“You literary people! You were always too literary to be a good painter.”
“Your first lesson…you remember? Tree…house…cloud! You were so kind to me, César. You may think you only taught me one or two things about painting; but really it was about art—all art. You changed my writing, too, you know. But even more than that you helped me discover so much about love and life. That’s the debt I really owe you. Whatever you tried to offer on that last night in Rome—comfort or whatever it was—that wasn’t important compared with the things you’d helped me to see already. That’s what I’ll always remember, and love you for.” She smiled to stop him looking so soulful. “As sister for brother, of course!”
It satisfied him. He was jovial again. How odd, she thought, that he, so self-contained and so assured of his genius, should have craved this small eulogy from her, a comparative nobody.
***
On paper the French civil-marriage ceremony is a dull and brief affair, designed, as Victor pointed out, to offer no competition to the worldly glory of its religious counterpart. But the mayor, an old friend of his and a freethinker from Bourbon times, managed to endow it with all the ecstasy the French language could deliver, which was no small measure. Abigail would naturally have preferred an Anglican service, but she would not force Victor into the hypocrisy it would entail. When it came to their civil vows she was astonished to hear Victor addressed as “monsieur le Baron.”
“What was that?” she asked afterwards.
He was embarrassed. “While we were in Venice, it seems, a distant uncle died and the title has descended on me, er, baroness.”
“La Baronne de Bouvier…Baroness de Bouvier…” She tried it in both languages. “Either way it sounds most forbidding.”
He shrugged. “We can ignore it.”
“No, no. It could be useful. It’s a battle-winning name if ever I heard one—I quail at the sound of it myself. Is there a château or anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Madame la Baronne, eh! Well, no one can say I sound like a lower servant any more.”
This visit to Paris was, in a sense, their honeymoon—at least, it was the only one they wanted; but Victor asked her if there was anywhere she particularly wanted to go, as a special mark of the occasion. She said she would like to see Gérard de Nerval’s grave. Victor’s story of Gérard’s tragic death had been the turning point in her feelings toward him. She regretted the wish when she saw how glum a face he made, but from then on he was determined to comply. They went to the Père-Lachaise cemetery the following morning.
They walked up from the Place de la Nation, entering by the Israelite Cemetery. Gerard’s grave was almost at the farther corner from there. The path led past the tomb of Abélard and Héloise.
“Are they really both buried there?” she asked.
“All of her and most of him,” Victor said.
“Oh yes, I’d forgotten. What a terrible thing to do to a man.”
It was a chill spring day, the opposite of everything conjured up by the phrase “springtime in Paris.” The sky was one sheet of unrelieved gray; the damp ground would never dry. Subdued birds watched sullenly from newly clad branches. Gérard’s grave was unremarkable, but she was glad to have seen it—to have, in her mind’s eye, a locus for the poet’s memory, bequeathed to her by Victor in such graphic detail.
“We thought he’d be content enough,” he said, “opposite Balzac and Bazin and so close to Nodier.”
He shivered and cast his eye wildly around, like an animal seeking escape. She asked why.
“This is the very spot, between the busts of Balzac and Nodier, where the Commune was killed. Nineteen years ago this day, the twenty-seventh of May. It was a Saturday, though, not a Tuesday. And the rain fell…mercilessly.”
“Were you here?”
“No. I was already being marched to Versailles.” He looked away to the east. “You see the wall there?”
She nodded.
“That’s the wall. They rounded up the handful who surrendered and shot them there. You know how many they shot in all? All over Paris?”
“I remember reading at the time. It was sickening.”
“Twenty thousand. The stink reached Versailles. The Seine was red with blood. People think that’s poetic fancy but it was literally true. The army went mad, they shot anyone, without reason. They shot all the doctors and nurses in my hospital. I’d have been shot, too, if I’d not been on the roof, hiding Daniel. They said they’d been fired on from my house, but it was a lie. To have stayed in Paris at all—that was the crime. General Valentin said as much. He wanted to kill or transport everyone who’d stayed in Paris.”
She shuddered. “Let’s go home,” she said.
Together they began the walk down to the main gate.
“I went out to look for food and got arrested. And because my hands were black they said I was an incendiarist. I pointed to the red cross on my armband, but the officer had never seen such a symbol. I told him it was the sign of the International Geneva Convention, which was the worst thing I could’ve said. All he heard was that one word ‘International.’ I was actually standing in a line of about three hundred people, waiting my turn to be shot, when a sergeant recognized the symbol and sent me over to join the ordinary prisoners. He’d been a medical student in the days when the world had been sane.”
“Oh, Victor—why did you indulge my whim to come here? I’m so sorry.”
“It’s better you should know. I can’t”—he gestured at the graves all around—“bury the memory. They shot anyone. If you had a watch, they said it proved you were an official of the Commune and they shot you. Even as an ‘ordinary prisoner’ I wasn’t safe. No one was. We were marched to Versailles by the cavalry under the Marquis de Gallifet. Clemenceau calls him The Swine, but it’s an insult to pigs. He stood us all in the Bois de Boulogne and the first thing he did was pick out everyone with white hair. ‘You’re old enough to have fought against us in the eighteen forty-eight revolution,’ he said. ‘Well, you shan’t live to fight a third time!’ There were over a hundred, and he shot them down in front of us, together with all the cripples, or even people he didn’t like the look of. ‘You’re an ugly fellow,’ he told the man next to me. ‘It’ll be a kindness to shoot you.’ And when the man pleaded for his life, Gallifet said, ‘I’ve been in every theatre in Paris. This acting of yours doesn’t affect me.’ Another prisoner told me—this was a different march; there was a march every day for weeks, all led by Gallifet: fifty thousand prisoners in all—this prisoner told me Gallifet had picked out a dozen pretty girls and told them they’d only be raped in Versailles and to spare them that he’d have them shot now. He made the soldiers strip them naked and told them to run. If they made it to the trees, they’d be safe. He held the fire until they were almost there, but—four hundred bullets! What chance had they!”
“The unspeakable…filth! Wasn’t he ever punished?”
“Punished! He’s in the present government.”
“Oh…Victor.” She closed her eyes tightly, but she was angry, not sick.
“I never want to live in France again. I was mad to suggest we should get married here.”
“No! Oh darling, no. I was mad, to suggest coming to this place.”
He smiled then and patted her hand on his arm. “No. It’s better for you to know. I want you to know—if you can bear it. And it’s like a purge for me. I’ll tell you it all now and then I need never tell you again.”
She nodded.
“More of us died on the way to Versailles. Anyone who stumbled or fainted they shot. And the soldiers relieved their tedium by tying anyone who still looked young and strong, man or woman, to a horse and then trotting, cantering, and finally galloping. No one survived that. And then in Versailles all the respectable bourgeois who had fled from Paris turned out to hit us with canes and par
asols. The army tried to cram all forty thousand of us into the cellars and the riding school, and the orangery; of course it wasn’t possible. I got sent with two or three hundred others to Saint-Nazaire. They sent thousands of us to islands and ports on the west coast. My party was put in open cages on pontoons in the estuary of the Loire. No regular food, of course, and no water but the river. We were kept alive for sport by ladies and gentlemen who came to throw us scraps of food and watch us fight for it like animals. Those who died were just thrown up onto the quay. I’ve seen respectable ladies coming down like vultures to poke at the bodies with their parasols; they tried to open the trousers and expose the corpses’ genitals. Then they’d stand about laughing. I never saw gentlemen do that to the female corpses.”
“It’s horrible. Horrible.”
“I’m sorry.” He was suddenly concerned. He had been speaking in a very light, matter-of-fact way, as if about some atrocity in ancient history, and had assumed from her silence and her measured walk that she had adopted his mood.
“No,” she said. “I must know. As you say: It’s right I should know. When were you brought to trial?”
“Never. We were all released, those who still lived, just before Christmas. They released about half of all the prisoners without trial.”
“My God! If you weren’t a revolutionary before, I’d think you’d be…”
“Exactly,” he interrupted. “That’s what gave the socialists and republicans their great victories in the ’eighties. Even so, it’s not safe to have been one of the fifty thousand. The police have long memories. And bulging dossiers.”
“You mean you’re not safe in Paris?”
“If I make no trouble, I probably am. Otherwise…” He shrugged. “Who knows.” He laughed then. “Well, it was a lifetime ago,” he said. “And it failed to break my spirit. And if I’d known that twenty years on I would be only just beginning the deepest and most wonderful experience of love, I’d have laughed my way from May to December.”
She spun rapidly on one foot, throwing herself against him. They kissed tenderly. Raising his eyes, he saw an elderly lady walking nearby and looking at them somewhat askance. He broke the kiss and, smiling at the lady, said in near-flawless English, “We were married only yesterday, madame.”
She looked at them, at the graves all around, and, bursting into laughter, walked away. Victor followed her with his eyes.
“Did you know her?” Abigail asked.
“I thought I did, but of course it can’t be. She’d be over a hundred if she were alive still. But—the resemblance! Have we just seen a ghost, I wonder?”
“Whose?”
“An actress. Mademoiselle George.” He laughed at a memory. “During her last benefit, her absolutely final farewell benefit, she wasn’t content to sit in her box. She went behind the scenes and begged Arsène to let her go on and sing. But he told her to be content. ‘Ah,’ she said, knowingly, ‘if I were only ten years younger, you wouldn’t give me such an answer. If I were ten years younger I could give you the sort of night no man would ever forget!’ And d’you know how old she was? She was eighty!”
Abigail laughed and clasped his arm, marching with vigour now toward the gate. “Oh, Victor, you’re invincible, aren’t you? Nothing can quench your fire.”
“I am an old man,” he began. “And already…”
“No!” She shouted him down and would not let him continue.
But before that day was out, her question—are you safe in Paris?—was to be answered.
Chapter 42
After a light lunch they went to the Gare du Nord to arrange theirjourney home. Abigail, wanting to show off a little, sent in her card, which still read Lady Abigail Stevenson, to the stationmaster. He came out to greet her as if she were royalty—as, indeed, was any son or daughter of John Stevenson in the railway world. John had built many of the lines in Normandy and most of the line between this terminus and Le Havre; indeed, in the early 1840s he could not walk through the streets of Rouen without being pointed out a dozen times. Of course, the stationmaster assured them, he would supervise all the arrangements for their journey and there would be a special coach—the royalty coach—for them. And he would see that the best berth on the cross-channel steamer was made available. They settled their departure for a week that day.
Victor was suitably impressed; she felt highly pleased with herself as they walked over to the cab rank.
Before they were halfway across the concourse they heard a woman’s scream and turned to see a gang of men attacking a young girl and dragging her toward the exit. She was now calling, in English, “Help! Stop them! Please…someone help!”
Several people nearby began to intervene, until a policeman in uniform, apparently one of the gang, though Abigail had not noticed him, stepped forward and prevented them.
“That’s the morals police, you may be sure,” Victor said.
The girl, seeing that no one would now come to her aid, stopped struggling; but the men grew even more violent, pushing and kicking her forward while others held her back.
“I’m going to stop that,” Abigail said.
“D’you want me to take a hand?” Victor asked. “I will if you wish.”
She saw the fear in his eyes. “No,” she said. “Go back to César. Tell him what’s happened here. His father has lots of friends in the government. It could be very useful.”
“I’ll stay if you wish. I mean it.”
“No, darling. Don’t risk it. I’ll be all right. I’ll go straight to the prefecture.”
The men had passed through the swing doors at the head of the short stairway to the street. Moments later Abigail burst through the same doors in time to see the girl fall headlong down the stairs. One of the men, probably in the act of pushing her, fell too—but fell upon her. She screamed again, but this time in agony, not fear. The man who fell on her stood again and kicked her. “Get up, filth!” he shouted.
The girl lay whimpering.
“Stop that at once!” Abigail called out as she ran down to where the girl lay.
“If you want trouble, we’re the ones to give it you,” one of the men told her. He grabbed Abigail’s arm and held it in a vicious grip—a grip that could have compelled any girl to follow him to the police station.
“Careful!” a more prudent colleague warned, looking at Abigail. No one could mistake her for anything but an upper-class lady of considerable wealth.
“This garbage is a common whore, madame,” the observant man explained to Abigail. “She’s been infecting soldiers of the army of the Republic. We are only doing our duty.”
“Not true. Not true,” the girl moaned in English.
“You’ve broken one of her legs,” Abigail said.
The man lost patience with her. “She’ll get treatment,” he barked, and turning, signalled the others to continue. Between them they lifted the girl roughly, leaving the broken leg dangling, to crash on each step. The girl was beyond screaming; with a strangled whimper she passed out. They paid no further heed to Abigail’s commands or entreaties.
They bundled the unconscious girl over the street and threw her in on the floor of the police wagon. Then, with the satisfied air of men who had already done half a good day’s work, they climbed over her and lounged on the benches on each side. Abigail looked well at the face of each, horrified at the laughter in their eyes; she wanted to be sure of identifying them again. They were like hounds, grinning and panting at the fringe of a kill.
“To the prefecture,” she said to the first cabman in the rank.
The prefect received her at once, the moment she sent in her card.
“I know your father, my lady. I am from Rouen. The Earl has great respect in those parts.” He spoke in English.
She answered in French. “He is an old friend of Monsieur Rodet.”
He nodded. He underst
ood. She told him what she had seen at the Gare du Nord and what she expected him to do. His thin smile vanished. His voice was grim as he said, “I shall investigate. If Lady Abigail will have the goodness to return in an hour?”
She spent the hour in a parlour in his apartments. She asked for paper and pencil and passed the time drawing likenesses of the men of the morals police. Then, in ink, she wrote a statement of what she had seen, thinking that if she had spent the last twenty-five years of her life developing both talents, drawing and writing, and their only use was in this hour, it was time well spent.
The prefect returned. “There has been an error, my lady,” he said. “A most unfortunate and regrettable error.” He buried her statement and drawings in a pile of papers as if they would not be needed now. “The girl is not a prostitute.”
“Even I could see that.”
“Then perhaps I should offer you a position among our morals police?” There was a new truculence in him. She became uneasy.
“The girl,” he went on, “was denounced by a jealous lover—a man she jilted here in Paris. He has just confessed.”
“You’ve arrested him? He’ll be punished?”
“No, my lady. We view it as a domestic fracas, soon forgotten. In France we’ve developed a tolérance for violence in crimes of passion, as you may know.”
“I know that the violence I saw, Monsieur le Prefect, had nothing of the colour of passion. But it assuredly was a crime. A cold and calculated crime. A rabid dog would have deserved less vicious handling—and this was an uncomplaining girl held by six large men.”
“An understandable error, my lady. Regrettable, as I say, but understandable. The women they usually handle are worse than rabid dogs. A full apology will be made, of course.”
“It will not be accepted. There must be an inquiry and discipline must be exerted.”
He smiled: trump card coming. “You are travelling, I believe, with a certain…” He pretended to consult a paper, half opening the pile at random. “Ah, yes—Monsieur Bouvier. Monsieur Victor Bouvier?”
Abigail Page 40
