by Marge Piercy
“You told me that Madame was your muse. Have you started writing poems to the daughter?”
“Actually I’ve stopped writing love poems altogether. Lucile found her mother’s diary, and she’s blackmailing her. My love poems were tucked in it. Lucile is using the poems I wrote in an attempt to seduce her mother to force Madame’s support for our marrying. Now there’s a woman after my own heart. Devious, passionate, crazy. I must have her.”
Georges was making money, Camille was trying to marry, and all about them, Paris was bubbling with a cauldron of hot fat, sizzling and spewing. On saints’ days, statuettes of Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, and Rousseau were more popular than the traditional little figures of the King and Queen and the saints themselves—and this was among the people, who were supposed to be stupid as the mud that clogged the streets.
Georges had never despised working people. He soon knew half his neighborhood. When he walked through the streets, he greeted everybody by name, asked after the husband or the wife, the kids or the parents, their bum leg or their arthritis. The Cordeliers neighborhood was rough and mixed. He felt at home. Everybody knew he was doing well, but nobody seemed to mind. He was comfortable with men and women of all classes, he knew how to tell the right joke and who to kiss upon meeting and who to slap on the shoulder and who wanted a slight bow. He went off to court and helped manufacturers and bankers and dealers in export-import cook up patents of nobility for themselves, and he got on with his clients. They felt he genuinely liked them, as he often did.
But he did not like his wealthy clients as well as the fellows in the taverns of the Cordeliers district. He enjoyed their open talk, their laughter, their solidarity. He respected people who worked with their hands. He liked to sit in the Cafe Procope across the square, where Voltaire had been a patron and the coffee was superb and the decor, quietly elegant, but he liked also to drink rough Montmartre wine in the Monk’s Belly down the street. Unlike Camille, who believed passionately in the cause of the poor but could not sit at a trestle table in a tavern and trade jibes and buy drinks all around, Georges knew he had a peasant body and in some ways a peasant disposition. He would never take his law business seriously. It was a ploy to make money. It was a joke on the system. He did it well because he had a good strong voice and a gift for oratory and the ability to think on his feet. He could make people like him. He could make people want to be on his side. He could charm the stiff judges and he could charm his clients and their wives. People would look at his ugly face and draw back. Then he would start working on them, smiling, joking, setting them at ease with his voice that Gabrielle called rich as oxtail soup flowing over them. Pretty soon they would be edging closer, touching him. He observed it constantly, even while he wondered what he had that drew people. He saw it in animals. Other dogs trotted after the top dog down the street. Other cats gave way before the dominant torn. He would have more fun as a defense lawyer, but there was no money in that. Most people never saw a lawyer before they were condemned. No, he had bought his way into a level of the legal system that turned dull law books into gold coins. He was satisfied, and he would make sure his clients were satisfied too.
NINETEEN
Pauline
(Spring 1789)
“PAULINE! Pauline!” It was Aimée. “Martin is beating Victoire again. He’s drunk as a monk and beating her with a big stick!”
Madeleine on the third floor back stuck her head out from the landing. “Lead the way, Pauline. Let’s get him.”
Pauline ran upstairs to get Catherine Fosse, who had not heard the racket because her children were making too much noise. Then the four of them went, carrying brooms and sticks, to defend Victoire, the old-clothes woman. Everyone said a man had the right to beat his wife if she had done wrong, but to beat her bloody for no reason but his drunken rage, that was not done. The women had a right to interfere. Everybody in the neighborhood knew everybody’s business—how could they not? They lived against each other, doors to the stairways open, business carried on in the street, in the taverns or shops.
“Martin, come out here. We have a bone to pick with you!” Pauline shouted. “Eh, Martin. You put down that stick and come see us.”
The screams inside stopped. A moment later Victoire, bruised and bleeding from her nose and mouth, came running down the steps. Aimée held her. “You poor thing. He’s at it again. What a mess he’s made of you.” Victoire was only four years older than Pauline, but it was hard to tell half the time that she was still pretty with her face bruised and her eyes blackened.
“Martin, you come down here.”
“I’m not coming down for a bunch of cunts. Go home where you belong.” He scowled out the window but did not pursue his wife.
“Martin, are you scared of us? Maybe you use a stick because you can’t use what else you’ve got. Everybody says you can’t cut it with your wife and that’s why you knock her around—because you can’t knock her up.” Pauline had grown up speaking the language of the streets. Everybody began laughing.
“Listen to chocolate mouth giving it to him. Hey, Pauline, you tell him. Tell him you women are going to hang him from the lantern.”
Aimée led Victoire off. They were cousins, and she would take Victoire in for the night, just pack her into their family bed. The women yelled for a while before dispersing. Martin was barricaded in his room.
Ever since they had drawn up their Petition of Complaint, Pauline found her position in the neighborhood changed. She was seen as a strong and just woman to whom other women could go for help. She was considered politically astute, because she read the papers. She read the wall posters aloud. Only the government was allowed to paste up announcements, but clandestine posters were slathered up every dawn. In the tavern she read to others the pamphlets and papers smuggled in from Holland, where the press was freer.
It had been a hard, hard winter, as bad as the one when her mother and sister died. The Seine was frozen for leagues. No fuel, no grain came in. The price of bread rose every week. The cook’s assistant around the corner from whom her parents had always bought leftovers raised his prices to the sky. Kitchen servants in the houses of the nobility and the rich bourgeoisie sold extra food to poor people.
In Paris nothing whatsoever went to waste. The clothes of the wealthy moved down the levels of society until they were rags worn by beggars. Any piece of wood would eventually be burned. Any scrap of food would be eaten. Any lump of shit would end up on a field in the suburbs somewhere. If a woman was filled with despair and threw herself off a bridge into the Seine, her body would be stripped of usable clothing before the authorities ever saw it. No corpse of the common people was buried with shoes on. Even buttons and candle ends were recirculated and used till nothing was left. Servants sold off everything from bits of soap to worn quills, cracked and chipped dishes, food and wine not finished. Servants lived better than other workers, unless their employers had little money. Then they would go hungry and sometimes be worked to death. But servants of the wealthy spent their days waiting at attention in anterooms, down in the kitchen listening for a bell to summon them. They had plenty of time to think up ways to skim off profit.
She had a cousin Nanette who worked as a scullery maid for a bourgeois family in the suburb of Auteuil. The family had been in furniture making, but now they speculated in suburban real estate. Pauline went to see if she could work out a deal for leftover food. Nanette saw her in the kitchen.
It was a big room, very warm. Pauline could not believe how warm it was. She could have sat there all Sunday afternoon, but Nanette obviously did not want her to stick around. She acted ashamed of Pauline. Nanette was in the old-clothes chain in the house and got decent dresses before they wore out. Nanette gave her a bowl of beef soup while they were talking and some white bread. Pauline was used to the dark bread that everyone ate, half rye, half wheat. This was like cake, light and all wheat. Pauline could have eaten a whole loaf easily, but Nanette only gave her two heels.
Nanette did agree to sell her some roast chicken and some of the rich soup she had just eaten. She carried her containers home along with a bag of heels from the white bread. Nanette had given her a decent price on the lot. The trouble was it was too far to go. She would have to find another servant in her own neighborhood. Aimée had heard of a lawyer’s cook selling food in the Rue des Cordeliers. Pauline would ask around.
You had to be careful that servants did not cheat you and give you food that had spoiled, that would lay you up with terrible pains in the belly. She always smelled the food before she bought it, but strong spices could cover up rotting meat. You had to trust each other, so you needed to establish a regular relationship for used meals.
Nobody poor had kitchens like that at Nanette’s house. Women just cooked in the fireplace, so no wonder they bought ready-made food when they could. Women worked, so who had time for anything fussy? Most people owned two pots, one for heating water. She was better off because she had chocolate-making pans and kettles and a little coal stove she cooked chocolate on, but she seldom bothered cooking for herself. If she were less popular, she would be mistrusted. Women simply did not live by themselves.
She had got used to sleeping alone, but she would never say that to anyone, for it would seem bizarre. It was considered unhealthy. Who would keep you warm? Commonly people slept up to seven in a bed. With no heat, she could freeze to death some night. But the shop stayed warm from all the cooking of the day. Only Sunday night was cold. She needed a Sunday night lover. She had been faithful to Henri. She had not looked at another man, paying no heed to flirtatious words or glances or young men falling into step beside her as she went off to the tavern or mass.
All the talk in the tavern was of politics and bread, as the iron winter relented into a hungry spring. The price of bread kept rising. Jokes, pornographic cartoons and pamphlets about the Queen were everywhere. The Austrian bitch was bankrupting France. She had bought another castle. How many did she own? How many houses could one woman occupy?
They had elections for the Estates General, but it looked like they were going to be screwed again. The rich people wanted everything to stay the same, only they wanted the court to spend less and they did not want to pay any taxes at all, thank you, let the poor people take care of that. Still, who wouldn’t be excited? All the women gabbed about Versailles as they sat around a rough trestle table in the tavern. Only the fishwives had ever been there. A delegation of fishwives had the job of being present during any royal birth to verify it. That was their privilege from time immemorial. They marched into the Queen’s bedroom when the time came. They watched the Queen’s cunt and they saw what came out, so nobody could fool them. Versailles was fairyland, the golden land in the clouds where people wore gold, slept in golden beds, sat in golden chairs, ate off golden plates and pissed in golden pots. Who could believe it really existed not far away?
Aimée’s husband came over to the table. “Hey, you women, when are you going to do something about bread? Get off your asses. Show them the business end of a pike.”
“Maybe we will,” Aimée said. “That’s for us to decide.” The women traditionally started the bread riots. They had to keep the government in line on anything to do with feeding their families.
“I hear they’re rioting upriver. Seizing grain shipments. They’re taking over bakeries,” Aimée’s husband said before he ambled off to join a game of dominoes.
Babette’s father called out, “Guess the women up there care about their husbands and their kids being hungry.”
“We’ll take care of our business,” Babette said, as she put down beers for them. They all liked wine better, but in hard times, they drank beer. It was cheaper. “Get off our backs. We’ll do what we have to.”
“He’s right,” Pauline said quietly. “We have to act. We need to send somebody to talk to women in other neighborhoods and the suburbs. Maybe we should go out on Sunday? We should ask the other women what they’re doing.”
Babette said, “We can send out word. I’ll go to Faubourg Saint Marcel and ask my cousin.”
Pauline said, “I’ll talk to the fishwives and the market women.” So this was how things started, just her and a bunch of other women at a table in the tavern. It didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem like anything could happen just from them gabbing. If she really thought a demonstration would result, she would be scared. Women could die or get arrested.
Within forty-eight hours, with no way to get in touch except conversations in the markets and at the river and the Pont Neuf, with no organization and no external discipline, the women were ready to take to the streets. It was a matter of making the government more scared of the people of Paris than they were of their own bureaucrats, who wanted free trade in grain. Suddenly every woman was talking about marching in the streets, all at once as if they were a flock of geese deciding to fly south. Pauline wasn’t sure they could put a scare into the government, the way they’d punished Martin for beating Victoire too often. But they had to try. It was the women’s duty.
TWENTY
Max
(May-June 1789)
MAX felt that the delegates from Arras came to Versailles with open minds. After all, the King had called the Estates General. They knew that many, many Petitions of Complaint had been submitted. Obviously they were summoned to Versailles to set things right. Each delegate brought serious ideas on how to make France governable again and how to solve the fiscal crisis—and the crisis of bread. They were a somber but hopeful group.
But the very first day, the Third Estate delegates were slapped in the face. At the opening ceremonies, the clergy were received in a large hall by the King and greeted individually; next, the nobility were received with full pomp. Again the King spoke to each one. All this time the Third Estate were kept standing in an antechamber, hour after hour. The King grew weary. At four he retired to his bedchamber, opened one door and greeted them in mass in the Hall of Mirrors as they were herded along between barricades at a trot.
The next day they were to march in procession. The nobility were dolled up in lace and silks, resplendent, surrounded by musicians. The upper clergy gleamed in purple and gold and red, magnificent enough to blind the eyes. The lower clergy were a bit dusty in their cassocks, and the parade marshall stuck a marching band between the upper and lower clergy, since the bishops and abbots complained that the plebeian parish priests embarrassed them.
The Third Estate were told to dress all in black. They looked like a bunch of mummers from a bad play, in black mourning broadcloth and three-cornered black hats. They scurried along, sulking. Max was always aware of what kind of figure he cut. These were not poor people. He was probably one of the poorest. There were scientists, astronomers, bankers, doctors, financiers, successful lawyers, men of business, men of importance.
The due d’Orléans tried to march with the Third Estate to show his political sympathy, but the parade marshall escorted him none too gently to march in his proper place with the Prince de Condé, the Comtes d’Artois and Provence, the King’s relatives, of whom Orléans was the least favored. But Orléans was popular with the people, who shouted for him. He was greeted more enthusiastically than the King or the Queen, a fact that escaped nobody’s attention.
Then came the interminable church service at which the Third Estate was once again kept standing. Max’s lower back ached. Some delegates complained they had to piss. Some forced their way into corners. Finally on May eighth, the King addressed them. Once again the Third Estate was shoved to the back and kept standing. The King discoursed interminably in a high whine about the dangers of an unseemly zest for innovation, commending humility and patience. The King was dressed in cloth of gold with a huge diamond winking on his hat. The Queen wore silver, with a heron’s plume in her hair, her entire person encrusted with jewels so that she glittered and clanked. All the princes of the blood sat on elaborate footstools, bedecked with forty pounds of golden finery apiece. Necker, once again the K
ing’s chief minister, then gave a three-hour drone on the state of the economy (deplorable) and the treasury (even worse), so detailed, so boring and so lacking in even a suggestion of a viable remedy, that he did not bother to read it all himself, but gave long sections of it to his deputy to mumble inaudibly. The King sat under a golden tent. The floor was covered with purple carpets flashing gold fleur de lis. Everywhere Max looked, thousands of livres of ostentatious waste met his eyes.
On the day they finally started deliberating, Max could feel their resentment, the raw pride, the determination. The King had insulted them, and they would look to him no further. Because of their numbers, they got the largest assembly room in the Hall of Small Pleasures, an echoey ramshackle warehouse where the King’s costumes and props for plays and masques were stored. The clergy and the nobility were meeting in the same building, in smaller rooms. The storage area cleared for the Third Estate was spacious; they promptly invited the other two orders to join them, to deliberate together.
The galleries were so roomy that the public began to attend. Common people, market women, interested and increasingly noisy observers cheered or booed the speeches. The deputies had no idea how to run their meetings. Such an assembly was a novelty. It wasn’t a court with judges and laws and traditional rules. They were improvising. A couple of Englishmen came by and commented that such unruliness, such a loud gallery, everyone on the floor talking at once, no agenda, would never be permitted in the British Parliament. Some delegates asked the Englishmen how Parliament conducted itself. Max did not bother. He was not an impassioned admirer of things British. They would work out their own way.
He made his first speech about a plan to get the clergy to join them. Hardly anyone bothered to listen. That evening as he was going back to his inn, he ran into a journalist who hailed him by name, then seeing Max’s puzzlement, identified himself. “Ca-Camille. Camille Desmoulins. From Louis-le-Grand.”