots all over Paris had repossessed their children; the convents of France and Europe were full of them. The trick was to become one of that lucky group, and on that road I had traveled far.
My petition, as it now stood, attached a statement of income and attested that I was prepared to reimburse the hospice and the state for Berthe’s care. I would guarantee her welfare and fees at an appropriate school if it was deemed “most proper” for her to live in a convent rather than at home with me. My profession was listed as companion, employed by a well-placed New Orleans socialite who had very little idea what she was signing, late one evening, on the piano draped with Confederate colors. At any rate, I was a companion. Chaste as a nun, for that matter. Some language had been included about matters of status currently under consideration by the Paris Council, asserting that I had “reformed” and was not practicing my assigned trade. Even that my enrollment on the Register would soon be expunged—a prospect supported by no evidence, though Beausoleil’s lawyer had promised to try to pull it off.
The second part of my plan, however, had stalled. I had traveled by rail to Tours, accompanied by Sévérine, and found Léonie blinking in the dusty sunlight at the excavation site of the rediscovered tomb of Saint Martin, a meeting we had planned through an exchange of letters. Beausoleil’s lawyer had located the girl. (It was marvelous what lawyers could accomplish. My present situation afforded many such revelations of their ease in dealing with life’s various affairs; and my surprise was always a source of amusement for Beausoleil.)
I had chosen the site for luck. Stephan and I had met around Saint Martin’s Day. But Léonie—now blossomed into a young woman of sixteen—shifted her feet and evaded questions, casting pleading looks from under her lashes. She appeared diffident and furtive, anxious to get back to her post—a different creature from the quiet but self-assured girl she had been at La Vrillette, when she so devotedly laid our fires and set our table. She was presently employed in the home of a railway official in Tours, she said, but declined to disclose anything else. I asked her to walk with me, explained what I needed. Tugged at her memories of La Vrillette—did she remember us there? Did she know where Monsieur Stephan resided at present? On that question, she demurred . . . His family? Her gesture seemed to indicate that her former employers were not entirely unknown to her (and I wondered, then, about the existence of the railway official). Finally I pressed a letter upon her and paid her a lordly sum to deliver it. She pocketed the money and promised.
She in her plain dress and apron, averting her eyes—while I reassured her from the height of Mademoiselle Colette’s latest copy, in my fine linen skirts and pale gloves. We stood in the shadow of Saint Martin, the saint who had cut his cloak in half and shared it with a beggar. Léonie took the letter and I saw that her small hand was chapped, the nails ragged. Had her hands been so hard-used before? I could not recall. And then I had to hurry for a cab to return to Tours station.
Now, at the august offices of L’Assistance Publique near the Hôtel de Ville, the directeur shifted his feet under the desk, folded and unfolded his spectacles. He rustled a folder of papers on the desk. He was not smiling.
“You have received the itemization of costs incurred in your daughter’s care?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“So you can see that a good deal of time has been spent on your case.”
I bowed my head. “Yes, I am grateful.”
“Despite your nearly impossible status,” he continued, “your friends’ influence caused us to spend an undue amount of time persuading the Mothers’ Aid Society to look kindly upon your petition—no small matter; and one in which our offices endeavored for discretion. The Christian Mothers surely would have followed. And as you know, the functioning of the hospice, the welfare of our many children, depends on these patrons, our volunteers—and they do not necessarily—look kindly on a case like yours.” He cupped his furrowed brow and tired eyes briefly with the palms of his hands, and sighed. Did it indicate a softening of demeanor; or merely a breath between one problem of his afternoon and the irksome next? He was not a terrible man.
“Surely you understand the law,” he said. Surely, surely.
“Yes, of course.”
“And you have worked very hard to make yourself an exception—so—forgive me, Mademoiselle Rigault; your actions make no sense.” My heart lurched.
“ . . . Monsieur?”
“ The birth certificate . . . was not in the proper case file. But it has now been found.” He slid it across the polished surface of the desk to me now, the document I had thrust into the hand of the night guard, the certificate that had not accompanied Berthe into the tour. Of course, I knew what it said. Or what it had said, because the name on the line identifying the father was now effaced by a black rectangle of ink.
“After all that you had accomplished—to conduct a research into paternity, put forward a claim involving one of the foremost families of Paris, to deliberately violate article 340 of the Code Civil? What—what was your intention?”
“I don’t—sir, what do you mean? I have not—” But indeed I had; I had inscribed Stephan’s name on the certificate; had put a letter into Léonie’s hand.
“The birth certificate has been corrected, but you have made it untenable for me to proceed. I believe that
you are in possession of further detail on this matter from the family’s legal counsel. If not—certainly it will be forthcoming. Case number 3568 has been closed to further inquiry.”
He rang for a Sister, and one appeared to see me out.
Furiously, horribly, back to the rue du Mail in a pounding squall. In the summer’s heat the downpour would have been welcome; now the streets had become running torrents, clogged with cabs and omnibuses. Finally home to sift through the foul matter of receipts and visiting cards; scrawled notes for debts at cards; Lili’s draft of the dental advertisement; opera programs. Menu and seating plan for a private dinner for twelve, including Gabriel and his newest ami-coeur, a dashing young man never seen without a very fine leather riding crop. A note from Mademoiselle Colette about boots in mauve calfskin, very unusual. Bill for eight baskets of violets, third notice (for what occasion?) . . . Galopin’s statement for the last order, a dozen bottles of champagne, as many of red and white; seven of port; one absinthe; and a Tennessee bourbon, special-ordered . . . Had some letter been buried? What did he think, this directeur, that I could attend to everything? I had no bevy of sisters all neat and tidy in their caps, just Sévérine . . . although I now remembered that La Tigre had slid an envelope on top of my stack and murmured something I could not now remember.
Finally, it was discovered between Mademoiselle Colette’s most recent note and a perfumer’s bill. And a note from Beausoleil—probably about tonight’s engagement—what was it, dinner, or the theater and dinner late?
On behalf of the aggrieved party and on pain of prosecution . . . Illegal breach of article 340 of the Code Napoleon forbidding recherche de la paternité . . . Cessation of correspondence with the referenced aggrieved and his immediate family . . . The registered prostitute Eugénie Rigault to be placed under authority according to the provisions of the municipal council.
Signed, stamped, and sealed within an inch of its life and embossed with the insignia of a Paris law firm.
I sank down into a Louis XV bergère chair, covered in striped silk and chosen by Gabriel. Stared out the balcony window, down to the rue Montmartre. The hotel, the café, the Mont de Piété. All of the evening comings and goings. Recherche de la paternité . . . All that I asked—that my dreaming, impractical Self had asked—was that Stephan acknowledge the past. I had written to the Stephan I had known, the loved man. And also because Beausoleil’s lawyer had told me that I needed material proof of our liaison.
I saw, now, in a sudden, cold light that the sort of truth my letter requested was out of the question. It could not possibly have been understood as I had intended; not in the shadow of legal proceedings. So why had I clung with such a grip, maintained an allegiance to what was long over; courting destruction, throwing myself down an abyss? I should have known better. I did know better, but had refused what I knew . . .
The rain cleared, casting a waning sunlight over the geraniums. The warrant stared up at me from the escritoire; its graceful curved legs holding up a pile of indulgences.
Stephan. In a certain way, the warrant was the first solid piece of evidence that Berthe’s father was anything but a dream. Was that—in the midst of the eddying whirl of what had become my life—what I had needed to prove?
I wondered when the police would pound at the door.
At last, I brought myself back and opened Beausoleil’s note. But it did not concern this evening, or any other evening. It consisted of several paragraphs, not the usual brief lines about our rendezvous. What he wrote now was that the French ministry had reversed its position on the matter of the empire’s support of the Confederacy. The government ministers denied ever having approved such support, which had been the subject of Beausoleil’s careful negotiations (involving the building of French ships at Bordeaux and Nantes to come to the aid of the Confederate ports) . . . Now, instead, a pact of neutrality was to be affirmed. France would favor neither side, North nor South. “We have lost a good deal in the matter,” wrote Beausoleil, in the same hand that had once penned “the Known improved greatly upon the Unknown.”
Beausoleil, for all his love of theater, play, and illusion—knew what was real and what was not. I might be interested to know, he wrote, that the marquis de Chasseloup, Pierre’s father, Napoleon III’s former naval minister, had been the one to issue this official reversal of France’s position. “And now I am called back to New Orleans. Matters do not proceed well at home after Vicksburg, and now losses in Tennessee and north Georgia. If you can see me off tomorrow I am your most grateful servant, &c. When I am gone, I hope you will remember me for sending you a sweet—and brief—reprieve from your own battle while we fought ours. I wish you every good luck in your affairs, and await news . . .”
My throat was parched. I sat for a long time, until the sun had set and the geraniums disappeared into the dark. From below, evening traffic clattered; iron wheels rumbled over the cobbles. Lamplighters now in their silent progress down the street. Reflections of the lights shimmering in the puddles left by the storm. Sévérine came in on cat’s feet and lit the gas; cautiously inquired . . . It was unusual, of course, that mademoiselle was not dining out? There was soupe, she said. Just a bouilli ordinaire.
Clio stalked in behind her and vaulted onto my lap. “Hello, faithless friend, where have you been?” She began to purr. “And why do you love me only when I have a bad day?” I buried my face in her rumpled ginger fur.
20. An Ink-Stained Hand
DOES THE STORY, in the way it is told, open a window into the soul’s fortress or place yet another stone to block the view? These events have been related as they unfolded; as accompanied by my feelings at the time or as I remember them to have been. But every life takes on its wrinkles, like lines on the face of an old madame—and who could have foretold her particular destiny in the tracings on a girl’s palm?
For a while, when not writing wasted love letters and petitions, I squeezed my own suffering down to an inky fingertip. This effort did not come continuously but in fits and fragments; stained and laden with debris and ill-cut from the start. Slipping like the awl that leaves an inarticulate scratch. Like Madame Récit’s finery mender, I brushed, concealed, restitched, and revised; eventually it seemed that even as my life occurred, I had hardly lived it, referring always to an unseen past or future. Forever at an impasse, shot through with doubt; assigning both agency and blame to others and yet my own words formed another kind of betrayal. Writing was intended to burn and to exorcise but its effect was the reverse. For in writing down there is no forgetting; in editing, contouring, shaping a thing, what has been omitted looms in the mind. Recorded with pen and ink, blotted and stacked in unruly sheets, the events, both those presented and left unrecounted, were ever with me, as in a dream in which one never runs hard enough to escape some threat. As ink stains water, billowing out and suffusing it, one substance entirely occupies the other until matrix and infusion are one. Thus is suffering formed and transmuted. But meaning accrues slowly, not in a cataclysm, and always unexpectedly.
For a period on the rue du Mail, while I enjoyed Beausoleil’s protection, food in the cupboard, and a maid to walk to the laundress, my days turned into a fury of revision at the little walnut escritoire (a surface too narrow for the task); a feverish search for the logic in a flustered tale of lost loves, ateliers, coal bins, and stone walls; butcher shops and dank corridors. Here was a word from Bovary, a whiff of Balzac; the cesspools of Zola and Huysmans’s vinegary indigestion. Madame Sand’s trousers and cigar hardly appeared; but very often the tinsel villainesses and heroines of the Seine bookstalls, and all the urgency of uncertainty. Giulia—a different woman in private than in public, came to the rue du Mail to read Veronica Franco aloud, translating from the Italian as she went. Little Giulietta accompanied her beautiful and celebrated mother, played quietly with her doll on the carpet while Giulia read: “To eat with another’s mouth, sleep with another’s eyes, to move according to another’s will, rushing toward the shipwreck
of one’s mind and body . . .” We both sat on the rug in front of my little balcony and wept. At the disappointments not only of our own lives—but centuries of lives. Franco taught us that.
But finally, my efforts added up to the story of one for whom all stories had failed. Perhaps if any of us live long enough, the skin and bones of life accrue to prove every word false. Every novel and painting; every lover; every war. Storytelling does not stand up to facts. Maybe that is why we do it, to compel the facts away.
What I have written here is mostly true, insofar as anything is.
The trip back to La Vrillette and to the rose garden was a fiction to assuage the heroine’s honor; the girl I wished I was. In reality there was neither the faith nor will for such a journey, nor could I afford a train ticket, and my better self foundered on life’s more withering details. Léonie did not find me there; although if she had seen Berthe in my arms in a garden of roses, perhaps her heart would have been in a different place, at Tours. Perhaps mine would have been.
This Eugénie, in her pages, did for good reason loathe the life thrust upon her, and did not see any part of it as resulting from her own choice. She did (at the tour) stand miserably in the rain, with the child for whom she was not prepared. The letters to her old lover—those were burned up in a stove. The one pressed into Léonie’s hand at Tours—another story she wove around herself, or tried to. Life rejected them; slapped her with the threat of arrest.
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 24