by Marge Piercy
A great murmur of joy went through the crowd. Manon found herself roughly embraced by a bony woman in a tattered blue skirt. “See how easy it is when you just explain what you need!” she cried into Manon’s ear. The weavers dispersed, cheering the intendant, praising the Virgin, singing and kissing each other.
While the weavers were still celebrating, the militia struck. They rounded up spokesmen and the merchants judged them. The next day, the strike leaders were slowly executed in the Place de Terreaux after appropriate torture. The town fathers decreed the bodies must hang till they rotted. That was the end of the strike. Manon avoided the Place de Terreaux and its rotting corpses.
Manon disliked the louts who shambled along in the street drunk every Sunday, but she disliked even more the rich merchants who believed it their right to crush the poor like lemons for lemonade. Lyon was a handsome city of elegant old houses, beautifully situated and with a fine tradition of the best cooking in France along with superior wine, with far more promise of a real political and social life than Amiens had offered, but it was in the hands of rich brutes. She preferred to retire to Clos de la Platière and live an honorable country life.
FIFTEEN
Max
(Winter 1788-Spring 1789)
MAX felt around him the glass coffin that was Arras, a neat prosperous town with the stepped facades of the north, flat green fields to the horizon. He had thought that returning with his degree, working hard within the court system and the social hierarchy, he would soon have a respected place. He was still the almost-bastard of a forced mésalliance whose father had deserted him after killing his mother with too many babies too fast: that judgement was always there, like the limestone caves under the town. He smothered his anger, but it grew within him year by year until it was indistinguishable from his strength.
He had done the responsible thing. He had returned from Paris and set up housekeeping with Charlotte in a small but respectable house of brick decorated with stone around the windows, near the theater and close to the Abbey where he had been a student. He sent Augustin through Louis-le-Grand. He practiced law, he sat as a judge in the episcopal court. Then, when it came time to sign a death sentence, he could not do it. He could not murder a man judicially. He could not kill a man for the Church or the King.
He sat at their interminable dinners pretending interest in petty social obligations. He belonged to clubs, droned verse in praise of wine and women, he who drank his wine watered and kept his distance from women. He even contemplated marrying Mlle Deshorties with her simper and her hypocrisy. Yet all the time his anger and his intelligence, which were one and the same, glowed inside him. The Church went on lovingly about mortifying the flesh. His flesh was not demanding. But he had been mortifying his spirit and his intellect—except for those pure exalted moments when he was defending a client who had been wronged, who was being broken by the laws and the power of the rich and well placed, who was in mortal danger because of class rather than any deed one had committed or left undone. Then Max felt his power. Then his silly weak voice took on an edge and became a tool of justice. His colleagues did not doubt his ability, but they felt superior to him because he took cases on their merit and not on their potential for money; and because he lost his temper in court and let his sarcasm show. Several times he had been rebuked for the way he spoke to judges.
He had tried hard to be the good father he never had. But Charlotte was vain and empty-headed. Those years in the convent for poor girls had ruined her mind. He had not the money to buy a husband for an opinionated spinster. Being his sister did not help her marriage prospects. Although she was perfectly capable of flirting, she would turn on the poor man half an hour later and rebuke him loudly for some fancied snub. She was loyal to him, jealous of any woman she thought he might take an interest in. She need not have worried. Sometimes when he was defending a client, he felt protective and almost attracted, but it would have been improper to take advantage of such a situation, and the women were often peasants or the daughters of poor artisans. His father had stooped to conquer and ruined his mother’s life.
The Estates General election caught Max’s interest. He helped the poor people of Arras and the surrounding area draw up petitions. The cobblers came to him and asked him to make their petition too. That inspired him to write a pamphlet in which he decided for the first time to be honest and direct in print. It would shock the gentlemen who were his colleagues at the bar, with whom he sat in the literary society, with whom he attended dances and weddings and funerals and mass. He was not writing for them. He was writing for the people who worked hard and got little. The people who fell into the law as off a cliff and perished miserably. The people whose children died in infancy and childhood, who had to send their daughters and sons off into service and often got back a corpse. Who worked hard till they were old and then begged through the streets, camped at the church door crying for alms, shoved into the poorhouse to end their days diseased. He felt as if gauze had been ripped off his mind. He wrote, yes, not the elegantly turned stillborn poems, the stiff little speeches with coy erudite references designed to create an illusion of high culture. For the common people he wrote simply, feeling the power of his words. This winter of ’88-’89 was the coldest he could remember. He was often ill, but he did not care. He wrote through his colds and chills, he wrote as if he were galloping through the long night of the winter in Artois. He was launching his election campaign. He was going to run for the Estates General, to represent the Third Estate from Arras.
The pamphlet To the Nation of Workers was printed at his own expense and gained immediate success. He heard that some of his colleagues wanted him arrested for sedition. But the common people bought it. The first printing sold out in two weeks, when he had to go back to the printer for more copies.
The Estates General was to meet in Versailles in May. The King wanted it to operate under the old rules. The clergy would elect representatives and meet as the First Estate. The nobility was to elect representatives as the Second Estate. Everybody else, the remaining ninety-five percent of the population, would meet as the Third Estate. Max had heard that over eight hundred petitions had gone to Louis asking that the Third Estate representation be doubled. That would not give them a majority commensurate with their numbers, but it would mean that the clergy and the nobility could not outvote them every time.
The people would choose electors who would then pick deputies to the Estates, a cumbersome system designed to cause delays and to keep ordinary people far from making important decisions. He wanted to win. Things were going to happen when the Estates gathered. There was a deep sense of fury and exasperation among the people. The more impassioned and angry his speeches, the louder they applauded, but his voice was still weak.
He walked out onto the frozen fields and practiced public speaking. He denounced injustice to the crows. A neighbor’s dog accompanied him, staring into his face. His voice seemed to vanish into the wind and the icy furrows. He came home with a sore throat, coughing. The next time he spoke, his voice did not break. He practiced projecting his voice, returning accompanied by the dog to the flat endless fields. The common people wanted to hear him. When he stood up in a meeting, they murmured approval.
He stood before groups in their rough clothes, men come from the shops, the fields, the quarries, the factories, women who worked as hard as any man in the dirt of farming and manufacture, men and women blinded by their work, coughing up the dust from cloth-making. They were loud and boisterous. They shoved each other and guffawed. They did not have the manners of his colleagues and their ladies, their tepid smiles, their empty compliments. The common people smelled of drink, manure and woodsmoke. They were poorly dressed and wore clogs or jabots, the heavy wooden shoes. Their hair was matted and wild. They were on the verge always of taking to their fists, both men and women, and punching somebody they had been having a friendly chat with ten minutes before. Yet he could make them fall silent and listen to him and mu
mble agreement. He could bring them to their feet cheering. He was for them, and they knew it.
He won the first round. He was one of forty-nine electors chosen to pick the real deputies from among themselves. The campaign was hard fought and bitter. Spring finally came and the storks appeared, but he had no time for long walks across the fields, no time to admire wildflowers in the hedges. He wrote more pamphlets, he gave speeches, he talked one on one to every elector.
Elections took months, but finally he won his place. The deputies from Arras were going to be late getting to Versailles. A married woman who admired him lent him money to travel on and a trunk in which to load his few clothes and books. A quarryman carried his trunk to the coach stop. Max was exhilarated. He spoke to his impromptu porter. “I won’t forget you, l’Anquilette. You’ll be mayor here someday, I promise you.”
“I don’t need to be mayor, my friend. I’d carry you and the trunk to Versailles to fight for us. Don’t forget us!” He plucked a flame-red poppy just opening and put it into Max’s lapel.
“Never!” Max promised, wringing the man’s hand as he stood waiting to board the coach with the other deputies.
“Max never forgets anything,” Charlotte said, dabbing at her eyes with a lacy kerchief. “Except to eat. Who’ll remind you to eat in Versailles? You’re too thin already. You’re a bunch of bones in a silk coat.”
“Don’t cry. I’ll be back when the Estates finish,” he said, but he did not mean it. There was no going back. Once in the coach, he discarded the poppy that was already withering.
SIXTEEN
Claire
(Winter 1788-Spring 1789)
COLLOT’S company was resident in Bordeaux for the winter of ’88-’89, when Claire took an official lover. She was tired of being importuned by men and equally tired of the jibes of the other women in the cast that she was flighty and immoral as a cat in heat. She should be taking men to bed for love or for money or for protection—not for the simple transient pleasure of sex. Now she was getting truly involved with a man who owned several ships engaged in exporting textiles, and her little theatrical family was more upset than ever. Her colleagues did not know she had been raised as an outcast Protestant, a heretic on sufferance not to be burned alive. However, everyone knew exactly what Mendès Herrera was: a man with no rights, no legal status, hardly viewed as human: a Jew.
Most Jews in France lived in poverty, some in small squalid villages, others in ghettos where tenements were so tall and so close no light fell on the narrow stinking streets. But some Jews in Bordeaux had managed to make their way in commerce. Father Herrera had established himself in the export trade.
Mendès wore a beard—a peculiarity she found sensual. She had never before been with a bearded man. It felt animal. The beard itself was silky and dark brown, softer than the hair of his head. Otherwise he did not look like the Jews she had seen in Alsace. They spoke barbaric German and dressed all in black, foreign and raggedy. He was not like the Jews from her childhood in Langue d’Oc, the horse dealers who came to fairs with their cattle, their oxen and above all their horses, curried and with combed manes. They were leathery men, scorched by the sun, wiry, talking to the horses in a language she had not heard since, a crazy Provençal dialect called Suadet. Those Jews could make any horse look good. They could leap on and off the horses and make them run in circles. They could doctor sick animals. Like the Gypsies who traveled through, they were deeply mistrusted. The same peasant who begged them to sell him a calf at a price he could afford or to cure his sick mule, would make the sign against the evil eye and spit when they passed.
Except for the beard, Mendès might have been any prosperous young merchant, sowing his wild oats, taking an actress for a mistress, going to meetings of philosophical societies and writing bad poetry praising love and liberty and reason. Yet there was a difference that attracted her. Oh, he was fine-looking. She had grown up among men of the Mediterranean south, and he was that type, bred into her from childhood as what a man should be. His hair was black, thick, glossy. But the eyes in his olive-skinned face were grey. Because they were so startlingly light, they dominated his face. His nose was aquiline, his mouth full. Against the dark beard, his lips looked red. He was stocky, compactly built and strong. His hands were not the hands of a gentleman. It was the custom in his family for the sons to work in the business, and he had shipped to the New World and down the coast of Africa. He had been to Turkey. He had been in storms and becalmed for three weeks in the doldrums. He had been shipwrecked near the mouth of the Amazon. Now he was thirty. His father had died of smallpox. His uncle and his older brother were running the business, and he was in the office and on the docks these days, no more roving.
She loved his stories, even when she did not believe them. Savages who went naked but for leaves on their private parts. Huge pink birds with red beaks. Alligators big as seven men with jaws that could eat a horse, swarming in the rivers so wide you could not see across. Huge snakes as big around as a cow that squeezed the life from their prey in powerful coils. Monkeys in the trees common as crows. Fish with breasts. Sea unicorns. Fish so plentiful you could cross to dry land on the backs of their schools.
She loved his stories as she had loved those her father had told her when she was a little girl as they all huddled around the hearth. Her father had been a wanderer too. He had practiced his craft as bricklayer down France from the Loire to Toulouse. She had outdone her father already, but she doubted she would ever get a chance to equal the wanderings of Mendès.
The moment she had first melted had been when she felt his hands on her back, on her hips, and they were not the hands of a gentleman. She was used now to men with soft hands, hands that had never done anything more difficult than turn a page or dip a quill in ink. The men who prided themselves on swordsmanship might have tiny calluses or a little nick on the back. Mendès’ palms were thickened with hard work. The end of the little finger on his left hand had been nipped off in a shipboard accident. There were odd stains and scars. His hands excited her.
At twenty he had married a woman he loved. They had four children. The smallpox epidemic that had removed his father had killed his wife and two of the children. The remaining boy and girl were being raised by his mother. He said he had no desire to marry again. “I’ve provided heirs. I’m the younger son. Why have more to quarrel over the inheritance? Why bring in a wife to meddle with the lives of my children? I had a good wife. I don’t need another.” While speaking, he had the habit of stroking his beard, exploringly, as she had often noticed ladies stroking a small dog or a Persian cat.
It was not only the adventurer in him that attracted her, but the way he had of looking at things. He did not take much for granted. His position in society was precarious. “My family lived in Granada since Roman times. We were more Spanish than the Spanish. We had lived under the Visigoths, under the Moors, under the Christians. Who expected anything but an occasional bad decade? To be uprooted, sent into exile, stripped of everything in a place we had lived since before the country existed, it was unthinkable. Yet it happened.”
“That was 1492. This is 1789. Three hundred years and you talk about it as if it happened last week.”
“Nobody among the Sephardim—what you call Spanish and Portuguese Jews—will ever take for granted that we belong in a country. No matter how much at home you are, how accepted you imagine yourself to be—in come a couple of fanatics like Isabella and Ferdinand. Then you’re lighting up the night like the new streetlamps, burned alive in the square for the edification of crowds, you instead of fireworks—cheaper and more entertaining.”
“My great-grandfather was burned as a heretic,” Claire said. “In the town where I was born, people still talk about the crusade that wiped out our religion, our rulers, our independence—as if it happened to them personally.”
“Some peoples have sharp memories of what has been done to them. Others don’t know how they came to be where they are. I met Indians in the
New World who have a record in beads going back hundreds of years. I belong to the people of the Book, but those Indians found their own way of keeping the past.”
“My grandmother told stories. When I was still little enough to sit in her lap, she impressed upon me there’s truth in the tallest tale. Like how you saw fish in the sea with breasts and milk coming out for their young.”
“Claire, I swear to you that was true and I did see it. You ought to believe me always. I’m a very truthful guy.” He smiled like a great cat.
“There’s no such thing.”
“You’re a cynic, Claire. If we don’t believe in larger things than ourselves, we’ll be in despair.”
“What do you believe in? Really. Not what you give lip service to.”
He was silent. “I believe in wind and water and the power of them. I believe in history. I believe the earth moves and time moves and things change. Sometimes they change for the better and sometimes they change for the worse, but always, always they change. And if you push hard, maybe you can change them the way you’d like them to go.”
“If the Jews could send representatives to Versailles for the Estates General meeting, would you run for election? Would you, Mendès?”
“You see into me. Yes. I would.”
“I wish we all could. But actors aren’t people either. And women aren’t.”
“Actually, in some towns, women have been voting. They’ve just done it, joined in the discussion and voted.”
“I’d vote for you. I think you’d be fair to me and mine. You’re straight and level.”
“I was raised to be just in my dealings. My father was famous for that. When you’re a Jew in business in Bordeaux, you have to be twice as honest to be credited with half of it.”
Sex came easily to Claire. After the first few men, she had learned how to move so that she got the contact she needed. She learned what she liked, how to get it. But sex with Mendès was sensual. His beard excited her. His hands with their rough surfaces, their strength, gave her pleasure. He used a kind of sheath so that he would not make her pregnant.