This letter was the answer to the one she had written over a week ago on her daughter’s birthday. Zoë had been fifty-one on the 27th of May. It seemed scarcely credible. Over half a century had passed since she had held that scrap of humanity in her arms—her third child, and the first to survive infancy—and how well she remembered that summer’s day too, with the window wide open to the orchard, the pungent smoke from the glass-foundry chimney filling the languid air, and the sound and clatter of the workmen as they crossed from the furnace house to the yard drowning her own cries in labor.
What a moment to bring a child into the world, that summer of ’93, the first year of the Republic; with the Vendée in revolt, the country at war, the traitorous Girondins endeavoring to bring down the Convention, the patriot Marat to be assassinated by an hysterical girl, and the unhappy ex-Queen Marie Antoinette confined in the Temple and later guillotined for all the misery she had brought upon France.
So many bitter and exciting days. Such exultation, triumph, and despair. All part of history now, forgotten by most people, overshadowed by the achievements of the Emperor and his era. Only remembered by herself when she learned of the death of a contemporary, and so was reminded suddenly, as though it were yesterday, that this same contemporary just laid to rest in the cemetery at Vibraye had been a member of the National Guard under her brother Michel, that the pair of them, with her husband François, had led the foundry workmen on the march in November ’90 to sack the château of Charbonnières.
It did not do to speak of these things in front of her son the mayor. After all, he was a loyal subject of King Louis-Philippe, and hardly liked to be reminded of the part his father and uncle had played in the troubled days of the Revolution before he was born; though heaven knows it tempted her sometimes to do so, when he showed himself more than usually pompous and full of bourgeois principle.
Madame Duval opened her letter and straightened out the closely written pages, crossed and recrossed in her daughter’s cramped hand. Thank God she did not need spectacles, despite her eighty years. “My very dear Maman…”
First, Zoë’s grateful thanks for the birthday gift (a patchwork quilt, worked at home during the winter and spring), followed by the usual small items of family news, her husband the doctor producing a paper on asthma to be read before the medical authorities, her daughter Clémentine making excellent progress with piano lessons under a good master, and then—the handwriting becoming more careless because of excitement—the main content of the letter, reserved as a final surprise.
“We spent Sunday evening with near neighbors of ours in the Faubourg St.-Germain,” she wrote, “and as usual there was quite a gathering of doctors and scientists, and much interesting conversation. We were both impressed by the fluent talk and engaging manners of a stranger to our particular circle, an inventor who has apparently patented a portable lamp and expects to make his fortune from it. We were introduced, and imagine my surprise when we learned that his name was Louis-Mathurin Busson, that he had been born and brought up in England of émigré parents, had come to Paris at some period after the restoration of the monarchy when he was quite a young man, in company with his mother, now dead, and his surviving brother and sister, and had since lived—chiefly by his wits, I gathered, and his powers as an inventor—between the two countries, sometimes in London, sometimes in Paris, with business in both cities. He is married to an Englishwoman, has a young family, a house in the rue de la Pompe, and a laboratory in the Faubourg Poissonnière. Now, all this might have passed me by but for the singularity of the two names Busson and Mathurin, and the mention of émigré parents. I was careful not to commit myself immediately, or acquaint him of the fact that your maiden name was Busson and Mathurin a family first name, but when I casually enquired if his father, the émigré, had followed any particular profession or had been a man of leisure he answered me at once, and with great pride, “Oh yes, indeed. He was a gentleman glass-blower, and owned several foundries before the Revolution. At one time he was first engraver in crystal at St. Cloud, the royal foundry patronized by the Queen herself. Naturally, at the outbreak of the Revolution he followed the example of the clergy and the aristocracy and emigrated to England with his young bride, my mother, and suffered much penury in consequence. His full name was Robert-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, and he died tragically and suddenly in 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, on returning to France in the hopes of restoring the family fortunes. My poor mother, left behind in England with her young children, little guessed, when she said goodbye to him, that it was for the last time. I was five years old then, and have no recollection of him, but my mother brought us up to understand that he was a man of tremendous principle and integrity, and of course a royalist to his fingertips.
“Maman… I nodded my head, and made some remark or other, while I tried to collect my thoughts. I am right, am I not? This man, this inventor, must be my cousin, son of your beloved brother my uncle Robert. But what is all this talk of his being called du Maurier, leaving a family in England and dying in 1802, when you and I know perfectly well that he died in 1811, and was a widower anyway, with his son Jacques a corporal in the Grande Armée? Why, I was eighteen years old when uncle Robert died, a schoolmaster in Tours, yet here is this inventor, Monsieur Busson, who must be his son, giving a very different account of his father from the one you gave us, and apparently in complete ignorance of his father’s true end, or of your existence.
“I asked if he had relatives. He said he believed not. They had all been guillotined during the Terror, and the château Maurier and the glass foundries destroyed. He had made no enquiries. It was better not. What was past was past. Then my hostess interrupted us, and we were parted. I did not speak to him again. But I have discovered his address—31 rue de la Pompe, in Passy—should you wish me to get in touch with him. Maman, what would you have me do?”
Madame Duval laid her daughter’s letter aside, and stared out of the window. So… It had happened at last. It had taken more than thirty years, but it had happened. What Robert had believed would never be.
“Those children will be brought up in England, and make their life there,” he had told her. “What should bring them to France, especially if they believe their father dead? No, that phase of my life, like all the others, is over and done with.”
Madame Duval picked up the letter and read it through once again. Two courses were open to her. The first, to write to her daughter Zoë and tell her to make no further attempt to get in touch with the man who had declared himself to be Louis-Mathurin Busson. The second, to go herself to Paris immediately, to call upon Monsieur Busson at 31 rue de la Pompe and acknowledge their relationship, and so see at last, before she died, her brother’s child.
The first course she dismissed almost as soon as it entered her head. By following it she would deny all family feeling, and so go against everything she held most dear. The second course must be embarked upon forthwith, or as soon as it could be put into practice.
That evening, when her son the mayor returned from Vibraye, Madame Duval told him her news, and it was arranged that she should travel to Paris within the week to stay with her daughter in the Faubourg St.-Germain. All attempts on the part of her son to dissuade her were useless. She remained firm. “If this man is an impostor I shall know it directly I set eyes on him,” she said. “If not, then I shall have done my duty.”
The night before she left for Paris, she went to the cabinet in the corner of the salon, unlocked it with the key she wore in a locket round her neck, and took out a leather case. This case she packed carefully among the few clothes she took with her.
It was about four o’clock on the Sunday of the following week when Madame Duval and her daughter Madame Rosiau called at 31 rue de la Pompe, in Passy. The house was well placed, on the corner of the rue de la Pompe and the rue de la Tour, opposite a boys’ school, with a garden behind and a long avenue leading directly to the Bois de Boulogne.
A cheerful femme
de ménage opened the door, took their cards, and showed the visitors into a pleasant room facing the garden, from where they could hear the cries of children at play. In a moment or two a figure stepped through the long windows giving onto the garden, and Madame Rosiau, with a brief word of explanation and apology for the intrusion, introduced her mother to the inventor.
One look was enough. The blue eyes, the light hair, the tilt of the head, the quick courteous smile, showing an instant wish to please combined with a desire to turn the occasion to his own advantage if it were possible—here was Robert in the flesh as she remembered him, forty, fifty, sixty years ago.
Madame Duval took his extended hand in both of hers and held it, her eyes, the mirror of his own, dwelling at length upon his face. “Forgive me,” she said, “but I have every reason to believe that you are my nephew, and the son of my eldest brother Robert-Mathurin.”
“Your nephew?” He looked from one to the other in astonishment. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. I met Madame… Madame Rosiau for the first time nearly two weeks ago. I had not the pleasure of her acquaintance before, and…”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Madame Duval. “I know just how you met, but she was too overwhelmed when she learned your name, and your history, to tell you that her mother’s maiden name was Busson, that her uncle was Robert-Mathurin Busson, a master glass-engraver who emigrated… I am, in short, her mother, and your aunt Sophie, and have been waiting for this moment for nearly half a century.”
They led her to a chair and made her sit down, and she wiped the tears from her eyes—so foolish, she told him, to break down, and how Robert would have mocked her. In a few minutes she was composed, and sufficiently mistress of herself to seize upon the fact that, although her nephew expressed himself delighted to find that he had relatives, he was at the same time a trifle disconcerted that his aunt and his cousin were not great ladies, but ordinary provincial folk with no claim to vast estates or ruined châteaux.
“But the name Busson,” he insisted. “I was brought up to understand that we were descended from an aristocratic Breton family going back to the fourteenth century, that my father became a gentleman glass-engraver merely for his own amusement, that our motto—Abret ag Aroag, First and Foremost—belonged to the old knights of Brittany. Do you mean to tell me none of this is true?”
Madame Duval considered her nephew with a skeptical eye. “Your father Robert was first and foremost the most incorrigible farceur I have ever known,” she said drily, “and if he told these tales in England no doubt it suited his purpose at the time.”
“But the château Maurier,” protested the inventor, “the château Maurier that was burned to the ground by the peasants during the Revolution?”
“A farmhouse,” replied his aunt, “unchanged since your father was born there in 1749. We have cousins there still.”
Her nephew stared at her aghast. “There must be some misunderstanding,” he said. “My mother can have known nothing of this. Unless…” He broke off, at a loss how to continue, and she understood from his expression that her blunt words had shattered an illusion held since childhood, that his self-confidence was shaken, that he might now even doubt himself and his own powers for the future.
“Tell me one thing,” she asked. “Was she a good mother to you?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, “the best in the world. And she had a hard struggle, I can tell you, with my father gone. But she had wonderful friends among the French colony. A fund was started to help us. We received the best of educations in one of the schools founded by the Abbé Carron, along with the children of other émigrés, the de Polignacs, the de Labourdomains, etc.” A note of pride crept into his voice, and he did not notice his aunt flinch as he pronounced names reviled and detested by herself and her brothers over fifty years before.
“My sister,” he continued, “is companion to the daughter of the Duke of Palmella in Lisbon. My brother James is in business in Hamburg. I myself, with the help of influential friends, intend placing upon the markets of the world a lamp of my own invention. Indeed, we none of us have anything to be ashamed of, we have great hopes…” Once again he broke off in mid-sentence. There was a speculative look in his eye strangely reminiscent of his father. This aunt from the provinces was, alas, no aristocrat, but had she money tucked away in a stocking?
Madame Duval could read his thoughts as once she had read her brother Robert’s. “You are an optimist, like your father,” she told him. “So much the better. It makes life comparatively easy.”
He smiled. The look of speculation vanished. The charm returned, Robert’s charm, winning, endearing, that could never be withstood.
“Tell me about him,” he said. “I must know everything. From the very beginning. Even if he was born in a farmhouse, as you say, and not a château. And far from being a nobleman was in reality…”
“An adventurer?” she finished for him.
At that moment her nephew’s wife came in from the garden, followed by the three children. The femme de ménage brought in tea. Conversation became general. Madame Rosiau, who felt that her mother had already been far too indiscreet, pressed the wife of her newly found cousin to comparisons between life in London and in Paris. The inventor produced a model of his portable lamp that was to make all their fortunes. Madame Duval remained silent, watching each of the children in turn for a family likeness. Yes, the little girl Isobel, pert and quick, was something like her own young sister Edmé at the same age. The second boy, Eugène, or Gyggy, reminded her of nobody. But the eldest, George, nicknamed Kicky, a lad of ten, was her brother Pierre in miniature, the same dreamy reflective eyes, the same way of standing with his feet crossed, his hands in his pockets.
“And you, Kicky,” she said, “what do you intend to do when you grow up?”
“My father hopes I’ll become a chemist,” he said, “but I doubt if I’d pass the exams. I like to draw best of all.”
“Show me your drawings,” she whispered.
He ran out of the room, pleased at her interest, and returned in a moment with a portfolio full of sketches. She examined them carefully, one by one.
“You have talent,” she said. “One day you’ll put it to good purpose. It’s in your blood.”
Madame Duval then turned to her nephew the inventor, interrupting the flow of conversation. “I wish to make a gift to your son George,” she announced. “It must be his, by right of inheritance.” She felt in the lining pocket of her voluminous cape, and drew forth a package which she proceeded to unwrap. The paper dropped to the floor. From a leather case she produced a crystal tumbler, engraved with the fleur-de-lys, and with the interlaced letters L.R.XV.
“This glass was made in the foundry of la Pierre, Coudrecieux,” she said, “engraved by my father, Mathurin Busson, on the occasion of the visit of King Louis XV. It has had a checkered history, but has been in my safekeeping for many years. My father used to say that as long as it remained unbroken, treasured in the family, the creative talent of the Bussons would continue, in some form or other, through the succeeding generations.”
Silently, her newly found nephew and his wife and children gazed upon the glass. Then Madame Duval replaced it in the leather case. “There,” she said to the boy George, “remain true to your talent, and the glass will bring you luck. Abuse your talent, or neglect it, as my brother did, and the luck will run out of the glass.”
She gave him the leather case and smiled, then turned to her nephew the inventor. “I shall return home to le Gué de Launay tomorrow,” she told him. “Perhaps we shall not see each other again. I will write to you, though, and tell you, as best as I can, the story of your family. A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can, with that same breath, shatter and destroy it. If what I write displeases you, it will not matter. Throw my letters in the fire unread, and keep your illusions. For myself, I have always preferred to know the truth.”
Mad
ame Duval nodded to her daughter Madame Rosiau and, rising from her chair, embraced her nephew and her nephew’s children.
The next day she left Paris and returned home. She said little about her visit to her son the mayor of Vibraye, beyond remarking that looking upon her nephew and his children for the first and perhaps the last time had revived old memories. During the weeks that followed, instead of giving orders at le Gué de Launay and inspecting her fruit trees, vegetables and flowers, she spent all her time at her bureau in the salon, covering sheet after sheet of writing paper in her formal, upright hand.
Part One
La Reyne d’Hongrie
1
“If you marry into glass,” Pierre Labbé warned my mother, his daughter Magdaleine, in 1747, “you will say goodbye to everything familiar, and enter a closed world.”
She was twenty-two years old, and her prospective bridegroom, Mathurin Busson, master glass-maker from the neighboring village of Chenu, was a childhood sweetheart, four years older than herself. They had never had eyes for anyone but each other from the day they met, and my father, the son of a merchant in glass, orphaned at an early age, had been apprenticed with his brother Michel to the glass-house known as la Brûlonnerie, in the Vendôme, between Busloup and la Ville-aux-Clercs. Both brothers showed great promise, and my father Mathurin had risen rapidly to the rank of master glass-maker, working directly under Robert Brossard the proprietor, who was a member of one of the four great glassmaking families in France.