by Marge Piercy
She wanted, she wanted—what? She was not used to passionately wanting objects that fleeted by her gaze. This place was a web of sensations that pricked her mind as well as her flesh. It made her want things she had never known existed and certainly would not care about tomorrow. She could spend her week’s earnings on multiflavored ices that shone like cathedral glass. It was as if the entire scene were entering her sexually, moving in her, bringing her to a torment of desire—but for what? She was not used to novelty. She tried to gain control. She would not spend her money. She would not desire what she had no reason truly to want, what she would never want if she were back in the chocolate shop or in her own bed.
The linden trees were just opening. A small band was playing a catchy new tune and people were dancing. Two men came up to Pauline and Babette and asked them to dance. “Where are you from, darling?” her partner asked.
“From over the river, the Cordeliers section. I run a chocolate shop—I’m not a whore, so you won’t get anything from me.”
He laughed. “I’m from Faubourg Saint Marcel. We’re the roughest guys in Paris. I know what you are—just a working fool like me. I work at the Gobelins tapestry factory. You don’t have to worry about me, I won’t try to hustle you. Do you come here a lot?” He had light eyes and lighter hair.
“Never till today. Babette—that’s my friend dancing with your friend—wanted to come. Her boyfriend keeps talking about this place, but he won’t take her, so we came to see for ourselves what the fuss is about.”
“There’s a lot of freedom because it’s under the protection of Orléans, and he’s royal blood. People say whatever they want here. It’s like Carnival every day. Don’t you have a boyfriend of your own? Or is he too cheap to bring you?” He grinned, showing a chipped front tooth.
“He’s in the army. He got taken in the lottery.”
He clucked. “Rough luck. Think you’ll ever see him again?”
“I pray for him. I’m ready to wait.”
“You’re a good girl. The right kind.” At the end of the dance, he bought her a lemonade. While she was still drinking it, Babette came up breathlessly and he quietly left.
“I told you it’s fun here. Oh, can I have a sip? I’m dying of thirst.”
“Take half.” Pauline believed in sharing. “Only half. No fair. Look how that girl does her hair.”
“She’s no girl, she’s a whore,” Babette said.
“She’s like us, Babette, just trying to make her way. I like her hair up in that swoop. I bet I could do that.”
“How do you know it’s not some whorish style, and if you did your hair like that, men would think you were for sale.”
“Look around. Do you see other whores like that? I’m going to try it when I go home. Let’s walk around and listen to the speakers. That’s free.”
One skinny guy dressed like a lawyer was giving a speech about balloons and how they would transport people all over, never mind bad roads and highway robbers. Two guys were debating who should have a vote in the Estates General. One idiot dressed in fancy clothes was arguing about how the grain trade should be freed of regulation. He was hissed off his chair. One type was reciting an obscene poem about the Queen and the notorious diamond necklace and the Bishop of Arras who was fucking her. A woman just a few years older than Pauline sang a ballad about a woman in Normandy who had run an outlaw band, robbed merchants and helped her neighbors. Pauline had never heard of a woman leading a gang.
A man was warbling about the lives of the saints, but they were not popular here. Pauline was partial to Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris and special to working women. Geneviève was always evoked in times of rising bread prices and famines. Pauline burned a candle to Geneviève every week, because she felt Geneviève cared for the poor women of Paris and maybe, who knows, she could do them some good. Every woman needed a saint.
They watched a short comic play about a shopkeeper cuckolded by his apprentice and they listened to speeches about land reform, about free speech, about suppressing the Masons, about the healthy effects of electricity on the brain, about the need for better sewage disposal. “I can go for that,” Pauline said to Babette, winking. When the wind blew from the wrong direction, all Paris stifled in the fumes of rotting garbage and shit.
Arm in arm, they straggled home, eating a hot roll they split. They peed in an alley, each standing cover for the other, each taking care not to get any on their good skirts. Both had two skirts, one for every day and one for Sundays, and they were proud of that. Many young women had only one skirt. Pauline’s good skirt had been her mother’s but it was still pretty and only worn in the hem.
Finally they were back in the neighborhood, telling friends where they had gone and what they had seen. Even though they had walked only twenty blocks, it was another world, and everybody wanted to know. Pauline was astonished how sleepy she was. She felt as if her eyes, her ears, her very nerves were burned out and could not absorb anything more. She could barely digest what she had experienced, and yet she could think of nothing else. Long after she had eaten some bread and a little leftover gruel, she lay in her bed and all the bright images exploded on the inside of her eyes. She had undergone something entirely new, entirely strange and intensely disturbing. There was Pauline before, who seemed to her inexperienced and naive, and Pauline now, who had been dipped from toes to brain in some new vivid dye. This new Pauline felt vastly experienced and sophisticated by comparison, although she was not sure why.
FOURTEEN
Manon
(1781–1786)
SHORTLY after Manon became pregnant, she and Jean moved into a house in Amiens, larger than they needed but because it had been deserted some years, cheap. The house was cold and damp and overlooked a cemetery. Jean had a placid grey horse he stabled behind the house. On it he went his endless rounds from town to town, factory to factory. She found a good maid, Marguerite Fleury, a sturdy widow her own age. She was less lonely after acquiring Fleury. Manon was also helping Jean with his encyclopedia of manufactures, a vast job that was to appear in many volumes and cover … everything. She was always researching some dull aspect of the wool trade or the manufacture of barrels. In the fall, her daughter Eudora was born. She had feared Jean might want to resume the conjugal relations she found tedious, but he did not seem to think of it.
“But Madame de la Platière,” the doctor intoned in horror, “breastfeeding? You’ve had a gentle upbringing. Only peasants … do that.”
“Jean-Jacques Rousseau says nursing bonds mother and child and produces healthy babies.” From the window of her bedroom where the doctor was examining her, she could see the cemetery, the rows of tiny stones for infants.
“Madame, if you grow too attached to an infant …”
“I was one of seven. Only I survived the wet nurse when most infants die.” She clutched Eudora to her, feeling the little heart beat. Eudora would survive!
She was trying to form Eudora’s mind early, to provide that stimulation necessary to bring out the natural goodness and intelligence of a baby, according to Rousseau. It was reasonable to assume that Eudora would be like her, serious, intellectual, precocious. Manon took Eudora into the garden out back as soon as she dared. Fleury tried to talk her into swaddling Eudora, but that would impede freedom of movement. Eudora must enjoy nature early. Manon was terrified Eudora would suddenly die. She hovered over her daughter and fattened her up.
Amiens was bleak and grey. Over the next three years, she did not grow to love it. She was not sorry to have an excuse to go to Paris on Jean’s behalf to try to get his family confirmed as noble, as that would give them numerous social and financial advantages. It would also cost a great deal. Proving nobility was arduous to the petitioner and profitable to the government.
After a month in Paris, traveling through the morass of the vast bureaucracy with frequent trips to Versailles, she gradually realized that she would not succeed, because Jean was not liked by his superiors.
She had a glorious time with friends in Paris including Dr. Lanthénas, a liberal interested in the political situation, whom she called “little brother,” and Bosc, a dear young botanist, already elected to the Science Academy. While she was waiting to see some bureaucrat, finagling to have herself invited to the tea or garden party of the wife of an official, they attended lectures in botany together and public demonstrations of scientific theory.
She did not feel guilty running around Paris, with three-year-old Eudora and Jean tucked away in grey Amiens, for she was here at her husband’s behest, trying to advance his family. She had additional help by now, so she took Fleury. Then she had a letter from Jean. “Why do you prefer the company of young men to your familial duties? This is not the behavior of a virtuous woman.”
She wrote back with indignation and a wry touch of humor, poking sly fun at Bosc’s shy bachelor ways and Dr. Lanthénas’ intellectual pretensions. She did not take Jean’s jealousy seriously, for she was a virtuous woman who would never prefer a moment’s pleasure, if sex was pleasure, to the serenity of her conscience. She reminded him of the days spent cultivating dull bureaucrats.
After three months, she could not secure her husband’s nobility, but she could get him a promotion. Her charm and diligence were worth that much. Jean was offered the inspectorship in Lyon, near his family home. They took a small flat in Lyon for the winter, but they lived most of the year in Clos de la Platière in the heart of Beaujolais. This was nature as she had never experienced it. The steep hills of the countryside were thick with low vines. The soil was red, and the local stone, of which most houses were built, was a deep gold. These were houses of the south, with rounded red-roof tiles and thick walls. They turned inward to their courtyards, roses spilling over, often a cat on the wall.
Clos de la Platière was old and pleasant, built low of whitewashed stone. Through a square arch of golden stone, an allée of plane trees led to the front door. Pavilions and barns formed a courtyard, private, charming. It was a working farm and vineyard. In the walled garden near the house were cherry and peach trees. Manon vastly preferred spending time at the Clos to the more elegant town house nearby in Ville-Franche, where his mother ruled. That house was grander but life meaner. Maman’s passions were cards, gossip and trying to run the lives of her sons. Dominique, a canon, lived at home, as did Laurent. All except Jean had gone into the Church. Manon knew the family had opposed Jean’s marrying her, wanting an heiress.
To please the family, she went to church every Sunday, riding a donkey up the steep hill through rich red and green countryside to Thiezé, one of the golden towns. Old women in black peasant clothes greenish with age squatted on the church steps begging. Fleury said, “They’re too old to work and their families can’t afford to feed them. Begging here is their right.”
She greeted them, learning their names, and gave each a small coin. In turn they blessed her by name. One Sunday after mass, one of them, Jeannot, seized her arm. “Madame Fleury says you made her well when she had the flux. Please! It’s my son. If he dies, we’ll all perish of hunger. He’s a good man! Madame, you must come and look at him.”
After explaining for ten minutes she was no doctor, to which Jeannot only nodded fervently, she decided it was easier to go along than to argue. She set off on her donkey, with Jeannot hobbling at her side, up and down the steep hills past the rows of vines leafing out. The “house” of Jeannot’s family was a hovel of old wood, rubble, plaster and an occasional stone. There was only one room, with a slat partition separating the sleeping-cooking area from the cow’s stall. The floor was earth, the bed, a pile of dirty straw on a wooden frame. The stench was incredible, but Manon was not about to let her disgust show.
“You must feed him eggs. I saw hens outside.”
Jeannot shook her head wildly. “We have to sell eggs. It’s all we have for rent and taxes. He can’t work. He’ll miss the harvest and we’ll starve.”
It was clear to her that Jeannot’s son had probably eaten something that poisoned him, something spoiled of which there was certainly an abundance, if of nothing else. Right outside the door was a great heap of dung and rotting vegetable scraps. Every scrap of manure was precious. She returned after supper with a broth made from beef and sage, with a little white bread. It was eaten as if it were holy. Jeannot’s son recovered two days later. Whenever Jeannot saw her now, she kissed the hem of Manon’s dress, embarrassing her.
Without meaning to, she became well known and popular among the peasants, because she knew something of herbs and medicine. Disease was rampant in the one-room hovels shared by up to twenty people. They were just work animals to those who had power over them. They lived on gruel made from grain, turnips, hedgerow greens. By thirty, they were toothless and arthritic. She came to know close to two hundred peasants by name. In winter, they brought what they cherished most, a cow perhaps, inside to keep both the cow and themselves warm. Without the cow, they would starve. A dying animal was mourned more than a dying child. A child could be replaced; a cow or a goat or an ox could not. Here was fertile country with everything to please and nourish, and those closest to its ocher-red earth lived worse than its pale cattle.
At Clos de la Platière, she began to make pies and put up fruit. Of all the treatises on the various manufacturing arts she studied for Jean’s work, the information about making jams and drying fruit interested her the most. She was the Rousseau woman: warm, natural, caring for and educating her child, embedded in the countryside. Reluctantly she followed Jean to Lyon in November.
In Lyon that winter of 1786, the weavers began to agitate. Jean explained at breakfast. “Their lives are harsh. They work an eighteen-hour day, six days a week usually in one or two rooms, masters and men together. The weavers sell their cloth piecemeal to the big jobbers, who pay them less than it costs to produce. They’re hungry; they’re getting hungrier.”
She had plenty of opportunity to observe them as she took Eudora and Fleury for their daily walks, or took Eudora to play in a park. They worked themselves into an early grave and their children begged in the streets. Sundays they got drunk on crude red wine in the taverns along the rivers. Lyon was built on the confluence of two great rivers, the Rhone and the Saône. The Rolands lived near a big hospital, at one end of the peninsula, and most weavers lived at the high end. Some lived in steep hillside warrens above the houses of the wealthy across the Saône. Through all the old areas ran hidden passageways, the traboules, unmarked and known only to locals, that led clear through buildings, making it possible to pass around the city invisibly. The workers used these to communicate, to meet. Traboules were vaulted passageways leading from doors on the street up, down from building to building, already old, dimly lit, secret.
The weavers were uncouth and filthy, but from an appropriate distance, she sympathized. Their lot was unceasing labor and growing debt. The mothers worked, the daughters worked, sometimes as whores, the sons worked, the children worked. They had no childhood like Eudora’s. From the time they could use their hands, they were set at looms. Often they were blind by thirty-five. They turned out taffeta, fine silks, brocades, passementarie, all the fabrics adorning the nobility and the higher clergy.
Now Marie-Antoinette introduced fashions influenced by Rousseau. Ladies wanted to dress like idealized shepherdesses, in muslin, in cotton, in lawn instead of silk. The merchants set the prices the masters could pay the journeymen and the apprentices, and wages were forcibly kept low. A journeyman could not buy enough bread to fill his belly on twenty sous a day. Of course he lived with his master in the same stuffy room, with the master and the master’s wife and four children and aged father and crippled uncle, along with the journeymen and the apprentices. No wonder they all smelled so strongly she would sometimes cross the street to escape the stench.
Now they were striking for an increase in wages and the price paid for piece goods: masters, journeymen, apprentices and their families. Strikes were illegal, but the weavers no longer cared
. They saw the regal mansions of the merchants. They saw them dress like lords, traveling in carriages painted with gold leaf behind matched horses, with liveried footmen running before.
The weavers gathered across the Rhone in overgrown rocky fields. There they could mill around away from the armed militia hired by the rich merchants. Around campfires they listened to orators and debated and reached a decision by rough consensus. Then they marched back into Lyon, across a bridge of boats. Jean insisted on going to see what was happening. Manon went with him, wrapped in her cloak. She left Eudora in Fleury’s care. The weavers gathered in the Place de Terreaux and threw rocks and yelled at the house of the most important official, the intendant, a huge stone palace. Manon was amused to find herself shouting too. “Manon!” Jean barked, appalled. “Behave yourself. You’re the wife of a government official!” She was too excited to keep quiet. She found something wild in herself that wanted to riot with the weavers. Finally the intendant agreed to receive a delegation. Their best speakers went to the intendant to explain their grievances. The weavers milled around, waiting. Manon sat yawning on the plinth of a statue of Neptune. She bought hot chocolate from a vendor and urged some on Jean, who was arguing with some artisan he knew. Two hours passed. She was glad she had left supper for Eudora.
The delegates returned waving their arms for attention. The square quieted. “The intendant has promised us prices we can live on. Piecework prices will be raised a sous. We will survive!”