A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [61]
While he was overseas, his sister, Annabelle, stayed at home where she would remain for life, keeping house (now that both her mother and the maid were gone) for her father, and occasionally painting burning schooners or schooners smashed to kindling on shores that bore no resemblance to those of the Great Lakes. And yet it was not entirely unthinkable that the ships she was surrounded by would meet their end on the rocks at the base of foreign cliffs. Often, after they were launched at the quays of the island, and if they were not to be used for the timber trade, they set sail for the wider world, travelling sometimes as far as Australia or Ceylon, carrying an unimaginable variety of objects in their hold, as if at that time it was deemed necessary to displace all the objects of the known world.
Branwell undoubtedly took up with several women in Paris—it would have been expected that this would be the case—in an attempt to forget about the hired girl altogether. Hers was a different story, her story and the story of their child.
Branwell, after a long night in Paris, perhaps a night of debauchery, had risen one day at noon and had decided to do penance by investigating the museums that would augment his scant knowledge of French history. He had already spent as much time as was required of any self-respecting art student in the Louvre and in the various churches and cathedrals famous for their art. Now he wanted war, he wanted Napoleon and his tomb, he wanted Les Invalides and the Musée de L’Armée. So, after his footsteps had echoed in the Pantheon, he entered the cool halls of Les Invalides with its rotting battle standards and its ancient swords and cumbersome suits of armour. He gazed for a while, no doubt, at Napoleon’s assorted costumes, and with a sort of grisly fascination at the great man’s two deathbeds. (It has been rumoured that two camp cots were required during the emperor’s demise as he moved, albeit with great difficulty and in great pain, back and forth from one to the other.) Eventually, somewhat bored and wandering aimlessly past the detritus of battle after battle, Branwell, upon climbing to the third floor, came to a low wooden door with the words Défense d’entrer written on it, and the early recklessness, which later disappeared completely from his personality, caused him without hesitation to walk through the forbidden portal and up a flight of poorly lit narrow stairs.
Les Invalides is a large, imposing building, festooned with heraldic carving, originally built to house mutilated soldiers from a never-ending series of wars. Branwell, evidently well aware of this, soon found himself in the vast dark attic of what he would in upcoming days describe in his journal as the architecture of misery, architecture built to house war and wounds and illness, a museum of distress. Shining through the otherwise smoke-coloured air were the silver discs of the oeil-de-boeuf windows that, upon approaching the building, he had admired from the outside. Gradually as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light he began to discern lumpy, abstract shapes on pedestals placed seemingly at random throughout the huge room. When he drew closer he could see that the shapes were tiny papier mâché towns and villages, stone walls in good repair, drawbridges pulled firmly up, now evenly coated with several centuries of dust. Branwell, without knowing it, had stumbled across the whole of fortified France in miniature, made, according to the few old labels he could decipher, so that Louis the xiv might survey his territory at a glance, a territory fearful of strangers and constantly prepared for strife. This, Branwell commented in his journal, was “the architecture