The school of mirrors, p.1
The School of Mirrors, page 1
Dedication
To the memory of my mother
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Paris 1793
Part One: Versailles, 1755–1757
1755
1756
1757
Part Two: Versailles, 1762–1768
1762
1763
1764
1765
1768
Part Three: Paris, 1768–1789
1768–1770
1773–1774
1775–1776
1778–1780
1782–1784
1788
1789
Part Four: Paris, 1792
October
November
December
Part Five: Paris, 1793
January
February
March
Part Six: Year II of the Republic
Vendémiaire
Brumaire
Part Seven: Year III of the Republic
Ventôse
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
About the Book
Copyright
About the Publisher
Paris 1793
SHE RUNS AFTER THE TUMBLING CART, her heart tripping, racing, tripping again.
The morning is crisp, the sky robin’s-egg blue. The streets are empty. Houses are shuttered, doors locked. Here and there chimneys belch plumes of thick smoke. Traitors are burning their sins, she has heard. Madame Guillotine is not swift enough.
The cart, pulled by a single horse, sways. The man on the cart, his once-black hair streaked with gray, is holding fast to the side. His eyes follow her, not letting go, not for the shortest of moments.
On the quai d’Orsay, slippery from the night’s rain, she glimpses an old bony woman huddling in the doorway. On the pont de la Concorde, a hunchbacked beggar, a bulging sack flung across his chest, is poking through a pile of rags.
In the place de la Révolution, the cart slows. Around a scaffold, a small crowd has gathered. A child wails and is quickly hushed. A dog barks.
She catches the glint of the blade and stops.
Part One
Versailles, 1755–1757
1755
MY MOTHER DIDN’T tell me much.
I would have to go into service, she said. It is not what my late father or she had once hoped for me, but it is how it would have to be. I might still do well for myself, if I learn fast, that is, and if I learn to please. At all times, not only when it suits me, willful girl that I am, eager to listen to everyone but my own flesh and blood.
Should I have guessed what bargain she had struck for me? Perhaps, but I was still a child, even if I had turned thirteen already. I didn’t know how to spot danger in the silence between words. I didn’t know the sequence of steps in the dance of sacrifice and betrayal.
Used women’s clothes was my mother’s trade. Old taffeta dresses frayed at the hems, underarms rotten with sweat; fancy court robes once embroidered with silver and gold now deprived of adornment; the torn, muddy skirts of suicides fished out of the river. I hated it when she brought them home to sort and mend, soaked through with the stink of their previous owners, filthy, infested with fleas.
We lived on rue Saint-Honoré by then, on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the Quinze-Vingts market. In our old house, on rue des Jardins, Papa had his own printing shop, where he printed and sold pamphlets and books, and we all lived in an apartment above it. Here our rented room was divided with strings on which I hung laundry to dry. We slept on folding beds: my brothers on one, Maman and me on another. We ate on Papa’s rickety workshop bench, which doubled as a sewing table. We cooked our meals in the communal kitchen downstairs, with its smoking fireplace and damp, moldy walls, a place of constant quarrels over firewood and cooking space, and sometimes of blatant thievery. The very day we moved in, I learned its basic rules: Turn your back and your wooden spoon will disappear. Leave your pot unattended and your food will vanish.
Marcel was eleven then, Eugene ten, Gaston eight. They no longer attended the parish school but ran chores for the carpenter or the butcher, who had their stalls in the inner yard. Marcel claimed that the carpenter’s wife would let him touch her pink tits. Eugene called him a brazen liar. Gaston followed his older brothers in awe. They only came home to eat and sleep. Sometimes when I collected their clothes for washing, in their pockets I discovered dice, stones or dead mice.
What would Adèle be like had she lived?
Children, I often heard Maman say, happen. Then they happen to live or die. God, who has called my sister to His side, is inscrutable. He can take you because He loves you or because He wants to punish you for your sins.
Lying in bed beside Maman at night, I thought about Papa and Adèle, wondering where they might be. Adèle I pictured enveloped in light, joyful in her Heavenly bliss as she worships around the Heavenly throne, God’s faithful and beloved servant. I imagined Papa there, too; although sometimes, remembering that he was not a child and may have sinned, I saw him in Purgatory, restless in the eternal queue of souls awaiting their time of release.
On the day my fate had been settled I was in the kitchen, warming up a pot of bean stew, stirring it all the time to prevent it from burning while I also kept an eye on my brothers. The fireplace was smoking as badly as ever. Gaston was running in circles, shouting as if possessed by demons, stopping to inhale and starting again, his voice shrill and loud: “Here, doggy, here! Sit! Paw!”
“I’m a hawk,” Marcel screamed, throwing himself at his little brother.
“Get him, get him,” Eugene urged him on.
I yelled at them to stop and was threatening to whack them with the spoon if they did not obey me when Dame Rambeaux’s chambermaid—of whom people whispered that she had drowned her bastard in the Seine—rushed in. Maman wanted me upstairs, she said, right now.
Catching Marcel’s arm as he ran past me, I made him swear he would stop teasing Gaston. When he did, I told Eugene to mind the pot and hurried upstairs.
“Where are your manners, Véronique?” Maman asked as I entered the room, hot and breathing hard. “Keeping our honored visitor waiting like that!”
That is when I saw him, a tall, thin man dressed in a purple velvet frockcoat, a walking stick in hand. The dusting of face powder deepened the web of wrinkles on his cheeks, making him look like a corpse. The mossy scent around him I would later learn to know by its name: ambergris.
“Is she the one you meant, Monsieur . . . ?”
“Durand.” The man finished Maman’s sentence.
Haughty I thought him, for when Maman implored him to take a seat, pointing at the only armchair that had survived the move from rue des Jardins, he looked at it with disgust. Was it because of the pile of dresses next to it, set aside for mending?
“Is this who you meant?” Maman repeated, motioning me to step closer. Smooth your skirts, girl, her eyes ordered. Stand straight. Stop panting like a chased dog.
I pulled on the gray russet, tightened the chiffon fichu around my neck. It was stained with brown spots that wouldn’t wash out and was therefore not worth selling. I forced myself to quiet my breathing.
Monsieur Durand rapped on the floor with his walking stick.
I had a vague feeling I had seen him before, but I didn’t think much of it. Men often trailed me then, teased me with their foolish talk. How I had struck an arrow right through their hearts; how they would die if I didn’t give them a kiss. I was a rare beauty, they said, a jewel to behold.
Some beauty, Maman scoffed. Gangly, she called me, all bones and sharp edges. It didn’t take much to turn my head, did it?
Fat Nanette who lived in a room next door said Maman was jealous. Dainty I was and lissome, fine-featured, like a china doll. My figure had such a soft line to it that even my coarse dresses could not spoil it. My eyes were a rare mix of grayish blue, my eyelashes long and thick, my skin radiant. Just look at these auburn curls with their copper tint, Fat Nanette would say, so silky to the touch. She would’ve killed for such looks once, when it still mattered. Alas, youth doesn’t last forever.
Monsieur Durand drew a sharp, impatient breath. His eyes passed over me as if I were just one of the objects in this cluttered room.
“Yes, Madame Roux,” he said. “She is the one.”
Maman’s voice hardened. I was a good, dutiful daughter, she declared, her favorite and beloved child. I had a quick mind and deft hands. I could learn anything fast. A treasure, she called me, an adornment to any household.
Monsieur Durand cut my mother short. “I possess a mind capable of forming my own judgments.” Then he turned to me.
“Can you keep a room neat and clean?”
I nodded.
“You can perchance also speak, can you not?”
“I know how to keep a room clean,” I said.
“Do you know your letters?”
“I do. Papa taught me.”
“Well enough to read aloud?”
“Yes.”
“Write in a good hand?”
“Yes.”
“Not too modest, are you?”
He ordered me to take a few steps to the right and to the left, though this had nothing to do with knowing my letters. I did what he asked, rather clumsily, forgetting about the loose board that always made me stum ble.
“I’ve seen enough, Madame Roux,” he said, turning back to Maman.
“Leave us, Véronique,” Maman said.
I was happy to obey. I had already decided that Monsieur Durand didn’t like me and that I would never see him again.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Eugene, Marcel and Gaston were sitting on the floor, shoulders touching. Glancing over their heads I saw that they were holding sticks, poking them into a piece of honeycomb and licking off the honey.
They didn’t steal it, Eugene told me. It was a gift from someone they were not to mention.
Sticky fingers, lips, vests, breeches, I thought. More laundry. More ironing. Why do I have to be the eldest? And the only girl?
Maman didn’t say anything when we returned to our room with the pot of bean stew. If it weren’t for the lingering scent of Monsieur Durand’s perfume, I could’ve pretended he had not visited us at all. But as we sat down to eat, Maman didn’t complain that the stew was slightly burned and even let us all have second helpings. She did not chastise me for fiddling with my hair, or Eugene for talking too much; and when it became dark, she lit two candles, not one.
After my brothers climbed into their bed, after the kicking and elbow punching ended, after I had picked up and folded their clothes and emptied their chamber pot into our slop bucket, Maman motioned for me to sit at the table across from her and cleared her throat.
Monsieur Durand, she said, wished to take me into service. She said it quickly, with a frown.
“To work in his house?” I asked, staring at my hands, fingers pricked so many times that the skin was tough as leather, red knuckles, chilblains from doing laundry. There was a scab where I had scorched myself on the hot edge of the frying pan. A beautiful sweet child you still are, Fat Nanette had sighed often enough. A screaming shame.
“And what would be so terrible about that?” Maman snapped.
My mind was reeling with everything Fat Nanette had ever told me about being a servant in her youth. About the attic where she slept with other maids, cold in the winter, baking hot in the summer. Not even a bed to lie on but a prickly mattress infested with fleas. A brood of children even more unruly than my brothers to clean up after. A mistress who went through her things, to make sure she didn’t steal anything. Another one who called her a slut and refused any advance on her wages.
Maman’s eyes narrowed, her fists clenched.
What other grand prospects did I have? she asked. Who else was knocking on our door offering to take me off her hands? What was wrong with going into service at a big house? Learning some manners? Earning my dowry, too, so that I could get married to someone with a future? Or was I, perchance, aware of some other brilliant opportunity?
I felt tears rise to my eyes.
“Answer me, Véronique!”
I shook my head. I had no other prospects.
“Then it’s high time you earned your keep,” Maman said.
I was hoping she would tell me more about this house where I would live and work, but what followed was Maman’s familiar lament. A woman’s lot . . . a vale of tears . . . a bitter cup . . . How when she was still young and pretty, her parents implored her not to marry Lucien Roux. How she wouldn’t listen, pigheaded as she was, refusing to look behind empty promises. She meant Papa’s printing shop that never prospered. She meant Papa’s debts that she was still paying off. She meant a pile of books no one would buy from her, crammed under the bed, gathering dust.
“Don’t you dare disappoint me,” she said. “Don’t get sent back here. I have enough mouths to feed as it is.”
Some calculations are simple. Sons trump daughters. Three children trump one.
Deep in my heart, I had already decided that nothing could be worse than the life I had. That my mother would always put my brothers ahead of me.
That the wrong parent had died.
* * *
Dominique-Guillaume Lebel, premier valet de chambre du roi, commands the realm of the king’s most intimate pleasures.
How hard could this be? his rivals ask. Louis the Well-Beloved requires mistresses? Plenty of those around. Court ladies sneak into his private rooms, drunk on the very thought of his wine-soaked breath. Parents push their ripening daughters into his path. What else is there to do but direct the traffic and pocket the rewards? Ha, Lebel would say, were it only that simple. Do those who aspire to replace him know just the right hint of coarseness under a thick veneer of polish that appeals to the king of France and Navarre? The precise combination of innocence and sauciness? A tang of ignorance spiced up with a subtle taste of the gutter? Do they know that self-sacrifice inflames his sovereign’s heart more strongly than any bedroom antics might? Or that any trait or word reminding him of the queen, of any of his daughters, or of Madame de Pompadour will kill the king’s ardor in an instant?
Lebel knows his king the way he is, and not the way he appears to be. Or should be. Or even—during his rare flare-ups of uncertainty and remorse—desires to be. Lebel also knows how much his master—locked in a maze of identical days, chained with etiquette, hounded by the expectations of others—craves variety. If the royal mistresses—noble or common—keep changing, the king doesn’t have to. He can tell the same anecdotes, offer the same gifts, which come so much cheaper if ordered by the dozen. Besides, as the duc de Richelieu likes to remind the king with a knowing wink, there is nothing like novelty to produce “the desired result.”
Yes, Dominique-Guillaume Lebel knows how to delight and how to appease, what to say and what to keep to himself. After all, he is a son and grandson of Versailles servants; the court is in his blood. He senses boredom or annoyance long before it surfaces, rejection before it creeps into the dark blue royal eyes. He knows which lines not to cross, whom to placate and whom to ignore. Should Louis wish to be an unseen spectator of his own court, Lebel can offer a secret passage, a room equipped with double mirrors, a staircase that leads all the way to the palace roof. This is why, he would tell his rivals, no one can take his place, especially now with the latest shift in the royal kingdom of pleasure.
No, this is not the profound shift that the court still so foolishly expects after the day, five years ago, when Madame de Pompadour renounced her place in the royal bed. No noble beauty who has since been admitted to that bed has managed to oust Madame from her place at the king’s side. Nor have any of the “little birds” flocking through the palace corridors in their flashy dresses, their bourgeois mothers in tow. Not even that Irish hussy, O’Murphy, who believed herself irreplaceable only because the king kept sending for her even after she produced a bastard.
The shift in the royal pleasure is of a different kind. The king of France, tired of courtly intrigues, has become a connoisseur of innocence. He abhors guile and artifice. He detests rouged cheeks, gaudy dresses, and saucy talk. The “little birds” Louis wants in his bed now must be unspoiled, which, on the royal lips, means willing to please but not yet knowing what pleasing a man entails.
Pleasing a man, not the king, is of the essence here, for Louis wants to be desired for himself, not his crown.
Since such girls cannot be conjured up at a moment’s notice, Lebel has to plan well in advance. This is why his scouts are always on the lookout for a suitable candidate. “Unripe and unspoiled, with that innocent look the king favors now,” he demands. “From a family with few prospects, willing to take a chance when it presents itself, but not searching for one.” The pretty daughter of a small merchant or artisan down on his luck, he suggests.
If his scouts locate such a girl, Lebel will inspect her. If the girl passes muster, Lebel will make his first move.
Introducing himself as Monsieur Durand, the trusted servant of his noble master, Lebel will approach the girl’s parents. He will be blunt. Their daughter has caught his master’s eye, he will say, and thus might have a chance to make something of herself. Might, he will repeat in a solemn voice, because his master is a man of taste and discernment for whom beauty by itself, however striking, is not enough. His master demands impeccable manners and the ability to divert him. Here Lebel will mention dancing or playing an instrument, which of course requires training he is willing to provide. He will use words like thespian, sophistication, ingenue.
Such manner of speech, too, he will signal, is a desired skill.
