City of Darkness, City of Light

by Marge Piercy

  “If you claim to be pregnant, they can bring in a doctor,” Théo warned.

  Pauline stood very straight beside their little table. “They are free to examine me. They’ll find I’m with child.”

  Théo’s face cracked open in an enormous grin. Gently he laid his hand on her belly, as if he could feel anything yet. “Now we really have to get out of here. Do you think I groveled enough? I’ll swear to anything.” He hugged her, carefully. “How do you feel?”

  It was a hot summer, little rain. The last hard rain had been the day Robespierre had fallen. They were sitting in the garden under a tree when the warden sent for them. “Good news. You’re out today. Get packed.”

  Pauline kissed Claire goodbye. “You’ll be free soon,” she prophesied.

  “I’m not so sure. They seem to find me dangerous still.”

  Claire was no longer dressing in the RRW mode, pantaloons and jackets, but more like a bourgeois lady. It suited her in prison. Théo wanted Pauline to wear better clothes. While they were still in prison, he had a seamstress make her up a blue-and-white dress. The seamstress called it à la anglaise. It was less comfortable than her normal clothes; when she tried it on at a mirror, she looked like an elegant stranger. Théo said to save it until they got to his regiment and she met the other officers and their wives. “Remember, you’ll be an officer’s wife.” He ordered another like it in white and red.

  An officer’s wife. She was alarmed. If she had married Henri and followed him to the wars, he was the lowest sort of soldier. She could not quite imagine what her life was to be like, or whether she could manage to get along with the other officers’ wives. It sounded daunting.

  “I have no idea what we’re going to find outside,” Théo said. “But if the Terror is really over, everything should be easier.”

  Hand in hand Théo and Pauline walked out of the Luxembourg. They had to get a cab to move their bed, their table, their linens and clothes and utensils and books. The streets looked different. Nobody was wearing the red cap of liberty. Many men and women dressed like ladies and gentlemen—not as fancy as the old nobility had dressed, but fine enough. Private carriages rushed through the streets. She saw a few men she recognized. Lawyers who had dressed like sans-culottes when she had gone into prison, now wore waistcoats, culottes, silk stockings, standard bourgeois finery. Shops catering to people with money seemed to have plenty to display, whether silks or lamb chops or gloves. Ladies were wearing enormous hats covered with flowers and birds. The carriage driver had not addressed them as “tu,” but rather used the polite “vous.”

  On the walls instead of the revolutionary posters denouncing or exhorting, there were notices of dances, of balls, of fairs, of plays and galas. When they came into her old neighborhood, everything looked different too, but not gayer. The people scurried along as they used to before the Revolution, nervous, wary. Lines stood before bakeries and butcher shops. Little was displayed. The contrasts between neighborhoods were far more marked than in the spring. All the barriers of class seemed back in place. She was reminded as the cab pulled into her little street that she had married a man from a higher social class than her own. Would he regret this? She had never thought of him as having a class, because they were political together. Only the line you followed mattered.

  The chocolate shop looked strange. She heard sawing as they approached. The doors and shutters were flung wide and a man came out carrying a pile of planks. “There’s someone in the shop!”

  Théo leapt out before the cab had come to a halt and ran up to the open door. “What are you doing in here?”

  A swarthy man with his sleeves rolled up paused in his sawing. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  Her shop had been rented out from under her. Now she understood why Babette had sent her a message that she had her things. Théo and Pauline entered the tavern warily, not sure what it all meant. Men were slumped at the tables drinking sullenly in the middle of the day, a sure sign of unemployment. Newspapers lay around but no one was reading them aloud. Instead of the animated political argument she had grown used to, the men were mumbling in low voices. Babette’s mother motioned them toward the back. Babette was sitting at a table with her leg on a chair.

  “Forgive me for not getting up, but I can’t. The fucking bastards broke my leg.”

  “Who broke your leg?” Théo leaned on the table.

  “Those bastards, Gilded Youth. They’re gangs of fancy thugs. You’ll see them. They dress like fops, with skin-tight pants and high cravats, sort of like Saint-Just used to wear. They keep their hair long and braided in back. They carry sticks with lead weights and they beat you up. They’re terrorizing all the sans-culottes and the Jacobins and everybody they hate. The streets belong to them. If you see a bunch of them coming, run for cover…. Anyhow, that’s why I haven’t been to see you. I can’t get around. They raped me. Then they beat me up and broke my leg.”

  Babette began to weep and Pauline held her. She wiped Babette’s face gently and patted her shoulder.

  Théo was still trying to find out about Gilded Youth. “So who are they? Pimps? Mercenaries?”

  Babette’s mother answered, from behind the counter. “They’re accountants, lawyers’ clerks, all the kids who got out of going to the army. We should have finished them off when we had the chance.”

  Babette’s brother shushed her. “Police spies,” he said. “They’re everywhere.”

  Babette did have Pauline’s things.

  “We’ll sell them at the market. We’ll keep the bed and some linens, your clothes, anything worth hauling. The rest we’ll sell off,” Théo said. “We’re leaving Paris as fast as we can. I just want to collect my papers. Then we’ll join my regiment. Your chocolate business is gone. Time to clear out with what we can carry.”

  They stayed in a cheap inn for the next week, while they wound up their affairs. Pauline sold off the furniture. She bought a horse and a simple wagon. At Théo’s insistence, she got some clothes, skirts, chemises, aprons, a new shawl. Victoire found exactly what she needed.

  She was having morning sickness but otherwise felt fine. Théo reported that the army was a sanctuary for radicals. She would be an army wife, traveling behind the regiment. There would be other women like herself, sansculotte women, women of Paris, he explained, because many of the new officers were men who had been raised up by the Revolution. Some might even know who she had been. Her mother had never taken her father’s name—lots of sans-culotte women didn’t—but Théo had expected her to take his. Perhaps it would be safer for her and the child, if people didn’t know that she had been a revolutionary leader. She began signing herself Femme Leclerc. Leclerc was a common name. They would disappear into the army. Gilded Youth could rage in the streets and the prisons could fill up, but they would be out of it, on the frontier or in another country. If the army won, victory could be sweet. They would always have enough to eat, no longer the case in her old neighborhood. She stopped dreading army life and began to look forward to it.

  The day they left Paris, she sang to Théo, old ballads her parents had taught her. She sang to her husband, her husband—think of it. In his uniform, he looked slim and handsome and perfect. She sang to her unborn child. It felt almost like going on an extended day off, into the country. Théo was armed. He took his musket, pistol and sword back from a friend who had been keeping them. She felt safe and excited. People had been telling her that nowadays, in the days of victory and the army reorganized, the officers did pretty well. She had landed on her feet. She might call herself Femme Leclerc now, but she was the true daughter of her hardworking mother and father, who if they were given half a chance, would manage, would come through.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  Claire

  (August 1794-August 1795)

  CLAIRE could read the political complexion of the government by who entered the prisons and who left. Victoire never tired of petitioning the various bureaucracies for her release, but months passed
, summer into winter, and she was still a prisoner. Elisabeth Lebas and her baby boy were locked up in the Luxembourg, along with her sister, Eléanore Duplay, who had been Robespierre’s fiancée. Eléanore was intense and very quiet. She observed Claire carefully for two weeks before beginning to speak to her.

  “My mother hanged herself. My father’s in La Force prison. When the news came that Philippe was dead, my sister fell into a dead faint. Her baby had to be put to a wet nurse. She was unconscious for two days. We thought she’d die. She had just come to and got her baby back when we were arrested.”

  “Your crime was giving a home to Robespierre?”

  “We all loved him,” Eléanore said. “I most of all. His idiot sister Charlotte renounced him. I will never cease to be faithful.”

  “Being faithful to a dead man is useless to both of you,” Claire said. She did not bother telling Eléanore how much she had grown to mistrust Robespierre and his virtue.

  “If you loved a great man, would you ever be satisfied with a little man?” Eléanore asked, her dark eyes glittering in her thin pale face. “He is my fate.” She seemed pleased to have settled that for herself.

  Claire was not only making more than she was spending in prison, she was laying by money that she gave regularly to Victoire. They were going to live together if she ever got out. Every day Victoire came, bringing her news, hope, affection, supplies to sell. Victoire was her life line. Never before had she depended on another as she depended on Victoire. For a time it frightened her, and then she grew used to that dependency, that connection. Without it, she would not survive. Winter was hard in prison because they must keep warm. Every fireplace had six beds huddled around it. Claire had no connections for firewood. Outside, people were starving. Babette told her, “Since they took off price controls, the price of bread has skyrocketed. Besides people dying of the terrible cold and hunger, there’s something new. Three women in the neighborhood killed themselves. Mimi walked into the Seine with her little daughter by the hand.” Babette came regularly to see her, hobbling on her crooked leg. She remembered Babette dancing.

  “Why? What’s wrong?” Claire could not imagine the women who had fought so hard, those bawdy strong women killing themselves.

  “Despair,” Babette said. “Despair is what’s happening.”

  She did not like to tell Babette that there was no starvation in the Luxembourg. The official rations had been cut, but almost everybody here had resources. Many of the better off had been released. Still the prison was always full. Elisabeth was getting help from the family of her dead husband. His brother came up to Paris to see her every month. He was working hard to secure her release.

  “He looks so like Philippe,” Elisabeth said to her. They were sitting together picking over dry beans for maggots before they made a stew. “Do you remember how handsome my husband was?”

  Elisabeth had regained her color. She was far prettier than her sister, although less bright. She was a good mother, and Claire expected she would go on being Elisabeth Lebas, but with a different brother, after she got out.

  Sometimes one of the new society ladies would visit friends in the Luxembourg, wearing the latest fashions. They were simple in line, but made of almost transparent fabrics. Sometimes the outlines of the breasts could be clearly seen through the white gauze. Fashions seemed to have gone from everyone dressing in working-class styles as if they were about to saw wood or do the laundry, to dresses that suggested every woman was a courtesan. Tallien, one of the conspirators who had overthrown Robespierre, had married his mistress who was setting the fashion. Her salon was the most renowned of the new ones.

  In late spring, Victoire came to see her, as she did daily, but with new excitement, catching Claire’s face between her hands. Victoire was lit up, shining. “Claire, your case has been reopened. Things are moving.”

  “But in what direction?”

  “Somebody bribed them. Suddenly they can find all your paperwork. Suddenly there’s a hearing next week. I’m told it’s a formality.”

  Claire could remember when a hearing was tantamount to a short ride to the guillotine. People were still being executed in droves. Only the personnel in the tumbrels had changed. Now they were almost always sans-culottes or Jacobins or former radicals from the sections. This was called the White Terror. It was even more widespread in the provinces. The prisons there were packed, but the new trick was for a prisoner never to reach jail. Instead he was ambushed on route after arrest; or he just disappeared as if yanked upward by a deus ex machina: except that a week later, his body would be found riddled with shot beside some deserted country road. In other places, whole towns were under reign of those who wanted revenge for the death of relatives, their own imprisonment, or just the lack of respect they had received from their inferiors. The low had been high; now the high were high again and the low were low, and they were going to see it stayed that way.

  A carpenter went to the guillotine because he was heard saying, “I miss old Robespierre. Under Robespierre, we had blood, but we also had bread.”

  Claire was half-reluctant to leave prison, where she had managed to set up a comfortable life. People depended on her to supply them. She felt safe and needed. She had no idea what it would be like outside. She had been in Luxembourg for ten months, and she knew the guards and the ways to finagle what she needed. Little bribes had slowly become a way of life. After Ther-midor—the fall of Robespierre—bribes had gradually turned into the usual grease for the wheels of the whole society. It was going to take some getting used to. If Robespierre had put his puritanical stamp on the time of the Terror, Tallien and Fréron, both corrupt, both venal, had spread their attitudes abroad through the new society. If you asked a favor, you passed money. You tipped afterward.

  The day before Claire was to be released, she had a surprise visitor: the still very handsome Mendès Herrera. He embraced her formally. “You’re looking fresh,” he said.

  “Are you the one who bribed the court?”

  “A few tokens of my esteem. Wine from Bordeaux is always appreciated.”

  “I appreciate too—that you’d help me. What’s happened with you?”

  “Things were dangerous for a while, but we kept our rights. We’re citizens. The import-export business had gone to hell with the British blockade, but I’m in wine now. I was able to pick up a good vineyard in the sales…. I’m helping you for old times’ sake.” He was keeping his distance and she behaved demurely also, waiting to see what the price was.

  “There isn’t anything I want from you,” he said, as if reading her mind. “I’m married. She comes from an old Sephardic family, she’s nineteen and beautiful, and she brings me a dowry of gold and olive oil. I learned of your problems. No one else need know. You’ve become a little notorious, Claire. I don’t know if you can turn it to your advantage on the stage. I wish you luck. You’re as beautiful as ever, but I’m a family man again.”

  Then he was gone. She was entirely brushed off, but she did not mind, for if he had his wife, she had hers: faithful Victoire, with whom she walked out of the Luxembourg into a cool overcast May day. She brought her things back to Victoire’s room, and there they pondered what they should do. That night in the sagging double bed, she made love to Victoire as if she were a man. She knew such love existed, but she knew nothing more about it than that it was a scandal and everybody said it was a sin. Everybody said a great many things were sins, but they did them anyhow. This, she thought, should be a sacrament. “I marry you, I marry you, I marry you,” she said to Victoire in the dark room where the candle had long ago guttered out leaving an acrid smell of smoke. The scent of their love-making hung in the air along with the stew they had made in the fireplace.

  “I marry you,” Victoire said back. “I’ve loved you forever.”

  “We must be very careful,” Claire said. “Or we’ll end up back in prison, this time both of us. Don’t tell anyone, not Babette, not anyone, what we are to each other. Outside this
room, we’re friends. Inside here, we’re married. We know that, but nobody else must.”

  Claire set out to see if she had any contacts left for a job. She wondered if Collot d’Herbois had gone back to the theater, for he hadn’t been in the Committee of Public Safety since September. She assumed he’d managed to protect himself, after bringing Robespierre down. But she learned he was being tried for crimes under the Terror, along with the melodious-voiced Barère, who had sung paeans to the army, and Billaud-Varenne, whom she remembered from the Cordeliers Club before he had served his time on the dreaded Committee. Swiftly they were condemned to life imprisonment in Guiana. Convicts died there like poisoned sheep. So much for Collot.

  The mighty had fallen all over the place, but then, they had only been mighty a matter of months. The guys with carriages and silk stockings were back on top. After three weeks of making the rounds, she got a job. Political plays were out. The Gilded Youth served as informal censors. If they didn’t like the politics of a play or of an actor or actress, they would make so much noise they disrupted the performance. If that didn’t work, they attacked the patrons. They liked to beat people up. They were protected by Fréron. They were an unofficial police corps of the reaction.

  She was worried about how they would respond to her. It was a melodrama of bourgeois virtue vindicated, one of the sort Collot had used to put on in the provinces. She was the villainess. She was set for a month. One of the patrons of the theater asked her out to supper at the Palais Royal after the Saturday performance. She went warily. Perhaps she wouldn’t have a month’s work. It would not be worth it if she had to fuck the patron.