The Year of the French

by Thomas Flanagan

  “I know that, Owen.”

  “You are not. You have that low, seminary Latin. You will never see how meaning curls and curves through a line. Still, we must do our best for you. Better than nothing, Ferdy. Better than nothing.”

  “Much better,” O’Donnell said, standing with him at the open door. “You did not quarrel with those fellows, did you?”

  “Which of them deserves to quarrel with me? They are a low lot, Ferdy, a low lot. You must hold yourself apart from that lot, now mind that. Remember Virgil. That lot in there, Virgil wouldn’t have given them the sweat off his balls.”

  O’Donnell watched him walk up the road, unsteady on his feet, drunk, a clumsy ploughboy going home.

  He sat on a small, grassy hill. The air was clear and cold, and the world no longer danced before him. He was disgusted with himself. He could not remember half of what he had said, and the other half he tried to forget but could not.

  He was no MacCarthy of Clancarty, but a labourer’s son, as his father had been before him, as the spalpeens in the cabin were. As he would be himself if his father had not found the pennies to send him to the hedge school outside Tralee. There had been an enigmatic power to the words in the foxed and battered primer, a luminous presence somewhere behind the page. He would be a labourer now had it not been for the master, a poet himself, who carefully taught him the forms and conventions. When he was older, and had himself begun to set words together, the master took him to the taverns where the poets met. MacCarthy would sit well away from the winter fire, where the poets sat, his hands wrapped around a cup of ale, an overgrown boy with long arms and legs. First one and then another of the poets would rise, speaking from memory, the bells of sound ringing across the complex nets of metre, images grouping themselves together, ring beyond bright ring. Beyond the fastened tavern door, the cold West Munster winter, with Atlantic winds cutting past Brandon and across the two bays.

  Home was a hovel on the Fenit road, as bad as any in Kilcummin, the dark, windowless room across which his heavy, exhausted father fell towards sleep. Against that darkness, the splendour of shaping a poem, the sounds and images entwining. It became your own, though linked with a hundred others by poets living and long dead. It was a world of air and sunlight. Everywhere else, cabins and the smell of dung, the pigs rooting by the bed, children fighting for the potatoes at the bottom of the pot. Clownish churl, you count your cows in children’s lives. But dawn would spring from blackness in a poem, a meadow in fair flower and a maiden moving across it, wondrous fair and bathed in light. The dark day of the Gael is ending, she would tell the poet, and her beauty would smite him like the power of truth. Ships are on the sea bringing the deliverer, an O’Neill or an O’Donnell, or the gallant young Scottish king, the royal blackbird. Darkness would shatter against the bright sword of that deliverer, and light would stream into windowless hovels.

  In time, first as apprentice to a hedge teacher and then a master himself, MacCarthy scrambled out of the hovels, moving from village to village, posting his notices of instruction on chapel gates, meeting his winter classes in barns to which each child brought each day two sods of turf. Hens and pennies for instruction at first, then hens and shillings. It was his trade: a poet had his trade and he had his craft. His trade could be teaching, tavernkeeping, even, as with Owen Ruagh O’Sullivan, day labouring. His craft was the articulation of sound and passion. In time, still in his young twenties, MacCarthy’s verses became known to other poets, spoken in taverns he had never visited by men whose poems he himself knew, joined in the freemasonry of language. He was welcome in the houses of the old native gentry, where Irish was still spoken, and where beeswax candles lighted walls upon which hung swords which a hundred years before had gone into battle with Sarsfield. Harp and pipe would fall silent and MacCarthy would be summoned forward to recite his verses, and the gentry, O’Conors and Frenches and MacDermots who had somehow kept their land, would nod their approval. Coins of silver or of gold for a poet who flung backward a slender bridge of words to a world lost by Boyneside and Shannonside, buried beneath the bloody mud of Aughrim. He had his aislings and laments for the Catholic big houses, and songs for the taverns, courting songs and drinking songs, the loose copper change of his art. His frequent drunkenness, his loose and wanton ways with women, his bad temper, his sardonic manner, were accepted as somehow bound into his craft. He and his fellow poets were the survivors of an old order, like the impoverished Catholic gentry with their fading pedigrees and their useless, ornamental swords.

  There were times, goose feather scratching beside tallow candle, when MacCarthy lived in a cold, perfect silence broken only by the ring of words upon his imagination. But there were other moments of chill doubt, striking at the hand which held the pen, freezing the fingers. His poems celebrated the old earls, the O’Neills and the O’Donnells, but what had these done in the heel of the hunt but take ship for Spain with their families, leaving their people stuck in the mud, as stuck they were to this day. They made fine poems about Ireland’s darling, Patrick Sarsfield, sailing off to France after Limerick with his Irish army, but few of these spoke of their wives who went screaming and wailing after the ships, their babies held high above their heads. Fine poems about King James, the Royal Stuart, but not one said what every poet knew, that the peasants who had been prodded and bayonet-pricked into battle called him “Seamus the Shit,” who fled so fast from the Boyne that he outdistanced the messenger bringing southwards the news of the great defeat. Rubies in the mud, those fabled names, O’Neill, Maguire, Sarsfield. The poets picked them up, polished them bright, set them in a filigree of words to comfort a people without hope.

  It was true that MacCarthy had travelled widely through his Munster and Connaught worlds, but he lied when he said that he had been to Antrim, and he had never been close to Dublin. A network of taverns lay open to a good poet, and MacCarthy had talked and drunk in Bantry and Macroom and Ballyvourney, in Limerick and Ennis and Galway. But he knew his world well enough to know that there was another world beyond it which he did not know at all. In his youth and in his father’s time, and his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s, Irish boys had slipped off to France in smugglers’ ships to serve King Louis, and now the last King Louis was dead, his head rolled into a barrel, lopped off by a great engine with an immense blade in the centre of it. No more songs would be written about the Irish brigades in the service of France, and there were no more toasts to King Louis in the halls of the Catholic gentry, who now were as terrified of France as the Cromwellian squires.

  “Oh, the French are on the sea, says the Sean Bhean Bhocht,” the poor old woman who personified Ireland. One way or another, the silly crone had been gibbering that for better than a century. And now the French might indeed be on the sea, but not the same French at all. These were the French who had struck off King Louis’ head, and perhaps planned the same for King George. Two years before, they had brought their great invasion fleet into Bantry Bay, but had been held off from landing by the Protestant winds. MacCarthy knew that bay well, long, slender arm of the sea; men must have stood by cabin doors, staring down hillsides at tall-masted ships, a prophecy almost fulfilled. Now, with parts of the island in turmoil, there was talk that they would come again. Songs of rebellion had been drifting towards Connaught all spring, but had a way of getting drowned in the Shannon. Unimaginable, that southern rebellion, much less the Ulster rising; a hosting of thousands on the roads, peasants armed with pikes. What had this to do with O’Neill in bright saffron, his belt blazing with jewels, or Patrick Sarsfield, jacketed in white satin, sash of red silk, silver-hilted sword? And what had history itself to do with the battered strands of Mayo? Mayo moved in its own cycle, hostage to its own wide fields, stone and grass and turf.

  What of MacCarthy himself, a man who would never have land, no more than his father? In the old days, it was said, poets sat at the table of chieftain and lord, but Ireland had been thrice broken, by Elizabeth, by Cromwell, b
y William. All poets now were hedge poets, taking honour where they could find it. Once, in West Cork, near Macroom, walking the road in the warm afternoon, he had rounded a curve to see set before him a big house of cut Portland stone with great white porticoes and eight tall pillars soaring from the porch. There was a carriage coming down the avenue, and MacCarthy stood aside to let it pass: a gentleman in finest velvet, his linen white and shining, his face white and shining, presenting himself to the sun. Now there, MacCarthy thought, if a poet writes for lords, I should be writing for this Squire Jenkins or Colonel Bumpkin. But if he sees me at all, he sees a gawky spalpeen, tramping the roads for work. And for my part, I write of chieftains whose ruined keeps, by bog or headland, are byres for cows.

  3

  FROM THE WORKBOOKS OF

  GEORGE MOORE, ESQUIRE,

  OF MOORE HALL, BALLINTUBBER,

  COUNTY MAYO, AUTHOR OF

  “THE WHIG TRIUMPH,”

  “A REPLY TO MR. SAURIN,” ETC.

  Tuesday. Above all else, the Girondists prided themselves upon their oratory, and doubtless it is by their oratory that they will be remembered. Of these circumstances, the first may be said to have defined their weakness, and the second may serve as their epitaph. “Here lie, headless, certain high-minded public figures. They spoke well.” But what oratory, what an appalling and insipid brew of Racine and Rousseau! Elaborate figures, formless effusions, bathetic autobiographical confidences exhibited amidst cheers. And their favourite stance, that of the austere and ancient Roman, a type most uncongenial to Rousseau’s onanistic ecstasies.

  I well recall Vergniaud addressing the Convention at the time of its decision that history itself was to be dated afresh, from the autumnal equinox of what we in our moribund fashion term 1792, but which to the French is now Year I. The very autumn which witnessed the appalling September Massacres, which shocked the Girondists but which they dared not denounce. There he stood, in all his tall, portly rectitude, one hand upon his bosom and the other raised aloft, felicitating himself and all within hearing that they lived within the very accouchement chamber of liberty and justice. And from that time forward, at every crisis in their affairs, they leaped into rhetoric as a fox into its covert, while their unappeasable enemies bayed and pawed the ground outside. Until, at last, their enemies caught them within the cruel trap fashioned by the issue of the King’s execution. For the Girondists heartily disapproved of his death, but were by now so thoroughly frightened that they lapsed not into oratory but into silence save for the word “mort” by which they voted for his execution. And upon that occasion, we heard a note of more authentic eloquence, with the stuff of steel and terror in it. Here is young Saint-Just, Robespierre’s Saint John, upon the matter of the King’s death: “The death of the tyrant is necessary to assure those who fear that one day they will be punished for their daring, and also to terrify those who have not yet renounced the monarchy. A people cannot found liberty when it respects the memory of its chains.” And here is Danton: “Let us fling down to the kings the head of a king as gage of battle.” And, most eloquent of all, Danton’s whisper to the Girondists: “Your party is ruined.”

  It is a wonder to me how my young brother John could have acquired so rich an arsenal of Girondist eloquence in the course of two Dublin terms, when he should have been studying law, or else, like a decent Irish gentleman, wenching, drinking, and gambling. Surely John is better suited by nature for such occupations, an open, manly young fellow, with a gentlemanly aversion to study and reflexion, as is demonstrated by the abrupt close of his connexion with the legal profession. And yet what pride it would have given Father to see his son as one of the first Papists admitted to the bar! Perhaps the spirit of Rousseau is in the very air these days, like dandelion puffballs. We were seated at breakfast the other morning, and John was discoursing to me, master to pupil, upon the tyranny of England, and the need to snap the galling chains of our oppression. As he talked, I was looking through the window at a gang of our peasants whom I have set to work enclosing one of our unused fields, which I intend shall be an ornamental garden. They were carrying, with their bare hands, heavy boulders, their backs bent and straining under the effort. John did not notice them, his eyes were fixed upon our legislative wrongs, the subservience of our Parliament, the civic and social corruptions worked upon us by our imperial masters.

  Wednesday. And yet it is upon these heavers of boulders, these hewers of wood and drawers of water, that the Society of United Irishmen relied. These wretches were to fight their rebellion for them. Why, they might well be living upon different planets, the Dublin barristers of the Society, and the peasants of rural Ireland. I myself, who live amongst them, have no true knowledge of their lives or their natures.

  I watched their Saint John’s Eve celebrations. Early in the evening, a bonfire was lighted on the low hill across the lake, and there the people gathered, talking, laughing, singing, and drinking freely. There were athletic contests of a sort, young men leaping through the flames, to the cheers of their neighbours. All was done most easily and spontaneously, and they had no notion, I am certain, that these are rituals unchanged from pagan times, a celebration and propitiation of the sun at the turning point of the year. The most powerful of all natural forces, those of fertility and generation, were being addressed. It is the custom of these people, when the ashes of the bonfire are cool, to gather them up and save them that they may be mixed with the seed corn of the following season. In this they obey not a deep natural instinct, but rather a ritual which has been carried forward, unchanged, from perhaps two thousand years in the past. And these are the men whom Tom Emmet and Wolfe Tone—and Malcolm Elliott and my young brother John here in Mayo—propose to instruct in the Rights of Man and the desirability of parliamentary reform and the virtues of a republican government.

  Thursday. But in Tyrawley, northwards of here, the Saint John’s Eve celebrations ended with an attack upon the cattle of a Kilcummin gentleman named Gibson, a magistrate who has incurred much local displeasure by reason of his severity and perhaps also his bigoted behaviour. This was more formidable than the attack on Cooper, many more cattle were injured, and a tenant who watched the attackers at work reports that there were at least forty of them. He professes to have recognised none of them, which is possible, for Whiteboys usually take care to blacken their faces.

  Saturday. Tyrawley, the barony which can boast of these Whiteboys, is a long afternoon’s ride northwards of here, a woebegone region which straggles along the River Moy. The County Sligo borders it to the right, but to the left it merges into the waste barony of Erris, beyond which lie the almost deserted bogs and mountains of Belmullet. The great extent of its acreage is the property of Lord Glenthorne, an absentee, but there are fifteen or so fair-sized estates, most of them the possessions of Cromwellian planters. These smaller landlords are understandably beside themselves with apprehension, and one of them, Cooper, the commander of the local yeomanry, proposes that he be given a “free hand,” by which he means, quite simply, that he proposes to burn, whip, and torture until he has extracted confessions.

  For a time at least he will be restrained by Dennis Browne, a man of great local influence, both political and social. Browne is of course no friend to Whiteboys, but his chief present concern is to keep Mayo tranquil until the threats of rebellion and invasion have passed away. But for all the suave and splendid polish which Browne displays in the Dublin Parliament and at the Viceregal court, he is at heart a chieftain and a man of property. If these Whiteboy attacks continue, I have little doubt that he will give Cooper the “free hand” he craves. Thus has “justice” been achieved in Mayo, for as far back as runs the memory of man.

  Monday. I was last night reading one of Tallien’s early speeches in the Convention, a typically coarse production, although whether “cynical” or “hypocritical” is the more exact word for him I cannot say. He has the Rousseau cant down pat, and little wayside flowers of “liberty,” “sacred rights of man
,” and “fervent love of freedom” blossom between the paving stones of brutal attacks upon his opponents. It is this man and other choice cronies who rule France today as the Directory. What a gang of rogues they are—Tallien, Rewbell, Barras, and the rest of them! They waded to power through the blood of the Terror, then turned on Robespierre lest they fell victim themselves. Nothing is left now save Power: no resounding oratory, no fine phrases, not even the sincere fanaticism which lent a baleful dignity to Robespierre. And these are the men with whom Wolfe Tone negotiates, that they may bring liberty to Ireland.

  He is fit company for them. I met this young man in London, at Holland House, when he accompanied the Catholic delegation as their Protestant agent. I confess I found him a plausible, attractive rogue, all nervous energy and wit. He has a lively and audacious mind, much intellectual bravado, is a skilful musician, and has a copious appetite for whiskey and wine. Had he been born a Frenchman, or even an American, a triumphant career would assuredly have been his, for his talents are in great demand these days. But alas for him, he shares with me the misfortune of having been born an Irishman, and must build with our humble bricks. And build he has done! He was in Bantry Bay two years ago, with Hoche and the French fleet, and though Hoche is dead now, the Cork coast may see Tone again. A marvellous career it may appear to some, a starveling barrister risen up to negotiate with the French Directory on behalf of a people who scarce know his name. But then, we live in marvellous times.

  Ambition, brains, lack of scruple—what may these not now accomplish, in this springtime world towards which we have been guided by Rousseau’s genius? I have no time for those who would argue that the authors of the Terror misunderstood their master. The Terror is implicit in Rousseau. Listen to Robespierre: “When a nation has been forced into insurrection, it returns to a state of nature, with regard to the tyrant. There is no longer any law but the safety of the people.” The guillotine stands guarantor for the social contract.