City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  “Beware of letting her read books,” Mme du Boismorel interrupted, looking Manon up and down like something she had decided not to purchase. “Take care she does not become any more learned. That would be a great pity. No one will marry her, and her poor parents will have her on their hands for the rest of her unhappy life.” She continued to lecture upon the proper duties of a woman of what she called uncertain family. Manon fixed her gaze on the mantelpiece. In the huge mirror above it she saw Mme du Boismorel, all flounces and lace and paint, not an inch undecorated and unadorned. Her voice was shrill, like her yapping dog who was nosing at Manon as if she were a lamppost. As Madame spoke she ogled herself in the mirror on the other wall. There were seven mirrors in this room. Manon counted them. Then she counted enameled boxes. Then she counted pictures marching up the walls, mostly pastoral scenes with naked nymphs and goddesses. Twelve paintings. No handsbreadth of silk-covered wall was without its painting, no table without Sèvres shepherdesses, marble busts of the royal family and noble Romans. She did not see a book. Not one.

  Manon longed to ask Mme du Boismorel if she had learned to read herself? But this woman had fixed a small income on Grandmère, and so she must keep her mouth shut. This was a great lady. This was the personification of high society and the beau monde. If Madame choked to death on the bonbons in the dish she had not offered them, what would be lost? What virtue did she embody? None that Manon could see. A waste of gilding. A waste of lace. All this rococo plaster and satin and this hive of servants buzzing about her, and at the center, not a queen; nothing but a drone. This stupid painted woman could only behave rudely and flirt with her reflection, as vacant upstairs as her little dog.

  FOUR

  Pauline

  (1777–1781)

  PAULINE Léon was born in the Cordeliers section of Paris, named for the monastery of the Franciscans whose habits tied with cords. It was an old, old neighborhood near the University and fairly near the Seine, a warren of ancient streets and a mix of decaying and new houses. The Léon family ran a chocolate shop on the ground floor of a narrow house in a cul-de-sac near the Cafe Procope, where the famous Voltaire used to hold court. The Léon family lived in a room behind the shop, cozy in winter and ovenlike in summer from the stove where the chocolate was cooked. The house was old and sway-backed. The floors groaned when even little Marie-Thérèse ran across them. Pauline was the older of only two living children. Marie was five years younger than Pauline. In between them had come two boys who had not survived their time with the wet nurse. So many babies didn’t. It was better to have them die with the wet nurse before you got too attached to them, Maman said wistfully, for if they died at home, your heart could be broken. Maman, who was called Marthurine Telohau, still hoped to have a boy—to carry on the family business, she said. Pauline’s father said, “Pauline is smart enough and strong enough. She can carry it on.”

  Maman had a bad fever that summer. Afterward, she was not in the way of women. Neither Pauline nor her mother let Papa know, because Maman feared he would go to another woman. She pretended to be having her time, and Pauline never let on. Women had to stick together. She was ten, but she was almost grown, and she was loyal to her Maman. Her Maman was popular with the women of the neighborhood, for she had a big laugh and a way of making other women laugh. She was said to have been pretty, but life wore everybody down. Her face was lined and she had lost a finger and her right arm was scarred from a kitchen accident. Where other women got stout, Maman grew lean and leathery. She never ate the chocolate, for she said smelling it all day made her hate it. Pauline did not feel that way. It was the best smell in the world. She loved coming back from errands and turning the corner of their street. Then the smell of chocolate would surround her, urging her forward: unless the sewer in the middle of the street was especially stinking.

  The people above them on what was called the noble floor, who actually rented the whole building and sublet to the other tenants, were a civil servant and his wife and two sons. Except for paying rent four times a year, the Léons had little to say to them, but were friendly with the Fosse family, father (a water carrier), mother (a button maker) and three sons, who lived on the fourth floor in one room. The room in which the Léon family slept in a big canopied bed surrounded by heavy curtains, opened onto a box of courtyard between them and the buildings on the next street. It got sun in the afternoon. It had a fireplace, rarely used since they had the stove in the shop. The shop took all their time.

  What learning she had came from her parents. If someone was going to run a business, they must know their numbers. She could read some, enough to make out placards and journals and bills, but she could do sums in her head. Even her father asked her to add up prices and discounts. She could write numbers and sign her name, but she could not write letters—not that she had any cause to. Everyone she knew lived within a ten-block radius. She was out in the street or in the shop all day and sometimes a good part of the night, working by candlelight and the cooking fires. Besides, there were the letter writers on every block who wrote love and business notes for a small fee.

  When she had time off, she ran wild with the other kids, up and down the streets and alleys, down to the river. Once they left their neighborhood, they stole anything they could. If they ran into another gang of kids, they had pitched battles with fists and rocks. Once they caught a kid dressed up in culottes (which identified him as upper-class) and velvet waistcoat, a boy older than them, probably twelve. They beat him and took his clothes to sell to a dealer in secondhand clothes. After all, they could hardly wear that finery. They hated the aristocrats, who ate whatever they wanted, who were never hungry and lay around in beds where they slept alone in their own rooms. The aristocrats were always beating the common people, and adults couldn’t hit back. Just the week before, she heard her parents say, a mason had run into a young milord on the street and spilled water on him. The milord had run him through. Nothing his family could do but curse.

  She knew all the street criers who came through, the sellers of used clothing, the fishwives, the fruit and vegetable women, the sellers of patent medicines, eaux de vie, little blue books of romance and saints’ lives and self-improvement, the knife and scissors grinders, all of them with their cries, repeated again and again like great stalking birds, the herons they saw sometimes on the Seine. Most peddlers were women. It was a tolerated semi-legal job. Few working people could take time out to go to the big markets like Les Halles, so peddlers resold stuff in the neighborhoods. They were all on sufferance to the police, who would just as soon knock them on the head.

  It had been a hard winter. Spring brought a rise in the price of bread. Everybody lived on bread. When the price rose, their wages or what they were able to earn from their little businesses did not rise accordingly. They did without wood to burn; they did without shoes; they did without anything they could spare to have bread. In the taverns and in the street, people muttered. Someone was getting rich. Someone was hoarding flour. The ministers of the new King kept him from knowing their troubles. Turgot, the King’s minister, was killing them.

  The morning of May third Pauline’s mother said sharply, “Something’s happening.” They went to the door of the shop. People were running past. After the grim mood of the preceding weeks of hunger, it seemed like a holiday. People were laughing and joking. Some were singing. “Come on, friends,” the greengrocer woman shouted. “We’re getting bread.”

  “It’s trouble,” Maman said, crossing her bony arms.

  But Papa went to put out the fires. “We won’t have customers today. I’m going along to see what’s up.”

  “Maybe it’s raining baguettes,” Maman said. She closed the shutters. “I’m telling you, heads will be broken.”

  Anatole Fosse, the water carrier who lived on the fourth floor, came running to get his wife. “We’re taking bread,” he shouted. “It’s time.”

  Maman would not go. She took Marie in back, but Pauline went off with Papa. Th
e crowd was taking over bakery shops. People mostly paid, but they paid what bread had cost before the terrifying escalation of prices. They threw the money on the counter and took the bread and went. It was an orderly looting, with a lot of horseplay. If a baker was disliked or felt to be a cheat, he might be roughed up, but mostly they knew the bakers had little more than they did—and they had to eat.

  The Watch was out but did not interfere. Some of them joked with the rioters. Around noon, having eaten their fill and carrying as much bread as they could, Pauline and Papa went home. Even after it got stale, they could dip it in broth or wine. It would silence their bellies for a while.

  In the tavern the next day, Pauline was sitting with her parents when she heard the end of the story. The Watch would not arrest people, but the King’s Grey Musketeers and Black Musketeers, dressed up in their finery and their plumes, would. Over the next week, arrests continued. It seemed as random as bricks falling from the skies. Jacques, an apprentice gilder, had a grudge against another apprentice, Etienne, going back to a dispute over a card game, and turned him in.

  A court was set up, a temporary court without appeal. Everybody who appeared before it was found guilty. Pauline listened to the talk in the streets. It was unfair, Papa said. They were condemning men for what everyone had done—which was the point, Anatole Fosse said. They were making a public example. The trials finished the morning of the eleventh, and word spread that men were to be hanged that afternoon.

  Papa took her along, saying that since she had gone to the protest, she should attend the punishment. Public executions were free entertainment. There was church and there were executions, and except for puppet shows or acrobats, there wasn’t much else to entertain them. They walked in a loose procession over the Pont Neuf and across to the right bank. The Place de Grève—Strike Square, because that’s where actions were organized—was a traditional spot for these spectacles, but the crowd was less jolly than usual. When they got to the square, it was not the way it always was. The scaffold for the two gibbets was built very high.

  Always the crowd pressed close, to see every bit of the torture that was the best part of the show. Criminals were broken on the wheel. Sometimes flesh was pulled off their bones as they screamed; sometimes boiling oil or sulfur was used on their wounds; sometimes a famous criminal was drawn and quartered—horses were harnessed to each limb and whipped until the man was torn apart. Sanson and his son were masters of all common and extreme tortures. They were the King’s executioners who took their bows like musicians. But there was no torture today. Two lines of the notorious musketeers were drawn up, one row facing the gibbet and the other facing the crowd.

  Papa murmured, “They’re afraid of an uprising. They know what they’re doing is unfair. So this is about as fast a death as you’ll ever see for a common slob. Only the nobility get their heads cut cleanly off. Nothing happens to clergy except they get moved someplace else. We hang and hang, writhing and twisting in the wind, unless Sanson is feeling kindly.”

  They dragged the two men in, rushed them to the gallows, put the nooses on and the priest began rattling off prayers for the dying.

  “Who are they, Papa? What did they do?”

  “Jean-Denis Desportes. It’s said that when he left work, he and his wife entered a bakeshop near the Gobelins factory. His wife took three four-pound loaves and only paid thirty-six sous. Jean-Claude Lesguiller, an apprentice gauze maker. He kicked the door of a bakeshop and demanded that they open it. Those are their crimes, little rabbit. They are dying in our places. To scare us and keep us quiet.”

  “Jean-Claude looks like a boy, Papa.”

  “He’s sixteen.”

  The men began to cry out to the crowd to save them, saying that everyone had done what they had, so let them loose. The priest finished quickly and backed off, holding up a cross. Sanson posed with his arms folded observing—this was a dull afternoon for him, no artistry here. The two assistants kicked the man and boy off the ladders. They swayed and bucked, flopping and turning like fish thrown on the muddy bank of the river. Sanson nodded. He was going to be merciful. The assistants stepped down and stood on the bound hands of the man and the boy. Jamming them in the stomach with their knees and jerking them down, they broke their necks and finished them off.

  Papa said gruffly, “Marie Croison, accused of stealing a brooch, took an hour to die, slowly, slowly choking. Her neck was too soft, they said. It’s real mercy when Sanson kills them fast.”

  Pauline knew that normally the crowd would be furious to have the spectacle cut short, but they just stood sullen and glowering. Some crossed themselves. Some spat, making the sign against the evil eye. Papa strode off cursing, forgetting about her. She had to run to keep up, toward the bridge and home. What should they have done, she wondered, for she did not doubt that they should not have let the hangmen kill the two. She had run through the streets and taken bread too. Now they were all hungry again.

  The winter she turned fourteen, the winter of 1781, she remembered those deaths. It was bitterly cold. The Seine froze over. The wheat barges and the wood barges could not come in, and people died every night of the cold. Their bodies lay waiting to be picked up and stored for burial. The ice was filthy with offal and sewage and excrement. The sound of coughing filled the house. All the wood they could afford went into the fires in the shop. The price of bread soared. Beggars were everywhere. Dead babies lay on the steps of the church, foundlings who froze before they could be taken in.

  Then in the middle of February, first Marie and then Maman came down with the grippe. Papa caught it but recovered, and Pauline never got it badly enough to take to the bed. She ached with fatigue, tending the shop with Papa and running back and forth. All the water had to be carried in. They were burning up and kept throwing the covers off. She took precious sous to buy them a remedy from an apothecary, but they could not keep it down. She felt frantic. She bought rosemary and sage to burn near the bed, to fight the infection. She poured vinegar on a shovel and heated it in the fireplace, piled with wood. Papa began spending time in the tavern. If they had depended on their neighbors for business, they would have starved; but chocolate was a luxury adored by the bourgeoisie and the aristocrats. Those people had plenty to spend this dreadful winter on hot chocolate and sweets. She tried hard to nurse her mother and sister. Never would she let them go to the Hotel Dieu or any other hospital, where the poor died stuffed six to a bed with strangers. Nobody got out whole. In the hospital, you did not get well; you got sicker and you died.

  First Marie and then Maman died. Pauline wept and wept. She could not believe Maman was dead. She could not sleep without her sister curled into her. She was as tall now as Maman had been—not a big girl, but strong in her build. Quick. Used to working twelve hours or more with little rest. Now she had not only to take over Maman’s tasks in the shop but to manage the household—cooking what she could, carrying the water in and throwing the waste out. Taking laundry to be washed when it could no longer be put off. Buying from the food peddlers as they came through, or running to their makeshift stalls against the Cordeliers church.

  They often ate in the tavern, the Dancing Badger, because Pauline was just learning to cook and Papa was lonely. She made herself small and listened to the men talk. She liked best when they talked about politics; least when they discussed women. The tavern was a low-ceilinged smoky room with crude chairs and benches and stools crowded around long trestle tables. Old men played dominoes and piquet and bet on the lottery. Sometimes a woman who had been her mother’s friend would take her to sit with the women and give her a little treat, bread dipped in wine. The women talked about hard times, the lack of bread, how to survive. Sometimes they too talked politics and sometimes they gossiped. She was used to the women being with women and the men with men: that was how it was. If you had a few hours off, it was saved for friends, often lifelong friends—always women if you were female. But she learned something from sitting with her father and playing
mouse-in-the-hole. Maman had said it was no business of women, worrying about the country and the King and his ministers, but Maman was dead. Someone in Versailles in the palace of the King decided who lived and who died in Paris, who froze and who starved and who was hanged for asking questions or demanding bread. So she listened.

  FIVE

  Nicolas

  (1775–1777)

  MARIE Jean Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, stood patiently while his two best friends straightened his small-figured waistcoat and vest, adjusted the ruffles of his shirt at neck and wrists. His valet had of course turned him out presentable enough, he presumed, but as Julie de Lespinasse said, surveying him, “You can destroy your tailoring in five minutes of fiddling! And Nicolas, don’t stoop. Your height is an advantage.”

  Nicolas was in revolt against the insistence of the aristocracy on the importance of petty details of appearance, of linens and style of perukes and powdering. Nicolas was the servant of reason. His father, killed right after Nicolas was born, had been a captain in the King’s cavalry; his mother was a devout provincial lady innocent of ideas. His family almost disowned him when he refused to go into the army or the Church, becoming a mathematician. A marquis simply did not do that, for science was for tradesmen, except as a hobby. Nicolas for all his apparent meekness never did anything he was supposed to.

  Now his friend and mentor Jean le Rond d’Alembert, named for the church on whose steps he had been exposed as a baby, and Jean’s platonic love Julie were preparing him to answer the summons of another old friend, Turgot. According to the values of the class to which Nicolas had been born, Jean was nothing: illegitimate, poor, shabby, without wife or family. Jean had changed physics and mathematics almost single-handedly, although Nicolas himself had done as much for probability theory. Mathematics was beautiful. Nicolas would never be careless with a proof. He believed in thinking and writing clearly.