by Marge Piercy
Sophie went into labor attended by Dr. Cabanis and her mother, who had arrived over Sophie’s protests the week before. Nicolas refused to leave the Mint. He sat at his desk trying to work. Then he gave up and paced. He began to understand the appeal of knitting for women, of embroidery, or anything at all, perhaps whittling. Men were allowed to whittle.
He tried singing to himself, but he had never been musical. Sophie was the artistic one; she painted exquisitely. It was her relaxation. She had done a series of portraits of him. She liked to paint flowers and still lifes. She said that no lily or pumpkin had ever gotten restless as it posed. Sophie, Sophie! She did not cry out. She would bite through a pillow sooner than alarm him by screaming. This was taking hours. Shouldn’t it be over by now?
He imagined all of them on a lawn like the one where he had fallen in love with Sophie. The child—sexless, vague—Sophie, slim again, and he stood in a garden in full bloom. It was healthier for children out of the fetid city. He had done a lot for the Revolution; perhaps it was time to retire and live comfortably and quietly. To, as Voltaire urged, cultivate his garden.
Finally Dr. Cabanis appeared. “You have a daughter, Marquis.”
“Titles have been abolished,” he said automatically. “How is Sophie?”
“She’s resting. But this was an easy, short labor, and she’s healthy and strong. It was quite simple.”
Easy. She had been in labor for almost nine hours. Cabanis was his good friend, but at the moment, he could have torn his head off. “Thank you,” Nicolas said coldly. “I’m glad you found it easy.”
The child was perfectly formed with a single swirl of fine brown hair on the crown. Sophie sat up in bed looking pleased with herself and pale, the child in the crook of her arm and the new nanny hovering while her own maid combed her hair. Her mother was lying in the armchair with her eyes closed, as if she had been the one giving birth.
“Conceived with the Revolution,” Nicolas said, gazing at his child. “May both of them thrive together. Is it too much to wish for her liberty, equality and brotherhood?”
“Not too much,” Sophie said so softly he had to lean close to hear her. There was still a scent of blood. “Just enough.”
THIRTY-TWO
Manon
(1790)
MANON was frightened when Jean came home from one of those exhausting trips with a high fever, his skin loose and grey, his gaze bleary. The doctor, when he finally arrived, pronounced him in mortal danger from a fever she had never heard of. The doctor bled Jean, gave him an enema, prescribed some vile salts and sent a stiff bill. She set about to cure Jean with bed rest, nutritious soups, good herbs from her garden and the fields. She had nursed scores of peasants through their illnesses, and she had a better record of patient survival than the doctor. She rearranged the house to give Jean a room near the kitchen where he would be warm. At first he slipped in and out of sleep, near delirium. After the second week he began to have coherent interludes. He apologized profusely and tediously for being ill. He was weak and needed help for all his functions. She learned he had been ill for much of his journey but had insisted on continuing his rounds.
Her days settled into a new pattern. Every dawn, she drank strong coffee and walked. Sometimes it was the only time she escaped the house all day. She walked two miles down the road and two miles back, unless the rain was heavy. Sometimes she rode the donkey. The bushes were leafing out, the currants, the gooseberries. The vines were fuzzy, then green. The days grew warmer. Now she had to keep him cool. She moved him to an airier room.
By midsummer, he got up sometimes, but he was still weak. In the meantime, news came that his post had been abolished. How ironical for a liberal like Jean to have survived all the King’s bureaucrats could throw at him, and then to be dismissed by the Revolution he had longed for, only a year after it had come to power. No matter. Once he was well, she would secure him another post. They had friends in Paris, and now Paris—not Versailles—was the center of power.
She doubted she had ever had romantic feelings for her husband. She was not entirely sure what romantic feelings were. She knew the sublime from viewing the grandeur of the Alps, the somber power of storms lashing the hills. She had wondered how any woman could talk herself into feeling such awe or excitement about a man. She loved her husband and honored him. She accepted her role in life, to serve him, to second him, to succor him. But it was disconcerting to feel toward her much older husband as if he were a balky and whining child. He really was far more difficult than Eudora. In the early weeks, she had kept Eudora away from him, but now the girl seemed a good companion for Jean in his bored and bedridden state.
When Eudora had taken her nipple, she had experienced a rich sensual pleasure and a powerful connection. She had felt much closer to Eudora as a babe in her arms than she did now, with the little lady daydreaming over her sums and making eyes at the vintner’s boy. How could an eight-year-old flirt? Well, Eudora could. She reminded Manon of the silliest girls in the convent, the ones who called her a bookworm. Eudora loved clothes and sweets. Her worst deceptions concerned whether she had stolen an extra slice of tart from the counter or finished a box of bonbons. These were petty sins to be annoyed by, but their very pettiness embarrassed. She did not want her daughter to care passionately about furbelows and bonbons. How had she failed to awaken Eudora intellectually? She had spent years trying to shape Eudora’s mind—but it was shapeless.
All summer, she nursed Jean faithfully. When Jean’s brother the priest arrived, she was smitten with happiness as if he were a first-rate intellect to converse with. If she was summoned by one of the peasant families for some emergency—a swollen infected foot, a sudden fever in an infant—she could not fight her own pleasure at having a good excuse to escape. When she walked back into her house after one of these visits, she was struck by the smell. Peasant houses stank, of course. The pile of manure and garbage ends outside the door gave its odor to the whole house in warm weather. They had almost no change of clothes. Sometimes they dipped in the river in summer to get cool, the extent of their bathing for the year. But her own home smelled unpleasantly medicinal and musty. It smelled like what it was, a sickroom expanded till Jean’s needs and routines and demands filled the entire house, sinking in the stucco and wood and stone. The stable had a pleasanter odor.
She rode on horseback to Lyon from time to time, on some excuse of family business. She went in for the great fete of May thirtieth, a patriotic festival on the banks of the Rhone and the biggest crowd she had ever seen. An official told her there were sixty thousand National Guards, all in uniform, auxiliaries of various sorts including women with pikes who made her wince with scorn, and what the official estimated was two hundred thousand ordinary people celebrating. She was half terrified, half exhilarated. The crowd was a vast ruminating animal, making a sound she had never heard, an endless soughing, murmuring, muttering. It produced its own heat. Here and there people were playing fiddles or flutes and dancing. She even danced with a group of strangers.
A huge artificial rock had been built near the river with a statue of Liberty on top wearing a Phrygian cap, the red cap taken from the galley slaves that some revolutionaries had been affecting lately. Between Liberty’s feet was erected an altar to the nation. There were speeches and songs and parades and more dancing. When she got home the next day, she wrote an account for Brissot’s paper. She described the joyful camaraderie of troops and populace, swearing fidelity and celebrating together.
He wrote back that her article was a tremendous success and he had to print up sixty thousand more copies of his paper with her long description of the fete. Desmoulins had picked it up and reprinted it. “If you signed your articles, Manon,” he wrote, “you would be as famous as Desmoulins.”
The happiest times were the few visits from the outside world. Henri Bancal came for a day. He had just bought a piece of Church property and was full of plans for all his friends, including the Rolands, to live there
together. Manon loved the idea. She would not be lonely and bored then.
In August, Bancal returned for a month. She was grateful for his company. By that time, Jean was up occasionally, but he tired quickly. The more time he spent in bed, the weaker he was, and therefore it seemed to her, the more time he spent in bed. At times she despaired that he would ever go about like a normal adult again. Bancal was a welcome contrast. He shared her love of walking and climbing in the hills around them. She felt a true meeting of minds with him. He was a very political man, who had been a lawyer but given up his practice for the Revolution. He was closer to her in age than to Jean. He had grown up in Clermont-Ferrand and had the air of a country man more than a Parisian, perhaps because he was husky and muscular. He always seemed to be straining his silk waistcoats and fine linen. He seemed happiest in country boots, striding along at her side.
Then one evening, he clasped her hands in his and told her he was in love with her. “No,” she said, “you’re mistaken.”
“I know what I feel, Manon, and I hope you feel something for me!” He began kissing her passionately, holding her in a tight grip. She controlled her panic and finally thrust him away with sufficient force that he left off.
“I mean, it’s impossible. I’m a married woman, as you well know.”
“What has that got to do with love?”
Very little in a way, to be sure. “It has to do with virtue, my friend. How I behave matters very much to me. We cannot permit ourselves impurities and venalities when we are trying to make a better world—can we?”
She was moved by his wooing, though not as he wished. She had tender feelings toward him, but none that could not be controlled. When he left, they continued to correspond about politics. He seemed willing to forget the aborted romance. She did not exactly forget. If she did not long for Bancal, his passion had touched some hidden place in her that said, There’s something we have never known, Manon. Never known.
She kept these seditious thoughts to herself. To Jean she spoke encouragement. Sometimes she caught herself speaking to him in that sweet simple way one spoke to children, senile old men, village idiots and dogs. Yet he basked in her care. He liked to be fussed over, in spite of his telling her constantly not to bother. He wanted her to insist on doing for him. It was a tedious game they played. She experienced at times a sharp desire to back out. “Oh, let me make you some fresh soup.” “Oh, don’t bother. I’ll have the old soup. What does it matter?” Then she imagined saying, “Fine, if it’s the same to you.”
But she couldn’t. She knew her duty as a good wife. After all, he needn’t have married her. She could still be stuck back on the Quai de l’Horloge with her dissolute father watching age wither her. No, she had a husband, even if he was taking an impossibly long time to get back on his feet; she had a healthy pretty daughter, even if her mind was second rate. She had a lovely house, even if it wasn’t in Paris. She had a woman’s life, and for that she owed him, including nursing him month after month.
He read voluminously. He read learned journals and liberal newspapers and technical reports. He worked on revisions to his encyclopedia of industry. He wrote an occasional article on textiles or politics. That is, he scrawled a draft and she wrote it, their modus operandi. She was pleased when he did anything that got him up at least as far as his writing desk. But his eyes tired. Much of the time he had her read to him. Sometimes she dozed off while she was reading some report on mining or harvesting machinery, and she would wake with her head fallen on her chest and his plaintive voice saying, “Manon? Manon? What then?” as if it were some Gothic melodrama.
Losing his position had sapped his energy. He needed to be in harness. Without work, he did not know what to do with himself. If she ever wanted to get him out of bed, she must provide him with an overweaning purpose, something that would fulfil the same desire to be useful as his abolished position as inspector of textile manufacture.
On her trips to Lyon, she approached men they knew and began feeling them out for Jean. She wrote letters that strongly hinted at what he needed to well-connected friends in Paris, Lanthénas, Brissot, men they had known for years and who were now in or near power and influence. There was a group of them, many of which she had entertained over the years or with whom she had carried on a lengthy correspondence. They were calling themselves the Social Circle. They had just lost the Paris elections. Now they were setting up a publishing house to propagandize for their views and educate the public.
One of them had to come through for her. Hadn’t she spent an enormous amount of time listening to them, nodding, smiling, offering suggestions, now and then writing a little something they needed. Half of them at one time or another had claimed to be in love with her. Let them show their devotion now. Let them produce some kind of position that would rouse Jean from his far too comfortable invalid stupor.
But it was the patriots she had cultivated and entertained in Lyon who saved them. In the fall, two of the men who frequented her little salon approached to sound her out. Jean must run for municipal council. He was needed. He was well enough known in a field of men whom no one had ever heard of. In spite of or because of his radical reputation, they assured her he would win. Within two days, Jean was out of bed. The idea of running for office galvanized him. He would be someone of importance again.
THIRTY-THREE
Pauline
(June-July 1790)
PAULINE was busy making chocolates. Bonbons shaped like the Bastille and National Guardsmen proved very popular. Half the neighborhood had gone off to the Champ de Mars to work. Before the Festival of the Federation to commemorate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, an enormous amount of hauling of earth and building had to go on. It was all done by volunteers, every day and by torchlight into the night. These were the long pale nights of June when she had fallen in love with Henri, who had disappeared as if down a hole. She kept expecting him to appear. Many soldiers had deserted.
She went to the Champ de Mars several times. Women were hauling and pushing wheelbarrows too. It was to be a great festival of unity, showing that everybody was together behind the Revolution and the new Constitution. Lafayette was organizing the program. An enormous triumphal arch with three entrances had been erected. A large earthen amphitheater was being constructed for spectators. In the center they were creating a raised area from which the speakers could address everyone, with an altar to the nation to be the focus of public thanksgiving. The King would sit there, right in the center of his people where all could see him.
It would be grand. Each time she went there, the scene was frenzied and more structures were being built. Nothing like this event had ever been. From all over the nation, National Guardsmen would come. To take so seriously being French was new. She had not grown up with that. The nation felt as if it were a huge hungry baby only one year old. Before that, you lived in a neighborhood, in a town or village, you lived in a province. You were a Limousin, a Breton, an Alsatian. Now you were first and foremost French. France had been born and must be fed and could, if they were not careful, receive a mortal wound and die.
On the great day, a year after she had fought at the Bastille, at dawn she rose and dressed in her best—including an almost new salmon-colored bodice from Victoire—and went off with Aimée, Babette and her mother, Otile, to walk to the Champ de Mars. Until the Assembly had decided to hold the Feast of the Federation there, it had just been a large dusty field in front of the École Militaire, where soldiers could drill and not trip over each other.
It was raining just as hard as it had been the day she marched to Versailles. By the time their hike was rewarded by the sight of the earthworks and the triumphal arches, they were bedraggled, soaked, and the streets were running streams smelling of human and horse waste. It took forever to get to the arches, for half of France seemed to be converging right there. She was scared as the crowd tightened around her. She was borne along.
Men in uniform were everyplace. When
she finally passed under the arches, they were covered with people who had climbed on them for a better view. They headed for the left embankment, although it meant sitting in the mud. Pauline had brought a small rug, which she stretched out. All the seats were already occupied, so they sat in front of the first row. Spectators had umbrellas of every color opening like flowers in the rain.
At one end she could see the grandstand crowded with dignitaries. While they were waiting for the fete to begin, Pauline read off the words on the triumphal arch. “With the defense of the Constitution, no poor man need fear any longer that he will be robbed by his oppressor!”
“That’s beautiful,” Otile said. “I wish I could read. I never minded before, but now I miss too much. It makes me ashamed.”
Aimée said, “Pauline, we should start a little class for women of the neighborhood who want to learn their letters. We could do it Sundays after church. Do you think women would like that?”
“I’d go,” Otile said, blowing her nose on her kerchief. “Patriots should be able to read the papers, I know it.”
First the cavalry charged in, to the accompaniment of salvos of guns. They galloped around and around the huge field, their horses all groomed and shiny. Then came the grenadiers, row upon row upon row. “There are enough soldiers to start a war here,” Babette said. “I love their uniforms.”
