The Porcelain Dove Page 8

  Heart tripping and cheeks aflame, I turned, expecting a towering major domo ready to turn me off without a character for mocking the dignity of M. le duc's ancestral house. Instead, I faced a short, square man with a heavy, cow-nosed peasant's face and a great many crooked teeth. His wig perched high upon his shaven skull and his silver-gray livery strained across his bull's shoulders. A lackey, then, and a low-comic one at that.

  "Devil take you, man," I said furiously. "You've frightened me quite out of my wits. Yes, I'm lost, as who'd not be, in such a rabbit's warren?"

  The lackey twisted his dark brows into a knot that, however hideous, utterly failed to alarm me. I stamped my foot. "You've no call to glare at me like that. It is a warren, and most prodigiously full of steps and corridors. I've been searching for the laundry this hour and more, and I begin to fear I'll still be searching when these chemises have rotted with age, and me with them."

  The lackey unknotted his brows and rubbed his nose. "When Dentelle does that, servingmaids wither and lackeys quail," he said ruefully. "I suspect I haven't the face for it. Artide Desmoulins, mam'selle, at your service." He bowed with a flourish that, had he been thinner, might have been elegant. "You require the laundry, you say. 'Tis in the old donjon tower. To reach it, you must go back through this gallery, turn left through the Violin salon, descend into the cabinet des Fées, through the Snuffbox antechamber and the Fan room, turn right and down the stairs that open by the Triumph of Pompey, and then—" He broke off, halted by my blank incomprehension. " 'Twill be easier to show you." He snatched the dirty linen from my arms. "Come."

  For one so heavy he walked very fast and kept up as we went a kind of running commentary upon the rooms we traversed. Trotting behind him, I wondered where he found the breath.

  "The cabinet des Fées," he said, "contains memoria of those good fairies whose numerous exploits have been chronicled by Mme d'Aulnoy, M. Perrault, and Mlle de la Force. Observe, for example, this ermine slipper, by means of which the prince's envoy recognized Cendrillon. These are seven-league boots, and this"—pointing to a tiny, rainbow-furred dog curled in a walnut shell—"is the dog Toutou, given to the youngest prince by the White Cat in fulfillment of his father's quest. We also have the linen cloth that will pass six times through the eye of the smallest needle, but not, of course, the White Cat herself, who was transformed into a princesse when the prince cut off her head and tail."

  I remember how I laughed, as if his exposition were an excellent jest. Seven-league boots! Magic dogs! What did he take me for? Surely he didn't believe in magic? Had the Age of Reason missed Beauxprés?

  He'd already passed through the antechamber; I hurried to catch him in the room beyond. Here the walls were lined with glass cases filled with fans: fans feathered, painted, woven; stiff fans and folding fans; fans of wood and silk; ivory fans inlaid with jewels, shells, mother-of-pearl.

  "These," Artide explained, "were gathered over the course of a long life by the present duc's grandsire. As you may have deduced, the rooms take their names from what is displayed there: the Tapestry hall—that's where the Triumph of Pompey hangs—the Box room, the Lace antechamber, the Miniature salon, the Meteorological closet, the Alchemical attic, and so on. I found you in the gallery of Depositions. Don't worry. You'll soon become familiar with them."

  I was more interested in the cabinet des Fées. "All that about the White Cat and the ermine slipper, 'tis only a fairy tale. Surely you can't believe it true?"

  Artide's ears turned a dark, painful red. "Bien sûr, 'tis true. I read it in a book," he said gravely, and, in a sudden burst of confidence: "I read a great deal, you see. I want to be a maître d'hôtel someday. In Paris."

  Of course he believed in fairies and fairy spells. Only through a fairy spell would he achieve his ambition, for in Paris elegance in a manservant is as indispensable as beauty in a femme de chambre. A groom, perhaps, or a running footman, since he was strong and quick. But no man wants a running footman able to read the messages he carries. Only consider the opportunities for extortion!

  Jean (whom Nôtre Seigneur designed for a groom; hands, teeth, and voice all complete) has never understood why I liked Artide, who hadn't the sense to be content with his lot in life. Look where Artide's ambition got him, he says, patting a demoness on her perfect fundament, and look where contentment got me. On the face of things, I admit that Jean is right. For as Artide lost his illusions over the years, he grew cynical, bitter, and prodigious foul-tempered. The last I heard of him, he had risen to be mayor of Beauxprés—which is to say that he was king of a midden. Yet in the years before the beggar came, Artide was the most interesting man I knew, with his peasant's face and his philosophe's mind that was equally hospitable to Magic and Science, Art and Nature. Ghosts were as real to him as electricity, witches as plausible as mathematicians. I'd never met anyone like him. And besides, he never flirted with me.

  The weeks passed. I spent my days arranging madame's wardrobe and finding my place in Beauxprés, which was an altogether more complicated matter than it had been in the hôtel du Fourchet. In Paris, servants are servants, and where you are born is a matter of little interest except to yourself. Can you speak French like a gentleman? Bien! You are a Frenchman, and if you are a Savoyard too, well, only the meanest of souls will hold it against you.

  But in a place like Beauxprés! Better than half of monsieur's servants had been born in the nearby village. I, along with M. Malesherbes the chef, Menée the maître d'hôtel, and Jacques Ministre the duc's steward, were foreigners, beneath notice as we were beneath reproach. Artide was friendly enough, and Marie; the rest of them, from Dentelle to the kitchen boys, hardly deigned to look at me. Indeed, when first I made confession to the parish priest, I was tempted to beg absolution for the sin of having been born in Paris.

  In the end, 'twas Marie saved me. Dear Marie. So young she was, and so full of questions, all about being a femme de chambre, and Paris, and whether the streets were really paved with white marble and the beggar-women all wore silk, as she'd heard.

  "No, they're not, to your first question. And, sometimes, if they're whores." She turned color at that. Perceiving I'd offended her, I gave her a gauze fichu, only a little soiled, and promised to teach her how to sponge brocade and starch thread-lace.

  "Then you may go to Paris yourself, and set up as a blanchisseuse, and wear silk every Sunday if you've a mind. 'Tis not every laundress can make thread-lace look new again."

  "I don't know about that," said Marie. "But I'd dearly like to visit Paris, and see Versailles and the Opéra and walk in the Palais-Royal."

  Sudden tears pricked my eyes. "So would I."

  "Why, Berthe, you look sad as an owl. Are you not happy here?"

  Embarrassed, I shrugged my shoulders. "My family is in Paris."

  "And you miss them. And your old companions, too—I hadn't thought of that. Poor Berthe, so far from home! I shall have to make you known in Beauxprés."

  Well, I'd thought I was known in Beauxprés, known and despised, but when I said as much, Marie assured me 'twas only that I'd not been introduced. Next market day, she promised, she'd take me down to the village and present me properly, and then I'd have as many friends in Beauxprés as I'd ever had in Paris.

  Doubtfully, I agreed. I hadn't the heart not to.

  Shelved into the northern side of the hill, the village of Beauxprés commanded a splendid prospect of the cornfields and fair meadows that gave the seigneury its name. The village itself was most amazingly poor and ill kept. The low houses shed stones and roof-tiles as dogs shed hair in summer, the paths were mud, and the gardens more full of tares than cabbages. Had monsieur kept a chaplain, I'd have had small occasion to set foot in the place. But he was an atheist, and those of his household who were not must needs descend to the village church to hear Mass. There was even a seigneurial pew to hear it in, though from the musty, mousy state of it, no seigneur had sat there for many a long year. Madame, who was most pious in company, went o
nce and never again, vowing she could not pray when surrounded by glowerers and mutterers. I went, me, as I'd been taught, Sundays and saints' days to eat at Christ's table. But whether I stood or kneeled, sang or approached the altar, I could feel the eyes of the peasants of Beauxprés upon me, measuring, judging, condemning.

  Be presented to the owners of those stern eyes and pursed-up mouths? Who greets an ass, I thought, is sure to be kicked. Still, I'd agreed. And so, come market day, I accompanied Marie down to the village well. Never let it be said that Berthe Duvet failed to keep her word.

  In the year of Our Lord 1763, the shortest route from château to village was down a steep path behind the stable-yard. The village was not far—when the wind was right, we could hear the dogs barking—yet no part of it was visible from the château, save the brazen weathercock that crowned the church steeple.

  Ah, the weathercock of Beauxprés! It saddens my heart to think its weathercock is all Colette can ever know of the village, just as bare chronicles and embroidered tales are all she can know of the wide world beyond. She herself feels no lack—the wide world is a cold place, she says, and she saw enough of its cruelties in her short life to haunt her through eternity. For her, the charm of Beauxprés is its impermeability. Thus, no doubt, her delight in the game we used to play with her, Adèle and I, when Colette was just a little thing, a hundred years ago and more.

  Hand in hand in hand we'd take the village path, wind down through the blackberries and the bracken to a grandfather fir, and stop and look down the hill to the great fallen beech that marked the village end. The path leads on under the beech, clear as print. Yet when we pressed on, a mist would gather, hiding beech and path and all from our sight. Giggling, we'd twist and turn and double back on our steps, and at last we'd break free—always before the game palled—and find ourselves in the enchanted garden, with our servant hands waving and patting us in happy greeting. And when we looked beyond the walls again, the sun would be shining, and the mountains, meadows, and forest would stand clear and bright as a fresh-painted scene with the weathercock against it, eternally crowing north-north-west, towards Paris. I haven't thought of that game in years.

  I was writing how Marie made me free of the village.

  Down the village path we went, me in my thin town slippers sliding and tripping over roots and stones, down among the untidy scatter of stone houses where monsieur's peasants lived cheek-by-jowl with their cows.

  A village like Beauxprés doesn't have streets or shops or squares like a real town; it has paths between gardens and an earthy clearing in front of the church for market days, with a well and a stone wash-house to one side and a bakery to the other. Here the women gather to draw water, to clean their linen, to bring their daily bread to be baked and, above all, to gossip. Which was what the crowd of women at the well were doing that day, jabbering in a villainous patois I couldn't make head or tail of. They looked alike as dolls to me—dark, solid women with hard, flat cheeks, red skirts, black shawls, wooden sabots, and round caps on their dark, undressed hair. They called incomprehensibly to Marie in their harsh voices, and Marie laughed and answered as she pushed in among them dragging me after. I vow I thought I'd perish on the spot.

  "This is Mme Pyanet," Marie was saying. "Her husband is Estienne Pyanet the baker. M. Boudin is a good-for-naught, mère Vissot here is my aunt who raised me, and this is mère Desmoulins, who is Artide's mother."

  I don't know why, I'm sure—perhaps 'twas just the weakness of my knees—but I dropped the beldam a curtsy. "I hope to make your better acquaintance, Mme Desmoulins. Your son has been most kind to me, and I am much obliged to him."

  Had it been a pig that curtsied and addressed her, mère Desmoulins couldn't have looked more astonished. She dropped her bucket, crack upon the ground, and commenced gabbling and rolling her rheumy eyes.

  When she'd done, Marie turned to me. "She asks if you want to marry Artide."

  Well, I liked Artide well enough, but I'd as soon wed a toad, so, "No," I said, a little quicker than was polite. Mère Desmoulins looked offended, the other women muttered, and even Marie looked startled, so I added hastily, "He's a good man, Artide, sharp as a needle and ambitious. A poor friend I'd be, to marry him and ruin his prospects for advancement."

  Marie translated my answer and the women pondered it for a while. Then mère Desmoulins, grinning toothlessly, took me to her bosom like a daughter while all her gossips laughed and patted my arms with their rough hands.

  After that I went often to the village, both with Marie and alone. I can't say I found much to say to Mme Boudin or mère Desmoulins, but Nicola Pyanet the baker's wife had a sister in service in Dijon and could speak good French if she'd a mind. So my life grew less narrow than it had been. Which is why I failed to take note when my mistress began to droop and fade like a rose left too long without water.

  Bien sûr, such a failure would have been impossible before her marriage, had I many companions or had I none. At Port Royal, we lived so close and so lovingly that a half-stifled sigh was enough to bring me hurrying to her side. By necessity, her marriage had made me hard of hearing, for when I heard her cry out aloud in the night, I did not dare go to her. The sounds caused by pain and pleasure are, after all, very much alike.

  So. One evening I heard a knock at the door of the cabinet where I sat mending a petticoat. Thinking it might be Marie, or even Artide come to read to me as I sewed, I gathered up the petticoat and opened the door to find my mistress, white as death, the rouge showing like wounds upon her cheeks.

  "Oh, Berthe," she moaned, and cast herself upon my bosom.

  Well, 'twas many months since we had been on such terms as those. I stood like a post in her embrace until she sank down at my feet, sobbing bitterly.

  "Am I grown so hideous that you must hate me too?" she cried. "If my husband and my Berthe both spurn me, where then shall I turn for comfort? Death is my only refuge now."

  Her words were only so much wind. Her tears, on the other hand, seemed real enough, and her lovely face so pale and woebegone that I quickly knelt down and put an arm around her heaving shoulders.

  With a cry of, "No! No! You hate me!" she flung me away.

  I sighed. "Indeed, madame, I do not. Come, sit before the fire and I will ring for a tisane—milk and chamomile and warm sweet wine, just as madame likes it. 'Tis the country makes madame so melancholy. I myself find so much peace and quiet trying to the nerves."

  She laughed at that, a small, watery chuckle, and I coaxed her to a chair, where she sat holding tight to my hand like a child and confessed to me that monsieur had forsaken her bed.

  "I have thought and thought, and can only conclude that Nathalie de Fleuru and Laure de Berline and even that odious abbé Pinchet were right, and my husband has wearied of my love."

  This confidence loosed a thousand conflicting emotions in my breast. On the one hand, I wanted her to myself again, maid and mistress in our old loving world. On the other, I wanted her to be happy. Even if her happiness lay with the duc de Malvoeux? My silence lengthened and, "I'm right, then," she cried. "I'm dull and silly and hideous!"

  To this, my answer came easily. "Madame is exquisite, as always," I said. "No sane man could weary of loving her!"

  She cuddled her cheek into my bosom, and for a time I stood and stroked her until her sobbing dwindled into hiccups.

  "I'll make thy tisane myself, madame, and then I'll brush thy hair just as I did when thou wert Mlle du Fourchet and Mme Ursule had birched thee for thy spelling. Here"—taking off her high-heeled shoes and tucking a stool under her feet—"sit and repose thyself."

  Making tisanes clears the mind wonderfully. Bien sûr, I wanted my mistress to be happy, and where better for her to be happy than in Paris? Before long, her pride would surely carry her back to the Hôtel Malvoeux, to furnish it anew in gilt and rosewood and, like other women of her class, to settle down to a life of keeping abreast of the mode in dress, friends, and amusements. I need only have patience
, I thought, and I'd soon have her to myself again.

  Accordingly, over the next days all was fair weather with me. Until I'd some hope of leaving it, I didn't realize how Beauxprés, its many rooms, its many things, had weighed upon me. Each time I passed through the gallery of Depositions or the Hunt closet, I could hardly keep from singing aloud, knowing that soon I'd be far from those weeping Madonnas and moth-eaten rows of withered paws and tails.

  Naturally, I scorned to betray my mistress' confidence, only hinting to a few intimates, to Marie and Artide, that madame and I might soon be returning to Paris.

  I remember telling Artide about the house in the Marais. " 'Tis not like Beauxprés, Artide, but 'tis a very fine house all the same. All it needs to become the finest hôtel in Paris is some life in it and new furnishings. The season is beginning, and madame is anxious to get back and see her friends again. I must confess I'm puzzled at monsieur's continued residence here. What could possibly possess a duc, who is entitled to ride in the king's own carriage, to stay in the country while the court sits at Versailles?"

  "Simple. The birds."

  We were sitting in the drying-yard at the foot of the old donjon tower: a pleasant green protected by tall hedges which seemed to catch the sun and hold it longer than any other place in the grounds. I was mending a stocking; Artide was polishing a large silver salt cellar—a towering marvel of filigree and metal flourishes. He coated a blackened encrustation with an evil-smelling paste and began to rub at it vigorously.

  "The birds," he repeated. I looked at him quizzically. "The birds, Berthe. You know: the present duc's answer to this monstrosity." He flicked his thumb against the salt cellar, which gave out a flat, metallic sound like a muffled bell.

  "Ah," I said. "To be sure. The birds."

  Artide sighed. "How blind a Paris-bred fille can be! Listen then, and I will tell you. 'Tis the curse of the ducs de Malvoeux that each is taken by some maggot of acquisitiveness that gnaws upon his mind all the days of his life. With monsieur's father, it was flowers, shrubs, and trees; with his grandsire, it was fans. With this duc, 'tis birds. His aviary is in Beauxprés, and so, therefore, is his heart." He hesitated. "I fear your mistress has no hope of attaching his interest for long unless she sprout feathers."