The school of mirrors, p.27
The School of Mirrors, page 27
Are all midwives like that? Marie-Louise wondered.
Soon the father was on his knees scrubbing the floor clean of afterbirth and blood. “As you say, Mistress Margot . . . Right away, Mistress Margot.” The mother was crying and laughing and cooing to the child, as if she had never been in pain.
“Is it always like that?” Marie-Louise asked Aunt Margot as they walked home through the morning mist.
“No. Sometimes everything goes wrong.”
“What do you do then?”
“Fetch a surgeon.”
“Then what.”
“Then you pray.”
Once inside the house on rue du Cygne, Marie-Louise tried to dash upstairs, but Aunt Margot grabbed her by the shoulders and made her hold her eyes. Watery blue, Marie-Louise remembers, rimmed with red, blinking after the sleepless night.
“This anger in you, child,” she said. “You can keep feeding it or you can start feeding what’s best in you.”
Only a crack, perhaps, but enough for a chink of light to creep through.
Marie-Louise quieted down not long after. Helped Hortense in the kitchen, lingered in the best room when Aunt Margot’s friends came on Sundays. Midwives all, with their talk of fate written into women’s bodies. Of lying-ins, slow or fast, in pain or with an ease that had to be marveled at. Of women feasting on red meat in hope for a boy, on fruits if they desired a girl. Of babies pulled out with their strong, skillful hands, babies weak or robust, in need of revival or in possession of iron lungs. Midwives laughing as they recalled a tug-of-war with a new mother begging them to reshape the baby’s head. “Be patient, I told her . . . give God a chance!” Or sending shivers down Marie-Louise’s spine as they whispered of a girl found half naked on the rampart, frozen to death, clutching her dead baby to her chest, or another giving birth to a daughter without a face.
Midwives, she heard, had to be ready for anything.
What pains Marie-Louise still is the time she wasted chasing phantoms, refusing to see what was staring her in the face.
That she had found a home.
That the past didn’t have to stain her.
* * *
Mugwort, wormwood and black pepper settled the stomach, promoted rest, strengthened the vital force. Chamomile tea soothed overwrought nerves. The mysterious jars on the windowsill in Aunt Margot’s room were there for the nettle trial: Put green nettle in her urine overnight. If she is with child, it will be full of red spots in the morning. If not, it will be blackish.
But in the end it was Aunt Margot’s books that broke the last vestiges of Marie-Louise’s anger, left opened as if by chance on a side table, on the mantel. A drawing, a passage marked, a trail of temptations. Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body: “the temporary lodging and instrument of the immortal soul.” The web of muscles and veins under human skin, showing the ways bones attach to each other, organs connect. Madame du Coudray, the Abrégé de l’Art des Accouchements: “presenting the womb in its position, its opening, its dilation by gradation, its contraction and obliquities.” Two hands with white cuffs holding a baby’s head, pulling it out of a bone basin or turning the baby around, to make birth possible. A midwife’s strong hands: nimble, supple and all-powerful.
Esteemed Madame Angélique du Coudray, Marie-Louise knew, had been Aunt Margot’s beloved teacher, with whom Aunt Margot had apprenticed for three blessed years. Who taught Aunt Margot everything she knew. “A teacher I miss every single day,” Aunt Margot would add, as by then Madame du Coudray had no time for Paris, traveling as she did all over France, training country girls in the art of midwifery. Here Aunt Margot might show Marie-Louise a drawing of the Machine that Madame du Coudray had invented, the cloth mannequin with its big belly on which would-be midwives could practice their skills without endangering anyone. Or tell her the story of Madame taking this wondrous machine to Versailles, where His Majesty himself delivered a cloth baby girl himself, with great pride, to the thunderous applause of the court.
Breadcrumbs leading Marie-Louise on.
“I can begin teaching you . . . if you truly wish it . . . if you prove you can apply yourself.”
How do you prove that? By keeping your eyes on the lodgers.
“My girls,” Aunt Margot called them. Some brought by relatives, others showing up on their own, in tears and in fear. Fleur, who resembled the Madonna in the print Hortense kept by her bed, swore pox on her deceitful lover. Pascaline, who asked Marie-Louise every morning, “So what’s happening in the grand world of the mighty?” Catherine, who, seeing a one-legged beggar, asked, “What bit his leg off? His sweetheart, the devil?”
Begging Aunt Margot for help, all of them, only to complain that a room was too small, Hortense pointed out often enough. Or the soap too harsh, or a cake not sweet enough. As if they paid Mistress a fortune, she would add, taking a dim view of Aunt Margot’s accounting. For why could other midwives charge twelve livres a day while Mistress Margot only took ten? Why did Hortense have to threaten to leave before mistress allowed extra charges for laundry?
That, Marie-Louise would say, was not a good question. Why did Aunt Margot listen to Hortense’s threats at all was a much better one. For how often did Hortense threaten to leave? Twice daily? Thrice? Which couldn’t do much to enhance her position, could it?
“Smart, aren’t we, palace girl?” Hortense would snort. “What else did you learn at Versailles?”
“That the best marble comes from Carrara. Which is in Italy.”
“Is that all?”
Her Versailles education was not the topic Marie-Louise wished to dwell upon any further. Especially since the memory of Old Gourlon’s taunting voice could still chill her blood. Why would you call for me in the middle of the night, Marie-Louise? An honest, God-fearing man like me?
For what if she didn’t escape that night? What if she had been weaker, slower, less lucky? What if Aunt Margot didn’t come to take her away?
To stop these thoughts, she would pinch her arm hard, to remind herself where she was.
You prove you can apply yourself by being useful.
This is why, when Aunt Margot checked on her girls, Marie-Louise was always around with a warm towel, the right jar of salve, learning to spot the earliest signs of trouble: bleeding, swollen feet, breath growing foul. To sniff out the despondent thoughts in the silly talk, prayers that took too long, nails bitten to the quick. Learning how Aunt Margot—her voice firm but never unkind—led her girls through darkness, through pain. How when she held a newborn in her arms, she whispered, “Poor, innocent mite. I’ll make sure you shall not want.”
You knew you had proven yourself when Aunt Margot takes you on her rounds. “My apprentice,” she says and makes you flush with pride.
1773–1774
IT WAS NOT UNTIL Marie-Louise turned seventeen that Aunt Margot could sign a proper apprenticeship contract with her, in a notary’s office on rue des Jardins. A contract that promised three years of training, during which “sworn midwife Madame Marguerite Leblanc pledged to show her apprentice the whole art, without hiding or disguising anything.” Not only of childbirth itself, but also of “medicines and remedies, bandages, fomentations and fumigations.”
All of it preparation for the qualifying exam at the College of Surgery. At the cost of 169 livres and 26 sous, in front of the first-surgeon to the king, senior members of the college, four sworn midwives from the Châtelet. “And other esteemed judges,” Marie-Louise would add quickly, not to terrify herself even more.
They formed her, these apprenticeship years, hardened her, made her who she is. Every day she accompanied Aunt Margot on her patients’ rounds. On the first Monday of every month, like all Parisian midwives, they attended Mass at the church of Saint-Côme and then paid charitable visits to poor women in need of a midwife. At the adjacent Saint-Côme College of Surgeons, they attended monthly lectures and observed dissections of women who died in childbirth, each a glimpse into why things went so terribly wrong. Pelvis too narrow, deformed by rickets . . . baby’s head too big, Marie-Louise would write in her thick, leather-bound notebook. Bleeding that could not be stopped . . . fever that would not abate.
Elations and losses filled up many such notebooks. Ninety-seven babies delivered alive in the first year alone. Twelve stillbirths. Seventeen mothers dead in childbirth, two with their babies still inside, the surgeon summoned in time but unable to help. Twenty-one miscarriages, five of which made Aunt Margot frown and question the patient for a long time. Drawings of pelvic shapes, childbirth positions, descriptions of labor, marked with question marks, exclamation points.
Notebooks Aunt Margot reviewed at the end of each week, pointing out in that voice of hers, half stern, half teasing: “La malade doesn’t give a damn about your doubts, Marie-Louise, or your feelings. She has a baby to deliver. By the way, the baby doesn’t care, either.
“And yes, Marie-Louise, a good midwife does need a strong bladder.”
It would all have been harder without Anne and Madeleine, who began their own apprenticeships the same year with two of Aunt Margot’s midwife friends. Anne was a little plump, with hazel eyes; Madeleine nearly as tall as Marie-Louise but thinner, with teeth that crowded her mouth.
Soldiers on a battlefield, Marie-Louise would refer to the three of them. Intrepid, charging forward while bullets swished past their ears, still standing as around them others fell. Remember Josée, who fainted at the sight of her first corpse at dissection? Or Jocelyn who mistook the bones a butcher sent for the Saint-Côme guard dog for human ones? Or that fiery girl, what was her name, who came to the dissection drunk and said all she had was a sip of her nerve tonic? And whom no one has seen since?
They saw each other daily, studied together whenever they could. It was not all seriousness. They made paper horns for themselves once, smeared their faces with soot and sneaked into the kitchen, scaring Hortense to inches near death, getting Aunt Margot into a fit.
Weren’t they supposed to copy anatomical drawings? What did they have to say in their defense?
Nothing?
Precisely.
“How many inches?” Anne whispered in Marie-Louise’s ear, proving that one can choke with laugher. Which fact Madeleine recorded in her own midwifery notebook, next to a drawing of two horns and a clenched fist.
When Marie-Louise completed the first year of her apprenticeship, a painter arrived for a sitting to commemorate the milestone with a suitable portrait.
It was Aunt Margot’s idea. A midwife and her apprentice together, a reminder of what each day was for.
The painter wanted to have the two of them seated on the green ottoman, Marie-Louise leaning her head on her aunt’s shoulder, looking up to her. Either serious or joyful, the painter suggested. If the former, Aunt Margot should focus her gaze on Marie-Louise, soft light illuminating their faces. If the latter, the joy would find its locus in Marie-Louise’s dark blue eyes and her smile.
Aunt Margot would have none of it. The two of them would sit side by side, leaning over Madame du Coudray’s manual. The open page, she demanded, must depict the open womb with a baby curled inside.
“As Madame who pays me wishes,” the painter said stiffly, forewarned no doubt. Midwives had a reputation. Opinionated, or, to put it more frankly, pigheaded. Unnatural, some said; it wasn’t right to allow that much power to be vested in a woman. A midwife’s word taken for truth in the court of law? Even against a man’s?
After four sittings and two months of waiting for the paint to dry before the unveiling, the portrait stood on an easel in the best room. The painter lifted the veil, not quite in one clean gesture as he intended but gracefully enough. For a moment everything looked as it should, the two figures seated side by side on the green ottoman with its yellow tassels. The book between them was opened to the picture of a pregnant womb.
But take a closer look and then you begin to notice that Aunt Margot’s painted hands are a tad too big. Make it two tads. Or three. Her half-opened mouth is gaping; her elbows are too pointed. Marie-Louise’s expression is more absentminded than self-assured.
Hortense, asked to speak her mind, declared, “Mistress does not have crooked teeth.”
The teeth had been fixed. Hands made a bit smaller, though this only after a round of aspersions and the threat of withholding the last installment of the payment. The portrait still hangs above the ottoman, which Marie-Louise thinks got the best deal as it resembles both itself and its essence.
And what about Marie-Louise, herself?
“Forgive me for being blunt,” Madeleine had said. “But you look a perfect goose in it. A mighty pretty one, though . . .”
Which is the whole, unadorned truth.
* * *
Wasted, Marie-Louise thought of her Versailles years. Bitterly, too.
To overburden people with attention, to insist upon obligations that they do not desire, is not only to render yourself disagreeable, but contemptible.
She was never wanted there, was she?
A bastard child taken in for money. Suffered, like a punishment. A duty to fulfill.
Not much was needed to bring such feelings roaring back. A Parisian cat might have the same tint of gray stripes as her rooftop Queenie or a limp like that of the white angora. Someone might whisper behind her back and disappear when she turned around. A man staggering out of a tavern swearing pestilence on all hussies might have something of Old Gourlon in him; a woman with a set jaw arguing with a coffee seller in a shrill voice might resemble Gardienne. Once, Marie-Louise was startled to spot Monsieur Lebel strut through the Palais-Royal, as if he were still alive. Dark suit, silver trim, a cane swinging in his clawlike hand. She quickened her steps and turned the corner, not because she believed in the dead returning to earth as Hortense did, but because—as Aunt Margot liked to say—a moving target was harder to hit.
Who were my parents, she still wondered, although by then she scorned her old childish dreams. Those drawings left under stones! Those deserts of Arabia!
A fruit of sin. The other side of the blanket.
A love child, Aunt Margot insisted. Her father didn’t wish to be known, true, but he had made generous arrangements. Every quarter an allowance was paid for her upkeep. There would be a dowry, too. Countless others have it much worse.
“Arrangements” were what Aunt Margot called the flurry of negotiations each time a lodger asked her to find a home for her baby or simply vanished, leaving it behind. She meant the search for adoptive parents, the trading of assurances and demands that followed. Sometimes money changed hands. Sometimes money was put aside, in trust or in an annuity. A mother might have to swear never to search for her child. A midwife might have to arrange the baptism on her own and come up with the child’s last name. The street where such a child was born might do, or an object the mother stared at while giving birth. Swan, Candle, Bird. Or sometimes simply Blank—for the empty space where the father’s name should have been inscribed.
Mistress Leblanc? Le Blanc?
“One day I’ll tell you, Marie-Louise, but not now.”
“What about my own name?” she asked. “Is there a street called Bosque? Or a town?”
“That I don’t know.”
This was what Aunt Margot did know. Marie-Louise’s father was a foreigner, a Polish count who came to France with the queen’s entourage.
“And my mother?”
“Pretty.”
“Did you know her?”
“Being pretty is a misfortune,” Aunt Margot said, which was not an answer, but the beginning of a litany that Marie-Louise had heard many times before: Pretty girls don’t know their own minds. They are like weathercocks, turning whichever way the wind blows. Too dependent on the constant flow of admiration, addicted to it.
“Is that how my mother was?”
Aunt Margot drew a breath, held it and then let it out. “I swore on the Virgin Mary to hold my tongue,” she said. And then, seeing how Marie-Louise blinked to stop tears, she added, “Silence is not such a high price to pay for keeping a child away from the foundling hospital, is it?”
How could Marie-Louise quarrel with that? After all, she, too, would say those very same words, many times.
* * *
Versailles was another country, people said. The king shunned Paris, so Paris shunned the king. “His Majesty is not universally respected,” a midwife at a Saint-Côme gathering might remark. After Sunday Mass someone might say that the Great Sinner was still not taking communion, proof he was not in a state of grace. Or refer to the “well-known profession” of the current royal mistress, Madame du Barry. Or simply call her a royal whore. “How much does she cost yearly?” Marie-Louise might hear. “More than all those Deer Park girls?”
It was lucky for France that the dauphin did not take after the old king. No royal mistress in sight, no royal bastards to pay for. A tad too shy, Madeleine thought him, and so awkward. To which Anne said that luckily his Austrian wife, Marie-Antoinette, was pretty and vivacious. A pity she might be barren, though. Five years married and still flat like an ironing board.
Aunt Margot would cut such speculations short. Didn’t they know by now it was not always the woman’s fault? Didn’t Madame du Coudray say midwives were to keep all possibilities in mind? Didn’t she remind them that midwives were called “wise women” for a reason?
She did.
It was a well-known and undisputed truth that venerable Mistress du Coudray had a saying for every occasion. And if she didn’t, Aunt Margot would invent one on the spot, without as much as a stammer.
Marie-Louise was halfway through her apprenticeship when the old king took ill. It was almost the end of April of 1774, three weeks after Easter. Hortense came home from the market announcing that His Majesty had caught a chill at a deer hunt. So severe, she said, that he had to be carried back to Versailles.
A day later the market women talked of a raging fever and the king’s body covered in pustules. The devil’s claws, Hortense heard, a proof that sins always leave marks for all to see.
