Thornfield Hall (14 page)

Nadar continues the story that was told him, by the Italian musician who had carried Maman away from Paris to her death. It was consumption: there hadn't been any way of stopping it, naturally. So Céline Varens, who had seemed immortal to all who knew her, like the heroines of the popular operas of the day—Marguerite in
La Dame aux Camélias
and Mimi in
La Bohème
—had succumbed to the disease that spelled ill-starred romance, and, inevitably, she had died in the arms of her lover.

 

When I found myself back at Jenny's flat, too numb with
shock and grief to reply to Jeanne's rough greeting, it was to discover yet again that my trundle bed was occupied, this time by a youth still in uniform: red rosettes were pinned to his blue shirt, from which blood also oozed conspicuously, and his red necktie was askew, from the amateurish attempts of the women to stanch the wound. A fine belt completed the outfit, and a sword lay casually discarded in the half-collapsed tapestry armchair I recognized as having come, along with Maman's pink silk pouffe, from rue Vaugirard. “He's one of Caussidiere's men,” Jeanne said, and I was also able to detect the note of admiration in the feminist socialist's voice for the working-class police force set up by the left-wing Jacobin, the new Paris chief of police. “Look, the sight of Adèle has revived him,” Jenny cried. “Albert, here is our friend,
citoyenne
Adèle.” So, by returning to the language of the '94 revolution, Jenny showed me she had decided on a match between the daughter of her old friend and greatest love, Céline Varens, and this son of the working classes, the people for whom, despite an obvious lack of gratitude on their part, those such as Jeanne and Jenny fought and dedicated their lives. If Adèle was to have a man, Jenny Colon indicated, then one like Albert was the perfect choice. I wondered how the two women had stumbled on this handsome
and lightly wounded hero. But I was in no condition to ask politely what the origins of their discovery had been. Deep down I sensed an anxiety on Jenny's part, that my time was taken up by Dubureau, with his increasing attentions to the young trapeze artist Adèle Varens, she who draws in the crowds with her audacity on the high wire and insists the net is taken away for the final number, where she flies through the air from one swinging bar to the next.

“Albert, take some of this.” Jenny smiled tenderly at the youth as she lifted a bottle of Armagnac to his lips. “You'll be fine by the evening, ready to take Adèle along after the performance, to the wedding party. Even the great Dubureau will hardly prevent you from taking an evening out on the river,” Jenny went on, turning to me as if she hadn't noticed my pallor and misery—which, of course, she can hardly have missed. It's as if this wedding party—or so I now see—which Jenny and Jeanne have been talking about for days, must now preface my own union, in secular and revolutionary terms, with the young policeman, who smiles faintly up at me from my own narrow bed. We shall dance; we'll be served at the bar by the girls with puffed-up hair and blond fringes, in their striped dresses and tight bodices; we'll drink and eat until we're hardly conscious of what we're doing, or why.

“Jenny,” I say, for I am determined to demand why the death of Maman has been kept so long from me, “I have come from Nadar, he has told me about Céline. Where is she now? How could you bury her without writing to me in England? How dare you still treat me like a child?”

But my words go unheard, against a tirade of concern by Jenny for Albert's state of health and a recitation of the coming wedding-dinner menu from Jeanne—who is a
gourmande
with an appetite large enough to fuel an insurrection against the entire ruling class. “Soup, fried mackerel, beefsteak, French beans and fried potatoes,
an omelette aux fines herbes, a fricandeau of veal with sorrel,” Jeanne intones. “Like the dinner for our friends the honeymoon couple Louis and Marthe on the river steamer at Rouen—”

“Jeanne, we need more bandages,” Jenny says. “And Albert's shirt needs laundering. He has none other to wear tonight at the ball.”

“Chicken,” Jeanne continues, imperturbable in her certainty that this litany of dishes will propel the trainee policeman into the arms of their
chère
Adèle. “Chicken garnished with mushrooms, obviously. A hock of pork served upon spinach, an apricot tart, three custards, an endive salad…”

“I'm feeling better!” young Albert delights the two women by saying. And he sits bolt upright in my bed, already with the air of a husband demanding that his dinner be brought to him.

“He's handsome, isn't he?” Jenny says as she strips the offending shirt from Albert's torso and makes for the washtub behind the screen in the corner of her room. And she winks at me as she goes, as if to insist that I plunge myself into a love affair straightaway, forgetting the fact I've just heard the terrible news about Céline.

As Jeanne brings forth another portion of the honeymoon couple's dinner, a feast she swears will be replicated tonight on the Seine in a steamer at least twice the size of the bateau hired by her friends at Rouen, I promise myself that Jenny will be forced to tell me the whole truth of the end of Céline before the evening is out.

For I need to know, did Maman say she loved Papa before she died? Did she have proof in turn, as I believe she must always have had, that Papa had loved her more than any other—that, despite his infidelities and absences, there had never been anyone in the life of Monsieur Rochester to equal Céline Varens? I need to know, and to have my instinctive knowledge of their great love for each other confirmed. Without this my life will be as meaningless
as if I had never been born the daughter of either of my parents. I might as well live in obscurity, married to Albert the policeman by the dignitaries of the new republic.

And I leave for the theater, with the voices of the two women ringing in my ears as loudly as the sound I hear each day of their boots on the wooden steps leading up to the flat in the Faubourg Poissonière.

“Take care on the
corde
tonight,
mon enfant,
” Jenny calls after me—and I think, sadly, that it's a little late now to show me, as she clearly tries to do, that she has understood the unhappiness I have suffered today and that she is sorry for her coldness and distance.

Jeanne's last words, as they drift down the stairs and out into the street, demonstrate the only kind of sympathy of which she is capable, that of comfort in the pleasures of the table. “A small roast leg of lamb,” Jeanne sings out as I go, “with chopped onion and nutmeg sprinkled on it, coffee, two glasses of absinthe…”

By the time Jeanne has arrived at the cheese, the plums, the grapes, and two bottles of Burgundy and one of Chablis, I have turned the corner of the Faubourg Poissonière and set off across Paris to the Funambules.

T
hey say when you drown, your life unfolds
before you. Scenes that had little meaning at the time race forward to prove they are the missing parts of the puzzle you have carried within you all your life. And when your parents are gone, the puzzle looms empty and menacing: for if you are not a part of someone else's night mysteries or daydreams, you no longer have a true place in the world.

I think this was the feeling of emptiness I had when I walked down the boulevard du Temple that day. Without Céline, I was alone, no longer the
petite fille
in blue and
rose
who follows her mother in the Luxembourg Gardens; tomorrow's pantomime faithfully tracing the steps of the great actress's theater of today. Then it came to me, as consolation, that I was my mother and myself together. And by believing this, I knew at that moment, crossing the crowded street to the Funambules, hearing the roar of the
paradis
inside and imagining the jugglers and clowns as they filled in time before the curtain could rise, that I
must be as Céline would have wished me to be: a tragedienne as great as Rachel, a purveyor of the deepest emotions drama and history could provide. It was my destiny to become the most acclaimed and revered actress in the land. Céline would be proud of me: from the wings, somewhere high in the sky, she would witness my growing maturity and applaud my ability to go deep into the characters I portrayed. Adèle Varens, a voice said as I climbed the steps of the theater, with its shabby pillars and the hawkers collected under the portico, each with his box of tawdry wares. Adèle Varens! People will wait in the streets to see you as you emerge exhausted and triumphant from your evening performance; Adèle Varens will become a household name!

Yet everything was as usual on the day when all had changed for me. The lion came on in his moth-eaten costume, and Dubureau handed over his bride—and the crowd catcalled and cheered as the Lovely Girl was wedded to the creature. As I stood in the crowd and observed them, I wondered what did it all mean to the child (as suddenly I saw myself, for all my pretenses to be a woman) who is about to stand shivering backstage, ready for the trapeze? Who was I now? When I began to fly, would I realize I had no identity I could call my own? Would I topple from the high wire to the ground?

And I asked myself, was flying drowning? Would all the scenes of my short, strange life come through the air and plunge me into the waves of forgetting and remembering, the deep, dark sea where I lost my mother and my father both, for he had refused to own me?

Tonight, as I watched the touching scene between Pierrot and the Lovely Girl, I felt fear for the first time at the prospect of climbing onto the bar that hangs high above the stage. As lopsided as the thin smile on Pierrot's painted face, the metal bar moves
slightly in the drafts of air caused by the violent scene changes. The refusal of Pierrot's devotion by the Lovely Girl, and then the springing open and shut of the trapdoor as it swallows poor Pierrot and takes him down to hell, stirs the wire also—which is so slender only I know it is there, tormenting tonight in its demand. I walk across smiling, balancing in my little pink ballerina dress, causing shouts of “Encore!” from the crowd.

How did I ever walk over this chasm? How can I fail to fall and break open my head?

I stand, waiting for the murmured words of support from Céline—for, since my coming to the Funambules, she has aided me in my imagination; and again and again it has been Maman, the most renowned
danseuse de corde
in the world, who has given me courage to walk without a net across a stage at least a hundred feet below. The cheers and roars from the
canaille,
who are small and far from me at the great height I walk across nightly, are as deafening as the sea.

Tonight will I dive down and down, into that thundering water?

Will I drown, in the angry jeers of a mob cheated of its glimpse of thigh and pink net ballet dress, skirt flaring as it dances across the wire?

Will Adèle die, all the sadness and happiness of her life coming to her at once in the sea of tobacco-chewing, rancid-smelling spectators at the Funambules Theater?

Where is Céline now? Knowing she is lost to me for good has robbed me of the illusion I lived with for so long—that she will come for me one day, that she will never, ever let me fall.

Trumpets blare. Pierrot, bad-tempered as a result of tripping in the understage machinery, hisses at me as I struggle to climb the pole to reach my bar.
“Vite, vite, enfant!”
and he stamps away backstage. My eyes burn, and a sudden hatred for the mime who is
more famous now than the character he has created—Pierrot, Dubureau, the world hangs on the dusty tear that trickles down his cheek, the mournful arrogance with which he surveys the audience—seizes me as my legs, heavy as they have never been before, go slowly upward. Why do people say Pierrot will marry Adèle and shut her up all day in his little house at Neuilly? But then, all these past months I have smiled and preened when Placide said I was destined to be wife of the great Pierrot. Why did I do this? I hate him, I have no desire to be a prisoner of the Funambules.

But as I reach the last wavering step of the rope ladder, I understand the loss of Céline as the disappearance of the one who could, if only in my dreams, have given me the strength to run away and make a new life, without Pierrot or Jenny or all the figures from my vanished past. Now I no longer trust I can be great, without a mother to teach me the tricks and sincerity of a true actress such as Rachel. I shall never be other than what I am. And what I am is a
jeune fille sans coeur
—a girl who was born with a stone in place of her heart, a child who permitted her only friend in those friendless days at Thornfield Hall—Antoinette, the lovely, empty-eyed Creole—to fall to her death. As I will today, with no Maman to hold me firm and stop me from falling. It is God's punishment, and truly I deserve it.

The realization seizes me as I wrap my legs around the pole, striped red and white like seaside candy, a gaudy pillar of danger and impending death. I pause as the bar pulls into me. And I think, I must hang upside down like a monkey on this cruel swing, and I must fly, fly….

For one second, maybe two, I pause, and the crowd, smelling my hesitation, understanding even, possibly, my new awareness of the ridiculous acts I am supposed to perform, gives a great roar of impatience. “Adèle!” They know my name by now, of course they
do.
La petite princesse
of the acrobatics of the air, queen of the high fliers, a brightly dressed insect, a jeweled butterfly. As yet they are not angry with their heroine of the skies, but a few seconds more and they will be. And in their rage of frustrated hopes, Adèle will plunge to the floor of the Funambules and die.

The bar, once I'm astride, is comfortingly familiar; I could be settling, I recognize with relief, into a chair that knows my body as well as I know its strengths and weaknesses. It's nothing to somersault and drop and rise by sheer force of the arms, to the sound of applause; it's as simple today as it was yesterday. And the fear is in abeyance: I can't think further than that, but I know I have neither mother nor father while I sail, dive, and fly. I'm alone in the world and the happier for it. The trouble is yet to come—and this I know—when it is time for me to dance across the wire. So fatally, foolishly, I wait. I stay a long time on the bar—and then the shouting, insistent demands start up again. “Adèle!
La corde!
Adèle!”

And I swing back to the pole as the excitement turns to a frenzy of hysteria. Now I sense, in the crowd, their longing for my first stumble, the slip of my foot on the invisible wire that will plunge me to the stage a whole continent of terror away. The swell of sound grows and consumes me as I dock beside the red-and-white-striped pole.

It is then that I see her. I'm stepping from the bar onto the wire—which trembles at the impact of my weight as it has never done before—and I pause another fateful second, this further demonstration of my loss of nerve sending the
canaille
in the
paradis
into a cacophony of screaming. I look down—as I have been trained over many sessions not to do—and I see first, on the stage, the angry, incredulous face of Dubureau, no longer made up as Pierrot, as he stares up at me, finger wagging, his velvet jacket with its ludicrously padded shoulders heaving directly beneath me.

The sight is unbearable. I look out into the audience—another
forbidden act, in the world of high-wire dancers. For everyone knows that the glimpse of a loved one—or a hated one, for that matter—can unbalance the trapeze artist. Equilibrium is easily lost: the consequences are unimaginable.

I'm on the wire, arms outstretched as if in supplication. Nobody here can think I could glide across, so violent are the twists and turns my desperate body makes, to regain its balance.

I pray for Céline to help me. But the vision of my mother does not come to me. Instead, out of the depths of my mind, there comes a picture: a dark dress, a white blouse primly tucked under it, a frank, affectionate gaze…

As I take sustenance from this vision of Jane, dear Jane Eyre, the governess I had considered long forgotten—and for all my denial of her, I had loved her once—I find my equilibrium returning, and, slowly at first, I make my dancing way along the wire. The crowd roars its recognition of the conquest of the force of life over death. And I smile, feeling the sweat break out along my arms and run down to my fingers as I twirl the baton I must never allow to slip away from me.

It's on my return—to the now-welcoming red and white pole and to the sound of huge applause from the spectators so far below—that I see—and, to my horror, recognize—a face in the crowd. (A real face, this: no vision from the past.)

I hesitate; my arms fly out. I almost plunge and then recover myself. I reach the pole safely and slide down. And, from the stage I run, leaping straight through the astonished crowd, and pursue what I have seen. For it is a face I know as well as my own that I saw there, a face I have no choice but to follow and find.