This was an old anger. Fathomless, tribal. Order without bloodshed is possible, said the Commune. But at night we heard the roll of cannon down the cobbles; in the morning, fresh barricades and knots of whisperers on the corners.
It was early spring. The melting of the snow; a few brave buds appeared on the few remaining trees; one or two cautious birds sang in the upper branches. The German soldiers had retreated from sight, after a two-day occupation agreed upon by the governments. When they left, people scrubbed the pavements. Removing the Germans from our minds was more difficult: Prussian troops were stationed outside the enceinte, occasionally making their presence known with volleys of gunshots. Daily more provisions appeared in the shop windows and on the shelves. The post was delivered: bags of letters from the outside world, dating back to October. One of these was a letter from Rome, from Sidonie, Giulia’s Paris maid who had gone back with her to Italy. At my little desk, my eyes blurred with tears. Giulia had died of consumption shortly after the siege began; that is, very soon after I had seen her last, shivering under a torrent of ice and champagne. And her little girl had wanted to take care of her mother better than Giulia wanted to care for herself.
I drove across town. The boulevards were in an upheaval again, and my driver did not know the reason—some kind of hubbub, a flurry of running boys and mobs on the corners. Some sort of altercation up on the Montmartre buttes, but we did not stop because I was in a hurry to pound on the door of my sometime lover . . . My foul-weather friend who arrived when things turned bad and Giulia was put in mind to kill herself for Russian gold. I had not heard a word from him—no thanks for the supplies, no indication of his plans, given the reconfiguration of Paris. On the other hand, my own thoughts strayed more and more to Henri.
After banging at the door I heard Mitra’s voice; then the boy unlocking many locks and opening it on creaking hinges. Now that the shelling was past, and Germans in the streets vivid in our minds, doors were locked again. In his bedchamber Stephan was flopped down in his sandbagged fortress, asleep. Mitra stood to the side, alert and guardlike, looking more like a man than his father did at that moment.
“Stephan, wake up! Monsieur le comte, it’s nearly noon!” Stephan groaned and flung an arm over his eyes. I turned up Stephan’s palm and tickled it, a most unpleasant sensation for a sleeping person. Palm of narrow escapes, indeed.
A pile of mail lay scattered to the side; thin envelopes with foreign postmarks. Indian letters, and thicker ones with seals. Stephan stirred and hoisted himself up on a sandbag.
“Mitra, coffee!” Glanced at me, sullen. I knew that look. I had brought apples with me, and tossed one at him now.
“Your post has come, I see. Mine came. Giulia is dead of the grippe.”
“I’m sorry. Truly,” muttered Stephan. “And Paris gossip has traveled quickly as ever, so you may as well hear it from me. My family intends to press forward with the lawsuit. They are sending their man to me today.”
I stared at him, not quite in surprise. “Your actions toward me haven’t made their claim any easier to prove, monsieur.”
“But lent it urgency, I’m afraid.”
“And where do you stand?”
“I am not standing, at the moment. I am lying down in bed, about to expire for want of a decent cup of coffee. Mitra!”
“Stephan. Are you going to Versailles?”
“I don’t know. But you should, if you want to. Your business affairs will have moved there, I daresay.” It took me a moment to think of what he meant.
“I have not come to ask your permission! But I am not in spirit for Versailles.”
“So much the worse. But. Eugénie, you and I must communicate through intermediaries now—otherwise it will simply be a wreck. I will mediate with the family, I promise you.” He sighed. “My mother is not well. My sister is not married. I have been hunting neither Bengal tigers—nor heiresses, as is my filial duty—”
“No heiresses! And why might that be?”
He sent me a cryptic glance. I sat back, stared at him. Could I possibly still love this man? Something in me had changed; it had begun on those dark nights of the siege. A silent passage, laid stone by stone. My “business affairs” indeed. How dare he.
I said, “Your family can act as they like. But their suit is useless, as will soon be proved in a republican court—or perhaps they would prefer a judge under the auspices of the Commune. Which will have been advised by the Women’s Union.”
“The Commune! Now you are ridiculous.”
“And one day—quite soon—I intend to retrieve Berthe and help her as best I can. I am not going to throw her away because of them. Or because you are a coward.”
“The suit happens to be based in the law, which is on the side of my family’s interests and its honor.”
“Bah! And it is a convenient sandbag for you, monsieur.”
“Eugénie, there is no winning this argument. Even if you had the girl—if she is alive—”
“She is alive.”
“How, under what circumstances, would you intend to raise her? As Giulia brought up her daughter?”
“Please. Giulia died trying to cover Giulietta’s school fees.”
“You see? It’s preposterous.”
“Own up to the situation you helped to create, Stephan.”
“In another world I’d marry you, Eugénie.” The man looked miserable. “But I cannot abandon my mother and Sophia, or divide myself from my family in that way—don’t you see that I am trapped as well? And besides, you would not understand India.”
And I would not have a “dictionary of the bed” to explain it to me, I thought, but I said only, “Very well. My lawyers will take it from here.”
“All right—all right. Perhaps I have not entirely thought it through; I need more time.”
“What else have you had to do these past three months?”
“Perhaps I can break with the family, with indigo and all the rest of it. Perhaps I do want the girl. Perhaps I do want us to—I don’t know. What the hell would we do? Go to America? Australia?”
I turned impatiently, went to his window, and looked out at the rooftops, at the place de l’Étoile—down at the avenue d’Eylau, where Haussmann’s construction remained incomplete even now. The avenue was divided, with half of it twenty feet above the new street level. Residents had to climb stairways, built along a “temporary” retaining wall, to get to their doors. There it had been left when the empire fell; and so it remained.
“Do you love me, Stephan? Do I love you? What obligation do we have, not under the Code, but between ourselves? I don’t have the answer; I have not asked you for a wedding ring, but why is it that we can never speak of—of what is important?”
The question went unanswered, for at that moment Mitra stepped into the room, turbanless and barefoot, balancing a tray with a silver pot on it, cups and spoons; he was wide-eyed, looking as though he was about to jump out of his skin. A sheaf of paper under his arm.
“Ah, Mitra. Coffee, thank you. And the papers; you are a prince among young men . . . Good Lord. What is happening out there this morning?” I peered over his shoulder—not at a newspaper, but at a hastily printed broadsheet. For a few moments, not a breath between us; just the rustling of the page.
Free of the tray and unable to contain himself any longer, Mitra hopped on one foot and shouted gleefully, “The government’s army has surrendered to the Commune!”
Stephan was pale, as if he had seen a ghost. “Mitra, do you know what that means?”
“Yes!”
“Then you are the only one in the capital who does.”
I said, “I may not understand India, but Mitra understands France.”
Early that morning of March 18, 1871, two brigades of the Eighty-eighth Regiment of the regular army had been sent up to the buttes, where Henri and I had kissed, to retrieve the cannon held by the the Fédérés, the so-called insurgents—or the Commune, depending on how you saw it. In adva
nce of the move to Versailles, Thiers and the assembly wanted assurances that Paris was under control; that it was not a powder keg controlled by the Reds and the rabble. They roused the troops at three in the morning and, in a chilly rain, without coffee or breakfast, sent them to retrieve the cannon. But there were not enough horses in harness to pull down the guns, and the troops of the Eighty-eighth had to wait while runners were sent back down to get them. Another runner went down the hill as well, I would later learn. Louise Michel, our former companion of the supper table and woman of no second thoughts (would she have had them if she had known what was to come?) bolted down from Montmartre with a gun on her back, rallying half of Paris to support the Fédérés.
Dawn was breaking just then, and up on the buttes only the milkmaids and a few guardsmen were out. Some of the women walked in front of the cannon and offered the soldiers of the Eigthy-eighth Regiment fresh milk; a few café girls from the dance halls stood by and flirted. More women and children came out to see what was happening; there was a lull, a suspension. The general in charge gave an order to fire, but the stars and planets changed position, perhaps; the first brigade turned up the butts of the guns, and refused.
“We don’t have to kill one another!” someone shouted, and the second brigade too turned its guns butt-up. No one let off a shot, but rather everyone put down their arms and began drinking milk, the troops of the Eighty-eighth and the National Guard together. It was a bloodless coup up on the buttes on a quiet morning in March, where Henri and I had been—the place Chasseloup used to stare at, brooding, from his atelier. (Almost bloodless. But all details of the event did not come out until later.) The broadsheets that Mitra brought told the story their own way.
We might be “thin as keys,” as someone later wrote, but our keys had unlocked a door and on that fine March morning we walked through it. By evening, the troops of the regular army had surrendered, deserted, or disintegrated, unwilling to rally on behalf of their generals and the assembly. The red flag flew over the great clock at the Hôtel de Ville. The next day, the weather turned bright, and everyone came out onto the boulevards, promenading in their best clothes as if it was a holiday. Henri, exhilarated and wearing a new and spotless National Guard coat, came to gather me up at the rue du Mail; and we rode through Paris together, to the roll of drums of the Fédérés, before he had to go back on duty. Finette stopped by, after work at the café chantant where she was employed—to tell us with shining eyes how it had been, up on Montmartre that morning, how the girls had moved through the ranks of soldiers with flowers and cups of milk, “not at all afraid even though there were guns!” It had already become a myth, a beautiful story people wanted to believe. Over the next few days—which were quiet—the streets were swept clean for the first time since the empire had ended, and flags sprang up like fields of poppies.
29. Correspondence
WHEN DO THE EDDIES separate ship from shore; when do you notice, with a hole in your heart, the widening distance between what you have been and what you will become? You might be able to string act to event, cause to consequence, but still you search for the moment when one substance becomes another. When color becomes image, or clay, flesh. Field corn is transformed to foie gras; the red dress becomes the red flag; an empress becomes a commoner, leaving behind her boiled egg. The awl slips and shatters the ivory, the paper is torn into shreds; love is broken like a crystal bowl. A woman’s body, once beloved, becomes a draining trough, a gutter. She has taken a turn in her life from found to lost. Or from lost to found again.
A singular moment, at the corner of the rue Montmartre and the rue du Mail. A plain moment, when one thinks, Someday I will look back at that street corner, at that woman in the green dress, with the umbrella: very ordinary except for the fact that there is a war on—but who was she, and what is she to become? Is there any hope for her? Moments ago she exited the corner building, a structure like many others, with shallow balconies onto the street. The sort of building where the mattress men stopped to drop and collect their rentals during the empire. It was the first thing she noticed about the place. She walks down the rue du Mail to the rue Montmartre. Above the Bakery Saint-Claude is a bold sign: SALONS, CABINETS. PRIVATE ROOMS. Over the entrance, marble cupids tease one another with garlands. And a round lozenge says GAZ: a restaurant’s proud advertisement of illumination within. All signs, now, of an era past . . . Something about the desultory tilt of her umbrella and the way she blinks in the weak April sun. But she is not headed for the teahouse that, during the siege, was known for black-market items other than tea; nor to the boulangerie that only intermittently displayed round loaves and long ficelles and braids of bread; and for some time, only ship’s biscuit. No, she is ringing the bell, then opening the door, for Maison Gellé at number 4, Impasse Saint-Sauveur: dyes, cleaning, and finishing. specialité: black for mourning. The clock’s hands stand at ten before ten. Because of a shortage of German clock winders, the clocks have not been reset, and all over the city, their hands remain askew.
I was at my desk again, sorting mail. More of it trickling in, months old. Solicitations, invitations, events from another time and a different world. Among them was one envelope of heavy paper; brown ink. Angular, pointy, old-fashioned script I had not seen often, and not in a very long time. A postmark from Auch. My stomach knotted, but before I had a chance to break the seal, Amélie, still in a morning dress and half-corset, appeared at my door.
“There is fighting in the place Vendôme. A group calling itself the Friends of Order has marched down the rue de la Paix in their top hats and canes, but shots were fired and the National Guard on the place has responded—or—”
“Who are these Friends of Order?”
“They marched yesterday, unarmed—today they are back. They want some kind of treaty with Versailles, or some further assurances from the Commune.”
“The chief of police has just been slapping too many rich men in jail . . . I just heard cannonade from the forts.”
“They say the Prussians are firing blanks to celebrate some kind of anniversary. But I don’t think I’ll go out. Are you seeing the Communard tonight? Or is something else up your sleeve?”
“Henri is a revolutionary. He doesn’t make firm plans. If there is fighting on the place Vendôme I hardly think he’ll be taking me to dinner.”
“Hard to keep up with you these days, Rigault. And are you related to the chief of police? Everyone is asking. I’d like to know which way the wind’s going to blow next.” She sighed.
The new chief under the Commune had long been an agitator on the Left; he had achieved his greatest fame by using a spyglass from the Seine bookstalls to look in on the former empire’s Préfecture—at all of the Noëls and Coués and their henchmen and superiors—then publishing his scandalous findings. Long before the coup of March 18, he had dubbed the police the Ex-Préfecture. So it was still called the Ex-Préfecture, although he was now the head of it. He was also a rake, notorious for believing that female favors should be granted for free; and he had no fond eye for priests. With his coarse black beard and cynical eye, he seemed to be trusted by no one. Oddly, I shared his name—Rigault.
“I can’t help you there. I may need to change my name. Everyone seems to hate the man.”
The letter was from my Uncle Charles. My mother’s brother had always prided himself on a dispassionate, full, and objective setting out of facts, and his crabbed and pointy script covered several pages. The letter recalled his voice, flowing with precision—dull to an impatient child; but now I devoured every word like the produce that had rolled in from the countryside, though I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t make me just as bilious. I looked up from the page to the ticking clock on my desk, the little porcelain-and-gilt one with filigree hands, a gift from Beausoleil. Its hands told the hour because I wound it myself, with a small gold key.
The occasion of his writing was to inform me about Berthe: my mother. She had been ill for some time, he wrote. She was confine
d to bed and in and out of consciousness; the medical men had given up bleeding her. Weak and jaundiced, she could not stand any coverings on her feet. “To a man, not one of the doctors has seen such feet . . . You will recall her willfulness.” Several times she had been near death, and Charles had gone through papers to settle personal matters while she was able to state her preferences. It was in these papers that my uncle had located my present address. All of my previous residences had been struck off, save the last, he wrote. A meticulous record keeper, my mother. She had kept track of it: through the Auch Préfecture. Reading that, I felt ill and stopped to take some bismuth and quince.
Berthe had never spoken about the documents that she received during the winter of 1861; and it was since that date that she refused to hear your name spoken in our home. But it is these documents that I have found among her papers.
. . . Her very great unhappiness, and blaming of herself for your situation, I believe, caused her to descend to her current state. It is the case that over a course of years under these conditions the feminine liver will collapse.
If history permits it, consider traveling to see her.
The letter closed with my uncle’s certainty of the victory of France in battle. I glanced again at the date: December—around the time true hunger began, with famine not far off.
Berthe. She had made only perfect things. Loved what was unsullied and beautiful: dowry sheets kept folded in the chest; china never used. Tiny, exact miniature portraits; the first immaculate radishes in the spring, rinsed of garden dirt, ruby-throated, white-tipped, arranged in a wooden bowl for her to paint. She was an artist, a creator of the unblemished surface. Except, of course—for her daughter, whom she had had to trace through the Préfecture, that pustulent wart on the rue des Fèves.
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 36