by Marge Piercy
“We’re only seeking rights for the Sephardim. The eastern Jews are another story,” Mendès said. “They have representatives here too. They’re a backward people, disgraceful. They speak a debased gutteral German. They’re poor and ignorant. We have nothing in common.”
A woman at work befriended her. Hélène had been born in a village ten leagues outside Paris and worked in this theater for two years. She was tiny with bright red hair and brown eyes. Her figure was voluptuous on miniature lines. Hélène was quick, bawdy and sensible. Claire felt at ease with her. “I’ll show you the ropes. You’ll need all the help you can get around here. Stay on the good side of the boss or he’ll fire you with one minute’s notice.”
“Does he insist on fucking us?”
“No, he does the boys, not us. You don’t have to worry changing in front of him. He couldn’t be bothered.”
“Hélène, I need a place to live. Got any ideas?”
“You’re in luck. A family just pulled a midnight flit in my building.…” Seeing Claire’s blank stare, Hélène explained. “They couldn’t pay the rent, so they took off. The room’s on the fourth floor front. It’s reasonable and the building is pretty good.”
It was in a mixed neighborhood near City Hall, lots of working people and some professionals, mostly lawyers. The ground floor was an apothecary. The parlor floor, the best lodgings in the house, were occupied by a down-and-out lady with aristocratic pretensions and two daughters. Hélène was just under Claire. Across the hall another theatrical couple lived. Above her were two unmarried brothers who worked as carters. Their horses were stabled in the yard behind the house.
Hélène’s room was intensely hers. She had a drapery on the window that matched her bed hangings. On a delicate chest of drawers only a little battered and painted with a scene of swans and maidens, Hélène had set up her make-up and scents. It had never occurred to Claire to decorate a room or do more than inhabit it. No one in her family did such things. On a little shelf was a bust of a scowling man. “That’s Marat,” Hélène said reverently. “He’s my hero.”
Claire let Hélène tell stories about him while she unpacked. “I figured you for a patriot.” When Claire assured her she was, Hélène said doubtfully, “How come you don’t know about Marat then? He’s the people’s friend.”
“I’ve been out in the provinces.”
“He was a doctor, but he lives in poverty, to be near us. The government is always after him. He can’t be bought. He can’t be scared off. He’s our watchdog. He doesn’t mince any words. He doesn’t bow down to anybody. Come on, let’s go to the Palais Royal and see what’s doing.”
The streets were swarming with beggars, but incredible equipages went galloping past, matched pairs or fours pulling gilded, carved, painted coaches. The aristocracy was far more visible here than in the provinces, their wealth flashing out. A funeral was the occasion for as conspicuous a display as a wedding or christening. Ladies alighting for the theater or going to a ball were dressed outrageously with hats as large as bushes and huge hair. The men dripped jewels. At the Palais Royal, they had Turkish coffee and Viennese pastries, while men ogled them and tried to pick them up.
Mariette, the woman who had predicted she would not last, was always talking about what kind of jewels women were wearing, what kind of furs, how much dresses cost. Mariette intended to have nice things. She was playing off two lawyers and a banker against each other. Claire was not impressed. She had never wanted anything from Mendès except that pistol she still had. Over the course of nine months, he had given her a necklace of garnets, a gold bracelet, a brooch in the form of a lion with eyes of tiny diamonds.
Once he gave her a bolt of silk to have made into a dress, for it had come to him at the docks and he had no use for it. She had a fancy dress made up, which she had worn exactly once, when the theater company was invited to a ball en masse by a young man more interested in shocking local society than in honoring them. Mendès insisted it would come in handy on social occasions when they could appear together. Actually that happened several times a week now, while he was wining and dining deputies. Her role was to be beautiful and keep quiet, he said. She imagined she was on stage playing a mute. These deputies were men like any others, no wiser, no less venal. They looked sideways at her bosom, stuck out in the low-cut dress, and they lost the train of their argument. Mendès did his best to charm them. She was a prop.
The only one who behaved differently was the small man Robespierre, who was courteous to her but otherwise indifferent. He ate little, drank little and observed Mendès with sharp intelligent attention. He asked many questions about the Jews of Bordeaux and about the different cultures of the three different groups of Jews inside France. He also asked about the political factions in Bordeaux. There were two types of questioners: those who actually listened to answers and those who did not bother. She suspected that Robespierre would file every answer in his organized brain.
He spoke frankly about the Assembly. “In Paris, the people won’t let the delegates forget that the Revolution is still going on. Many of the delegates would like to believe it’s all over but for commemorative tablets. They already see their grand moments sculpted in bronze. David, a radical painter whom I find congenial, is doing a portrait of the Tennis Court Oath—already.”
“Do you think we’ll get our rights?”
“I will do my best. I try to be a representative not just of Arras but of all those who desperately need representation. But the Assembly is preoccupied with finances. The government is hugely in debt, and the only place we can see to raise money is by annexing Church properties. Then we can sell them off, put some into the hands of the landless, get them onto the tax rolls. It’s a huge battle and everyone’s preoccupied with that question.”
She found him icy but impressive. He had little physical presence, unlike Mendès, who exuded strength, but he had another kind of presence that made him formidable. As he studied Mendès, she studied him. There were all sorts of new types making themselves felt in Paris these days. Collot was right: things were happening here. If a man could make things happen, perhaps a woman could too. When Mendès went back to Bordeaux, she would not go with him.
THIRTY-ONE
Nicolas
(Spring 1790)
SOPHIE was visibly pregnant. Dr. Cabanis came by to check on her every week. Cabanis was the adopted son of Mme Helvétius, whose salon they both attended Tuesdays even though she lived a bit out of Paris in Auteuil. Cabanis, a patriot and a friend, was courting Sophie’s younger sister. Sophie and Nicolas had been looking at houses near Mme Helvétius, to have a place to get out of Paris in warm weather, especially after the baby was born.
Sophie was carrying off her pregnancy with style and élan. It was perhaps easier for a big woman to lumber about at the fulsome end of gravidity; nonetheless he admired her stamina. She would not take to her bed or even to her chaise longue. The translation of Adam Smith proceeded, as did her labors at the Lycée.
He had nightmares about the birth, which he kept from her. He felt guilty to have taken her lithe firm body and made it swell. He could not bear to lose her, and he wondered why they had not simply gone on together perfectly contented, without a child in the way. Had he been proving his manhood? Had he been concerned with bringing into the next turbulent century the dubious blood of his undistinguished ancestors? Did he crave the impossible duplication people sought in children? He felt that her pregnancy was a lapse on his part. Oh, he knew she wanted a child; but he also knew that she was deeply committed to pleasing him, and he could have talked her out of it. Now he had put her in danger, and for what?
It was late to indulge these doubts, so he kept them to himself, with the murky sense that this was the first thing he had kept from her since they married. She seemed content, stoical about the discomforts of late pregnancy, a vast monument to fecundity. He noticed with disgust how men and women who would never dare touch her with familiarity in normal times, now
felt they could pat her belly, an amazingly intimate gesture that brought to his mind violent images of drawing the sword he had never used. Men and women spoke to Sophie differently, as if pregnancy had emptied her mind and rendered her simple and pliant, instead of the stubborn, brilliant intellectual she was. He was embarrassed, humiliated, indignant for her. Her giving over to maternity made others insolent. The more she was a woman, the less she was considered an adult.
As Nicolas was about to have lunch one spring day, he spread out the newspapers he had sent his valet Henri to purchase. He was sipping a glass of white Burgundy and waiting for Sophie to finish her correspondence and join him. Then he began to find bits of nastiness. “It is obvious that the beauteous Sophie, wife of the Marquis de Condorcet, formerly Sophie de Grouchy, is expecting a blessed event, but for who is this event truly blessed? Surely not the husband, with whom the very young lady, half the age of the philosopher, is said to enjoy a marriage blanc. Then who is the black knight who has taken the white queen?” The monarchist papers were the worst. He could feel the gossip seething through learned and fashionable society.
He rang the bell and told his secretary Cardot to dispose of the papers.
Sophie came in, looking flushed. “I’m always warm lately. Instead of a child, I may be carrying a brazier. Where are the papers?”
“I thought we might do without them today.”
“Oh, the gossip. Nico, I’m ashamed of you. You mustn’t care what the idiots say. You know me and I know you.”
Her pregnancy made him a more avid defender of women than he had been; he spoke about women’s rights, women’s wrongs, the need for suffrage. A Dutch woman, Etta Palm d’Aelders, addressed the club. She was concerned with divorce, with abolishing primogeniture so all sons and daughters could inherit equally, protection against wife beating, the right to divorce. Sophie had befriended Etta, and soon they were close.
He had recently delivered a speech in favor of extending the vote to women. His speech had not been booed, as had another by a younger man, but the attitude seemed to be, good old Condorcet, that’s his hobby horse. The general assumption was that to be in favor of women’s rights was to be less of a man, and thus unable to father the child Sophie was carrying. It annoyed him. “It’s simply unpleasant to be talked about.”
“Come now, you have friends who’d shoot themselves on the Pont Neuf at noon if they thought that would get them sufficiently talked about!”
She was always feet to the earth. He smiled for the first time since he had sat down. “Nonetheless, when the baby is born, I would prefer that he or she look like you. It might set the tongues to rest if it resembled me, but it would be far better if the child were beautiful like his mother than big and shambling and homely, like his silly father.”
They had never hung on each other in public, and they did not do so now. Those who did not understand their intimacy could live on in ignorance. Most of the men and women who gossiped around him could not imagine a relationship in which everything relevant could be discussed, in which no tricks were needed to pique or keep interest, jealousy was not a useful tool of intimacy, and trust was the environment. Yet he admitted to himself that he was offended. He did not view himself as a great lover, a ready cocksman, a Casanova. He had fallen in love only twice, loved passionately only Sophie. How could they imagine he did not have the wit or the energy to satisfy her? As if only people who abused each other could inspire love.
It made him recall that scandalous novel that had come out and been suppressed without daunting its success, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, written by an ex-army officer Laclos, secretary of the due d’Orléans. Laclos had recently joined the Jacobin Club and begun a newspaper to correspond with the other Jacobin Clubs springing up in the provinces. In that novel, sex was a war. Seduction was victory. Fidelity was only an obstacle to overcome by stealth, by lies and false promises, by coercion, by force if necessary. He could not imagine deriving pleasure from such intercourse.
The funniest part of the reaction of other men to his support of women, was that none of them seemed to realize that if he were in search of ladies to seduce, he could hardly do anything that would have rendered him more popular. Women were always cornering him and telling him how wonderful he was. Even at his wife’s salon, she had to rescue him. They gave him bouquets. They wrote him love letters, some amazingly explicit about their charms. Women liked men whom they perceived to be on their side: why not? It made sense, even if the manifestations were bizarre. Sophie did not like women pursuing him, especially during her pregnancy. In reality, she was far more jealous of him than he had ever had occasion to be of her.
Gossip was annoying, like a cloud of mosquitoes or the stench of the city as spring advanced. But gossip could also be dangerous. With the royal family in Paris, curiosity about the details of their life intensified. Since Louis XIV had invented the elaborate rigmarole, the dense gold-encrusted dance of courtly etiquette and ceremony where even getting dressed in the morning for the Queen or the King could involve fifty courtiers, the royal family had been set like gods above the people. Every item from shaving to eating soup was a prescribed ritual involving written and unwritten rules and hundreds of courtiers and servants. Now they had been brought down to earth with a thump, and the people in their ongoing affection wanted contact, knowledge, specifics. But it felt to Nicolas as if the more intimate details were printed about the King and Queen, the less they were admired, even respected. The court etiquette, described in newspapers, sounded farcical. Gossip about Axel Fersen, reputed to be the Queen’s lover, was unending. He was frequently seen leaving her quarters late at night. But the worst blow to royal prestige came from finances.
The court and the royal family used up money at a terrifying rate. As the Assembly was struggling with the budget and arranging the sale of confiscated Church properties, it was inevitable that the King for the first time be called to account. Louis controlled vast sums never tallied or monitored. He received secret funds to spend as he chose. This struck the deputies as a ridiculous way to run a country or a business.
After great protest and procrastination, the royal accounts (called the red book) were finally published in the newspapers. It was one thing to imagine the jolly good King on high ruling. It was another to read how much money had gone down the drain on gambling, partying, clothing, royal entertainments. How many millions of livres were rained upon the King’s brothers who had fled the country at the first successes of the Revolution and were now plotting abroad. How many millions had been showered upon the Queen’s favorites, male and female. These figures printed in the newspapers inflamed some people and disgruntled others, but among no one did they render the royal family more beloved. Not even the former nobility viewed the red book with complacence, because most were country squires in Provence or Auvergne. No king had given them sinecures, offices or tithes. There it all was in rows of numbers. The day the papers published the King’s accounting, Nicolas saw people studying the figures in cafes, in restaurants, in taverns as he walked about the city. The commonest sight in Paris that week was someone silently scanning those columns and frowning, or someone reading them aloud to a group, who began to mutter. “You know how many people it takes to roast the man a damned duck?” “And then she gave her girlfriend Princess Lamballe another twenty thousand livres?” “Marie must be the worst cardplayer in France to lose that much. The woman must be an idiot.” “A thousand livres a day for flowers? What do they do, pave the roads with them?”
Even the Communal Assembly could talk of little else. Most of the members were businessmen or lawyers, who had always had to account for every penny. They were gossiping about the royal family, so perhaps they would forget Sophie and himself. When he walked into City Hall, he wondered as he was greeted from all sides who among these men thought him cuckolded. The town government seemed to run on gossip and factionalism. They were engaged in a war with three sides. On one side was his old academic rival, Mayor Bailly, repr
esenting Lafayette’s faction who wanted a strong central authority, restricted citizenship, and order above all. On the other side were the districts, wanting to vote on everything, the most democracy possible. Sometimes his faction made common cause with them. His group of colleagues were sometimes called Brissotins for Brissot. They were closer to the districts than they were to Bailly. Personal animosity between Nicolas and Bailly stretched back fifteen years, but now there was internecine warfare between the Mayor and Nicolas’ colleagues in the Communal Assembly.
Finally his group decided to legitimate themselves as a formal organization. They named themselves the Social Circle, a bland enough name and in reality what they had all along been, a group of friends with similar ideas and interests. They rented an office and started a paper. On the door they put a box with a metal lion’s head called the Iron Mouth, and invited anybody who wanted to air their views to put a message inside. The most interesting would be published in the newspaper Nicholas Bonneville would edit.
The idea caught on, and many, many messages and letters and notes were shoved through the lion’s mouth, littering the floor within. Some were written on weighty, imposing stationery with a well-trimmed quill. Others were crudely printed with many misspellings and not a few of the obscenities that filled popular speech, on the back of pages torn from pamphlets, in ink made of charcoal. Nicolas spent many afternoons in the office. He was comfortable around books and papers, newspapers and pamphlets, education and propaganda. It was his contribution to the Revolution. He could persuade and he could explain. Not the worst duties he could assume.
