As time went by, and the children grew older and left, their places were taken by those homeless or down-on-their-luck individuals so dear to my brother Pierre. Needless to say, they never paid for their bed or board, but looked to him for charity. The pension, started with such high hopes, deteriorated into a kind of lodging house where all were welcome, with Pierre acting host, and Robert endeavoring to make up for his brother’s lack of money sense by coaching private pupils before they sat for examination.
The decline, so François said, was only to be expected; indeed, it was a wonder the place was kept going at all. It saddened me to see the house grow shabby from want of care, the walls unpainted, the stairs unscrubbed; and when I went to stay in the rue des Bons Enfants, as I did from time to time, I would miss the laughter and the clatter of those children of the first year, when the pension opened. Instead I would hear a rasping cough from some semi-invalid in the room adjoining, or meet a grumbling individual as I walked down the stair to the inner court where the children had once played.
Neither Robert nor Pierre seemed aware of dilapidation or decay. They had chosen to live thus, and it seemed to suit them. The light of both their lives was Belle-de-Nuit, whose radiant presence turned the otherwise drab pension to a place of joy.
This enchanting child, doomed—though thank heaven neither her father nor her uncle lived to see it happen—to die of tuberculosis before she was twenty years old, had all the family gifts and none of their faults. Selfless like Pierre, she possessed more application and discernment. Intelligent like Edmé, she was without rancor, and envied no one. Her talent for drawing was such that, had it matured, she could have excelled as a professional artist. As it is, I keep the best of her drawings, filed away in my cabinet in le Gué de Launay.
She was the only one of Pierre’s children to profit by Robert’s teaching. The boys, after military service, drifted into various trades, Joseph starting up as a saddler in Château-du-Loir and Pierre-François, my own son’s namesake, becoming a hairdresser in Tours.
“The inevitable result of deliberate neglect,” François used to say. “Those boys, with proper upbringing, might have entered a profession.”
Even so, what talent they possessed came from their hands. I have seen leatherwork stitched by Joseph with all the loving care that a fine engraver would put upon his glass, and wigs dressed by Pierre-François that the Empress herself would not have scorned to wear. Nothing is degraded that is bequeathed with love. My father handed down a passion for craftsmanship to the grandsons he never saw.
“Let each one work to the best of his ability,” Pierre used to say. “I don’t care what they do as long as they do it to extreme.”
He spoke his own epitaph. Fishing one Sunday on the banks of the Loire, he saw a dog leap from the opposite shore to retrieve a stick thrown by its master. The dog faltered in midstream and pawed the water, frightened, at which my brother flung off his coat and plunged in after him. The dog, seeing his rescuer, gained courage and turned for the shore, but Pierre, shocked by the sudden cold and hampered by his clothes, was seized with cramp, and sank. The owner of the dog gave the alarm and a boat was launched, but it was too late. Pierre’s body was recovered three days afterwards.
The impulse which brought him death, and so much grief to his family, had its consequences, one of which might never have occurred had he lived. Because of it, I like to think that his impulse was not in vain.
The tragedy happened in April 1810, a few days before Pierre’s fifty-eighth birthday and Jacques’s twenty-ninth, and during the time when the Emperor was holding the celebrations in Paris for his second marriage, to Marie-Louise of Austria. Jacques’s regiment had formed part of the Grande Armée since 1807, he had campaigned in most of the countries in Europe, and his company was among those doing duty in the capital for the marriage celebrations.
I wrote to him instantly, upon learning of the accident, so that he could send a message of sympathy to his aunt and cousins. I did not imagine for a moment that he would obtain leave of absence.
François and I and our daughter Zoë, now seventeen, went down to Tours for the funeral, and we delayed our return for a day or two, with the intention of taking my sister-in-law Marie and Belle-de-Nuit back with us.
The child, who was now fourteen and had adored her father, stifled her own grief in attending to her mother. It was during their preparations for departure, when I was with her in her room, that she suddenly turned to me and said, “I don’t know if I did wrong, tante Sophie, but I wrote to Jacques to tell him what has happened.”
“So did I,” I reassured her. “No doubt you will be hearing from him, and your mother too.”
She looked at me in her steadfast way, then said, “I’ve asked him to come here. I told him he was needed.”
This news disturbed me. We did not want a repetition of the encounter of seven years past. Pierre’s death had greatly shocked my brother, and he was in no state to suffer a second rebuff.
“It wasn’t wise, Belle-de-Nuit,” I said. “You know Jacques does not care to speak to his father, or to see him. That is why he refuses to come on leave to Tours unless your uncle is away.”
“I know that very well,” she answered, “and it was always Papa’s wish to bring them together. It seemed to me that the time had come to try just that. We will see.”
I did not know whether to warn Robert or to say nothing. I felt certain Jacques would not be able to get leave of absence because of the celebrations, but I was wrong. I never discovered what special pleading Belle-de-Nuit put into her letter, but it brought a response, which mine would never have done. That evening, I was descending the old staircase into the inner court, with Robert by my side, and as I paused a moment, my hand on the carved balustrade, I heard Belle-de-Nuit’s cry of welcome in the archway leading to the street beyond.
Instinct told me who it was, and I made to turn.
“What’s the matter?” Robert asked. “If it’s another caller, the child will deal with him.”
They came through the archway together, Belle-de-Nuit in her black mourning dress and Jacques in his uniform of caporal fusilier. The boy had developed into a man, still short but broad and thickset, with powerful shoulders, and I should hardly have recognized him but for his blue eyes and his shock of fair hair.
The pair of them stared up at us, and I saw that Robert beside me had turned white. He must have shared my instinct, for he turned to make his way back up the stairs once more, stumbling as he did so.
“No, uncle, don’t go.” Belle-de-Nuit’s voice rang clear like a command. “Jacques has permission from his company commander for two days,” she said, “after which they will rejoin the battalion for service in Spain. He has come to say goodbye to you.”
Robert hesitated. His hand on the balustrade trembled.
“I was decorated last year at Wagram,” said Jacques. “If it would interest you, I should like to show you the medal.”
The voice was no longer harsh and arrogant. It held respect, and a certain shyness too. Robert turned again, and looked down the stairs at his son. His hair was no longer dyed these days. It had gone white, as Pierre’s had done, and he looked all of his sixty years.
“I heard about the decoration,” he said. “I should like to see your medal more than anything else in the world.”
Jacques started up the stairway towards us. I kissed him quickly, and then joined Belle-de-Nuit in the court below. Our presence was not needed at this encounter. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw father and son silhouetted a moment at the turn of the stairs; then Robert put his arm through Jacques’s and led him up to his room beyond.
The rest of us left the next day for le Gué de Launay, and Jacques spent the remaining twenty-four hours of his leave alone with his father. I could only guess what the reconciliation meant to both of them.
There is little left to tell about my brother Robert. Despite my entreaties that he should give up the pension and come to live at
le Gué de Launay, he would not be persuaded. I think he felt that Pierre would have expected him to stay.
“I shall keep the place open,” he told me, “just as long as I can afford to do so.”
But once Pierre’s widow had departed back to St. Christophe with Belle-de-Nuit, unable to face life at the pension without him, the little joy remaining went out of the poor shabby building, and with it my brother’s will to live.
He became very frail and shaky during the succeeding winter, and, like Michel before him, complained in his letters of shortness of breath. He continued to coach pupils before examinations, for young faces were his one delight, reminding him, not only of Jacques and Belle-de-Nuit, but of that family of his across the Channel, of whose existence I alone knew.
He spoke of them to me the last time I saw him, which was in May of 1811, little more than twelve months after Pierre’s death.
“If he still lives,” Robert said to me, “my second Jacques will now be eighteen years old, Louise, like Belle-de-Nuit, approaching sixteen, and Louis-Mathurin in his fourteenth year. I wonder if they have become entirely English, disliking all things French, even their own language.”
“I doubt it,” I said, “and one day, ten, twenty, thirty years hence, they will come home.”
“Perhaps,” he answered, “but not to me.”
He waved goodbye to me from the upper window of his room at No. 4 rue des Bons Enfants, for I would not let him walk with me to the diligence that would take me back to Vibraye, in case it strained his heart.
I left him with an unhappy feeling of premonition. There were not more than half a dozen persons living in the pension, none of whom knew him well, or would be able to take care of him if he became ill.
A month later, on the 2nd of June, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, he was climbing the stairway from the inner court to the landing above when a clot of blood must have blocked a vein of his heart, for he fell, and was found there by two of the lodgers, dying, a moment or two afterwards.
They carried him to his room and laid him on his bed and stood there waiting, uncertain whom to send for or what to do. He tried to speak but could not, and they thought he wanted air, and opened the window. It troubles me still, after thirty years, to know that my brother was with strangers when he died.
Epilogue
Madame Duval laid down her pen on the 6th of November, 1844, the day before her eighty-first birthday. It had taken her a little over four months to write the story of her family, and during the telling of her tale she had lived again, in memory, many incidents she had thought forgotten. Their faces were very clear to her: her father Mathurin and her mother Magdaleine, her three brothers, Robert, Pierre, Michel, and her sister Edmé.
She had outlived them all, even her nephew Jacques, who, severely wounded in January 1812, had died the following June, shortly after leaving hospital, thus surviving his father by only twelve months.
Edmé, poor Edmé, whose dreams of a life where there should be a “communauté des biens,” equality and happiness for all, were shattered forever by the restoration of the monarchy, continued to lead a lonely and frustrated existence in Vendôme, telling all who cared to listen to her of the great days of the Revolution and the Constitution of ’93. Passionate for reform, forever scribbling ideas for a future political system that no editor in Vendôme dared to print, she died in her early fifties, “sans fortune et sans famille,” a republican to the end.
François Duval had the satisfaction of seeing his son, Pierre-François, succeed him as mayor of Vibraye in 1830, and his daughter, Zoë, married to Doctor Rosiau, former mayor of Mamers, before he was laid to rest in Vibraye cemetery, near to his onetime partner and comrade, Michel Busson-Challoir.
The glass-houses founded and developed by Mathurin Busson nearly a century before had continued to flourish, though no member of his family had any connection with them.
On her eighty-first birthday, despite the lateness of the season and the threat of rain, Madame Duval induced her son, the mayor, to drive her the short distance to la Pierre, so that she might descend from the carriage awhile, and look through the park gates at the château and the foundry beside it.
The château was shuttered, its owners away in Paris, but smoke came from the foundry chimney, and the familiar bitter tang of charcoal filled the air. Workmen were wheeling barrows to and from the sheds to the furnace house, a two-horse wagon waited to be loaded, and three apprentice boys, laughing and joking to one another, came out of one of the sheds bearing a crate between them.
Across the greensward were the workmen’s cottages, and one or two women stood in the open doorways, staring at the carriage. They had taken advantage of the meager sun to spread their linen on the grass to dry. The foundry bell sounded for the midday change of shift, and the men came out of the furnace house and from the sheds, and gathered in little groups. Like the women, they stared at the waiting carriage.
“Haven’t you seen enough?” asked Pierre-François Duval, mayor of Vibraye. “We are drawing attention to ourselves, standing about like this.”
“Yes,” answered his mother, “I have seen enough.”
She got back into the carriage, and looked for a moment through the open window. Nothing had changed. It was still a community, a little body of craftsmen and workmen with their families, indifferent, even hostile, to the world outside, making their own rules, abiding by their own customs. What they created with their hands would go out across France, through Europe, to America; and surely each object would carry upon it some stamp of the first masters who long before had worked here with pride and love, passing on the old traditions to their successors.
Madame Duval’s last glimpse of her childhood home la Pierre showed the furnace house, with the buildings grouped about it, caught momentarily in the pale glimmer of a November sun, the whole shrouded and protected by the tall forest trees whose strength and durability fed the furnace fire.
That night she made a package of all the papers she had written, tied them with ribbon, and gave them to her son for dispatch to her nephew Louis-Mathurin in Paris.
“Even if he does not read any of it aloud,” she said to herself, “or suppresses those parts that show his family, and especially his father Robert, to disadvantage, it will not matter. I shall have done my duty and told the truth. Most important of all, his son George, the boy he called Kicky, will keep the glass.”
She went over to the window and opened it, listening to the rain falling upon the garden below. Even here, in her own house at le Gué de Launay, it seemed to her that the community she loved was not far distant. The men would be going on night shift at la Pierre and at le Chesne-Bidault, and the women preparing coffee; and even if she herself no longer lived among them, the spirit of the past was with her still.
About the author
Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) was born in London, the daughter of the actor Sir Gerald du Maurier and granddaughter of the author and artist George du Maurier. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931, but it would be her fifth novel, Rebecca, that made her one of the most popular authors of her day. Besides novels, du Maurier wrote plays, biographies, and several collections of short fiction. Many of her works were made into films, including Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, My Cousin Rachel, “Don’t Look Now,” and “The Birds.” She lived most of her life in Cornwall, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1969.
Books by Daphne du Maurier
Novels
The Loving Spirit
I’ll Never Be Young Again
Julius
Jamaica Inn
Rebecca
Frenchman’s Creek
Hungry Hill
The King’s General
The Parasites
My Cousin Rachel
Mary Anne
The Scapegoat
Castle Dor
The Glass-Blowers
The Flight of the Falcon
The House on the Strand
>
Rule Britannia
Short Stories
The Birds and Other Stories
The Breaking Point: Stories
Don’t Look Now and Other Stories
Nonfiction
Gerald: A Portrait
The du Mauriers
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë
Golden Lads: A Study of Anthony Bacon, Francis, and Their Friends
The Winding Stair: Francis Bacon, His Rise and Fall
Myself When Young
The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories
i Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Novelist (Arrow Books, London), p. 324.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part One: La Reyne d’Hongrie