by Marge Piercy
Nicolas wondered how many of the delegates in Versailles had any notion what was happening all over France. The Committee of Thirty could put it together; their intelligence gathering was more accurate than that of the King, which habitually told him what he wished to hear. People were blocking grain shipments, refusing to pay taxes or pay their lords. Troops balked at firing on crowds. The situation was approaching anarchy. The Estates General must pull together and act, for the good of all.
TWENTY-TWO
Manon
(1788–1789)
MANON’S winters were spent in Lyon, where she held receptions and attended those of other well-placed wives. This was the most trying aspect of her life, carried out expertly for the sake of Jean and his career. Manon prided herself that she could draw interesting men toward her and bring out Jean’s best characteristics in small social gatherings. There were enlightened souls in Lyon with whom they could chat about ideas that mattered. Anyone with pretensions to philosophical or progressive interests passing through Lyon must visit the Rolands or journey out to the house at Clos de la Platière.
That gawky young doctor from Paris, Lanthénas, who had a crush on her, came often and filled them in on political doings. A young journalist of advanced opinions and great talent named Brissot began corresponding with them, having admired Jean’s articles. Brissot had already written remarkable political pamphlets, for one of which he had been imprisoned in the Bastille.
As the years passed and Eudora grew, Manon still spent a lot of time educating her daughter. Manon had assumed that Eudora would be herself in miniature. “Eudora. Today we will discuss subtraction.”
Eudora went on dressing her china-faced doll. “Do we have to?”
“You must master elementary mathematics, Eudora, to understand your own finances.” When Manon came back with the text they were using, Eudora had vanished. She found her outside chasing the chickens. Manon called her in a loud stern voice. Well, at least Eudora was sturdy. She had one talent Manon had discovered. Like her mother, she liked to dance.
The peasants had dances when they married, when the various harvests came in, whenever anything could reasonably be celebrated. They asked her and out of politeness the first time, she went. She discovered that she liked to dance with the peasants, she liked the vigorous dances they did far better than the polite minuets and promenades Grandmère had taught her. Mme Roland did not think Manon’s dancing with the peasants appropriate. Manon ignored her objections. She drank the good Beaujolais, she ate her own pies. If she did not walk every day, she would become fat. She did gain weight, but she looked better than ever. Her skin glowed. Friends liked to come and visit. As the years passed, they got to know other liberals, nearby or distant.
Manon’s life here was more sensual than she had thought herself capable of. It was not her relationship with Jean that made the difference, for theirs was not a physical bond. They were truly married, for they shared their child, their ideas and their work. She had plenty of intellectual labor to perform on Jean’s reports, his encyclopedia, his occasional papers for learned societies. He was elected to several, a mark of great distinction. She did not mind that he got the credit for her writing, because it was appropriate that he should be the public figurehead. It would be immodest for her to claim authorship. The Rousseau woman was nurturing, in accord with her inborn nature. She cared for her child, she served her husband and made him happy. Didn’t she make Jean happy? He was pampered in every way. She took his notes and jottings, his old rambling dull letters, and turned them into good prose. When he had to make a speech, she wrote it. He was not the world’s best speaker, but people respected his productivity and his dignity. He was a man of stern demeanor, simply dressed in black after the fashion of Ben Franklin, a Quakerly style he had adopted.
Roland did not stand for election to the Estates General the winter of 1789, saying he was too busy with his inspectorship. She would have liked to go to Versailles, but she knew he was hardly a charismatic figure. He lacked rapport with those beneath him socially. She did not know how to speak to the workers of Lyon, but her long loving relationship with her wet nurse had given her ease with the peasants. She helped them compose their Petition of Complaint. As she was walking with Jeannot to the church where they were meeting, Chevalier de la Chaise passed in his coach, making them scramble into the hedgerow. Jeannot spat. “Sir Paunch banging along. May his wheel fall off and break his greasy neck and splatter his guts for the vultures.”
Manon had always imagined peasants to be awed by the nobility. When they began to curse them in front of her, she understood that she had been accepted, that they were showing her the underside of obsequious silence: brutal hatred. They had names for the local gentry, Old Rusty Rod, Lady Shit in her Shoe. That suppressed fury was invisible to those who were its target, because what could the peasants in their rickety stinking hovels do to those who passed in their carriages or rode through their fields trampling the grain that was life itself in order to chase a hare or a fox or a panting deer? Yet the anger was always present as the dirt under everyone’s feet.
“No, I’m not idealizing them. Jean, they have political ideas, believe me. Marie the Stout reads pamphlets to half the village.”
“Marie the Stout? Who are you talking about?” Although Jean had grown up here, he did not know any peasants. They were part of the landscape, like the vines on the steep green hills, but they were not real to him as the workers in the textile industry were.
“You’ve seen her hundreds of times. The wife of Barbière.”
“Who’s Barbière?” Jean looked mildly annoyed.
“She’s uncommonly tall for a peasant, with a streak of shocking white in her dark hair. Her voice could curdle milk. The animal midwife. She has a talent with difficult deliveries of sheep and cows. Everybody knows her.” Manon was fascinated. As the workers in the streets of Lyon all looked the same to her, dirty, unkempt, menacing although cowed, so all peasants seemed uniform to Jean. To her, each was individual, drawn in bright or drab colors, sharply etched. “Jean, they’re not as simple as we imagined. A surprising number have some notion of progressive ideas. Those who can read consume cheap books that give them watered-down ideas of the Enlightenment, of Voltaire and Rousseau. Those who can’t read are read to.”
“But what can they understand? They can barely grunt.”
“With each other, they’re hardly taciturn or inarticulate. Helping them prepare their Petition taught me what they really think. They think the aristocrats should get off their backs. They want an end to the salt tax and unpaid labor for the lord and on the roads. They grow the food of France, and their bellies are empty, they say, these creatures we’ve viewed as stolid and wordless as rocks by the side of the road.”
Brissot went off to America. On his return, he came to see them and she held a big reception for him in Lyon, so that those who shared liberal views could hear him speak about America and discuss the new ideas of government and law. She was thrilled by the response. Then the three of them retired to the country for more intense discussions. Brissot liked her but did not flirt. He was straightforward and intensely ambitious and daring. He had a long face in which everything seemed a little stretched out. He had a thin mouth, thin brows and a prominent straight long nose. He spoke well and firmly, as if he knew exactly how things were. Brissot planned to launch a newspaper in Paris.
Her mother-in-law’s death removed a minor annoyance. Manon was delighted to assume the role of matriarch of the remaining Rolands. She was in the barnyards with the hens and rabbits, she was out in the vineyards supervising the harvest, she was among the peasants doctoring their sick. Up and down the steep hills past the golden stone houses and the ruddy earth she went striding or mounted on her donkey. Then she retired to her study and worked on Jean’s manuscripts, read books and periodicals, wrote letters and articles, listened to Eudora’s lessons.
After the Estates started meeting and then turned themselves into the N
ational Assembly, Manon and Jean tried to follow events. Fortunately Brissot’s new paper came to them regularly. Manon could not endure the sense of being utterly cut off from what mattered, the real events of the world. Her life of jam making and nursing peasants, all that had consumed her pleasantly began to feel frivolous. A woman was supposed to be fulfilled by this life. She was confused by her own reactions. She wanted desperately to be in Paris, where history was being forged. She wanted Jean to assume a position of importance and to work for the new order. Now when she carried out tasks that used to nourish her, she was fretting about events she had to read about instead of experiencing.
Censorship seemed to have vanished with the Bastille. After years of hunger for real information, for intelligent political opinion, Manon found herself drowning in a flood of pamphlets, newspapers, journals that she subscribed to and then could not speed through quickly enough. There were twenty presses churning out printed matter in Lyon. In Paris, there must be five hundred. Opinions she would only have dared whisper to Jean in bed were now published in bold type and read aloud in the clubs and reading rooms that were starting up everywhere—or spouted on street corners.
She never saw those sullen silk workers without papers under their arms. Those who could not read seemed to buy papers anyhow and demand others read to them. She was so accustomed to the lower classes looking down when they passed someone “respectable,” that she could not at first understand what was disturbing in the demeanor of workmen. Then she realized they no longer lowered their gaze from her. As she passed lowly taverns that reeked of cheap wine and urine, she would hear a voice declaiming the words of some politician or journalist. She would never have believed that those tough closed faces had any interest in affairs in Paris or cared what the new National Assembly debated. But they cared passionately. They were hungry for knowledge. She would not forget that again. They needed enlightened pamphlets in language they could understand. She would pursue that topic when she saw Brissot face to face.
“We should go to Paris,” she said to Jean.
“I hate Paris,” he replied shortly.
“But my husband, your talents are needed. The government is reorganizing. Jean Roland de la Platière is needed.”
“I have no time. I have to work doubly hard because one of my assistants fled to Austria, convinced he was going to be strung up on a lamppost.”
Jean simply would not see that advancement lay in Paris, with the government changing and opportunities opening up for a liberal hard-working man knowledgeable about administration. How many of these eager young orators had Jean’s experience with actually running anything? How many knew how things were manufactured or how to get the country moving economically?
Even in Lyon, things were changing. The city was still in the hands of aristocrats and wealthy silk merchants, but groups of enlightened men were beginning to meet. She started a Thursday night salon at their Lyon flat. Jean was pleased to hold forth, warmed by the attention. Afterward, she gave him her sizing up of each man, his opinions, his character, his usefulness to their cause. She listened to everything, sitting quietly in a corner doing her needlework or writing to Brissot. He had asked her to be Lyon correspondent for his journal The French Patriot. She agreed, so long as her name was not used. She did not want to embarrass her good husband by doing something public, as if she had no modesty. She wrote dispatches under the name Citizeness of Lyon. She picked up a great deal at her Thursdays, and besides, men liked to talk to her. If they sometimes seemed more interested in peering at her charms than in discussing ideas, she never gave them encouragement. Those who did not value intelligent discussion found someone more pliable to flirt with. It was pleasant to see her words in Brissot’s fine newspaper. A few men guessed it was she writing the dispatches, but she smiled and changed the topic.
Finally it was too hot and unhealthy to stay in Lyon, and they left for Beaujolais. Brissot had planned to visit them in late July. One day she received a note that events were moving so quickly he could not get away. Manon carried the note to her room and flung herself on the curtained bed weeping with disappointment. It was not that she had personal feelings for Brissot, but he was so involved politically that sharing a room with him was like being in the presence of what people were beginning to call the Revolution. How she longed to peer over the walls of her marriage.
TWENTY-THREE
Pauline
(July 1789)
PAULINE could smell anxiety and excitement like a tang of acid in the air. Summer was upon them. Paris was cooking. After the long and terrible winter, everybody wanted to be in the streets, by the river, in the country. The people, who followed every word, every gesture of the delegates in the Estates General—that is, the Third Estate, their folks—were nervous. “They have balls,” Babette’s father said. “They stood up to those aristocrats and they said, you’re nobody next to us. Join us or get out of our way. But the King won’t budge.”
The women demonstrated in support of the Estates General. Some days, a procession to the Church of Sainte Geneviève—their own saint. Some days, a meeting in the Place de Grève in front of City Hall. Sometimes a lot of women came out; sometimes, both women and men; sometimes just a few. They kept at it so the King would not think the people of Paris were asleep. Every dawn, posters went up and newspapers published. The government could not suppress the papers fast enough. The delegates sent back daily dispatches read aloud in every section. The electors of Paris were still meeting, discussing what the National Assembly—as it called itself now—should do. If interesting speeches had been printed by the Assembly, as was the custom, those were read aloud too. They had new heroes. People from the neighborhood went as if on holiday to Versailles to watch the proceedings and report back. Even though the King had tried to kick the people out and forbid them to watch their delegates, the people continued shoving into the gallery.
Pauline and Babette traveled there on a Saturday, getting a ride with Armand the carter, along with the family of Simon the pig butcher. At five-thirty, they started. They all sat in the cart drinking wine and eating leftovers from the tavern. They sang, they told jokes, they commented on the people they passed on the road, who made comments back at them.
In the gallery, they listened to the speeches and let the men know what they thought. If they liked a speech, they shouted approval and pounded their heels on the floor so the room shook. A couple of women had flowers they threw down. If they didn’t like a speech, people made a louder uproar. Some people brought rotten fruit or vegetables. Up with them were the journalists, madly scribbling. Pauline never wanted to go home. Mirabeau was an ugly man with a face like a wild boar, but he was on their side, even though he was a count. A little man in a threadbare coat spoke up for the poor as if he really knew what he was talking about. The women with the flowers threw them down for him. “That’s Robert Speer,” one said. “Something like that. He’s our man.”
They slept in a stable. A bribe of some wine and bacon to the manager, and it was theirs for the night. In the morning, the church was too full to go to mass, so they headed back to Paris, stopping along the way to eat in a guinguette, a wine garden where everything was cheap and the roses were in mad lush bloom. Breathing their perfume made her giddy.
“It’s stupid to have the Assembly meet in Versailles,” Pauline said, her head propped on her hand as she half drowsed in the heat. “They should meet in Paris where we can keep an eye on them. We’re the real capital.”
“Did you see all those soldiers? They say the King is calling in new troops.” Babette frowned, chewing on a thumbnail.
On the way into the city, they saw more soldiers setting up camp. “Those are the Swiss. They don’t give a shit about us,” Armand said. “They fight for money, and they don’t care who they kill.”
The sight of all those musketeers sobered them. Paris was being encircled. The King had tried to dismiss the Assembly already. “The King has bad ministers and bad advice. The Queen
’s a Hapsburg.” Simon the pig butcher said, “She don’t give a damn about France. Always the kings married foreign brood mares. But Louis XIV, Louis XV, they had French mistresses.”
“Like du Barry, who spent as much as Marie,” Pauline said. “No thanks.”
“What’s the advantage to being ruled by a French whore instead of an Austrian bitch?” Armand asked, giving the reins a jerk the old horses ignored. Nothing would compel them above a sedate walk.
“We’re going to be ruled by bayonets and muskets before the week is out,” Pauline said. “Look. There’s ones in different uniforms. Germans.”
On Thursday the word went through the quarter that ten French Guards—the King’s own—had been thrown into l’Abbaye Prison for refusing to carry out police duties against the people of Paris. By the end of the day, the men and the women in the taverns could talk of nothing else but the guards locked up for being on their side. “Can we allow this to happen to such patriotic men?” Pauline read aloud. “Patriotic” was the new word for being on the side of the Assembly, not the King and the aristocrats. One of the new papers was her favorite, The Friend of the People. It was written by a doctor named Marat and full of letters from ordinary men and women in trouble, facing injustice, really fucked by the government or the aristocrats. Marat said the King was preparing to dissolve the Assembly by force. He said the loyal French Guards should be freed at once, for the people had to show their gratitude to get other guards on their side too. It was up to the people to act.
Word went from one quarter to the next. In the Cordeliers neighborhood, the electors began to arm local guys for a militia. A local lawyer named Danton marched them through their paces. The whole neighborhood was seething, one big informal meeting. Friday morning the impromptu militia accompanied by sixty neighborhood women marched off to meet at the Place de Grève with other militia. Men who were suddenly militia and women who were used to demonstrating about bread milled around listening to whoever would urge them on to l’Abbaye Prison. Pauline did not go, as she had taken last Saturday off and had orders to fill. But she heard that four thousand demonstrators surrounded l’Abbaye and freed the French Guards.