The Glass-Blowers
The months that followed proved my brother right. The great army gathered at Boulogne waited in vain for a chance to cross the Channel, and when summer turned to autumn, with the onset of bad weather, their hopes of success faded, and so did ours.
Robert, who was living with us once more at le Gué de Launay, admitted to me one evening during the worst of the winter, in February 1804, that even when spring came he did not believe Bonaparte would risk invasion.
“The chances of a defeat at sea would be too great,” he said. “I think we must make up our minds to a long-drawn-out war between ourselves and England, no matter what success Bonaparte may have elsewhere. This means, from my own point of view, that I must stop thinking of Marie-Françoise and the children. I’m dead to them, and have to face the fact they are dead to me.”
He spoke without bitterness, but with decision, and I realized that he must have been turning the matter over in his mind for some while.
“Put it that way if you will,” I told him, “but not if it’s just to quieten your conscience. They are alive in London, growing year by year, just as Pierre-François, Alphonse-Cyprien and Zoë are growing here, and Pierre’s brood at St. Christophe. Accept the fact that they are living and you cannot help them. It will be easier for you to hold to the truth if you have the courage.”
“It isn’t a question of courage,” he answered. “I mean they are dead to me emotionally. It’s a strange thing, but I can’t even conjure up their faces anymore. They’ve become like shadows. When I think of Louise, who was always my favorite, her features turn into those of little Belle-de-Nuit. Perhaps it is because they are the same age.”
Here was a perplexity. I know that if I had been separated from my children, no matter for how long, their faces, and their voices too, would become more vivid. I wondered whether the disastrous encounter with Jacques had shocked some part of Robert’s brain, affecting his memory. Or could it be that he conveniently forgot all things that troubled him? I doubted if the thought of Jacques had bothered him much in London, and the decision to name his second boy Jacques could have been pure perversity, and part of the fantasy life. I could not help remarking, though, his genuine affection for my children, and for Pierre’s also. He had a natural way about him, gay and lighthearted, that won their response, despite his age, and I noticed that my two sons would run to him with some problem of grammar or arithmetic sooner than to their father. After all, it was Robert who had tried to teach me Latin in the old days at le Chesne-Bidault before he married, and during those last few years in London he had helped the Abbé Carron with the émigré pupils in the Pancras school.
“You’ve wasted your time as a master engraver,” I said one day, after I had found him with my two boys on either side of him, with a volume of Latin grammar in his hands. “You ought to have been an instructor in a school.”
He laughed and put the book aside. “I was glad enough of the work in London for the money it brought in,” he said. “Here it passes the time and stops me thinking, which—you will agree—is an achievement.”
Once more he spoke without bitterness, but although I knew he was content with my company, and happy to be among us, I sensed the void within. A year ago he had been building in imagination a future with Jacques; now that was over, but the days had to be filled all the same. My brother was fifty-four. His inheritance from our mother was untouched. Somehow he must maintain himself and have a raison d’être.
“You have only to say the word,” Pierre wrote to him, “and I will join forces with you in any undertaking you care to suggest, with one exception. The glass trade must be barred to us. For one thing, we haven’t the resources. For another, your creditors in Paris have forgotten you, but any attempt to bring your name forward again in circles familiar to the trade might fetch them about your ears. Here, in the Touraine, you are unknown.” We were many years distant from Busson l’Aîné and his influential friends.
In early May Pierre told us that Jacques had written him to say his grandmother, Madame Fiat, had died, and he was on leave in Paris receiving the inheritance due to him. His grandfather, old Fiat, was also ailing, and Jacques confirmed that when he died the house and its contents would belong to him.
“Which means,” said Robert, “that Jacques now knows himself to be independent. He will be able to sell the house and invest the proceeds, leaving the capital untouched until he quits the army.”
“In other words,” I replied, “he will never need your help. When you saw him last year you could not be sure. Now you know.”
“He would not have come to me direct,” said Robert, “but he might have approached Pierre. Even that last hope is now denied me.”
It was not until news came that Jacques’s regiment had embarked at Toulon for service in the Mediterranean, and was likely to be out of the country for at least two years, that Robert finally decided what he wanted to do with his own inheritance. He asked Pierre to come to le Gué de Launay for a family conference, and when the three of us were together—François preferring to take no part in the discussion, and Edmé too deeply involved with her Jacobin friends in Vendôme to attend—he put his proposal to us.
“I want to devote my life, what remains of it,” he said, “to the young. I want to try and do, heaven knows in a much smaller way, what I watched the Abbé Carron achieve in London. He chose a crowd of fatherless boys and girls from the poorest among the émigrés, housed them, fed them and clothed them, and gave them an education into the bargain. It could be that this is what he is still doing for my family there. In any event, I want to do it here.”
I think we were too surprised at first to make any comment. My remarks to Robert that he had wasted his talents as an engraver had been spoken in jest. I had never for one moment considered they would bear fruit. As to Pierre, he had his own strange ideas on education; let a child alone and it would teach itself was the method he had employed with his own boys, much to the disruption of his household, good-humored though it was. Now, with Robert’s pronouncement exploding among us like a cannonball, I wondered what the effect would be on Pierre. An occasion for argument, perhaps, with the theories of Jean-Jacques claiming us until midnight. Instead, Pierre’s enthusiasm took me by surprise. He leapt to his feet and clapped his brother on the shoulder.
“You’ve got it,” he almost shouted. “You’ve got it absolutely. I can think of at least six boys straight off, sons of my old clients in Le Mans, who would come to us as pupils. I could teach them philosophy, botany, and law, and leave the rest to you. We would charge practically nothing, of course; we don’t want to make money out of them. Just enough to cover the cost of food and rent. Sophie, you will give us Pierre-François and Alphonse-Cyprien. I’m not so sure about my own three, they’d be better working on a farm. But it will mean letting the house in St. Christophe and moving to Tours. Tours must be our center. I wonder if we can persuade Edmé to quit Vendôme and give lectures on political freedom? Perhaps not, her ideas are too advanced, and we must do nothing to offend the Code Civil.”
Pierre’s enthusiasm was infectious. He had all of us inspired. Two days later he left for Tours in search of suitable quarters for the proposed pension, and, more important still, to obtain permission from the authorities for “les frères Busson” to found a “maison d’éducation” for fatherless children. Even François, who had prophesied some fresh speculation on Robert’s part with its inevitable loss, had to agree that the new idea was commendable, if hardly profitable, but insisted that our own boys, having a father living, could not qualify for position in the school.
It took six months or more before the pension was ready to receive its first pupils, and when it opened in early December 1804, at No. 4 rue des Bons Enfants, Tours, I remember that our own family celebrations coincided with that of the whole nation. The city was beflagged, the crowds were out in the streets, for Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul, had been crowned Emperor.
How much the general excitement contributed
to my two brothers’ sense of dedication I did not know, but the occasion was a moving one. As they stood side by side, welcoming their twenty pupils, in the square oak-beamed room on the first floor of the ancient house in the center of Tours which they had taken for their pension, it seemed to me that the wheel had somehow come full circle, and the Busson brothers were together again in a community. This community life was what they had known as children in the glass-houses of Chérigny and la Pierre; it was something to which they had been born and bred, and although here in Tours there was no foundry chimney, no furnace, no product made with hands, fundamentally the spirit was the same.
My brothers were the masters, imparting knowledge and a way of life to those children, just as my father and my uncles had bequeathed the knowledge of their craft to my brothers when they were apprentices at la Pierre. Here, in the rue des Bons Enfants, were no molten glass, no rods, no pipes; the glass-blowers did not stand before the fire, blowpipe in hand, breathing life into the slowly expanding vessel. Instead there were children, their personalities malleable, awaiting development, and my brothers must guide them as surely and as steadily as they had once shaped liquid glass, bringing to fullness and maturity a rounded and balanced human being.
Pierre had the ideals and the selflessness to put those ideas into practice, Robert the powers of persuasion, the necessary charm and inventive ability to turn a history lesson into an adventure.
I watched the eager expectant faces of those orphaned boys, and the one girl among them, little Belle-de-Nuit, twenty-one in all staring at my brothers, who, each of them in turn, made a short speech of welcome. Pierre, his blue eyes, so like my mother’s, afire with enthusiasm, and his white hair en brosse, bore small resemblance to those professors of education whom I had seen elsewhere in Tours.
“I am here,” he said, “not to teach you, but to be taught. I’ve forgotten all I ever learned, except a smattering of the law, which I applied in my own fashion when I was a notary in Le Mans. I know nothing about buying and selling, and if you ask my brother about this it won’t help—he lost everything he possessed in speculation. What I do remember is where to look for wild strawberries in early summer, and the most likely trees to climb to find the nests of buzzards—for this, you must go to the forest, and we will do it together. Buzzards are predators, that is to say, they rob the nests of other birds and eat their young. This is antisocial, and for this reason they are mobbed by their fellows. People who follow their example in the world suffer likewise. We might also examine together the life cycle of butterflies and moths. You are all of you, at this period of your life, grubs and caterpillars; the fascination of growing up is to see what you become.
“I don’t intend to make any rules here that I won’t keep myself. If you make any among yourselves I will keep them too. My wife has one request, that you don’t throw your food upon the floor. Food, mixed with dirt, encourages rats, and rats breed plague. Nobody wants plague in Tours. This evening, if any of you care to listen, I shall be reading the first few chapters of Rousseau’s Emile aloud. If nobody turns up it does not matter. I enjoy the sound of my own voice, and shall not be offended. Afterwards, I shall start building an aviary for two birds with broken wings that my daughter, Pivione Belle-de-Nuit, brought with her from St. Christophe, and helpers will be welcomed. Now, perhaps you will have the courtesy to hear my brother. He is the elder by three years, and has all the brains.”
Pierre sat down, amid bewildered though polite applause, and François, at my side, whispered that the pension would surely be closed down by the authorities within the year.
Robert rose to his feet, his hair, newly dyed for the occasion, contrasting a little oddly, if spectacularly, with his new plum-colored coat. He carried a sheaf of papers to steady the tremor in his hands.
“There was once a lad,” he said, “who went to Martinique to seek his fortune. He returned empty-handed, having given away whatever he possessed, save for an embroidered waistcoat and two parrots. That lad, now middle-aged, has just been speaking to you. He knows little more of life now than he did then. If you want to learn how to gamble for vast sums and lose them within the year I can teach you, but don’t expect either my brother or myself to bail you out of prison afterwards.
“The English poet Shakespeare said that life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But he put these words into the mouth of a Scottish chief who had murdered the King sheltering beneath his roof, so it need not apply to you at the moment—unless you rise up and murder my brother and myself in our beds. Life, on the contrary, is at its most intense when it is silent; the silence of a prison cell, for instance, which gives every opportunity for thought, or when sitting beside the dead body of a loved one to whom you never bade goodbye.
“The sound and the fury, nevertheless, you will experience all in good time as obedient conscripts fighting for the greater glory of the Emperor and France. But whilst you are here, at No. 4 rue des Bons Enfants—which name, by the way, is quite fortuitous, for we came upon the street by chance—I shall endeavor to imbue your reluctant souls with a desire for stillness. Restless as a caged lion myself, I can never stay motionless for more than five seconds at a time; hence my respect for those who can. I was forced to remain still at certain periods of my life, which I may tell you about one day—it will depend upon how much I have had to drink.
“ ‘Pitchers have ears’—another quotation from Shakespeare, Richard III this time, for I am an English scholar—and if you keep yours alert you may hear a great deal to your ultimate advantage, on the wiles of men and princes. For I speak as one who saw the heyday of Louis XV and his unfortunate descendant, and now bows the knee to the Emperor Napoleon. History, literature, Latin, grammar, arithmetic, I’m a qualified professor in all five subjects—in my own opinion, if not in my brother’s—and before you go out from here in a few years’ time to shed your blood on the battlefields of Europe, I suggest you obtain some sort of grounding in these matters, along with gathering wild strawberries with my associate, so that dying you may murmur, ‘Virtuti nihil obstat et armis,’ which may be some consolation in the circumstances.
“In my own youth I held to the precept, ‘Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor,’ which is the reason my hands tremble today and I dye my hair—I do not ask you to follow my example.
“Meanwhile, my life is yours. This is your home. Trample on both to your hearts’ content, and be happy.”
Robert shuffled his papers, replaced his spectacles, and gave a signal for dismissal. The children, conditioned after the first speech to applause, clapped their hands loudly, led by Belle-de-Nuit. Only my husband, the mayor of Vibraye, shocked beyond measure, stared firmly at his feet.
“I think it only fair to tell you,” he said to my brothers as soon as the children had clattered down the stairs and across the small inner court to their own quarters, “that, despite our relationship, I shall have to erase the name of the pension from my list of recommendations. These children won’t have a chance under your care. They will grow up either scoundrels or buffoons.”
“We are most of us either the one or the other,” replied Robert. “In which category do your class yourself?”
This was no moment for a family quarrel, and I laid my hand on François’s arm.
“Come,” I said, “you must see the dormitory where the boys will sleep. Pierre has contrived it with great cunning, and partitioned it into two.”
My tact was wasted, for at this moment Edmé, who had come over from Vendôme for the occasion, approached us.
“I liked both your speeches,” she said in her usual forthright fashion, “but you neither of you said anything about tyranny. Surely one of the first lessons a boy should learn is how to distinguish between the oppressors and the leaders of the people? Nor did you as much as mention the Rights of Man.”
Pierre looked astonished. “But I gave an explicit description of tyranny when I spoke about buzzards,” he said. ?
??And as to the Rights of Man, I intend to hammer the point home when we find our first clutch of eggs and leave them intact. Birds have their rights as well as human beings. Little by little these children will discover the facts for themselves.”
Edmé appeared relieved, though not entirely convinced, and as we made a tour of the house I saw her frowning at the enthusiastic “Vive l’Empereur” that one of the students had already scrawled in enormous letters over the entrance to their dormitory.
“That,” she observed quietly, “should be removed straightaway.”
“What would you put in its place?” questioned Robert. “Children, like adults, need a symbol.”
“ ‘Vive la nation’ would be preferable,” she said.
“Too impersonal,” answered Robert. “You can’t have the nation seated on a white horse, with the tricolor in the background against a stormy sky. When these lads scrawl ‘Vive l’Empereur,’ that is what they see. Neither you nor I will ever dissuade them.”
Edmé sighed. “Not you, perhaps,” she replied, “but if I was allowed to speak to them for twenty minutes about conscription, and what it will mean for them, they would never scrawl ‘Vive l’Empereur’ again.”
I could not help being relieved, for the sake of both my brothers, that my sister had not been invited to lecture at the pension in the rue des Bons Enfants, for if she did the place would close, not in a year as François prophesied, but within three months.
As it turned out, the pension Busson remained open for nearly seven years, though not quite as my brothers intended it. The laws on education became much stricter as the months passed, all part of the Code Civil, which the local authorities throughout the country were bound to enforce. Boys were obliged to attend the State schools and be taught by qualified teachers, and so the unorthodox and original theories of my brothers were never fully put into practice. The pension remained a pension for fatherless boys, a place in which to eat and sleep, but they went daily to the State schools.