Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (58 page)

Napoleon always had disgruntled citizens in the countryside.

What did they care for Italy, or Austria, or Prussia, or, God help us, Egypt? They wanted their sons and husbands to help them eat. Paris liked the victories. And they kept calling for more men. Claudette’s Benoît had disappeared on the Egyptian campaign. She kept hoping he would return, somehow, across all those miles of water and land.

Napoleon had abandoned his army when he was cut off by the British fleet and sneaked through, to return in glory, wearing Egyptian regalia, claiming the right now to rule France. He just needed a new army, which he quickly gathered. And I just had to be on the alert for those who decided they didn’t want to help him. Napoleon’s secret police, a much more efficient network than the old Committees of Surveillance or Public Safety, had got some word of me, and sometimes I caught them watching the cottage, but they never saw me do anything more suspicious than harvest my cabbage.

By now the new century had dawned in glory and blood. While most people tried just to live their own lives, the new empire kept expanding.

In the autumn of 1801, though, communication eased up with Britain, and suddenly I heard from William. He wrote to me of long walks among rainy hills with his sister, Dorothy, and with another poet, called Coleridge. He said they were forced out of a wonderful big house in the south of England because
he
was being watched as a possible spy for the French. They said that he sent letters to France (which never reached me), and that he and his friend wrote seditious material and didn’t work (they didn’t consider writing
work
).

But he came back to his beloved mountains in the north of England and was happy there, he said. Now Dorothy started to write to me.

She called me “sister” and said that William had taught her French.

I was pleased at first—I felt part of the family—then I realized she was virtually taking over the correspondence. I would ask William something—about the routine of his day, new poems, anything to help me picture him, for he was growing daily into more of an abstraction—and Dorothy would answer in detail, more than I had asked for. The facts were gratifying, but I began to wonder, Were my letters even reaching him?

She said whenever William received a letter from France (she didn’t say, “from you”; why was that?), he was so distracted that he couldn’t write for several days, or had such powerful headaches that he simply went straight to bed, even in the middle of the day, and was good for nothing. She said she saw it as her duty to do what she could to ensure that William had an undisturbed life so he could write, and that also made
him
most happy.

When I answered that I thought he might want to hear from me and hear about his daughter, even if he did get a headache, Dorothy responded that she herself would pass on all my information in casual conversation as they walked. I imagined her saying, “I received a letter from
France
today. Caroline is doing quite fine, and her mother’s tomatoes sold well at market.”

Was I becoming merely a conversation topic heard about secondhand? What was he like when he became so “distracted?” Was it so unpleasant that he had no desire to receive my letters anymore?

Then he wrote and said that he read all my letters until he had memorized them, would walk at night for hours in any weather or not say a word all day and climb peaks to think of Caroline and me.

Now
that
is what I wanted to hear. He had found a way, he said, to work me into his poems, although he didn’t say what it was. He said even lying on his bed after a letter from me (not “from France”), with a headache splitting his brain apart, he was composing poems about me, but in a way that others couldn’t tell.

Then I didn’t hear from him for months. But I heard from Dorothy. Her news, after she politely inquired about Caroline, was all about Mary. Mary was her old friend who had lived with them all one summer—though William had kept excusing himself to go on walks.
Mary
now roamed the Lake Country with her, William, and Coleridge.
Mary
delighted in discussing poetry with them, and William always asked the opinion of Dorothy and Mary on a new work.

Coleridge had fallen in love with Mary’s sister, even though he was married. His wife didn’t understand him, though, Dorothy said.

I wanted to know what William thought of this Mary. Instead, I wrote that they sounded like a happy group, and perhaps we could all live by each other someday. Dorothy replied that it would be nice to have Caroline and me visit their cottage, though it was rather small.

I told her William could stay in
our
cottage when the war ceased. We had a room he could write in, miles of river by which to walk, and, very best of all, his own daughter to delight him. To this Dorothy didn’t say anything at all, except for a reference to France as “a very excitable place” and to her, William, Coleridge, Mary, and Mary’s sister all being “like a family.”

William sent me a copy, in English, of the book,
Lyrical Ballads,
that he and Coleridge had written together. I could make out his name and therefore which poems were his and not Coleridge’s. I could catch a few words, like
nature
,
mountain,
and
hermit
;
love
he himself had taught me. I tried to sound out William’s poems, but wasn’t very good at it. I would have to wait either for him or someone else to translate them, and the next month he did send me translations of “Lines Written in Early Spring,” “The Tables Turned,” and one he hadn’t published yet, on seeing a rainbow. I liked them all very much.

William said his critics made fun of him, saying they weren’t really poems, but he didn’t care. His critics called them “simple,” and he took that as a compliment. He also said it seemed that the war would go on forever, and that his thirty-second birthday was approaching. I didn’t see the connection.

Only Dorothy wrote to me of Mary.

Unexpectedly, in the late spring of 1802, since Napoleon had beaten everybody several times over (except the British, who had wisely only opposed him on the sea, where they always won), he declared a peace. After nine years of war, suddenly there was peace, and no one knew quite what to do about it and whether to trust it or not. But William knew what to do. He wrote, could I travel to Calais and meet him there?

So on August 1, 1802, after almost nine years’ absence, we met again. But it was not just us. I brought Caroline, and William brought Dorothy.

With the peace, the émigrés could return for a visit.

Marguerite wrote and said they would all cross the Channel in the autumn. She wanted to see my cottage. She longed to see Caroline. Gérard was going to a boarding school now, like most English boys, and she was afraid he was forgetting that he was French. But he still talked of his aunt Annette. Marie had suitors who were naval officers. Paul had just left for Spain and Portugal, purchasing sherry, madeira, and port for the British import company. Then Marguerite talked of the roses in bloom in her garden. She was fond of her English garden. It was like a dream to be going to see them all again, yet like a dream it was also strange. As William once pointed out to me, when you are away from people, you think of them as being stuck in time, as they were when you last saw them. We were all different.

Now, in the
diligence
on our way to Calais, I described each of the Vincents in detail to Caroline, in the way I remembered them, and in the way I had heard from Marguerite. Then she wanted me to describe her father to her. “I’ve already told you all about him,” I said. “But I want to hear it again,” she said. We had a long journey.

I explained that her father had an even longer one, from the north of England, then across the Channel.

This man of myth and legend, of the pink cap she still had in her room, whom she claimed she remembered singing her good night when she was less than a year old, she would meet soon, and I think she was a little nervous about it, and of course, so was I. She was so used to him being in the realm of myth, it was very odd all of a sudden to be seeing him, like meeting a character out of a favorite story that one has read or heard many times. I told her I had tutored Marie and Gérard as I tutored her, and they, too, had become beloved characters in her nightly fictions. She was nine years old now, and a lovely girl, pleasant to be with.

Caroline and I walked along the seashore together as we waited for William’s boat to arrive in the evening. Caroline liked the waves, and we kicked our feet in the shallows, getting the hems of our skirts wet.

I gave her the parasol. She was fair, like her father, and I liked to feel the sun on my shoulders.

The boardwalk along the beach was crowded. All the people who had not come out to enjoy the sun and walk by the sea for ten years of war were now out promenading in their shabby best. It seemed like an ordinary hot end of July, yet there was something frantic about it; we all wanted to be here before something started again. But France was on top of the world. That would last, they all thought, as long as Bonaparte lasted, and he was young.

It was hot and muggy, and I shaded my eyes when I looked at the sea. Many gold fires were spinning on it, as on a summer day on the Loire, when Marguerite and I would look down from her terrace. But there we were so far above the river, the sun was not so bright on the water. Here, I could hardly see for the glare.

Caroline liked walking with the parasol. “Do you think that’s Papa’s ship?” she asked.

There was a bulk on the horizon. “Perhaps,” I said.

She held my hand and swung our hands to and fro as we looked at the sea. “How tall is he, Mama?”

“He is much taller than we. He has long legs and loves to walk.” I had told her all this before.

“I love to walk.”

“Perhaps we can go walking together.” Then,
with Dorothy,
I added to myself. But I was anxious to see her too. I wanted to meet this woman who had answered so many of my letters with such friendship and concern, who even called me “sister.” She had taken care of William when he had come back from France, depressed, worried, and having no clear path in life. She gave him back his confidence, I thought. Can she give him back his life? Do we still have a life together?

“I’m thirsty, Maman. The ship is too slow.”

We waited at a café, and Caroline poured water from a carafe into the pale yellow-green citron juice in each of our glasses. She then put spoonfuls of sugar into each glass and stirred them. I was looking out across the boardwalk at the sea, and when I looked down at our table, I saw she had done all this.

“Thank you. Did you put two spoonfuls in?”

“Of course.”

“We like it sweet,
chérie
. You are so grown up. Your father will be proud of you.”

“Will we have dinner together?”

“Probably, unless they are too tired from traveling. We have had a day to rest. But we will do everything together. We have a whole fortnight.” Two weeks against nine years is not a lot, but to a child, a fortnight is forever.

We ordered some bread and a little jam for Caroline. Butter was too expensive, but the bread did not need it. It was lighter than our bread from the big oven at home, fresh and flaky, and I could not believe how delicious it was. Caroline carefully spread the jam on her bread. She was so beautiful, especially here, with her profile, looking down, being serious over her bread. She did remind me of William, her sudden quick movements and her feeling that every little thing was significant in some way.

We walked to read the charts of the vessels coming in, and we found we had made a mistake, and the Wordsworths’ ship would not come in until four the next morning. Or perhaps we had not made a mistake, and the tides had changed and delayed them. I could not tell.

It was hot, and I was having a difficult time reading the charts.

“The
Ceylon
will not come in until four in the morning?” I asked.

“That’s what it says,” said the man behind the window and beneath the charts. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead. It must be stifling in there, I thought.

“But I thought it was coming in today.”

“Not this ship.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s
wrong,
Madame. That’s just the way it is. The
Ceylon’
s coming in on the morning tide.”

He looked down at the papers on his desk.

Caroline was very disappointed. She walked by my side and swung my hand listlessly in the heat. The boardwalk was empty now, and the flag on the quai lay limp and still in the heat. Shutters were closed on the windows of the shops, and the street seemed devoid of movement.

“But I will be asleep when Papa’s ship arrives. I wanted to see it come in. I wanted to greet him on the quai.”

“I know,
chérie
, but we ’ll see him tomorrow morning.”

After nine years, what was another day, more or less?

For some reason I felt that I had got something wrong. I was sure William’s letter said he was arriving today. But things change. How could he have known, when he wrote the letter, about the tide? No one can control the tide.

When I saw William again, it was through the fine cambric curtain of our rooms on the rue de la Tête d ’Or. We had just finished our rolls and coffee and hot chocolate. A rather tall man helped a woman, dressed in black, out of the cabriolet. She was even smaller than I.

They did not look like brother and sister. I could not see his face well.

I could see more the top of his head, but I knew it was he.

I had faced dangers in the last ten years with some degree of equanimity. Why was it now that I had the desire that we should not have come? Why couldn’t we leave it comfortably in the realm of fine memories and the legend of the English father, the great poet who lived across the seas? My stomach knotted as if the old Committee of Safety were at my door. After all, what would we say to each other? I was glad his sister was here now, for she could help us talk. But what could she say, either? He had traveled hundreds of miles, and I was afraid I would disappoint him. I wasn’t the young woman he remembered. I was almost middle-aged. I didn’t know any English. I had a sudden impulse to pretend we were not home and to go back to Blois in the afternoon. Caroline, sticking a roll in her mouth, noticed me staring out the window.