“There is no such thing as time,” whispered Edmé. “I’m back again at la Pierre. I’m three years old, and the bell is sounding in the foundry for the men to come off shift.”
I think what moved us most was her wardrobe and the linen stacked neatly on the shelves within it. Linen that we had forgotten all about but that she had kept and treasured all these years, making do herself with a few worn sheets, the rest of it put away untouched that it might now form part of our inheritance. Embroidered sheets and napkins, tablecloths by the dozen. Petticoats, handkerchiefs, muslin bonnets of long-outdated fashion but exquisitely laundered and fresh, some hundred and twenty of them, laid on a shelf with rose leaves.
These things, so unexpected and incongruous in our troublous times, were an indictment of our age that reverenced nothing past and hated all things old.
“If you have finished your inspection of the citoyenne Busson’s effects,” said the health officer from behind us, “the authorities will make a proper inventory in due course. Meantime, I must replace the seals.”
We came out of our childhood world and were back again in Brumaire, Year III. Yet it seemed to me that I felt my mother’s hand on both our shoulders as Edmé and I turned and left her room.
We buried her in the churchyard at St. Christophe beside her parents, Pierre Labbé and his wife Marie Soiné.
The five of us had an equal share in the inheritance, with the citoyen Lebrun, public notary for the département, representing young Jacques, in place of my émigré brother. These shares, drawn up into five lots, consisted of the various properties owned by my mother in the parish of St. Christophe. So that no one of us should own more than the other, the value of each of them was taken into account: whoever should find himself owner of Pierre Labbé’s house in St. Christophe, for instance, would pay cash to whichever of us might hold the smaller properties. Then the notaries shuffled the names of the lots in a hat, and we all of us drew in turn.
Michel, who had no need of it, had the luck of the draw, finding himself possessor of my grandfather’s house. He at once offered it to Pierre, who had drawn a small farm outside the village, and my brother from Le Mans, with three hearty boys of his own, a newly adopted nephew, and another baby expected within the month, was glad of the exchange. It was shortly after this that he left Le Mans and brought his family to live in St. Christophe, for unrest had started again in the west and there was constant fighting against the royalist irregular armies, or “chouans,” as they were called, and Pierre dared not expose his family a second time to the horrors of civil war.
I drew the small farm la Grandinière and Edmé la Goupillière, and the notary public held l’Antinière for Jacques. We continued to lease the properties, for the dwelling houses were no use to any of us.
The personal effects were put up for sale among the four of us, and we bid for those things each one of us valued the most. I know that Edmé and I shared out the linen, that Pierre, because of his growing family, bid for all the chairs, for the dog kennel and the parrot’s cage that had no parrot in it, and Michel, to my pleasure and my astonishment too, paid nearly four thousand livres for my father’s golden snuffbox and his gold-topped cane.
“They’re the f-first things I remember,” he said afterwards. “Father would take the cane to Coudrecieux to church on S-Sundays, and when Mass was over stand outside ch-chatting to the curé, offering him snuff from that same snuffbox. It was the f-finest sight I’ve ever seen.”
He pocketed the box, and smiled. Could it be, I wondered, that Michel, the son who had fought against parental authority from the beginning, was the one who all these years had loved my father most?
He looked across at Edmé, who, like himself, had no family to consider. “What are your p-plans?” he asked her.
She shrugged her shoulders. The prospect of moving to St. Christophe did not attract her. If Pierre really intended to give up his position as public notary in Le Mans and live out there in a village, there would be no work for her. Domestic duties and a pack of boys might satisfy her sister-in-law, but Edmé Busson Pomard liked to use her brains.
“I have no plans,” she answered, “unless you know of a new revolutionary party I could join.”
Our mother’s death, as it happened, had coincided with a fresh change of government in Paris. A royalist insurrection in the capital had been crushed a few weeks back by General Bonaparte, and on the very day my mother died the Convention wound up its sessions, and a Directoire of five ministers was given executive power. How they would govern the country nobody knew. The only men with any authority were the generals, Bonaparte above all, and they were too busy winning victories against our enemies abroad to sit in Paris.
“There’re plenty of J-Jacobins in Vendôme,” said Michel. “Hésine is there—he’s to be c-commissaire under the Directoire. His idea is to work for the b-bringing back of Robespierre’s Constitution of ’93, and put an end to all these m-moderates and chouans. I know him well.”
I could see a new light in Edmé’s eyes. Robespierre had been her God, the Constitution laid down in ’93 her breviary.
“He’s going to p-publish a newspaper in Vendôme,” Michel continued, “called L’Echo des Hommes Libres. Babeuf, the extremist, will write for it. He believes that all wealth, all p-property should be shared. Some men c-call it Communism. It s-sounds like a new faith, and one that I could believe in.”
Suddenly he went to Edmé and held out his hands.
“Come to V-Vendôme, Aimée,” he said, using the old pet name of childhood days. “Let’s l-live together, and share our inheritance, and go on w-working for the Revolution. I don’t mind if they call me a t-terrorist, or an extremist, or a s-sacré Jacobin. That’s what I always have b-been, and always will be.”
“Me too,” said Edmé.
They burst out laughing, and hugged each other like two children.
“It’s a q-queer thing,” said Michel, turning to me. “It must be something to do with l-living in a community all my life, but I’m lost without my own p-people about me. If Aimée comes to V-Vendôme it will be like living in the f-foundry once again.”
I was happy for the two of them. The future, which had seemed so bleak and drear for both, now had a purpose. It was strange that my mother’s death should have brought them together, the two who were lonely, the two most like in feature to my father.
“If our politics don’t succeed,” said Edmé, “we’ll take another foundry and go into partnership. I can do a man’s work. You’ve only to ask Pierre.”
“I’ve always known it,” replied Michel, quickly jealous. “I d-don’t have to ask anyone.”
He frowned for a moment, as if struck by a sudden thought, and heaven knows from what hidden depths within him came his next suggestion.
“We might rent the f-foundry at Rougemont,” he said, “and reinstate it in its old g-glory. Not for ourselves, but to share the p-profits with the workmen.”
He did not choose la Brûlonnerie, or Chérigny, or even la Pierre. He chose Rougemont, the foundry that had first brought ruin to Robert, and I knew that once again, without understanding why, Michel sought to atone for his brother’s fault.
“That’s the answer,” he repeated. “If our political c-comrades fail us we’ll go into partnership, Aimée, and d-develop Rougemont together.”
As it turned out, it was not so much that Michel’s comrades failed him as that their ideas of a people’s sovereignty, with all things shared in common, displeased the corrupt Directoire to such an extent that some eighteen months later Gracchus Babeuf, the originator of these ideas, was condemned to death, and Hésine, the editor of L’Echo des Hommes Libres, imprisoned.
How Michel and Edmé escaped imprisonment themselves I never discovered. That both of them were deeply implicated in all that concerned Hésine and his associates was common knowledge in Vendôme, but François and I, with our growing family, were more concerned to keep out of politics and trouble than risk everything f
or a lost cause.
We settled in our small property at le Gué de Launay, outside Vibraye, in November 1799, just after Bonaparte’s coup d’état in Paris and his subsequent appointment as First Consul. It was in this same year that Michel and Edmé, pooling their joint inheritance from my mother, entered into partnership at Rougemont.
The project was doomed to failure—we all of us knew it. Pierre, living in St. Christophe, his brood of boys enriched at last by the birth of a daughter named—so characteristic of Pierre—Pivione Belle-de-Nuit, warned both of them that any attempt to resurrect a glass-house the size of Rougemont, which had completely fallen into disrepair, would have small hope of success unless backed by vast capital sums.
Michel and Edmé would not listen to Pierre, or to anyone. A glass-house, where the workmen and the masters shared the profits, was their dream, and they pursued their dream for nearly three years, until, in March 1802, they were forced to abandon it. Like other ideals, before and since, like the Revolution itself and its spirit of equality and brotherly love, the attempt to put it into practice failed.
“He has ruined himself, and he has ruined your sister too,” said my husband François, now the mayor of Vibraye and father of two sons, Pierre-François and Alphonse-Cyprien, besides our daughter Zoë. “Michel will be obliged to take some beggarly employment as manager of a small foundry, and Edmé either housekeep for him, or exist on a few acres in St. Christophe. They have thrown everything away, and are left without fortune or a future.”
François had been successful; they had failed. Despite the happiness we enjoyed, François and myself, with our little property and our growing sons and daughter, there was something about our smug complacency that made me secretly ashamed.
It was a few months after this, when the First Consul had signed the Treaty of Amiens, so bringing about a truce at last between France and England, that I was in our garden with the children, seeing to the bedding-out of some plants in front of the windows of the salon, when my eldest son, Pierre-François, came running up from the drive with his sister to tell me that a man was looking through the entrance gate, asking for Madame Duval.
“What sort of a man?” I asked.
We still had vagrants on the road from time to time, deserters from the remnant of the chouan armies, and as we lived some little distance out of Vibraye I did not care much for strangers when François was absent.
My daughter Zoë, now about nine years old, spoke for her brother.
“I can tell you he wasn’t a beggar, maman,” she said. “He took off his hat when he spoke to me, and bowed.”
The gardener was within hailing distance should I need him, and I walked down the drive, followed by the children.
The stranger was tall and lean, and his clothes hung about him as though he had lost weight through recent illness. They had a foreign cut about them, as did his dusty, square-toed shoes. Spectacles concealed his eyes, and I could tell by the unnatural brightness of his reddish hair that it was dyed. I guessed him to be a traveling salesman, from the bag he had set down by the gate, who hoped to persuade me to buy trash.
“I’m sorry,” I said, intending to drive him off by my severity, “but we have everything we need here for the household…”
“I’m glad of that,” he answered, “for I can contribute nothing. I have only one clean shirt in my bag, and my father’s goblet, unbroken.”
He took off his spectacles and held out his arms.
“I told you I’d never forget you, Sophie,” he said. “I’ve come home to you, just as I promised.”
It was my brother Robert.
Part Four
The Émigré
18
The first shock, so Robert said, came just five months after their arrival in England. Everything had gone well during the early months. His employers at the Whitefriars Glass Manufactory, known to him of old during the days when he had held the position of first engraver in crystal at the foundry in St. Cloud, and to whom he had written asking for work before leaving France in December ’89, welcomed him with courtesy and kindness, and had arranged lodgings for him and his wife in Whitefriars close by.
The knowledge that he was free of debt, had no responsibility, and was in every sense starting life anew with his young wife, with whom he was much in love, made Robert ignore the small pinpricks and irritants almost inevitably inherent in the position of anyone starting out to make a living for himself in a strange country. The language, the customs, the food, even the climate, which would probably have daunted Pierre and Michel, more tenacious in their way of life than their elder brother, he accepted as amusing, and a challenge to his own powers of assimilation. It delighted him to plunge immediately into English colloquialisms with a total disregard for grammar, to slap his fellow workmen on the back, English-fashion, to drink his grog and his ale, and to show himself in every way perfectly at home and quite unlike the frizzed and perfumed Frenchmen lampooned in the English newspapers.
Marie-Françoise, left alone most of the day in the lodgings, and obliged to do the household shopping without a word of English, was more overcome. But youth, good health, and a wide-eyed admiration for everything her husband said and did soon found her echoing his phrases, praising the Londoners for their good humor, and declaring that she saw more life on Thames-side than she had ever done in her twenty-one years in Paris—which, as almost all of them had been spent in an orphanage in St. Cloud, was not surprising.
As far as his work was concerned—he was employed as engraver in crystal—Robert soon discovered that he had nothing to learn from his associates. Equally, he could not boast of any superiority in technique. The standard at the glassworks in Whitefriars was high. It had been founded as long ago as 1680, and the flint glass made there was famous throughout Europe. There was no question of a Frenchman crossing the Channel to teach his trade to English craftsmen; the contrary was the more likely, and Robert was quick enough to tone down any little hint of patronage that might have risen to the surface in his first attitude of bonhomie to all.
A lively interest, though much ignorance, about recent affairs in France was shown by the cockneys, both at the glassworks in Whitefriars and among his fellow lodgers; and here Robert was pleased to show himself supreme authority, once he had mastered enough English to make himself understood.
“It takes more than a few months to set right the abuses of five hundred years,” he would declare, whether it was in a chophouse near Thames-side or in his landlady’s front parlor. “Our feudal system was as out of date as your moated castles and barons would be today. Give us time, and we may accomplish great things. Providing our King adapts himself to the mood of the people. If not”—here, he told me, he would pause significantly—“if not, then we may replace him with an abler and more popular prince.”
He was referring, naturally, to his patron the duc d’Orléans, whose arrival in England the previous October had contributed largely to Robert’s own decision to try his luck across the Channel.
He soon found, however, that Chapel Street was very different from the Palais-Royal. The arcades of the latter had been my brother’s home and place of business; he had been free to come and go at will, to exchange gossip and chat with the throng of minor officials, busybodies, secretaries, and personal aides that went to make up the entourage of the duc d’Orléans. At the Palais-Royal a whisper to the right person, a hint about favors given and received, would bring results. The very sense of being on the fringe of a society close to the most popular man in Paris had added enormously to Robert’s self-esteem.
There was none of this in London. Laclos, Captain Clarke, the duc d’Orléans’s valet and one or two others, including, of course, his mistress Madame de Buffon, were the only members of his personal circle whom the prince had brought with him to England. The servants in the furnished house in Chapel Street were English. Stately footmen answered the front door and stared blankly at any intruder upon the step. There was none of the coming and go
ing, the free enter-as-you-will atmosphere of the Palais-Royal; and Robert, when he called for the first time soon after his arrival in London, was allowed to leave his card with the footman but was not invited within.
He called again, with the same result. The third time, he wrote a personal letter to Laclos, and after a week or more received a laconic reply to the effect that, should the duc d’Orléans or his staff require any private business done for them during their temporary sojourn in England, Monsieur Busson would be informed.
Here was a rebuff, but Robert was undaunted. He took to frequenting the alehouses in the immediate neighborhood of Chapel Street, in the hope of meeting with someone or other, whether it was the valet or the barber, who might give him more definite news of the duc d’Orléans’s intentions. He had some small success in learning that his patron was privately sounding the English Cabinet as to their objections or approval should he accept, if it were offered to him, the crown of Belgium. This, my brother insisted, was more than rumor. Full of optimism, as usual, he returned to Marie-Françoise with much talk of Brussels as a possible future home instead of London.
“If the duc d’Orléans becomes Philippe I, King of the Belgians,” Robert told his young wife, “he will need a very large staff indeed. There is no question but that I shall obtain some sort of position.”
“But can you leave the Whitefriars foundry so abruptly?” she asked. “Have you not signed papers agreeing to be employed by them for several months?”
He waved her question aside. “If I wish to leave Whitefriars I can do so tomorrow,” he told her. “I only took on the work to tide over these present months. As soon as the duc d’Orléans has need of me he will send for me, and if it’s a case of going to Brussels, to Brussels we shall go. There would be great possibilities in serving a new monarch, and our future would be assured.”