The Porcelain Dove (39 page)

There are few sights less pleasing than a grown man howling like a wounded beast, and if I'm no saint now, I was certainly none then. I'd a sudden urge to kick the boy where he lay, especially as madame had added her voice to his, and Pompey, who might have quieted them, sat staring into space like an obsidian statue. A howl rose in my own throat, and just as it was threatening to burst from my lips, Linotte tapped me on my shoulder. I spun around to face her, my hand upraised for a slap.

Unperturbed, she reached out and took my hand in hers, gave it a reassuring squeeze. "Don't fret, Berthe. I'll see to my brother."

I fetched a deep breath. "You're welcome to try, mademoiselle," I said, and went to madame to shake and pet her into some semblance of calm. Under her sobs and Justin's, I heard the rise and fall of Linotte's voice, singing tunelessly, repetitively, a few notes up, a few notes down, a drone like bees in summer or the hushing of blood in my ears in the night when not even the rats are stirring. Even after madame fell silent, I had to strain to hear it.

My eyes drifted shut. My chin came to rest upon madame's lace cap. Then Pompey was shaking me and pulling me to my feet and bidding me help carry my slumbering mistress into her bedchamber. Once we'd disposed her on her bed, loosened her stays, removed her shoes, and drawn the curtains closed, my head was clear again, and I followed Pompey into the antechamber where Linotte was sitting tailorwise with her hand upon a gently snoring heap of rags.

"I sang the sleep spell," she said proudly. "We can do anything we want with him now."

Pompey smiled. "Wise child," he said. "We'll wash him, I think. Will mademoiselle consent to stay and let Berthe make her fine while I tend to her brother?"

Linotte pouted at that, but was wise enough to know she'd little choice in the matter. So Pompey hoisted the heap of rags over his shoulder and bore it away to be bathed and clothed like a duc's son. I returned to cutting Linotte's hair.

When that was done, I bathed her and rinsed her thick black
curls with oil and comfrey water. At last she rose, a knobby Venus, and paused before stepping from madame's copper bath to consider her dripping form in madame's long glass. I remember how thin she was and long-wristed, and her naked limbs as bony and angled as a marionette's.

"I'll be as tall as Justin when I grow up," she said placidly. "Poor Justin. He won't find the Porcelain Dove."

CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

In Which Wild Birds Are Caged

Madame and I embarked upon our last journey from Beauxprés in August of 1783. We didn't know, of course, that it was to be our last journey, any more than we knew what had become of the vicomte de Montplaisir. Had we known, would we have spent it as we did, with the marquis and marquise de Bonsecours in Versailles?

For myself, I've never liked Versailles. Its chambers are built for titans, so that mortal men and women must pad themselves out with wide-skirted coats and panniers and elaborated rituals just to cast shadows in them. Wherever one looks, there are mirrors to mock one and gilding to blind one and paintings of gods to keep one in one's place. And should all this splendor seduce some ambitious noble into desiring it for himself, there are warnings in the shape of allegorical fountains. Latona is one. Another is a figure of the titan Enceladus, who sought to climb Olympus, half-crushed beneath a flooded tumble of stone. "We are gods," says Versailles. "You are vermin. And so shall you ever be."

Yet on that journey to Versailles I saw gods and vermin gaping in astonished equality at the phenomenon of a cock, a duck, and a sheep sailing through the air in a straw basket, and that was a sight I'd not have missed for a year's wages. 'Twas like one of Jean's hearth-tales come unexpectedly to life, and in its own way as great a magic as the removing of Beauxprés from the circle of the world.

The spectacle had been touted with much fanfare, and a
Judgment-day hodge-podge of ranks, professions, ages, and sexes were gathered in the Great Court to watch it well before the appointed hour. Between the terrace and the gilded gates, ministers and water-sellers, whores and shopkeepers craned and elbowed for a glimpse of the platform from which the balloon would ascend. Of the balloon itself nothing was yet to be seen save a great wad of azure material surrounded by any number of scurrying men. They were all dressed in black and looked very like mice from where we sat perched high upon the stone balustrade of the Minister's wing. Or at least madame, Linotte, and the marquise de Bonsecours were perched on the balustrade. I stood behind it, wedged between the marquis and the vicomte d'Anceny.

The vicomte was the marquis' oldest son—he who had attended my mistress' wedding in his mother's womb—grown to be a soldier and a veteran of the American War. A pleasant young man, with something of his father's placid temper and his mother's quick wit. I remember him undertaking to explain to me the mysteries of the scene before us.

"Do you see the tall man, Mlle Duvet, the one all dressed in black? That is M. Montgolfier himself, the inventor of the aerostatic globe, whom they call the Benjamin Franklin of the stratosphere."

To my other side, the marquis shook his head in solemn wonder. "We have discovered the secret for which the centuries have sighed." Poor M. de Bonsecours. With age, his hunchback had become more pronounced than ever and gave him an air of being forever on the point of glancing over his left shoulder. "Man will fly," he went on, "and, appropriating for himself all the power of the animal kingdom, become master of the earth, the waters, and the air. A heavy responsibility, is it not, my son?"

"Mountainous," agreed the vicomte amiably. "Look, Mlle Duvet, where the balloon inflates."

The heap of material stirred, subsided, billowed, and with infinite stateliness, blossomed into a monstrous azure mushroom decked out in swags and ruffles and golden fleurs-de-lis like a court gown. As it rose slowly above the platform and bobbed against its restraining cords, the crowd gasped and exclaimed.

"Look. Something's going on." My mistress pointed across the yard, where a wave of activity was rippling through the crowd. The marquis de Bonsecours, with characteristic prudence, had brought along a spyglass, which he now applied to his eye.

"What do you see, Bonsecours?" asked the marquise after a space.

"Yes, Bonsecours, what do you see? 'Tis monstrous unfair of you to keep both glass and knowledge to yourself, I vow." Thus my mistress, pouting.

"Patience, patience. I have not yet adjusted the focus." M. de Bonsecours peered and fiddled and twisted his neck into painful cricks, and, "Enfin, I cannot make it out," he said regretfully, and folded the instrument to replace it in his pocket.

The vicomte reached across me, plucked the glass neatly from his father's hand, extended it, and clapped it to his eye. "They're bringing animals onto the platform," he reported. "A sheep, a cock, some other bird, white—a duck, I think. Now they're putting them into a cage, or making the attempt. The sheep seems to have recollected a pressing engagement elsewhere. I can't blame it, poor thing."

"Poor thing indeed," said Mme de Bonsecours. "They say the king wanted to conscript a pair of convicts as the balloon's first passengers. This is much more humane, should the experiment miscarry."

"It will not miscarry," said the vicomte.

"'Tis hardly an experiment, my dear," said M. de Bonsecours. "There have been many flights before this, not the least of which was a year since, in the Champ de Mars. I paid a demi-livre for seats in the stands. You do not recall it because it rained that day and you did not attend. On that occasion, the balloon ascended notwithstanding the inclement weather. You will observe that the sky is quite clear today, so that I have every confidence . . . "

Mme de Bonsecours laid a plump hand upon her husband's arm. "And so have I, Bonsecours, and so have we all."

"Look," exclaimed Linotte. "It rises!"

The drums rattled in a crescendo of excitement, M. Montgolfier's assistants cast off the ropes, and to my vast astonishment, the great azure mushroom wobbled ponderously upwards. All the clerics, aristocrats, bourgeois, and canaille gathered their breaths in a gasp of wonder, which they let out again in an exhalation that might have swept the balloon all the way to Paris had not a violent gust of wind dipped and scudded it westward instead. Against the sky a loose triangle of taffeta could be seen flapping wildly. Another gasp—of fear, this one.

"Oh! 'Tis torn!" shrieked madame. "It must come down! We'll all be crushed!"

"Don't be a goose, Adèle," said Mme de Bonsecours. "See, there
it goes towards Vaucresson, high as ever." She put her arm about Linotte, who sat between them. "And what dost thou think, petite? Is it not a pretty sight?"

Mouth O'ed in rapture, Linotte watched the balloon glide over the roofs of Versailles, trailing its barnyard aeronauts in a wicker basket. Not until the gaudy équipage was out of sight did she turn to her aunt. " 'Tis splendid, madame. I should like to fly like that."

Knowing Mlle Linotte, I thought she very well might, someday. The vicomte, who did not know her, laughed indulgently and M. de Bonsecours patted her black curls.

"'Twould be a strange thing for a little cabbage like thee to fly in a balloon," he said with ponderous levity. "Yet, if such flights grow common, one might say with Ovid that things are now done that hitherto have been regarded as completely impossible."

"Yet 'tis no stranger for a woman to fly than a man," objected the marquise.

Over my head, son and husband glanced at one another with a martyred air and forbore to answer her.

Owing to the press, it took us upwards of an hour to traverse the few streets between the palace and the de Bonsecours' apartments in the rue Sainte-Geneviève. Almost I thought myself in Paris as we edged our way down the terrace and across the Great Court, shoved and jostled by wearers of silk coats and frieze coats, phrygian caps and bonnets é la Montgolfier, elbowed by petits-maîtres with daintily curled wigs and laboring men with their heads tied up in dirty rags. Was that hand pawing my skirts an impertinence or a clumsy attempt upon my handkerchief? Such was the throng that it might have been either, or even an accident. Madame, who had never liked crowds, locked one hand around my arm, the other over Linotte's shoulder, closed her eyes, and endured.

You must recall that Linotte had not left Beauxprés above three times in her life, had been to Paris only once, and then was kept as cloistered as a nun within the walls of the hôtel Fourchet. Yet she threaded the crowd as deftly as a Parisian gamin, and, when a foulmouthed carter loudly shook the fleas from a shabby cleric who'd had the misfortune to step on his foot, listened to his railing with grave interest and wondered aloud what a "salopard" could be. Mme de Bonsecours laughed; madame blushed and scolded. Later Linotte took
pains to find me alone so that she might ask again. I told her, of course—it wouldn't do to have her use it when we returned to Beauxprés not knowing what it meant.

We were upwards of two months with the marquise and her husband; two months of dinners with financiers and soirées with diplomats from which madame returned heavy-eyed with boredom. We often walked in the gardens among the grottoes and the myriad fountains behind the palace, nodding to such of Mme de Bonsecours' vast acquaintance as might be walking there also, talking of scandal and money and how far the new treaties with England would redress the great wrongs done to the French economy in the treaty of '63.

Once, I remember Linotte asking, as we rested by the fountain of Winter after a game of cache-cache, whether 'twas true what her uncle de Bonsecours had said, that the Devil had spawned Englishmen in answer to the Frenchman of le bon Dieu as He had spawned crows in answer to doves.

Mme de Bonsecours laughed. "What a droll little cabbage thou art, to be sure. Thine uncle was only making a kind of joke, ma mie. Although they are our enemies, Englishmen are creatures of le bon Dieu no less than Frenchmen are."

"Then why are they always sinking our ships and taking our islands?"

Madame frowned. "It does not become thee, child, so to cross-question thy aunt. I'd have thought shame, when I was of thy years, to be so pert and forward."

"Don't scold the child, Adèle," said the marquise placidly. "The question is a fair one. Now attend, Linotte. This war with England is not a matter of good and evil, but of trade and commerce, the buying and selling of such things as cotton, rum, and slaves. The country commanding the greatest number of ports commands the greatest profit. Having so lately lost their American colonies, the English seek West Indian colonies to replace them. The Spanish and the Dutch are helping us to protect our possessions. C'est tout."

There was a little silence while Linotte considered this. "These colonies," she said, "they have people living there?"

"Bien sûr, my child: growers of cotton and sugarcane and other things that do not grow in Europe."

"Do they grow slaves, too?"

Madame laughed. "See how she teases you, Hortense. Indulge her, and you'll soon be out of countenance. Grow slaves, indeed! What a thing for a young girl to ask."

"I ask only because of Pompey," Linotte explained.

'Twas the turn of Mme de Bonsecours to frown. "There are no slaves in France, Linotte. We love freedom too well, we French, to deprive even a savage of the right of living freely upon French soil. Pompey is a servant whose wages are paid by monsieur thy father, like Berthe."

Linotte twisted on the iron bench to look up in my face. I'd just been thinking how neatly these sentiments sprang from one who was accustomed to complain of the slavery in which Frenchmen kept their women. Linotte caught my eye and winked as though she'd read my thought. Annoyed, I blushed. She smiled, turned again to her aunt, and said, "Like Berthe. I understand now, madame."

My last journey to Beauxprés was as little like my first as it could be. The cold weather had come on early that year, and we bounced over a frozen road between fields in which the corn stood stiff and black. The vineyards too were grim, and the grapes as frostbit and shriveled as the faces of the peasants who tended them.