City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  “You like any uniform,” Otile said. “It’s the same old equipment in a fancy package.”

  “Look, here comes the Assembly marching.” Babette pointed. “Who are the old guys?”

  “Veterans from the Invalides. They wouldn’t take the muskets apart when we were attacking the Bastille. Give them a cheer.” Pauline was proud of herself for knowing. “Here come the electors of Paris. Look, there’s our Danton with the presidents from the districts.”

  The King and the Queen had been brought out to the raised area in the center where they could review the marchers. The flag bearers from the National Guard lined up with their companies to file past the royal family. More battalions marched by, including their own. The crowd was cheering itself hoarse. Everybody was screaming and waving whatever they had to wave.

  “Here come the fédérés!” Babette yelled, carried away completely, jumping up and down. “Ain first. They came from all over, just to be here.”

  The procession went on for hours. The rain stopped and the sun came out dimly. The women went behind the earthworks to pee, then bought lemonade. When they slipped back, still the fédérés were passing. Then came more soldiers and sailors. It was halfway through the afternoon before the marching was over and the Archbishop of Autun, a patriot clergyman, celebrated High Mass and blessed every banner and flag, thousands of them.

  The King and Queen seemed to be blessing everybody too. It felt great, everybody pulling together for a change. It was like the best mass she had ever attended, better than a wedding or a grand funeral. Then all the guns went off, deafening her. She pressed her hands over her ears and waited for the ground to stop shaking. She could feel the cannons in her bones.

  Lafayette in his tricolor sash got up where the King and Queen were and everybody shut up. Faintly they could hear him taking an oath in the name of the National Guard and all the soldiers and sailors to remain faithful to the nation, the law and the King. Then the fédérés swore the oath, as if they were all getting married. Pauline found herself moved so that tears swelled in her eyes. Oh, come on, she told herself, it’s just old Lafayette. He has contempt for us. But she could not help it. She wanted to believe in the King swearing the oath and the Queen, holding up the Dauphin as the tricolored plumes on her enormous hat swayed in the breeze.

  She wanted to believe as she cheered in her failing voice: she wanted desperately to believe. The King had taken the oath to uphold the Constitution, the same oath taken by the fédérés, the National Guard, the soldiers and sailors. But she could see the King. He looked bored. Men were always swearing something or other: I’ll love you forever; I’ll always be true; if you let me put it in, I won’t come. In their minds they had their fingers crossed. Who wouldn’t want to stay King?

  The fédérés meant it. They were shouting with a passion that found its equal in her own. About the other soldiers, she wasn’t so sure. When push came to shove, would they fire on the people or join them? And those deputies from the Assembly, they had done great things but they were backpedaling.

  At six the fete was over, although it took them an hour to get out through the enormous crush. “What do you want to do now?” Aimée asked them.

  “I’m going home, I’m all used up. My feet, my butt, my throat are sore. But you girls should go to the Bastille Ball. If I was your age I’d go hop up and down where the Bastille stood.” Otile winked.

  Aimée shook her head. “My old man has had the kids all afternoon.”

  “We have to stop in my shop and dry off first,” Pauline said. Two minutes ago she had been exhausted and a little downcast. Now she was full of excitement and energy again. “The Bastille Ball! I’m going. Babette? Please go with me.”

  “Of course! I wonder if those gorgeous grenadiers will be there.”

  To party on the place of the Bastille, what a lovely turn life had taken. Pauline was hungry but she did not care. She wanted to dance all night on the Bastille. What was the use having a Revolution if they could not have fun?

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Georges

  (Spring-Summer 1790)

  LAFAYETTE had a grudge against Marat. Georges could imagine how Marat rubbed a patrician gentleman of ancient blood, family riches and great personal glory, and above it all, towering arrogance, not only the wrong way, but into a fury. Here was Marat, who had been a society doctor, a physician to a royal regiment, gone far to the left. Lafayette pursued him from refuge to refuge, driving him into the sewers where he lived like a rat and still put out his newspaper. Sometimes Marat hid in the cellars of old monasteries. Sometimes an admirer put him up for a few days or weeks. Sometimes he camped in the quarries of Montmartre.

  Marat was said to have been a ladies man. Now he wore shabby workmen’s clothes. He had a good woman, Simonne Évrard, who supported him in poverty, made sure he ate, tried to care for his ailments. He was wearing himself out, she said, in the service of the Revolution. Marat would never compromise because he wanted nothing at all but revolution. Lafayette and Bailly had the power in Paris, controlled the police and City Hall, but Lafayette was not enjoying power as much as he must have expected to.

  Again and again Lafayette had the Châtelet issue warrants for Marat’s arrest. The Châtelet was an ancient fort at the Pont au Change, but the name referred to the King’s old star chamber which had the right to arrest political prisoners and lose them in the dungeons underneath. Now Lafayette controlled it. Lafayette was always sending out squads to break up or confiscate Marat’s presses.

  Georges found Marat foulmouthed. He had no inner checks or censors. He said what he felt, never diluting it out of politeness, fear, desire to please. Georges admired that, at the same time that he would not emulate him—or care to stand too close downwind. The poor workingmen and women of Paris, the sans-culottes, worshipped Marat. Georges, who also craved their admiration and support, understood Marat’s appeal to the poor and the desperate. He would not sell them out. Marat was a verbal juggernaut who could not be reasoned with, bought off, led astray or seduced. Many of the new political men viewed him as a rabid dog, but Georges respected his power. If he could, he meant to stay on the good side of Marat, although he doubted that personal support would win him anything from Marat beyond a moment’s nod for having done the right thing.

  Marat had moved his newspaper, The Friend of the People, into the Cordeliers neighborhood, seeking protection. Georges took that appeal seriously. A Guardsman came to warn Marat and the district that Lafayette was on the move again. To arrest Marat, Lafayette arrived with two cannon and three thousand men in arms, all in their new National Guard uniforms.

  Georges got enough people into the streets to slow them down. Then he stood in the street in front of Lafayette on horseback, reading the warrant line by line. He put his training as a lawyer to work and found a flaw in their warrant. While three thousand National Guardsmen stood around twiddling their thumbs and a messenger ran to get the warrant corrected at the Châtelet, one of Georges’ men—he had a whole group by now fiercely loyal and ready to follow his orders—got Marat out of the neighborhood. Marat would be safe until Lafayette cooled down. Thus when Georges said, “Oh, be my guest, your papers are in order, you may arrest Marat,” Marat was long gone.

  In March Lafayette attacked again. This time his target was Georges. His friend Panis came to warn him that Lafayette was demanding his arrest in the National Assembly. He doubted if Lafayette was skillful enough at discerning differences in what he considered the lower orders to tell Marat’s politics from his own. To Lafayette, they were both jackals. The Cordeliers district protested to the Assembly. Both Lafayette’s warrant of arrest and the petition of protest languished in committee. Nobody came to arrest Georges. He was more amused than frightened. It was good publicity. In a society just beginning to have elections, nobody had any practice running for office. They were studying at being politicians, a new career line. Georges had already figured out one thing: if nobody has heard of you, they aren’t go
ing to vote for you.

  In May Bailly and Lafayette persuaded the Assembly to abolish the districts, which had been so uppity, so independent, so able to summon the people into the streets. Instead Paris was to be “rationally” divided into forty-eight sections, with only citizens owning sufficient property able to vote. Cartoons in the right-wing press showed the dragon of Paris cut into little pieces by a Saint George who looked like Lafayette. Lafayette was now their hero.

  Georges, Camille and the Roberts, husband and wife who ran a revolutionary paper, sat at the Danton family table. Gabrielle, eight months pregnant, waddled to and fro overseeing the service of supper and then gateau caramel and coffee. On a map of the city Camille plotted out how their district had been redrawn. They now ran down to the Seine. The limitations on the powers of the old district assemblies, as they were forcibly metamorphosed into the new section assemblies, meant they would be weak and ineffectual.

  “We can’t give up our power base,” Georges said bluntly. “We are the Cordeliers. That’s a name to reckon with in Paris. Now they call us the Théâtre-Français section, as if we were a bunch of actors in costumes.”

  “Most of the new blocks they’ve given us are sans-culottes,” Madame Robert said. “They’re good people, but they can’t vote.”

  “We need some way to reach them,” Camille said. “We need face-to-face organization. The Jacobins have a club. Lafayette and company just broke away and started the Society of ’89. We’ll be the Cordeliers Club.”

  Georges stood, yanked Camille upright and embraced him. “That’s a brilliant idea.”

  “Why Georges, do you adore my idea, or is it just that Gabrielle is out of combat these days?”

  Camille would try to disconcert him but always fail. Georges could not be embarrassed sexually. That was his turf. He slapped Camille on the backside and dropped him into his seat. “The Cordeliers Club. With cheap membership. Dues the sans-culottes can afford. Not only let them in, welcome them! Make them comfortable. We are their political home. Be sure to look them over carefully, pick some new guys to groom and give them offices to make them loyal. Lafayette and Bailly think they skewered us, but they just gave us a bigger power base. They’ll live to regret this game.”

  Thus the district became the Club, and the Club was more militant and better organized than the district had been. Nobody referred to them as Théâtre-Français. They were still called by everyone in Paris the Cordeliers. Now there were more of them.

  It was a sultry June night, a reddish moon hanging like a slice of country sausage over the steamy streets. Gabrielle’s mother had arrived for her confinement, and he was ordered out of the flat. After things at the Club petered out, he sat in the Cafe Procope, nervously sipping eau de vie. “You’re out late tonight,” his old friend Fabre said, sitting down at his table. “I thought you were very much the married man these days.”

  “My wife is in labor. Why aren’t you worrying about your play? Didn’t it just open?”

  “To applause and fury. I have written the first great revolutionary drama. If I’d known you were at liberty this evening, I would have insisted on taking you.” Fabre still dressed as a fop, an enormous cravat setting off his long homely face with its somewhat receding chin.

  “I hope you have a huge success.”

  “There’s another revolutionary playwright in the neighborhood. An actor-manager who used to have his own company touring the provinces. I’ll have to introduce you, my dear Georges. Collot d’Herbois. A very political as well as dreadfully handsome young man—tall, dark. We should recruit him for the Cordeliers. He’s a firebrand with a big carrying voice.”

  Twice Georges went home and twice he was turned away. Finally Mme Charpentier let him sleep on the sofa. At four-thirty he was awakened. He was permitted in briefly by Madame and the midwife to view his new red squalling son and sweat-soaked Gabrielle, who had fallen into a sleep of exhaustion with the baby in the crook of her arm.

  They named the baby Antoine. Some of the militant revolutionaries were withdrawing from religious activities, but he had his son christened. It would have upset the grandparents to neglect that; it would have upset Gabrielle. It was polite to follow custom and it did not matter to him. Why mark the boy with the prejudice of a moment? Governments changed.

  “Are you happy now?” Gabrielle asked as they walked back from church. “O paterfamilias.”

  “You’ve made me happy.” And he was: a son at last, a good woman.

  The Cordeliers were growing weekly, meeting in the old monastery that had given its name to the neighborhood. It wasn’t a fancy building, just an oval inside with wooden benches, a raised platform for the president and another for the speaker of the moment. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was pinned to the wall with crossed daggers. The only other decoration was a row of plaster busts of Mirabeau, Rousseau and William Tell. It was always dusty and often the mud of the street was tracked in. He also joined the Jacobin Club, which had much grander quarters. It was moving left. It had garnered power and prestige. Everyone in France had heard of the Jacobin Club; chapters were being organized in every provincial city and town. It was time to get his foot in the door, but the Cordeliers were his base.

  Lafayette and Bailly had stolen the power from the districts, turning them into impotent sections. Well, if push came to shove, he could show them how potent these sections could be. They might be surprised down at City Hall how fast the Cordeliers could call out the troops.

  His section chose him late that summer to represent them at City Hall; but each of the one hundred forty-four delegates had to be approved by all the sections. He was the only delegate to be voted down. It was a bit of a shock to his ego. He was outrageously popular in his section. He had obviously become known in Paris; but among the citizens with property enough to vote, he was not acceptable. He was conflated with Marat. That helped him at home, but obviously hurt him in greater Paris.

  It was an obstacle, but hardly insurmountable. Either more citizens had to be given the vote or he had to make a better name. He began working toward both those ends. An election was coming for the Departmental Council—far less powerful than the Paris Commune, but something. They were all learning this election business on their feet. He was beginning to vary his speeches once he had judged the audience, to talk one way to sans-culottes and differently to a bourgeois audience. This time he was successful. It was almost an empty office, but he had proved he could win.

  The National Guard in his old district voted him their commander. That was a power base too. He kept on top of the Cordeliers. He went regularly to the Jacobins and made a speech from time to time. He watched everything and ran for every office that became vacant. He was getting proficient at campaigning. The Departmental Council was his, but boring and far from the center of power. No, he wanted into the Commune. They had to pry control of the city away from Lafayette and Bailly, and he had to be part of that effort.

  The King’s court had been abolished and he had no more income from the law. He still had debts. He took a bribe from time to time, but the problem of how to live well hung on his neck. The situation was promising, he maintained to Gabrielle, now breastfeeding his handsome baby son. But he had to figure out how to work it. In the meantime, he had lots of supporters and a group of loyal allies who were his to command. He had to maintain his base in the neighborhood and break out into the city; and eventually, the country. A newspaper like Marat and Camille had used to make themselves known was not for him. He rarely bothered writing down his speeches except for jotting a few ideas; he improvised. He would have to improvise himself a career.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Max

  (Late 1790-April 1791)

  WHEN the Assembly reluctantly followed the King to Paris, Max did not choose to live near the Tuileries. He found inexpensive lodgings in the Marais. Some blocks of the Marais held aristocratic town houses favored by bankers, investors, industrialists, minor aristocracy. But near the river we
re old narrow streets of leaning houses, where he rented three rooms. An elderly widow came in to cook and clean for him. When she was not about, he just ate fruit and chocolate or coffee with milk.

  He was paid as a deputy, but he was supporting Charlotte and Augustin, back in Arras. Augustin wasn’t doing well at the law. Being the brother of a man who had become notorious did not help. As head of family, Max felt guilty at having escaped Arras. True, he had not run off with a mistress or to make his fortune in Brazil, but he had abandoned his family for politics. He sent them every bit he could and still they always needed more. Unscrupulous operators tried to bribe him occasionally. He knew how to freeze a man who was trying to slip him something, hinting at some advantage to be gained by trimming his principles or his vote to their interests. No one was fool enough to try it twice.

  Max worked hard to stay abreast of important issues and speak to them. Aside from the galleries, few deputies listened. “They see you as a dangerous radical,” Camille said as they sat in a bright cafe near the Assembly. Camille read aloud from a monarchist paper: “This Rattle-spear wants to give the vote to artisans and peasants and then, no doubt, to barnyard animals too.”

  “They think I’m a joke,” Max said bitterly. “But I’ll laugh last.”

  “You have a following on the streets of Paris. The little people light candles to you.” Camille made a gesture of praying.

  “Many of these deputies are provincial lawyers like me, but they think if they’ve secured a place as full and equal pigs at the trough, then the aims of the Revolution are achieved. They’re already retreating from the grand and fair claims of the Rights of Man. Now they’re granting full citizenship only to men with an ample income. Most citizens were called passive and expected to be so, without a vote. It’s a sickening reversal of the democratic ideals of August.”