Читать книгу The Yellow Poppy - D. K. Broster - Страница 32

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Now, at eight o’clock the morning after her entry, she was already going up the stairway to the ground floor, the keys of Mirabel in her hand, for during her night under the patchwork quilt she had discovered that there was one thing about which she had miscalculated her strength. She could not endure to make re-acquaintance with her violated home in the company of Mme Prévost. True, she would probably be obliged to retrace her steps with the ex-concierge when the latter came to instruct her in her new duties, but it would be less desecration of her pride and of her memories if she revisited Mirabel for the first time alone.

But at the top of the stairs she hesitated. What was she going to find? She knew only too well what desolation might greet her. Paris had long been a vast pawnshop for the sale of the plundered goods of noble owners exiled or murdered. She had but to go into the once aristocratic Faubourg St. Germain to see a whole street of empty palaces, stripped, many of them, not only of furniture, mirrors and balustrades, but even of the very lead from the roofs.

And outside Paris it was the same. Where were the galleries and faïence pavements of the château of Ecouen, Mirabel’s contemporary? And Anet, that palace of love, fruit of the same brain as Mirabel, where every door and window bore the interlaced monograms of Henri II. and Diane de Poitiers? Of that jewel of stone, set in its woods in the valley of the Eure, nothing but its walls remained. Its costly canals were rotting mud and rotting water, its parks cut down, the kneeling statue of Diane in pieces, her mausoleum a horse trough. Chantilly, stripped of its marble columns, of its jaspe fleuri, of its panels of agate, had become a manufactory. Bellevue, that haunt of the Pompadour, was a barracks; Marly, a field and four walls.

And Versailles itself? Versailles was the museum of the department. The avenue under whose fourfold ranks of elms had passed Turenne and Colbert and Corneille existed no longer. In the chapel the very marble itself had been split and hacked to get rid of the encrusted Lilies, and the Virgin over the altar still held a pike in her hand. The beds in the park were covered with brambles and weeds, the borders of the Grand Canal were a grazing ground for goats and donkeys, the Pièce des Suisses was muddy, the Naiads were covered with dust. Trianon was for sale. The rooms, said Suzon, who had been there, smelt damp, like a cellar, and the dining-room was full of a strange lumber which Valentine recognised from her description as the remains of those sledges on which the young, laughing Court of 1788 had sped over the ice. . . .

How should she find her house of Mirabel?

The morning sun, at least, knew nothing of change of ownership nor of desecration. It came stooping in through the outer arcading just as it used to do. In room after room, as she went onwards from one to the other, it accompanied her, the only habitual thing left in that desolation. But, though these rooms were stripped, they were not damaged—only, in their aching bareness, very strange.

She came at last to the midmost point of the ground floor, the great banqueting hall, or Salle Verte, a vast apartment so closely resembling in decoration the Salle d’Hercule at Versailles as almost to suggest that it was a copy of it. There was the same effect of green relieved with gold on a white background, the same green marble pillars and heavily gilded cornice. Triumphal deities swam across the ceiling, and, just as at Versailles, two great pictures, set in elaborately carved frames, formed part of the integral scheme of decoration. As Valentine entered and looked down the vista of pillars she was confronted by the same huge canvas, saw that Æneas was still toilfully bearing Father Anchises on his shoulders from the burning town—the huge canvas which had witnessed the dancing on her wedding night and much beside. She turned almost unthinkingly to look at the companion picture which used to face it at the other end of the great room, over the hearth, and was met by a large blank space. Dido surveying the Trojan ships, with Carthage’s proud towers behind her, was gone. Why? A rude scrawl of Les reines à la lanterne on the blank space answered her. Dido was a queen; Æneas probably considered to be the very model of a virtuous and filial Republican. The Duchesse smiled; not a smile of amusement.

One thing the removal of the enormous canvas had brought into prominence, and that was the coat of arms in relief on the stone hood of the chimney. It was blazoned in colour, and gilt to boot; and though it had been partially defaced, among so many quarterings there were still decipherable enough roses and besants and castles and ermine to show the great alliances of the house. And at the top the phoenix of the Saint-Chamans still soared undefeated from the flames, while below was yet clearly to be read their arrogant motto, doubly defiant in this pillaged and ownerless dwelling, charged, too, with a double irony: Memini et permaneo—‘I remember and I remain.’ She, who had lived with it for one-and-twenty years and knew that it proclaimed even more than that—‘I hold out, I stay to the end,’ shivered now as she looked at it.

She turned away at last, and walked half the echoing length of that deserted splendour with a steady step. Small risk of losing foothold now on that once slippery parquet!

The room which next she entered had much more of the Renaissance about it, designed as it had been as a withdrawing-room for Mirabel’s first royal owner. The great feature of this apartment—known always as the “sallette”—was the vast chimneypiece, behind which ran a staircase mounting to a kind of tribune or gallery, as in a chapel. The tapestry representing the history of St. Louis of France, which had clothed the walls of this room since the reign of Louis XIII. at least, had never been removed till the Revolution, nor the furniture of the same epoch, for the “sallette” had always been something of a curiosity, and here the phoenix of the house of Trélan had never replaced the crowned salamander of the Roi Chevalier. But now the place was despoiled alike of the furniture and of the woven story of the royal saint—all but one strip a few feet long, whose scorched edges testified to the passage of fire upon it. It was part of King Louis’ embarkation at Aigues Mortes for the Holy Land, and over his armour, as Valentine remembered, he had worn a mantle sown with fleur-de-lys—indeed, some were still visible. . . .