“Well, so much the better. I suppose that Uncle Charles won’t object to our getting married,” I said, relieved, though I had the distinct impression that Maryse knew much more about that duel than she cared to say.
“He will not oppose it. Before returning to his ambulances, he told me that it was for you to decide if you wanted to marry or not, that he would defer to your wishes. The truth is, quite apart from the positive opinion he has of Robert, I think that your uncle is none too comfortable having you under his guardianship. It’s not that he’s said as much to me. But if he has chosen not to have a family of his own, it must be to avoid responsibilities other than those occasioned by his military service. But come now, my friend,” she said, changing her tone of voice in an attempt to direct my attention to the day’s affairs. “Napoleon is already on the march. I can’t imagine how you could have slept through all this noise. I expect our carriages will be arriving shortly. It’s been two days since I’ve seen Claudette and I’m worried about her. If you only knew how fragile she is.”
“I’d like to go with you. One carriage would be sufficient for us. Pierre and Françoise would be thrilled to return to Foix. It would also be much more economical for us. Maintaining two horses is much different than four. Don’t you think? We could share expenses.”
“Never relinquish a carriage, my dear. That’s a piece of advice I’ll offer you. A carriage means freedom of movement. Suppose you wanted to return to your château. How would you get there? And anyway, my carriage is full to overflowing. So full, in fact, that Claudette and I generally ride in the coach-box. I’m traveling with everything you saw in my tower in Boulogne. I take my little world of illusions with me. My scenery. In the tower, I used it as a backdrop for the gypsies; next week, or the week after, I’ll use it to present an Italian tenor or a string quartet, or even Claudette, who performs the Dance of Salomé like no other. I’ll have you know that I play guitar and piano quite passably and that I can sing a Mozart aria as readily as a Creole melody from the islands. I made my living this way in Paris and in Saint-Domingue, my pet. And that’s what I plan to do here as well. I’ll open my salon wherever Napoleon takes it. My audience, at twenty francs a seat, is now the Grand Armée.”
“And Uncle Charles? I’m certain he’s interested in you.”
Maryse came over to the bed and sat down next to me. Looking me in the eye, she said: “Oh, Henriette, you have much to learn about your uncle. He’s happy in his profession, but I can’t imagine him working in some provincial hospital, much less in an office on the main thoroughfare, his name engraved on a bronze plaque. His true vocation is the war. War intoxicates certain men, my darling. You’ll soon see what I mean. Letting blood from a businessman in his underclothes is simply not the same as amputating an arm or stitching up a saber-wound on the battlefield. He was born to do these things in the same way that I was born for the life I lead. To each his own. Don’t fool yourself. Charles and I will never be anything, or, I should say, anything serious. It’s just not in our nature. We are both too independent. You must accept us both for who we are: Charles with his ailing soldiers, me with my traveling salon, and you with Robert. That way we’ll all be just fine.”
“I understand,” I sighed. Changing the conversation, I added: “As I said, I would very much have liked to travel with you. I would have learned so much from you. I’m just a foolish girl. I don’t even know how to find Robert.”
“Oh, don’t worry, my pet,” Maryse replied, getting up from the bed and returning to the window. “I’ll wait for your carriage to arrive.
I’ll go in front and you’ll follow me. If you really think about it, we will be traveling together. We’ll visit one another. But, chop chop! It’s getting late and we still need to eat something. God only knows when we’ll have the good fortune to sit at a proper table again!”
“Where is my dress?” I asked her, looking around the room. “I left it on that chair last night. Did you put it in my trunk?”
“Who’s ever heard of a fiancée dressed in black?” she said, and, with a languid gesture, indicated a dress with a daring décolletage hanging in the armoire. “It will be a touch short on you, and a bit loose, but I’ve scarcely worn it. In the next city, we’ll go shopping.”
“Which city will that be?” I asked,
“Whichever one strikes Napoleon’s fancy, my dear.”
3
THE URGENT NEED TO SEE Robert, to feel myself in his arms and to hear him say that he loved me; to fall asleep at his side in a big bed with white pillows and feel the heat of his body on my skin; to walk, arm in arm, along a tree-lined avenue, the leaves already crisp, glorious in their agony of gold, burgundy, and orange, and to swear my eternal love for him; to sit with him in some café in Ulm, or perhaps Munich or Augsburg, full of tobacco smoke and the sweet smell of fried onions and sausages smothered in mustard, to agree on the date and the place and the church and the time and all the other details of our wedding. (“The sooner the better,” counseled Maryse.) Yes, my desire to reunite with Robert grew within me like an endless stairway that seemed to lead to nowhere; the hours passing slowly and torturously as we doggedly followed the wagons laden with munitions and provisions through the streets of Württemberg, of Swabia, knowing that up ahead, somewhere far up ahead, marched the 5th Hussar Battalion, with Robert among them. There was no way to quiet my mind, nothing to distract me. Françoise, for some mysterious reason, was reading The Genius of Christianity, her lips moving as though gnawing on the words, her finger tracing the lines so as not to lose her place with the continual jolting of the carriage. If I decided to take advantage of a moment in which our carriages were stopped to visit Maryse and Claudette, I invariably found them going over song lyrics and dramatic dialogues, and I couldn’t help but feel like an intruder in their artistic endeavors. I didn’t doubt the affection Maryse felt for me, but she and Claudette were bound by links forged in Saint-Domingue, by a tumultuous and private past to which I did not have access, which they shared in the simple exchange of a glance, or a slight smile of understanding. And so it went all the way to the Danube, with me writing desperate letters to Robert whenever we stopped, copying the same paragraphs over and over again, watching the ink supply dwindle while still receiving no news, or at least any worth mentioning, beyond the laconic “all’s well” that circulated daily among the 5th Battalion, all the way from the Chief of Staff down to the last supply wagon. Just at the break of dawn one gray morning, we heard a distant thundering from the east. Half-asleep, I stuck my head through the carriage window and asked Pierre if a storm was coming. “It’s the war, mademoiselle!” he shouted from the coach-box. “We’ve arrived at the war!”
The following day we discovered that the battle had been fought in a place called Wertingen, on the south bank of the Danube. We passed a long line of Austrian prisoners, their white uniforms earth-stained and bloodied. They were being led by a contingent of Mounted Chasseurs who drove them forward, shouting at them as though they were oxen, and threatening the stragglers with their curved sabers. I jumped out of the carriage and planted myself in the middle of the road: The Hussars of the 9th Regiment? No, they had not participated in the battle. Robert Renaud? He is with General Treilhard. No, he’s with Field Marshal Lannes, as an aide-de-camp. No, I saw him yesterday in General Gazan’s convoy. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure he receives your letter. Consider it done, citoyenne, I’ll give him your message as soon as we return from Stuttgart. I’ll do what I can, citoyenne, I promise you. . . .
After that first victory, the nervous unease I’d been experiencing transformed into an ardent patriotism—a feeling that grew, from one day to the next, from a simple fluttering to a veritable fervor. I longed for more battles, more victories, and, above all, to see Robert marching triumphantly through the streets of a conquered city. While I’m sure my zeal had something to do with the enthusiasm of youth, I wasn’t the only one infected with what Maryse called “Napoleonic fever.” Françoise, who, a week earlier, had declared Europe to be drowning irrevocably in a bottomless pit of blood, and who dreamed of one day living serenely among the savages of America, stopped reading Chateaubriand