Peter Carey: Parrot and Olivier in America

She fairly sprang.

If the footman fell over she did not notice for she was-as the servant scurried blushing from the room-bowing to a visitor. That is, my mother, she whose status required her to give no more than a polite curtsy to anyone, bowed deeply to a man whose arm had been chopped off. Later I thought that bowing was surely some private reference, a play, a quote, a joke: Moliere?

The visitor was Marie-Jean de Villiers, ecuyer, Marquis de Tilbot, sometimes known as the Hero of the Vendee, although I seldom heard him called anything but Monsieur. Whether this was the fruit of modesty or pride I do not know. He was big and ruddy as a side of beef, a noble warrior who had led the peasants of Calvados and Orne against the Revolution. If only, my mother later said, there had been one hundred Monsieurs.

In the Gold Room, Tilbot spoke very quietly to my mother. He had brought a "little something," a folio of engravings of exotic species, such as were popular in the lost libraries of the ancien regime. I suppose he planned to sell it to her, but I did not know that then. They both examined the item, sheet by sheet, exclaiming with delight at the bizarre botany of Australia. As to what they said to each other, I heard nothing, but I felt the air shiver and knew this horrid one-armed soldier was about to steal my father's birthday from us.

That dinner was to be a grand affair of fricasseed chickens, and minced partridges, and ember-cooked pies and chickens with truffles, and so it was, but the feast was now laid waste, not by the awful thunderstorm, but by the visitor who talked too much in a way quite clearly intended to hide the truth from a child. When the songs had been sung, Bebe excused himself and I understood he was angry. My father? He became exceedingly formal and his skin took on a shining waxy sheen as if he were a clever copy of himself. My mother twice remarked on the amounts of paperwork awaiting him and complained, as if in sympathy, that no one in Paris thought sufficiently to honor him with a copyist or secretary. Nothing was said of the engravings.

I was an excitable child, now in a distressed condition. When my father spoke, as he was often wont to do, of the young peasants he was marrying off to save their lives, Monsieur smiled directly at my mother. What this meant I did not know, but if I had been my father I would have taken the visitor's empty sleeve and slapped his face with it. I wished it so violently that my lungs rebelled against me and I was taken off to receive my final gift-not the crystallized fruit, but Odile and her leeches, and sheet lightning all that August night.

The next incident I recall was on a morning some months after the departure of M. de Tilbot. I had discovered my mother in her quarters.

"Where is Celeste?" I named her maid.

My mother did not answer. She was filling a traveling trunk with white cockades. She set her head to one side, smiling, just so. I thought, Good grief, what is the matter? Is she happy?

"Maman, what has happened?"

I sat quietly, prickling inside my scarf which I wore to hide the leech marks. My mother, I saw, was playing the part of servant. Finally she locked her trunk and the real servants were called to take it down.

In later years she would always insist that she could not tell me the truth because I was too frail, but when she locked herself in her boudoir with Celeste she only brought me to a higher pitch.

By the time she emerged I had scratched my arms until they bled, but all this discomfort was forgotten when I saw-she had dressed herself in costume, like a pretentious bourgeois in a play.

She dragged me into her apartments where she squeezed me into what was called a skeleton suit, short red jacket and tight trousers. I wondered why it would have such an awful name.

There then followed a completely unexpected audience with my father. This took place out-of-doors in the midst of all the confusion caused by my mother's imminent departure. He was dressed as a Garmont in the Titian portrait, as a noble of the robe, his gorgeous ancient sword hung at his side occasionally making that small sound like gold coins in a purse. He smelled of talcum powder and raven oil and I apprehended him with a feeling very close to awe. Thus, very formally-Olivier in his skeleton suit, M'sieu l'Comte in all the glory of his rank-we faced each other. It was exceptionally hot and bright although the sky was completely gray.

"Your mother has explained to you?"

"No, Papa."

"King Louis is returning," my father said, clearly in a state of high emotion. "The comtesse will be a Dame du Palais to the queen. I will sit in the Chamber of Peers. You will one day be the Comte de Garmont. I am going to Paris to greet His Majesty," he said, his eyes glistening. "Your mother refuses to remain at home. She will go in her carriage."

How could I continue breathing? I thought, I will not be left behind.

As always when observed by servants, my tender father embraced me stiffly.

"Good man," said he, and swung himself upon his stallion to whose proud body he had restored scabbards, halyards, saddlecloths, all the signs of ancient rank. He galloped away with no more reliable news than that which is always blown along the Paris road, no more educated than the opinions of men with burning faggots in the night. I thought, They will guillotine my papa and then I will kill them in their swarms, God forgive me. Yet I was also very proud to see him leave with no other company to protect him. He set off to Paris where, as everybody now knows, the Russian prisoners and wounded Frenchmen were carried through the gates in carts. Some, half dead, fell beneath the wheels which they stained with blood. Conscripts, called up from the interior, crossed the capital in long files to join the army. In Paris all was still turmoil. That very night, my father would hear artillery trains passing along the outer boulevards. No one could know if the explosions meant victory or defeat.

"From the towers of Notre-Dame you could see the heads of the Russian columns appearing, like the first undulations of a tidal wave on the beach." So wrote Chateaubriand and it is likely true, or most of it.

Paris was in the process of being invaded or liberated, and the cannons split the trees in the Bois.

At the Chateau de Barfleur my mother was brave and frightened, calculating and careless. She had dressed as a bourgeois, as I said before, but then she called for the coach which declared her an aristocrat without apology. She embraced me and whispered I must stay safe with Bebe, but then she was in the kitchen personally packing a hamper, ignoring the cook and maids, whose sulky offers of cold meats and fruit she firmly refused. And this was how I knew I would go to Paris: I saw her choose a series of small and sweet surprises for her only son-crystallized fruits, rose-scented Turkish delight, caprices de noix, those Perigord walnuts, glazed in sugar and coated with bitter cocoa.

I rushed to Bebe and demanded that he come to Paris. I thought, I will be the Comte de Garmont now. I thought, Why will he not obey me?

I ran and clambered into my mother's great Tormentor, leaving Odile and the other servants to follow, crammed like pickled turnips in the coach behind. It was an ordinary day, gray and overcast, very quiet as we escaped our exile. I thought, We are like the cicadas who live so many years entombed beneath the earth.

Then the coach wheels rolled across the courtyard stones and my mother rose up singing and I with her, leaving behind our yellowed skins, our sad bedclothes for the laundry maids.

MY MOTHER'S CARRIAGE was like its patron-heroically resistant to change. That is, no modern suspension could fit it.

I would, on any other occasion, have begged to travel with Odile in the second coach.