The part Michel had played, and my husband too, in the primary elections to the Convention a year before was not forgotten among the various communes in our district. Busson-Challoir and Duval, so it was said, were favored persons, not only because of their relationship to an ex-deputy but because of their high position as “acquirers of national wealth.” This title, so popular in ’91, had lost much of its prestige by ’94. The poor were still poor, and those who had enriched themselves by the purchase of Church lands were looked upon as profiteers, despite the initial act of patriotism.
If the civil war against the Vendeans was over, an aftermath of discontent remained, and this was very evident in our own neighborhood and among our own workpeople. The millennium had not come about. Living was still dear. And, worst of all, conscription was taking away the youngest and strongest members of each family, very often the breadwinner.
“Why do our lads have to go?” This was the eternal question asked by the wives and mothers in our community. “Why don’t they call up the officials first, and the acquirers too? Let them go off, and our lads follow afterwards.”
As the wife and sister of both officials and acquirers I was hard put to it for an answer, except that the country, like the foundry, must be administered by men who were trained and capable. This reply would be received with a stare, or a grumble that the Revolution had benefited those people who had been doing well in the first place, but as far as the workmen and peasants were concerned nothing had changed. Such statements were not true, but they made me feel uncomfortable all the same.
Another difficulty was that the Law of the Maximum, passed by Robespierre and the Convention the preceding autumn, put a limit, not only on the price of food and goods, but upon wages as well. This caused great discontent among workmen everywhere, and at our own foundry Michel and François were accused as if they were to blame for the decree, and not the Convention.
“Citoyen Busson-Challoir and Citoyen Duval can buy national property, but our wages must stay as they are,” I would be told.
Throughout the winter and spring of ’94 this spirit of dissatisfaction grew. News of the daily executions in Paris, not only of the former aristocrats but of the Girondin deputies who had helped to govern us the year before, and indeed of anyone who dared to lift a voice against the inner circle of the Convention, Robespierre, St. Just, and a few others, filtered through to us in the country.
Danton’s death shocked all of us, even Michel. Here was one of our greatest patriots sent to the guillotine in his turn.
“We can’t g-give an opinion,” said my brother angrily, angry, I think, because his faith in the Convention had been shaken. “Danton must have been c-conspiring against the nation, or he would n-never have been condemned.”
The war against the Allies progressed with successive victories for our republican armies, yet the numbers sent to the guillotine increased. François admitted to me that he believed Robespierre and the Revolutionary Tribunal had gone too far, but he dared not say so before Michel.
The excesses, and the severities, brought their own reaction throughout the country as a whole, and in our region too. Petty pilfering began in our own foundry, refusals to work, threats uttered against Michel.
“If this sort of thing continues,” François told me, “either we must break up the partnership and Michel will have to go; or we shall have to surrender the lease, and leave le Chesne-Bidault.”
The lease was due for renewal on All Saints’ Day in November, or, as we now called it, the 11th Brumaire, and the decision what to do must be left over until then. Meanwhile, we should hope to see trade and tempers improved during the summer.
What distressed me most was that the goodwill among us all seemed lost. Hostility, for no good reason, could be sensed in the workmen’s lodgings and on the furnace floor, and I could feel it with the women too. The camaraderie, instilled into the workmen when Michel first took over as master of the foundry, had vanished, and whether it was conscription, or the toll of the civil war, or the limit of their wages, nobody could say—these are things that are never put into words. Madame Verdelet, my usual informant, told me that the people were “fed up.” This was the expression used.
“They’ve had enough,” she said, “enough of the Revolution, enough of fighting and restrictions, enough of change. It was better, so the older ones say, when your mother was in charge here and everyone felt settled. Now, nobody knows what tomorrow will bring.”
Tomorrow, so far as the government was concerned, brought a struggle for power within the Convention itself, a treacherous assault upon Robespierre and his colleagues. On the 10th Thermidor, July 28th, the leader whose integrity and convictions we so much respected, however ruthless his methods, was sent to the guillotine within twenty-four hours of his arrest. The people of Paris, whom he had protected against invasion without and rebellion within for so many months, made no effort to save him.
The death of Robespierre and his friends was a signal for the relaxation of the many rules and restrictions without which the nation could never have survived. The moderates were back again. The Law of the Maximum was repealed. Prices and wages soared. Those with royalist sympathies began to talk openly of a return, before long, to the ways of the old régime and the restoration of the monarchy. The Jacobins everywhere lost their positions of authority, and this was reflected in the municipalities of the various districts throughout the country. “Progressives” were out of favor, not only with officials but among the workpeople too, and men like my brother Michel, who had openly supported the rigorous measures of Robespierre, were called the “enragés”—terrorists—and in some cases were arrested simply for this reason.
The halt in the forward movement of the Revolution, and the fall from power of the Jacobins, profoundly shocked Michel. Just as his faith in human nature had been shattered when my brother Robert emigrated, so now his belief in the Revolution received a similar blow. His pride suffered too. Michel Busson-Challoir had become someone of consequence in the district during the past few years, a figure to be reckoned with, possessing considerable power over his neighbors. Now, because of a switch in government policy, all this must be abandoned. He was suddenly no one—a master glass-blower whose business was not even flourishing, and about whom his own workmen muttered spiteful slander behind his back. As the date for the renewal of the lease approached I guessed, with a heavy heart, how it would go.
“We’re not only losing money,” said François, “we’re losing the confidence of the trade as well. If we try to continue, under present circumstances, we shall end as bankrupt as your brother Robert, though for different reasons.”
“What’s the answer, then?” I asked. “Where are we to go?”
I could tell by my husband’s face that he was not sure of my agreement with his plans.
“My brother Jacques has been suggesting for months that I should go into business with him at Mondoubleau,” he said. “We could share his house—there is plenty of room. Then, in a few years’ time, we could retire to our little property at le Gué de Launay.”
“What about Michel?”
“Michel must fend for himself. We’ve already discussed it. He talks of going to Vendôme. There are several ex-Jacobins living there with whom he is in touch, though they are lying low at the present time. Whether he thinks of forming some sort of society with them or not, I cannot say. Michel is not very communicative these days.”
Once, had he admitted so much, François would have said this with a sigh. Now he picked up our daughter Zoë, some fifteen months old, and jigged and danced her on his knee without further thought of his associate and comrade. Time had come between them. Or perhaps the Vendeans. When my brother marched his workmen off to war the year before, leaving my husband at home, something had been shattered.
“If this is how it has to be,” I said to François now, “nothing I can say or do will make any difference. I’ll come with you to Mondoubleau. But let it be, as you say,
for a few years only.”
I went out and stood in the orchard. It was a good year for apples, and our old trees were laden. We had the ladder up against one of them and a basket, half-filled, below. In my mother’s day the little apple-house at the far end of the orchard would be stacked from one year’s end to the other, and the apples for the house chosen in strict rotation, so that the ones which kept the longest would be eaten when the fresh fruit on the trees was ready to pick again.
Le Chesne-Bidault had been my home for over sixteen years. I had come here with my parents, my brothers and sister, when I was a girl of fifteen. I had continued to live here as a bride. Now, with my thirty-first birthday approaching, only a few days after the date when the lease for le Chesne-Bidault would be rejected, I must prepare myself to pack up our possessions and say goodbye. I stood there, tears pricking behind my eyes, and someone came softly behind me and put his arm through mine. It was my brother Michel.
“Don’t fret,” he said. “We’ve had the b-best of it. Nothing perfect ever l-lasts. I learned that l-long ago.”
“We’ve been happy here, the three of us,” I said, “though I spoiled it for you at times by jealousy.”
“I never n-noticed it,” he answered.
I wondered, thinking how much my husband must have borne in silence in order to spare his friend. Men have strange loyalties to one another.
“Perhaps,” I said, “when times become more settled again, and trade improves, we can start up all over again somewhere else.”
He shook his head. “No, Sophie,” he said, “once we’ve made the b-break, it’s b-better to abide by it. François will soon s-settle down, either in Mondoubleau or le G-Gué de Launay, and help you raise your f-family. As for myself, I’m a l-lone wolf, and always have been. It might have been b-better had I been killed in a scrap against the b-brigands. The people of the district would have given me a hero’s b-burial.”
I understood his bitterness. He was now thirty-eight, the best of his life behind him. Trained in glass, he knew no other trade. He had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the Revolution, and his fellow revolutionaries had abandoned him. I could foresee no happy future for him in Vendôme.
When the time to leave came, I went before the others. I could not bear to see my home stripped bare. Some of our possessions went to le Gué de Launay, to be cared for by our tenant until we lived there; the rest we gave to Pierre. Saying goodbye to the families was like saying goodbye to my own youth, and to part of life that was now shut away forever. The older ones that I knew were sad. The others seemed indifferent. If they could earn a living under the new leaseholder, a relative of the proprietor at Montmirail, it mattered little to them who lived in the master’s house.
As I was driven away, with Zoë in my arms, I looked back over my shoulder to wave at François and Michel; the last thing I saw was the foundry chimney piercing the sky, a wreath of smoke above it. And that, I thought, is the breakup of our family; the Bussons, father and sons, existed no more. The tradition was broken. What my father created had come to an end. My sons, if I should ever bear them, would be Duvals, bred to a different trade in a different age. Michel would never marry. Pierre’s boys, brought up in haphazard fashion without education, would not turn to glass. The art would be lost, the knowledge that my father bequeathed to his sons wasted. I remembered Robert, an alien and an émigré. I wondered if he were dead, and if that second wife of his had borne him children.
My daughter Zoë put her hand up to my face and laughed, and I shut the past behind me, looking forward, with some misgiving, to a house in Mondoubleau that would not be my own.
Nearly a twelvemonth passed before the four of us, Pierre, Michel, Edmé, and myself, were reunited once again, and, when we were, it was not a moment for rejoicing, but for sharing a common grief.
It was on the 5th Brumaire, of the Year III (the 26th of October, 1795, by the old calendar), when we were sitting down to dinner—François, my brother-in-law, and I, with Zoë promoted to a high chair at the table and my infant son Pierre-François asleep in his cradle above—that we heard the peal of the entrance bell, and then the sound of voices. François rose to his feet to investigate. Within a few minutes he was back again, his face grave, his eyes searching mine.
“It’s young Marrion,” he said, “from St. Christophe.”
Marrion was the farmer my mother employed at l’Antinière to look after the farm and her few acres. There were two of them, father and son. Instantly I knew the worst, and it felt like a cold hand touching my heart.
“She’s dead,” I said.
François came at once to my side and put his arms about me.
“Yes,” he said, “it happened yesterday, very suddenly. She was driving out from St. Christophe to l’Antinière to shut up the house for the winter, young Marrion with her, and they were just turning down from the road to the farm when she collapsed. He called to his father, and between them they carried her inside and laid her down on the bed. She complained of violent pain, and was sick. Marrion sent his son for the doctor at St. Paterne, but the boy had hardly left the house when she died.”
Alone there, with the farmer. Not one of us with her. And, knowing my mother, I could see what must have happened. She must have felt unwell earlier in the day, but told no one of it. Determined to keep to her routine of closing the farmhouse in the early autumn and spending the winter months in her other small house in St. Christophe—or Rabriant, as it had been renamed in ’92, when the saints were out of favor—she had set out from the village to put everything in order.
Shock numbed my emotion, and it was still too soon for tears. I went into the kitchen, where young Marrion was having his dinner, and questioned him.
“Yes,” he agreed, “the citoyenne Busson looked pale when she left the village, but nothing would deter her from driving out to l’Antinière. She said she must look round just once, before the weather turned. She was obstinate, you understand. I said to my father afterwards—it’s as though she knew.”
Yes, I thought, she knew. Instinct warned her that it was to be for the last time. But instinct came too late. There was no time to look about her, only time to lie down upon her bed, and die.
Young Marrion told us there was to be an autopsy. The health officer for the district was to go out to l’Antinière this very afternoon to discover the cause of death.
It was too late for us to drive down to St. Christophe that evening. We decided to send word to Pierre and Edmé at Le Mans, and to make a start early the next day. Someone, young Marrion said, had already gone from the village to tell my brother Michel at Vendôme.
It was one of those soft golden days that come sometimes in late autumn when the four of us gathered together at l’Antinière. Tomorrow the skies would cloud over and the wind come from the west, bringing the rain as it always did, stripping the last leaves from the trees and making the country all about us drear. Today everything was mellow, tender, and the yellow-washed farmhouse in the fold of the hills hazy under the sun.
It was the sort of day my mother loved. I stood on the rise of the hill above the farmstead, on the very spot where she had been taken ill, young Marrion told me, and I had the strange impression that she was with me, holding my hand as she used to do when I was small. Death, instead of severing all ties, made family feeling stronger.
The health officer was waiting in the house, Michel at his side. My brother had grown thinner and paler since he had left le Chesne-Bidault. Presently Pierre and Edmé joined us, and my sister, who had never shed one tear during our three days of terror in Le Mans two years before, now burst out crying at the sight of me.
“Why didn’t she send for us?” she said. “Why didn’t she tell us she was ill?”
“It was not her way,” answered Pierre. “I was here only a few weeks past, but she never complained. Even young Jacques noticed nothing wrong.”
Jacques was with one of our cousins, the Labbés, in St. Christophe, pending the decis
ion about his future. It did not surprise me when Pierre instantly volunteered to be his guardian.
We stood in silence by my mother’s body, while the health officer explained to us that the autopsy had shown the cause of death to be inflammation of the stomach, but of how long duration he could not say. He and his colleague had performed the autopsy in the farmer’s lodging close by, and it was there that my mother’s body lay, awaiting burial. The officer had placed his official seals on the doors of l’Antinière itself, but he removed them now so that we could go inside and see for ourselves that nothing had been touched.
I had not cried before, but I did so now. The imprint of my mother was on everything we touched. Much she had given away to all four of us already, keeping for herself those things that reminded her most of my father and the life they had shared together.
St. Christophe might become Rabriant, Madame Busson a “citoyenne,” kings, queens, and princes go to their death and the whole country change; but my mother had held fast to her own timeless world. There was the old chest with the marble top, the walnut desk, the dozen silver plates she had served grand dinners upon when company came to the château of la Pierre. She had kept the eighteen goblets and the twenty-four crystal saltcellars blown by Robert in his first days as a master, and in the writing desk among her papers we found the closely written copy of his procès for bankruptcy.
More intimate, as though she were with us still, was her easy chair before the fireplace, the card table on which she played a solitary piquet, the music stand—memory of days long past when we had our own choir at la Pierre and the workmen came to sing on feast days—the dog basket for Nou-Nou, the spaniel dead these many years, the parrot cage for Pelée, one of the two parrots Pierre had brought home from Martinique in ’69.
We went upstairs to the bedroom, and it was full of her presence—the bed with the green hangings which she had shared with my father, the tapestry on the wall, the fire screen by the writing table. The clock on the chimneypiece, beside a silver goblet, my father’s gold-topped cane and his golden snuffbox, given him by the marquis de Cherbon when he left Chérigny for la Pierre, her taffeta-silk umbrella, her bedside lamp…