“Yes, of course, Grandmère,” Yola agreed, “but I don’t think that the pleasures of Paris will give him an appreciation of The Castle.”
“How can you be sure of that?” the Comtesse queried almost sharply. “He was happy here as a boy. Your grandfather was very fond of him and so was I.”
She was silent for a moment.
Then as if she looked back into the past she said slowly,
“He was a handsome little boy and his tutors spoke well of him. I remember your grandfather used to take him riding and say that he was fearless on a horse.”
“I am sure he is a sportsman,” Yola said, “but that is not to say, Grandmère, that he is the kind of man I want to marry.”
Her grandmother made a gesture with one of her hands and her rings glittered.
“My dear child,” she said softly, “the decision does not rest with you.”
“That is not true!”
“Not true?”
There was no doubt that the Comtesse was startled.
“I intend to choose my own husband.”
“But that is impossible!” her grandmother cried. “No French jeune fille has such a choice. Of course, if you loathe the Marquis on sight and he hates you, then excuses could be made and negotiations, even if they were already started, could be stopped and we could find someone else.”
“We?” Yola questioned.
“It is just a figure of speech,” her grandmother said with a smile. “As your father left everything in my hands, I have written to the Marquis – Leonide, as I used to call him – to ask him to stay with us next month.”
“You have already written to him?” Yola questioned.
“I have not, of course, said anything specific or binding,” her grandmother replied quickly, “but the Marquis is a man of the world. He will read between the lines and I have a feeling that he was waiting to hear from me.”
“Why should you think that?”
“I gathered from your father, of course, and as I did not know he was going to die, I did not press him for details that there was already an understanding between him and the Marquis that when you were old enough you should be affianced.”
“I do not believe that Papa would have forced me into a marriage without first consulting me!”
Yola’s voice was firm and there was a note of rebellion in it, which her grandmother did not miss.
“I am sure, ma petite, he would have discussed it with you. I know how much you meant to each other and your father would never have made you unhappy.”
“It will make me very unhappy,” Yola said, “to be married off to a man of whom I know nothing. You said yourself, Grandmère, that you have not seen him since he was twelve. How do you know what he is like now?”
Her grandmother was silent and Yola went on,
“The girls at school talked of him as if he was Don Juan, Casanova and the Devil himself all rolled into one!”
“Oh, no! That is not true!” her grandmother cried.
“They said it was true,” Yola replied. “I used to get tired of hearing of the exploits of the Marquis just as I was sick of hearing of the different ladies who were favoured by the Emperor.”
“There is no comparison between the two,” the Comtesse said swiftly. “Louis Napoleon may be Emperor of France, but he is not a man I would welcome here. The Marquis’s family is as good as our own and he has Beauharnais blood in his veins.”
She paused to look a little apprehensively at the darkness in her granddaughter’s eyes before she went on,
“Of course you know that Montereau Castle was destroyed by the Revolutionaries and their estates confiscated, while we here were so fortunate.”
Just for a moment Yola’s expression softened.
She had always been touched by the fact that during the French Revolution when Anjou was one of the chief battlegrounds of the Republicans and Royalists, General Santerre had arrived from Paris with a troop of revolutionary reinforcements.
Then miraculously the beauty and the atmosphere of the Garden of France had cooled their ardour so that they had laid down their muskets and cast off their accoutrements.
That was why so many castles in the Loire valley had not been destroyed or burnt and the families who owned them had not lost their lives.
“So you are thinking,” Yola said slowly, “that the Marquis has been waiting unmarried all these years to own Beauharnais?”
“It is what your father wished,” the Comtesse replied, “and you have to marry someone.”
“Why in such a hurry?” Yola enquired. “I have only just left school. I have seen nothing of the world and, I thought, Grandmère, that at least I would have a Season in Paris.”
“Paris is now nothing but a sink of iniquity!” the Comtesse exclaimed harshly. “The Emperor and Empress reign over a régime of such extravagance and such depravity that they have scandalised every decent country in Europe.”
Yola looked startled.
“Do you really believe that is true?”
“It is true,” the Comtesse said grimly, “and this International Exhibition that is taking place this year is only a ruse of the Emperor to cover up from the eyes of the world his deficiencies in other respects.”
While her grandmother spoke so positively, Yola was silent.
It would have been impossible for the pupils at the fashionable finishing school at St. Cloud not to be aware of a great deal of what took place in Paris.
Girls, who were supposed to be blind and deaf until they emerged from the schoolroom into the salon, heard and repeated every item of gossip that was exchanged between their parents, their parents’ friends and, of course, the servants.
Her father had often said, Yola remembered, that people always behaved as if the servants had no feelings and the children were morons.
“They talk over their heads as if they did not exist,” he said, “and yet I am convinced that more scandal is carried from house to house by the Major Domos and grooms than actually travels from salon to salon.”
Yola had often visited the other pupils in their homes and she found that the parents talked to each other when their daughters were present in a manner that they would have thought twice about in the presence of their friends. And many things that were said concerned the Marquis de Montereau.
“What has ‘le Marquis Méchant’ been up to now?” Yola heard one attractive Parisian say to her husband when she and their daughter were supposedly looking at photograph albums in the salon.
“What do you imagine?” had been the reply. “And it will mean another duel, another affaire scandaleuse and one can only hope to Heaven that the newspapers don’t get hold of it.”
“He is incorrigible!” the lady of the house had exclaimed.
It was not a censorious criticism, but almost one of delight.
Thinking of it now, Yola realised that, if she married the Marquis de Montereau as her grandmother wished, she would not have a marriage of frustration and privation like her fathers, but one of endless frivolity, extravagance and scandal!
Something hard and resolute rose within her to make her feel that she must fight every inch of the way to prevent herself from being swept up the aisle with such a man.
It was inconceivable that her father, who had loved her, should wish her to embark on a life that would obviously be one of unhappiness.
For how could she keep up with the sophisticated society in which the Marquis moved?
She was sure that he was almost a ringleader of those in the pleasure-seeking Capital who sought amusement twenty-four hours a day and had no time for anything else.
She remembered reading in one of the newspapers, which the Headmistress of her school would not have approved of the girls perusing, a review of the Season written by an obviously exhausted critic,
“We are in a Parisian Paradise or a Parisian Hell. Every night since January the first has been spent in festivals, spectacles, concerts and dances. It is a perpetual comin
g-and-going, a constant to-ing and fro-ing, an unending treadmill.”
‘Is that what I want of life?’ Yola now asked herself and she knew the answer was a very forceful ‘no!’
Aloud she said,
“I wish, Grandmère, that you had asked me before you wrote to the Marquis. I thought it would be pleasant to have a quiet time before we started to entertain.”
She smiled to make her words seem less censorious.
Then she went on,
“I want to renew my acquaintance with our employees on the estate, to visit the farms, to find out what has been done in the fields and in the gardens. It will all take time.”
“You have a month, ma chérie,” her grandmother replied. “I have invited the Marquis for the beginning of June.”
Yola pressed her lips together to prevent herself from retorting that The Castle was hers and she would entertain when and whom she wished.
Then she knew that she could not be unkind or cross with her grandmother, whom she loved.
She rose, bent down and kissed the elderly woman’s soft cheek before she said,
“When we hear from the Marquis, Grandmère, I think it would be an excellent idea if we invite some other eligible bachelors to meet several of my friends I went to school with. It would then not be so obvious why he has been summoned to Beauharnais.”
She knew by the startled expression in her grandmother’s eyes that, although her letter had been very discreet, it had in fact made it very clear that the invitation was not just for pleasure.
‘I have no intention of marrying him,’ Yola thought to herself.
At the same time, she knew it was going to be very difficult to circumvent her grandmother’s plans, especially as she obviously intended to keep reiterating that it had been her father’s wish.
Leaving the salon, Yola walked through the long stone corridors to the room that had been particularly her father’s.
Her mother had hardly ever entered it and it was here that he had sat with his daughter often talking late into the night.
The walls were lined with the books from which he had taught her and there were just two of their favourite pictures on the walls that had been taken from other parts of The Castle.
It was a large and beautiful room and had been used by the reigning Comtes since the sixteenth century.
It was here that the Knights in ancient days had held their Councils of War and Yola felt it was a suitable place for her to plan her own campaign.
“It is going to be a hard battle,” she said aloud, as if talking to her father.
She closed the door behind her and walked across the room to the large desk where he had always sat.
Yola settled herself in the high-back red velvet chair, which was embroidered with the Beauharnais Coat of Arms.
Then she looked down at the blotter her father had used, at the great silver inkpot that had been in the family for three hundred years and at all the other items that littered the desk and which were particularly his own.
Quite suddenly it seemed to Yola impossible that he was no longer with her and that she was alone.
Because she was a woman, her grandmother and the rest of the family would force her into marriage as quickly as possible so that she would have a man to dominate her, to force her to do as he wished.
“How could you have died before I grew up, Papa?” Yola asked.
She remembered how they had so often talked of the things they would do together.
“I will take you to balls,” her father had said, “and I know, my dearest, you will be the most beautiful woman in the room.”
She had laughed at him.
“You are flattering me, Papa! – something you have always said you would never do.”
“I am appraising you as I might a stranger,” her father answered, “and I am not being prejudiced when I tell you that you are very different from the other girls of your age.”
“Why do you think that?” Yola asked, eager for him to praise her.
“It is not just that you are beautiful. There have been beautiful women in the Beauharnais family for generations,” her father said slowly, “and it is not because you are instinctively graceful and walk as if your feet hardly touch the ground.”
He paused before he added,
“It is, Yola, ma petite, something very different.”
“Then what is it?”
“It is difficult to put into words,” her father replied. “Perhaps because I wanted a child so desperately and because I beseeched Heaven to send me one who would embody all my ideals, you seem to me to be a gift from God.”
He spoke very seriously and Yola looked at him wide-eyed.
“Do you – really mean – that, Papa?” she asked in a low voice.
“I mean it because it is true,” the Comte answered. “It is what you think and feel inside, my dearest, that shines through you like a light and which makes you beautiful beyond the conventional meaning of the word.”
Yola put her arms round his neck and pressed her cheek close against his.
“I want to be everything you want me to be,” she said, “but you will have to help me, Papa.”
“That is what I have tried to do ever since you were born,” he said. “I love your mind, Yola, for it makes everything you say sharp, clear and logical, which is very different from the usual scatter-brained feminine observations.”
Yola smiled.
“You are being very scathing and critical.”
“I am saying what I think,” he replied and then he went on, “And I respect your courage.”
“Which I have inherited from you.”
“Before you were born, I wished you to be a son,” the Comte said, “but now I am very content with my daughter. You are original, inventive and you have a mental and physical bravery that is worthy of a man.”
“And who could ask for higher praise?” Yola asked almost mockingly. “I wish I had been a boy for your sake, Papa. At the same time I cannot help feeling that it might be rather amusing to be a woman if in fact I have all the qualities that you credit me with.”
“Amusing for you, but undoubtedly painful for those who love you,” the Comte said quietly.
“Painful?” Yola questioned.
“Many men will love you and I suppose I shall be very jealous of them. But because I believe that you are like me, you will love only one person in your life with all your heart and soul.”
Yola had hardly understood what he meant at the time, but now his words came back to her forcefully.
She knew that, if she married the Marquis or anyone else without loving him with all her heart and soul, her marriage would be one of misery and despair as her father’s has been.
‘How can Grandmère expect me to accept the Marquis, knowing what I have heard about him?’ she asked herself.
Then she knew that, while her grandmother might be determined to return as quickly as she could to the South of France, she was at the same time behaving in an entirely normal and correct manner in marrying Yola off as soon as possible.
It was exactly what any other Frenchwoman in the same position would do automatically.
She had a rich, eligible, attractive granddaughter and the only surprise lay in the fact that she was prepared to accept a mere Marquis as Yola’s husband and the future owner of The Castle.
She might have looked higher amongst the Bourbon Princes who still existed despite the Revolution.
“To marry the Marquis de Montereau is impossible!” Yola reiterated.
Everything she had ever heard about him seemed to be repeated and repeated again in her mind.
She knew that he typified the jeunesse dorée of French Society and, thinking back, she was quite certain he also shone in the world of the courtesans.
A French jeune fille was expected to be very innocent and to have no knowledge of the women who embellished Paris like beautiful, exotic and extremely expensive flowers.
But Yola would have
been very stupid if she had not realised that there were two social circles in Paris that intermingled in a manner that would not have been permitted in any other country in Europe.
There was the Imperial family headed by Napoleon III, who was married to the Empress Eugénie, the beautiful Spaniard whom the French suspected of urging her husband continually towards war.
Yola had heard that life at the Tuileries Palace was dull and bourgeois and laughed at by the real French aristocrats who wished to disparage everything about Louis Napoleon Bonaparte.
But in his endless pursuit of beautiful women, the Emperor gave them every ground for criticism.
He was closely followed by other members of the Imperial family, Prince Napoleon, first cousin of the Emperor, was one of the most gifted yet controversial and significant figures in the Second Empire.
When Yola was young, he had become an Imperial Highness and a Senator and her father had read her his speeches, which showed him to be a champion of democracy.
But when she was at school, the Prince’s private life was the subject of girlish giggles and much whispering in corners.
She learnt that like the Emperor his mistresses were legion. A father of one of her friends, not realising that she was listening, had said,
“I called on Prince Napoleon this morning. I had heard there was always a petticoat left trailing in his private apartments and this morning there were two!”
Indivisibly in her mind the Prince was linked with the Marquis and she was sure that they were each as bad as the other.
It was these two men and the Emperor who had allowed the demi-mondaines to encroach on the Social world.
In her grandmother’s time no lady of quality and certainly no young girl would have known that such creatures even existed, but the girls at school had whispered names that at first meant nothing to Yola and yet she heard them repeated again and again.
It had been impossible for her not to wonder who these ladies were who apparently filled the Bois de Boulogne with their smart horses and chic appearance and gave parties, which were reported in the newspapers as if they were Roman orgies.
It all seemed very strange and Yola had longed this last year for her father to be there to explain to her what it all meant.
64 The Castle Made for Love Page 2