Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  The English ladies twittered. The gentleman in the round hat asked her, in vile French, how she went, and offered her his hand. She allowed him to pull her to her feet, only to collapse with a cry of pain. The ladies twittered again, on a more sympathetic note. Then the crowd fell back a little, and a masculine voice inquired courteously whether mademoiselle were ill.

  Victorine lifted her eyes to the newcomer, who was hunkered down beside her, his broad, open brow furrowed with polite concern. The gold braid on his sleeves proclaimed him an officer, and the gold ring on his finger suggested wealth.

  “It is very silly,” she said breathlessly, “but I have twisted my ankle and cannot stand.”

  “If mademoiselle will allow?” He folded her skirt away from her foot, took the scarlet boot into his hand, and bent it gently back and forth. Victorine hissed through her teeth.

  “Not broken, I think,” he said. “Still, I’m no doctor.” Without asking permission, he put one arm around her back, the other under her knees, and lifted her from the ground with a little jerk of effort. As he carried her downhill to the surgeon’s tent, she studied him. Under a chestnut-brown moustache, his mouth was firm and well shaped, and his nose was high-bridged and aristocratic. She could do worse.

  He glanced down, caught her staring. Victorine smiled into his eyes (they, too, were chestnut-brown) and was gratified to see him blush. And then they were in the surgeon’s tent and her scarlet boot was being cut away. It hurt terribly. The surgeon anointed her foot with arnica and bound it tightly, making silly jokes as he worked about gangrene and amputation. She bore it all with such a gallant gaiety that the officer insisted on seeing her home and carrying her to her bed, where she soon demonstrated that a sprained ankle need not prevent a woman from showing her gratitude to a man who had richly deserved it.

  October, 1870

  It was a strange affair, at once casual and absorbing, conducted in the interstices of siege and civil unrest. The officer was a colonel in the National Guard, a man of wealth and some influence. His great passion was military history. His natural posture—in politics, in love—was moderation. He viewed the Monarchists on the Right and the Communards on the Left with an impartial contempt. He did not pretend that his liaison with Victorine was a grand passion, but cheerfully paid the rent on her apartment and bought her a new pair of scarlet boots and a case of canned meat, with promises of jewels and gowns after the Prussians were defeated. He explained about Trochu and Bismarck, and expected her to be interested. He told her all the military gossip and took her to ride on the peripheral railway and to see the cannons installed on the hills of Paris.

  The weather was extraordinarily bright. “God loves the Prussians,” the officer said, rather sourly, and it certainly seemed to be true. With the sky soft and blue as June, no rain slowed the Prussian advance or clogged the wheels of their caissons or the hooves of their horses with mud. They marched until they were just out of the range of the Parisian cannons, and there they sat, enjoying the wine from the cellars of captured country houses and fighting skirmishes in the deserted streets of burned-out villages. By October 15, they had the city completely surrounded. The Siege of Paris had begun.

  The generals sent out their troops in cautious sallies, testing the Prussians but never seriously challenging them. Victorine’s colonel, wild with impatience at the shilly-shallying of his superiors, had a thousand plans for sorties and full-scale counter-attacks. He detailed them to Victorine after they’d made love, all among the bedclothes, with the sheets heaped into fortifications, a pillow representing the butte of Montmartre, and a handful of hazelnuts for soldiers.

  “Paris will never stand a long siege,” he explained to her. “Oh, we’ve food enough, but there is no organized plan to distribute it. There is nothing really organized at all. None of those blustering ninnies in charge can see beyond the end of his nose. It’s all very well to speak of the honor of France and the nobility of the French, but abstractions do not win wars. Soldiers in the field, deployed by generals who are not afraid to make decisions, that’s what wins wars.”

  He was very beautiful when he said these things, his frank, handsome face ablaze with earnestness. Watching him, Victorine very nearly loved him. At other times, she liked him very well. He was a man who knew how to live. To fight the general gloom, he gave dinner parties to which he invited military men and men of business for an evening of food, wine, and female companionship. Wives were not invited.

  There was something dreamlike about those dinners, eaten as the autumn wind sharpened and the citizens of Paris tightened their belts. In a patriotic gesture, the room was lit not by gas, but by branches of candles, whose golden light called gleams from the porcelain dishes, the heavy silver cutlery, the thin crystal glasses filled with citrine or ruby liquid. The gentlemen laughed and talked, their elbows on the napery, their cigars glowing red as tigers’ eyes. Perched among them like exotic birds, the women, gowned in their bare-shouldered best, encouraged the gentlemen to talk with smiles and nods. On the table, a half-eaten tarte, a basket of fruit. On the sideboard, the remains of two roast chickens—two!—a dish of beans with almonds, another of potatoes. Such a scene belonged more properly to last month, last year, two years ago, when the Empire was strong and elegant pleasures as common as the rich men to buy them. Sitting at the table, slightly drunk, Victorine felt herself lost in one of La Fée Verte’s visions, where past, present, and future exist as one.

  Outside the colonel’s private dining room, however, life was a waking nightmare. The garbage carts had nowhere to go, so that Victorine must pick her way around stinking hills of ordure on every street corner. Cholera and smallpox flourished among the poor. The plump blonde of the Veau d’Or died in the epidemic, as did the elderly waiter and a good proportion of the regulars. Food grew scarce. Worm-eaten cabbages went for three francs apiece. Rat pie appeared on the menu at Maxim’s, and lapdogs went in fear of their lives. The French wounded lay in rattling carriages and carts, muddy men held together with bloody bandages, their shocked eyes turned inward, their pale lips closed on their pain, being carted to cobbled-together hospitals to heal or die. Victorine turned her eyes from them, glad she’d given a coin to the young infantryman that day she saw La Fée Verte in the Tuileries.

  And through and over it all, the cannons roared.

  French cannon, Prussian cannon, shelling St. Denis, shelling Boulogne, shelling empty fields and ravaged woodlands. As they were the nearest, the French cannon were naturally the loudest. Victorine’s colonel prided himself on knowing each cannon by the timbre and resonance of its voice as it fired, its snoring or strident or dull or ear-shattering BOOM. In a flight of whimsy one stolen afternoon, lying in his arms in a rented room near the Port St. Cloud, Victorine gave them names and made up characters for them: Gigi of the light, flirtatious bark on Mortemain, Philippe of the angry bellow at the Trocadéro.

  October wore on, and the siege with it. A population accustomed to a steady diet of news from the outside world and fresh food from the provinces began to understand what it was like to live without either. The lack of food was bad enough, but everyone had expected that—this was war, after all, one must expect to go hungry. But the lack of news was hard to bear. Conflicting rumors ran through the streets like warring plagues, carried by the skinny street rats who hawked newspapers on the boulevards. In the absence of news, gossip, prejudice, and flummery filled their pages. Victorine collected the most outrageous for her colonel’s amusement: the generals planned to release the poxed whores of the Hôpital St. Lazare to serve the Prussian army; the Prussian lines had been stormed by a herd of a thousand patriotic oxen.

  The colonel began to speak of love. Victorine was becoming as necessary to him, he said, as food and drink. Victorine, to whom he was indeed food and drink, held his chestnut head to her white breast and allowed him to understand that she loved him in return.

  Searching for a misplaced corset, her maid turned up the ripped green kimono and inqui
red what Mademoiselle would like done with it.

  “Burn it,” said Victorine. “No, don’t. Mend it, if you can, and pack it away somewhere. This is not a time to waste good silk.”

  That evening, Victorine and her colonel strolled along the Seine together, comfortably arm in arm. The cannon had fallen to a distant Prussian rumbling, easily ignored. Waiters hurried to and fro with trays on which the glasses of absinthe glowed like emeralds. The light was failing. Victorine looked out over the water, expecting to see the blue veil of dusk drifting down over Nôtre Dame.

  The veil was stained with blood.

  For a moment, Victorine thought her eyes were at fault. She blinked and rubbed them with a gloved hand, but when she looked again, the evening sky was still a dirty scarlet—nothing like a sunset, nothing like anything natural Victorine had ever seen. The very air shimmered red. All along the quai came cries of awe and fear.

  “The Forest of Bondy is burning,” Victorine heard a man say and, “An experiment with light on Montmartre,” said another, his voice trembling with the hope that his words were true. In her ear, the colonel murmured reassuringly, “Don’t be afraid, my love. It’s only the aurora borealis.”

  Victorine was not comforted. She was no longer a child to hide in pretty stories. She knew an omen when she saw one. This one, she feared, promised fire and death. She prayed it did not promise her own. Paris might survive triumphantly into a new century, and the mason and his blonde might survive to see its glories, but nothing in La Fée Verte’s vision had promised that Victorine, or even La Fée Verte, would be there with them.

  The red light endured for only a few hours, but some atmospheric disturbance cast a strange and transparent radiance over the next few days, so that every street, every passer-by took on the particularity of a photograph. The unnatural light troubled Victorine. She would have liked to be diverted with kisses, but her colonel was much occupied just now. He wrote her to say he did not know when he’d be able to see her again—a week or two at most, but who could tell? It was a matter of national importance—nothing less would keep him from her bed. He enclosed a pair of fine kidskin gloves, a heavy purse, a rope of pearls, and a history of Napoleon’s early campaigns.

  It was all very unsatisfying. Other women in Victorine’s half-widowed state volunteered to nurse the French wounded, or made bandages, or took to their beds with Bibles and rosaries, or even a case of wine. Victorine, in whom unhappiness bred restlessness, went out and walked the streets.

  From morning until far past sunset, Victorine wandered through Paris, driven by she knew not what. She walked through the tent cities, past stalls where canteen girls in tri-colored jackets ladled out soup, past shuttered butcher shops and greengrocers where women shivered on the sidewalk, waiting for a single rusty cabbage or a fist-sized piece of doubtful meat. But should she catch sight of a woman dressed in green or a woman whose skin seemed paler than was usual, she always followed her for a street or two, until she saw her face.

  She did not fully realize what she was doing until she found herself touching a woman on the arm so that she would turn. The woman, who was carrying a packet wrapped in butcher’s paper, turned on her, frightened and furious.

  “What are you doing?” she snapped. “Trying to rob me?”

  “I beg your pardon,” Victorine said stiffly. “I took you for a friend.”

  “No friend of yours, my girl. Now run away before I call a policeman.”

  Shaking, Victorine fled to a café, where she bought a glass of spirits and drank it down as if the thin, acid stuff would burn La Fée Verte from her mind and body. It did not. Trying not to think of her was still thinking of her; refusing to search for her was still searching.

  On the morning of October 31, rumors of the fall of Metz came to Paris. The people revolted. Trochu cowered in the Hôtel de Ville while a mob gathered outside, shouting for his resignation. Victorine, blundering into the edges of the riot, turned hastily north and plunged into the winding maze of the Marais. Close behind the Banque de France, she came to a square she’d never seen before. It was a square like a thousand others, with a lady’s haberdasher and a hairdresser, an apartment building and a café all facing a stone pedestal supporting the statue of a dashing mounted soldier. A crowd had gathered around the statue, men and women of the people for the most part, filthy and pinched and blue-faced with cold and hunger. Raised a little above them on the pedestal’s base were a fat man in a filthy scarlet cloak and a woman, painfully thin and motionless under a long and tattered veil of green gauze.

  The fat man, who was not as fat as he had been, was nearing the end of his patter. The crowd was unimpressed. There were a few catcalls. A horse turd, thrown from the edge of the crowd, splattered against the statue’s granite base. Then La Fée Verte unveiled herself, and the crowd fell silent.

  The weeks since Victorine had seen her on the stage of the Salon du Diable had not been kind to her. The dark eyes were sunken, the body little more than bone draped in skin and a walking-dress of muddy green wool. She looked like a mad woman: half starved, pitiful. Victorine’s eyes filled and her pulse sped. She yearned to go to her, but shyness kept her back. If she was meant to speak to La Fée Verte, she thought, there would be a sign. In the meantime, she could at least listen.

  “I am a seer,” La Fée Verte said, the word taking on a new and dangerous resonance in her mouth. “I see the past, the present, the future. I see things that are hidden, and I see the true meaning of things that are not. I see truth, and I see falsehoods tricked out as truth.” She paused, titled her head. “Which would you like to hear?”

  Puzzled, the crowd muttered to itself. A woman shouted, “We hear enough lies from Trochu. Give us the truth!”

  “Look at her,” a skeptic said. “She’s even hungrier than I am. What’s the good of a prophetess who can’t foresee her next meal?”

  “My next meal will be bread and milk in a Sèvres bowl,” La Fée Verte answered tranquilly. “Yours, my brave one, will be potage—of a sort. The water will have a vegetable in it, at any rate.”

  The crowd, encouraged, laughed and called out questions.

  “Is my husband coming home tonight?”

  “My friend Jean, will he pay me back my three sous?”

  “Will Paris fall?”

  “No,” said La Fée Verte. “Yes, if you remind him. As for Paris, it is not such a simple matter as yes and no. Shall I tell you what I see?”

  Shouts of “No!” and “Yes!” and more horse turds, one of which spattered her green skirt. Unruffled, she went on, her husky voice somehow piercing the crowd’s rowdiness.

  “I see prosperity and peace,” she said, “like a castle in a fairy-tale that promises that you will live happily ever after.”

  More grumbling from the crowd: “What’s she talking about?”; “I don’t understand her”; and a woman’s joyful shout—“We’re all going to be rich!”

  “I did not say that,” La Fée Verte said. “The cholera, the cold, the hunger, will all get worse before it gets better. The hard times aren’t over yet.”

  There was angry muttering, a few catcalls: “We ain’t paying to hear what we already know, bitch!”

  “You ain’t paying me at all,” La Fée Verte answered mockingly. “Anyone may see the near future—it’s all around us. No, what you want to know is the distant future. Well, as you’ve asked for the truth, the truth is that the road to that peaceful and prosperous castle is swarming with Germans. Germans and Germans and Germans. You’ll shoot them and kill them by the thousands and for a while they’ll seem to give up and go away. But then they’ll rise again and come at you, again and again.”

  Before La Fée Verte had finished, “Dirty foreigner!” a woman shrieked, and several voices chorused, “Spy, spy! German spy!” Someone threw a stone at her. It missed La Fée Verte and bounced from the pedestal behind her with a sharp crack. La Fée Verte ignored it, just as she ignored the crowd’s shouting and the fat man’s clutching hands
trying to pull her away.

  It was the sign. Victorine waded into the melee, elbows flailing, screaming like a cannonball in flight. There was no thought in her head except to reach her love and carry her, if possible, away from this place and to Victorine’s home, where she belonged.

  “I see them in scarlet,” La Fée Verte shouted above the noise. “I see them in grey. I see them in black, with peaked caps on their heads, marching like wooden dolls, stiff-legged, inexorable, shooting shopgirls and clerks and tavernkeepers, without pity, without cause.”

  Victorine reached La Fée Verte at about the same time as the second stone and caught her as she staggered and fell, the blood running bright from a cut on her cheek. The weight of her, slight as it was, overbalanced them both. A stone struck Victorine in the back; she jerked and swore, and her vision sparkled and faded as though she were about to faint.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the husky voice said in her ear. “They’re only shadows. They can’t hurt you.”

  Her back muscles sore and burning, Victorine would have disagreed. But La Fée Verte laid a bony finger across her lips. “Hush,” she said. “Be still and look.”

  It was the same square, no doubt of that, although the café at the corner had a different name and a different front, and the boxes in the windows of the apartment opposite were bright with spring flowers. Victorine and La Fée Verte were still surrounded by a crowd, but the crowd didn’t seem to be aware of the existence of the two women huddled at the statue’s base. Every eye was on something passing in the street beyond, some procession that commanded the crowd’s attention and its silence. The men looked familiar enough, in dark coats and trousers, bareheaded or with flat caps pulled over their cropped hair. But the women—ah, the women were another thing. Their dresses were the flimsy, printed cotton of a child’s shirt or a summer blouse, their skirts short enough to expose their naked legs almost to the knee, their hair cut short and dressed in ugly rolls.