Madame Simon scowls, and I see she’s had enough of me. “Marthe, I know this has been a difficult day for you, otherwise you wouldn’t make such a febrile suggestion.”
If I were in my right mind, maybe I wouldn’t. But I can’t just go back to life as usual. Maybe I can’t find out anything about my mother or the name in my file right now. Maybe the smart thing is to just pretend nothing has changed. But I can’t. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to wake up tomorrow morning like usual and fill inkwells and scrub chalkboards and teach little girls to sing fascist songs like ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’ I’ve been drowning for months as it is. I have to do something.”
“The only thing you have to do is go into quarantine because you’ve been exposed to a contagion. And hopefully time alone will bring you back to your senses.”
* * *
—
“You must be loving this,” Anna calls from the other side of the door, where she’s setting down a tray of soup for me. “The mad artist locked in her castle tower, being waited on hand and foot.”
Under other circumstances I’d laugh and shout, Oh, shut up, will you?
Instead, I’m grateful for the door between us.
With Henri gone, Anna has become my closest friend. I’ve shared more with her in these past few months than I’ve ever shared with almost anybody. I’m pretty sure that one look at my face and she’d know everything I’ve ever known about myself has been put in doubt. I want to tell Anna everything. On the other hand, what I have to tell can’t be shouted through a door.
Mother: Minerva Furlaud, deceased.
Furlaud. Have I heard that name before? And what does Madame Beatrice know about it? I idly wonder if any of her belongings would give me a clue. I look again at the photograph of the French soldier and a pigtailed girl in his arms. And for the first time, I seriously wonder, could it be me?
There’s no one to ask, and I feel like I’m going to lose my mind wondering. The only thing that will keep me sane is to finish my portrait of Adrienne Lafayette. Though the Marshal isn’t going to visit the chateau, the baroness said it was important to change the castle’s image, so the work goes on. Even if I can’t figure out who I am, maybe I can figure out Adrienne . . .
The next morning, when Anna brings my breakfast, she calls through the door, “You’d better emerge with a bloody masterpiece.”
Later, she’s back again to ask, “Are you dying of loneliness yet?”
“Oh, I’m not alone,” I say, looking around the room of an absent mistress of the castle who might know more about me than I know about myself, while drawing the mistress of the castle who came before us all. “I’m keeping company with the castle’s ghosts.”
It’s not really a lie. To keep from thinking about my birth record and what Madame Beatrice might have done to it and why, I spend every day reading about Adrienne Lafayette. I’m starting to dream about her too. And by the time Dr. Anglade finally comes upstairs to examine me and give me my walking papers, I’m starting to like her a little. Adrienne wasn’t the milquetoast dishrag I thought she was.
In fact, I’m no longer sure she was the kind of woman to whom nobody could object . . .
FOURTEEN
ADRIENNE
Paris
February 1779
Two years had passed while my husband fought in the American war. Years in which much changed for me and inside of me. Perhaps it was the turning tide of public opinion in favor of helping the rebel Americans. Perhaps it was the king’s shift in policy with a formal alliance. Perhaps it was the fact that the Noailles—even my father—now supported Lafayette wholeheartedly and basked in the reflected glory of his name. I will always believe, however, that the greatest change came the moment at a house party when the great Voltaire himself, bent with the weight of his eighty-one years, shivering beneath his fur-trimmed pelisse and crimson cap, knelt before me to say, “I have come to make my obeisance to the wife of the Hero of the New World. May I live long enough to salute him as the liberator of the old.”
Alas, the great man did not live that long. But Voltaire—one of our ideological heroes and one of the world’s greatest minds—had acknowledged that my husband and I were not unworldly or foolish or naive to think we could change the world. Indeed, that the world could not be changed unless we believed it.
And I believed it now like scripture . . .
Unfortunately, Gilbert’s temporary leave from duty and his return home remained a most delicate matter. Though my husband was now considered everywhere to be a great war hero, he had defied his king to fulfill his destiny. And though my father was daily negotiating at court to bring about a face-saving reconciliation, Maman warned we must prepare ourselves for the possibility that my husband would be clasped in irons the moment he set foot on French soil.