Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution Read online

  So my wise mother said, “Very well, then, I will prepare you for society, to meet your perfect mate.” I thanked her profusely. I knew I was a gauche girl, so I welcomed this opportunity, especially when she told me the next day that she had hired me a tutor. Now tutors figured prominently in two of the novels I had read. It seems gauche girls couldn’t refuse them, and well-intentioned mothers kept hiring them. I half hoped mine would turn out to be an old music master, whose hands trembled when he turned the pages of the music, whose voice was dry and crackly when he sang. Yet I also knew my teacher would be nothing of the sort and that, as in my favorite novels, my destiny was laid out before me.

  My tutor was an accomplished music and dance master from Orléans, who, Maman pointed out, only came to the finest houses. His name was Raoul Leforges, and when I met him he was dressed fashionably in black silk, from the ribbon on the queue of his powdered wig to his high-collared coat to his knee breeches and black-and-white-striped stockings. He held a black beaver-skin hat in his left hand and bowed graciously to me. No one had ever bowed to me before, and I thought I had never seen a more handsome or a more striking man.

  Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse had prepared me for such a thing, and so had other novels that we circulated in secret at the convent school, especially the one reserved only for girls in their last year: Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses. Even then, to read it you had to be approved by a committee of head girls and swear oaths that could send you straight to hell, and you could only have the book for twenty-four hours at a time.

  The first lesson started with Monsieur Leforges presenting his hand, without saying a word. He nodded, and I stepped back, thinking we were going to dance, and stopped.

  “No, no,” he said, “look at your feet.”

  I did, and was embarrassed for them.

  Monsieur Leforges had Maman’s permission to break the gaucherie out of me all summer, and he did it through chastisement, rigorous hours, and occasional encouragement. More than once, as I performed a particularly shameful step, he tapped me firmly on the behind with his bamboo cane, and I glowed beneath and above my muslin.

  He was preparing me for my first ball, which would be at the château de Beauregard, the home of the count. As well as my entrance into society, it was the first fête of the new season, and the count wanted to make sure no one wanted for anything and that his fête would set the standard for all the rest to come. That warm September night, as the orchestra played some gentle Lully and before I had to hasten up the marble stairs so I could descend them in slow, graceful steps, I lingered by the refreshment tables. I was too nervous to sample anything, but I swore to myself I would have my fill after I danced my first dance, which I was sure would be in a kind of daze.

  Then I would retire here for most of the night.

  On a table that stretched the length of the room lay rows of corniottes, little three-cornered hats made out of cheese pastries; religieuses, also known as nun cakes; almond pastries in the shape of yellow, green, and red fish; puff pastry with almond filling (which I loved when I escaped from convent school and sat in a pâtisserie in Orléans last winter); plum, lemon, and strawberry tarts; pear cake with red currant jelly; and pears cooked in wine, lemon, and sugar.

  I leaned over the bowls to breathe in the fragrant syrup. And then, in a hundred glasses set in bright silver cups, gleamed strawberry ices. At the end rose a pyramid of candies: dark chocolate, sweet lemon, almond macaroon. And at every pillar, under every arch, stood a sober servant holding a silver tray of tall glasses of sparkling white wine.

  I had worked harder than I ever had in my life all that summer to become a lady; to play piano passably; to know how to curtsy with subtle nuances of difference to a marquis, to a count, to a father; to talk to servants in a firm yet gentle tone; to walk with grace and dignity; to converse by asking questions and by making witty interjections; to sing somewhat respectable duets; and especially, to master the art of the dance. And Monsieur Leforges, the nonpareil of style and taste, had been my taskmaster in all of these. I deserved all the rewards I could reap now of pastries, tarts, ices, and wine. But I had grown to worship my stern and handsome tutor, who said I dare not lose my concentration through even one taste or sip until I had proven myself on the ballroom floor—and through those curtsies that I would bestow on the crowd first, which we had worked on all of a particularly sultry August afternoon. He said he deserved his reward too, although I was sure Maman was paying him well.

  Then before I knew it the count had me by the arm, had guided me past the perfumed pear bowls and to the top of the stairs. I was afraid for a moment and thought I might dash into the corridor behind me, which led, in flickering light, to a long hall where loomed tiles of marching musketeers and portraits of every king of France and his queen up to Louis XIII. It wasn’t an attractive thought to run in the half-dark in that direction, and the count still held my arm, as if he intuited my fear.

  The music stopped. The count whispered, “May the Virgin be with you,” though I never thought of him as a devout man, and we began the slow descent, then paused halfway, so everyone could regard me.

  Now it was disconcerting and wonderful at once, hovering as if in midair in a gauze gown and white taffeta skirt with tiny red roses.

  All the silk-clad crowd looked up at me, a hundred candles lighting their faces, powdered wigs, and coiffured hair, their smiling, expectant faces, the proud faces of my parents. Everyone I loved was there, with a soft glow over them all.

  My nervousness melted, and I felt ready to enter their world, to be one of those who moved with grace and dignity and beauty under crystal chandeliers and marble stairways. The gauche girl had suddenly dropped away, and now I, too, would lightly touch gloved hand to gloved hand, a fan dangling from my own wrist, my satin-slippered feet gliding over the bright floor to the beauty and order of Rameau’s music, which dictated the orderly and beautiful movements of the dance. The music started again, and I descended.

  It’s a marvelous thing to be young and at the radiant center of one’s world. The problem, of course, is that so often that radiance is purely of one’s own imagination, and its light of such short duration.

  One thinks differently when one is young, if one thinks at all. It seemed to me that Monsieur Leforges was the world of charm and grace. I gave my heart to that world. My tutor religiously followed Rameau’s Art of the Dance, and I religiously followed him in everything, and by the end of that evening I had followed him too far.

  I never made it to the tables waiting for me with their sweet rewards. After I had been the center of all the world and had danced with ease in a circle of taffeta and perfumed lace cuffs, Monsieur Leforges claimed his own reward. The night of my triumph I was vanquished by my tutor in the small room built for a secretary of state in the Renaissance, at the end of the portrait gallery of kings and musketeers. The tiny red roses on my taffeta skirt were crushed. I stared at the gold bells in the coat of arms of the lords of Beauregard that hung from the gilt ceiling. Monsieur Leforges abruptly got up, saying he had to return to the ballroom. He had to dance late into the night, he said, with the guests. As a professional dancer, that was his duty. He did not ask me to go. I didn’t know whether to follow him or wait for him to ask me, and all of a sudden I was alone. At first it seemed intolerable, and I couldn’t move from my position on the Turkish carpet. Then it seemed a relief to be alone in the dim room, with the glow of one wall sconce reaching up to the Beauregard coat of arms. I stayed a long time with the golden bells. They seemed, in the sagacity of their silence, their ancient age, and their loftiness in the shadows, mildly comforting.

  A fortnight later I made my way down the steep streets and the old stone stairways in the falling dusk. I pulled my collar high and my broad hat down as the first, fine September rain made slick the cobblestones and softened the dusty streets. Maman had put a date to my marriage now with the sugar merchant, and I would lay the matter before Raoul.

  He
always had an answer.

  I had left my chaperone, the stern Agnès, at the market and went early for a lesson at my tutor’s. Feeling the urgency of the situation, I walked past his protesting valet, opened the tall doors of the salon, and saw my dance master on the settee on the far side of the piano, engaged with a wealthy widow of the town. Yards of velvet skirt lay crumpled about her hips, revealing fine legs (far longer than mine).

  A few days earlier I had been so naïve as to believe that settee was reserved solely for me.

  “Oh, it’s your little convent-school girl, Raoul,” the widow said languidly, not shifting her position. “She must have been quite a challenge.”

  Monsieur Leforges’s game with me was up, and he ended it with a cold panache all his own. “Madame Lambert,” my tutor said evenly, not taking his arms from around her, “is having her lesson. You may return at your proper time.”

  I will never forget how then, without lifting her head from a silk pillow, Madame Lambert let loose a lazy peal of humiliating, vulgar laughter.

  Monsieur Leforges chuckled too.

  The Chase

  My father taught me to ride to the hunt that autumn.

  He had found out about my liaison with the dance tutor through a letter I had lost at the count’s château. The count had informed him. I never knew what Papa went through then, but the count’s discretion and Papa’s forgiveness kept a foolish girl from social disgrace. My father didn’t let Maman know, but made her abandon her plans for the mariage de raison with the sugar merchant. He told her I wasn’t ready, and Maman declared to me that because I wanted to choose my own husband like a butcher or a baker’s daughter, I was decidedly common.

  She had reserved for me her worst insult, and the matter was closed.

  She had made a success with her first daughter’s marriage and had one more daughter besides me with which she could make another success. Maman had washed her hands of me, and she handed me over to my father. He told her he was going to drive the silliness out of me by teaching me to hunt. That was fine with me. I had had enough of dancing instruction.

  The hounds were kept in a kennel at the side of the hunting lodge and fed a huge slab of very red deer carcass every evening at five o’clock. The count’s young groom, Benoît, stood between the meat and the lean, even emaciated hounds and kept them at bay with a whip. He finally let them at the meat, and they tore at it and fought and jumped on each other to get at it. It was not a big enough piece of meat for all the hounds. I always felt sorry for the ones that could not make it in for their dinner.

  That autumn the Revolution was still years away. The gold leaves fell from the chestnut trees, and my father taught me to shoot. In the morning we gathered outside the count’s hunting lodge. It was well off the main road, buried in the woods on the grounds of his château. You could smell the forest of pines and chestnuts as soon as you walked out the door.

  The hounds, tails wagging, barking in anticipation, milled about the legs of the horses. We sat on horseback in a circle now, an odd assortment: my father, tall and gaunt in an old cloak; the count, of perfect physique with gold braid on his coat; the baron de Tardiff, short, portly, and dark; my brother-in-law, Paul, tall, slender, and fair; Philippe, the count’s son, a year younger than I, skinny, swimming in his coat; and I in my riding cloak, three-cornered hat, and jockey boots, all in the English style, as my maidservant, the wise Claudette, prescribed.

  I was on the horse that my father had given me, a three-year-old sorrel mare I named La Belle Rouge, shortened to La Rouge, after my father’s stallion, Le Bleu. (He wasn’t really blue but a dappled gray.) The men’s grooms sat on horseback just behind them, each with a pistol and a musket just in case one had a problem with a wounded stag or wild boar or a horse with a broken leg.

  The count’s horse took the lead down the narrow track to the meadow, our customary starting point. The horses grew more excited as we approached it, La Rouge’s ears forward and Le Bleu, in front of me, wanting to break out, stepping to the side of the path. Then we heard the hounds.

  When they reached the meadow, the men let the horses have their head. From the cold shadow of the forest I saw the count’s stallion streak out in the early sunlight, followed quickly by the others, their servants bouncing faithfully behind them. Now, my father and I together at the dividing line between shade and light, we let Le Bleu and La Rouge go. I had raced my mare against stallions along roads that summer and had felt her speed, but she was young and uncertain and followed Papa’s lead. Yet she was running flat out now, and my boot heels skimmed the meadow, and I could smell the grass, fresh with the morning, as we flew through it. It was as smooth as walking, twirling my bonnet in my hand, but a thousand times more exhilarating.

  The leaders were nearly across the meadow when a stag bounded out of the grass in front of them; it hung in the air for an instant and disappeared into the thicket on the other side of the meadow. They took off after it. Papa and Jean, his groom, plunged into the thicket after the others, and La Rouge continued her pace, unslackened, so I pulled hard at her reins to turn her left, to slow her down just at the thicket’s edge. I was still not far behind Papa when I heard him curse as a low branch swiped his cheek. But following Papa’s groan was another squealing sound in the brush.

  The commotion of the hounds and horses had flushed a boar, who now charged through the thicket with Papa after him. La Rouge heard the sound too, and its shifting unfamiliarity, as if the brush itself were squealing, frightened her. She bolted back toward the meadow, and I reined her in there and had just calmed her down when I heard a shot from the direction in which Papa and Jean had gone. La Rouge whinnied but got no response from the other horses. We rushed through the thicket in their wake; both Rouge and I could sense where the others were. She dashed headlong down a gulley; I was obliged to stand upright in the stirrup, her rump above me, it was so steep. Ahead of us lay a dry streambed, strewn with leaves under a sheer rock face.

  Le Bleu, riderless, stood under the lee of the rock.

  On the ground, amid copper leaves and stones, lay Papa. Le Bleu must have bolted and thrown his master when the boar, cornered in a rocky gulley, turned on its pursuers. Jean had shot his musket, wounding the boar and increasing its desperation, and was now reloading.

  The hounds leaped and barked at the boar; it grunted, lunged at them, hating them, its tusks thrusting in the air and the hounds leaping back.

  Then the boar went after the source of what had caused him pain and, before Jean could fire again, charged through the dogs and gored him in the ankle. Jean dropped the musket on the rocks.

  Jean’s scream, the boar’s fierce grunts, the hound’s howling, and the horse’s whinnies filled the gulley; then the boar paused, the dogs keeping back, and it turned toward my father, a welcome quarry down on its level among the stones. In the seconds that the boar paused to consider its second prey, I pulled as hard as I could at Rouge’s bit, and we reached the bottom of the gorge. As the boar charged my father, I jumped down from my saddle, snatched up the musket, and shot into the nape of its tough neck. The boar lay still among the leaf-littered stones, a few inches from my father’s chest. The hounds were on it in an instant.

  That night at the count’s table we enjoyed boar’s head along with haunch of venison in chestnuts, though I myself did not partake of the boar. Above us hung a tapestry of the hunt: a man in a red-and-blue cloak on a white steed leaping over a log, in the grasses a white hart not far before him, about to disappear into a forest of a hundred shades of green. I always preferred to think he got away, across the meadow strewn with the mille-fleurs, the thousand flowers, into the woods out of which rabbits peek: the hunter still has his crossbow slung across his back. The joy is obviously in the chase. The enormous hearth flames licked massive logs; light and shadows flickered across the oak paneling.

  My father had attended Jean’s wound and said Jean might always walk with a slight limp. Papa himself had a twisted ankle from his fall,
and he had his foot up on an embroidered cushion and was in jovial spirits.

  He insisted that I sit at table with the men. The count’s son had retired early; Paul had gone home to spend the evening with my older sister Marguerite and their little daughter, Marie, and the men of the château de Beauregard were toasting me now.

  “To Annette, a huntress the likes of whom haven’t been seen since the days of Diane de Poitiers,” the baron said, which made Papa beam. Diane was his heroine from the days when the kings and queens hunted through these forests.

  “To the huntress!” they cried.

  Everyone laughed and drained their glasses, and with my father glancing proudly over at me, I felt I belonged just as much here, with the huge fireplace and the wine and laughter, as in the ballroom under a thousand tapers of shining chandeliers and the carefully timed movements of hand and leg and foot, the fan swinging or lifted for coy messages.

  What else might I do now? I was glad now Raoul Leforges had his rich widow and dozens of other naïve or not-so-naïve girls, and that I was free. What a purgatory to live only through another—him or a sugar merchant in Tours. How odd life was, with its twists and turns.

  I was not sure it was proper in a woman to do, but I raised my glass, and in a voice that sounded strangely high, I proposed a toast of my own.

  “To my father,” I said, “who taught me to ride, to hunt, and who would have stared that old boar down if I had not made that unnecessary shot.”

  “To Jean-Paul Vallon!” they sang out, and the firelight flickered on the hunter’s white stallion and on the oak beams high above.