by James Wyllie
On the PROMENADE, there will be hawkers selling all manner of items and you will be able to select from the plethora of publications that have been released since the Revolution did away with censorship; newspapers like Révolutions de Paris, with its racy prose, eyewitness reporting and captioned illustrations, or Marat’s incendiary L’Ami du Peuple, which urges readers to ‘sweep away the corrupt, the royal pensioners and the devious aristocrats’. Also on offer will be SATIRICAL PAMPHLETS, political tracts and ballad sheets. Cheap FIREWORKS – for twelve sous you can buy squibs, rockets and serpents – are on sale everywhere and provide a constant backdrop of noise and colour, adding to the carnival atmosphere.
As you wander round you will see LIMONADIERS (lemonade sellers) plying their wares, and we suggest you try some: limonade is France’s favourite soft drink and a source of national pride, considered the best in Europe. This is not surprising given the care that goes into its preparation. The yellow rind from three or four lemons is sprinkled into a jug filled with clean spring water, covered and left to stand for a few hours. Next, the juice from the lemons is added and, after 30 minutes’ waiting time, filtered eight times through a coarse linen cloth. After adding sugar the whole mixture is run through the cloth two more times, resulting in an extremely refreshing and thirst-quenching beverage. After drinking a glass or two, you may need to empty your bladder; if so, there are public latrines – enclosed rooms with rows of wooden seats and a lunette (cover) over each hole.
CAMILLE DESMOULINS ADDRESSING A CROWD AT THE PALAIS ROYAL, OUTSIDE THE CAFÉ DE FOY.
For contemporary popular entertainment, the Palais offers the THÉTRE BEAUJOLAIS, featuring three-foot-tall marionettes and child actors, and the VARIÉTÉS AMUSANTES, which stages music-hall-style farces and melodramas to packed houses. Novelty attractions – MAGIC LANTERN and SHADOW-LIGHT SHOWS – can be found in the wooden galley running along the Palais, alongside a kind of FREAK SHOW; one of the biggest draws is Paul Butterboldt, the FOUR-HUNDRED-POUND MAN; also look out for a DEFROCKED PRIEST singing obscene songs while strumming his guitar.
A must-see for all visitors are the WAX-WORKS DISPLAYS at Salon No. 7, mounted by Philippe Curtius, a pioneer of this form of spectacle and owner of Paris’s first waxwork museum, Le Grand Couvert. At the Palais you will pay twelve sous to sit up close, or two sous at the back. In front of you will be waxwork tableaux featuring various royal families, cultural and intellectual giants like Voltaire, and military heroes.
For those of a sporting disposition, there are BILLIARD TABLES and GAMBLING DENS on the upper floors. After 10pm, flocks of PROSTITUTES will gather by a colonnaded area known as the Camp des Tartares.
EATING AND DRINKING
There is no need to leave the Palais for dinner. Its RESTAURANTS are the finest in Paris. The best, and most expensive, is the CAFÉ DE CHARTRES, where you can enjoy plats bourgeois (the general term for haute cuisine) such as fried mutton feet, rabbit steaks with cucumber, roast veal in pastry and vine-leaf fritters. Slightly cheaper, but no less excellent, is LES TROIS FRÈRES PROVENCAUX, run by three brothers from Marseille who serve regional specialities; bouillabaisse (fish soup) and brandade (puréed salt cod). Normally with your meal you’d expect a top-quality pain mollet (soft bread) like the elaborate pain de fantaisie, however, in times of need, when BREAD is scarce, it is customary not to bake such fancy loaves and the owners will respect this tradition; to ignore it is to invite trouble.
For coffee, a dessert of sorbet or ice cream, and a liqueur to finish, the Palais also has plenty of CAFÉS to choose from. The current hotspot is the CAFÉ DE FOY, frequented by leading revolutionaries like Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. The COFFEE comes from Santo Domingo in the Caribbean and you can have it strong and black, or with milk (café au lait); you can even get a mocha. Take a seat at one of the outside tables under the chestnut trees and you will be surrounded by all manner of Parisians passionately debating politics. Games of CHESS are also available at a number of tables: chess is a common feature of café culture and standards are high, competition fierce. So if you are an enthusiast, pull up a chair and test your moves against the best in revolutionary Paris. For a more refined atmosphere visit the CAFÉ DE LA RÉGENCE, with its marbled tables, mirrored walls and chandeliers.
FRENCH BREAD
The role of BREAD in the events you are about to witness is critical –and symptomatic of its importance to eighteenth-century French society. Available in a range of shapes and sizes, from round to long and thin (don’t call them baguettes as the word doesn’t appear until 1920), their unique flavour and texture is largely due to their ingredients: salt, either grey from the salt marshes or white from the Normandy seaside; water drawn from rivers, fountains, wells, or directly from rainfall; butter; sometimes milk and sugar; occasionally egg, for a glazed effect. White stone-ground flour is sifted through cloth to create three main types of dough: ferme (hard), molle (soft) and bâtard (bastard), which is somewhere in-between the two and is overtaking ferme as the standard variety.
Bread also denotes social class. The elite will mostly eat pain mollet (soft, crusty, savoury bread); the bourgeoisie, bâtard breads like the aptly named pain bourgeois; and the vast majority pain du commun (hard crustless bread). Over the course of this trip, you will sample a range of these loaves and get a taste of what the Women’s March is all about.
LOWER ORDERS
If you want to be better acquainted with the lives of the working women and men who will lead you to Versailles tomorrow, we suggest you walk the short distance to the less affluent neighbourhoods near LES HALLES (Paris’s main market) and go into any busy TAVERN, where you will be able to get reasonable wine from Bordeaux and Burgundy, and a hearty bowl of soup. The bread, if there is any, will either be pain à soupe, which is a very flat loaf made entirely from crusts and bâtard dough, or a pain du commun (hard) like the local staple, gros pain de Paris. For a more downmarket experience, check out one of the many street-corner WINE SHOPS, where you can buy a bottle to take-away or stay and drink standing up (there are no chairs) and mix with labourers on a daily wage – market porters, chimney sweeps, coachmen – as well as criminals and hookers.
In all these venues, you will hear the clientele speaking POISSARD, the favoured slang of the market women and fishwives. Derived from the word poix (pitch), it is a crude but vibrant patois featuring heavy elision, fractured syntax and grammar, plus rudimentary rhyme, perfect for jokes and ribald songs. It has quickly become fashionable, taken up by the bourgeoisie and the aristos, who get a kick out of dropping it into polite conversation.
MONDAY 5 OCTOBER 1789
After your late night – Paris does not sleep until about 4am – you will need to ready for BREAKFAST by 7am, dressed in your PROLETARIAN OUTFIT. Women should be wearing a white bonnet, loose white blouse and a white apron over a billowing pleated skirt. Men should wear a red cap, white shirt with a sleeveless brown leather jacket and blue culottes (knee-breeches). Both sexes will have a TRICOLOUR COCKADE, best worn as a sash, either wrapped round your waist or across your torso.
At your local patisserie try a pain à café, which is a rich breakfast roll. Obviously it goes well with coffee, but we recommend you order a chocolat chaud instead: either a dark chocolate brew – vanilla and sugar mixed with cocoa paste – or a creamier version with milk. Since its arrival in France in the seventeenth century, HOT CHOCOLATE has been growing in popularity, and these days it’s all the rage – Marie Antoinette has her very own chocolatier working on new recipes – and spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and clove are common additions. If you are fed up with bread and would like something different, try a choux bun; made by mixing butter, water, flour and eggs to create a light choux dough, this type of bun was recently invented by the pâtissier Avice.
While you are eating you will hear the Toscin sound from the Church of Sainte-Marguérite, followed by the BELLS of dozens of others summoning the citizens of Paris onto the streets to answer the call of a young woman w
ho is banging a drum and yelling, ‘When will we have bread?’ As their numbers swell to nearly 7,000, THE WOMEN – mostly fishwives, shopkeepers, market traders and pedlars from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, armed with cudgels, knives and sticks – are joined by men from the surrounding districts. Together the angry mob will proceed to the HÔTEL DE VILLE, Paris’s town hall and the focal point of mass protest.
AT THE HÔTEL DE VILLE
You should be in the PLACE DE GRÈVE, outside the Hôtel de Ville, by 8am. On arrival, you will see the women, and some men, breaking down its locked doors. The more adventurous may want to follow them as they burst in, tearing up documents and ledgers as they search for weapons; however, this is not an occasion for wholesale looting; a wad of a hundred 1,000 livres notes goes missing but it will be returned a few weeks later, while 3.5 million livres in cash will be left untouched. This does not mean you will leave empty-handed; 700 rifles and muskets, plus two cannons, are seized and carried outside, where the increasingly restive crowd is busy denouncing the Mayor – JEAN-SYLVAIN BAILLY, an astronomer whose speciality is the moons of Jupiter – along with the Flanders Regiment and the King.
By 11am, the mood will be turning increasingly ugly, the women chanting, ‘A Versailles, ou à la lanterne’. This is no idle threat. It has become customary to hang enemies of the people from lampposts (lanternes) before chopping off their heads. On hand to help is Mathieu Jouve Jourdan, better known as JOURDAN COUPE-TÊTE (Jourdan the Head-Cutter). Dressed all in black, carrying an array of hatchets and cleavers, Jourdan is a former butcher who gained his fearsome reputation thanks to his involvement in the murder of the financier Joseph-François de Foulon. Jourdan removed his head after his corpse had been dragged naked through the streets, then turned his attention to Foulon’s hapless son-in-law, Bertier. Having shown Bertier his grisly handiwork, Jourdan proceeded to carve him into little pieces.
WOMEN ON THE MARCH. TWELVE MILES IS A LONG WAY TO DRAG A CANNON IN THE RAIN.
As the women string up ABBÉ LEFÈBVRE, the Hôtel de Ville’s quartermaster, and Jourdan sharpens his blades, STANISLAS MAILLARD, a hero of the Sacking of the Bastille, intervenes and persuades them to cut Lefèbvre loose. Thanks to his standing with the crowd, Maillard is able to convince them that the time has come to march on Versailles.
THE MARCH
With Maillard and a group of drummers leading the way, you and the women begin the TWELVE-MILE MARCH in pouring rain that will persist throughout the day. You will cross the River Seine at the Cité, follow the Quai des Orfèvres to Pont Neuf, cross over again to the Louvre, pass the Tuileries Garden, halt briefly at the Place Louis XV, then continue along the Champs-Elysées and the Right Bank until you reach Chaillot, then Sèvres (about halfway), and finally VIROFLAY, the last stop before Versailles. En route you will sing POISSARD SONGS about getting your hands on bon papa (the King), and watch gobsmacked onlookers being corralled into joining you, while shopkeepers hurriedly board up their premises.
AT VERSAILLES
After six hours on the road you will reach the town of VERSAILLES and proceed down its main boulevard, the AVENUE DE PARIS, where you will be met by local officials who greet you with fine words and barrels of wine. You will also notice the dramatic appearance of THÉROIGNE DE MÉRICOURT, a strikingly beautiful young woman astride a jet-black horse, wearing a plumed hat, crimson riding coat, and brandishing a pistol and sabre; this former courtesan will soon become a totemic figure, embodying the spirit of women’s liberation.
While most of you will mill about drinking, a detachment of women, supported by men dragging one of the cannons, will continue down the Avenue to the PLACE D’ARMES, directly in front of the Palace, only to find the iron grille gates of the COUR ROYALE (Royal Courtyard) firmly shut and protected by the Gare du Corps (Royal Bodyguard), the Cent-Suisses (Hundred Swiss) and members of the detested Flanders Regiment. Undeterred, the women will threaten to open fire and insult the King for refusing to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
LOUIS XVI, who has rushed back from hunting at Meudon, agrees to receive a small group of you. Once in his presence, one of the women, a seventeen-year-old flower girl, PIERRETTE CHABRY, will be so overawed that she faints; the King will rouse her with smelling salts and promise that any grain currently en route to Paris will be delivered immediately.
THÉROIGNE DE MÉRICOURT WAS THE MODEL FOR THE FIGURE OF LIBERTY IN DELACROIX’S REVOLUTIONARY PAINTING, LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE.
His offer will be met with healthy scepticism by the women outside and, as time passes, tempers fray after repeated attempts to force the gates are thwarted by the FLANDERS REGIMENT. The King, understandably worried about further enflaming the women, has the PALACE BAKERY emptied and its contents distributed among you – tuck in to their excellent bread, as this may be all you get to eat for a while. Around 6pm, the King will declare that he is ready to SIGN THE DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN and ratify the AUGUST DECREES that dismantled feudalism. For the moment, these concessions will mollify the crowd, and for the next few hours a sort of calm will prevail, broken only by the odd exchange of gunfire.
THE SALLE DES MENUS PLAISIRS
While you may be content to loiter outside the gates, there will be plenty to see at the SALLES DES MENUS PLAISIRS, a complex of buildings with huge rooms reserved for public functions and ceremonies, located at 22 Avenue de Paris, not far from the Palace. The Salle you are heading for was expanded to accommodate the Estates General when it opened here on 5 May 1789, but soon became home to the National Assembly. 150-foot long, 75-foot wide, and thirty-foot high, its domed roof, painted ceilings, Grecian pillars and racked circular seating that surrounds the vast debating floor, take your breath away.
At first only a few of you will accompany MAILLARD into the Salle, where he will present your demands to the bemused delegates. But then hundreds of marchers – stinking of mud and dripping wet from the long march – enter the auditorium, some with hunting knives and swords dangling menacingly from their skirts. Pandemonium ensues. Deputies are elbowed aside to make room for everyone on the benches, one woman will occupy the President’s chair and issue decrees on his behalf, others will fire their muskets into the air, the shots booming round the cavernous hall. You will see a young cleric trying to stop a fishwife from further insulting an archbishop by bending and kissing her hand; she dismisses his goodwill gesture and, instead of responding in kind, tells him she will not ‘kiss the paws of a dog’.
Not all the assembly are treated with the same contempt. The women will happily mingle with MIRABEAU, the corpulent pock-marked revolutionary whose thunderous oratory and quicksilver mind have already made him famous, while ROBESPIERRE, a thin, stiff-backed provincial lawyer who will later gain notoriety as the architect of the Terror, exchanges pleasantries and makes encouraging noises.
OUTSIDE THE PALACE: MIDNIGHT
Towards midnight you will hear the tramping of massed boots and see thousands of torches approaching through the darkness. It’s the NATIONAL GUARD, nearly 20,000 of them, marching six abreast down the Avenue de Paris, wearing their red-trimmed uniforms with blue coats, white lapels and leggings, the colours matching their cockades. This semi-professional militia, formed to defend the Revolution, is led by LAFAYETTE, a French hero of the American War of Independence and the nearest thing France has to a Commander-in-Chief, mounted on his white horse. Following in their train are thousands of armed civilians. The whole cavalcade left Paris at 4pm, delayed by Lafayette, who eventually gave up trying to persuade his men not to march on Versailles when a few of his officers suggested he might like the view from the top of a lamppost.
On arrival, Lafayette quickly secures an audience with the King, leaving you to wait impatiently for his return. When he finally reappears outside, he brings good news: the Flanders Regiment will be dismissed. The majority, by now a little weary, will be content with this, and by 3am Lafayette, sufficiently reassured that the worst is over, will head to his grandfather’s house nearb
y to get some shut-eye. However, almost as soon as he is gone, a seventeen-year-old apprentice cabinetmaker, JÉRÔME HÉRITIER, will be shot dead by a Black Musketeer firing from a Palace window.
BACK AT THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
As the night wears on, you will receive regular UPDATES FROM THE PALACE, each concession by the King met with wild applause, and be treated to a brief visit from Lafayette. However, the excitement will start to fade as exhaustion takes hold. Many women will simply crash out where they sit; some will even fall asleep standing up. You may also be ready to curl up somewhere and take a nap. But, whatever you do, don’t oversleep. Make sure you are BACK AT THE PALACE BY 4AM, for things are about to kick off.
INSIDE THE PALACE
For some reason, in the middle of the night a large detachment of Royal troops will be sent to the far end of the Palace Gardens, leaving the COUR DES MINISTRES lightly patrolled. The women seize their chance, breaching the gates and flooding into the COUR DE MARBRE, the Palace’s innermost marbled courtyard, with direct access to the ROYAL APARTMENTS. These are located on the first floor of the immense Pavilion Block – the wings alone are half a mile wide – which also includes the private apartments of courtiers and government officials, their rooms enfilading off each other.
At this point, at around 4.40am, a few women will leave the main pack and set off HUNTING FOR MARIE ANTOINETTE; some are intent on using their aprons to carry her bowels, while one woman threatens to tear out her heart, cut off her head and fricassee her liver. Others will roam through the rooms of France’s wealthiest individuals, stealing valuable items – tapestries, candlesticks, gold trinkets, porcelain figures. Look out for the DUC D’ORLÉANS, owner of the Palais Royal, leaning on the main stairway wearing a grey frock coat and slouched hat, riding whip in hand, pointing you in the direction of the Royal bedrooms. As you stream towards them, you may spot terrified courtiers hiding under chairs and diving behind sofas.
