by Kate Quinn
Whereas men like my husband appealed to reason and law, trusting in gravitas and intelligence to light the way. That division between emotion and logic, more than any other, was the one beginning to divide this new government. In the beginning it was the royalists and the revolutionaries, but now there were factions among the revolutionaries, and more than Jacobin or Girondin or any other party name they might call themselves, they were divided into the men of extremism and violence, and the men of moderation and reason.
Well, I would follow reason as long as I lived, and never abandon my faith that my fellow men would do the same. They needed only to be shown the calmer path.
“Welcome,” I greeted the envoys. “How may I assist you?”
Their leader stepped forward with jutted chin. “Jean-Théophile Leclerc,” he said, staring at me as if expecting a reaction. I didn’t give him one, even though I knew exactly who he was—one of the founders of Les Enragés, a man who had joined the uprising in Martinique against slavery. I could laud him happily for such action, but not his swaggering and frothing now that he was back in Paris. Who can trust a man who refuses to deliver a speech full of ideals, but insists on shrieking it? “We’re honest citizens, ready to set off to defend the city.”
The news of Verdun falling to the attacking Prussians had swept over Paris yesterday like a great wave; rumormongers said the enemy would swarm the capital in three days. I wanted to roll my eyes and demand how any army laden with baggage trains and artillery could get here so quickly, but these men were clearly already seeing Paris burned and sacked by morning at the latest. “We have no arms, citizeness,” the man continued rudely. “We’ve come to see the minister and demand weapons.”
“The minister of the interior has never had arms at his disposal. You should address yourselves to the War Ministry.”
“We’ve been there. No arms to be had there either.” Leclerc spat, narrowly missing my hem. “All the ministers are traitors. We want to see Roland.”
“He’s not above arrest,” came a mutter from the back. “No one’s above arrest.”
I wanted to swallow, but I would not let them see my throat move. “Is there a warrant?” Who would move against us? Had the split between the men of reason and the men of violence really deepened so quickly? “If there is, show me.”
A thickened silence. “Maybe we will,” the leader said, eyeing me. “Maybe we won’t.”
Another mutter from even farther back: “Maybe we don’t need one.”
They were all in motion, some pacing with jerky steps, some rocking on their feet and flexing their hands. I could feel that they wanted to come around behind me, make me look back and forth like a cornered mouse, but I had purposely set myself before the vast bulwark of Roland’s desk and they could not encircle me. Since the age of ten, I had not gone into a room with any man without gauging where to set my back, for I swore I’d never let myself be flanked by someone with bright predatory eyes again.
They wanted me to beg to see their warrant, to beg for mercy. I deflected instead. “Well, whether it is a warrant you are to present or arms you wish to seize, the minister is not home. Come search the building with me; you will see.” I spoke like a busy housewife with supper to get on the table; the best way to get restless men into line. After all, they had all once had mothers who clouted their ears and told them to behave themselves. “If you want Roland to speak to you, go to the Marine building where the council is in session . . .” And just try to arrest my husband in front of the council, I thought as I led them on a brisk tramp through our private apartments, waving them through empty rooms to show I hid nothing. By the time they realized I was speaking truth, they looked more like foolish small boys than burly swaggering men. As they withdrew, Leclerc even doffed his red cap and begged pardon for intruding.
“You are forgiven, citizen,” I said graciously, even as some frozen part of my mind thought, Had Roland been here, I think you might have killed him.
My maids wept in relief as the doors closed and locked behind the men, but my pulse still beat fast and cold. Going to the window, I could see among the restless seething crowd a man in shirtsleeves waving a sword and yelling out that all ministers were traitors. “Fetch me a coach. I must warn Roland.”
I WAS A child of the Seine, a daughter of Paris. My marriage took me to Lyon, but I grew up looking out over the smoky horizons beyond the Pont au Change. I had loved this city all my life, yet that night I learned to hate it.
“The murders at the prisons go on.” My husband had a deep, fine voice that made up for his clipped way of speaking—his voice had been the first thing to draw me to him—but in the grainy gray light of this terrible dawn, he sounded as frail as a man one hundred years old. “In the Abbaye, at La Force, at the Bicêtre . . . yesterday evening in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, there was an attempt to move an overflow of prisoners to the Abbaye. People were lying in wait with pikes and swords. They murdered every man and woman, there in the open street, and all Paris watched.” He shook his head, astonished and grieving. “After so many died at the Tuileries, I thought we were beyond such madness.”
I sat on the floor with my head in my husband’s lap, as exhausted as he. After delivering my warning to be on his guard, all I could do was wait as the night deepened. Roland returned near midnight, and neither of us had been able to sleep in the ostentatious bed with its canopy of ostrich feathers.
Why? I could not stop thinking. Why?
The massacre at the Tuileries on August 10 had been horrendous enough—perhaps six hundred of the royal family’s Swiss Guard torn to pieces; another three hundred Parisians killed—but this was worse, far worse. The Tuileries riot at least could be laid at the door of panic and miscommunicated orders, but these prisoners pulled from their cells had been slaughtered in cold blood.
“It is not right,” I whispered. “Jailed noblemen—some may have been useless aristocratic parasites, but it doesn’t mean they were plotters. And there were so many others who could not have been guilty—priests, petty offenders . . .”
“Women.” My husband’s hand moved over my hair. “The poor Princess de Lamballe—they say she was raped, pulled to pieces, her limbs displayed on pikes . . .”
I’d heard of her, a silly blond creature who was one of the queen’s lovers if you believed the gutter press, which I certainly did not. The poor woman hadn’t earned such a terrible fate. Nor had the other women who died this night, down to the ragged prostitutes and beggars of the Salpêtrière. This revolution could now say it had executed women . . . children, too, for we’d heard of small bodies lying among the dead.
A shiver racked me to my marrow. I had always thought that my sex and my daughter’s youth would protect us from violence in this great endeavor but now I knew better.
No one is safe.
I shuddered again. “You say this was no vast mob of killers, just small bands of armed men. Did no one try to stop them?”
My husband sounded lifeless. “No one lifted a finger.”
“I hate this city,” I heard myself say, voice shaking.
“The citizens had no orders to defend the prisoners—”
“Orders!” I looked up, dashing away tears of rage. “Does a man need to receive orders from his officer when it is a question of rescuing people who are having their throats cut? How can liberty find a home among cowards who stand by watching violence that fifty men with a little backbone could have prevented?” I would not stand by to watch any man, woman, or child be dragged from a cell and butchered without trial. I would charge with my bare hands.
Roland only looked at me, helpless. “What do we do?”
It was the question that defined our marriage. What do we do, Manon? How do we proceed, Manon? Tell me, Manon. I looked at my husband—twenty years older than I, his complexion yellowed by strain, his hands hanging limp—and wished for a moment that I did not have to find the answer. That I did not always have to find the answer.
But Paris
was drowning in blood, and if it could be saved from its worst impulses, the answer had to come from someone. It might as well be me.
“Acts of terror can be suppressed only by firmness,” I said at last, rising to my knees and taking his hands between mine. “The men who encourage such acts hate you anyway, since you have tried to check them. Make them fear you. Impose your will.”
He looked anxious. “How?”
I went upstairs to my writing desk, looking for a long moment at the letter still lying there. His handwriting. Manon, I love you . . .
I burned the letter in the hearth and sat down to a blank sheet of parchment. “Paris will not be allowed to surrender to her worst instincts,” I muttered, sharpening my quill. “Nor will you, Manon Roland.” And I began to write.
I NEVER HAD the slightest temptation to become an author.
Any woman who acquires that title loses much more than she gains—men dislike her, and women criticize her. If her work is bad, they make fun of her. If it is good, everybody says she cannot have written it herself. If forced to admit she was responsible for most of it, they turn to picking holes in her character. No, a woman gained nothing by picking up a pen and writing under her own name; she would only pay with her reputation, and I had spent my life avoiding that trap.
Yet that day, my pen flew swift and sure.
By evening I sat slumped and drained, as Roland paced before the dying fire reading my words. “‘—it is the duty of the constituted authorities to put an end to this chaos, or see themselves reduced to nothing—’ That is excellent, my dear.”
I smiled faintly, looking at my husband: minister of the interior for the second time, reinstated this August after his fiery letter of reprimand to the king had gotten him dismissed in June. Never had I been prouder. Not of that letter, which had since become famous, but of the stand he had not been afraid to take, even if it cost him his office. Small wonder he had been reinstated after Louis Capet fell, as our revolution realized it needed men of principle. Roland read on now, light shining through his thinning hair—he had always scorned to wear a wig. “‘—if this declaration exposes me to the fury of certain agitators, well, let them take my life . . .’ Is that not too strong?”
“The times call for strong words.”
“But to issue a direct challenge like that, that I am happy to die rather than abandon my stance or my post . . . there are many things to live for besides one’s post, after all.”
There is nothing to live for above duty, I thought. A minister ought to stay at his post in the face of anything. But I chose not to say that. Instead, I smiled, murmuring, “Amend it as you see best.”
He sat down with my sheets and his quill.
I knew people whispered that I meddled in politics through my husband, that he never spoke a word in the Assembly not written by me. Of all the mud inevitably flung at people in public life, it was that charge that nettled me the most, not that I ever let that show. Why should I not share in my husband’s work?
I would never put myself forward in any unseemly way; that was not a wife’s place and I would never overstep my role. Not for me any notion of equality, all those silly notions put forward by women like Olympe de Gouges, penning her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and accomplishing nothing at all but to make every man in Paris either chuckle or froth. No, a woman’s role was properly filled behind the scenes, behind her husband, and I was steeped in my husband’s ideas. If I took up a pen to draft his speeches, well, it was because as a woman I had far more leisure for writing. Maybe I had a certain knack for imbuing his style with more boldness and strength than he might have achieved unaided—it had been my pen that drafted the famous letter he read aloud to the king in June—but once Roland discovered how well I could interpret his thoughts, he relied on me entirely. What would make a woman happier than to see her husband gain acclaim with her own words?
Watching him edit the address, I suddenly remembered my darling maman, gone these many years, looking over her embroidery at my young self and asking with some exasperation why I had turned down the latest suitor. “He has a high regard for you and will be happy to be guided by you. You could dominate him.”
“Oh, Maman,” I had said with a sigh. “I have no use for a man I could dominate. I cannot marry a great baby.”
“Mignonne, you are very hard to please—for you do not seem to want a strong man either.”
“I certainly do not want a man who would give me orders,” I replied with all the assurance of a girl who knows nothing. “But neither do I want to have to control my husband. These little men who are five feet tall with great beards, who never cease making it clear that they are the masters . . . if a man like that started trying to make me accept his superiority, I should quickly resent it, while if another man gave way to me entirely I should be embarrassed by my own dominance.”
Then came my mother’s smile, wise and amused. “I see. You want to control a man in such a way that he thinks himself the master while doing exactly what you want.”
“That is not it at all, Maman,” I had sniffed at the time. I still think my mother was entirely wrong, wise as she was in other matters, but I couldn’t help remembering her words.
“Come look at this, Manon,” my husband called. “This phrase?”
He’d scratched out a bit of my wording, reworked it, then scratched that out and written my own back again. “I think you say it very well, my dear.”
He kissed my cheek. “You should go to bed. You look tired.”
He was the one who looked tired—his features drawn, his eyes sunken. How exhausting it was to stand alone in such a sea of chaos. We will need allies in the days to come, I thought, because we cannot accomplish this work alone. The schism in the new government must be healed—and it was the moderate men, our men, who must win.
Allies. I thought of the burned note in the handwriting that seared my eyes—I love your straight brows and your eager way of jumping from a carriage and your fine mind like a diamond. Say the word and I will come.
I did not want to write back. I was terrified to write back. But savage men who were the puppets of calculating men had come to our doorstep with blood on their minds, and it was just chance things had not turned violent—chance, and perhaps my will to face them down. But I could not count on that working again. The next crowd might not scruple to rend me to pieces like those poor women at the Salpêtrière.
We needed allies, and the man who loved me had a powerful voice.
Retreating to my bed, I sat under the absurd canopy of ostrich feathers and scribbled swiftly: My friend, I cannot give you what you seek. But come to Paris for friendship alone, for the wolves are gathering.
THE ADDRESS I drafted was well received—of course it was. Little men of little courage applauded my husband, showing all the boldness weak people show when they witness a courageous denunciation they would not be capable of themselves. Afterward, it was printed, distributed, posted to the masses, but nothing raised my spirits. The dead were still dead, and the blood of more than one thousand victims still stained the paving stones of Paris no matter how much vinegar was poured to scrub it away.
Yet the game of politics played on, and now we had a new stage.
“Who can keep it all straight?” I heard that cry often, as pamphleteers struggled to keep the public informed of the latest political factions.
For myself, I observed that the names changed but the debates didn’t. The king’s Estates General might have become the National Assembly, and the National Assembly might have become the Legislative Assembly, and now it was late September and we had the National Convention that had newly convened at the Tuileries. “Don’t bother trying to tell the different assemblies and conventions apart,” I advised a perplexed woman watching from the galleries at my side. “It might be different men, but they all sound the same, talking of their own merits the way a loose woman talks of her chastity.”
Royalty abolished; the French Republic decl
ared one and indivisible—those were advances of the Convention I could cheer, up in the spectator galleries where I went daily to witness the debates, a tricolor sash at my waist and tricolor rosettes on my slippers. But oh, how much more debate there was than action! Men like my husband pressed to bring the killers of the prison massacres to justice, then some blocky coarse-featured fellow would rise from the high bleacher seats the radicals had made their own, and cry, “During revolutions, vigorous measures are necessary!” Then a colleague of my husband’s would rise, thundering in full countercry, and nothing would be done.
I could have boxed their ears, every one of them. I could have stamped down to that floor and told them what was needed to restore order: dissolve the radical Paris faction that was determined to run everything to suit themselves (the rest of the nation be damned); reorganize the forces of public order; provide them with a commander chosen by the country’s geographical sections. Was that not obvious? I wanted to bang my hands on the rail and shout down that not all France was Paris and we must have a federal system as the Americans did so that the whole of the country was represented and we might deprive these city mobs of the power to levy life and death. And I would have told Citizen Robespierre, now a deputy of the National Convention, and his increasing band of fanatics to go to the devil if they contradicted me.
So many men to evaluate from my place in the gallery, but the longer I watched, the more the true leaders of the Paris faction became clear. Seated in those high bleacher seats at the Convention—the Mountain seats, which made them the Montagnards—they formed a radical triumvirate, one to bring a republic low rather than raise it high as in the days of Rome. You three, I thought, eyes narrowing.
Robespierre—the small, cool, bewigged leader of the Jacobins who were becoming the voice of the fanatical Paris faction. I’d once liked him, or at least admired him, but now I had the powerful urge to wring his neck every time he enunciated counterrevolutionary treason in his high, precise voice.