Louisiana History Collection - Part 1

by Jennifer Blake

  “He is concerned still about the traffic with the English.”

  “Indeed. It’s said that Le Parham brought a strong demand from the king for Vaudreuil to put an end to it. No excuses for failure to be accepted. Rumors also say, however, that the governor had advance warning of the strict new edict some months ago, brought by Lemonnier.”

  “By René? How odd.” Did it, perhaps, explain his part in the attempt to capture the Bretons?

  “Just so, a friendly hint from the king’s minister, Maurepas, from one politician to another.”

  “Then the governor must surely stop the smuggling.”

  “So he must, or see his chances at the governorship of New France fade to nothing. And no doubt he will be successful. That will make it all the more lucrative for Madame la Marquise later when the competition is driven away and she is able to resume her activities.”

  Cyrene shook her head. “What a cynic you are.”

  “Am I?” He looked immensely pleased with himself. “Now there’s a pose I must develop.”

  “I beg you will do no such thing!”

  “You like me the way I am?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Ah, a declaration at last. I was beginning to think you were immune to my charm.”

  “I would have complimented you earlier,” she said with gentle irony, “had I known your ego was in such need of it.”

  “Cruel, cruel,” he mourned. “Perhaps I should go straight from here to the marquise. She may be an avaricious lady who has forgotten how to count her years, but at least she knows how to appreciate fine form in a man, whether mental or physical.”

  Cyrene could not help laughing at his histrionics, though, an instant later, she sobered. “It’s true, then, that the lady has young lovers?”

  “As to lovers, I couldn’t say, but she has a good eye for a manly leg and is not above testing with her own fingers to see if the shape is natural or has been helped with padding.”

  The loose breeches worn by most laborers, including the Bretons, were decent enough, but the tightly fitted garments made of silk and satin worn by gentlemen, designed to show that they could not possibly stoop, in the most literal meaning of the word, to manual labor made a fine display of manly attributes. “You mean she—”

  “Frequently. If one is so unwise as to pay a visit to her alone or venture into a dark corner when she is near.”

  “There were rumors, but I can hardly credit such behavior. She has so much dignity.”

  “A useful thing, dignity, also honors and position,” he said, his tone suggestive.

  “Yes, I see what you mean.” Cyrene paused a moment, then went on. “Had you heard — that is, do you know anything of her and René?”

  “When Lemonnier first came he was as catnip to the cat; she practically purred when she saw him. Not only was he a fresh face but also wildly attractive, and with just that air of danger about him that some women enjoy. The pursuit was quite diverting, since he was more wily than most or perhaps more used to being hunted. His reputation had preceded him, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” she echoed. Poor René, chased by Madame la Marquise, attacked, injured and half drowned in the river. Then what had happened when he was safe and dry and on the mend again? She had thrown herself at him.

  Cyrene allowed her gaze to be caught and held by the flickering flames in the fireplace as she went on. “One might say he had brought it on himself with his past conduct.”

  “They might, of course,” Armand said, tipping his head to one side with a judicious air.

  “But you don’t think so?”

  “These things are always difficult. Who is to say why people do what they do, what drives them to their vices?”

  “Must there be something?”

  “Not always, but in the case of Lemonnier it would seem likely.”

  “What makes you say so?” she challenged him.

  “I have the story from a great-aunt in Paris who knows the family and sometimes writes my mother, you understand, so you may judge how accurate it may be. It seems Lemonnier was not always as he is now, but was rather a dutiful youth, the second-born son. He was put to reading law and studying the management of large estates so that he might serve as custodian to his older brother, who would inherit the family lands and titles. Then the brother became embroiled in an unsavory scandal having to do with counterfeit bank notes. There was a great deal of money lost. The older Lemonnier son returned from Paris where the misfortune had taken place. One day he rode out to a lonely wooded spot where he shot himself in the head with his dueling pistol.”

  Cyrene uttered a sound of shocked horror. Armand gave a nod. “Even so. The valued first son was no more. Overnight, Lemonnier fell heir to the responsibilities and duties of his brother, and also the debts and the scandal. He set off for Paris to discover what had brought his brother to ruin. He was made so welcome there that he soon forgot his purpose. He had been a provincial moldering on his father’s lands too long; the pleasures of the city and the glories of Versailles went to his head, as it has to many others. He offended someone of importance, and voilà! Here he is in Louisiane, an exile—”

  Armand broke off as footsteps sounded on the stairs and René appeared in the doorway. Smiling, making ready to greet his host, he went on smoothly. “But then we are all exiles, in one way or another.”

  “Armand, so pleasant to see you again,” René said, the irony of his tone a comment on the frequency of the younger man’s visits.

  Armand, not to be outdone in civility, sketched a slight bow. “I realize I trespass, but Mademoiselle Cyrene is that rare creature, a women of both physical charms and brain. One must have inspiration for one’s literary efforts, after all, and how refreshing it is to find here also a true appreciation.”

  “Ah,” René said with an air of great affability, “you have brought her another poem. May I see it?”

  He picked up the sheet of foolscap that lay on the settee beside Cyrene and began to peruse it as he moved to stand with his back to the fire.

  Armand looked decidedly ill at ease, though he tried to be nonchalant about it. “It’s another of my poor efforts, I fear, one that comes nowhere near to doing Mademoiselle Cyrene justice. I’m sure that in your career you have written many that were much better.”

  “I’ve penned one or two. One can hardly escape, so mad has the world become over scribbling,” René said without looking up. “However, I don’t recall ever comparing a lady’s eye to a swamp.”

  “Oh, but I only meant dark and deep and mysterious!”

  “So I apprehend. And what of muddy and shifting and stagnant?”

  “I never said that!”

  “Didn’t you? How odd? I thought you did.” René turned to Cyrene, extending the poem to her between two fingers with an air that was indescribably negligent. “Would you ring for a pot of chocolate, chérie? I’m sure we all need it.”

  “To remove the taste of my poem?” Armand said, his sigh glum.

  “Did I suggest such a thing?” René looked surprised.

  “There was no need. I know it well. Spare me the chocolate, mademoiselle, if you please. I must go and commune with my muse.”

  “I thought,” René said in polite puzzlement, “that she was here.” He indicated Cyrene.

  Armand was not to be drawn. With a look of great melancholy and many excuses, he took himself away.

  When he had gone, Cyrene said to René, “Did you have to be so disagreeable?”

  “Did you expect me to encourage him? You do enough of that.”

  “There’s not the least harm in it. Every lady has her admirers,”

  “I know that well enough, but he admires you a bit too extravagantly, and too often, for comfort. His admiration is leaning toward an excess of affection that you will find embarrassing.”

  “Does that trouble you?”

  “The question is, does it appeal to you? Armand Moulin is young and idealistic and with a comfor
table fortune behind him; he’s everything, in fact, that you have a right to expect in a prospective husband.”

  Cyrene got to her feet, moving away from him. “Is that your way of saying that you think I should accept a proposal if it is made?”

  “By no means. I’m only — only pointing out his suitability.”

  What he was doing, René saw well enough, was indulging his jealousy. It was, as Cyrene said, quite the thing for married women and those in the keeping of other men to have admirers, men who worshiped from afar and found in the forbidden object of their affection some outlet for their suppressed passions and a subject on which to perfect their techniques of amorous dalliance. Knowing these things did not make it easier for the man in possession of a beautiful woman to bear with the lovelorn.

  “I see,” Cyrene said. “Yes, I suppose he is suitable.” What she also saw was that, whether he wished to admit it or not, he was telling her that she might wish to look around her, that her arrangement with him would not be permanent.

  “What was he telling you when I came in just now?” René asked.

  “Nothing of importance.”

  “That I have trouble believing. He has a glib tongue, but he has not yet learned to control his blushes.”

  Cyrene, standing with her hand on the back of the settee, could not help smiling a little; Armand had indeed been perfectly crimson. “It was nothing salacious at all. We were merely speaking of your brother.”

  “My brother?” René’s tone was sharp.

  “I had not known of his death. I’m sorry.”

  “He isn’t dead.”

  The words were cold, their lack of expression more disturbing than a shout would have been. “But I understood—”

  “He shot himself, but he did not die. He destroyed his mind; his body lives and breathes, eats and sleeps and ages and will, when my father dies, carry the titles and honors of the eldest son.”

  René watched her closely, but there was no reaction on her lovely face except pity and distress. They were useless emotions. He should know since he had expended so much of the same.

  “‘Titles and honors that would have come to you if he had died?” she said, her tone tentative.

  He made a quick gesture of repugnance. “No. Never that. For those things I have no use, none at all.”

  15

  GOVERNOR VAUDREUIL DID NOT forget the amateur theatricals that he had mentioned when Cyrene had first met him. The play they would do was a comedy by Marivaux, a shortened version of his Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard, or Game of Love and Chance. With Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, the day of final, frantic merriment before the forty days of abstention required by the Lenten season leading up to Easter, so close upon them, it would be some time before it could be presented. That was all to the good, however; they would need the time for rehearsal.

  The story involved a gentleman and a lady promised to each other, sight unseen, in an arranged marriage. Both of them being dubious of the match, they each decide to view the other first without revealing themselves. They therefore change places with their own servants for the initial meeting, the lady with her maid and the gentleman with his valet. They fall madly in love. Their servants are also smitten with each other so that there are four people involved, two of whom think the people they love are beneath them in station and two who think the people they love are above them. It was a challenging play, for much of the humor depended upon the posturing and posing of the characters in their unaccustomed roles and the rapid-fire delivery of the dialogue.

  Cyrene, cast as the lady opposite the governor as the gentleman, was not certain she was up to the part, though the marquis insisted she had just that combination of independence and spriteliness necessary. René was assigned the role of the valet, while the maid was played by Madame Pradel since Madame Vaudreuil could not be persuaded to tread the boards with them.

  The governor’s wife declared that she enjoyed a play as much as anyone and was delighted that La Pompadour had revived the pastime of amateur theatricals, but play she could not. To learn so much dialogue was simply beyond her, the marquise declared, though Cyrene thought privately that what the lady meant was that it was beneath her. Playacting had always enjoyed a rather risqué reputation, and the patronage of the king’s mistress had done little to change that.

  There was a great deal of practice necessary, for the governor, though not a perfectionist, required that the production have a certain polish. Everyone must be able to move with grace and style as well as declaim their lines with as few embarrassing mistakes as possible. He made his wishes clear, but it was, in fact, Madame Vaudreuil who saw that they were achieved. She took upon herself the job of stage director and sat in the back of the long room, where the performance would be held, calling out complaints and instructions. The marquis himself was unfailingly generous in his comments and tactful in his suggestions; still, Cyrene, remembering what Armand had said, began to watch the couple and to wonder if Madame la Marquise was not simply carrying out her husband’s will.

  For Cyrene, acting with him, playing scenes of a suggestive and amorous nature in such close proximity was a daunting experience, despite his charm and exquisite manners. Vaudreuil was somehow larger than life, with so high a polish on his person and his personality as to give an appearance of being mirror hard and bright. Moreover, there was a great deal of unconscious arrogance about him.

  Nor did René help matters by the close watch he kept on her every movement, her every smile and gesture. It made her more nervous than she was already. Why he regarded her so closely, she could not imagine; she was not blind to the appreciation in the gaze the marquis turned on her, but there was no familiarity in the gentleman’s manner and certainly none in hers.

  The same could not be said for Madame Pradel, who missed no opportunity to place her hand on René’s arm or to lean over him as they practiced their lines. It was a tasteless display, and quite distracting. Not that she was jealous, of course, or that she credited René with any such degree of concern over her. No, René’s attitude toward her, she thought, was one of possessiveness, like a dog with a new bone. There was nothing in that to preen herself over and much to annoy her.

  She particularly did not appreciate the way he came up behind her and stood listening as she sat having wine and cakes with the marquis when the rehearsal was over. They had been talking of this and that, with the governor, like some royal personage, asking questions or introducing topics and she merely responding. He asked if she had family and friends, indicating with a few words that he meant other than her mother and father, whom he knew were no longer living. She told of her grandfather in Le Havre and also of her estrangement from him.

  “Ah, yes, I knew the gentleman in New France to the north, I believe.”

  “Did you really?” she asked, her eyes lighting with pleasure.

  “It was some time ago, before I was appointed governor of Trois-Rivières. But I remember your grandfather striding around in a cloak of beaver fur so long it swept the ground. He always declared he would rather be warm than fashionable. It was a sentiment I thought quite practical at the time.”

  She laughed. “I daresay he is still the same; he was when last I saw him. And did you know my mother as a girl, perhaps?”

  “Indeed, a most charming creature. You have a great look of her, as I remember. I’ll never forget the despair among the beaus when she married. That was her first husband I speak of, naturally.”

  “Her first husband? What can you mean? There was only one.”

  “But I was sure… Your mother’s name was Marie Claire? Marie Claire Le Blanc?”

  “Yes, but I never heard that she had been married before. Who could he have been? And what became of him?”

  The governor stared at her for long seconds, then it was as if a shutter closed somewhere behind his eyes. “Perhaps I was mistaken, mademoiselle. I must have been. Forgive me.”

  “But you had the name correct,” she protested
in puzzlement.

  “Correct name, perhaps, but most likely the wrong woman. My poor memory. In any case, the man I was thinking of died in the wilderness, as I recall. The lady married again soon after.”

  “In New France?”

  “So I believe.”

  That was all right, then. Cyrene’s own parents had met in New France but had been married at Le Havre.

  It was then that René spoke from where he stood behind them. “If that is the end of the family history, Cyrene, ma chérie, shall we go now? Acting, I find, is most fatiguing. I long for my bed.”

  Madame Pradel sauntered to René’s side as Cyrene turned to look up inquiringly at him. The older woman gave a tinkling laugh of appreciation as she heard his comment. Her tone suggestive, she said, “Among other things, I don’t doubt.”

  René did not glance in her direction. He stepped around Cyrene’s chair and offered his arm. Drawing her to her feet, entwining her arm in his so that she was held to his side, he looked down at her, the smile he gave her heated with promise as he agreed, “Among other things.”

  Cyrene made no move to remonstrate him, either at the governor’s house or on the short walk back to his lodgings.

  When they were inside, however, and the door closed behind them, she drew away from him.

  Over her shoulder she said, “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know very well. Why did you sweep me from under the nose of the governor and all the others as if you could not wait to bed me?”

  “Perhaps it was for that exact reason.”

  It was more than that, René knew. He resented the ease with which she seemed able to talk to Armand and even Vaudreuil while she had hardly a half-dozen words to say to him at any given time. Knowing the cause did not make it any easier to bear.

  “Indeed?” she said, her voice chill. “What are you waiting for, then? If that is your pleasure, help me out of these clothes and let us retire to bed at once.”

  He heard the derision in her voice, saw the pain that fueled it. He was not unmoved by either; it was just that they did not count against his great need of her or his certain knowledge that there was communication of a vital kind between them as they lay in bed. Whether she knew it or not, or whether or not she willed it, there was also to be found surcease for his doubts and sanctuary, however temporary, from his fears.