Spirit of Lost Angels (13 page)

I held my breath and clenched my buttocks to still my quivering body. I dared not move, nor utter a sound, under the frosty stare of Sister Superior.

The woman took her goose-feather plume and lowered her gaze to the register that, from what I could make out, recorded every detail of life in la Salpêtrière — its rules and punishments, garments and food allotted, animals maintained, vegetables harvested, personnel employed.

‘Name: Charpentier, Victoire Athénaïs, widow of Armand Bruyère, merchant and innkeeper,’ Sister Superior read in a grim monotone. ‘Date of entry to la Salpêtrière Insane Quarter: 8 September, 1785. Age: 23 years. Condition: Alienism of
la Frénésie
type caused by too much moral sensitivity, the listlessness of deep grief, and an imbalance of bile humour. Medical Observations: The effect of this humour has bogged the patient’s intestines by slowing down excretions and drying out the brain.’

Sister Superior barely took a breath and her voice never wavered. ‘Usual treatment performed on patient for six weeks: copious bloodletting from the feet to the temporal artery. Leeches applied to the anus. Purges, ice baths, spinning stool. Balms applied to the shaven head. Medical Observations: patient appears to have responded to treatment and regained lucidity. Recognises own name.’

She paused, meeting my eyes again as if searching for lingering madness.

Ink flickering across the page, she wrote and read at the same time: ‘Date of transfer to Prison Quarter of la Salpêtrière — 1 November, 1785. To be held there for life for the crime of murder. Condition: Alienism, diminished to the mild
mélancolie
type.’

Transfer to prison! I could barely stifle my gasp. ‘But, but, Sister Superior, am I not to be sent home? I don’t recall any murder. There has been some mistak — ’

‘The prisoner will not speak.’ The glacial eyes didn’t blink, nor move from mine. ‘Otherwise I’ll have no choice but to remove her back to the dungeons.’

I clasped my hands, holding them close to my heaving breast. Sister Superior kept writing. My pulse racing, I looked down at the register again, trying to understand, and to find the mistake. There must be one, somewhere.

It was difficult to read upside-down, but it looked like a list of the different asylum dormitories, each bearing the name of a saint — Sainte-Anne: 107 cantankerous old women with canker sores. Sainte-Catherine: 87 deformed girls. Sainte-Magdeleine: 48 epileptics. Les Cachots: 84 violent, crazy women. Logis: 100 incurably insane women and girls. Long lists of women coming from all over the country, it seemed. A shudder bristled through me as I read, in many of the final columns, “suicide” or “death”.

‘I note you, widow Bruyère, have no particular skills in weaving, spinning, embroidery or lacework,’ Sister Superior said, jolting me from my horrified daze. ‘As a former innkeeper, you shall thus provide your cooking services to the community of la Salpêtrière.’

She kept on talking, never raising nor lowering her voice; never blinking.

‘Nourishment shall be given, as to all prisoners, by soup, bread and water. You will be allotted a blouse, a dress, stockings and a bonnet every eight days. You are to wear your own clogs.’

I had no choice but to bow in submissive assent. ‘If I hear the slightest complaint about your kitchen work, or if you fail to remain silent outside the daily hour permitted for talk, you shall be taken from your cell, chained by the neck to a wooden beam and whipped. You will remain in that upright position for one whole day. If this bad behaviour continues, you will be returned to the dungeon.’

Not the dungeon. Never could I survive another day in such a living tomb. I could hardly believe I’d survived almost two months there. In my weakened state, I felt faint, my legs threatening to fold beneath me.

I said nothing and bowed to Sister Superior, who nodded to two keepers standing by the door.

The keepers hustled me across the icy cobblestones, gripping me so tightly my arms went numb.

‘Please, you’re hurting me.’ I tried to twist away, but they held me tighter.

‘Think you’re lucky to escape the dungeons, do you, my lovely?’ The keeper sneered. ‘Those
cachots
that make ordinary folk tremble?’

‘She mightn’t think herself so lucky once she gets to the Prison Quarter, eh?’ the other said with a cackle. They hustled me to walk faster and I stumbled, and fell to the cobblestones, which grazed my face.

After perhaps ten minutes, we reached a building as gloomy as all the others, besides the dungeons, for which there were no words.

‘Here we are,’ the keeper said. ‘The Prison Quarter of la Salpêtrière — your new home.’

‘But you forget,’ the other one said. ‘She needs her flower — our pretty
fleur-de-lys
reserved for murderesses.’

They sniggered as one pinned me down, the other, holding an iron, lurching at me. As the hot iron seared its lily flower pattern onto my left shoulder, the pain ripped the breath from me so that I couldn’t even scream, and I thought my heart would stop beating.

‘Off you go to the wolves now, my lovely,’ a keeper said, pulling me from the chair.

As they bundled me into a room, banged the heavy door shut and slid the bolts home, an icy rush scrambled down my back.

***

Clammy fingers pawed at the shoulders of my prison garb. I winced from the pain of the burn, taking in the vast dormitory in the scant light from a high dormer window.

‘Welcome, Victoire
.
I’m Agathe,’ a husky voice whispered close to me. ‘You need anything in here, you ask Agathe.’

Smallpox had ploughed the woman’s face into deep furrows, and robbed her of an eye. I shrank from her stale breath and the crusty sores that spotted her lips and oozed yellow liquid.

‘And we all know what the pretty emerald-eyed Victoire did to end up here,
n’est-ce pas
?’ Agathe winked at the group of women surrounding her, her smile mocking. ‘Poor drowned little mites.’

I opened my mouth but couldn’t think what to say. I tried to recoil from Agathe’s moist touch; from the foulness that made my gut heave, but the sharp curves of the woman’s nails held me still, and punctured my skin.

I shut my eyes to rid my mind of them, but all I saw was the river flowing faster, higher, the heads of Blandine and Gustave bobbing on puckers of current like flower heads the wind had ripped from their stalks.

‘S’pose we all got our reasons for doing what we do,’ Agathe went on. ‘I myself had the bad luck to marry a gambling drunkard, Victoire. Had to chop him up with his own axe in the end.’ Her throaty laugh was snug with phlegm.

With a ragged nail, Agathe began tracing my lily-flower branding.

‘Hah, truly one of us!’ Her fingertips moved slowly, dipping into the hollow below my shoulder, and following the rise of my breast down to the stippled skin. She grabbed my nipple and twisted.

I cried out and tried to run, but there was nowhere to go, and the stink of the inmates rose as they pawed at me and clung feebly to my dress. I wrapped my arms around myself, choking on my sobs.

‘Aw, no need to cry, pretty thing.’ Agathe was at my side again. ‘Come and meet my friends.’ She pointed out two tall women. ‘Catherine and Marguerite. They’re poisoners, here for life, like you. And here is sweet Toinette, a freethinker, swindler and cheat.’ Agathe raked her mouth into a horrible grin as she pointed out Marie-Françoise. ‘A knife-wielding blasphemer, and over there is Julie, our little gypsy girl and money forger.’

‘Sleep, you whores!’ a sister officer shouted from the corridor. ‘Bedtime!’

Bedtime? I gazed about me, at the fifty or sixty inmates. I counted only six straw mattresses.

Agathe laughed. ‘How many sous
you got
for me
,
Victoire? Most expensive bed is next to the window. No money, no bed.’

‘Silence!’ the sister officer shrieked through the spy hole. ‘Next one who makes a sound goes in with the crazies.’

I had no choice but to huddle on the damp straw covering the ground with the other luckless ones without beds. The cold bit at my hands and feet as I lay, crowded in with all those women, yet the pain of solitude wrenched at me as if I were the sole occupant.

The inmates’ breathing slowed to gentle snores but, as small things crept and gnawed through the straw beneath me, my eyes stayed wide open, staring into the blue slice of light.

To remain in the dungeons would have meant certain death, but survival here in the prison seemed hardly possible either. I knew, like crops struck by drought, I would quickly wither and die.

***

The chapel bell clanging through the fog signalled the end of Mass. The chill November morning hovered between dawn and day, as two keepers took me to the kitchens for my first working day.

Up to the end of my time in the dungeons, I’d been too ill to contemplate escape; too sick to think of anything besides surviving. Now, outdoors once again, thoughts of fleeing the asylum flitted through my mind.

I glanced around, my brain spinning with ideas to get past the asylum’s guard of soldiers and corporals. Perhaps to the left of the main courtyard, via the workshops and housing for the wheelwrights, locksmiths, cobblers and carpenters. Or the lodgings of those who watched over us — the keepers, guards and sister officers. Was there was a way out through the stables or the wheat granaries? Or could I hide in a cart that transported sick women and children to and from the city hospital?

The carts came every day, full of young girls with labels attached to their bonnets, stating their name, age and dormitory. Older women too, were aboard, their labels attached to their right sleeve. In the split second the cart governess might turn her head, I would jump down, unseen, into the crowded Paris street.

I shook my head. The cart governess would never turn her head, constantly watching for women exchanging their labels, ripping them from sleeves, or jumping from the cart. Despair wracked me. For the poor with no money, no connections, escape was unthinkable.

The smell told me we’d reached the kitchen, and I dismissed all notions of fleeing the asylum.

‘Peel those vegetables,’ a stout woman barked, wielding a knife. ‘Then you can stuff the chickens.’

‘Marinade the beef!’ another barked at me.

‘
Non, non
, imbecile, cabbage is not cut like that,’ a beak-nosed woman snapped.

More people began shouting orders at me, all at the same time so I could barely understand any of them. The noise was worse than all the bells of Paris clanging at once. I flinched against the din, trying not to retch on the smell of boiled cabbage and mutton fat, or to faint with hunger, which seemed even worse surrounded by food.

‘And don’t be tempted to eat the slightest morsel,’ a sister officer said. ‘I’ll be watching you, and if one crumb passes those lips, your punishment will be the dungeons for twenty four hours. Understood?’

I nodded.
‘Oui
, madame.’

I learned quickly how to make the daily gruel — thin and bland with much the same odour as the drains and the barnyard located next to the asylum orphanage. Once the food for patients and prisoners was prepared, I helped cook the meals for la Salpêtrière personnel, who ate in a vast dining room, and for the few wealthy prisoners who could pay for decent food and water.

Blasts of muggy air and hours of inhaling the smells of untouchable food made my heart beat quick and thready, and many times throughout the long day, my legs trembled and I feared I might collapse. That sister officer’s eyes never left me.

***

‘
Allez
, lazy whore,’ the keepers said when my kitchen day was finally over. ‘Back to your cell.’

The scent of woodsmoke prickled my nostrils; the food smells lingering in my clothes taunting my taste buds. I licked my numb lips as I slithered across the icy cobblestones under the keepers’ firm grip.

Back in the dormitory, Agathe was beside me again.

‘What did you bring me from the kitchen,
chérie
?’ she said with her cracked grin.

I shook my head, opening my empty palms.

‘What, nothing? Hold the bitch, Marie-Françoise.’

As the tall, God-cursing woman restrained me, Agathe pinched and twisted my nipples again.

‘Stop, please, stop!’ I begged.

‘Next time you’ll bring me something nice, eh, Victoire?’ Agathe said, pus leaking from her lip sores. ‘A slice of beef or a plump chicken breast, perhaps?’

‘Surely you could hide
some
leftovers?’ Julie said, her gypsy face locked in a nest of black curls.

‘Anything?’ Catherine, one of the poisoner women, said.

I shook my head. ‘Please, leave me alone. I cannot get you anything. They watch me constantly. All the food, even the scraps, are checked and recorded in the register. I’m s-s-sorry.’

‘What a shame,’ Agathe said, ‘because s-s-sorry isn’t good enough.’

I closed my eyes and let her blows batter my body, undefended. Until I could think of a way out of la Salpêtrière, it was easier not to fight.

The tawny November fog lifted but the clear, more frigid air of December seemed to freeze in my lungs. Vicious as a keeper’s whip, snowstorms beat against the austere walls of la Salpêtrière’s vast buildings and outhouses, their grime staining the snow brown.

Throughout that icy winter in the asylum, the mournful nocturnal cries of the desperate grew louder as the cold claimed its victims. They removed the multitude of women and girls who perished, their bodies shovelled together in the foetid necropolis of Paris, like old dogs. I hugged myself and prayed for their wretched souls.

As I diced vegetables, stirred soup and baked meat, fish and dark bread, I often recalled cooking at
L’Auberge des Anges
. I saw my beloved Armand laughing with the inn guests, pouring his wine. ‘A toast to our good health!’ he said, raising his beaker.

I smiled as tiny twin footsteps, and those of their sister, Madeleine, scurried about, their shrieks of glee drowning the older voices of Léon and his siblings. I hoped somehow, they had rekindled the spark of
L’Auberge des Anges
.

What had become of Léon? Remarried, no doubt. Grégoire and Françoise’s children — Emile and Mathilde — must have grown so. There would be more children by now. I prayed they were taking good care of my little Madeleine — that she was so entranced with my brother’s tales she wouldn’t be suffering my absence.

I blinked away the pain that scissored my head when I let myself reflect on all I’d been forced to leave for this prison life.

As I moved through my day, from Mass to the kitchen, then back to the dormitory for evening prayer and Agathe’s hell, I wondered how much longer I could continue such an existence.

***

The snow finally melted. I had survived the winter. The distant sun moved closer and cast the asylum buildings in an insipid yellow. From my barred existence I heard no spring birdsong though, as if the birds avoided this forgotten place where trees barely grew, where flowers struggled to blossom and where, behind its sombre facade, the women were abandoned to die.

Most mornings, as the keepers herded us to the chapel, I wrenched my eyes from the grim dormitories that housed la Salpêtrière’s orphanage and the school for poor and abandoned children. I feared, amongst the knot of orphans, I might perceive a girl — a lovely child with the same green eyes and cinnamon hair as mine. A girl who was six years old, by the name of Rubie.

That sharp March morning, from my place in the pews of the Saint-Louis Chapel, I couldn’t stop my eyes from straying to the lines of children, and their governesses, leading them into the great domed building.

The two ordered ranks, all dressed in white — child brides from la Salpêtrière and child grooms from la Pitié — slowly advanced towards the altar, coming together for
la bénédiction nuptiale
. Against the noise of hymns, the deep stride of organ music, their weak ‘
oui’
spiralled with the incense smoke, evaporating into nothingness.

In that single morning, I witnessed about sixty such “marriages”, and as the newly-wed children departed for the boat at Le Havre, I looked into their frightened eyes, wide with the helplessness of young victims.

No, no, my Rubie cannot be among them, I kept telling myself. She is not being brought up to be placed for work, or married off to populate some far-off colony in Madagascar, Louisiana or Canada.

That afternoon, perhaps because my thoughts were full of Rubie, I yearned to feel the soft innocence of an infant.

‘I would like to help out in the nursery,’ I said to the sister officer. ‘For the break after prayers, until my kitchen tasks resume.’

The sister officer agreed, of course. Continually short of hands, the
nourrices
were not fussy about the help proffered — even that of a woman imprisoned for child murder.

I stood before hundreds of barred cradles aligned in numbered rows. Not a soul cared for these motherless bundles whose wails and whimpers echoed off the bare stone walls. I gaped, too stunned; too sad to speak. I wanted to hold, to love, all of them — these babies of girls who had no money, no standing. No choice.

Moving down a line, from one bundle to the next, I began changing their soiled nappies. The dried excrement and their raw, blistered skin told me the infants were rarely changed.

A
nourrice
instructed me to feed several, from a bottle of milk, which I did, holding them close, cooing soft noises at one nameless cherub face after the other.

‘No point getting attached,’ the
nourrice
said. ‘We only keep them for a week. Then they’ll be shipped out to the country.’

‘The country?’ I said. ‘But why?’

‘Farmed out to wet-nurses,’ she said. ‘Though most won’t survive the journey — five or six to a basket stuffed with straw, and hitched to a mule.’

I thought of Rubie on those church steps and how I’d imagined matron would simply take her to her foundling hospital and raise her there, and find good parents for her. I knew nothing of this farming out to the country.

My poor Rubie. Never would I have left you in the basket, but what was a penniless, sullied scullery maid to do? No, no, stop. Don’t think like that. Rubie has found a good home, a loving maman and papa who dress her prettily on Sundays for Mass and let her wear my angel pendant.

After I fed the babies, I wrapped and lay them back in their stained cots. Some screamed, some cried weakly, others lay still, too feeble to make any noise at all. From the smell, I also knew that several were dead, though nobody had bothered, or had the time, to remove them to some common grave.

I picked up the next baby, a little girl. One arm had wriggled free from the cocoon wrapping. As I touched the hand, tiny fingers closed around my thumb, gripping it with surprising force.

‘Petite chérie
,’ I crooned. ‘You cannot be much more than a day old.’

As I stared into her perfect face, the unsuspecting eyes, the unbounded sadness of my own past, and the terrible assaults of prison life, clogged my brain.

I rocked her gently and shut my eyes. The river washed over me, its force sweeping my feet from the murky bed. I tried to clutch at ferns, a rock, a sprig of leaves, but my hands kept slipping, the current dragging me downstream. In their little white shifts, Blandine and Gustave swirled with me.

As my babies disappeared, my eyes flew open and a horrible light broke inside me — a flash so fierce it both terrified and calmed me.

Darkness snuffed out the light — the same creeping darkness that had brought me to the asylum; a sadness so familiar it had seemed almost like a friend I’d clung to in those first terrible weeks of the dungeons. It had somehow been easier, sheathed in madness, than to be lucid, and comprehend the terrifying reality of
les cachots
.

‘Poor child,’ I whispered to the infant I cradled, seeing at once its destiny laid bare. ‘Misery only, watches over your cradle.’

I looked around. The
nourrices
were busy. Nobody paid me the slightest attention.

‘How simple it would be,’ I murmured, ‘to lift the length of my dress and press it over your beautiful face.’ I surged with gladness. ‘Would it not be simpler to relieve you of your suffering now, before it only gets worse?’

A sister officer marched up to me and snatched the baby from my arms. ‘Time to get back to the kitchen, you.’

***

On that first day of June, the cobblestones trapped the heat and threw up the stench of putrefying food, diseased flesh and unwashed bodies. The whole of la Salpêtrière stank like one great rotted mass.

As they escorted me from the kitchen back to my cell, I watched old scabies-ridden women scraping up scraps of onions and cabbage from the courtyard. The keepers’ foetid odour snagged in my nostrils and sweat dripped into my eyes. I ran my furry tongue over dry lips.

‘That Diamond Necklace trial is over,’ the fat keeper said.

‘What happened?’ asked the other, thin one.

‘It’s all here,’ the fat one said, flapping the newspaper about with the hand not restraining me. ‘Front page news!’

‘Well, read it to me, man,’ the thin one said.

The fat keeper thrust his newspaper at him. ‘You read it.’

‘I can read,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you what it says.’

The fat one shoved his paper at me. ‘Go on then, smart whore.’

‘“In a sensational trial the thirty-year old con artist and brains behind the Diamond Necklace Affair, Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la Motte, was condemned to be whipped and branded in public, then interred for life in the Prison Quarter of la Salpêtrière”,’
I read. ‘“After having accepted the
Parlement de Paris
as judges, the Cardinal de Rohan was acquitted, and exiled by the King. The prostitute Nicole Leguay d’Oliva and the charlatan, Cagliostro, were also acquitted. In his absence, after his probable escape to England with the necklace, Jeanne’s husband, Count Nicolas de la Motte was condemned to the galleys for life.”’

The following day, the asylum quaked with two pieces of news. Firstly, a new Sister Superior had been appointed.

‘Some rich old bitch,’ Agathe said.

‘
Only the wealthy and well-connected get that position,’
Marie-Françoise said with a sneer.

The other news rippling through the dormitories was of the famous Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, and her pending imprisonment in la Salpêtrière’s Prison Quarter.

‘They say she fought so hard when they whipped her that five torturers had to hold her,’ Julie said.

‘And she writhed about so, the hot iron slipped and they burned the
voleuse
“V” into her breast instead of her shoulder,’ Toinette said.

‘Bet she’s still got them diamonds,’ Agathe said. ‘I don’t think she’ll mind sharing some with me,
n’est-ce pas
, Victoire?’

‘Or she sold them and we’ll get a load of sous out of her,’ Marie-Françoise said. The two women cackled and Agathe hacked a gob of green phlegm at my feet.

But none
of my fellow prisoners got to meet la Comtesse de la Motte.
Two keepers came to our dormitory and hauled me away.

‘Where are you taking me?’

The men remained wordless as they hurried me across courtyards into another part of the vast prison, and pushed me into a private cell.

Clothed in a black silk dress, a woman sat on the blanketed bed. How regal she looked, trying to hold her back straight when I knew it must be stinging from the whip burns.

From beneath a dark lace net that covered most of her face, she smiled, stretching one hand out to me.

‘Sister Superior informs me you are an intelligent, literate woman, just as I requested. I am very happy to welcome you as my personal maid, Victoire.’

My hand clamped in the warm grip of the most-talked about woman in the country, I sensed a confidence; a subtle power. Bathed in the dark luminous eyes, I glimpsed a hint of the enigma that shrouded Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy.