City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  The King continued bringing in more troops, many of them his German mercenaries who would not think twice about firing on Parisians. The National Assembly asked him to disperse the troops, but he insisted they were necessary to restore order. If the Assembly feared disturbances, it should go home or else meet in some nice remote place he would provide them.

  News came to the neighborhood: the King had dismissed Necker, whom the people liked because he tried to control the price of bread. That had made him a hero by contrast to Louis’ other ministers and favorites. His dismissal meant the King was going to scrap reforms. “He’s going to fuck us,” the men said loudly. Six months ago, a man whispering such a thing would be turned in by a police spy and rotting in some prison before anybody knew what had happened to him. His family would not see him again, unless at an execution.

  Now people shouted their anger in the streets. They placarded it on walls. They marched screaming slogans of anger. They got up on stoops and tables and church steps and bellowed their anger. They printed and bought newspapers proclaiming their anger in large type. They sang songs of rage. They began looking for weapons. Any ironworks, any blacksmith was besieged with orders for daggers, for swords, above all for the humble weapon of the poor, the pike.

  Necker was sent into exile in Switzerland. In his place the King had stuck an old court louse de Breteuil. The Queen’s party was triumphant. The King was saying loudly, “There will be no change! As it is, so shall it be.” That meant: You can starve in the streets.

  The bread was foul. It was black and full of clay and made her throat raw till she gagged. People said it was poisoned, but the bakers claimed the grain was spoiled and that was all the government was giving them. They couldn’t make bread out of bricks. Armand had heard that less and less food was coming into Paris through the barricades. The customs officials were stopping food at the barriers, people said, for the King planned to starve them into silence.

  The weather got hotter and the water began to stink. Paris smelled like a shithouse. There was little to eat, and most of that foul. Nobody was working anyhow, except the undertakers. They were busy and sang while they worked. They carted the bodies off and more bodies took their places. The winter had weakened them, and now they were being starved in the summer.

  Sunday Pauline, Babette and half the neighborhood went off to the Palais Royal, because everybody knew that was the place to hear the freshest news—and the ripest rumors. So many were crowded into the Palais that people climbed trees like monkeys. It was bawdy, noisy, with shouting matches and fistfights breaking out. One novelty of the Palais Royal was tables set out under the plane trees in the big courtyard. It was a favorite place to eat and drink in warm weather, but today, the tables were platforms for speakers. There were the usual bevies of whores around, but they were indistinguishable from other working girls, for instead of plying their trade, they were listening to the speakers and shouting comments with the rest.

  Pauline was so wrought up, she could not even feel her hunger, although she had had nothing to eat but a crust of stale bread soaked in watered wine, foul bread with which she had scraped the remains of the chocolate in her pots. She was agitated beyond control. It felt as if they—the poor people of Paris—had been given something wonderful and splendid and their own, their Assembly to talk for them—and now that was going to be taken away. That made the pain and longing and hunger worse. She could not remember why she feared the police or the aristocrats or the soldiers of the King. They could only kill her.

  A sudden thunderstorm forced everybody to crowd under shelter. It was over as quickly as it started. Paris felt just as sultry. Steam rose from the paving stones. She had expected the rain to disperse the crowd, but more people kept pushing their way in.

  A gawky young man got up on a table. He started speaking passionately and people were cheering him. He was waving his arms and thrusting his head back. He was dressed bourgeois but shabby. He looked as if he got a decent feed as seldom as she did. She wriggled through the crowd, determined to hear him.

  “I’ve just come from Versailles, and if we don’t act, the Assembly will be dismissed or imprisoned. Louis has sent for his Germans, he has sent for his Austrians, he has sent for his Swiss, his killers for hire, and they’re surrounding Paris in a noose of steel. They’ve tossed out Necker, they’ve crushed hope underfoot. We must rise up or be slaughtered. We must arm ourselves and fight for our freedom! Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now!”

  “Who is he?” she asked a burly man dressed like a porter.

  “Camille Desmoulins. He used to stammer, but now he’s an orator.”

  She recognized his name. “He writes about the Assembly.”

  Desmoulins pulled two pistols out of his shabby waistcoat and waved them. “To arms! Take up arms! Let’s go, people. What are you waiting for? A German boot on your neck? A bayonet through your guts? Take up arms and follow me!”

  He leapt down from the table into the crowd, who caught him. As he did, he grabbed a big leaf off a plane tree and stuck it in his hat. “Green for hope! Green for love! Green for the future! Let’s go!”

  The crowd stormed out of the Palais Royal as if they had only been waiting for someone to tell them to go. As they went, they broke into the wax museum and took out busts of Necker and due d’Orléans. They boiled down the street and closed the theaters. Crowds from the theaters joined them. People poured out of taverns, out of restaurants and cafes.

  When she looked back, the street was crowded as far as the eye could see. People had improvised green banners, as Desmoulins had suggested, but just as many had black banners to symbolize mourning for Necker and the dismissed government of reform. People were grabbing at ironwork, anything that could be used as a club or an improvised pike. She wished she had something to carry. At the Place Vendôme, they met a company of dragoons who ordered them to halt. The people just laughed and kept going. The dragoons stood aside.

  They poured into the Tuileries gardens, where people like her were only let in once a year. As folks were wandering through the gardens, curious about what they’d been kept from all these years, they saw horsemen in front of them coming hard in a cloud of dust. It was the Royal German Horse charging with bayonets fixed, led by the Prince de Lambesc. Pauline scrambled up a tree, joined by Babette and a kid. They saw people go down, women screaming as they were bayonetted and fell under the horses’ hooves. The horsemen were taking their time, picking out individuals to kill, going after them among the clipped bushes and the statuary of gods and nymphs. One hefty lieutenant with a bristly blond moustache looked up into the tree and swung his sabre at Babette, slicing through her skirt and cutting her leg superficially as she scrambled higher. He laughed and rode on. Then demonstrators began to fight back. They piled up chairs for barricades. Scattered shots rang out and two of the horsemen and one of the horses went down. People began to throw stones. They were using stones from the pathways, they were tearing down walls. The stones pelted through the air till the horsemen began to retreat.

  When they cleared the garden, there were bodies of six horsemen, two horses, one dead and one flailing that a man shot in mercy; there were also the bodies of nineteen men, fourteen women and five children, including a baby who fell when his mother was hit. He had been trampled by a horse.

  By dusk, the people controlled the right bank of the Seine, but the soldiers still held much of the left bank. Several French Guards crossed over to the people. The militia from the sections began to show up. Groups broke into gunsmith shops and blacksmith shops to find weapons. Pauline hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with a gun. Except for men who had been in the army, few of them did. When guns were found, they were passed hand to hand until someone got hold of a pistol who knew how to use it. Then it became his. People broke off branches to use as clubs or improvised pikes out of railings and metal ornaments. “We fought back, and the soldiers ran away,” Pauline said to Babette. “Next time, I’m not going to hide in a tree.”
It felt wonderful to be moving through the city as if they owned it at last, their Paris, to be part of a huge crowd of one mind, one emotion. It was as if her own feelings were enlarged until they filled not just her chest but the streets, the earth, the sky.

  Word was passed along the street that other groups were attacking the customs barriers, so that food could pass freely into Paris. The walls of the city were being torn down from within. The troops on the left bank began to withdraw toward the Champ de Mars, the large open field near the military school. French soldiers were deserting. Sometimes they abandoned their weapons; usually they brought them along.

  As night came on, the crowd thinned. It was dangerous running around the streets in the dark. Pauline and Babette crossed the bridge wearily. “My feet hurt,” Pauline admitted. “We must have run for miles.”

  “My feet hurt and that bastard cut my leg. But it was fun.”

  “It was exciting,” Pauline said slowly. When she lay down in her bed alone, hearing the snores of the Louvet family from above her, she wondered if she would get up tomorrow and everything would be as it always had been. Would the world be changed? Or would all the iron walls be back in place? Would the people calm down like a drunk after a spree, or would they remember how it felt to fight back? She could not imagine how it would be, tomorrow.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Georges

  (July 13–14, 1789)

  GEORGES stared at Camille, who was stabbing the air with his fist. “I spoke and lit a fuse. They exploded. Who’d believe that anybody would pay attention like that? Words are power, Georges.”

  “The right words at the right time.” Georges envied Camille that moment standing on the table waving two unloaded pistols and inciting the crowd. The power of rhetoric in a court of law was strictly fenced in by custom, regulation, the tolerance of the judge. Rhetoric in the streets was power unleashed. Could he command that power? Camille seemed an unlikely leader of men, sallow, skinny, a waist like a girl’s, a twig that could be snapped in his hand.

  It was Monday but no one had gone to work. All Paris seemed to be in the streets. He recognized gunfire in the distance. The tocsin was ringing. That ringing of the bell very fast in the parish church was a call to arms, the call to come out and be ready to fight: the popular signal for revolt. Georges sent for the newly organized militia. Getting his men in line took more than an hour. They were not used to being a company yet. Only six had muskets. His own military experience was confined to meeting with these men. He had gone hunting with his stepfather and his uncles: that was his whole expertise with weapons.

  Two women came running down the street heavily laden with bottles and cheeses. “We’ve broken into Saint Lazare. It’s true what the posters said about the monks. We found hundreds of casks of wine, huge wheels of cheese, all the food you can eat for a month. Cartloads of wheat, kegs of melted butter, more hams than you can count. What a feast!”

  His company looked about to take off in search of loot. “Men, we can’t go barging around like mad jackasses,” Georges bellowed. “If we stop and loot, then the soldiers will come and take the city. We need weapons.”

  A runner came. “Patriots have occupied City Hall. The electors have set up a commune to run Paris. They’re calling for all militia to report. They’ve got some guns and some powder—what they’ve been able to find. They want you to march there now.”

  When they got to the Place de Grève, the paving was crowded with bales of cloth, sacks of wheat, kegs of oil and wine, nails, a load of kindling wood, timber, cabbages, all piled neatly. Since the customs barricades had been torn down, produce and products were freely entering Paris. The carters were told to leave some voluntary tax in objects at City Hall, and they were happily complying. As time passed, citizens were taking what they needed. In City Hall, women were sewing cockades for the militia, since they had no uniforms. The cockades were little simplified flowers, sometimes just concentric circles. They had given up on green and were sewing the old colors of Paris, red and blue. Militia were already lined up for cockades. Georges saw that his men got their share of the muskets and powder in short supply.

  From all over impromptu militiamen were arriving. More men were coming to sign up. Their names were being taken at long tables in the Place. Another messenger came to say that the King had the Assembly locked up in Versailles and would not let them send a delegation to Paris, even to cool things down. “That doesn’t bode well,” Georges said to another improvised leader of improvised militia. “The King thinks he can crush this. We have to arm ourselves.”

  That’s what everybody was saying, milling around City Hall, where the new government, just as improvised as the militia, was meeting in continuous session. Georges put his men to work building barricades to protect City Hall. He realized he was enjoying himself. It was much more fun to be a leader of men than a lawyer in the King’s court. It was exciting. It was absorbing. He liked being out in the open air, instead of in dark and stuffy courts. He liked telling men what to do and having them obey him, not sullenly but willingly. He liked the way women looked at him with open admiration. He liked the swagger he permitted himself. He adjusted his cockade and grinned.

  When night fell, City Hall seemed somewhat better defended. Everywhere they marched on their way back to the neighborhood, people were putting up barricades. “March” was a relative term. Georges saw no reason to imitate the mechanical precision of real troops. The sound of gunfire came sporadically from all sides. Rumors of pitched battles ran through the crowds.

  Nobody slept much that night. “What does it all mean?” Gabrielle asked him. “It feels like Carnival, everybody in the streets, the world turned upside down. What will happen to us?”

  “I have no idea,” Georges said truthfully. “But we have to defend ourselves. And I’ll tell you, Gabrielle, the world is changing while we lie here. The world is changing faster than any of us imagined possible. There’s power to be seized. Money to be made. Freedom is coming—opportunities for gain and disaster beyond anything I dreamed at my most ambitious.”

  “I’m scared,” she said, but she did not curl into a ball or weep. She reached for him in a rage of passion and they made love half the night.

  By dawn people were out in the streets. The tocsin was ringing. The word came by runner from City Hall, from militia to militia, that they were all to go to the Invalides to get muskets. Without firepower, the King’s German and Swiss soldiers would slaughter them. The home for crippled old soldiers was also an arsenal.

  The wind was from the south and the clouds were heavy. They dropped into the stinking streets like exudations of sweat. They felt like fear and tension turned into sky. He saw all Paris moving toward the Invalides, thousands and thousands of men and women armed with everything from kitchen knives to clubs made from chairs or firewood to improvised pikes and an occasional sword or pistol. With them came the militia, who looked exactly like everybody else except that they wore red and blue cockades, attempted a soldierly march and one in ten had a musket.

  A runner, a kitchen boy pressed into service, came from the Invalides. The general in charge of Paris ordered the governor of the Invalides, where thirty thousand muskets were stored, to have the crippled soldiers dismantle the muskets. The inmates sent out word of what was happening and that they would be sure to have a great deal of trouble taking the muskets apart with their aged hands. In fact, if the people hurried, they would manage to have almost no guns pulled apart before the crowd arrived. These were old guys who had never had two sous to rub together, and they weren’t going out of their way for the rich and high-living governor or for the King who’d had their arms and legs and youth. When the crowd assembled at the Invalides, the governor had the gates opened to address them. The minute the gates swung wide, the crowd surged forward and swept into the courtyard, carrying the governor along like a paper in the wind. Gladly the old veterans handed over the muskets. In six hours they had taken apart only twenty. The columns lined up f
or guns and headed back snakelike over the river. The veterans told them that the gunpowder was stored in the Bastille. So they had guns but nothing to fire. Obviously they had to go where the powder had gone: to the Bastille, the fort that had never fallen.

  Camille turned up on the march. “This is a suicide mission,” he said.

  “Well, you were so proud of starting this insurrection. Do you think there are prisoners inside the Bastille who might revolt?”

  “Only a handful. They’ve been gradually putting it out of operation as a prison. Still, it’s a place we might end up if they don’t blow our heads off first. You don’t have a trial. Just a letter from the King and bang, the doors slam. Goodbye. Of course, if you’re rich, you can have your cook, your valet, your bed and your mistress shipped in. The poor don’t survive the first winter.”

  “Maybe we can share a cell and eat cockroaches together.” Georges turned to his men, putting on a bluff hearty manner. “Let’s roll! Time to knock down tyranny’s walls and get that gunpowder. Thirty thousand pounds!”

  By noon they were assembled around the Bastille’s thick walls, towering like rock cliffs above them. Georges had passed it a hundred times since he had been in Paris, but never had it looked so vast, so impressive or menacing, its eight towers that bulged out halfway up so they couldn’t be scaled, its massive walls, its height like a mountain. It was a motley army he saw, men, women, old people, children, whole families as well as thousands of the new militiamen, distinguished only by cockades. Georges saw the thirty formidable cannons of the fort trained on them, ready to blow them to bite-sized pieces. Cannon peering over the crenelations, mounted on the towers.