XVI

 

 

 

 

“No, shhh, don’t worry,” I said. “It has to be Aurore. She saw where I went in. She’s warning us.”

“She’s on her way here, then. Hide. Quickly.”

“Where?” I looked around the room desperately.

“Under the desk? No, here behind the bed.”

The back of the bed was hung with more velvet drapery, and there was just enough space for me to fit between the curtain and the wood paneling of the wall, if I crushed my bustle and skirts and squeezed in my stomach.

I heard the door open, and footsteps.

“Just getting up?” the Marquise said. “Still in your nightshirt? It was repulsive how much you drank last night. You’re not permitted to drink anymore.”

“Good day to you too,” Thérion said.

“I mean it. It’s an insult to me to have you so obviously stinking drunk in front of everyone. How can you think it’s acceptable?”

“Forgive me. I thought my being drunk would shame you less than my blood spattered on the floor from shooting myself.”

“Don’t bore me with your melodramatic nonsense. You took a vow before God to be a husband to me. I’m owed the honors of a wife.”

“Why do you care what my friends think? They’re not your set, are they? I shouldn’t think they’d be grand enough.”

“You do have a great love of trash. That Monsieur Ulysse has refined manners at least, but those women. Everyone knows the one is a gutter whore, and the other one, the blond bumpkin, is – what? – the wife of some near-dead old army officer? A nobody. Then there’s her little relative with the long face who was so cowed she hardly said a word. Not to mention the so-called painter, who’s clearly a gold-digging slut. I know her type. She wants to ruin some honorable marriage by entrapping a man to support her. And she’s after you. She pretended to want to paint me, but her sketch showed a complete lack of talent. Do you know what I think? She meant to make me look ugly, to get away with insulting me without saying what she thought to my face.”

“I’m sure she only meant to do you a kindness.”

“Are you defending her now? I expect they’re plotting against me. They think I’m stupid and can’t tell what they’re up to. But I do love it when people underestimate me. It makes it so much sweeter when I catch them out and expose them.”

“No one’s plotting against you. You’re always your own worst enemy.”

“Tell your friends to leave. I’m putting my foot down. We’ll invite some people of quality to have a grand hunting expedition.”

“No.”

“No? What do you mean, no? Finally you might bring something to this marriage, after years of being a worthless, drunken, cheating parasite. And you’d have the gall to try to deny me a perfect opportunity, at last, to reciprocate for the hunting party expeditions I’ve been invited on?”

“It’s just – it’s not that. There’s a long tradition that we don’t …”

“Tradition? You scorn the teachings of the Church, but you raise tradition as an objection? You’re just uncomfortable around my friends, around good society, because it reflects to you your own unworthiness. Oh, I know you better than you know yourself. You just want to flirt and leer at these ugly whorehouse salopes.”

“They’re all going home at the end of the week, anyway. It will cause talk if you send the whole party away early. Ulysse admires you, and he’s an influential man. He’s even corresponded with Madame de Pompadour, and she’s spoken favorably of his books. No need to ruffle any feathers when it’s only a matter of waiting a few days.”

“Hmph. Good riddance to bad rubbish. But I do plan to organize a hunting party before we go back.”

“I was trying to tell you, it’s not a good idea.” He paused. “The woods here aren’t safe. Believe it or not, I care about you and don’t want to see you hurt.”

Her voice softened. “Of course. But you needn’t worry. We’ll be properly equipped, I’ll make sure of it.”

He took a deep breath. “You’re a good Christian. Perhaps you can understand – I believe there are unholy things in those woods. You can’t protect yourself from them with mere muskets.”

“Oh, pish. The Abbé’s a man of God, with the power of the Cross behind him. We’ll go in broad daylight, when any ghosts or evil spirits wouldn’t dare to show themselves.”

“You’ll risk bringing down a curse on us.”

“Enough. I don’t wish to discuss it anymore. Speaking of the Abbé, he tells me your book collection is worth rather a lot.”

“He’s welcome to borrow whatever he likes.”

“I think it’d be a better use of it to garner some favor for me at court.”

“What do you mean? Inviting your friends here to read in the library?”

“I mean to give the books away, as gifts. Surely you don’t need so many.”

He sputtered, dumbfounded. “You can’t give away my books. They belong to me.”

“I’m your wife,” she said sweetly. “And I’m the one who understands the proper value of things. And you owe me everything, so they belong to me, and I’ll dispose of them as I see fit.”

“I’ll sue for a separation. Have me sent to the Bastille if you like, or Miolans. I don’t care.”

“Oh, I hope it will never come to that. You won’t be able to take any books with you to prison, I promise you that. So it would rather defeat your purpose.”

He made a sound that was half a growl and half a wail of despair.

“And another thing,” the Marquise said. “All these sketches of yours. I want you to stop wasting your time on drawing. You’re a grown man, not a child. Apart from the danger of soiling my name by publishing this political rubbish, it’s a boorish hobby. And I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but I do it out of love – you have no talent.”

He made no reply.

“Now, clean yourself up,” she said. “You’re filthy and you stink. It’s time for luncheon. I want us to go in together and show these so-called friends of yours we’re a happy couple, and it’s useless for any of these greedy trollops to try to lure you into their beds. Go on. I’m waiting.”

There followed an interminable half hour in which my arms ached and ached from pressing back my skirts and bustle behind the velvet drapery, and I focused all the rest of my energy on trying to breathe silently, while Thérion washed, shaved, and dressed, and the Marquise continued to throw the occasional cruel jibe at him. I heard her tapping her feet, pacing, pawing through the papers and ledgers on his desk. She tore up two of his sketches. He ceased to speak or respond to her in anything but monosyllables.

At last he was ready and she said to him, now in a warmer, kinder tone, “There, see how handsome you are. If only you’d be this way all the time. I want you to come to me in my room tonight and make love to me. The way you used to, when we were first married. I love you more than anyone in the world, you know. All you need is me steering you in the right direction.”

At long last, both their footsteps went out. I waited another five minutes, just to be sure, and emerged from behind the bed curtain.

Just as I put my hand to the doorknob to go out, footsteps tapped toward the room from the hall, and then the doorknob turned under my palm. There was nowhere for me to hide, but as the door opened, I backed away silently and squeezed myself as tightly as I could into the corner behind it. The Marquise entered, her back to me. She moved forward with a vigilant air, advanced on the bed, and pulled aside the front curtains, and then the back ones where I had stood hidden earlier. She patted down the pillows and bedclothes and looked underneath the bed. She had left the door ajar, and I pressed myself into the wall and hid in the shadows as she came back towards me. She went out and closed the door behind her. I waited another ten minutes before I crept out into the hall at last, dusty and breathing hard.

 



 

Before dusk, the Abbé, the Scotsman, and Tristan returned and showed us the specimens they’d collected in the forest. The Abbé had set up a small, dungeon-like laboratory space, lit by lamps, in a storeroom next to the cellar, the same one by way of which Thérion had carried me into the house the morning before. We all gathered there to watch. The Abbé shook mushrooms from a bag onto the table and laid out an array of them on a handkerchief for us to admire, organized by shape and color. He left them to dry and did the same with bags of leaves, twigs, berries, and wildflowers. He set out a row of small glass bottles containing foul-smelling fluid, in which he had embalmed beetles, dragonflies, and spiders. He pinned dead butterflies and moths to a board.

In a corner of the room on another table, he set down two crudely constructed cages of woven branches fastened with thin leather cords. In the smaller cage was a small purple-feathered bird, a kind I’d never seen before, twittering and shuffling and rifling its wings anxiously. In the larger cage a dun-colored rabbit blinked and trembled. A circle of dark brown dried blood ringed one of the rabbit’s legs like a bracelet, where it had been caught in the Abbé’s snare.

Thérion’s eyes widened when he caught sight of the cages.

“What is this?”

“Oh, I’m not much of woodsman,” the Abbé said genially. “But I have some rudimentary skills at improvising instruments of captivity for live specimens.”

“Is that alder wood?” Thérion’s tone betrayed his horror. The Abbé didn’t seem to notice.

“Ah, yes. Your noble estate’s namesake. Alder wood cuttings make for good, flexible material.”

“Which tree did you cut it from?”

“Oh, goodness, I hardly thought to remark which tree.”

The Scotsman said, “It was one right next to the standing stone at the edge of the forest proper. Is something wrong?”

Thérion looked pale. “Oh, nothing. There are a few traditions, local ones, about the alders of those woods. Some were thought to be sacred.”

The Abbé shrugged. “No matter. God gave man dominion over the earth. Surely his holy word holds more power in it than old traditions of witchcraft and devil-worship.”

The Abbé prepared a kind of surgical theater, with three sharp knives – small, medium, and large – a saw, shears, sponges, a basin of water, an empty bowl to hold blood, and a carving board with grooved edges to channel fluids.

“Does he mean to kill and dissect the poor thing?” Clio whispered to me.

“It doesn’t look good for our friend in the cage,” I whispered back.

“Now,” the Abbé said, “I must ask our gentle ladies to leave the room.”

“Why?” asked Séléné. “What do you mean to do?”

“A scientifically important procedure, which the delicate nature of females renders inadvisable for you to observe.”

“I’ll stay,” the Marquise said. “I’ve seen you do it before. I’m not squeamish.”

The Abbé nodded to her. “Of course, Madame la marquise. I meant for the others who’d likely be unfamiliar with modern scientific practices.”

“Modern scientific practices,” said Séléné. “Is this to be a dissection of a live specimen?”

The Abbé raised his eyebrows and nodded more deeply. “There are unique insights to be gained from the examination of internal anatomy and organs while there’s still a pulse of life in a beast.”

A low hiss of disapproval came from Tristan. “If I’d known this was your purpose, I’d never have gone with you. If science is to be advanced through cruelty and torture, then it ought not to be advanced.” He turned on his heel and left the room. Clio watched him go out, and then followed behind him. Séléné left too. Ulysse bowed.

“Gentlemen, Madame la marquise, if you’ll excuse me, I have some correspondence to attend to before dinner.” He went out, and Aurore and I did too, leaving only Thérion, the Marquise, and the Scotsman with the Abbé. We gathered outside the door.

Ulysse quoted in a low voice, “‘Natures that are bloodthirsty toward animals give proof of a natural propensity toward cruelty.’”

“Montaigne,” explained Séléné, and the rest of us nodded to each other.

Clio shook her head and whispered, “That man is a horror. He’s worse than Donatien, if it were possible.”

An unearthly squealing came from the room.

“Oh, please, let’s go,” I said, and we hurriedly filed up the narrow stairwell. I could still hear the rabbit screaming a long way up.

 



 

At dinner, the Scotsman defended the practice of the vivisection of animals to Tristan.

“I can’t argue with you about there being a regrettable element of cruelty to it. Animals feel pain and the desire to preserve their lives, just as we men do.”

“Precisely,” Tristan said. “Why should they not therefore have a claim on our compassion, just as our fellow men have?”

“But there are higher moral purposes that justify stifling our natural compassion at times, in the case of both animals and men. For example, we take the lives of animals to feed ourselves. There are ways of minimizing the pain of the beasts in doing so. In fact, several religions contain edicts that govern the slaughter of beasts, to make it as humane as possible; Mohammedanism and the Hebraic religion for example. It’s said the good Indians of the New World say a prayer to their gods when they take the life of a deer in hunting, because they consider the animal’s blood to be sacred.”

“But what purpose could there possibly be in vivisection, that couldn’t be served as well by killing the animal humanely first and then dissecting it?”

“The purpose is the advancement of natural science. To observe the functioning of the machine of the body in action, and not merely its component parts. Just as, for a clockmaker, there’s value in watching how the pieces of a clock function while operating together with one another, not merely in seeing all the parts of a disassembled mechanism.”

“Ah, but there’s more to it than that,” said the Abbé. “Why, vivisection and so-called cruelty to animals are justified by the whole structure of the natural world.”

“How so?” asked the Scotsman.

“Nature is a constant war of all against all. The lowliest worms are eaten by your gentle-seeming birds, who are eaten by foxes, who are food for wolves, whom men destroy with bullets or arrows. All is blood and storm and violence, strength against strength, strength against weakness, weakness against strength through cunning and trickery, weakness against weakness with its own feminine forms of warfare. Power over animals is a man’s birthright, and cruelty is in our natures, ordained in us by God. It’s only right that we exercise it, for our very blood and that of the beasts calls for it.”

The Scotsman’s mouth fell agape and when he met our eyes, there was shame in them for having sided with the Abbé earlier.

“You’re a man of such great insight, my dear Abbé,” the Marquise said. “You’ve also summed up some of the many reasons why hunting is not only a privilege of the nobility, but also such a great pleasure in itself.”

“Ah, yes, and when does your ladyship have in mind that we’ll have a hunting party here?” the Abbé asked.

“What was your estimation from your survey of the woods? Is there game enough to make it worthwhile?”

“Oh, very much so. There’s a healthy population of red deer. We saw signs of them all over. But they’ll likely go further down the mountain to warmer feeding grounds as the weather turns colder.”

“Marvelous. It would be best to take advantage of the last days of the season. If only we had hounds and a few muskets. I wonder if anyone in the village …”

“No need,” the Abbé said, “we’re in luck. I already had a letter from Donatien before dinner. He’s on his way via Dijon. He’ll bring his own trained hounds and the dog boys from his estate. It’ll be his pleasure, he said, and he was glad for the chance to make amends for any past misunderstandings.”

I shook my head. Could I have misheard? Donatien was coming here? I almost forgot myself and spoke the question aloud. Clio met my eye, warning and silencing me. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but then reconsidered and instead turned to Tristan next to her and whispered in his ear. Thérion stared down at his plate and looked as if he was about to cry. Ulysse and Séléné had been carrying on their own conversation in low voices at the other end of the table, but Tristan touched Séléné’s arm next to him and whispered in her ear. She murmured to Ulysse across from her, and Ulysse spoke.

“I beg your pardon, Madame la marquise, did you say Donatien’s coming back?” His tone was jocular. “I thought that miscreant had been banned from Boisaulne for being a little too charming with the ladies.” He winked at her.

The Marquise smiled and dismissed this with a wave of her hand, her many jeweled rings flashing in the candlelight. “Nonsense. I know the boy’s a bit of a flirt, but he means no harm. He’s quite beloved among my friends at court, and he has a kind heart. He donated thirty gold louis to my favorite charity, just last month.”

Ulysse gave an exaggerated nod. “And when is our charming friend expected to arrive, did you say?”

The Abbé answered, “He left Paris straight away after talking to us last Thursday. I knew he meant to visit his estate, so I directed a letter to him there. He’s written back that he hopes he might be here already by tomorrow, but I’d say he’s being overly optimistic. It must be nearly twenty leagues from Dijon, and traveling with hounds will necessarily slow him down. But it’s truly admirable that he’s taking so much trouble to bring them, just for a few days, and then to go back again, purely to please Madame la marquise.”

The Marquise lifted her chins and ran her jeweled fingers down her neck, preening. “Isn’t it? Let’s cross our fingers we’ll see him tomorrow then, or the day after at the latest.”

I felt cold and exchanged glances with Aurore. This was the end. I had to leave first thing in the morning, with or without Aurore, whether for Paris to become Aurore’s companion, or to Annecy to rejoin my father’s household and perhaps find employment as a housemaid. If I was still here when Donatien arrived, he’d identify me to the Marquise, and God knew what disasters would befall us then, Thérion and me. Time had run out for me to help my love. Unless some miracle occurred, he would remain in the hands of this wretched woman and her execrable abbé. They’d make Boisaulne into a true hunters’ retreat, and my love and I would never meet again.