by Marge Piercy
The week after she buried Mignonne, while she was sitting in her old black mourning dress counting sous in the household drawer, Jean appeared. “I have been seriously reconsidering my life. Manon, I have reached a decision as to the new course it should take.”
He sounded so remote, she was terrified. He was going to emigrate to America; he was going to join a monastery like his brother. “Oh? What have you decided, then?”
“I wish you to become my wife.” He managed a thin smile and held out his hand.
She did not hesitate. She took it and he winced. She realized she had grabbed his hand too hard and immediately loosened her grip. “I accept.”
“I informed my mother and my brothers by letter. They are not enthusiastic, but they will raise no objections.”
They would, but she did not care. “I’ll try to win them over.”
“I’m sure your charm will have that desired effect.… I do have two conditions.” He folded his arms across his chest.
Why was she not surprised? “What would those be, Jean?”
“I don’t want you to see your father again. You may write to him occasionally, but that is all. He’s a spendthrift and an immoral sponger. I don’t want him trying to squeeze me for money to squander.”
She hesitated only a moment. Her father had not offered even perfunctory condolences on the death of Mignonne. “I accept your condition. He will never bother you, I promise.”
“Excellent.” He rubbed his hands together and then rose to kiss her lightly on the mouth. “Now that we are engaged, I would like to get the marriage under way without delay. My other condition is we not make a great fuss. I don’t want to waste time or money, but to get on with our lives.”
“As soon as you wish.” She meant that fully: soon, immediately, before his family could raise difficulties, before her father managed to ruin things. “I need no more than a day or two to prepare.”
After he left, she paced through the flat, then began to pack. They would be married in three days. She owned little but books, a few frocks, shawls and cloaks, tiny mementos like a perfume flask and earrings from her mother. As she packed, she stopped to dip into her old journals. Hope and despair flashed from them. At last she was beyond despair. She would be the wife of a man with important work to do in the world. Her life was finally about to begin.
EIGHT
Claire
(1783–1784)
CLAIRE joined the theater company led by Jean Collot d’Herbois. Every little toady who had pretensions stuck a “de” in the middle of his name to imply he had land, was noble or practically so, the lord of whatever particular dungheap he was claiming. Every manager she had worked for was “de” something. Collot took it less seriously than most. He did not pose as noble, boasting about his rough times on the streets of Paris.
She was the primary ingenue in his company, since Yvonne had got knocked up and gone off to have her bastard. Yvonne had seduced an innkeeper, a widower. He offered her a room in back and said if it was a boy, he’d marry her. Nobody need know she was an actress. Otherwise the Church wouldn’t marry them. Actresses were lower than prostitutes and forbidden the Church’s rites. “So he doesn’t wear silk and laces. He eats well. He sleeps in a warm room in a feather bed. I’m twenty-seven,” Yvonne, officially eighteen, confided. “This is the best I can do.”
So Claire moved up to main ingenue. She really was eighteen. Three years after she had run away from home, this was her fourth company. She had been hired away from the first group within six months, when they had been performing at a fete in Orleans. The women had never warmed to her. She had let the head of the company fuck her but she did not like him. She had not thought she had a choice. Since then she had learned she was in demand as an actress, for her striking looks, her loud voice, her carriage, the fact that she actually could assume roles, learn the lines and give some semblance of emotion. Nowadays she did not feel she had to oblige.
This was the best company so far. They played real theaters in every town—no more putting up a rough stage in a town square or screaming over the heads of drunken louts at a fair. They had costumes and scenery and written-down plays. They got paid regularly. One of the roustabouts who traveled with the company stood guard at the dressing rooms and did not let just anything with two sous in his pocket bother them.
Sometimes the boss himself, Collot, wrote plays for them, like a spectacle he had slapped together to celebrate the birth of the Dauphin, the heir to the throne. It featured a huge fountain surmounted by a dolphin, played by Claire, who had to sing in the fish outfit, when she had been at the bottom of the company hierarchy. She was glad when audiences showed they didn’t like the play any longer. The Queen was growing unpopular, regularly referred to as “the Austrian bitch.” She was also called Madame Deficit, spending money faster than it could be soaked from the poor. Collot had scribbled a new pageant, that featured a balloon taking off—pulled up by wires. Claire, in a costume of feathers, sang about going up, up in the clouds. The Montgolfier brothers had recently flown a hot air balloon at Versailles. Balloons were all the rage. Rich ladies wore big gondola balloons in their hairdos. It was good that ladies sat in boxes, because nobody behind could have seen through their elaborate hairdos, full of frigates in full sail, shepherdesses (the Queen liked to play shepherdess at her private palace Petit Trianon), forests, towers and vases of fresh flowers. Claire had hair down to the top of her buttocks, dark chestnut, black in lamplight. In one romantic comedy, she was discovered sitting by a river combing her hair, apparently naked but for those tresses, although of course she was wearing a flesh-colored shift. That always went over big with the gentlemen. Claire was not modest. They did a couple of pantomimes in which she was almost nude. She had the body for it, so why should she care if people looked?
When some lout with more money than manners tried to strongarm her into bed, Collot backed her up. She had left her previous company in Lyon, when the manager insisted she fuck the silk merchant who was the angel of the tragedy they were performing. Collot encouraged her to refuse. “They think we’re dirt,” he said. “We have four times the talent and brains of these pigs, but they relegate us to the gutter.” He slammed his fist on the table. Platters and goblets rattled, and his wife, Madame, laughed nervously.
Collot had a pretty, weak-willed wife who did everything he told her and more. She kept the books, sewed costumes, filled in minor roles, carried the programs to the printers and picked them up. She soothed ruffled feelings, calmed roiled nerves, sat up with the sick and drunken, provided remedies to the hung-over. Collot was an unusual manager in that he was bright and faithful to his wife, although he treated Madame as he might a servant. That was considered by all (except Claire) a good marriage. He yelled at them, but that was to be expected. She didn’t have to lie down next to him after he called her seventeen foul names for slut and told her she had the talent of a rotten melon. The company was successful, whether they were putting on pantomimes about current events, melodramas of virtuous bourgeois maidens pursued by wicked lords and rescued by equally virtuous men of their own class—the so-called Third Estate—or the occasional tragedy or farce. They were a good all-around troupe who gave audiences what they wanted.
Collot had come up from the streets of Paris by wits and hard work, fueled by a rage that never vanished. It gave edge to his acting. He played villain’s roles, saying they were more fun. When she was older, she would do the bad women.
They ate together before the evening performance, around a big table in the inn where they were staying, everyone except Juliette, who had a merchant who was keeping her in her own small rooms. Juliette did the wicked women now; she had been the ingenue before Yvonne. Collot sat at the head of the table and Madame at the foot. Madame was slender, blond and wispy. She could make her voice carry onstage, but offstage, she whispered. It was hard to engage her in eye contact. Sometimes actors forgot she was in the room.
Not so Collot. Nobody could overl
ook him. He was a tall slender man with regular features, large striking dark eyes, hair even darker than her own that he kept long and loose on his neck or in a pigtail. He wore a wig on stage and when he was dealing with gentry. He looked better with his own dark hair around his face dominated by his striking and powerful gaze. His body was hard and whiplike, a waist almost as slender as hers. There was a fierce smouldering energy to Collot that worked well on stage.
Even though he stuck the stupid pretentious “de” in his name, he did not pretend to be a gentleman. His father had been an unsuccessful goldsmith on the Rue Saint Jacques in Paris. He had gotten to know the regulars at the Pont Neuf, where it was said that if a person wanted to find anybody in Paris, they had only to stand there for a day. He had befriended acrobats, fire eaters, jugglers, mimes, peddlers of quack cures and love potions. By twenty, he was part of a traveling company making their way in crude wagons across France.
“When you’re an actor, nobody’s your friend except other actors,” he said in his sonorous voice. He always seemed to be addressing the last row in the upper balcony. “Every little prick with a shop that does a hundred livres of business a year looks on you as scum. They won’t claim you as a friend in public. In private, they love you, but don’t ask for help.”
She could understand Collot’s anger, although she did not have his drive for recognition. He felt insulted, kept down. He lusted after position and power forever closed to him. She felt as if her life was so much better than it was supposed to have been, that if she dropped dead tomorrow, she would have stolen three years of good living. She ate regularly, better food than her family had ever seen. She often had meat or fowl. While she was with the first company, she had been hit often and beaten for bleeding on a costume once, but since then, nobody had struck her. She had more clothes than her entire family put together. She slept in a bed with only one other woman, Lucie de Fontanelle, who did the heroines and had a fine soprano voice, better trained than her own loud uncertain contralto. Lucie could not dance as well as Claire and she had not as statuesque a body. She had the same delicacy of features and coloring as Madame, although with a flirtatious manner she could summon or drop like opening and closing a box lid. Lucie was sharp, although she concealed it behind that arch manner, a woman who held a fan before her face while she surveyed the world with a cold eye. Admitting to twenty-five now, she had been born in Bordeaux, in a shopkeeper’s family with too many girls. “My papa sold me to a company that was passing through. When I went to leave them, they told me I couldn’t, that they had bought me. I said, sue me. I walked out the door.”
Claire admired Lucie because she got good roles, because she did not belong to anybody, because she was clever and unimpressed with the niceties and the furbelows that other women thought important. “Put some money by,” Lucie said. “How long will the men want to look at you? Buy a little house, buy land. That’s all that matters.”
Claire did not make enough to save much, and she sent money home to her grandmother. She did not want land. She wanted to be free to roam all over France, beholden to no one.
Around the table in Caen, in the inn where they were staying, the women talked together, except Madame, about the sort of men they fancied. Claire had little to say. Every so often she saw a man she wanted, and she went to bed with him. A midwife had told her once when she was worried she had an infection, that she had a tipped womb and it would be hard for her to conceive. She hoped so. She picked up a spinner, she picked up a dock worker, she picked up a monk, she picked up a captain of artillery who claimed to be a nobleman and might have been. She tried them all for fun and was done with them. What mattered the most was that she chose.
“I don’t think I’ll ever marry,” she said to the women.
“La, you’re an idiot,” Lucie said. “You need someone to ride out the hard times with. Just pick a man who can make a living and has the gumption to work hard. A man with some property.”
“I don’t see it’s better,” Claire said stubbornly. “I have no father. Nobody owns me. Why should I give myself to a man?”
“An unmarried woman is at risk,” Juliette said in her know-it-all manner. “A nun doesn’t need to be married, because she has Christ for a bridegroom and the Church will protect her. But you’re no nun. A woman needs a man as protector.”
“I never noticed men protecting any of you,” Claire said. “We can be carried off to prison for saying the wrong thing. We can be accused of picking pockets or blasphemy or indecency. We can be accused of stealing a handkerchief from the room of some man we spent the night with. Who’ll believe us? We’re at risk, but a husband won’t keep off the law.”
“Pregnancy does,” Lucie said. “If you’re ever in serious trouble; get pregnant fast or fake it. They never hang a pregnant woman.”
“Nobody stays pregnant for long,” Claire said.
“You won’t say that the first time you’re pregnant,” Mme Abiel said. She was the oldest in the company and did the odd jobs Madame missed. “It’ll seem like forever. But don’t get pregnant, girls. It’s the end of you.”
“It wasn’t the end of Yvonne,” Juliette said.
“That’s not my idea of how I want to quit,” Claire said.
“Do you want to quit?” Lucie asked.
“Never,” Claire said. “I like this company. Collot blows off at us, but he knows what he’s doing. We always get paid. I like the life.”
“You’re young,” Juliette said.
“I’m not young, am I?” Mme Abiel said. “I still relish the life. Once bit, always bit. There’s always another play, another town.”
Madame tapped on her door the next afternoon. “Claire, this letter came for you.”
It was from her sister Yvette.
I have to tell you that things are very bad here. The last two harvests failed and nobody has money to spend on laundry. Grandmère died of a bloody flux two months ago, but it was the hunger that really killed her. Maman was sick for two weeks and last Sunday she died too. The money arrived too late to help. We were thrown out of the house. Pierre went off to Toulouse to look for work as a servant. The nuns are going to take me in as a laundress. At least I could have Maman buried in holy ground in spite of her refusing the last rites. I persuaded the priest she was out of her mind with fever.
I know you are damned forever for your sins, but I am your loving sister. Here is the address of the convent. Please send money. Everyone is starving. There are no babies or old folks left. People go around dragging like horses that have been worked to death. But the nuns have food in the convent, fish and chicken and fresh figs and even white bread. The kitchen staff look so pink and plump, my mouth waters when I look at them. I have not eaten more than weeds boiled into soup in weeks, but tomorrow I go to the convent. I’ll pray for your sins.
Claire wept so hard she had to wash her face in alum water to take the swelling down for the evening performance. She should have stayed with them. But what could she have done? Grandmère dying without Claire to hold her hand and close her eyes. Grandmère gone, Maman gone. Dying of lack of bread while she had more than she could eat.
Collot talked to Claire more than to the other actresses. He said she had more brains, but he also told her she was a fool, for not getting what she could out of her admirers. “How long do you think your looks will last? You see anybody lining up to fuck Madame Abiel? Take what you can get while the getting is good. You should put the squeeze on all of them.”
“I don’t care what a man desires. It’s whether I want him that matters. I’ll never sell myself.”
“We all sell ourselves. We sell passion and beauty and lechery and fear and pity. We sell everything we’ve got, Claire, and you’re an empty-headed goose if you think anything else is going on.”
Collot played a brigand, leader of a robber band, in a play about a kidnapped baker’s daughter, who converted them to virtue by her sterling example. Claire played the heroine, but the lines almost broke he
r up. Collot said as long as she showed enough bosom and leg, it didn’t matter what she thought. The strange thing was that while Collot was playing the leader of the gang, she found him attractive—this man she often resented, her boss who had reduced his wife to a timorous nonentity, who regularly insulted her. As soon as he became king of the robbers, he radiated sexual significance that he could never possess in life. She would never let him glimpse her reaction, but it put an edge on what would otherwise be a vacuous performance.
Men available to her often inspired her contempt. They were taken in by poses on the stage, by paint and flimsy costumes. They wanted to bed an image that in the darkened theater smelling of many bodies titillated them. Some were young lawyers who thought an actress a suitable object of lust, a prestigious mistress. Some were older men who longed for their youth and thought a woman desired by other men might magically restore it. For some she was a trophy. If she was occasionally moved by a broad set of shoulders, a flashing smile, a witty line, then she acted on her lust before it vanished.
The other actresses called her fickle, but she did not want more from those backstage and back alley admirers than a quick touch of sensual pleasure for a night or two. The less seriously she took those men, the more they wanted to hurl jewelry and other trinkets at her feet and the more they pledged undying love, as if they had any notion who she was, where she came from, what interested her. However, she liked the jewelry. Nobody in her family ever had jewelry. It could be sold in a pinch. Gold was gold.
She imagined a man who could move her. Her daydreams were absurd, but sometimes as they trundled along in rough terrain bounding and jouncing in a stagecoach on the way between relays and cities, from one flea-infested inn to the next, she would imagine a robber gang blocking the road. She imagined herself being carried off like the fainting heroine she played, but willingly. She could imagine being wildly and passionately attracted to a man who defied the law of the land, who placed himself outside society (as she was outside).