Chapter 12

I KNOW YOUR thoughts, reader.

You are shaking your head. You are knitting your brow. You fear for me. For certainly no happiness ever came of courting the good graces of a friend’s rival. Well, I shall grant you this: when I set out upon the road to La Volière, which lay just north of Cambrai and less than an hour from the camp at Valenciennes, I understood that I placed my fate in the hands of Providence. I knew nothing of my destination and had heard not a single compliment uttered about my hostess. Yet I entered willingly into her capacious coach, with its green leather seats and gilded wheels. I did not relish the errand I was to undertake, but took special pride in placing myself at the disposal of one to whom I owed so very much.

As Madame de Buffon’s coachman intended for us to arrive in the late hours of that night, we embarked shortly before dawn, when the air had still a freshness to it. The streets of the city were just rousing themselves into life. The ragged scavengers could be seen picking through the dust, while the servants emerged with their brooms and baskets and pails. The first carts and barrels were rolled into the lanes, and the drunkards and beggars removed from the doorways where they slumbered. There could be seen, too, another figure, a curious one amid this regular morning scene. He appeared in a blue uniform and cockade and made a slow progress down the centre of the road upon his horse. He read a proclamation as he did so, crying it out at the shuttered windows and locked doors. In those days, I paid but scant attention to such things. There was always some warning of trouble, ever some agitator or other upon a street corner spouting a promise of a bloody end for the King and Queen or the nation. So consumed was I in my own thoughts and machinations that I did not bother to take down the glass and listen, but instead turned to Lucy and sighed at the familiarity of this spectacle. I had begun to grow quite indifferent to these constant threats of danger, which never once manifested themselves as these harbingers would have the city believe.

I found the guard at the barrier who examined my passports no less determined to terrify me.

‘You know there is war near to where you journey, mademoiselle? You know that the counter-revolutionaries prepare their armies? That there is likely to be an invasion?’

I nodded to each of his questions, although the third was not something of which I had been aware until that morning.

Seeing that he could not dissuade me from my travels, he grunted and offered back my documents. ‘You are safer in the country than in Paris,’ said he, before signalling to the coachman.