The Sparks Fly Upward

by Diana Norman

  She knew something else; she couldn’t go home without him. Yes, I was in France. I went to rescue somebody but he was too busy, so I came home.

  Another humiliating failure to add to a long list.

  Somehow, during the course of that afternoon, it was arranged. She was to stay at Number Fifteen to await the completion of Condorcet’s manuscript. She was to be its new maid—partly to explain her presence in the house and partly because Mme Vernet wanted to send the old one to safety and could not manage on her own.

  The maid’s name was Manon and she’d been in Mme Vernet’s employment for twenty-seven years and this, the occasion of her dismissal, was probably the first time they had ever quarrelled.

  Manon’s denunciation of her sacking was loud; everybody heard it and the little punctuations of quiet, which were Mme Vernet’s loving but obdurate insistence.

  ‘I will not go. Why should I go? . . . You think I am afraid? . . . We will go to the guillotine together ... But that chit (gosse) cannot care for you properly. Can she starch your caps? Make M Sarrett’s tisanes? . . . I am not going, you cannot make me.’

  Mme Vernet could and did. The two of them embraced in the courtyard, Manon still weeping and pleading, while M Sarrett carried her luggage to the cart that was to take her to the Rouen diligence and the Normandy village of her birth.

  Until then, Philippa had not been sure that Mme Vernet was fully aware of how great a danger she ran in hiding Condorcet. But the woman stood at the gate until the cart was out of sight; when she turned her face was that of one who had bidden an old friend good-bye for ever.

  So the name of Manon Bercot disappeared from the prescribed list of residents at Number Fifteen, Gravediggers, and that of Jeanne Renard took its place.

  The new maid and her mistress went together to register the change.

  Philippa was frightened from the moment they left the house. The walk down the hill to the church of Saint Sulpice, now the administration headquarters of the Luxembourg Revolutionary Section, was like walking into jungle with nothing to protect her from its beasts. She could hear them baying.

  In a sense, the noise in the church provided cover. It bounced off marble and stone to bewilder the ears; everybody was too busy and too harried to be on the watch for counterrevolutionaries. At the entrance, women were sorting a small mountain of donated shoes and boots awaiting shipment to the battalions fighting in the Vendée. A ‘Down with Tyranny’ flag was draped over a confessional box, swathes of tricolor ribbons hid such icons as hadn’t been already chipped away. An out-of-date poster that hadn’t kept up with the thinking of Robespierre declared, ‘Liberty is the only form of Worship.’ Others, more usefully, gave the names of the months and days in the new revolutionary decadal calendar for those still confused by it—practically everybody.

  In a side chapel a choir of children was rehearsing the ‘Hymn to the Republic,’ while a small boy on a chair delivered the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the lines of people waiting at one side of the trestle tables for papers, permits, food and fuel stamps, certificats de civisme, destitution relief. Clerks, questioning and scribbling, sat at the other.

  It seemed to Philippa, trying not to shake with nerves, that people would notice Mme Vernet, so neat, so cool, an eye of calm in this hurricane of hubbub and anxiety; composure like hers must be unpatriotic.

  But Republic or monarchy, the Mme Vernets of France were eternal factors; anyway, most of the Luxembourg—an area she’d lived in since she was married—seemed to know her. The clerk who dealt with them called her ‘Madame,’ without being dragged off to prison, or anyone even noticing.

  They returned home without incident, Philippa on legs left weak with tension.

  The work at Number Fifteen was hard, made harder by shortages and Mme Vernet’s refusal to deal with the black market. At first Mme Vernet did most of the shopping and cooking—miraculously stretching rations to include her unregistered guest—Philippa most of the cleaning and laundry. At nights she dragged herself up to her attic room almost too tired to undress. Yet living by Mme Vernet’s immutable routine was her safeguard against fear; inside these walls, she could almost believe that God’s purpose still ran and that, sooner or later, the jungle outside would achieve the harmony existing within. It was only in her dreams that reality broke through the defenses in a flood of blood, mingling terror and a horrible desolation; I don’t want to die among strangers. I want to go home. I want Ma.

  Curiously, if escaping the havoc of loving Andrew Ffoulkes had been one of her reasons for coming to France, she had achieved it. The love was there and always would be, but it had retired to the horizon, a crazy sweetness of adolescence to be remembered with nostalgia.

  That much had been achieved, then.

  But the best reason was Condorcet. She set his breakfast tray on the floor while she knocked on the door of the third floor room—and waited. After a while a voice said: ‘Seven to the power of n . . . Come in.’

  She smiled. So he was between chapters and relaxing his mind with mathematical problems the way other people took a walk, or a bath. It had been a foible of his, to speak his last thought before everyday life intruded on him, like putting a bookmark between pages. Still was.

  The room was thick with the smell of tobacco smoke, books and bad feet. Philippa crossed it, put the tray in the fireplace—every other surface was covered with papers and his manuscript—planted a kiss on the head of the man sitting at a writing table and raised the window to allow air in.

  He’d aged dreadfully. He’d hardly left this room in eight months and lack of exercise had made him flabby. His right leg had become ulcerated but he refused to allow Mme Vernet to send for Cabanis to treat it, saying it was too dangerous for the doctor to come, and anyway the discomfort was nothing.

  ‘I’ll be seeing Sophie today,’ Philippa said and saw his eyes shut in happiness, though automatically he said, ‘No.’

  He feared for her; she brought him newspapers and he was therefore more aware of the jungle’s dangers than she was—she didn’t have time to read them. But if Philippa had a purpose here now, it was to provide the link between two great souls who loved each other and whom she loved.

  His letters to Sophie made no mention of his discomfort; they spoke of plans for their future, drawings to make Eliza laugh, a small miracle of a book he’d written on a simple method to teach her mathematics.

  Sophie’s letters to him ignored her poverty and gave descriptions of her sitters, gossip, tales of their child and love, always love.

  Oh, God. Philippa remembered that today she must deliver to him the letter on which Sophie was spending blotched, agonizing days of composition, telling him she must divorce him.

  ‘I’m safe enough,’ Philippa said to him now. ‘Mme Vernet is even letting me do some shopping—it will look strange if she’s constantly queuing while she has a maid to do it.’

  ‘To queue’ was the new verb. Somebody had likened the waiting lines of people outside the shops to a tail of hair and the word had caught on. You queued for everything, sometimes for hours, waiting for the rationed meat or bread to come in. Rumour went around: ‘Fouquet’s has a consignment of stockings,’ and you queued for those. Sometimes you joined a queue not knowing what it was for but hoping it was useful.

  For Philippa, the queueing itself was an education and not an unhappy one. For one thing, the weather was sunny though, as an old countrywoman she met in the bread line had pointed out, the persistent drought was worrying—it meant that the queues next winter would be longer and for less.

  For another, it brought her in touch with the ordinary Parisians, mostly women, but sometimes men as well, and the latest cautious gossip—you never knew if a Committee of Public Safety spy was listening in.

  What it was like in the East End where extreme poverty and the Rue Saint Antoine enragés kept up the demand for more and more heads to roll, as if blood could feed the starving, she didn’t know. But in the queues around the bo
urgeois sections of the Luxembourg and Quatre Nations dominated by the Cordelier Club of men like Danton and de Vaubon, she detected a deep and growing sickness at the slaughter perpetrated in the Republic’s name.

  Fewer and fewer turned up in the Place de la Révolution to watch the executions, and those who did were people you wouldn’t want to take home to mother.

  Standing at the window, looking out at the back garden and the doomed hens, she said suddenly: ‘Why can’t it stop? Nobody wants it any more. They were muttering against Robespierre in the queue yesterday. What happened to our Revolution? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I.’ He took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Perhaps the expectation was too high; people wanted more bread and more power than it was possible to give them immediately. They became a mob. An individual is of value above rubies, a mob is reasonless.’ He shook his head. ‘I am sorry for Robespierre; he didn’t want this, either, he’s on the back of a tiger and trying to direct it by pulling its ears.’

  He isn’t sorry for you, Philippa thought, he wants to feed you to the tiger. But she had already broken the rules; in this room the present was merely an inconvenience, one that might kill him but still just a passing wobble in humanity’s steady march towards betterment.

  Somewhere under that mound of papers lay the certificat de civisme and travel documents she’d given him, less important than the essay that covered them that charted mankind’s progress from its earliest days, that prophesied, that promised, a world where men and women would have no master except their own reason.

  ‘It will show that nature has set no bounds to the perfecting of human faculties, Philippa,’ he’d said of it. ‘Independently of any power that would like to stop it, as the Terror is trying to do, so long as our globe exists the tempo will differ but we shall never go back.’

  Oh, she loved him. ‘Don’t let your coffee go cold,’ she said and went to the door.

  But today, because he was between chapters, he wanted her company. ‘I’ve become a garrulous old man,’ he said, ‘whereas you’ve told me very little of yourself. You lay this burden of gratitude on me yet I know nothing except that it cannot be repaid. Tell me whys and wherefores. Speak English—I grow rusty. Have you kept up with your mathematics?’

  She smiled and sat down. ‘No.’ It was typical of him that this should be the first question he asked. ‘I’ve been too confused and in love.’

  She could tell things to this clear and alien mind that she kept concealed from those they most closely concerned. She told him about Ffoulkes and his marriage, about Stephen Heilbron, about the Condorcet society and what Fitch-Botley had done to her, and threw in some makeweight about her mother—though they’d never met he’d always loved Makepeace stories.

  Once she’d enumerated the portmanteau of problems that had driven her to France in order that he would not feel so indebted, she went back to the beginning, to the Ffoulkes’s ball and her request for papers from The League and Sir Boy Blanchard’s reluctance to help her. From this distance, the man’s subsequent actions against her appeared ludicrous.

  ‘He had me followed,’ she said, amiably. ‘Now there is someone who’ll go to all lengths to avoid England’s pollution by your damn republicanism.’

  ‘Yes.’ He was looking out of the window. ‘He’s a traitor, you know.’ He said it as if it were of passing interest.

  ‘He’s a what?’

  ‘Hmm?’ He turned from the window. ‘Yes, Brissot used him. Called him a flesh-monger, I remember. A shameful business but there were some of the old regime, some aristos we couldn’t allow to escape; they were taking too much of the country’s gold with them. Blanchard would offer them transit and then hand them over to the State.’ Condorcet smiled apologetically. ‘In return for a portion of the gold, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Blanchard? Sir Boy Blanchard?’

  He nodded. ‘Oh, yes.’

  She stared at him; poor old man, his mind was wandering. But he’d been in the center of revolutionary government for three of its years; he’d know. ‘Andrew wouldn’t have allowed it. ’

  ‘Lord Ffoulkes? No, no, I doubt he was aware of it. His men seem to have run a most successful escape route. Certainly, we never caught them at it.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps we didn’t try too hard; the greater the number of our aristocrats other countries had to support the better we liked it.’

  ‘But Blanchard . . . he sold some of them to you?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ The perfidy of men didn’t interest him, perhaps because he’d never understood it. Anyway, some factor to the power of n, or a new idea for the book, was now occupying him. He began fidgeting with his papers.

  She sat on a while longer, then groped for the door and went out. On the landing she gripped the balustrade, listening to voices and seeing visions of a beautiful mouth hiding bad teeth.

  ‘He’s a schemer. He’s jealous of everything Andrew has, without the goodness and money to have it.’

  Ma knew, bless her.

  ‘Imagine a Machiavelli that plays cricket and you’ve got Boy Blanchard. ’

  For a moment she was assailed by pity for both betrayed and betrayer; how terrible to be the trusting Andrew Ffoulkes; how much worse not to be Andrew. What a burden on the soul; in England to twirl in the light of adulation from those you helped to escape knowing that in France you peddled human beings to a contemptuous enemy. A flesh-monger.

  She could almost smile, remembering their encounter; an insignificant woman asking his help to bring to England one of the few people who could reveal what he had done and declare to his adoring, betrayed aristocrats, ‘This man is stained.’ The energy he’d used in trying to stop her had been panic.

  She stopped smiling. If he knew she’d succeeded, how much more would he do to stop her getting back? Her description would be sent to the Committee of Public Safety within the day.

  He doesn’t know. Nobody’s even aware I’m in France.

  Yes, they do. The smugglers know.

  But he can’t know exactly where I am, nobody knows where Nicolas is hiding.

  Sophie knows and you told Andrew you’d received a letter from her.

  Yes, but why should Andrew tell Blanchard?

  He trusts him; why should he not?

  ‘Jeanne?’

  ‘I’m coming, Madame.’

  She went downstairs, frantically trying to remember whether she’d given Andrew Sophie’s address.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE council of war in the Green Room had only one defeatist in its ranks.

  ‘I tell you they’re going to close The Duke’s down,’ Makepeace repeated.

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ Murrough told her. ‘They’re only going to refuse us a license to perform plays.’

  ‘It’s the same thing, aint it?’ Her eyes were closed with weariness. She felt as if she’d rolled down an extremely steep hillside and was being asked to climb up it again; she wasn’t sure she had the energy. The Lord Chamberlain, more especially Stephen Heilbron and his understanding pity, had taken the stuffing out of her.

  Salvos of not-at-alls and certainly-nots were coming at her from all sides. They amazed her; they weren’t at all cast down.

  ‘We could turn Oroonoko into a burletta. We could ...’

  There were apparently several ways to get round Lord Chamberlain rulings. If there were not, virtually the only theaters in the country would be Covent Garden and Drury Lane, those two holders of the royal patent, whereas nearly every big town now had its playhouse, or at least some hall where drama could be performed by one of England’s bands of strolling players.

  You could use what was known as the ‘snuff ploy;’ get in some cases of snuff, charge the audience to sample it and perform the play free while it was doing so. ‘Colley Cibber did that, do you remember? Turned Lincolns Inn Fields into a snuff factory?’

  There was the similar ‘chocolate ploy,’ providing a cup of chocolate per person. ‘And that’s be
tter,’ Polly Armitage said. ‘That way the buggers don’t sneeze during the performance.’

  Or, since the Lord Chamberlain couldn’t forbid a concert, you could charge for a musical entertainment—‘hire a fiddler or two, dance the odd hornpipe’—and invite the audience to watch you ‘rehearsing’ a play gratis during the interval. ‘Goodmans Fields got away with that for three years.’

  Or, on much the same principle, you could turn the play itself into a musical entertainment, punctuating it with song and dance and calling it a ‘burletta.’ In his early days, they assured Makepeace, the great Garrick himself had appeared in a Macbeth that included fifteen songs and a hornpipe.

  She looked around at them. Dizzy’s fine, long face flickered with persuasion, Ninon’s lifted as if encountering an old enemy, little Chrissy Gardham kneaded her hand, trying to enthuse her through her skin.

  Irreverent to church and authority. Vagabonds, all of them—literally. None of the statutes passed against them by Henry the Eighth, by Elizabeth, by the Puritans, by Walpole, had been rescinded. The laws that had clipped the ears of their predecessors, put them in the pillory, in prison, could still do the same to them; government hated mockery as much as it hated the transmission of ideas.

  She contrasted their faces to the miser’s purse that was the Revered Deedes’s.

  How sorry, he’d said, he was to see her, his neighbor, a widow and consequently in need of Christian protection, consorting with these, the lowest dregs of humanity, this nursery of impious immorality, contamination and damnation . . .

  He’s rehearsed this, she’d thought. He trod the boards of his bedroom, practicing his alliteration and striking attitudes at his looking glass. He’s as much a performer as those up on the stage.

  ‘. . . ribaldry and obscenity. I could not shirk my duty to one of my own flock. The Lord Chamberlain was informed out of the need to save you from yourself.’