The General's Mistress (38 page)

“Madame St. Elme?” he said, as though for a moment he wasn’t sure. Perhaps I had changed too.

I stepped back from the door. “Please come in, General Ney. I’m glad you were right on time.”

He pulled out his watch from an inner pocket. “Actually, I was early. I’ve been waiting down in the stairwell until it was time.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “You could have come up.”

He looked around for a place to put his hat that wasn’t either on the table set for dinner or on one of the chairs. “I couldn’t have. My mother always hated it when guests were early and threw all her plans off.”

I took the hat from him and cast around. No place to put it. “I’ve just moved in,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll have to put it on the bed in here.” I scurried into my room and dropped it on the bed, then popped back out from behind the curtains.

He was standing in the middle of the salon. The windows were open, letting in the last warm air, though the sun was setting. It was really fall now, and over Paris the stars were high and far away, the evening star glittering through the smoke and cloud, Sirius rising cool in the sky.

He seemed to fill up my room, though he could not be that tall. Still, it was strange to look up a good six inches. I was a tall woman, and unused to it.

I went over and closed the windows to give myself something to do. “It will be cold later,” I said.

“Probably,” he said. “It was last night.”

“The weather is often variable at this time of year.”

“Yes,” he said. “The weather can be different from day to day.”

I looked at him. Blue coat, gold braid, the tricolor sash wrapped around his waist. I had imagined him often, tried to
remember what he looked like from that one brief meeting. I had imagined him before that, the King of Chalices in my tarot deck, the red-haired king, swift in every feeling. And yet the reality was strange. He had a square jaw like a street fighter, but he stood like cavalry.

“Are we going to talk about the weather?” Michel asked.

“We don’t have to,” I said. “We could talk about something else.” He had a small scar across his jawline on the left side, white against his sunburn. A practice foil? A childhood accident?

He looked down, almost as if he had read my thought in my eyes. Down meant straight down my cleavage. I was wearing my new pink gown, a rose so dark it was almost red, with gold trim at the sleeves and waist. Then he took a step back and pulled something out of his pocket. It was a grubby piece of paper, folded many times over. “I brought your letter back.”

For a moment I didn’t know what he meant.

“The one you meant for someone else. ‘I am sending your boots as you requested, along with several pairs of new stockings. I have taken care of the table linens. . . .’” He held the paper out to me.

I felt myself flushing wildly. “You must think me a complete idiot.”

“The letter was for General Moreau?”

“You know that I was with him,” I said, taking it from him.

“I didn’t, but I certainly found that out,” he said. “When Moreau called me into his office last spring and upbraided me for being no gentleman, the kind of cad who cuts in on his senior’s territory, and warned me that if I intended to keep my command in the Army of the Rhine, I had best learn how things are done.”

I drew a deep breath and half-turned away. “I am so sorry,” I said. “I never meant that he should hold it against you. I told
him that nothing had ever happened between us.” I put the paper down very carefully on the table, next to the pewter forks that served me for plate. For a moment I felt my eyes swimming.

“You got worse,” he said. He stepped closer, and I could almost feel him behind me, as solid and trapping as a wall. “I heard he threw you out.”

“He did.” I shrugged. I didn’t look at him. “That’s how it goes sometimes.” I turned and gave him a brilliant, brittle smile.

“I didn’t know,” Michel said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were an actress. I saw you on the stage later.”

“You seem to have turned up for all my most humiliating moments,” I said.

He smiled, and it was grave and kind, not mocking. “You were very bad. But I liked it anyway.”

“I’ve gotten better,” I said. “I only got that part by sleeping with the right person.”

“The fat man I saw you with after?”

I nodded.

“I thought so,” he said. “So I didn’t come up to you.”

“But you were watching me,” I said. “You sent the roses. There was no card.”

“There was when I left them,” he said. “It must have gotten lost.”

Along with my shoes,
I thought. Oh yes, I could see too easily how that had happened. “He gave me money and a part,” I said.

Michel put his head to the side. “Are you trying to make me think worse of you?”

“I want you to know what I am,” I said. “I want you to have no illusions about me.”

“I know what you are,” he said. “At least, I think I do.”

I looked away. I could not stand the expression on his face.
If I looked at him another moment, I would do something I would regret. Like burst into tears. Or kiss him.

“Dinner is nearly ready,” I said. “Would you open the wine?”

I put the length of the room between us, ladling soup and getting out the bread. He handed me into my chair as soon as I had put the plates on the table, and poured the wine deftly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just moved in. I have no servants yet.”

Michel shrugged, breaking off a piece of bread. “I never had servants at all, growing up. We all just did for ourselves. My father was a cooper for the vineyards at Saar-Louis, and there were five of us children, so we all had to do our part. Mother couldn’t have kept up otherwise.”

“Are you the oldest?” I asked.

He shook his head, his mouth full of soup. It took a moment before he swallowed it. “I’m the middle one. My sister Sophie is the oldest. She’s six years older than I am. She was married long before I left home. Margarethe is my other sister, and she’s five years younger, and still lives with my father. Joseph was my older brother, and he was two years older. He was killed at Trebbia last year.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That must be hard.”

He nodded. “And then Charles was my younger brother, two years younger. He died when we were children.”

I caught a sudden breath, as though something had punched me.

“What’s the matter?” Michel said, laying his spoon aside.

“I had a brother named Charles, too,” I said. “Two years younger. He died when I was eight.”

“I was nine,” Michel said. His hand reached for mine across the table. “I didn’t mean—what’s wrong?”

“I can’t even begin to tell you,” I said. “About Charles.
About my family. It’s so complicated.” I shook my head. “It’s too strange. You wouldn’t believe it.”

Michel shrugged. “I believe some pretty strange things.”

“You?” He seemed the picture of a big, honest Saarländer.

“I’m not as wholesome as I look,” he said, smiling.

I couldn’t help but smile back. “You can’t be as bad as you think.”

“Try me,” he said. “Maybe I just need some lessons.”

I laughed and looked away. The desire on his face was so plain. Every emotion was written all over him. I could read him like a book. “Like a soldier from the country looking for sophisticated vices?”

He shrugged again. “In Saar-Louis, vice is having a baby six months after the wedding. We’re wholesome people. Salt of the earth. Hardworking and early-rising and all that. We love our vineyards and our farms and orchards and wells, and our big families and our excellent ham.”

“And you?”

His smile faded. He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “I never belonged there. I’ve always been in love with blood.”

A chill ran down me.

“As a child, I always wanted the darkest stories. When the old men would sit around in the tavern talking about the Seven Years’ War, I wanted to see the stumps of their arms, to touch them. And wondered how I would feel, knowing my arm wasn’t there, how it would feel to lose it, half frightened and half fascinated.” He picked up his glass, the light playing on the stem, on his clear, passionate eyes. “I ran away to the army when I was sixteen. I’d never wanted anything else. This was in ’85, when if I served all my life, I might end a sergeant. A half-lettered thug with a really big sword.” Michel raised an eyebrow at me. “I was a sergeant at twenty. Then the Revolution came.
And suddenly it was a good time to be a thug with a really big sword.”

“I think you’re more than that,” I said. “You couldn’t look at yourself with irony if you weren’t. Man of blood you may be, but you’re a good deal more than a thug.”

“If so, it’s because I chose to be,” he said, lifting the glass again. “If there’s one thing that the Revolution taught me, it’s that we’re all inches from savages. It’s just that I know it more than most. I can’t dress it up in pretty explanations when the bloodlust is on me, pretend that I’m fighting for anything else than the joy in it. That’s why I have to be so careful. And trust in God to help me moderate these passions.”

“You believe in God?” I got up to fetch the chicken and its accompaniments and bring them to the table. “That’s very dated.”

Michel didn’t seem offended. “I do. I believe in God and the teachings of Christ, in the brotherhood of mankind and the inexpressible love of the Holy Spirit.”

I looked at him, as shocked as if he had muttered obscenities. I couldn’t remember hearing anything of the kind before, except as a pious platitude or a clever mockery. It simply wasn’t said in society by intelligent people. But he sat there perfectly composed, getting ready to carve the chicken.

I sat down across from him. “I am only wondering how you can be anything but a rationalist after what you have seen,” I said.

“Like Moreau?” he asked, looking at me, one eyebrow cocked.

I didn’t rise to that bait. Instead I sat back in my chair, my fragile muslin dress looking the color of old blood in the light.

“How can you be anything but a cynic after the things you have seen? How can you really believe that, other than some
vague humanistic aim of good government and freedom from foreign oppression, that there is any greater good in all of this?”

He looked at me, startled. “How can I not?”

Two years ago, I had fancied him my eternal love. Instead he was a stranger, a man I didn’t know. Not really. I wanted to reach out and touch him, for him to tell me something, to know it all and understand. But he was a stranger.

“Don’t you believe in anything?” he asked quietly. “Not gods or destiny? Not justice or beauty or Heaven?”

I took a quick gulp of the wine. It stung my throat and my eyes. “Heaven is no comfort for me,” I said lightly. “I hope it does not exist, as I plan never to reside there. Which is just as well, I suppose. It would be awfully boring, sitting around with Augustine and the Church Fathers, playing the harp and wearing a little white chiton. I’m all fumbles with stringed instruments anyway. Can’t you just see me taking up foot washing in the St. Mary Magdalene room, having seen the error of my ways? Forgiven, but only so much?” I spread my finger and thumb apart.

He raised his chin. “How many men have you killed?”

“What?” There was, unbidden, falling past me, the bandit on the road with no face, the other whose face I had never seen.

“How many men have you killed?” he demanded again, leaning forward, nothing nonchalant in his pose now, just intensity of line and feature.

“One or two, perhaps,” I stammered. “Does it matter?”

“451 dead at Heinsberg, 72 at Maastricht, 967 at Altenkirchen, 244 at Winterthur, close to 1,200 in other actions. These are my casualties, my troops killed by my orders. Close to seven thousand of the enemy. Hundreds who have lost legs or arms or their sight.” His voice was perfectly steady and terribly precise. “So you have shared men’s beds. You have not
dismembered them, or seen your own wounded hacked to pieces by surgeons in a futile attempt to save their lives. You have not written the letters. ‘Dear Madame: I send you your son Jean-Paul in three pieces. I am dreadfully sorry. I made a stupid mistake in the disposition of my left flank!’”

Michel reached for the wine again. “So when I am here, safe and sound, where there is only the guillotine and a crowd of mad ex-Jacobins to fear, please forgive me if I do not die of guilt at the thought of spending the night with a woman I am not married to, or in some other sophisticated vice. It pales next to more than nine thousand counts of murder.”

I sat there in stunned silence while he poured carefully and drained his glass. “And you believe in God?” I asked.

He looked up at me over the gilded rim of the glass. “Of course I believe in God. I have come within inches of death more times than I can count. Men have fallen at my back stricken with the bullets aimed for me. A saber once turned in the air above my head as though it had been stopped by a blade I couldn’t see. I believe in God. I must. In all these slaughters, I am spared. God has something else in mind for me. And given the slaughters to which I aspire, I can only say”—he paused and took a sip of the golden wine. “He delights in it.”

“Delights? You don’t believe, then?”

“In a good and just God?” Michel met my eyes. “Oh, yes, I do. Because, hackneyed as it is, I believe in the Republic. I do believe that this is necessary. It’s better. Not perfect, because nothing made by the hand of man ever is, but better. Better than starvation under a corrupt king. Better than hundreds of thousands of lives stifled and dying for lack of air, living and dying in ignorance, spirits broken by the sameness. By doing as their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them, with
no hope and no choice. It is better that the responsibility of sin be taken on by those who agree to do it.”

His eyes were shaded in the flickering light. “Make no mistake. Our enemies mean to destroy us. If they should win, it will be French citizens who bleed under a Terror like we have never known before, and French children who grow up in ignorance and poverty, condemned to accept it with the fatality of the inevitable. If we go back, we will go all the way back. It will be 1648 again. Who knows how many hundred years it will be again, before we once again have the idea of revolution?” He gave me a sideways smile, rueful and sharp. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know that my hands are covered with blood.”