The Porcelain Dove

by Sherman, Delia

  Perhaps 'twas to try this devotion, or simply to display it, that monsieur allowed—more, encouraged—my mistress to hold levées like her mother. He would invite his own friends to attend his wife's toilette, lead them on to talk about her beauty, and watch them ogle her with a painful glitter in his narrow black eyes. Me, I'd run back and forth with pounce-boxes and aigrettes, trying to prevent this gentleman from stepping on Doucette and that gentleman from fondling my bosom, all the while puzzling over M. le duc's odd behavior. On the one hand, he seemed to be dangling my mistress before the other men like a glittering bauble: See, this is mine and not yours. Is it not splendid? On the other, he was clearly jealous of their eyes on her. And the bauble herself, my mistress, postured, preened, and chattered like the sulfur-crested cockatoo he had given her, that fanned its yellow crest and croaked "pretty lady" when you stroked it.

  This uncomfortable farce ended at last one morning at the end of August, in the presence of a silk-seller, a modiste, a mariner with a monkey to sell, the baronne's old friend abbé Pinchet, and one vicomte de Tergive.

  The vicomte was no friend of monsieur's, nor of madame's either, being one of those youthful lily-knights who amuse themselves with grown men's wives. Mme de Fleuru's chevalier d'Emplumer was another such, and hardly more notorious than this vicomte de Tergive, who must have oiled the lackeys' palms well to persuade them to allow an uninvited guest into madame's bedchamber. Within a bare minute of entering, he'd sprawled himself over the bergère and embarked upon such a pointed catalogue of my mistress' charms as caused M. le duc to throw up his hands and disappear into his dressing-room with a slam.

  Madame dropped her rouge-pot.

  "Husbands," purred the vicomte in a tone of great sympathy. "They have no generosity of heart."

  "That is not true," said madame with some spirit. "I am sure M. de Malvoeux has the most generous heart in the world, and, as I am among the silliest of women, I am very fortunate that it should be so."

  "He, too, is very fortunate, madame," said the vicomte, and gazed at her with a kind of melancholy smirk.

  "Oh? How is that?" Madame turned upon her stool and tilted her head like Doucette when she thought you had a bonbon for her. Very coquettish she looked in her loose-bodied robe, and yet 'twas so plain she had no idea of the vicomte's meaning that he was quite embarrassed how to answer and took snuff to cover his confusion.

  Lifting his eyeglass, the abbé examined first the sneezing vicomte and then the sailor's monkey. "What the vicomte means, madame, is that your husband is very fortunate in the possession of so loving a wife. Although most men, or most husbands, rather, find such love—dare I say it?—rather wearing on the nerves. After a while, of course."

  "A while?" said madame. "Three months? La, sir! A very short while indeed. I confess that I have seen no sign of such wearing. But as I have said, I am very silly, so perhaps I've missed the signs."

  The vicomte looked very annoyed; his voice took on a malicious edge. "Your femme de chambre is a monstrous pretty piece," he said.

  "Yes, my Berthe is very pretty. You cannot conceive how monsieur my husband admires her."

  The vicomte smiled, studied his impeccable nails. "Ah," he said. "I think I can." He glanced up at me; I bared my teeth in return and imagined how he'd look wearing a chamber pot.

  "The question with maids," said the abbé, shamelessly ogling my ankles, "is whether to have them safely plain and thereby offend one's eye, or pleasingly pretty and thereby offend one's honor. 'Tis a constant temptation to husbands, having pretty maids about."

  At last madame understood, for she grew quite pink. "Oh," she gasped. "How you dare!"

  Upon her words, monsieur emerged from his dressing-room and stood by the long-case clock with his shoulders hunched up to his ears and his dark eyes ablaze.

  "Out!"

  At that, the pie-faced boy and one of his fellows threw open the door and advanced meaningly. The abbé Pinchet lifted an eyebrow at the vicomte de Tergive, who shrugged, rose, bowed deeply, and strutted out between them with his nose in the air.

  "Out!" shrieked monsieur again, frightening the monkey into a chattering fit. "Out, out of my wife's bedchamber, every damned last one of you!"

  There was a general rush for the door, the modiste trailing ribbons and bonnets and the silk-seller clutching her wares helter-skelter in her arms. The last to leave was the abbé Pinchet, who turned at the threshold and leveled his glass at monsieur, then bowed himself out with an ironic flourish. The lackeys withdrew and gently shut the door. I prudently made for madame's dressing-room.

  "Stay, Duvet," said monsieur. "You must hear what I have to say. Adèle, I beg you pay no heed to the insinuations of those . . . toads, those popinjays, those poxed sons of underbred whores. Berthe is nothing beside your beauty—a black-browed wench, a bubo. I praised her only to please you."

  Weeping now, madame rose and went to him. He seized her head between his hands, thrusting his fingers through the curls I'd spent so long arranging and kissing her with such violence that my lips stung in sympathy. Then he sank to his knees, and, kissing her hands and arms, pulled her down upon the carpet in a froth of lace and satin. He unlaced her bodice and fondled her bosom and still I stood petrified, unsure whether I'd been dismissed, uncertain whether my mistress' moans were pain or passion. Passion, I suspected. I feared he meant to possess her before my eyes.

  "We will leave Paris, my love," he murmured as he teased up her skirts. "Paris is a trap, a sink, a brothel. We will go to the country, to Beauxprés." He began to unbutton himself. "Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow we will leave this place."

  Tomorrow. "With your leave, madame, I will begin to pack," I said, curtsied, and fled.

  CHAPTER THE THIRD

  In Which We Come to Beauxprés

  Once upon a time, there was a young femme de chambre who had never seen Beauxprés. She thought herself a connoisseur, urbane, with a fine taste in actresses and argument, a citizen of Paris and therefore a citizen of the world. I can just remember her, blind as an unweaned puppy whose world is a box and a bitch's teat. How frightened she was when there proved to be a wider world beyond! And how quickly that world drew in around her! Haven, prison, burden, bower—Beauxprés has been all these things to me. And after two centuries or more, 'tis grown like my own body, a place to look out of, not at.

  Jean, having been born here, I think has always felt so, and also the Maindurs, who have eyes only for their own obsessions. For Adèle, Beauxprés is the sumptuous mise-en-scène of her private dramas. And Colette—in spite of the life she has known here, growing older and wiser as no ghost has been known to grow before—Colette thinks of Beauxprés as the place where she was killed.

  Not that she's said so, to be sure; she's freer with philosophy than sentiment, our Colette. Yet from time to time, I've observed it: when her eye by chance alights on a case of fans or painted miniatures and her poppy face blanches with fury. Oh, I understand—never think I do not. I have even shared her rage. And I remember also my first sight of Beauxprés, how beautiful and terrible it seemed to me, like a Heavenly mansion or an enchanted castle.

  The journey from Paris to the high meadows of the Juras generally took five days when the roads were dry. Only five days. To me, who'd never ventured farther afield than M. du Fourchet's château in Montmorency, it might as well have been a two years' journey to Cathay.

  Besides madame's cockatoo and the lovebirds, monsieur had bought in Paris a dozen or so rarer specimens: redpolls and popinjays and emerald cuckoos from Brazil. These, with Doucette, Pompey the black page, and the unspeakable Dentelle, were my only traveling companions, madame riding alone with monsieur her husband in a second carriage. We set out before light. By dawn we were out of sight of the southernmost faubourgs of Paris; by dinner we were deep in the country. That night, for the first time in my life, I slept at an inn.

  This, I thought, was the world: this, I thought, was adventure.

  Each morning we rose at f
our, lashed the baskets of birds into the berline, and bumped along through the dust until two in the afternoon, when monsieur and madame dined. Dentelle, Pompey, and I would bolt down a glass of wine and a slab of meat while the horses were changed, for we must reach the inn in good time to feed the birds, order supper for the duc and duchesse, air their beds, and unpack their dressing-cases. We made a silent company; for Dentelle wouldn't lower himself to gossip, and Pompey (as far as I then knew) couldn't speak at all.

  I don't know what I expected to encounter as we drove south and east—flying pigs, no doubt, and men with two heads. The last thing I'd expected was that the land itself would change. For all I knew, the whole world was like the Île de France: flat as stretched cloth, with the sharp, gray steeples of little villages poking up from it like ill-secured pins. Imagine my surprise when the land began to wrinkle and, as we neared Dijon, to gather itself into deep folds thickly sewn with rows of vines. Eastwards towards Poligny, steep meadows were pleated above the road, and cornfields, and long, shadowy stretches of forest. Even the trees were different: shaggy, red-trunked, taller than the poplars and chestnuts I was accustomed to, hung, in the place of leaves, with black needles through which the wind sighed dismally.

  'Tis hard to believe, after two hundred years surrounded by firs, that there was ever a time when I'd never seen one, but there you are. I remember thinking they looked like church steeples ought to look—ought to, I say, for to my mind Jura steeples are barbaric things, shaped like flat-sided bells and gaudily tiled in scarlet and yellow and green. As for the villages themselves, I thought their inhabitants must be half-goat, so steeply were the houses canted up hillsides and tucked down gorges. More than once I had occasion to close my eyes against the sight of a bone-crushing drop from the narrow road, with red roofs and tiny green gardens clinging to it like boletus to a tree. I've journeyed a hundred times since then, to Nice and Bordeaux and Brittany and Lausanne, yet 'tis that first journey to Beauxprés sticks in my mind as the longest, the strangest, the most uncomfortable of them all.

  I remember the light was golden and slanted when at last we approached Beauxprés. All day we'd been driving through a fir forest—the Forêt des Enfans, Dentelle called it, ancient and masterless, haunted by ogres and wolf-masters and evil fairies. Parisienne as I was, I laughed at him, the louder for the darkness of the wood and the closeness of the air under the bearded firs. He'd scolded me, of course, which served to pass the time. Yet day and forest both seemed interminable, and I was at the end of my patience by the time we broke free of the trees at the edge of a wide plateau.

  Absurdly, it reminded me of a soup dish, flat and round and bordered all around with hills, with a great mound sitting in the midst of it like a green dumpling. The bottom of the dish was all meadows dotted with cows and fields in which the ripe corn shimmered like watered silk in the wind. Or perhaps 'twas my tears made it shimmer, tears of self-pity from racketing along mountain roads in an ill-sprung berline with the outraged chirps of a dozen basketted birds dinning in my ears. My stays were poked into my breasts, my spine was jolted through my cap, and I was beginning to fear I'd not live to see Paris and civilization again.

  "One hopes," remarked Dentelle out of a long silence, "that madame's servants will know to keep their place when we come to Beauxprés. 'Tis unbecoming to think oneself the equal of those who have served the ducs de Malvoeux for twenty generations."

  "La and mercy," I said. "And here was I, thinking your wrinkles and pustules were just ugliness, or too free a hand with the white-lead in your youth. Now I know you to be upwards of four hundred years old, I'll vow you're tolerably handsome."

  Dentelle pleated up his mouth very small. Pompey, unexpectedly, giggled. Much heartened, I wiped the tears from my eyes, settled my stays, and straightened my cap under the hood of my cloak.

  Soon we reached the foot of the green mound and the end of a chestnut drive that swept up the steep rise in wide curves. At each turn my heart knocked harder in anticipation, and then we were at the mouth of the drive with a long green terrace rising before us, and a great cream-colored palais at its head.

  Once the château Beauxprés was a real, fortified château like Blois or the Château de Joux, but the round, gray tower presiding over the enchanted garden is the sole remnant of that ancient fortress. For the rest, Beauxprés is nothing more than a house set on the crest of a hill—a very broad hill, to be sure, and a very large house. Blond stone, three floors above the rez-de-chaussée, balanced ranks of windows answering one another across three large courtyards: Beauxprés is magnificent beyond astonishment. The drive approaches respectfully along one side of the slope so as not to obstruct the view, then curls at the south wing into the forecourt, where cobbles give way to dressed stone laid in an elaborate, shell-like pattern around a marble fountain.

  Ah, that fountain! Among so many novelties, I greeted it as old friend, for 'twas a faithful copy of the great fountain of Latona at Versailles. The Beauxprés Latona is much smaller, to be sure, and the frogs besetting her only the size of cats, even the ones that are not entirely frogs, but half-transformed men with wide mouths and eyes bulging in reptilian horror at the sight of their flippering hands. To be sure, 'tis none the less grotesque for being diminished.

  Not that I recognized it just at first, mind you. At first, I only had time to glimpse a kind of outsized epergne in the forecourt before we drove round the north wing to the stable-yard and bumped to a halt.

  We were home.

  A well-set-up youth ran out from the stables to the horses' heads. "Ho, Carmontelle!" he greeted the driver. "Ho, Dentelle! You've been gone so long, we've been selling off your clothes. And who's this?" He eyed me up and down and grinned widely, revealing a mouth full of strong, square, yellow teeth. "Welcome to Beauxprés, mam'selle. We've seen Parisians before, though 'tis seldom they're so comely as you."

  Well, I'd heard the like before, and the unwelcome propositions that generally followed, and so I was prepared for the youth's lewd appraisal of my bosom and his lascivious wink. 'Twas like a miracle when he returned my frown with a shrug and a smile of such frank good cheer that I felt the corners of my mouth lift in reply. Dentelle, observing my rising spirits, lost no time in seeking to squelch them.

  "Ah, Jean, Jean," he said sadly. "One weeps for the blindness of the unlearned, who can mistake a modish bonnet for comeliness. This is the serving-woman of Mme la duchesse. She is only a city girl, after all, and beyond doubt our new mistress will soon come to her senses and dismiss her."

  Jean—very properly, to my way of thinking—ignored this speech. Or perhaps he just didn't hear it, for by this time the stable-yard was alive with lackeys and servingmaids who swiftly stripped the berline of its baskets, boxes, trunks, and cases. As Jean uncoupled the first pair of horses and led them toward the stables, I looked around for Pompey, but he had disappeared as utterly as a shadow at noonday. So I alit, keeping a tight hold on Doucette, and stood in the dust, as uncertain as I've been in my life.

  A young girl, sixteen or so, rosy and plump and fetchingly capped, touched my arm and smiled.

  "Don't mind Dentelle, mam'selle. Not one of us can bear the sight of him. I'm Marie Vissot, and if it please you, mam'selle, I will be madame's personal laundress. What a pretty little dog! Ah, mignonne!"—this to Doucette, who goggled at her and growled—"Poor thing: she misses her mistress. Are these madame's trunks? Pierre! LeNain! Take madame's trunks to the China apartments. Does your mistress like porcelain? The hangings are silk damask, such a lovely shade of crimson, to set off the china, you know. They'll last another ten years, with care. Unless, perhaps, madame wishes to buy new?" She fixed me with a bright and questioning eye.

  I thought her a cheeky, common girl, and answered her very high. "I am Mlle Berthe Duvet, and I'm sure the hangings will do very well until madame has had time to look about her. As for your being madame's laundress, you may wash her linen, but we'll have to see about the lace-work. We are very particular abou
t madame's lace."

  Solemnly Marie curtsied to me, all her merriness dampened. I suddenly remembered that I was not yet nineteen and far from my home and began to drizzle like a baby in leading-strings, upon which Marie embraced me, inspiring me to weep the harder. In a trice, she had me in the kitchen with a hot brick at my feet and a dish of tea in my hand. The chef gave Doucette a cutlet and the maître d'hôtel pinched my chin. And that was my introduction to Beauxprés: flattery and kindness and a flood of tears. Not a bad beginning, all in all.

  Now that I am arrived at Beauxprés, I hardly know what to write. I found it very splendid, bien sûr; also draughty, vast, and labyrinthine beyond belief—a veritable puzzle-box of a house, with every chamber giving onto two or three others, and odd little stairs and corridors throughout. Why, it took me a week to find my way from the servants' wing to madame's apartment to the kitchen or the laundry without losing myself, and months before I could begin to number all its chambers, salons, galleries, cabinets, chambers, antechambers, pantries, and outbuildings.

  A labyrinth, in short, and like all labyrinths, the abode of any number of fabulous monsters. No, not monsters precisely, except for M. le duc—comic types, rather, like the persons of a farce: finical valet, garrulous soubrette, amorous maître d'hôtel, temperamental chef de cuisine. And the lackeys, like all their liveried tribe, much given to lounging in antechambers and leering at the servingmaids. I could not think them real, the servants of Beauxprés, not as my friends Saint-Cloud and LeBeau and Olympe were real, at least not at first. And then one morning on my way to the laundry, I found myself in a long gallery hung with dark paintings, every one of which depicted the Deposition of Christ from the Cross. 'Twas a gloomy enough place to be, and I had no idea where it led or how I'd reached it.

  "Merde!" I exclaimed. "Name of a name! Foutre ce dédale infernal!"

  "That would be painful indeed, mam'selle," said a deep voice at my back. "And quite useless. Am I to understand that you have lost your way?"