City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

You need a smart woman

  tell you what to do.

  Oh, papa, little papa,

  up there in Versailles

  no one to teach you

  how we live or die.

  Oh, papa, little papa

  don’t shiver and moan

  we’re coming to fetch you

  we’re bringing you home.

  The procession was cheerful in the rain, for it was cooler. All the women except the occasional wife of a lawyer were used to getting wet. The Guard marched with them. Lafayette galloped past to put himself in front. The Commune had finally agreed to back the march, since it was going to happen anyhow. Up ahead Pauline could see a woman on a horse, dressed in men’s clothing, wearing a long red scarf and waving a sword. “Who’s that? She’s pretty.”

  “That’s Théroigne de Méricourt,” Babette said. “My boyfriend told me. She’s a peasant girl who became a rich whore. But she never forgot where she came from, and she’s on our side. She gave the Guard money for arms.”

  Pauline carried her pike in a determined way, trying to keep her women in order so that no one would laugh at them as they marched to Versailles. It took them seven hours and a bit. The rain slacked off and the sky lightened.

  When they got there, passing through the outer gates and then up the long allées to the great gardens and the huge palace that was the biggest building she had ever seen, a musketeer told them the King was off hunting but the Assembly was in session. They were all pissed at the deputies. They had done a good job in August, but since then they just sat around gabbing. The women poured into the galleries and took over the floor. The men looked aghast, shocked, a few of them amused. “Look, honey,” said a big fishwife with a fourteen-inch fileting knife at her waist. “We need the grain to move into Paris. We need the prices fixed for bread. Our bellies are empty, and our patience has run dry too.”

  Deputies tried to shoo them out. The women laughed. They hadn’t walked twelve miles in the rain to be scared of some men in waistcoats. A little guy with green eyes, spectacles pushed up on his head, took the floor. He was neat as a fancy woman, powdered like a dandy. But he did not look at them as if they were scum. He said in a shrill ringing voice, “These are women of Paris. They are telling us what they need. They walked here to talk to us, and we should heed them. These are working women. They know what they want, and we must listen well and be ready to act.” She remembered him from the last time she had been here. After that, the delegates let the women speak.

  The women were lounging around, they were not acting respectfully and respectably, as if they all picked up how to behave to scare the men. They were not being ladylike or meek. They were being raunchy and loud. They were sitting in the deputies’ chairs or on the tables, their legs swinging. They were letting the deputies know that if they didn’t mind what the people wanted, this hall could be torn down. They too could hang from a lamppost. These guys thought they’d done their job by making up some fine phrases, but nothing had changed. Not where it counted, the belly.

  As soon as they heard the King was back, around five, the women sent a delegation to the immense palace. The King received them, but they got only vague promises. He would make things better for them, oh, sure. The session ran on and on. Women went out for food. They discovered there was plenty of bread in Versailles, white bread such as they had rarely seen. The women picnicked in the hall. The Assembly did not adjourn until three A.M., by which time the King had finally signed the Declaration of the Rights of Man. So far, so good.

  Some women slept in the hall, others in stables, in doorways, in coaches they commandeered. Some Guards took over a barracks, and some shared the hall with the women. Most Guards and quite a few women spent the night in the gardens keeping warm around huge fires they built. Pauline wandered off with Babette, Victoire, Aimée, a group from the neighborhood. After they strolled by torchlight through the woods, they came on something they couldn’t quite believe. It was a pretend village. It was an imitation of a country village but clean and cute with thatched roofs and a spotless mill. It was like an adult-sized child’s toy—the toy of a very rich child. Nearby were pens of baby farm animals, washed and beribboned. Everything was tidy and smaller than real—except the rooms, which were well furnished with upholstered chairs and gilded beds, perfumed and hung with silk draperies. Someone played here, someone who could command any fantasy and have it built to order.

  Victoire was infuriated. “This is obscene! I grew up in a village in Beaujolais and I know what peasant homes are like. Who had roses tumbling over the door and six rooms, all with glass windows and nice straight doors? Who had neat clipped hedges and everything clean, flowers in pots all the way up the steps to the mill! Who made this toy? It’s a mockery of all of us who grew up poor. This belongs to the Austrian bitch.”

  They slept in the tidy beds in the little houses, on real linen. Babette and her Guardsman were making love in the next room. Pauline pulled the goose feather bed over her ears. At dawn, they were up. The sky had cleared. The sun rose golden over the city of gold and gilt. They had only concluded half their business. It was time to empty out this place of display, this jeweled mirror in which the court studied itself. They would bring the King and the Assembly back to Paris, where they could make sure they did the people’s business.

  The palace was locked up tight but always there were servants, there were soldiers who sympathized with the people, who knew they were the people too. Someone had just accidentally left a gate unlocked, and in went the crowd, rushing into forbidden areas. No one like them had ever trodden the slabs of these courtyards, the parquet and marble floors, the Persian carpets. Waving their pikes, their axes, their muskets, their knives, their improvised banners, they roared on into the white and gold and crystal world with rooms wider than streets, the spun-sugar world, whooping and yelling. The King’s bodyguard met them on the stairs and began to fire into the crowd. It all happened so suddenly Pauline stood still, paralyzed. One moment they were surging along yelling, the next they were dying around her. Women fell bleeding. Mère Roget was struck in the shoulder and carried out to the courtyard by Aimée and Babette. But momentum from behind shoved Pauline forward. The crowd flooded on to surround the bodyguards. When they stopped to reload, they were hacked to pieces. The carpet was already slippery with blood. More and more people were crowding into the palace. The crowd broke into the Queen’s bedchamber, but she was gone. The word came she had run to the King.

  Pauline looked around as the crowd pushed on. The bed, behind a golden balustrade, was huge and painted with scenes of gods and goddesses. Over the damask hangings, the ceiling was thickly encrusted with gilded cherubs. The carpeting on the floor was as thick as needles in a pine forest. The bed hangings of gold embroidery were set with jewels. They passed into another bedroom behind this one, not as huge but equally luxurious. Why did the Queen need two beds? On the vanity table were pots and bottles shaped like angels and doves and flowers. She picked up one and smelled the stopper. Lilies of the valley. She touched the stopper to her forehead, to her arms.

  Near the bed was a clock in the form of a shepherdess. As the hour of eight struck, it began to play a melody, It is raining, shepherdess, it is raining. One of the women raised her pike and smashed it and smashed even the little pieces on the Oriental carpet. “They hanged my husband for stealing a piece of beef,” she said softly. “May they all rot in hell. I’ll use the Queen’s guts to tie up bunches of flowers.”

  A woman dressed like a fishwife picked up a gold-backed brush and stuffed it in her apron. “None of that,” a bourgeois woman in a velvet hat said. “We’re here to make a point.”

  “My point is, I paid for all this in taxes, and I want a piece.”

  The women were pulling at things, throwing them down, stomping on them. More women came piling in to see what was there. One woman was standing on the bed pissing. Another was tearing at the draperies.

  Lafayette pushed past with his grenadiers, Laf
ayette’s own boys, loyal to him. He drew up his grenadiers in the anteroom to the King’s bedchamber, their weapons cocked to guard the King and the surviving bodyguards. Since Pauline could not get any further, she went down to join the crowd in the courtyard yelling for the King and Queen to show themselves on the balcony. First the King came out. Then the Queen and the kids. She looked scared shitless. The crowd was calling for her head, but when she curtseyed to them and stood there alone, the howls of rage began to abate. Lafayette came out on the balcony, bowed and kissed her hand and tried to lead a cheer for her. The people began to calm down. Pauline wondered if they had won. People were murmuring in satisfaction. If the little King and the little Queen would behave themselves, the people would bow to them and cheer all they wanted. Lafayette stood on the balcony with the Queen. The crowd was yelling, “To Paris! To Paris!”

  “My children,” Louis said in his weak voice. It carried from the balcony because everybody shut up to hear what he would say. “You want me to go to Paris? All right, my children, I will go, but together with my wife and children. I will not be separated from my family.”

  The crowd cheered. It was a sunny day, and they were ready to go home. Just about noon, the King got into the carriage with his family and Lafayette. Pauline balanced on the rim of a fountain watching. The coach started off in the midst of a procession of women and National Guardsmen. Some Guards and two women had the heads of bodyguards on pikes. They had commandeered flour and bread. Many of the marchers had loaves of bread stuck on bayonets or pikes. They had wagons of flour, wagons of foodstuffs. The women were singing songs about how they were bringing the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s apprentice back to Paris, and nobody would be hungry any longer. Pauline’s group had got flour and bread too, in a cart, and they fell into line.

  It was a cheerful, relaxed and bawdy crowd that went home. They were proud of themselves. They were really bringing the King to Paris, which Louis XIV had deserted so many years before to build Versailles. Now Versailles would be abandoned and the King would be accountable to his people. The Queen would not play shepherdess any longer in her toy village. Pauline was exhausted but satisfied, walking hand in hand with Aimée and Victoire more slowly than they had come, just behind Babette riding with her Guardsman on a roan horse they had commandeered, pulling a cart with Mère Roget lying in it. Pauline had done her duty. They were bringing bread and power to Paris. Once again the people had taken the world in their hands and changed it.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Nicolas

  (October 1789)

  SOPHIE held her salon as she had for three years, but the visitors changed. There were fewer aristocrats and many young revolutionaries, like Nicholas Bonneville who had found a way to bring grain into Paris. “Revolution” was the word they used now. “We haven’t the words for half of what’s happening,” Nicolas said to Sophie. On this grey October morning, they sat at a small table with the French doors open on the Seine. They no longer took their breakfast in bed, for Sophie needed to eat sitting up. She was queasy in this, her third month of pregnancy.

  “I always thought,” Sophie said smiling at him, “that revolution meant a complete turn of the wheel, so that all would end up in the same position as before. We’ve made revolution mean the opposite.”

  “All sorts of new words are being coined, or old ones yoked to strange new meanings. The working people of Paris are calling themselves sans-culottes—without breeches. It’s a word of powerful emotional resonance to them, but to me it sounds silly. The breech-less. As if politics wore clothes.”

  “You wear culottes to your knees and they wear trousers to the ground. I always thought gentlemen wore culottes to show off their fine calves in silk stockings. Wearing trousers means a man does manual work.”

  “Now whether someone wears the tricolor cockade is a matter worth coming to blows about. All these arbitrary symbols have a life of their own and run about the streets and council chambers wielding broad swords. Suddenly lampposts have sinister significance. A picture of a lamppost is a threat of hanging. That rabble-rouser Desmoulins is called the Lamppost Lawyer.”

  “How can we tell what a lamppost or these other objects mean to the common people? We know very little about how most of Paris lives, Nico. We don’t know how they feed themselves, how they feel about each other, how they raise their young. Deer have been more studied than the poor of Paris.”

  “One of the important tasks facing us is to communicate with these people. To educate them and to learn more about their problems, so that we can begin to solve them. I think some of the younger patriots know more about the common people than we do.”

  “Perhaps, Nico, but most of them are lawyers, not tradesmen and certainly not carpenters.”

  “Sophie, I want to start having the sort of dinners Lafayette used to for the Americans. I want these young men I’ve been meeting to come, with their wives. One advantage of living in the Mint is that we certainly have room to entertain. I want you to look these men over and tell me honestly which of them you trust. Your judgement is often shrewder than mine.” He was too busy at work governing Paris to spend a lot of time brooding over anything. He was in the ad hoc government set up during the Bastille days.

  His old rival Jean Bailly was the mayor. Bailly, who was doing no more astronomy these days than Nicolas was doing mathematics, would never forgive him for winning “his” seat on the Académie Française. Bailly was far more conservative than Nicolas. He wanted to be a strong mayor, to hold executive power and the initiative to introduce legislation. He distrusted the assembly of electors that called itself the Commune and functioned as a city council, of which Nicolas was a member. At the same time, districts of the city were clamoring to rule themselves. They wanted to vote on everything. They wanted to keep power in the neighborhoods. In between both extremes was a group Nicolas found himself allied with. Unlike Bailly and himself, they had scrabbled for a living before the Revolution, small lawyers, journalists. One of their leaders was Brissot, who had been shut in the Bastille for his journalism and had a great admiration for the American experiment. Another was Abbé Fauchet, a revolutionary priest and their most charismatic speaker.

  Many of these men had known each other for years. They spoke of other friends politically close to them, the Rolands in Lyon, for instance. Nicolas was one of the newer members of the group, for he was drifting away from his old friends. He no longer went to Lafayette’s Mondays. Lafayette and Bailly were in total agreement. They both considered the Revolution completed, perhaps having gone a bit too far. They wanted a constitutional monarchy, society pretty much as it was, with a compliant king.

  Back in the Committee of Thirty, they had all seemed of one mind. They were the liberal elite who were going to pry the country out of its long wallow in the muddy sty of tradition. They were the heirs of the Enlightenment about to bring that light into the darkness of outmoded absolutism. But he remembered how Voltaire had admired Catherine of Russia, who had been Diderot’s benefactor; how both had called Frederick of Prussia friend. They had believed in enlightened despots as a way to drag a country into rational order; he did not. The ultimate meaning of the Enlightenment was recognition of the inborn intelligence of each individual and his or her right to make decisions and express them freely—not just those born to money or privilege, not just those who had a law degree, not just those dressed like gentlemen.

  His old colleagues were horrified by the women’s march yesterday. He heard them trying to explain it away. “It was men in women’s clothes,” they said to each other. “It was paid for by the due d’Orléans.” “It was rabble from Faubourg Saint Antoine, the out-of-work laborers wearing skirts.” The women were on the road back with the King and royal family, while already those who did not like this piece of history were revising it.

  Mobs in the streets were as frightening to him as to Lafayette, who had put himself at the head of the line of march when he could not stop them. But Nicolas und
erstood that people denied the vote, denied an education in making governmental choices, and, indeed, with no way to make their will felt, had little choice but to riot. Because they could not vote their will, they picked up pikes and hatchets and paving stones.

  About seven, the women and the Guardsmen brought the royal coach to City Hall, where Nicolas was one of the dignitaries nominated five minutes before to greet them. He had never been presented at court, so could not officially meet the King, but the elaborate minuet of court etiquette seemed to have dropped by the wayside during the trek from Versailles. The King was clearly tired and wanted to get to his dilapidated and almost empty palace. But the dignitaries must greet him and make speeches. Nicolas declined to make one. He felt there were quite enough speeches.

  He was asked to accompany the royal family to the abandoned palace of the Tuileries, joined on the river side to the old Louvre, but with gardens between. No one had been allowed to enter the King’s presence who had not been summoned and who had not three hundred years of noble quartering. Now everybody was pushing along into the palace, women who had not yet gone home to their dark slums, lawyers, politicians, journalists, Guardsmen, a fishwife or two, including one old lady who insisted on telling Louis how she had seen him born, his red face coming out of his mother’s cunt. She probably had.

  The palace was thick with dust and cobwebs. It smelled musty. What furniture remained was hidden under old grey coverings. Women were wandering around lifting the dropcloths randomly. Guardsmen were setting up their duty rosters. Everyone was clamoring what had to be done next, while the royal governess attempted to settle the children. Nicolas stood at the top of the coil of staircase marveling at the bustle and chaos. The King, who had never been spoken to since he had ascended the throne in any terms but the most dulcet and flattering, who had been raised to believe himself semi-divine, had been this day packed up and trundled off against his will by a pack of working women whose clothes were muddy and whose manners were exceedingly direct. Since his coronation, Louis had scarcely left Versailles except to hunt. Now he was a citizen of Paris, a city he feared and disliked. The people had picked him up, dusted him off like a china figurine from a mantelpiece and set him down right in the middle of their lives. It remained to be seen, Nicolas thought, how Louis would cope with his new role. He was a good family man, much as Nicolas aimed to be. Perhaps he could adjust to being a good constitutional monarch, like William and Mary whom the British had installed after they chopped off Charles’ head and then dumped James. He could be a homely down-to-earth king, if he chose.