The General's Mistress (11 page)

The courier at my side chuckled. “Like a well-turned-out fellow, do you, Madame?”

I had the shame to blush. “I do. I can look, can’t I?”

He nodded good-naturedly. “Lots of people look at Colonel Ney.”

“Ney?” I squeaked.

The courier nodded. “That’s old Red Ney. He’s a bastard and a martinet, but a good fellow all the same.”

The White Queen

I
arrived in Paris on my twentieth birthday, September 28, 1796, and went directly to the house Moreau owned. It was a small townhouse on a quiet and unfashionable street, the kind of house owned by lesser merchants and clerks, professors and junior deputies. Three stories, with no yard at all, it had three bedrooms on the second floor, with a nursery and two tiny servants’ rooms on the third floor. The kitchen was in the cellar, and the first floor consisted of a drawing room, a dining room, and a tiny study on the back of the house. The furniture was Louis XVI, in good condition but far from stylish. I wondered how in the world this had come to be Moreau’s house. Nothing about it reminded me of him at all.

Madame Duferne explained that the first evening. Not the young, beautiful woman I had feared, she was fifty and cheerful, with a white cap on her unruly dark curls. While the housemaid set dinner on the table, she explained.

“General Moreau has never lived here, Madame. He has a lovely new house in Passy. This is one of the houses he bought up for almost nothing during the Revolution, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Oh?” I said. The beef was well cooked but utterly bland, without a seasoning on it. The cook was obviously no great chef.

“At first, the general made offers to aristos and others who wanted to flee the country. He gave them cash for their homes and furniture, at a greatly reduced price, of course. After all,
what good did property do them if they either had to flee and abandon it or go to the guillotine? So he bought a number of properties in nice parts of town for almost nothing. And then some houses, like this one, were seized by the Committee when their owners were executed for treason. The general made offers to the Committee that were accepted. After all, they wanted cash, not houses.”

“I see,” I said. The table I sat at, the china that held my dinner, had been chosen by some poor woman who had been guillotined. White china with a pattern of roses. Perhaps the wedding gift of a couple now dead.

“After my husband, Antoine, was killed, I didn’t really have anywhere to go. The general rents out houses all over town, but this one didn’t bring much in because it’s not very fashionable. So the general said I could stay here for absolutely nothing if I would keep house for him and host any of his friends who needed to stay here.” She smiled at me across the table. “And I do a very good job, as you can see.”

I nodded. “Everything is impeccable, Madame.”

I took a drink of my wine. It was decent table wine, sweeter than I liked, but not bad. And I asked the question that I wanted the answer to badly. “Any women, Madame?”

She laughed. “Oh, you want to see if you have rivals! Not many. Once in a while he has had someone stay a day or so, but no one as beautiful as you, and not in some time. Married women, I suspect. Who cannot, of course, be seen at his house in Passy. When they come, I go out, and don’t return for hours. But I imagine you have nothing to worry about. You are so very lovely, and he’s sent you here from his camp. He must be madly in love with you.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

Upon retiring, I searched the master bedroom quite closely.
The windows were small and hung with thick drapes, and the huge four-poster was very comfortable. The bureau contained several more pamphlets of a “political” nature, as well as a polished wooden box. I opened it and was not surprised to see a pair of soft leather cuffs with silver buckles, a bottle of oil, and an ivory phallus.

I closed the lid, then opened it again and examined it closely. This was more like what I had expected, much more so than this grim decorum. An unlikely love nest, and one where games of passion were hardly to be expected, in a respectable neighborhood where a respectable woman could go in perfect propriety.

No, I had no rivals.

I woke in the night wondering if they had guillotined the children, the ones whose nursery was upstairs with their toys still there, or if the children had been spared to beg in the streets and look up at lighted windows like the ones they had once had.

I closed my eyes and buried my head in my pillow.

The house was absolutely silent.

I had not prayed since I was a child myself, but I found myself whispering words that might have been from my childhood in Italy. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, watch over those children if they live. And if they do not, please take them to your peace.”

I
t was fall in Paris, and the weather was lovely. Unfortunately, I knew no one and had no friends. I had nothing to do. In camp, at least there had always been bustle and excitement. I did not want to stay in the house all day, so each day I hired a carriage and did too much shopping. It was easy to spend time in the shops.

Fashion had changed dramatically in just a few years. All the
heavy panniers of my girlhood were gone, exchanged for diaphanous cotton gowns so thin that the shape of the body showed through quite clearly. Some of them were lavishly pleated like those of ancient Egyptian goddesses, worn with little sandals of gilded leather and no stockings at all. To make their feet look beautiful, women had them scrubbed with pumice or sea salt, then rubbed in oil, and had their toenails polished and painted.

By the time Moreau returned to Paris, it was too late in the year to wear those sort of clothes abroad. December had already begun, and the weather had turned rainy and gray.

A message arrived late one night that he had just that moment returned to town, and that he would visit me the following evening. I spent all of the next day in a state of excitement. Would passion have survived a separation of two and a half months? He had been in the thick of war, while I had been reading books and shopping, engaged in perhaps the most useless days of my life.

And the loneliest. When I was brutally honest with myself, listening to what I was beginning to term my Inner Moreau, I could admit that. I had no companions, and Madame Duferne was incredibly boring. I had no responsibilities. I had no occupations, not even bookkeeping. There was, in short, absolutely nothing to do from sunup to sundown except read, shop, and tend my beauty. If this was the life of a grand courtesan, it was dull in the extreme.

So I awaited Moreau’s arrival with the breathless anticipation of a harem girl, for whom her lord’s summons might be the only event of note in half a year, a lofty fate that might be attained but rarely in a lifetime. For that reason, I chose for our intimate dinner a costume I had had made up, a pair of gauze pantaloons in the sheerest of blue shades, with a bolero jacket of dark-blue velvet embroidered with gold. Beneath the bolero
I wore nothing, and only a frog of gold braid held the bolero closed. I did not expect it to last the night.

Instead of greeting me as I had expected, with harsh words and a command or two, Moreau instead came in quietly, divesting himself of his soaking cloak and hat and putting them before the fire. His face seemed heavily lined in the firelight, and his clothes were black. I lit the candles on the table and went to him.

He did not force me to my knees. Instead, he cupped my chin in his hands and kissed me thoroughly, almost sweetly, sending warmth running throughout my body. I put my arms around him and drew him close. With him in boots and me barefoot, he had a little bit on me in height.

“My dear,” he said quietly, his mouth against my ear and my golden hair, “you look lovely.”

“And you look tired, Victor,” I said. His collar was wet from the rain.

“Well, it was a tiring journey,” he said. “But it is over now.” One hand ran down my back to the bare skin between the bottom of the bolero and the waistband of the pantaloons. It simply lingered there. “My dear,” he said, “I need some time. The transition is too abrupt.”

I nodded. I wanted him, but I could wait. And there was something undeniably sweet about being pressed in his embrace like this, as though I were something he valued immeasurably. “Let us have dinner, then. The cook has gone home, but I have kept everything warm in chafing dishes.”

The dinner was rather better than the first one I’d had in this house. I had done the sauce with capers myself, rather than leaving it to the cook. We talked about books I had been reading and about the weather, nothing that touched on war or trouble, and I watched him slowly unwind. I poured him a second glass
of wine, and a third, and he did not object as he usually did. It was not enough to make him drunk, but it did bring some color and animation back to his face. Afterward I made coffee with water I had kept hot over the fire.

He watched me kneeling on the hearthstone to pour it out, and smiled when I brought the press to the table. “My dear,” he said, “I doubt any man in France has ever been waited on so attentively by such a lovely houri.”

I had something clever to say, but when I opened my mouth it was not what came out. “I have missed you,” I said.

“Did you really? With all the amusements of Paris at your disposal?”

I shrugged. “I haven’t had any amusements. I know nobody, and I have nothing to do.”

Moreau took the coffee from me and drank it neat and scalding hot. “We will have to remedy that. I will not be leaving until March. There is ample time to introduce you to congenial society.”

“And what is congenial society?” I asked, sitting down and sipping at my own coffee. I put the cheese on the table, but he didn’t touch it.

“Politics,” he said. “Everything in Paris is about politics. And if you think war is a dangerous game, you have not seen Paris politics. Here, people lose their heads with alarming regularity. This is not your husband’s silly games. This is life or death.”

“So I had gathered,” I said. And I did not mention the house, the constant reminders around me of the losers.

“The Directory is little more than a year old. This tenuous coalition holds together a selection of people who hate each other, but who have three enemies in common. First, none of them want another popular insurrection of the sansculottes, the Paris mob who gave us the Committee of Public Safety and the
Terror. Second, none of them want the Austrians to win this war and conquer France. And third, none of them want the Bourbon kings restored. You cannot imagine what life was like then, if this degree of risk seems preferable.”

“And what do you want?” I asked, putting my elbows on the table and cupping my coffee in both hands. “To be a Director? To be the Republic’s premier general? To be a wealthy man?”

Moreau smiled at me delightedly, as though I had surpassed his expectations. “I already am a wealthy man, my dear. There are army contracts and many other avenues of opportunity.”

“And the other two?”

“Why not?” He reached for the cheese knife. “There are no greater talents than mine among the Directors.”

I said nothing, for I did not know the Directors or their talents, beyond what I read in the papers.

“And you should have seen some of the members of the Committee of Public Safety. Pigs, my dear.”

“They say Barras is capable,” I said.

“Paul Barras is all charm and no substance,” Moreau said. “He hasn’t an idea in his head that wasn’t put there by public opinion. He couldn’t manage his own household if he didn’t have that little Creole that he bought from prison.” I raised an eyebrow, and he continued, “It’s said that he had a
tendre
for the Creole wife of an aristo. He let her husband go to the guillotine, and then went to her in prison and offered her a choice between his protection and the blade. So Joséphine de Beauharnais agreed, like a sensible woman. And she was a charming hostess. Eventually he grew tired of her and married her off.”

“That’s terrible,” I said quietly.

Moreau shrugged. “If I were you, I should rather pity the women without the interest of a man like Barras. They’re dead.”