by Marge Piercy
“You’ve improved as an orator. I heard your speech yesterday.”
“You alone did, then. When I speak, the delegates pass notes. They chat. They slip out to relieve themselves. Only the gallery listens. And a few friends from the Breton Club.”
“I’m praising your speech in my paper. And everyone calls the Club the Jacobins now, as if you’d all become monks!”
“I’m the only monk.” He smiled wryly. The Club had moved into an old monastery near the Assembly, further along on the Rue Saint Honoré. That was an even longer hike from his lodgings, but he walked briskly, carrying a stick, and most of the street people knew him by sight. Just as the Cordeliers were named for the building where they met, his club was now called the Jacobins. When he spoke there, he was far more respectfully heard than in the Assembly.
On December thirtieth, 1790, Max stood as best man to Camille as he finally married his sweetheart Lucile in the big, rather bland church of Saint Sulpice, near the empty Luxembourg palace. Outside in the square, it was poultry market day around the fountain. The shouts of buyers and sellers drifted in. Max was moved for Camille. It was given to few men to achieve their heart’s desire, and this appeared a true marriage of affection to which he could give full approval. “You’ve sometimes been wild and unconsidered in your actions, but now you can devote your best efforts to the Revolution.” He straightened Camille’s cravat.
It had been hard to find a priest. Camille had made fun of the Church often enough. He was strongly supporting the confiscation of Church property in his newspaper, and what was called the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which meant all were paid by the government and swore an oath to the Constitution. Priest after priest refused to marry the couple, until Camille was joking about getting an American medicine man. Finally Max spoke to a man who had taught them at Louis-le-Grand. Camille mouthed a few transparently false promises of recantation, which the father did not believe but would be useful to him with his own superiors. He was a good-natured man pleased, like Max, to see his mischievous student finally married.
As Max stood through the ceremony, attentive, serious, he knew he could not hope for anything similar. He felt dizzy with relief that the Estates General had been called in time to keep him from marrying the cousin whose face he could not clearly recall. He would neglect a wife the way he used to walk off and leave Charlotte in the street, forgetting she was there. He had no right to children. Even if he did not die before he did what he must, he would have only his political legacy. He could dream of a woman who would see clearly his aims, his ideals, but what then? He had nothing to offer. He watched Camille kiss his bride and tears briefly burned his eyes. Soon, he thought, I will not even remember I imagined being held and cherished. Lucile wore pale pink. She shone, as only a very young bride who desperately wanted to be married to her husband and him alone, can gleam. To look into her face hurt his eyes. Gravely he kissed her cheek, inhaling lavender perfume and the scent of her body. A throb of sexual reaction touched him and he grimaced. He did not have a strong sensual nature, fortunately, and his body troubled him little. What vexed him sometimes was the desire to be in a warm relationship. He imagined a simple dignified domesticity, the physical manifestation of a spiritual and political harmony.
Max wished they lived nearer to him. He liked to be around happily married people. But they set up in the same building as the politician who had recently been coming to the Jacobin Club, Danton. Danton had an unruly aspect but good politics. He had a streak of the demagogue, but his voice was usually raised on the correct side, and Max could hardly fault him for vehemence in good causes.
Max was deeply concerned for the Revolution. Everywhere the forces of reaction were rising. In Aix-en-Provence, a former lawyer of the Parlement and two noblemen were persuaded by the King’s cousin the Prince de Condé to plot an uprising against the revolutionary town government. In Perpignan, the local Jacobin Club had a shooting war with a royalist club. In February, a royalist group armed themselves and attempted to seize the Tuileries and liberate the King. Every day new plots broke out. The Revolution was far, far from being won, and yet the fools in the Assembly could not see the danger.
In March the Prince de Condé began to organize an army. In Worms across the Rhine, he recruited soldiers to invade France. The King’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, was gathering an army at Coblenz. Mirabeau’s younger brother, the drunkard called Barrel, had his deathshead hussars at Colmar. All these armies were heavy on generals and captains and weak on privates, but Max knew that the poor could always be conscripted. Economic necessity made soldiers of farmhands. The poor of Germany and Austria would march off to invade France the way the French had always marched at the King’s bidding. Max hated war. It was organized slaughter in the interest of those who organized it. There was no such thing as glory for a poor boy gut-wounded and dying like a stuck pig.
The royalist armies were unprepared. Still it was criminal folly to forget the enemies within and the enemies without. These military aristocrats did not mealymouth the way the King did. They were open about their intention to hang every last member of the Assembly and all the journalists of Paris. They wanted to crush the peasant uprisings and the workers, as they had so many times. They wanted exactly what they had enjoyed, every privilege, every sous, every scrap of land, every feudal right. They wanted the ancien régime back, but more so. The King had dishonored himself by promising to sign the Constitution. He would be replaced by his brother, Artois, who was ready to lead an army that would vindicate divine right and smash the Revolution.
Max noticed how ghastly Mirabeau looked when he spoke in the Assembly. Mirabeau was forty-three, older than most delegates. In April, he died. Rumors were repeated in wall posters and newspapers that he had been poisoned. The public prosecutor ordered an autopsy. Just an inflamed liver from overindulgence. Max was asked to deliver one of the many eulogies. Whatever personal reservations he had about Mirabeau, the man had been a strong force for the Revolution, indispensable in the early days of the Assembly. Mirabeau was buried as a hero of the Revolution in the unfinished Pantheon.
Max was in a minority of radicals in the Assembly. He had learned to be more vehement, more passionate in an icy controlled way. He was finding a way to speak that the galleries loved, even if the Assembly often tried to shout him down. When he volunteered for a committee, it was as if he had not spoken. He was shut out from the work of government.
When Max walked in the streets, people cheered him. He was embarrassed to see crude replicas of himself made of clay, wood, even porcelain on sale. He was always seeing his likeness hung in humble shops and taverns and workshops, little factories. Men and women alike wanted to touch him. Women brought him their babies to bless and named them for him. It seemed as if the less power and influence he had in the Assembly, the more he was revered by the people. Their increasing adoration made him feel like a fraud. What have I done for you? he wanted to ask. He managed to shame the Assembly into voting that they could not succeed themselves in the next elections. They were increasingly conservative.
But he had not been able to secure for ordinary people the right to vote. He had not abolished black slavery. Slowly he was working toward rights for the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine. He had not been able to protect the rights or even the lives of soldiers who revolted against unjust conditions and lack of pay. He had not been able to abolish capital punishment.
The day after the King finally signed the Constitution, people in the streets unhitched the horses of a cab that he and Pétion had just climbed into. They began to draw the cab themselves. Max jumped out. “You’re not horses, people. Don’t act like draft animals. You’re free Frenchmen! Don’t make idols!” He railed at them, trying to make them understand that they should not adulate anyone. The more he tried to order them not to exalt him, the louder they cheered and cried out his name.
He did not know where to turn for advice. When he spoke of his new fame to Camille, Camille teas
ed him as a new popular saint. It was not fitting for people who worked so hard for so little to adore anyone. They desperately wanted defenders and heroes, and certainly he was their defender and would die for them. But this uncontrollable worship of public men could bring the unscrupulous to power. At the same time, he recognized as he examined himself and his behavior meticulously, that it did salve the wounds to his pride delivered daily by his fellow delegates. If his speeches were addressed now more to the galleries than to the floor, that was because the galleries listened. The words no one in the Assembly bothered to heed were published at once in the radical papers and repeated as gospel in taverns and workshops. Every day he was more famous among the little people and more infamous among the big people. He could see what had to be done, and yet he could not make those with power do what was needed to save the Revolution. In spite of the adulation and his friendship with Camille, he felt bitterly alone.
THIRTY-SIX
Claire
(January 1791)
A YEAR had passed since Claire said goodbye to Mendès. He had returned to Bordeaux, his mission accomplished and with fervent plans to organize young Jews into the National Guard. She thought of him more often than any man she had been with, but less as the year went on. She did not replace him with a new lover. She had no time to waste.
The theater on the boulevard where she worked was putting on a big pageant in the new year of 1791. As usual she would be almost nude, the centerpiece of a tableau called France Is Reborn. Flesh-colored tights and a tricolor shawl completed her costume. She was looking for a better job, but actresses were commoner than horses. On her side were her looks that men always seemed to end up staring at, even with twenty other women on the stage. She exuded something. She fulfilled some wish. She had no idea what it was, and she didn’t take it seriously. It was a matter of a few years at best, and then she would be a middle-aged woman sagging around like her mother: her mother who died in Pamiers and whom she had never seen again once she ran away. Sometimes she wondered if anyone was left of her family, except for Yvette in the convent.
She had a letter from Yvette just a week after she had been brooding about her. It had a Toulouse address.
Dear sister,
I am to be married next month. The revolution broke up the convent and I had to look for work. I was hired by a lawyer in Toulouse. There I met Pierre, who was the valet of a nobleman until the coward ran away and left all his servants to fend for themselves. But Pierre saved his money and he is buying a restaurant. He says that people have to eat, no matter what government is in power. I am very happy. He is older than me but his two children are dead. So there is no problem. His wife is dead too I forgot to say. I have been saving my money, so we have a real nest egg. We are looking for a good property. Every Sunday we look at possible restaurants. I am terribly happy and I wish you were a good woman and could get married too. Please send me whatever you can at once as we are going to need every sous we can scrape together.
Your loving sister,
Yvette.
P.S. Pierre does not want you to come to the wedding, but I know he won’t mind if you visit us after a while. I will work on him.
“So!” Hélène wrinkled her snub nose, “Are you jealous of your sister?”
“Just suspicious. I can’t imagine a man willing to marry her.”
“They say for every man, there’s a woman, if you believe that stuff.”
“I don’t think I could trust a man enough to give up and marry him.”
“What do you mean, give up?”
“Give up the freedom I have.”
“Freedom!” Hélène laughed bitterly, pushing her hair from her eyes. “Some great freedom …” She wrung her hands. “Claire, I’m caught.”
“Are you sure?”
“I haven’t had my time for three months. My breasts are sore and swollen. I remember my mother. She had eight kids, Claire. We women can get pregnant from thinking about it. The Virgin Mary has nothing on us.”
“Who’s the papa?”
“How do I know?”
Claire laughed and put her arm around Hélène. “Well, who have you been thinking about?”
“You remember that masked ball in October we were all invited to? You walked out early.”
“I don’t like pigs in masks pinching me.”
“I was with this guy. I don’t know who he was. It was very romantic, Claire, he was like a hero out of a play—”
“Hélène, how could you? You know what crap we put on.”
“A girl likes to believe in something above the ordinary. I felt carried off. It was like a dream. We danced and danced and he kept kissing me. He gave me a gold bracelet. It turned out to be fake.”
Claire took her hard by the shoulders. “Hélène, what are you going to do? Anatole will fire you. You can’t raise a bastard by yourself. Will your mother take it?”
“My father threw me out when I was sixteen and he caught me with my boyfriend. I was on the streets for four months before I got a job in a pantomime. I can’t go home… I’m going to a woman tomorrow. They say she’s a wise woman and she can get rid of it.”
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“Would you? Please. I’m scared. I’ve heard of girls dying that way.”
“You’ve heard of dozens of women dying in childbirth too. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, right? We’ll both go.”
The wise woman lived in the Faubourg Saint Marcel near the Gobelins tapestry factory, one of the most revolutionary sections. They went down the steep Rue Mouffetard. They passed the Salpêtrière, where they shut up whores and women punished for transgressions of morality. Hélène said wryly, “That’s where if somebody does you wrong, they jail you so you can feel really rotten. It’s supposed to be one of the worst prisons in Paris.” Women shouted to them through the gates in the heavy walls and they waved back. On Sunday visitors were streaming in and out and peddlers of all sorts. They could smell chicken cooking and backed-up drains.
Claire knew why Hélène was staring at the walls of Salpêtrière prison. If an unmarried woman got pregnant, she was obliged by the law to report it at once. She could go to prison for being pregnant and not reporting it. She could go to prison for trying to get rid of the baby. She could go to the workhouse if she had the baby, unmarried.
“As the Revolution moves along, as the people get more power, we’ll open the doors of Salpêtrière and free the women. We know why women are whores. Because it pays. Because it’s a job like any other. We’ll fix things, Hélène. You wait and see. I believe in this revolution.”
“So do I. But the men don’t understand what we need. They don’t care about the same things.”
“We’ll do it ourselves then. You’re walking slower and slower.” She grasped Hélène by the elbow, muscling her along and craning her neck to look for the address. Things were more spread out here. Houses did not loom over the narrow street, as in their neighborhood, but the streets were wider and often houses had gardens in back and rabbit hutches, a shed. The people had no more money—many hovels were patched together out of trash—but they could spread out a bit, grow beans, raise chickens for eggs. The snow from last week was yellow with horse piss. Today it was above freezing. Dirty heaps of old snow wept into the street, making going sloppy. They were standing in a street that seemed to be the right one, both looking around, when a woman hailed them. “By the looks of you, you want Auntie Michelle. Just turn at the corner and her door is the blue one. She’s two stories up.”
“How did she know?” Hélène muttered. “Do I look pregnant already?”
“Because when two women come together to this street obviously lost, they’re nine times out of ten looking for the wise woman. Come on.”
It took an hour. Claire had to hold Hélène down and keep the gag in. The blood ran everywhere. Claire felt faint and nauseated with the stench of blood, the awful blood running from Hélène. It was not right for Hélène to be lyin
g there naked from the waist down bleeding profusely. But they had to take off her skirt for fear she would stain it. A skirt was not something Hélène could do without.
Hélène was weak afterward from the pain and the loss of blood and still bleeding. Claire was afraid the woman would throw them out, but she let Hélène rest until it was beginning to get dark. “Now you better go, girls. It’s not too safe to be hanging around at night.”
Hélène had to stop frequently. The bleeding continued. It was much harder to climb the Rue Mouffetard than it had been to descend it. The night was still relatively mild and at least the puddles did not freeze. Slowly they made their way home, Hélène leaning more and more on her. Instead of taking Hélène home, Claire put her in her own bed. Slowly the bleeding ebbed to a slow regular flow.
The next day Hélène could not go to work. On the way home, Claire got soup at the corner tavern. Hélène took an hour to eat a bowl of soup, she was so weak. Claire was scared for her.
“You’ll stay here, with me. You’re going to get better. You’re going to eat up the soup and drink this wine and you’re going to feel better. I’m going to ask the apothecary for something to build up your blood. My grandmother said liver.” She went to the butcher’s for a piece of liver. Grandmère knew. She had always known what to do for burns and bruises, strains, cuts and lacerations.
The next few days were frightening. Hélène stayed weak and seemed feverish and then lethargic. Her red hair hung lank, no curl left. Her face was without color. Then slowly her strength returned. Claire fed her a potion from the apothecary supposed to restore vigor. She bought brandy. Nothing was too good for Hélène. Claire marveled at herself, how she did not mind taking care. Once she got over the fear that Hélène would die in her bed, she rather liked playing mother. She felt closer to Hélène after a week had passed than she had to anyone since her grandmother. Hélène was her friend and her project.
