by Marge Piercy
A style of journalism had arisen that promoted violence. Hébert, a squat man who had been a ticket taker in a theater, was putting out a journal called Père Duchesne, after a rough folk figure who made stoves. Hébert used consciously foul language. These fucking asshole aristocrats, we should cut off their pricks and stuff them down their throats. It was disgusting and vulgar, and it stirred up the people to a dangerous extent. Marat was just as bad and he had been at it longer. He was always screaming traitor and calling for somebody’s head, frequently hers.
She considered sending Eudora back to the country, but decided it was a bad idea for the child to be separated from them. She hired a governess instead. There was plenty of room in the mansion. Their old friend Lanthénas, her “little brother,” moved in. When Buzot won his seat in the Convention, she invited him to remain until he had arranged lodging. After all, they had room upon room upon room. She might as well treat the mansion as a lodging house for colleagues.
Jean had been elected to the Convention and wanted to resign the ministry, but Brissot and Buzot insisted he remain at Interior. Of all the delegates to the Convention, she soon felt closest to Buzot. He admired her openly and respectfully. She began working on his speeches. Buzot was young but far more serious than most men around her. He took nothing lightly. He was fiery, emotional, a man of true principles. Physically and in character, he was the polar opposite of Danton: neat, principled, a slender small man who often chose to remain in the background while others held forth, a man of honorable and intense emotions.
“You’re the best, the finest, the most attractive woman I have ever met,” he said to her in her little office.
“François, I’m six years older than you.”
“My wife is thirteen years older. We’ve never had anything in common. I don’t think she’s ever met an idea she liked. It was an arranged marriage. At the time I had no notion that there could be loving communication between a man and a woman, that we could share a universe of discourse.”
He came from a nasty provincial town in Normandy, the oldest son of a bourgeois family. He had early formed an attachment to Plutarch and other Roman writers and then, as she had, found Rousseau. He was gentle-spoken, always impeccable, with large luminous eyes and a direct gaze.
“Don’t you think he looks a little like Robespierre?” Lanthénas asked.
“Don’t be absurd. You can’t compare that savage little weasel with the loyal and good Buzot, with his generous great heart.”
“You’re very partial to him,” Lanthénas said sourly.
“I respect each according to his virtue and his ability.”
“He’s a good orator but his arguments lack cohesion and edge.”
“Perhaps his speeches will improve. Let us hope so.”
She refused to take Lanthénas’ jealousy seriously. After all, she was doing nothing wrong. Quite simply, Buzot and she understood each other. It was a joy to work with him. He did not dismiss her suggestions nor take her labors for granted, as her husband did. He made her feel supremely appreciated. For her to feel a precious fondness in return was only natural. To talk about François, even with someone as insensitive to his true nature as Lanthénas, was a deep, almost embarrassing pleasure. Sometimes even hearing his name unexpectedly sent pulses of warmth through her.
“The Revolution needs new men and new women,” François said, “yet in order to make a revolution of virtue, we must be renewed ourselves. It seems an impossibility, Manon, a circular thesis, that we must already be what we must become in order to accomplish our goals.”
“The impossible is what is not yet possible, François. When we do it, it is no longer impossible. Only difficult.”
Using given names was a small but permissible sign of intimacy. It was the new fashion, for the aristocratic manner of greeting people by title was mistrusted. It was a little caress to say François, to hear him say Manon.
The salon that week could discuss nothing but the revolt that had broken out in the Vendée in support of the King and the Church. These were dangerous times. Still, when she sat at her frugal but beautifully set table looking around at fifteen or sixteen men whom she trusted and who were now the government of France (providing that Danton had not invited himself and that worm Fabre along), she felt a glow of accomplishment and pride. This was the center of decision, the brain and heart of the Revolution. Jean presided at the head of the table between Brissot and Louvet. She sat at the foot, François on her right hand, Lanthénas on her left. There were always flowers. She would have felt the table was undressed without flowers. She provided the place and the time and the atmosphere, and afterward she would open her mind to whichever of them sought her out to discuss the issues. She was a good woman, a good wife, a good revolutionary. If she had a private tender understanding with François, how did that impact anything else, including Jean—who did not even notice?
FIFTY-FIVE
Claire
(Fall 1792)
CLAIRE and Hélène walked arm in arm, with Pauline and Babette just ahead, all of them stealing an afternoon for a half-holiday. Now Claire was out of work and Hélène had a job in a patriotic musical. She was the wicked aristocratic vamp who seduced the patriot from his truehearted girlfriend and tried to get him to betray his country. She wore a wonderful purple silk dress with a farthingale, the bodice cut most of the way toward her waist. Hélène had recovered her full health, glowing again, her hair a little bonfire.
Last night the women of the quarter had celebrated the passage of the divorce law they had urged on the men. Since its passage, already ten women of the section had gone to court. Primogeniture had been abolished at the same time. Now all children would inherit. Almost everybody had something to leave, if only a bed or coat or tools or a chest of drawers. Always the oldest son had gotten it all, the way her mother’s house had been earmarked for Pierre. Claire thought, I will live to be an old woman, and I’ll still be angry at my mother because she could not cherish me as she loved her sons. It was more than ten years since she had run away from home to join the traveling players, and still she had that sore spot just under her heart. She felt a little ashamed. She had not been sent out crippled to facilitate begging. She had not been starved, she had not been abandoned, her maidenhead had not been sold.
Jacques Roux, a radical priest who had become her friend, talked often of the plight of children. He had a heart as big as the Champ de Mars, and he cared about the children of the poor, he cared about women, he cared about the old and the infirm and those who had worked themselves nearly to death. He felt that a revolution that left people poor and half-starving was no revolution. “Jacques is a good soul,” Claire said. “As good as they grow them.”
“He makes me nervous,” Hélène said. “He’s so intense.”
“I’d go to his church if it wasn’t such a long walk.” Jacques Roux lived in the Gravelliers section, one of the poorest.
“I want a striped petticoat like that one,” Hélène said. She was changing the subject deliberately. Claire had not realized how uncomfortable Jacques made Hélène. Now that she thought about it, Hélène usually found an excuse to go shopping when the priest came by. She had assumed Hélène was being tactful and letting them discuss politics.
“Tell Victoire. She’s all over the place lately.” Victoire was the first local woman to get a divorce. Her husband’s beatings had caused her to miscarry twice. Now she was on her own, singing the praises of the Revolution at the top of her lungs. She looked five years younger.
They sat on the balustrade of the bridge swinging their legs and watching people go by. It was a free show, though nowadays it was regular people looking at each other instead of footmen running ahead of the matched horses drawing fancy carriages and more footmen running behind. Workmen were demolishing a statue of Henri IV. Statues and metalwork were being melted down for the army, where most of the horses had gone. Hélène was prattling about the petticoat. Claire nodded and made appropriate
noises, but she was actually listening to the story Babette was telling Pauline.
After Babette’s father was killed, her older brother Baptiste turned up and tried to take over the Dancing Badger. He told his mother to get out from behind the counter and work in the kitchen and he told Babette to go find other work and clear out. He was planning to install his wife as waitress and bar maid. Babette protested to the section, and they upheld her. The eldest son could no longer take everything. They must all share the Dancing Badger. Now there was daily war between the two factions, but at least Babette had not been turned out on the streets.
Suddenly Pauline said, “There’s Victoire. You wanted her. She’s in the street with her rack.”
They had to go to her, because the bridge wasn’t her territory. She stood on their bank, waiting for them.
“I love fall. It makes my blood run faster.” Victoire had hair almost as dark as Claire’s own, and her face was freckled from being out in the streets so much. Her eyes were a clear light brown, huge against her skin and dark hair. Claire had always thought of her as a quiet, somber woman, but now she was talkative and grinning all the time. “I’m a free woman, Claire, just like you. I’ve always admired you for that. Now, why did you call to me?”
“For me,” Hélène said, standing on one foot and looking from under her lashes as if she had to flirt to do business. “I want one of those shiny striped petticoats.”
Victoire reached into her pile and pulled out one striped yellow and green and white and black. “How’s this?”
Hélène fingered it, frowning. “I don’t know.…”
“This is brighter.” It was even shinier, green, red and blue.
“I like it better.” Hélène pinched the fabric, shook out the petticoat to go over it inch by inch. “It’s not bad.”
They began to haggle. Claire and Pauline strolled back on the bridge to wait, while Babette looked at bodices. A boy was hawking the newest Friend of the People, and Claire bought one. The Commune Tribunal had a new prosecutor, one Fouquier-Tinville, who was trying traitors briskly. “What a weird name the new prosecutor has,” Pauline said, reading over Claire’s shoulder. “But they say he gets the trials over in half the time.”
“Austrians still advancing…” Claire handed Pauline the paper, her mood dampened. “What will happen to us if Paris falls? It could be brutal beyond belief.”
“We’ll fight them ourselves if it comes to that,” Pauline said stoutly. “They’ll never take Paris.”
Hélène and Babette finished their purchases and Victoire went off pushing her cart laden with old clothes, the better ones set up on a wobbly rack. She had to be her own horse, like most street merchants. The other women went off across the bridge, Hélène and Claire bringing up the rear.
The guillotine was set up in the Place du Carrousel, in front of the Tuileries, but there was talk of moving it. Refurbishing the Tuileries was taking forever, because the workmen would rather watch the executions. Claire had seen public executions at home, of course. A Protestant had been burned in the square when she was little. Her grandmother stood and prayed for him defiantly. A horse thief had been hanged along with his young son. Thieves and robbers, arsonists and murderers, all had hung on the end of a rope and slowly, slowly died. Sometimes they were broken on the wheel first. Sometimes their flesh was torn open or they were tortured with hot pokers or rods. Once a noble had been beheaded for rape and abduction, but it was done in effigy. Only the straw head rolled. He was in seclusion under a lettre de cachet, the King’s arrest warrant. She tried not to bring her old horror of executions to this event, because this was ordered by the Commune. It was just and fair. They were executing an officer of the Swiss Guards, a counterfeiter, two aristocrats accused of smuggling information to Austria, a rapist and a former naval captain who had flogged his men to death.
The guillotine stood high in the center of the square. There was a crowd, but they could see pretty well, because it was elevated on a big wooden platform. It looked plain and ordinary and serviceable, not particularly frightening. It was like a big window with a blade at the top. A window to quick death. While they were still trying to find a good place to stand, a prisoner was executed, snick, snack, just like that.
Down it came and a head rolled into a basket. The executioner looked bored. Pauline said it was the same royal executioner Sanson, who missed the good old days when he got to do fancy public torturing. Now he just fitted them into the mechanism. They lay facedown on their bellies with their throat extended. Down came the blade with a whomp. That was it. After the first few, the air smelled of blood as in the squares where butchers worked.
The people around them cheered when a head rolled. Pauline and Babette cheered, even Hélène clapped, but Claire could not. She could not applaud death. She knew they were getting the justice they deserved. It wasn’t like the old executions. There was no prolonged suffering to witness, no torture. Very efficient, they said, almost painless—you couldn’t feel a thing. But people were still dying, and she felt like a traitor because she could not cheer. It was certainly fast: the last man had just been executed and the crowd began to stir and drift away.
Sometimes she thought her childhood had warped her, that she was apart from everyone else and could not enjoy what they did, that she always had doubts. This was no entertainment for her. On one edge of the place, a musician was playing the fiddle, a woman was beating a drum and people were dancing the carmagnole. The dance was named for a jacket worn by the working men of Paris. Hélène held out her hand and pulled Claire into the circle of dancers. At last Claire felt united with the others. It was a perfect golden and blue afternoon despite the news of enemy victories and the approach of troops whose general had sworn to put the city to fire and sword. To turn them into a monstrous pile of corpses to show what happened when a people arrested their king.
After the dancing stopped, they stood watching the crowd. “It’s an exciting time to be alive,” she said to Hélène. “Now the Tuileries is ours.” She pointed at its vast bulk. “What shall we do with it? If the Convention moves into the theater, that still leaves the whole palace. We should put orphans in here. Orphans and the elderly who have no one to care for them. Prostitutes thrown out of work by the Revolution will take care of them, and the rest of the time, teachers will give them their letters and a useful trade.”
“In a palace? You’ve gone crazy.”
“Ah, Hélène, the real revolution is just beginning. Women can divorce now, women can inherit just like their brothers. Soon we’ll vote too. We’ll run our own businesses. No more kings, no more nobles. Justice, Hélène, justice!” She felt as if she were flying. Her blood still fizzed from dancing and her mind felt incandescent. Everything was being made new. Jacques Roux was right. The poor need not suffer any longer. No one need lie down in freezing cold and wake to hunger. It might be fall, but it was the spring of the world—unless the Austrians and Prussians came and burned it down.
Babette and Pauline wanted to attend the new Convention, but Hélène insisted on the Palais Royal. “It’s my holiday too,” Hélène said, sulking, so Claire said goodbye to her friends. The Palais Royal was as crowded as ever, still the center of hot politics and fashion. At first they stood and watched the crowd, Hélène pointing out interesting clothes. Women of style were wearing their dresses looser, with less boning, less pain and strain. Big floppy bonnets covered with lace and flowers and ribbons were in vogue. The new cottons were popular, whites mingling with primary colors. Coatdresses without over-skirts showed up, often with military trim and buttons. The Palais Royal was no longer only for prostitutes and poor women; bourgeois women had started going there, as bourgeois men always had. No one here seemed worried that the Austrians might slaughter them next week. Maybe it was only in the poor neighborhoods that people took the threat seriously and felt it was meant for them.
Then they came to the Cafe Italien and Claire learned why Hélène had so much wanted to come. Severa
l men and women from her musical were enjoying ices there and gossiping. Claire sat down with them and joined in, but she watched bleakly as Hélène began flirting with a tall young man with hair down to his shoulders and a Roman profile he kept showing off, turning his head to the side to be admired. As he kissed Hélène’s hand and held it, Claire began not to enjoy the sunny afternoon.
FIFTY-SIX
Max
(Fall 1792)
MAX returned to Arras to help with Augustin’s campaign, so he could be elected to the Convention along with Max. A vicious smear campaign did not prevent Augustin from winning, but it reaffirmed for Max how strong and entrenched the counter-revolutionaries still were.
Charlotte took this opportunity to make her demands known. She adored Elisabeth and went everywhere with her, but she detested Mme Duplay and Eléanore. She insisted that now both brothers were elected to the Convention, they should live according to their class and be able to entertain properly. Max couldn’t see anything wrong with the way he entertained now, chez Duplay. But Charlotte hounded him. “You went off and left us in Arras all these years. I devoted my life to you. Who’ll ever want to marry me now? I’m forced to live as a guest in another woman’s house. I want to make you happy, Max, I want us to live together as a family—not as lodgers in the house of a carpenter and his scheming daughter!”
