BOOK II
“And so, cold, courteous, a mere gentleman,He bowed, we parted.Parted. Face no more,Voice no more, love no more! wiped wholly outLike some ill scholar’s scrawl from heart and slate,—Aye, spit on and so wiped out utterlyBy some coarse scholar! I have been too coarse,Too human. Have we business, in our rank,With blood i’ the veins? I will have henceforth none;Not even to keep the colour at my lip.”
“And so, cold, courteous, a mere gentleman,He bowed, we parted.Parted. Face no more,Voice no more, love no more! wiped wholly outLike some ill scholar’s scrawl from heart and slate,—Aye, spit on and so wiped out utterlyBy some coarse scholar! I have been too coarse,Too human. Have we business, in our rank,With blood i’ the veins? I will have henceforth none;Not even to keep the colour at my lip.”
“And so, cold, courteous, a mere gentleman,
He bowed, we parted.
Parted. Face no more,
Voice no more, love no more! wiped wholly out
Like some ill scholar’s scrawl from heart and slate,—
Aye, spit on and so wiped out utterly
By some coarse scholar! I have been too coarse,
Too human. Have we business, in our rank,
With blood i’ the veins? I will have henceforth none;
Not even to keep the colour at my lip.”
Aurora Leigh.
In spite of the bare six miles which separated it from Paris in spite of its position only a little off the high-road there-from to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a great peace reigned this afternoon over the hamlet of Mirabel-le-Château, those few dwellings which had grown up, for its convenience or by its favour, round the vast oblong mass of the Renaissance palace from which they took their name. It was the light, warm peace of early April sunshine, of occasionally rising April dust, and of trees all brightly and freshly arrayed, but, whatever its ingredients, it was a tranquillity entirely unappreciated by the one human being in sight of Mirabel, the sentry in his box outside that deserted palace. He was so bored with being sentry there!
Years ago, in the bad old days, as he was accustomed to regard them, if he had been in Mirabel-le-Château at all—which was improbable, for he was a Parisian—the village would not have been so deathly quiet, for, vassal though it were of the great house which it was now his untoward lot to guard, it beat at least with the life radiating to it from that centre and reason of its being. But if all the remaining inhabitants of Mirabel-le-Château could boast, in theory, of a glorious liberty, of bowing the knee no more to M. le Duc de Trélan, nor even to the King of France—but only to France’s five kinglets, the Directors, to the military authorities who bled them by incessant conscription, and, in a measure, to that member of theConseil des Ancienswho had charge of the château, Georges Camain—they certainly could not congratulate themselves on the possession of overmuch gaiety or even of bread. In those same bad old days the tyrannical owners of Mirabel had given them work, or bread, or both; no one to-day gave them either, for there was none to give. Besides, there were not now many inhabitants left in the hamlet to receive.The village boys who, as boys will, had cheered on the Paris mob which sacked Mirabel in the summer of 1792 lay, many of them, as quiet as the bodies round which they had unthinkingly danced—corpses themselves in the blood-stained soil of Flanders or Switzerland or Italy or Syria. Those who lived were far away. In Mirabel-le-Château now only the old and the women remained.
Certainly, in the bad old days, Mirabel-le-Château had been a more cheerful and a more populous village; but then it had not been free. Certainly, in that time of oppression, such of its inhabitants as were so minded could flock on Sundays at the sound of the bell to the little church and hear the white-haired curé say Mass and admonish them—two proceedings which some of them found, strangely enough, to be of assistance in their daily lives. Now that old man was slowly dying, a deportee in the swamps of Cayenne, there was no one to say Mass, and even the bell, the symbol of a cult, might on no account be rung. Yet every tenth day these freed citizens were all but hounded into the bare and desecrated church to hear a discourse on patriotism or the social virtues. But were they not delivered from “the imbecile liturgy of the priesthood” and all the superstitions of Catholicism? Was not Sunday replaced by the more enlightened if penetratingly dull Décadi? And whereas, in the bad old days, the master of Mirabel had all but owned them, now, on the contrary they, or at least the French nation, claimed to own Mirabel. It was true that singularly little benefit had accrued to them from the change.
And thus the village of Mirabel-le-Château was less than half animate, and the sentry from the guard-house opposite the Temple of Reason (formerly the church) had to bear his dreadful affliction of ennui unsolaced. Only a wooden barrier and some acres of gravel separated him from the château behind him, for the great wrought iron gates, of the finest Italian workmanship, had been destroyed when the present proprietors entered so tempestuously on their new acquisition seven years ago. These gates had been very economically replaced, all the time that the deceased Convention was in power, by a cord bearing a knot of tricolour ribbon and the legend, “Défense d’entrer,” written on a card in violet ink that had run and paledwith the rain. But now, under the Directory, a neat wooden barrier spanned the wide space between the stone gateposts with their mutilated shields and lions, a barrier bearing a painted notice which, headed “Ci-devant château de Mirabel, Bien National,” went on to state that since the Government intended eventually to turn the château into a museum of art treasures, citizens were already at liberty to visit it twice in the “décade,” on payment of a fee. Practically nothing, as yet, had really been done towards the formation of the proposed museum, and if the Directory, always pressed for money, depended for this consummation on the payments of visitors it could have amassed very little towards that object. Meanwhile it had locked up such of the rooms as had not been entirely stripped of pictures and furniture, installed a female concierge with power to summon relays offemmes de journéeto her aid, and kept what seemed to be a rather unnecessary sentry till nightfall at the entrance.
And this sentry, fixed bayonet and all, lounged to-day in his box as though he had never known the meaning of drill, as though he were not a National Guard from what had been one of the most turbulent sections of Paris. He sighed as he sat there, his musket between his knees, he fidgeted with his white cross-belts, he drummed with his heels; a member of a free people felt himself very much in bondage this afternoon. He would not be relieved till another hour and a quarter had dragged by. For a few minutes’ conversation with some human being of whatever station, sex, or age, he would have given almost anything that he could think of. But the village, round the corner to his right, seemed uninhabited as well as invisible; even the cabaret on his other hand, between him and the high-road at right angles some half-mile away, might as well have been shut, for all the company it was receiving or emitting. Though he could not betake himself thither, sheer boredom was making the Citizen Grégoire Thibault altruistic. To see anybody go in, even. . . . And it was in looking dejectedly along the poplar-bordered road to the Café du Musée that he became aware of a cloud of dust settling down in the distance.
A little interest sprang into his veiled eye; he leant forward out of his box and spat upon the ground with areturn of vigour. That dust must betoken the passing of the diligence from Paris to Saint-Germain. Now, had it set down any one for Mirabel-le-Château? Very improbable; but if it had the traveller would be obliged to pass him to get to the hamlet. . . . There was nobody, of course, and, as to talk, only the conversation of the poplars with the breeze. “Oh, sacré métier!” groaned the Citizen Grégoire, and took out his pipe as a last resource. There was no one to report him to the sergeant.
He pushed down the coarse tobacco by means of a handsome gold and bloodstone seal with a coat of arms, loot from the great pillage, which he had bought last year for ten sous on the Quai de la Mégisserie, began to feel for his tinderbox, and stopped. The diligencehadset down a passenger after all!
Down the sunlit road under the poplars was advancing the figure of a woman, carrying a little covered basket in her hand. By her gait she was young. So much the better. Thibault rose to his feet; it seemed too good to be true.
It must be conceded that, as the godsend came nearer, he suffered a measure of disappointment. The woman was not young—but neither was she old. She was walking rather slowly, with her eyes on the ground, but when she was quite near she lifted them and looked at him, and M. Thibault perceived that she was about to stop of her own accord.
“Good-day, la femme!”
“Good-day, citizen sentry,” she returned. “This is the only entrance to the château, is it not?”
Her voice was very sweet—though indeed any voice would have fallen like music on the ears of Grégoire just then. The eyes which she raised to him were noticeably well-set; under her decent black bonnet he saw fair hair turning grey. She was tall and generously made; he took her to be about forty-five. Then her little covered basket and her air of having business there suddenly recalled to him a fact he had totally forgotten.
“Name of a pipe!” exclaimed he, slapping his musket. “Is it possible, citoyenne, that you are the new concierge?”
The woman nodded. “Yes, citizen sentry. I was instructed to come this afternoon. My baggage, a small trunk, should have arrived already.”
“I don’t believe it has,” said M. Grégoire Thibault musingly, and he rubbed a rather bristly chin. “If I had seen anything of it, I shouldn’t have forgotten that you were coming. But perhaps it arrived this morning before I was on duty.” He appeared to be ruminating on this possibility, but in reality he was thinking to himself, “She has been a fine woman, that, once!” Aloud, he said, “I knew, of course, that Mère Prévost was giving up her job, but I had forgotten that she was to leave to-day. Her man has come back from the wars, I believe, short of an arm. And so you are the new caretaker, citoyenne?”
He took another look at her. “Le diable m’emporte,” he thought this time, “if she is not a fine woman still!”
Resting his musket against the sentry-box he went slowly, fishing out a key, to the movable portion of the barrier. But having got there, instead of unfastening the padlock he turned round again, leaning against the bar.
“I’m sure I hope you’ll like this business, citoyenne,” he began conversationally. “Pretty dreary, I take it, living alone in that great house there, full of nothing but memories of the time of the Tyrant, and of the bloodshed the day the people took it. If one believed in ghosts, now——”
“You don’t believe in them, evidently, Citizen?”
“I hope I am a better patriot,” responded the National Guard with dignity. “Ghosts, the so-called saints, prayers for the dead, the Republic has done away with all that nonsense.”
“Yes, there has been a good deal done away with these last ten years.” The tone of this remark a little puzzled Grégoire, but he continued nevertheless, “Still, I must confess that Décadi doesn’t often see me at the Temple, unless there’s a wedding. It’s just a little wearisome. . . . But my wife in Paris goes to the Temple of Genius regularly—the lateedifice Roch, as you know—and says she likes it, especially since they have instituted recitations by the children, and our youngest took a prize. But what were we speaking of?—ah, the château. Well, if I were not a good patriot, and disbelieved in saints and angels and all that rubbish, I might be tempted to think that the ci-devant Duchesse walked there o’ nights without her head, or maybe with it, looking in her silks and satins as shedid before they stuck it on a pike, for I have heard that she was a famous beauty.”
“Yes, I have heard that,” said the newcomer with a shade of impatience. “But I have also heard that it is incorrect,” she added.
“Well, beauty or not, it was all the same to her, poor wretch, when she came out of La Force that day,” observed Grégoire, comfortably leaning back on his elbows on the barrier. And having thus dismissed the subject he went on, “The ci-devant Duc now,—supposed to be alive, he is. So you won’t meet him walking there. Instead of Monseigneur we have M. le Député Camain; he often comes, and sometimes the Citoyenne Dufour, who used to be at the Opera, with him. She acts at the Ambigu-Comique now. They say he’s going to marry her. Curious world, isn’t it, Citoyenne? Think, if the Duc and Duchesse could see Mirabel now!” He laughed.
The new caretaker drew her shawl round her as if the April breeze caught her. “I think I had better——” she began, making a fresh move towards the barrier. And then she said abruptly, “You spoke just now of the Duc. Has anything been heard—here in Mirabel-le-Château, I mean—about him?”
M. Grégoire shook a waggish finger at her. “No, no, nothing more is known about him. And take care, citoyenne concierge!” he added grinning. “It doesn’t do, since Fructidor, to be too much interested in aristocrats as high up as that, especially when they are still émigrés. But I believe from what I have heard, that Monseigneur le Duc could turn any woman’s head. I don’t suppose, however, that you ever saw him, did you?”
“I am from the provinces,” was the new concierge’s reply. “I only came to Paris after the tenth of August.”
“Ah, you missed something!” said the National Guard regretfully. “I wasn’t at the storming of the Tuileries, but I saw the place afterwards. And this nest of ci-devants, as I daresay you’ve heard, was rushed two days later, by patriots from Paris. Not so much fighting, of course, as in the Place du Carrousel, since there were no troops here, but they barricaded the place as well as they could, and the Duchesse’s maître d’hôtel was killed outside her boudoir, and two or three servants on the stairs andso on. Then the house was pretty well looted; I’ve heard the citizen Camain regret that.”
The concierge looked away from him at the great façade. “And how was it that the Duc escaped?” she asked.
“How did he escape! He did not need to escape!” retorted the sentry. “He wasn’t there. He had emigrated long before that. That’s what saved him.”
“But he could not know, long before, what was going to happen in 1792,” said the woman, almost as if she were defending M. de Trélan.
“Maybe not,” returned the National Guard indifferently. “All I know is that he wasn’t here. But she was—the ci-devant Duchesse—and that was the end of her, after a few days of La Force. Myself, I don’t approve of murdering prisoners, especially those of the sex, though the woman Lamballe, being such a friend of the female Capet—as we used to call her before Thermidor—doubtless deserved what she got. But as for this Duchesse, I have heard that she was always kind to the poor, here and elsewhere. But what would you have? Mistakes happen.”
“Yes,” agreed the concierge, looking at him. “But, no doubt, she is well out of this world. It is not too merry a one, Citizen, even, perhaps, for a Duchesse.”
M. Thibault, who was in reality a sympathetic soul, and by no means the blood-boltered patriot he liked to paint himself at times, said to this, “You have known trouble, Citoyenne?”
“I have known what it is to lose my husband, my home, and every penny I had. But I am not faint-hearted; do not think that! One goes on to the end, does one not, citizen sentry—till the relief?”
“Sacré tonnerre, yes!” asseverated the citizen sentry, struck. “I see you are a good-plucked one, Madame. Well, I shall like to think of you behind me in the château there, and if ever there’s anything you want doing for you, I’m your man. Grégoire Thibault is my name.”
The new concierge thanked him with a smile which caused a sensible warmth to flow over the Citizen Grégoire, and made him regret still more that he could not decently keep her waiting any longer. He fitted the key slowly into the lock, saying, “You’ve got your warrant with you, I suppose, Madame?”
The woman held it out at once—an official document duly stamped and sealed, appointing the widow Vidal, sempstress, of the Rue de Seine, concierge of the ci-devant château of Mirabel, in room of the woman Prévost, resigning that charge. The document was signed by the Deputy Camain, the administrator of Mirabel, and countersigned by one of the five Directors, Larevellière-Lépeaux.
“ ‘Vidal,’ ” murmured the sentry, studying it. “Parfaitement.” He returned the paper and at last unfastened the barrier. “Do you see those two bits of balustrading, Madame Vidal, on either hand of the great steps? When you get there you will find that there is a stairway the other side of them, going down to the basement storey. The left-hand one has ‘Concierge’ on it. You go down there. Mme Prévost will probably be on the look-out for you. Good-luck to you, Citoyenne!”
She bent her head again with that smile which had charmed him.
“Thank you, Citizen. I think I shall find my way. . . . Ah, there is one thing I forgot. I have lived in Paris for some years with my niece Mme Tessier, and it is probable that she may come to see me soon—that she will come regularly, in fact. She will have a pass from M. Camain himself. I suppose therefore that there will be no difficulty?”
“No, that will be all right. No need to bother about that,” replied M. Thibault heartily.
And Mme Vidal passed through the barrier. As she did so she not unnaturally glanced up at the broken stone lion on one of the gateposts which still held between its paws the defaced shield of the Ducs de Trélan. The man, who saw the movement, made a gesture of half-tolerant contempt.
“Those watchdogs won’t bark at you now—nor at any one!” he remarked. But Mme Vidal seemed not to have heard him; nor did he, on his side, observe that she had caught her underlip between her teeth like one in sudden pain. Then she began to walk steadily towards the great house.
A trifle of agitation might easily have been excused in any prospective caretaker confronted for the first time by the château of Mirabel. Since there was, on this side of it, no half-concealing avenue, nor, indeed, trees of any kind whatever, but only the prone skeletons of what had been a series of formal gardens, the whole towering extent of the façade broke in one oppressive moment upon eye and brain. And that, no doubt, was why Mme Vidal, walking at first with fair speed towards it over the wide gravel approach, suddenly came to a standstill, and, gripping tightly the handle of her basket, stood like a statue, gazing, across its forlorn parterres, at the overpowering bulk of her new home.
Forty-two years had gone to the making of Mirabel. Begun in 1528 for François I., at the same time as that other palace of Fontainebleau, it had risen under the eyes of successive Royal architects, de l’Orme and Primaticcio, till it became the great château reckoned, in that day of the French Renaissance, so wonderful a novelty—a residence not built round courtyards one or many, but constructed in a solid mass, a parallelogram of great length and height, whereof the north side exactly reproduced the south and the east the west. And Girolamo della Robbia, brought from Italy, had ornamented it in every part with details of many-coloured majolica.
So it stood, this great pile, before the eyes of Mme Vidal—its five-storeyed façade cut, as it were, into three portions by the two square-faced towers which ran up it, and which were repeated, something larger and more aspiring, at the corners. Along both of the two lower storeys, making a sort of colonnade or loggia in front of the tall windows, went richly decorated arcading, fifteen bays of it, lofty and round-arched. Interrupted by similartowers at intervals the colonnading ran, in fact, round the entire building. But the five bays of the central portion were more deeply recessed than the others, for at their pillar bases stretched, from tower to tower, twelve immensely long, wide and shallow steps. Save for the absence of these steps and of the great entrance door to which they led—and for a difference, also, in the frieze over the arches—the second storey exactly reproduced the first. But the third and fourth gained a measure of variety from the absence of the colonnading; though on the third there was still an uncovered terrace or balcony. Here too the windows, no longer so lofty, showed differing schemes of ornamentation, the frames of the lower row being supported by a sort of winged design, the upper accompanied by flat columns.
Yet, despite these devices to break monotony, it was with relief that the eye, travelling upwards over this regular assemblage of colonnades and windows, came at last to the high-pitched roofs, with their agreeably different levels, their dormer windows, and their tall, ornate chimney-stacks. The roof of the midmost portion of the château, between the two central towers, was the lowest; yet even this, after putting forth two great decorated chimneys, suddenly soared up at each end into a peak higher even than those of the towers. And on either hand of it sprang the great pointed pavilion-roofs of the side wings, much higher again, and blossoming, they also, into the most intricately ornamented chimneys and dormer windows.
And everywhere there was this astounding many-hued, glazed and highly-modelled decoration, lavished in frieze and medallion from the richly diapered soffits of the arcading on the ground floor to the very crests of the roofs themselves. It was true that it did not glitter so brightly in the sun of 1799 as in that of 1570, that more than two centuries of exposure to northern weather had dimmed—not perhaps to its disadvantage—something of the Italian’s lustre and colouring, and that the far more destructive human agencies of the last seven years had obliterated some of his ornaments altogether, yet Mirabel still was a “palais de faïence,” still supported the enthusiastic testimony of a Renaissance contemporary that its mass was “fort éclattante à la veue.” And even if the decorationwere too exuberant, even if the whole building were imposing rather from sheer size than from any other architectural virtue, it was undeniably a great house, with a majesty and a history of its own, a house that bore out the proud motto of its vanished owners,Memini et permaneo—‘I remember and I remain.’
Such was the château of Mirabel, built for the first King of the Valois-Angouléme branch, whose salamander still in places adorned it, and given by the last to his favourite, César de Saint-Chamans, Marquis de Trélan. Up and down those great steps, in the last two hundred years, had gone many a prince and warrior and statesman and courtier, many a great lady and fair. Mirabel with its colonnades and majolica had known much revelry, much wit, much evil; some good deeds, no little patronage of art and letters, now and then a liberal charity; once or twice, in brides of the line, some approach to saintliness. And it had sheltered always a brilliant courage, a brilliant egoism, an astoundingly tenacious self-will, and a pride as great as the Rohans’. For these last qualities it had been no unfit setting.
Now it was . . . as it was; and a poor semptress from Paris, whom the warrant of that little hunchbacked, cross-grained Angevin attorney, the Director Larevellière-Lépeaux, had appointed its only tenant, stood in front of the blind, shuttered mass and gazed at it. The sun might strike on the majolica, but how eyeless looked those great lofty windows of the lower storeys, through that empty colonnading where no one ever now walked or talked! The glass was gone from some of them. Everything was dead, ruined, deserted—a pulseless body. Only, over the level central roof, against the clear sky of afternoon, voyaged with light heart a feather of an April cloud, and the April breeze shook cheerfully the few self-sown flowers that flaunted haphazard in what was the mere chart of the formal gardens. But Mme Vidal’s eyes were on the house, and the house only.
Presently a lively discussion of sparrows took place near her on the gravel. The angry cheeping appeared to rouse her, and she began to go on again towards the château, while the victor of the affray, hopping to the basin of a sunken fountain, drank delicately of that water with which the spring rains, and they alone, had filled it.
Very soon the new concierge was close enough to the house to distinguish plainly the winged beasts, like dragon-headed horses, that went in couples, face to face, all along the frieze running above the colonnading of the ground floor, and the medallions of classical heads that filled the spandrils below the frieze, and the Doric entablature of the next storey. Walking now like an automaton, she came nearer and nearer, and stood at last at the foot of the great steps, and, looking up, saw, over the blotched and discoloured marble, through which the grass was pushing triumphant fingers, how the great door, visible now through the richly diapered archway, was roughly mended and yet more roughly boarded up. It still wore the scars of that August day seven years ago when, for the first time in all its proud history, it had been opened to a will that was neither its master’s nor the King’s. At it, too, the concierge stood a moment or two gazing, then, as she had been directed, she turned to her left hand, and began to descend the steps which led from the ground level at the foot of the tower towards the basement offices. These steps, at the base of either tower, were invisible till one was close to the house, since they were screened by a line of stone balustrading, but, as the sentry had said, a board with a legend and a downward-pointing hand directed the feet of the visitor to this subterranean entrance. Mirabel had been greatly admired once for the possession of this very thing.
Just as Mme Vidal got to the bottom of the steps the door at right angles to them opened, and revealed the outgoing caretaker, a dry, thin-lipped woman dressed in rusty black, with a fairhaired child of three or four clinging to her skirts.
“I hope, Madame,” said her successor apologetically, “that I have not inconvenienced you? I fear I am a little late; the diligence was not punctual.”
“You’re not later than I expected,” replied Mme Prévost unemotionally. “I saw Thibault chattering to you at the gate; I know what he is, so I don’t blame you. From the way his tongue goes, it’s a pity he’s not a woman.”
Without more ado she led the way in, the child’s hand in hers, and Mme Vidal followed her along a short passage into a smallish living-room, clean, bare, and distinctlystuffy with an accumulated rather than a recent smell of cooking. Facing the door, high up, were two tall windows, which came just down to the level of the ground outside, itself, naturally, higher than that of the floor. They gave sufficient light, but it was not very easy to see out of them, for they were heavily barred. In the middle of the room, covered with a nightmare of a cloth, stood a round table. On the left hand was the stove, with a few shelves and appurtenances; on the right a press, two chairs and another door.
“Here is the bedroom,” said Mme Prévost, opening this door, and affording a hasty glimpse of a still smaller room, where the chief object to be seen was a short, wide, wooden bed, covered with a patchwork quilt of various shades, and situated in a recess.
“You’ll find these rooms quite comfortable,” said the woman. “The Government provides all necessaries, down to pots and pans, as I expect you’ve been told, so you’ll have what you want for cooking. And I will come again in the morning to show you round the château; I can tell you your duties then. I have left you enough provisions for your supper and breakfast, in case you did not think to bring anything with you. There is a small trunk of yours arrived, however; I put it in the bedroom. I suppose you know that people come to see the place occasionally, though a good portion of it is shut up? There’s keys—a mort of keys. Look, Madame!” She unfastened a small door in the wall, and showed them reposing in a sort of cupboard.
“It will take me time to learn all those,” said Mme Vidal, resting her hand on the table. She had a look, suddenly come upon her, of great fatigue.
“Oh, they are all labelled,” returned Mme Prévost complacently. “Well, I’ll come and show you in the morning, about nine. Yes, ma petite”—for the child was tugging at her skirts—“we are going to see Papa. She hardly knows what the word means; born in Germinal of the year IV, she was, and he away in Germany with General Moreau. . . . I hope you will find everything you want, Madame. I can assure you it’s all clean and as it should be.”
“I am sure it is,” answered Mme Vidal. “But may Inot pay you this evening for the provisions you have been kind enough to leave me?”
“Very well, Madame, if you wish,” replied the other, who was gathering together some small possessions. “There’s the bread and the coffee, and a couple of eggs—not so easy to come by in these hard days. The milk-woman comes at half-past six in the morning.” Reflecting a moment she named a sum, and Mme Vidal, pulling out a shabby purse, paid it with reiterated thanks.
“But I see that you have left me some wood too,” she added. “Do I not owe you for that also?”
“No, no,” said Mme Prévost, waving away the proposal. “There’s never any lack of wood here, and the Government lets the concierge have it free. It would be hard indeed if they were stingy with it, considering that it costs them nothing, as it is all off the estate. This lot is particularly good, you’ll find; it comes from the pine avenue, I fancy.”
Mme Vidal took a step backwards. “They are not cutting down the pine avenue, surely?” she exclaimed in a sharp, sudden voice.
A great astonishment dawned in the meagre visage before her. “Why, do you know Mirabel already!” she asked. “I thought—the Citizen Deputy said you came from the provinces.”
“So I did—so I do,” stammered the new concierge. “But even in the provinces . . . one had heard of the pine avenue at Mirabel. My late husband had seen it in his youth.”
“I see,” said Mme Prévost slowly. “Well, I will leave you to settle in, Madame, for you look tired. I’ll come in the morning about nine then. The stairway up to the ground floor is a little to the left out there; not that you will need to go up before I come. The key of the door I let you in at is in the lock; everybody, visitors and all, comes by that door, and you are not responsible for any other; in fact the rest are nearly all barred up. You had better lock that door behind me now. Come along, Mariette.”
Almost in silence Mme Vidal went with her into the passage, and when Mme Prévost and the child had passed through, and she had responded with a pale smile to theoutgoing concierge’s “A demain, Madame!” she turned the key and pushed the bolt. Then she went back to the living-room, and locked that door behind her also.
Back in Mirabel! back in Mirabel! Was it possible? Back in Mirabel—though, to be sure, in a region of it that she had never even seen before. Some of the swarm of servants had lived here in old times. Had she betrayed herself about the avenue? How foolish, after all these years of self-repression! She looked slowly round. Yes, this odd couple of rooms was no doubt some lesser steward’s in the past. But, if unfamiliar, it was at least situated within the shell of what had been, what still was, Mirabel—Mirabel the loved, Mirabel the hated, Mirabel the enchanted palace, Mirabel the purgatory. . . .
She went suddenly to the cupboard in the wall, and putting in her hand drew out the keys. Yes, she was once more, in a sense—but in what a sense—the châtelaine of Mirabel.
And, flinging them back clashing into their seclusion, she sat down at the table, buried her face in her hands and began to laugh. There was never a laugh more mirthless, yet the situation had its humours. At her, indeed, the “watchdogs” on the disfigured gateposts, as the sentry had termed them, would never even have growled. The new concierge of Mirabel’s fallen estate had once been the mistress of Mirabel’s magnificence, for Mme Vidal the caretaker was Valentine de Saint-Chamans, was the Duchesse de Trélan in person.
The general belief that the Duchesse de Trélan, thrown into prison when Mirabel was sacked, had shared the terrible fate of the Princesse de Lamballe, though it was unfounded, had a large amount of probability to justify it. Valentine de Saint-Chamans had come very near to being cut down by the weapons of the killers in that shambles of a street outside La Force on the 3rd of September, 1792—so near it indeed that her entire disappearance from that hour was assigned to that cause and to no other.
But she had been saved on the very brink by a man almost unknown to her, acting under a stimulus not commonly as powerful in this world as it might be—gratitude.
Years and years before the Duchesse de Trélan had discovered in Paris, precariously situated, a former steward of Mirabel, had pensioned him from her own purse, and had continued the pension after his death to his granddaughter, Suzon. Suzon in due time wedded one Alcibiade Tessier, a young watchmaker with ideas—the Duchesse, who was fond of her for her own sake, contributing her dowry. After that Valentine lost sight of her protégée, and for some years before 1792 she had seen nothing of Mme Tessier, so that no one had less idea than she in what good stead her own past generosity was to stand her.
The first intimation of it was the sudden appearance, at one o’clock in the afternoon of that third of September, in the little courtyard of the prison of La Petite Force—where only an hour and a half earlier Mme de Trélan had seen and spoken to the Princesse de Lamballe, now gone to her doom—of a man whom she seemed to have seen before. This man approached her, looked her in theface, said with meaning, “Do not be afraid! I shall be there!” and walked rapidly away again. It was Alcibiade Tessier, now an important member of his “section,” and, as such, decorated with a badge of authority commanding respect, though meaningless to the Duchesse de Trélan.
Sure enough, when a little before three o’clock several men came to take her before that mock tribunal in the adjoining prison of La Force, he was at their head. Still Mme de Trélan had not recognised him, and thought his remark merely ferocious irony. But a measure of enlightenment as to his aim, at any rate, came when she found him confidently taking the words out of her mouth, and answering for her to those questions that she only half understood. It was he who at the end of that rapid interrogatory caught her arm and, raising it, said, “See, she cries ‘Vive la nation’ ”; it was he who, on the pronouncement of acquittal, went out in front of her through the door of death into the swimming Rue des Balais, he who, with some more under his orders, hurried her up the length of that swirling red gutter into the worse carnage of the Rue St. Antoine, and finally he who, when one of the male furies there, with dripping sabre, tried to get her to kneel on the hillock of corpses and shreds of corpses to swear fealty to the nation, pushed her by, covering her face with his hat, asseverating that she was not a friend of the Lamballe, and that she had already sworn.
But it was only when she sank down, half dead, in Alcibiade’s little shop in the Rue de Seine that the Duchesse de Trélan began fully to realise the harvest which she was reaping. In the Tessiers’ attic, where, more or less indisposed, she was hidden for a month, she knew it better still. For Suzon had quite decided that her benefactress was to instal herself there for the present, until she could safely get away, and she and Alcibiade so wrought upon Mme de Trélan that in mid-October she openly appeared as Suzon’s aunt from the provinces, arriving one evening, for the benefit of the neighbours, with a trunk—Suzon’s.
She was then able to attempt to communicate with her émigré husband, and wrote a very guarded letter addressed to his last direction in London. Suzon, who was anxious for her to join him, contrived to get it conveyed somehow across the Channel. Cautiouslyas (for the Tessiers’ sake) the letter was worded, it showed that Mme de Trélan was waiting for a lead to join the Duc in England. No answer came. The obvious explanation of the silence was that her letter had never reached him. That was quite to be expected. After Christmas she wrote again; fresh difficulties of conveyance, fresh uncertainties as to its arrival. And again no reply.
“The reason is,” Suzon would say, “that M. le Duc is coming himself to take you away. One of these days he will turn up in the Rue de Seine, you will see!”
But Valentine knew—indeed, hoped—that that was out of the question. In that early spring of 1793, after the King’s execution, how could a proscribed noble possibly get into Paris without incurring the most terrible risks? She was haunted sometimes by the thought that he had come, and had paid the penalty. That thought made her hesitate too about fleeing on her own account to England—always supposing such a course were possible without compromising the Tessiers—for her husband might meanwhile be searching for her in Paris, since she had not dared (again for their sakes) to give her address plainly. She would wait a little longer.
And then, in that April, the bloody thundercloud of the Terror broke over France. Ere the first spattering red drops had swelled to the stream which was to run so full Valentine found herself once more in prison—this time in a much obscurer place of detention than La Force. A piece of her underclothing, incautiously sent to be washed out of the house, was found to bear a compromising mark; the washerwoman denounced this widow from the provinces who had a coronet on her shift. The marvel was that the Tessiers themselves were not included in this catastrophe, but they put up such a good defence, Alcibiade’s character for patriotism stood so high, and Suzon affirmed so stoutly that the garment in question belonged to a ci-devant in the country whom her aunt had once served as maid, that in the end Valentine was imprisoned as a suspect merely. And as a suspect she remained in her mean captivity for more than a year, unrecognised—for there were none of her acquaintance there—and forgotten.
The Gironde fell, Marat was murdered, the Queen executed, Vendée defeated. The year 1793 closed; the nextbegan; Hébert’s, then Danton’s head went the way of the rest, and at last the long suspense was ended, when on a May morning of 1794 the widow Vidal stood before Dumas and his assessors in their plumed hats, in that hall of so many anguishes in the Palais de Justice, to find acquittal on an unforeseen ground. There was no evidence against her; the zealous washerwoman was dead, and even Fouquier-Tinville himself, demanding his quota of heads a day, was intent on nobler quarry than this country widow. Her trial only lasted ten minutes. One was quickly lost or saved just then.
The fishwives on the other side of the barrier acclaimed the acquittal, little guessing whom they were applauding. Some of them insisted on accompanying the Duchesse home—to all the home she had. Henceforward she was more or less sacred. But never, now, while that orgy of blood and denunciation lasted, could her real identity be suffered to reveal itself, or the Tessiers would be lost indeed. Moreover, Mme de Trélan was herself beginning to be uncertain of it. And, though her position was improved by her official acquittal, the months of prison and privation had left their mark on her character in a kind of inertia and indifference very foreign to her nature. In common with many others in those days of superhuman strain, the love of life was running low in her. Existence was almost a burden. She was ill, indeed, for months. Then at last, in that stiflingly hot and cloudless Thermidor, the spell of terror was snapped, and the guillotine came back from its ceaseless work in the east of Paris to the centre for Maximilien Robespierre himself.
In the reaction Valentine roused herself to write again to her husband, more because she felt she owed it to him than because of any great wish to do so, or of any hope that he would receive the letter. She did seriously contemplate leaving France, or at least leaving Paris, but the days went on, and she took no steps. . . . It was better to think that Gaston was dead. She did think it at last. If he were not, she was too proud to make an appearance in the world of emigration as a deserted wife. And the few family ties she, an only child and early orphaned, had possessed were all broken now, by nature or violence. She was happy, too, in a sense, with theTessiers, who had risked so much for her, and to whom, since Thermidor, her presence was no longer a menace—though she was still very careful not to betray herself. She began to earn money by embroidery, which she had always done exquisitely; she began, too, to enjoy the new sensation of earning. And when in ’97 Alcibiade died very suddenly, and his widow, keeping a journeyman to attend to the clocks and watches, turned half the shop into a lingerie, Mme de Trélan’s skill helped to support the new venture.
So—unbelievably when she looked back at their added months—five years, almost, had passed since her release, and she was still in the Rue de Seine, having reached an indifference to outward circumstances which might, on the surface, have earned the commendation accorded by spiritual direction to “detachment.” Yet this state of mind was not in the main the fruit of the astonishing change in her fortunes, of captivity and indignities or suspense—not even the fruit of her husband’s strange silence. It sprang from a tree of older growth than these, though no doubt these conditions, and especially the last, had ripened it; it was the lees of a cup more deadening, even, than that which the Revolution had set to her lips—the cup which she had begun to drink years before, when her heart had been slowly starved amid the luxury and state of Mirabel.
The marriage of Geneviève-Armande-Marie-Valentine de Fondragon with Gaston-Henri-Hippolyte-Gabriel-Eléonor de Saint-Chamans, Duc de Trélan, had been arranged, as often happened, when the bride was a child in the convent. But Mlle de Fondragon had seen her betrothed before the ceremony rather oftener than fell to the lot of most highborn young girls in her day, and no match, in the end, had been more one of love than hers with the singularly attractive young man who came sometimes, as was permitted, to the parlour of the great aristocratic nunnery of the Panthémont where she was being educated. She was seventeen, beautiful and accomplished, when she was wedded with all imaginable pomp in the chapel of Mirabel to a bridegroom of twenty-three, and began with him an existence out of which custom andthe demands of fashion, rather than anything more menacing, were so quickly to suck not only the early enchantment, but the more lasting affection that might have replaced it. For the splendid and handsome young patrician whom she had married went his own way in life—and it was not hers.
It was indeed expected of a man of rank in those days that he should either keep a mistress or be assigned as lover to some married lady of his own world, and that he should see only as much of the society of his own wife as a certain standard of good usage demanded. After a few years of marriage the young Duc de Trélan was conforming most faithfully to both these requirements. And Valentine, formed in that corrupt and polished society which grew up so early, was even at twenty-one too much of her rank and epoch ever to utter reproaches, or even to feel very keenly that her husband’s far from unusual conduct was reprehensible in itself. Practically the whole of the highest society was an amazingchassé-croiséof such arrangements. But she did feel it in another way, and that sharply enough; for there was a factor not always present in like situations—she loved her husband passionately. And so, just as an ordinary woman, she suffered.
Not that Gaston de Trélan was by any means a profligate. He was difficult in his preferences, and she knew well how violently—and for the most part unsuccessfully—he was run after in society. “Saint-Charmant” was the current play on his name in the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain and of the Marais. Nor did he ever fail in attentions to her; nay, as the years went on, she knew that she had his respect always; intermittently, perhaps, almost his love. Of the freedom, not to say licence, which a lady in her high position could claim, she herself had not taken the shadow of an advantage. And yet, though she was herself so unsullied, and though she was also a very proud woman, she would have passed over in her husband what her world, so far from censuring, almost demanded. As youth fell away from both of them she certainly felt it less, and the Duc’s love affairs, never scandalously frequent, became almost negligible. It was not that trait in him which had cut the deepest; it was the gradual conviction that the high promise of his character and gifts wouldnever be fulfilled. Her love for him, which had survived unfaithfulness, was ambitious, and not without reason. More than most of his line Gaston de Trélan had capacity, but unluckily there ran in his blood far more than his share of the indolent pride of the Saint-Chamans. If he could not do a thing supremely well, he would not do it at all. Indeed, he appeared to see no reason why he should trouble to do anything, in a world where all was at his feet, but be uniformly charming, gay, keenwitted—and supremely wilful. Like most young nobles he had had a military training, and had been given a colonelcy at the age of twenty; but not one second more than the obligatory four months of the twelve would he ever spend with his regiment. Indeed he resigned the burden of this command a few years after marriage. In later life the coveted position of First Gentleman of the Bedchamber had been almost forced upon him; fortunately that only entailed a year of service. Valentine, a Dame du Palais herself at the time, had no love for the long and tiring ceremonial of Court attendance, and if only he had accepted the post of ambassador to Sweden which was offered him about the same period, or that of governor of Provence for which he was proposed, she would have forgiven him had he refused the honour at Versailles. But there existed no influence strong enough to make him shoulder responsibility against his will.
Yet the slow disillusionment had not killed her love. After all, when the crash came in 1790 they were neither of them old. And she herself, as she felt bitterly at times, had failed to do the one thing which was really demanded of her. She had not given her husband an heir—and Gaston de Trélan was the last of his line.
It was a shattering blow to a house which dated from the eleventh century. The name would be extinguished altogether, and the property broken up. Mirabel would go to a cousin, the Duc de Savary-Lancosme, who would also inherit the great estates in Berry. Saint-Chamans, that cradle of the race in the South—which for some reason Valentine had never liked and rarely visited—would fall to another branch. So the Duc de Trélan was pitied, as she knew, for what, to a man of his rank, possessions and ancient lineage, was indeed a profoundmisfortune. Things might indeed have been very different if Mirabel had not been a childless house—not in the accepted sense that the birth of a son would have drawn husband and wife together, for this was doubtful—but because the Duchesse de Trélan would not have felt always, as the hope of one died, the sense of an irremediable shortcoming, and because a certain fatal retort could never have been made.
For her husband’s entire abstention from reproach on that score Valentine had always borne him gratitude. And indeed no one in the world ever counted up more greedily than she his good qualities—his generosity, his courage, his strict regard for honour, his contempt of anything petty or mean. It was nothing but that undying wish of hers to see him openly what he really was which led, after the years of partial estrangement, to their final rupture, when, in July, 1790, the Duc announced his intention of emigrating.
He assumed as a matter of course that his wife would accompany him from a France grown, as he said, insupportable. Most people of their rank had already gone, for with them it had become practically a principle; M. de Trélan was inclined to blame himself for having remained so long. But Valentine did not approve of the principle, and said so; for a man of any weight and authority to leave France at this juncture seemed to her like deserting one’s country in her hour of need—though the opinion was not fashionable. Her husband listened to her, as he always did, with courtesy, but replied that by remaining he regarded himself as tacitly countenancing the growth of theories and practices, both in politics and religion, which he most cordially detested. And the Duchesse on that had frankly told him that, having for so many years refused to take any part in politics, or diplomacy, or military affairs or indeed anything, he had hardly the right now to complain of present developments. Never before had she been within even measurable distance of such plain speech.
And M. de Trélan, who could never brook criticism, was plainly more than annoyed, but he had controlled himself, and recurred more insistently still to the question of his wife’s accompanying him into exile. Once more theDuchesse had refused, saying finally, when pressed for a reason, that she “did not like running away.”
It was true that she had hastily added “from responsibility”—since she knew, none better, that the last weakness on earth of which her husband could be accused was physical cowardice—but it was too late. The Duc was on his feet, quite white. “Madame,” he said, “God made you a woman; you may thank Him for it. Do you stay here then, with your responsibilities. They are doubtless great; and if I do not return”—he took no notice of her as she tried to break in—“if I do not return, you can superintend the bestowal of my property on its legal heirs. Savary-Lancosme and the rest will have cause,as ever,to be grateful to you. I have the honour to wish you good-day.” And he walked out of her boudoir.
She never saw him again. Within an hour he had quitted Mirabel for ever, leaving her to reflect, wounded to the soul as she was, on those two little words “as ever” and what, after all, they revealed.
But in a few days there came a letter from him begging her, not without a certain stiffness, to forgive him for what, in the heat of the moment, had passed his lips, and offering her, if she had reconsidered her decision, his escort to Coblentz, or, if she preferred it, to England. Otherwise, for the short absence which he proposed to make, she would find that his affairs were sufficiently in order not to incommode her, and he prayed her to remain at Mirabel or wherever seemed good to her.
Except for an absence of feeling the letter was perfect, but Mme de Trélan knew that it was the letter of a man who wishes to set himself right in his own eyes for what he considers a lapse from good taste. She thought emigration foolish and unpatriotic—the day had not yet come when it was the only chance of safety for the wellborn—and she could not bring herself to accept an amende prompted less by affection for her than by a desire for rehabilitation. And if it was to be a short absence, why leave France at all? Down at her country house in Touraine she was, besides, interesting herself in a certain philanthropic scheme of her own. So she answered the Duc’s letter in much the same spirit, asked his pardon also for her hasty words—and refused.
The Duc de Trélan never came back. From Coblentz he went to England, and though he and his wife at first kept up a desultory correspondence on matters of business, for five or six months before the sack of Mirabel she had not had a line from him. Intercourse with England was by that time becoming uncertain, but she had news of him through less direct channels. By all accounts Gaston de Trélan was much too popular in English society to find time for writing to the wife who so deeply disapproved of his having taken refuge there.
But the strange twist of Fortune’s wheel which, nine years after her husband’s departure, had brought the Duchesse de Trélan as concierge to her own palace, was first set in motion when M. Georges Camain, originally a builder at Angers, was returned at the elections of 1795 as Deputy for Maine-et-Loire, and, coming up to Paris to take his seat, received, after a time, from the Director Larevellière-Lépeaux—like him an Angevin and the quasi-pontiff of that new and arid creed which M. Camain also professed, Theophilanthropism—the charge of Mirabel. For M. Camain was a cousin of Suzon Tessier’s, though they had not met since Suzon was a child.
Nor indeed did the Deputy discover Suzon’s existence till the year that Alcibiade Tessier died; but after that he was pretty assiduous in his visits. Valentine sometimes wondered if he had a vision of consoling the little widow. She herself met him occasionally at meals—a person of forty-five or so, large, high-coloured, good-humoured, inclined to a florid style in dress and a slightly vulgar gallantry. Report said that down at Angers in ’94 he had been a Terrorist, but Suzon discreetly refrained from making enquiries on that point. Now he seemed so moderate in his politics that it was hard to understand how he had escaped beingfructidoriséwith the other moderate and Royalist deputies in thecoup d’étatof 1797.
M. Camain found, of course, that Suzon’s “aunt” had already lived with her for years, and he was not sufficiently conversant with his cousin’s relations by marriage to contest any statements which Mme Tessier chose to make about her kinswoman’s past history. Even her neighbours in the Rue de Seine scarcely remembered now, so fast did events move, that Mme Vidal had begun her residencewith the Tessiers at a very significant date in 1792, and had passed more than a year in prison since. Besides, M. Camain did not frequent any house in the street but Suzon’s.
One afternoon, therefore, in March, 1799, the Deputy, dropping in, in his genial way, to his cousin’s little shop, said, after some casual conversation, “By the way, ma cousine, how would you like to live in a château?” and when Mme Tessier, who was sewing behind the counter, replied that she had no such ambition, her kinsman admitted that she might find Mirabel lacking in cosiness.
Mme Tessier’s work left her fingers. “Mirabel!” she exclaimed, in a tone not to be described.
Camain cocked his eyebrow at her. “Yes, Mir-a-bel! The present concierge is leaving, her husband having come home discharged from the army, and I always refuse to have a married couple there. Do you fancy the job?”
“God forbid!” said his cousin fervently.
“Of course, I was forgetting your grandfather. His ghost would certainly walk to see you installed there as the employee of the present régime.”
“Mirabel is full of ghosts,” said Mme Tessier, half unconsciously, her eyes suddenly fixed. Yes, had the Deputy but known, the ghost of ghosts was not even so far away as Mirabel.
As if, startlingly, her cousin had read her thoughts, he said, looking from one counter with its array of clocks to the other with its piles of linen garments, “No, I suppose you would not want to leave this singular union of science and . . . er . . . art which you have created. But what about that aunt of yours? She is very badly off, isn’t she,—and a charge to you, I suspect? How would it suit her? She would have assistance, you know, for the cleaning—she need never touch a brush herself—but she would have to live in the place, and be responsible for its condition. She has always struck me as a notable woman. What do you think of that, Cousin Suzon? You see that I am determined to do you a good turn, whether you will or no!”
And not all Suzon’s hastily found arguments about Mme Vidal’s unwillingness and unsuitability could turn him from his purpose of at least offering her the post.Moreover, during the discussion the Deputy unwittingly gave vent to a number ofdoubles entendres, such as “Nothing like keeping Mirabel in the family!” and, “It only wants a woman with a head on her shoulders,” so that by the time his threat to go and interview Mme Vidal in person had driven her perforce to undertake the office Suzon Tessier was almost hysterical, and went up the staircase wringing her hands. Never for one wild second did she imagine that the offer would be accepted.
At first, indeed, Mme de Trélan had seemed to see in it an insult thrown at her by Fate—but by Fate’s hand only, for Suzon was certain that the Deputy had no suspicion of her identity. “Caretaker of my own house!” the Duchesse had exclaimed. And then she had begun to laugh, saying that it was so preposterous as to be amusing. Yet the next moment, to Mme Tessier’s horror, she had exclaimed, “Dear God! why should I say it is preposterous,now! Tell me, Suzon, what I should have to do as concierge of Mirabel?”
And when Suzon, brokenly, had told her, hoping against hope that she was only playing with the idea to feed the little vein of ironic humour which she had sometimes observed in her, Valentine said gravely, “Since this strange thing has come to me, Suzon, perhaps it is meant, for some reason, that I should do it.”
“Madame, think what you are saying!” cried the poor Tessier, all her fears back again. “You a concierge!”
“But what am I now, Suzon—a sempstress, almost your pensioner.” She said it without bitterness.
“But atMirabel—and you its Duchess!”
To that the Duchesse only said calmly, “I could resign, I suppose, when I wished. And you would come to see me sometimes, would you not? I should still have leisure, perhaps, to sew for you. . . . Yes, Suzon, if your good Deputy wants an immediate answer you can give it to him. Tell him that—I accept.”
And as Suzon’s horrified protests against this—to her—monstrous and sacrilegious compliance were broken into by the none too patient benefactor himself tapping on the door, Mme de Trélan was able to tell him in person that, if he really thought her suitable for the post, she should be pleased to take it.
“There!” said Georges Camain triumphantly to the overwhelmed Suzon. And to her “aunt” he announced with a bow, “Madame, one has only to look at you to know that Mirabel is fortunate!”
It was in this manner that the Duchesse de Trélan came to accept her own, and to pass, some three weeks later, into a sort of possession of it.
Now, at eight o’clock the morning after her entry, she was already going up the stairway to the ground floor, the keys of Mirabel in her hand, for during her night under the patchwork quilt she had discovered that there was one thing about which she had miscalculated her strength. She could not endure to make re-acquaintance with her violated home in the company of Mme Prévost. True, she would probably be obliged to retrace her steps with the ex-concierge when the latter came to instruct her in her new duties, but it would be less desecration of her pride and of her memories if she revisited Mirabel for the first time alone.
But at the top of the stairs she hesitated. What was she going to find? She knew only too well what desolation might greet her. Paris had long been a vast pawnshop for the sale of the plundered goods of noble owners exiled or murdered. She had but to go into the once aristocratic Faubourg St. Germain to see a whole street of empty palaces, stripped, many of them, not only of furniture, mirrors and balustrades, but even of the very lead from the roofs.
And outside Paris it was the same. Where were the galleries andfaïencepavements of the château of Ecouen, Mirabel’s contemporary? And Anet, that palace of love, fruit of the same brain as Mirabel, where every door and window bore the interlaced monograms of Henri II. and Diane de Poitiers? Of that jewel of stone, set in its woods in the valley of the Eure, nothing but its walls remained. Its costly canals were rotting mud and rotting water, its parks cut down, the kneeling statue of Diane in pieces, her mausoleum a horse trough. Chantilly, stripped of its marble columns, of itsjaspe fleuri, of its panels of agate, had become a manufactory. Bellevue,that haunt of the Pompadour, was a barracks; Marly, a field and four walls.
And Versailles itself? Versailles was the museum of the department. The avenue under whose fourfold ranks of elms had passed Turenne and Colbert and Corneille existed no longer. In the chapel the very marble itself had been split and hacked to get rid of the encrusted Lilies, and the Virgin over the altar still held a pike in her hand. The beds in the park were covered with brambles and weeds, the borders of the Grand Canal were a grazing ground for goats and donkeys, the Pièce des Suisses was muddy, the Naiads were covered with dust. Trianon was for sale. The rooms, said Suzon, who had been there, smelt damp, like a cellar, and the dining-room was full of a strange lumber which Valentine recognised from her description as the remains of those sledges on which the young, laughing Court of 1788 had sped over the ice. . . .
How should she find her house of Mirabel?
The morning sun, at least, knew nothing of change of ownership nor of desecration. It came stooping in through the outer arcading just as it used to do. In room after room, as she went onwards from one to the other, it accompanied her, the only habitual thing left in that desolation. But, though these rooms were stripped, they were not damaged—only, in their aching bareness, very strange.
She came at last to the midmost point of the ground floor, the great banqueting hall, or Salle Verte, a vast apartment so closely resembling in decoration the Salle d’Hercule at Versailles as almost to suggest that it was a copy of it. There was the same effect of green relieved with gold on a white background, the same green marble pillars and heavily gilded cornice. Triumphal deities swam across the ceiling, and, just as at Versailles, two great pictures, set in elaborately carved frames, formed part of the integral scheme of decoration. As Valentine entered and looked down the vista of pillars she was confronted by the same huge canvas, saw that Æneas was still toilfully bearing Father Anchises on his shoulders from the burning town—the huge canvas which had witnessed the dancing on her wedding night and much beside. She turned almost unthinkingly to look at thecompanion picture which used to face it at the other end of the great room, over the hearth, and was met by a large blank space. Dido surveying the Trojan ships, with Carthage’s proud towers behind her, was gone. Why? A rude scrawl ofLes reines à la lanterneon the blank space answered her. Dido was a queen; Æneas probably considered to be the very model of a virtuous and filial Republican. The Duchesse smiled; not a smile of amusement.
One thing the removal of the enormous canvas had brought into prominence, and that was the coat of arms in relief on the stone hood of the chimney. It was blazoned in colour, and gilt to boot; and though it had been partially defaced, among so many quarterings there were still decipherable enough roses and besants and castles and ermine to show the great alliances of the house. And at the top the phoenix of the Saint-Chamans still soared undefeated from the flames, while below was yet clearly to be read their arrogant motto, doubly defiant in this pillaged and ownerless dwelling, charged, too, with a double irony:Memini et permaneo—‘I remember and I remain.’ She, who had lived with it for one-and-twenty years and knew that it proclaimed even more than that—‘I hold out, I stay to the end,’ shivered now as she looked at it.
She turned away at last, and walked half the echoing length of that deserted splendour with a steady step. Small risk of losing foothold now on that once slippery parquet!
The room which next she entered had much more of the Renaissance about it, designed as it had been as a withdrawing-room for Mirabel’s first royal owner. The great feature of this apartment—known always as the “sallette”—was the vast chimneypiece, behind which ran a staircase mounting to a kind of tribune or gallery, as in a chapel. The tapestry representing the history of St. Louis of France, which had clothed the walls of this room since the reign of Louis XIII. at least, had never been removed till the Revolution, nor the furniture of the same epoch, for the “sallette” had always been something of a curiosity, and here the phoenix of the house of Trélan had never replaced the crowned salamander of the Roi Chevalier. But now the place was despoiled alike of the furniture and of the wovenstory of the royal saint—all but one strip a few feet long, whose scorched edges testified to the passage of fire upon it. It was part of King Louis’ embarkation at Aigues Mortes for the Holy Land, and over his armour, as Valentine remembered, he had worn a mantle sown with fleur-de-lys—indeed, some were still visible. . . .
Mme de Trélan did not spend much longer on the ground floor. On the next, whither she now mounted, were rooms she had preferred, the little Galerie de Diane, for instance (large enough in any smaller house) where most of the older tapestry used to hang. She supposed it would not be there now. But it was: Brussels and Gobelin and Mortlake and some old Arras. Yes, there was the piece of Arras she had loved as a bride—a little world of leaves with its small merry woodland creatures interminably roaming and leaping about in it. And there was the piece of English tapestry, Soho or Mortlake, of which the Duchesse Eléonore had been so fond. Here, too, in a sixteenth century piece from the looms of Paris, was the deathless bird of the Trélans rising from a perfect sea of flames, and surrounded very oddly by a quantity of angels and martyrs, the device floating in a wind-borne scroll from its beak. Oh, what crowds of memories!
Valentine de Trélan passed on. She went through the ante-chamber, where the crimson velvet curtains were embroidered in twisted columns of silver, and came to the jewel of the house, the Galerie de Psyché, for which Mirabel was famous. It was indeed a place of stately beauty, and she, once its possessor, found herself marvelling at it anew, seeing for the first time with a gaze not that of ownership the perfect harmony between its delicate ornament and its splendid proportions, and the charm of Natoire’s beautiful paintings of the story which gave the place its name.
And the Galerie de Psyché seemed to have been purposely preserved as a show-room, for here were gathered together some of the best specimens of furniture from other parts of the house. The Duchesse recognised, for instance, the magnificent Boule escritoire from her husband’s private apartments, with its wonderful marquetry of tortoiseshell and copper, and a little green vernis-Martin cabinet of her own, acquired when vernis-Martin of thatshade was the rage, and other things. This assemblage of objects seemed to her more insulting than spoliation, and she stayed for a little by that cabinet of hers. Had she been betrayed into an undertaking which, after all, she had not strength to carry through?
But, having come so far, she would at least go on to her own apartments. She did not think of them with any special affection; she had loved more her less magnificent rooms in her country house near the Loire.
She came first to her bedroom. Much earlier in the century chamber music must have sounded in this room, for all its decorations were trophies of musical instruments, lutes and pipes and tambourines knotted together by fluttering ribbons. All these were carved; there was no painting here, save the delicate ivory paint which covered these and the panelled walls alike. The elaborate bed of gilt and inlaid tulipwood was still there, projecting from the wall, but stripped of its green silk coverlet fringed with gold. This bed stood on three raised steps, outside which, as usually in the bed-chambers of the great, ran a gilt balustrade. Half of it was still there. So was a large armchair of green satin and gilt—but nothing else.
The Duchesse de Trélan stood outside the broken fence and looked at the bed where she had often lain. But it seemed certain to her that it was another woman who had rested under that canopy—a woman, on the whole, unhappier than herself.