by Marge Piercy
“Are you going to the Convention?” Claire asked him.
“On my way. Remember, girls, no excessive force. We’re just going to push them till they squeal and get out of the road.”
Everyone was taking them seriously now. Pauline’s heart felt as if it were bigger than the walls of her chest. Finally, women were beginning to be treated as equals. Olympe de Gouges’ great manifesto would be true. There would be the Rights of Men and Women. She made herself not mind that Théo was marching with Claire. He had heard about the bullet she had taken at the Tuileries. No, she would not be jealous, for the great Danton had addressed her as a fellow soldier.
She saw Mimi at her window. “Aren’t you coming?”
“My husband says it’s enough you got his last wife Aimée killed. He says he can’t afford to risk me too. After all, you’re on your own. No husband, no kids, no parents. Nobody depends on you. I have to raise Aimée’s kids and my own too—thanks to you.”
Pauline felt her eyes sting and she gripped her pike hard. Aimée had been her friend, not Mimi’s. She wished she could think of a reply that would make Mimi feel as bad as Mimi had made her feel.
Claire ran off to talk with Victoire. Théo was waiting for her, looking a little lost among the women. Pauline fell into step beside him. “I hope you’ll address us about the colonial situation, about sugar and slaves and the rights of the Blacks,” she said in her president-of-the-club style. Then she smiled and said, “I surely would like to hear your experiences. You were in prison out there, right?”
“My first time. They use old hulks as prison ships so you can’t escape. Those waters swarm with sharks. If you try to swim for it, they’ll eat you to the bone.” Théo looked pleased to be asked. He stopped watching Claire and smiled at Pauline. “Are you frightened, little one?”
“Everybody is.” She shrugged, but she could not help smiling back. “I fought in every great day of struggle since we took the Bastille. I led the neighborhood women to Versailles, when we went to fetch the King.”
“You could use a pike with a shorter staff. There’s a proper ratio for a person’s height. I’ll cut it down for you.”
The women, several thousand strong, converged on the Convention. About three hundred were active members of the RRW, another thousand came sometimes, and the others were just women who agreed with their objectives and were ready to act. The RRW was the biggest, the strongest, the most militant of the women’s organizations. Claire and she had set it up so no man belonged. What they did have was a lot of children. Pauline had strongly urged mothers to leave the kids home today, but not every woman could. They were marching to battle on the Convention with five-year-olds, ten-year-olds and babes in arms. An army of women often became an army of women with children.
A great crowd gathered, many armed. The National Guard was marching with sixty cannons, with Hanriot—a scrappy little guy who had fought on previous days of uprising—astride his horse to lead them. The women poured into the Convention. The Convention no longer met in the old riding school, where Pauline had often gone; it now used what had been the Tuileries theater, a bigger, more formal room. The deputies were not crowded together. The speakers were farther from the galleries. The women occupied the corridors, all the seats in the galleries and blocked the doors. “Justice and bread,” they shouted. “Down with the Girondins! Down with the traitors!” The roar of the crowd outside penetrated the theater. It sounded vast and dangerous.
All their lives the women had been pushed around, by fathers and husbands and priests and every man who felt like it, landlords, shopkeepers, tax collectors, doctors, pharmacists, aristocrats and politicians. It was fun to stand in the doors in their red pants and red bonnets, with their pikes and some with daggers and pistols and even an occasional musket, and to push those scheming nitwits around. The Girondins were scared. It was astonishing, Pauline thought, how scared they actually were. These were gentlemen, lawyers, men of property. They were afraid of the women of the city streets. These were not ladies; these were not the sort of women they married or had as mothers. The women kept shouting and shoving. They would not let anybody else into the hall. They made a wall of their bodies.
The Convention refused to act against the Girondins. Hérault de Séchelles, currently presiding, led a walkout. Some of the women went and sat in the delegates’ places, while Pauline led a charge after them. The men walked into the Carousel straight into a face-off with Hanriot and the Guard. Hanriot stayed on his horse, looking down. “The people have not come to listen to idle talk,” Hanriot bellowed. “They demand the guilty be arrested. Gunners: to your cannons. Prepare to fire!”
The representatives ran around trying to escape. Marat climbed on a cannon to harangue them. “Delegates, to your duties! Don’t run like cowards. Return to the posts you’ve abandoned and do the people’s will!”
Théroigne de Méricourt suddenly appeared, in her usual tricolor uniform. Pauline assumed she had come to join them, but she stood with the Girondins. She marched out in front, between them and the cannons. “Protect the great leaders of the Revolution. Don’t turn on them! These are good men!” she began in her carrying voice. “Don’t forget what they’ve done for us—”
The women hurled themselves on her. Théroigne went down under a pile of women pummeling her. They did not use weapons but they used their fists, and it was thirty women on one. Pauline was furious at her for betraying them, she who had led the march on Versailles, who had killed an aristocrat at the Tuileries. Now she had joined the counter-revolutionaries.
Claire tried to stop them. “She’s one of us. If she’s got a Girondin boyfriend, forgive her. Don’t kill her! She’s fought on our side.” Claire ran back and forth tugging at the women.
Marat was shouting too to spare Théroigne. Finally the women left off. They backed away from where she sprawled on the pavement. She lay almost naked, her clothes in rags and bleeding from her nose, her mouth, her breasts. She had lost consciousness. Marat told two men to carry her to safety before he swung back to glare at Hérault and the representatives.
Hérault de Séchelles was an ex-aristocrat who claimed to be a revolutionary. With little choice, he turned and led a retreat into the chamber. Reluctantly they filed back in, followed by the women and National Guard. They resumed their debate on the Girondin leaders.
In midafternoon the Convention voted the arrest of twenty-two Girondins including Brissot, the Rolands, Buzot, Vergniaud and Louvet, who had attacked Robespierre. The Mountain was triumphant. The government had fallen the only way it could: the people had toppled it. Now they would have what they wanted: bread and freedom and a new constitution. The Mountain would owe the women big.
As they made their weary way home, Pauline said to Claire, “Now we’ll get what we want. We put them in and they know it, and they know we can pull them down too. We can’t let them forget that.”
Claire was walking with her gaze cast down. She didn’t respond.
“Are you okay? Did you get hurt?”
“I feel bad about Théroigne,” Claire said. “She gave a lot to the Revolution.”
“But she turned on us,” Pauline said stubbornly. “She turned against us for those guys with their fancy cravats and their fancier talk. The women just gave her a whipping.”
“They humiliated her,” Claire said. “They hurt her badly.”
“Forget about her,” Pauline said, gripping Claire’s arm. “We have to keep the organization going. We need to draw up petitions for laws that women need, like education for all the kids. We showed today how important we can be, and now we have to press our advantage. Justice and bread. Respect and a full belly, that’s our demand.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
Manon
(May-June 1793)
MANON knew they should leave Paris. She was finally up, after more than a month of illness. Now that Jean was out of office and the Girondins were in peril, she found herself without energy to fight. She packed. She made arra
ngements. But she could not go. She imagined herself back in the house she used to love in Beaujolais, with her husband and his grey reproachful face. She had been sleeping in Eudora’s childish room. The excuse was that she did not wish to infect Jean, but she was glad to escape that depressing marital bed. Leaving Jean would make a mockery of her principles; she would be reduced to the level of a courtesan of the old regime, trading in an old man for a young one. He was dependent on her. He did not write any of his letters or papers. His health was fragile. With what could she reproach him? He had done nothing wrong.
But she could not leave François either. She could not turn her back on the only passion she had ever felt. She loved François, and if she forced herself to hold that passion in check, it did not mean that she found abstinence easy or that she could bear months without seeing him. She simply could not abandon the comfort, the intensity, the fascination of his presence. She did not want to be shut up in Le Clos with Jean, full of sighs and dismal moans, while the fresh sweet face of François was leagues away. She could no longer do without him. So she remained suspended, a fly buzzing in a web of white silk, while events precipitated downhill. She hoped for a rising in the provinces to overwhelm the armed Parisians. She hoped for those good people who supported the Girondins to make themselves heard. She hoped for the Plain to rise against the Mountain and recall Jean to office.
At dawn when she awoke, drums were beating, the tocsin was ringing. She ran to the window. Armed citizens were gathering. Pikes glinted in the darkness between buildings. Something was happening, and it was not good. Was there an invasion? Was this another day of violence when blood would run in the streets?
A messenger came to report that all was uproar at the Convention. They must flee. Neither seemed able to act. Jean kept worrying how to clear his reputation. Uncertain what was happening, they told each other that the National Guard would defend the Convention against the mob. In the late afternoon, there was a knock on the door and several armed men tramped in. “Citizen Roland, I’m here to arrest you,” a young man said nervously. “The Commune sent me.”
Jean took the papers and glanced them over. “These are highly irregular. They are not properly made out or signed by the correct authority. I certainly will not go with you on an illegal warrant. You may go back to your Commune and tell them I await correct papers.”
The young man seemed flustered. “Take him anyhow,” one of the armed men snarled. “Don’t be fooled.”
“But he’s right,” the young man said, reading the papers himself. “It isn’t correct. We have to go and get it fixed or we’ll be in trouble.”
Manon watched from the window as they marched off. They did not even post a guard. “Jean, you must go now! Your bag is packed. Go someplace safe and send for me. I’ll join you.”
“Get your valise and come with me,” he said, staring at the street. A vein was throbbing in his forehead. His hands were knotted behind his back. “They mean to try me like a common criminal. They’ll chop my head off. Come! At once!” He ran to get his suitcase and his coat.
“I’ll slow you down. I’m too weak to travel quickly. They’ll close the gates of Paris. Get out while you can. There’s no warrant for my arrest.”
Fleury hovered in the doorway, twisting her hands in her apron. “Monsieur, you must go! You must get out of here, now!”
He was too frightened to argue. “As soon as I reach a safe place, I’ll send for you.”
He kissed her dryly on the lips and then was gone, actually running down the steps. How would he manage without her? He would break down, become ill. She watched him trotting away. Then he turned the corner.
She sank back on the couch, putting her arms around Fleury, who began to sob. They held each other for comfort, rocking back and forth. Then Manon rose. “We must see to his papers. Let’s build a little fire in the hearth. They’ll be back soon enough. We should make sure there’s nothing that can involve anyone else, people who’ve written to him.”
It was dusk before the men returned. This time they had a properly executed warrant. “Where is Citizen Roland?”
“He told me he was going to the Commune to straighten this out.”
“I’m sure,” said the young man bitterly. “So he’s flown away. You can take his place. Come with me.”
“You can’t take Madame. She’s a mother,” Fleury said. “She isn’t a politician.”
“Citizeness Roland, you are formally under arrest by order of the Commune,” the young man said. “This time, no nonsense. Come along.”
They did not touch her or jostle her. They simply surrounded her at a respectful distance and marched along through the streets. She considered it a sign of the chaos of the times that hardly anyone glanced at them. She was taken to the prison of l’Abbaye. No cell had been prepared for her, so the jailer’s wife took her in. They spent the evening in the salon chatting. Manon could not eat, although the jailer’s wife tried to press some chicken on her. Finally a small cell was ready. When she was locked in for the night, she lay down on the trestle bed and covered her face in her hands. She felt too weary and too desolate even to weep. She could hear coughing and sobbing, cursing and singing, night sounds of the prison. She felt utterly alone and abandoned. How long would she remain here?
She rose in the morning determined to exhibit stoic calm. At least Jean was safe. If he had been captured, she would have heard. But what had happened to François? Was he in danger? The jailer and his wife seemed civilized and friendly, probably sympathizers. She must set a good example to the other unfortunate women incarcerated in l’Abbaye.
By the end of the first week of captivity, the cell was full of flowers that Bosc picked in the Botanical Gardens and placed in vases Fleury carried to her. Her cloth covered the rickety table with its scars of previous prisoners (Here lay Marie the Poisoner, may God have mercy on my soul; Jean Forrestier, 1790, Innocent!). She sat in her little chair at her delicate desk. Her books, her coverlet, her linens were on hand. Soon they must release her. She looked forward to her interrogation. She would be composed and prepared.
In the meantime, she felt oddly free. She was reminded of her days in the convent. The convent too had been peaceful, full of women. She was not a mother here. Not her husband’s amanuensis and counsel. She ran no salon and had no appointments. She neither shopped nor oversaw cooking. If she lacked something, a friend brought it.
Her gracious jailers permitted her unlimited visitors. During the day, the cells were unlocked and the women freely circulated. They chatted. Many entertained male friends. Others saw their families. How comfortable a prisoner was depended more on their resources, social and financial, the devotion of friends and family, than it did on what crime she was accused or convicted of.
What Manon had, she shared, except for precious paper and ink. Since she no longer had to write Jean’s or François’ speeches, she could write for herself for once. She began to set down her recollections of the Revolution and the men who had made it. She rose early and wrote all morning. Afternoons she received friends. Evenings she passed in the apartment of her jailer or with other prisoners, singing or telling stories, acting charades or playing whist or checkers. When a prisoner had a visit from her son or daughter, the other women including Manon, would gather and make a fuss over the child. It was like the convent, except that her life, instead of starting, was perhaps ending. There was always a niggling fear in the back of her mind that prison massacres could recur. If there were more military reverses, if Paris felt threatened, then the same murderers who had attacked the prisoners before could force their way in and slit their throats.
Bosc told her Girondins had raised an army in Normandy and were trying to start revolts in other provinces. She imagined the entire country in arms against Paris and the Convention, now controlled by the triumvirate of dangerous demagogues, Danton, Marat and Robespierre. They had produced some specious Constitution written in eight days by Hérault de Séchelles. She stayed reason
ably well informed. Many Girondins had escaped, including Jean and François. She was told both were hiding in Normandy.
Finally armed men came for her. She was taken to the Palais de Justice. Her interrogator was the assistant prosecutor, not Fouquier-Tinville. They wanted to know where Roland was, where Buzot was, a dozen others. She learned that twenty-one Girondins had been arrested the same time as she. Some were held under house arrest; others were in prison. The Tribunal was determined to hunt down those who had escaped Paris. She was evasive and deft. She kept insisting that as a woman she really had no idea what the men intended. She had met them all while entertaining for her husband, but she had not taken part in their conversations, as any guest could verify. She did her needlework and attempted to make sure the guests were comfortable.
In three hours, they got nothing out of her. She was proud of her evasive skills. She did not lie. She did not refuse to answer. The next day when her jailer came to tell her she was being released, she was not surprised. She sent for Fleury and they packed. A few leftover items she distributed. It was a warm and humid day. It felt astonishing to be walking outside, at liberty, between the steaming sky and scorching pavement stones. She would stay in her apartment until she was sure she was not being watched. Then she must figure out where to go. She would have liked to join François, but could not: unless she failed to find Jean.