by Marge Piercy
Pauline would never be considered beautiful, for her nose was too sharp, her teeth gapped. But she had a good figure and she was strong for her size. She could lift a crate by herself. She was cute, pert. She had an infectious laugh and a fine clear speaking voice. She could talk quietly enough, her voice caressing. Her voice could also carry over a crowd. Claire had heard her in the women’s meetings and even in the Cordeliers. Women were not supposed to be members, but they acted as if they were, speaking out when they had something to say. Pauline was regarded as a strong local leader who could be depended upon to bring out the women. Yes, Pauline was vital, a spark. But Claire doubted they would ever giggle together half the night telling secrets from their childhoods, that they would admit they were blue and hold each other.
When Claire heard that Olympe de Gouges was going to have a play put on in a private theater, she was determined to audition. She was no longer having trouble getting jobs. Her reputation wasn’t exactly pristine. She had not had a role in Paris in which she remained fully clothed. She was becoming known as a rabid revolutionary. With some people that helped; others immediately labeled her a whore. She said to Hélène, “Have you ever noticed how when the right is putting down women on the left, they call them whores? To work for people without money means you’re a whore, while to fight for people with money or sit on your bum and do nothing is virtuous.”
Hélène shook her head. “Whenever men insult any woman, whether she’s a mother superior or a midwife or a peasant mother of ten, they call her a whore. So don’t get fancy about it. I’ve heard you refer to Marie-Antoinette that way fifty times.”
“You’re right,” Claire said slowly, embarrassed. “We have to hate with intelligence and love with intelligence.”
Hélène laughed bitterly. “Is that conceivable? Love is the opposite of intelligence.”
“Is it? I love you. I use my brain and see you clearly and I use my heart and care for you.”
“Oh…” Hélène dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “Women are different. Just being friends, that can be with open eyes.”
“Then maybe it’s a better sort of love.”
“Probably,” Hélène said without conviction. “What shall we do for dinner?”
Claire found out where Olympe was casting. The theater was in the mansion of a marquis in exile, now owned by a wholesaler and his wife, who was attempting to make a reputation as patroness of the arts. Olympe was a tall woman, almost as tall as Claire but much older. Her hair was her own, brown streaked with grey and shoved up in a chignon and topped with a gauze headdress supposed to cover her hair, but constantly slipping. She wore a bedraggled white muslin chemise dress that had seen better days, a while ago. So had her cashmere mantilla. But her voice was strong. “Say it as if you mean it,” she ordered the actor on stage. “I don’t care whether you do or not. Just sound as if you have a couple of convictions rattling around in your skull.”
Claire had heard that Olympe was illiterate and had to dictate her plays. Yet she was putting on and taking off a pair of Ben Franklin spectacles, obviously following the script in her lap. One more rumor turned out to be trash. Olympe had probably been a beauty, but she did not have the manners of a grand coquette. She was loud, straightforward, direct as a bludgeon. Claire had also heard that Olympe was a butcher’s daughter from Montaubon. That she did believe. Olympe was no aristocrat, with her loud direct manner. Watching her, Claire felt that she did not even think how she looked most of the time, she was not pinned by the regard of the men around her. She aimed to dominate the moment and the project: not a feminine program of behavior. Olympe would be interesting to work for, interesting to observe.
Olympe was not the only woman playwright, just the predominant woman radical playwright. The play was The Necessity of Divorce, about unhappy marriages. Claire desperately wanted the part. These were not first-rate actors or actresses coming out for Olympe, but most of them were from legitimate theater. They were used to the kind of declaiming this play would require—something Claire had only done in the early days. When Olympe gave them direction, some of them argued with her, unwilling to take orders or even advice from a woman—even a woman who had written and planned to direct the play for which they were auditioning.
When Claire’s turn came, she went up, took her position and said as preamble her experience. An actress who had boasted she had been in the Comédie-Française for three years, tittered audibly. “Pantomimes!”
Olympe grimaced. “This isn’t a pantomime, young lady. This requires acting. I would prefer classical training, frankly.”
“I’d like to try. It would be a great honor to work for the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens. My friends and I have read it through countless times.” That was the truth, but it was also flattery; she doubted anyone else there knew what key to press.
When Olympe smiled, her face looked years younger. The marks of penury and strain eased. “Let me hear you then, Citizeness. Can you read the part?”
“Yes, Madame, I can.” She used the more honorific title intentionally, and Olympe did not correct her. Claire was reading Herminie, the selfless heroine. High declamation was not her forte, but she had heard enough of it to have a good idea how she should deliver her speeches. She had the carriage for a queen, as she had often been told, and she moved about the stage as she read the script. Okay, she had no classical training, she was hardly an actress from the Comédie-Française like that bitch, but she could carry it off.
When she finished, Olympe was frowning. There was a silence in the theater, that smelled of tallow and sweat and dust. Olympe nodded then, abruptly. “The auditions for the part of Herminie are closed. This one—Citizeness Lacombe—will do. I will now be auditioning for Constance.”
Claire came bubbling home to tell Hélène, who was not as pleased as Claire had expected. “But everybody says she’s illiterate and a butcher’s daughter and a scandal.”
“I’m the daughter of a laundress and a bricklayer. You’re the daughter of people who made and sold candles. I saw her read. And speaking for myself, do you think I’m not a scandal?”
“But will you really get paid?”
“She has backing. She has a theater. I like the idea of a woman writing and directing a play. I bet I get to keep my clothes on in this one.”
FORTY-FOUR
Manon
(Summer-Fall 1791)
MANON and Jean had gone to the Champ de Mars to sign the petition against the King. To avoid standing in the hot sun for hours, they arrived on the late side. The line was still snaking around the altar to the nation and in wide lazy loops across the training field. Manon was walking on Jean’s arm looking for the end of the line when Lafayette and his men arrived. She assumed they had come to keep order, but Jean pulled her out of the throng. She could not believe what she was seeing, troops shooting into the unarmed crowd, people falling. She started forward to try to stop the Guards, but Jean held her forcibly and hastened her away.
She was grateful for his cool head, but she could not stop sobbing afterward. She could not sleep. Weeks passed before she was free of it, the image of an old woman struck in the belly, sitting with her legs spread and blood seeping through her fingers, a boy lying dead across his dead father. They appeared before her as she was brushing her hair, as she was shopping for a new fichu, as she was writing to a friend.
One pleasure Manon revisited was to write regularly to Sophie Carnet. When she had married, Jean insisted she break off her friendship with Sophie. He had separated Manon from her closest women friends, and she never stopped missing that warmth. Finally in Paris, he lifted his ban. At once Manon got back in touch. Sophie had married a very old man and worn herself out nursing him. Now she suffered from weak lungs. With her maid Fleury, Manon had a daily intimacy, a sharing of the life of the family and the household. But they were not equal. Sophie was not her intellectual equal, but they had known each other through adolescence and early w
omanhood. Manon did not tend to find the company of other women interesting, but her dear old friend was an exception. She had missed her desperately. There was no one else to whom she could speak with any degree of frankness about her marriage and her life.
She wrote Sophie how terrified the massacre had left her. She had pitied the innocents struck down, but she had also been afraid for herself. It had not occurred to her that she might die for the Revolution. It had been a matter of writing letters or articles, of discussing ideas with men in her salon, of arguing now and again. She had not thought of mortal danger until she saw the bodies, their blood turning the soil into mud. “I begin to think,” she wrote, “that freedom may have a higher price than I had guessed.”
Manon’s salon was in full sail. The Assembly usually adjourned in late afternoon, and the Jacobin Club did not open till evening. In between, favored politicians gathered at her flat. The food was spartan—usually one course. Men were not encouraged to flirt with her. Other women were seldom present. It was a great convenience for the members of the liberal group to have a place to review the day, analyze, discuss, refute, plot. Sometimes she went along afterward to the Jacobins. She felt an immediate admiration for Robespierre and tried to attract him to her salon. Occasionally he came, but he said little and sat in a corner, observing. She wished she could draw him out as she did so many of the other men. He seemed deeply shy, a very private sort of man. She sensed in him a kindred soul, a true man of ideals who would never waver from what he believed, who would never compromise what should not be compromised. She wondered if he had not had some terrible disappointment, a lover who died tragically or proved perfidious.
“Citizen Robespierre, what do you think of the new Legislative Assembly?”
“Not much,” he said. “They do little for me to consider.” But he did not ask what she thought or let the conversation develop. She could not charm him as she did Brissot, Pétion, the young Buzot, Louvet. She had trouble with Condorcet also, although he was talkative enough. His wife ran a rival salon and was said to share his ridiculous ideas about women’s suffrage. Condorcet came occasionally to her salon. He had a turgid overly formal approach and a tendency to go on. She had trouble taking him seriously, but he was active in the Assembly. They kept giving him posts—posts Roland could have done wonders with. She was aware he tried to avoid her dinners and simply drop in for the conversation. She supposed his much-gossiped-about wife set an elaborate aristocratic table. That was a marriage superficially like her own, with a twenty-year difference between them. The resemblance ended there. Condorcet was polite, always remembering to ask her opinion, but he showed no partiality, no sense that he recognized she was not an ordinary woman, but one with a masculine intellect.
An increasing number of liberals sought out her opinion on issues and proposed legislation. They loved to use her as a sounding board for their ideas, running speeches by her. She saw their faults all too clearly. Brissot was an incorrigible optimist, shallow, although he was personable, a good speaker, a true patriot. Buzot was young and had so far done little of note. Pétion was an overgrown child. Lanthénas was languid and lacking in drive. Her own Jean was too dry. He expected others to agree simply because the facts supported his position. He could sound smug and self-righteous. He assumed the facts spoke for themselves and despised rhetoric.
It was disillusioning to see how many human faults these patriots had. Instead of rising to the great occasion of history before them, standing tall in the pursuit of their ideals, they fiddled around, they temporized, they womanized, they lined their pockets, they worried about their own personal safety, they longed to be popular with the masses or the well-to-do. They were all currying favor with someone. All except Robespierre, and she could not attract his focused attention.
From Lyon, how noble all these posturing men had seemed. She had thought them figures of grandeur, like the ancient Romans she adored in Plutarch and Tacitus. Close up, they had axes to grind and resentments. They had mistresses and expensive households. They had a weakness for flattery and adulation. They did things halfway and hoped the slapped-together mess would hold. The Assembly was a great disappointment to her, not at all the great theater of ideas and republican virtue she had imagined. These were far smaller men than they should have been to stand in the sun of history and cast such long shadows. She was wasting her energies trying to set them on course.
She had forgotten how humid Parisian summer could be. In August she was ill with stomach cramps for two weeks. She had not seen Eudora in months and began to think of her daughter fondly. Jean was always wanting to go home. She had not managed to secure him a position in the government. Their friends were well known, sometimes able to be elected to office, but they had no patronage to bestow. She began to feel restive.
Jean complained. “You’re not well, I feel ill, and who knows how things are going at home? No one but ourselves can be trusted to oversee the harvest and make sure the wine is correctly made and laid down. Do you want to lose the whole year’s vintage? My brother writes that it should be a good one in Beau-jolais, if the weather holds.”
Jean persuaded the rump end of the Assembly to reduce the debt of Lyon by more than half. Suddenly he had succeeded in the mission that to her had been only an excuse to reach Paris. There was nothing to detain them.
They left Paris on September thirtieth, just in time for the harvest. In Beau-jolais, this was the most beautiful season of all its beautiful seasons, a time as golden as the stones. Eudora was nine years old and seemed to have learned at least manners and deportment from the nuns of the Visitation at Ville-Franche. Manon collected her and brought her home. Her daughter did seem more obedient. Manon resolved to love her better. She was surprised how glad she felt to be in the country. The peasants began trooping to see her, full of minor and major complaints. Within a week of arrival, she was regularly doctoring them again, making her rounds. Here she lived surrounded by steep green hills of vines instead of narrow dark streets reeking of sewage. There was everything to do—pears ripening, table grapes to be dried—and she was satisfied to immerse herself in country chores, to forget for a while the Revolution and their political friends in Paris. But not forever.
FORTY-FIVE
Georges
(Fall 1791)
GEORGES stayed in the country till fall. He had bought an estate near his old home, and now they had time to fix it up. He got to know the men who worked for him, fired one and hired a couple more. He discussed each day’s work with his head man. You had to let country people know at once that you were not a lawyer from the city who had never shoveled manure or seen a grapevine pruned, that you were in for the long haul.
The house was ample enough; would do for the family they planned. The vines had been left to run wild, but in a couple of years, he would have his own wine. Pears grew on a hill along with an apple orchard. Both needed work. He and his uncle Robert attended an auction and got a few cows and two roan horses. A local man had been haying on the meadows. Now he would keep his own hay.
Gabrielle flourished. Even though she missed seeing her parents every Sunday, she was happy. She took to the country life, supervising the servants and the kitchen, raising chickens, preserving wild and cultivated fruit. She turned brown from the sun. Their son ran about in the courtyard underfoot, brown too and suddenly sure on his sturdy short legs. At fifteen months, he was already the size of most two-year-olds. His hair was bleached by the sun far lighter than either of his parents’. Gabrielle was pregnant again.
Georges almost let her talk him into staying, but he had to make a better name for himself, he had to make money. He needed a profitable office. He had been recruiting supporters for two years. Camille, who had returned to Paris, wrote him weekly of the Cordeliers, of the Jacobins, where Robespierre was remaking the Club stronger than ever. Robespierre was emerging as the number-one man there. Camille reported that their section had made Danton an elector for choosing delegates for the Legislativ
e Assembly.
“I’m going to have to return for the meeting of the electors. I have to show my face, or people are going to forget me or start thinking I’m afraid.”
Since he only expected to be in the city a fortnight, Gabrielle stayed on the farm. He took a coach and arrived in Paris just in time. The electors were meeting in City Hall. He had just finished his first speech when a man called Damien came and shoved a rumpled parchment in his face. “You’re under arrest, Georges Danton!” he shouted. “When I came to your section for Marat, you tried to humiliate me. Let’s see how you like some time in a cell.”
“How dare you interrupt the proceedings of the electors of Paris, you little worm who kisses the bums of aristocrats. Still doing Bailly and Lafayette’s dirty work for them!”
The electors were outraged that Damien came in with an old and politically motivated warrant to interrupt their deliberations. Instead of Georges being arrested, Damien was removed by the bailiffs. Georges appealed at once to the old Assembly, and Damien did the same. It was great publicity. Georges could not have hired better press. Two hours after he returned to Paris, he was the center of a controversy emphasizing his revolutionary credentials. Robespierre defended him at the Jacobins. The Assembly released Damien and left Georges alone. They would be out of office in no time, replaced by the new Legislative Assembly, and none of them could see an advantage in picking up such a hot rock.
In the wake of the King’s acceptance of the Constitution, the Assembly voted a general amnesty, so Georges was free to forget the old warrants. But he had not been nominated for the Legislative Assembly. A new prosecutor for Paris was about to be elected, along with a new mayor. It was too late to run for mayor. After his country sojourn, he was not in the minds of those who usually pressed money upon him. He got a stipend from Orléans, but the court had not been slipping him money. He had expenses. The country felt distant and irrelevant. He sent for Gabrielle and his son. She was to close up the house for the winter, leave the men their instructions and come to Paris. It was time for Georges to get into office. He would run for prosecutor.