Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution by James Tipton Read Free Book Online Page B

to take my arm, so Marie and I stood and knelt and prayed together. It felt good to hear her soft child’s voice next to me and feel her small arm, firmly locked in mine. She is the one who enlightened me, I thought, that the finality of death is only for the living.
    Papa in his goodness had provided for the living—he had left substantial gifts for each child, not to be confused with inheritance, complicated as that was by issues of gender and by the fact that my mother was still alive. These were gifts to be used when needed, and, twenty and unmarried, I appreciated the security that such a gift might offer me one day.
    I repeated softly Ave, verum corpus, natum de Maria virgine and looked up at the vast arches of the cathedral. How can they make a ceiling of stone so that it doesn’t fall down, as if it’s floating far above us? There were so many things I didn’t understand.
    I felt Marie’s small hand in mine, and the touch of that hand kept me linked to the mortal world. Otherwise, I thought, I wish I could just pass right up along those arches where the incense curls and disappears, where a single, thin sun shaft comes down.

A Safe Place
    My nephew, Gérard Vincent, learned to speak as the disturbed air of the Revolution moved about him. Sometime after his fourth birthday in 1791, he began referring regularly to demons, and I was never quite sure how much of this was his own active child’s imagination and how much was influenced by those conversations that children overhear and of which they understand not the meaning but the feeling. He had his own ways of dealing with these demons, before whom his parents were powerless. Marguerite and Paul, though, did their best to keep Gérard and his sister in their own happy world.
    I had returned to live with my mother and Angelique, but Maman’s criticisms of my riding and her insistence that I follow her advice on suitors agitated me. Less than a year after Papa’s death, perhaps out of her need for stability in the changing times, she married an ambitious lawyer in town, who came to live at chez Vallon, now chez Vergez, which was his name. It wasn’t my home anymore, and I returned to chez Vincent, grateful to be part of a family, but apart from it as well.
    I tutored and played with little Gérard as well as Marie. He was a talkative four-year-old, and we spent so much time together, he was rapidly becoming my very good friend.
    On a sunny October afternoon we made up spontaneous songs about things we saw from Marguerite’s terrace. Gérard sang first about how the sun was bright on the water and how the river looked small because it was far away, then he sang about how it would be winter soon because the grapes had all been picked. I had been teaching him about seasons. Then it was my turn, and I made up a verse about how the red roses no longer flared at the end of the vine rows, and that was how you knew the harvest was over and winter was coming.
    Gérard was telling me how his hoop, which he could not roll well yet with his stick, was actually a circle to catch demons in. I told him demons were only in the imagination and to use his imagination for good things, and he said he had two imaginations, one good and one bad, and when the bad one came it took over his whole body; that is why he needed the hoop.
    How much did he know, in his fine world of song and play, of the way the world he was growing into was falling down outside the walls of his father’s beautiful house? I was afraid that his haven would suddenly collapse in upon itself. I gave him a little hug and kissed his cheek, and he went right on singing his song about the demons.
    Marguerite joined us at the table by the small fountain, and we poured iced water into our glasses of juice squeezed from lemons, then, with gleaming silver pincers, dropped in two or three cubes of sugar. I made a third, very sweet citron pressé for Gérard, who was playing under the table and surfaced for a sip from