Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (40 page)

Twining roses covered the arched door and the unmirrored walls.

The count smiled with satisfaction. “It is a lovely room,” he said, and shivered. “But would you be so kind, Annette, as to do me one more favor—I’ll open the mirror from this side—could you please bring me a scuttle of coal? Just tap on the mirror.”

A horrible thought was troubling me. “Count—”

“We need to rest now,” he said. “It’s been a long day and night for me, and I assume for you too, my dear. Thank you so much. I am forever in your debt.”

“How did you know about this room?”

“Many of the old houses had secret rooms built into them, as the grand houses had
petite maisons
on their grounds. We used to play in here. This room is far older than I.”

“Whom did you play with here?”

“Card games among friends. A late meal on that amazing table—the middle tray slides out or can be raised or lowered. Here, watch—”

And he put his glass and hat on the top tray and slid the middle one out. A cloud of dust blew in his face.

“Now one can bring a dish to the card table, for instance.” He slid the tray back.

“Were you having a liaison with Madame Dubourg?”

“Madame Dubourg? My dear, look at her. A giraffe eating leaves in the Jardin des Plantes.” Then I saw instantly by his face that he knew the mistake he had made. He placed the candelabrum on the vanity table, and it shone back from the mirror.

“I am tired,” he said. “I speak nonsense. It’s just a room where we had private fêtes after a more public one. Those were jolly times. We were all young.” His sunken eyes looked deeper as he stood outside the immediate glow of the candlelight.

“Doesn’t that door,” I said with difficulty, “lead to Maman’s room?”

The count sighed and opened his mouth to speak. I didn’t give him time.

“You were friends with my father since your youth.”

“At university. He studied medicine, I law. We roamed Paris together.”

“Maman was girlhood friends with Madame Dubourg. She stayed here weeks at a time. And she married when she was sixteen. You wouldn’t have—before then—that means—”

“Annette, you don’t understand—”

“What don’t I understand? A definition of friendship that includes treachery?”

“My dear, sit down.”

“On that bed? I’d rather stand.”

“I am sorry you had to come to this conclusion.”

“Did you think I would be so stupid as not to guess? Or were you just thinking of yourself? As when you didn’t warn William and me about the brigands—”

“The deal was that the brigands stayed in the south end of the forest—”

“You make deals with the devil.” The count started to raise the glass to his lips but stopped.

I held my arms straight out from my sides, palms upward, as if I were going to dance, with a gentleman on either side. “This is such a lovely room,” I said, lightly. “So
discreet
. So
prudent
—Maman’s favorite words, you know. Card playing among friends. A late-night meal—on this wonderful table.” I pulled out the middle tray and threw it on the dusty floor. “Self-righteous, deceitful, lying hypocrites, the both of you! Oh, I should have not let you in and instead let the Committee wave your head high on a rusty pike. I will fetch you no coal, Monsieur Count. You can lie on your old dusty Turkish bed and freeze—”

Suddenly I started to cry and sat down on the bed in spite of myself. The count held his half-filled brandy glass in front of me, and I finished it, and coughed.

“You are quite right, my dear,” he said. “Everything you say is true. As far as your father goes, I told him, when we were out in the forest on a ride. I asked his forgiveness and said I would end it immediately, which I did. He rode away, without saying a word. He didn’t talk to me for a month. When hunting season resumed, I wondered if he would be there. He rode up to me in the dawn and said simply, ‘Hatred is a waste of anyone’s time. My wife and I will have a family. You and I will hunt the stags, and the world will go on.’ That was a long time ago, Annette. Your father was an eminently worthy man, unlike myself. He intimated to me once that he had had some kind of vision in the forest.”

“He said something of that once to me—that two people he loved had hurt him, and he rode deep into the forest and—something appeared to him.”

“Do not blame your
maman,
Annette, if you know anything about love that grips you in your youth, about indiscretion....She and I knew each other
before
she met your papa, but it was my duty to marry a woman who had a title, and she...she preferred your father to me, it’s just...we were each other’s first passion. Love is not prudent. I think your
maman
has tried to give you the wisdom of her experience—though, from her lesson, she may err on the side of duty and authority rather than on that of natural feeling. If you could have known her at sixteen, at seventeen, her laughter, the look in her eye when she turned her head in a dance—”

I stared at the empty glass. I saw where my hand had made a print in the dust on the bed. A hundred candles flickered in the mirrors, reflecting each other indefinitely on in the distance, the shadowy figures of the count and me repeated manifold.

“You can see yourself a lot in this room,” I said.

“Yes, it’s regrettable,” he said.

“I’ll get you that coal. Your clothes are still wet. Stay here. Just let me out, please.”

When I returned, carrying a brass coal shuttle, I also brought with me a jug of water, a loaf of bread, and some cheese, and more candles. “I thought you might be hungry,” I said.

“You are your father’s daughter,” he said.

“My mother’s too,” I said. “Good night, Count.”

The next afternoon, five armed members from the Committee of Public Safety arrived at the door of chez Dubourg. They said that Count Thibaut of the château de Beauregard had last been seen in Orléans, and they were checking places in town where they knew he had friends. Before Monsieur Dubourg could say anything, I told them that no one here was a friend of the count’s; my parents had been. Nevertheless, they searched the house thoroughly, knocking over the green porcelain vase outside the gilded mirror, then left without saying anything.

The count stayed five days, and the Committee never returned.

I brought him
Les Liaisons dangereueses
and Montaigne’s essays for him to read in his lonely room, which I only visited late at night.

Then he left on a journey to Tours, where his estranged wife lived.

He did not want to burden us.

Caroline was over three months old and smiled regularly.

Those are, perhaps, the most beautiful smiles of a person’s life: innocence beyond an adult’s comprehension. Later, William would write that a child entered the world
trailing clouds of glory
.

That certainly seemed true of Caroline. She had just laughed at some expression I had unwittingly made, and now I was making the same expression purposefully and getting the same reaction—blissful belly laughs that made me laugh in turn. When Claudette knocked, I singingly told her to enter, then looked up and saw her face.

“My parents,” she said. She looked shocked and frightened.

“They’re here, in the stable.”

“All the way from near Tours? What—? Tell them to come in; I’m sure Monsieur and Madame Dubourg won’t mind.”

“They’re hiding, Madame.”

“What have they to hide from? They are not aristocrats, like the count.”

“My father would not let my two brothers be taken by the
levée en
masse
. He hid them when the men from Paris came. They want
all
unmarried men, between eighteen and twenty-five, Madame. There are others like my parents, many others. They are tired of their priests being taken, now their sons and husbands too. It’s happening throughout the Vendée, my parents say, and in Normandy, Brittany.

The Committee of Public Safety will soon have a civil war on their hands. I have brought my parents food, but—they need a place to stay, and I am afraid for chez Dubourg if we shelter them here. It is not my decision.”

“We will tell no one—except Angelique,” I said. “No servants; they might talk. Tell Angelique to help you fetch fresh sheets—several pairs—and extra blankets, and meet me by the clock down the hall in a few minutes.” I tried to put Caroline down, but she was not sleepy and was insulted at the gesture, so I carried her.

It was with some pleasure that I reached up on tiptoe behind the gilded couple and glanced back at my two conspirators with wide eyes, then dropped jaws, as the mirror swung open. I quickly ushered them in and closed it again. “Angelique, please cover those mirrors with the extra sheets. Claudette and I will change these sheets and make up the bed.”

“But how—,” Angelique began.

I didn’t like lying to them, but it wasn’t the time to explain the history of Maman and the count—I might never tell Angelique—nor was it the time to reveal that the count had recently stayed here. As much as I loved Angelique, she wasn’t the most discreet person.

“I’m sorry I never told you,” I said. “It was one of Marguerite’s and my secrets—the mean older sisters. She found out about this room when we were children. It was built long ago for parties, and no one ever used it anymore. That is why you and Etienne could never find us when we played hide-and-seek. This is where we were.”

“You scheming girls. To keep a room like this from me! We could have had our own parties. This is wondrous! I would like—well, never mind what I would like.”

“It’s a strange room, if you ask me, Madame,” Claudette said. “I don’t think my parents will feel comfortable here. It has a flavor of ancient liaisons.”

“That’s why we ’re covering up the mirrors.”

“I want to look in that armoire,” Angelique said. “What kind of gowns are in there?” She finished hanging up the sheets and opened it. I had never looked inside when I brought meals to the count. Caroline was lying on the bed, and we had to work around her. I kept glancing over at Angelique, at the open door of the armoire.

“Look at this,” she said. “Look at this nightdress. It’s lovely.” She held it up to her. “It just fits, even if it is old. But how can
négligés
go out of fashion? It suggests everything but actually reveals little. It would be quite comfortable. What a shame it’s the only one in here. What parties they must have had in the old days. Why couldn’t I have been born then? Did you and Marguerite ever try this on when you hid in here? Tell me the truth.”

“I’ve never looked in that armoire. That’s the truth.”

“You prude.”

“I think,” Claudette said, “that you should leave that old gown alone. There’s something very strange about his room. I would like to put some painting of the Virgin in here for my parents—but I’ve never seen any paintings like that at chez Dubourg. And it’s strange,” she said, looking around, “that the layers of dust are not even. And,” she said, squatting by the grate, “that these ashes are not old.”

“Perhaps some of the servants know about this room and had their own parties,” I said.

“Well, it must be a secret now,” Claudette said. “No one must know my parents are here.”

“This room is cut off from the world,” I said.

The spring weather we had waited so long for had not arrived, and late that night Claudette led her parents in through the never-ending rain. “I do not like this,” her father said softly in the kitchen. “We should have permission of the master of the house.”

“Madame Annette has invited you.”

“But she is not the master,” he said. “I want to see the
monsieur
and ask him. I am not a criminal.”

He stood there, defiant. The candelabrum I held flickered over his broad face and weather-beaten cheeks, and the black hair coursing down over his forehead. He was tall and broad and straight-backed.

His long wool coat had patches at the elbows, and his brown trousers were tucked into working boots. “You best take those boots off here, Monsieur Valcroix. We must not let Monsieur Dubourg know you are here to protect him, not to hide information from him. That is a sacrifice to one’s honor that one must make in these days.”

He grunted and sat down at the kitchen table and took his boots off. His wife wore a long cloak with big pockets and the hood still up.

Underneath that she had scarves around her head, and I couldn’t see her face clearly. She was small, about my height. But I noticed her kind eyes, under the dimness of the hood and her scarves. “Thank you, Madame,” she said. “Claudette has always told us how happy she is in your service.”

“I am mainly in her service, Madame. I could not live without her.” It was true.

They followed me quietly up the stairs, but I heard them behind me as the mirror opened. Claudette’s mother gasped, and her father invoked the Virgin.

“This is an unholy room,” he said when he walked in.

“It will have to do, Papa,” Claudette said. “If you’re going to defy the Committee you’ll just have to sleep where you can. It’s a very nice bed. It has fresh sheets for you. A fire is in the grate. A pitcher of water is on the top tray. Cold mutton is on the second tray, which slides out. Bread, cheese, and apples are on the bottom tray. You will be very comfortable here. You will live like kings.”

“There are no kings,” her father said. “They have killed him.”

“Well, dukes then,” his daughter said and threw up her arms.

“Good night, Papa, Maman; I will visit you tomorrow.”

We started to leave. I was about to press the lever, nestled in the center of a wallpaper rose, that swung the mirror open from this side.

“Your brothers,” Claudette’s father said. “I am sorry, but your brothers are pursued. I told them to come here too. Your mother said that you,
ma petite
, always said that Madame Annette could do anything. We had nowhere to go. There are those in Normandy who can help if we can get there. We are really very grateful. We will not stay long. We will find our way to those Norman houses, and we will work there. I do not like not working. Your brothers will come in a few days. After we leave. Then they can go on to Normandy and work again too. They are good lads. They did not want to fight for the Parisian government. Do you know the men from Paris came and took the bell from our church? After they arrested our priest. Then they wanted our boys to fight their wars. Who are these people?”