The Sparks Fly Upward

by Diana Norman

  In fact, with Marie Joséphine in tow she was subject to more embarrassment than if she had been alone since people, shopkeepers especially, braced themselves at the sight of the Frenchwoman as if glimpsing a hornet heading in their direction.

  Passing the draper’s, Marie Joséphine shook her fist at its proprietor who was in the doorway. ‘I ’ave not forgot the cambric.’ There’d been an outbreak of hostilities over a bolt of the stuff when Marie Joséphine discovered a miniscule fault in one edge of the weave and Mr Clark had unwisely said it didn’t matter.

  Mr Clark hadn’t forgotten it, either. ‘I said I was sorry,’ he shouted after them.

  The anticipation men showed on hearing the words ‘French maid’ was disappointed when they encountered Marie Joséphine, who was squat, dark, mustached and of evil temper.

  Mistress and maid had met soon after the establishment of the Revolutionary government in France. Philippa was staying with the Condorcets who had moved into the Hôtel de Monnaie, the French mint, on Nicolas’s appointment as minister of finance.

  It was a time when, owing to years of Bourbon rule, countrymen and women were being forced to leave their homes and search for food and jobs in the big towns. Some eight thousand a year were migrating to an already overcrowded Paris and it had seemed to Philippa that a large proportion of them was being accommodated at the expense of the Condorcets in the vast and august halls of the Hôtel de Monnaie.

  Sophie had converted one wing into a temporary hospital for mothers with their babies. Her husband, loathing the Church as he did, refused to allow a nun near the place, and the work had fallen on Sophie, Philippa and like-minded women, threatening at times to overwhelm them.

  Among one set of new arrivals had been an ill-favoured woman clutching a bundle. ‘See what you can do to help her,’ Sophie had begged of Philippa. ‘She won’t let go of her baby and the poor mite is dead.’

  The woman squatted in a corner with the baby clutched to her chest, not tragic, not defiant, not anything, merely looking at nothing, as if the crowded, noisy room were a quiet forest and she a wild animal in it, listening to the leaves fall.

  Not knowing what to say and consequently saying nothing, Philippa cautiously lowered herself alongside the woman. After a while she stretched out her hand and cupped her palm around the tiny, cold skull and kept it there. Her arm was touching the woman’s and it seemed to her that some small realization of the child’s oblivion leeched from the mother’s body into her own, slowly silting up, petrifying her as she stared into the Medusan eyes of the future. This is mother-love. How can they bear it? How shall I bear it if this happens to me?

  An hour later, the woman looked at her and nodded, and they were able to take the baby to the Hôtel’s chapel while Philippa went in search of a suitable coffin and a priest, her instinct telling her that, Revolution or no, the funeral must be in accordance with the rites of the Catholic church.

  Evidently, the child, a little boy, was unbaptised and she had to resort to bribery to have him put in holy ground but eventually the interment was conducted by an indigent curé in the presence of the minister of finance in the graveyard of the deserted Convent des Récolettes nearby.

  Marie Joséphine’s surname was Mellot and she came from Poitu; apart from that she told them nothing about what had happened to her. Nor did they ask; the history of Paris’s immigrant women was drearily uniform—they had either been raped on the road or had reached the capital unscathed, found poorly paid work as a maid, become pregnant, lost their job and been forced onto the streets in order to feed the child. Such babies as couldn’t be cared for were left on the steps of convents and hospitals. It was reckoned that during Louis XVI’s reign there were forty thousand new foundlings in France every year.

  When it was time for Philippa to return to England, Marie Joséphine announced that she would accompany her. There was now nothing for her in France, she said. Philippa was lacking a personal maid at the time, her old one having been lost to marriage, and she, too, felt the bond that had been forged between them.

  It was brave of them both but it worked out reasonably well. Marie Joséphine’s insertion into Makepeace’s household had stormy moments, especially with the cook, but the ferocity that characterized the Frenchwoman was applied to learning how to increase Philippa’s comfort and woe to anyone who threatened it.

  In the distance the clock of Chelsea parish church sounding midday carried frostily through the air as Marie Joséphine and the incurably punctual Philippa turned into Don Saltero’s Curiosity Coffee House in Cheyne Walk.

  Even when it was empty of customers, the downstairs always looked crowded; the walls were shelved with glass cases holding the curiosities that had made the place famous in the earlier part of the century, ancient firearms, stuffed exotic birds, relics from Jerusalem, Knights Templar dice, a petrified crab from China, a full-sized image of a cannibal. A pickled serpent that had attacked a ship’s keel in the West Indies writhed across a ceiling studded with foreign coins between the dangling dancing shoes of Queen Elizabeth, a hummingbird’s nest and other objects too darkened by tobacco smoke to be identifiable.

  The café’s great days were gone, as was Don Saltero, but it was still popular with the locals and the air was already full of the rustle of newspapers, conversation and the smell of coffee and mulled punch.

  Mrs Hall, the don’s granddaughter, escorted them up the creaky staircase to an upper room, lit a fire and brought them coffee. The room served as an overflow for the museum downstairs and Marie Joséphine, who was seeing it for the first time, circled it, clicking her tongue at the mummified head of an Egyptian, the Pope’s infallible candle, the jaws of a wild boar that had starved to death by his tusks growing inwards . . .

  Philippa stood at the window, looking across the river to the whitened Surrey hills and wondering how many members of the Chelsea Ladies’ Charity for Foundlings would turn up.

  England’s record on caring for abandoned children was little better than France’s and on her return to England in ’89 Philippa had founded a local group to raise money for Thomas Coram’s Foundlings Hospital in London. But the women she’d managed to attract to the cause had been of a caliber to recognize the deeper problem underlying the immediate need and, while raising funds, had applied their thinking to the desperation that caused a mother to abandon her child in the first place and, then, to the situation of women in society generally.

  Such thinking was frightening; they had been frightened. They came from comfortable homes, they were not abused, few of them had outright conflict with their fathers or husbands. The realization that they were chattels, as were all women, something they had not been forced to consider before, was like wandering down a pretty garden path and opening the door in its wall to find wholesale rape and pillage in progress outside it.

  Many retreated and the charity lost members who hastened back up the garden path to safety. Philippa had to make up the loss of their contributions out of her own money so that the foundlings didn’t suffer.

  Those who remained to view the new, alarming world learned that there was an alternative. They became cognizant of what was really happening on the other side of the Channel rather than the version of it peddled by their own propertied class. They used their schoolgirl French to read Rousseau’s Social Contract and Linguet’s Memoirs of the Bastille. They watched English performances of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro with fresh eyes. New names became familiar to them; that of Mme de Genlis and Olympe de Gouges whose Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne made them gasp with its supposition that marriage as an institution had failed and should be replaced by ‘une sorte d’union libre.’

  One calm, reasoned French voice, however, commanded their attention more than these, saying clearly that all citizens irrespective of sex or rank should receive free state education together and that women were as entitled to the vote as men.

  Their landscape changed. The vote was too distant to be
spied; they knew they would never enter a polling booth, nor, perhaps, would their granddaughters.

  Education, though. Universal literacy. Independence. Seeds sown into fallow minds so that laboring women were not chained to the distaff or the factory bench, that there was some other resort for the desperate than prostitution.

  They retained their status as a charity but secretly they became the Condorcet Society.

  We should have declared ourselves, Philippa thought, we were timid. Yet the inevitable vituperation against these ideas by friends and relatives, the hostility of the genteel society to which they belonged, had been perturbing; they would be condemned—worse, they would be ridiculed.

  A woman, braver than they were, spoke out on their behalf in A Vindication of the Rights of Women. They responded by renaming themselves the Condorcet and Wollstonecraft Society but, again, they did not publicly own it.

  Then, in September of ’92, news came from France of the massacres. True, royalist armies were advancing on the capital—Verdun had already fallen to them—and a defenseless Paris had panicked, fearing that the royalist sympathizers in the prisons would rise up to join the enemy. That might have been the reason why violent men had hacked fourteen hundred prisoners to death but it could never be the excuse.

  And now the Terror . . .

  The door of the room opened to let in two women and then, almost immediately after, a third. Their eyes went hopefully to Marie Joséphine. ‘A new member?’ asked Kitty Hays.

  Philippa shook her head. ‘I fear not.’ Marie Joséphine restricted her world to what was around her at the time, as if she moved in the light of a single candle; events outside its circle remaining in ignored obscurity. Efforts to read her news of what was happening in France were met with disinterest. ‘Le roi, le révolutionnaire . . .’ A shrug. ‘. . . c’est toujours le même chose.’

  ‘But she’s trustworthy,’ Philippa added.

  Georgiana Fitch-Botley said, ‘Did you get it?’

  ‘No.’ She told them about Blanchard’s procrastination in supplying a forged certificat.

  ‘Damn, damn.’

  ‘We must delay any further discussion until the others arrive.’ Eliza Morris was today’s chairwoman.

  They sat down to wait round the central table, watching Marie Joséphine as she exclaimed at a case containing William the Conqueror’s sword, a Chinese flea trap, a dolphin with a flying fish in its mouth and several pieces of the Holy Cross.

  All of them were in their twenties and comfortably situated. They could have met in each other’s parlors but from the first it had seemed more adventurous to hold their gatherings in a rented room, like men did. Saltero’s Curiosity Coffee House was convenient to their homes, its proprietress sympathetic and, anyway, as the society became increasingly radical, somehow fitting; they were curiosities themselves.

  Eliza’s father was a Whig MP and, though concerned not to do anything to affect his position, she had cut her hair as a gesture of solidarity with the laboring classes; it made her look like a worried Joan of Arc.

  Kitty Hays, the daughter of a well-to-do landowner, was the oldest, wore a divided skirt and smoked cheroots during the meetings to show her daring. Georgiana, cousin to Viscount Glenny, swore like a trooper in their company in order to show hers and adopted a Turkish headdress. She had the face of a marble Venus, and had once met Marat whom she described as an ‘interesting little bastard.’

  When at home they were different women; Philippa noticed that in the company of their menfolk, Kitty shed her cheroot, Georgiana her headdress and bad language, both adopting a mawkish attentiveness to husbands who were less intelligent than they were but on whom they were financially and emotionally reliant.

  Eliza was quieter and equally attentive to her father who, though a kindly man by most standards, had stopped her allowance for a month when she’d cut her hair without his permission.

  Only Philippa was assured enough in her family life not to be different when she was away from it. At home and at meetings, she looked and dressed like a conforming society woman but, as Kitty had once told her: ‘You are the most radical of any of us, which makes you the greatest curiosity of the lot.’

  At one o’clock it became apparent that there would be no others.

  Eliza sighed and tapped her coffee cup with a spoon. Dutifully, they discussed charity business first, a sale of work in the parish hall next week, the form of letters of appeal to be sent around the neighbourhood.

  ‘Now then,’ the chairwoman said. ‘We are agreed that M de Condorcet must be rescued, are we not? In view of Sister Dapifer’s disappointing news, how is that to be done?’

  Kitty said, ‘What’s the use of him to us if, when he gets here, he’s regarded as just another blood-drinker? English opinion refuses to differentiate between the revolutionaries.’

  ‘Fact is, my dear,’ drawled Georgiana, ‘the Revolution has done for all of us. The vote? We’ll be lucky if we’re not put back into chastity belts.’

  ‘We need him,’ Philippa said. ‘We need a leader.’

  ‘I thought we had one,’ said Kitty. ‘I thought we’d agreed to ask Mary Wollstonecraft to come and talk to us once she’s back from France.’

  ‘I have news of Miss Wollstonecraft. She also has done for us, damn her,’ Georgiana said. ‘Or, rather, has done for herself in more ways than one. While viewing the delights of the Revolution, still unmarried, she has managed to become pregnant. While in France, my dears, as the venacular has it, she has been jumbling her giblets.’

  After a while, Philippa said, ‘How do you know? And, Ginny, if you use that disgusting phrase again, I shall leave.’

  Georgiana waved her elegant hands in apology. ‘I’m so put out. It’s so . . . so careless of her. I know because Lady Mountcashel told me—Wollstonecraft was her governess, if you remember, and Margaret has always kept up with her. She’s had an affair in France with some American. Margaret says he has no intention of marrying her.’

  There was another silence. After a while, Eliza said, ‘God help us.’

  He was likely to be the only one who could. Wollstonecraft’s book had spoken for them all, not condemning men but pointing out that the bondage of women was to humanity’s disadvantage; one half of the population was being dragged in chains, a dead weight retarding the advance of the other half.

  Only let women be free, she’d said, allow them full education, strengthen their bodies and their understanding so that they can contribute to the partnership. Society could never fulfill its potential until it was founded on reason. If man regarded himself as the only creature capable of reason and its uses, she wrote, ‘women have no inherent rights to claim and therefore, by the same rule, their duties vanish, for rights and duties are inseparable.’

  Instantly, she had been portrayed as a slut. ‘. . . a philosophical wanton,’ one ladies’ magazine called her, ‘who would break down the bars intended to restrain licentiousness.’ A speaker in the House of Lords warned his fellow peers not to allow their wives and daughters to read this ‘hyena in petticoats.’ Smoking-room jokes in the clubs somewhat confusingly attached a penis to her while at the same time attributing to her a voracious sexual appetite for men.

  There had been brickbats in plenty and now this, the most shining prophet of female emancipation, had herself supplied the enemy with its ammunition.

  ‘She’s done for us,’ Georgina said again, quietly.

  There was no doubt that she had. And yet, thought Philippa, only a free-thinking and uninhibited woman could have written as Wollstonecraft has done; why, then, are we blaming her for being what she is?

  Kitty Hays stubbed out her cheroot in her saucer. ‘Damn her,’ she said. ‘And damn Robespierre. They’ve put us back to being a charity. That’s all we’ll ever be, carriers of nourishing gruel to the poor. It’s all they’ll let us be.’

  Marie Joséphine had taken the curious flea trap out of its case and carried it to the window to inspect it—a good fle
a trap was worth having—and a long slant of winter sun cast the shadow of the thing’s mechanism over their table in a shape unnervingly like that of a guillotine.

  It was Eliza, the sweet-natured, who kept them in line. She tapped her cup again. ‘To return to the original proposition, I see no reason why we should abandon M Condorcet to his fate. For one thing, he is too good a man to be killed by those monsters and we owe him much. For another, he would command attention. Father says that he was the only one of the revolutionaries the House of Commons would have given a hearing to. What do you say, Philippa?’

  ‘He’s no orator.’ She had been on a balcony in the Tuileries with Sophie when Condorcet had outlined his proposed revolutionary constitution to the Legislative Assembly and found herself nodding off to sleep, along with most of the 745 deputies. It was in small groups that the man’s intellect and essential goodness became apparent. ‘But Eliza’s right. He has great influence when you meet him. Women would listen to him as they wouldn’t to us. Men, too. He never wanted France to declare war on us and I am sure that if we could get him an interview with Mr Pitt ...’

  ‘We ain’t even got him to England yet,’ Kitty pointed out.

  ‘Ah, well, as to that ...’

  Walking home with Marie Joséphine, Philippa thought how ridiculous all of them must have seemed to the Frenchwoman if she’d had good enough English to understand what they were talking about, how ridiculous they all seemed even to themselves.

  ‘Marie Joséphine, wouldn’t you like to be equal with men?’ she asked.

  ‘With him?’ They were passing the draper’s shop again and Marie Joséphine gave a vicious little nod towards it.

  ‘With all men.’

  ‘I am better than Sanders,’ Marie Joséphine said, offended. ‘He is a coachman, I am a lady’s maid. And ’Opkin is only a footman.’