The Hôtel de Gascogne’s terrace was decorated with flower boxes; the petals protected by a fine mesh screen, not bee-stung to death. Tomorrow there was to be a tasting of the local foie gras. Tonight, it seemed, beds were at a premium, the hotelier harried as he served a portly woman in a silk bonnet with a shrill, trumpeting voice. Another customer stood at the desk, his voice the edge of a whine. He wanted many beds—two beds, three beds, one bed additional. At Lourdes, the hospital beds were made ready for as many as came. Nor did the dying demand or rush, though they may have traveled a thousand miles for a cup of water. And yet I was more attached to this world than that other.
I came away altered from Lourdes, and not just because of what I had learned. Indeed—Stephan had so long played the villain, it would be easy to continue to cast him in that role. But much of the news, as I now reflected, was good. Berthe was alive; she had been brought up in some way that had made her kind and civilized. Even hard truths could be faced, at least in my little whitewashed room near the Grotto; and in quiet conversation with the sister, who had embraced me as we parted, told me to be of good courage. I did not bathe nor go to mass, visit the stations of the cross, nor did I have the strength to push the sick and suffering up the hill. Yet it was enough. Lourdes gave what was needed and offered no reproach. It was a rare place on earth, for that. But the Grotto was the Grotto; and Auch was Auch. My boots were back on; and on my ring finger lay a gold band from a Limoges pawnshop; it gleamed palely, strange and heavy. My trunk, left in Limoges with instructions to be sent on, had arrived, disgorging every trapping of conventionality I could drape over myself. Boots, crinoline, gloves, hat, and veil. My umbrella—a good one from Lafarge, in the Galerie Feydeau on the Passage des Panoramas in Paris. A man’s umbrella, not a flimsy woman’s parasol. Black, with a silver head. I wrapped my hand around it.
My grandfather’s house, which now belonged to Uncle Charles, was off the place Salinis in the shadow of the pale stone Tour d’Armagnac, not far from the center of the upper part of the town. High and lower Auch were linked by a network of steep, narrow alley stepways, the poustrelles. Poustrelle de las Houmettos, Poustrelle des Couloumats. The names still had a ghostly magic; I had made many trips up and down them during my school days, studies forgotten; counting the moments until I was able to get back home to the finches and linnets and fields, the gusts of perfumed wind.
“Madame Auguste Maillard.” I announced myself to the maid at the door. Her face was impassive as a plank.
Uncle Charles rubbed his shiny-pated head, now fringed with gray; he wore small, rounded, gold-framed spectacles. His young, second wife was called Christiane, and they had two small daughters, Susanne and Sabine. After they had gone to bed, and Christiane retired to instruct the cook and housekeepers, we sat alone in front of the fire, my uncle and I, with a bottle of his good vieille resérve Armagnac. Fiery stuff, liquid gold, fragrant with oak and sun on the vineyards. My uncle, a capable and optimistic man, owned vineyards around Auch and a good part of the town. For him, to build was to invest and what was broken merely waited for repair—he was less certain when confronted with the vagaries and contradictions of women. And war.
I had been telling him, as neutrally as possible, of the events in Paris during the siege; how the capital had felt in March, after the army surrendered to the Commune. Charles had been to Paris as a young man; now he pushed the flat of his hand against his scalp, as if to press it in place, and sighed. He was silent for a moment, and rested the heavy glass in his hand; the conversation turned back to Berthe.
“We believed for a long time that you had died. Your mother had a slab of marble put up at Sainte-Marie’s, with an epitaph. It was not until recently that I began to doubt. And then I found the papers.” I must have turned quite white, for he said, after a pause, “Of course it has always been difficult. With my sister Berthe.” He sighed again and reached for the bottle.
“Are you familiar with the works of Augustin Benedict Morel?” he resumed. “The belief is very deep with your mother that a man, or a woman, can fall from the pure, original nature into a state of degeneration, and that these characteristics or qualities may be passed down from parent to child. Your mother believes that it was a very great sin of her own—that she was responsible for what happened to you—and that this is a part of a—spiraling downward—of society as a whole, to which she has contributed. Of course, science and medicine and even philosophy have come some distance since Morel, but she holds by her own thinking.”
“What—what sin does she believe she committed, Uncle Charles?”
A cloud crossed his face; he shook his head. “My sister has not risen from bed in weeks. We have run through all of the domestic help in town; Christiane has been a merciful angel, but it is perhaps you that she needs. I am glad you’ve come, Eugénie.”
“It may be the final straw to put her under,” I said wryly.
“According to the doctors, she could have been buried a year ago; the last six months beat the miracles at Lourdes. She’ll have a crisis, but pull back. She’s had last rites”—he counted on his fingers—“eight times. Every priest in the department has been here.”
“She may not let me in the door, Uncle.”
“Nonsense. You are a respectable married woman now. And priests—well, she tosses them on their ear, anyway.”
Later Uncle Charles walked me across the square and kissed me on both cheeks in front of the Hôtel de Gascogne. If he disapproved of a woman staying alone at a hotel, he never said as much, merely invited me to dine the next evening. After all, I was a respectable married woman; for some inexplicable reason traveling without her maid.
“And you will see Jean-Louis,” he said, with his gloved hand on my elbow. “Your brother . . . Oh, he hasn’t answered to ‘Charles’ in years. Now, get some rest.”
Tall tapers flickered in their holders on Christiane’s table. Two table maids, a pair of clear-eyed, tight-lipped girls, both the very stamp of the older woman who had answered the door, moved on cat’s paws in and out of the swinging door, with stacks of snowy folded napkins, wine and water glasses of cut crystal sparkling in their pale hands. The soup bowls had been set out. Gold-banded, white and ruby; their creamy interiors set off the rich gold of a translucent broth. A filigreed fuss of salvers and spoon holders, napkin rings and silver carafes. The damask was well-known to my fingertips; the fleur-de-lis pattern, hemstitches thin as threads of frost. My fingers had rubbed that silver until it shone; it was Berthe’s dowry silver.
“It is a lovely table, Christiane.”
She was bare-shouldered and glowing—fashionably dressed, for a provincial wife—but Charles was wealthy and I should know better than to hold such prejudices. Les auscitaines had always been stylish, and Christiane’s smile was warm and genuine.
The two girls, blonde-headed, hair tied up in ribbons, sat wide-eyed and bolt upright. Because of their new Paris relative and their—apparently—badly mannered cousin Jean-Louis, they were allowed to sit at the dining table with the adults. Sabine, the older of the two, had confided in me, earlier, in the drawing room.
“What is so impolite about your cousin, Sabine?” I had asked earlier; and she looked carefully around the room before answering. “Well, he is always late, with muddy shoes and no handkerchief, and he says terrible things out loud!” At table, she held her sister’s hand, and they both barely controlled their giggles. The gold band on my third finger lay heavily against the damask, clicked softly against the wineglass. Our silver spoons had been set down, and the tureens and the ruby bowls cleared, when from the outer hall, my younger brother’s arrival was announced.
“Jean-Louis,” said my uncle, before I could speak, “Your sister, Madame Maillard.”
“Eugénie, of course,” I said, rising to meet him.
The boy was tall and graceful for his thirteen and a half years, with a shock of silky hair falling over his face. As a male of the Daudet line, he was set to lose it in about three mo
re years, but he seemed quite vain of it now. And Jean-Louis was the very mark of my mother’s spirit; he wore her like his unnecessarily ragged coat. He had Berthe’s eyes, and my own.
“You are here to see Maman,” he said. “But you are supposed to be dead.”
Susanne and Sabine were quiet and round-eyed; Christiane held herself very still, at an artificial angle, at Charles’s side.
“As you can see, I am not. Just living in Paris.”
“Do you know artists there?” he said, somewhat in spite of himself. “I am an artist.” Uncle Charles sighed and Susanne suppressed a giggle.
“You take after our mother, then.”
“Monsieur Maillard, your sister’s husband, is an engineer,” said Charles. I swallowed.
“Monsieur Maillard’s first patent was for a table extender,” I said, with a silent apology to the man. “That is for when a table must be more generous than was previously planned. As this one has been to me; and I thank you, Christiane.”
“Maman has told me about you,” Jean-Louis said. He and I were alone, walking back to the Hôtel de Gascogne. Past the old narrow, blackened poustrelle. One could get lost among them, even though by Paris standards, the area was small. Poustrelle de las Houmettos. It sounded like a place the ghosts would live, and I thought they did.
“Has she? Other than my death, that is?”
Jean-Louis made an unintelligible scoffing sound. “I knew you weren’t dead. Only that you had shamed the family. Are you a thief?”
“No, Jean-Louis. And what does our mother think of your artistic ambitions?”
“She has always said we were alike, and I will do what she could not. When she dies, I will go to Paris, to the Beaux-Arts,” he added. “In Paris, you were inside, during the siege?” His eyes round.
“Yes.”
“They say you ate rats; is it true? How?”
“How would you eat them if you had to?”
“With a lot of sauce!”
“Indeed. And the brewery ones were much tastier than those from the sewers.”
“Did you kill them yourself?”
“No, we bought them at the butcher.” Tales of the siege were made for such boys.
“What about the zoo animals? Camels and bears and monkeys?”
“I saw them in the butcher’s window, just like chickens and ducks. But you know—it was a serious business, Jean-Louis.”
The Basilique Sainte-Marie was made of pale stone blocks, like the Préfecture in Paris; only it had huge windows and a garnished gothic entry, below which we stood.
“Do you want to see your epitaph? I can get inside.”
Beyond the archways, an arcaded porch, two strong square towers. Jean-Louis led me past carved oak choir stalls (like caskets for the seated), then to a small chapel, tucked under a stone carving and hidden behind a stack of old chairs. All of the dust and mildew tickled my nose, and I began to sneeze. Affixed to the wall was the usual plastering of plaques, emblazoned with commemorative platitudes.
JEAN-JACQUES RIGAULT, 1818–1860. IN LOVING MEMORY.
EUGéNIE LOUISE RIGAULT, 1845–1861. MAY MERCIFUL GOD FIND AND WALK WITH HER.
“She blames herself for your life,” said Jean-Louis. And suddenly he was half an orphan, a boy whose mother was ill and dying and had been bitter for as long as he could remember. He did not remember her when she was young, when she was an artist herself.
The false gold band pressed against my finger; my heart snagged. Because of it, I would vanish from here like a ghost. Sometime in the future, Jean-Louis would remember, perhaps, and wonder if our meeting had happened at all . . . Madame Maillard? Why, no such person exists . . . or she does, but she is someone very different.
“Do you remember our father?” asked Jean-Louis sadly.
“Of course,” I said. “I have an idea. Let’s go taste the foie gras they are offering at the hotel, and I’ll tell you about him. To begin with, he didn’t like the stuff, said it tasted like geese smelled . . .”
By the time I sent Jean-Louis back across the square, the last of the foie gras tasters had left, the staff were clearing champagne glasses and sweeping up the leavings. Toast crumbs. Empty bottles. A rind of cheese. Slipped under my door was a note from my uncle. I was to come to the place Salinis at three the next day to see my mother.
“I will let you be; ring if you require anything,” Charles said to me, and gestured to a bell pull to the side of the hearth. He softly departed and the room narrowed; darkened. We stood, facing each other, my mother and I; because she refused to seat herself even though she was hardly able to stand. Her penumbral cloud had descended; settled and spread in the room like an infection; and indeed, she was like the malades at Lourdes: suffused with illness. The table on which her hand rested had a marble surface and dark, whorled legs. On it were her miniatures, made so long ago—small painted jewels in their gilt frames, the ivory now as sallow as the whites of her eyes. There was my father, my uncles, my grandparents; the baby Charles. My own small portrait had once stood among them.
I felt dizzy and needed to touch something solid. On my finger, the Limoges wedding band felt cold and heavy. Oh, Maman. So proud, lovely—but the face in front of me could hardly be translated from the original. Her thin-lipped mouth was set above a heavy neck; her wrists and ankles, once so beautifully turned, were creased with the bloat of flesh on bone. There was a sickly sweet smell that was vaguely familiar—medicine and eau de vie? My mother’s fingers, once slim and tapered, with strong, perfectly oval nails, were discolored; swollen. Her old wedding band could never have fit on these hands; the one she wore was larger, and plain. My grandmother’s ring. I recognized it.
The tip of her tongue, caught by her teeth from long habit, protruded just slightly. And her eyes, their whites yellow-tinged, glittered like jet; the licking flame, faint, veiled; a sly, hungry fire. Her step forward was a laborious, burdened movement, the flesh of another woman heaped upon her once-graceful form. Her hands groped for a support. That much, at least—stubborn pride—was Berthe all over. She must usually rely on a cane, one that she had refused today.
“Maman—let me help you.”
She stared at me, up and down. Her glance rested, solid as a rock, on my left hand. White lies, black magic; broken crockery; a boy’s kisses still warm on my lips . . . nothing could touch what she knew. I was sixteen again, and transparent to her.
“You have no right to that word in this house,” she said, at last. Her voice issued from a ravaged throat, but it was the same voice. My heart, that absurd, hopeful instrument, turned to stone, and the sick and queasy nausea of a lifetime welled up. I groped behind me and sat down; which I immediately realized was a mistake, on this battlefield. A cunning, satisfied expression traced my mother’s face as she stared at me.
“I wore black for five years. The first and second for your father. The third and fourth for your grandfather; the fifth for you.”
She stared back, her eyes cold, and the room was silent, but for the heavy wheeze of her breath. It was cold, but there was no fire, nor hope of one, it seemed. She shifted slightly; continued to look at me with the same glittering stare.
“You didn’t think you would just be permitted to run off? A Rigault daughter? A Daudet granddaughter? With that—criminal who stole the harvest, bought it cheap, starved out your aunt and cousin and half the village, if it weren’t for Besson to lend?” I closed my eyes. Blink, and let Berthe tell the story her way. Blink, and it is true. Blink, and you believe what she says, for half a lifetime. What she says bends lives; contours them to her meaning. It was always this way. It is no different now. “Yes. A fine business for you to be mixed up with.”
“You left,” I said, quietly, helplessly.
“Your grandfather and I searched every town from here to Rouen.”
I looked up.
“We would have taken you back—even so. We investigated the matter thoroughly. My father tracked you down in Paris, through the police. We
did not want to give you up, I did not want to give you up. But it was definitive. It was too late.” Her voice dropped from a throaty whisper to a scratch. “How dare you come to this house.” Scratch like rat’s feet; like the nib of a pen . . . Sickness engulfed me, rising from my gut, that dizziness—the old feeling—that had followed me everywhere, everywhere, since Tillac, or even before . . . when had it begun? Perhaps it had always been there. Perhaps it had begun with her.
“The authorities in Paris wrote you off for a thief and a whore. My own daughter.” She spat the words. “I doubted at first, how could I not? I would not believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. And so they finally sent it to me, a copy of the police register that bore your name. Your name, and mine—I tore out my own heart to think of what you had done. I refused to sign the paper. A notary had to do it for me. Then his silence was bought.”
“Maman—” I whispered. Why did you not help me—?
“You were dead to me after that. I mourned for a year and then put it away. Life—such as it was—went on. And now that I’ve had a good look at you—” Her voice changed, became a whine. High-pitched, out of body, like an insect’s scream. “Do you know what I am? What you made me into? I will tell you. Oh, I’ll go on—”
“I think you have said enough, Maman.”
“You did not write, you never came. Just walked away, with that man who ruined you, and even when you were dead you never came back. I ordered a crate from Condòm every few months. Eau-de-vie de vin. That is what your leaving did to me.” She steadied herself against the doorframe, gnarled old hands trembling. She was the very node of turmoil; a trouble inseparable from me, that webbed my life. She was every part of me; the knife edge of my own contamination. I didn’t need Paris to find corruption.
The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. Page 40