The Last Banquet (23 page)

That was how Manon and Laurant, Charlot and his family found me.

The duke had come from Saulx, drawn apparently by the flatness of Virginie’s reply to his letter and the sadness of my last to him. Lisette was with him, and their son. The boys had Tigris with them on a lead. She was getting too big to be led but her blindness made her more docile than nature intended. They were grinning. At least they were until Charlot froze and ordered them back to the house. Manon took one look at me in tears beside Virginie and said she’d take them. After a glance from Charlot, his wife said she would return to the chateau too.

‘When?’ he asked, once we were alone.

‘Just now. I thought she was sleeping.’

He looked down at his sister, eyes closed in the shade, her hand draped across a book split at the spine and worn at the edges from use, and smiled sadly. We both knew what Charlot was thinking, that she looked happier now than at any time in the last five years. Losing Jean-Pierre began her sadness, having Laurant made it worse. Only I knew it had taken the lake to end it.

‘I’ll stay with you until the funeral.’

He took my hand as if to shake it and kept it gripped. The years had given his face a gravitas his youth never hinted at. Somehow he’d turned from the wild one, dangerous and beautiful, to a solid member of the nobility, a counterweight to the dissolute fops who’d encouraged the king so disastrously in our recent and ruinous wars. His friendship could make or break a man’s life and prospects, and looking into his eyes I knew I had his friendship for life. Whatever doubts he might have had about my marriage to Virginie, and I had no idea if he did have doubts, they were gone. He gripped my hand one last time and let it drop.

‘Do you want me to stay with her while you send for servants?’

I shook my head. ‘You go,’ I told him. ‘I’d like a few last minutes alone.’

Charlot looked at me with pity and turned away, his back heavy and his head bowed with grief as he left the garden Virginie and I had made for ourselves when we were young enough not to know how young we were, and life was happier. I knelt beside her, and breaking the private habits of a lifetime, because I only paid public dues to religion, I closed my eyes and prayed. When I opened them again it was to stare across the lake into the bushes beyond. There was a flash of white as a small girl stepped back into the shadows. Hélène. How long she’d been watching, I had no idea.

1763
Funeral

I
’ve been told that François Couperin cannot really be considered the heir of Jean-Philippe Rameau, but since they were both French, both famous and both composed for the harpsichord people talk of them as if they’re interchangeable. Virginie certainly spoke of them as if they were brothers, Rameau, the elder and a little more serious, Couperin, younger and known to be flighty: although Couperin died the year I first met her brother and Rameau was dead before she was born.

I hired musicians from Bordeaux who claimed to have played at Versailles and charged accordingly. The afternoon of Virginie’s funeral they alternated between her favourite two composers and the women smiled at me through tears and the men took me aside and said seriously it was touching how deeply I’d cared for her.

Only Charlot muttered that he’d always hated that tinkling rubbish but if his sister had liked it he supposed I was allowed. Emile came across to say he remembered Virginie playing the piece the musicians were playing. No doubt he was right.

What matters is intelligence and ability not bloodline.
That should have been a harmless enough statement from a man like Emile Duras. His grandfather and father had been lawyers, he was a lawyer . . . If I’d been feeling difficult I’d have said he’d already established his bloodline – a bloodline of the law. In time he could hope to become noblesse de robe
.
If not him, then his son certainly.

Instead I just nodded. We were at Virginie’s funeral and I was making my round of those remaining at the chateau. Many had come to the church, the law stating that weddings and funerals must be open to all; fewer came to the feast afterwards, but still enough to make a sizeable crowd. It was inevitable Emile would be invited. He was my oldest friend and had known Virginie when she was young. If our lives had drifted apart it was because they no longer ran on parallel lines.

Emile was someone now. A representative of the local assembly, as well as a successful lawyer. I knew he had ambitions to represent the third estate at the assembly in Bordeaux. He wore expensive shoes with pompadour heels in cork and leather that added a good three inches to his height. His coat and waistcoat were dark blue with fine black embroidery on the edges, deep cuffs, and pocket flaps. His waistcoat reached his thigh. A fob chain vanished inside a pocket. Seeing my glance he pulled out a small pocket watch. ‘Thomas Mudge, London,’ he told me. ‘It has a detached lever escapement. It’s the newest thing. No one in Paris is doing this yet.’

‘Monsieur L’Ingénieur.’

He flushed slightly at my gentle mockery but I could see he was pleased. I mentioned a problem with a weir on one of my rivers and he listened carefully and made two useful suggestions: that I rebuild the weir in brick, and that I consider straightening and widening that bit of river and linking it to the Canal du Midi. The frequency of barges would increase and the extra revenue collected in taxes could pay for the river-widening and weir. I thanked him for his good advice. He’d married again after the death of his first wife and now had a son to go with his daughters.

Before Emile and I talked I’d been watching his son. A handsome young boy of eleven or twelve – already close to his father in height and probably destined to be taller. Looking at Emile’s wife I could see where Georges Duras got his height, his figure and his blue eyes.

The boy was dancing attendance on Hélène like one born to be a courtier. And though my nine-year-old daughter pretended not to notice I could see that she was flattered. Smiles had been rare since her mother died. Manon had tried talking to her and got nowhere. Charlot’s wife, whom Hélène adored, did little better. But here she was talking to Emile’s son as if they’d known each other forever.

‘Let them be,’ Charlot said, materialising at my side.

I smiled, took his advice, felt grateful my daughter was prepared to talk to anyone, and wished the day would be over. Only when the last of the mourners had gone would I have my own chance to talk to Hélène, who’d been avoiding me, and to Manon, who was doing the same. A week had past since Virginie died and most of that had been taken up by administration and formalities. Jerome had already warned me the second week was worse. He based this on losing his oldest sister but said he imagined losing one’s wife would be much the same. He came, of course. Jerome was one of us. An original.

‘I hear you’ve reduced the banals again . . .’

Charlot meant the duties peasants paid to have their flour ground by my miller and their bread baked in one of the communal bakeries. ‘The last harvest was bad,’ I told him. ‘The one before little better.’

He sighed and patted me on my shoulder. ‘Peasants will always tell you the last harvest was bad, this year’s will be terrible and next year’s probably worse.’

‘I should talk again to Emile.’

Charlot smiled. ‘Ever the diplomat,’ he said, before returning to his wife and leaving me wondering what was diplomatic about what I’d just said. He smiled at me across the room to say he was with me, that all of my friends were with me, as Emile turned and smiled to see me coming. His was a tighter smile. We’d seen almost nothing of each other since Laurant was born and little enough before that. He had his law offices in Paris and Limoges. I’d been told his company acted for wine shippers in their disputes with vineyard owners and had handled more than one complicated inheritance case. He was known to be clever, none of us had ever doubted that, but in the intervening years he’d developed a reputation for ruthlessness as well. He left his enemies not only poor but broken.

All the same Emile smiled. And glancing to where my daughter and his son talked – their heads close and their voices low – said the words that shaped the last third of my life. ‘What matters is intelligence and ability not bloodline. Don’t you agree?’

Charlot’s father would have regarded that as blasphemy, but I was not Charlot’s father or even Charlot. So I nodded and thanked him for coming, in such a way as to avoid implying that I’d thought he might not. We gripped hands and he told me how sorry he was, how he knew what it was like to lose a wife, how impossible he found it to consider life without her replacement. Of course, he understood things had been complicated . . . Of course he did, everyone in the room did. People danced around the subject of Virginie’s illness with varying degrees of delicacy and Emile showed more finesse than most. I turned the conversation to more general matters and somehow we ended up talking about religion, a subject on which Emile was indiscreet. ‘I’m not sure the people can cope without the idea of God,’ I told him. ‘Without spiritual heights to which they can aspire, like young men looking at a rock face and daring each other to climb. If we abandon our belief in God we become God and take his powers.’

Emile laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve started to believe?’

I stared at him. ‘I’ve always believed.’

‘In God the father, God the son, and God the holy ghost?’

‘Of course not. But in something. Well all have to believe in something.’

‘If we don’t . . . ?’ He let his question hang.

‘We start believing only in ourselves.’

‘Belief in God is the cause of war, superstition, irrationality . . . And has been the cause of those since time began.’ What Emile spoke was treason, and if not treason, then certainly blasphemy, but I’d heard it from him so often it barely registered. He was hunched forward, knuckles white around his wine glass from where his fists were clenched, like a boy trying to make an impression on the classroom. As he’d been when I first met him, a lawyer’s son sent to live among the children of impoverished nobles.

‘Without God the wars will get even worse.’

‘We’ll see,’ he said. And there our conversation ended. I told him there were things I needed to do and he nodded at my convenient lie. We clasped hands one last time and I crossed the room to talk to Père Laurant, who had made the trip from Paris. Each year seemed to age him faster than the one before and listening to him it was easy to understand why. He’d gone to the Sorbonne foreseeing a life of study and found himself in a world of politics, backbiting and intrigue made all the worse for being regarded as irrelevant by everyone else. Apparently his recent promotion was a poisoned chalice and a dozen atheists and heathens were waiting for him to fail. He added that he was drunk, apologised for his indiscretion and agreed with my suggestion that I have a servant show him to his chamber so he could rest. This was my last unwanted conversation of the day. After that, I bid my guests goodbye, Emile and his son among them, and went to repair the damage with my lover and my daughter.

1768
Mission to Corsica

F
ive years separated my bidding goodbye to the last of those unwanted guests and a letter arriving from the king. Five years in which I tried to re-make my heart and settled instead for a comfortable routine. Virginie’s death made me rich; that is, I’d always been rich if you regarded her money as mine, but now it was truly mine and I no longer felt guilty about spending it. So I had the kitchens rebuilt, installed a huge ice house, extended the herb garden and had a second lake dug to house aquatic mammals sent from Versailles. I even had a wall thrown right around a small wood to give Tigris somewhere safe to wander.

Manon took the place of my official mistress without being asked, and because I’d done my public grieving when Virginie was still been alive, few understood how hard her death hit me. Only once did the grief fight free; on a night when I walked down to the lake to get clear sight of the constellations. Walking back beneath the stars I started to sob, fierce tears mixing with ferocious anger. At what, I didn’t know. At Virginie leaving me perhaps. I felt a sense of abandonment and guilt. Only next morning did I wonder if perhaps I’d been the one to abandon her. Either way, we forsook each other before death gave us no choice.

I married Manon eighteen months after Virginie died, in a quiet ceremony in my own chapel. It was a morganatic marriage, as I was noble and she was not. She took the title vicomtesse with the king’s permission, although most called her marquise from politeness. I doubt my servants understood the difference anyway. Charlot came to visit us twice, Jerome once. I met Emile in Bordeaux and we ate at his hotel, an indifferent meal to accompany indifferent conversation. I wondered later if he found the few hours we spent together as difficult as I did. Manon took over the running of the chateau and responsibility for Hélène. There was a familiarity in the way she talked to me that troubled some of our neighbours. Our conversation lacked the formality found in their marriages, our affections and occasional irritations, best kept behind closed doors, bled into open conversation. So be it. We were shaped by how we’d begun.

I started to think of my life as clay. That day by the dung heap, my life was entirely malleable, soft to the touch and easy to shape. Slowly it dried and grew stiff, until I began to accept the shape it had because change was hard. One day in early summer, Manon found me in a potter’s shop, stripped to my shirt, which was splashed with clay water like earthy blood, the wheel spinning erratically as I treadled. A lump of drying clay twisted and twitched beneath my fingers.
‘Jean-Marie.’
She realised there were people around us, the potter’s family, his neighbours, a ragged apprentice younger than my son, and her tone softened. ‘What are you doing?’ From the way the apprentice hid behind Manon’s skirts, I wondered if he was the one sent to tell her where she might find me.

‘Wondering if my life is really like clay.’