“The city’s beauty is due to France’s peasants,” Gilbert said. He disapproved of the corvée in which peasants were forced to labor in repairing the roads in readiness for the great occasion. He said this prevented them from planting their crops, and he hoped the king would remember their sacrifice.
But even Gilbert had little notion of the seeds we sowed that summer whilst shots rang out across the sea. For as we made ready to coronate our king, the American colonists at Lexington and Concord took up arms against theirs. It was a farmers’ insurrection that would change our lives, and yet at the time, the coronation seemed far more important. The trumpets announced the arrival of the king’s magnificent cherub-ornamented carriage. I gasped to see the jeweled Crown of Charlemagne. I bore happy witness as our king was crowned as Louis XVI, and I cried, “Vive le roi!” Bells pealed, cannons boomed, and, imbued with God’s blessing, the newly crowned king waded into a crowd of sick persons desperate for his touch. Later, several claimed to have been healed. Both my father and Gilbert were dubious of miracles—the rare thing upon which both could agree.
The other thing they both agreed upon was joy in my pregnancy. Gilbert was the expectant father, but when we returned from the coronation, the duc d’Ayen strutted the black-and-white tiles of the H?tel de Noailles like a peacock, declaring that I must be denied not even my smallest whim, whether it be asparagus in late summer or raspberries in winter.
Anything to help along the birth of the long-awaited Noailles heir!
I had never known before what it felt like to be in favor with my father—how interesting and charming he could be. How interesting and charming I felt myself to be when I had his approval. At long last, I had secured what I craved most: the love of my husband and my father too.
Alas, in the midst of a snowy December, I was delivered of a little girl, pale and frail.
Maman consoled me, telling me what joy daughters could bring. Gilbert pronounced himself smitten with his new daughter and allowed me to name her Henriette, after my mother. Meanwhile, my disappointed father called for a carriage and disappeared into the night in search of his mistress, after having mused that if he were not a scientist, he would believe himself cursed.
Yet, with the arrival of my daughter, for the first time in my life, I knew myself to be truly blessed. Before her birth, I had questioned God.
Why does God forgive wicked people?
Why would a loving God bring us into a world where suffering exists?
Why should we have faith?
Now I began to understand. Having made my daughter within my own body, nurtured her, and brought her into being, I loved her fiercely and unconditionally. I would have forgiven her anything. And though I had brought her into a world where suffering existed, I would do all I could to protect the miracle of her being. When she cried, not understanding when I must do something for her own good, I wished her to trust me—to have faith. This must be what God’s love truly is. I did not yet know God’s purpose for me, and I did not think I would ever stop questioning, but that winter, I had found faith enough to make my first Communion. For what I lacked in an earthly patriarch, I found in my heavenly Father.
* * *
—
By 1776 everyone was talking about the Bostonians—colonists in the New World who demanded of their British king No taxation without representation. To make their point, these rebels had, a few years before, dressed as tomahawk-wielding natives and flung crates of tea into the ocean. Thereafter, the panicked British Parliament declared a state of rebellion, much to the glee of every Frenchman.
Some Frenchmen jested that they’d like to go fight alongside the rebels.
For my husband, it was more than a jest. Since the birth of our daughter, it had been a year of restlessness. Gilbert had been forced out of uniform and removed unceremoniously from active duty by the decision of the war minister that French officers should be seasoned fighters—not aristocratic young noblemen. Now, at nineteen, banished both from court and from the army, my husband was in veritable disgrace. Thus, the opportunity to prove himself in America was a powerful temptation, one he confided in me when we were abed. Smiling at the way morning sunlight illuminated his hair like spun copper on my pillow, I accused, “You just want to fight the British.”
After all, Gilbert’s father had been struck dead by a British bullet.
“Oui,” he admitted. “I want to avenge my father, but from what I know of the American cause, I believe it to be just. I cannot countenance the notion that people owe blind obedience to a faraway sovereign who cares nothing for their pains. I admire these Bostonians who wish to govern themselves like the Romans of the old republic . . .”