Not that life in Paris was so bad. The Revolution had learned a lesson from the Terror. Gradually, a legislature with two chambers emerged, themselves subject to election and law. There were problems. Members of the Convention dominated the legislature. There were riots, effectively put down. But for four years, the new system, with a small Directory acting as a cabinet government, brought some order to the land.
Émile kept meaning to go down and visit Dieudonné and his mother, but somehow other business always intervened.
For his own life in Paris kept him very busy indeed. His practice thrived. He treated a number of politicians and their families. But perhaps the most important patient he ever acquired was a charming lady, a widow with two children, who was the mistress of Barras, one of the members of the Directory.
In itself, this was a most useful contact, but it was to lead further than Blanchard could have imagined.
For when Barras decided that it would be a good idea if Joséphine transferred her attentions to a rising young general, who was proving most useful to him, and who was clearly fascinated by her, Blanchard found himself the friend of young Napoléon Bonaparte.
“And from then on,” he would tell the younger members of his family in years to come, “I never looked back.”
For whatever the faults of the future consul and emperor of France, Napoléon was a loyal friend. Having decided that the doctor attending Joséphine was an honest and capable man, he sent patients to him throughout his reign. Often they were powerful and rich. Blanchard was well rewarded.
By the time that the emperor Napoléon’s extraordinary reign of conquest, imperial grandeur and tragedy was finally brought to an end in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo, Dr. Émile Blanchard was a wealthy man and ready to retire to the pleasant house he had purchased in Fontainebleau.
Not that the fall of the emperor affected him professionally. He was secure, he was fashionable. The restoration of the monarchy brought him more aristocratic patients than he could possibly accept.
It also caused him, quite inadvertently, to do a final good turn to the family of de Cygne.
In the year 1818, one of his noble patients asked the good doctor if he’d like to be presented to the king. Naturally, Blanchard was happy, and somewhat intrigued, to accept.
He found the king much as he’d expected: very corpulent, but with a certain nobility and dignity in his face. When the nobleman told the king that Blanchard had treated such people as Danton, Robespierre and others in the days of the Revolution, Blanchard was a little taken by surprise.
He was afraid that this information would not make him a very welcome visitor with the king, and he would hardly have blamed him. But not at all. The king was rather curious, and asked him to tell him about them. Then he asked what had been Blanchard’s most memorable experience from that time. And Émile was just wondering what to say when he remembered poor Étienne de Cygne and his son—whom he hadn’t thought about for several years.
He told the king the whole story, start to finish.
“And so this lie you told, that the lady was pregnant, not only saved her life, but turned out to be true?”
“Exactly, sire. Conception must have been a day or two before, I think.”
“It was a miracle.”
“The boy was named Dieudonné, sire, since he was clearly a gift from God. Thanks to his birth, the family continues.”
“A family, my dear doctor, who have served my own for many centuries. I had not known of this wonderful circumstance.”
He seemed quite delighted.
“Well,” he suddenly declared, “if God shows such favor to the de Cygnes, then so should their king. I shall make the boy a vicomte.”
And it gave Dr. Blanchard great pleasure, soon afterward, to write to Dieudonné and his mother to congratulate them on this happy addition to the family’s ancient honor.
Chapter Twenty-five
• 1936 •
When Roland de Cygne had first proposed to her, Marie had made a mistake. She’d refused.
“I’m very honored,” she told him, “and very touched. But you need a wife who can devote herself to you, and your estate, and your son. And with Joséphine to look after, I can’t do that. I wouldn’t be any use to you.” She had smiled. “If it weren’t for all that, I think I should say yes. But I know it wouldn’t be fair to you.”
“I did not make any conditions in making my offer.”
“I know. But that doesn’t change the circumstances.” She had put her hand affectionately on his arm. “I should like it very much if we could be friends.”
“Of course.”
“And I think you are right. May I say it? You should marry. God knows, there must be any number of charming women in Paris who would leap at the chance.”
“But it was you I was asking,” he pointed out.
“There are many better choices all the same.”
“Well then,” he said crossly, “if you are so certain about it, you’d better find me a wife.”
“You want me to find you a wife?”
“Why not? You tell me you are my friend, and that although you can’t marry me yourself, there are all these other women I should marry instead. Very well. Show them to me. I trust your judgment. You choose the wife, and I will marry her.”
She had laughed. But as she was growing fond of him, she did select one or two women, introduced them, and sent him out with them.
The first one he told her frankly was beautiful, “but there was no spark between us.”
The second he liked better. But she was “just a little too stupid.”
“Ah,” she cried, “you are difficile!”
“Perhaps, but I must ask you to try again.”
The third took her a month to find. The woman was aristocratic, amusing, elegant—perfect in every way. He took her to the opera and to dinner. To her surprise, he turned up without warning at her apartment the following evening.
“Well,” she asked, “how was this one?”
“No good.” He shook his head.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She’s too intelligent.”
Marie burst out laughing. “You’re not difficile; you’re impossible.”
He made a face. “What can I do?”
She took his coat by the lapels, pretending to shake him. And whether she was taken by surprise when he held her and kissed her, or whether she was not, they had become lovers that evening.
“I shall be your mistress, but only until you find a wife,” she declared.
But then Claire had left for America. She hadn’t realized what an effect that would have. Life at the Joséphine store was not the same. They tried to replace her, but none of the replacements worked. Before long both she and Marc came to the same conclusion. They weren’t having any fun. The store was still doing well, yet they could both foresee that it would slide into mediocrity. They’d decided to close it.
So now she had nothing to do. And she was lonely.
She had no right to be lonely, she told herself. She had her brother and her aged parents, and even Gérard’s widow and children. She had many friends. She had a lover.
But her only child—and her grandchildren, when they came into the world—would probably remain three thousand miles away. The store which had filled her days was no more. She hadn’t enough to do.
Roland, reading her mood, had proposed again, and this time she had accepted. Cleverly, he had pretended that his affairs were in less good order than they actually were. And the château, he assured her, needed a thorough renovation. She had a project now, to keep her busy. She felt a sense of purpose again.
And indeed, there were all kinds of decisions to be made. The first was what to do with the mansion in Paris. For ample though de Cygne’s resources were, the place had become drainingly expensive to maintain. “The sensible thing would be to live in the country, and to maintain an apartment in Paris,” she told him.
“I
wouldn’t know how to live in an apartment,” he complained. But she guessed that he knew very well that this was what he ought to do, and that her role, as the new wife from the upper-middle class, was to organize the business while he told his aristocratic friends that she had made him do it. Since many of those friends had long ago done the same thing, Roland could still claim that he was one of the last holdouts from the old regime. For the truth was that, apart from a few industrialists, or the great Jewish families like the Rothschilds, who had a magnificent mansion above the Champs-Élysées, and a handful of Sephardic families near the Parc Monceau, few people could maintain such houses now.
But Marie had thought of a clever compromise. For two seasons, the de Cygnes had entertained brilliantly in the mansion. This had given Roland a chance to show off his wife to all his old friends and many new figures she was able to entice to the house. With her practice at organizing and her knowledge of the fashionable world, Marie made these parties memorable. They culminated in a magnificent party for Roland’s son.
In the summer of 1929 they sold the house for a huge sum. Three months later, the Wall Street crash came. The next year, for a fraction of the proceeds from the house, they acquired a splendid apartment on the nearby rue Bonaparte. Into this went the best of the furniture from the house. The effect was breathtaking.
Meanwhile, without disturbing the rustic charm of the château—which might have been considered an act of vulgarity—Marie was able to redecorate a salon in the eighteenth-century part of the house, create a magnificent dining room and improve several of the bedrooms with furniture left over from Paris.
Her relationship with the château was particularly happy. Before they married, she had asked Roland for his advice about how to approach the people on the estate, whose workings would be new to her.
“When you started Joséphine,” he said, “it was your own creation, so you were the boss from the start. But the estate has been there for centuries. It’s like joining an old regiment. I’d advise you to ask everyone how things are done. Let them adopt you, before you make any changes.”
It had been sound advice and she had followed it. Everyone at the château knew that she was a rich and powerful woman, and they had been bracing themselves for the new regime. So they were charmed when she came to them so modestly and showed herself so ready to learn.
And the life she encountered there was, indeed, new to her. In the château’s ancient, vaulted kitchen and larders, she found hams, sides of beef, churns of milk, as well as, naturally, the produce of the fruit and vegetable gardens, which had all come from the estate. Her husband would walk out into his woods in the early evening and return with pigeons he had shot as they returned at dusk. For the first time in her life, she was in the real, rural France, where man and nature existed side by side as they had for thousands of years. And chatelaine though she was, she was quite determined to learn how to do everything, including skinning a hare and plucking a pheasant. It was not long before her husband, passing by, heard laughter from the kitchen and guessed that his wife was with the cook in there.
Perhaps her happiest day was when Roland asked her parents to spend a long weekend with them during the summer. Her mother had become so vague in her mind that she was no longer up to it, but her father came.
Roland could not have behaved better. Dinner was becoming a little too taxing for old Jules, so Roland gave a luncheon party to which he invited a number of his neighbors, and made a most gratifying speech welcoming Jules not only as his father-in-law but as the dear friend of his own father.
“Indeed,” he added gallantly, if not quite truthfully, “had it not been for my father’s sudden and unexpected death, and my regiment’s posting to the east of France, I might have asked for your daughter’s hand many years ago. But before my battle dispositions were made, another lucky man stepped in and married her.”
Despite his age, old Jules was quite lively. He took a great interest in the estate, and she discovered that he knew more about farming than she had realized. Before he left, he told her: “I was so pleased and proud when you took on Joséphine. But now I am happy to see you here.” He’d smiled. “You did not know, in the days when you were a little girl, how much pleasure I used to take in visiting the farms with whom we used to do business. For it’s the countryside—the farms and villages as well as the estates like this one—where every Frenchman belongs. This is the true France.”
Marie also took up riding in earnest. Roland gave her instruction, and she soon made progress. Each morning she would ride out with the head groom, and in no time she was taking small fences. There was an enthusiastic hunt in the local forest: mostly stag, sometimes boar were hunted. The riding itself was not arduous, and though it was mostly men taking part, a few of the women rode. One day Roland suggested that Marie might like to ride with him at the next meet, and with some uncertainty she agreed. But when the head groom asked anxiously if she was still intending to hunt, she went to Roland and asked him if he thought the groom was trying to suggest that she should not. To her delight, Roland only chuckled.
“It’s the other way around,” he said. “He’s so proud of you that he’s been boasting about it to all his friends. He’s only terrified you won’t show up.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“Because he told me.”
Having organized the decorating of the house, Marie had turned her attention to the library. It contained some fine old volumes from the eighteenth century, but almost nothing since. So she set to work. “You’re indefatigable,” he laughed, as she imported the classics from the nineteenth century and some of the more interesting productions of modern literature—none of which he had any intention of reading. But he didn’t stop her.
Of more interest to Roland was another, longer-term project Marie undertook.
The de Cygne family archives were not in good order. “My father meant to sort them out,” Roland told her, “but he died before he got very far.”
There were boxes of letters tied with ribbon in cabinet drawers. There were trunks of unsorted documents in the attic, and lead-lined strongboxes of parchment, going back to the sixteenth century.
“It’s probably a treasure trove,” Marie informed him, “if we can ever sort it out.”
“It will keep you occupied for years,” he replied with a grin. “And future generations will bless your name.”
These researches were not only significant because anything relating to one’s ancestors was important to an aristocrat. One day Marie even discovered that the family owned some quite valuable fields a few miles away that, during the confusion at the time of the Revolution, they had forgotten that they possessed. Roland was both proud of the fact that his noble family could forget such a detail, but equally delighted when Marie managed to recover the fields for him.
And then there had been the evening when she had come into the old hall carrying a small box of letters and asked him: “Did you know that your family went to Canada?”
“No.” He frowned. “In fact, I’m sure they did not.”
“Well, there are a whole collection of letters here, written with great affection, from the brother of a former owner of this house. They date from the early seventeenth century. He’d gone out to Canada and settled there. It’s clear that the two brothers were in quite regular correspondence. I wonder if there were descendants.”
Roland was silent. For some reason she didn’t understand, he looked awkward.
“I seem to remember hearing from a Canadian once,” he said. “But I don’t know that he had anything to do with this seventeenth-century fellow.” He shrugged. “I may have written him a rather unfriendly letter.”
“You could always write again.”
“It’s all a long time ago,” he muttered. And since the business seemed to embarrass him, she didn’t bring it up again.
Meanwhile, she continued to archive the material, and see if she could find any more hidden treasure for he
r husband.
She was enjoying being chatelaine of the estate, and she believed that she might be getting quite good at it.
In fact, she only had one regret. She wished, now, that she had married Roland a few years earlier. Not because of Roland himself, but because of his son. She would have liked to be more of a mother to Charlie.
Everyone called him Charlie. The serious boy she’d first met at the Gobelins factory had still been at school when she’d married his father. He was already a tall, good-looking young fellow by then, though still a little gangly. He looked quite like his father, except that his hair was dark where his father’s had been fair, and Marie suspected that before he was thirty, his hairline would be receding. Like many boys, he’d been a little unsure of himself, and occasionally withdrawn, but she had been very straightforward and friendly with him, and he seemed to like that. She’d never pressed him to confide in her, but she’d ask him what he thought about all sorts of things, and freely shared her own thoughts about everything from politics to marriage. She hoped she’d made his home a warm and comfortable place for him.
But they’d only really gotten to know each other for about a year before it was time for him to do his military service.
The liberal French governments of the twenties had no great wish to build up the military, which had always been their enemy. So Charlie’s military service had lasted only one year. But that had been long enough to transform him from a gangling boy to a strong, athletic young man. The experience hadn’t awakened any desire to follow a military career, however, nor did his father encourage it. Charlie had begun to study law at the Sorbonne, though he didn’t study very hard. But that didn’t mean that he had no ambition. Indeed, his ambition soon became absolutely clear.
He wanted to be a hero.
It was only natural, Marie supposed. He was a young aristocrat, heir to a fine estate. He’d fallen in with a crowd of young men who obviously expected him to play a certain part. And he’d found he could do it.