City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  The deputies staggered out into false dawn exhausted and emotionally drained, nine-tenths of them unsure what had been done. They only knew that they had changed France forever. Max, who kept a running tab of the motions, knew exactly what they had done and not done. It was not as much as the nobles, muttering about the utter ruin of France, believed had been wrought. The respect for property that was an article of religious faith for almost all of them had kept the estates of the nobility intact. But in truth it was far more than he or anybody in the Breton Club had hoped for twenty-four hours earlier when they had planned their strategy.

  He walked home under a heavy humid sky, satisfied with a night’s work. Camille trotted beside him, chattering. Camille was talking as if they had made a revolution, which Max was well aware was barely begun. The people would be pleased but not satisfied. They were his masters, not the other deputies. The main task of the next days was to keep those who had been carried away by enthusiasm from backsliding. They had gone only a short way forward, but that journey had changed the landscape. The sun that was rising shrouded in ruddy clouds over the formal gardens was no longer the sun of Louis XIV, founder of absolute monarchy. No, it was the sun that Benjamin Franklin had pointed to on a carved chair at the Constitutional Convention in America, asking if it were rising or setting. It had been rising there, and now it was rising here.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Claire

  (September 1789)

  CLAIRE was fitted for a costume that was mostly a pseudo-Grecian drapery, and not much of that. Suddenly everything had to be Greek. She was Marianne, the symbol of France, leading the attack on the Bastille, which the heroes would tear apart on stage, throwing the paper stones through the air while backstage the stagehand made appropriate crashing noises.

  “Shouldn’t I have a pistol? Or a musket? Or at least a pike?”

  “It wouldn’t be appropriate,” Collot said disdainfully. “It isn’t done for women to bear arms.”

  “It’s better to lead a charge on a fortress in a couple of gauze curtains with my tits flapping?”

  “You’re a symbol.”

  A symbol of unpreparedness, she thought. Collot had thrown together The Heroes of France Storm the Bastille. It was a huge success, six evening performances and two matinees. Some people came back twice or even three times. Claire could not comprehend the appeal, as it had little plot, much assuming of grand postures and heroic speeches, a couple of big crowd scenes; it was more pageant than play. Their aristocratic audience had fallen away, but the bourgeois ate it up and even some of the common people who had a few coins to spare came and loudly approved. Collot knew exactly what his audience wanted: melodramas, sentimental plays, spectacles. Collot knew how to hit them where they could feel it.

  She continued seeing Mendès. She actually liked him, she enjoyed being with him. The sex was good, and she still liked the conversation. It astounded her, that she could be faithful and interested in a man for five months already. She was not about to take up with anyone else, not because she feared his jealousy—although that would probably show itself unpleasantly—but because no one seemed comparable. The other men she met seemed pallid.

  Every night she took enormous dancing leaps across the stage, carrying high a banner of red, blue and white that was supposed to stream over her head as if in a wind, only the fabric was too heavy to stream properly. Her arm tired waving it around, but fortunately, she had not lost her peasant strength. Costumes made for her often revealed her breasts, her shoulders, her legs, but covered her upper arms. Her upper arms were muscular, and women were not supposed to have muscles. Her arms were considered unfeminine, but they were damned useful when hauling a cow’s-weight of cloth around the stage. None of the other women could lift it longer than a minute.

  Collot was getting edgy. He had gone into the provinces because it was much harder to succeed in the theater in Paris. Theaters chartered by the King, like the Comédie-Française, had an advantage. Everything was expensive. Audiences were more critical. There was fierce competition, for aristocrats had private theaters in their mansions that were prestigious to attend.

  At supper he fussed over events in Paris. Among them, the theater company bought twenty-five papers of all political complexions from lily white to flaming red. Collot was a self-pronounced radical. He was fuming that so much was happening while he was stuck in Bordeaux, but she thought that rather a lot was happening here too. A man from Paris would never quite believe in the importance, even the ultimate reality, of actions in the rest of the country. All over France, people were seizing arms, peasants were rising and overthrowing their lords, militia were forming and marching, people in the towns were forcibly removing old officials or just ignoring them and starting parallel governments that simply took over. Bordeaux was in the hands of a new patriotic government that had developed from the electors who had chosen deputies. After all, electors were the first representatives that people had ever voted for. Their authority came from being chosen by free election.

  Bordeaux had a new militia that was training seriously. “I’m going to volunteer for the National Guard,” Mendès told her. That was what they were calling the militia.

  “They won’t let you in. You know that.”

  “No, I don’t—not anymore. They passed a Declaration of the Rights of Man. I was a man last time I looked. I’m going to try.”

  She was astonished when they accepted him into the Bordeaux Guard. She thought he was secretly just as surprised. He was not a legal citizen, but now he began to think that perhaps he soon might be. The Jews of Bordeaux were actively raising the issue. The supreme virtue of a Jew in Bordeaux had been to be inconspicuous. “Don’t be noticed,” was their constant motto. If a Jew was visible, only disaster could result.

  But now they were lobbying the local patriotic government and the deputies to the National Assembly. They wanted to be citizens. They wanted to be treated like other Frenchmen. The community wasn’t of one political opinion. Some supported the King; most were patriots. The talk about rights and equality stirred Mendès. He wanted to believe they could mean him too. But he was wary. So often things seemed to be offered and then were snatched back. He had been issued a tricolor cockade and a musket with a bayonet. The Guards were hoping to have real uniforms soon. She hefted his musket where it stood in the corner of his bedroom. Lately he had her come to his house, instead of always coming to her room. If Marianne carried a musket, her charge would make sense. Claire brooded about her future. If Collot broke up the company and went back to Paris, what would she do? She had few illusions about the life of an actress.

  “You needn’t worry about starving,” Mendès said. “I can set you up.”

  Set her up as what? Being a part-time lover was one thing; being a kept mistress dependent on a man, even one she perhaps loved, was quite another. Men got tired of women. She would not be able to exercise her own will, but rather depend on him for a place to live, money in her pocket. “That would put a strain on what we have,” she said honestly. “I’m sure I can get a position with another company, I’ve always been in demand.”

  A letter came from Yvette.

  It is wonderful here at the convent. I wish I could become a nun, but I just work in the kitchen and I can’t persuade the sisters I have a vocation. I bet I could be a perfectly good nun. What do I care about men, anyhow? We had enough of our brothers to last me a lifetime! Who needs that kind of trouble?

  We have plenty to eat every day, and even Lent is just lovely. I hate to leave the convent to run errands for the sisters, it is so safe and comfortable here. I could spend my whole life here and never miss our old home. Nuns have the best life of anyone!

  At least Yvette was doing well. Once a month, Claire sent her some money.

  Men acted a certain way when they met an actress. She was a public woman. That made her highly desirable and yet just next door to a prostitute. It was assumed that her favors could be purchased. On the other hand, actors
made a fuss about what they did. They spoke of it as art. She was not sure she had such a high opinion of her job. She had started out with the group that had performed in squares, at fairs, putting on simple plays on a few planks. Her current job paid much better, yet it was all of a piece. They were taking people’s money and giving them sensations. They sold them pity, they sold them a sense of being compassionate and superior, they sold them excitement. Even Collot thought they were pursuing some higher calling. She alone in the company did not. In a way she thought what they did was worse than a sword swallower at a fair or a lady who read minds. In many plays, the audience was allowed to feel smug, to feel that bourgeois folks just like them had some prior claim on virtue, honor, compassion, now patriotism. She did not like the way weeping a few tears for virtue in danger made both men and women in the audience feel they were extraordinarily sensitive. They would go home and beat their servants and demand the beggars be cleared from the streets.

  Six nights a week she ran across the stage whipping the tricolor banner through the air shouting for liberty and equality. Six nights a week she led the attack on the Bastille. Unarmed. She would have to be an idiot to charge without a single weapon, and it bothered her more, not less, as she repeatedly led her troops into mock battle. What would it be like to be a part of such a demonstration in real life? If her nightly gallop left her cold, would the reality stir her? She had seen pieces of the Bastille for sale just yesterday. There was a peddler in the square who had bits of stone mounted as bookends. Mendès practiced marching and shooting with the Guard. It turned out he had used a pistol, for the merchant ships went armed in fear of pirates. One early October day he took her out in the woods. He was supposed to be hunting for grouse, but he promised to teach her to use a pistol. If she had been weaker, she could not have held it steady before her. The retort made her ears ring. She had to learn not to flinch when she fired. She quickly got over flinching. She wanted to shoot the pistol so badly that she would have endured anything. Mendès was patient with her. He seemed more amused than alarmed that she wanted to learn. “This way you can protect yourself if you ever need to. These days, it doesn’t hurt to have a little something extra you can count on.”

  Unlike Collot, he did not seem to think it broke some heavenly law for a woman to take up shooting. After they had gone practicing several Sunday afternoons, he presented her with a pistol of her own. It was lighter than his, inlaid with silver but just as real, just as deadly. Afterward, she made love to Mendès with a passion that had little to do with her own pleasure. She fucked him in gratitude until he slept, exhausted. She wanted to be the best lover he had ever had or might ever have. In her own room, she slept with the pistol under her bed. She felt she had grown six inches. She had been a tall woman since puberty, but now she was taller. Marianne might have only a banner, but Claire Lacombe had a pistol.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Pauline

  (October 1789)

  PAULINE had to wait in line an hour and a half to get bread. Bread was expensive, thirteen sous, and scarce. It was said that the harvest had been good, but where was the grain? Aristocrats were fleeing, taking with them half the money in the country. There was even a shortage of coins. She saw their heavy laden carriages trundling out. Good riddance, but their flight had thrown servants out of work, hairdressers, workers in the luxury trades. Some of them went back to their villages, but others hung around, ready to make trouble.

  The aristocrats would be back soon enough if the King had his way. He had refused to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man the Assembly had passed. Nor had he signed the decrees abolishing feudalism. But the people had a real National Guard. Men had to buy their own uniforms, which meant that ordinary working guys couldn’t afford to be in the Guard. They were still the people’s soldiers. Often when the women held demonstrations of support or protest, the Guard marched with them. The women were marching a lot these days, to protest the scarcity of food, the price of bread, to keep the high and mighty aware that the people had not gone back to sleep, that they were armed and powerful. People said the King meant well but he was weak, under the influence of his Austrian Queen, his reactionary brothers, the court. A pamphlet was going from hand to hand, being read aloud. It was called The Lamppost Speaks to the People, written by the guy whose speech had started the taking of the Bastille, a skinny guy with long hair named Camille Desmoulins. He told the people to remember they could take direct action again.

  Babette had thrown over her old boyfriend for a National Guardsman in his uniform. He looked handsome, certainly. Pauline wished she had a uniform to march around in. It set a person off as official. If he was standing someplace, he looked on guard. If he was marching along, people got out of the way. The Guards took their new status seriously. They kept their muskets and bayonets clean and their boots polished. They had a prouder stance than the troops used to, not that air of swaggering dogs in livery. She wished that Henri were back in Paris in the Guard instead of the King’s army. Her worst nightmare was that he would be with troops ordered to attack the Guard and the people. Rumors were circulating, flying wildly from person to person, repeated in the papers, enlarged and repeated again, that the King was once again summoning his dependable troops to Versailles. The people were jittery as September rolled to a hot close.

  The butchers went out on strike. So did the apothecaries’ assistants, the tailors and the shoemakers. Strikes were still illegal, but nobody was about to throw strikers in prison. Things were too tense. The authorities were nervous. There had been little wind, little rain. The water tasted as if something had died in it. Only the wine and the beer were safe to drink. People were thirsty and they drank what they could.

  Her business was slow. Nobody wanted chocolate in the heat. She let the boy who worked for her go, hoping to hire him back later on. She did not stand around idle. The women had the interests of their families, their neighborhoods to look out for. Food was their business. Food was their problem. When there was not enough food, not enough bread, then the women rioted. So it always had been, and so it was right now. The women must act.

  There was always a time before an action when discussion raged in the streets and markets and taverns like the buzzing of the flies that were everywhere in the heat. The women had to reach a critical boil of anger and intent. Marat’s paper, The Friend of the People, reported that the King had sent for troops not influenced by revolutionary ideas. The Flanders regiment arrived in Versailles the first day of October. On the fourth, the papers were full of a party some called an orgy, given the night before in the opera house at Versailles, a party thrown by the King’s bodyguards for the Flanders regiment. At this party the black of Austria and the white of the Bourbons had been raised and the tricolor cockade of the Revolution, trampled underfoot. Toasts underscored by regimental trumpets had rung out to the King, the Queen, but not to the Revolution or to the people, who had been cursed. In Paris it was felt as a direct challenge.

  Now angry women filled the streets. Louis must be made to sign the Declaration and the Acts, he must sign at once. He could not hide in Versailles behind a wall of troops. Tomorrow first thing, came the word, tomorrow before dawn. We’ll go see Louis and that bitch and we’ll tell him what we want and he’d better listen. Arm yourself as best you can and be prepared to walk.

  During the night the rain began. Pauline had a pike she had made from the spear point of a railing on a house a marquis had deserted for his country mansion. The fishwives of the central markets were already marching to their own drummer, going to City Hall. There women would assemble before they set off on the twelve-mile march to Versailles. The women of the Cordeliers district milled around getting into formation. They had been in so many protest marches already, they had a well-worked-out line of march. Pauline was always in front with Babette on one side, Victoire on the other. The Guard from their neighborhood got into line with them. A boy named Albert was their drummer. There were market women, shop women, women wh
o made hats or books, who worked in furs and in leather, who sold flowers and peddled old clothes, like Victoire. There were servants and bourgeois women in nice dresses, several with real swords. Occasionally a woman was mounted on a horse. The wives of coachmen could always lay hands on horses and so could the carters.

  In the Place de Grève, thousands of women were gathering. Babette’s boyfriend hastened over. The Guards had a few cannons. The women pushed their way into City Hall past the officials to the armory. Enough women had been in and out of City Hall since the fall of the Bastille so they knew the layout down to where the extra paper was stored. They passed out arms in an orderly way. None of the men on duty made more than a perfunctory protest. Pauline assumed they understood it was time for the women to act. The men always looked nervous when the women took to the streets, as if they might go too far. Well, they intended to go far today. Pauline was told to get her women in marching order. As they marched out of the Place de Grève, led by Maillard, a hero of the Bastille, new and old songs were going around. The market women sang how they were going to explain to Louis what the women needed.

  Oh, papa, little papa,

  you’re silly and blue.