Pam Rosenthal

by The Bookseller's Daughter

  Oddly, there did seem to be a war outside her window. Dull thuds like distant thunder, multicolored flashes of light. She must be imagining it, she thought. He’d excited her so profoundly that the entire world appeared to be aflame, exploding into sparks just as she was.

  He raised his head, overcome by laughter.

  “The fireworks,” he managed to gasp. “Jeanne’s precious fireworks.” He took a long breath—unbearable, excruciating, her body protested—and quickly dipped his head back down, to tend to the fireworks of his own making.

  For she hadn’t dissolved completely. More, her body seemed to cry, I want more, I want enough to last all my life. Until at last he exhausted her and she screamed and tightened and finally relaxed into throaty laughter at the wondrous absurdity of it all.

  “Fireworks,” she giggled, as he pulled himself up beside her and gathered her into his arms, “oh dear, fireworks.”

  He grinned, raising an eyebrow. “Rather de trop, wouldn’t you say?” he murmured. The murmur became a purr as she gently licked the skin below his throat.

  “Ummm,” she whispered, “rather.”

  “They’re winding down out there, I believe,” he said. “Do you want to go to the window and see the end of it?”

  She didn’t ever want to move again. “I’ve seen quite enough fireworks. At least for a while.”

  He held her more tightly. “At least for a while.”

  The night continued, soft, warm, blurred by passion and exhaustion. They’d doze, and then they’d wake to find that they wanted each other again.

  “Again?” one or the other would whisper in mock consternation.

  “Again.” The other would smile—fiercely, proudly.

  “Again,” they’d both sigh afterward, sinking heavily back onto the pillows and curling into each other, neither of them sure anymore which intertwined limb belonged to whom.

  “You’re different than before,” she seemed to hear him whisper sometime during the night. “You’ve grown up…and I have too.”

  Had he really said that?

  She couldn’t remember what she’d replied, or even if he seemed to think that their growing up was a good or bad thing. For sometime after midnight she fell into a deep and blissful sleep, a sleep too deep, mercifully, even for dreams.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  She woke in the wildly disordered bed, to the sound of Sophie’s predawn whimpers. Not quite consciously, she reached for Joseph. But there was no one beside her on the pillows.

  She rubbed her eyes open. Just as well; if he’d been there she couldn’t have pulled herself away. Without him, though, she might actually muster the will to carry out the plans she’d made so carefully.

  It was a pity not to get one last hot soak in the blue bathtub. But she couldn’t heat the water and fill the tub by herself, and she wouldn’t be ringing for help this morning. The Hôtel Mélicourt was still and silent; the Marquise had given everyone leave to linger in their beds today. Shivering in the early morning air, she scrubbed away last night’s sweat and smells with tepid water from the basin.

  A weary face stared at her from the mirror: eyes with shadows like bruises beneath them, mouth soft and yielding, cheeks reddened by the bristles of new beard on Joseph’s cheeks. The milkmaid coiffure was a nest of Medusa tangles; it took some work to brush it out and tie it back with the ribbon that she’d bought earlier in the week especially for today.

  She fed Sophie, dressed and diapered her, and quickly pulled on a dress she’d bought with Gilles’s money. She’d be leaving behind the Marquise and Mademoiselle Beauvoisin’s gifts and hand-me-downs, most particularly—and most imposingly—the necklace that still lay cold below her throat. She struggled with the clasp, cursing her clumsy fingers. When she finally got the thing undone, she laid it on the writing desk, on top of three folded letters she took from the drawer.

  The ones addressed to the Marquise and to Mademoiselle Beauvoisin had been easy: she’d thanked them from the bottom of her heart for everything, and wished them every happiness. She’d also asked the Marquise to give Claudine the clothes she was leaving behind, and to see if Monsieur du Plessix could do something to defend Arsène.

  But writing to Joseph had been a challenge. Her sentences were awkward, knotted. Of course he knew a lot of it already. Long ago in the chateau, she’d told him about the sort of life she’d wanted: a shopkeeper’s life, decent, busy and dull. And independent. No matter what the risks, she needed to be independent.

  She hadn’t changed her mind since then. But her convictions had deepened. Paris, it seemed, had taught her a few things about herself.

  I have to live my life among ordinary people, Joseph, she’d written. The mass of people who crowd the streets and curse when a nobleman’s coachman (your coachman, perhaps) shouts to get out of the way.

  She needed to live her life at street level.

  For she was a common, ordinary, street-level person, with a common, ordinary person’s loyalties and resentments. A common person and a conventional person—with very little patience for elegance, or games of power, seduction, and egotism.

  And so, Joseph (she’d concluded), although I’ll love you for the rest of my days, I can’t love the life you were born into.

  And until she could think her way through this muddle, it would be best not to see him—for a little while or a very long one, she wasn’t sure yet. She knew what she wanted; it was a whole new world really. What she didn’t know was what she’d finally settle for, in the world she actually lived in.

  No wonder her sentences had become so tortured. But she’d straightened them out as well as she could and made a clean copy, blotting it meticulously with sand that seemed to have gotten into her throat and eyes.

  No tears though. There’d be plenty of time for crying after she was settled into the tiny apartment down the street from Monsieur Moreaux’s bookshop. The rooms were quite decent and just big enough for her and the baby. Of course there were no tin bathtubs or thick carpeting. But it was cheap; she’d be able to afford it on the wages Monsieur Moreaux had offered to pay her.

  He’d made the offer a week ago, after assuring her that he didn’t want to pry. And he wished her only the best if—he’d stammered here—if the Vicomte would be keeping her from now on.

  But, he’d continued, if she was in need of a position—well, might he suggest a way of earning her living that might be congenial to herself? And to him as well, he’d added, for she was a gifted and hardworking bookseller and would be a tremendous help to him in his work.

  She’d been touched by his delicacy.

  Yes, she’d replied, she might well be in need of a position. But she was afraid to definitely accept his offer, for fear that she’d change her mind at the last minute and leave him and the landlady in a bad situation. Could they wait three days? she asked. Just until Thursday. If she hadn’t shown up by nine Thursday morning, she told him, it meant that she hadn’t found the courage to accept this kindest and most generous of offers.

  The clock on the mantle struck six. She straightened out the bed and picked up last night’s finery from where it lay on the carpet. Still too early. Monsieur Moreaux wouldn’t be at the shop until eight. But she was packed and ready to go, with Sophie in her arms and a few clothes, diapers, and books packed in a cloth bag that dangled from her shoulder.

  Better to leave now and get it over with.

  She slipped down the stairs, turning quickly at the corridor that led to the mansion’s side door, the one that tradespeople used. Fitting, she thought.

  It would be a warm, beautiful day. The Paris streets were never empty, but there was a lull at this hour: the bakers who’d been up all night had gone home and the gardeners weren’t yet marching to work with rakes slung over their shoulders like muskets. She yawned as the sun climbed over a row of buildings.

  A cup of coffee would be nice, but she’d wait until she’d gotten a little farther. Fifteen minutes later she stopped in front of
Notre Dame, where the coffee vendor, a brawny woman who carried the tank easily on her back, admired Sophie while Marie-Laure sipped the strong brew from a tin cup.

  “She looks like her papa,” Marie-Laure told the woman. Stunned by the pain it cost her to say these words, she quickly handed the cup back and hurried on.

  She lingered on the bank of the Seine, watching men and women unload the crates that would feed the city today. “Look, Sophie, look at the ducks and chickens, the sweet little rabbits.” How sad that someday she’d have to explain that the “chicken” that had clucked and pecked and scratched in the morning was the same “chicken” they’d eaten for dinner at noon. But at least that sadness lay in the future. Sophie waved her hands happily at the sunlight dancing on the water.

  “You’re open early this morning, Madame Mouffe,” she greeted the round-faced, wrinkled proprietress of a bookstall a little farther on.

  A toothache, the old woman told her with a grimace. Might as well get to work if you can’t sleep. Marie-Laure nodded. She told Madame Mouffe about her new job, and enlivened by the thought of money coming in, the old woman invited her to scan the bookshelves. If she wanted anything, it could be held for her until she got her first week’s pay from Monsieur Moreaux.

  Not now, Marie-Laure told her, reaching into her bag.

  “But perhaps you’d like to buy this from me.” A Libertine Education, Monsieur X’s memoirs—she’d bought the book on impulse the first day she’d wandered into Monsieur Moreaux’s shop.

  No point keeping it; she knew it by heart and right now she needed the money.

  Toothache or not, Madame Mouffe drove a hard bargain. Still, Marie-Laure thought, even the little bit she’d gotten would help furnish the new apartment.

  She traced the narrow streets to the bookshop. It was still early but she’d wait out in front until Monsieur Moreaux arrived for work. She didn’t mind: Sophie had dozed off and there were people to watch and the sounds of the city to listen to.

  Shop clerks passed by on their way to work. Street vendors sang out odes to the quality and cheapness of their wares.

  Herrings—buy my sweet herrings!

  Beets—a sou for the pound!

  Lettuce, sorrel, purslane, peas!

  Marie-Laure! Marie-Laure!

  It wasn’t easy to pick out all the different vendors’ calls from the cacophony in the streets; people said that only a native Parisian could get every word. Clearly, Marie-Laure reflected, she still had a way to go. She could hear herring and beets, but one of the calls had utterly befuddled her provincial ear. Because it sounded for all the world as though the peddler were shouting Marie-Laure.

  It wasn’t a peddler.

  She could see as well as hear him now, running down the street, disheveled in last night’s coat and breeches, inelegantly yelling her name. The silver streaks in his hair caught the sunlight. And he had a book in his hand.

  He drew nearer. The book was A Libertine Education.

  Damn Madame Mouffe and her toothache anyway.

  His eyes were huge and frightened, their rims darkly shadowed in a face flushed from running. He hadn’t shaved this morning and he looked as though he’d gotten even less sleep than she had.

  “Thank God,” he panted. “Marie-Laure, thank God I found you. The coffee vendor…said a woman…a baby that must be mine…crossed…to the Left Bank.”

  It wasn’t fair. It would be much more difficult this way. He had to go away.

  “I didn’t want you to find me,” she said. “Please. Didn’t you read my letter?”

  He’d almost regained his breath. “I’m sorry. I can imagine how this must look to you. But please, just let me tell you one thing. No, two things. Two, that’s all, I promise. Please. And then I swear I’ll go away if you want me to.”

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Almost eight.”

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go for a walk. But I have to be back here by nine.”

  She waved away the hand he held out to her. “Let’s just…walk.”

  As though by mutual agreement, they headed toward the Seine.

  He swallowed a few times before he began. “I didn’t want to leave you alone in the middle of the night like that. But I promised Jeanne I’d come for some sort of midnight supper she’d planned. Very mysterious; I didn’t know why it couldn’t wait until today, but she insisted.”

  Her insides clenched. Perhaps the Marquise had decided it was time to find out what men were all about.

  He looked down at her and smiled. “No, it wasn’t that. Not that at all. On the contrary,” he paused, “she wants me to marry you.”

  She hated it when he spoke in riddles. “Don’t joke about something like that,” she said.

  “That’s what I said to Jeanne. But it’s no joke, Marie-Laure. She means an annulment. She’s been discussing it with priests—well, the very liberal Abbé Morellet, anyway, who’s written articles for Diderot’s Encyclopedia. And Morellet thinks it can be done. After all, she and I never did go to bed together. And she’s prepared to make a fairly staggering donation toward rebuilding some cathedral tower, I forget which now—well, it was late when she told me.”

  She stared at him dumbly.

  “I know, it’s a lot to take in at once. But as she put it, ‘I couldn’t buy you out of the Bastille, but it seems I can buy you out of this marriage.’”

  “But why would she want to? Aren’t she and Mademoiselle Beauvoisin better off—safer—this way?”

  “They are, but when I asked her about that she said she’d learned that love wasn’t about safety. Love was about committing yourself any way you could and this was her commitment.”

  “My God.”

  “They want to go away,” he said, “to travel together—Venice, Berlin, even Russia—they want to see the world. Ariane has some invitations to perform. But the main reason, according to Jeanne, is that they don’t think France is going to become a better place for women like them. They think that whatever other changes occur—even good ones—the country’s going to become more straitlaced and puritanical, and they don’t want to be here when that happens.”

  The ground seemed to be moving under her feet.

  “And…and…you’d marry me then?”

  “Are you proposing to me?” he laughed.

  “I’m asking you if you’re proposing to me.”

  “Of course. Or I will, in a few minutes. But wait. Because you won’t know which me I’m asking you to marry until I tell you the other thing.”

  “I hope,” she murmured, “that Sophie doesn’t inherit your taste for conundrum.”

  “Just be patient,” he told her.

  “You see,” he continued, “I had another very important conversation yesterday as well. With Doctor Franklin. I suppose I should have told you about it last night, but you kept me pretty well occupied.”

  They had reached the quay now, and he nodded a familiar hello to each bookseller, in his or her stall, as they passed. Madame Mouffe waved.

  “I should have realized you’d know them,” Marie-Laure said. “I paid Madame Mouffe double,” he said, “after she told me where you were headed. I hope she uses the money for a dentist, but she’ll probably dose the tooth with brandy.

  “But as for Doctor Franklin,” he continued. “We got on very well last night, and he offered me”—he tried to say it casually—“a means of employment.”

  She had to smile; his aristocratic mouth was having some difficulty shaping the word employment.

  “As an assistant to the French consul for Philadelphia. Well, actually, the position’s not his to offer, but he promises to recommend me for it. If I want it.

  “If you want me to take it, Marie-Laure. Or, as he put it, ‘if that intelligent, industrious, and wonderfully pretty young woman wants you to.’”

  “If I want you to!”

  “I think they’d look kindly on me,” he continued. “After all, I did fight in America, and Mons
ieur Franklin’s recommendation is worth a lot. Then, of course, I can write, and I get on with people when I want to. And there’s no question, Monsieur Franklin said, of my bravery or daring.

  “I’d have to organize an office though. And I’m not very patient or good at details.”

  He’s nervous, she thought. He’s frightened of taking it on.

  “My father tried to be a diplomat once,” he said, “and failed miserably.”

  His voice faded for a moment. He forced himself to continue. “But I wouldn’t have to fail, you know. I think if I applied myself I could develop a little patience and become good at details.” His eyes pleaded for confirmation.

  “I know you could.” She looked at him levelly.

  “Because after all,” she added, “you are not your father.”

  He laughed with surprise and confusion. “No,” he said, “I’m not, am I?

  “I’m glad,” he continued, “that you don’t think this is a ridiculous idea. Because I wouldn’t want to renounce my title and move us to Philadelphia and then discover that I wasn’t any good at work I’d committed to do.”

  In truth, she thought, he could become a wonderful diplomat. It was a perfect opportunity for him to use his charm, his cleverness, and the passion for liberty and equality that he’d never known what to do with. As well as his newfound seriousness.

  And then the import of what he’d said sank in.

  “Move us to Philadelphia!”

  “Doctor Franklin said that you were halfway toward being an American already, so the change wouldn’t be too much of a strain on you. Whereas for me—he thinks I’ll probably live out my days somewhere between the old culture and the new. But he thinks this could be a good thing—for I’d understand both sides of a negotiation.”

  Doctor Franklin was very wise.

  “But I’m still not sure.” He gestured at the river, the jostling crowds, the spires of Notre Dame. “What do you think, Marie-Laure? Paris is a lot to give up.”

  She was too overcome to speak. But Sophie, who’d been watching him wave his hands about, suddenly bestowed upon him a wide, glorious, toothless, and just slightly crooked smile. An absolutely genuine, bona fide smile—no possibility of it being gas or fleeting accident—that demanded matching smiles from both her parents.