“Or shooting horses by then.”
“Trochu has a plan, you can count on it.” (A plan, a plan. The man has a plan! PLAN, PLAN, PLAN! Mon DIEU, what a fine Pla-a-n! Thanks to him, nothing is lost. That’s what they sang in the streets, with mocking, eerie prescience.)
“If Châtillon is lost we will be girdled tighter than Mademoiselle Thérèse after dinner.” The present worry was that if the Prussian army established itself on the Châtillon plateau to the south of the city, three of the forts protecting the capital would be vulnerable. And from Châtillon, shells launched by the Krupp cannon, which had been admired so recently at the Great Exhibition, could reach the heart of Paris.
“Trochu will defend Châtillon to the last gun. He’s not mad, just a Breton.”
“Yes, and a Catholic, and a soldier, as he is fond of saying—and a pessimist and a procrastinator! My money is on Gambetta, now there’s some fire!” Léon Gambetta had proclaimed the republic from the windows of the Hôtel de Ville; some thought he was the only Frenchman capable of raising a defense of Paris. His handsome profile made Amélie swoon, although Francisque declared him common. General Trochu, head of the new Government of National Defense, was monklike and forbidding as a toad, and favored by none of the women—though we certainly hoped he could save us, just like the old muffes we couldn’t afford to hate.
“It is Belleville Trochu is afraid of. He’d rather answer to a German than to the mob.”
“Madame P, have you taken all the fish heads, as well as the fish?”
Boxed English biscuits, strings of dried fish, sardines, salted beef, and confit; Liebig’s meat extract, “Extractum carnis Liebig”; parcels of Chollet’s desiccated vegetables. Rounds of waxed Dutch cheese. Tea. Coffee. Sugar (very expensive, as was salt—they had run out of salt at Strasbourg, it was rumored, and could not make a decent sauce to cover the rats). Flour and rice. Casks of wine and one of Armagnac. I opted for a generous supply, took a few parcels, and ordered the rest for delivery.
On the way back, boulevard traffic was slow, and several of us from the queue shared a cab. Then the carriages were diverted and re-routed—another parade approaching? But the republic was less taken with parades than the empire had been, and this one advanced without fanfare. The gentleman beside me, supplies captive on his lap, drew out a small spyglass. Many carried these devices now, either to look at their neighbors or to go up to the heights and study the fortifications.
“I think these marchers have come from Châtillon.” After looking, he passed it along, and we took turns watching the columns of soldiers—lines and lines of infantry marching toward us. Some ramrod straight, with placards on their chests—others barely shuffling, like sleepwalkers, or with an attitude of sulky defiance rather than the customary bravado. Their soldier’s caps were reversed, and coats and trousers turned inside-out—even those of the proud Zouaves—and if they were armed, we could not see it.
“They must be deserters.” The first of the ranks were now passing quite near. I craned my neck to see that one soldier had broken from the line and was moving from carriage to carriage, shouting. When he reached ours he stared at each of us in turn.
“NOUS SOMMES TRAHIS!” he said, and then again, hoarse and urgent—as if I had not heard, or as though he expected an answer, he repeated the words. We are betrayed.
“Why is he saying that?” asked Madame P, with her stock of dried fish heads, which she said were for her cat. “What does it mean?”
“Trochu betray the French army? Never! These deserters all love to claim they are betrayed,” said the spyglass.
To look into their eyes, though, was to feel the creep of something familiar. Of deals made far above one’s head, out of one’s view; destiny on the chopping block.
***
Rumors were whispered, although not among the likes of those in the black-market line. Some said that in the wake of the failure to produce an armistice, Trochu’s “Plan” was not to fight but to capitulate to Bismarck; but that he could not do it too soon, for fear of a popular uprising. Even now, some murmured that the police were not safe on the streets in the working districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant, where men (and women as well) were all for taking up arms against the Prussians themselves. So the French army was being trickled out in its insufficient numbers, with few supplies and no defensive strategy; an army of show to appease the population and keep them busy in the ambulances, the makeshift hospitals that had sprung up all over the city to take in the wounded (which were few) while the government dithered and debated. But looking at their faces, it was difficult to believe these soldiers were deserters. I wasn’t sure what it meant; no one was.
“So what is going to happen now,” asked Mademoiselle Fish Heads, whose simpering was beginning to steam the windows.
“I would prepare to walk, if I were you, mademoiselle,” said the gentleman with the spyglass, gathering up his parcels to disembark. “It will get you into condition for the time, God forbid, when we have eaten all of the cab horses in the capital.”
Something terrible had certainly happened. At the rue du Mail, my neighbors were up in the atelier with telescopes—palm glued over one eye, as children will do. The roof gave a view all the way out to the Fort de l’Est. On the horizon appeared bursts of white smoke, each vanishing in a puff. We watched until dusk; the lights from the fortifications flickered like gas jets; and cannon fire sounded hollow and dull—just, as one diarist would later describe it, like the clunk made by an oar as it struck the side of a boat. We waited; watched. In the streets, people gathered uneasily at the kiosks for any news, even opposing reports. But now there was nothing. No word. During that brief, uneasy interlude between now and forever, the flicker of doubt replaced the lick of gaslight. Now the thunder that we heard signified no storm; it was the sound of many keys turning in many locks, the distant tumult as bridges exploded over the Seine, and the rattling closures of the gates. The capital was being cut off from the rest of France. Châtillon had been abandoned; it was now held by the Prussian crown prince.
In the following days, usual activities were suspended. Theaters remained dark, orchestras silent. Mail and news from outside ceased and the usual chatterers seemed to be stunned mute. The landlords had fled like rats off a ship, so no one was collecting rent, which changed the tenor of certain things. At the Préfecture, most of the Morals Brigade had been conscripted for the army—even Coué was hurriedly recommissioned. Without the police, no distinction existed between inscrit and non-inscrit; everyone stood where they pleased in all of the old off-limits places: the Champs-Élysées, the Tuileries. Girls smoked, drank beer, undid their bodices, and headed out to the ramparts at midday because the National Guards made one and a half francs per day and were virtually idle, although no one understood exactly why. The Prussians did not advance; our army did not engage them. Opinions flew: that the Prussians did not dare attack Paris, the “beating heart of Europe, the city of cities; the city of men,” as Victor Hugo had gustily written earlier that September. Or Trochu was negotiating to capitulate; or the Prussians had suspended their advance because they were so stunned that the French had not mounted a sturdier defense of Châtillon. Or we were all waiting for Gambetta to take charge and change tactics. With hardly any news to print, the papers turned to accusing the girls. In fact, from the very beginning of the conflict, the helpings of blame were generous: it was courtesans from the top, boulevard girls from the bottom, who had rotted the empire and debilitated the fighting forces of France.
With nothing else to do, Amélie and Francisque and I sorted through our gowns. Conclusion: none appropriate. Cherry satin, violet moiré shot with orange, sea and emerald velvets were bundled into the armoires, and only my drab cloaks, suitable for incognito trips to the Préfecture, were kept in use. Amélie volunteered for the women’s battalion, the “Amazons of the Seine,” but was turned away at the rue de Turbigo for lack of an escort to attest to her character. (Trochu later trounced the idea of a
battalion funded by rich women’s jewelry, disappointing fifteen hundred applicants.) Undaunted, Amélie set out to sew silk into balloons at a factory in the Impasse du Cadran. Our hopes now were set on the hot-air balloons launched from the buttes, sending military intelligence, mail, and messengers out of the capital. Léon Gambetta himself was to be ballooned out to raise an army in the provinces. These airborne vehicles were a bold and unlikely idea—but the only one proposed. And so we waited. As the last days of September crept by, Strasbourg capitulated.
In early October, the ration card was introduced. It was only a precaution, said the pronouncements on the walls; but the line leading to the mairie of the second arrondissement snaked down the block, and you would be surprised at who was standing there, waiting to get a card. It was stiff and blue, marked off by the days, and could be used in exchange for a single ration at the municipal butcher or two portions at a city canteen. It also specified the composition of one’s household, and one’s profession. (Francisque asked, “Do you think that they will have cross-referenced the Register with the ration cards?”—which made me pause, because who would think Francisque worried about the Register?)
“In this turmoil? The government that lost Sedan?” snorted Amé. “Besides, what do you have to worry about?”
“I think they are better at waging war against those poor girls than against the Prussians,” snapped Francisque. She was having a morning of nerves.
“Not without Coué,” I said. “Amé is safely a milliner.”
“And I am a zebra at the Jardin Zoologique,” said Francisque. “I dare them to challenge it.”
“Household?” asked the official, now, at the ration desk.
“Myself, and one maid.”
“Profession?”
“Private secretary,” I replied.
“Too long for the line!”
“Scribe, then?”
“Better scribe than inscribed,” I joked darkly, later, to Amélie.
In late October an aurora borealis illuminated Paris with a claret-colored sky. It was a beautiful sight; the heavens avid with movement and splendor; a rush of lights and afterward the most brilliant stars. Everyone stood in the streets and watched.
“It is some devilry of the Prussians, you can count on it.”
“The heavens are cracking open to give Paris hope!”
“No, it means we’ll have the coldest winter in living history.”
***
Eugénie,
I sit here in my apartments—in the American colony of the 16th Arr. with the remains of the displaced Confederates, business exiles, divorcées, et cetera, all poring over the American Register, with a herd of goats in the courtyard guarded by a boy of twelve with a pistol. I cannot, of course, book passage back to Calcutta. Friends and Relations have fled down to the last Hair—and I have found myself unable to conduct any business whatsoever. Would you care to dine? Brébant vows to serve dinner every night of the siege . . . Yours humbly . . . S de C
“Wartime lover, oldest trick in the book,” said Jolie, over one of my shoulders.
“You must find satisfaction in the rematch!” said Nathalie, over the other. “Water or champagne, my dear?”
And so, Brébant, week three of the siege. The menu and the mood a simulacrum of what it had once been; with white clothes, mirrors reflecting a thousand lights; flicker of gas lamps on the wineglasses, the dark windowpanes. Waiters’ feet feathered across the black-and-white floor; men’s suits set off the ivory shoulders of their companions. Wines—from vineyards now occupied by Prussian guns—were uncorked; silver came and went, and glasses, napkins refolded in the fleur-de-lis. All smooth as clockwork, no clumsiness, no ragged motions here. All around, the murmur of a hundred civilized voices: the optimists, the morbid, the war diarists and siege flâneurs, the stenographers of suffering; elites who had not managed to escape. Meat graced our plates because the grass in the parks stopped growing when the weather turned; there was not enough feed hay within the walls to keep the animals that were to be preserved for producing milk and butter. They were slaughtered for meat and sold to the highest bidders. We were aware of these particulars, now. Where the fillet came from.
“Have you noticed?” Stephan said calmly, knife poised. “All of the women are eating instead of pushing food around the plate . . . Eating, breathing, what will be next? Walking in the street?”
“Prussians eating at these tables next week?”
“Bah! Never! Not while I am standing. But it is ludicrous. Ten years in the jungles of India, every muscle yearning for civilization, and this is what I come home to? To be a prisoner in Paris.”
“What brought you back?”
“Business on behalf of Bengal’s blue devil.”
“Indigo.”
“Yes, and it is late in the day for saving French fortunes by a dark blue stain.” Stephan cut into his fillet. “And I came to face down my own devil.”
I cut into my own fillet. Tasted it cautiously. Bit into a mélange of carrot and haricots verts, as crisp and buttery as if they were real. “Where do you think they are getting these?”
“Jeweler on rue de la Paix has turned vegetable dealer, I believe.”
“So here we are. Dining well.”
Stephan looked up from his fillet. “I understand, Mademoiselle Rigault, that you are worth a minor fortune.”
“I’ve had some advice, good and bad.”
“They say that no one knows who your ‘protectors’ are, you have friends in the highest offices in the city, travel the world under aliases, modeled for a famous painting—and that after this mess is over, you plan to publish your memoirs.”
“Absolutely not. You have my word.”
“My family’s intention was to prosecute this—our case— through our lawyers. However, our men are, at present, sitting in an English country house, eating some partridge or a pheasant and waiting it out.”
“Is that why you have suddenly come to the table? When the case is reopened, which I will see that it is, I will countersue and the circumstances will be considered in a republican court, not an imperial one, where they may take a more appropriate view of ‘research of paternity.’”
“Any government will need to protect family and property. Why, it will take years to sort it out, even if they do want to institute changes in the Code Civil.”
“When the armistice is signed, we’ll see where we are.”
“The courts will be clogged with cases.”
“In Tillac they used to say, ‘When a man cannot cross by the bridge, he will cross through the water.’ But they never said what to do when there is no bridge and no water either. A woman must invent a crossing that defies physical means. Have you come with a proposal?”
He slouched back against the banquette cushions; the space between us widened, cooled. “The prosecution was initiated by my family, you know—I had enough on my plate in India.”
“That is a weak argument, monsieur.”
“Very well. They—rather, we—do not want any illegitimate claim troubling the estate, which is in enough difficulty as it is.”
“The claim is not illegitimate in any just terms. And it is not an incursion into your family’s fortunes that is my interest.”
“The Code does not see it that way.”
“The Code, the Code! Even that Bonaparte invention was never intended to foster profligacy, which is all that it has accomplished. The hospice is overwhelmed. Women line up and cry in the corridors like ewes whose lambs are gone to the slaughter. If you had ever seen it—why, even you might cry. It is expensive to administer, this tenet of the Code, and the courts may well want to take a stand against it. With any luck it will be torn down completely.”
“But until they do, if they do, nothing else governs the matter. The law is on the side of the estate and I am not going to war with my mother and my sisters. God knows I have spent the past decade making amends. A penance under sweltering Bengal skies so my family would no
t suffer.”
“So your sister Sophia’s feet would never have to touch the cobbles in Paris!”
“Now, I will not see them ruined while you swill away the hours with self-loathing Italian whores.”
“Giulia is my friend; you could not know less about her.”
“And this sanctimonious cant of motherhood—I cannot stomach it.”
A waiter appeared to clear our plates; we stared each other down over the crumbs. Who was this man? Amends for what, and to whom?
“I have recently hired a new maid. She fell off a vegetable cart from Saint-Denis before the gates closed. Illiterate, filthy, doesn’t know a fork from a fish knife. An abandonné, a runaway. Terrified of being sent to ‘the coffee mill,’ as she puts it; and nearly sold into traffic at the age of twelve. That’s the sort of daughter you gave to the empire that restored your title, monsieur le comte.”
Stephan gave a dark laugh. “You dress like a cocotte and talk like a Jacobin. I’m sorry for the state of your household, but if your daughter is anything like her mother she will figure out a fork from a fish knife well enough . . . Do you want to know of misery and blighted lives? I’ll tell you, it is not in France.” He leaned away sharply and stared out the dark pane, where the silk turban of his boy sat like blurred midnight, outside. “My mistake—all right—my hedonism and conceit and your benighted innocence—yes, I took advantage; I was young and human and graceless. I wanted my pleasure, and took it as offered—became drunk on it, I even believed I could not do without you, had every right to you. You were willing—as I recall.”
“I had none of the sophistications of your world, monsieur. As you were well aware.”
“But while we were dallying under the mistletoe in my uncle’s house, he was collapsed over a roulette table at Nice—”
“Mistletoe! I should have boiled it up and used it as a midwife told me to. Men will never understand a woman’s follies, no matter how often we repeat them before your eyes. All you can do is accuse, and rewrite the story to please yourself.”
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 30