by Marge Piercy
Now he was giving the people the price controls with one hand and taking away their power with the other. He turned on the women who had always come out for him. Suddenly he spoke of them with disgust. They were unnatural. They were dangerous. They were a threat to the Revolution-the Revolutionary Republican Women who put justice, bread and freedom before everything. She burned with betrayal. She felt scalded, a pain that did not diminish. Since September, when some of their program had been adopted by the Convention, everything had been going wrong. The RRW presented a petition for national homes for prostitutes, where they could learn a trade to support themselves and their families. Instead the Convention adopted a statute punishing prostitutes severely.
Théo’s paper was suppressed. In the Jacobin Club, the RRW was condemned. “Those counter-revolutionary sluts cause bread riots. They make a revolution about coffee and sugar and soap, and they’ll make others if we don’t watch out!” Claire’s room had been searched and weapons they had stored there, seized. Claire was far more the focus of the attacks than Pauline. For one thing, she was more visible because she was tall and beautiful. For another, she was living with Théo, whom Robespierre particularly disliked. Robespierre did not understand Théo, a man of action. He had gone to be a soldier very young; he had lied to join up when he was still underage. Théo spoke before he thought. Claire stopped to shape her thoughts, but Pauline found that often words tumbled out, and that was when she moved women to action. Théo was the same way. He spoke and then he heard what he had said.
The Committee of Public Safety was cutting back the rights of the sections. They were doing just what the Girondins had done, curbing power at the local level. The people wanted government in their own hands. If they delegated power, they wanted to monitor its use and be ready to recall representatives. Here was Robespierre, carried in on the backs of the sans-culottes, and now he thought more about holding on to power than about respecting the people.
The RRW was being denounced from all sides. The men who had been scared of them stood up and screamed what ugly harpies they were and how they should be ashamed. The Convention, the Jacobin Club rang with speeches about the proper place of women. The revolutionary woman was home suckling her babies. The revolutionary woman did not go to meetings, but got her news from her husband, who always knew where she was. The revolutionary woman did whatever they told her to and not one thing more. The husbands who had been pissed off that their wives weren’t making supper or waiting for them, they all cheered.
The RRW had been fighting with the market women. The market women had been for the Revolution till price controls. The fight was economic at its base, for the RRW represented the women who needed controls and the market women were those whose profits it would eat into; but blows started over costume. The RRW women wanted every woman to wear the cockade to show support for the Revolution. The fight was really not about cockades, but that was how it came down. At their new meeting place in Saint Eustache in Les Halles, the market women took to waiting to catch them alone or in small groups and beating them up.
One afternoon, they had just met and a few of them were straightening up the church afterward. Claire left, because she was late to the theater. Pauline was still putting things back in place when she heard screaming outside. She ran to the door. Claire was being attacked.
“Come on,” Pauline shrieked. “They’re killing Claire!” She launched herself at the market women, Babette and Victoire and Babette’s mother Otile pitching in. But there were too many beating on Claire. Pauline punched and shoved. She remembered what had happened to Théroigne, who had never gotten out of the hospital. Claire was fighting back, but she was in the center of the mob. Her nose was bleeding and her blouse was torn.
“Hey, they’ve got Claire Lacombe,” she heard a man shout. The working men of the district, the porters and the butchers’ apprentices, came charging into the fray. The men shoved the market women aside, throwing them down, and lifted Claire up to carry her off. It was humiliating that Claire had to be saved by men, but Pauline wasn’t about to object. She ran after them. When the men put her down, Pauline wrapped her shawl around Claire. Men enjoyed seeing women in a cat fight, but this battling in the streets between organized groups brought down quick repression. Women on both sides were hauled off to prison. The market women were back the next day, but the RRW women they kept in jail.
They went to the Convention, where they had gone so many times to cheer or boo speeches, to petition, to march through with their pikes and pistols, to force changes-Claire and Pauline and fifteen other women from the RRW. The market women also sent a delegation. The Convention chose to hear them first. “Citizens, we’re just simple women doing what women have always done in the markets. It’s these bitches that are causing trouble, marching around like men and making speeches. It makes us sick. And they interfere with business!”
Fabre d’Églantine, riding high because he had just created the new revolutionary calendar, stood up to denounce them. “First comes the red bonnet, then the gunbelt, then the gun. These women go after bread like pigs at a trough. These are not good mothers and well-behaved daughters but wild women, female grenadiers!”
Amar from the Committee of Security spoke next. “We all know women lack the sense to make political decisions. They lack the moral fiber, even the physical fortitude, to run a meeting properly, to encourage a rational debate, to deliberate. The decorum required by nature, as Rousseau tells us, is a moral imperative. Each sex is called to its proper occupation. Woman should be confined to the family domain where nature has assigned her functions: to begin the education of men, to prepare children’s minds and hearts for public virtue.”
Claire leapt to her feet, but she was shouted down and ushered from the hall by force. Pauline tried politely to get the floor but she was drowned out. She was not removed because she was quick to sit again. It was voted to forbid women’s organizations, to forbid women to take part in political clubs. The men were grinning as they voted. The market women applauded.
Two evenings later, the leadership met illegally. Many members were frankly terrified. Women were going to the guillotine every day. None of them wanted to share the fate of Marie-Antoinette or Olympe de Gouges. Twelve of them crowded into Claire’s room. “What should we do?” Babette asked, but nobody knew. Their own side had turned on them. Fear made it difficult to think. They decided to make a wall poster but not to sign it, demanding women’s political rights.
Pauline was returning home around ten near the Cordeliers, when she saw a body in the gutter. She recognized the man at once under the overhead oil lamp. “Théo!” she shouted and hurled herself on him. She pressed her cheek to his chest. He was breathing.
He had been beaten bloody. She managed to pull him to his feet. She was close to her shop. She could never move him across the river to Claire’s. “Théo, I’m taking you home with me. Can you understand? Please try to help me.” She got him walking. Blood from a head wound trickled down his face.
“Who did it, Théo?”
“Pauline? Little Pauline.” He held on to her. He sounded drunk, but she knew he drank little.
“Who beat you?”
“I just … left the Cordeliers. They were waiting. Three men from the Jacobins. They kept saying, this is for taking Marat’s name, this is for daring to insult the Incorruptible, this is for stirring up the sluts.”
She struggled along. He was leaning heavily on her but walking as best he could. He understood he must keep moving. Finally they reached the shop. At least it was warm inside from the fire banked under the stove. She sat Théo in a chair and began cleaning him up. Fortunately she had a bucket of almost clean water she had used only for pots. Soon he smelled like chocolate, as she did.
“Things are getting dangerous,” he said more coherently. “Give me some coffee, if you have any.”
“How about a little broth?” She spooned that into him.
“Little Pauline, you’re always so stron
g. You make a good nurse. I put myself in your hands.”
She loved touching him. She felt something turn over in herself. It was wrong to look at him that way. It was wrong to touch his face again and again, to enjoy washing the blood from his hair. To find enormous pleasure in stripping off his bloody shirt and laving his bruises. “Scalp wounds bleed like the devil. Do you think you have a broken rib?”
“I’m stronger than I look. I won’t be dancing in the streets for a while. But I don’t feel anything broken.”
“Tomorrow I can get a doctor.”
“I doubt if I need one. Now I have to lie down. I’m dizzy.”
She helped him into her bed, the only bed. She blew out the candles. She was not sure what to do. There was no place else for her. She lay down in the bed beside him. He was already asleep. She felt confusion and turmoil. She could not sleep lying beside Théo. Was she in love with him? It was wrong to be in love with Claire’s man. It was totally wrong. Suppose his head injury was like Théroigne’s and he went crazy. Who would take care of him? She could not imagine Claire taking on that long-suffering role. But Pauline could. It was wrong to wish he would be injured seriously so she could nurse him.
What would become of them all? The RRW was disbanded. She had been a leader: now she was a severed head. She had seen how frightened even the most militant women were. They did not want to be taken from their families and stuffed into prison. They did not long to march to the guillotine. She admitted to herself she was scared. Surreptitiously she moved closer to Théo in the double bed, to share his warmth, to take comfort from his presence. He was ardent and extremely brave, but he had no power to protect himself or her.
When she rose in the morning, he was still sleeping. She went to buy from the water carrier, who came around just after dawn and then again in the late afternoon. She toted two buckets back. As quietly as she could, she stoked up the fires. Théo woke, confused. He stirred and groaned. She had to help him up so he could piss in the pot she would empty in the street.
“How did you ever get me here?” he asked, back in bed but sitting up with the pillows behind him.
“I couldn’t leave you in the street.”
“You were gentle with me, I remember. You were crying.”
“I was afraid you were badly hurt.”
His gaze stayed on her as she made cocoa for both of them. “I’ll get bread. It will be a while. Drink the cocoa and stay in bed, please. Won’t Claire be afraid since you didn’t come home?”
“I doubt she’ll worry too much,” he said sourly. “Don’t fret, I’ll stay in bed. I don’t have the strength for anything else. Every move I make hurts like hell. I feel like a sixty-year-old.”
She ran to get in line at the baker’s. When she returned, he woke again. She had some jam Babette’s mother had made. They ate bread and jam with more cocoa. She was going to feed him in bed, but he insisted on sitting at the table with her. “You work alone? Don’t you have family?”
She explained. Soon all the jam she had been saving would be gone, but she did not care. She kept looking at him. He was radiant, even in the bandages she had put on him clumsily, torn from an old petticoat.
He slept again afterward while she made batches of chocolate. Then he woke and watched her. “You seem surprisingly … domestic.”
“I like my work,” she said softly, staring at him. It seemed so unlikely that he was here in her bed.
“Don’t you have a lover?”
“I did … years ago. He was taken for the army before the Revolution began. For a long time I thought he would come back.”
“And you were faithful to him?”
She nodded, too embarrassed to speak. Now he was staring at her. He kept watching her as she worked. She felt as if she danced in his gaze. Even if his gaze was all she ever had of him, she had the sense that his eyes touched her with respect and understanding. They talked about what was happening. The revolutionaries were fully in power for the first time, so why didn’t they feel safe? It was their side who had won. Why were they in more danger now?
She knew she should run across the river to Claire’s and tell her where Théo was and arrange to move him. But she did not. She told herself she had to take care of him till it was obvious how serious his injuries were. She brought supper back from the tavern, where she found that she did not want to tell Babette or anyone else what had happened. She pretended to herself she was afraid of police spies. She could not put Théo in danger while he was weak.
He got out of bed to eat, wearing her father’s old dressing gown. She told him about her father. “You were close to your family,” he said.
She nodded. “I loved them all dearly. I miss them still.”
“I don’t belong in my family. I’m a fox born to a family of geese.”
“Claire isn’t close to her family either.”
But he did not pick up that cue to talk about Claire. “I’m feeling much better,” he said. He made no move to dress himself or to leave. She went out for papers and they read them to each other. “Like an old married couple,” he said. “Do you ever think of marrying?”
She knew she blushed. She could not look at him. “Perhaps,” she said. “Should I go to the tavern for wine? We’ve drunk what I have.”
“Let’s go to bed. It’s time.”
She blew out the candles and lay down beside him. There was no place else to go. What was she doing? He reached for her and drew her into a firm embrace. He put his mouth on hers and began to kiss her. She had only kissed one other man, years and years before, and she did not think it had been like this. She felt as if she were falling into him.
“No,” she said, pulling away. “You belong to Claire.”
“Claire doesn’t want me. But you do.”
She could not speak. She felt consumed with shame, that he had read her desire. She felt like a fool. But she could not draw back when he pulled her close to him again. “Pauline, don’t hide your face. I see who you are. You work so hard for everybody else, nobody sees you. The sweetness and the love in you. I see it. I want it. I want you.”
“No, I can’t do this. I can’t hurt Claire. I can’t just go to bed with someone like a whore.”
“You’re not a whore. Give yourself to me, Pauline. Willingly.” He laughed softly against her hair. “It has to be more than willingly, because you’re going to have to be gentle with me. I’m just a bag of bruises. You’ll have to do most of the work.”
“Why do you want to do this with me?”
“We’re suited, Pauline. I just had a revelation. My parents will be a little shocked when they meet you, but you’re exactly what I need. You failed to be a soldier’s wife once, but the fates have it set in stone for you.”
“I don’t understand.” But she put her arms tentatively around him. She wanted him, she could not help it. She loved him.
“Yes, you do.” He put his hand into her bodice, closing it gently over her breast. She could feel his prick against her belly. She had never wanted Henri this fiercely, never. She could not have refused him if Claire had been standing in the kitchen with them. She moaned. Her mouth opened into his.
But when he spread her thighs, it was his hand, not his prick, he put under her petticoat to find her opening. With his fingers he rubbed and rubbed at her and stuck his finger into her. Something began to catch like a fire. A convulsion took her that she had never known. “Oh, I love you,” she said.
Then he came into her and began to ride slowly. “Yes. We will love each other. Now and again and again.”
When they lay quietly, she said, “We must tell Claire.”
“All right. Tomorrow I’ll get up, we’ll tell Claire. Then we go straight to City Hall.”
“Why?”
“Silly Pauline, to get married. Because deep down, you’re a good girl. I’m a good bourgeois inside. And an officer. An officer needs a wife. We both want to be married. To each other.”
SEVENTY-THREE
Man
on
(September-November 1793)
MANON wrote impassioned love letters to François, far beyond what she had allowed herself to say to him. Occasionally she wondered what she would do if they acquitted her. The situation remained impossible. She could not divorce Jean, who had done nothing wrong. Nor could she give up François. He was the only man she had ever loved passionately; it had not happened before and it could not happen again. She was inescapably pinned in place between the two men. Prison protected her from a fierce tug-of-war.
She finished her memoirs, smuggling them out in batches. Friends still dared visit her, including Sophie and Bosc. She had two letters from François, which she read and reread. She wrote to Robespierre, intending to beg his mercy. He could save her if he chose. She remembered when they had been friends. The letter emerged from her cold and full of bitter anger. It would be pointless to send it. She could not beg. She tore up the letter.
She stopped eating. She would starve herself and deny the Mountain the pleasure of seeing her die in public. Then her property would not belong to the State but would be inherited by her daughter. She asked Bosc to make sure her memoirs were published-when it was politically safe-so that Eudora might have the income. She permitted herself only water. As she grew weaker, she began to dream of eating. She could not sleep and then she slept and slept. Her jailers begged her to eat. Her fellow prisoners tried to tempt her with chicken and apples, late grapes.