Chapter 1: The House of Shadows

November 1873, Montfaucon, Burgundy, France

The last of the German infantry finally leave their garrison in Besançon. The French government has finally paid the twenty million in compensation for the disastrous war, and the German army of occupation is now being withdrawn. The humiliating defeat of the French army at Sedan; the ceding of valuable territory; and the social upheaval following the siege of Paris, are too much for old-school aristocrats like Jeanne’s father to bear. He, like many other nobles, longs for a return of the old order. However, despite the continuing efforts of the monarchists inside and outside of the new government, those days aren’t likely to return. The fledgling Third Republic is slowly exerting its authority throughout France, even though unemployment, crime and poverty remain rife.

The war not only disturbed the social order, but the loss of life was horrific. Soldiers who rush towards the imagined glory of war must accept the risk of injury or death on the battlefield. Those left behind have less choice. Many French soldiers were killed, but many more civilians died from hunger, disease, or directly from the sieges and bombardments. Jeanne’s betrothed, Jean-Paul, was one such casualty of the war. A junior officer in the Hussars, he was injured and captured on the battlefield. He later died from his wounds in a Prussian prison camp.

Jean-Paul’s parents used their influence and wealth to have his body returned to them for internment in the family crypt. After two years of bureaucratic delay, Jean-Paul’s body was exhumed and recently returned to his parents home in Besançon. The mortician did his best to present Jean-Paul’s remains in a favourable light, but Jeanne was the only one among his family and friends who could bear to look at his decomposed body. Jeanne’s fortitude in that situation is perhaps due to her late mother’s lessons in nursing the sick and infirm.

Jeanne’s friend Estelle was luckier. Her betrothed returned unharmed from the war and they were married earlier this year. Jeanne wishes she could feel happy for them, but Estelle was her closest friend. Estelle’s departure for Bordeaux with her new husband has left Jeanne with an empty feeling inside her. Jeanne knows that she’s being selfish, but Estelle and Jeanne were particularly close.

Jeanne’s own situation is now precarious. She’s nineteen years of age and she has been of marriageable age for several years. Like Estelle, Jeanne was betrothed at sixteen, which freed her from the endless social gatherings that were little more than bride auctions. Such gatherings were all but stopped while German soldiers occupied Besançon. It was bad enough that the council decreed that a third of the town’s unmarried women were to attend to the needs of those in the German barracks. Such a shameful surrender avoided conflict between the occupiers and the occupied, but at a huge cost to the women involved. Nearly all of those women have now been abandoned with a young child at her breast, or inside her belly.

Thanks to Jeanne’s social position, her own fortunes were less traumatic. However, she must now wait for her father to recover his senses, and once more peddle her charms around what remains of the social circles in which Jeanne and her father once circulated. The alternative of remaining unmarried, and becoming a governess, or entering a nunnery, are too horrible for Jeanne to contemplate.