The men who had come to seize me had to lift Aunt Charlotte into the carriage, and she made it as difficult for them as possible. Meanwhile, one of the well-meaning men in the village rushed to me. “Should I watch over young Georges whilst you are gone?”
Mon Dieu, would the soldiers realize he was speaking of my son? I nodded quickly, pleading with the good villager to be silent. One of the marauders glared in our direction. I feared he would ask after Georges—instead, he snarled at the villager, “Stop groveling before this aristocrat.”
The villager ran off, looking back only once as if to promise my son’s safety. In the chaos and upset, though, all the men of Chavaniac seemed to have lost their senses. I had just stepped inside the carriage when another servant came to see me off, fretting, “Mademoiselle Virginie is to stay behind?”
It was too much. Nearly faint with distress, I cried, “Oh, please, monsieur!”
Was everything to go wrong? The commissioner narrowed his eyes and approached. Officiously, he read the warrant again. It called for the arrest of my children, but did not name them.
A small mercy.
In the carriage, Aunt Charlotte made the sign of the cross over herself; God must have seen, because the commissioner slammed the carriage door shut, and then we were off. Anastasie reached for my hand. “Don’t be angry, Maman. I could not allow you to be taken without anyone to defend you. Papa would never allow it, so how could I?”
“Oh, my sweet,” I said, pressing my lips to her hair. “Your father would be so worried if he knew, but, like me, so proud.”
FORTY-ONE
BEATRICE
Paris
February 1917
Morphine. The pain had finally become too much for Willie. Having sworn off booze for my sake, he submitted to the needle. And that needle became the center of my husband’s world, though he convinced himself that I was. He did not want me to join him at his house—and Emily needed me anyway. So while I set up the Lafayette Memorial Foundation and recruited our executive board, Willie came for tea with me every afternoon at Emily’s house.
There, he only sipped at his cup and had nothing to say. Not even when explosive news reached us that the Germans had sunk another American cargo ship. I expected Willie to rage at Woodrow Wilson’s weak response. I expected him to call Wilson a craven jackass, a pompous professor, a lickspittle . . .
Instead, he just nodded. He didn’t even open the newspaper. Perhaps current events were too black a subject for his already-black mood. I tried to interest him in books, but he was too tired to read; too drugged to want to debate, or discuss, or even recount old stories of his glory days. He just sat and stared.
Under the influence of morphine, his brilliance was all gone.
Was my larger-than-life Willie to become an old man, addlebrained before his time? “Perhaps this summer,” he finally mused, “we shall go fishing at Buzzards Bay.”
Buzzards Bay! Of all the dreary holes. I would die there, and so would he. He was no longer steady enough to walk on land, much less the deck of his yacht. A traitorous part of me wondered if this would be our future together, and I dared not bring up the subject of adopting Marthe, for it seemed to me as if my husband himself might soon need more care than a babe.
Instead, day after day, week after week, I was as kind to him as I knew how to be, and polite. Achingly polite. For when he left each afternoon, I knew that he’d go directly to bed and stay there, writhing in pain, or drooling on morphine, and though he still refused to let me tend to him, I was consumed with pity.
“Pity is the death of romance,” Clara said, on her third cigarette in an hour. “Let him keep you at a distance if he wants. You weren’t destined to spend the rest of your life as a nursemaid.”
She knew, of course, about Max’s letter. I’d confided in her, fearing Emily might judge me more harshly. Now Clara stubbed out her cigarette viciously. “You need to read Nietzsche! Trample down all feelings of pity and live for yourself alone!”
This from the woman who had become a chain-smoking scarecrow under the stress of trying to find housing for refugees. The truth was, I had read Nietzsche. More recently, I’d been reading the letters donated to our foundation. Priceless letters from Lafayette to his wife, Adrienne, and hers to him, filled with archaic devotion. Letters of honor and unselfishness and sacrifice. With their example in mind, I shook my head against the bleakness in my heart. “As admirably suited to our era as the rules of Nietzsche may be, I cannot live by them. I married William Astor Chanler for better or for worse.”