by Marge Piercy
“Nothing but friends. I fell in love once before but it wasn’t returned. Perhaps that seems a considerable weakness to you—”
“No, I want to be loved alone, not in a list.…” She turned toward her mother who was puffing up, swishing her fan at them as if they were flies. “Maman, you look quite warm. Are you feeling well? Perhaps we should go and sit in the house until you’ve recovered.”
As Sophie went off arm in arm with her mother, who appeared to be scolding her—probably about staying so long alone with him—she managed to look back and smile. It was not a coquettish smile but a big smile of pleasure and good will. She did not love him yet as he loved her, but if he was very very lucky, she might.
TWELVE
Georges
(1787)
GEORGES had a new hangout, even if he had little else new. Oh, he had a room on the Rue des Mauvaises Paroles—and how could he not enjoy an address on the Street of Bad Words? He was still scrabbling for small cases and small rewards. He needed money. But he liked to enjoy himself, and a living man couldn’t spend all his time conniving and finagling and trying desperately to pry open doors the system and the gentry bolted in his face. Now and then he needed to relax, to chat, to watch the world saunter by, to pick up news and gossip. Given the few papers the government permitted through censorship, a man could learn a lot in conversation.
His new cafe was on the right bank just off the Pont Neuf, where everybody passed and everybody saw and was seen, high and low. He liked the mixture. He liked a taste of low life and he appreciated refinement and veneer. He had discovered a comfortable niche in the Cafe d’École (the sign said Parnasse, but no one called it that), a lively place where a young man could meet others who were trying to make their way and sometimes meet those who could help them do it.
He struck it off at once with the proprietor, François-Jérôme Charpentier. Charpentier, who came from Provence, had married an Italian woman, still good-looking. There was a warmth, a zest to both of them that Georges was right at home with. L’École coined money, for it was in a great spot. The light food they served was excellent, with a southern flavor that set it apart; the coffee was dark and rich; the beer and wine were good and relatively cheap, for Jérôme had connections in the wine trade, as perhaps in everything else that went on. He had bought into the tax collection agency—taxes were “farmed out.” The collectors got whatever they could squeeze and then gave the King his due. The rest was theirs. It was highly profitable, little risk, good return. Jérôme had bought into it as one might buy shares in any other business.
Jérôme and Maria had a daughter, Gabrielle. She was twenty-five but looked younger. Under a mane of thick glossy black hair her face was oval and sweet. Her dark eyes shone on him. Her skin was olive and perfect. Her bust was large, her hips full, and she laughed not like a lady but like a peasant, from the bottoms of her feet. He genuinely liked her. She stirred him, not outrageously but generously. He would enjoy taking her to bed, but more he wanted to marry her family. They had a gold mine in the cafe and fine reliable income from the shares in tax farming.
He spoke honestly to Jérôme of his situation (no point trying to fool a prospective father-in-law he intended to borrow from) and passionately of his ambitions. He flattered the mother, but always he was looking at the daughter. He took to sitting near enough to the counter to keep her in his line of sight. Now when he walked in, she snapped to attention and her large dark eyes gleamed. He openly admired Gabrielle to her parents. He was allowed to sit with her, to talk, but nothing more. They were exceedingly careful of her virtue. He did not press her. She wore a perfume scented with lilacs and sometimes she smelted of cinnamon from the kitchen. She was ripe as a peach.
He was always looking out for a chance to move out of the common courts, where he could count his fees on his fingers. Camille Desmoulins was still scrabbling and scribbling. He had fallen in love with a married woman who was too virtuous to have him, although she entertained him regularly. Mme Duplessis, wife of a bureaucrat, liked Camille for his wit and the poetry he wrote her incessantly, but he had not got further than snatching a kiss. Georges thought the affair absurd, but it did have the advantage of getting Camille out of his truly depressing servant’s room up on the sixth floor of a rundown building and feeding him good dinners three nights a week.
Georges was not short of friends, all poor, ambitious and discontented as he was. Fabre d’Églantine was another. Even his name was an invention, much as Georges had taken to signing his name d’Anton. Églantine referred to some poetry prize he had won in Toulouse. Fabre was a law clerk, a would-be litterateur, always entering some essay or poetry contest, and in the meantime, writing pornography and the occasional pamphlet attacking the government.
Louis had been dismissing ministers every year or so since he’d dumped Turgot and then Necker, each new one more hopeless and unpopular. The meeting of Notables had brought down Calonne, who had admitted the government was bankrupt and actually revealed the size of the national debt. In the meantime, the Queen was buying new palaces and had recently been caught in a spicy scandal involving a handsome prelate, Cardinal Rohan, Bishop of Arras, and a diamond necklace that seemed to have disappeared after costing a fortune. Many political pamphlets were pornographic, because attacking the Queen’s morals was the quickest way to attack the regime.
Camille said it was due to Louis’ floppy prick. “He doesn’t like sex, Georges. He’s the first French king since Saint Louis who doesn’t enjoy women—or boys. He likes to shoot birds and fix locks. French kings always had a foreign wife but a French mistress, the real female power. We want a Frenchwoman behind the throne, not the Austrian bitch. We don’t think she has our interests at heart. She was born a Hapsburg and reports to her family.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine having all that power and all those gorgeous women fawning over you, and not wanting to enjoy them. Now if I had a sweet juicy wife …” The image of Gabrielle leaning on the counter, her eyes doting on him and her full breasts quivering in her blouse assaulted him. “I’d be true to her, at least eighty percent of the time. But all that temptation? Something’s missing.”
“Deficit downstairs, deficit upstairs. The man is stupid. He’d make a great peasant or a cart driver. But as a king, he’s a joke on us.”
They had to drink the cheapest beer or cider or wine, for they had barely enough between them for a tavern meal. But good company made it bearable to be nobody at twenty-seven, still nobody.
Friends were important, and he tried to preserve them, which is why he still had a good relationship with his first mistress in Paris, Françoise, now kept by a lawyer Huet de Paisy. She remarked to him that Huet was looking to sell his office as an advocate before the Council in the Palais de Justice, a civil court that took care of cases concerning wealthy and frequently noble clients. The workload was not irksome and the fees were high. However, Huet’s asking price was eighty thousand livres. Georges could get his hands on five thousand. That left a bit of a gap.
He whipped his courtship into a gallop and made his case as powerfully and passionately as he could. He was wooing the father as much as the daughter. Gabrielle wanted him, clearly, and she was no weak-willed ninny. She made her desires felt in her family. But he must convince Jérôme that lending him money was a winning proposition. It was tied up together: the office he must buy, the wife who would help him buy that office, and the new style of life that would open to him. This was his golden chance. If he had ever been told he had a persuasive manner, a gift for oratory, a commanding presence, charm, now was the time for those attributes to raise him out of obscurity into the good life.
One noon, Jérôme told him to come back on Monday, the day they closed, and they would have a family dinner together and talk business. The business was the loan and the marriage. The marriage would occur immediately after he had the Council status in hand, and the loan of fifteen thousand would be his.
Françoise, who had bee
n saving her money and trusted him to pay her back, lent him thirty-three thousand francs without the knowledge of her lover. He scraped up some from his family. Still, Françoise had to broker a deal, a mortgage on his family land in Arcis, whereby he would owe Huet twenty-two thousand, to be paid off over the next five years. Most offices were bought. The crown made money on them. Then those who bought the offices sold them when they were ready to cash in. By the second week in June, Danton had his official papers signed by the King confirming him in his new office.
The wedding occurred as fast as his relatives could arrive from Arcis. Gabrielle looked splendid, vibrant, and he was as happy as he ever had been—and he was a man who knew himself to have an immense capacity for simple earthy happiness. He had the wife he wanted. He had an office that should finally bring him not only status, but plenty of cash. If he was in debt, that didn’t weigh him down, for he intended to repay everyone who had faith in him.
His father-in-law set them up in a fine apartment across the river, on the corner of the Cour de Commerce and the Rue des Cordeliers. It wasn’t a fancy neighborhood, but it was a bustling one where he and Gabrielle would feel right at home, only a few blocks to her parents and to the Palais de Justice where he’d be doing most of his courtroom work. He inherited some cases from Huet. He hired Fabre as his clerk. Why not spread the bounty around? They did not bother with a honeymoon, except for two days they spent mostly in bed.
She was a virgin, as he had expected. Not that that meant a great deal to him, except she was after all his wife and he intended to start a family. She was a virgin but hardly virginal. She wanted him. She told him she had been wanting him for six months.
“I knew you were for me, Georges. I waited for you to know it, and soon you did. Then I waited for you to make it happen while I kept up a clamor to Papa and Mama. I talked till their ears were sore. I knew you were my husband, since the day you walked in, strong and proud as a bull into his field.”
She was not coy, she did not hold back. Before she got into bed she prayed to the Virgin, but he did not mind. It might make her a better mother. She let her black hair loose falling in coils around her bare shoulders. If he were going to pray, he would pray to her, just as she was. Her body in bed with him was truly holy. Gabrielle was June in his arms, flowers and fruit and solid flesh, that scent of lilac and cinnamon, his. In their new apartment that still smelled of wallpaper paste and paint and echoed because they had so little furniture, they lay in the big matrimonial bed and made love until they both were sore. Then they sank into sleep together, wrapped legs into legs, her hair brushing his chest lightly as a warm wind.
THIRTEEN
Pauline
(1789)
RIGHT after mass on Sunday, Pauline, Babette and Aimée went to a meeting of neighborhood women to discuss the Complaint Petition they were drawing up. “Our little father, good King Louis, is calling the Estates General,” Mère Roget announced. “The flower sellers, the lingerie women, market women, fishwives are drawing up petitions. We have grievances too. We must make a petition.”
They had problems enough. “We women who dig ditches are paid half what the men make. We do the same work, barrow load by barrow load.” If a woman’s husband was called for a soldier, if he grew sick or suffered an injury, if he abandoned her or dropped dead, then she could scarcely feed herself, let alone her children.
Nobody could get married till they could afford it, but couples who were betrothed could not wait years to go to bed. Were they made of wood? Like Pauline and her boyfriend, couples made love; then if the marriage didn’t occur and the woman got pregnant, the Church landed on her. The neighborhood would stand behind a woman who left a man for good reason, but the Church would make her go back. There was no divorce. No wonder couples delayed marriage, not just to save money to buy a bed, but because there was no recourse if things went sour. Like Victoire, the old-clothes woman married to a man with a vicious temper, a woman was stuck.
“We shouldn’t have to desert babies because we can’t feed them.” The woman speaking had left her own baby five years before on the church steps. When her husband recovered and the family business of button making was going, she looked for her daughter. Like most foundlings, the little girl had died.
“How about enough to feed ourselves?” Pauline asked. “The price of bread goes up and up and never comes down.”
There was a throaty mutter of agreement. Of all their problems, this was the greatest, for everyone lived mostly on coarse dark bread, as much rye as wheat, pounds of it every day for every working person. Bread was life, but the price rose and rose and their wages and their earnings remained the same. They were being squeezed to death. It was bread before rent, bread before fuel, bread before medicine or shoes.
Taxes were next. How could they pay taxes when they couldn’t even pay for water and wood? “Why shouldn’t the fat ones pay their share? The richer a man is, the less he pays. Bloodsuckers, all of them!”
The women addressed the King familiarly. “Dear little father. Our friend Louis just doesn’t know how we suffer. He’s calling the Estates General to fix things, and he’s asking us what we need.”
Pauline knew better. Louis was calling for the Estates General because he’d been backed into a corner. She read all the pamphlets she could lay hands on and the illegal wall posters quickly torn down by the law. She listened in taverns. The King was bankrupt. The government had spent itself deep into debt. The King had tried to get the nobles to empty their pockets for him, but they squealed like pigs at the butcher. Louis was trying to make them pay by calling the Estates General, which hadn’t met in a hundred fifty years. Representatives of all three Estates, the clergy, the nobles and the rest of them, would go into separate sessions at Versailles. All over the kingdom, little groups were meeting by town, by profession, by guild to draw up their complaints, their wish lists, for the King and the Estates to consider. Everywhere people gathered to work on letters, hoping to catch the King’s eye. Would he read any petitions? It was like putting a prayer on the wind, inscribing it on the down of a dandelion and setting it adrift.
Believe in the King? It was like praying to some saint for intercession. Saints were in the business of listening; kings were not. She had seen a pamphlet last week by a woman, Olympe de Gouges. Pauline had been thrilled, although the men said that a woman could not have written it and some man had done it for her. Olympe described herself as a butcher’s daughter, but there she was writing in public all about the Estates General and how we the common people must demand double representation, because we outnumbered the other two estates forty times. Pauline cherished her name as if she were a saint: Olympe, the butcher’s daughter. What did she look like? Where did she live?
Pauline herself could not resist hope. Perhaps somebody at court would read these petitions of grief and longing for a more decent life.
The dawn showers and morning overcast had opened into a wispy blue sky between the tall houses. It was too late to go with a group of friends to the country, but too nice, too warm a May Sunday to spend inside. “Let’s go to the Palais Royal.” Babette took her arm. “Everybody talks about it.”
The King’s cousin, the due d’Orléans, did not get along with the King. He had gone into the real estate business in Paris. Orléans had made over a palace he owned on the right bank, just inland from the Louvre and the Tuileries—an old palace the royal family never used. People said the Palais Royal was the liveliest spot in all Paris. Respectable women didn’t go there, but Babette and Pauline weren’t respectable. Poor women never counted as ladies. “Are you sure they’ll admit us? We don’t look fancy.”
Off they went in their Sunday skirts, walking as fast as they could through the crowd over the Pont Neuf and across the river. People were dancing on the quai. Some men were fishing a body out with a long pole, the corpse of a woman, swollen and blackish. A fiddler was entertaining a small crowd. Pauline saw a pickpocket working the back row, but she didn’t s
ay anything. He had to make a living too. She wore her red pocket under her petticoat on a ribbon. Over her breasts she wore an almost new fichu trimmed with fine lace she had bought from Victoire.
The Palais was in the official style, light colored stone with arches giving on a colonnade on the ground floor. It was built around a huge courtyard jammed with gentlemen, bourgeois, lawyers, working people, prostitutes high and low, mimes, sword swallowers, pamphleteers, balladeers selling song sheets, musketeers, the town militia, puppeteers, dancers and actors. Around the courtyard were cafes with tables set out to fill much of the interior of trees and well-trampled grass. In the center of the enclosure was The Circus, about two-thirds underground, where a cockfight attracted a noisy crowd of bettors. When somebody wanted to make a speech, he just climbed on a chair or up on the table and began to shout. People applauded and he continued; or people booed, and the orator got down in haste. Underground was a wax museum; whorehouses and sexual exhibition halls, more restaurants and cafes, a real theater run by the governess of the children of Orléans, who wrote very moral plays. Aboveground were shops selling fancy clothes and hats and jewelry and books and perfumes and powders and ointments.
Pauline caught her breath and grabbed Babette’s arm, thinking she saw a huge nude woman, but it was a statue of rosy wax. When there was trouble, someone would scream “Scipio! This whore is shouting foul!” or “Aladdin! The grenadiers are fighting the sailors!” The managers would come unhurriedly, two of the blackest men she had ever seen and over six feet tall. Calmly they would separate the offenders and impose order.
The brightly striped Italian Cafe was crowded with men jabbering Italian and drinking coffee and aperitifs. The Cafe of the Thousand Columns was studded with mirrors, creating illusions. The Mechanical Cafe had strange contraptions that made food and liquid appear and disappear. The Cafe Tortoni offered ices and frozen desserts. She felt dazzled. She felt as if her nerves were burning in her flesh. She had never seen so many colors, lights, vistas, images, illusions; never heard so many sounds of strange and familiar music, voices, speeches, declamations, screeching; never smelled such a stew of humanity, cook and drink. It was a place where things shrieked and danced.