CHAPTER 90
CARCASSONNE
When the heat of July had turned the green pastures between Rennes-le-Château and Rennes-les-Bains to brown, Léonie could bear her confinement no longer. She stood in need of a change of scene.
The stories about the Domaine de la Cade had intensified. Indeed, the atmosphere on the last occasion she and Louis-Anatole went down into Rennes-les-Bains had been so unpleasant that she had resolved not to visit for the foreseeable future. Silence or suspicious glances, where once there had been greetings and smiles. She did not wish Louis-Anatole to witness such unpleasantness.
The occasion Léonie chose for the excursion was the fête nationale. As part of the celebrations of the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille more than one hundred years before, there was to be a display of fireworks in the medieval citadel of Carcassonne on the 14th day of July. Léonie had not set foot in the city since the short-lived and painful visit with Anatole and Isolde, but for her nephew’s sake – it was a belated treat for his fifth birthday – she put her misgivings to one side.
She was determined to persuade Isolde to accompany them. Her aunt’s nerves had been worse of late. She had taken to insisting that there were people following her, watching her from the far side of the lake, that there were faces under the water. She saw smoke in the woods even when no fires were set. Léonie did not wish to leave her, even in Marieta’s capable hands, for so many days unaccompanied.
‘Please, Isolde,’ she whispered, stroking her hand. ‘It would do you good to be away from here for a while. To feel the sun on your face.’ She squeezed her fingers. ‘It would mean so much to me. And for Louis-Anatole. It would be the best birthday gift you could give him. Come with us, please.’
Isolde looked up at her with her deep grey eyes, that seemed both to carry great wisdom and, yet, to see nothing.
‘If you wish it,’ she said in her silvery voice, ‘I will come.’ Léonie was so astonished that she flung her arms around Isolde, startling her. She could feel how thin Isolde was beneath her clothes and corset, but she put it out of her mind. She had never expected Isolde to acquiesce and so was delighted. Perhaps it was a sign that her aunt was, at last, ready to look to the future. That she would start to get to know her beautiful son.
It was a small party that set out by train to Carcassonne.
Marieta was watchful of her mistress. It fell to Pascal to occupy Louis-Anatole with military tales, the current exploits of the French army in western Africa, Dahomey and the Cote d’Ivoire. Pascal talked with such relish of the deserts and the roaring waterfalls and a lost world hidden on a secret plateau that Léonie suspected he had borrowed his descriptions from the writings of Monsieur Jules Verne rather than from the pages of the newspapers. Louis-Anatole, for his part, entertained the carriage with Monsieur Baillard’s tales of the medieval knights of old. A thoroughly satisfying and bloodthirsty journey was passed by both.
They arrived at lunchtime on the 14th July and found themselves in lodgings in the lower Bastide, hard by the cathédrale Saint-Michel, far distant from the hotel where Isolde, Léonie and Anatole had stayed six years previously. Léonie passed the remainder of the afternoon sightseeing with her excited, wide-eyed nephew and permitted him to eat too much ice cream.
They returned to their rooms at five o’clock to rest. Léonie found Isolde lying on a couch at the window, looking out over the gardens of the Boulevard Barbès. With a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, she immediately realised that Isolde did not intend to come with them to view the fireworks.
Léonie said nothing, hoping she was wrong, but when the time came to venture out for the evening spectacle, Isolde claimed she did not feel equal to the crowds. Louis-Anatole was not disappointed, for, in truth, he had not expected his mother’s company. But Léonie allowed herself an uncharacteristic stab of irritation that even on this one special occasion, Isolde could not rouse herself for her son.
Leaving Marieta to tend to her mistress’ needs, Léonie and Louis-Anatole set out with Pascal. The spectacle had been planned and paid for by a local industrialist, Monsieur Sabatier, the inventor of L’Or-Kina aperitif and the Micheline liqueur known as ‘La Reine des Liqueurs’. The display was as an experiment, but with the promise that the event would be bigger and better the following year should it be deemed a success. Sabatier’s presence was everywhere, in the promotional leaflets that Louis-Anatole collected in his small fists, souvenirs of their outing, and on posters affixed to the walls of buildings.
As daylight started to retreat, crowds began to mass on the right bank of the Aude in the quartier Trivalle, gazing up at the restored ramparts of the Cité. Children, gardeners and maids from the big houses, shop girls and boot boys all swarmed to the church of Saint-Gimer, where once Léonie had sheltered with Victor Constant. She pushed the memory from her mind.
On the left bank, they gathered outside the Hôpital des Malades, every handhold and foothold occupied. Children balanced on the wall beside the chapelle de Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. In the Bastide, they gathered at the Porte des Jacobins and along the riverbank. No one knew quite what to expect.
‘Up you come, pichon,’ said Pascal, swinging the boy on to his shoulders.
Léonie, Pascal and Louis-Anatole took a position on the Pont Vieux, squeezing into one of the pointed becs – the alcoves – that overlooked the water. Léonie whispered loudly up into Louis-Anatole’s ear, as if confiding a great secret, that it was even said that the Bishop of Carcassonne had ventured from his palace to witness this great celebration of Republicanism.
As darkness fell, diners from the nearby restaurants swelled the numbers on the old bridge. The crowd became a crush. Léonie glanced up at her nephew, worrying perhaps that it was too late for him to be out and that the noise and the smell of gunpowder would be alarming, but she was delighted to see the same look of intense concentration on Louis-Anatole’s face as she remembered seeing on Achille’s when he sat at his piano composing.
Léonie smiled and realised she was increasingly able to enjoy her memories, without being overtaken by the sense of loss.
At that moment, the embrassement de la Cité began. The medieval walls were enveloped in a fury of orange and red flames, sparks and smoke of all colours. Rockets shot up into the night sky and exploded.
Clouds of acrid vapours rolled down from the hill and over the river, stinging the watchers’ eyes, but the magnificence of the spectacle more than compensated for the discomfort. The blue sky was purple, now, glowing with green and white and red fireworks as the citadel was enveloped in flame and fury and brilliant light.
Léonie felt Louis-Anatole’s small, hot hand creep on to her shoulder. She covered it with her own. Perhaps this would be a new beginning? Perhaps the grief that had dominated her life for so long now, too long, would loosen its grip and allow thoughts of a brighter future.
‘A l’avenir,’ she said under her breath, remembering Anatole.
His son heard her. ‘A l’avenir, Tante Léonie,’ he said, returning the toast. He paused, then added, ‘If I am good, may we come again next year?’
When the display was over and the crowds dispersed, Pascal carried the sleepy boy back to their boarding house.
Léonie put him to bed. Promising they would have such an adventure again, she kissed him good night and retired, leaving a candle burning, as always, to keep away the ghosts and evil spirits and monsters of the night. She was bone tired, exhausted by the excitements of the day and her emotions. Thoughts of her brother – and her guilt at the part she had played in leading Victor Constant to him – had pecked at her memory all day.
Wishing to be certain of rest, Léonie mixed herself a sleeping draught, watching while the white powder dissolved in a glass of hot brandy. She drank it slowly, then slipped between the sheets and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
A misty dawn crept over the waters of the Aude as the pale morning light gave shape back to the world.
The banks of the river and the pavements and cobbles of the Bastide were littered with pamphlets and paper. The broken tip of a boxwood walking cane, a few sheets of music trampled underfoot by the crowds, a cap detached from its owner. And everywhere Monsieur Sabatier’s leaflets.
The waters of the Aude were as flat as a looking glass, barely moving in the quiet of the dawn. The old boatman, Baptistin Cros – known to all Carcassonne as Tistou – was steering his heavy, flat barge across the still river towards the Païchérou weir. This far upriver there was little evidence of the celebrations for the fête nationale. No spent cases, no streamers or advertisements, no lingering smell of gunpowder or singed paper. His steady gaze took in the purple light that shimmered over the Montagne Noire to the north as the sky turned from black, to blue to the white of morning.
Tistou’s barge pole caught on something in the water. He turned to see what it could be, adjusting his balance with practised ease.
It was a corpse.
Slowly, the old riverman turned his barge. The water lapped close to the wooden rim of the boat, but did not spill over. He stopped momentarily. The overhead wires that linked one side of his river crossing to the other seemed to sing in the soft morning air, even though there was not a whisper of a wind.
Anchoring the craft by plunging his wooden pole deep into the mud, Tistou knelt down and peered into the water. Beneath the green surface, he could just make out the shape of a woman. She was half floating, face down. Tistou was glad. The glazed dead eyes of the drowned were hard to forget, the blue-rimmed lips and the look of surprise etched on skin as yellow as tallow. Not long in the water, Tistou thought. Her body had not yet had time to change.
The woman looked strangely peaceful, her long blond hair swaying back and forth, back and forth, like weeds. Tistou’s slow thoughts were mesmerised by the motion. Her back was arched; her arms and legs trailing gracefully down beneath her skirts, as if she was somehow attached to the river bed.
Another suicide, he thought.
Tistou braced his legs and leant forward, locking his bent knees against the thwarts. He stretched over and grabbed a fistful of the woman’s grey morning dress. Even sodden and made slimy by the river, he could feel the quality of the cloth. He pulled. The barge rocked dangerously, but Tistou had done this countless times and knew where the tipping point lay. He took a deep breath, then pulled again, clutching at the collar of the woman’s dress to get better purchase.
‘Un, deux, trois, allez,’ he said aloud, as the body slithered over the side and flopped, like a netted fish, into the damp hull of the boat.
Tistou wiped his forehead with his neckerchief, then rearranged his trademark cap on the back of his head. Unthinking, his hands drifted to his chest and he crossed himself. It was an act of instinct, not belief.
He turned the body over. A woman, no longer in the first flush of youth, but beautiful still. Her grey eyes were open and her hair had come loose in the water, but she was clearly a gentlewoman. Her white hands were soft, not those of a one who worked for her living.
The son of a draper and a seamstress, Tistou knew good Egyptian cotton when he saw it. He found the tailor’s mark – Parisian – still legible on the collar. She was wearing a silver locket around her neck, solid not plate, with two miniatures inside, of the lady herself and a young, dark-haired man. Tistou left it be. He was an honest man – not like the scavengers who worked the weirs in the centre of town, and who would strip a corpse before turning it in to the authorities – but he liked to know the identity of those he reclaimed from the water.
Isolde was quickly identified. Léonie had reported her missing at first light, the moment Marieta had woken and found her mistress gone.
They were obliged to remain for a couple of days while the formalities were observed and the paperwork signed, but there was little doubt as to the verdict: suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed.
It was a dull, overcast and soundless July day when Léonie brought Isolde back to the Domaine de la Cade for the last time. Guilty of the cardinal sin of taking her own life, Isolde would not be allowed by the Church to rest within hallowed ground. Besides Léonie could not bear the thought of her being buried in the Lascombe family vault.
Instead, she secured the services of Curé Gélis from Coustaussa, the village with a ruined chateau midway between Couiza and Rennes-les-Bains, to conduct a private memorial within the grounds of the Domaine de la Cade. She would have approached the Abbé Saunière, but she did not think, in the circumstances – he was still suffering at the hands of his critics – that it was fair to taint him with the scandal.
At dusk on 20th July 1897, they buried Isolde beside Anatole in the peaceful patch of ground on the promontory overlooking the lake. A new, modest headstone set flat into the grass recorded their names and dates.
As Léonie listened to the murmured prayers, holding tight to Louis-Anatole’s hand, she remembered how she had already paid her respects to Isolde in a graveyard in Paris six years ago. The memory swooped down upon her, so sharp and vicious that she caught her breath. Herself standing in their old drawing room in the rue de Berlin, hands clasped before a closed casket, a single palm leaf floating in the glass bowl on the sideboard. The sickly aroma of ritual and death that had insinuated itself into every corner of the apartment, the burning of incense and candles to mask the cloying sweetness of the corpse. Except of course that there had been no corpse. And on the floor below, Achille hammering endlessly on the piano, black notes and white seeping up through the floorboards until Léonie thought she would be driven mad with his playing.
Now, as she heard the thud of earth on the wooden lid of the coffin, her only consolation was that Anatole had been spared this day.
As if sensing her mood, Louis-Anatole reached up and curled his little arm around her waist.
‘Don’t worry, Tante Léonie. I will look after you.’
