Parrot and Olivier in America (5 page)

The servants, crowded like geese inside the entrance, applauded.

This shocked the comtesse clearly. She stopped on the third-to-last step and her entire forehead erupted in a frown of disapproval while her dark eyes shone in undiluted triumph. In this style she ran the gauntlet of her audience and I behind her, still clutching my letter to the Abbe de La Londe. Through the gates I beheld a crowd of men of all sorts wearing white cockades, and women too, some very rough. My mother, not knowing whether to acknowledge them or no, wrapped her shoulders with a shawl of fleur-de-lys, and this simple action raised another cry.

"Vive le roi,"
they cried.

"In, in," my mother hissed.

I jumped into the dreaded Polignac monster and she followed quickly after me.
"Vive le roi,"
she whispered in my ear, brushing my cheek with the fresh blooms in her hat. "
Vive le roi
, my treasure." And so we rolled along the rue Saint-Dominique to the rue de Rivoli where we called on Mme de Chateaubriand. M. de Chateaubriand was not at home but many other aristocrats were gathered around the dining table which was stacked high with papers bound with bright green printer's cord. Even as we entered these cords were cut and the pamphlets divided between la Marquise de La Tour du Pin and Mme de Duras and Mme Dulauloy and many others whose names I did not know, although I do believe Mme de Stael was of the party, but in any case we all rushed out onto the rue de Rivoli, not to our many waiting carriages but down along the street so the coachmen followed us, at what you might have called a funereal pace, and we, in shining white, spread like a flock of splendid birds, rare flamingos perhaps, out across the boulevards and squares down from the faubourg Saint-Germain into the faubourg Saint-Antoine, giving away M. de Chateaubriand's pamphlet which, at the time, I assumed to be some sort of announcement of the king's return. In fact it was a pamphlet written by M. de Chateaubriand, and it had a very great impact on the population as it legitimized the restoration.

Louis XVIII later said that
Of Bonaparte and the Bourbons
was worth a whole regiment to him. It never did occur to Chateaubriand that he had been mercilessly flattered, but in that he is no worse than every other writer ever born.

Dear Little Bebe, I wish you a good day. I am going to tell you something. I am to have a new suit for His Majesty's visit. The statue on the place Vendome has just been knocked down and they have put in its place a white flag with fleurs-de-lys on it.

Goodbye, little Bebe, I kiss you with all my heart. My friend Thomas is now here with all his sisters. He asks after you and demands you come to join us very soon.

Olivier

VI

THE GATES WERE REPAIRED and painted. There were new curtains, cream and silver, luminous by candlelight, which had been sewn and hung in just two days, one of them a Sunday. Our horses were lodged with the young nephew of the duc de Berry, who was a neighbor, and the entire rue Saint-Dominique echoed with hammer blows as our stables were rebuilt by a group of Marseillais who ate so gluttonously that a cook was engaged to deal with their unreasonable demands. Every day the king was expected in Paris. Every day he was delayed until, finally, my sleep was quite destroyed by nervous expectation.

"Why does the king not come to Paris?" I asked.

"He is not only king of Paris, Master de Garmont. He is king of all the French."

"Then he is the king of murderers!" I cried, and was dispatched to my room where Odile was ordered to prevent me writing letters to Thomas. I doubtless made an appalling noise. Who knows, I might have gone on all day had I not been witness, in seeking a sight of Thomas, to a conversation in the garden beneath my window. That is, I heard, very clearly, the duc de Blacqueville tell my father that the prefet had left for Boulogne to greet His Majesty.

"Then tomorrow?" my father asked.

"Or the next," said M. de Blacqueville.

Vive le roi
, I thought, with great relief. He will be here soon.

The Blacqueville wisteria was reattached to its ancient stone and we were permitted to play in the Luxembourg Gardens. A new wave of visitors arrived with articles that could be used to make our house to
fit a king
, among them a splendid Sevres service with views of Paris sent by the wife of a newly appointed Gentleman of the Chamber. This meant my father would soon be made a peer, Odile said.

Vive le roi
, thought Olivier, and if his lungs hung like rags on the bony rack of his little chest, he remained a strong and willful boy.
Vive, vive, vive
, I thought, inflating myself with the intoxicating smell of lemons that had been used to clean the brass. I was a lunatic child staring wide-eyed, unprotected, at the moon which--at that very moment--must be shining on the waving plumes of the shakos, the splendid black royal carriage splattered with hard hot sprays of mud. In my imagination, I urged on the sweating horses through the night, past the flares and faggots of the King's
good honest
people. I prayed for him. Oh do not fear, my king.

I was still engaged in this journey, driving away his enemies, twisting in my sheets, when Odile returned from her evening off. My pulse was racing, and I myself was very hot, but not so hot as Odile, and I will tell you how I knew: When she leaned to kiss my forehead I could feel her blushing down her chest.

"What has happened, Odile?"

"The king has been detained again."

"No, do not tease me."

"This time it is the flour dealers of Amiens."

"But flour dealers
, Odile? Do not the flour dealers want his head?"

"No, no, my small master." She placed her hot hands on my cheek. "It is the millers' ancient privilege."

"Millers," I thought. How
preposterous
.

Good Odile stroked my forehead until I slept and when I woke she had gone, although I soon understood that she was sobbing in her room. The daughter of a peasant, I thought, but she is no different from Blacqueville or myself. Neither of us can bear to wait another day.

At breakfast she did not wish to be bothered with me, so I pulled at her broad fingertips until she slapped my leg.

I said I would tell my mother.

"Tell who you like," she said. "It can't be worse than this." She said she was to be sent back to the Chateau de Barfleur that very day.

"Oh poor Odile," I cried, "you will never see His Majesty."

Odile's small round nose was red with her own misery, and yet she smiled and shook her head. I thought, It is not so bad for her as it would be for me.

"Little Olivier," she said, "your silly Odile has fallen in love."

I thought, It is the king, of course.

"Who will look after me, Odile?"

"Oh," she cried, "you poor little creature."

I was briefly puzzled to hear her speak this way. Yet it was not uncommon that her generous affections would lead her to forget her place.

Shortly before lunch I observed, with some alarm, a swarm of the strange Paris servants piling various items of my clothing, willy-nilly, upon the billiard table. Having at first taken exception to their appalling method, it took me a moment to see, among the tangle, the Ch'ien-lung bowl. Then I finally understood why she, a servant, had called me a
pauvre petite creature
. I was to be sent away with her.

When my mother confirmed these fears, I threw up on my shoes and declared myself too sick to travel. In any case, why must I be banished because a
servant
had misbehaved?

"You must study your Latin," my mother said formally, and again many hours later, by which time I lay exhausted on my bed. It had been a horrid, horrid day. The leeches had finally fallen off and been cast into the flames. "Bebe is waiting for you at home, my darling."

"Maman, you know I cannot possibly leave before the king arrives. Bebe must come here."

"Olivier, the Abbe de La Londe will not come to Paris."

"I cannot travel, Maman. I simply can't. I will study my Latin with Blacqueville. He will teach me Greek as well."

"Young man, you are a Garmont not a sparrow. You cannot sing the same song all day."

"It will be much better for everyone if I remain."

And so on.

The very next morning, having been permitted a tearful farewell with Thomas, I was carried to my tumbrel, a quilt wrapped around my
poor thin legs
. How dare they, I thought. How dare my own parents treat me so stupidly.

I was of noble blood. It was my right to stay but instead I was sent into exile, the horses plodding through mud and drenching rain,
through melancholy, to melancholy
, as the poet has said.

The servant steadied the Ch'ien-lung bowl on the seat between us and it was then that she confessed--we were being sent away to
safety
because she had fallen for a splendid Austrian guard and my mother would not have it.

I thought, What has this to do with me?

"You will have the abbe anyway," she said, lighting her little clay pipe and filling the carriage with her dusty smoke.

It is not Odile who is to blame, I thought. It is Bebe.

"Bebe is afraid," I said. "He is afraid Bonaparte will put him to the sword." I had never said such a vile thing in all my life and I waited to be shamed for it, but Odile shifted the Ch'ien-lung onto her lap and clutched it to her stomach as if it were her child.

"Everyone should be afraid," she said. "They are not afraid enough poor creatures."

"You are a poor creature, too, Odile."

And at that she began to laugh. "Aye," she said. "Look at us."

We entered the gates of the Chateau de Barfleur at that time of day when--so dreary, so predictable--no lights were lit and the dark beached mass of chateau bled into the gloom. How I dreaded it, the very air of my home, the dusty smell like that of a reliquary built to house the thigh bone of a tortured saint. I would be the only person of my age.

In the great courtyard we were greeted by Gustave the blacksmith, whom I had imagined to be in Paris, and by Bebe who, to my private shame, was so kind and affectionate toward me. He announced that we were, immediately, to make a
bivouac
in the unwalled pavilion my father had built beside the pond. We would sleep there and study there. We would botanize.

So Odile was left to take her leeches and grief into the chateau which, with so many of the servants in Paris, must have been a very lonely place indeed. Although, I thought, perhaps they like it, perhaps they have secret balls and grand dinners where they wear my parents' clothes and drink the best of our cellar and perform plays and juggling tricks when Bebe has gone to bed.

Let them dance, I thought, poor creatures.

But of course there were no dancing parties in the chateau. Or they were not visible. From the pavilion we could see only a single lighted candle in a window below the eaves, a very lonely flame compared to the rushing sparks from Bebe's splendid fire. The rain soon stopped. The sky cleared. We ate grilled rabbit below the great eternal wonder of the stars.

If you had observed Olivier's greasy face in starlight, you might have supposed he had been cured of his bleeding, vomiting, gasping upset. Yet this was a very willful constant child and he did not, not for a moment, forget his king. So while you see young Olivier admire the reflection of the moon in the pond, you must not doubt that he was, even as he turned to smile at the Abbe de La Londe, picturing the royal coach, the spinning wheel hubs decorated with painted suns, the spokes like shining rays ending in the firmament portrayed by the signs of the stars. He was a good boy. He said his prayers. He lay down beneath his uncle de Barfleur's bearskin. He closed his eyes and pictured the great ship of state plowing through the night.

VII

THE RUDIMENTARY COMFORTS of our first night suggested only a brief diversion. Who would have expected we would live there all that summer and that our bivouac, of necessity, would assume an established character, with Turkey rugs and armchairs and my grandfather's campaign bed, an antique brass construction held together with verdigrised butterfly nuts and wire cross bracing.

A refectory table was discovered in the old pigeon loft, and when this was scrubbed and waxed it was where we spent our mornings, classifying the previous day's botanizing according to Linnaeus.

We had a wide low roof over our heads and if, from time to time, the rain blew in from the river, the summer was warm and our rugs were easily resuscitated in that gorgeous dry air, ripe with the perfumes of hawthorn blossom and grass and manure and fresh rich hay. Black honeybees and bumblebees danced around me as I studied. More than once we had speckled wood butterflies basking on our table, and once the sexton's cow awoke me with a dreadful bellow in my ear.

M. le Blacksmith constructed an Indian's fireplace, that is, a
babracot
, and the servants split firewood and the English cook finally consented to grill the game as Bebe ordered.

My mother wrote a letter every day. I looked forward to her pale blue
tutoiements
with a simple joy one would never feel in approaching her quite formal person. One broke the sealing wax with a dreamy sort of pleasure such as an eagle might feel lazily gliding on a warm delicious current. It was as if the windows had opened in my mother's life and the air was filled with cyan dragonflies. Today it is my sweetest memory of Henriette-Lucie, the jasmine escaping from its paper shell.

These love letters were delivered by means of the postal system my father had designed as an improvement on that arrangement the emperor so famously devised. In our corner of Normandy there was no household, be it as low as a charcoal burner's, where a letter would not arrive as quickly as it did at the chateau. It was as a result of my father's particular system that we were blessed to have Marie-Claude, the sexton, deliver our mail directly to the pavilion. He had no horse, nor did he require one, for we were less than a kilometer from the village and every morning--provided there had been no death in the night--he would amble, long-armed and poke-necked, as if demanding that the peculiar world explain itself. He would stumble through the dew-wet pasture to that place where he would be pleased to withhold my mail while he inspected the botanical samples spread across our table.