City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  She was amused how upset her colleagues were. “But you said I should have a regular lover. You’re never satisfied, even when I follow your advice.”

  Juliette made a gagging sound. “How can you? A dirty Jew.”

  “Actually he takes a bath every Friday. A complete bath.”

  “He’ll die of the pleurisy,” Madame said softly. “Bathing weakens you.”

  Lucie, who played heroines, said in her buttery voice, “I know for a fact that they cut off part of their pricks and grow tails instead.”

  Claire laughed until she spilled her soup. “Go on believing that. Absolutely! Leave the field to me.”

  Juliette looked thoughtful, putting her finger to her nose. “He does give you nice presents. You could pawn that necklace for a good price.”

  “When I need to, I will,” Claire said. Someday times would be hard again. She would not have her looks forever. In the meantime, life was amusing. She enjoyed Mendès and she enjoyed annoying her colleagues. A lover who could please her and displease them had many virtues.

  SEVENTEEN

  Nicolas

  (Spring 1788-Spring 1789)

  NICOLAS found he had a natural talent for being married to Sophie. His father had died too young for him to have any impression of how his parents had behaved but he understood his father to have been as stern and withdrawn as his mother was pious and interfering. He would never forget dragging about in girl’s clothes for his first eight years; if he had been able to forget, there was a portrait of him at five to remind him, with an inscription from his mother bidding him to be as innocent before the Virgin in his adult life as she had consecrated him to be in his infancy. Sophie made it disappear. He did not ask her what she had done with it, his childhood repression in a gilt frame.

  His marriage was nothing like those of his friends. He intended to be faithful and he meant to be open with her, as he urged her to be with him. Sophie expected to enjoy sex. His understanding was mostly theoretical, but he genuinely loved her body as well as her mind. She was not a small woman but built on a statuesque scale, so he did not fear hurting her with his weight or his occasional clumsiness, although that was passing as they got better at pleasing each other. Her size put him at ease. When they kissed, he had only to bow his head slightly to reach her. When he held her, her body touched all of his. They were a matched pair.

  Her time in a convent had not inhibited her, as it was a convent designed to polish the daughters of the wealthy before marriage, not to turn them into nuns. There was more dancing than praying. It was mostly a legal scam designed to enable fathers to arrange for daughters to inherit. Sophie had gotten away from her mother and read books forbidden at home. For Sophie as for Nicolas, the Church was a problem rather than a solution, and the deity a superfluous construct that could comfort only the ignorant.

  “I’ve never seen a marriage of equals,” he confided, “but I want us to have one.”

  “Can we really be equal with you out in the world making interesting things happen and discussing serious ideas with intelligent men of action and intellect, while I putter around in our flat, attending an occasional lecture?”

  Early the next year, she launched a salon. Every Tuesday she had the circle of which he had been a part for years, the surviving philosophers and younger men and women who showed promise, who had perhaps written something of interest. Salons were something Sophie seemed to understand intuitively. She attended several, including that of Mme Helvétius, out in the suburb of Auteuil. Mme Helvétius, widow of a philosopher, had adopted Dr. Cabanis who was courting Sophie’s sister. They were all good friends.

  First the hostess must set the tone and create an interesting and lively mix. Salons were the place where the liberal aristocracy mingled with intellectuals, with men successful in law or business or science or medicine as could never happen at court, where a bourgeois, no matter how bright or renowned, would never be received. Second, she must have both clever women and attractive women, to leaven the discussion, to keep the men at their best and to provide a mating pool. Marriages were conceived in salons and affairs were sparked. The court nobility fulminated against them, for they encouraged the mixing of classes and the rule of women, the devout said.

  Reputations were made and unmade, literary, theatrical, political, scientific. Appointments were campaigned for and against. Fashions were created and banished. Of gossip there was some, but mostly there were discussions, flights, repartee, arguments, theses put forward and rebutted. The buffet that Sophie spread was excellent. She circulated constantly. Each hostess had her own method of running her salon: some sat in one place and watched openly or clandestinely. Sophie preferred to wander the room, dipping into conversations, making necessary introductions and nudging people towards or away from each other. She had a gift for nuances of personal interaction.

  She read a great deal, went out with him to public and private theaters, to other salons, to dinner at this or that great or interesting house. She painted miniatures. He knew the gossip that attended his marriage, the ribald jokes about his discovery of sex at forty-two, how soon he would be cuckolded. His hearing was exceptional, so he often caught comments others had not intended he intercept. Some of his academic colleagues were shocked at his marriage; they feared he would prove to be in his dotage. They would never understand that Sophie was as intellectually stimulating as they were. He was deeply in love with her, but not besotted. He could see her clearly. She had a temper. She hated to be proved wrong, even in small things. She was careless with her books and her personal effects, leaving open volumes in the oddest places. He could no longer sit in any chair without looking first. She lost gloves and kerchiefs at an alarming rate. She was truthful with him, but beware being on her bad side. Having had plenty of practice lying to her mother, she showed a distressing talent for fabricating stories. “But I don’t enjoy lying. A tyrant demands lies, because truth is punished unless it conforms to his wishes. Therefore a tyrant creates liars as the sun creates shadows.”

  “Then I must never in the smallest way tyrannize over you.”

  “Exactly!” She grinned.

  “Nicolas,” she said late in 1788, as the first puddles were freezing and the muddy streets turning to icy ruts, “we should start a school for adults. I want to study mathematics and science, and I suspect many women and men would like to learn more than their haphazard educations provided them.”

  They called it the Lycée and held it in a building across from the Palais Royal. Nicolas taught mathematics. She was one of his students, as she had promised, but she also did much of the organizing and daily administration. It was another node in the web of connections among the people who liked reason above tradition. The court was increasingly irrelevant; Paris was the heart and brain.

  Nicolas had been going since November to the house of a wealthy magistrate and member of the Parlement of Paris, Adrien Duport. Duport had called together influential liberals to meet quietly at his house, to avoid exciting the King or the government. They called themselves the Committee of Thirty, but they soon rose to fifty. It was by invitation only.

  One regular visitor was Lafayette, ginger-haired and lanky, a marquis like Nicolas but far more apt to style himself a general of the American army—an army which had appreciated and promoted him far more generously than his own. Nicolas and Lafayette had been friends for years. In spite of being younger than Nicolas, Lafayette had married much earlier, at fifteen. Lafayette had stood up for Nicolas at his wedding to Sophie. Frequently Nicolas and Sophie dined at his house Mondays, when he held his American dinners. Any representatives of the American government currently in Paris, from Jefferson to Franklin, came, and everybody spoke English and talked of events past and present in America the free, the democratic. Jefferson and the British economist Adam Smith were taken with Sophie and began coming not only to her salon but to the Mint for dinners and evenings of conversation. Sophie’s conversational English had rapidly improved, catching up
with her fluency in reading and writing. She was discussing with Adam Smith translating one of his works into French.

  Another important member of the Committee of Thirty was the skinny, dour Abbé Sieyès. He had plunged into fame by writing a pamphlet that Nicolas, along with half the country, much admired. It began boldly. “What is the third estate? Everything. What has it been up until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something!” Yes! said all common readers.

  Most members of the Committee of Thirty were wealthy, so they raised money among themselves to print and distribute pamphlets putting forth what they called a patriotic line. “A patriot,” was the highest praise they could bestow. It was a new catchword among those who wanted change. The country first, the King second: the people are the country. Nicolas had been turning out pamphlets on every political subject. The Committee was producing sample Petitions of Complaint, so that towns and guilds all over the country would know how to draw one up—also to give them ideas on what to ask for.

  The King had been forced to call the Estates General. Louis imagined it would set in stone his desires and those of the ministers he appointed and fired at will. Louis thought that he was Louis XIV and could nod and it would be so. But the world had moved on. People were more educated, more enlightened. A man had only to look at America to see how rebellion could pay off. It was an electrifying time to be alive.

  When Nicolas looked around the salon that Sophie was running in their sumptuous apartments in the Mint, when he circulated among friends and allies at the house of Duport, when he debated republican forms with Benjamin Franklin at Lafayette’s house, he felt at the center of everything vital. He stood on the point Archimedes had spoken about, when he said that if he had somewhere to stand, with a fulcrum he could move the world. They were going to move the world forward, out of the darkness of superstition and privilege and violence, into rational equality and sunny tolerance. They were good men, his friends, his colleagues, who knew what had to be done. They had only to explain it clearly for ordinary people to grasp the way forward.

  His allies were the hub of a wheel, and as they turned in the center of Paris, the rim spun round. Important men in the Church came, successful bankers and businessmen, noblemen who had known each other for years. They could trust one another. They could delegate responsibility, knowing that each was capable and had the resources to put that capacity into action.

  For years Nicolas had been writing about what had to be done in order to save France from itself, to end the deadlock of privilege, to rationalize a decrepit system, to ease the burden on the poor and give them a chance to raise themselves out of misery, to make education universal, to end all kinds of slavery. Now he was beginning to see how liberal men of influence might together bring about profound changes that had seemed a daydream. He had interested himself in the improvement of society, but since Turgot fell, it had felt like self-indulgent fantasizing. Now he came together with other enlightened men and women, ineffectual no more. Everything would be changed, and soon.

  EIGHTEEN

  Georges

  (1788)

  GEORGES found he had been right all along. All he had needed was a foot up. Only a fool could have held the position he had purchased so expensively and not made cartloads of livres. He would have no trouble paying off his debts in the period promised. His card and his door now read “Monsieur d’Anton.” One of his new specialities was helping bourgeois gentlemen who had made piles of money prove they were noble. He became accomplished at fiddling around with genealogies and faking connections. It was lucrative, and he was successful often enough for his clients to spread the word that this d’Anton could trick the system and get it to cough up a title.

  After years of counting sous, nursing one coffee and borrowing a newspaper, alternating his two suits and his four shirts, eating at the cheapest tavern he could find, now he sat down to superb dinners. Gabrielle could really cook and she delighted in doing so, with the assistance of the maid of all work they had hired. Now that Gabrielle was settled, the Charpentiers had sold the cafe and moved to a pleasant holding outside Paris. It was close enough for Gabrielle and Georges to visit every Sunday.

  He liked looking at his wife, with her opulent dark beauty growing riper every day, now that she was pregnant. He liked eating the savory food she knew how to prepare. He liked going out with her on his arm, pressed against him and making soft comments for his ears. Oh, she was no meek dove. When a tradesman crossed her or the maid disobeyed, her voice could ring out, harsh with contempt and anger. But him she wanted to spoil. Their bed rocked like a happy skiff on the river. She had begun to fear no one would suit both her father and herself. She had wanted a husband and children, and here he was. She had a way of folding her hands across her belly, still visibly the same, and looking as if she were counting gold. “You have given me a child,” she said to him every morning, as if he had made her some grand present. Marriage was highly agreeable, no question about it. He had chosen wisely and was amply rewarded.

  He would never stop looking at other women, he would never stop men-tally stripping off their skirts and imagining how they might be in bed, but he-was satiated. When he felt women eying him, he only smiled. He was under no illusions that he would be faithful to Gabrielle, but why bother with what he did not yet need? She was still full of surprises. He called her his lioness, and she purred.

  She proved to have a sharp eye for how things should be arranged domestically, how the rooms of a young upward-climbing counselor should display to best advantage his taste, his acumen, his (so far nonexistent) wealth. She bargained fiercely. Her peasant’s hands would pinch and prod, poke at the seams and joints. Her eyes would narrow and spark with scorn. Her voice would crack with indignation. What did they take her for? She knew the value of a livre. She knew all the tricks. Even as they fought near-mortal battles, tradesmen admired her. She knew her sofas, her tables and chairs, her linens, her china. One use to which she had put the years of waiting for the right husband to appear, was to learn everything about proper domestic existence. He had married a professional. His life was soon comfortably, even sumptuously arranged, on a budget.

  Their bedroom was done in straw yellow, with the bed in an alcove lined with darker yellow and red tapestries. Gabrielle used an escritoire decorated with marquetry. In the drawing room, where he had clients wait, there was a sofa and six armchairs. Ten lyre-back chairs stood around a dining table for guests. Otherwise, they ate privately at a table in their bedroom. His study she had done in masterful red. What was supposed to be the dining room turned into an office for his clerks. He was proud of the impression the rooms made.

  In court he was an excellent pleader. He had good help. He had hired some of his old penniless friends. Fabre d’Églantine and his pal from school, Paré, were his clerks. Camille Desmoulins did odd jobs for him. Camille was to be found at the Palais Royal most evenings, listening to inflammatory speeches and occasionally mounting a chair to make one. He was trying to overcome his stammer. He practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth, like Demosthenes.

  Camille had given up on his long seduction of Mme Duplessis and decided to fall in love with her daughter, Lucile, only sixteen but madly in love with him. “How can you go from courting the mother to courting the daughter?” Georges asked, swatting him on the back. “That seems a little coarse. Doesn’t Madame object?”

  “They all object, except Lucile, who’s having the t-t-time of her life. She would run away with me. She st-st-starves herself, she f-faints, she throws fits. She wants me, she must have me.”

  “I notice you’re not hanging around there any longer.”

  “I’ve been shown the door. It’s one thing to be courting the virtuous mother, year after year. But to marry the daughter, they want money, position. As if they don’t have enough themselves to share some with me. But I love the whole family, Georges, that’s what it is.”

  “I know what you mean. I courted Jérôme
Charpentier as hard as I courted Gabrielle.”

  “I love the Duplessis clan, one and all. My own father is impossible to please. He has a way of smiling that makes me feel like horse droppings. Monsieur is such a dear bureaucratic fudge. He knows everything someone in his position should know, and nothing he shouldn’t. He respects everything he’s supposed to respect, but he doesn’t meddle in the family. His wife and daughter dance rings around him.” Camille tossed his long lank hair. Sometimes Camille was not so much handsome as almost beautiful, like a young girl. Other times he was gawky, weird-looking, a stooping stork, at twenty-seven still a boy. A schoolboy’s girlishness. A fragility that perhaps would appeal to a headstrong young girl, bored at home and full of romantic notions from novels and bad poetry. Always rumors swirled around Camille. He never had money from home and little from his work. Yet there were periods when he seemed flush, when he could treat Fabre and Georges to dinner out. Some of it came from women, and some if it seemed to come from older men. Camille was a bit of a whore.

  “She doesn’t mind your stammer then, this Lucile.”

  “I never st-st-stammer with women, Georges. Only with men. Don’t you think I’ve gotten b-better?”

  Actually he had. When Georges first met Camille, the boy could hardly force out a sentence. Now his stammer came and went. When he was flustered or nervous, it returned. When he was calm or passionate, it vanished. “How can you marry a woman whose family has shown you the door?”

  “Lucile is determined. She’ll make it happen. Then, like you, my in-laws will set me up. They’re better off than yours. They’ll have to take me whether they want me or not—and decidedly, they don’t.”