City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  He had a big war map on the wall of his office at the Ministry. He was in touch with Dumouriez whose army was to the north and Kellermann whose army was to the south. He sent messengers several times a day so that he could tell whether they were managing to bring the two armies together before the Prussians could advance between them. He would have liked to head for the front, but he could not leave Paris with the crisis at hand.

  On the day the volunteers were to gather for the new army of defense, he gave a speech. If the Rolands called him a rabble-rouser, let them see how well he could rouse the people. “The tocsin will ring tonight in all the sections, but not as a signal of alarm. It is the signal to march for the new army of Paris. The tocsin sounds the charge against the enemies of our nation. To conquer them, citizens, we must have courage, more courage, always courage, and then France will be saved!”

  Marat had been calling for the massacre of counter-revolutionaries held in the overcrowded old jails and the even more overcrowded prisons improvised from nunneries, hotels, the houses of aristocrats who had fled. Georges knew that such a slaughter was likely, but he could not urge men to join the army and march out when the tocsin rang, and also hold the people back from what they considered vital to protect themselves while their men were gone. He knew something was going to happen that night. How bad it would be, he had no idea. He was not involved in whatever plotting was going on in the sections, but he could smell the fear, the anger, the odor of conspiracy.

  Robespierre and Billaud-Varenne were both calling for the arrest of the Girondins, insisting they were not prosecuting the war with zeal, that they were scheming to put the King back in. Georges was not going to permit that infighting. When the Commune sent a warrant of arrest for Roland to him, he tore it up. He had no love for Roland, but he did not think he deserved to die for providing lousy suppers and sanctimonious self-congratulatory conversation. Georges helped whomever he could. He sent private messages to monarchist former deputies to get out while flight was still possible. He would do nothing to prevent the massacre Marat was insisting upon, but he would save anybody within his arm’s reach.

  Marat caught wind of what he was doing and stormed into his office like a shit heap on fire. Georges would not back down. “I won’t stop what we both know is going to happen. But I won’t push anyone in the way of the mob. I save whoever I can. You can’t scare me, Marat. I have as big a mouth as you do and plenty of followers.”

  “You’re a sentimental fool. Every enemy you save will raise twenty more against you. You have fun playing God—I save you, I save you—but in the end, we all croak, Danton, and you’ll lose your head like your friends. You’re on one side or the other, or you’ll get cut in half.”

  Georges tried to jolly Marat. “We have common enemies and a common cause. If we differ about a few minor players, what does it matter?” Marat did not reply, stalking off, his head bandage crooked and pistols visible in the waistband of his long dirty trousers.

  When the tocsin rang, the volunteers began to gather and the prisons were attacked. Groups of men and women rushed the gates of the prisons with muskets, with hatchets, with pikes and knives and scythes and all the makeshift weaponry they used in the streets. They set up tribunals and on the spot they either released the prisoners, kissing them, applauding, welcoming them back to society, or they slaughtered them. Georges tried to regularize the instant trials. He appointed judges. He urged the impromptu courts to consider evidence. But he had to support the people, because he understood their fury. By the end of the second day, it was all over.

  The Rolands and Brissot were running around wringing their hands and calling him a murderer. They imagined you could take people, brutalize them all the days of their life, let them see their fellows tortured and hung for stealing a loaf of bread or a cloak to keep warm, a piece of wood to burn, you could give them executions as the only public entertainment, you could starve their daughters into prostitution or work them to death, you could walk over them with boots, and then be astonished when they seemed to enjoy killing those they blamed for their misery. He did not relish slaughter, but then he had enjoyed a happy childhood in a middling bourgeois family. Everybody had needs. He wanted money. The poor wanted revenge. Who was he to say they could not have it? So he stood up before the Girondins who were crying Savages, Murderers, Butchers, Fiends, and said, “The people did what they had to. They’re sending their men out to save the country. It was swift and dirty justice, but it was justice.” He cast his lot.

  He read the gruesome reports and went into the prisons. They had been emptied. Over half the prisoners had been tried and released. The rest had been cut down on the spot. Record-keeping was so sloppy that no one really knew how many had been shut up, how many had been let go and how many had been killed. The Queen’s old favorite, the Princess Lamballe, had been slaughtered, hideously dismembered, cut up like a chicken, and her head carried on a pike under Marie-Antoinette’s window. It was said that Louis warned her not to look down. Mostly the invaders had killed aristocrats and priests, but they had also executed common criminals they thought dangerous. Reports of the bloodbath made him wince, but he could not back down. It had happened, and it was over. A better mechanism of administering justice quickly must be set up, so this would never be repeated. They needed to give more authority to the court of the Commune where Camille’s cousin was prosecutor, to move fast and decisively, condemn or let go.

  Georges had been elected to the new Convention. They still had that old rule that a member of the legislature could not be a minister, although they tried to get Roland granted an exemption. The Girondins weren’t about to do that for him. His ministry was over. When Manon saw him in the corridor, she drew aside her skirts as if he could contaminate her. “Madame Roland,” he said, “do not fear. Unfortunately, common sense is not contagious.” Fools, all of them. They would never believe he had saved them.

  The next day he learned that his efforts to rouse the army had not failed. The Duke of Brunswick was defeated at Valmy. It was not a ferocious battle—casualties on both sides were less than at the Tuileries—but the French army held. Astonishingly, the Prussian army then withdrew, marching across country to the frontier and out of France. His secret negotiations had worked. The French army did not harass the Prussians, only following them, as agreed. But the Prussians had a worse enemy than the French. Bodies littered the roadside. Bloated corpses awaited the French troops. The Prussians had dysentery. They were dying and they were done. Now was a precious opportunity for the French army to be trained properly and given guns, ammunition, clothes and boots. Time to integrate the new troops he had recruited. Paris was safe. The war was beginning to go well. The Girondins were happy and shone with confidence.

  Now, he thought, would be an opportunity also for reconciliation and reunification of the factions of the Revolution. No better time would ever come. But no overtures were tendered from the Rolands, Vergniaud, Louvet, Buzot, Brissot. Instead they turned and began a fresh attack on him, on Robespierre, on Marat, on the Mountain and the left. Since he had saved their war from disaster, they had declared another war, on him.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Pauline

  (Fall 1792)

  PAULINE studied the life of her neighborhood. On one hand, nothing had improved. The Convention would not control the price of bread. When the sections asked for price controls, the Girondins refused. They had never gone hungry, men with flowing hair and grand postures who kept talking about the noble Romans. Damn them all. She and her people were just as poor and just as ragged and just as hungry as they ever had been—as Marat said. Hélène was always quoting from The Friend of the People. Pauline was having a hard time making a living, because the high price of sugar meant that she had to charge too much for chocolate.

  On the other hand, life was livelier. Nobody lay around depressed. Fewer men and women sat drinking till they fell asleep at the table or slipped down on the floor. She did not know anyone who had killed
herself in the last two years. There was less wife beating since divorce became legal. Claire and Victoire had been running a school for the women who wanted to learn to read and write. Most women could sign their names and spell out wall posters, but some could not do that; and many wanted to read books. It was a popular thing to go to reading and writing class Sunday mornings instead of mass. It felt patriotic to dismiss the Church. Pauline missed Sainte Geneviève, that sense of connection with her own saint, but otherwise, Church passed out of her life and the time closed in and filled up and she never thought, I should be there.

  When she tried to decide what was better, it was how people felt about themselves. If they were hungry, as they usually were, they weren’t lying on their backs suffering in silence. They were out in the streets letting the Convention know just how they felt about their hunger. What they had, they might be more apt to share, because they felt a common cause with each other instead of divided into striving competitive families.

  Every day there were sectional meetings and meetings of the women and meetings of this or that committee of vigilance, of justice, of making bandages or collecting iron or saltpeter for the army. There were committees of propaganda and education. Any time of the day and sometimes all through the night, there were meetings and discussions, speeches and votes. Instead of a hundred saints’ days, they had anniversaries of victories, defeats, remembrances. The calendar was jammed.

  The Convention was theirs. They—the sans-culottes, what the rich had called rabble—were the watchdogs of freedom. They were the soldiers of the Revolution. They had changed the government twice. They could do it again. All their lives, the aristocrats had been telling them they were dirt underfoot. Nothing ever truly belonged to them, not even their bodies that might be coerced and starved, beaten, torn in pieces to make an example to frighten other nobodies. Under a low grey sky, they had been mice in their dirty rooms.

  Now they knew anything could change. Whatever they desired was possible, if they took action and made it happen. Hadn’t they discovered their power? They must never let up the pressure on the Convention to make the laws they desperately needed. They wanted victory, they wanted justice. Everyone was human, the King too. He had been sacred, he had been all-powerful and all-wise, he had been the sun: now he was just Louis Capet, whose every move in the Temple was printed in the papers. There were rumors that he was a traitor, that incriminating papers had been discovered in the Tuileries.

  A lot of people said that so long as the corrupt and the secret sympathizers remained in Paris, in power or able to influence the government and buy favors, the people would never be safe. Always they would be in danger of the Duke of Brunswick who had sworn to burn down the city and kill them all. Always they would be in danger from within. Marat said they had to kill a hundred thousand to be safe. She could not imagine a hundred thousand people alive, let alone lying in dead piles.

  But there must be a conspiracy for real. The proof came when Robespierre was attacked in the Convention. They had mounted a plot against him, those Girondins with their big words and their small deeds, their secret connections to the court and the King. The papers said that Roland had attacked the Commune and Robespierre, accusing them of terrorism. He said more massacres like the prison massacres of September were being planned. He accused Robespierre of working to make himself dictator.

  She went at once to the Convention. Enough women in the crowded gallery knew her for her to be passed in and to squeeze through the crowd to a good place. Some women saw her the way she saw Robespierre, as a hero of the Revolution, someone truly and entirely on their side. She never had to wait in line. Always another woman would start calling her name, “Pauline! Pauline!” and others would take up the cry. It embarrassed her. But there were those who glared when they realized who she was. If she was a heroine to some women, she was a villain to many men. She heard herself described as a dangerous demagogue and had to ask Claire what the word meant.

  She was mainly a leader in the sense of being willing to do organizational work. If the women wanted to petition the Convention, it was, “Pauline, take this petition to the Convention. And would you rewrite it clear and get more people to sign it, please?” Demagogue? Drudge was more like it. She was a maid of all work to the Revolution.

  Now, Robespierre, there was someone who could set a crowd on fire. They’d see what they had stirred up, those windy do-nothings. It was so cold in the Assembly, she was glad it was overcrowded in the gallery, to keep warm. The only heat in the whole drafty place was a porcelain stove down on the floor, in the shape of the Bastille. It was only October twenty-ninth, but today a cold wind was blowing from the north. There had been a frost. She peered down at the ranks of the deputies. The two sides of the hall faced each other across a narrow aisle. They were always passing notes and murmuring and sometimes loudly arguing, whatever was going on.

  A small thin balding man, Louvet of the Girondins, was attacking Robespierre. People said Louvet was the lapdog of Mme Roland. He had been famous before the Revolution for writing a novel—The Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas—which she had actually read. It was racy and her girlfriends had passed it around, the ones who could read. She was ashamed of how much she had liked it. His speech was full of references she had trouble figuring out, Cicero and Brutus and the Capitoline Hills and the Sibyl and Plutarch. Lots of delegates were nodding away like their heads were on strings he was pulling.

  “You say who dares accuse you? I dare accuse you.” He was off and running. “You are the leader of a longstanding and vile conspiracy. Your aim is nothing less than to destroy those who now try to govern fairly and in the name of the people, my colleagues. Your aim is nothing less than our complete destruction and your own assumption of total power. You are guilty, Maximilien Robespierre, of arrogance. You have fostered, you have nurtured a personal cult bordering on a religion among the poor and ignorant, a cult of which you are the saint. You provoke their adoration and you hope to ride to power on it. You have taken over the Jacobin Club one denunciation at a time and turned it into your personal tool for power. You have driven out every man who could stand against you. You purged and purged until it’s only a shrine to your egotism, your vanity and your lust for power.

  “On August tenth, where were you? Where are you ever? Cowering at home plotting how to use the violence for your own ends. On August eleventh, you began to take over the Commune. You used the Commune and the threat of mass violence to control the Assembly, and you are planning to use it to control the Convention. You try to impose your will with the bodies of the slum dwellers armed with pikes and hatchets.

  “You, I accuse, and your henchmen Marat and Danton. You are the triumvirate attempting to subvert the Revolution to bring yourself into power. You and Marat work in tandem. He arouses the rabble to blood lust and rampage, and then you coldly step in and take over the machinery of power. The blood of helpless prisoners is on your hands as well as on Marat’s and dripping from the hands of Danton. Is there anyone you would not kill to seize power? You want our blood to run on the streets. We have in our hands a secret police report which says you intended that we all be shut up in prison and then murdered by the mob. We escaped you then, but you will not escape our justice now! I call you a would-be tyrant. I call you a man conspiring to seize power and rule as dictator. I dare to accuse you, to stand up to you and send you back into the obscurity from whence you crawled. I demand the immediate arrest of Marat and establishment today of a commission to investigate the conduct of Robespierre with the aim of indicting him.”

  Many delegates wildly cheered Louvet, but the galleries were still. Finally Robespierre got the floor, shouted down until Danton intervened and in his huge booming voice insisted Robespierre be heard. He looked so alone there, small, neat, intense, the focus of the hatred and scorn of all those men who thought themselves better than her and better than him. “Many serious charges have been leveled against me. In my respect for the Convention, I wish
to answer carefully. To do so I will need to consult the records of the Assembly and the Convention and my own notes. I ask the Convention for eight days to prepare, after which I will come before you ready to answer each of these charges fully. I too could rant as my accuser has, but I prefer to deal with these accusations not with empty words but with full accountability and disclosure. I therefore ask you to accord me a hearing in eight days.”

  After haggling, finally the Convention agreed. Pauline got up to leave. She had to get to work. On November fifth, she would be back. That night as she climbed into her old bed in the back of the chocolate shop, she envied the women all around her who had company, a warm backside against them, someone to care what happened. Sometimes she felt twice as vulnerable as the other women, because she was completely alone. Would she ever marry? Would she ever have a family? She began to doubt it. She would die in one of the increasingly dangerous demonstrations and in five years, no one would remember she had ever lived. Even her fame was two-edged, making her more visible to her enemies and frightening off men who might have liked her.

  She returned the night of November fourth, because there was going to be an all-night line waiting. She brought a blanket, but gentler weather had returned. The women huddled together around a few braziers and bonfires. Bottles were passed around and bread. It was a long night but they sang revolutionary songs and told stories. The hardier dozed on the pavement. At dawn, a coffee seller came to them with her tank of coffee on her back.

  She got a good seat and waited, gnawing nervously on a bit of stale bread. Robespierre was one of the last to arrive, flanked by the lanky guy always with him lately. Saint-Just had a tall lean body and a handsome face, but she did not know any women who were crazy about him. He looked too cold and too perfect. She found him intimidating, although he was near her own age and a newcomer to Paris. He looked as if he could kill with a stare, disdainful when he wasn’t coldly furious. Still, he was loyal to Robespierre and always at his elbow. Flanking his other side as he marched in was his younger brother. She liked Augustin. He was not awe-inspiring like Robespierre. Everybody called him by his first name. He looked approachable, as well as handsome. Would Robespierre silence his accusers? Or would they do him in?