Spirit of Lost Angels

by Perrat, Liza

  ***

  I stood beside the fountain in the vast gardens of the Palais-Royal, gazing at the colossal cream-coloured facades. The misery of the poor out of sight for a moment, I could not help feeling lifted by the grandeur of this palace owned by the King’s cousin, the Duke of Orléans.

  I located Le Faisan Doré restaurant midway along the rue Montpesier, and handed the proprietor my recommendation letter.

  ‘And how is our mutual friend?’ the elegant dark-suited man asked.

  I coloured, unsure what to say. ‘She is well, thank you. Very well, monsieur.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine she is,’ he said with a knowing smile. ‘I do hope the Channel crossing was not too turbulent for her. I am certain she will be happier on the untroubled shores of Great Britain.’

  He read my letter and looked me up and down, his manner not unfriendly or leering, simply professional.

  ‘You may start tomorrow, Mademoiselle Charpentier, at midday. And remember three o’clock is the busiest time,’ he said, ‘when people take their main meal.’

  Still unsure why I should work in his restaurant, I couldn’t help smiling to myself. Within a few hours, I had become a respectable, working Parisienne. Jeanne had sent me here for a reason and I was curious, excited and a little nervous, to discover why.

  Perhaps, once I knew, I could stop working as a cook, and use my literacy skills, somehow. But what of my family and Léon, so far away in Lucie? I had to see them soon.

  It seemed odd to eat in the restaurant in which I would be working, so I took a table in another establishment further along the rue Montpesier.

  Decorated in ancient Greek style, with long mirrors, the café was airy and clean, the high windows sweeping in great swathes of light. I caught snaps of the men’s conversation — for the clientele was almost exclusively male — as they sat around marble-topped tables drinking brandy, reading newspapers, or playing chess or dominoes. I noticed their raised eyebrows when one mentioned the words, “Versailles”, “deficit”, or “Marie Antoinette”.

  ‘La soupe, s’il vous plaît,’ I said to the waiter. I could order anything — everything — on this menu, I yearned to boast to him, but I smiled, coy and unassuming, as was fitting for a lady dining out alone.

  Like the other people with this life of leisure, I gazed out into the enclosed gardens. Fashionable men and women in striped silk gowns or the white muslin of the Queen’s “milk maids” were gathered in the Valois Gallery on the far side of the garden, and in the Beaujolais Gallery, to my left. I noticed more and more people wore their hair loose and unpowdered these days, and rustic simplicity had evidently become fashionable among the nobles. It also seemed that canes had largely replaced swords, and women had developed a penchant for small yappy dogs.

  The irregular-shaped duke’s palace stood at the far south end of the garden. Common folk thronged in the low wooden stalls of the Tartar’s Camp, from where vendors barked out their wares. I thought of my friend, Claudine, who frequented the Tartar’s Camp, and yearned for her friendly face in this sea of strangers — someone to ease the ache of my loneliness without Jeanne.

  I beckoned a waiter. ‘Please, I need paper and quill, and a reliable messenger boy.’

  He dipped his head. ‘Oui, madame.’

  My dear Claudine,

  I hope you recall your old friend, from Armand’s country inn a week south of Paris?

  I have been ill for some time and unable to contact you, but happily I am well recovered and keen to rekindle our friendship.

  Please find below my new address, and advise me when we can meet at the fountain in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.

  With the honour to be your true friend,

  Mademoiselle Rubie Charpentier

  I folded the paper and pushed it into the messenger boy’s palm, with two sous for his trouble.

  ‘Please, it is most important,’ I said.

  The boy nodded, bowed his head and hurried off through the crowd. I could only hope that when the Marquis or the Marquise intercepted and read it, as they did all servants’ letters, they wouldn’t guess it was from their long-forgotten scullery maid, Victoire Charpentier, and simply cast it aside.

  My hand itched to pen a few words to Grégoire; to let him know I was no longer a mad asylum woman. I wanted to ask after Madeleine and thank him for taking care of her, but I was afraid my brother would never understand any code I adopted to disguise my identity. It might only confuse and frighten him.

  ***

  Perhaps it was the novelty of being free to roam; to have the money to do whatever I desired, that enticed me to stay at the Palais-Royal for the afternoon puppet show.

  ‘Mr Punch is one jolly good fellow,

  His dress is all scarlet and yellow,

  And if now and then he gets mellow,

  It’s only among his good friends,’ sang the boy and girl, beating drums as they strutted up the aisle and onto the platform of the small theatre on the west side of the Palais-Royal.

  The crowd hushed as the curtain parted. They began laughing as Punch beat his wife with the traditional stick. I feigned a laugh but I did not find it funny and, beneath my velvet cloak, a chill scrambled along my arms as Punch beat the woman, over and over.

  A dog bit Punch, which made the children in the audience shriek. Punch ended up in prison, and I shivered again as he tricked the hangman into hanging himself.

  The curtain closed and the boy and girl reappeared with beaming smiles, bowing to loud applause. I left in the crowd’s wake, via the rue de Richelieu entrance, hurrying back along the rue Saint-Honoré to the apartment. The bells of Saint-Roch struck five o’clock and the afternoon mealtime calm was broken with the din and chaos of traffic lurching, once again, in all directions.

  The shadows shortened and disappeared, and twilight fell over Paris. I caught sight of a sign in a window: Proposed voyage. Monday, February 26 at 7pm precisely, a superb berline with eight new, solid seats, will be leaving Paris for Lyon. Travellers are invited to view it at the following address: M. Brissot, angle of the rue Saint-Denis and the rue Saint-Honoré. This berline transports packages, trunks and other important effects as well as travellers.

  I wanted to stay here in Paris to fight the commoners’ battle, but oh how wonderful it would be to see Madeleine, Grégoire and his family, Léon too, and L’Auberge des Anges.

  Powerless before, to help the inn through financial difficulty, Jeanne’s wealth now gave me the means to resurrect the auberge to its former grandeur.

  Scenes of the farm, the village, flitted through my mind like the pictures in Maman’s book of fables. I longed to breathe the clear air of Lucie, to hear the sough of wheat on a summer wind and to float in the clear waters of the Vionne, rather than swimming naked with all the Parisians in the filth of the Seine River.

  Abruptly, I came to a page that was blank — white at first, then darkening as the terrible reality seeped in. Someone had sent me to la Salpêtrière. I wondered why this had never occurred to me in the asylum, when I’d learned how any poor girl could be sent on the whim of family members, neighbours or villagers — badly behaved girls, pregnant or idiot ones, and crazed women whose madness could not be treated otherwise, their devil’s curse afflicting the entire family.

  Who then, had sent me? I could never believe my beloved brother capable of such treachery, and the cool breeze coming off the Seine bristled the hairs on my nape and whispered a single name in my ear: Léon Bruyère.

  Léon must have told the bailiff I was mad; that I’d drowned my little Blandine and Gustave. He’d had me sent to the asylum, left there to rot like some old carcass. In that instant — with the shock of his betrayal — the blood drained from my limbs, the pain piercing my breast like a poison barb. I leaned against the wall to calm my shaking body.

  Well, it was certain now — I could never return to Lucie. I walked on, my steps short and shuffling, as if those chains still shackled my ankles. I was not free; I had simply exchang
ed one prison for another.

  30

  The early March sun threw weak slivers of light into the parlour. Aurore frowned in concentration, gripping her quill as she painstakingly copied out the words.

  ‘There’s soon to be another after-production party,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come, Rubie? You could meet new people, have some fun.’

  ‘More of your tempestuous political friends?’ I blew on my coffee and winked at my “maid”. I was still unsure who my pretty friend truly was — the small girl with a big heart and a temper that flared with the slightest kindling. I was certain though, she was no more of a maid to me than I’d been to Jeanne.

  ‘Well why not,’ I said. ‘Yes, I would love to come to your party.’

  Aurore continued writing out the words I’d listed, my reluctant pupil yawning and sighing.

  ‘I’m tired, I can’t concentrate,’ she said. ‘I drank too much tavern ale last night, which is your fault, Rubie.’

  ‘Not everyone reaches twenty-five,’ I said with a smile. ‘I think I deserved a birthday celebration, n’est-ce pas?’

  ‘Mmn, I suppose,’ she said, as I returned to the book I was studying: The Dark Side of the Human Mind. I sipped my coffee, the birds outside chirping louder as the morning wore on, as if to drown out the rising din of people, carts and horses.

  Aurore flung the quill onto the table, arcs of ink droplets fanning across the page. ‘It’s no use, I’ll never be more than a badly-paid acrobat, pretending to be an actress.’

  A frown creased her petulant face as she swallowed the dregs of her coffee, bounced out of her chair and waved her arms. All this melodrama did not surprise me. Aurore was always jumping up and down about something.

  ‘Oh I know what you’ll say, Rubie. Compared with the five or six sous those wretched workers earn at slaveries like the Saint-Gobain glassworks or the tanneries, we actresses are well-off, but I’m still poor and I don’t want to stay like that all my life.’

  ‘No, of course you don’t,’ I said, trying to steer the conversation away from money. After several weeks together, I had begun to trust Aurore, but still I didn’t know if she was aware of the wealth Jeanne left me. I was never sure whether she was digging for information or if hers were genuine grievances.

  ‘So, if you want to earn extra money copying scripts for rehearsals,’ I said, pushing the goose-plume back into her hand, ‘you must learn to read and write. And that takes lots of practice. Don’t you enjoy our mornings here together, both of us learning our lessons?’ I nodded at the pile of books — works on astronomy, science, politics and biology — through which I was striving to become a scholar.

  ‘Yes, I know you are a good friend,’ Aurore said with a smile, her teeth bright against honey-hued skin, ‘to teach me my letters.’

  ‘Besides,’ I said, settling back in my chair as Aurore resumed her writing. ‘I’m sure this is why Jeanne brought us together. You helped me when I came to the apartment, now it is my turn to help you.’

  Aurore put the quill down again and rested her chin in her cupped hands. ‘I’ve never told you, Rubie, but la Comtesse Jeanne helped me too. She rescued me from the deepest, blackest pit.’

  ‘Black pit?’

  ‘My parents died in a coach accident when I was six. They were actors, and their theatre friends took me in and taught me to dance and sing, and walk the high-wire. When I grew up I became a dancer in the chorus of a small theatre company. Along with the singers, we were the worst paid, and forced to become spies.’ She waved a thin arm. ‘We’d sell our information to the police or anyone else hungry and willing to pay for a scandal, but that still wasn’t enough to survive.’ She lowered her dark gaze. ‘In the end I had to do what most girls like me do.’

  My hand tightened over Aurore’s. ‘You don’t mean … sell yourself to … mon Dieu, I couldn’t imagine anything more terrible.’

  ‘The clients would often run off without paying, and beat us. When Jeanne found me, I was bruised from head to foot, and too sick and starving even for rage.’ She sighed. ‘The hatred came later.’

  ‘My poor Aurore. So Jeanne took you away from all that?’

  ‘She gave me money, and she spoke to a friend who found me a better-paid acting job with a theatre company that had moved from the Boulevards to the Palais-Royal.’ She looked around the parlour. ‘Jeanne also brought me to live in this apartment … with her.’

  ‘With her? Jeanne li-lived here too, w-with you?’

  An entirely different sensation began to creep over my sympathy for Aurore; an oddly sickening thing stained with grief, which stirred low in my gut.

  ‘Oh Jeanne had several residences,’ Aurore said, flicking a slender wrist. ‘She had to keep moving, you know, while … during that jewel business.’

  Her smile rueful, Aurore lifted her gaze to the sun-lit window. ‘If they hadn’t caught Jeanne and thrown her in that gruesome prison, we’d still be together. At least she helped bring down the Queen,’ she said. ‘You know, when the Cardinal de Rohan was acquitted, the people truly believed Marie Antoinette perpetrated that extravagant fraud for her own frivolous ends. The people hated her even more!’

  I felt as if something was siphoning the life from me, draining me so that I barely heard her words. Jeanne and Aurore together, here. Probably sleeping in the bed I slept in. Had I simply been the next in Jeanne’s long line?

  ‘This necklace scandal was nothing short of political disaster for the King and Queen,’ Aurore went on, with her raucous chuckle. She slipped her shoes on, to leave for work and I saw she hadn’t the slightest notion of the venomous impact of her words.

  In a murmuring part of my mind, I’d always suspected I might discover I meant little to Jeanne, while she was everything to me, but in that instant I was numbed. I wanted to cry out but the tears seemed frozen inside — hard little ice chips.

  I no longer heard the snorts of horses, the clippity-clop of hooves on cobblestones, the creaking of cart wheels and the shouts of drivers. My world went silent, and through the open window, the sweet fragrance of spring flowers turned sour as they reached my flared nostrils.

  Aurore fussed about, tucking her hair under her cap. ‘Are you walking with me?’ she said, in her joyous lilt.

  I cleared my throat. ‘N-no you go ahead, I’ll walk to the Palais on my own today.’

  When I heard the door shut, I crossed to the window, and as the scent of window-box roses and lilies vied with the stink rising from the street, I envied Aurore her skipping steps, as if she hadn’t a single care.

  As she disappeared onto the rue Saint-Honoré I flung myself across the bed and sobbed into the pillow.

  ***

  After several minutes I heaved my sorrowful self from the bed and drank another cup of coffee. How childish this was, not at all the elegant behaviour I’d worked so hard to adopt.

  I should go to the restaurant. If I stayed in the apartment and reflected on Jeanne’s falseness, on her flippant juggling of my emotions, I feared la mélancolie would creep upon me again — the sadness that seemed ever poised to spring onto my back and wrap its malevolent arms around me for the slightest reason.

  Along the rue Saint-Honoré, the Palais-Royal was only ten minutes by foot from the apartment, but I wanted time to think, so I took the opposite, longer way. With its leafy trees and elegant cafés, the Boulevard — city limit before the construction of the hated Farmers-General wall — was the perfect place to stroll, and think.

  I dawdled, letting the spring sun play across my cheeks, drenching me with its warm energy. I would not reply to Jeanne’s letter. I would leave her stewing in London, writing her nasty memoirs about the Queen. I’d let her wring her hands with worry when she had no news, despite sending me letter after letter wrought with worry.

  From the Boulevard, I turned right onto the rue de Richelieu, where Jeanne had had my plush ball gown made.

  I walked across the intersections of small streets, where construction work was goi
ng on all around. Scaffolding, piles of stone, the noise of stone-cutters’ chisels and carpenters’ hammers met me at each turn. It seemed every man was a builder’s labourer, swathed in plaster dust, his shouts hanging off the dusty air, sweat glistening off thickly-cabled limbs.

  Teams of them were tearing down old buildings and replacing them with new ones, in the fragile white stone of Paris, and all at reckless speed to earn the bonus for finishing ahead of time.

  I stood with a small crowd witnessing a complex operation with a boulder. Accompanied by the labourers’ curses and shouts, the great stone crashed to the ground, and as the noise drummed in my ears for minutes afterwards, I thought of Jeanne again. The vibrating void of that resonance filled with all she had given me — a decent prison life and the means to escape it, education, clothes and a comfortable apartment, not to mention money and, of course, the diamonds.

  If it wasn’t for Jeanne de Valois, Agathe and the other women from that foul prison cell would have beaten me to death, or I’d have perished from the cold or sickness, my nameless corpse shovelled into some communal tomb.

  I understood Jeanne was what the great thinkers — our philosophers — meant when they spoke of free spirits; a woman who belonged to no one. Especially not to me. A woman who could change her circumstances, her lover, as readily as she exchanged one silk dress for another.

  I recalled our conversation about how dissimilar we were; how she lived free from the chains of tradition and morality, and how my existence seemed bound in the disciplines of my upbringing. I remembered how we’d envied each other.

  I hurried away from the crowd, my steps lighter and quicker as I approached the Palais-Royal, and slipped in via the Richelieu entrance.

  As I secured my apron and began marinating meat and dicing vegetables, I still felt the pang of losing Jeanne, but my loss was tempered as I recognised the sweet balm of true friendship.

  ***

  ‘A brandy for me, s’il vous plaît,’ a businessman said.

  ‘A pot of your finest tea over here,’ another asked.