for as long as you need it. Don’t be deceived.
I must go back to when our new baby was born. The birth was easier than the first two—quicker, anyway. It was another boy; healthy, bonny, with good lungs and the same head of thick dark hair that Antoine had, and the little one I lost. We called him Francois-Georges. My husband kept buying me things—flowers and china and jewelry, lace and scent and books that I never read. So one day this made me cry. I shouted at him, it’s not as if I’ve done anything clever, anyone can have a baby, stop trying to buy me off. A kind of storm of crying overtook me, and when it was over I was left with stinging eyes and a heaving chest and an aching throat. My memory seemed to have been wiped clean; if Catherine my maid had not told me that I said such things I wouldn’t have believed it.
Next day Dr. Souberbielle came. He said, “Your husband tells me you’re not very well.” I was simply tired, he said. Childbearing was a great strain. Soon I would feel much better. But no, doctor, I said to him, very politely, I don’t think I’ll ever feel better again.
Whenever I put my baby to my breast, whenever I felt the flow of milk, I felt tears begin to leak out of my eyes; and my mother came, looking business-like and serious, and said that he should be put out to nurse, becasue we were making each other unhappy. It is better for children to be out of Paris, she said, and not to be crying at night and waking their fathers.
Of course, she said, when you get married, you live your first year or two in another world. As long as you’ve got a good man, a man you like, you feel so smug and pleased with yourself. You manage to keep all your problems at bay for that year or two—you think you’re not subject to the rules that govern other people.
“Why should there be rules?” I said. I sounded just like Lucile. That’s what she’d say—why should there be rules?
“And
My mother didn’t need to ask for clarification. She just patted my arm. She said I was not the sort of girl to make a fuss. I had to be told that often these days—or who knows, I might have forgotten, and made one? My mother patted me once more—my hand this time—and said things about girls today. Girls today are romantic, she reckons. They have these strange illusions that when a man takes his marriage vows he means them. In her day, girls understood what was what. You had to come to a practical arrangement.
She found the wet nurse herself, a pleasant, careful woman out at l’Isle-Adam. Pleasant she may be, careful she may be, but I didn’t like to leave my baby. Lucile came with me, to meet the woman, to see if she would do for her own child; and yes, she would. What a neat arrangement! How practical! Lucile has only weeks to go now. How they fuss over her; you’ve never seen such a fuss. No question, though, of her feeding the mite herself. Her husband and her mother have forbidden it. She has sterner duties; there are parties to go to, after all. And General Dillon will prefer her bosom a discreet, agreeable size.
I don’t really blame Lucile, though I may sound as if I do. It isn’t true that she is Freron’s mistress, though he has this slow, dragging obsession with her that makes him miserable and makes everybody else miserable too. With Herault, as far as I can see, she simply goes through the usual social routine—leading him on, then pulling away. Herault looks slightly weary sometimes, as though he has had rather too much experience of this sort of thing—I suppose he got it at Court. And part of the reason Lucile has fixed on him is that she wants to get back at Caroline Remy, who made her so confused when she was just married and hadn’t learned all the tricks. Oh, I was relieved when I knew that Lucile was pregnant! I thought, this at least postpones things. But I didn’t hope for more than a postponement. I watch Georges. I watch his eyes following her. I wouldn’t expect anyone to refuse him. If you think that’s an impossible attitude for me to take, then it just shows that you don’t know him well enough. Perhaps you’ve only heard him making a speech once. Or passed him in the street.
Only once I did blunder in, talking to Lucile’s mother, trying to ease the situation because I thought it needed easing. “Does she—” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. “Does she have a very hard time with Camille?”
Madame Duplessis raised her eyebrows in that way she has, that makes her seem clever. “No harder than she wants,” she said.
But then, just as I was turning away, feeling rather sick about it all and apprehensive about what my future was to be, Mme. Duplessis put out her little be-ringed hand and took me by the sleeve—I remember this, it was like a little pinch, cloth not skin—and said to me one of the few real things that this artificial woman has ever said. “You do believe, I hope, that all this now is out of my control?”
I wanted to say, Madame, you have brought up a monster, but it would not have been fair to her. Instead I said, “It is as well she is pregnant.”
Mme. Duplessis murmured,
All this summer, as in the summers since ’88, our apartment was full of people coming and going; strange names, strange faces, some of them becoming less strange as the weeks went on, and some of them, frankly, more. Georges was out a good deal, keeping odd hours; he gave dinners at the Palais-Royal, at restaurants as well as at home. We entertained the people they call Brissotins, though not often Brissot himself. There was a lot of uncharitable talk about the wife of the Minister of the Interior, whom they call “Queen Coco”—some joke that Fabre started off. Other people came late at night, after the meetings of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers. There was Rene Hebert—Pere Duchesne, people call him, from the name of his foul news sheet. Georges said, “We have to put up with these people.” There was a man called Chaumette, scruffy and sharp-featured. He hated the aristocrats and he also hated prostitutes, and the two things used to get quite confused in his mind. They talked of the need to arm the whole city, against the Austrians and against the royalists. “When the time comes,” Georges said.
I thought, he talks like a man who has circumstance by the throat, but really he is making his calculations, he is carefully weighing the odds. He has only once made a mistake—last summer, when we had to run away. You will say, what was it, after all? A few weeks skulking out of Paris, and then an amnesty, and things go on as before. But picture me, that summer night at Fontenay, saying good-bye, trying to keep my self-control and put a good face on things, knowing that he was going to England and fearing that he might never come back. It just shows, doesn’t it, how much worse things can get when you think you’ve hit rock-bottom? Life has more complications in store than you can ever formulate or imagine. There are many ways of losing a husband. You can do it on several levels, the figurative and the actual. I operate on all of them, it seems.
Faces come and go … Billaud-Varennes, who was once Georges’s part-time clerk, has met up with this actor Collot, whom Camille calls “much the worst person in the world.” (He says that about a lot of people these days.) A well-suited pair they are, wearing their identical dyspeptic expressions. Robespierre avoids Hebert, is cool to Petion, just civil to Vergniaud. Brissot twitters, “We must try to avoid personalities.” Chaumette will not speak to Herault, which Herault declares no loss. Fabre examines everyone through his lorgnette. Freron talks about Lucile. Legendre, our butcher, says he makes nothing of the Brissotins. “I have no education,” he says, “and I am as good a patriot as you could find.” Francois Robert is agreeable to everybody, thinking that he has a career to make; all the fight has gone out of him since last summer, when he was thrown into gaol.
