City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  “Are they going to shoot into the crowd?” Georges wondered aside to Camille. “Will they do that?”

  “Your guess.” Camille said. “Voltaire would say, it depends what they ate for lunch and how well they digested it.”

  Georges had his men draw up and wait to see what would happen. A delegation went inside to parlay for the powder. An hour passed. They had disappeared. People were getting restless. They said their delegation must be in the dungeon now, hung in chains.

  “The walls can’t be breached. It’s too damned thick. Think of it. Voltaire was imprisoned here twice. The Marquis de Sade. The Man in the Iron Mask. What a great spot to enter history.” Camille grinned. “I did want to marry first. Perhaps reproduce a little Desmoulins—an heir to nothing.”

  “Enough of dying. We got into the Invalides without a shot being fired, no casualties—not even a bruised knee. Our luck may hold.”

  They were standing with thousands of others, more crowding in all the time before a massive rectangle with eight towers as high as any building in Paris. There were two courtyards inside the moats and drawbridges. It had been built to be impregnable, a fortress-prison into which people disappeared. It was doom in the form of a great box.

  Finally the delegates came out. De Launay, the governor of the prison, would not surrender or let them have powder. He would defend the Bastille. The crowd had now been milling around for over two hours. A party scaled the roof of a perfumer’s shop that leaned against the outer wall, scrambled up and over into the outer courtyard. In a moment the drawbridge to the outer court banged down, crushing a man standing too close. The crowd surged forward into the outer yard. Danton tried to keep his company together in an orderly advance, but the crowd swept forward like a giant undertow carrying all before it. They came to an abrupt halt at the inner walls.

  The Swiss began firing through holes in the raised second drawbridge, methodically picking off the vanguard. They were shooting into the crowd trapped in the court, every shot finding a victim. Soon close to a hundred people lay dead in the courtyard. The crowd wanted to retreat, but people outside were still pushing in. Georges tried to give an order to his men, but they could not hear him over the screaming and the shots. Gunsmoke drifted in clouds. Bizarrely, the smell made him think of fireworks. The dead, the wounded were trampled. People tried to lift them but when they raised a wounded man, he was picked off at once. Georges pulled his men aside so that two wagons of hay could cross the drawbridge, having the men pass on the order one by one, speaking into each other’s ears to be heard over the screaming. He could not see what was happening, but soon clouds of smoke rose from the burning hay, blinding the defenders. Now nobody could see well enough to hit anyone. Finally they could get the bodies out. Women were weeping and shrieking over the corpses. Georges had lost no men, but one of his men had his arm partly crushed against a wall in the surging panic of the crowd. Two of the neighborhood women saw to him, a tavern keeper and her pretty daughter. He said some encouraging words and then pushed his way back to his men. He said to Camille, now that they could hear each other again, “How the hell are we ever going to breach the walls?”

  About three-thirty, sixty soldiers arrived dragging four cannons and a mortar. Accompanying them were a few hundred armed civilians. The leader was a French Guard Camille identified as the director of the Queen’s laundry.

  “A general of sheets,” Georges said. “I hope he knows a cannon from a washboard.” He noticed that more and more French Guards were joining the crowd in the bloody siege. A new delegation under improvised white flags—more sheets; this was proving a day of laundry—went timidly forward to parlay. The Swiss Guards were either nervous or under orders to fire, because they shot the three delegates, their sheets falling over their bodies, turning red. One sheet bucked for several minutes, but no one could reach the fallen.

  The crowd was furious. “Let’s take it. Let’s tear the fucking Bastille down.” The Queen’s chief laundryman had the cannons and the mortar pulled into position for a serious assault. Then through one of the holes the Swiss had used for firing, a white handkerchief waved and a piece of paper fell to the ground. Under covering fire the Queen’s laundryman ran to retrieve it. “They’ve surrendered. Under condition no one inside is hurt. They’re surrendering!”

  “That’s beyond luck.” Georges wiped his forehead. “Why surrender?”

  “Nobody’s fired on us but the Swiss. The rest of the staff are French, veterans like at the Invalides.” As a journalist, Camille either knew or pretended he did, which made him useful to Georges. “They don’t want to fight half of Paris. They probably agree with the crowd.”

  Slowly the assault parties filed across the second drawbridge. Between two of the inner towers was a clock chiming five, a clock with huge figures in chains dragging themselves across its face. The staff greeted the people enthusiastically. A lot of them were crippled veterans, as Camille had said. Soon the people were on the roof, eating vegetables from de Launay’s private garden, drinking his stock of fine wine and waving improvised flags. The staff, the guards and the invaders were drinking together.

  But the families of the hundred people shot down in the courtyard were out for revenge. The Guards tried to take de Launay and the Swiss who had done the firing to City Hall, where they could be held. The relatives were furious. “They killed my husband!” “That was my only son you shot down, you butcher!” “You let us in and then you murdered my wife in cold blood. She didn’t even have a stick in her hand.”

  The crowd swarmed over de Launay. He went down and a moment later Georges saw his head hoisted on a pike and carried off. Five Swiss Guards were slaughtered on the spot. The Guards managed to get the others away.

  Georges walked through the Bastille with Camille. His men were fraternizing with the old vets, asking for stories of the prison. “They always brought new prisoners in a curtained carriage and we had to stand at attention with backs turned, so we couldn’t see who it was.”

  “The stones are saturated with three hundred years of pain, Georges,” Camille said softly, running his hands over the walls. They came away smeared with lampblack. It smelled like death in here, death and mold and backed up sewers. Even in July, it was cold. The cells were gloomy caves of despair, where men were stored to sicken and die. The torture implements turned his stomach, although they looked rusty with disuse.

  “I can’t believe how easily we took it. If all the soldiers inside were like the Swiss, they could have killed thousands of us and held out till the King’s troops came to their rescue,” Georges said.

  “The regime is made of straw and paper, Georges. Don’t you see? They aren’t governing France. It’s falling apart of its own rotten weight.”

  Georges climbed to the ramparts with those of his men not too drunk to navigate the winding stairs. They looked down on Paris, spread out like a map. This must be what the world looked like from those hot air balloons. Far away smoke was rising. More customs barriers going up in flames? People were moving off to City Hall, but Georges decided to lead his troops home. They had taken the Bastille, and now it was time to eat.

  “I never had dinner today. No wonder I’m starving.”

  “Can I come home with you?” Camille made a pitiful face. “I’m just a waif without a wife. A supperless soldier of liberty. Gabrielle sets the best table I know.”

  “All right, come along. But don’t hang about all evening. This has been an exciting day. I want to fuck my wife.”

  “Georges, you’re a gross pig. No wonder your men adore you. I’m ready to march behind you—on to supper.”

  When they crossed the second drawbridge they had to go single file, as several workmen were standing taking measurements, while officials from the new city government waited. “I say we can tear it down in a week. But it won’t be cheap,” the work boss said, pulling a pad from his leather apron.

  “We want it leveled to the ground. As fast as possible.” The official spat. “N
ot a stone standing.”

  “I can put together a crew by seven A.M. tomorrow. My men are good and careful and fast. No accidents, no trouble. Let’s sit down at a cafe and I’ll draw you up an estimate.”

  “You know, Camille,” Georges said softly as he led his men straggling toward the river, “fortunes are being made under our noses. Everything is turning over, and a man has to watch for the main chance. We both need money. We should keep alert.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Max

  (July-August 1789)

  MAX was beginning to be respected. Comte de Mirabeau noticed him, calling him the stalwart Robespierre. Camille, who now put out his own paper, told Max that Mirabeau liked to collect rising young delegates and others he thought might be politically important. He had approached Camille, giving him a fine cravat, taking him out to lavish suppers. Max took care not to be collected. Mirabeau’s reputation as an insatiable womanizer put him off, lives left in disarray. A woman who had left her husband for him had killed herself. Numerous sources insisted he had committed incest with his sister. He was tricky, close to the court at the same time that he claimed to represent the people. Max watched him carefully—from a distance. He was pretentious and overblown, extravagantly dressed and lavish in his gestures.

  The Breton Club was growing more interesting. The efforts of the radical deputies were no longer directed at securing the continuance of the Estates General. It was now the National Assembly and did not recognize the right of the King to dismiss it. The King had been behaving himself since the uprising in Paris. It was a fait accompli that Paris ruled itself now. Lafayette set up a National Guard other cities were emulating.

  After the July insurrection, the King had to recognize the crisis. Too many of his generals told him the troops would not fire on the people. He had insufficient foreign mercenaries. Therefore the King went to Paris to accept or pretend to accept the new Paris commune. He was accompanied by fifty deputies, chosen by the Assembly. Max was one. The cockade the Parisians wore added white, the King’s color, so it became a tricolor of red, blue and white. Improvised banners were everywhere in the jammed streets near City Hall.

  When the King put on the cockade of the Revolution, the people cheered. They threw caps and hats in the air, they shouted till they were hoarse. He saw many women and some men weeping, transported with joy. The illusion of the King as father had power over them, as opposed to the shortsighted pudgy narrowminded fool Max saw. The King had not changed his mind. He had been raised for absolute power. Max watched the charade. Louis was biding his time, dismissing his new repressive ministers, summoning Necker back.

  In a ripple effect, other cities had risen. A deputation from Arras presented Max with a piece of the Bastille suitably mounted and ready to sit on a desk or hang on a wall. He thanked them politely. It could have been any piece of street pried up. He did not care for holy relics. He would give it to someone else, as a token of esteem. Perhaps Camille would enjoy it. Austerity pleased him both morally and aesthetically. He did not like physical clutter any more than emotional or intellectual. The virtue of the people was inherent in their direct simplicity. Their representative should be the same.

  He could not help but view himself as something to work on, like a project in the Assembly, a piece of unfinished legislation. He practiced his voice projection at dawn. People in the gallery were beginning to trust him. They looked for him, they called his name. They all seemed to know he liked fruit, so women brought him peaches or a bunch of grapes in a handkerchief. He wanted to be worthy of their trust, for whom had they to depend upon? Who cared how hard their lives were? When deputies of the right upheld the King and the nobility, when other deputies waffled, the gallery threw rotten fruit. But to him the people brought the best they could find, pick or steal.

  From all over the country, stories came of peasant revolts. What nobody had believed possible was now happening, not once, not in isolated pockets, but in hundreds of villages. The peasants were marching on their lords and burning manor houses. Sometimes they simply burned the papers that gave the lord claim to their land and their services. They burned the tax rolls. They burned the lord’s deeds and legal records. They scared the nobles rather than killing them—but that did happen. That occasional violence was multiplied in the minds of the elite, because they did not understand the peasants.

  If he had not gone back to Arras after school, he would be as ignorant as the rest. But he had come to know the peasants he defended. They were not, as the delegates muttered, violent by nature. On the contrary, they had put up with violence against them all their lives. The aristocrats and even the bourgeoisie saw them as savages, half animal in nature; but the intelligence of their revolt, aimed at the legal basis of their oppression and the records that condemned them to servitude, showed that they understood quite well.

  The delegates did not talk about the peasants. Instead the knowledge of their revolt threw a giant shadow on the walls of the hall where they met. Even middle-of-the-road delegates came to feel they must act, authoritatively, decisively. They had an audience waiting to see what they would do, and the time had come to prove themselves on the people’s side. Max could feel that mood building and did what he could to encourage it.

  Still August fourth caught him by surprise. It started like any other day, at nine A.M. The Assembly was to discuss feudal privileges. The Breton Club had worked overtime preparing a strategy. A liberal nobleman was to rise and offer a plan to abolish hereditary privilege. He would be immediately seconded by a deputy from the provinces—not from Paris. They had written the first six speeches of the morning, although they could not control whom Bailly would call on. Everybody was urged to be prepared. The time was ripe, Max was convinced. The peasant uprisings had shaken the delegates. The insurrection in Paris had proved to the Assembly that far from being in the vanguard, they were running to keep up with the populace. If they did not speed up their deliberations, they would be left in a back closet of history. These were educated men, used to considering themselves an elite. They did not enjoy chasing after the crowd, which had proved ready to force changes the Assembly had not even discussed.

  It was hot in Versailles in August. Max, whose nose was more sensitive than was convenient, wished he could defer breathing for a day. Not only did the room reek of lavender and musk and all the thousand varieties of toilet water bestowed upon each gentleman by his barber that morning when his hair was being done, the tons of powder on their heads, the smell of horses that wafted in from the stables, but they were all sweating and had been for days. The humidity was visible in the wilting stocks and cuffs, the crumpling linen, the fine film on every forehead, the pages that hung limp as overcooked greens. Even the King’s hideously ostentatious fountains in the gardens, full of gold frogs and twining nymphs, looked inviting. Max had never before appreciated the beauty of simple water rising and drifting its mist across grass. They must all wish they were out of this room and under the sky. But once he took his place, he dismissed any thought of discomfort. It was not appropriate to think of one’s own ease while the people waited.

  Bailly began the proceedings with minutiae. A committee must give its endless report. Objections, amendments, discussions of amendments, corrections. For all the planning of the radical deputies, nothing could be accomplished in the day session. They were to meet again at eight P.M. As soon as that session opened, the duc de Noailles rose to propose that in the interests of restoring peace in the countryside, the Assembly should remove the special privileges enjoyed by the aristocratic, the wealthy and certain towns. Everyone should be taxed equally according to income. Then every citizen would have an interest in public order, and none would feel unduly and unfairly burdened. Servitude to the lord would be ended (where peasants had not already forcibly ended such demands, he did not add) and feudal privileges terminated, with appropriate compensation.

  The seconding speech by another noble went off smoothly. The first four speeches the Breton
Club had set up were called upon in order, setting a tone for the debate they had hoped would be successful in abolishing as much of feudalism as they could get away with. But something strange and wild happened. Delegates began jumping up and proposing wider and wider reductions of privilege. It was an avalanche, and the Club, which had prided itself on its preparation, saw events plummeting of their own weight and momentum. The nobility themselves seemed to have been moved to a bonfire of privilege, demanding to be stripped of rights, incomes, honors they alone enjoyed. Some deputies no doubt were being sarcastic or hoped that by going too far, they would undermine the process. But some aristocrats and most of the bourgeois deputies were saying what they’d secretly thought for a long time. Let’s blow all this trash away.

  Max finally got to give the speech he had prepared, already wishing it were twice as strong. What had got into the men? Max was sure that the King himself had caused much of this, with his damned feudal opening of the Estates, all cloth of gold and contempt. Versailles burned money as if it were a mighty furnace stoked with livres, and they were stuck in the midst of it. The deputies were sick of bankrupting the nation to support a court that did little but amuse itself at public expense. The Queen was known to lose several hundred thousand in a night playing cards—money supplied by the public.

  The right of the lord to have his own court, to be his own judge and jury was abolished. Hunting rights were abrogated. No more would the lord have the right to ride through the peasant’s wheat at any season in pursuit of a hare. No more would the lord’s doves eat the peasant’s grain while his family watched, seeing their living go down birds’ gullets. Serfdom was ended with a voice vote. Applause greeted every new proposal. A wild enthusiasm swept along most deputies, while those of the right muttered and passed notes to end the session. They tried to move adjournment and were shouted down. No more would military or judicial offices be sold. The Crown could look elsewhere for cash. Tithes were abolished. Every Church office, every military rank, every governmental position was to be open to all qualified regardless of birth. Priests could no longer hold many benefices, only one. Accounts of pensions and salaries should be open to the Assembly, so it could decide who was being overpaid and find out where the government’s money was going. Passed, passed, passed, passed, passed.