Chapter 5 #2
Despite the revolution, Paris still had the best schools.
There was even a place for Anne Saint-Clair.
Her family’s pantomime was not sufficient to communicate why they were sending her away.
When Marguerite and her grandson left Anne at the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes, Marguerite was relieved, the girl was terrified, and René was as miserable as if he’d betrayed her.
In a flurry of panic, Marguerite embarked on the quest that had truly brought her back to France: for the copy of their parish register from Saint-Domingue.
The record of her grandson’s Baptism would note his mother’s color and status.
Marguerite saw them in her head, those cold terrible words that would change everything:
mulatresse
quarteron
esclaves
She must find that page and destroy it. She would tear it into pieces and devour it if she had to.
The fawning little Priest apologized, but the volume covering 1789 was missing entirely. Perhaps it had been misplaced during the revolution, or perhaps the ship carrying it to France had sunk. Sans doute, the original in Le Cap had been lost one of the times the city burned.
The missing register meant she had no proof of her grandson’s valid Baptism. So René was baptized again conditionally just before his Confirmation, his mother’s name now officially recorded as Maria Dolores, deceased. Libre was not considered necessary. Of course she had been free.
René had studied his catechism without enthusiasm, though he spent nearly as much time at Anne’s school as his own. He learned all the signs and wrote her fretful parents of her progress. Before he began his doctorate, by flapping his hands at her, René asked Anne to marry him.
Her own teachers—the ones who could hear at least—worried she could not understand what he meant.
Anne’s body might be seventeen, but her mind would always be a child’s; to make her a wife, a mother, when she could not truly give her consent…
There were reasons the courts usually forbade such unnatural unions.
Marguerite herself was appalled. Why would someone so full of promise chain himself for life to a savage, as the Institute’s own director had called his charges? Did her grandson suspect what ran in his veins? Did he think no one else would have him? Or was love simply deaf as well as blind?
When Marguerite demanded an explanation, that was René’s answer: “I love her, grand-mère.”
“You pity her,” Marguerite insisted.
“No, grand-mère.” Instead of the lechery of his mother’s race, the boy had inherited Matthieu’s inexplicable devotion to a woman unworthy of him. Marguerite could not let it destroy them both.
A dozen times she began a letter to Anne’s parents, then threw it in the fire.
Gérard and Jeanne Saint-Clair prided themselves on being the kindest master and mistress in Christendom; but they would never let their daughter marry a negro, Marguerite knew—even if she was an idiot.
Marguerite could put an end to this engagement at once.
Yet in their fury at her deception, whom else might the Saint-Clairs tell?
A part of Marguerite hoped her grandson would never marry.
As much as she wanted great-grandchildren, she also dreaded them.
What if René’s African blood showed in his offspring even more strongly than in himself?
She’d read that could happen. Marguerite could only cling to the theory that mulattos always became sterile by the third generation.
So her grandson obtained the Saint-Clairs’ blessing, found an attorney to argue his case, and married Anne.
They mixed their blood with indecent alacrity.
Their firstborn was premature, frightfully small, and too dark for Marguerite’s liking—all signs of degeneracy.
But René and Anne would not let Joseph out of their sight; they were determined to keep him.
The idiot’s one attribute was her color, and she’d failed to impart it.
At least Joseph was a little lighter than his father and responsive to sound.
His sister Catherine was not much of an improvement.
She was born during the Russian occupation of Paris, but named for the fourteenth-century Italian saint, not the Tsar’s grandmother.
Finally Europe settled into peace and René completed his medical studies.
He decided to return to Charleston. France was already overflowing with doctors, he said, and Anne wanted to be near her family.
Marguerite tried to dissuade her grandson, but in the end, she could only follow.
In France itself, there were no slaves, and so few coloreds they were more a curiosity than a concern.
In South Carolina, René’s position and his children’s futures would be far more precarious.
So surely his choice of residence proved that her grandson did not know of his black blood, and that was the important thing.
Her own children had never known they were illegitimate, so the truth could not harm them.
If René thought himself white, if he acted white, others would take him for white.
At least in Charleston, her grandson would escape the influence of his liberal student friends. But Marguerite feared the damage had already been done—that René would remain unorthodox for life.
As soon as they left France, that missing parish register began to haunt her. What if it were not at the bottom of the ocean? What if it had simply fallen into some dusty corner of the archives? What if someone found it? Across the Atlantic, she could do nothing to ensure its destruction.
Across the Atlantic, they would be safer from its secrets.