Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  Manon’s memoirs, penned in her prison cell and smuggled out by friends, served as the backbone of my research; I used as many of her own words as possible. Written with the boldness of a woman who knows she has nothing to lose, her words are tart, honest, and as relevant to a modern audience as if they were written yesterday. She frets that her daughter isn’t very bookish; she rolls her eyes at Danton’s crude sexual humor; she seethes about the revolutionary men who keep talking instead of doing. She mourns her mother’s loss, recounting the conversation where her mother wryly accused her of wanting a husband whom she could boss around (Manon refused to admit this was true). Sometimes she is endearingly shortsighted when it comes to her own blind spots; she insists a little too vehemently that she believes in wifely submission, even as her every action in life chafes against that role. Her passion for reform embraced some advanced-for-the-time views (Manon was a staunch supporter of abolitionist newspaperman Brissot, and herself wrote the words “No republic is perfect if it allows slavery,” according to historian Sandrine Bergés) and some startlingly behind-the-time views (she was against women’s suffrage, a right lobbied for by many of her contemporaries). Manon’s memoirs paint the compelling, contradictory portrait of a woman intelligent and hardworking, starchy yet passionate, shortsighted but visionary.

  The sexual abuse she endured as a child is another incident recounted directly from her memoirs. Her feelings of guilt and inadequacy afterward, her initial difficulties experiencing sex as a grown woman, could have been penned by any modern abuse victim struggling through therapy. The segments dealing with her molestation were for a long time censored from published editions of her work, as editors considered them indelicate. Today, those sections have been re-included and Manon’s voice as a survivor has been restored—hers remains one of the few historical accounts of sexual abuse penned by the victim in her own words.

  The men in Manon’s life were never overtly told of the incident in her childhood, or so she claims. She writes affectionately of Jean-Marie Roland, describing a deep friendship and partnership, even as she is exasperated with her husband’s slowness to see the mounting troubles in the new republic, which, to Manon’s mind, were obvious. She agonizes over her late-blooming love for fellow Girondin politician François Buzot, a passion she confessed to her husband out of scrupulous honesty, and refused to consummate in a physical affair (the identity of her suitor was unknown for many years; only when a cache of their love letters was uncovered did it become clear her platonic lover was Buzot). Manon’s memoirs were left unfinished when she marched calmly to the guillotine, but in her prison cell she had found an ironic freedom, flowering at last as a woman free to write her own words and not see them passed off as a man’s. Neither of the men who loved her survived her for long: Roland shot himself the day he learned of her execution, and though Buzot attempted to continue her fight by raising support in the provinces against the Reign of Terror, he killed himself when he realized his capture and execution were imminent. He carried with him a miniature of Manon Roland.

  Inevitably, some historical facts have been tweaked to serve the story. Théo Leclerc may not have been in Paris when I showed him during the September Massacres, and he was not the man to arrest Manon later; I made use of him to shrink the book’s vast cast of extraneous characters. The Rolands did a certain amount of traveling to and fro between Paris and Lyon during the timeline of this story, much of it omitted for clarity. Manon’s public defense against accusations of a royalist plot didn’t happen till December of 1792; I shifted it earlier since it would have confused the issue of the king’s trial, which had already begun. The king’s execution is an event with conflicting accounts, which I have done my best to merge; it is not certain Manon was present, but very likely considering her fascination with important moments of change in her new republic. Manon’s meetings with Sophie Condorcet and Émilie de Sartine have been fictionalized, although they certainly would have interacted with one another as active political women. There is, however, no evidence that Manon ever encountered Charlotte Corday, as I have her doing in an invented journey to Caen. We do know that Manon admired Charlotte Corday, whose assassination of Marat she applauded from her prison cell.

  Many thanks to my wonderful coauthors for inviting me into this collaborative at the last minute when a gap appeared in my writing schedule, and for encouraging me to dig deeper into Manon’s character when at first her personality mystified me. “If you need something done, ask a busy woman”—my coauthors have proven that every day in the writing of this book, as they juggled their own careers, their own families, their own individual deadlines yet always took time whenever any of the Scarlet Sisters needed a critique pen, a sounding board, or a sympathetic ear. Liberté, egalité, sororité!

  E. KNIGHT

  * * *

  The first time I stood before Versailles and heard the name Marie Antoinette, I was eight years old. I studied her pretty face carved into marble and wondered how it had come to pass that she should have died so tragically. Every time I was in France visiting family, I made a special trip to Versailles, still asking myself that same question. Fast-forward many years later to sitting in a booth at Panera eating hunks of baguette with Stephanie Dray as we mused over the tragedy of many women’s lives during the French Revolution, and how extraordinarily parallel the fight for women’s rights seemed then as it does today. A flame was lit within us—we had to tell these women’s stories. But not only from the eyes of those within gilded rooms, steeped in impossible privilege; we wanted to see how history unfolded from all feminine angles, from the poorest of the poor to those born of royal blood, from royalists to Jacobins, from the streets to ballrooms. It has been an extreme pleasure working with my fellow #ScarletSisters to breathe life into the women of the French Revolution, and to share their stories with all of you.

  Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont has alternately been named a heroine of the French Revolution and an evil assassin. She was certainly an assassin, but I don’t believe she was evil. In her own words: “I killed one man to save a hundred thousand.” Though poor, Charlotte was nobly born. When she was fourteen, her mother died along with one of her sisters. Grieving too much to care for all his children, her father begged boarding admission of the mother abbess of the Abbaye aux Dame, in Caen, which was first built by William the Conqueror’s wife, Matilda, as a place that young impoverished girls could be educated. It was at the abbey Charlotte developed a love of literature by Plutarch, Rousseau, and Voltaire.

  However, in the summer of 1791, due to the Revolution’s views on religious orders, the abbey was shut down. Once more, Charlotte found herself destitute, and her dislike of those at the head of the Revolution grew.

  While she tried to live with her father, the arrangement did not last long, and she pleaded charity from a distant and aging relative in Caen, Madame Le Coustellier de Bretteville-Gouville. I found conflicting texts stating that her relative was an aunt, and another that she was a cousin. For the purposes of this story, I went with distant cousin. While Charlotte was living with her relative, the political upheaval in Paris was felt all around Caen, with uprisings and the distribution of political papers. Charlotte, though surrounded by royalists in her household, came to sympathize with the Girondins who had sought refuge in Caen. There are records of letters she wrote to friends and family discussing politics, religion, and her growing worry over the state of her beloved France. From one such letter came the quote used at the beginning of my chapter.

  By the summer of 1793, Charlotte came to the conclusion that Marat played a significant role in inciting the September Massacres through his abusive paper L’Ami du Peuple. Propaganda that was circulated in Caen made mention of “Remove the head of Marat and the Republic will be saved . . .” Perhaps this is what gave her the idea he must die.

  With this thought in mind, Charlotte determined to travel to Paris without telling her family her destination. She left a letter indicating she’d head
ed to London to escape the Revolution to throw them off her trail. Charlotte’s original plan was to assassinate Marat inside the National Convention, but when she arrived in Paris, a change of plans was necessary since Marat was too sick to attend. Over the next couple of days, she made attempts to meet with the minister of the Convention in hopes of forming a more peaceful solution, but she would not be heard, and for the sake of time, I did not include these attempts in the narrative. Unsuccessful in her attempts to make a change, Charlotte penned her Address to the People, of which you’ll find parts I used in the narrative to describe her motivations and beliefs. She made several unsuccessful attempts to meet with Marat at his apartment before seeing her deed done.

  While imprisoned, Charlotte penned an extensive letter to a Girondin she’d befriended in Caen—Barbaroux. She gave in-depth details of her travels. I tried to stay true to these details in my story, but some had to be left out for the sake of brevity. It is not known why she wrote the letter, other than her confession that a friend had wished to hear about her travels. However, the complexity of the letter suggests she’d determined her correspondence would be read, and that she desired her truth be known by her own hand versus what might be spun by those against her.

  There is no doubt Charlotte knew what she was doing, and believed strongly that by removing Marat permanently, she could put the steps in place needed to destroy the dangerous men in power.

  At Charlotte’s execution, her severed head was lifted by a man temporarily hired to assist Sanson, the executioner. His disrespect—the famous slaps—did not go unpunished. Sanson wrote a letter demanding penance and the assistant was jailed for a short time. However, the facial reactions of her severed head to the slap spurred scientists to test the theory of the brain remaining alive and active after the head was removed from the body. The fact was argued in Parisian papers that “consciousness of feeling may persist” and was subsequently proved many times over. Another disturbing fact: after she was executed, Charlotte’s body was examined to see if she was a virgin, yet another violation of her person, which was confirmed, much to the surprise of the men in power who wished to label her forever a whore. Despite two hundred years having passed, it is still a slap in the face that women today are presumed to be “whores” when they assume a position of power.

  While we seem to have a plethora of information on Charlotte Corday, very little is recorded about Pauline. What we do know is that she was the daughter of chocolatiers, that she lived with her mother after her father died to help her run the shop and to take care of the little ones. We know her mother was also politically active and that Pauline believed women, no matter their place in life, could and should fight for their rights. She was adamant women should be able to protect themselves, and to that end, she even spoke in the National Convention regarding the matter, as well as had petitions signed. She was the leader of the women’s revolutionary society, having founded it with her friend Claire Lacombe—some documents report it as May 1793, while others state July. I went with the later date for my story. Because of Pauline’s and her society’s alignment with the Jacobins and Les Enragés, it is a good assumption to make that she might have admired Olympe de Gouges, while at the same time thinking her on the wrong side—after all, Pauline despised all things Girondin. Pauline spent her time marching, speaking, and heckling women who refused to wear the cockade. Shortly after the brawl at a society meeting in 1793, women were told they had to be silent observers in the Revolution. The risk of arrest and even death if the law were to go unheeded was very real, and quite tragic. How long have women been told to sit down and shut up, to go home to their families where they belong? And for her and her fellow female activists, it was no different. The death of Marat was a deathblow to women (they did carry his tub, and her society did build an obelisk in his honor), and from there, the slow unraveling began.

  During the brawl between the market women and Pauline’s Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires at the latter’s meeting, it was not specifically mentioned in text resources that Louise led the fight for the market women; however, given that she was the Queen of the Market Women, and her sanity was tenuous at this point, I think it plausible that she would have led such a fight against women she had once fought beside. In the rendering of this scene, I believe I gave a good representation of how the feminist elements split apart during this time period.

  Pauline did marry Jean-Théophile Victor Leclerc, a radical revolutionist, the onetime rumored lover of her friend Claire Lacombe. In 1790, Leclerc followed his brothers to Martinique, but by 1791 was arrested and banished back to France for joining the islanders and other revolutionaries who were revolting against the governor and slavery (a revolt that began in 1789). In 1792, whilst in service in the military, he returned to Martinique to defend other revolutionaries, whom he was able to successfully defend before the National Assembly. He returned to military service shortly thereafter, but by 1793 he was on the political scene in Paris, where he formed his radical revolutionary group Les Enragés. In June of 1793, a delegation of black men and women, including a 114-year-old Jeanne Odo, spoke at the Convention in Paris, and then was also received at the Jacobin Club, where political leaders promised to bring an end to slavery. It is my hope that, with how involved Pauline was, she was in attendance. Later in this same month, a new Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was enacted, which stated that no man could be sold.

  In 1794, Leclerc, along with Pauline and Claire, was arrested. It was at this point Pauline appears to have made a complete one-eighty on her position, claiming in a long letter that she wished nothing more than to be at home and taking care of her family. Was this her way of getting out of jail? Perhaps. The truth remains that she was an activist who came to power, bravely led women in the revolution toward equal rights, and then just as swiftly fell into obscurity.

  I think Pauline’s tragic fall is what saddens me the most about this chapter in history. At every turn it felt as though she was being thwarted, from having her weapon taken away to her very voice, and that is why I wanted to share her story with you. Because we must remember that our voice is our power. We will not be silenced. And I hope in this book, we’ve given voice to women who have long believed that our rights are every bit as important as a man’s.

  LAURA KAMOIE

  * * *

  As a historian of the eighteenth century, I have long been fascinated by the connections between the American and French Revolutions—the sister revolutions, as they’ve sometimes been called. So I was thrilled to be invited to participate in a novel that would give me a chance to delve further into the complicated historical drama of the French Revolution—and honored to get to work with such a fantastic group of author-friends.

  Writing the story of Charlotte-Rose-Émilie Davasse de Sainte-Amaranthe Sartine was daunting for a number of reasons. First, since my story would be last, I knew I would need to tie up the loose ends of all the other characters’ stories, making sure that the reader knew of everyone’s fates. Second, because the Cult of the Supreme Being became such an important part of Émilie’s family’s story, I had to ensure that all the religious historical groundwork that needed to be planted in the earlier parts to make that storyline understandable for the reader was there.

  Émilie’s story was most challenging because of the relative dearth of English-language sources on her. And, at least in what can be identified online, her history doesn’t seem to have survived much in French either. Fortunately, several key moments in this period of Émilie’s life were recounted in detail in books about broader themes or other people, and they revealed a young woman who’d led a whirlwind of an interesting, privileged, and even romantic life before being caught in the middle of historical currents much bigger than herself.

  A Gascon Royalist in Revolutionary Paris, by G. Lenotre (pen name for French historian and playwright Louis Léon Théodore Gosselin), provided a wealth of details about the political events that led to
Émilie’s arrest and execution. This volume described Émilie’s love affair with the opera singer Jean-Baptiste-François Elleviou, including his secret costumed visits to her; the surprise search of her family’s country home; their eventual denunciation, arrest, and execution; and the political machinations that led to Émilie and her family being declared as the most active agents of the mysterious and elusive Baron de Batz. Lenotre also included the story, apparently pulled from Mémoire de Fleury, that two hours before their arrest, the Sainte-Amaranthes received an anonymous letter advising them to fly—in Robespierre’s handwriting.

  Alphonse de Lamartine’s History of the Girondists added more about the politics that led to the Sainte-Amaranthes’ deaths. Most interestingly, and adding credence to the idea that Robespierre might have tried to help them, Lamartine recounted an argument between Robespierre and the president of the Committee of General Security, Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier, over the members of this family. Vadier was set on including the Sainte-Amaranthes as leading conspirators on a list of mass denunciations. Lamartine said that Robespierre not only told him not to include them, but went on to say he’d attack Vadier if he did, while “scarcely holding back the tears of anger that rolled in his eyes.” The next day in committee, their names were among those denounced—and Robespierre remained silent, apparently fearing to appear to protect counterrevolutionaries at a moment when radicals were denouncing one another as the Reign of Terror escalated into a witch hunt used almost purely for the purpose of silencing political enemies. By mid-June 1794, Robespierre’s enemies already feared he intended to make himself the ruler of all France, and they viewed his religious activities with the Cult of the Supreme Being as evidence of that. How ironic that the Sainte-Amaranthes joined this movement to win Robespierre’s favor, which apparently they achieved, but then the man was outmaneuvered in a way that kept him from using it on their behalf. Lamartine also contributed many of the details for the scene depicting the Sainte-Amaranthes’ initiation into the Cult of the Supreme Being and the dinner afterward with Robespierre, where “he consented to an interview with his two admirers,” Émilie and her mother.