Stephan leaned forward. “And you think the courts—even if there are new courts—will take your part? Listen. I am attempting to convey to you the facts of the situation as they occurred, ones that you do not know.”
“Oh, I can listen.”
Indeed, it had become my stock in trade. I sat back and folded my hands.
“After we parted, I boarded a ship to Calcutta. I was to meet my uncle. Arrived at Howrah Station, went as planned to the Great Eastern Hotel. We were to tour his investments, go tiger hunting—then return to Paris. I waited a week, two, then three before a telegraph finally reached me. He had never left Nice. Died there, at the gaming table, leaving me his fine, empire-plated title and properties stripped down to the wainscoting and so heavily mortgaged that I couldn’t bail them out in a hundred lifetimes. Some time thereafter, a letter from my mother pleading with me to put his affairs to rights; to take my place as head of the family, with all that entails . . . Discharge the debts. Provide a fitting level of support for her and my sister—that was understood. And I’d had enough of dancing with heiresses at Paris balls, if you want to know the truth.
“News travels fast in India—and not by telegraph. We don’t know how it does. But I could not even leave the hotel; suddenly about a thousand Hindoos had assembled in the lobby and outside, waiting for me, waving papers in the air. These were people who had been ruined by my uncle’s dealings, or so they claimed. I had to explain that he was not coming; I was terrified of being engulfed; however, the news appeared to delight them. Suddenly I was not being threatened but offered help of every kind. Loans, credit, help, arrangements, servants. I was virtually a captive; and one of them had a letter that had given the name of the indigo concern in which my uncle had sunk the last of his capital. This man became my dobachy—of course, he had only a random claim on the letter; who knows how he got hold of it! These documents are used as currency; they are traded like scrip. He turned out to be only an underservant of an underservant of the real dobachy. A moneylender. From this man I learned that my household was already assembled. Cooks, lackeys, hookah bearers, punkah pullers, clippers of nose hair—saheb le comte certainly needed a large staff—he even assured me I would have a language teacher whom I would find much to my liking. I tried to refuse and found that I had less sway over the situation than a Bengali boy of fourteen. I was herded on a train as far as Mozufferpore and went the rest of the way by dak—a relay of bullock wagons, bamboo carts, and ponies. Surrounded by a horde—their train fare already charged to my ‘account’—into the mountains. I had no idea where I was, who I was with. The dobachy negotiated everything; it was entirely in his hands. We arrived at a series of fields, and a group of huts . . . Indigo.” Stephan paused. “I hardly knew what it was.
“The plantation’s manager was an Englishman. He recognized a desperate fool when he saw one; I had no idea what I was doing. Why, my idea of life was that of a Paris gentleman who lives between his tailor, the club, his mistresses, and the theater, with the occasional adventure abroad. I had intended to follow in my uncle’s footsteps, indeed—had made a good beginning.
“Instead I was hired as a factory assistant; the last one had just succumbed to some kind of galloping fever. I was lucky in one way—the position of factory assistant was viewed with such contempt that most of my “staff”—all except for a few, about a dozen of the roughest and strangest of the lot, just disappeared. I had not a rupee to pay the ones left, and no idea why they stayed. But they knew. And the Englishman knew.
“I was installed in a bungalow near a vast field of waving plants that I would not know from a sheaf of wheat, speaking not a word of the languages, and left on my own—if you can call being surrounded by fourteen Bengalis, each strong as an ox, on one’s own. My first order of business was to take another three days’ journey by dak to an area the planter was preparing to cultivate, and to oversee the destruction of a village’s vegetable gardens. The plowing under of their rice fields. And then, the tumnee . . . Of course, I did not know, either, what that was.” Stephan fell silent, then resumed.
“It is the digging that precedes the re-sowing of these areas with indigo. That was my initiation, that first tumnee. Everything about indigo depends on a properly executed digging. It is all done with bamboo staves by men in a line, watched over by ‘stick men’ with even larger ones. If it is not done well, the plants fail, rot in the ground, succumb to blight, never mature. Much can go wrong with indigo. Sometimes you don’t even know about the problem until fermentation, when dye cannot be extracted from the plants. Of course I did not know how to do it, but the men did and the stick man knew.
“I had the grace to be ashamed. But here was a group of strongmen calling me saheb le comte. They were ready to work, their families were depending on them, and if I did not pay them when their salaries came due, they would carry me out to the jungle. My dobachy told me this. Very politely.
“And so I stood by the edge of a field—a rotten, pillaged swamp of a field—and I watched them. At the tumnee’s finish, the Englishman gave their salaries to me and in turn, I paid the men. Afterward I went back to the main fields and learned indigo. How it was made, what made it profitable, and how, in great detail, my uncle’s properties had come to ruin. What was owed in interest alone. How the Englishman—Charlton—had taken over, and with bad fortune. Too much land depleted, tumnees scamped over by badmashee coolies. Fields gone to opium—we can’t compete with it. Too much security required to plant and harvest. Fifty years ago the system worked, but now it has decayed . . . So. Village by village, field by field—I worked with Charlton for a ruined decade. Oh, and it got more complicated—everything does. I can tell you the details sometime, if you are interested. Once you hear them, I defy you to try to outrank me in suffering.”
Silence fell between us. Icy pins of rain had begun to strike the windows. I said finally, “Your boy—he will be cold outside. He must not be used to weather like this?”
“Mitra likes the Paris scene. He enjoys watching.”
“But—what’s happening?”
Heads had turned toward the window as though wind gusted over a field.
A clatter through the drapes, billow of cold air, then noses poked through the curtains, knees edged in, a knobby shoulder. Blackened faces and dirty hands. Stock still, chests heaving, eight pairs of blinking bruised eyes. A hush fell on the dining-room babble and everything stopped, as though we were waiting for something to happen—a hand to reach down from the heavens and pick up the vagabonds by the scruff of the neck! Forks and glasses halted in midair; fans snapped and gentlemen half-rose in their seats. Would someone please fire upon these children?
A man—short, squat, dressed in tails—shouldered between the tables and made his way back toward the kitchen. He reappeared with a basket of bread and apples, steady as the ox pulls the cart, looking neither left nor right as he passed the tables of silent diners. The drape billowed again behind him, as he stepped outside into the rain.
“Auguste Maillard won’t settle the mob by throwing them crumbs,” muttered a man at the next table. I felt cold, and my stomach turned over. Maillard: the man who had bought Chasseloup’s painting.
“Feed them tonight; tomorrow there will be a dozen more, then all of Belleville, on our doorstep. Your table extenders cannot reach that far, Auguste!” Laughter, mean and nervous. Auguste Maillard’s first successful patent had been for a dining-table extender; a generous and pragmatic invention, I had always thought, reading about him in the papers.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” exclaimed a woman, folding her fan. “What do you think made them so bold?”
“A change in the weather,” said Maillard. He turned full, then, and looked—or perhaps I only imagined it—in my direction; made a slight movement with his hand. I was trembling.
“It is Maillard,” I said, uselessly. “He is still in Paris.”
“I know who he is,” said Stephan. “He was an investor i
n indigo, in the whole French colony. But he did not like the ryot uprisings; security became too expensive. Men like him sit in Paris, never tramp down a field, or sit down to hookah with the zemindars. They say Maillard is going toward the mob, but the mob will never have him—not with his Saint-Simonian notions, unifying Europe for the economic good and the rest of it.”
“I heard that he—Maillard—shot his own horse to feed his workers because they threatened to strike. A beautiful mare.”
“One lives as one must, I suppose. Do you care for dessert? Figs in wine sauce. Figs are dry; wine, at least—plentiful. As long as I can dine, I intend to look at this siege as a strange but well-deserved holiday. Unless of course—well, it is unthinkable that Trochu will so botch the thing that—it will continue to deteriorate. How do you know Maillard?”
“He bought the painting. The one you mentioned earlier, for which I was the model.”
“Ah. There is a painting, then.”
“It was done just after I came to Paris, yes.”
“And Maillard has it?”
“He owns it, so I suppose he does have it.”
Stephan looked curiously at me. “Why, I must see it. You have no idea how I—how I thought of you, then.”
I had finally seen the painting myself; had read in the paper that Maillard had lent it to be shown, and I went and saw it. The girl in the painting was half-turned, looking over her shoulder, a white shawl, like a cloud, drifting over her shoulder and down her arm. The hair, dark; her skin, pale. A three-quarters profile. A hand. Resting on the other arm. I could not look at it for very long.
I picked up my fork to stab a fig; placed it back down. Watched shapes in the half-light; candlelight licking goblets full of wine, reflecting a hundred ruby flames. Stephan’s account had made me feel feverish in an ugly way. Toyed with; pulled to and fro; not unmoved by the sad truths of the unseen world. The waiter came. He apologized, to Stephan, for what he called “the disturbance.”
“It is all right,” I replied. “It is the world we are living in now.” The waiter’s head swiveled toward me; his lip curled, in a breach of Brébant protocol; neither of us knowing where the other stood. That was the true siege; the not-knowing, the curtain coming down on all of the old tales we told ourselves.
***
Stephan helped me into my cloak, the one lined with rabbit. The street was empty now, quiet. No lamps lit . . . Indeed, it was getting colder.
We drove, silently, a hired cab. Careened through streets, barely missing pedestrians and farm animals; soup kettles, random fires flaring alongside the boulevards. The silhouettes of makeshift canteens, dark and empty now; little shacks made of a curtain and some old boards that served soupe in exchange for ration tickets. We stopped at a café for brandy; it was lit with candles as gas was under ration too (although it had burned brightly enough at Brébant). Drove again through the ruined landscape, its façade once so spruce and manicured. That now seemed like a bit of scenery for a musical, stacked to the side to be carted away. The Bois de Boulogne had been denuded; the trees felled for fuel and also so the enemy could not hide among them. The artificial lakes stood empty; the cascade did not fall. We hit a gash in the roadway and my head fell against Stephan’s shoulder just as it had once before—a decade ago.
I loved him when he was an arrogant boy, rescuing me from my father’s lingering ghost; I would love him again, a man caught in a snarl of my destiny. I loved him as women love: despite everything. Love needed; demanded and hoarded; hurled back, burned, and claimed again. Ash. Dark hair; pale skin. A full mouth. Dark eyes. We invent each other . . . I cannot tell the truth of it, for I will never know that; nor how, nor why the heart plays its tricks.
This carriage became that other one; the rustle of absent trees in the Bois became the leaves of La Vrillette; its empty lakes the dark rectangular pool before the house, and I closed my eyes and fell, and fell. The void-of-myself, minus the elegant trappings, plain as an empty belly, those first Paris days. It was as before, it was no different, I was no different. I was not wiser.
Our crush of lips was a thing guttural and inarticulate; no benevolent third between us. I had once thought it was an angel, a generous, lighthearted spirit, or a sprite of the fountains that had brought me to him; to ferry me out of disaster. Maybe Berthe, determined to be born.
In my own bed at the rue du Mail with the snowy coverlets I turned toward him, took him against me. Felt the weight of his boots as they dropped to the floor. Unfastened his collar, the small, pearled buttons of his shirt. The place longed for again and again; coming back to what had been lost. My young, uncorrupted self. To breathe again as I once did, when my knees did not ache; the blue veins did not show in my hands.
Shivering, we undressed each other and his hips found mine in the dark; we were hungry, both of us urgent for that nourishment so long withheld, and I tumbled back ten years, a hundred. To a time unmarked, clean. My soul, light and strong, as it once was; my body firm and free; a young untutored heart. Heart beating; warm, live flesh—oh yes, the same scents, the same hands, the same body—the same kisses, brushing my lips; the heat of his breath, his mouth; the way of fingers, then lips—how the body does not forget the smallest detail. Sheets tangled around us; pillows, covers falling to the floor. At La Vrillette we had been like birds calling to each other. In the morning, at sunset; never tired. We flew farther; the distance grew, but still he called, and I answered; our voices overlapping, touching under heaven’s arc. Then I called, and heard nothing—ah! Where has the other one gone? I called until my throat was hoarse; my ears strained for listening to the silence. And now he had returned. Our green wood had once burned, popped and smoked and smoldered; now it burst into flame with a fast, bright heat. And in the morning he was smoking by the window, the same.
. . . From there, a giddy plunge into a desolate world. With Paris besieged, friends departed, rations short—we were two vagabonds who could care less, and why not? . . . A joke between the two of us, penned in his slanted, graceful hand. Our rendezvous named, a place whispered among the knowing. Invited guests only. Illumined by guttering candlelight, guarded by waiters with guns, wineglasses were filled, plates adorned with peas and butter; with white bread; with beef and cheese from God-knows-where. I ate for the Eugénie who had starved, once. Who shrank at the poissonnière; skulked through the aisles at Hédiard; cried into her butcher’s offal.
Stephan was, as I learned, an expert in diverting us from disaster; a master of the arch edge, the Parisian ambiguity, the elegant reappearance. Arriving unannounced at the rue du Mail with something as unlikely as a prune tart, a pat of butter up his cuff, a can of sardines or even a bunch of carrots. Once a set of teacups from the Mont, borne upstairs looped on his fingertips; and we had soupe au vin in them, that staple of the siege: wine boiled over the fire and poured on dried bread. His visits to the rue du Mail delighted Finette, especially after he brought her a pair of bangles.
“My silver and gold,” she said, fluttering her arm in the air.
“More like tin and brass,” I said.
We walked in Père Lachaise cemetery, quarreled in front of the tomb of Abélard and Héloïse, a filigreed fantastical structure, the house they had never shared in life.
“I wrote letters—so many.”
“Apparently that is why my family is suing you.”
“I only sent one. What would you have done if you had not been held hostage in an indigo field?”
“How can I say?”
“You can speak for your intentions!”
“I intended to come back for you.”
“Is that true?”
“As true as a—callow young man knows. But Eugénie—sooner or later I would have felt the weight of my obligations. They kept me in India and would have dogged me here.”
“India was an added convenience, then.”
“Yes.” He wrapped his long arms around me; fierce, tight. Just to remember those arms. To teach myself what it wou
ld have been.
Outside our world of diversions, the municipal beef was gone and goat’s meat worth its weight in gold. Horses were scarcer; omnibuses infrequent; gaslight finally failed entirely. The government’s ration was cut, and cut again. Troubled questions hung in the air—why did Trochu not call for a levée en masse? Why was he not fighting the enemy with every arm in the capital? For it was apparent that negotiations had failed; that there was not to be an armistice; the “Plan,” whatever it was, had fallen apart. (Or worse—voices fell to a hush—this was the Plan.) From Tours, where his balloon had landed, the gallant Léon Gambetta had waged a successful battle with an army that had surged in from the provinces to support him—and that victory had given us hope, was celebrated in the streets and at the rue du Mail; we opened a carefully hoarded bottle of champagne. But Gambetta’s achievement initiated a split between Trochu’s command and his. Our defending forces were mired in disagreement.
Street barricades had been erected all the way up to Montmartre because the balloons went up from there, and the pigeons flew back with messages from Gambetta’s flank. Red placards on the walls asserted the right of the National Guard to defy the government’s stance of “negotiation,” proclaimed the urgency of the Great Sortie—an overwhelming rush toward the Prussian lines with everything, and every fighting man, Paris had. With each success of Gambetta’s, Parisian morale rallied even more toward him and against the stoic Trochu. Everywhere, in all the parks and empty spaces, the National Guard, citizen-soldiers called up from every quarter of Paris, from the wealthiest to the most humble, drilled and marched with orders—or without. They were a motley collection, variously uniformed, erratically disciplined—serving from their separate and distinct neighborhoods. They had one thing in common, though: they were all armed.
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 31