French Passion

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  The next two pages I scanned, wondering why she was writing of the political situation. Because of the inflation there had been much unrest. King Louis, to set the country at ease, had asked communities all across the land to elect deputies from the three Estates, clergy, nobility, and common folk. An Estates-General was formed. The poet Égalité was one of the deputies for the people.

  “Thank you, God, for letting him escape,” I whispered. “Thank you, Izette, for telling me.”

  Izette didn’t pretend to understand men, but as far as she could see, bringing together the Estates-General had been a colossal blunder.

  The Assembly, as the deputies for us common folk is called, has asked for equal rights with the clergy and the nobility. King Louis refuses. In protest, some in Paris has been rioting. And now we’re worse off than ever, and many fear the King will hire foreign troops to keep order—

  I read no further. Dear, kind Aunt Thérèse, who had mothered me, was dead. Shoving the letter under my pallet, I began to weep.

  All day I wept. I wept that night, and was still weeping as dawn grayed the high window.

  This grief for Aunt Thérèse unlocked all of my raw, aching loneliness.

  Always, my pleasure and joy has been people. Loving them, caring about them, talking to them, even arguing with them. I had enjoyed my salon not for its glitter but for the companionship. The letter told me Auntie was dead. Also it reminded me how utterly I was cut off, suspended in a solitary stone cage six paces by six.

  I’ll punish you until you’ll wish you were dead, too, the Comte had warned.

  I knew then that the elaborate hoax had been a figment of my imagination. The unknown jailor had been filling in for the idiot, a coincidence. The letters were genuine. The Comte, in his extremity of passion, knew me completely. He understood that cutting me off from the joys and sorrows of humanity would be the cruelest punishment for my betrayal.

  His unhappy and unwilling revenge was complete. Leaning back against rough stones, I yearned for death.

  Chapter Six

  I’m not sure how many days passed. Maybe ten, maybe more. On this morning I woke with a premonition of disaster. It took me a few seconds to realize that from the high window fell a muted clangor of church bells. Bronze, silver, iron notes sounding and resounding. Every church bell in Paris is being tolled, I thought, going to the stool to raise myself to the window.

  Heart racing, I cocked my head, trying to understand the tocsin. With my sense of doom, I thought of invasion. Hadn’t Izette written of foreign troops? I got out the letter, squinting until I came to: Many fear the King will hire foreign troops to keep order over us.

  Were enemies at the gates of Paris?

  I began to walk, six steps up, six back. My shoes had worn completely through and clammy, uneven stones rubbed on my stockingless feet. What happens if the King himself has invited the enemy? On which side would fight my brother, Captain Jean-Pierre d’Epinay, still of the Royal Guard? And André, sitting with the ignored Assembly, would he bear arms against the King? Where did Izette stand in this? My other friends? The bells rang, unanswering yet evocative.

  My legs numb and shaking, I walked six up and six back. It was long after the idiot normally appeared. The other guard hadn’t come either.

  A shot rang. I jumped. There had been volleys all day, but this was close. It shattered against my nerves.

  A deep, thunderous roar. What was that? Cannon? But how? Why? I clung to the window bars in the same manner that, during a storm, a caged bird, helpless and unknowing, flutters its wings in an attempt to escape into danger.

  The loud sounds terrified me. Not solely their implication but their noise, too. The silence in my cell had been so great that my own breathing was audible. Now, suddenly, the fiends of hell were screeching. I wanted to cover my ears. Instead, I gripped the bars more tightly.

  The waves of sound swelled, growing, spuming into yells, shouts, cries. My eardrums ached. I sank onto the low stool, pressing both hands to my head.

  The door flung open.

  A confusion burst in. A bent little porter holding a musket as long as he, a stout market woman shaking a cleaver, other ragged men and women bearing every variety of weapon. Each wore a tawdry red-white-and-blue cockade.

  Hands to my ears, stupid with fear, I stared at them. Their faces formed grimaces.

  “Freedom!” shrieked a woman.

  “Prisoner of the Bastille, you’re released!”

  “Victory to the people!”

  A tiny gray-haired woman hugged me to my feet. “Come,” she yelled. “Come!”

  The crush of so many bodies, the noise overwhelmed me. I shrank into a corner.

  A ragged bare-armed man pulled himself up to the window. “A prisoner!” he howled, and the word echoed below, many voices crying, “A prisoner!” as if I were a prize, a badge of triumph. “A prisoner!”

  A giant with a red beard and a thick braid of red hair pushed into the cell. “Name of God!” he boomed. “You’re frightening her to death.”

  The others made a path for him. He appeared to be their leader.

  “Are you Manon d’Epinay?” he asked.

  My mouth opened, but no words came. He wore a simple peasant’s loose smock and trousers, yet his height, his huge shoulders, flaming beard, the voice that rose from deep within his barrel chest, gave him vast power. I felt I was being confronted by a great and vital animal. After a moment I managed to nod.

  “I’m Goujon,” he said. “Izette’s friend.”

  “Izette?”

  “It’s all right, little one,” he said. His appearance might be ferocious, yet his brown eyes and his deep voice somehow calmed me. “It’s all right. Soon you’ll be with her.”

  “You’re free!” a voice yelled in my ear. “The people of Paris have taken the Bastille!”

  And then I was part of the melee. Goujon—Izette’s friend, this red-bearded giant—bore me into the narrow corridor. In the alien space I shivered. Goujon called, “Make way for the prisoner.” And the crowd pulled back, letting us down the narrow circular stairwell.

  In the alley he held me by my waist, lifting me onto his broad shoulders. “The released prisoner!” he shouted.

  Cheers of triumph arose.

  Bewildered, disoriented, high above the glint of weapons and a sea of crimson wool hats that streamed with tawdry red-white-and-blue cockades, I was borne to the same square to which the Comte and Old Lucien had delivered me.

  In the arch of the registrar’s doorway stood the idiot. A flat-featured, sobbing hulk. Three laughing men pulled at his hooded blue guard’s cape while a fourth held a sharp knife to his throat. As I watched, the blade moved, and a line of redness trickled at the quivering neck.

  Until now I’d been as lifeless and unresisting as a wooden doll. Now, suddenly, I was hitting at Goujon’s massive shoulders, kicking at his barrel chest. “Let me down!” I screamed.

  Surprised, he obeyed.

  I became part of the malnourished crowd. I fought to control my faintness and the trembling of my thighs, knowing that if I fell, wooden shoes could trample me to death. Pushing and shoving with every ounce of strength, I forced my way to the arched doorway where the jeering men had captured the idiot. Now the fourth man slowly teased his knife across the flabby, heaving chest. The idiot, without his protective cape, was soft as a slug, and he gazed at me with blank-eyed fear. I hit at the hand holding the knife. The weapon fell. In this crush there was no chance of recovery.

  “What the devil!” cried the knife’s owner.

  “Get away from here!” yelled another of the foursome.

  “Let him be!” I panted. “Let him be!”

  “He’s going up there.”

  It was then I saw the drops of redness on their shoulders, the redness on their hands. I’ll never know how I’d missed seeing the decapitated head, for it was raised on a pike. The half-open eyes glittered, and the powdered hair dripped.

  A woman, following m
y gaze, laughed. “He’ll be just as handsome.”

  “No!” I cried.

  “It’s the will of the people.”

  “But he’s just an idiot” My voice wasn’t loud enough. “An idiot!” I screamed.

  “He’s a guard. Death to all guards!”

  A sharpened scythe was passed forward.

  “Please!” I yelled. “Let him go! He’s my friend!”

  “Friend? Let the drab join her friends, then.”

  “She sounds like a bloody, high-up aristocrat!”

  Hands were reaching for me.

  “Let her go.” Goujon was forcing his way through the crowd.

  “She’s nobility,” someone shouted. “Goujon, nobility.”

  “She’s a freed prisoner,” Goujon roared.

  “A freed prisoner?”

  “Let her go, I said.” Goujon’s roar rose through that vast body. “I took her from the cell myself.”

  The others fell back a little. My tormentor pulled away, and the one who held the scythe removed his crimson hat to me, bowing. All at once I was an object of awe. I leaned limp against Goujon. “He’s my friend.…”

  I could feel Goujon’s chest expand as he called, “The prisoner wishes this man saved.”

  His words were repeated and the idiot, freed, was pushed toward us. Again Goujon lifted me. The idiot held fast to my tattered skirt, looking up at me with a bewildered terror that matched my own, and then we were pouring through a series of massive gates, across the drawbridge, around us the mob waving their grisly pikes. I glimpsed only one other freed prisoner, a small, bewildered gray man. With cries of “Victory!” and “Liberty!” and “Equality!” we were streaming along the shabby streets of Faubourg St. Antoine.

  And I saw her, forcing her way through the mob, a wide smile on her dear and pitted face.

  “Izette!” I called.

  Goujon set me down, and I fell into her hug.

  I hunched in the round laundry tub, steaming water covering my raised knees and slumped shoulders. Blessed hot water. Blessed quiet.

  The mob had continued on its turbulent, triumphant way. Izette had yanked me into the nearest inn. The innkeeper, proud at being honored by a released prisoner of the Bastille, had given us his best rooms. Space, like sound, terrified me, and I was overjoyed that even the best rooms of the Inn of St. Antoine were tiny. A bed crowded this space, and beyond that red-dyed curtain, the small living area was filled with the idiot’s loud breathing. Goujon, keeping up with the insurrectionary parade, had vowed to return.

  Izette’s strong fingers scrubbed at my scalp, her massage, the hot water, and flower-scented soap calming me as layers of dirt were removed. I’d been in the Bastille ten months. My poor attempts with cold water and no soap had been, I saw now, most inadequate.

  Two raps sounded on the door. “I myself brought a feast for the released prisoner,” called the landlord.

  “The other room,” Izette called back. I heard the other door open, heard the idiot’s frightened grunts. The door closed.

  “There,” Izette announced, pouring a final slow, hot stream over my head. “You’re done.” I stepped out of the tub into a warmed towel. “You’re thin,” she whispered, “so very thin.” She rubbed me dry carefully, as if being thin meant I would break.

  The innkeeper’s daughter had lent me a night shift. Made of homespun linen and tied with faded pink ribbons, it reminded me of the shifts I’d worn as a girl in the country. In the wavery, candlelit mirror I saw myself for the first time. The mass of pale, damp curls fell to improbably narrow hips, and my face, feet, and arms, rosy from the hot bath, were elongated.

  Izette, tying the faded ribbons, stepped back in her usual appraisal. “Too thin,” she said finally. “But who else could look so gorgeous after nearly a year in the Bastille?”

  Wrapping a large black shawl around me, she pushed aside the curtain. The idiot’s jaw dropped, as if he didn’t recognize this clean woman.

  “It’s me. Truly it is, Monsieur Turnkey. I’m Manon d’Epinay. Now I shall finally know your real name.”

  He pointed his index finger into his gaping mouth.

  And I knew he was a mute.

  “You and your lame dogs!” said Izette in an odd, choked voice. “Well, let’s call him Fido.”

  Fido. Faithful dog.

  “Monsieur Fido,” I said, “will you share our supper?”

  Izette removed dented covers, and richly-odored steam curled from browned duckling, bright peas, a plum tart covered with thick yellow cream. Delicious food. Yet I found all I could manage to swallow was white bread touched with golden butter. After ten months of stale, sour bread, it was heaven. The idiot—Fido now—wolfed. Izette ate in her neat, methodical way.

  They were finishing the tart when Goujon opened the door. Not moving, he gazed into the firelight at me.

  Izette’s sober face split with that quick grin. “Close the door, you great lummox. You’ll kill her with the draft.”

  Still gazing at me, he shut the door.

  Izette began to laugh. “I already told you she’s the most beautiful woman in Paris. Now when was I ever one for exaggeration?”

  Tugging at his neatly trimmed beard, he came over to the fire.

  “Monsieur Goujon, I never thanked you for writing the letter. It made me … so much …” My voice broke. I was again plunged into the desolation of Aunt Thérèse’s death. I swallowed. “Thank you for bringing Izette and me together, Monsieur Goujon.”

  “Goujon, no monsieur, mademoiselle.”

  “If,” I replied, “it’ll be just Manon.”

  “Stop gawking at her.” Izette smiled. “Sit down.”

  “Won’t you have some food?” I asked.

  The sturdy settle creaked as he lowered his great bulk. He finished the duckling and tart. The idiot hunkered in front of the small blaze, his flat-backed head nodding drowsily.

  Goujon said, “I see your friend’s content.”

  “Thanks to you for saving him.”

  “It was all your doing. In a day that will go down for bravery, that was the bravest act.”

  I’d behaved instinctively, without thought, and Goujon’s flattery, I felt, was undeserved. “What happened to the other guards?”

  “Killed,” Goujon replied briefly.

  I shivered, remembering heads on pikes. “And all the other prisoners, where are they?”

  “There were only seven, including you.”

  “Only seven!” Izette and I gasped at the same instant.

  “We, too, thought there would be hundreds, else we shouldn’t have risked going into the cannon’s mouth. We found many soldiers and guards, but only seven prisoners. Manon, you’re very rare.” His grammar was of the educated class, yet he spoke with peasant accents.

  “Seven.… That’s why it was so quiet.”

  “The walls cried out. Skeletons hung in chains, there were torture chambers, vaults, oubliettes, holed-up mummies, letters pleading release from another century. Name of God, the horrors of the past cried out to us.”

  Izette, grim-faced, raised her pewter mug. “To July fourteenth,” she said. “The day the people of Paris captured the Bastille.”

  Goujon corrected, “To July 14th, the day the Old Regime was killed and the reign of the people began.”

  His toast rang like a prophecy and, remembering those severed heads, I shuddered.

  After three or four sips of wine I was drowsy, and their voices receded, buzzing.

  Huge arms lifted me, I was being put to bed as if I were a child. How good to lie on a soft mattress and smell clean linen, feel the down coverlet over me. The curtain was drawn.

  From the other room I heard Goujon say, “Name of God, that’s a brave little one. When I took her from the cell she trembled like a captured bird. But the moment she saw them threaten this idiot, she was on her feet, ordering them to release him. One more minute and they’d have had her head, too. And she only a woman—”

  “She’s
got more courage than all you men put together!” Izette said fiercely.

  “She does,” Goujon said, his deep voice very low. “But, Izette, even with the courage of ten lions, she couldn’t keep in Secret a year and come out the same.”

  “She’ll stay here, nice and peaceful, for a while,” Izette said. And then she whispered. I caught only the word him.

  “Yes, I’ll find out if he’s in Paris,” Goujon said.

  “Wherever he is, I’ll bring him to her.…”

  Then I heard no more. I slept.

  Chapter Seven

  I lay on my pallet watching shabby skirts and workmen’s trousers whirl around me. Sabots thundered unbearably, and I yearned to cover my ears, but my muscles were leaden with fear. I couldn’t move. Then, suddenly, the dance halted, the dancers parted, and one man stepped toward me. He carried a pike. If only I could move! If only I could shut my eyes! But I couldn’t, and so was forced to watch as he slowly, very slowly, tilted the pike at me.

  Atop the pike was a severed head. The dark hair was matted, the small forehead scar visible, the hawk nose more prominent in death. “André!” I screamed, and woke.

  The nightmare was too real. Yesterday’s heads, ghastly enough, were as nothing compared to André’s severed head. I sat bolt upright It’s an omen, a warning, I thought. The bed was darkened by hangings. I yanked them apart. Yellow sunlight told me it was late morning. The borrowed shawl hung on the hook, but I couldn’t see my own tattered, filthy clothes. Feverish, I ran to open the armoire. Empty.

  The curtain between the rooms parted. Izette stood with a porringer from which curled steam. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “My clothes. Izette, where are my clothes?”

  “I’ve just given them to the ragman.” Her brief smile gleamed. “He weren’t no fool. One sou and no more, that’s all he’d pay.”

  “But I need them! I have to go—”

  “You ain’t going noplace,” she interrupted in an infuriatingly sensible tone. “Now eat your breakfast.” With one hand she pushed gently until I sat on the bed, while with the other she put down the bowl.