A Place of Greater Safety

  Lucile left a line. She took a breath, then began again.

  “She spent her last night writing letters. She sent a diamond to Mendoza, and one to the King of Spain. When all was under seal, she sat with open eyes while her women prayed.

  “At eight o’clock the Provost Marshal came for her. At her prie-dieu, she read in a calm voice the prayers for the dying. Members of her household knelt as she swept into the Great Hall, dressed all in black, an ivory crucifix in her ivory hand.

  “Three hundred people had assembled to watch her die. She entered through a small side door, surprising them; her face was composed. The scaffold was draped in black. There was a black cushion for her to kneel upon. But when her attendants stepped forward, and they slipped the black robe from her shoulders, it was seen that she was clothed entirely in scarlet. She had dressed in the color of blood.”

  Here Lucile put down her pen. She began to think of synonyms. Vermilion. Flame. Cardinal. Sanguine. Phrases occured to her: caught red-handed. In the red. Red-letter day.

  She picked up her pen again.

  “What did she think, as she rested her head on the block? As she waited: as the executioner took his stance? Seconds passed; and those seconds went by like years.

  “The first blow of the axe gashed the back of the Queen’s head. The second failed to sever her neck, but carpeted the stage with royal blood. The third blow rolled her head across the scaffold. The executioner retrieved it and held it up to the onlookers. It could be seen that the lips were moving; and they continued to move for a quarter of an hour.

  “Though who stood over the sodden relic with a fob-watch, I really could not say.”

  Adèle, her sister, came in. “Doing your diary? Can I read it?”

  “Yes; but you may not.”

  “Oh, Lucile,” her sister said; and laughed.

  Adèle dumped herself into a chair. With some difficulty, Lucile dragged her mind back into the present day, and brought her eyes around to focus on her sister’s face. She is regressing, Lucile thought. If I had been a married woman, however briefly, I would not be spending the afternoons in my parents’ house.

  “I’m lonely,” Adèle said. “I’m bored. I can’t go out anywhere because it’s too soon and I have to wear this disgusting mourning.”

  “Here’s boring,” Lucile said.

  “Here’s just as usual. Isn’t it?”

  “Except that Claude is at home less than ever. And this gives Annette more opportunity to be with her Friend.”

  It was their impertinent habit, when they were alone, to call their parents by their Christian names.

  “And how is that Friend?” Adèle inquired. “Does he still do your Latin for you?”

  “I don’t have to do Latin anymore.”

  “What a shame. No more pretext to put your heads together, then.”

  “I hate you, Adèle.”

  “Of course you do,” her sister said good-naturedly. “Think how grown-up I am. Think of all the lovely money my poor husband left me. Think of all the things I know, that you don’t. Think of all the fun I’m going to have, when I’m out of mourning. Think of all the men there are in the world! But no. You only think of one.”

  “I do not think of him,” Lucile said.

  “Does Claude even suspect what’s germinating here, what with him and Annette, and him and you?”

  “There’s nothing germinating. Can’t you see? The whole point is that nothing’s going on.”

  “Well, maybe not in the crude technical sense,” Adèle said. “But I can’t see Annette holding out for much longer, I mean, even through sheer fatigue. And you—you were twelve when you first saw him. I remember the occasion. Your piggy eyes lit up.”

  “I have not got piggy eyes. They did not light up.”

  “But he’s exactly what you want,” Adèle said. “Admittedly, he’s not much like anything in the life of Maria Stuart. But he’s just what you need for casting in people’s teeth.”

  “He never looks at me anyway,” Lucile said. “He thinks I’m a child. He doesn’t know I’m there.”

  “He knows,” Adèle said. “Go through, why don’t you?” She gestured in the direction of the drawing room, towards its closed doors. “Bring me a report. I dare you.”

  “I can’t just walk in.”

  “Why can’t you? If they’re only sitting around talking, they can’t object, can they? And if they’re not—well, that’s what we want to know, isn’t it?”

  “Why don’t you go then?”

  Adèle looked at her as if she were simple-minded. “Because the more innocent assumption is the one that you would be expected to make.”

  Lucile saw this; and she could never resist a dare. Adèle watched her go, her satin slippers noiseless on the carpets. Camille’s odd little face floated into her mind. If he’s not the death of us, she thought, I’ll smash my crystal ball and take up knitting.

  Camille was punctual; come at two, she had said. On the offensive, she asked him if he had nothing better to do with his afternoons. He did not think this worth a reply; but he sensed the drift of things.

  Annette had decided to employ that aspect of herself her friends called a Splendid Woman. It involved sweeping about the room and smiling archly.

  “So,” she said. “There are rules, and you won’t play by them. You’ve been talking about us to someone.”

  “Oh,” Camille said, fiddling with his hair, “if only there were anything to say.”

  “Claude is going to find out.”

  “Oh, if only there were something for him to find out.” He stared absently at the ceiling. “How is Claude?” he said at last.

  “Cross,” Annette said, distracted. “Terribly cross. He put a lot of money into the Périer brothers’ waterworks schemes, and now the Comte de Mirabeau has written a pamphlet against it and collapsed the stocks.”

  “But he must mean it for the public good. I admire Mirabeau.”

  “You would. Let a man be a bankrupt, let him be notoriously immoral—oh, don’t distract me, Camille, don’t.”

  “I thought you wanted distraction,” he said somberly.

  She was keeping a careful distance between them, buttressing her resolve with occasional tables. “It has to stop,” she said. “You have to stop coming here. People are talking, they’re making assumptions. And God knows, I’m sick of it. Whatever made you think in the first place that I would give up the security of my happy marriage for a hole-and-corner affair with you?”

  “I just think you would, that’s all.”

  “You think I’m in love with you, don’t you? Your self-conceit is so monstrous—”

  “Annette, let’s run away. Shall we? Tonight?”

  She almost said, yes, all right then.

  Camille stood up, as if he were going to suggest they start her packing. She stopped pacing, came to a halt before him. She rested her eyes on his face, one hand pointlessly smoothing her skirts. She raised the other hand, touched his shoulder.

  He moved towards her, set his hands at either side of her waist. The length of their bodies touched. His heart was beating wildly. He’ll die, she thought, of a heart like that. She spent a moment looking into his eyes. Tentatively, their lips met. A few seconds passed. Annette drew her fingernails along the back of her lover’s neck and knotted them into his hair, pulling his head down towards her.

  There was a sharp squeal from behind them. “Well,” a breathy voice said, “so it is true after all. And, as Adèle puts it, ‘in the crude technical sense.’”

  Annette plunged away from him and whirled around, the blood draining from her face. Camille regarded her daughter more with interest than surprise, but he blushed, very faintly indeed. And Lucile was shocked, no doubt about that; that was why her voice came out so high and frightened, and why she now appeared rooted to the spot.

  “There wasn’t anything crude about it,” Camille said. “Do you think that, Lucile? That’s sad.”

  Lucile turned a
nd fled. Annette let out her breath. Another few minutes, she thought, and God knows. What a ridiculous, wild, stupid woman I am. “Well now,” she said. “Camille, get out of my house. If you ever come within a mile of me again, I’ll arrange to have you arrested.”

  Camille looked slightly overawed. He backed off slowly, as if he were leaving a royal audience. She wanted to shout at him, “What are you thinking of now?” But she was cowed, like him, by intimations of disaster.

  “Is this your ultimate insanity?” d’Anton asked Camille. “Or is there more to come?”

  Somehow—he does not know how—he has become Camille’s confidant. What he is being told now is unreal and dangerous and perhaps slightly—he relishes the word-depraved.

  “You said,” Camille protested, “that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It’s true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation.”

  “Yes, all right, but that’s what people do. It’s a harmless, necessary, socially accepted convention. It is not like, it is a million miles from, what you are suggesting. Which is, as I understand it, that you start something up with the daughter as a way of getting to the mother.”

  “I don’t know about ‘start something up,’” Camille said. “I think it would be better if I married her. More permanent, no? Make myself one of the family? Annette can’t have me arrested, not if I’m her son-in-law.”

  “But you ought to be arrested,” d’Anton said humbly. “You ought to be locked up.” He shook his head …

  The following day Lucile received a letter. She never knew how; it was brought up from the kitchen. It must have been given to one of the servants. Normally it would have been given straight to Madame, but there was a new skivvy, a littl girl, she didn’t know any better.

  When she had read the letter she turned it over in her hand and smoothed out the pages. She worked through it again, methodically. Then she folded it and tucked it inside a volume of light pastoral verse. Immediately, she thought that she might have slighted it; she took it out again and placed it inside Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. So strange was it, that it might have come from Persia.

  And then, as soon as the book was back on the shelf, she wanted the letter in her hand again. She wanted the feel of the paper, the sight of the looped black hand, to run her eye across the phrases—Camille writes beautifully, she thought, beautifully. There were phrases that made her hold her breath. Sentences that seemed to fly from the page. Whole paragraphs that held and then scattered the light: each word strung on a thread, each word a diamond.

  Good Lord, she thought. She remembered her journals, with a sense of shame. And I thought I practiced prose … .

  All this time, she was trying to avoid thinking about the content of the letter. She did not really believe it could apply to her, though logic told her that such a thing would not be misdirected.

  No, it was she—her soul, her face, her body—that occasioned the prose. You could not examine your soul to see what the fuss was about; even the body and face were not easy. The mirrors in the apartment were all too high; her father, she supposed, had directed where to hang them. She could only see her head, which gave a curious disjointed effect. She had to stand on tiptoe to see some of her neck. She had been a pretty little girl, yes, she knew that. She and Adèle had both been pretty little girls, the kind that fathers dote on. Last year there had been this change.

  She knew that for many women beauty was a matter of effort, a great exercise of patience and ingenuity. It required cunning and dedication, a curious honesty and absence of vanity. So, if not precisely a virtue, it might be called a merit.

  But she could not claim this merit.

  Sometimes she was irritated by the new dispensation—just as some people are irritated by their own laziness, or by the fact that they bite their nails. She would like to work at her looks—but there it is, they don’t require it. She felt herself drifting away from other people, into the realms of being judged by what she cannot help. A friend of her mother said (she was eavesdropping, as it happened): “Girls who look like that at her age are nothing by the time they’re twenty-five.” The truth is, she can’t imagine twenty-five. She is sixteen now; beauty is as final as a birthmark.

  Because her skin had a delicate pallor, like that of a woman in an ivory tower, Annette had persuaded her to powder her dark hair, and knot it up with ribbons and flowers to show the flawless bones of her face. It was as well her dark eyes could not be taken out and put back china blue. Or Annette would have done it, perhaps; she wanted to see her own doll’s face looking back. More than once, Lucile had imagined herself a china doll, left over from her mother’s childhood, wrapped up in silk on a high shelf: a doll too fragile and too valuable to be given to the rough, wild children of today.

  Life for the most part was dull. She could remember a time when her greatest joy had been a picnic, an excursion to the country, a boat on the river on a hot afternoon. A day with no studies, when the regular hours were broken, and it was possible to forget which day of the week it was. She had looked forward to these days with an excitement very like dread, rising early to scan the sky and predict the weather. There were a few hours when you felt “Life is really like this”; you supposed this was happiness, and it was. You thought about it at the time, selfconsciously. Then you came back, tired, in the evening, and things went on as before. You said, “Last week, when I went to the country, I was happy.”

  Now she had outgrown Sunday treats; the river looked always the same, and if it rained, and you stayed indoors, that was no great disaster. After her childhood (after she said to herself “my childhood is over”) events in her imagination became more interesting than anything that happened in the Duplessis household. When her imagination failed her, she wandered the rooms, listless and miserable, destructive thoughts going around in her head. She was glad when it was time for bed and reluctant to get up in the mornings. Life was like that. She would put aside her diaries, consumed with horror at her shapeless days, at the waste of time that stretched before her.

  Or pick up her pen: Anne Lucile Philippa, Anne Lucile. How distressed I am to find myself writing like this, how distressed that a girl of your education and refinement can find nothing better to do, no music practice, no embroidery, no healthy afternoon walk, just these death-wishes, these fantasies of the morbid and the grandiose, these blood-wishes, these images, sweet Jesus, ropes, blades and her mother’s lover with his half-dead-already air and his sensual, bruised-looking mouth. Anne Lucile. Anne Lucile Duplessis. Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and worse for it’s much less dull than better. She looked herself in the eye; she smiled; she threw back her head, displaying to her advantage the long white throat that her mother deems will break her admirers’ hearts.

  Yesterday Adèle had begun on that extraordinary conversation. Then she had walked into the drawing room and seen her mother slide her tongue between her lover’s teeth, knot her fingers into his hair, flush and tremble and decline into his thin and elegant hands. She remembered those hands, his forefinger touching paper, touching her handwriting: saying Lucile, my sweet, this should be in the ablative case, and I am afraid that Julius Caesar never imagined such things as your translation suggests.

  Today, her mother’s lover offered her marriage. When something—blessed event, however strange—comes to shake us out of our monotony—then, she cried, things should happen in ones.

  Claude: “Of course I have said my last word on the matter. I hope he has the sense to accept it. I don’t know what can have led him to make the proposal in the first place. Do you, Annette? Once it might have been a different story. When I met him at first I took to him, I admit. Very intelligent … but what is intelligence, when someone has a bad moral character? Is basically unsound? He had the most extraordinary reputation … no, no, no. Can’t hear of it.”

  “No, I suppose you can’t,”
Annette said.

  “Frankly, that he has the nerve—I’m surprised.”

  “So am I.”

  He had considered sending Lucile away to stay with relations. But then people might put the worst construction on it—might believe she had done something she shouldn’t have.

  “What if …?”

  “If?” Annette said impatiently.

  “If I were to introduce her to one or two eligible young men?”

  “Sixteen is too young to marry. And her vanity is already great enough. Still, Claude, you must do as you feel. You are the head of the household. You are the girl’s father.”

  Annette sent for her daughter, having fortified herself with a large glass of brandy.

  “The letter.” She clicked her fingers for it.

  “I don’t carry it on my person.”

  “Where then?”

  “Inside Persian Letters.”

  An ill-advised merriment seized Annette. “Perhaps you would like to file it inside my copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.”

  “Didn’t know you had one. Can I read it?”

  “No indeed. I may follow the advice in the foreword, and give you a copy on your wedding night. When, in the course of time, your father and I find you someone to marry.”

  Lucile made no comment. How well she hides, she thought—with the help of only a little brandy—a most mortifying blow to her pride. She would almost like to congratulate her.

  “He came to see your father,” Annette said. “He said he had written to you. You won’t see him again. If there are any more letters, bring them straight to me.”

  “Does he accept the situation?”

  “That hardly matters.”