The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.

by Carole DeSanti

  I collect news, sort it as I am able. Some is happy: Beausoleil (who excels at avoiding actual battlefronts) plans a visit to Paris. And Odette writes from London: the French courts under the reinstated republic finally ruled against her. But it does not matter; she prefers London and she is in love. Surprise! It is Maxime Lisbonne, the Commune fighter and Henri’s friend, whom I saw two years ago on the rue d’Enfer. He escaped the massacre and deportations—the shape-shifting devil—dressed in disguise, carrying a trunk of his old actor’s costumes. I remembered his soft-looking mustache, his clear eyes, and my heart lifted for my old friend. So he and Odette go out in style, dressed as whomever they please.

  I will write to her soon. Lisbonne will have information.

  . . . The rising, falling, unsteadiness of one’s spirit. A sudden desire to eat and drink with abandon; make lists of what to buy and to do—a new restaurant open around the corner; friends to call upon (as soon as one finds out if they are alive)—even with bags still unpacked, by the door. Then a new ingress of information, and the need to crawl between the sheets.

  Francisque, ambitions rewarded, arrived one afternoon on a reinstated government arm; sat on the bergère chair, looking pinched despite her fashionable trappings. A year ago she had seen Amélie behind a prison fence at Satory, near Versailles. Arrested with others in the Women’s Union, penned in like an animal, her gown in tatters. Our old comrade of the card table made a bitter sound. The fashionable set at Versailles had gone on “outings” to see the Commune prisoners.

  “You cannot imagine,” said Francisque. “It is beyond describing, Eugénie. If we had said anything we would have been arrested ourselves. Even to speak about it, now.” She fell silent, than added, “You know, she had lovely patrician features, Amélie. She did not look like ‘a proletarian.’ There was a lot of talk in the papers about who looked degenerate, ferocious. And that is how the guards decided who the Commune had ‘conscripted against their will.’ And you know Amé. She never gave up her manicures, even when she worked at the balloon factory. Her hands and feet were smooth; she would have buffed them at Satory if she could. So she went to trial. Some in the military believed that women should not . . . have received such treatment. In the end she was among the deportees. They say there will be an amnesty, eventually. They say.”

  “And you, Francisque?”

  But Francisque must not stop long; her “arm” was waiting; his elbow not a patient one.

  Along the main “boulevard” in Tillac—the village in which I was born, and where I returned to my father’s house after my mother’s death—lay a pathway of pounded red earth. On a bench under the trees, the old ones sat, jowls and chins sunk to their chests, shaking their heads at the events in Paris. Ah, these times, and what things are possible. I walked through the center of town, touching the old walls. Found the bench, sat at twilight with the evening air soft against my skin. At first tensed for the weight of a hand, a shadow creeping up behind. But there were no police, no prowling hopefuls there. You might think one would forget, with the passing of years, but the body remembers every touch, the sensation of a falling shadow. I am black with handprints. They haunt me in dreams, or when I am traveling from one place to another.

  The first night in Tillac, a ghost came to my room. The door stood open by a breath. It entered, pushed it open as only a lover would, came and kneeled down by my bed. I wasn’t afraid. Laid fingertips against my temples, brushing my hot eyelids. Cool fingers. For a moment neither of us breathed and I felt my heart move. Deep in the buried place where it lives.

  People talked. They asked questions. Became less shy, as they saw me putting things to right in the empty place, and when they heard that my tongue remembered their patois. They asked, in disbelief: Has all of Paris burned—the Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries, all ashes? Had the Seine become a bloody streak of red, were the rumors true—twenty, thirty thousand killed? Gunned down by firing squad, buried in trenches—such numbers, to a tiny village, were impossible to comprehend. Was it true that women joined the fighting with the men? Why had they not stayed with the children? Did girls carry kerosene in milk cans to and from building to building, setting fires like harpies, witches? (I said I did not think so.) Had prisoners lined up in the Luxembourg Garden to be shot? I had not been in Paris then, I tried to explain; had left before the capital became a battleground, before it was engulfed in flames. I could only tell them what I knew. But it did not matter. To them, I was Paris.

  A few nights after I arrived the sky was purple dusk; little birds were dipping and scooping down toward the marshes; the scent of wild thyme. A lifetime apart from the Paris I left, with the milky night air soft; green ridges of vines fading into the twilight and stretching forward. The promise of rest tonight and fruit tomorrow, and the cold sweet water that comes up from deep in the ground. I had forgotten, living in the city for so long, that figs and flowers come up from the earth, grow for nothing. From here the world seems lit with possibility, not yet ruined. Possibility. A breath of it . . . Or God’s deception come again?

  Afternoons, the skies could turn blue-black as midnight, and the storms moved in from the mountains. Thunder crashed, lightning branched across the sky, and I rushed to gather up my cups and bowls and ink pens; ran back inside to bolt the shutters. The storms lasted half an hour, and after, the sky was clear blue again, with white wisps of cloud. The slates on the terrace, which had sizzled hot earlier, were cool and wet; covered with leaves that had dropped from the trees. A violet, rain-cleared evening sky, and the field poppies on the other side of the wall were bright crimson.

  No matter that I dream that my hair is falling out. Tufts of it, wisps, were left, and the sores on my scalp, once hidden, were red and angry. The tide had gone out, leaving the scarred beach of my skull. I feared that I would die poor yet, of some wasting disease.

  After the rain I went out in the garden to cut lavender, rosemary, fennel. Metal rang against pots and bowls; from the neighbors’ hearths, wood smoke from a kitchen fire drifted out over the terrace. Small birds from the marshes were roasted over vine shoots. The locals ate them whole, making a crunching mouthful of the heads. I never touched them for fear of bones stuck in my throat.

  Down the terrace steps a path led to a shaded grove with a stream running past. The village was out of sight up the hill; the trees slender-trunked, silver-skinned sentinels. The rush of water over stones drowned the swimming of my thoughts, settled and calmed the terrible clanging of the head. Breathing the icy cold of the stream, quiet came for whole minutes at a time. It was the edge of something not-known, the old magic fountains. Breath of wind against my cheek, a tingling feeling from the crown of my head, brushing.

  But after a few moments, this was no refuge because the insects made themselves known and drove me back up the path. Small and large, winged and crawling; humming, buzzing, beating their way into the thick of the wildflowers. After the bees, with their dark, greasy wings and obscene pulsing bodies, come the hummingbirds, insectlike, with their green-slicked backs and needle bills; then the black-and-yellows again. They were at it before the sun rose; still there well after the terrace was too dark for reading, their dark anxious legs clambering from bloom to bloom. In the dark of night, the lesser mouths of the moths attached themselves to the blossoms with dusty wings fluttering; finally the stems hung down exhausted, bits of blossom scattered on the ground. Like dragging lace, ruffled skirts, and soiled crinolines, a last breath of perfume when evening falls. The pots of lavender on the terrace were mercilessly distressed at night until I wanted them to dispense venom instead of sweetness, just like the earth shoots up poisonous plants when it has been disturbed . . . a beautiful, deadly blossom can repel all that touches it.

  The villagers remembered quite well my having left with Stephan after the Nérac fires. “Ah, he was handsome, and you were young,” they said. “What do you expect?”

  Writing is a loathsome task. If I had any talent for it I would paint
, or sculpt, or compose music. With words, you try to say a thing, if you can convince yourself it is worth setting down, find the beginning of it at all; if, once you begin, you can follow the thread. To write at all one must feel something other than deadened by the press of human events, the terrible flat uselessness of the world. To turn its broken fragments this way and that, make sense of the thing, create logic, sequence, in the midst of shattering. What is the way to look at it; what is the vindication? Why can a woman not answer a single question about her own life? . . . My own siege was fought from invisible barricades; and in some ways, the world that had betrayed me made more sense when it too was gone. And still it is that one must live not only in the midst of one’s times, but despite them; all at once—

  I buried my heart, after leaving Berthe. There was a night—in our quarters on the rue Serpente, on the old pink velvet chaise—when I felt my heart in my chest—the heart that loves, therefore it is—my poor heart, so insufficient to what it desired. I took it in my hands and wrapped it, as we used to wrap smoldering irons to warm the featherbeds in Tillac. It was so hot that it scorched the inner layers of the muslin. But I wrapped it in more layers, and when it was a white bundle, carried it south. Flew with it over the Loire Valley, swinging past the Dordogne. Carried it over the furrowed, rutted roads and past the far fields, to the tree where I’d once lain—mostly innocent, as it was. A tall pine, branches sweeping the ground like skirts. A known tree; a place understood. And so I dug a hole where its roots were coming up, knobby, out of the ground, and buried my heart among those roots. Heal, here. Draw sustenance, grow stronger. And I left my heart, and traveled on my road, and whenever I thought of it again, I said, It is safe. Safer than it would be with me.

  Ah, but I was wrong.

  In Paris, it’s hard to come by good information, because people want to forget. Someone says that during that time in May known as Bloody Week, Henri was a hero, putting up a stiff fight against the government troops at a stronghold on the Left Bank. And that Jolie was firing at the rue Blanche barricade, shoulder-to-shoulder with Louise. Do I want to learn the truth, if it is even possible; replace the stories, gossip, noble lies, terrible speculations? Write to Lisbonne, look into the court records? Because the facts might be worse even than I imagine. For Jolie, I can still hope that if she died at the barricades it was swift, with Henri or Louise at her side, and that there was some glory in it—though I do not believe in martyrs nor, I think, did she. But Jolie had seen prisons enough for one lifetime, and dying of the pox would hardly suit her. It has been two years, but I hear her voice every day, see her cigarette waving in the air. Questions—the unresolved, unanswered, the unknown—tug at corners of my heart. Henri? A born warrior, without the privileges of a Lisbonne. Had Henri a chance of escaping the Versaillais death march, the broom that swept the capital clean?

  I pull out my stationery box. Dear Odette, I begin. But my pen falters.

  Amidst the pile on my desk, a note from Auguste Maillard: Chasseloup’s painting, An Unknown Girl, was lost in the bombardment at Neuilly. Would I be willing to sit for another? If so, to contact Gustav Vollard, who was in touch with several artists.

  My lawyer sends a large invoice and writes that the case for recherche de la paternité brought by the de Chaveigneses is to be dismissed. I almost laugh.

  There is a small stack of my own letters, addressed to Berthe because at almost thirteen, she would be able to read them. I still do not know where she is. With the assistance of this same lawyer, I engaged a man in Calcutta to investigate Stephan’s whereabouts. That was six months ago, and the effort and expense was not offering much reward.

  I begin to shift things into piles.

  The dress is green, a good polished linen, with white lace at the neck; the umbrella is black. The hat is a galette, a flat black cake. It is a sultry summer day; threatening skies, dust rising from the street. Men are rebuilding the city with enormous efficiency. All around me is a rainbow of stone, the insides of stone, all shades of blue-to-gray. New foundations, doors and windows and roofs.

  Within my lifetime the old walls were brought down. Under the empire, boys earned enough in seven months to support their families the year round. Heaps of dirt and brick and stone, mounds of clean earth were pulled out from under tumbledown houses and the poor were pushed out of the center to the perimeters. Now the French people—my people—are raising the indemnity owed for the war. They are determined; already astonishing the world. I am stopped, now, in a sudden glare of sun through the clouds; dust and tears burn my eyes.

  An omnibus careens down from the top of the rue du Mail, heading away from Montmartre to the Great Cross, the wide expanse of intersection where Saint-Germain meets Saint-Michel. Near where Henri may have fought. The Salamandre on Gay-Lussac is open for business; a girl at the bar—a new sight all over Paris—wipes down the zinc with a cloth. At the Luxembourg gates, women steer baby carriages toward tranquil, buzzing comfort, as though it had not, so recently, been a place to line up and be shot. Couples walk arm and arm and a kiosk offers glasses of beer; pressed lemon and water. I turn onto the boulevard Saint-Jacques. I had meant to veer toward Val de Grace, but now, instead, I am on the rue d’Enfer. Gas lamps and trees in full leaf, exposed brick and crumbling plaster walls, a wooden fence and spiked iron gates; the afternoon sun pounding down, hot sweat running down under my arms and breasts, trickling down into my stays. Skirts—all bustles, now—and top hats mingle down the block. A crowd gathers for an exhibition of some kind, and a cool dark place out of the sun.

  The pictures are lined up on the walls and divided by quartier. They are photographs, some of the first ever taken in Paris. Each section begins with a map; the monument, building, or street labeled in sharp black script, homage to the known city: école de medicine. hôpital hommes vénériens. My heart slows and my blood cools amid the murmur of voices and a swish of skirts. The light in the pictures like the brightness of midday diffused though a sudden rain. The sun comes out again, dazzling through the clouds. Just for a few moments, the street glistens, wet and empty; but everyone has rushed indoors.

  The streets in these pictures are not lifelike, but empty. Shops without customers, as they were during the first siege and in anticipation of the second. The very kiosk I had just passed, the one by the Luxembourg gates, is shown with windows open for business, but the little round cork mats on the counter have no beer glasses upon them. Even the pissoirs are empty; no one fumbles with trouser buttons. In the Opéra-Madeleine section, on one corner stands a flower shop with roses standing in pails; on another, a china shop with white bowls in the window; opposite, a poster offering translations of documents and letters. Behind these, at the top of the street, peculiarly angled is a seven-story building with its gabled roof, spots in windows high enough to receive afternoon light. The windows of the lower flats are shuttered; eggs and butter are for sale in a shop on the ground level. These pictures could not have been taken during the emptiness of the siege, then, because there would have been no eggs. My heart begins to pound and my breath comes faster; my stomach, calm just a few moments ago, lurches.

  Someone behind me is explaining the camera’s mechanism. These streets were full of people, he explains, but because of the swiftness of their movements and the length of time needed to burn the image onto the plate, only the standing structures, radiant with light, remain. He is pointing at something that looks like a misty smudge on the surface, and I place my face very close, straining to see what has vanished.

  And indeed, to look closely is to see light smears resolve into eerie silhouettes: a nipped-in waistline, the flare of crinoline; the round shape of a stovepipe hat. At a theater at matinee time, a crowd entering in a great rush of movement. What appear to be clouds of smoke occluding the photograph resolve, at a closer look, into umbrellas. A mist is two heads leaning together, a couple walking arm in arm; and here is a single, spinning, silver-spoked carriage wheel—captured without axles, horse, or driver; hove
ring above the cobbles . . . the luminosity of these pictures is not rain but light diffused through vanished movement. In a picture of a junk shop, a jumble of chipped cups and plates, tables without a leg, chairs without backs . . . a cloudy smear at head level. Whose, and on what errand? While the exposure was taken, shop doors swung open and closed; lemonade was paid for and drunk, carriages wheeled in and out of the frame . . . Every picture packed with the living, with the motion of life both evident and evanesced at once. I go back to the beginning and look at every picture again. On one map I find the Royal Observatory, a block marked ENFANTS ASSISTéS. No camera could have captured the swift, furtive movements there. But the tour was long closed, anyway. The new authorities thought better of it.

  But it is late in the day, and the patronne gives a sigh and pulls a black curtain across one end of the gallery. Another woman at the end of the hall has been looking as intently as I, making marks on a small tablet. I had to blink; her outline reminded me of Mlle. C.

  Back outside, I blink again in the sunlight and find the café; order a lemonade, which warms quickly in the heat. Bits of pulp floating on top, turning from pale yellow to grayish while the boulevard fills and empties.

  I have two letters with me, and I open the first now. Its postmarks and many stamps tell me that it is from Chandannagar, West Bengal. It is not from the man I hired; but the black ink has a familiar slant. There is a name, and an address, of another lawyer’s office—this one in Paris. Tickets are waiting, writes Stephan. Two, because I will need to employ a companion for this journey. The ship is the India Queen and it sails for Calcutta in September.