Children of the Siege

by Diney Costeloe

  She found him assisting Pierre and Jeannot to carry the trunks up to the bedrooms.

  ‘Emile, I must speak with you,’ she said. Her voice was sharp and brooked no argument, and caused her husband to lift his head in surprise. Rosalie had never addressed him in such a tone before.

  ‘Very well,’ he said and turned to dismiss Pierre and Jeannot.

  ‘Tell Pierre and the boy to wait here,’ said Rosalie. ‘We shall need them in a moment.’

  Even more surprised, Emile said, ‘You heard Madame. Wait here for a moment.’

  Rosalie led him into the drawing room and closed the door behind them. The shutters were still drawn across the window and the room felt cold and damp in the dim light that filtered through the slats. Rosalie shivered despite the fact that she had not yet removed her travelling cloak.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Emile. ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Rosalie shortly. ‘There is no food in the house and I doubt if there is any fuel either. I don’t think Margot can have got your letter; it’s obvious she wasn’t expecting us and anyway her mind has softened. There are no other servants and I should imagine little likelihood of obtaining any at the moment, so we shall be cold and hungry if we don’t fend for ourselves.’

  Emile listened and then said, ‘Well, we’ll keep Jeannot on for a while, he seems an enterprising boy and he’ll probably be glad to stay for some warmth and regular food.’

  ‘When we’ve got some to offer.’

  ‘Precisely, when we’ve got some. Now, if you will be so good as to make a list of what you need I will send Pierre and Jeannot out to get it. I think it will be better if they keep together. Jeannot will know his way around all right and Pierre can deal with the money.’

  Rosalie nodded and feeling a little less desperate, said, ‘I’ll go and talk to Marie-Jeanne, she’ll know what to get,’ and leaving Emile to speak to Pierre and Jeannot she went up to her daughters’ rooms to find her old nurse.

  ‘Madame,’ cried Marie-Jeanne as she entered. ‘I was coming to find you. We must have fires lit at once, the house is cold and damp. We shall all catch our deaths.’ At the comforting sight of the old lady Rosalie felt suddenly tired. She sank on to Hélène’s unmade bed and said, ‘We have to get food and wood for the fires. We have nothing in the house. Monsieur St Clair is sending Pierre out to get things. What shall I tell him to bring? What can we cook to feed us all?’ Her news was greeted with cries of consternation from the three girls, but she hushed them saying Marie-Jeanne and she would soon have everything planned, and in the meantime they could help by removing the holland covers from the furniture. With the children busily employed, Rosalie gave her attention to Marie-Jeanne.

  Between them they concocted a list of basic necessities and when it was complete Rosalie took it downstairs. Jeannot was standing with Pierre, grinning from ear to ear, and at her approach he cried out, ‘Don’t worry about food, madame. I know where to buy food, as long as you’ve the money. Rich folks don’t starve!’

  Pierre aimed a cuff at the boy’s ear which was dodged neatly and said gruffly, ‘If you’re going to work here, young ’un, you learn not to speak till you’re spoke to.’ Having asserted his authority over the boy, Pierre said to Rosalie, ‘Monsieur St Clair has given us money, madame, and the lad here knows where to go to get what we need.’ Rosalie nodded and turning to Jeannot asked, ‘Will you stay with us, Jeannot, after today?’

  ‘Yes, madame.’

  ‘Then when you come back we must find you some better clothes – perhaps I have an old suit belonging to one of my sons.’

  The boy’s eyes gleamed and tugging his appalling cap from his head, he said, ‘Yes, madame. Thank you, madame.’

  Undeceived by this action Rosalie smiled and handed Pierre her list. ‘Well, off you go or we shall all be hungry and cold.’

  While they were away in search of provisions Rosalie organised Marie-Jeanne and the girls into making the house habitable again, and Emile searched the attic, finding several old packing cases which he brought down to the yard and chopped for firewood. They decided that only two fires could be lit: the kitchen range which would be needed to cook their food and would warm the lower region of the house, and the one in the drawing room where the family would congregate and for the present, take their meals.

  ‘The bedrooms will be very cold, I’m afraid,’ said Rosalie, ‘but there are plenty of bedclothes and everyone can have extra to keep warm.’

  Hélène and Clarice were set to unpacking the trunks and shaking out the crumpled clothes which had been so hastily bundled back into them at the city gate, and Louise helped Marie-Jeanne shake out the feather beds and draw the curtains against the encroaching darkness. The lamps were lit and the mellow lamplight gave an added illusion of warmth.

  Pierre and Jeannot arrived triumphant, Pierre carrying two baskets containing vegetables, bread and cheese, and Jeannot trundling his squeaking handcart laden with two sacks of coal and some green logs. They were greeted with cries of delight and Marie-Jeanne soon produced some hot, thick soup and hunks of bread and cheese after which everyone felt considerably better.

  ‘Not the dinner I had imagined on our homecoming,’ remarked Emile in a rare moment of family companionship, ‘but I’ve never known a meal more welcome or taste better.’ And taking the relaxation of his mood from him everyone agreed, and for a short while the whole family enjoyed the content brought on by full stomachs and a warm fire.

  Below in the kitchen, Jeannot, resplendent in trousers two sizes too big for him and a warm woollen shirt, regaled the company with horrific tales of Paris under siege, describing his life in the streets where he slept rough and lived on his wits.

  ‘Haven’t you any family?’ asked Marie-Jeanne.

  ‘No,’ replied Jeannot breezily. ‘Never knew my pa, and Ma died a long time ago.’ He glanced round the kitchen and knew he had struck lucky. Warmth, food, clothes and wages. He was made for life, but even with these wonders all in prospect he already regretted his loss of freedom and wondered how long it would last, this living in a posh house. He eyed Margot, still huddled in her chair, and wondered if them upstairs would turn her out. It was clear she had gone barmy. He shrugged and turned away. Not his problem. He would stay for a while anyway, see how things went; he might get to like it.

  Margot had not moved from her chair; she still sat rocking herself, apparently unaware of the activity about her. Her pitiful fire had died, but the kitchen glowed with heat from the range; even so she looked shrivelled with cold. Marie-Jeanne had coaxed her to swallow a few spoonsful of broth and spoken to her softly, but Margot had made no reply and at last Marie-Jeanne left her to retreat into her private world and went upstairs to put the girls to bed.

  Alone in the drawing room, Rosalie spoke to Emile about their unexpected situation.

  ‘Should we get the staff to come up from St Etienne, do you think? Or engage new servants? Poor Margot, Gilbert’s death and the siege have quite turned her brain. I think we should send her to the country.’

  Emile looked up from his contemplation of the fire and replied, ‘It is as you wish, my dear – I leave the running of the house to you, as always. I shall return to the office in the morning to see how they have fared there.’

  ‘We’ll need another governess for the girls,’ went on Rosalie. ‘When Mademoiselle Germaine left in July I had several applications for the post, but as we decided to leave it open until we returned from St Etienne, perhaps they are no longer available and I should advertise again.’ Rosalie fixed her mind determinedly on the normality of these problems to keep at bay the fears she had for their future. Suppose there were no servants any more? Suppose there was no food; had they to live indefinitely from hand to mouth as they had today?

  ‘What about the boy, Jeannot?’

  ‘I’ve told him he can stay and help Pierre,’ said Emile. ‘He’s glad of the food and a roof over his head, I should imagine. Scruffy little urchin. Still
, he knows his way about and we’d have been in trouble without him today.’

  Rosalie shuddered at the remembrance of their walk through the back streets. If they had been in the carriage they would have followed the main roads and avoided all that squalor. She looked round her comfortable drawing room and knew that whatever privations they might suffer in the immediate future, her life was immeasurably better than the sordid lives of people in those streets and she was not ungrateful.

  Upstairs in the chilly bedroom, Hélène lay and listened to the regular breathing of her two sisters. She was too cold to sleep; she curled her legs up and wrapped her arms round her body in an effort to get warm and fall asleep, but she seemed as cold as ever and her brain whirled with the events of the day. She had seen places today that she did not know existed. She had seen the walking skeletons promised by Anne-Marie and had smelt the condition of their lives. Even in the chilly freshness of her own room, wearing a clean nightdress, her face and hands scrubbed and her mouth rinsed, she could smell the stench of the street and taste the foulness of its air. She had known fear in herself and seen it in the eyes of others and Hélène knew this day would be with her always, for the rest of her life.

  3

  Normality returned gradually to the house in the Avenue Ste Anne. A housemaid and cook were engaged and food became more plentiful and varied. Though there was as yet no governess, a daily routine was established with lessons set by Maman, meals in the schoolroom supervised by Marie-Jeanne, sewing with Maman and piano practice for an hour before the evening meal. Very occasionally they were allowed to go for a walk in the gardens nearby, but only if escorted by Pierre as well as Marie-Jeanne. These excursions were few, however, and became increasingly less frequent, finally ceasing altogether as the air of unrest in Paris increased and returning soldiers began to bivouac in the parks and gardens. It was considered far too dangerous to allow the possibility of young girls encountering the sullen defeated soldiers.

  Hélène, who disliked the schoolroom and missed the freedom she had grown to enjoy at St Etienne, hated being cooped up in the house, but there had been demonstrations against the new government at Versailles and people had been murdered by angry mobs. Her parents were adamant, there was no question of any of the girls leaving the house except under the strictest supervision.

  A new cook reigned in the kitchen now, a cheerful, dumpy woman called Berthe. She wore a huge blue apron and her arms were strong and floury. Berthe always welcomed the girls to her kitchen and allowed them to help her with pastries and pies. Rosalie was aware of their expeditions below stairs and did not altogether approve. However, she recognised her daughters’ need for diversion, and the nice brisk walk around the gardens which she would have recommended against boredom being in the present circumstances inadvisable, she did not forbid them to visit the kitchen for a short while each day. Emile might have taken a far less lenient view, but he was unaware of their visits. Scarcely at home, he spent all day at his office trying to gather the rags of his business together. He had returned there the day after his arrival in Paris to find the building deserted, cold and dank, with the air of having been so for many months. Obviously his letter warning of his return had not arrived and his draughtsmen and clerks imagined him still in the country and the office closed. The business of setting things in motion once again kept him from home all day and often into the evenings so that his daughters were already in their beds before he came in to dinner.

  Often, when the girls were making gingerbread and custard tarts, Jeannot would linger in the kitchen in the hope of sampling their cooking, until Berthe noticed his idleness and assisted him back to his work with a box on the ear and a piece of pie. She had a soft spot for the boy and was seldom really angry with him and so Jeannot was often about the kitchen. Gradually, a friendship grew between him and Hélène. Clarice regarded him as dirty and kept herself fastidiously away from him, Louise was as unaware of him as she was of anyone who was not immediately concerned for her comfort, but Hélène was intrigued by him and by the fact that he had been in Paris throughout the war and the siege. They were probably much of an age, though in worldly knowledge and experience Hélène was a babe in arms compared with Jeannot. She loved to talk to him, pouring out questions she would never have dared to ask anyone else.

  ‘Where are your parents?’ she asked one day. ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘Don’t know where they are,’ Jeannot said. ‘Don’t know who they are, neither.’

  ‘But haven’t you got any family?’ asked Hélène, wondering how that might feel.

  Jeannot gave brief thought to the elderly couple, Tante Edith and Oncle Alphonse, who’d given him shelter during the siege. But they weren’t family.

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘I’m on my own.’

  Berthe put a stop to their chatter if she thought it unsuitable, which was often, sending Jeannot to his work outside, but Hélène slipped away, following him out into the yard where he was splitting logs or pumping water, and while he worked, or more often while he leaned on the axe or pump handle, he told her about the city he knew, so different from the one known to her. And she believed his tales, for she had seen for herself on the fateful day of their arrival. He told her, too, about the riots that were going on now.

  ‘There was a huge meeting at the July Column in the Place de la Bastille the other day,’ he told her importantly, ‘to keep the anniversary of the last revolution.’

  ‘And did you go there?’ asked Hélène.

  ‘Of course, I support the Fédérés.’

  ‘Fédérés?’ Hélène had never heard of them. ‘Who are they?’

  ‘They’re our people,’ replied Jeannot importantly. ‘The people of Paris. The National Guard. They’re going to throw the Prussians out and run Paris for the people.’

  ‘How will they do that?’ Hélène was unconvinced.

  ‘Us Fédérés…’ began Jeannot.

  ‘But what is a Fédéré?’ demanded Hélène.

  ‘National Guard!’ Jeannot informed her.

  ‘You’re not in the National Guard,’ objected Hélène.

  Jeannot gave her a withering look and repeated, ‘Us Fédérés will fight.’ He waved his skinny arm in the air and cried, ‘Vive la République. Vive la Fédération.’

  Hélène was impressed despite her lingering doubts. ‘So, what happened by the July Column?’

  ‘The people of Paris came, thousands of them, all marching past the column. The National Guard led the way and…’ Jeannot dropped his voice dramatically, ‘there was a spy there. He was counting…’

  ‘Counting? Counting what?’

  ‘Just counting,’ Jeannot said, nodding his head judiciously. ‘Going to report back to the government.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Hélène again.

  ‘They caught him. No government spies get away from us. People were shouting, yelling what was to be done with him!’

  ‘And what was?’ Hélène was wide-eyed.

  ‘Trussed him up and chucked him in the river!’

  ‘But he’d drown!’

  Jeannot nodded again. ‘Course he would. That’s the whole point! That’s what you do with spies… kill ’em.’

  Hélène, silenced at last, stared at him. A picture of old François, the gardener at St Etienne, drowning a litter of unwanted kittens in a barrel flashed into her mind. He’d just tossed them, mewing, into the barrel of water; they couldn’t get out and they’d drowned, but how could you do that with a man?

  When Hélène remained silent Jeannot went on, ‘Never mind him! I’ll tell you something else…’ and he gave her the most exciting news of all. ‘The Prussians are coming to Paris.’

  Her heart contracted with fear and she cried out in horror, ‘Oh no. Not into the city, we’ll all be killed.’

  Jeannot laughed. ‘No, we won’t,’ he said. ‘They’re not coming to fight again. They’re coming to parade – so’s we can all see them. So’s they can show us they’ve won.�
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  ‘But we know that already,’ pointed out Hélène, her fear subsiding now she knew it was only a parade.

  ‘Course we do,’ agreed Jeannot, ‘but they want the world to know, see. Their emperor wants to ride in and make believe he’s our emperor too. They want to show they can walk in and out of Paris just as they please.’ He laughed again and added in a whisper, ‘’Less, of course, they’m stupid enough to come by theirselves.’

  Hélène’s eyes widened again. ‘Why? What do you mean? What happens to them?’

  Rolling his eyes, Jeannot drew a dramatic finger across his throat and then with a strangled gasp collapsed in a heap on the ground.

  ‘You mean…?’ Hélène stared.

  Jeannot nodded and got to his feet. He might have said more, but Berthe appeared from the kitchen to call Hélène in out of the cold and the boy snatched up his axe and began enthusiastically splitting his pile of logs.

  Hélène considered this news and when working her embroidery later in the day in the company of her mother, she said casually, ‘Maman, will we see the parade?’

  ‘Parade?’ Rosalie looked up in astonishment. ‘What parade?’

  ‘On Wednesday. The Prussians. Coming into Paris. The Emperor’s leading them in.’

  ‘Where did you hear of this?’ asked her mother sharply. ‘Who told you?’

  Anxious to protect Jeannot and to keep the secret of their friendship, of which she knew her mother would not approve, Hélène said she had heard Pierre mention it to Berthe in the kitchen.

  ‘I see. Well, you should not listen to the idle gossip of the servants.’ She appeared to be going to say no more but Louise, intrigued by the idea of a parade, asked, ‘But will we go, Maman? To the parade, to see the Emperor?’