She had often wondered what had happened to him. Donna Lavinia had told her as she was leaving, that Prince Corrado had confined him in the cellars, that no doubt some form of punishment would follow. But how could he punish a man who all his life had served him, and served his family devotedly… and one moreover who certainly knew his secret! With death? Marianne could not believe that Matteo Damiani had been killed, for he himself had killed no one.
The horses trotted on towards Fontainebleau and the sun splashed gaily through the moving curtain of leaves, but Marianne paid no attention to the road slipping by outside the windows of her coach. Her mind remained curiously divorced from the present and divided in the strangest way, part of it dwelling on Germany and her friend Jolival, of whom she had such high hopes, and part, the greater and more vulnerable part, roving about the ancient prison of La Force which she knew so well.
There had been a day when Adelaide, in a mood of nostalgia, had taken her to the old quarter of the Marais to show her her old home, a beautiful building made of pink brick and white stone dating from the time of Louis XIII, a neighbour of the Hôtel de Sévigné, but horribly scarred and disfigured by the warehouses and rope-walks which had taken it over during the Revolution. La Force was not far away and Marianne had glanced with revulsion at the squat, blank shape, under the low mansard roof, the stout though leprous walls and the low, heavily barred gate with its two rusty lanterns. It was a sinister gate, indeed, a dirty rusty-red in colour as if it were still soaking up the blood which had washed about it during the massacres of September 1792.
Marianne's elderly cousin had told her about those massacres. She had seen them from her hiding place in a garret of her own house. She had told of the ghastly death of the gentle Princesse de Lamballe. The story returned to Marianne's mind now in all its hideous detail and she could not repress a shudder of superstitious horror at the fate which seemed to be drawing Jason Beaufort inexorably along the same path as that taken by the martyred princess. He had gone so quickly from her house to what had been her prison. And had not Marianne herself heard her ghost weeping in the house where Madame de Lamballe had sought oblivion from a king's ingratitude? To Marianne's impressionable and highly sensitive mind it seemed a warning of disaster. What if Jason, too, were to leave La Force only to go to his death?
Such thoughts as these, combined with her own utter powerlessness to aid her friend and what she thought of as the Emperor's cruelty, did nothing to improve her spirits. By the time she reached Bourbon two days later, Marianne had not slept since she left Paris and had eaten only a little bread sopped in milk. She was in such a state of depression that she had to be put to bed as soon as she arrived.
Bourbon-l'Archambault was, however, a very attractive little city. It stood at the heel of a large lake through which a bustling river ran and its pink and white houses were piled in the shade of a mighty spur of rock on which had once stood the seventeen proud towers – now reduced to three – of the dukes of Bourbon. The town had been rich, powerful and extremely busy in the day of the Grand Rot, Louis XIV, when the choice spirits of the court came there to nurse their rheumatic ailments. But here, too, the Terror had passed. The shades of the poet Scarron, of Madame de Sévigné and the Marquise de Montespan who had there made a good end to a dubious life had melted into the mists along the Allier, while the towers of the chateau fell and house and chapel along with them.
But Marianne had no eyes for the three surviving towers, mirrored so prettily in the shimmering waters of the lake, nor for the fair hills cradling the town, nor even for the country folk in their becoming, picturesque costumes who crowded curiously round the elegant berline with its steaming horses.
She was accommodated in the Pavilion Sévigné, in the room which had been that of the irresistible marquise, but neither Agathe's care nor the respectful and benevolent welcome accorded her by the proprietor of the establishment could rouse Marianne from the black mood into which she had allowed herself to sink. There was only one thing she wanted, and that was to sleep, to sleep for as long as humanly possible, until someone came to her with news of Jason. It was no use to talk to her of the charms of the countryside or of anything else: she was deaf, dumb and blind to everything around her. She simply waited.
A fortnight passed in this way. It was a strange period because it was one which in after days disappeared altogether from Marianne's memory, so intense was her determination to withdraw from life, to make one moment so like another that they would blend into a single unvarying stream. No one was admitted to her presence and the physicians of the place especially were hard put to it to know what to make of this strange visitor.
The spell was broken by the arrival of Talleyrand, which brought a new spate of activity to the little town and an unexpected annoyance to Marianne. She had been expecting the prince to bring with him only a small suite, consisting perhaps of a secretary and his valet, Courtiade. However, when the house next door began filling up with large numbers of people, she was obliged to admit that she and Talleyrand held widely differing ideas on the subject of what constituted a suitably princely retinue. Whereas the Princess Sant' Anna was content with her maid and her coachman, the Prince of Benevento brought with him an army of indoor and outdoor servants, his cook, his secretaries, his adopted daughter Charlotte with her tutor, Monsieur Fercoc, as short-sighted as ever, his brother Boson, ten years his junior but deaf as a post, and lastly his wife. From time to time, also, there were guests in addition.
It was the princess's arrival which gave Marianne the greatest astonishment. Although at the Hôtel Matignon, Talleyrand endeavoured to be as little as possible in his wife's company, and although with the arrival of fine weather he generally packed her off to rusticate in her own little château at Pont-de-Seine, in which he himself never set foot, greatly preferring the society of the Duchess of Courland and the pleasures of her summer residence at Saint-Germain, he regularly, without fail, brought his wife to Bourbon.
She was to learn that this was a tradition instituted by Talleyrand in the belief that the least he could do was to spend three weeks in the summer in the by no means exclusive company of his wife. Marianne was touched, also, by the welcome she received from her one-time employer, who kissed her warmly as soon as she set eyes on her and showed a genuine delight in seeing her again.
'I have heard of your troubles, child,' she told her, 'and I want to assure you that you have my full sympathy and support.'
'You are much too good, Princess, and this is not the first time I have had cause to know it. It is a great comfort to know that one has friends.'
'In this hole, of all places,' the princess agreed with a sigh. 'It is enough to make one die of boredom, but the prince insists that these three weeks do an immense amount of good to the whole household. Ah, when shall we be able to return to our summers at Valençay!' The last words were uttered in an undertone, to keep them from her husband's ears.
Residence at Valençay had in fact been strictly forbidden ever since the chateau and the romantic setting, having been made the enforced home of the Infants of Spain, had encouraged an idyllic affair between the mistress of the house and the good-looking Duke of San Carlos. Matters might have gone no further had Napoleon not seen fit to advise Talleyrand personally of his misfortune, and in terms of such coarseness that they had provided a gold mine for unkind tongues. Talleyrand had been obliged to act and the poor princess was inconsolable at the loss of her private paradise.