Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [159]
When we got in the house, she put her arms around me and cried and said she was sorry for being so crazy. She said I was her iron band all along, didn’t I know that?
We share a flat now, she and I, a two-bedroom in Belleville. She’s getting better. She has her bad days but the iron bands are holding. She’s painting again—still lifes, no more portraits. Sometimes the new paintings have references to Truman in them, like a penknife that belonged to him, or a feather he once found, or his key—the one I used to wear around my neck. I don’t wear it anymore. I keep it in a box on our mantel and take it out to look at it every once in a while. Truman is part of the picture now, not the whole picture anymore. There’s room for other things in my mother’s life again. There’s room for me. Which is nice. Because I need her now. I’m really busy.
I graduated from St. Anselm’s—much to everyone’s surprise. Because of my thesis. Because of the premise—the whole musical DNA thing—and especially because of the ending, where I said that the composer Amadé Malherbeau was really Charles-Antoine, Comte d’Auvergne, and that his groundbreaking use of minor chords and dissonance came about because of the grief he felt over the death of his parents, the former Comte and Comtesse d’Auvergne, at the hands of the revolutionaries.
I also suggested that his name for the Concerto in A Minor—the Fireworks Concerto—was inspired by the selfless acts of a young woman named Alexandrine Paradis, who set off fireworks over Paris in the last days of the Revolution, and who’d left behind a diary.
I could hardly say it was because I let him listen to Zeppelin on my iPod.
My thesis, Alex’s diary—they both caused a huge flap. Before I even turned it in, I’d been interviewed about it by Le Monde, Die Zeit, the Guardian, and a lot of other international papers. The New York Times did a piece with this headline: Teenage Sleuth Solves Malherbeau Musical Mystery. The article was nice but the headline was kind of cringey. I mean, Vijay’s still calling me Nancy Douche.
This is how it happened. When Virgil brought me home in the wee hours, after a visit to a Paris emergency room, I told my father and G and Lili, who were all a bit freaked out, that I’d tripped and fallen by the Eiffel Tower. The next day, after I’d slept and recovered a bit, I gave G the diary. I showed him the secret compartment in the guitar case, and the miniature of Louis-Charles. And I told him about the roses in Amadé Malherbeau’s portrait, and how similar they were to the rose on the Auvergne coat of arms. I told him I thought Amadé Malherbeau might be Charles-Antoine d’Auvergne.
G was of course totally blown away. He read the diary immediately. He went to Amadé’s old house to look at the portrait. He took photos of it and compared them to the coat of arms. A few days later, I found myself driving to Auvergne with him and knocking on the door of the old château. We introduced ourselves to the elderly woman who opened it and G explained that we were trying to establish a connection between the last Comte d’Auvergne and the composer Amadé Malherbeau and were wondering if the château still contained any personal effects of the doomed comte and comtesse.
The woman, Madame Giscard, invited us in. She told us that an ancestor of hers had bought the château in 1814 from the Jacobin official who’d acquired it during the Revolution. She said that heating and plumbing had been installed in the late nineteenth century but that little else had been changed. She then brought us into the great hall and showed us several portraits that had been hanging there for as long as she could remember. G immediately recognized some of the people in the paintings, like Louis XIV and Napoléon Bonaparte.
While G checked out the paintings on one side of the hall, I looked on the other. I saw lots of faces and places I didn’t know, and then, to the right of a huge