The First Garden

by Anne Hébert

  “Out there, the Empress of Britain, moored at pier 21!”

  Her voice changes. She appears to be speaking to no one, inclines her head as if fascinated. All that seems to matter to her now is the brownish water close against the pier, with its greasy traces of oil. The horizon is blocked, she thinks. The breadth and majesty of the river prove to be obstructed by the massive white bulk of the Empress of Britain. Flora Fontanges has nothing to look at now but the expanse of dirty water between the pier and the liner, which spreads before her eyes as the Empress wrenches herself from the earth, in long oily trails.

  Is it her greatest fear that her true face will suddenly loom into view and appear before her, mingling with the huddled crowd that is leaning on the rails? The broad waves of her hair falling to her shoulders, her small face as it was before all the masks of the theatre, hard as a stone, her gaze fixed obstinately on the water, between the pier and the boat. While on the pier crowded with people waving handkerchiefs and shouting inaudibly into the wind, perhaps M. and Mme Eventurel will appear, both of them tall and thin in their dark clothes: Madame’s white face speckled with black by her thick veil, Monsieur’s silhouette tightly buttoned into a velvet-collared black coat.

  If M. and Mme Eventurel were to show themselves again to Flora Fontanges, she would see that they are deeply offended and angry with her for all eternity, motionless and congealed in their resentment, and that she just has to disappear again now, as she did in 1937, on the Empress of Britain.

  She says “Good Lord” and buries her face in her hands.

  She cannot, however, stop a thin young girl in a severely tailored grey suit from haunting her memory, from making the same movements as in 1937, from experiencing again the same fever and the same guilty joy at the mere thought of leaving M. and Mme Eventurel, of crossing the ocean and becoming an actress in the face of all opposition.

  In the time it takes the Eventurels’ adopted daughter to slip on the black dress, the embroidered apron and the flimsy headdress of the Empress of Britain chambermaids, the piers have disappeared altogether, far behind the wake of the ship. M. and Mme Eventurel have already toppled onto the horizon. Forever.

  “I went away on the Empress of Britain and never came back.”

  He has stopped paying attention to what she says. He is following his own thoughts, looking out straight ahead, at the river covered with mist, studying the passage of his own moving images, evoking them himself, giving them their proper life and form as they appear, as if he were preparing a history lesson with slides.

  “Let’s go now, Raphaël dear! There’s nothing more to see here.”

  He says you can look at the river and question the horizon forever.

  ALWAYS, PEOPLE HAVE DONE THEIR utmost to see as far as they can, as if they might be able to extend their gaze to the gulf and surprise the ocean at her source, as it begins coming near us for our happiness or our despair. In winter, nothing comes at all because of the ice, and the waiting for spring is interminable.

  In the winter of 1759, after the battle of Sainte-Foy had been won, they reached an agreement with the English occupier that lasted a few months, with the hope of seeing the arrival that spring of French ships laden with arms and munitions, with provisions and blue-uniformed soldiers. Never has the breakup of the ice, shattering and jamming, never has the cawing of the first crow after a winter without birds, been more eagerly awaited. But when at last the surface of the water started moving again, driven by an unseen force, it was English vessels that were making their way along the river, numerous and in orderly fashion. France had ceded us to England like a burden to be shed. What happened to us then, suddenly, like an ill wind, was almost indistinguishable from utter despair.

  RAPHAEL TALKS ABOUT A BYGONE time, long before the English conquest, at the very beginning of the world, when every step that was taken upon the naked earth was wrenched from the brush and the forest.

  They are all there on the shore, waiting for the ships from France. Governor, Intendant and gentlemen in their Sunday best, bedecked, beplumed and covered with frills and furbelows, in spite of the heat and mosquitoes. A few nuns resist the wind as best they can amid a great stirring of veils, of wimples, scapulars, cornets, and neckcloths. Newly disbanded soldiers, freshly shaven, following orders, wearing clean shirts, eyes open so wide that the sun looks red to them, waiting for the promise that is marching towards them along the vast river that shimmers in the sun.

  Below, at the top of the cape, is the sketch of a city planted in the wildness of the earth, close against the breath of the forest, filled with the cries of birds and muffled stirrings in the suffocating heat of July.

  This time it’s not just flour and sugar, rabbits, roosters, and hens, cows and horses, pewter jugs and horn-handled knives, lengths of wool and muslin, tools and cheese-cloth: this is a cargo of marriageable girls, suited for reproduction, which is the matter at hand.

  New France has a bad reputation in the mother country. People speak of a “place of horror” and of the “suburbs of hell.” Peasant women need coaxing. They have to turn to the Salpêtrière, that home for former prostitutes, to populate the colony.

  Now they are crowded here onto the bridge, huddled together like a bouquet too tightly bound. The wings of their headdresses beat in the wind and they wave handkerchiefs above their heads. The men, in ranks on the shore, stare at them silently. The decency of their costumes has been observed, at once and with satisfaction, by the Governor and the Intendant. Now they must find out, even before the women’s faces can be distinguished, whether they are modest and their persons carefully tended. The rest of the meticulous, precise examination will be carried out at the proper time and place, little by little, even as they make their way towards us with their young bodies dedicated unreservedly to man, to work, and to motherhood.

  In the absence of peasant women, they must now be content with these persons of no account who have come from Paris, with a dowry from the King of fifty livres per head. Though they already know how to sew, knit, and make lace (this they have been taught at the Salpêtrière, “a place as ignominious as the Bastille”), we’ll just see the looks on their faces when they have to help the cow to calve and change its litter.

  Now their features can be seen clearly in the light, framed with white linen and wisps of hair in the wind. Some are red and tanned by the sun and the sea air, others are bloodless and skeletal, consumed by seasickness and fear.

  The men stand on the shore, on this splendid day, as if they were seeing the northern lights. Now and then cries burst from their heaving chests.

  “Ah! the pretty redhead! That lovely one in blue! The little one with curls!”

  When men have been without women for so long, save for a few squaws, it’s a pleasure to see such a fine collection of petticoats and rumpled linen coming toward us. It has been arranged, between Monsieur the Governor, Monsieur the Intendant, and ourselves, the marriageable boys, that we would take them as they are, these filles du Roi, fresh and young and without a past, purified by the sea during a long rough crossing on a sailing ship. Thirty passengers died along the way and had to be cast overboard like stones. The survivors will long be haunted by the lurching and pitching, so deeply does the ocean’s great flux still inhabit their bodies, from the roots of their hair to the tips of their toes. They are like a procession of drunken girls as they make their way to us along the gangplank. Their lovely shoulders straining under shawls crossed on their breasts sway like sailors on a spree.

  Monsieur the Intendant is categorical. All discharged soldiers, some of them dealing as brigands, will be barred from fur-trading and hunting and the honours of the Church and the religious communities if within a fortnight after the arrival of the filles du Roi, they have not married.

  The fattest ones were chosen first, during brief visits in the house lent for that purpose by Madame de la Peltrie. It is better that they be plu
mp, to resist the rigours of the climate, so they say, and besides, when you’ve consumed misery through all the pores of your skin in the King’s armies for years, it is comforting to sink your teeth into a good solid morsel, for the time God grants us in this land that has been a barren waste since the creation of the world. In reality, only hunting and fishing are possible here. The condition of coureur de bois would suit us well enough, although it is the King’s will that we be fettered to a piece of land covered with standing timber, with a woman who talks on and on, claiming that she has emerged from between our ribs to take her first breath here, in the earthly paradise. What answer is there, then, to that expectation, that desire for absolute love which torments most of the women? Only the succession of days and nights will win out over their fine ardour. That’s because it wears you down in the end, to withstand the fire of summer, the fire of winter, the same intolerable burning from which the only escape is a wooden shack fifteen feet square, covered with straw. In the dwelling’s only bed we take each other, and then again, and give birth and accumulate children, it is where we spend our dying days, then breathe our last. Sometimes it resembles a pigsty, and tears mingle with sperm and sweat, while generations pass and life constantly remakes itself, like the air we breathe.

  STANDING ON THE PIER AT anse aux Foulons, surrounded by the smell of tar and the falling night, Raphaël and Flora Fontanges have started to recite the names of the King’s girls, the filles du Roi, like a litany of saints, names hidden away in dusty archives forever.

  Graton, Mathurine

  Gruau, Jeanne

  Guerrière, Marie-Bonne

  Hallier, Perette

  d’Orange, Barbe

  Drouet, Catherine

  de la Fitte, Apolline

  Doigt, Ambroisine

  Jouanne, Angélique

  La Fleur, Jacobine

  Le Seigneur, Anne

  Salé, Elisabeth

  Deschamps, Marie

  In reality, it concerns her alone, the queen with a thousand names, the first flower, first root, Eve in person (no longer embodied solely by Marie Rollet, wife of Louis Hébert), but fragmented now into a thousand fresh faces, Eve in her manifold greenness, her fertile womb, her utter poverty, endowed by the King of France in order to found a country, who is exhumed and emerges from the bowels of the earth. Green branches emerge from between her thighs, an entire tree filled with birdsong and tender leaves, coming to us and casting shade from river to mountain, from mountain to river, and we are in the world like children struck with awe.

  One day our mother Eve embarked on a great sailing ship, travelled across the ocean for long months, making her way to us who did not yet exist, to bring us out of nothing, out of the scent of a barren land. In turn blonde, brunette, or auburn, laughing and crying at once, it is she, our mother, who gives birth in the fullness of life, mingled with the seasons, with earth and dung, with snow and frost, fear and courage, her rough hands running over our faces, scraping our cheeks, and we are her children.

  At the end of a long chain of life begun three centuries ago, Raphaël and Flora Fontanges look at one another as if self-conscious at being there, both of them, facing one another, in the month of July 1976, with their hands and their arms, their feet and their legs, their astonished faces, their hidden sex, their separate stories, their respective ages.

  Let the filles du Roi be reduced to dust, thinks Flora Fontanges, let the dead bury the dead. It is pointless to search among the mothers of this country for the mother she has never known. Orphaned from her first cry and first breath, Flora Fontanges has no business here among the filles du Roi, revived through the imagination of a history student and of an old woman who has been bereft of her own mother from the dawn of time.

  And if life were only that? The notion of absolute maternal goodness, just like that, at the end of the world, and you set out to meet it, directing your life towards it, anyone, anywhere, anyhow, so strong are both hope and desire, all of us are like that, like someone who does not truly see, an orphan without hearth or home, while our blind fingers move mistakenly across the soft and tender face of love. It’s using a carrot to make the world move like the donkey in the fable. So many disappointing loves for Flora Fontanges and always the same hope renascent from the ashes when the furtive face of love withdraws. How strange is the life that she leads, and how difficult love is to grasp! What is the initial wound of love, for everyone, not just for Flora Fontanges who has no father or mother? What was it for Maud who has been loved desperately since birth, who has been a runaway from birth, who is constantly running away, straight ahead, not looking back, as if life existed somewhere in the distance, hidden in the clouds?

  His barely audible voice, the pause between his words, that lost look of his.

  “What if Maud’s gone away with someone else?”

  In the end they seek reasons for Maud’s departure, they imagine responsibilities, feel guilt, a sort of vague complicity.

  He lifts his grave and childlike face towards her:

  “Why did she go away? Is it my fault? Yours?”

  What is this loss? There is always someone who’s not there when you need him. How to accept that without fretting, without trying with all one’s might to avoid its ever happening: this absence, this negligence of the heart?

  “And Maud was so secretive, so inaccessible. Who could know?”

  “I never asked her any questions. I liked her to be secretive and inaccessible, so beautiful and untouched inside her mystery, alone with me as if she were alone with herself, with no secrets. And then she went away, just when I couldn’t get along without her, without her mystery and her smooth face and her eyes that were open too wide. I think she sensed that, and she was afraid I’d close her up inside a stifling intimacy . . .”

  “If love is a trap, it was different with me, it was just the opposite. There were many dropped stitches in the net, there was nothing to hold her back and she couldn’t bear that. An actress mother isn’t the easiest thing for a child. Too much cuddling at one time, between two performances, then long absences when I was on tour. It’s not normal, alternating between too much and nothing. Impossible to live with, very likely.”

  They both reach the same conclusion. For different, sometimes contrary reasons, at a certain point Maud inevitably finds herself facing the intolerable, and then she can only run away.

  “If she comes back it won’t be the same. I won’t be able to live quietly as we did before. I’d be too afraid she’d go away again. I’d probably start asking her questions, pestering her about her escapades, about her past, both recent and remote. I don’t think I’ll be able to accept her secrecy any more. I might even become jealous and wicked like everyone else . . .”

  That sulky pout, the tear on the rim of the lashes. Raphaël repeats that he is wicked, jealous, jealous, and says it’s destroying him.

  The boy slumps suddenly as if his whole life is a burden.

  Flora Fontanges squeezes in her hand the long strong hand that rests flat on the table. She says that Maud will come back. Maud always comes back. She talks to him as if he were an old close friend. She feels light and experienced in grace, a kind, consoling woman at the side of a weeping child.

  Raphaël starts to talk animatedly again about the filles du Roi, as if his life depended on it.

  THEY MUST ALL OF THEM be named aloud, all of them called by their names, while we face the river whence they emerged in the seventeenth century, to give birth to us and to a country.

  Michel, Jaquette

  Mignolet, Gillette

  Moullard, Eléonore

  Palin, Claude-Philiberte

  Le Merle d’Aupré, Marguerite

  It is nothing for Flora Fontanges and Raphaël to recite a rosary of girls’ names, to pay homage to them, greet them as they pass, to bring them onto the shore—their light ashes—to have them bec
ome flesh again, just long enough for a friendly greeting. All, without exception: fat and lean, beautiful and plain; the brave and the others; those who returned to France because they were too terrified to live here with the Indians, the forest, the dreadful winter; those who have had ten children, or fifteen; those who have lost them all one by one; she who was able to save a single infant out of twelve stillborn—a little girl called Espérance, the name meaning hope, to ward off bad luck, although she died at the age of three months; the one who was shaved and beaten with rods at the town’s main crossroads for the crime of adultery; and little Renée Chauvreux, buried in the cemetery on January fifth, 1670, who had come from France on the last ship and was found dead in the snow on the fourth day of January of that same year.

  For a long time Flora Fontanges has been convinced that if she could one day gather up all the time that has passed, all of it, rigorously, with all its sharpest details—air, hour, light, temperature, colours, textures, smells, objects, furniture—she should be able to relive the past moment in all its freshness.

  Of little Renée Chauvreux, there are very few signs: a mere three lines in the city register and the inventory of her meager trousseau. This fille du Roi died in the snow. Her first winter here, her first snow. White beauty that fascinates and kills. Starting with her own childhood in the snow, we should be able to approach Renée Chauvreux, who lies under three feet of powdery snow, if we move stealthily, as lulling and numbing as death itself. But how to awaken the little dead girl lying stiff under ice and time, how make her speak and walk afresh, ask for her secrets of life and death, how tell her she is loved, fiercely, like a child who must be revived?

  And thus has Flora Fontanges in the past approached Ophelia, downstream among the drifting flowers, asking the same tormenting question of Ophelia as of Renée Chauvreux, about the bitter destiny of girls. Why?

  One day she took Ophelia into her arms, the arms of a living actress, warmed her with her living breath, made her take back her life and her death, night after night, on a stage that was violently lit for the purpose. Why, in the case of Renée Chauvreux, can Flora Fontanges not feel all her blood turn to ice in the veins of a little dead girl, surprised by the winter on a sandbar of the Ile d’Orléans, swept by the wind, white as the sky and white as the river and the earth? A single white immensity, as far as the eye can see, in which to lose oneself and die, in a blizzard that erases footsteps one by one.