City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  If it were not for François, she would have felt herself perishing in an emotional desert, blasted by sandstorms of intrigue. Every day she managed to see him briefly. It was important they not spend too much time alone. François swore he absolutely respected her virtue, but she suspected that he would give way to passion if she let him. She permitted him to embrace her and to kiss her, that was all. Even friends did that. From time to time he would push a little.

  “Don’t you think passion too has its rights? That love as great as ours is entitled to full expression?” He put his hand on her thigh.

  “François,” she said. His full name was François Nicolas Léonard Buzot. She said it to herself when she was carrying out household tasks. “The despicable women of the old regime married as a matter of property arrangements. They never hesitated to commit adultery. We’re not of that breed. I chose to marry Jean. No one coerced me. My father did not approve of the match.”

  “Did he think Roland too old for you?”

  “I don’t know, as I didn’t listen. As I would never listen to anyone who slandered my husband.” She looked down at his hand.

  “I have the utmost respect for my colleague, Minister Roland. No one has his grasp of the economy.”

  “I respect him deeply, François, and I could never cause him pain.”

  “I understand.” He removed his hand. “You’re the whole world to me, Manon. I could never offend you. You have the keys to lock and to loose. I know how much you do for me. There’s no woman like you. I’m hardly able to believe you care for me, that you chose me.”

  How could she not cherish him? He was only a little taller and heavier than she. He was neat, handsome without flourish or self-consciousness, a pleasant well-turned-out man. And he loved her. That was the gift she carried against her heart. She was not ashamed to be loved and to love him, because she never deviated from the path of virtue. She was a true wife to Jean.

  Still, as they lay under the canopy at night, Jean to her right, she on the left side of the ornate bed with cupidons and cornucopias on the head and foot and writhing grapes on the posts, she thought of François. He lay with his much older wife, as she lay with her older husband. Of course it was not really the same. Jean was a minister, a superb administrator with, as François had said, a keen grasp of the economy equaled by no other politician. François’ wife was a silly woman who had brought him an ample dowry but little else. There was nothing to be jealous of. Yet sometimes Manon felt a scalding of jealousy when she imagined the intimate moments they shared.

  François assured her they had not made love in years, as she assured him she had not been intimate with Jean. It was almost true. Jean asked for her wifely submission perhaps once or twice a month. She always obliged, unless she was truly indisposed. It was a meaningless scuffle in the dark. She could not understand why a woman would risk life and reputation for such dumb grappling. Yet occasionally when François touched her, when he kissed her, she felt something unexpected and wild in her. She turned her mind elsewhere.

  There was plenty to concern her. The war was going well. General Dumouriez, whom she had never quite trusted, was nonetheless proving to be a most competent, in fact a talented general. He had been racking up victories. It helped their cause immensely with the people and with the Convention. A victory in the field assured them a good vote in the Convention.

  Not only were the invaders driven from French soil, but the war had been carried across the border in the north. French armies were liberating the low countries, just as Brissot had predicted. Robespierre had claimed the French armies would not be welcomed by the common people. Perhaps he had feared a war would lessen his chances to seize power. He was too crafty to admit his ambition to be dictator; whereas when Marat was accused, he said, Why not? He claimed that a triumvirate of Danton, Robespierre and himself would rule much better than the Girondins. Those three dangerous men were highly popular with the volatile rabble of Paris. Their effigies were everywhere. Their faces—Danton’s crooked leer, Marat’s scrofulous countenance with its dirty bandages, Robespierre’s pinched little cat face peering out—adorned mugs, lamps, candlesticks, broaches, rings, plates. Portraits were sold on linen or silk. Little statuettes, the sort that used to be sold of the King, were peddled through the streets. She wondered if the ignorant prayed to them.

  One day in late November, a locksmith named Gamaine appeared in Roland’s office along with the architect Heurtier. Gamaine had just gone to Heurtier, who was in charge of the renovations at the Tuileries, and recounted that Louis had him make a secret safe in the wall shortly after the King and Queen had been forced by the women to move there.

  “Could you find this safe?” Roland asked Gamaine.

  “Of course! How many times does a king ask you to install a secret safe? I can take you right to it. A good job I did too of hiding it.”

  As soon as Gamaine opened the safe, Jean saw that these were dangerous papers. He was appalled. As he said to Manon in bed that night, “Louis was a fool not to burn them. The Mountain and the Commune have been calling for Louis’ head since September. Now he’s doomed. He was plotting with Austria. He was sending money to the émigrés to invade. The Queen was sending messages to her brother in Austria detailing our plans for battles. The idiots!”

  Jean brought the papers to the Convention, but the Mountain immediately attacked. They said he should have opened the safe in the presence of official witnesses. Since the papers contained information that several members of the Legislative Assembly had been bribed by the King, they accused her husband of removing papers that would implicate Girondins. Reputations were tumbling. Mirabeau was revealed as having been in the King’s pay. His ashes were removed from the Pantheon. His bust was smashed at the Jacobin Club. These revelations made the madmen of the Commune and the Mountain madder than ever. They suspected everyone, even Jean, even her, saying they were in league with the royalists, in the pay of London. It was so absurd she could not imagine that even the men who wrote these libels daily could actually believe them. She hoped that the papers would incriminate the leaders of the Mountain, especially Danton, but he was lucky. He was in the clear, whereas her husband, who had just been doing his duty, was under suspicion of destroying evidence.

  A cry for the King to be tried went up, far stronger than in August. Now even the moderates of the Plain were calling for a trial. It was a question how long Brissot could stave it off. The war was going well. Louis was harmless now. They feared only Robespierre and Marat and Danton. Brissot still controlled the Convention; the men of the Plain usually voted with them; the presidents of the Convention were still drawn from their ranks. The president determined the agenda, the order of speakers, settled questions of procedure and appointed committees—from their own men.

  But the people were always demonstrating about something. Lately they were complaining incessantly about bread and demanding price controls, something neither Brissot nor Roland would ever stomach, for they believed passionately in free trade and a free marketplace. Price controls were anathema to them.

  She had fun the next week, writing a letter to the Pope demanding the release of two young French artists who had been studying in Rome; they had been thrown in prison as revolutionaries. She gave him a history lesson in the same tone she had adopted for her famous letter to Louis. Of course this one too would be signed by her husband, but she shared it first with François. The personal attacks on her continued. When she was feeling especially vulnerable and shamed, she took refuge with François. He held her, stroking her hair. They kissed and kissed till she had to run from him and hide herself away, so that she would not lose control. When she left him, sometimes she wept with frustration and keyed-up emotion.

  She was summoned peremptorily to the bar of the Convention to answer the trumped-up charges. She dressed carefully, spending two hours on her toilette with Fleury’s help. She was booed when she came in. But by the time she had spoken for half an hour, she was applauded.
Robespierre wasn’t the only speaker who could carry a crowd. As a respectable woman, she never had the opportunity to speak in public. Oh, some of the harridans of the Paris slums would raise their shrill voices. That chocolate maker and that actress were always jumping up and declaiming. She never would put herself forward unless forced to.

  She could see her enemies scowling and the men of the Plain applauding her warmly. Afterwards, they voted not a censure but complete vindication. Men pressed from their seats to embrace her. It was hard for her not to turn and flee, but she made herself smile and smile. When she came home that night and Fleury helped her change, she thought, I could have been as good a speaker as Vergniaud, the Girondins’ best orator. I would have been an effective politician (better than Jean) if I had been born a man. It was out of the question. Only academic fools like Condorcet wanted women voting and running for office; what other women would she trust doing that? No, it was enough that she could defend herself and her husband when she must. It was only a pity she could not be with François tonight, to share her triumph with him. But tomorrow they would steal an hour together. Tomorrow.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Nicolas

  (December 1792-January 19673)

  NICOLAS found the Convention more difficult than the Legislative Assembly, where he had felt at home. In his earlier days of admiring the Americans and dreaming of a republic, he had imagined an austere and rather formal chamber where cultivated men of a philosophical bent debated at whatever length was necessary the issues and laws that came before them. The old Committee of Thirty had resembled his ideal legislative body. They were all men of a certain level of education, a certain class, of course. He could chide himself now for naivete: events developed their own momentum.

  His circle of enlightened gentlemen had been sure they were the center of whatever might happen. They imagined a revolution that would be vigorous but polite, a matter of making speeches and passing laws and perhaps a referendum or two. They had never imagined that people who waited on them in stores and made boots for them, who carted off their waste and brought them water, would come to rule. Had it occurred to any of them that the ordinary people they walked among like grass in the field, with no more attention to their individuality, would overthrow their authority so quickly after they had assumed it? Would say, no, gents, we prefer our own leaders. We like our rhetoric direct and profane. We know what we want. Get out of the way!

  The Convention was loud and disorderly, and always there was a sense of the mob outside waiting to charge in if they did something the populace disliked. A royal veto no longer hung over them. Now they had thousands of vetoes armed with pikes and hatchets and wearing the red wool cap of liberty. These delegates screamed, they booed, they shouted each other down. They belonged to factions and slandered each other. Some still dressed like old regime gentlemen. Others looked like highway robbers. Marat resembled a lunatic loosed from an asylum, where Nicolas would like to put him. Others looked like the butcher or the baker. So-called Girondins mostly wore their hair long and assumed poses as if they were in heroic plays about their own worth. He sat with them, he often voted with them, but he sometimes thought them fools.

  They were incompetent. They would neither rule nor step aside. They put their best passion into faction fighting instead of running the government and solving problems. The Rolands were the worst. Anyone disloyal to them personally was an enemy of the state. Manon was the brightest of the lot but unbalanced in her judgements, too romantic, too vehement, too personal. Nicolas wished Danton were still in the government. Danton was a powerful speaker. Nicolas could not help admiring that attribute, because when he rose to speak, within five minutes the delegates were chatting, eating lunch, having a nip, snoozing, sneaking out. Danton’s rhetoric often seemed to say one thing when his intention was far more moderate. “Let the bastards croak in their blood! Let the enemies of the Revolution tremble in their gilded shoes,” he would thunder, then end with a proposal to vote a censure. Danton was more humane and reasonable than he let on.

  The man saved Paris and roused the people to incredible efforts. He had been running half the government before he was sacked: because the Rolands hated him. Danton was scarcely a gentleman and seemed to be doing suspiciously well out of the Revolution. Certainly funds disappeared from the Justice Ministry under his tenure. But he was a man you could reason with, a man who could straddle the widening gulf between Convention and Commune. He had a good brain under all that hair and attitude. He was widely read. When Nicolas talked with him, he was often surprised. So many of these men seemed to have read one author, Rousseau, and to have built an entire world view on his maundering.

  Nicolas simply could not manage the popular rhetoric of the Convention with its self-dramatizing and self-aggrandizing gestures. Even Robespierre seemed to confuse himself with the Revolution. He was incessantly martyred. This style offended Nicolas’ sense of decorum. It produced a kind of emotional and intellectual hysteria. It confused self-pity with righteousness. It carried on about its own virtue and forgot logic and temperance.

  “What you want,” Sophie said, “is a republic of Condorcets, my dear.”

  “I wouldn’t want a republic without a Sophie for every Nicolas.”

  “Ah, but you’re not including Sophies in your republic.” Sophie tapped the papers on his desk.

  Nicolas had been appointed by the Convention along with Tom Paine and Abbé Sieyès, to draw up the Constitution for the new republic. They had decided upon universal male suffrage. “Sophie, I can’t even make the other committee members grant the vote to women. In the Convention, we have no chance.”

  It was the culmination of his entire life’s work, this Constitution of which he was the primary author. It was extremely long, for he had been brooding about these matters for twenty-five years. Here was a chance to put all his best thoughts into usable form, to set his imprint on the new government, once the Convention was done with the problem of the King. Over them all hung the question of Louis. The Commune grew increasingly impatient for resolution. They wanted Louis’ head, especially since the affair of the iron safe. They might never have found the safe in the wall of the palace, so well hidden, if it had not been for a stomach ache. The locksmith who had installed it had eaten in the palace and was violently sick. He believed he had been poisoned.

  Nicolas had been elected from Aisne, along with a strikingly handsome young man always at Robespierre’s side. He dressed as formally as his idol but in black. He carried his large magnificent head in which all the features were bigger than usual—his eyes, his mouth, his chin—stiffly on an oversized white cravat he tied just so. About Saint-Just Nicolas knew little, except that he had gotten in trouble for stealing silver from his mother and running off to Paris, that he was the author of a radical and pornographic long poem. When he began to deliver his maiden speech in favor of the King’s death, delegates paid no attention at first; then they all shut up.

  He spoke in a clear harsh voice that was electrifying, crisp, laconic. He used no flowery language—exactly the opposite of Barère, who was regarded as one of the finest speakers, far different from the emotional self-regarding tone many of the delegates affected. He spoke as if from the tables of the law. There was something inexorable about him. Nicolas was impressed and discomforted as Saint-Just demanded death for the deposed King.

  Brissot was delaying. The enemy, he insisted, was not their hostage Louis, but Robespierre. Nicolas felt that deposing the King should have ended the matter. He knew Danton was negotiating secretly with the British to save Louis if it would keep Britain neutral; but the British government was not interested. “If we judge Louis, he’s dead,” Danton said privately. He was never enthusiastic about executions, although he backed them publicly. Nicolas knew he had been right about Danton, and Brissot and the Rolands were wrong; Danton was a working politician, a new breed, master of compromise. Nicolas was fascinated, as if a startlingly novel animal had come into being overnigh
t. Saint-Just, Danton were no one he had met under the old regime. Even though the times were increasingly dangerous, he was pleased to observe these exotic new human types.

  Saint-Just and Robespierre were arguing for immediate execution. The people had rendered their judgement. “There is no way to rule innocently,” Saint-Just said. To try the King, Robespierre argued, would be to put the Revolution on trial. Louis had already been found guilty. But the overwhelming opinion of the delegates was that they weren’t accepting a version of history where Louis was tried by the people of Paris; no, they were going to try him themselves. A radical, Robert Lindet, was chosen to prepare the case for the prosecution.

  December tenth, Lindet’s accusation was presented. Nicolas shuddered as he listened. It was compelling, thorough and quite damning. Louis had run the government way into debt and summoned the Estates General to solve his money problems. When the Estates had insisted on real reform, he attempted to intimidate them, to send them home. He called up his troops. Only the attack on the Bastille and the women’s march had forestalled his plans. In Paris, he thwarted the will of the legislature. He conspired with France’s enemies. He sent money to encourage armies to invade France. He bribed legislators. He funded counter-revolution. He massed troops at the Tuileries in August, commanded them to defend an empty palace and left them to die.

  The galleries were watching; the Commune was watching; the people with their pikes and muskets were watching. The convention voted to bring Louis to them the next day to hear the accusations. They spent two hours debating stringent security precautions. If Louis escaped, the Commune would kill them all. They decided to send a small army. Louis would come to the Convention in the Mayor’s coach, surrounded by soldiers, cannons before and behind, a detachment of cavalry guarding him.