Spirit of Lost Angels

by Perrat, Liza

  Her smile, bent with irony, revealed straight, polished teeth. I’d always thought they were so white because of the ivory-mounted brush she used, or the toothpaste, which cost an outrageous three livres. Now I understood they must be the same, expensive porcelain teeth of the Marquis.

  She kissed the back of my hand, and rubbed the rough skin.

  ‘Let me smooth those working hands with my special salve,’ she said, massaging her rose-scented cream into my skin. ‘Then we’ll stroll in the courtyard. We must continue your French lessons and try to rid you of that dreadful provincial accent. Besides, the fresh air might colour your cheeks.’

  ***

  Jeanne batted at flies with her walking cane. She twitched her nose at the smells rising from the drains, and the waste rotting in piles in obscure corners. I could almost pretend, on our afternoon strolls, that Jeanne — ever poised and elegant — was a real countess roaming the grounds of her vast country home, and I her dedicated maid.

  As Jeanne instructed me on the words and phrases of the language of Paris and the manners of a respectable city woman, I forgot my dormitory cell and the fellow prisoners I had to endure.

  ‘You have never told me your story,’ Jeanne said, twirling the cane. ‘Everybody has one. Why won’t you tell me yours, ma chère?’

  ‘Oh it’s not very interesting, the usual peasant-girl childhood.’ I fingered the lavender and the pale blue hydrangeas, which had folded themselves against the burning heat. The leaves on the sparse trees hung low, the shrubs too looked thirsty, their colour bleached out in three months of scorching sun.

  Jeanne hooked her arm through mine and as we walked on, I found myself telling her about the fun of the harvests, Carnival and Saint John’s bonfire night.

  ‘My brother, Grégoire and I, and my friend, Léon had our own special place at the river. We’d swim in the waterfall and catch fish with our bare hands.’ Remnants of song lyrics, sunlight and raked hay flitted through my mind. ‘Maman always warned us the Vionne River could be dangerous. She forbade us to go there.’

  ‘But that never stopped you?’ Jeanne said with a knowing smile.

  ‘We’d come home wet through, so she must’ve known where we’d been, but we were so happy, I don’t think she had the heart to scold us.’

  ‘Is your maman still alive?’

  I looked away, across to where the Seine River flowed behind the high asylum wall. ‘They claimed Maman was a witch and murdered her. She was no witch. Maman was Lucie’s healing woman and midwife. My mother was also an angel-maker. As a child, I imagined she performed some magical, fairy-like thing with the tea she made from rue, vervain and her tiny blue flowers.’

  I waved an arm in the direction of the nursery. ‘Seeing those hundreds of doomed babies in there, I can’t help thinking that surely an angel-maker is not so dishonourable after all?’

  ‘A most philanthropic calling in life,’ Jeanne said, brandishing the cane again.

  ‘After Félix and Félicité, then Papa died, Maman became … I don’t know, sad. A little mad perhaps, as if each separate tragedy swelled into one great crushing wad of grief. She lost her faith in God, and the Church.’ I felt for my angel pendant — an instinctive gesture I couldn’t throw off.

  ‘Mon Dieu, the barbarians,’ Jeanne said. ‘I assume she had no proper trial?’

  ‘There were never trials.’

  ‘Another victim of our unjust, archaic system, Victoire — the one we must fight to change. And your father?’

  ‘Papa was a carpenter,’ I said. As I told Jeanne about the fire that had destroyed our cottage, the agony of that moment still split my heart in two. ‘Since a baron killed my father, and of course, those nights in Saint-Germain, I have despised every aristocrat.’

  ‘I know too well life can be unjust.’ Jeanne’s arm pressed against mine. ‘You have borne terrible tragedies. I would like to hope that for the rest of your days, you will experience only pleasurable things.’

  ‘Nice things? In here? And they’ll never let me out, Jeanne, ever. All that — the peasant girl from Lucie — is so distant, so unreal. It’s as if my whole life has been this asylum.’

  ‘How absurd, ma chère! As if someone as God-fearing as you could remain in this infernal mosaic of misery, with such a wretched portion of humanity — all the country’s mad people and vagabonds, its whores, charlatans and cutthroats. A place of no gentleness, no remedy! Not likely, Victoire, as I have a plan for us. It is proving time-consuming but I will tell you of it shortly. So don’t ask questions now.

  Jeanne still held my arm as we strolled alongside le potager where gardeners were plucking the last of the season’s garlic and vegetables for the meals of la Salpêtrière’s personnel and its wealthy, paying prisoners, like Jeanne de Valois.

  ‘Don’t despair, Victoire. As I said, if my plan succeeds, everything will change. I have privileges and some influence here, but still it will not be easy and requires careful planning. Besides, you need time to learn the ways of the Parisian bourgeois society if you are to blend in once you are free.’

  ‘Bourgeois society?’ I said. ‘Free?’

  Jeanne touched a finger to my lips. ‘No questions yet, remember? Now, I notice, ma chère, you do not mention your little twins. Naturally, I have heard the talk here, but am I to believe such malicious gossip? How hard I find that, of someone so … so unstained — a woman who seems not to have a speck of badness in her veins.’

  I breathed deeply, the tendrils of melancholy unfurling, wrapping themselves around me again as I tried to recall that day on the riverbank. ‘When I think about it, it starts coming back, but before I know what truly happened, it’s gone.’

  We had reached the Insane Quarter, girdled on three sides by a lofty wall. Through the gate, I could see several women chained to benches, their grey dresses hanging from them like empty sacks. They stared at us with wide, liquid eyes.

  As we approached, I shut my ears to their cries, their shrieks, and the soft whimpers of the particularly feeble.

  ‘The dungeon keepers would put us outside for an hour every day,’ I said, nodding towards the women. ‘To improve our mental health, they claimed. What a joke.’

  ‘Poor, desperate wretches.’ Jeanne beckoned me away from them with her cane and nursed my arm closer to her side. ‘You know, ma chère, whatever you have done, whatever happened at the river with your babes, I’ll not judge you. I, of all people, know everyone has their reasons.’

  As we walked away from the dungeon women, I saw myself in the orphanage, cradling the baby girl, something urging me to press my dress down over her face. The thought both shocked and terrified me.

  ‘Well I’ll not press you now, Victoire, but one day I hope you can free yourself of this terrible secret trapped in your mind.’

  ‘And you, Jeanne, why have you never told me the necklace story? The true story?’

  ‘Mon Dieu, that gaudy chunk of jewellery. Well, probably because I was so angry I’d missed my chance,’ she said. ‘But time has cleared the fog and the future shines bright and sunny, ma chère. I will regain my name, and our land.’

  She took my hand, fondling my fingers and rubbing my calloused joints. ‘But first you must know the beginning, Victoire. Then you might understand why I did what I had to.’

  Jeanne sat on a bench and patted a place next to her. ‘My dear papa, Henri de Saint Rémy-Valois, was a descendant of the love child of King Henri II and Nicole de Savigny. He was a member of Parliament. I should have lived in luxury, but they stole everything from me.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The King’s guard came and murdered my father, and the Crown stole our property and land.’ Jeanne’s voice did not waver but from the pulsing vein in her temple I knew she was, as always, masking her fury.

  ‘So instead of an opulent life, we were the poorest of poor. Maman was forced to prostitute herself for our survival, and my siblings and I tramped the streets, begging for charity for the last of the Valois. Poor Mam
an’s heart was broken when she lost my father. She died soon after.’

  ‘So you too, are orphaned.’

  ‘My sister and I were destined for the convent, so we escaped back to our birthplace, Bar-sur-Aube,’ she said, ‘and found refuge with a family we had known. I never forgot the injustice but I knew that to regain our property, I had to be in royal favour.’

  ‘However does one get the royal favour?’

  ‘I married the nephew of the family, Count Antoine-Nicolas de la Motte, and voilà, I became Countess de la Motte.’

  ‘A real count?

  ‘How many of the aristocracy strutting around this country are genuine?’ Jeanne said with a smirk. ‘What with all those rich bourgeoisie buying government offices, inventing some long-lost noblesse, or the King simply elevating them to the noble class — that new Nobility of the Robe.’

  ‘You got into the royal court with your husband’s title?’

  Jeanne nodded. ‘I hoped to become close to Marie Antoinette and get back what was rightfully mine.’

  ‘Rumours say the Queen ignored you?’

  Jeanne flipped her head. ‘The Austrian bitch would have nothing to do with me.’ Her fingers began tracing a gentle line from my wrist, up my inner forearm. ‘All the Queen had to do was notice me, listen to my pleas, read my petition. All the rest could have been avoided.’ Her fingertips lingered in the crook of my elbow.

  ‘Then the goose laid me a golden egg,’ she said. ‘The Cardinal de Rohan wanted to become Prime Minister of France, but when he was envoy to Austria, his personal letters were intercepted. He bragged that he’d bedded half the Austrian court and said Marie Antoinette’s own mother, the Empress, had begged him for her turn. Of course, Marie Antoinette blocked his ministerial progress at every turn.’

  She dropped my arm and gazed towards the wall behind which the Seine River curled its way through Paris. ‘So, we lay there, together, I exploding with intrigue, the Cardinal exploding with lust. I told him I was an intimate friend of Marie Antoinette’s.’ She laughed. ‘Silly, silly courtesans and royals, so caught up in their frivolous, purposeless lives. I assured the Cardinal I would reinstate his good name, and he would become Prime Minister. A kiss, a caress in the right place, and the fool was a kitten in my palm, spooning out louis d’or like honey.’ She smiled. ‘Money for the Queen’s charity work! Though it did get me into respectable society. See Victoire, you can do whatever you like with money.’

  ‘But what of this necklace?’

  Jeanne took her cane and marched off. I stood too, and hurried to keep up with her brisk steps.

  ‘All those festoons, pendants and tassels of diamonds. Nothing but an inglorious tribute to the vanity of man,’ she said. ‘The vanity that began when the previous king asked Boehmer and Bassenge — the jewellers, you see — to create a diamond necklace to surpass all others, as a gift to his favourite mistress, Madame du Barry. It cost two million livres. Can you imagine, for one piece of jewellery, and such a hideous one?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Well, it took these jewellers several years and a lot of money to assemble the diamonds, but in the meantime the old King died of smallpox and the du Barry woman was banished from court.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I heard the story of the old King’s death.’

  ‘The bankrupt jewellers then tried to sell the necklace to the new king,’ Jeanne went on. ‘But Marie Antoinette refused because it had been designed for her enemy, Madame du Barry. Well, that was my cue, Victoire. Of course, my scheme was not without risk, but there was every chance I could succeed. I told the Cardinal the Queen secretly desired the necklace. He paid the two million livres to me, believing I would hand the money to the Queen.’ She swiped at a fly, fidgeting around my cap. ‘I then collected the necklace from the jewellers, who thought I would give it to the Queen, who would then pay them. When the time came to pay and nothing happened, the jewellers complained to the Queen, who told them she had never received or ordered the necklace.’ She waved an arm. ‘Then followed the coup de théâtre which you no doubt heard about.’

  ‘I think the whole of France was talking about it,’ I said.

  ‘Well, ma chère, you know the rest — how they whipped and branded me and threw me in here. That bitch Queen fixed it all. She will suffer, as I have. I am finished with the rich trampling the poor. And I would hope you are too, Victoire.’

  She pointed her cane at a tree. ‘Look at those leaves, already on the turn. Do you want to spend another winter here, flirting with death? You are twenty-four, and still ravishing. You may still have a good ten years left, out of this madhouse.’

  ‘I stopped thinking of a life beyond these walls long ago,’ I said. ‘Nobody could get past the guards.’

  Jeanne laughed. ‘My sweet love, so naïve. I told you, I have an idea to get past those imbeciles.’

  ‘Visitor for you, countess,’ an approaching keeper shouted.

  Jeanne raised my hand to her lips. ‘Return to the dormitory. It is safer for you if you know nothing. That way they cannot torture you.’

  ***

  So accustomed I was to the shouts, steam and clatter of the kitchen, I’d almost forgotten the daily silence of the cell. Since I had become Jeanne’s maid, they only made me cook in the mornings. The afternoons I spent with my mistress, learning the ways of Parisian society. I never questioned why this good luck had befallen me. The wise never asked questions at la Salpêtrière.

  The women were hard at work — knitting, weaving, embroidery, lace work and spinning — as they would have been since morning prayers. Sister officers strolled amongst the quiet clot of women, all clothed in identical ash-grey dresses, bonnets and clogs.

  Religious in nothing but name, the sister officers tapped their sticks on the stone floor, rapping the knuckles and shoulders of anyone who slackened off from the incessant labour, or who made the slightest sound.

  ‘Don’t think your hands will stay idle,’ one of them hissed, as I entered the dormitory. She threw me a pile of cloth. ‘No special privileges when you’re not with that con woman.’

  Agathe raked her festering lips into a smirk and blew me a kiss.

  At four o’clock work ceased briefly as we said the rosary and prayed again. A little later, I knew it was five-thirty, because I heard the children and old women outside — the only ones, apart from the insane, permitted to leave their dormitories to take the courtyard air for an hour.

  Five-thirty was also the one hour of the day they permitted us to talk, but not to stop working. We were never to stop working except to sleep, eat or pray — that same monotonous cycle.

  ‘How is our personal maid, then?’ Agathe twisted my arm behind my back, but I refused to cry out with the pain. ‘When are you going to find out about those diamonds?’

  ‘I told you, I am only her maid. I know nothing.’

  ‘Careful, Agathe,’ Marie-Françoise said, ‘Remember last time you gave her those bruises they locked you in the dungeons with the crazies for two days. Our Victoire is well connected now.’

  ‘But the countess woman must still have the diamonds, or the money,’ Agathe said.

  ‘Yes,’ Toinette said, ‘how else could she afford a private cell, a maid and proper food?’

  ‘And afternoon strolls, outdoors,’ Julie said.

  I raised my hands. ‘Please, I know nothing.’

  Agathe sneered and spat a glob of phlegm at my face as the sister officers distributed the evening meal of black bread, potage and wine. I dared not wipe my cheek, and the phlegm slid down my face. ‘You’ll talk, my lovely,’ Agathe went on. ‘You’ll tell me everything before I’ve finished with you.’

  Agathe could threaten me all she liked, but the woman no longer frightened me. Since Jeanne shared her simple, but adequate, meals with me, I felt stronger and more able to bear her intimidation, her beatings, and her resentment of my privileged role.

  The meal over, Sister Superior rang the bell for evening prayer and recital of psalms. Afterwards, the siste
r officers performed their nightly dormitory inspection, checking nobody was hiding anything illegal. At ten o’clock they snuffed out the sole candle.

  I lay prone on the straw mattress. There was no room to curl up, though every lonely night I did silently thank Jeanne for buying me this bed by the window. At least I shared it with only two others, instead of the usual five.

  I listened to the women’s exhausted snores, their shallow night breaths, and I felt their loneliness, their desperation. As I began to drift into my own restless sleep, a single cry from the Insane Quarter broke the quiet. Then another, and another. The cries spread, louder and louder; inhuman shrieks, which penetrated the night silence and rose over the stone walls. Woken by the noise from the lower loges, several prisoners cried out, like some instinctive reply to an ancestral code. I clamped my hands over my ears.

  The light from the zenith moon slanted through the dormer window, casting criss-cross shadows on the wall. I’d resigned myself to an existence in la Salpêtrière, death my only way out, but as the illusory warmth of that feeble moonlight flooded my face and neck, a glimmer of hope shone through the shadows of desperation. I could almost believe in Jeanne’s claim of another life for me beyond the bars.

  25

  I scuttled through the crisp autumn breeze, across the courtyard, from the kitchen to Jeanne’s cell, and tapped on the door.

  It opened a crack and I was surprised to see the smirking face of a guard. A muffled giggle and another, deeper voice, came from inside.

  One of Jeanne’s sleek dresses was heaped on the floor, along with her undergarments. The keeper who had opened the door was reaching for his uniform. The second keeper lay naked, sprawled on the bed beside Jeanne; she too, was unclothed.

  Her skin so pale it was almost translucent, Jeanne reminded me of the nymph creature painting in the Saint-Germain house. The dark curls between her thighs recalled to me those grape clusters, draped across the creature like forbidden fruit. I swayed back, averting my eyes from the male bodies.