Parrot and Olivier in America (2 page)

I knew I would be cured in Paris. In Paris I would be happy.

It was the Abbe de La Londe's contrary opinion that Paris was a pit of vile miasmas and that the country air was good for me. He should have had me at my Catullus and my Cicero but instead he would drag me, muskets at the ready, into what we called the
Bottom Hundred
where we would occupy ourselves shooting doves and thrush, and Bebe would play beater and groundsman and priest. "You're a splendid little marksman," Bebe would say, jogging to collect our plunder.
"Quam sagaciter puer telum conicit!"
I translated. He never learned I was shortsighted. I so wished to please him I shot things I could not see.

My mother would wish me to address him as
vous
and
l'Abbe
, but such was his character that he would be
Bebe
until the day he died.

I was a strange small creature for him to love. He was a strong and handsome man, with snow-white hair and shrewd eyes easily moved to sympathy. He had raised my father and now I trusted myself entire to him, his big liver-spotted hands, his patient manner, the smell of Virginian tobacco which stained the shoulder of his cassock, and filled me with the atoms of America twenty years before I breathed its air. "Come young man," he would say. "Come, it's a beautiful day--
Decorus est dies."
And the hail would be likely flailing your back raw and he would marvel, not at the cruel pummeling, but at the miracle of ice. Or if not the ice, then the wind--blowing so violently it seemed the North Sea itself was pushing up the Seine and would wash away the wall that separated the river from the
bain
.

The meek would not swim, but Bebe made sure I was not meek. He would be splashing in the deep end of the
bain
, naked as a broken statue--"Come on Great Olivier."

If I became--against all that God intended for me--a powerful swimmer, it was not because of the damaging teachings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but because of this good priest and my desire to please him. I would do anything for him, even drown myself. It was because of him that I was continually drawn away from the awful
atmosphere
of my childhood home, and if I spent too many nights in the company of doctors and leeches, I knew, in spite of myself, the sensual pleasures of the seasons, the good red dirt drying out my tender hands.

And of course I exaggerate. I lived at the Chateau de Barfleur for sixteen years and my mother was not always to be found lying in her pigeonhole with the wet sheet across her eyes. There was, above my father's locked desk, a large and lovely pencil portrait of my maman, as light as the dream of a child that was never to be born. Her nose here was perhaps a little too narrow, a trifle severe, but there was such true vitality in the likeness. She showed a clear forehead, a frank expression, inquiring eyes that directly engaged the viewer, and not only here, but elsewhere--for there would be many nights in my childhood when she would rise up from her bed, dress herself in all her loveliness, and welcome our old friends, not those so recently and swiftly elevated, but nobles of the robe and sword. To stand in the courtyard on these evenings with all the grand coaches out of sight behind the stables, to see the fuzzy moon and the watery clouds scudding above Normandy, was to find oneself transported back to a vanished time, and one would approach one's grand front door, not speeding on a bicycle, but with a steady slippered tread and, on entering, smell, not dirt or cobwebs, but the fine powder on the men's wigs, the lovely perfumes on the ladies' breasts, the extraordinary palette of the
ancien regime
, such pinks and greens, gorgeous silks and satins whose colors rose and fell among the folds and melted into the candled night, and on these occasions my mother was the most luminous among the beautiful. Yet her true beauty--evanescent, fluttering, deeper and more grained than in the pencil portrait--did not reveal itself until the audience of liveried servants had been sent away. Then the curtains were drawn and my father made the coffee himself and served his peers carefully, one by one, and my mother, whose voice in her sickbed was thin as paper, began to sing:

A troubadour of Bearn
,
His eyes filled with tears...

At this moment she was not less formal in her manner. Her slender hands lay simply on her lap, and it was to God Himself she chose to reveal her strong contralto voice. I have often enough, indiscreetly it seems now, publicly recalled my mother's singing of "Troubadour Bearnais," and as a result that story has gained a dull protective varnish like a ceramic captive in a museum which has been inquired of too often by the overly familiar. So it is that any tutoyering bourgeois and his wife can know the Comtesse de Garmont sang about the dead king and cried, but nothing would ever reveal to them Olivier de Garmont's fearful astonishment at his mother's emotions, and--God forgive me--I was jealous of the passion she so
wantonly
displayed, this vault of historic feeling she had hidden from me. Now, when I must remain politely at attention beside my father's chair, I had to conceal my emotion while she gave away a pleasure that was rightly mine. Our guests cried and I experienced a violent repugnance at this private act carried out in public view.

His eyes filled with tears
,
Sang to his mountain people
This alarming refrain:
Louis, son of Henri
,
Is captive in Paris
.

When she had finished, when our friends remained solemnly still, I walked across the wide rug to stand beside her chair and very quietly, like a scorpion, I pinched her arm.

Of course she was astonished, but what I remember most particularly is my wild and wicked pleasure of transgression. She widened her eyes, but did not cry out. Instead she tossed her head and gave me, below those welling eyes, a contemptuous smile.

I then walked, very coolly, to my bed. I had expected I would weep when I shut my door behind me. Indeed, I tried to, but it did not come out right. These were strange overexcited feelings but they were not, it seemed, of the sort that would produce tears. These were of a different order, completely new, perhaps more like those one would expect in an older boy in whose half-ignorant being the sap of life is rising. They seemed like they might be emotions ignited by sinful thoughts, but they were not. What I had smelled in that song, in that room full of nobles, was the distilled essence of the Chateau de Barfleur which was no less than the obscenity and horror of the French Revolution as it was visited on my family. Of this monstrous truth no honest word had ever been spoken in my hearing.

My mother would now punish me for pinching her. She would be cold, so much the better. Now I would discover what had made this smell. I would go through her bureau drawers when she was praying. I would take the key to the library. I examined the papers in my father's desk drawers. I climbed on chairs. I sought out the dark, the forbidden, the corners of the chateau where the
atmosphere
was somehow most dangerous and soiled, well beyond the proprieties of the library, beyond the dry safe wine cellar, through a dark low square portal, into that low limitless dirty dark space where the spiderwebs caught fire in the candlelight. I found nothing--or nothing but dread which mixed with the dust on my hands and made me feel quite ill.

However, there is no doubt that
Silices si levas scorpiones tandem invenies
--if you lift enough rocks, you will finally discover a nest of scorpions, or some pale translucent thing that has been bred to live in a cesspit or the fires of a forge. And I do not mean the letters a certain monsieur had written to my mother which I wish I had never seen. It was, rather, beside the forge that I discovered the truth in some humdrum little parcels. They had waited for me in the smoky gloom and I could have opened them any day I wished. Even a four-year-old Olivier might have reached them; the shelf was so low that our blacksmith used it to lean his tools against. One naturally assumed these parcels to be the legacy of a long-dead gardener--dried seeds, say, or sage or thyme carefully wrapped for a season some Jacques or Claude had never lived to see. By the time I pushed my snotty nose against them, which was a very long time after the night I pinched my mother, they still exuded a distinct but confusing smell. Was it a good smell? Was it a bad smell? Clearly I did not know. Not even Montaigne, being mostly concerned with the smell of women and food, is prepared to touch on this. He ignores the lower orders of mold and fungus, death and blood, all of which might have served him better than his ridiculous assertion that the sweat of great men--he mentions Alexander the Great--exhaled a sweet odor.

The old blacksmith had died the previous winter. Gustave was the new blacksmith, and Jacques his apprentice. They had recently restored our damaged gates with fierce spikes along their top and were presently rehanging them. While Gustave barked at Jacques, I quietly laid the first of these musky parcels outside on the flagstones. They certainly did not look like death or horror. The yellow wrap of newspaper, being very old, broke apart like the galettes we ate at Epiphany although, in this case, they contained not the delicious almond cream called frangipane, but--what was I looking at?--no more than the desiccated body of a bird, a pigeon from whose dried remains there issued a line of small black ants, and it was the ants who caused me such upset. That is, they swarmed along my arms and down my neck, and bit me. I was soon running up and down the courtyard crying and it was not until Gustave removed my tunic that I was saved.

So loud were my screams that my father rushed from the court in his judicial gown and wig. A robust bride and big-nosed groom came after him and peered at what I'd found. Gustave and Jacques now produced dozens of these parcels and laid them, according to my father's instructions, in a neat line along the side of the building. When they were all formed up, my father gave orders that they should be destroyed, which I naturally assumed was because they were filled with horrid ants.

Odile, drawn by my screams, came out to see. So did Bebe. This was a considerable crowd to be in such a place. But then my mother drove through the open gates in The Tormentor--which is what we called her swaying carriage--and in a moment she had descended and was in the thick of it, against my father's wishes.

"No, Henriette-Lucie, you must not." Those were his words, exactly.

My mother snatched the crumbling paper from my father's hand. "My pigeons!" she cried.

I did not understand, not for a second, but I had found the very explanation of my life.

My mother held her handkerchief across her mouth. It seemed she might be vomiting. She was blind to me, half dead with noble shame. She would not be attended to by servants, only by the aristocratic Bebe who now escorted her to the chateau. No one noticed me, and I remained behind while my father ordered his bride and groom back into the court. I stayed to watch the cremation of the pigeons, but even so I did not understand that each parcel contained a victim of the Revolution.

Inhabiting the wainscoting, as it were, I easily rescued a single fragile sheet of paper and, careful of it as if it were a lovely moth, carried it away into the woods to read.

II

THE HORRIBLE AUSTRIAN stared at me as I fled toward the oratory whose door I hammered at until the latch jumped free. I threw myself before the altar, blood pouring from my nose. Would God not protect me from that hideous thing I carried crushed inside my hand?

Then my Bebe kneeled beside me. He took my hand as if to comfort me, then forced it open. Firmly he held my wrist, gently he brushed the fragments from my palm.

"What is this my child?"

It was a drawing from the old newspaper that had wrapped a pigeon.

It showed a machine, an awful blade, a set of tracks, a rope, a human head severed from its body. It was the king's head. I knew his noble face. A hand held the head separate from the butchered neck of whence the blood did spurt and flow. An ornate typography declared: QUE LE ROI SOIT DAMNE.

Bebe offered his rumpled handkerchief. It was not the
complete and total inadequacy
of this that frightened me but that he, my own Bebe, should look at his Olivier with eyes so dull and tired.

"This
happened?"
I demanded.

He held out his big hands in resignation. This was terrifying but worse than that, far worse--he
shrugged
.

"It is horrid." I cried as bats cry, flying through the dreadful dark.

Below me was a great abyss, no floors, no walls, and my mind was awash with the monstrous terrors of decapitation. The king's head was a perfect living head that might smile and speak, and its eyes were perfect eyes, and the hair was dressed as a king's hair should be dressed, and everything about him was so fine and good except for this vile machine, these flying drops of blood, this filthy squirt and gush.

"Is this why my mother cries? Does she know this?" I meant was this what she saw when she lay with the damp sheet across her eyes?

"Yes, my darling, alas."

"Then who made this dreadful thing, Bebe? Who would
imagine
such a horrid sight?"

"It is thought to be kinder," said Bebe.

"It was Napoleon who did this? This is why we hate him?"

"No, this is the father of Napoleon."

I did not understand what he could mean--a
father
.

"Bebe, who killed so many pigeons?"

"The peasants put the birds on trial for stealing seeds. They found them guilty and then they wrung their necks."

"But we don't have pigeons, Bebe. The loft is empty. We have never had pigeons."

"Your grandfather kept pigeons. The peasants felt oppressed by them it seems, to have them eat the planted seeds."

Can you imagine such a flood of horror washing over so young a child? But so it was, at six years of age, I had my first lesson in the Terror which had been the flavor of my mother's milk. My parents had been thrown into Porte Libre prison where every day one of their fellow nobles was called "to the office" and was never seen again. In these months my father's hair turned white, my beautiful mother was broken in that year of 1793, when the
sansculottes
came up the road from Paris.