Camille Desmoulins was in hiding near Versailles. In Arcis, Danton arranged his affairs. He had given his brother-in-law a power of attorney, authorizing him inter
Lord Gower, the British Ambassador, in dispatches:
Danton is fled, and M. Robespierre the great
Revolutions de Paris: a newspaper:
What will become of liberty? Some say it is finished … .
PART FOUR
Camille Desmoulins:
“The King has aimed a pistol at the nation’s head; he has misfired, and it is the nation’s turn now.”
Lucile Desmoulins:
“We want to be free; but oh God, the cost of it.”
CHAPTER 1
Manon Roland sat by the window, turning her cheek to catch the fading warmth of the late October sun. Slowly, with deliberation, she dipped her needle through worn cloth. Even in our circumstances, there are domestic servants for such tasks. But nothing is ever done quite so well as when you do it yourself. Then again—she bent her head over the work—what could be more soothing, more ordinary than a linen sheet? In a fractious world? There will be more need to darn and patch, to mend and make do, now that, as her husband puts it, “the blow has fallen.”
What is it with these metaphors of domestic work? Does she resist them, or do they resist her? The center is frayed, worn, gone to threads; so, turn edges to middle. “
Her husband, late fifties now, ulcer, liver complaint, is prevented by her nursing and her strength of will from sinking into invalidity. He had been an Inspector of Manufactures; now under the new dispensation, September 1791, his post is abolished. They had applauded the death of the old regime; they were not self-interested people. But the applause must be muted, when you have no retirement pension, and nothing ahead but genteel poverty.
You have been ill, she thought, fevered and drained by the Paris summer, sickened by the blood of the Champs-de-Mars. “It has been too much for you, my dear; see how excitable you have become. We must leave everything and go home, because nothing is more important than your health, and at Le Clos you were always so serene.” Serene? She serene? Since ’89?
That was why they had come back to the run-down little estate in the Beaujolais hills, to the vegetable beds and faded hangings, and the poor women coming to the back door for advice and herb poultices. Here (she had read a great deal of Rousseau) one lived in harmony with nature and the seasons. But the nation was choking to death, and she wanted … she wanted …
Impatiently she hitched her chair away from the window. All her life she has been a spectator, an onlooker; the role has brought her nothing, not even the gift of philosophical detachment. And study has not brought it, nor self- analysis, nor even, she thought wryly, gardening. Some would think that it ought to come in the course of nature to a woman of thirty-six, a wife and mother. A little calm, a little quiet within—little chance. Even after childbearing, there is blood in your veins, not milk. I am not passive in the face of life, and I do not think I ever will be, and— considering recent events—why should I be?
This latest misfortune, for instance; of course she will not lie down under it. They have just come from Paris; they must go back. Either they must obtain a pension, or a new position under the new order.
Roland did not look forward to the trip. But she thought, Paris calls me. I was born there.
Her father’s shop was on the Quai d’Horloge, near the Pont-Neuf. He was an engraver—fashionable trade, fashionable customers—and he had the manner shaped to go with it, assertive yet sufficiently obsequious, artist and artisan, both and neither
She had been baptized Marie-Jeanne, always called Manon. Her brothers and sisters all died. There must be some reason (she thought at eight or nine) why the good God spared me: some particular purpose? She looked narrowly at her parents, measuring with callous child’s eyes their limitations, their painstaking veneer of refinement. They were overcareful of her; held her, perhaps, a little in awe. She had a great number of music lessons.
When she was ten her father bought her several treatises on the education of the young, reasoning that any book with “education” in the title was the kind of thing she needed.
This clever child, this pretty child, this child for whom nothing was too good; what carelessness of theirs was it to leave her alone one day in the workshop? Yet the boy, the apprentice (fifteen, too tall for his age, raw-handed, freckled), had always seemed well mannered, harmless. It was evening, he was working under a lamp and she stood at his elbow to look at his work. She was not disturbed when he took her hand. He held it for a moment, playing with her fingers, smiling up at her, his head tilted; then forced it under the workbench.
There she touched strange flesh, a damp swollen spike of flesh, quivering with its own life. He tightened his grip on her wrist, then turned in the chair to face her. She saw what she had touched. “Don’t tell,” he whispered. She tore her hand away. Her eyebrows flew up to the curls bouncing on her forehead, and she strode away, slamming the door of the workroom behind her.
On the stairs she heard her mother calling her. There was some small errand or task to perform-she could never remember afterwards what exactly it had been. She carried out her mother’s request, her face dazed, her stomach churning. Said nothing. Did not know what to say.
But in the weeks that followed—and this was what, later, she found hard to understand, because she could not believe that she was a child of vicious inclination—she went back to the workshop. Yes: she took the occasion. She made little excuses to herself; it was as if she had decided, in those days, to walk around with eyes half-closed to her own nature. It was only curiosity, her grown-up self said: the natural curiosity of the over-protected child. But then her grown-up self would say, you made excuses then and you are making them now.
