The Girl from Paris

by Joan Aiken

  Suddenly, unaccountably, Luke remembered his other son: the son who had died at birth. Such a beautiful infant he had been! When the distraught father had been summoned to see his child, as was thought proper, before the infant Luke had been sewed into his tiny shroud, the sight had been almost unbearable: the little perfect waxen creature, lying motionless in its cot, had seemed like some calm Egyptian godling with its strangely elongated head (due to the process of birth), its face dispassionate and remote, as if the refusal to engage in life had been a moral choice, not a physical failure. The anguish of that moment, the intolerable frustration, the excruciating disappointment, had never really left him; he could still feel it as fiercely as when first experienced.

  The birth of Gerard, six years later, had come almost as an anticlimax.

  How old would the younger Luke have been now? he wondered, and it was not for several minutes that he recalled that the boy was Ellen’s twin; she was now twenty-one, so would her brother have been. At University, doubtless, or reading for the Bar; and there would have been coming-of-age festivities. The birthday was in April; it had passed unregarded because of Luke’s accident. In any case, who would wish to celebrate that date? For with hindsight he saw that, after the birth of the twins, Matilda’s slow decline had set in.

  Once, beforehand, she said to Luke, laughing, with no premonition at all, “Imagine it, twins! How extraordinary! It seems so bizarre to produce human beings in pairs, like socks.”

  “Mattie! How can you speak so?”

  “How can I not?”

  “But what you are saying is so—so frivolous—almost irreverent! As if you disputed the ways of Providence, Who has seen fit to bless us with two children, instead of only one.”

  Two sons! he had been thinking. Perhaps it will be two sons.

  “Oh, no, my dear, I wouldn’t dream of disputing with Providence. What would be the use? Providence always has the last word. No, I was just thinking about the twins. There they lie inside me, poor little dears, cuddled together so lovingly; no one will ever be so close to them again as they are to each other now. Do you suppose that one will be very good, and one very bad? I do hope they are quite different from each other—it would be rather stingy if Providence fobbed them off with one character between the two.”

  She had held up her clasped hands, smiling at them thoughtfully. When she smiled at very small children, or animals, or plants that she had grown herself, Mattie had a wonderfully serene, amused expression, as if she were in the confidence of the creative mind that had planned this delightful absurdity.

  Later on in the day Luke had been rather scandalized to find on Mattie’s dressing table a copy of a medical diagram showing the position of twins curled up in their mother’s womb. Who could have supplied her with such dangerous rubbish? If it were Dr. Bendigo, he would speak a sharp word in that gentleman’s ear. Just looking at such a picture might be enough to make the over-imaginative Mattie become downright morbid.

  Luke cut the engraving into small pieces and carefully burned them. He did not mention what he had done to Mattie, and she never alluded to the loss of the picture.

  But sometimes, strangely enough, the image of that diagram came back to him, as clearly as the one of little Luke, motionless in his cradle. Forever embraced, the embryonic twins clung to each other, like the two halves of his heart in the dream.

  Eight

  Ellen soon found that her time at the Hôtel Caudebec was very fully occupied. She worked on Germaine’s manuscript, she read with the Comte, she taught, as best she could, little Menispe, and took her for outings. The only person, in fact, with whom she had very few dealings at all was her pupil’s mother, who continued aloof, and, Ellen thought, somewhat hostile.

  “You are growing quite a literary character, Miss Paget, I gather,” Louise remarked acidly one afternoon, discovering Ellen at work on Germaine’s manuscript in the sunny courtyard while Menispe took her riding lesson. “My husband has nothing but praise for your rendering of Dickens. For him, it is like looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Fleetingly Ellen wondered why the Comte had not asked his wife to elucidate the difficulties of Dickens. “Raoul is becoming quite a changed character,” Louise went on. “We see so much more of him these days!”

  She did not sound gratified by the change; indeed the irony in her tone was unmistakable. For a moment Ellen, overwhelmed by irritation, was on the point of snapping at her: I am not neglecting your wretched child! She is probably receiving more attention than ever before. Nor am I flirting with your husband—though I can’t imagine why you should object if I did.

  But, restraining herself, she recalled that one of Lady Morningquest’s reasons for introducing her into the house was to be a friend to Louise; in which aim so far she had signally failed. Unfortunately Louise did not appear to require her friendship, though it took no perspicacity to see that all was not well with the Countess. She was paler, frailer than ever; elegantly dressed for walking in black-and-white muslin and a straw hat with yellow roses, she looked wraithlike; the hand holding the lace parasol was pitifully thin, and shook slightly. Despite her annoyance, Ellen could not help feeling sympathy toward the poor girl. She had, after all, involved herself in the pact with Germaine when still a child; and she was still very young, and in far deeper waters than she had reckoned on.

  I must try harder to win her confidence, Ellen resolved, not for the first time.

  She said gently, “Menispe does not suffer because of the other things I do, Countess. Indeed, I think if you were to visit the schoolroom, you would be impressed by her gift of moving to music, and her drawings of horses—”

  “Oh, very likely—I daresay—” Louise, impatient, distrait, glanced up at the clock tower over the stable archway. Its hands pointed to three o’clock. “I am sure you do your best with the child—I don’t criticize you. What can have become of Mademoiselle de Rhetorée, I wonder?”

  Ellen, as she continued to wait and to fidget, said, with a good deal of diffidence, “Countess, if I made sure that Menispe was happily occupied at the time, would it be permissible, perhaps, for me to be present at one of your salons? Ger—Mademoiselle de Rhetorée’s descriptions have, I confess, given me a great curiosity to hear some of the disputations—”

  Louise glanced her way in surprise. For an instant the mask of ice appeared to crack—a human being looked out. Then she replied in a colorless tone, “Why, certainly, my dear girl—if you are so interested? Come when you choose. The child can be with Véronique, having her goûter—I daresay it makes little difference—”

  “Thank you, Countess.” Mastering another upsurge of annoyance, Ellen turned to meet Menispe, who had just dismounted.

  “If you are going into the house,” Louise said, “and should encounter Mademoiselle de Rhetorée, perhaps you would be good enough to remind her that she and I had arranged to go to Mrs. Clarke’s this afternoon.”

  “Of course,” Ellen said.

  Germaine was easily discovered in the library. This was a handsomely appointed ground-floor room, which had been stocked with rare books by Raoul’s father, and was now devotedly looked after by an elderly cousin, the Abbé Grandville. It was one of Germaine’s favorite haunts; indeed she had once said to Ellen, with a wicked grin, “As soon as I heard about this collection I told Louise that she must marry into the la Ferté family.”

  Raising her head from a magnificently illustrated Decameron, she said pettishly now, “To Mary Ann Clarke’s? That dowdy old Englishwoman who thinks she conducts a salon? What a bore! Why cannot Louise go on her own?”

  “She is waiting for you,” said Ellen.

  “Oh—pfui!” Then she glanced sideways, laughing. “Now, if it had been you who asked me—”

  Leisurely, she picked up her hat and removed herself from the room.

  * * *

  Ellen had learned to swim at the age of eight. This was a
rare accomplishment, shared, she found later, by none of her colleagues at the Pensionnat. It had come about—like many other blessings—from her friendship with Dr. Bendigo. In warm Septembers the family of a gypsy named Pharaoh Lee would come and settle for a month on the sunny side of the Downs at Eartham, whittling hazel wands for clothes-pegs. Dr. Bendigo, on cordial terms with the tribe, would borrow little Selina Lee, who was the same age as Ellen, and take the two children to the sea, where he encouraged them to race on the sands and splash in the still-warm water. Selina seemed to have been able to swim since she was born; she and Dr. Bendigo rapidly taught the art to Ellen.

  Remembering those days, she sometimes wondered which she missed more: the affectionate, unfettered dialogue with the old man or the physical bliss of running free on the sands, swimming in the buoyant water. In dreams she found herself riding on the cracked leather seat, lulled by the regular clip-clop of old Dobbin ahead, putting some question to the doctor, waiting for his thoughtful measured reply. Or she would be in the sea-green swell off Selsea—where she and Selina might swim only on calm days, for there was a dangerous undertow—drifting up and down between smooth glassy rollers, effortlessly floating.

  Now—unexpectedly—in the white-and-gold music room of the Hôtel Caudebec, Ellen found herself reminded of both her happiest memories. The exhilarating lift and flow of the talk that surged about the room seemed akin to the joy of swimming, of running barefoot.

  How in the world could she ever have guessed that she would owe this to Louise de la Ferté?

  The Thursday salons at the Hôtel Caudebec always opened with a formal discussion on some elevating theme, ethical or technical: Why should moral suffering be considered more interesting than physical? Which should be of paramount importance to the writer, the thought or the phrase? Sometimes a work, classic or contemporary, would be read aloud, and then discussed by the assembly.

  This first, organized, part of the evening was, by some of those present, considered a shocking bore, but Louise deemed it essential to establish a dignified tone, break the ice, and put the guests in the right mood, lively but not malicious, for the general conversation which then followed. The change to the latter stage was signaled by the handing round of refreshments—which were always extremely modest, due, it was whispered, to the Comte’s parsimony—tea, wafers, and sorbet.

  Then, after a few hesitating moments, the real business of the evening would start; talk would break out, sporadic, becoming torrential; voices would grow louder (though never loud to the point of ill-breeding—the room was too large, and too beautiful, to encourage any raucousness); faces became intent, gestures liberated, groups divided, re-formed, and split again, as friends and rivals observed and sought each other; talk ran like a river, ideas bounded like drops of spray, and through the midst of it all Louise de la Ferté, in command of all this animation, moved about, calmly enjoying and directing it like the master of ceremonies at some great firework display.

  Who would ever have thought it? Ellen wondered, watching Louise in amazement; she seemed less to participate than to enjoy her power as directress, escorting learned old ladies to meet ethereal young poets, introducing cynical, careworn critics to aspiring playwrights, listening with every appearance of sympathy to earnest talkers while her eye roved, ceaselessly, capably, round the room, making certain that nobody felt left out or slighted, that arguments did not become rancorous, that no vulgarity or personal vendettas were allowed to cloud the atmosphere.

  I don’t believe Louise will ever be a writer, Ellen said to herself (for Germaine had showed her some pages of the Treatise on the Golden Age of Gynautocracy and, unlike the Goncourt brothers—perhaps they were just being polite?—she had found it turgid, over-romantic, and muddled), but for this kind of thing she certainly has a genius. It is plainly what she was made for.

  In no time Louise had noticed Ellen lingering diffidently near the entrance, and had, like a hard-working sheep dog, rounded her up and introduced her to a dowdy old lady, the Duchesse de Quelquechose, who had a piercing eye, a bristling mustache, a priceless cap of Mechlin lace; this lady rapidly turned Ellen’s brain inside out, analyzed and rearranged its contents, before drawing into their conversation a large undistinguished-looking man with prominent eyes, red weather-beaten face, and drooping mustaches, who just then drew near.

  (“It is M. Flaubert,” she rapidly confided to Ellen. “He is a very unsociable fellow, he hates coming to these affairs, but he comes, nevertheless, because he can’t resist talking to me about writing; he knows I will enlarge his ideas.”)

  M. Flaubert appeared mulishly reluctant to be subjected to this process, but he was no match for the Duchesse; she soon had him involved in a rattling discussion with a tall, well-built, gray-haired man in a trim frock coat who turned out to be the cartoonist Gavarni, so much detested by Germaine de Rhetorée for his opinion of women. “Just the same, a man of genius,” Germaine said irritably, and Ellen could only agree, as the talk leaped exuberantly from Cartesian philosophy to higher mathematics—“the music of numbers”—and back to writing. Could this, Ellen wondered, be the Flaubert who wrote Memoires d’un Fou? He seemed so very rustic, unlike her idea of a writer. But yes, it was he.

  “The plot,” he was saying, “is of no interest to me. When working on a novel, my aim is to produce a tone, a color. My Carthaginian novel, for example, will be purple. In Madame Bovary, I wanted a dove-gray mole color. I didn’t give a rap about the story. Why, just a few days before I began, I still thought Emma was going to be a pious old spinster. But that would never have done for a heroine. Would it?” He rounded on Ellen, fixing her with a bulbous, bloodshot eye, and she surprised herself by replying, “Possibly not for you, monsieur, but I fail to see why such a character might not serve as the subject for another writer. The obstinacy of some saintly old lady might easily drive a whole community into difficulties.”

  “Very good, child,” said the Duchesse. “Saintliness can be a much more troublesome attribute than wickedness. Everybody knows, in theory, how to deal with sin. Whereas saints are nothing but a nuisance.”

  “My God, yes!” remarked Gavarni, with a sour look at Ellen. “England is full of them. It is a wonder that any fiction may be published there; especially when you consider the national drink. Le gin du pays!”

  They were joined by a heavy-faced, weary-eyed man, who kept yawning and interrupting Flaubert in his discussion of style, to say, “Pardon me, mon cher, but form inevitably gives birth to thought.”

  “Isn’t that what I was saying?”

  “I have always, always hated writing. It is so useless! Ahhh! Excuse my yawns, I have been at my desk since six-thirty this morning. But writing now…I never think what I am going to say; I toss the phrases into the air as if they were kittens; and they always come down on their feet—”

  “And then you give them a saucer of cream, my dear Théo,” said the Duchesse.

  The talk bounced to Edgar Allan Poe, a writer unknown to Ellen.

  “Marvelous! A marvelous innovator!” Gavarni was saying. “He is something wholly new—you mark my words, this will be the literature of the twentieth century! Science at last embodied in miraculous prose—the fabulation of A plus B—”

  “But objects in his writing play a greater part than humans,” objected Flaubert. “That cannot be right.”

  “That is good, that is right! Humans have had their day—emotions should now give place to statistics.”

  “But if you listen only to the brain, never to the heart,” objected the Duchesse, “the human race will die out.”

  “And a good thing too!”

  Ellen resolved to procure the works of Poe. Almost certainly Germaine would have them.

  At this moment Germaine herself strolled up and drew Ellen away.

  “Good that you have found your way here at last, mon amie! (And that blue becomes you excellently, you look like a w
ild hyacinth.) Now come and meet Matilde, whom you will love; she resembles everybody’s kind aunt.”

  Ellen went a little reluctantly. Matilda had been her mother’s name; she was not sure that she wanted to meet another. And she had been enjoying the conversation of the Duchesse’s group.

  But the Matilde in question, at the center of another lively circle, greeted Ellen with the utmost friendliness. She was, just like her description, a dumpy woman with a broad, sweet, kindly smile and a peering, shortsighted expression. She asked innumerable questions about the writings of Mrs. Gaskell, Currer Bell, and George Eliot. The latter Ellen knew to be female—“I believe she was the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, and has just produced a new novel, Adam Bede”; about Currer Bell she was not so certain, save that she believed the writer to have died some three or four years ago.

  “And was it this Bell who wrote Les Hauts de Hurlement?”

  No, Ellen understood that to be another, related Bell.

  “For my part,” said Germaine, “I am sure they are both women. Who but a woman could write Jane Eyre? And I admire her with my whole heart.”

  Ellen’s attention wandered a moment; she heard Flaubert exclaim, “Theatre criticism? It’s easy. You swallow a couple of absinthes in the foyer bar, then write, ‘The play isn’t bad but needs cutting.’ Every play does. Last time I went to the Comédie, I sat next to two women who were telling each other all the way through what would happen next. Of course that’s what’s wanted, in boulevard theatre—for the audience to be able to guess what’s coming.”

  Madame Matilde said very kindly to Ellen, “I shall hope to see you at my house. Camille, here, will bring you: Wednesdays, every alternate week. I shall tell my friend Madame de Fly to send you a formal invitation.”