'We do not know yet,' Marianne said soberly, 'if she will agree to give evidence against a fellow countryman.'
'If Mademoiselle Adelaide cannot persuade her, then no one can. In any case, we can only try. Another thing is that Lord Cranmere was briefly at Vincennes, when Nicolas Mallerousse arrested him in the Boulevard du Temple. It may be possible to trace him from the prison records.'
'Do you think so? He escaped so easily. He may never have been entered at all.'
'Not entered? When Nicolas Mallerousse handed him over in person? I'll wager he was. And that entry in the register is incontrovertible proof of the connection between Lord Cranmere and your poor friend. If we can get the register examined, then we have a chance of getting first the police and then the court to listen to us. And if necessary we will go to the Emperor. You have been forbidden to seek an audience, my dear, but I have not! And I shall demand an audience, and he will hear me. And then we shall win!'
As he spoke, Arcadius became more and more carried away by the new hope which had risen in him with these two new suggestions, put forward by Marianne and himself. His little bright eyes sparkled and the funny crumpled face which a moment before had been drawn with worry wrinkled into something approaching a smile. To Marianne, his infectious enthusiasm was like a breath of joy and hope. She hugged him warmly, her whole being quite transformed.
'Arcadius! You are a marvel! I knew that as soon as you were here again I should be able to hope and to fight again! Thanks to you, I know now that all is not lost. We may save him yet!'
'May? What is all this may?' retorted Jolival, on whom the effects of the prince's brandy were working to increase his natural enthusiasm. 'You must say that we shall save him!'
'Yes, you are right. We shall save him. At all costs,' Marianne echoed, in a tone of such ferocious determination that Arcadius returned her hug, so delighted was he to find her showing a touch of her old spirit.
That night, for the first time since she had left Paris, Marianne went to bed free from the overriding feeling of hopeless impotence which had haunted her every night, growing sharper and more agonizing as darkness fell. She had recovered her confidence, at least, and she knew that even if she were exiled, far from Paris, she could still act through others and do something to help Jason. The thought was a comforting one.
When Jolival set out again for Paris the next morning, with a readiness which did honour both to his horsemanship and to his powers of endurance, he carried with him, besides a letter to Adelaide from Marianne, all his young friend's renewed hopes. He left behind him a woman who had rediscovered the will to live.
To Marianne, the next few days provided a much-needed period of relief. Trusting in Arcadius and Adelaide to do what was necessary, she allowed herself to be seduced by the charms of the little spa and the hours passed leisurely, marked by the clock in the Quinquengrogne Tower. She even found a certain amount of entertainment in watching Talleyrand's household relax in conditions of greater freedom than those it enjoyed in Paris.
All day long, she could hear little Charlotte laughing and singing. The child seemed to be making it her business to rejuvenate her staid preceptor, Monsieur Fercoc, and was succeeding for once in encouraging him in a regime in which expeditions into the surrounding countryside played a much larger part than Latin and mathematics.
Every morning, Marianne derived a good deal of amusement from watching from her window the prince's departure for the baths. Having first bundled himself up in such an incredible assortment of shawls, blankets, flannel waistcoats and woollies of every description that he resembled nothing so much as a huge and hilarious cocoon, he inserted himself, according to local custom, in a sedan chair with the blinds drawn down. None of this prevented him from dressing and behaving perfectly normally once the various stages of the ritual had been performed, nor was there any indication of a special diet when the whole company sat down to dinner (Marianne took all her meals with her friends) to do justice to the marvels which Carême managed to produce – from a kitchen of such modest resources that it threw him into a permanent state of nerves each summer until he was able to return to the splendidly appointed nether regions of Valençay or the Hôtel Matignon.
There was also the deaf brother, Boson, who paid shy court to Marianne in a manner both archaic and almost wholly incomprehensible, since he was unable to understand more than half of what was said to him. However, his advances were somewhat interrupted owing to the fact that he passed the greater part of his time with his head immersed in water in the hope, apparently, of achieving a cure for his deafness,
The afternoons were passed either out driving with the princess or reading with the prince. They went to Souvigny, the St Denis of the dukes of Bourbon, to admire the abbey church and its tombs, driving through the wooded Bourbonnais landscape of hedgerows and tree-shaded meadows dotted with big, white oxen. The warm, perfect weather showed the rich farmland in the full flush of peaceful beauty and even Madame de Talleyrand's aimless chatter seemed to Marianne sane and restful in this interlude from the dark plots which surrounded her.
With Talleyrand, Marianne read, as he had promised, Madame du Deffand's Letters which the prince enjoyed very much because they reminded him of 'his youth, his first entry into the world and all the people who mattered at the time'. And in his company Marianne found herself plunged to her surprise and delight into the charming, frivolous eighteenth century which had been the setting for her parents' courtship. Often, too, their reading would end in talk and the prince would find pleasure in reviving for his young friend his own recollections of 'the handsomest and most perfectly matched pair' that he had known, but of whom she, their daughter, knew so little. Through his words, which could be strikingly tender and affectionate, Marianne seemed to see her mother, a golden beauty in a white muslin dress, a tall, beribboned cane in her hand, moving about the alleys of the Trianon or seated in an armchair by the fire in her own drawing-room, graciously entertaining the guests who flocked to her house to drink 'English tea' and managing somehow to create an intimate and delightful occasion for as many as fifty people at once. Next, Talleyrand would momentarily bring to life again the idealistic Pierre d'Asselnat, his whole life devoted to his two great loves, the monarchy and his wife. Then it would be the big, military portrait in the rue de Lille which came to life in Marianne's imagination as she listened, dazzled and yet oddly envious.
Oh for a love like that! she thought, hearing her friend talk. To love and be loved like them… and then if need be, to die together as they did amid the blood and horror of the scaffold. But before that, a few years… a few months even, of irreclaimable happiness!
Oh, how readily she could understand her mother's gesture when, seeing her husband taken, she had proudly claimed her right to follow him to his death, rejecting all thoughts of the child she left behind her, in order to live out her love to the end. She herself had thought many times during the long nights through which she had suffered since that terrible night at Passy that she would not outlive Jason. She had pictured a hundred tragic ends to her own, unhappy story, had seen herself breaking from the crowd and casting herself in front of the guns of the firing squad as the command was given to fire or, if he were not given the right to a soldier's death, stabbing herself to the heart at the foot of the scaffold, supposing he were treated like a common criminal. But now that Jolival had given her fresh hope her whole will was directed towards the achievement, against all odds, of that happiness which still seemed so obstinately to elude her. Let her only live with Jason and then let the whole world perish, only so long as they had drunk the cup of happiness together to the last drop.