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"Why don't you tell me what's it like in Paris, Monsieur?" I said, and I realized right away that it sounded mocking and rude. "I'm sorry," I said immediately. "I would really like to know. Did you go to the university? Did you really study with Mozart? What do people in Paris do? What do they talk about? What do they think?"
He laughed softly at the barrage of questions. I had to laugh myself. I signaled for another glass and pushed the bottle towards him.
"Tell me," I said, "did you go to the theaters in Paris? Did you see the Comedie-Francaise?"
"Many times," he answered a little dismissively. "But listen, the diligence will be coming in any minute. There'll be too much noise. Allow me the honor of providing your supper in a private room upstairs. I should so like to do it -- "
And before I could make a gentlemanly protest, he was ordering everything. We were shown up to a crude but comfortable little chamber.
I was almost never in small wooden rooms, and I loved it immediately. The table was laid for the meal that would come later on, the fire was truly warming the place, unlike the roaring blazes in our castle, and the thick glass of the window was clean enough to see the blue winter sky over the snow-covered mountains.
"Now, I shall tell you everything you want to know about Paris," he said agreeably, waiting for me to sit first. "Yes, I did go to the university. " He made a little sneer as if it had all been contemptible. "And I did study with Mozart, who would have told me I was hopeless if he hadn't needed pupils. Now where do you want me to begin? The stench of the city, or the infernal noise of it? The hungry crowds that surround you everywhere? The thieves in every alley ready to cut your throat?"
I waved all that away. His smile was very different from his tone, his manner open and appealing.
"A really big Paris theater. . . " I said. "Describe it to me . . . what is it like?"
I think we stayed in that room for four solid hours and all we did was drink and talk.
He drew plans of the theaters on the tabletop with a wet finger, described the plays he had seen, the famous actors, the little houses of the boulevards. Soon he was describing all of Paris and he'd forgotten to be cynical, my curiosity firing him as he talked of the Ile de la Cite, and the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne, the Louvre.
We went on to more abstract things, how the newspapers reported events, how his student cronies gathered in cafes to argue. He told me men were restless and out of love with the monarchy. That they wanted a change in government and wouldn't sit still for very long. He told me about the philosophers, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau.
I couldn't understand everything he said. But in rapid, sometimes sarcastic speech he gave me a marvelously complete picture of what was going on.
Of course, it didn't surprise me to hear that educated people didn't believe in God, that they were infinitely more interested in science, that the aristocracy was much in ill favor, and so was the Church. These were times of reason, not superstition, and the more he talked the more I understood.
Soon he was outlining the Encyclopedie, the great compilation of knowledge supervised by Diderot. And then it was the salons he'd gone to, the drinking bouts, his evenings with actresses. He described the public balls at the Palms Royal, where Marie Antoinette appeared right along with the common people.
"I'll tell you," he said finally, "it all sounds a hell of a lot better in this room than it really is. "
"I don't believe you," I said gently. I didn't want him to stop talking. I wanted it to go on and on.
"It's a secular age, Monsieur," he said, filling our glasses from the new bottle of wine. "Very dangerous. "
"Why dangerous?" I whispered. "An end to superstition? What could be better than that?"
"Spoken like a true eighteenth-century man, Monsieur," he said with a faint melancholy to his smile. "But no one values anything anymore. Fashion is everything. Even atheism is a fashion. "
I had always had a secular mind, but not for any philosophical reason. No one in my family much believed in God or ever had. Of course they said they did, and we went to mass. But this was duty. Real religion had long ago died out in our family, as it had perhaps in the families of thousands of aristocrats. Even at the monastery I had not believed in God. I had believed in the monks around me.
I tried to explain this in simple language that would not give offense to Nicolas, because for his family it was different.
Even his miserable money-grubbing father (whom I secretly admired) was fervently religious.
"But can men live without these beliefs?" Nicolas asked almost sadly. "Can children face the world without them?"
I was beginning to understand why he was so sarcastic and cynical. He had only recently lost that old faith. He was bitter about it.
But no matter how deadening was this sarcasm of his, a great energy poured out of him, an irrepressible passion. And this drew me to him. I think I loved him. Another two glasses of wine and I might say something absolutely ridiculous like that.
"I've always lived without beliefs," I said.
"Yes. I know," he answered. "Do you remember the story of the witches? The time you cried at the witches' place?"
"Cried over the witches?" I looked at him blankly for a moment. But it stirred something painful, something humiliating. Too many of my memories had that quality. And now I had to remember crying over witches. "I don't remember," I said.
"We were little boys. And the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the blackened ground. "
