The Porcelain Dove

by Sherman, Delia

  M. Deyverdun swallowed the strawberry and touched his lips with a kerchief. "A pity indeed, Mme Bell. He has been much occupied of late in Parliament, subduing America, he says. What a wretched piece of work the British are making of America, to be sure. The naval strength of Great Britain is not sufficient to prevent the Americans—for do you not agree, dear madame, that they can no longer be called rebels?—from receiving every assistance from the French."

  The lady paused with a second berry halfway to his mouth, "They can indeed be called rebels," she said frostily, "for they are rebels, rebels against the authority of His Most Gracious Majesty King George. And the sooner they come to realize that, the sooner my husband will be able to return home. To England, M. Deyverdun, which is my home also." And laying the strawberry in her own mouth, she flounced away.

  "Tea, Deyverdun, tea," said a slight, fair man at his elbow. "With all the tea those English drink, there's little wonder that they're all mad. Ah, Duvet, Berthe Duvet, is it not?" I curtsied and smiled with a good will. Everyone knew M. Tissot: a neat, nervous man in a plain gray coat with eyes made sad by gazing on misery. The darling of society, he was not above doctoring common folk as well. Once he'd lanced a boil on my thigh and couldn't have been more courteous had I been the queen of France.

  "I'll take some of the tongue, Berthe, if you'd be so kind," he said, and then, ever the doctor: "I trust you've been bathing often. Boils are not to be sneezed at, you know, and regular bathing is the only way to avoid them."

  Well. A journée is no place for unwelcome truths, so I assured him that I'd bathed head to toe only last night. He smiled, then turned his attention to a plump girl who was tapping his arm with her fan, crying, "Maître docteur, a word if you please!" He nodded politely and she embarked upon a litany of palpitations, lethargy, and melancholy that might have lasted the afternoon had not M. Tissot interrupted it to inquire whether she were accustomed to drink tea. She was just telling him that she fairly lived upon tea when a young man came up behind her and tweaked a hanging curl.

  The plump sufferer squealed and jumped. " 'Pon my soul, Étienne, I wonder how you can be so cruel, to startle me knowing how the least upset brings on my palpitations."

  "A thousand pardons, sister," said the young man cheerfully. "Shall I fetch your salts, or perhaps a dish of tea?"

  "No, no tea," said M. Tissot earnestly. "Teapots are evil things, worse than the box of Pandora, from which all evil issued. For teapots do not even leave hope behind but, being a cause of hypochondria, disseminate melancholy and despair."

  The girl pouted. Her brother promised the doctor that his sister's teapot should be thrown onto the dust-heap without delay, then bowed and retreated, towing her behind him.

  I remember that I thought him an insolent young puppy, though pretty as a watercolor. One may meet a dozen such in an afternoon's promenade through the Bois, all of them alike as whelps of a single litter. I'd not have thought of him again if 'twere not for what happened an hour or so later, when I was going through the gardens pouring coffee from a silver pot for Mme Réverdil's guests.

  They were very famous, the gardens of Portsûreté, and I'm sure they are famous still; for beauty is beauty and must remain so, however many years come between. They are laid out in the English manner, with numerous grottoes and arbors overhung with climbing roses cleverly arranged to create an illusion of solitude even in the midst of the most crowded assembly. Perhaps now they shelter great artists or sages contemplating the joys of perfect liberty, equality, and fraternity. In my day, they were commonly used for flirtations.

  Under roses and among fragrant ferns, lovers sat or knelt by their mistresses' sides, murmuring verse into delicate ears and searching lowered eyes for some spark of desire returned. Some were glad of the coffee I offered them; some bade me go drink it myself. Others were too engaged to notice me. Among these latter was the melancholiac's pretty brother, whom I discovered on his knees in one of the fernier grottoes fanning a reclining woman.

  My first thought was professional curiosity. Where in Lausanne had the woman come by the same striped stuff I'd used to make my mistress' gown? My next was embarrassment, to be thus peering and spying upon an amorous assignation. I was just on the point of turning away when the woman sat upright and patted the lace at her bosom. It was madame.

  Well. My heart gave a thud or two, and I'd hardly the wit to step behind a bush and conceal myself among its leaves. The hushing of an artificial waterfall masked their words, but I could clearly see the tear sparkling in my mistress' eye and the sigh swelling the young man's narrow chest. He caught her hand and pressed it to his lips. Blushing, she withdrew it, upon which he looked downcast. She paused, then addressed him animatedly, leaning a little towards him as though scolding him for his impudence. He snapped shut her fan and held it to his white forehead in an attitude expressive of despair, peeping at her as he did so, very like a puppy indeed.

  Madame laughed. My mistress—newly risen from a bed of pain, haunted by a sorcerer's curse and the weeping ghosts of children—my mistress laughed aloud, snatched the fan from the young man's grasp, and coquettishly tapped his wrist with it.

  I need hardly say I'd no desire to watch the dumbshow's denouement. I prefer tragedies to comedies, with their single, tedious, unvarying plot of attraction, misunderstanding, and consummation. Lovers on the stage are always foolish, save when their passion is tried by unimaginable hardships and glorified by poetry. Lovers off the stage are foolish, tout simple. All that blushing and simpering—bah! Even now it sickens me to write of it.

  The journée dragged on as 'twere for three days, until at last the sun began to set and the guests to disperse. Pompey went to alert the chair-men while madame made her farewells to Mme Réverdil. The puppy was beside her, his arm under her hand, and when the chair came, he helped her into it, gazing upon her with his infant soul in his eyes. As I trudged back to Bellevue beside the chair, I caught glimpses of her through the glass, twirling a pink rosebud between her fingers and smiling vaguely, for all the world as if she were stupid with drink.

  Knowing she must long for me to tease the story out of her, I declined to mention the puppy, and talked only commonplace as I prepared her for bed, about the beauty of the comtesse's garden and the excellence of the comtesse's table. I might as well have held my tongue, for my mistress was too preoccupied with her mirror to answer me. By the time she dismissed me to my pallet, I was agitated beyond description.

  Clearly the puppy had captured my mistress' fancy. More than thirteen years of absolute fidelity to her mad husband, and now to entertain the blandishments of a boy ten, perhaps twelve years her junior! What could she hope to gain by such an affaire?

  Even to my sand-blind eyes the answer was evident. Admiration, after all, was the breath of life to my mistress. Doubtless the puppy had compared her to Venus, praised her arching eyebrows and her lithe, white neck. They were worthy of praise—why, time and again I'd praised them myself, trying to distract her from the faint lines her illness had graved between her brows. Yet when I told her she was as beautiful as the dawn, she only protested that she more resembled the twilight and bade me veil her mirror. Not two hours in the company of a pretty young man and she was preening at her naked image in a long glass, dreamily folding up her black hair and then unfurling it over her pearly breasts, her sloping belly, and her round, soft thighs.

  "Is this the body of an old woman of thirty?" she had asked me archly. "Would you believe I'd borne seven children, Berthe, had you not seen me brought to bed of them?"

  I'd thought her, as always, more beautiful than the Princesse Printanière. But I'd be damned, that night, if I'd tell her so.

  Lying on my pallet, listening to the straw rustle with my movements and the patter of the wind through the trees, I chewed the cud of jealousy whose taste was even more bitter than it had been on madame's bridal-night. I'd always known I must share her with a husband. A lover was a different matter.

  I arose nex
t morning late and unrefreshed, dressed in blind haste, and hurried so with my mistress' morning chocolate that when I reached her door at last, the tray-cloth swam with it. A faint and tuneless tra-la-la-ing reached me through the polished wood. I scratched for admittance; Pompey opened to me and lifted an eyebrow.

  "Berthe?" caroled madame from within. "O Berthe, dearest Berthe. Come hither at once, sweet Berthe, and see what Pompey has brought me."

  Twitching my ribbons and my smile into place, I entered. My mistress was sitting by the window in a stream of sunlight with both casement and curtains flung wide and the fresh mountain air stirring the lace lappets of her nightcap. In her hand she held a small scarlet object which she gazed upon with a hungry amazement that wrung my heart like a mangle.

  "Look, Berthe," she said. "Only look what the chevalier de Faraud has sent me."

  The object she held up for my inspection was a heart, fashioned out of scarlet satin and stuffed plump with cotton wool. A scrap of paper was skewered to it by a long silver pin. The whole reeked most vilely of attar of roses.

  "You may read the verses, Berthe," said my mistress, blushing. "They contain no word I need scruple to show all the world."

  Unfolding the scrap of paper, I read the following.

  The sovereign art of inspiring love is thine,

  With handmaid arts of gentleness and ruth.

  Thy wise heart knows the gaiety of youth

  And eke the weight of philosophy divine.

  No wonder thy heart falters, when the tooth

  Of mortal illness gnaws fast at its root.

  Ah! Friendship then, looking before, behind,

  Must faithful prove in its fond endeavor

  To ease the path this fainting heart must tread

  And enlist Art to make it beat forever.

  "Very pretty, madame," I said when I could trust my voice. "I confess the silver pin puzzles me."

  "You are laughing at me, Berthe," said madame reproachfully. "Or else you haven't really grasped his meaning at all. The silver pin is me. I've transfixed his heart, you see, like the pin, and he intimates that Love is the curé both of my illness and his pain."

  I glanced at her doubtfully, then reread the verses. They might support such an interpretation, I supposed, if the recipient brought sufficient art to the reading of them.

  "There's also a note asking if I will allow him to escort me to the musical evening at Mme de Charriere's. He writes that his happiness depends on my acceptance, Berthe. Deprived of the light of my eyes, he strays benighted. What shall I answer him?"

  With a fine attempt at carelessness, I shrugged. "Were I madame, I'd tell the impudent puppy that I was a duchesse, me, and not to be won with a few trinkets and a little indifferent verse."

  "Indifferent verse? I cry shame on you, Berthe, for making sport of the poor chevalier, who's done nothing to deserve your scorn. Jealous creature."

  Though I felt the traitor blood in my cheeks, I shrugged again. "Jealous, madame? I've no right to be jealous, me. Madame might think of her husband, however, before squandering his good name upon a pretty boy barely seven years her son's senior."

  I was sorry as soon as I'd said it—not that I didn't mean every word from my heart, you understand, but that my tongue had betrayed my good sense.

  My mistress' lips thinned. "Never think, Berthe Duvet, that I cannot find another femme de chambre," was all she said. But coupled with her tone, which I vow I'd never before heard from her, 'twas enough to bring tears to my eyes. Whereupon she bade me not to be an idiot and desired me to bring her lap-desk at once that she might compose the chevalier an answer.

  "Replying to a billet-doux is a most delicate matter, don't you think?" she said lightly. "Not too warm, not too cold. Friendly, easy, just a little distant. As you say, Berthe, he must be reminded that I am a duchesse."

  An hour or so later Pompey conveyed her note to the chevalier's lodging and shortly returned bearing a brief note tied around a posy of dark blue ribbons.

  Madame read the note, smiled, and stroked the ribbon posy with her forefinger. "Such a lovely color, don't you think, Berthe? I believe they're the exact color of his eyes. I shall wear them on my skirt tomorrow."

  Over the next weeks, my mistress revealed a gift for coquetry whose existence I had never so much as suspected. She who had always seemed so wholehearted in her passions, so artless in her desire to please those she loved, toyed now with her chevalier as a cat toys with a wounded bird. Now she allowed him to kiss her inside wrist, now she sent him a note informing him that today she was indisposed to see him. She received him lying in her bed—but only when half a dozen friends were present. Worst and cruelest of all, she required me to witness the whole. As once she'd prattled of her husband to me, now she prattled of the chevalier de Faraud, the difference being that this time she knew very well how I hated to hear her speak of him. Each night I tormented myself with waking dreams of his mouth upon her breasts, his ink-stained fingers rifling her most secret treasures while she stretched and sighed. Each night I swore I'd leave her, only to discover the prospect even less supportable than that of seeing the chevalier in her bed.

  My only relief was complaining to Pompey.

  "How can she not see that he loves her not at all? He loves his bad poetry, the exchange of notes and trinkets and gewgaws. How he smiles and preens when a friend or a mirror tells him that he and she make a prodigiously pretty pair! Though he wears his heart on his sleeve, I wager he locks it up at night with his rings and watch-fobs!"

  'Twas spleen made me rant thus. Yet Pompey agreed that the young man stank of self-love. One day he came to me with his mouth primmed up as though he'd eaten alum.

  "This is the chevalier's latest gift." He held out a box—silver filigree, with the inevitable slip of parchment tucked under its amber latch.

  I shrugged. " 'Tis pretty enough."

  He slipped the parchment free, unfolded it, and declaimed aloud:

  "'While my love from me is parted,

  Cruel hours, swiftly flow.

  But, that time's law be not flouted,

  When I'm with her, journey slow.' "

  "No worse than usual," I said. "What has upset you so?"

  Gingerly, Pompey opened the box, revealing two dead spiders on a bed of salt.

  I poked one of the little corpses curiously; a threadlike leg broke off. "What grotesquerie," I said. "What could he mean by it?"

  "I asked the same of Mme Réverdil's coachman, who informed me that the haut monde has contrived a language of flowers and objects for the purpose of sentimental communication. In that language, salt signifies 'I love you night and day.' "

  "And the spiders?"

  "'I love you until death.' Dear Berthe," he said, shutting up the little coffin. "I am sorry for thy pain."

  I did not know whether to rage or to weep. So I pulled his woolly hair and sent him away.

  'Tis clear enough, I suppose, why my memory of that sojourn in Lausanne remains so sharp when other, happier journeys have faded like watercolors in the sun. Jean laughs when I swear that I've forgiven madame her chevalier, and speak of him only in illustration of the change that came over her after the beggar's curse. I'm still angry, he says, like the beggar himself, cherishing my grudge through more than two hundred years, and for nothing more grave than a few silly gifts, some bad verses, a kiss or two, perhaps a brief embrace. I record his opinion because I've sworn to be honest: Colette must judge which of us is right. And while she's judging, she should take into account how strangely madame's children comported themselves in Lausanne. For 'tis my opinion that the family de Malvoeux took advantage of the absence of monsieur to step one by one upon the stage and, like the persons of a harlequinade, declare their characters and their destined rôles: Coquette, Rake, Monk, Sorcerer Maid.

  M. Léon, of course, was the Rake, although his dissipations were limited by his tender years. He bought himself an arbalest, with which he shot at every cat, dog, and goat unlucky enough
to cross his path until mère Boudin took it from him. Then he took to disappearing for hours at a time, walking, he said, exploring the beauties of the natural world. Entranced with this evidence of her son's sensibility, madame never questioned his absences, and we'd never have known what he was really getting up to had not Linotte run into the garden one midsummer's day to tell us that Léon was fighting with Bernarde in the laundry.

  "Bernarde?" asked madame blankly.

  "The goat-girl, madame," I answered her, and on the instant, madame started up and ran towards the house. Scattering her silks, I hurried after, calling for mère Boudin to come and remove Linotte, who was trotting curiously behind.

  We all reached the laundry at once—Boudin, Linotte, and I—ten steps behind madame, who was clutching the lower half of the door and staring in through the open top. I caught Linotte and thrust her, protesting loudly, into Boudin's arms, then looked over my mistress' shoulder into the laundry.

  I scorn to soil this paper describing what I saw. All I'll say is that Marie was wrong. Child as he was, the vicomte was able to do a man's work. As for how he chose to address his mistress, I can only conclude that he'd learned his technique from her goats.

  "Oh, my son," moaned madame. "What will monsieur your father say?"

  At the sound of his mother's voice, the vicomte started and groaned, and Bernarde gave a great shriek and buried her head in a tumble of sheets. Madame flung her arm across her eyes. The vicomte disengaged himself, did up his clothes, and floundered out of his nest of linens. His cheeks were scarlet with exertion; his expression was half-proud, half-sullen, and wholly unrepentant. Bernarde turned over onto her back, pulled down her skirts, and howled.

  Madame lowered her arm. "Slattern!" she cried. "Putain! To seduce an innocent child!"

  Bernarde commenced to wring her hands so hard I thought she'd wrest them from her wrists. M. Léon laughed aloud. "Ah, ma mère," he said. "You must not call my Bernarde hard names. For all of me, she's a virgin yet. And as for being a whore, why, I offered to give her five livres towards her dowry, but she'd not take a sou."