Read Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution Online
Authors: James Tipton
Tags: #Writing, #Fiction - Historical, #France, #Mistresses, #19th Century, #18th Century
“I see.”
“There are fortifications at the harbor at Nantes. You will have to float by them silently.”
“In any case, it is far better than riding between Hell Columns with your band.”
“If those are your only choices. You are a very odd and wonderful woman, Madame.”
“But you knew, once I heard about children being drowned, I really had no choice.”
“You are still rare, you and Jeanne Robin. Extreme times can also bring out honorable qualities.”
“And you?”
“If I weren’t fighting for a Philanthropic Institute, I’d probably be raiding vessels on the high seas.” And he kissed my hand and vanished into the cold night. I never learned, on the marquis’s unexpected visits, where he came from or where he went.
At dawn I was awakened by loud sounds like fireworks suddenly going off, and I realized they were volleys of muskets. I thought at first the civil war had come to Blois, then realized it was far away, and crushed, at least for now. No, I thought, as I sat bolt upright and stared at the closed shutters, these were executions of prisoners, now being held at the Château. The sound of the volleys echoed over the blue slate roofs of Blois all the way to my cottage, with its ripe pears on the boughs. These were prisoners I couldn’t save. There were probably women among them, taken upriver from Angers, which had full prisons now. No trials, no lawyers for the defense, no witnesses, just tribunals exercised by the representative-on-mission from Paris. “Pity is not revolutionary.” Jeanne Robin had mentioned to me something of the reports from Savenay, the highways piled high with corpses, in some places piled in pyramids. I counted twelve volleys before silence once again surged back over the town, wakening into another day of the Terror.
I was now riding with the current down the longest river in France, with the fragrance of hay and the earthy smell of cattle, and the cold winds blowing upriver from the Atlantic, the banks spotted with snow, and now, on my left, the stern château de Chaumont, where Queen Catherine de Médicis had exiled Diane de Poitiers, her husband’s favorite, after his early death. At least Diane still had the river as a view.
“Our river” was now taking on a new connotation for me. I did not know if it would ever be the same—La Rouge’s and my river, by which I had ridden in the summer by the
luisettes
, the trickles between the sandbanks, or in the rainy autumn, or snowmelt of spring, when its waters swirled high under the arches of the bridge; Gérard’s and my river, that we had watched, gray or blue, from Marguerite’s terrace and had made up songs about; and William’s and my river, by which we had walked and performed our make-believe and so serious wedding: the river that, like Monsieur Jefferson’s Shenandoah, ran through the heart of all that was dear to me. Now it was polluted near Nantes with the deaths of perhaps thousands. These drownings now had a name—
noyades
—and the Chouans had also reports of them at Saumur and Angers, and other towns. Citizen Carrier’s plan had been so successful, it was being copied.
But they were still performed at night, with no witnesses, as if the republicans were fearful that word of them would show the Revolutionary Tribunals and the Revolutionary Army for what they were.
The marquis’s feeling was that if just one
noyade
could be stopped, the Committee of Public Safety would fear that they were no longer secret and that public opinion, told constantly that the atrocities of the Terror were only conducted on a high moral plane, would be hard to manipulate in this case. The guillotine was one thing, ridding the Republic of dangerous counter-revolutionaries, one by one, in public view. Mass drownings of women and children in the dead of night was another. The Revolution would be finally hard-pressed to justify its actions. Perhaps the patriot Carrier had gone too far. But first the ubiquitous committees would have to know that people had found out about the
noyades
and were willing to do something about them: at least, two women on a barge full of cattle were going to try.
Jeanne and I slept in a cabin at the back of the barge and on a coal burner there cooked soup and porridge, which we also served to the two bargemen, who reminded us that they were just hired to man the boat: if there was any fighting, they would not participate; if we were captured, they would say we had forced them to ferry us downriver.
After all, we had weapons, and they didn’t. Jeanne had her cavalry sword and a pistol. I had my pistols and a stiletto.
It took five days to float downstream to Nantes, and in that time Jeanne Robin and I came to know each other better. She had joined the cavalry of the Royal and Catholic Army last June with her brother, father, and fiancé. Both her brother and fiancé were about to be drafted into the Revolutionary Army. The army had imprisoned their priest, whom they had known all their lives, and had taken their draft horses to pull their cannon, and before they could take their three best hunting horses and themselves, her father and older brother decided to ride against the army that would ride against them. They did not try to dissuade Jeanne from joining them. Her mother and younger brothers and sisters stayed behind at Loches—first protected by the successes of their local army, then having to flee. Jeanne had saved them all but her fifteen-year-old sister. Her father had been also killed, and when her brother and fiancé decided to move west with the army, Jeanne stayed behind.
She had no desire to traipse a hundred miles north to meet the British, and she couldn’t comprehend fighting outside of her region. She didn’t really care about
la patrie
, about the abstraction of a nation. She cared about her family, about the way of life that had been destroyed by outsiders, about the people of her village, and finally, about her horse. I liked her. She was pretty, selfless, and unbelievably brave.
She had seen horrors of battle that I did not want to imagine, and she spoke matter-of-factly about other horrors I would rather not have known about.
“You have not heard about what they call the ‘republican marriages’?” she asked me as we passed the mouth of the Cher, and I was thinking about a summer long ago, when my parents had brought us to a large fête at the château de Chenonceaux, along the Cher: a ball was going on in the large hall built on arches over the river, as Marguerite and I walked outside in the warm night, with two boys at our sides and a chaperone behind us, and on the other side of the hedge we heard the cries and laughter of the older girls and boys in the maze, and the music from the hall floated over the river, and the torches on the arches cast orange lines that quivered on the dark water. I thought, vaguely, that republican marriages were some type of wedding performed without a priest.
“I’m surprised you don’t know of them—they’ve been going on for a couple of months now, starting in this part of the river we ’re on now, west of Tours. They think it’s quite amusing. They strip a priest and a young royalist woman naked, tie them facing each other, and take them out in boats and lower the bodies into the Loire. You see, drowning prisoners in the Loire is not a new idea. I think Citizen Carrier came up with his plan after the popularity of the republican marriages.”
I had nothing to say. My river had changed utterly.
The next day it was hard to keep warm, and Jeanne and I stayed wrapped in our blankets, huddled over the small coal fire in the cabin.
“Have you heard of the ebony trade, Jeanne?”
She shook her head. I could only see her black eyes. She held the gray blanket up over her nose. She had on a green woolen cap, and below that her black hair fell over her shoulders. She was a lot taller than I, and even sitting I had to look up when I spoke to her “Well, most people haven’t,” I said. “The ebony traders like it like that. It’s still going on. It’s very successful. People in Nantes, like my grandfather, became rich through the ebony trade. I visited him once in Nantes. He was about to die, and my father thought his father should meet his granddaughters. He and Papa had quarreled long ago over the ebony trade.”
Jeanne nodded. She pulled the cap down over her ears. “I can still hear you,” she said.
“He had a sugar cane plantation in Martinique. He was in the West Indies often and went there by way of Africa, where he picked up a black, or ebony, cargo. You understand? It’s all in the wording, like Citizen Carrier’s report about the
noyades
. If you call it ‘cargo,’ it’s all right. And in both cases the ‘cargo’ was human.”
Jeanne reached her hands out of the blanket to hold them over the coals. She was a farm girl who had become a soldier and who knew many horrible things. But that this business was conducted by people so close to her home was new to her. “Your grandfather traded
slaves
?” she said.
“And probably his father. Oh, they traded sugar too. But my father refused to go into the business. He was a disgrace to the family, the only son. He went to Paris to study medicine, and worked all his life. He could have been a gentleman of relative leisure. His name was respectable from his family’s wealth. And on my grandfather’s death, Papa still inherited most of the fortune. His friend once told me he thought Papa worked hard as a doctor as a type of penance for his family. I never knew about the ebony trade until this friend told me. I never knew why Papa worked when we had enough money. I think Maman always thought his working a little distasteful.”
“I would have liked to know your father,” Jeanne Robin said.
Soon I would be passing by the city of his childhood. His family had a mansion among other mansions, I remembered, along the quai.
But I didn’t see it, or recognize it when we got there. I had other things to worry about.
On the afternoon of the fifth day, we let the cattle off at La Chebuette. We dropped anchor just outside the harbor of Nantes so that we would arrive at the scene of the
noyades
late that night. I had been asleep for a few hours when Jeanne awakened me. “We ’re passing in front of the fortifications, now; we should be coming to their barge soon.”
I got up to watch as we passed the harbor. Jeanne was at the bow, talking with the bargemen. I stood outside the cabin door and reached down and rested my hands over the pockets of my cloak. I felt my pistols there, in their familiar places.
Nantes was the last stop for river traffic. It would be odd for a barge to be going beyond the harbor. We would have to pass unnoticed, by two islands on the south side of the river, only a dark blur in a quarter moon, in and out of storm clouds.
But I could still make out the snouts of cannon on the west tower of the old castle, under the torches that gleamed on them and made paths that we crossed, noiselessly, on the black current. The harbor was filled with barges with square sails, with
sapines
, the big rafts already discarded on the shore, for they were only used to go downriver, and with dozens of
gabares
, which towed smaller boats, including a barge with a cabin, upstream.
Now the masts of the
gabares
stood silent and ghostly, packed against each other, with a thin moon seemingly caught in their rigging. I was glad when the harbor was suddenly behind us, and then before us, a black bulk on the black river, was the destination of our long voyage.
With the moon and the clouds, sometimes we saw the barge clearly and sometimes lost it entirely. I could tell it was either moving very slowly or not at all, which was both a good sign, as we could easily catch up to it, and a bad sign, for if it were still, that would mean it had already been scuttled and was in the process of sinking. I noticed a rowboat tied to the side of the barge, presumably so the guards could escape before the barge sank, so they had to be still aboard, finishing their grisly work.
Now a few cries reached me, indistinct through the darkness. The barge appeared to be stopped, and a cold rain started pattering on our deck. I couldn’t see a thing, then suddenly the moon ducked out from the thick clouds, and a slice of light fell directly on their deck: a man had got free of his bonds and was trying to free his neighbor’s hands.
A large guard ran out from the cabin, his sword raised, and cut off the arm of the man who had escaped. The arm just fell right there on the deck, silently from where I stood. The man’s scream cut clearly through the rain. The guard was raising the sword again now, either to finish off the man or against the other prisoner, who was now struggling free of his ropes, and I aimed my pistol and shot quickly. The guard staggered, still raised his sword, and I fired my second pistol.
The guard fell, like a heavy sack of flour, into the river.
The rain was turning to hail now, pounding loudly on the decks as we came smoothly up beside the barge, and Jeanne and I jumped down onto it. Jeanne had a cloth in her hand, and she knelt and wrapped a tourniquet around the bleeding arm of the first man who had got free.
I was cutting wrist bonds with my stiletto, working as fast as I could against time. The barge was covered with hundreds of prisoners, half naked, crowded close against each other in the lashing hail. Once free, they untied their ankles and started to run, with difficulty, for they had been tied for hours, toward our barge, and I yelled at them to free their neighbors first. Most of them stopped, their memory of humanity flooding back. Men and women bent over children, untying their ropes. A young man asked me, “Who are you?”
“A Chouanne,” I answered.
“Who’s the other woman?”
“A Chouanne. Now help me free the others.”
And it was not easy to loosen their bonds. Often, in the hail and in the fear of the sinking boat, the prisoners’ fingers would not work right, and the ropes were tight, and I had to go from huddled figure to figure, slicing my stiletto in the dark, with some screaming, frightened now that I was going to stab them. It was worse for them when Jeanne approached, for she wielded her cavalry sword with swift assurance, cutting between their wrists and just an inch away from their neighbor, lying in a rising flood of river water, the boat now growing noticeably lower. Finally Jeanne said to me, “We ’ll never get to them all. Just cut the bonds at their feet and have them jump to the other boat.”