City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  The forces drew up before the palace. Claire, Babette, Hélène, Victoire, Babette’s mother and father and all Pauline’s friends were near but not in the front ranks. The troops inside looked at them and they looked at the troops inside. The troops wore blue uniforms with red revers, crisp and elegant, hung with cartridges enough to blow them all to hell. Section leaders went to parlay. Pauline had not eaten since three in the morning and she was hungry. A man fiddling with his musket discharged it by accident and everyone started yelling and pushing. Rumors of deals and betrayals ran through the crowd. She shifted her pike yawning. Claire and Hélène were arguing in low private voices. The sun was beginning to heat up. Ten, said Notre Dame and the bells of the former monasteries answered, ten.

  Suddenly the crowd started moving. Someone had opened the gates. People were entering quickly but peaceably. The Marseillais soldiers had taken the lead. They were marching across the courtyard while the people poured in behind them. They shouted to the Swiss to join them, to share camaraderie. “We’re all soldiers. Why should we kill each other?” Once again the forces supposed to be against them had proved to be on their side.

  From ahead came the word, “We’re in the palace. The Swiss are throwing down their weapons and cartridges. They’re going to come over to us!”

  More and more people crowded in. It was a repeat of the last time they had stormed the palace. But as the Cordeliers contingent was entering the courtyard, they heard from ahead the sudden bark of muskets and then screaming. “The Swiss fired!” “They trapped us.” “It’s an ambush!”

  They surged forward, but now blood puddled on the stones underfoot. They tripped over the dying and dead. Bullets rained down from above where the Swiss had taken up strong positions. Then came a wave of those ahead of them running back, wounded, panicked. The Swiss were firing at will into the crowd in the courtyard, hitting a target every time. They could not miss, with people packed so tightly. No one could fire back. No one could stand or take a position. There was no cover. All around her people went down. The wounded were either picked up and carried away, or they were trampled underfoot. It was turning into a rout. Pauline could not even lift her pike in the crush.

  “Stand and fight!” someone was yelling, but bullets continued to smash into random flesh. People screamed and fell. Hélène fled with her hands over her ears. Claire was cursing. As they ran, the Swiss followed, shooting methodically into their backs. Pauline turned as they were forced through the narrow gates, more going down all the time, and saw some of the Swiss dragging away cannons the National Guard had abandoned. Swiss artillerymen were pulling the cannons into the palace. They had won. Every movement exuded confidence. More Swiss trotted forward toward the gates the crowd was squeezing through, bayonets fixed and spearing at will into back after back.

  The captain of the Marseillais climbed on the fence. He berated his men. He bellowed at them to be brave. Finally, he told them to sing. The drummer boy was hoisted up beside him and began the tatoo. The fédérés gathered into a ragged mass and began, “To arms, you citizens!” More and more of them sang. Then they turned and started back.

  “No retreat!” Their commander was yelling. “Advance or die! No retreat!” The Marseillais went charging through the gates, carrying the remainder of the fleeing crowd with them. People began to scream their anger as they pushed forward. Everyone was rushing back into the court. Bodies lay everywhere. As Pauline ran forward, her pike fixed at last for use, she saw several of the Swiss musketeers finishing off the wounded. They were caught by surprise and gunned down as they stood over the dying and mangled.

  The Swiss kept shooting from cover, deliberately, every shot bringing down a body, but there were hundreds now charging forward, there were thousands. The railings crashed flat. The court was open to the street. People were racing across into the line of fire. The shooting became more sporadic as the Swiss fell back into the palace. So many people were flooding into the courtyard that Pauline saw a Marseillais carried on with the crowd, although he had been shot in the eye and was dead.

  Claire at her side, Pauline entered, her pike fixed for action. They could hear Théroigne’s loud husky voice exhorting the soldiers ahead. A Swiss Guard behind a column shot and the bullet flew past Pauline close enough to make her cry out before it hit Babette’s father. He went down without a word. Claire stepped forward and fired her pistol as the musketeer was reloading. She shot him in the shoulder and he fell. There was no time to think. A man in silk culottes swinging a sabre was coming at Pauline. She speared him with her pike and then could not pull it back, for he had fallen on it. Blood gushed out of him. He was dying on her foot. Feeling sick, she left her pike and backed away. She had killed him, some unknown man. She began to cry, rubbing at her eyes in shame. As she stood there, a Cordelier pulled her pike free and charged forward into the melee.

  At the foot of the grand staircase, the Swiss were firing down. “Shit!” Claire said. “Shit!” She fell on her knees. She had taken a bullet through the flesh of her left arm, and blood was pouring down on her clothes.

  They found shelter behind a pillar. “You should get out of here,” Pauline said.

  “Just bandage me up. Tear off part of my petticoat. The bullet went through, thank God.” She leaned against the pillar, eyes closed. “Take my pistol.”

  “I don’t know how to use it.” Pauline hefted it uncertainly. Hélène began to cry. Between them they tied a tight bandage and stopped the heavy bleeding. Claire lay back against the pillar. A Guardsman handed them a flask and she drank the brandy.

  More and more people were pouring in, National Guard, men and women, all the ragged army of the morning. They were charging into the fire from the Swiss and knocking them off one by one, stabbing them, shooting, bludgeoning them. The line of the Swiss broke under the sheer numbers. The stairs had been cleared and there was hand-to-hand fighting all over the palace, wherever Pauline looked, pikes against sabers, improvised weapons against pistols. Many bodies of Marseillais lay on the marble floor and on the grand staircase, but up above were bodies of the Swiss. Babette had found her father and was keening over him. People were kicking the dead Swiss in their smart uniforms. “The bastards tricked us. They invited us in. Then they slaughtered us.”

  Babette began to move through the palace with a butcher’s knife in her hand. When she found a living Swiss or nobleman, she stabbed him through the heart. She tried to hack off a head, but she was not strong enough. “You tricked my father. You killed him with muskets against his little knife. How do you like this little knife?”

  With Claire weak from loss of blood leaning on her and Hélène, Pauline led them wandering through the rooms. Corpses were everyplace, the attackers, the defenders and any inhabitants of the palace who had not fled. Blood stained the silk and tapestry seats of the sofas, the armchairs, the bergères. A mirror the size of a wall had been shattered by bullets, turned into a glass spiderweb. Someone had bayonetted a big portrait of Louis XVI. A woman in court dress with paniers had been shot and stuffed into the works of a clavichord, the immense hoop of her skirt sticking up, holding the lid. No one could find the King or the Queen. The palace was theirs, for although an occasional shot or scream rang out, they had won. Claire collapsed on a blue silk sofa in a room all blue and white. “I feel very weak.”

  “Rest.” Hélène wiped Claire’s forehead. “Soon we’ll go home.”

  Pauline wondered why she felt only numb.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Georges

  (August 3–17, 1792)

  GEORGES went to Arcis the week before the insurrection. He wanted to fix a pension on his old nurse and make sure his mother would get her share of the estate he was leaving mostly to Gabrielle. He was fully aware of the troops the King had brought into the Tuileries. The revolutionaries were going up against real soldiers with a mob from the sections, ill-armed, dependent more on enthusiasm and anger than on military know-how. The fédérés, on whom so much hope was pinned, ha
d learned to march and sing and carry their muskets properly, but none had been in a skirmish. Georges was settling his affairs, in case he did not survive.

  He came back to Paris calmer. He had tried to mediate, he had procrastinated, he had made militant speeches with conciliatory endings, but the time had come to change the government into one that could pursue the war with real commitment, with full mobilization. Otherwise the Austrians would march into the city, and he would be hanging on the end of a rope.

  The Queen still imagined if she could buy off a few leaders, the Revolution would vanish. She simply could not believe in any players of note who were not in the old court nobility. She hated Lafayette, who had been trying to save the royal family, far more than she hated the populace that was about to overthrow her. Nothing that had happened could persuade the Queen that the Revolution was anything but the plot of a few dissatisfied and jealous courtiers who felt they had not received sufficient royal favor.

  The time had come to sweep the whole mess away. Gabrielle wept in his arms, but he had committed to an action from which there was no turning aside. August ninth, the section met all night. He made a good rousing speech and then met with Camille and men he could depend on, who were fiercely and personally loyal to him. Then he went home, made love to Gabrielle and slept.

  Finally it was time. They were to meet with whatever desperate men the other sections had sent, and they were going to take City Hall and put in their new Commune. They would seize the city or be shot down in the attempt. When Camille took up his musket, Lucile burst into tears and clutched him. Then she turned to Georges with huge baleful eyes. “Promise me you’ll take care of him! Promise me you won’t let harm come to him.”

  “In God’s hands,” he said, but that wasn’t the answer she wanted. Finally to shut her up, he promised. Camille would return with not a hair mussed. They took their weapons and went off in the grey predawn. As they crossed the Seine, they could see the red sun rising. “A morning of blood,” Georges said, staring at the ruddy sky.

  “Let it be theirs,” Camille said fervently. “Georges, this is really bizarre. It’s just us, you know, you and me. Only we’re not off to pick up a whore or cause a little trouble or rattle some windows. We’re actually proposing to take over the government. We’re going off to seize power. I feel like an imposter. Don’t you?”

  “No,” Georges said frankly. “I know what to do with power. Those fools have not used their power well. I can rule. I know what people want.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to lead a revolution against you next month.”

  “Nonsense. If we win today, you’ll be in the government too. I’ll see to that. You can use the money.”

  “Papa Duplessis is tired of subsidizing us. It would lighten the atmosphere marvelously if I made a few sous, a little something toward supporting Lucile. She does like to spend money. You must admit she has exquisite taste—but exquisite objects have the most exquisite prices.”

  “Everything costs,” Georges said. “Children, wives, houses, families, and today we gamble for power with our lives for chips.”

  “Power is not real to me,” Camille murmured. He had slowed his pace, wearing that dreamy introspective look that made him appear all of eighteen. “Power exercised upon me, I know that. My father, the domestic tyrant. The Fathers at school. Bosses—”

  “Keep up your pace. We aren’t taking a Sunday stroll. We shouldn’t be the last to arrive. If you’re tempted to dawdle, remember what the Duke of Brunswick promised us. Summary execution. The city leveled. Our families condemned. Troops turned loose on civilians. Move it!”

  At six A.M, they walked into chaos. The Insurrectionary Commune was attempting to disperse the old machinery. They were armed; few of the old officials had weapons, but there were scuffles. One bureaucrat of the old city council, who had a pistol in his belt, shot an insurgent in the thigh and was himself shot down. One police official was stabbed. An insurgent was pushed down the stairs. Another was hit by a chair. Danton stood at the head of the stairway and bellowed, “Your resistance is illegal. The people put you in. The people have removed you. You are no longer wanted or needed here! The city is in arms. Fight with us or get out of the way, or die like slaughtered pigs. You can’t block the armed people.” The fighting stopped. Officers of the old government began to leave.

  Pétion was hovering. His sympathies were with the Revolution, but he was Mayor. Georges decided to simplify things for him. He issued an order to two of his men. “Put the Mayor under house arrest for the next twenty-four hours. Take him home.”

  Pétion could scarcely suppress his relief. “As you wish, Danton,” he said. “I cooperate.” The man was overjoyed. “Citizens,” he addressed his supposed captors. “I am your prisoner!”

  The next problem was Mandat, for the head of the National Guard intended to defend the King. The lines of authority over the Guard were confused. It was not clear what governmental body had the authority to call them out, but clearly, their general did. One of the Guard commandants from Croix Rouge showed Danton an order signed by Mandat ordering the Guards to march with the sections and then fire on them from the rear when they attacked the Tuileries, thus catching the people between fire from the palace and fire from behind. It would be a massacre. Georges dispatched a message, using Pétion’s seal, summoning Mandat to City Hall for an emergency meeting to discuss defense. He thought Mandat would come, and indeed, Mandat arrived just ten minutes after the return of the messenger. He was arrested at once.

  Georges ordered a Cordelier to take Mandat to prison. The man made a slashing sign at his throat and Georges nodded. Mandat would shoot no one in the back. Santerre, the revolutionary brewer, took command of the Guard. Now they would join the insurrection or sit it out. That improved the odds.

  By eight A.M., the insurrectionaries had taken over City Hall. Representatives to the Insurrectionary Commune trickled in erratically but in growing numbers. Eighty-odd representatives elected by the sections were on the job. The popular government of Paris was in session. They sat around a big oval table in City Hall and divided tasks. Now they could hear gunfire. It was already hot. The day was sultry. There was an odor of shit and smoke in the air. Runners came regularly with news of the battle beginning at the Tuileries twelve blocks away.

  Georges occupied the former comptroller’s office temporarily and sent Fabre d’Églantine to Brissot stating that he thought the people would take the palace that day, and the King would fall. What was Brissot prepared to do? They must discuss the new cabinet that would be set up. He signed himself, “Danton, representing the Insurrectionary Commune of Paris.” He was not quite sure whether to use the Commune as his new power base or whether he could move into the national government. His negotiations with Brissot were aimed at getting a good ministerial portfolio.

  They could hear a lot more gunfire now and cannonballs landing somewhere. Runners told them the insurrectionary forces had been driven from the palace with great casualities. Danton debated rushing over to take part. Then a messenger came to say that the Marseillais were leading the charge back into the palace. Hundreds were dying on both sides. It was a real battle. In the meantime, Fabre came back from Brissot with a note. “Let’s have a discussion. I don’t want to go to City Hall at the moment. Please come by my flat around four.”

  Wise man. Someone in the Commune might find Brissot tempting to remove. “Fabre, I don’t think we should meet with Brissot on his territory. Tell him we’ll meet him in the Palais Royal—the Italian Cafe at four. Camille and you should be there too.”

  Four was a good hour to meet, because the Tuileries had fallen. The King had escaped while his Swiss Guards were being slaughtered and dismembered in the palace and then on the streets. They had shot down too many people to survive. Each Parisian slain had a dozen family and friends to avenge them, and they did. The bodies were stripped for practical reasons: the poor needed every scrap of fabric they could lay hands on. Weapons were even more precio
us. But the people were enraged, because they had been tricked.

  On the way to the Palais Royal, Georges passed among the women at their grisly task of vengeance on the dead. He understood: the death of a breadwinner could mean the death of the whole family next winter. Camille was sick behind a bush. Fabre pretended to be amused at the grislier mutilations, to judge them according to aesthetic criteria. Georges kept his party moving.

  They ran into Santerre, who told them casualties on both sides probably amounted to twelve, thirteen hundred dead. There were more dead on the King’s side, more wounded on the popular side. Now it was over except for the crowds milling around in the palace and hunting down the Swiss. Santerre walked along with them. “The King and the rest of the royal family hid in the Assembly. By the way, only half of the delegates had the balls to show up today. When the Swiss started shooting, the King had already run to cover. They weren’t defending him but an empty palace. What a piece of work he is—ordering them to fight and then bolting.”

  “What’s the Assembly doing now?”

  “The people are confronting them. The Assembly’s debating suspending the King and calling for a National Convention to replace themselves. They’re scared to the point of wetting their culottes—for good reason.”

  By the next day, Georges was Minister of Justice in the new government. All the rest of the ministers were from Brissot’s group. Georges’ position was awkward, as the only representative of the left in the government the people had put into power through insurrection. He might be able to close the gap between the two factions.