"You're coming out with us on Sunday, right?" Courfeyrac asked, his hand still on the open door to Combeferre's flat.
After what had been a reasonably productive discussion of how to continue grooming the fan painter, this was an odd but not out-of-character manner of bidding a man good evening. Nadal and Prouvaire had already disappeared into the night.
"Sunday?"
"Montmorency. Cherry Sunday," Courfeyrac reminded him. "Bring Nina. I think we can squeeze eight of us in the carriage, and I'm holding you two places."
"I have rounds at the hospital, and her sister will never approve. You'll be more comfortable without me."
"Nonsense," Faniel said. "I see medical students taking a country holiday all the time."
"Medical students perhaps, but not externs."
"Not interns," he corrected. "I'll accept the excuse next year, but not now. You know damned well Nina will say yes, sister or no."
The idea was certainly sweet, and Combeferre knew Faniel was right: he cared more than Nina did what her sister thought of the liaison. "Who is 'we'?"
"The three of us and Prouvaire," Courfeyrac replied. "And the girls, of course. I've hired a britzka. Bahorel is probably going to run a hired Tilbury into a ditch, and I'd rather the day not be spoiled. There's only one Cherry Sunday a year."
"And he intends to spend it gorging himself," Faniel ragged, to Courfeyrac's knowing laughter.
"I'll consider it," Combeferre hedged. The others studied law at their own pace; they could leave behind their responsibilities for a day in the country. "Give Nadal my place if I cannot go."
"His family remittance hasn't come in, so he's staying in town until he has cash in hand. So I'm taking this as a 'yes' from you." Courfeyrac grinned. "I'll pick you both up at 8."
"You know you can't say 'no' to him."
"No one can," Combeferre agreed. "Very well, but only if Nina says 'yes'."
Nina was thrilled to say "yes". "Montmorency, really?" Her dark eyes were huge with excitement. "I've never been before. You are such a dear!" She kissed him in gratitude.
"What of your sister?"
A sharp exhalation showed precisely what she cared for her sister's opinion. "It is not my affair if she does not wish to have some fun in Paris. I'm too old now to be sent home in disgrace."
"Your reputation -"
She cut him off. "Is mine, not yours. I know what I do, and I want to go to Montmorency."
"Courfeyrac will come for us at eight."
"So I can stay the night with you? Really?" He had met her every week at various dance halls since January, but he had not dared kiss her until March. He had not shared her bed until the coronation, when he felt so helpless against the press of government and police and army that he had taken consolation in the one action he was only half permitted. Nina had been aching for more than just kisses; her sister had been less approving of his actions. Since she still lived with her sister, refusing his offer to help pay the rent on a place of her own, she had not stayed the night again. Now Combeferre wondered if perhaps this was Courfeyrac's plan all along and whether he should curse the boy or thank him.
For how could the pastoral pleasures of Cherry Sunday, or the evening ball, compared to the night when Nina was waiting for him after rounds? Some men took a temporary wife, as it were: brought a girl to live with them, pooled the funds from his parents and her work, and then left her after their three or four years in the capital were done. Combeferre did not understand those men. It seemed so cruel to take so much of a girl's life and care without intending to make their life permanent. And would not the magic of a night like this be lost if it were repeated every night? They could so easily grow tired of each other and become cruel in their boredom. He had seen the petty arguments flare out from behind closed doors, spilling into cafés and streets and hallways. For now, it was so much sweeter that Nina wish to remain independent of him yet take such joy in his presence. Her affection was entirely for him, not for the comparative fortune he brought her.
In the morning, Courfeyrac was late, as they might have expected, but the day had dawned gloriously and when he blamed the crowd at the livery, no one could blame him for the ten minutes they had spent on the street waiting for the smaller than expected britzka. "Forward or backward, my friends?" he asked, Jeannie, his buxom girl, settled into the rear seat generally reserved for the servants. They would not be part of the crush to put six upon seats constructed for four.
Combeferre left the choice to Nina, who after much thought, elected the rear-facing seat. "It is not fair to take the best seats before the others have a chance," she murmured to him as they passed slowly through the narrow streets to pick up Faniel and Prouvaire. She was not naturally selfless, but she was far from greedy, and Combeferre knew he had to rescue the party in fear Prouvaire's girl would also try to be a martyr to the others' fun. It seemed impossible that Prouvaire could have a girl unlike himself, sweet and self-sacrificing.
Prouvaire and Faniel, with their women, were waiting together near the Luxembourg. "Let the girls take the forward-facing seat for themselves," Combeferre suggested. "They deserve the best view."
"Aren't you a gallant one?" Marion teased. She had taken up with Faniel earlier that spring, so she and Nina and Jeannie were great friends by now. Prouvaire's girl, however, was a stranger to the entire company. She was taller than he was, blonde, of a sort of fleshy softness like a Greek marble. Combeferre had expected her to be more physically like her lover, small and thin, perhaps a bit consumptive in appearance, with large eyes in a pale face. Instead, she looked more like the girls Bahorel favoured. "Have you met Odette?" Marion asked. "Sit between us, love. It's best to be in the middle of everything."
Nina gave Combeferre's hand a tight squeeze in thanks as she shifted to the other side, the three girls nearly on top of one another.
"One of us should go on the box with the driver," Faniel suggested, looking at how tightly the girls fit.
"I'll go. My legs will be in the way otherwise," Combeferre suggested. He was quite the tallest of the company, though he had the most experience of keep himself as small as possible when traveling.
"Don't be a martyr," Courfeyrac ordered him. "Everyone in. It isn't an outing if you can't play with your girl all the way there and back."
"Sit down," Prouvaire told him. "We'll be fine. It's only four and a half leagues."
Four and a half leagues north in heavy traffic under the hot sun in a brilliant blue sky, for everyone was out for Cherry Sunday. The celebrated fruit was perfectly ripe for only one week in the year, a brief harvest of rubies that attracted everyone in the Paris basin who could afford the journey to Montmorency and the day of country pleasures it promised. To be sure, one could spend Cherry Sunday very cheaply, walking out from Paris and partaking only of the most frugal picnic, ignoring the ball and the inns and even the cherries entirely. But what was the point of Cherry Sunday without cherries? One simply had to hire a vehicle and lunch at one of the well-known taverns and gorge oneself on cherries just plucked from the trees and dance oneself to exhaustion at the Hermitage. It was possible some adventurous girls took student lovers just for the few months necessary for those young men to finance a few days in the country, for they would never see these pleasure grounds on their own small earnings. Montmorency cherries were a luxury beyond a grisette's purse.
Combeferre admitted that Courfeyrac and Prouvaire had been right; it would have been only marginally more comfortable for the company had he joined the driver on the box, but it would have greatly diminished Nina's and his enjoyment in the trip. Courfeyrac and Jeannie had quite the best seats, for they spent half their time necking and the rest joining in the conversation a beat behind the rest. Prouvaire said little, as usual – he did not have Courfeyrac's or Faniel's gift for small talk – but he and Odette kept up a furious game of footsie whilst the girls attempted to draw out the newcomer.
Contrary to her solid appearance, Odette was quite as reticent, if not quite as dreamy, as Combeferre had expected after all. She was an inheritance from Bahorel, in a way – Prouvaire had rescued her from an overzealous advance Bahorel made at a dance hall after Roselle had dropped him. Her looks attracted the gallants, but Prouvaire was a true gentleman. She blushed along with him at every bit of praise, whether given by the men or the women.
The brief stop at Saint-Denis was accompanied by Jeannie standing on the seat and exclaiming, "Look at all the carriages! We're at the front of the pack, dears!" This outburst prompted Marion to follow her lead while Nina giggled and Odette reddened again. Only the chastisement of their coachman got them to resume their seats.
Combeferre limited himself to only a few comments to Nina about the antiquity of the basilica, the various stages of construction, the statues removed during the Revolution that he himself had seen in the Museum of French Monuments. Prouvaire deliberately looked away, as he always did when real, rather than theoretical, religion was mentioned, but Odette was polite enough to claim herself impressed with his erudition. Nina was always impressed and interested in every fact that left his mouth, and what good was a trip outside Paris if one could not show off a bit for a pretty girl who practically begged one to show off?
They were, indeed, among the early arrivals to an already crowded village. Thousands would descend that day, and they were among the first few hundred. Hired cabriolets were turning back to Paris to pick up new passengers, and a handful of donkeys were still available for hire. Courfeyrac, stronger than he looked, lifted Jeannie down to the street. Marion refused Faniel's hand and jumped down after her. Nina and Odette, more ladylike or less daring, waited for their men to hand them down properly. They were immediately accosted by one of the ass-drovers. "Donkeys, messieurs? Donkeys to the orchards?"
Nina took one look at the beasts and shook her head. "I would rather walk." The rest bargained a price to hire six of the animals.
"You're walking all the way to the Hermitage?" Courfeyrac asked incredulously.
"A true pilgrimage is done on foot," Combeferre reminded him.
"The girls are on holiday, not a pilgrimage."
"And you heard Nina. She would rather walk."
"Two o'clock at the Cheval-Blanc," Courfeyrac reminded him. "Or you shan't be fed anything but cherries."
"We shall see you then," Nina agreed. She took Combeferre's hand and led him off down a narrow road through chestnut trees in bloom.
He did not mind the quick parting, but he had to speak up. "I don't think this is the right direction."
"I don't care. I just wanted to get you alone. We can take our time."
"I'm sorry. Courfeyrac is – well -"
"M. Courfeyrac is himself. He is always himself.I like him – I like all your friends – but sometimes they run over you and M. Prouvaire, and I wanted to come to Montmorency with you."
"I fear my mother is right, that I am too gloomy of spirit for the ordinary course of pleasure."
"You are not gloomy at all, much less too gloomy for me to take pleasure in your company. You are serious, and that is what I like best in a man. M. Courfeyrac is too light for everyday wear. Now tell me about the trees, or whatever it is that smells so sweet, then you may tell me about M. Rousseau to whom you go in pilgrimage on foot."
The trees were Spanish chestnuts; the forest one of the places the Prussian army had passed through en route to their occupation of Paris. Rousseau had retired to the great forest for quiet so he might write, and it was here in Montmorency that he had written his greatest works, the ones that still might change the world. Perhaps Courfeyrac would not explain to Jeannie in any great detail the importance of a pilgrimage to Rousseau's Hermitage, but Combeferre could not dream of treating a woman, even a grisette, so lightly.
They were joined on the narrow forest paths by a large number of strangers, but never in such profusion that the paths grew crowded. Occasionally they passed foreign holidaymakers, generally English complaining in their native tongue. Combeferre translated the most interesting for Nina – "this is what the Papists do of a Sunday? How could you talk me into committing such boring heresy?" was perhaps the best – and they stifled their laughter. "What could they possibly think one does of a Sunday?" she asked him after they had passed well out of earshot of that disappointed middle-aged couple.
"I've not been to England, but I believe they spend the day at church and in other religious pursuits. They think us poor benighted heathens, and I suppose they must expect something more debauched than a picnic under the chestnuts."
"That is their own fault. They would think themselves far more native and debauched if they had merely left the glasses at home."
"I don't think the English are capable of drinking anything directly from a bottle."
The path before the Hermitage was crowded with Sunday pilgrims, young men with confused or amused women in tow, and at the sight of lace curtains fluttering in one of the side windows, Combeferre limited himself to a brief genuflection.
"Does someone still live there?" Nina asked in concern as they hurried away.
"It seems so. I thought it was empty since Grétry's death. That poor tenant must have no peace at all on what should be a day of rest. It does conclude my business all the sooner, that the rest of the day may be entirely devoted to you."
They walked far out among the fields, the rye and wheat and oats ripening in different shades of green and yellow according to their time of planting, the vineyards in full leaf, the blackcurrant shrubs full of green fruits, as they sought out the less picked-over orchards. Out here, at least, their coin might rent them a share in a tree with only two or three other strange couples, the cherries glowing in the sunlight as brilliantly red as if they were made of coloured glass. The designers of every Gothic cathedral in the country could only hope to make their windows as vibrantly crimson as the cherries of Montmorency.
"I've never seen anything so beautiful," Nina confessed, staring up in awe at the fruit above her head.
"Nor have I," one of the other women chipped in. "We grew common cherries back home, so I never understood the fuss about coming out here. These aren't common cherries." Nor were they the sour griottes but something in between. Warm from the sun, they burst in the mouth with the acid of a lemon and the tannic dryness of a good red wine.
One of the men had climbed into the tree and was tossing down fruit to the women. It was hard to see his face, but he was wearing fine riding boots. "Newcomers? Come here, doll, I'll pick for you, too. I pick for all the ladies. Catch – just like a kiss."
Nina blushed at the final statement, it having come after he had dropped a cherry she could not help reaching to catch. "Thank you, monsieur, but I think we shall do well enough on our own."
"Suit yourselves. Come, ladies, who's for another?"
Combeferre bent down a rather high branch behind the strange gentleman so they might strip it for themselves. "Why must he make a fool of women he does not know?" he complained quietly to Nina.
"He is no worse than M. Courfeyrac, I think. The harm is in taking offense before we know if it is meant."
"And Courfeyrac is almost certainly up a tree himself somewhere, eating one cherry for each he throws down to his followers. What do you think of Mlle Odette?"
"I don't know yet. Marion rather keeps herself the centre of attention, doesn't she?"
"Is she what you expected?"
"No, but yes. Maybe. Perhaps tonight I may speak to her more. Are you afraid she is taking advantage of M. Prouvaire?"
"Not entirely. I don't know if she has me unsettled or if my own failing has me unsettled. Her appearance is surprising."
"I agree. A girl does not usually like to be taller than her man, but she is not so much taller, and perhaps she is a better person for making that choice. She seems rather refined, don't you think? Ladylike. I hope Jeannie does not scandalize her too much. But perhaps she has just been quiet, since M. Prouvaire does not talk much. We shall have to see."
By the time they had eaten their way through the branch, the man with the riding boots came down from his tree with a thud. "Hello!" he greeted them, his flushed face finally visible. "No hard feelings, mademoiselle, monsieur. She's in fine hands, I can see." He was perhaps a bit drunk, for his companions snickered at him. He was a bit too friendly, but sportingly so.
"No hard feelings, monsieur," Combeferre agreed. "A good day to you all."
"You see, there is nothing wrong. All the same, I am glad M. Courfeyrac is not here. Our group is large enough, I think, without adding them to it." It was to be hoped that Jeannie and Faniel would keep Courfeyrac in line, otherwise dinner would dissolve into a banquet for twenty, all of them Courfeyrac's new bosom friends.
They met up with Prouvaire and Odette on the walk back to the village, the latter pair leading their donkeys and walking hand in hand, looking very sweet indeed. "The donkeys were not a success?" Combeferre asked.
Prouvaire pulled a face. "These prefer to be led. You had the far better idea, for we have walked all the same. I don't think we rented them from the man who owns them."
"One always hears of the donkeys, and now I may say I have done it," Odette said agreeably. "The beasts are very gentle and no one was thrown; they merely do not walk unless there is someone in front of them."
"May I help you back up?" Combeferre offered. "We'll lead you into town."
Thus the ladies came riding in, led by their men, to meet Courfeyrac and Faniel already waiting at the Cheval Blanc, luckily alone with their girls. "There you are! Waiter! Now can we have a table?" Courfeyrac cried.
Prouvaire was thoroughly animated once the order had been placed and talk turned to the pilgrimage. "The appropriate house is the one in town," he argued. "He wrote Emile and the Social Contract here in town, not in the country house."
"But it is there that those ideas were formed; only the work of writing was done here. The great work, the conception of ideas, that is what we must celebrate," Faniel explained.
"Yet what do ideas matter if they are never set down? It is both the conception and the creation we must celebrate." If by Combeferre's tone an observer thought the matter had been settled, that observer was an utter stranger to the group. In their own minds, they were no longer three law students and a medical student: they were would be lawyers, a philosopher, and a poet. They argued on, the girls whispering together their own conversations of a very different social contract, until the food was gone and they were thrown out so another gay party might take the table.
They retreated to the forest, bottles of wine in hand this time, to be as debauched as the English must have expected. "Tell them about the English couple we saw," Nina begged Combeferre. He complied, with much laughter from Courfeyrac.
"Were they old and fat?"
"Middle aged and fat," Combeferre corrected. "If the man had been on the Continent in the war, I daresay it was as chief of supply than as a combatant proper. He looked more like a ship's master than anything else, though without the sea legs."
"To the English!" Courfeyrac toasted. "May we learn all the pleasure they have to teach us, especially on a Sunday."
When bottles were empty, they wandered two by two to the other Hermitage, the cabaret in the forest where a glade had been converted to a grassy dance floor. There, under the baton of a real conductor, a fine orchestra played for the dancers who could afford tokens. They danced and drank champagne under the boughs of chestnut trees while those who could not stay or feared to take the last miles in darkness left town. It was only at Faniel's insistence that they left sometime after eight.
"It's still light," Prouvaire complained.
"For now."
"The road is clear and well-known,"Combeferre tried to tell him. Ordinarily, he might have been more susceptible to reason, but the holiday had gone to his head the moment he was sitting with Nina in the britzka. Morning rounds were entirely forgotten in this day devoted to pleasure.
"We've lost most of the traffic as it is, so now is the perfect time to leave."
"What's the matter?" Courfeyrac asked, his arms around Jeannie. Nina had pulled them off the dance floor.
"We're leaving," Faniel told him.
"What happened?"
"Nothing happened. But it's after eight o'clock. Do you want to take the whole trip in the dark?"
"Very well," he relented grudgingly.
Prouvaire insisted that he and Odette would join the driver on the box. "Are you sure?" Marion asked. "It's not very comfortable."
"Thank you, truly, but we know what we are doing," Odette told her. Indeed, it was the best way they might hold hands and whisper to each other all the way home whilst sitting as far away from where Courfeyrac and Jeannie were pawing each other in the servants' seat.
It was an even lovelier drive back under the setting sun than under the bright morning sky. Prouvaire and Odette's move to the box left the seats to the other couples, and Combeferre and Nina rode backwards, wrapped in each other and paying little mind to Faniel and Marion. "May I stay tonight, too?" Nina asked. "I'll go back first thing in the morning."
"I can think of nothing I want more," Combeferre confessed, suddenly feeling foolish for the admission. He had wasted a day, technically, yet all he wanted was to extend it to the night, to make love to her as he had not dared do under the chestnuts where anyone might pass by at any minute. But he was gratified that Nina was of the same mind, that ordinary life and its more important dictates could be put off a few more hours.
When they woke blearily the next morning, naked in Combeferre's bed, the new day felt grey though it dawned as bright as Sunday morning. Nothing in the city could glow as passionately bright as the cherries of Montmorency.