I was scarcely aware that it was Robert who carried me back to the coach. When I came to, we were entering the city again, and Uncle Charles was waving a bottle of ammonia from his medicine kit under my nose.
“You must have had too much to drink,” he affirmed, after taking my pulse. “Don’t worry, I won’t say a word to your Aunt. As far as I’m concerned, you only drank one glass of wine.”
When we arrived at the guesthouse, we saw immediately that something was wrong: Françoise met us with a long wail and ran toward us, her head in her hands. It seemed that Aunt Margot was having chest pain and could scarcely speak. She had sent Françoise for a priest.
We ran to her room. Uncle Charles bled her immediately, assisted by Pierre, the postilion. While the basin filled with blood, I knelt next to her bed and took her hand. I could see that she was suffocating and I tried to cool her with my fan. But nothing seemed to help. Her strong constitution allowed her to hold out until Françoise returned with the priest. As soon as she had received the Last Rights she fell into a sweat-soaked trance. At dawn, her irregular breathing ceased completely.
2
JUST HALF AN HOUR AGO, while Milly and I were turning the plants toward the light and picking dead leaves from their stems, the memory of Aunt Margot felt so vivid that I was compelled to sit down and write about her, and also about my family.
I must begin by saying that I have almost no memory of my parents. Whenever I try to evoke them, their faces appear blurry and incomplete, like fragments of worn daguerreotypes that someone’s left under my pillow. Mama sitting before a mirror, her back to me, combing her long, copper-colored hair, or a faint smile in her blue eyes as she let me take a sip from her cup of hot chocolate. My father’s vigorous hand, pointing out my first rainbow, or tying, too tightly, the laces on my little white booties. Neither do I remember Lausanne, nor the house in which I was born. Sometimes, in the deepest recesses of my memory and at the end of a long hallway, I think I can see a dog; at others, hanging from an invisible wall, as though floating in the nothingness, a bird in a cage and a cuckoo clock, that, come to think of it, could have been the same thing; perhaps a full-length mirror and a big bed with two giant white pillows, and yes, also my tiny chamber pot. All told, nothing too terribly precious.
My years in Foix passed happily among my Aunt’s conservative ideas and the clandestine revolutionary rumors spread by the servants at the château. Despite my Aunt’s best efforts to educate me in accordance with her values—instruction in piano, voice, dance, sewing, Italian and Spanish, flower arrangement, and etiquette were entrusted to a long-nosed woman named Madame Montiel; grammar, Latin, Greek, mathematics, logic, geography, and didactic lectures were dutifully imparted by abbé Lachouque; riding lessons and fencing were the province of the good Captain Laguerre—my contact with the gardener’s clever daughters, with whom I carried out make-believe decapitations next to a dead tree that we called The Guillotine, Pierre’s Jacobean diatribes that he delivered, undaunted by my curiosity, to the other servants in the kitchen while my Aunt napped, and my intense conversations with Françoise, a secret admirer of Rousseau and of the Philosophes, had marked me with a vague sense of anti-monarchical patriotism that, though I never dared to express it, had grown within me as spontaneously and disorderly as a flowering vine, ideals that I continue to hold to this day with the same lack of political discipline. In any case, my childhood and adolescence belong to Aunt Margot, as does the sum total of my filial love. In truth, I couldn’t have asked for a better mother. And if, at the time of her death, I did not share some of her convictions, I nevertheless owe to her example my only three virtues: perseverance, physical stamina, and the capacity to make decisions in difficult moments. Of all of my belongings, the one I value most is a tiny portrait of her that I wear, to this day, on a chain around my neck. It has been no easy task to keep it all these years. On three separate occasions I have lost the gold chains that it hung upon: the first was in 1812, during the terrible retreat from Moscow to the Niemen; then in Spain, when I fell prisoner in the Battle of Vitoria; and finally, in jail in Santiago de Cuba, when I was stripped of everything of value I’d had with me. I have just opened the stubborn little door of the locket to say hello to Aunt Margot, an Aunt Margot at age nineteen, a newlywed, surprisingly thin, but already wearing her customarily resolute expression, a portrait painted by one of those miniaturists who found fame in the Court of Versailles.
The Cavents, enterprising people from the Languedoc, had sought refuge in Geneva, fleeing religious persecution. There they had prospered as manufacturers of knives and scissors. My maternal grandfather, Antoine-Marie Cavent, had embraced the Roman Catholic faith—a creed loathed in the city—in order to marry the heiress to a great textile empire. From this union were born, in consecutive years, my mother, baptized Suzanne, Aunt Louise, Aunt Margot, and Uncle Charles. Widowed and suffering from an ailing heart, my grandfather ended up bankrupt due to competition from British manufacturers. All that remained of his considerable fortune was the house in which he lived. Since the profitable marriages he had expected for his daughters were no longer possible, he married them off the best he could, to men of various professions: Paul Faber, my father, the owner of a modest printing press in Lausanne; Guillaume Curchet, of Geneva, an employee of a bank owned by the Necker brothers, proved worthy of Aunt Margot, and a certain Brunet, a lawyer in Lausanne, obtained a “yes” from Aunt Louise, the eldest and most beautiful of the three sisters. Each of these marriages was born purely of love, since none of my grandfather’s daughters had any dowry to offer other than a solid conservative education. As for Uncle Charles, my grandfather dissuaded him from following his true inclination toward a military career, convincing him, instead, to go to Paris to study medicine.
With his daughters’ domestic situations arranged, my grandfather sold his house, complete with all of the furniture inside it. The following day he went to see his son-in-law, Curchet, in his office at the bank, and deposited all of the money in an account to be managed by Curchet himself. From that sum, Uncle Charles was to receive a modest allowance for thirty-six months, provided that he continue with his medical studies; the remainder would go toward a dowry for the first marriageable granddaughter, or, in the case that there were no granddaughters, it would be given to the first grandson when he came of age. After making these farsighted provisions, he went to the best hotel in Geneva, ordered a Pantagruelian dinner, and died that same night, in his sleep, from his second heart attack.
A few weeks later, Curchet and Aunt Margot’s social life took an unexpected turn. Upon being named Finance Minister in France, Jacques Necker asked his brother Louis to send him two or three trusted employees from his bank in Geneva, requesting Curchet in particular, as he was his wife’s cousin. From one day to the next, the young couple found themselves living in a house in Paris. Owing to Curchet’s loyalty and intelligence, very soon they were living a life of ease. From then on, Curchet’s destiny would advance in tandem with Necker’s, whose turbulent career in politics and finance is well known. In any case, following his protector’s second term as Finance Minister, whose unpopular dismissal sparked the storming of the Bastille, Curchet withdrew from public life and consolidated all of the wealth he had amassed though his lucrative speculations. He intended to return to Geneva, but Aunt Margot, fearing political excesses, categorically refused. Geneva was nearly as tumultuous as Paris, and she was of the opinion that it was not conducive to a comfortable, carefree life. Her ancestral instinct drew her to the Languedoc. They settled first in Toulouse, but, during an excursion to Ariège, Aunt Margot was captivated by an old château that was for sale on the outskirts of Foix, on the banks of the river. Curchet, who indulged her in everything, bought it for her without a second thought, heedless of the cost. Further, in the following years, he dedicated himself to renovating it and beautifying the gardens. He also acquired three neighboring farms and two vineyards, joining them to the estate. (It would become our habit to call the château and estate “Foix,” although the actual village was downstream and, except for its proximity, had nothing whatsoever to do with the property.) Meanwhile, Uncle Charles, having graduated from medical school, joined the cause of the Republic, inspired by his friend Larrey, whom he had met at the School of Anatomy at the University. After the medical schools, considered “institutions of privilege,” had been shut down, Uncle Charles served for a few months as a surgeon in the