Angelique - Part 3. The Corridors of the Louvre Chapter 11 - Read online

A GREEN, mellow light bathed Angelique. She had just opened her eyes. She was at Monteloup, under the foliage by the river, where the sun reached her through a verdant veil. She heard her brother Gontran saying:
“The greenness of the plants is something П1 never capture. At best, by treating calamine with cobalt salt from Persia, you get an approximate shade, but it’s a thick, opaque green. Nothing like the luminous emerald of the leaves above a brook. . . .”
Gontran’s voice had grown thick, and hoarse, yet she recognised the sulky tone he always assumed when he talked of his paints and pictures. How many times, gazing into his sister’s eyes with a kind of rancour, had he muttered: “The greenness of the plants is something I’ll never capture.”
A burning ache in the pit of her stomach gripped Angelique. She remembered that something terrible had happened.
‘Good God P she thought, ‘my little baby is dead P
He was certainly dead! He could not have survived so many horrors. He had died when she had jumped out of the window into that black abyss. Or when she had raced through the corridors of the Louvre. . . . The panic of that mad chase still shook her limbs with fever; her heart, which had been strained to breaking-point, still seemed in pain. Summon¬ing all her strength, she managed to move one of her hands and place it on her belly. A soft quiver responded to her pressure.
‘Oh! he’s still there, he’s alive! What a valiant little companion!’ she thought, with pride and tenderness.
The baby stirred inside her like a little frog. She felt the round head under her fingers. She was recovering her senses gradually, and realised that she was actually in a large bed with twisted columns, through whose serge curtains seeped a sea-green light that had reminded her of the banks of the river at Monteloup.
She was not at Hortense’s place in the rue de l’Enfer. Where was she? Her memories remained dim; she only had the feeling of dragging with her, like a huge dark lump, she knew not what frightful drama of black poison, flashing swords, fear and clinging mud.
Gontran’s voice rose again:
“Never, never will we catch the greenness of water under trees.”
This time Angelique almost uttered a cry. She must be mad, or dread- fuUy Ш? . . .
She sat up and pulled the curtains aside. The spectacle before her eyes confirmed her conviction that she had lost her reason.
Before her on a kind of dais lay a fair, pink, half-naked goddess holding a straw basket of luscious clusters of golden grapes whose shoots spread exuberandy over velvet cushions. A stark-naked little Cupid, adorably rounded, with a wreath of flowers sitting awry on his fair curls, was nibbling at the grapes with great gusto. Suddenly the litde god sneezed several times. The goddess looked at him with concern and said a few words in a strange tongue, which was no doubt the language of Olympus.
Someone moved in the room, and a red-haired, bearded giant, dressed quite simply like a contemporary craftsman, stepped over to Eros, picked him up in his arms and wrapped him in a woollen coat. At the same moment, Angelique noticed the easel of the painter Van Ossel. Near him stood a workman in a leather apron, laden with two palettes splashed with a medley of gaudy colours. The workman, his head slightly cocked to one side, was gazing at his master’s unfinished painting. Pale daylight fell on his face. He was an ordinary-looking fellow of medium size with a coarse linen shirt open on his tanned chest, brown hair carelessly cut to shoulder- length with a dishevelled fringe that half hid his dark eyes. But Angelique would have recognised that sullen lip anywhere, not to mention that rebellious nose and the jovial, heavy chin which reminded her of her father, Baron Armand.
She cried:
“Gontran!”
“The lady is awake!” exclaimed the goddess.
And the whole group, its number swollen by five or six children, promptly crowded around the bedside. The workman seemed dumb¬founded. He stared amazed at Angelique, who was smiling at him. Suddenly he blushed crimson, gripped her hand in his and murmured:
“My sister!”
The opulent goddess, who was none other than Van Ossel’s wife, called out to her daughter to bring an egg-nog which she had prepared in the kitchen.
“I am glad,” said the Dutchman, “I am glad to have obliged not only n lady in distress but also my companion’s sister.”
“But why am I here?” asked Angelique.
The Dutchman related in his gruff voice how, the night before, an insistent knocking at the door of their lodgings had awakened them. In the light of a candle the Italian comedians in satin rags had held out to them an unconscious woman, blood-soaked and half-dead, and they had begged them in their excited Italian tongue to save the unfortunate creature. In the placid Dutch tongue the answer had come: “She is welcome here!”
Gontran and Angelique looked at each other now with some em-barrassment. Wasn’t it eight years ago that they’d parted at the approaches to Poitiers? Angelique remembered Raymond and Gontran as they dis-appeared on horseback along the steep lanes. Gontran, perhaps, was conjuring up the vision of the old carriage in which the three dusty little girls were closely packed.
“The last time I saw you,” he said, “you were with Hortense and Madelon, and you were going to the Ursuline Convent in Poitiers.”
“Yes. Madelon died—you know?”
“Yes, I know.”
“You remember, Gontran? You used to paint old Guillaume’s portrait.”
“Old Guillaume is dead.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I still have his portrait. I did an even better one . . . from memory. I’ll show it to you.”
He had sat down on the edge of the bed, his hands spread open on his leather apron—big hands stained and encrusted with red and blue, corroded by the chemical products which were used to mix the colours, and calloused by the pestle of the mortar in which, from morning to night, he ground the red lead, ochres and litharges, mixed with oils or with muriatic acid.
“But how ever did you come to land in this trade?” questioned Angelique with a shade of pity in her voice.
Gontran’s touchy nose—the Sance nose—quivered, and his brow clouded over.
“Fool!” he said bluntly. “If I landed in it, as you say, it’s because I wanted to. Oh, my stock of Latin is complete, and the Jesuits spared no pains to turn me into a young lord, able to continue the family name, since Josselin has run away to America and Raymond has entered the famous Society. But I too had my own ideas. I fell out with our father, who wanted me to go into the army to serve the King. He told me that he wouldn’t give me a sou. So I set out on foot like a beggar, and I became a craftsman in Paris. I am finishing my years of apprenticeship. Afterwards, I shall start my tour of France. I shall wander from town to town to instruct myself in all that’s being taught about the painter’s and engraver’s crafts. For a livelihood, I shall hire myself out to painters or else do the portraits of the well-to-do townsfolk. And later I’ll buy a mastership. I shall become a great painter, I am sure of it, Ang&que! And perhaps Г11 be commissioned to paint the ceilings of the Louvre . . .”
14 You’ll cover them with hell-fire and grimacing devils!”
44No, I’d cover them with the vaulted blue sky, with sun-touched clouds, and emerging among them the King in all his glory.”
“The King in all his glory . . .” echoed Angelique in a small, tired voice.
She closed her eyes. She suddenly felt older than this young man, though he was her elder brother. He had known hunger and cold, to be sure, he had been humiliated, but he had never ceased striding towards his dream.
“And I?” she said. “You don't ask me how I landed where I am.”
“I daren’t question you,” he said, embarrassed. “I know that, against your wish, you married a frightful and redoubtable man. Our father rejoiced in this marriage, but we all pitied you, my poor Angelique. So you've been very unhappy?”
“No. It's now that I'm unhappy.”
She wavered on the brink of confiding in him. Why should she trouble this boy who was indifferent to all that wasn't his enchanted labour? How often had he dreamed of his little sister Angelique? Rarely, no doubt, and then only when he grieved at not being able to reproduce the greenness of the leaves. He had never needed anyone else.
“I am staying with Hortense here in Paris,” she said.
“Hortense? What a shrew! When I arrived, I made an effort to see her, but what a litany I had to put up with! She died of shame to see me come into her home with my rough shoes. I wasn't even carrying a sword any more! There was nothing to distinguish me from a coarse craftsman! That's true. Can you see me carrying a sword with my leather apron? And if I, a nobleman, like to paint, do you think that prejudices of that sort are going to stop me? I kick them out of my way with my foot.”
“I believe we are all cut out to be rebels,” said Angelique with a sigh. She took her brother's calloused hand affectionately in hers.
“You must have gone through a lot of hardship?”
“No more than I'd have gone through in the army, with a sword at my side, debts up to my ears, and usurers at my heels. I expect no pension from the good temper of a distant overlord. My master can't cheat me, for the guild protects me. When life gets a little too difficult, I sometimes nip over to the Temple, to our brother, the Jesuit, to ask him for a few icus.” “Raymond is in Paris?” exclaimed Angelique.
“Yes, he’s living at the Temple, but he’s the almoner of I know not how many convents, and I should not even be surprised if he became the confessor of some high personages at Court.”
Angflique pondered. Raymond’s help was what she needed. An ecclesiastic who would, perhaps, take the matter to heart, because it was a family matter . . .
Despite the still smarting memories of the dangers she had run, despite the King's words, it never occurred to Angelique for a moment to give up. She only knew that she must act with extreme caution.
“Gontran,” she said in a resolute voice,4 you’ll take me to the inn of 'The Trois-Maillets'.”
Gontran made no fuss about Angelique’s decision. Hadn’t she always been a character?
The painter Van Ossel advised waiting for nightfall, or at least till dusk. His wife lent Angelique one of her short petticoats with a dark beige bodice of simple cloth—dry rose, the colour was called. She tied over her hair a black satin kerchief, like those that the town women wore. Angelique was amused to feel the skirt, which was shorter than those of noble ladies, flap around her ankles.
When, in Gontran’s company, she left the Louvre by the little portal that was called the washerwomen's door, she looked more like a crafts¬man's sprightly little wife clinging to her husband’s arm than a noble lady who, only the previous day, had talked to the King.
Beyond the Pont-Neuf the Seine shimmered in the last rays of the setting sun. The horses being led to water splashed in the river up to their breast-plates and shook their manes, neighing. Hay barges were deposit¬ing the long line of their fragrant bales along the river-banks. A ferry¬boat from Rouen unloaded on the mud-bank its contingent of soldiers, monks and nurses.
The bells were ringing the Angelus. The pastry and biscuit-merchants ran down the streets with their napkin-covered baskets calling out to the gamblers in the taverns:
“Eh! Who calls for the biscuit-man When each one of you has lost?
Buy my wafers, buy! The price isn't high.”
A coach passed, preceded by its runners and its dogs, and the massive, lugubrious Louvre, glowing violet at the approach of night, stretched out its interminable gallery beneath the reddening sky.