“Get a mattress,” I said to Emile. “He’ll have to have a mattress. The other one too. Bring down mattresses for both of them.”
Surely, I thought, the sick man should be stripped of his things, and linen wrapped about him. The clothes he was wearing must be burned… I went into the kitchen, and I saw that every cupboard had been flung open and every drawer turned out, and all the food remaining in the house piled high on the kitchen table. Two women were cutting up the bread, stuffing themselves as they did so, and feeding the children. The third woman stood by the stove, stirring the soup she had found there, suckling her baby at the same time. They took no notice of me when I entered, but went on talking to each other in their own patois.
I took some cloths and a pail of water into the salon to scrub the floor where the poor sick man had lain. And now the man with the injured leg was groaning; I could see the blood coming through his bandages. No one was looking after him. His companions had pushed past me and gone into the kitchen to search for food, and I could hear them cursing the women for feeding themselves before the rest.
There was a thumping on the floor from the back room above, and I called to Emile to tell his mother to keep the children quiet; the house was full of the Vendeans, some of them wounded and sick. He came running back again within the minute.
“The boys are hungry,” he said, “they want to come down to supper.”
“Tell them there is no supper,” I said, wringing out the floorcloth. “The Vendeans have taken it all.”
Somebody thundered on the entrance door, and I thought it might be the man with the musket to see how his friends fared. But when Edmé went to open it six more of them pushed their way inside, five men and a woman, better dressed than our first peasants, and one of the men a priest.
“How many in the house?” demanded the priest.
He wore the Sacred Heart as an emblem on his breast, and a pistol thrust into his belt beside his rosary.
I shut my eyes and counted. “About twenty-four,” I said, “counting ourselves. Some of your people are sick.”
“Dysentery?” he asked.
“Two with dysentery,” I answered, “one with a badly injured leg.”
He turned to the woman beside him, who already held a handkerchief to her nose. She wore a bright green gown under a man’s military cloak, and her feathered hat sat on a pile of curls.
“They’ve dysentery in the house,” he said, “but it’s the same everywhere. The house itself looks clean enough.”
The woman shrugged her shoulders. “I must have a bed,” she said, “and a room to myself. Surely the sick can all go in together?”
The priest pushed past me. “Have you a room upstairs for this lady?” he asked Edmé.
I saw Edmé staring at his Sacred Heart. “We have a room,” she said. “Go upstairs and find it.”
The priest and the woman went upstairs. The other four men had already passed through into the kitchen. In the salon the man with the injured leg began shouting aloud with pain. In a moment or two the priest came down the stairs.
“Madame will stay,” he said. “She is very exhausted, and hungry. You will please take some food up to her at once.”
“There is no food,” I said. “Your people are eating it all in the kitchen.”
He clicked his tongue in annoyance and thrust his way past me to the kitchen. The uproar ceased. I heard the priest’s voice only, raised in anger.
“He’s threatening them with hell,” whispered Emile.
The cursing changed to intoning. They all began saying the Ave Maria, the women’s voices loudest. Then the priest returned to the entrance hall. He looked half-starved himself, but he had not eaten anything.
He stared at me a moment, then asked abruptly, “Where are the wounded?”
I took him to the salon. “One wounded,” I said, “two in the further room with dysentery.”
He muttered something in answer, and, unfastening his rosary, passed into the salon. I saw him glance down at the bloodstained bandage on the leg of the wounded man, but he did not examine the wound or touch the bandage. He held the rosary to the lips of the sufferer, saying, “Misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus.”
I shut the door of the salon and left them alone.
I could hear the latest arrival, the woman, moving about in Pierre’s and Marie’s room above. I went up the stairs and opened the door. The woman had flung wide the cupboards and was turning Marie’s clothes out onto the floor. There was a fine shawl among the clothes, a gift to Marie from my mother. The woman put it round her shoulders.
“Make haste with the supper,” she said. “I don’t intend to wait all night.”
She did not bother to turn her head to see who it was at the door.
“You’ll be lucky if you get any,” I told her. “The women who were here before you have eaten most of it.”
She looked over her shoulder at the sound of my voice, which was new to her. She was handsome in a disagreeable way, and there was nothing of the peasant about her.
“You had better watch your tongue when you address me,” she said. “One word to the men below, and I’ll have you whipped for insolence.”
I did not answer her. I went out and shut the door. It was her kind that the Committee of Public Safety in Paris were rounding up and sending to the Conciergerie en route for the guillotine. As wife or mistress of a Vendean officer, she believed herself of consequence. It did not matter to me. I passed one of the peasant women on the stairs bearing up a tray of food to her. “She doesn’t deserve it,” I murmured. The woman stared.
When I went into the salon once again the man with half a leg was crying softly to himself. The blood had come right through his bandages and soaked the material on the settee. Someone had shut the door leading to the inner room where the dysentery patients lay. The priest had gone.
“We’d forgotten about the wine,” said Edmé, coming through from the hall.
“Wine? What wine?” I asked.
“Pierre’s wine,” she said. “There were about a dozen bottles in the cellar. Those men have found it. They have all the bottles on the kitchen table, and are knocking the heads off them.”
Emile had crept past me and was listening at the door of the inner room.
“I think one of those men must be dying in there,” he whispered. “There’s a queer groaning noise. Shall I open the door and see?”
It was suddenly too much. The moment and the hour. Nothing that any of us could do would be of use. I felt my legs tremble under me.
“Let’s lock ourselves in one of the rooms upstairs,” I said.
As we left the salon the man with half a leg began to groan again. Nobody heard him. They were all singing and laughing in the kitchen, and just before we locked ourselves in Edmé’s room we heard a great crash of breaking glass.
Somehow we slept that night, waking every few hours and losing all count of time, disturbed by continual treading in the rooms beside us, and by crying—whether of our own younger children from the back of the house or the Vendeans we could not tell. Emile complained of hunger, though he had eaten well at midday. Edmé and I had taken nothing since early morning.
We must have fallen heavily asleep, all three of us, in the small hours, for we were awakened about seven to hear the sound of the cathedral bells. Emile jumped off the bed and ran to open the shutters. The bells were pealing as they did on Easter Day.
“It’s the Vendean priests,” said Edmé after a moment. “They’re going to celebrate their entry into the city by singing Mass in the cathedral. I hope they choke themselves.”
The rain had ceased. A dreary, fitful sun was trying to force its way through the pallid sky.
“The street’s empty,” said Emile. “None of the shutters are open in the houses opposite. Shall I go downstairs and see what’s happening?”
“No,” I said, “no, I’ll go.”
I smoothed my hair and straightened my clothes, and unlocked the door. T
he house was silent, but for the sound of heavy snoring in the adjoining room. The door was half-ajar. I glanced in. The woman with the baby was asleep on the bed, and a man beside her. One of the other children was lying on the floor.
I crept downstairs and looked into the salon. The room was in complete confusion, with broken bottles strewn about the floor and men sprawled anyhow. The man with half a leg was still lying on the couch, but twisted sideways, his arms above his head. He was breathing loudly, half snoring with each breath he took. He was probably unconscious. The door through to Pierre’s library was still shut, and I could not go and ask after the men with dysentery because of the others sleeping on the floor.
The kitchen was in the same confusion. Wreckage and destruction everywhere, broken bottles and spilled wine, and the filthy litter of spoiled food. Four of them were on the floor here too, one of them a woman, with a child across her knees. None of them woke when I entered, and I felt they would lie here all the day. One glance about me, and in the larder, was enough to tell me there was nothing to eat.
Once, long ago when we were children, a traveling menagerie had come to Vibraye, and my father had taken Edmé and me to see the animals. They were penned in cages, and after staring at them awhile we came away, because of the reeking smell. The kitchen smelled as the cages had done that day. I went back again upstairs, and beckoned Edmé and Emile, and we went through to the room at the back to see Marie and the others. We found them desperate with anxiety, not knowing how we had fared. The children were whining and restless, asking for their breakfast, and the poor dog frantic to go outside.
“Let me take her,” said Emile, “they’re all asleep. No one will say anything to me.”
Edmé shook her head, and I guessed her thought. If a dog was loose in the street, even for a moment, some passer-by might seek to destroy it instantly for food. The larder in our house was empty, others in the city would be the same. There were some eighty thousand Vendeans in Le Mans, and somehow, through the day, all of their number must be fed…
“Have you anything to give our children?” I asked. My sister-in-law had four loaves left, and some apples, and a jug of milk half-turned. The widow had three pots of blackcurrant preserve. They had water enough to brew coffee, and with this they must be satisfied. There was plenty of wood to keep the fire going.
The three of us drank coffee, knowing it might be all we should get that day, and then we locked their door and went back to our own room. We went on sitting there through the morning, keeping a watch on the window in turn, and about noon Emile, who was on guard, reported movement from the house opposite. Two Vendeans came out and stretched themselves, and presently a third, and then a fourth, and they talked among themselves awhile on the step, and then began walking up the street.
There was movement in our house too. We heard the door open below, and two of our “lodgers” went into the street, with the woman and the child who had been lying in the kitchen. They walked up the street after the others.
“They’re hungry,” said Emile. “They’re going off to see if they can do better somewhere else.”
“It’s like watching a play,” said Edmé, “and not knowing the ending. A play where the actors don’t pretend anymore, but come alive.”
Suddenly we saw a carriage come up the street, driven by a man in uniform, wearing a white cockade. The carriage stopped before our door.
“It’s that priest,” said Edmé. “He’s had a lift to save his feet.”
She was right. The priest of the night before got out of the carriage and knocked on the door of our house. We heard someone open the door and admit him. There was a murmur of voices from below, and presently a stumping up the stairs, and knocking on the room at the end of the landing, Pierre’s and Marie’s room, where the woman in the green dress had gone.
“What’s he going to do in there?” whispered Emile.
Edmé murmured something under her breath and Emile, half choking, stuffed his fist into his mouth.
In about five minutes’ time the window of Pierre’s room was flung open and we heard the priest shouting down to the soldier in uniform. The soldier shouted back, and then one of the peasants from below went and held his horse, and the soldier entered the house and came upstairs.
“Two of them?” whispered Emile, his voice high with hysteria.
Presently there was a sound of dragging and thumping from the room to the stairs, and peering from our window we saw that the priest and the soldier were hauling Marie’s clothespress into the street, helped by one of the peasants, and between the three of them they lifted it into the carriage.
“Oh no…” said Edmé. “No… no…”
I held her wrist. “Be quiet,” I said. “We can’t do anything.”
Now the woman in the green dress was throwing things out of the window, shoes belonging to Marie, and a fur cape and several dresses, and, not content, she followed up with the blankets from the bed and the quilted bedspread that had been Pierre’s and Marie’s from their wedding day. The woman found nothing else to her fancy, for soon we heard her coming down the stairs, and she went out into the street and stood talking for a moment to the priest and the soldier. Her voice carried, and it was not difficult to understand her.
“What has been decided?” she asked, and the soldier and the priest argued together, but it was impossible to hear them, though the soldier pointed towards the center of the town.
“If the Prince Tallemont is for evacuating the city you can rest assured that is what we shall do,” said the woman.
There was further argument and further talk, and then she and the priest climbed into the carriage and the soldier took the reins and they drove away.
“The priest didn’t go in to look at the wounded man, or the men with the dysentery,” said Emile. “All he could think about was letting that woman have my mother’s clothes.”
The priest’s example must have fired the peasants, who had awakened from their drunken sleep below, for there now started a great racket throughout the house, up and down the stairs and in the salon and the kitchen, and the men began carrying things out into the street as well—pots and pans, and coats belonging to Pierre from the closet in the entrance hall.
I was reminded, all too suddenly, of the workmen from le Chesne-Bidault and their forays to Authon and St. Avit. What had been done to others was now done to us.
“Only surely,” I said to myself, “it was not quite the same. Surely Michel and the workmen set about it differently?”
Perhaps not. Perhaps, in fact, it had been just the same. And there had been women and a young boy watching the National Guard from the windows of the château Charbonnières just as we now watched the Vendeans.
“We can’t prevent them,” I said to Edmé. “Don’t let’s look anymore.”
“I can’t stop myself,” said Edmé. “The more I watch, the more I hate. I didn’t know it was possible to hate so much.”
She stared down at the street below, and Emile called out in bewilderment and anger when he recognized familiar objects carried from the house.
“There’s the clock from the salon,” he said, “the one with the chimes. And my father’s fishing rod—what can they want with that? They’ve stripped the curtains from the window and rolled them into a bundle, and that woman with the children is making one of the men carry them on his shoulder. Why can’t we shoot at them?”
“Because,” said Edmé, “they’re too many for us. Because, perhaps for this day only, luck is on their side.”
I saw her glance at the two muskets still standing in the corner of the room, and I could guess how much it cost her to keep her hands off them.
“That’s the finish,” said Emile suddenly, his eyes filling with tears. “The woman has found Dadá in the cupboard below the stairs. She has given it to her child, and he’s walking off with it.”
Dadá was the wooden horse that had been Emile’s childhood toy, prized all his thirteen years, and now the lo
ved property of his youngest brother. Clocks, clothes, bed linen, the theft of these I had accepted with resignation, but the bearing away of Dadá was the final outrage.
“Stay here,” I said, “I’ll get it back for you.”
I unlocked the door and ran downstairs and into the street after the woman and the boy. Neither Edmé nor Emile had told me, though, that the peasants had been piling their loot into a cart, and now, as I came out into the street, they had climbed up into the cart and were driving off. There were three or four of them in the cart, sitting on top of the stuff they had packed onto it, and the woman was there, and the boy clutching Dadá.
“We don’t mind you taking the other things,” I cried, “it’s the horse. The horse belongs to the children in the house.”
They stared down at me, astonished. I don’t think they understood me. The woman nudged her companions, and broke into a silly cackle of laughter. She shouted something, which made all of them laugh, but what it was I could not say.
“I’ll find your boy another toy if we could have back the horse,” I said.
Then the man who was driving cut down at me with his whip, flaying my face. The shock of the pain made me cry out, and I backed away from the cart, and a moment later they were driving down the street. I heard the window above being opened, and Edmé called down to me, her voice half-strangled and unlike herself, “I’ll shoot them for that… I’ll shoot them for that.”
“No,” I shouted, “no, they’ll kill you…”
I ran up the stairs and into the room, and as I entered it I heard the explosive shot of the musket. She had missed, of course, and the shot had hit a house at the end of the street. The peasants, startled, looked up at the sky and all about them, then drove on, turned the corner of the street and disappeared. They had not seen from where the shot had come.
“That was madness,” I told Edmé. “If they had seen you, they would have sent soldiers back to shoot us all.”
“I wish they would,” said Edmé, “I wish they would…”