Life goes on. It was growing within my womb. I had to make plans for you, for Aimée, for poor Pélagie, whom I could not abandon, for my own safety. I was sitting in my bed, thinking of what the future held for all of us, when Manon, looking very pleased with herself, entered and handed me a letter. I did not expect any and opened it with great curiosity when I recognized my brother’s handwriting.
Madam,
I received from your maid news that you are unwell and a request that I allow you to return to Fontfreyde when you are again able to travel. I do not know whether her letter was simply a ploy to appeal to my love for you, or whether you are indeed too sick to write. If the latter is true, I am sorry to hear it and wish you from my heart a full and prompt recovery. Whatever the case, I want to make my feelings clear.
Do not believe me ignorant of your conduct during these past two years. I know to what, and to whom, you owe the preservation of your life. At a time when the King and Queen, our sister Hélène, and so many of our friends confronted the gravest dangers and met their deaths with heroic courage, you found your safety in the bed of a man whom I had detested long before the true extent of his depravity became public knowledge. You enjoyed, thanks to his protection, your own little island of comfort in an ocean of innocent blood. This I know for certain, but I suspect worse.
I suspect that you eagerly threw yourself in the power of that man whose name I cannot bear to write, that scoundrel, that cutthroat, that murderer of thousands. I suspect that you enjoyed your degradation and that your present illness results from its sudden ending, although his death is considered a blessing by all decent persons. How you could have sunk so low is beyond my comprehension. Have you no conscience?
If you are in need of money, I will send you all I can spare. It will not be much, because the peasants have become insolent beyond belief nowadays and seem to think that the abolition of our ancestral rights absolves them from paying rent. As to giving you the protection of my roof and my name, it is out of the question, now or at any time in the future. Your company would be unbearable to me. The truth is, Gabrielle, that I never want to see you again. My anger may fade in time, but the disgust I feel for you is so deep that I cannot imagine it subsiding.
During these two years, how many times have you thought of me? You have been constantly on my mind. I spent sleepless nights worrying that the brute, your love, would tire of you. I feared that he would on a whim sentence you, still fresh from his embraces, to share the fate of his other victims. I pictured you, your hands tied behind your back, climbing the stairs to the scaffold. I tried in vain to prepare myself to hear the ghastly news. Yes, little sister, sometimes I prayed for the continuation of your disgrace, if only it could preserve your life, and sometimes I cried for you as one cries for the dead. You made me wish for what I hated most.
I believe in the forgiveness of all offenses. Yet I cannot forgive you. I have no more ardent desire than to see my beloved Gabrielle again, to feel her presence next to me, but pray tell me, what is left of her now? I am happy to know that you are safe, but I would not be able to look at you without thinking of what you did; I would always picture that man touching you. His shadow will forever separate us.
I beg you not to renew your request. It hurts me to deny it, but my answer is firm. Have your maid write back: I will do everything in my power to help you, except what you are asking. You have always enjoyed an excellent constitution, which leaves me no doubt of your recovery.
May God keep you, Madam, and my niece under His holy protection.
The Marquis de Castel
P.S. I enclose the note he had the cruelty to send me, along with its contents. Why I have not burnt both I cannot say. Please imagine what I felt upon receiving them.
Within my brother’s letter was a note, dated of the 28th of September 1792, and addressed to the “so-called Marquis de Castel.”
Citizen Castel,
You will be happy to learn that I am extremely satisfied with your sister.
Greetings and fraternity,
Pierre-André Coffinhal
Folded within was the white and blue garter he had taken from me, and whose twin I had found in his lodgings. Pierre-André’s note was written, as an added mark of disrespect to my brother, in the familiar style.
I put both letters down on the bed covers. I was angry with my brother; I pitied him. The sight of Pierre-André’s bold handwriting made me cry. I understood now why he had asked for my garter. In one sentence, he had taken his revenge for the humiliation received years earlier, for the destruction of our hopes of happiness, for the long misery that followed.
Suddenly I was freed of the ties that had bound me to my brother. All that mattered was to keep the last promise made to Pierre-André. I had to live and to leave France.
88
LANGTON COURT, THIS 14TH OF JULY 1815
The rest you know. As a child, my love, you made me tell many times the story of my escape from France thanks to a passport in the name of Jeanne-Françoise Dunoyer and Pierre-André’s pistols. You know how Aimée, Pélagie and I reached the Netherlands, sometimes on the stagecoach, sometimes on foot; how I was arrested again as an Austrian spy close to the frontline; how I arranged for us to cross the Channel from Ostend on a smuggler’s boat. What you did not know, Edmond, is that you were part of that adventure. I was carrying you, my most treasured possession, the memento of my dead love, the token of my pledge to live.
At last we arrived in London, where I found many of my old friends, including Emilie, now widowed, and Morsan, among the French émigrés. There I met the Earl of St. Ives. I told him of you. I told him everything. He cared enough for me to offer me and my unborn child the protection of his name. He proposed. He has raised you as his son and heir; he has loved you no less than if you had been his own. If these memoirs serve only one purpose, it should be to make you aware of his goodness and the debt we owe him.
You may have heard of what happened to the remaining characters of this story. Carrier, the murderer of my sister Hélène, the man who conspired to assassinate Robespierre and your father, quarreled with the other Thermidorians. Soon after their victory, they had him tried for the atrocities he had committed in Nantes. Pierre-André was right: Carrier did not live to see 1795. He was guillotined in December of 1794.
Fouquier too was arrested once his services were no longer needed by the Thermidorians. He languished in jail for almost a year. He was tried in May of 1795, along with Herman, Sellier and the remaining judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Like them, he was doomed. He and Sellier must have hoped to save their lives by sending Robespierre to his death, but the guillotine was their sole reward. I thank God for sparing Pierre-André the slow agony of those months in prison.
During the year that followed the fall of Robespierre, many of the Jacobins who had not been guillotined were summarily executed or massacred in jail by mobs, all with the active participation or tacit approbation of the Thermidorians. Thousands died in what was called the White Terror.
Dear Manon chose to remain in France. She inherited a tidy sum of money from an aunt and married a fellow twenty years her junior. They have an umbrella shop in Paris. She writes that they are very happy.
Many others survived. Mesdames de Rochefort and de Tourzel, my companions at La Force, were jailed in 1794, during and after the Great Terror, but both are alive. Pauline de Tourzel married the Count de Béarn and, like some members of the old aristocracy, joined the new Court of Napoléon Bonaparte after he proclaimed himself Emperor of the French in 1804. I always thought with some amusement of that disparate assemblage of the ancient nobility and a crowd of upstarts. Former washerwomen, whose husbands had become Dukes, rubbed elbows with ci-devant ladies-in-waiting to Queen Marie-Antoinette. Repentant Jacobins fawned at the feet of His so-called Majesty Emperor Napoléon.
My brother, the Marquis de Castel, still lives in his château of Fontfreyde. He never married. His heir is the Count de Chavagnac, Madeleine�
��s elder son, who is almost my age. I have never corresponded with the Marquis since leaving France, but my sister Madeleine keeps me abreast of all the news from Auvergne. She had the sorrow to lose her younger son, who had become a Colonel in the armies of Napoléon and was killed at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, almost ten years ago.
In 1808, I saw again Marie-Joséphine de Savoie, the former Countess de Provence, now Queen of France in exile. She had just arrived in England, worn down by sorrow and bitterness. I would visit her on occasion at Hartwell House, where she had at last joined her husband. They had lived apart during those years when she had been driven away from one country after another by the victorious armies of the French Republic, and then those of the Empire.
“Goodness gracious, Baroness, I mean Lady St. Ives, is this you?” she exclaimed when I first called on her. “I am so happy to see you; you were always so good to me. How is it that the years, those terrible years, have spared you? You are as beautiful as ever, my dear angel, maybe even more so, in a different way.”
“Your Majesty is very kind.”
“Yes, they call me the Queen now. Look at me, a shrunken old woman! What a cruel mockery that is, a Queen of France with only a few acres of English land to call her own.”
“With all the respect I owe Your Majesty, I must admit that, when one speaks of the Queen of France, I always think of the late Marie-Antoinette.”
“So do I, dearest friend. I never understood my sister-in-law, but what a fate! Did you know that the poor woman had already passed away when she went to the guillotine? Yes, she had bled to death during her monthly curses. Can you imagine such an atrocity? They decapitated her corpse.”
I did not argue with poor Queen Marie-Joséphine, grateful that she had at least recognized me. Dear Marguerite remained with her till the end, which followed two years later, in 1810. Queen Marie-Joséphine did not live to see her husband restored to the throne. Along with all of the French émigrés, and all of Napoléon’s spies in England, I attended her funeral at Westminster Abbey. I do not know which was more mournful, the occasion or the gathering of the debris of the Old Regime. I could not behold my fellow émigrés without a mix of pity and contempt. Even those who had lived here for twenty years had not learned a word of English, for they had been too busy commiserating with each other and recalling the days of the “sweetness of living.” These are lost, gone forever.
Last month at Waterloo, the defeat of the French armies, outnumbered almost two to one, heralded the final fall of Bonaparte. Forty-five thousand men perished on the day of that butchery. The war, started twenty-three years ago by Queen Marie-Antoinette and the Girondins, has ended at last. The powers of the victorious English-led coalition, like the witches in Macbeth, are to meet
When the hurlyburly’s done,
When the battle’s lost and won.
The Bourbons are restored for the second time, once again brought back to France in the luggage of foreigners. The fact that they owe their throne to the enemies of their own country never seems to disturb them.
Your paternal uncles have done very well under both Napoléon Bonaparte and the restored Bourbons. Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal was a member of the Legislative Assembly under the Empire and is now the Chief Prosecutor of the Court of Appeals of Riom. Joseph is not even called Coffinhal anymore. He became a State Counselor under Napoléon, who later made him a Baron. Both brothers, as you can guess, promptly switched allegiances when the Empire fell. Joseph recently received from King Louis the Eighteenth permission to drop the name Coffinhal altogether “due to the disgrace attached to it by his younger brother during the Revolution.” He is now My Lord the Baron du Noyer, plain and simple. Many of the opportunists, the cowards, the traitors, the men who abandoned their ideals, their friends, their brothers, survived and prospered. So did I. Today is my forty-sixth birthday.
I often wonder what would have happened if I had been allowed to marry Pierre-André at fifteen. He would likely have remained a physician in the high country. Both of us would have spent the years of Revolution safely in Auvergne. Would he have been content with domestic happiness in a small town while events in Paris shaped the fate of the Nation? You would have been born, Edmond, but in very different circumstances, one of a country doctor’s many children, to follow your father’s profession, or perhaps to become an attorney.
And what if I had sought Pierre-André when I arrived in Paris at seventeen? He would have wed me. Would he, married to a noblewoman, have become such an implacable enemy of the Old Regime, a friend of Robespierre, an insurgent, a judge of the Revolutionary Tribunal? Instead of perishing on the guillotine, would he have lived to enjoy as successful a career as his elder brothers? Or would his passionate belief in the new ideals have led him down the same path, to the same death, regardless of the vagaries of personal destiny? No one can answer, I least of all.
I am an aristocrat again, now an English Countess, but I still cannot return to France. My country is in the grip of a second White Terror. Atrocities are committed there against the remaining Jacobins and those who supported the Revolution. The fortunate ones are executed by firing squads, others slaughtered with refinements of cruelty, some bled to death like swines. If it were discovered that I aided and sheltered your father, one of the judges of Marie-Antoinette, my life would be forfeited. So, Edmond, I will die an exile here.
Emilie called last week. She once boasted, on that day of August 1792, that she would be back in Paris with the victors in three months. Little did she know that she would have to wait over twenty years. I envy her: like the other émigrés, and unlike me, she may now return to France. Yet the country she will find across the Channel has little in common with the land she left. The tricolours are outlawed, replaced by the white flags of the old monarchy. The Revolution has been defeated, those who fought for it have been put to death, but its mark is imprinted on all minds, even those of its enemies. One does not kill ideas.
My soul remains in the country I will never see again; my heart is wedded to that of a dead man. Yet I have the memory of love, and I have hope. As he once said, we will be reunited someday, though not in this world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A novel is a labor of love. Not only the love of the writer for her characters, but also the love she draws from her family, her friends.
I wish to thank my first American readers, who, after reviewing a few chapters, encouraged me to persevere in this endeavor. I am thinking of Dr. Andrea K. Scott, and others who will not be named here.
Some of the more pleasurable, stimulating moments in the conception of this book were the conversations during wonderful French dinners at the home of Christiane David and Philippe Lemaître. Thanks to Philippe for his many trips to the Research Library at UCLA.
Later, my life plunged into darkness, and I abandoned the novel for months. Then my son told me that he missed seeing me writing, and the happiness it had brought me. It was the incentive I needed to return to the story.
My mother helped in so many ways while I completed the novel. My thoughts go to my father, a native speaker of the Roman language, who shared with me his passion for history. Sadly, he did not live to see this book published.
Pam Sheppard taught me much about the craft of writing. I cannot thank enough Stephanie Cabot, my agent; Julie Doughty, my editor; and all of the people at Dutton who helped turn my manuscript into this book. I am grateful to all for their support, enthusiasm, and great work.
Mistress of the Revolution: A Novel Page 56
