FORTY-ONE

BEATRICE

Paris

February 1917

Morphine. The pain had finally become too much for Willie. Having sworn off booze for my sake, he submitted to the needle. And that needle became the center of my husband’s world, though he convinced himself that I was. He did not want me to join him at his house—and Emily needed me anyway. So while I set up the Lafayette Memorial Foundation and recruited our executive board, Willie came for tea with me every afternoon at Emily’s house.

There, he only sipped at his cup and had nothing to say. Not even when explosive news reached us that the Germans had sunk another American cargo ship. I expected Willie to rage at Woodrow Wilson’s weak response. I expected him to call Wilson a craven jackass, a pompous professor, a lickspittle . . .

Instead, he just nodded. He didn’t even open the newspaper. Perhaps current events were too black a subject for his already-black mood. I tried to interest him in books, but he was too tired to read; too drugged to want to debate, or discuss, or even recount old stories of his glory days. He just sat and stared.

Under the influence of morphine, his brilliance was all gone.

Was my larger-than-life Willie to become an old man, addlebrained before his time? “Perhaps this summer,” he finally mused, “we shall go fishing at Buzzards Bay.”

Buzzards Bay! Of all the dreary holes. I would die there, and so would he. He was no longer steady enough to walk on land, much less the deck of his yacht. A traitorous part of me wondered if this would be our future together, and I dared not bring up the subject of adopting Marthe, for it seemed to me as if my husband himself might soon need more care than a babe.

Instead, day after day, week after week, I was as kind to him as I knew how to be, and polite. Achingly polite. For when he left each afternoon, I knew that he’d go directly to bed and stay there, writhing in pain, or drooling on morphine, and though he still refused to let me tend to him, I was consumed with pity.

“Pity is the death of romance,” Clara said, on her third cigarette in an hour. “Let him keep you at a distance if he wants. You weren’t destined to spend the rest of your life as a nursemaid.”

She knew, of course, about Max’s letter. I’d confided in her, fearing Emily might judge me more harshly. Now Clara stubbed out her cigarette viciously. “You need to read Nietzsche! Trample down all feelings of pity and live for yourself alone!”

This from the woman who had become a chain-smoking scarecrow under the stress of trying to find housing for refugees. The truth was, I had read Nietzsche. More recently, I’d been reading the letters donated to our foundation. Priceless letters from Lafayette to his wife, Adrienne, and hers to him, filled with archaic devotion. Letters of honor and unselfishness and sacrifice. With their example in mind, I shook my head against the bleakness in my heart. “As admirably suited to our era as the rules of Nietzsche may be, I cannot live by them. I married William Astor Chanler for better or for worse.”

“And now things are worse,” Clara said. “Where was Monsieur Chanler when you were at home raising children? When you needed him, he was adventuring. He wanted a separation then. Now that it’s worse for him, he wants a wife again . . .”

I winced at the way she laid it out so coldly. It didn’t capture the whole truth, but neither was it a lie. Perhaps if Willie had allowed me to help him, to live with him, to tend to him—if he’d let me get closer than skin upon skin—things would be different. Hell, even fighting would be better than this disconnected existence, this half marriage . . . it was intolerable.

And I didn’t want to think about any of it.

What I wanted was to bury myself in work. I hoped to recruit the most important men in France to serve on the board that would oversee the work at Chavaniac. I also wanted to visit the chateau—the sooner, the better. And all my friends wished to go with me.

Marie-Louise LeVerrier was to help with the school. Clara Simon with the orphanage. And the ever-practical Emily with reconstruction. It wasn’t until the end of February that we were finally able to go, which was fortuitous, because it meant that Emily was out of childbed and could bring along little Anna on our journey.

It was, of course, impossible for Willie to accompany us. And as the reality of his condition set in, I did my best to detach myself from baby Marthe, surrendering her into Clara’s lap for the trip.

The road to Chavaniac ran all the way to Brioude—a trip so arduous that we’d been advised to take the train. It provided an excellent distraction for Emily, who had bade her husband farewell with a stiff upper lip, but sobbed when he was gone back to his duties in the air corps. Now, as five-week-old Anna slept in her lap, Emily marveled at the passing scenery. “What a wild country. Are we sure it will be a good place for children?”

Clara shrugged. “Better than living in rubble and poison gas.”

Marie-Louise chirped, “They say pine forests exude a health-giving air.”

“Let’s take a deep breath, then,” I said, watching a farmer drive oxen along the road. This was old France—as steeped in her essence as Paris, but in her raw unchanging state. Something untamed, and perhaps untamable. “It was probably little different in the time of the Gauls, when Vercingetorix resisted the Romans, and we must do all we can not to be seen as invaders here.”

I’d already decided to make a donation to the locals for a monument they wished to erect to their war dead.

We disembarked at Saint-Georges-d’Aurac, then piled into a camion for the rest of the trip, and as we sputtered up into the little village of drab stone houses with red tile roofs, I caught sight of an old church, the curé of which stepped out to wave. I was struck by the pastoral nature of the place—sheep in the grazing land beyond, and an angry donkey at the side of the road that brayed as we passed. How did I never realize Lafayette had been a country bumpkin?

Something flashed white at the summit—surrounded by sparse trees denuded of their leaves by winter—one of the twin towers of the chateau. “Stop!” I told our driver, and threw the door of the camion open before he applied the brakes. Here it was. Here I was. Where Lafayette had played as a child, where he’d ridden his horse, where people doffed caps to him. The towers didn’t gleam so white as they must have in Lafayette’s time, but in my mind’s eye, I could see them as he must have seen them. What a home this would make for lost children. Why, if Minnie had been able to grow up in a place like this . . .

Not wishing to wait on the groundskeeper, I unwound the iron gate’s rusty chain, which fell to my feet. Then we made our way up the bramble-covered walk to the heavy wooden door, so old and weathered I worried it might fall from its hinges. Dirt stained the white walls, and upon closer inspection, I felt dismay at the shabbiness of it all.

“Look!” Emily cried, pointing to the Phrygian cap embedded over the door. “That must be the stone from the Bastille.” We left the babies under the supervision of Emily’s lady’s maid, and I took another invigorating breath before approaching the house. I opened the door, squinting in the dim light. Clara had thought to bring a lantern, but it wasn’t bright enough to fill the space, so I reached to draw back one of the dusty old curtains.

It was then that I felt a swoop near my hat and a flutter by my ear, into which some creature emitted a squeak. Naturally, I screamed. But when I screamed, so did my lady friends, all of us creating a comical jam in the doorway in our retreat, dropping pocketbooks and losing hats to the wind until our screams turned to shrieks of laughter.

That is how our guide found us after parking the motor and finding the concierge, who, upon introduction, made a sweeping bow to Emily. “Bonjour, Baroness . . .” Emily was now above me in social station by virtue of noble title, and that was going to take some getting used to.

The groundskeeper spoke with accented French that I couldn’t make out. “Bats,” Clara translated. “There’s a colony of them in the attic. Some come down through a crack in the ceiling. That will have to be repaired straightaway . . .”

Emily dutifully added that to our list of planned renovations. We would also need to add electricity and running water. Meanwhile, I was eager to explore, bats or no. Brandishing my parasol, I said, “Into the breach . . .”

Entering the chateau, we found that despite the family’s attempts to buy back many of their belongings after looting during the French Revolution, the whole house still remained sparsely furnished.

I was charmed to find, in the apartments that had belonged to the hero’s wife, several game tables by the fireplace, where I imagined Adrienne must have played with her children. Would she be pleased to see children play here again? I hoped so. There was much to explore, from the kitchen where guardsmen and servants used to take their meals to the little blue-painted chamber where Lafayette sat at his desk and did his writing. That was to say nothing of the secret tunnels . . .

“There is a rumor they lead out to the village; another that they lead to the water’s edge,” Clara translated.

“Goodness,” I said. “What an adventure!”

However, I didn’t have a hat suitable for spelunking.

The library was a shambles—the floors rotted away and the walls crumbling. But the philosopher’s hall with busts of the thinkers Lafayette admired was intact, and a charming room at the top of one of the towers where a chandelier now hung was perfectly habitable.

Lafayette’s bedchamber had been kept pristine.

The wood floor creaked under my feet as I took in the faded red toile. Did the Revolutionary general choose this himself? Pictures and portraits still hung upon the wall, little items on the mantelpiece that might have amused the great man. The room having been kept as a veritable shrine by the family, the chamberlain explained that he had made it ready for the baroness with fresh linens.

“Oh, no,” Emily said, embarrassed. “The honor should go to Mrs. Chanler.”

“The bed is big enough for two,” I said. “It isn’t the Ritz, but what romantic dreams we’ll have!”

This was going to be a greater enterprise than I had ever dreamed. We’d need a staff—a housekeeper, housemaid, and gardener at the very least—to put the house back to rights, and a curator for the museum. For the orphanage, we’d need a school, a headmaster, teachers for the children, a physician to tend them, seamstresses to sew their clothes, and farmers to tend the sheep and perhaps raise crops to keep them fed.

First, however, we’d need to hire architects, because the chateau would have to be repaired and reinforced. Of course, that would take time. Time that homeless children like Marthe did not have . . .

Clara blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke. “It would be faster to build something new.”

“You’re right.” I lit upon an idea. “You’re exactly right. Which is why we’re going to build a new addition.”

The chamberlain winced as if I intended a desecration, but I was convinced this was nothing Lafayette would have opposed. He was, after all—like me—a person for progress. And I felt certain this was work I was born to do.