The First Garden (6 page)

F
OR A LONG TIME FLORA
Fontanges has been a stealer of souls, in hospitals, asylums, the street, salons, backstage. She would lie in wait for the dying or those in sound health, for the innocent and the mad, for ordinary people and for others full of pretensions, for those who are masked and those who go through life exposed, their faces bare as hands, for those without love and others who are radiant with overflowing passion, like monstrances.

She takes from them their gestures and their tics, the way they bend their heads and lower their eyes, and she feeds on their blood and their tears. She learns how to live and how to die. She has models who are alive, and the dead laid out on their hospital beds. How long has she spent at the bedsides of the dying, spying on their last breath, on the supreme moment when the features stiffen and all at once go white, like old bones? She has held the little mirror to dying mouths, thinking to see the soul's passing in the mist that forms, wanting to take hold of that evanescent soul and give to it an additional life, wanting to use it this very night when she plays
Camille.

And Raphaël? Perhaps he has no soul. All that she can be sure about him is his strange beauty, utterly animal and disconcerting. Is it possible that he has no mystery or any hidden dream, like smooth water? Here there is nothing for Flora Fontanges, who is a thief, to steal. Raphaël eludes her, like innocence.

That night, Flora Fontanges had a dream. Her daughter Maud appeared to her, her long black freshly combed hair framing her face, falling to her shoulders and her chest, gliding from her waist to her hips. Maud talked with her mouth shut, her lips unmoving, with no line stirring on her very white face. Maud's voice was audible as if from far away, behind a wall of ice. She declared that Raphaël had the name of an archangel and the teeth of a wolf. At that moment Raphaël's dazzling smile filled all the space in Flora Fontanges's dream, erasing the image of Maud at one stroke. His smile, like the Cheshire cat's, floated in the still air, while Raphaël's face and body remained hidden. Then little by little his smile disappeared, like a drawing under an eraser. It began to turn very dark and very cold in Flora Fontanges's dream.

O
NE CLIMBS UP AND DOWN
in the city, one sees the mountain, then no longer sees it. The layout of the streets is unpredictable. Her past life and her present life also lie in wait for everything that passes, like a small wild animal alert for its prey. Flora Fontanges listens to Raphaël's stories, draws from them characters and roles. Sometimes she can see clearly before her the women Raphaël has conjured up, dressed in the finery of a bygone age. She breathes the breath of life into their nostrils and begins to live fully in their place. Is enchanted by this power she possesses.

At the residence of Monsieur le Gouverneur they ape the court of the King of France. The men have curly wigs and hats with plumes, the women, tall fluted headdresses of muslin and lace. There is wrangling over precedences and privileges in a residence from which the bark has just been stripped. While all around comes the growl of the forest's green and resinous breath, sometimes advancing by night like an army on the march, threatening at any moment to encircle us, to close in on us and take us for its own.

The governor's daughter is twelve years old; she turns in her bed, inhales through the walls the forest's vast breath. The howling of wolves mingles with the wild smell of the earth. The governor's daughter is overcome by nightmares and dread. Says she wants to go back to France. Her father reprimands her, complaining that she is not brave, promising she will be married soon, to an officer of the Carignan regiment.

The governor's daughter has blonde hair, and she is slender and tall. She dances a ravishing minuet. When night falls her eyes are dilated by fear.

They have named her Angélique.

For a moment Flora Fontanges tries on at her wrists the chilly little hands of the governor's daughter. She feels a morbid fear. Frees herself at once to join Raphaël, who is waiting for her at the door to the General Hospital.

T
HEY ARE THERE, BOTH OF
them, amid the disorientation of the convent and of time, heedful of what role the life of the past might be playing in this closely guarded place.

On the wall, three young sisters painted by Plamondon testify to their earthly monastic existence, even though they have long since been merely ashes and dust. They persist in a
tableau vivant
as a witness, captured for all time by the eyes of a painter who apprehended them and followed them to the threshold of the mystery, before he too fell silent and vanished into dust.

In a glass showcase, among the pious souvenirs on display there, are a little wrought-iron hammer and scissors, the work of a nun who died in 1683, according to the Sister who guards the museum.

Raphaël and Flora Fontanges must awaken a little nun, faceless and nameless, and keep her alive beneath their gaze, long enough to imagine her story.

Please God, thinks Flora Fontanges, let me be clairvoyant again, let me see with my eyes, hear with my ears, let me suffer a thousand deaths and a thousand pleasures with all my body and all my soul, let me be another woman again. This time, it is a nun at the General Hospital, and

I shall remake her life from the beginning.

“It's quite an accomplishment to go back in time and draw their secrets from the dead,” Raphaël murmurs in Flora Fontanges's ear.

Once again they agree, perfect accomplices in a game that enchants them. They wish and are able to summon the past to the city, to restore the light and colour to the air that covered everything when the city was merely a village tucked away between river and forest. Now it is a matter of reviving a faded sun, of replacing it in the sky like a ball of light: is that so difficult, after all?

The high tide spreads itself from shore to shore; one can hear it lapping gently against the wharfs when the forge is still and the flame stands briefly erect and motionless. A girl wearing a leather apron that falls to her feet is doing a boy's job at her father's forge on rue Saint-Paul. Standing in the heat and glare of the fire, she wields the forge, the hammer, and the tongs, she pounds the iron, gleaming and streaming with sweat, then takes it from the furnace to the basin of cool water in which she plunges her work. The flame is no longer on her face and she is all black in the dark. Her father, arms folded, watches with admiration as she works, and his heart is heavy, for his daughter must leave him soon to enter the convent.

For a long time she has been childlike and good, the delight of her father and stepmother. Then, at the table one day, she declared before everyone that she wanted to become a blacksmith like her father. There were no boys in the family. Six daughters from the first marriage, like a garden in which all the flowers are blue, without the shadow of another color. She wrote with a black pencil on a sheet of white paper, in highly wrought and ornate letters:
THIBAULT AND DAUGHTER, BLACKSMITHS
. You could see at once that it would make a very pretty sign. The father smiled, quite dazed, and overcome by uncertainty and doubt. The stepmother shrieked that she must be possessed by the devil to be thinking of such a thing. She talked of bringing in the exorcist.

A tall girl with broad shoulders, a sweet face, and strong hands effortlessly lifts heavy weights, and she smiles almost all the time. Guillemette Thibault is a fine name, one to bear all one's life, never to change for the name of some stranger who would take her as his wife. She has already refused two suitors and she wants to take over from her father at the forge. Everyone has joined in to reason with her, the stepmother first, then her five sisters and the curé. The father is silent and lowers his head.

She listens to them, her face leaning into the shadow of her coif, her sturdy hands flat on her knees. What she is hearing now has been told her time and time again. There is men's work and women's work, and the world is in order. Marriage or the convent: for a girl there's no other way out. She looks at her hands on her knees, she listens to her heart beat in her chest, and it's as if all the strength and the joy in her heart and in her hands were freezing inch by inch.

Guillemette Thibault decided in favour of the convent. But before she entered the convent her father allowed her to forge on the anvil and in the fire a pair of scissors and a little hammer, so delicate and finely made that she brought them along to the General Hospital with her trousseau and her dowry, as an offering.

What she feared most in the world, that her name be taken from her, subsequently came to pass. After two years of novitiate, she became Sister Agnès-de-la-Pitié and no one ever heard of Guillemette Thibault again.

T
HEY LIKE WALKING IN THE
port at the end of the day, when a warm mist rises from the water, and sky, earth and water, ships, wharfs, docks, sailors and strollers, are mingled, mixed, confused in a single white and hazy substance.

So much looking at the river has given her a vacant stare; she can no longer sort out her images, but lets herself be assailed by all that passes, then passes again, near and far, on the water and in the harbour and even in her memory.

He feels like waving his hand in front of Flora Fontanges's eyes to bring her back to him, make her stop staring into space.

“Flora, what is it you see that I don't?”

He has never before used her Christian name and he struggles to meet her gaze. The water hovers, as far as the eye can see. Small waves pound the pier, oily filaments congeal at the edge and glimmer gold and violet.

She stretches her arms towards the watery void.

“Out there, the
Empress of Britain,
moored at pier 21!”

Her voice changes. She appears to be speaking to no one, inclines her head as if fascinated. All that seems to matter to her now is the brownish water close against the pier, with its greasy traces of oil. The horizon is blocked, she thinks. The breadth and majesty of the river prove to be obstructed by the massive white bulk of the
Empress of Britain.
Flora Fontanges has nothing to look at now but the expanse of dirty water between the pier and the liner, which spreads before her eyes as the
Empress
wrenches herself from the earth, in long oily trails.

Is it her greatest fear that her true face will suddenly loom into view and appear before her, mingling with the huddled crowd that is leaning on the rails? The broad waves of her hair falling to her shoulders, her small face as it was before all the masks of the theatre, hard as a stone, her gaze fixed obstinately on the water, between the pier and the boat. While on the pier crowded with people waving handkerchiefs and shouting inaudibly into the wind, perhaps M. and Mme Eventurel will appear, both of them tall and thin in their dark clothes: Madame's white face speckled with black by her thick veil, Monsieur's silhouette tightly buttoned into a velvet-collared black coat.

If M. and Mme Eventurel were to show themselves again to Flora Fontanges, she would see that they are deeply offended and angry with her for all eternity, motionless and congealed in their resentment, and that she just has to disappear again now, as she did in 1937, on the
Empress of Britain.

She says “Good Lord” and buries her face in her hands.

She cannot, however, stop a thin young girl in a severely tailored grey suit from haunting her memory, from making the same movements as in 1937, from experiencing again the same fever and the same guilty joy at the mere thought of leaving M. and Mme Eventurel, of crossing the ocean and becoming an actress in the face of all opposition.

In the time it takes the Eventurels' adopted daughter to slip on the black dress, the embroidered apron and the flimsy headdress of the
Empress of Britain
chambermaids, the piers have disappeared altogether, far behind the wake
of the ship. M. and Mme Eventurel have already toppled onto the horizon. Forever.

“I went away on the
Empress of Britain
and never came back.”

He has stopped paying attention to what she says. He is following his own thoughts, looking out straight ahead, at the river covered with mist, studying the passage of his own moving images, evoking them himself, giving them their proper life and form as they appear, as if he were preparing a history lesson with slides.

“Let's go now, Raphaël dear! There's nothing more to see here.”

He says you can look at the river and question the horizon forever.

A
LWAYS, PEOPLE HAVE DONE THEIR
utmost to see as far as they can, as if they might be able to extend their gaze to the gulf and surprise the ocean at her source, as it begins coming near us for our happiness or our despair. In winter, nothing comes at all because of the ice, and the waiting for spring is interminable.

In the winter of 1759, after the battle of Sainte-Foy had been won, they reached an agreement with the English occupier that lasted a few months, with the hope of seeing the arrival that spring of French ships laden with arms and munitions, with provisions and blue-uniformed soldiers. Never has the breakup of the ice, shattering and jamming, never has the cawing of the first crow after a winter without birds, been more eagerly awaited. But when at last the surface of the water started moving again, driven by an unseen force, it was English vessels that were making their way along the river, numerous and in orderly fashion. France had ceded us to England like a burden to be shed. What happened to us then, suddenly, like an ill wind, was almost indistinguishable from utter despair.

R
APHAEL TALKS ABOUT A BYGONE
time, long before the English conquest, at the very beginning of the world, when every step that was taken upon the naked earth was wrenched from the brush and the forest.

They are all there on the shore, waiting for the ships from France. Governor, Intendant and gentlemen in their Sunday best, bedecked, beplumed and covered with frills and furbelows, in spite of the heat and mosquitoes. A few nuns resist the wind as best they can amid a great stirring of veils, of wimples, scapulars, cornets, and neckcloths. Newly disbanded soldiers, freshly shaven, following orders, wearing clean shirts, eyes open so wide that the sun looks red to them, waiting for the promise that is marching towards them along the vast river that shimmers in the sun.

Below, at the top of the cape, is the sketch of a city planted in the wildness of the earth, close against the breath of the forest, filled with the cries of birds and muffled stirrings in the suffocating heat of July.

This time it's not just flour and sugar, rabbits, roosters, and hens, cows and horses, pewter jugs and horn-handled knives, lengths of wool and muslin, tools and cheese-cloth: this is a cargo of marriageable girls, suited for reproduction, which is the matter at hand.

New France has a bad reputation in the mother country. People speak of a “place of horror” and of the “suburbs of hell.” Peasant women need coaxing. They have to turn to the Salpêtrière, that home for former prostitutes, to populate the colony.

Now they are crowded here onto the bridge, huddled together like a bouquet too tightly bound. The wings of their headdresses beat in the wind and they wave handkerchiefs above their heads. The men, in ranks on the shore, stare at them silently. The decency of their costumes has been observed, at once and with satisfaction, by the Governor and the Intendant. Now they must find out, even before the women's faces can be distinguished, whether they are modest and their persons carefully tended. The rest of the meticulous, precise examination will be carried out at the proper time and place, little by little, even as they make their way towards us with their young bodies dedicated unreservedly to man, to work, and to motherhood.

In the absence of peasant women, they must now be content with these persons of no account who have come from Paris, with a dowry from the King of fifty
livres
per head. Though they already know how to sew, knit, and make lace (this they have been taught at the Salpêtrière, “a place as ignominious as the Bastille”), we'll just see the looks on their faces when they have to help the cow to calve and change its litter.

Now their features can be seen clearly in the light, framed with white linen and wisps of hair in the wind. Some are red and tanned by the sun and the sea air, others are bloodless and skeletal, consumed by seasickness and fear.

The men stand on the shore, on this splendid day, as if they were seeing the northern lights. Now and then cries burst from their heaving chests.

“Ah! the pretty redhead! That lovely one in blue! The little one with curls!”

When men have been without women for so long, save for a few squaws, it's a pleasure to see such a fine collection of petticoats and rumpled linen coming toward us. It has been arranged, between Monsieur the Governor, Monsieur the Intendant, and ourselves, the marriageable boys, that we would take them as they are, these
filles du Roi,
fresh and young and without a past, purified by the sea during a long rough crossing on a sailing ship. Thirty passengers died along the way and had to be cast overboard like stones. The survivors will long be haunted by the lurching and pitching, so deeply does the ocean's great flux still inhabit their bodies, from the roots of their hair to the tips of their toes. They are like a procession of drunken girls as they make their way to us along the gangplank. Their lovely shoulders straining under shawls crossed on their breasts
sway
like sailors on a spree.

Monsieur the Intendant is categorical.
All discharged soldiers, some of them dealing as brigands, will be barred from fur-trading and hunting and the honours of the Church and the religious communities if within a fortnight after the arrival of the
filles du Roi,
they have not married.

The fattest ones were chosen first, during brief visits in the house lent for that purpose by Madame de la Peltrie. It is better that they be plump, to resist the rigours of the climate, so they say, and besides, when you've consumed misery through all the pores of your skin in the King's armies for years, it is comforting to sink your teeth into a good solid morsel, for the time God grants us in this land that has been a barren waste since the creation of the world. In reality, only hunting and fishing are possible here. The condition of
coureur de bois
would suit us well enough, although it is the King's will that we be fettered to a piece of land covered with standing timber, with a woman who talks on and on, claiming that she has emerged from between our ribs to take her first breath here, in the earthly paradise. What answer is there, then, to that expectation, that desire for absolute love which torments most of the women? Only the succession of days and nights will win out over their fine ardour. That's because it wears you down in the end, to withstand the fire of summer, the fire of winter, the same intolerable burning from which the only escape is a wooden shack fifteen feet square, covered with straw. In the dwelling's only bed we take each other, and then again, and give birth and accumulate children, it is where we spend our dying days, then breathe our last. Sometimes it resembles a pigsty, and tears mingle with sperm and sweat, while generations pass and life constantly remakes itself, like the air we breathe.