by Marge Piercy
Nicolas had been taken in hand by Julie—also a bastard but the foremost intellectual hostess of Paris, who ran an important liberal salon. Nicolas lived in a web of important friendships. He had a gift for friendship, if not for romance. His friends included those much older than himself, like Jean and the great writer Voltaire; and younger men, like the liberal Marquis de Lafayette. He had replaced his family, in which he was viewed as a weird failure, with friends who cherished him, and for whom he would do anything.
“Turgot is my old friend,” Nicolas said defensively. “He isn’t sending for me to admire my waistcoat. He means to put me to work.”
“So much rides on his shoulders,” Jean said with a sigh. “If he can reform the government, we’ll enter a new era. If he fails, France may be doomed to anarchy and decay.”
Nicolas detached himself from their helpful primping and went into the salon, where Turgot was waiting. “Marquis,” said Baron Turgot, motioning him to a seat. “Are you prepared to let your mathematical pursuits go, let go of the Science Academy and come to work with me? I’m a demanding taskmaster, and I have a great many tasks for you.” Turgot was a heavyset stern man, a squat mountain of resolve. He had been appointed Chief Minister by the new King, not yet crowned, and was determined to reform the government and the economy. He operated out of the comptroller-general’s office in Paris, reducing his own salary by half to set a good example to the court.
Turgot had begun to replace the entrenched bureaucracy with men steeped in new ideas. “You must move into the Mint. I want you to rationalize the money system and weights and measures. Every time a merchant crosses the border of a province, everything changes. It’s absurd.”
“Baron, I’m ready!” Nicolas wanted to embrace Turgot in gratitude, but confined himself to rising and bowing deeply.
The Mint was a great stone palace shining and new in the classical style on the left bank of the Seine near the Pont Neuf. Nicolas agreed to move, although he knew little about setting up housekeeping. He had always lived with married friends, because he liked being taken care of. “You’re a perfect uncle,” said Madame Suard, in whose house he had stayed for years enjoying an intense platonic bond. Everyone assumed that he would never marry, a bachelor at thirty-three. His one foray into love had been so disastrous, his female friends no longer tried to set up liaisons. He had fallen violently in love with a married woman. Marguerite de Meulun. For two years he had been besotted. If she had ordered him to go out in the street and fall upon his sword, he would have done it. In retrospect, she was an unimaginative flirt who liked to collect admirers. Finally he recovered, as from a long and virulent fever, slightly ashamed. Sometimes he thought his women friends viewed him as a gifted child. He was no Adonis. He was amiable looking, so he’d been told. The good Condorcet, Julie called him: a volcano covered with snow. Well, if he could not manage at love, he would have a go at government. He moved into the Mint and Turgot’s ministry.
The reason he had become so involved in the new field of probability theory was because only statistical knowledge would make it possible to form intelligent proposals how to govern. It was a fine time to be alive and Nicolas wanted nothing better than to be useful. The air itself felt more lively. Ideas swarmed like midges in the rising sun of activity. Nicolas got himself appointed along with Jean to oversee canals and rivers. They were Plato’s philosopher-kings.
Nicolas despised the bureaucrats he must supervise, but he determined to win through. Almost every evening he saw Turgot at one of the salons they frequented. Nicolas kept warning him about the pious camp at court, about enemies in Versailles, until Turgot, who liked to get on with everyone, told Nicolas he was a sheep in a passion, an enraged sheep. Turgot said, “Men in my family die at fifty. I’m forty-seven. My dear Marquis, that gives me three years to accomplish great things. Stop trying to rush me.”
Nicolas found him slow-moving. Turgot deliberated; he pondered; he consulted too much. Turgot was friendly with Malesherbes, whom the new King recalled from the exile into which Louis XV had condemned him. Nicolas tried to warn Turgot against Malesherbes. “He’s a cold and dangerous man who cares for no one. Do you remember the story of his marriage?”
“It always astonishes me, Marquis, how you can appear so benevolent and yet every bit of gossip you ever overheard is stored in your brain.”
“I listen well. Malesherbes married into the upper bourgeoisie for money. No one saw his wife until the day she killed herself by tying a pistol to a tree with a ribbon attached to the trigger and blew out her guts with a single blast. Malesherbes never spoke of her again. You don’t consider this significant?”
“No, I do not, Marquis. How a man behaves with women is none of my business. Nor yours, to be blunt.”
“How men behave with those they have power over is a revelation of their character: how they behave when they can get away with it.”
“What I personally care about is that Malesherbes censors with discretion. He warns writers he respects when they are to be arrested.”
While most of their work was in Paris, Turgot had to travel frequently to Versailles. It was a rapid trip, for the best road in the country connected Versailles and Paris: the King’s own road. Every time Nicolas made the trip, he fought despair over how impossible their task really was.
Versailles was a silly place where he felt awkward. While his family was noble for centuries, they were just country nobility never called to the King’s court. He was comfortably off (though his family still had him on an allowance, in anger at his life choices), but his was not one of the great fortunes. He did not own four hundred suits of fine brocade and silk shot with silver or gold to change into several times a day and glitter as he walked.
He went to Versailles with Turgot reluctantly. None of his talents counted. No one cared about mathematics, social theory or philosophy. They treated him the way people behaved when served the new and nutritious vegetable, potatoes, earth apples. They stared at the objects on their plate and toyed with them. So the bored and haughty courtiers stared at him, an earth apple if they had ever seen one, and attempted to toy with him. Ladies of middle rank flirted. He could not flirt back. He hardly found them of the same species. A woman who took six hours to dress, whose hair loomed a foot over her head, who was painted bright gold with red splashes and artificial moles, who reeked of violets and attar of roses and was packed into a dress that stood out three feet on either side of her, inspired him with nothing but a kind of contemptuous fear. All the courtiers were ranked by absurd roles (the countess who handed the Queen’s first lady of the bedchamber the royal petticoat; the comte who stood on the King’s left as his shirt was buttoned) and their privileges, both formal (who could sit on a stool in the royal presence and who must stand) and informal (the marquis the Queen danced with last night; the lady she smiled at; who had made the King giggle).
Versailles was an unnecessary city, built on ostentation as if on sand. It was larger in land than all of Paris and enclosed by walls. The streets were lined with the houses of officials whose functions were frivolous, and storehouses that held too much of everything. One building housed two hundred seventeen royal coaches. In Turgot’s coach as they made their way through the crowded streets, they passed the residences of men who cleaned the palace fountains, men who helped the King to hunt birds, who tended his packs of dogs, ten men in charge of crows, six of blackbirds. Scores of almoners, chaplains, confessors, clerics, choristers, the hundreds employed in the royal chapel or in providing sacred or profane music, clustered around the churches. Hairdressers alighted from carriages with the air of great generals, as heavily floured as bakers. The amount of flour consumed in a day in Versailles to powder the court’s hair could feed Paris.
Soldiers were everywhere, smartly dressed. Ten thousand were stationed here, light horsemen, infantry, Swiss Guards in ruffs and plumes, Grey and Black Musketeers. All wore splendid gilt-trimmed uniforms and strutted in the streets like lords. This place could be
carried away in a tempest and the essential work of France could go on: the peasants would plant and harvest, bread would be made and sold, wine would ferment and be carried to market, ships would sail from Bordeaux and Marseille, textiles would be spun, mines would plunder the earth, scientists would discover laws of astronomy and physics, surgeons and physicians would heal, chefs would cook and dressmakers sew up costumes. Versailles was an empty head that interfered unnecessarily with trade, Nicolas passionately believed, as did Turgot. It collected huge taxes from those who could least afford it and spent that money on maintaining itself and fighting stupid and costly wars.
Turgot rarely saw the King; Louis did not like him and the Queen hated him. But as he said, he was in power to work, not to gossip with the King. Never had Nicolas felt so useful, buoyed up and energetic. Even his family was less furious at him than usual. He had more access to his inheritance.
In the palace, huge rooms led into huge rooms, with not an inch undecorated. Rooms had walls inlaid with twenty hues of the finest marble. Ceilings depicted gods and goddesses disporting, Hercules at his labors. The ceilings suggested that this was Olympus and that the visitor was in the presence of deities. Gilded walls of bas relief, walls upholstered in velvet and silk, sagged with paintings of more deities and portraits of the royal family and mistresses. It gave him indigestion of the eyes. It was someone screaming in his ear, HOW IMPORTANT I AM! Outside on the grand canal, courtiers flirted in gondolas and held mock fights with small galleys and frigates. Yet everything was filthy. Excrement had been ground into the carpets. Every corridor stank of stale urine, as did the bushes in the grand garden. Pigs were slaughtered and roasted in a courtyard. In summer, the smell of offal stifled him.
The best times were in Paris when Turgot and Nicolas engaged in mapping out reforms. Turgot was freeing the grain market from the controls that had kept the price of bread at a certain level. Grain could not be artificially sequestered from the rest of the economy. Free trade must reign. The price of grain immediately soared and the cost of bread rose. Turgot knew it would find a natural level once the laws of supply and demand came into play. More grain would be grown because it would prove profitable, and the more grain was grown, the lower would be the price of bread. The free economy was their bedrock.
The people did not agree. Bread riots broke out all through the Ile-de-France—the country around Paris. The price of bread had risen from four sous to thirteen. Turgot held firm. “There’s no reason to pay attention to the people’s complaints. They don’t comprehend. We must force them to realize that the more they kick, fuss and riot, the firmer will be the containment. It’s the price of reforming the economy. In the long run, it will benefit even those who cry out the loudest now.” By the end of March, the price of a loaf in Paris was twenty-one sous. The price soared all through April. More riots. Even in Versailles the little people took to the streets and confronted the soldiers. The authorities gave in and lowered the price of bread, setting price controls. Turgot was furious. An example had to be made. When bread riots broke out in Paris, he ordered in the King’s musketeers, because the city guard would not attack the hungry mobs. His orders were to make examples of whoever they could catch and hang them.
Nicolas knew little about the life of the people swarming in the streets, and in truth they frightened him. Still he knew enough of the judicial system from his work with Voltaire on the cases of poor wretches to take Turgot to task. “Our laws work fine for those presiding in the courts, and are reprehensible for those who go before them. It’s judicial murder.”
Turgot shrugged him off. “We must set an example. We can’t back down before the people or the court. We must slash spending and revive trade.”
Nicolas ground his teeth. “Look, if the government is so encrusted with debt, why not cancel the coronation? Let the Archbishop come to Paris and stick the crown on Louis’ head in Notre Dame and pour oil on him as if he were a salad, and we’ll save millions.”
“My dear Marquis, the King would never agree to abrogate a thousand-year-old tradition. Louis would think it sacrilege to give up one jot of royal power or prestige. The people want a king properly crowned.”
The way it is. The way it has always been done. The customary method. The privileges of the nobility. The rights of the clergy. The King’s will. Yet as the year wore on, something was happening across the ocean in America. In August Louis sent an agent to see firsthand, on the principle that, if the uprising discommoded their enemy England, it must have some merit. Nicolas joined the Nine Sisters lodge of the Masonic Order, where all the talk was of the uprising against the British. Nicolas read every pamphlet that came to him. He was serving as science adviser. He figured out how to test a new device for desalinating ocean water; he advised on controlling a cattle plague. He revised manuscripts on artillery and naval science and printed them. He put a committee together to test Magellan’s naval instruments. Finally Turgot began to move. He abolished forced labor on the roads, so hated by the peasants, and the entitlements of the guilds. He was preparing to attack that great sacred cow, the tax structure. People of privilege protested to the King. Turgot was summoned to Versailles. The King dismissed him. With the system in chaos—reforms launched, the old system partly dismantled—depression hit France. The King appointed the Swiss-born banker Necker, considered a reformer but financially solid. Louis could not really appoint Necker, a Protestant. Louis got round that by appointing a nonentity as minister in name. Nicolas submitted his resignation. So much for the great reforms.
Surprisingly, Necker asked him to stay on, insisting he was needed. With serious misgivings, Nicolas agreed. Still, he could not abandon his attempt to bring reason to the Mint just because Necker, whom he disliked, had become minister. At least he did not have a sixteenth-century mind, as Nicolas felt both Louis and Marie-Antoinette did. They lived in a fantasy land where divine right rose with the sun and never set.
Nicolas continued his labors, but he was no longer at the center of decisionmaking. Then, early in 1777, Nicolas met a man who seemed the embodiment of the values he cherished: freedom, rationality, liberalism, science, philosophy. The American envoy Benjamin Franklin arrived, dressed not like a courtier but like a Quaker in a plain black suit. Nicolas spent hours discussing the new Declaration of Independence with him. He studied it phrase by phrase. Even if Turgot had failed, a true revolution led by rational men was taking place across the ocean.
All of Paris was in love with Ben Franklin, who especially enjoyed the attention of ladies, although presumably he was too old to do more than enjoy their public attentions. Julie de Lespinasse died, leaving Jean d’Alembert in despair, for he discovered her passionate love affairs. Nicolas took care of his friend as best he could, making sure he was never alone. Jean in turn was trying to get Nicolas into the Académie Française, a battleground for the war between the philosophers and the devout parties. Nicolas was already secretary to the Science Academy—a nice stipend.
Paris was a pot always on the boil. Books were banned and burned weekly, writers were thrown into prison or fled into exile, atheism and new ideas were denounced from the pulpit. Nicolas found himself in a constant ferment of political struggle, new and old friendships, the lively dance of ideas. He went out every night. If he rattled around the Mint with his servants, he was seldom in his apartment except to be dressed and to sleep. He scarcely had time to be lonely, even though for the first time he was living alone, away from his friends, the Suards. He invited them to join him, but they declined.
He did his work, he attended his meetings, and he dreamed of change that never seemed to come. In Versailles the Queen gambled away fortunes while hundreds of courtiers danced the Quadrille and dressed in ever more outlandish styles till they resembled mechanical insects of gold. In the liberal salons of Paris, men and women discussed America, where reason and liberty were exalted, where people spoke plainly, dressed simply and fought to the death for something new and fine, a republic. Sometimes hi
s friends day-dreamed aloud about moving to America, if the young nation won its war against its superior opponent. Sometimes he even spoke of that himself. A man needed some kind of dream.
SIX
Georges
(1771–1784)
GEORGES-Jacques Danton grew up in Arcis in Champagne. The Aube River rushed through the village, olive green and swift, near their wooden house that overlooked the town square near the lumpy church. Besides a chateau and tower, most of Arcis was squat stone houses of the poor, simple as stables, cobbled streets that gave way to dusty roads among the fields. Pastures, fields, vineyards, wooded hills were his playground. It was paradise for a boy with freedom to wander, flat country where he could see for leagues. He followed the river in an old leaky boat and then fought his way back upstream. He fished below the mill at the rapids.
His mother, his sisters doted on him. His father had died when he was not quite three, yet he would call his childhood happy. His stepfather was an easy-going unsuccessful lawyer. Georges ran wild over the countryside leading a pack of boys, leaving right after breakfast and never coming back till dinner, then rushing out as soon as he was full. When he looked in the hall mirror at home, a rectangular gilt-framed monster that had been in his mother’s family for almost a century, he saw his face scarred and grinning. He had been chased and mauled by a bull he had attempted to wrestle. He had been trampled by a herd of pigs. Then he had battled smallpox. His face—marred, tough, lopsided—grinned back at him. Finally his mother and stepfather sent him to school with the Oratorians at the market town of Troyes. The Fathers were supposed to tame him.
He liked Troyes with its half-timbered houses and its canals, bustling, much larger and richer than Arcis. It had a zest, an energy in the air. In old medieval streets buildings touched over his head and a young man could stand out of the rain. There were big plazas and fountains along the canals, all his to explore when he escaped school. There were streets of whores who called even to boys and open air markets selling pigs, cattle, horses, selling produce, roasted chickens and chickpeas, local wine.