“As Rosine told you, it was indeed complicated, because I was a Jewess who’d borne a bastard. For all his grand speeches about men being free, women, it seems, were a different matter. He wasn’t prepared to risk his future. It’s a tiresome tale, all too familiar. I consider myself fortunate; he was honorable enough to admit his mistake and pay for it. Others cast such mistakes aside and pretend they never occurred. And his money helped me to depart that horrible seamstress’s establishment and start my own life.”
She went silent for a moment. “He is dead,” she said flatly. “He died last year of a fever.”
I sat there, sundered, longing to wail, to rend my breast like the agonized saints in the convent books. But in that devastating moment, I couldn’t mourn what I’d never known. For the first time in my life, I felt entirely, horribly, grown up.
“He left you a sum in his will,” Julie went on, “but like everything with him, it, too, is complicated. I managed to secure your board and tuition from his estate, seeing as he himself had insisted you be sent here. As for the rest…”
She gestured impatiently, as if to dismiss my pain at the news that the man who’d sired me, whom I had never met yet imagined so many times, was no more. Standing up and smoothing out her skirts, she said, “I shall return for you in August. We will go with Rosine and your sisters on holiday. The physician recommends a respite in the mountains to help heal your lungs. I know a lovely spa in the Pyrenees, at Cauterets.”
I gazed up at her, dumbfounded. “And afterwards…?”
“You’ll finish your education here. After all, he did pay for it. Then we shall see.”
Without another word, she left me, slumped on my chair.
Only then did I realize that much like my mother had, becoming someone else might be my only choice in life.
VIII
While I didn’t look forward to spending time in the mountains with my family, given my relationship with my mother, I was eager to know my sisters. And once we arrived in Cauterets, I found that Jeanne was clearly my mother’s favorite, arrayed in miniature versions of Julie’s attire and giving herself too many airs for her age, making me suspect she was indeed Morny’s child. But she could forget her hauteur when out of Julie’s sight, reverting to being just a little girl as she joined Rosine and me on day trips to the local farms, where I found myself besotted by lambs and baby goats.
Régine, on the other hand, became my favorite. Nearly a year old, she was boisterous, wailing up a storm and grasping at my hair, my sleeves, anything she could take hold of to stake her claim. Perhaps because she didn’t resemble any of us, with her olive skin and huge dark eyes, I saw her as someone apart, whom it was safe for me to love.
Julie remained aloof, our conversation in the garden having done nothing to bring us closer, as I’d hoped it might. Rosine made up for it with her ceaseless fussing over me, ladling soup and cheese and thick brown bread down my throat until I regained most of the weight I’d lost during my illness.
I returned to the convent fattened, and with just a nagging trace of my cough. Resuming my education, I also reclaimed Marie’s friendship with much coaxing and gifts of chocolate, and we both made a new friend in lively, blond Sophie Crossier, whose family lived nearby and welcomed the three of us into their home on Sundays. With the onset of my menses, the nuns moved me into the older girls’ dormitory, and my deportment and diction lessons took precedence. By the time I turned fourteen, I spoke like a Parisian, all trace of my Breton accent erased, and I could perform all the meaningless accomplishments expected of a bourgeois girl, such as straining tea into the pot, reciting poetry, playing the pianoforte, and conducting silly conversation about trivialities.
Yet I lived every day under the shadow of dread. On my fifteenth birthday, I’d be considered an adult per the convent rule, and my stay at Grandchamp must come to an end. Though I’d not given up hope of becoming a nun, I knew it would never come to pass. Mère Sophie had made it clear I wasn’t suited to a religious life—another burden to bear, as all too quickly my fifteenth year loomed before me, in all its uncertainty.
A few days before my scheduled departure in August, Mère Sophie summoned me.
“You must remember everything we have taught you. You must accept God’s will and obey His commandments. Your will is formidable, Sarah, but you mustn’t allow it to lead you astray. I fear temptation will be your constant adversary.” She didn’t elaborate, but her intent was unmistakable: she knew what my mother and aunt did to support themselves, and while the nuns had prepared me to the best of their abilities, my choices were limited. Indeed, I could count those choices on one hand.
“I’m so afraid.” My voice broke as I regarded her, this woman I’d come to love so much that I thought of her as more of a mother than the one who gave birth to me. “What will I do?”
“Let God show you the way,” she said. “God and your heart. You will know. Quand même, Sarah. No one can force you into a life you do not desire.”
The trouble was, I didn’t know what I desired. Packing my suitcase with my linens and clothes, my worn Bible and well-thumbed rosary, I found myself in near despair. Julie had sent a landau to take me to Paris, but neither she nor Rosine came to accompany me.
As I hugged Marie goodbye, she burst into tears. “We must write to each other every day,” she bawled, until I reminded her that she had to write to me first with her address, as she would be in Flanders. At this, she scowled; much like me, she had no choice. Her mother had accepted a proposal of marriage from one of her suitors, a “fat Flemish merchant who stinks of cheese,” as Marie described him, and she’d only been granted an extra six months at the convent while her mother arranged their move. But she, too, would soon depart Grandchamp, while our friend Sophie, being younger than us, had just a year left. Sophie made me promise to visit her, which I knew I wouldn’t do, though I assured her I would, trying to smile as my tears rose up to choke me when I proceeded into the courtyard to find the nuns assembled to bid me farewell.
They couldn’t say anything to ease my desolation. I felt as if I were being evicted from the only home I’d ever known. Mère Sophie took me by the hand. “Remember to choose the life you want,” she whispered as she walked me to the landau.
From the landau window, I watched her standing back as the contraption jolted forward, as I felt myself carried down the lane, out the gates, past the old oak trees shading the walls, taking me away from this holy world I’d become such a part of toward a world I feared would devour me whole.
Old César let out a mournful howl.
Seated alone on the red-cushioned carriage bench, I clutched a handkerchief that smelled of the lavender in the garden to my face and I wept.