A bit of my white wool has already been snagged on the brambles by the roadside. Farewell, my angel!

5

FROM RENÉE DE MAUCOMBE TO LOUISE DE CHAULIEU

October

How moved I was by your letter, and above all by the differences in our two destinies! What a glittering world will be yours! In what a quiet repair I will live out my little life! Two weeks after I arrived at the Château de Maucombe—of which I have already told you too much to say anything more, and where I found my bedroom much as before, though I was now able to appreciate the sublime landscape of the valley of Gémenos, which as a child I looked at and never saw—my father and mother, accompanied by my two brothers, took me to dine at the home of a neighbor, an aged Monsieur de l’Estorade, a nobleman who has grown very rich in the time-honored provincial fashion: by the good graces of avarice. That old man had not succeeded in protecting his only son from Bonaparte’s clutches; he saved him from conscription but was obliged to surrender him to the army in 1813 for the Honor Guard—and then, after the Battle of Leipzig, Baron de l’Estorade heard nothing more from him. In 1814 he went to see Monsieur de Montriveau, who claimed he had seen his son captured by the Russians. Madame de l’Estorade died of grief as the fruitless search she had ordered in Russia was still going on. The baron, a very Christian old man, practiced that beautiful theological virtue we cultivated in Blois: Hope! With Hope’s aid, he saw his son in his dreams; for that son, he saved up his income and set aside a share of the inheritances that came to him from the late Madame de l’Estorade’s family. No one ever made so bold as to mock the old man for it. I soon came to realize that this son’s unexpected return was the cause of my own. If someone had told us that while our thoughts were racing wildly hither and yon my future husband was trudging homeward through Russia, Poland, and Germany! His ordeal came to an end only in Berlin, where the French minister helped him make his way back to France. Being a minor nobleman of Provence with an annual income of ten thousand livres, Monsieur de l’Estorade père lacks the Europe-wide renown that might have inspired someone to take an interest in the Chevalier de l’Estorade, whose name sounds so oddly like an adventurer’s alias.

With an annual interest income of twelve thousand livres from Madame de l’Estorade’s assets, and his father’s savings on top of that, the poor Honor Guard has what is considered in Provence a sizable fortune, something like two hundred and fifty thousand livres, not counting his land. The day before he was to be reunited with the chevalier, l’Estorade bought a neglected but very fine estate, where he plans to plant the ten thousand mulberry trees he had been cultivating in his nursery to that end, having long foreseen this purchase. Once he was reunited with his son, the baron could think of only one thing: finding him a wife, and not just any wife but a young woman of the nobility. My father and mother fell in with their neighbor’s plans for me as soon as he announced his intention to take Renée de Maucombe with no dowry, and to claim receipt of the sum due the aforementioned Renée in their wills. On attaining the age of majority, my younger brother, Jean de Maucombe, was accorded an advance on his parental inheritance equal to one third of their legacy. This is how the noble families of Provence evade Monsieur de Bonaparte’s shameful civil code, which will put as many noble girls in the convent as it has caused to be married.[13] From what little I have heard on the subject, French nobility is deeply divided on these very serious matters. That dinner, my dear darling, was a business meeting between your doe and the exile. Let us begin at the beginning. Count de Maucombe’s servants dressed in their old corded livery and ribboned hats; the coachman donned his big flared boots. We fit five people into the old coach and majestically arrived toward two o’clock for a three o’clock dinner at the bastide[14] that is Baron de l’Estorade’s home. The father-in-law has no château, only a simple country house at the foot of one of our hills, at the end of our beautiful valley, whose glory is certainly the old de Maucombe castel. That bastide is a true bastide: four rubble-stone walls faced with dull yellow mortar, topped with curved tiles of a beautiful red. The roof sags under the weight of that brickyard. Set into those walls without the slightest regard for symmetry the windows are flanked by enormous yellow-painted shutters. The garden is a typical Provençal garden, enclosed by low walls built of big round stones stacked in layers, the mason’s genius being expressed in his manner of arranging them alternatively lying flat or standing on end; here and there the layer of mud that covers them is falling away. What gives that bastide the air of a true estate is a tall metal gate at the entrance to the grounds, just by the road. It took a great deal of begging to have that gate built; it is so frail that it made me think of Sister Angélique. The house has a stone staircase in front, and the doorway is decorated with an awning that no peasant of the Loire would ever want for his elegant house of white stone, its blue slate roof glinting in the sunlight. The garden and grounds are horribly dusty, the trees scalded by the sun. Clearly the baron’s life has long consisted in rising, retiring, and rising again the next day with no thought in mind but saving up his sous. He eats the same meals as his two domestics, a Provençal boy and his late wife’s aged chambermaid.