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1783
"Well?" Mario asked, a bit nervous. He realized too late that he was tapping the end of his paintbrush against his chin and considered trying to wipe the daubs of blue from his face, but decided that that would only exacerbate the problem and instead placed the paintbrush on the edge of his palette.
His mother, without removing her gaze from the painting before her, tugged a linen handkerchief from her pocket and handed it to her son with a smile that crinkled the skin around her eyes into a flurry of fine, elegant lines.
"It's wonderful," she said simply, as Mario awkwardly patted at his face and quickly moved to the basin in the corner of the room to rinse the gouache from the handkerchief. "I'm especially impressed with how you've managed to capture such a subtle expression."
Now Mario couldn't suppress a smile himself, for he had painted his mother as he and all of her acquaintances had seen her a thousand times, as he always envisioned her in his mind's eye—poised, attentive, her head tilted very slightly as if politely questioning everything around her, a gently skeptical smile turning up just the corners of her mouth. The Empiricist, he thought; that might make for a nice title for the portrait. (Mario sometimes enjoyed titling his works before he had actually painted them, which his father, laughing, always said was a form of combined inspiration and motivation he'd never heard anyone else use.)
"You think Papà will like it?" he asked, wringing out the handkerchief, which thankfully was dyed a faded indigo in the first place and hopefully would survive this ordeal mostly unscathed with a proper wash.
"I know he'll love it." Mario's mother put a hand on his shoulder and kissed his forehead; he had just hit another growth spurt and was now nearly her height, and Mario suspected he was in for a lot of this sort of treatment in the little time that remained for his mother to subject him to it.
"And David?" Mario asked anxiously.
"And David," his mother repeated, her hand still on his shoulder as she turned to scrutinize the painting once more. "I can't see into David's mind, of course, and he's never been the type to take on an apprentice whose work he didn't think showed real promise, not even the sons of dedicated patrons. But I'd be shocked if this didn't impress him. It's a very fine portrait, my dear, and I mean that in a completely objective sense."
Mario blushed, pleased. His parents, admittedly, had always indulged his artistic sensibilities, however justified or not. In one of his earliest memories, Mario had spent an evening watching his mother add her own thoughts to the margins of a book in pencil with a serious furrow between her eyebrows, and the instant he was left alone with the book himself, he had decided to likewise improve upon the reading by scribbling onto a page a small and somewhat indecipherable illustration of Lulu, the family's aging spaniel, sleeping by the hearth. Far from chastising him for this addition to her copy of Beccaria—gifted to her by the philosopher himself, who had referred to his Italian-speaking French hostess as the one bright spot within his otherwise miserable trip to Paris—Mario's mother had laughed with delight and called her husband over, Mario's father then joking that a veritable medieval bestiary might appear in the marginalia of the family's library (Mario, chubby-cheeked and earnest, had gone wide-eyed in wonder at his father's descriptions of knights fighting giant snails). The childish doodles of falcons and leopards that his parents had subsequently requested from him—on unbound paper, to spare the books—were still contained in any number of portfolios carefully stored on the shelves of his parents' library. And yet, for all the uncritical encouragement his parents had given him throughout his youth, Mario was now almost a man, and he sensed that his mother was being as straightforward with him as she was with any other adult she knew. The thought made him swell with pride even more than her praise for his painting had.
"But we'll have to wait and see what David himself has to say, of course," added his mother briskly. "So, for the moment, dearest, try to put it all out of your mind. Oh, and please do change your shirt before dinner? We have a special guest dining with us tonight, one I think you'll like very much, and your cuffs are a bit smeared."
Mario ascended the stairs to his bedroom slowly, fiddling absent-mindedly with the paint-stained cuff of his sleeve, wondering what special guest would be at dinner. He hoped it would be Franklin, especially now that the British and the Americans were negotiating a peace treaty and Franklin might not have reason to stay in Paris for much longer, sighing and mumbling, "It'll be fine, it'll be fine," whenever he was asked how the revolution across the ocean fared. The previous year, Franklin had come to dinner and brought with him a thunder house, which he demonstrated after dessert, showing first how electricity could be discharged safely through the house by use of a brass conductor, and then, with a wink towards Mario, removing the conductor and exploding the little wooden structure with a second jolt of electricity through the broken circuit. (This was, to put it mildly, one of the greatest evenings of Mario's young life.) A few months ago, Franklin's post-prandial display had been an aurora flask that captured the delicate shimmer of the northern lights within its half-drained glass chamber; after the fact, Mario had used pastels to render the sight, pinks and orange-reds and shimmering pale greens. If it was Franklin again, Mario planned to give him the aurora sketches he had done, in the hopes that it would encourage the jocular American to return at least once more with some new curiosity demonstrating the latest advances in electricity. "For your nice son, and for your beautiful self, anything," Franklin always told Mario's mother in his bad French, kissing her hand so extravagantly that even Mario's father—who grumbled loudly in private that Franklin was an irredeemable old flirt—could not help but be amused.
Mario had so nearly convinced himself that tonight's guest would be Franklin back with another electrical show that he stared in mild confusion at the unfamiliar young man who was chatting with his parents when he arrived just outside the dining room.
"Our son, Marius," his mother was saying. "And this is André Chénier, the son of my dear friend Élisabeth."
Chénier bowed slightly in response, and Mario did the same, trying not to feel too disappointed.
It seemed Chénier had recently left a military regiment in Strasbourg, which was at least somewhat interesting. Mario picked at his food, halfway following the conversation, until his father asked Chénier what he wanted to do next, and Chénier replied without a beat of hesitation, "I intend to become a poet."
Well! Mario's fork clinged musically against his plate as his attention turned from his fish to the suddenly much more interesting dinner guest.
"A poet?" repeated Mario's father. "You write already, then?"
"Not often," Chénier replied. "Not nearly often enough. But I am studying. I will work hard at my craft. And I will be great, one day."
From anyone else, it might have sounded like a boast. But Chénier's expression matched the calm intensity of his demeanor, and Mario knew that this was not a boast, but rather a simple and unshakable declaration of intent. Chénier knew what it meant to study, what it meant to recraft a single element of a greater work, over and over and over, until the element slotted perfectly into the whole structure of the creation. He would work as hard as it took to one day become as great as he imagined.
"Well, I wish you the best of luck," smiled Mario's mother. "I know your mother's salon already hosts the likes of Lebrun-Pindare, but if there's anything that we can do to assist you with your ambitions..."
"Actually, there is," Chénier said. "I want to study the classical poetry of the ancient world. Only then do I feel I'll be able to express myself as fully as I wish in my chosen medium. But I haven't spent time in the Mediterranean since my earliest years, and I had wondered if you might make recommendations. Monsieur le Chevalier, you're a Roman born and raised, I understand..."
"And I'd be more than happy to connect you with anyone I know in Rome, when you're there," said Mario's father, nodding. "We'll have to write up a list of places for you to visit..."
"Pompeii," interrupted Mario.
"Not a bad idea," agreed Mario's father.
"Why Pompeii?" asked Chénier, turning his keen gaze on Mario for the first time, and Mario found himself unexpectedly shy, all of a sudden, afraid of making a misstep before a man with such a penetrating stare.
"Because when you're there, you feel like you're at the root of everything," Mario explained. "Even more so than at the Campo Vaccino, because there, you can see the modern city around you. In Pompeii, what's visible has only recently been dug from the ground, and you can just feel the rest of the city slumbering under the layers of ash."
"Perfectly preserved," murmured Chénier, and he nodded, approving. "I think you understand me well, and what I'm searching for in wanting to rediscover the ancient world, in trying to bring it back to life for our times and passions."
"Marius is an accomplished painter," explained Mario's father, his chest puffed out a bit with pride.
"Ah, well, that would explain it." Chénier smiled at Mario, as if they were truly equals despite the fact that Chénier was a man grown, a former soldier, and his poise made Mario feel more than ever like the boy he still was. "Pompeii is for you what Ovid is for me. Ancient, frozen in time, and yet still so present and so filled with life and vigor. How can we create something that is beautiful and true in this world, without understanding what has always been beautiful and true throughout the course of history?"
By the time dinner was over, Mario's parents had all but drafted an itinerary for Chénier—Naples, Pompeii, Rome—and were consulting each other in low voices in their armchairs by the fire about the best points of contact for the aspiring poet while visiting the Eternal City. Chénier sipped his coffee and shot a small smile at Mario, who lingered shyly at the end of a nearby couch.
"You know Rome and Pompeii well, then?" Chénier asked.
"We spend our winters there, visiting my father's friends and remaining family," Mario explained. "What was it like being a soldier?"
Chénier laughed.
"Wretched," he admitted. "I didn't last a year in my regiment. When I enlisted, it seemed noble to be willing to fight and die for a cause, but the reality of things was far less glamorous and infinitely more boring."
"Maybe it still could be noble, if the cause were really put to the fight while you were there," Mario suggested.
Chénier smiled sadly at Mario.
"Ah, so you're one of those boys who still relishes the idea of a glorious death," he sighed. "You'll grow out of the idea, I think."
"Don't you feel a revolution in this country is as inevitable as it was in the Americas?" Mario argued. "I'd be more than willing to fight and die for that."
"You're very young," Chénier reminded him kindly. "It's easy to think of life as a given, when you've barely tasted what you've been offered. And someone your age rarely thinks beyond his own feelings. No matter how heroic your death, it would not be easy to bear for those who love you."
Mario bowed his head, embarrassed and suddenly ashamed, remembering what one of the servants had once told him about the small cedar box with green silk lining that his mother kept under her bed, a box that contained five pairs of tiny shoes, each sized for a child no older than three years of age. Mario had spent his childhood trying not to think about this box, for while he did not believe in angels and demons, he did believe in ghosts, just a bit. Now, older and wiser, guilt clenched his entrails as he considered what it would cost his parents to be bereft of their only surviving child.
"I just want to do something great for the world," he confessed in a small voice. "I want to do something that will make a difference."
"I don't doubt you will," Chénier promised him. "But art can be as powerful a weapon as a sword or cannon, you know. The power to sway hearts and minds is the germination of a revolution."
Given that the poet's advice resounded in Mario's ears long after he had bade the Cavaradossi family good night and departed in a fiacre, Mario could not disagree. Chénier's words, lodged in Mario's heart, sculpted his breaths, guided his fingers and wrist as he held his paintbrush, echoed in the passages of Ovid that he re-read because Chénier loved them.
"I think Mario is a touch smitten with that son of your friend's," he overheard his father tell his mother one evening, as he passed the door of the drawing room.
"I can hardly blame him," laughed his mother. "If I were his age, I'd be just as smitten with someone with that degree of intellect and confidence!"
And Mario, blushing, thought of Chénier out there in the world that Mario half-considered his own: standing in the indigo shadow of the Colosseum at midday with the travertine of emperors looming overhead, overlooking the aquamarine sea from the Castel Sant'Elmo with Vesuvius rising powerfully behind the bay, walking quietly through the splendid ruins of Pompeii in the moonlight with the ghosts of the dead whispering sorrowfully from their necropolis. Perhaps Chénier would come to love these places as Mario himself loved them. And perhaps, if he was lucky, Chénier would admire Mario's work inspired by these sites and their histories, as surely as Mario knew he would one day admire Chénier's verses.
1784
Perhaps it was inevitable that Mario, his mild infatuation far from over, would still be thinking about the promising young poet a few months later, when his mother informed him that they'd been invited to dine at her cousin's.
"Just behave yourself, my dear," she told him, trying not to smile too broadly. "As entertaining as I always find them, I doubt Charlotte wants to spend her time writing up yet another long missive about how you scandalized her daughter during dinner."
"I never scandalize Madeleine," protested Mario, who thought that the Comtesse de Coigny gave her daughter far too little credit when it came to wanting to engage in discussion about current events.
"You know what I mean," his mother said gently. "I'm glad you always feel you have the right to speak your mind about these things, whether at home or elsewhere. But perhaps, just for tonight, it would be prudent to keep to yourself your full opinions about the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from positions of political power."
Mario supposed this was only fair, and despite the proposed restriction on his usual outspokenness, he felt oddly cheered as his family's carriage clattered onto the paved entrance of the Château de Coigny. Madeleine's mother may have been outrageously proper in her views on what dinner topics were fitting for a young lady, but she did always lay an excellent table. And it had been far too long since Mario had last seen his favorite cousin.
"Marius!" exclaimed Madeleine when Mario appeared in the drawing room; she leapt lightly from her chair and ran to him as he bowed slightly, taking his hands in her own. "Oh, thank goodness, I was just telling Bersi that I was afraid you wouldn't make it."
"Well, here I am," Mario laughed; and then, because his mother had told him that women always appreciated being complimented on their appearance, he added, "You're looking very lovely tonight, as usual."
"No thanks to these suffocating clothes," said Madeleine, pulling a face, then quickly glancing over to make sure her mother hadn't seen.
"You look wonderful," Bersi insisted from the chair in which she was still seated, and from the bored tone of her voice, Mario suspected this was a continuation of an ongoing conversation between the two.
"Mademoiselle Bersi," Mario added, bowing to her and taking her hand, and Bersi laughed, inclining her head slightly.
"Charmed, Monsieur," she told Mario. "Are you still sketching away, like always?"
"Like always," Mario assured her.
"Any chance you'd like to sketch us?" Bersi asked, one eyebrow quirking upwards in a slight challenge, and when Mario bowed again, she stood and announced that she'd go fetch some paper and pencils from Madeleine's room.
"Bersi's decided she's taken a rather strong liking to you," Madeleine warned Mario with a grin, seating them both on a couch so she could better whisper in his ear. "She seems convinced that you're the best catch in all of Paris for a young woman."
"For you, you mean?" Mario asked, wrinkling his nose before realizing how rude he was being. "That is, sorry, Madeleine, I didn't mean..."
"Oh, don't worry," Madeleine laughed. "No offense, Marius, but as fond as I am of you, I don't think I could ever marry you. You're far too eccentric for me."
"Me? Eccentric?" Mario placed a hand to his heart. "And here I thought you enjoyed my updating you on international affairs every bit as much as I did."
"I enjoy the updates, true, and one can't help admiring your degree of passion," Madeleine said dryly. "But even you have to admit that a virtual monologue of thirty minutes' length on any subject is taxing enough for the listener, and especially when the subject is the economic impact of the revolution in the Americas on the coffers of both France and Britain. I wouldn't have complained about the whole matter to my mother if you'd been brief and to the point—and, by the way, I'm sorry that she took the wrong message entirely from my complaint."
"Best avoid my mother's dinners, then, if you're looking for less political pontificating," Mario winked.
"Oh, believe me, I shall." Madeleine nudged Mario playfully with her shoulder. "Politics in small doses for me, thank you very much. Nothing on the scale of your detailed explanations, and God forbid I ever have to live through the minutiae of such events myself!"
"Monsieur?" Bersi had returned and was holding out the paper and pencils to Mario; he stood and offered her his seat on the couch, before seating himself opposite. Mario considered the two of them for a moment, his fair cousin and her dark companion, their faces complementing and somehow balancing each other. As he began to set their features down on paper with short, brisk lines, he considered once more the bewildering fact that Bersi apparently found him attractive, and then further considered that he didn't find her wide, dark eyes displeasing in the slightest.
"I've told Marius I won't abide another of his excruciatingly long political rants at dinner, by the way," Madeleine was informing Bersi.
"I see," laughed Bersi. "And so what will you allow as a topic of discussion? I'd say painting, but that seems like it might provoke an equally lengthy monologue."
"You two have no faith in me and my ability to speak briefly about any given subject," Mario pouted.
"What about poetry?" Madeleine proposed. "That seems like a subject where we'll be on about even footing, unless you've recently gained much more knowledge about it than I have."
The mere thought of discussing Chénier's desired medium made Mario's heart skip happily in his chest.
"Poetry sounds perfect," he grinned, and his cousin and her companion both laughed.
And Mario thought he might have imagined it, but when he raised his head from his sketch to glance at both of the laughing girls before him, his eyes locked on those of the footman standing in position against the wall, some feet behind the couch, and he could have sworn that the servant—who could not have been more than Mario's age—looked at him with an expression of pure hatred, before turning a neutral gaze back towards the empty air before him.
Before he could interrogate the footman's behavior, however, the majordomo had appeared to announce that dinner was served, and when Mario turned back around after this announcement, the footman had already vanished.
"I can take those," Bersi offered, and when she caught Mario's scowl as he handed over the paper and pencils, a small smile quirked the corner of her mouth. "No need to look so grim, Monsieur."
"It's just so unfair," Mario muttered to her. "You'd be able to talk circles around most anyone at this table. I wish they didn't make you go."
Bersi was about to reply, but then her eyes fell on the page in her hand, and she lifted it, her expression softening as she examined the care with which her interlocutor had rendered her and the noblewoman to whom she acted as a companion. The corner of her mouth quirked again, not sardonically, but with a sort of fragile pride.
"Enjoy dinner," she murmured to Mario, not meeting his gaze, and she slipped out of the room, Mario's sketch and supplies still held carefully in her hands.
"So, poetry," Madeleine said as Mario caught up to her at the entrance to the dining room. Mario wondered whether she felt Bersi's absence as acutely as he did, or whether the exclusion of her servant—her best friend—from certain spaces had become as unremarkable as the wallpapers of the various rooms of her family's château. "I didn't know you were such an enthusiast."
"I'm more cultured than you may think," Mario retorted in mock indignation, making to pull out Madeleine's chair for her, only to find the hostile footman had beat him to it. Madeleine, briefly greeting her other neighbor as she sat, missed the glare that the young servant directed at Mario from only a few inches away, making Mario flinch backwards as if he had been jolted by one of Franklin's electrical curiosities.
"Well, what have you been reading lately, then?" Madeleine asked. "Wait, let me guess: some dead Roman or another, in the original Latin."
"Ovid," Mario admitted. "If Bersi were here, I'm sure the two of you would be taking the greatest delight in teasing me for how endearingly predictable I am."
"Don't worry, I always compile extensive lists of things to relate to her, after dinners like these, so we'll have a good laugh over you later." Madeleine dipped her spoon into her soup and considered its creaminess with approval before continuing. "Anyway, what fascinates you so much about the Ancient Romans? There's been plenty of excellent poetry written since their time, you know."
Mario shrugged.
"It just helps me understand who I am," he said, by way of an excuse. It wasn't a total lie; he missed his father's Roman community throughout the months his family spent at home, just as much as he missed Madeleine and his other French friends during the months his family spent away from Paris. Reading Ovid helped anchor him to that other world he inhabited, a world of eroded marble columns emerging from the soil, of stone pines with their coronas of vivid green stretching wide like umbrellas, of Baroque church façades and silvered domes glinting in the brilliant sunlight. Paris was his home, and yet Mario would never hesitate to proudly call himself a Roman.
"And I know that plenty of excellent poetry has been written since then," he added, picking up his own spoon. He thought suddenly of Chénier and wondered if Madeleine would one day tease him for reading the aspiring poet's neoclassical verses just as fervently as he read their model. "I have no doubt more will be written in the future, too."
Madeleine took this as her cue to launch into an explanation of the pastoral idylls she had been reading, and Mario nodded politely and let his mind wander from there to a few disdainful thoughts on the Queen's frivolous new hamlet at Versailles, and finally back to Ovid and Rome. Perhaps this was why he saw so clearly the chasm between Bersi and Madeleine, he mused, while Madeleine's gaze slipped easily over the divide. Mario was fully aware of the privileges he held as a nobleman, ones that a woman like Bersi would never possess, no matter how intelligent and accomplished, and he was well aware that this would be the case in Rome just as much as in Paris. But, like Bersi, he lived between worlds and had the capability of viewing Madeleine's society as an outsider, able to pinpoint so keenly its eccentricities and flaws by comparison, even having grown up within it.
And perhaps it was because his mind was on Bersi and the injustices of Parisian society that his ear snagged on a snippet of conversation from down the table.
"You can't be serious, though," a nobleman in an overly powdered wig was laughing in a braying voice.
"And why not?" asked Mario's father calmly. "Athens alone proves that it's not irrational to believe that the Third Estate can be trusted to opine on their own political interests."
Apparently Papà didn't get the message about staying away from the subject of the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from positions of political power, Mario thought ironically, whispering an apology to Madeleine and turning his head to watch.
"But my dear Chevalier, it goes against the natural order." The nobleman smirked scornfully, a false beauty mark twitching at the corner of his mouth. "It's folly to think the lower classes will ever be equal to the likes of us..."
"Are they not inherently created equal?" Mario's father raised his eyebrows. "Locke would say so. Jefferson, certainly."
"Equal in that they have the same physical forms, perhaps," scoffed the nobleman. "But to imagine them as political equals is preposterous."
"Equal in that they have the same capacity in every sense," Mario's father asserted. "Give them the same access to knowledge as noblemen and they would be just as well-equipped to govern. After all, d'Alembert—may he rest in peace—might have spent his life in obscurity, just another baby abandoned on the steps of a church, if he had not gotten an education."
"D'Alembert, if I'm not mistaken, was the bastard of a baronesse and a chevalier," replied the nobleman coldly. "Whatever genius he showed is the result of his parentage, however base the circumstances of his birth."
"I don't question d'Alembert's parentage, but I still suspect the money his guilty father put towards his schooling was far more important to his understanding of mathematics and physics than his noble blood alone," Mario's father replied dryly.
"Monsieur le Chevalier," smiled the nobleman nastily, "I must assume that things are very different in the Papal States from how they are here. How else can you so deeply misunderstand just how irreconcilable the Second and Third Estates truly are, both politically and socially?"
"I have lived in Paris these past thirty years," Mario's father argued. His accent was always apparent, no matter how flawless the construction of his French, and it seemed to Mario's ears that the Italianate contours of his father's speech stood out all the more strongly in this moment: the lilting ebb and flow of his cadence, the subtle doubling of his consonants, the nearly imperceptible grip of Ns on his nasalized vowels. "I am well aware of how things work here."
"You may have lived here, yes," replied the nobleman idly, "but you'll never really be one of us, will you? Once a foreigner, always a foreigner, isn't that the sad truth of it all?"
Mario's father opened his mouth, an angry flush rising on his cheeks, but he checked himself when his wife laid a restraining hand on his arm.
"I'm surprised at you, Marquis," she smiled at the nobleman, although Mario could see that his mother's eyes were flashing with barely contained fury. "And ashamed that my husband should face such hostility here in France. After all, whenever I've visited Rome, I've been embraced with nothing but kindness and understanding by his friends and family there."
This was true, although Mario had heard his father joke time and time again that his wife was more Roman than he himself. It was Mario's mother, after all, who insisted that their family speak Italian to each other at home, not only for Mario's benefit when he was small, but also because she loved the language intensely, spoke it with an ease that left new acquaintances wondering where precisely on the Italian peninsula she had grown up. Mario had once asked his mother why they didn't live most of the year in Rome, if she loved it so much, and she had laughed and said it was only because it would have broken his father's heart to be away from Paris for so long.
"And you grossly underestimate my husband's deep loyalty to France," Mario's mother was saying, as if voicing Mario's thoughts. "Don't they say that converts are always the most zealous advocates of their religion? The same is just as true for citizenship. You, Marquis, are French purely by accident of your birth. Nicolas, by contrast, had to petition the crown for a letter of naturalization. His worthiness to call himself French has been scrutinized and found sufficient at the highest levels of government."
"Oh, so cut his heart open, and I'd find engraven there a fleur-de-lys?" The nobleman snorted and shot a dismissive look in Mario's direction. "You act as though your husband's naturalization were due purely to patriotism, and overlook the fact that it was the only way to guarantee that his children would inherit his French property, rather than letting it revert to the crown. And, if I may say, Madame, you seem startlingly blasé about your husband's radical beliefs and their potential consequences. If he allows your only son to marry some shepherdess with no standing or title, I doubt you would consider this to be—what was that phrase your friend Voltaire liked to bandy about?—'the best of all possible worlds'."
Mario was sure that even those who did not know his mother as well as he did could see the way her jaw clenched, although he imagined that, of those assembled, only her cousin would know that his father had petitioned for his naturalized status during the long years before Mario's birth, when his parents had given up hope of leaving property to any child of their own. He glanced at Madeleine, who was watching the ongoing debacle with such shocked fascination that she seemed to have forgotten that she was still holding the handle of her spoon, dipped halfway into her soup and there forgotten.
"Our son may love whomever he chooses, so long as his love is matched in happiness and devotion," Mario's mother declared, her smile fixed in a manner that meant she was feeling positively murderous. "After all, I think it can be very safely said that the loftiness of one's birth has little direct relation to the quality of a person's manners. And how charming that you're familiar with that particular quote, Marquis! I somehow doubt you've ever cracked open a copy of Candide, but it doesn't surprise me that those who have would so strongly associate you with it."
Mario could tell who around the table had read Voltaire based on who nearly choked on their food trying not to laugh; his father quickly turned away in a fit of mock coughing, and Mario himself had to press his napkin to his face, under the pretense of wiping away a dribble of soup. The nobleman smiled at what had appeared to be a compliment, then quickly frowned as he realized he had been insulted in some manner beyond his understanding.
"Speaking of books, cousin, weren't you telling me recently in one of your letters about a novel you were reading? A light romance, I believe." The Comtesse de Coigny glared meaningfully down the table as she deftly wrestled the skirmish at hand back into the realm of polite conversation, and Mario's mother took the hint and navigated her commentary into safer waters, although Mario could not miss that his father had slipped his hand into hers.
"Your mother is never inviting us to dinner again," he muttered to Madeleine.
"Oh, don't you dare threaten to abandon me so heartlessly," Madeleine whispered back. "You've been a perfect gentleman so far, so she can't exile you from her table. Besides, displeased as she may be about what just happened, she can't be all that surprised that your parents acted just like, well, your parents. Really, if anyone's to blame, it's that awful Marquis. Goodness, I hope Bersi's been eavesdropping on all of this, though! I don't think I could ever do your mother justice in my reports to her."
And when Mario saw Bersi as the guests were departing after dinner, he could not resist approaching her to ask. He had said his farewells to Madeleine already, and Bersi stood by the front entrance with Madeline's shawl in her arms. Mario's parents were still speaking to the Comtesse, no doubt offering their apologies for any friction that evening; as he passed at a distance, Mario noticed the same footman who had glared at him with such anger earlier that evening, eyeing his parents with something almost like admiration. The instant the footman turned and noticed Mario, though, he stiffened and shot him a final parting glare before retreating from the brilliant moonlight and back into the château.
"Who is that?" Mario asked Bersi, following the departing footman with his gaze.
"That?" Bersi rolled her eyes. "Just Gérard—or, the younger Gérard, I should say. Don't mind him if he was acting strangely towards you. He's always bitter and resentful towards everyone, these days."
"And here I thought I'd offended him somehow, despite the fact I didn't embark on a single unseemly tangent during dinner," Mario laughed. "Were you listening in, by chance? Madeleine had hoped you might."
"No, not tonight."
"Oh, well. You may be subjected to an animated portrayal of my mother on her worst behavior later this evening, then."
"I look forward to it," laughed Bersi. "And your discussion of poetry? Any revelations? Any recommendations?"
Mario shook his head, then tilted it pensively.
"Have you read Shakespeare's sonnets? You might enjoy them, especially the last thirty or so."
"I'll keep that in mind, thank you."
Bersi bowed her head, her gaze fixed on Madeleine's shawl. A single strand of her dark, curly hair fell across her cheek, framing her cheekbone and her full lips in a manner that Mario could not help but find lovely.
"You're staring," she informed him, and he jumped, not realizing that she had been watching him in return.
"Sorry," he muttered.
"It's all right." She smiled sadly. "Believe me, by this point, staring doesn't bother me anymore, so long as it's of a kind nature. I've grown accustomed to being a curiosity."
"You're not a curiosity," Mario insisted. "I was thinking earlier this evening when I was sketching you and Madeleine that you're every bit as beautiful as my cousin, even if it's a very different sort of beauty."
Bersi exhaled a long sigh and raised her head towards the bright moonlight, which fell palely across her face and tangled in her dark eyes.
"See, this is one reason why I've always liked you, Cavaradossi," she said, looking at the moon instead of at him. "You say things like that so earnestly that I can almost believe you. You know I love Madeleine more than anyone in the world, and if she's been betraying my confidences, I'll have to forgive her for that. So I'll accept your compliments, but nothing beyond that, all right?"
"All right," responded Mario, flustered.
"Just because, much as I like you, I like my position even more, and I can't imagine the Comtesse responding kindly to news of any sort of flirtation between her daughter's companion and her cousin's son, however innocent," Bersi explained, nearly managing to sound completely flippant. "But, far more importantly, Madeleine is the sort of noblewoman with many friends and few confidants—just you and I, really. And I wouldn't want to hurt her by creating something between the two of us that shut her out."
Across the courtyard, Mario's parents finally were making their way to their carriage, still saying their goodbyes to various relatives as they went.
"You're a very loyal companion," he told Bersi. "And I promise I don't say this out of self-interest, but I really do hope we one day inhabit a world where you can act on your own desires, rather than worrying about protecting my cousin."
"Go." Bersi quirked half a smile at him, nodding towards her head towards the Cavaradossi family's waiting carriage. "Who knows, perhaps some day. Until then, I'll keep looking at your sketch and imagining that anyone else can view us as you did."
And Mario bowed once more to Bersi and made his way to the carriage.
"Well!" Mario's father burst out laughing, clearly having suppressed his mirth for quite some time. "Are we out of trouble yet, do you think? I thought our apology was very appropriate!"
"Oh, you know Charlotte," gasped Mario's mother between her own laughs, wiping at her eyes with her indigo handkerchief. "I can just imagine her next letter already: 'Catherine, I cannot tolerate such an indecorous tone at my dinner table, I cannot sanction such unconscionable political discourse in my home, it fills me with grief to see such antics enacted in front of my impressionable daughter; also, please be sure you mark down the 12th of May for my next dinner, I will be devastated if you miss it.' My dear cousin." She sighed, amused, and leaned her head against her husband's shoulder.
"And for once, I caused the fewest problems of the Cavaradossis assembled," Mario noted, as his father winked at him. "It's a good thing you two manage to be so charming when you're not getting in fights."
"Hmm." His mother raised her eyebrows at him, her eyes twinkling. "Do as we say, and not as we do, Mario. You'll earn yourself far fewer enemies if you stick to charm and avoid the brawling altogether. I sincerely hope the two of you and Charlotte were the only ones who could tell how close I was to filleting that man with my dinner knife."
"I appreciate that you leapt to my defense like that." Mario's father kissed his wife's hand and then her forehead, and Mario cleared his throat loudly to remind his parents that he was sitting right across from them and they'd best behave themselves. "Although I'm glad you just managed to restrain yourself from hurling Rousseau in that idiot's direction, my dear, I could tell you were tempted. I think your cousin can tolerate us well enough as godless political radicals when we're acting as uncontroversially as possible, but reciting the main points of a book banned for blasphemy and treason would have been a step too far."
"Perhaps." Mario's mother grinned across the carriage at her son. "Well, when Mario marries his shepherdess, I'll be interested to see if she's brave enough to attend the wedding."
Mario knew she was just teasing him, but as he left his parents to their quiet laughter, he found himself wondering if his parents really did believe he was free to love whomever he chose. In theory, no doubt they were serious; but he considered the eyes that had made his blood flare, and he knew his parents could never approve of his choices. Bersi, with her dark skin faded to lavender in the brightness of the moonlight, understood this so much better than he ever could. And yet, his father had spoken that evening of education as a great social equalizer, and Bersi, in looking at his own sketch of her and Madeleine, had hinted at the same for art. Maybe, though his work, Mario could help others envision a world in which such equality was possible, in which a nobleman and a shepherdess might be wed in peace. Perhaps this was what Chénier had meant when he spoke of art as a spark that could set a revolution ablaze.
1786
The Hôtel Cavaradossi had been constructed by Mario's parents a decade before his birth, a graceful structure whose façade bore traces of the Roman motifs that so characterized his father's childhood—pediments capping windows between fluted pilasters with Doric capitals, acanthus leaves scrolling lazily beneath the deep cornice. Mario had always regarded his home in Paris as a temple to the Enlightenment, as a celebration of the scholars of the ancient world and a promise of a forward-thinking world to come.
Never before now had he considered his parents' house to resemble the marbled coldness of a mausoleum, Death draped gauzily about its familiar corridors like a grim veil.
Mario had always known he would lose his parents before many of his peers did. After all, his parents had been in their forties when he was born, a wholly unexpected but desperately wanted child, a sweet balm to his parents' middle age after so many unspeakable losses. And yet, while he had known that his parents were approaching their sixties, Mario had never seen either of them as old. Not when the intellectual world of Paris still gathered around their dinner table, squabbling and debating while his parents moderated the discussion with their typical calm; not when they still laughed side by side on one couch in the evenings, holding hands like young lovers, impervious to the idea that age should ever temper passion of any sort. Disease took no note of these indications of vigor, however, and only when Mario saw his mother slumped in her chair in the evenings, her eyes closed in exhaustion against the sickness that was beginning to ravage her body, did he suddenly realize that she was no longer young.
Neither he nor his father had been permitted into the room to be with her, once the doctor had diagnosed the disease as influenza. This measure was one of the last things his mother had requested, with her sore throat and her dry lips, before she slipped into a heated daze. Even before her passing, his mother's absence weighed heavily on their lives, a circuit with its brass conductor knocked loose. Mario was certain that this was what had killed his father in the days that followed, for even the most rational mind could not cope with the sheer guilt of not being by the side of his beloved partner at the hour of her death.
Mario could not recall the last time he had set foot in a church for the purposes of attending a service. Granted, he was constantly poking his head into churches, but that was because he had always loved the architecture, the carvings, the dramatic interplay between light and shadow across the pews and niches and altars. As a boy, Mario had often stopped before the church of the convent near his family's house, enchanted by the reedy harmonies of the organ, and more often than not his parents would indulge his curiosity. Much as he disliked religion, churches themselves reminded Mario of listening to the upper and lower pipes delicately twine their melodies around one another, his father's smiling face turned upwards into the array of light streaming through the stained glass windows, ruby and sapphire and ochre. Now, he watched his father's motionless face as he listened to the priest recite a mass for the dead, knowing his parents would not have blamed him for asking for help with all the burial arrangements from the easiest available source, and yet feeling oddly guilty nonetheless. In a niche to his left was a lovely painting of the Annunciation, and Mario found himself focusing on the brushwork, reflecting that the dove above the Virgin's head signifying the Holy Spirit was not entirely unlike the shower of golden rain by which Danaë conceived Perseus. His parents had had nothing against the mythology of the Catholic Church, he reasoned; what they had disliked was not personal faith, but rather the use of such mythologizing to consolidate political power.
"You really should never judge a person for their religious beliefs, Mario, so long as they respect others," he could hear his father's measured voice saying, as clearly as if issuing from the open coffin amidst its funerary lilies, its owner ready to clap a doting hand to his son's shoulder. "Faith is often all that those lost and abandoned by society have for comfort." And Mario closed his eyes, understanding for the first time what that might mean.
In the days that followed, visitors stopped by, to pass along their condolences, to check in on him. David had told him to take the time he needed to wrap up his family's affairs, likening the loss of Mario's parents in such rapid succession to the loss of Voltaire and Rousseau within only months of one another. (Mario had been only seven years old at the time of that loss, too young to spend dinners at the table with such luminaries and too young to appreciate his parents' grief at their passing, although he fondly remembered Voltaire as the man who often waved at him from down the hall and referred to Mario as his parents' proudest achievement.) When a familiar man stepped into the drawing room and doffed his hat respectfully, it took Mario a shocked moment to recognize him.
"Monsieur Chénier," he gasped, rising to his feet.
"Monsieur le Chevalier," nodded Chénier, and Mario found himself overwhelmed once more at being called by his father's title. "I came as soon as I heard. I hope you're bearing up as well as one possibly can?"
Mario nodded, torn between his ongoing despair and the sense of awe that Chénier always instilled in him.
"Death always comes too soon for heroes," Chénier murmured, casting his eyes over the portraits that hung over the fireplace—Mario's mother, rendered in oils after the gouache study that had secured Mario's admission into David's atelier; beside her, Mario's father, his expression gentle and amused in contrast to his wife's sparkling inquisitiveness. "And your parents were among the greatest people I have ever met. They did not merely pray for the poor, but met with politicians and urged social reform, consulted representatives of the working classes and strove to help them as they could through alms and policy. They helped me in every way they could, not only with their connections in the Italian states, but with publishers here in Paris, with poets and writers who could provide me with guidance. I will forever be indebted to their memories for their faith in me, no matter what happens."
"And how has your writing been going?" Mario asked, desperate to change the subject.
"Ah." Chénier smiled bitterly. "The writing has been going, but I have not yet found a publisher. I have persevered only thanks to the likes of your parents, whose confidence has made the battle worth fighting. But now..."
"Don't give up," interrupted Mario, stricken. For it was Chénier who had convinced Mario that the world could be changed through the power of art, and if Chénier no longer believed his own words, then Mario feared he would not have the strength to believe them, either. "Please. I... I've spent years waiting to read the verses you spoke of writing that evening."
Chénier suddenly passed a hand over his face and turned away, overcome with emotion. When he finally turned back to Mario, he was smiling, although his eyes sparkled with tears.
"Thank you," he whispered. "It seems, young Cavaradossi, that you are very much your parents' son. I will continue to write, and I will write words that ennoble their legacy and further the causes they held most dear. And I hope you find the meaning that you need in your own art, especially now, in this most difficult of times. If I can ever be of any assistance to you, however small, please do not hesitate to call on me."
With that, Chénier bowed once again and took his leave, and Mario resumed his restless mourning vigil. He was not nearly so surprised when Madeleine appeared at his doorstep a few hours later, Bersi at her side, both dressed in black.
"Oh, Marius," said his cousin softly, taking his hand, Bersi bowing her head respectfully. "I'm so sorry. Is there...?"
"No," he choked, not looking at either of them. "No, but thank you for being here."
Madeleine nodded, and squeezed his hand a bit tighter.
"They're with God now," she murmured.
"Perhaps," laughed Mario harshly, wishing not for the first time that he could believe in a heaven. "Perhaps."
"Well." A small smile had turned up the corner of Madeleine's mouth at the reminder of her cousin's fervent atheism. "If there's anything after this life, then I hope they're there together. That seems like the best possible ending for two people in love."
Mario nodded. The most irrational part of him resented his father for hastening to his mother's side, for continuing to admire and worship his wife above everything else in the world, rather than living for his son's sake. But he had seen his father's face as he collapsed, had seen the fear in his eyes as he reached feebly and fruitlessly for his only child's hand, seeking comfort in his death from a young man who had not known how to react.
"I don't know what to do, Madeleine," he sighed, Chénier's words about his parents and their insistence on helping others returning to him. "I'm just a painter, not the sort of person who rallied intellectuals like my parents did. I don't know how I can carry on their legacy, the way they would want me to."
"Just be yourself." Madeleine pressed his hand. "They were so proud of you for who you are, you know. When you were accepted to the atelier, my mother kept shaking her head and wondering whether she'd ever receive another letter from your mother that didn't mention your apprenticeship with Jacques-Louis David at least once. I don't think they ever expected you to be anyone other than the talented and thoughtful and kind person they'd raised. You'll carry on their legacy, in your own way."
Mario had been in too great a state of shock at finding himself an orphan to weep, but now a great sob racked his shoulders.
"I didn't even get to say goodbye to either of them," he wept in a small voice as Madeleine placed a comforting hand on his back, Bersi politely turning away her own beautiful dark eyes as they filled with tears. "I know she was just trying to protect me, but I'll have to live for the rest of my life without having told her one last time how much I loved her. And then he just collapsed one day, without warning, and I ran to get help, and he was gone by the time I returned..."
"They knew," said Madeleine simply. "Of course they knew how much you loved them. And even though they're no longer here with you, you'll always carry their love with you, as long as you live. Remember that, and you can and will survive this moment, and live as fully as they would hope you would."
Madeleine sat with him until Mario had collected himself a bit, not saying anything, contemplative, and Mario was more grateful than he could say for her presence. His cousin was right that life would have to continue on somehow, and he would take both her advice and Chénier's, living for art, living for love. When Madeleine and Bersi finally took their leave with promises to return soon, Mario dried his tears with the linen handkerchief that he found crumpled in his pocket—a faded indigo, with the slightest smudges of blue gouache still pressed into its weave—and walked once more around his parents' house, saying farewell to the furnishings and the old paintings on the walls and the rows upon rows of books in the library. He would have the house closed, shutters bolted and cloths drawn over the couches and tables and clocks, and he would return to David's atelier until after his training was complete. He would not return to these silent, dreaming rooms for nearly a decade, by which time the world had jolted so violently as to render the unaltered mansion all but unrecognizable.
1794
Death hung over Paris, heavy and bleak and relentless, the darkness of a well that smothered all light, the smothering folds of a funerary shroud. Society had buckled under its uneven weight and fallen hard, dislodging the familiar and stable; a single shock had exploded the edifice entire, and now, years later, the streets ran slick with blood.
Mario had not intended to return to the Place du Trône-Renversé so soon, not when the execution of the nuns the previous week had left him drained of energy and bitter beyond words. On his weary meander that morning, trying and failing to clear his head of the horrors he had just witnessed, Mario had found himself on the path to his parents' old mansion and let his feet carry him where they would. He passed the façade of the old convent down the street from his childhood home, its shutters bolted and rubbish strewn before the closed door of its chapel, its organ and choir silenced, sunlight streaming colorfully through its stained glass onto an eerie stillness. His parents had despised the political power of the church, but they would have been horrified by the forcible dissolution of monasteries under the new laws, for this was not the freedom of religion that they had promoted, this was not the France of which they had dreamt and for which they had fought. Mario picked through the overgrown shrubbery of the drive and pushed through the dense grasses that by now reached his waist, and sat on the steps of his family's home where he had sat a thousand times as a small child as his father conferred with the carriage driver in the entrance court, gazing miserably up at the gestures of Rome on this edifice in Paris, the architecture of the Enlightenment suddenly as passé as that of the ancien régime.
This could not continue, this slaughter of innocents whose deaths proved the paranoia and distorted power of Robespierre and Fouché and the other so-called leaders of the Revolution. Mario had always known that the cost of revolution was life, but by this point, the blood toll had tipped the project from that of reformation to despotism. He would no longer be witness to its excesses, would no longer pay homage to the merciless guillotine singing in its blood-soaked square. He had wanted to change the world through art, to use beauty to model the promises of liberty and equality and fraternity; and yet art had not been enough, and he had failed his parents and the France they had envisioned. He laid a palm on the steps of the Hôtel Cavaradossi, grieving the loss of his parents, grieving the loss of his innocence, and then pushed himself to his feet and picked his way back through the overgrowth, wanting nothing more than to pretend that the world outside of David's atelier did not exist.
And yet, when he heard that the Revolutionary Tribunal had sentenced Chénier, Mario pulled on his hat and boots and hurled himself into the heat of July, shaking with fury. He had known that Chénier had been arrested and imprisoned a few months prior, and he could not understand it, not when he had read both of Chénier's published poems, his breath catching over the eloquent fury sparking from the page with all the vivacity and purity and beauty of a living flame. Mario's footsteps pounded through the streets, keeping time with the verses that echoed through his thoughts, verses addressed to his own master, verses he had read so many times that their music sang in his very blood:
Take up your robe of gold, tie your sash tight,
Poetry young and divine:
Although these stormy times eclipse your light,
To David's lips, king of the painter's sight,
Carry the gods' cup of wine...
His parents, Mario reflected, would have been proud beyond words of the young man they had supported and advised. Chénier had learned well from his time on the Italian peninsula, had reached deep into the traditions of his mother's family, the structure of his poems echoing Pindar, the substance crying out for equality. Chénier, more than Mario himself, had created a vision of what the future could look like, a vision sculpted of the marbled democracy of Athens and the bronzed republic of Rome, a vision in which what was old had been mined from the earth fresh and untouched, rediscovered as new. In Chénier's soaring ode, the Horatii raised their hands in solemn oath to the blades of their swords, cast in light and shadow as David had painted them, their gestures reverberating through the ages to the hands raised to another oath rendered by David, the men on the tennis court in Versailles committing themselves to their own bloodied destinies.
A wine-dazzled gaze through the palette is shown.
The gods roam the earth from their caves in Paros.
The brass flows and breathes. And marble and stone
Now rise in hallowed porticos.
Chénier understood the vivid line between past and future, the line that Mario had sought for so long to express with David as his guide. And yet now David sat at the right hand of Robespierre, and Chénier was condemned to death, and Mario no longer understood the world whose future he so longed to correct. They could not execute Chénier, not when his voice sang with an otherworldliness, his poetry soaring beyond anything Mario could have envisioned from that dinner so long ago with the prospective voyager. France's sins against her people had rendered her hideous enough already. Let her not snuff out one of the few scraps of beauty she still had to offer.
You, too, virgin fair with the voice that enthralls,
Siren sweet, o winged nymph so blessed,
Your tongue becomes soft in the palace's halls,
Your disdain brought to earth and with childish squalls
Your uncertain march is oppressed...
As he neared the square, his collar damp with sweat, Mario spotted a familiar figure disappear around a corner. He had seen Bersi once since the Bastille fell, laughing, flirting with an unknown man, dressed in the garb of a merveilleuse; and yet, when he had started forward to greet her, she had caught sight of him and lowered her eyes in shame, disappearing quickly through a doorway with the man in her wake. What had brought her here today, he wondered, his footsteps picking up as the roar of the crowd rose, the rhythm of Chénier's verses suddenly choked by the fury of the masses.
Mario could barely see through the masses assembled around the guillotine, but when he spotted the condemned through a gap, he gasped. There was Chénier, haggard, defiant, his gaze turned forward and his chin level, every inch the soldier trained to stare down death. But, to Mario's shock, standing next to the poet in the little cart was his cousin Madeleine, her head held equally high, her hand clutched in Chénier's. Later, Mario would wonder how they had met, when they had fallen in love, what events had brought them to this tragic pass. But for now, it was enough for him to see that they were meeting their fates together, dying for art, dying for love.
Mario could not say how he managed to push his way through the crowd to the very front, but there he found himself, panting, as the little cart clattered to a halt before the guillotine and the figures within it alit. He could not bring himself to call Madeleine's name, but he pulled from his pocket his mother's old handkerchief and waved it, like a little patch of the wide blue sky that a poet had once beheld above a field of violets. Somehow, impossibly, it caught Madeleine's eye, and she smiled at Mario, her face suddenly as radiant as the sun. Chénier, watching her, followed her gaze into the crowd and nodded to the young painter who had urged him to continue writing himself into immortality, even when fate seemed to still his pen. They turned their backs to him, hands still clutched, ready to face their deaths like the heroes they were. And Mario knew, even as he too turned away from them and made his way back through the jeering crowd, that his love would follow them to their graves and beyond, as surely as the sun warms the earth once more after even the fiercest of storms.