City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  SIXTY-NINE

  Claire

  (Summer 1793)

  CLAIRE liked living with Théo. Théophile Leclerc was certainly bright, but he was not broody. He did not waste time sorting through his motives or hesitating over what he wanted. His feelings were close to the surface and available. He did not have to figure out why he was angry or sad. There was an admirable simplicity in him of one who acted out of his inner impulses and followed them like a rock slung through the air.

  She had noticed that early. Not the first time she had met him a year ago (he had been in Pairs pleading for some issue involving soldiers), but the second time, when the left had been defeated in Lyon and he returned. He had given her a beautiful silk tricolor scarf. Drawing the scarf about her shoulders, she asked, “Why give me this?”

  “I want you to like me,” he said. “I thought it might please you. It’s a very fine silk chiffon. It’s from Lyon.”

  “Why do you want me to like you, Citizen Leclerc?”

  “Because I want you to call me Théo. Because I want you to love me. Because I want to make love to you.”

  Refreshingly direct. “Why not? Come home with me.”

  Within a week, he moved in. They had been together ever since-not stuck to each other’s sides. They were both extremely busy. This time in Paris, he achieved sudden visibility. He’d already been arrested by the Girondins and held in jail for a week before they’d gotten together: not his first time in prison. Théo was an odd mixture. Like Mendès, he came from the middle class but he had been out in the rough world. Odd memories would flash out of him matter-of-factly that sent a chill through her. They were passing through Les Halles near the butchering stalls, and a butcher was flaying a calf. “I saw a man flayed once in the islands. A black slave they were making an example of. Except he wasn’t dead. His widow lived to tear out the heart of the overseer who skinned him and feed it to her pigs.” He smiled as if he were telling her a pleasant anecdote.

  “It’s not true,” he would say, “that people always die of head wounds. I knew a man who had his head cut open with an ax and he lived for two months. Of course he was crazy all that time.”

  Or, arguing with Pauline about how merciful the guillotine actually was, “Listen, at Lyon when they were rounding up the patriots, when the Girondins won, they meant to make an example of Chalier, so the Girondins set up the guillotine. But the thug they picked was not a real executioner and didn’t set it properly. So the blade kept coming down and hacking at the poor bastard Chalier, a real revolutionary that one, with the blood spurting out but still he could not die. Finally the butcher gave up and sawed off Chalier’s head with a knife.”

  Yet Théo was gentle in bed. He liked her to mount him, which she enjoyed. It was easier for her to come in that position, but often men were afraid of it. Théo wasn’t about to be scared of a woman on top. He had a fine lithe body, well muscled and tight. It was marred with scars. There he had taken a saber cut. That was the exit mark of a bullet. This was from being thrown against the bulkhead in a storm. That was from a flogging.

  They did not have much of a domestic existence. Intimacy was haphazard. She was extremely busy with the Revolutionary Republican Women. They both went to the Jacobin Club and the Cordeliers, although she had recently been denounced at the Jacobins and Théo had been thrown out twice. They were called Mad Dogs, Enragés, by those they considered too fond of compromise. So was her good friend Jacques Roux, always in trouble with the authorities. Théo started a paper, taking over Marat’s title, The Friend of the People. Robespierre persuaded Marat’s widow to denounce Théo, but ordinary people seemed to like the paper, which increased its circulation every week.

  She had a brief job that paid the rent, playing Simonne Évrard-ironically Marat’s widow who was attacking her friends-in a play called Marat Enters Olympus. Then she had a role in a fete, Liberty embracing Marat. In that one, her right breast was hanging out. She had to slug the actor who played Marat and threaten to sic Théo on him so he’d keep his hands off.

  The women had a festival to commemorate The Friend of the People in the Place du Carrousel, where an obelisk had been erected. Around the stone obelisk were displayed a bust of Marat, his bath, his lamp and his writing desk. She had trusted him, but she found the veneration hard to take.

  There were more and more executions lately. She did not know if she could go to see Olympe de Gouges’ execution. It was a sign of respect to go. To say goodbye if only with your eyes. But she did not want to see Olympe die. Olympe had got in trouble for refusing to renounce her adoration of the royal house. She was a revolutionary monarchist. That piety ran deep. Now it would cost her life. Claire kept her opinions to herself, because all around her everyone was calling for death to hoarders, to speculators, to the guys in the Convention who had not voted death for the King. Things were out of control, with generals going over to the enemy and the fleet given to the English and revolutionaries killed in Lyon and the Vendée. But the Mountain, now that they controlled the Convention-won with the aid of the women-was not honoring its promises.

  The Mountain was trying to win over former supporters of the Girondins. The people had their own agenda. They wanted local democracy, direct recall of delegates who didn’t do what they were supposed to, immediate execution of aristocrats and traitors who worked against the Revolution, execution of hoarders, speculators, those who starved them for a profit. They wanted price controls on bread and other necessities. They wanted higher taxes on the rich, the distribution of the property of exiles and traitors. It was a simple direct program and not about to dissipate in the new clemency and moderation of the Mountain. Claire made the people’s program her own, although her heart was not in the call for executions. The poor had always cursed the rich, but now it seemed they could curse unto death.

  Claire and Pauline moved the club out of the Jacobins. They were tired of the men trying to interfere. They began to meet in Saint Eustache, a church in Les Halles, the market district. It was big as a cathedral, plenty of the room they needed, for they were attracting more women every week. It was a light pleasant space, often with market smells wafting in.

  When Claire arrived home late the last week in August, Théo had fallen asleep across the bed in his clothes, so that she could not climb in without waking him.

  “I was so disappointed you weren’t here. Where were you?”

  “The meeting. We had a lot to settle, so we went on till midnight.”

  “You’re going to have the husbands up in arms, Claire. They’ll start denouncing you.”

  “Really. I’m glad I’m not married.”

  He was silent, rubbing his eyes. “Are you glad? I thought you might like to be married, to me. It’s simpler that way.”

  “Death is the great simplifier. No, Théo, I don’t want to be married to anyone. Not even to you.” She was taken by surprise. Where was this coming from? She didn’t want to be tied to any man by a legal cord. “Don’t you think the kind of free union Marat and Simonne had is best?”

  “They didn’t have children. He was sick all the time. Suppose you get pregnant?”

  “That’s what wise women are for. But I doubt I will. I never have.”

  “But don’t you want to some time?”

  She looked at him, sprawled on her bed, and for the first time, she was not entirely pleased he was there. She liked him well enough, but she did not love him the way he wanted to be loved. She wondered if she had any romance in her. When she listened to other actresses, she felt not only years older but of different stuff. She wanted a lover who was first and foremost a friend. “Théo, I’m exhausted. I’ve been dealing with four hundred fractious women for four hours. I want sleep far more than I want anything else in the world. I can’t even remember what we’re supposed to be talking about.”

  Why couldn’t they just be friends who fucked? He imagined himself in love with her, and she dutifully said the words. She could not act the part correctly because al
l the mooning and romantic glue seemed to her the stuff of bad plays she had acted in over the years. It wasn’t real, like a good meal or a good fuck or a good glass of wine or a talk with a friend and a laugh in the cafe. The good things in life were simple and direct. They did not require talking yourself into wanting them. They did not require a suspension of judgement and common sense. Too many of her women friends who married for love were dealing with broken jaws and beatings a year later. It was the privilege of the Parisian poor to follow their feelings, but that seemed to lead the women mostly into trouble.

  Fortunately they were both too frantically busy for the subject of marriage to arise often. Beyond anything else, she wanted the ordinary people who did the work of the world to make the important decisions about their own lives-especially the women. That was why they had to keep hammering at the Mountain. Too much compromise with the fat folks, and nothing good would happen. So they marched, they petitioned, they agitated, they made noise in the streets.

  They were highly visible, the Revolutionary Republican Women in their dirty red caps and their red pantaloons and their tricolored shawls, they were far more visible than the men who always outnumbered them. They were scarier than they should have been. Most men saw them as bloodthirsty Amazons about to do something unspeakable. That they had seized the male prerogatives of weapons and bold demands seemed to scare the men the most, as if some enormous charade on which their power depended might topple. That was their most potent weapon: the perception of them as unnatural, out of control and therefore wild and dangerous. Everyone gave them a lot of credit for the overthrow of the Girondins and that lent their petitions clout. But it was male fear that gave them their edge. Too bad Théo knew her too well to be afraid.

  SEVENTY

  Nicolas

  (June-October 1793)

  ON that terrible day in June when twenty-two of the Girondin delegates were outlawed and either thrown in prison or forced to become fugitives, Nicolas was surprised he was untouched. He was shocked that a mob could oust elected representatives. They no longer had a republic but rule by violence. He tried to protest, but the Convention was not the Legislative Assembly. In the Assembly, he had been prominent, and the delegates, reasonably polite. In the Convention, half the time when he tried to speak, he was booed or simply ignored. These men were young and rambunctious. Most had come up through the Revolution. They were used to shouting and arguing without polite formulae or indeed, without manners. They called each other names like aristocratic lackey and drinker of blood. The gallery applauded when they were rudest.

  He was deeply wounded by what happened with his Constitution. It had been four-fifths his. Danton made some comments, the others had a pet clause or two. Tom Paine had worked most closely with him, but it was the child of all those years of studying society. It was as close to a perfect machine as he could create. It was long, certainly, because it attempted to spell out exactly how the government should be elected, run, monitored, changed. It was eighty-five pages of dense small printing. When it had been distributed to the Convention, he had expected cheers, but they groaned. They sounded like schoolboys. “How do you expect us to read all this?”

  “One sentence at a time, gentlemen. It will be worth your while.”

  But most of them never bothered. For three months part of the business of every working day was haggling over some clause. Half the members left whenever the Constitution came up. Then after the Girondins had been driven from the Convention, Hérault de Séchelles dashed off a Constitution in a week. Abbé Sieyès said to Nicolas, “It’s just a bad table of contents for a Constitution.” But it was short. The delegates liked that.

  “How could you hope to create a working Constitution in eight days?” Nicolas objected.

  Hérault shrugged. “God made the world in six.”

  Nicolas wrote a pamphlet denouncing that ridiculous sketch for a Constitution. Chabot rose to demand Nicolas be arrested for sedition. Friends told him a warrant for his arrest had been issued. His brother-in-law Dr. Cabanis found a woman who would hide him, a widow who usually provided lodging to medical students. He was whisked out of his house, with barely time to kiss Sophie and his daughter Eliza goodbye.

  Now he lived in a little room in Mme Vernet’s apartment, on a narrow street between the Luxembourg palace (recently turned into a prison) and the church of Saint Sulpice, in the Latin Quarter. She was the widow of a painter. He could not go out for fear of being recognized. However, being idle had its own rewards. He had time to write, not pamphlets like the one that had got him in trouble, but a real book. If he had not been able to reach his countrymen by his speeches, he would reach them with his words on paper.

  He was personally upset when Olympe de Gouges went to the guillotine, as if her Declaration of the Rights of Women and her plays constituted a threat. No decent government would fear such intelligent and reasoned dissent. She was not deeply cultivated like Sophie, but she was bright and original. One of a kind. Marat too was dead. Marat had been an important figure of the changes, no matter how much Nicolas personally disliked him. His world was being depopulated. It was embarrassing to find fanatics who called themselves Girondins, like the unhinged Charlotte Corday, posing for her portrait with every hair in place and a soulful look, in between stabbing Marat in his bathtub and marching with a martyred air to the guillotine.

  In mid-October, he was condemned to death in absentia by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Dr. Cabanis slipped in to see him. “Pierre, could you get me a sure poison? Something to fall back on in case they catch me. I should not like to ride that tumbrel. I don’t wish to die with a thousand people watching as if it were a balloon ascent.”

  “Sophie would never forgive me if I gave you poison.”

  “Sophie would never forgive you if I had to go through the humiliation of a public execution. Could you do that to her?”

  Ten days later, Pierre gave him a small quantity of poison in a ring with a gaudy stone, hollowed out: a mixture of a nightshade derivative and opium. It would finish him off supposedly without pain. Since he intended to wear it constantly from now on, he wished the ring were not in such bad taste. It was insurance that he would control the time of his death, that he would not be made a spectacle, subject to a punishment he did not feel he deserved.

  The first month he missed Sophie fiercely, a pain like a toothache. She could not come, for she was watched. The Committee of Security-the police committee-had hoped she would lead them to him. Finally they relaxed surveillance, and she could visit him occasionally. She was extremely careful. She never came directly and never went directly back. He wished she dared bring Eliza with her, for he had not seen her since he fled. Most of his assets and properties had been seized. Sophie was supporting him, Eliza and her own sister.

  Mme Vernet always led Sophie straight to his room. She did not intrude or chat. He never knew when Sophie was coming, but of course, he was always there. At first they embraced stiffly. Then they sat down and had a glass of wine together. It took them a while to find their intimacy, with all the habits and rituals of their domesticity broken. They were shy with each other. He felt guilty about exposing her to risk. If he were braver, stronger, he would forbid her to come. But he needed to see her.

  Sophie had opened a lingerie shop, which she was running. “Oh, our customers are courtesans, high-priced ones, and mistresses of men with money.”

  “Under the Revolution, I wouldn’t think there’d be many of them.”

  “Think again. Your army contractor, your new millionaire who speculates in grain or assignats, your landlord who bought up three monasteries and turned them into estates, wants a good time. The deputies from the provinces, some brought their wives, and some didn’t. None like to sleep alone. And there’s old money lying low and living a little less ostentatiously. They let go their carriages, but they kept their diamonds and their servants and their mistresses.”

  “Sophie, I hope you aren’t becoming a cynic.”


  “I’m never a cynic about you. You’re a good man, and you don’t deserve this …imprisonment. Your color is very pale.”

  “I can’t go out. I’m not safe.”

  “I read the manuscript you’ve begun. Nico, it isn’t worthy of you. You don’t need to justify yourself to a bunch of fanatical nincompoops-most of whom would be taxed by anything weightier than Père Duchesne. This is your chance to create your vision. I want you to tackle something larger, something that sums up your philosophy. Not a petty series of anecdotes-I didn’t do that and you did that to me, and then I said and he replied.”

  “I won’t write a word more.” He rolled over to face the wall, pouting.

  “Nico, do something grand. You have the time. You’ve always had the vision. Never mind the circumstances of the shabby moment. Let yourself fly.”

  After she had left, he was sorry he had sulked. It was only that, seeing each other every two weeks, every second had to be filled with honey. But her criticism struck home. He had been answering carping attacks, instead of writing for the ages. He would show Sophie he could still fly.

  Mme Vernet was a few years older than Nicolas, a round squirrellike woman with tiny bright blue eyes and a turned-up nose. She was a reasonable cook, better when Sophie had extra money to give her. Sophie was not only working in the lingerie shop but painting miniatures. That was more lucrative but chancier, four commissions one month and none the next. The shop paid more reliably. She was living out in Auteuil, in the house they had bought for weekends and summers; she traveled into the city almost daily. She was not allowed to sleep in Paris, being a fugitive’s wife.