Each evening the boy ate with the family; because he was so young, and far away from his own people, her mother was anxious about him. She couldn’t afford to be different, in his presence; they would wonder about it, might ask questions. After all, if they do—I did nothing wrong, she would tell herself. But she began to wonder if life were fair; if people were not often blamed when they were not at fault. Of course, it was so in childhood; every day there were careless slaps and nursery injustices. Grown-up life, she’d thought, would be different, more rational— and she was on the verge of grown-up life now. The closer she came, the more risky it all looked, the less it seemed that people were amenable to reason. A nagging inner voice told her: you are not at fault, but you can be made to appear at fault.
Once he whispered to her: “I didn’t show you anything your mother hasn’t seen.” She flung her chin up, opened her mouth to quell his impertinence; but then her mother came in with a plate of bread and a bowl of salad, and there they were side by side, good children, shy children, eyes on the tablecloth, thanking God for salad and cheese and bread.
In the workshop, where she lurked around, there was tension between them, an invisible wire drawn tight. Had she perhaps tormented him a little, scampering in and out when the presence of other people protected her? She kept thinking of that strange flesh, blind and white and quivering, like something newborn.
One day they had of course found themselves alone. She kept a distance from him; she was not to be trapped in that way again. This time he had approached from behind her, while she stood looking out of the window. He slipped his hands up under her arms, then pulled her backwards onto his knees, folding into a chair strategically placed. Her skirt was rucked up; he touched her once, between her legs. Then his freckled arm, full of its scrawny nascent strength, was locked across her body; the hand formed a fist. She gazed down at that fist; he held her there like a doll, inanimate like a doll, her pretty lips parted, whilst he wheezed and puffed his way to satisfaction. Not that she knew it was satisfaction: only that some kind of climax to this activity had been reached, for he released her, and muttered a few distracted kindnesses, and never once (she thought later) did he look at her face, he had held her quite deliberately backwards so that he did not need to see whether she was pleased or horrified, whether she was laughing or whether she was too stunned to scream.
She ran; and soon after—at the first, rapid request to know what was wrong with her—she began to splutter out her story. Tears poured out of her eyes as she told it, and her legs felt weak, so she allowed herself to totter to a chair. Her mother’s face seemed to fly apart in horror. She reached for her, dragging her back to her feet; her mother’s hands gripped her arms with a crushing pressure. She had shaken her—her, the precious child—shrieking questions: what did he do, where did he touch you, tell me every word he said, every word, don’t be afraid, tell your mother (and all the time she was shaking, distorted face inches from her own), did he make you touch him, are you bleeding, Manon, tell me, tell me, tell.
Dragged along the street, she wailed like a three-year-old; inside the church her mother snatched at the bell pull that brings the priest quickly if you have done a murder or are dying, then the priest comes at once and he gives you absolution so that you won’t be damned. And he did come … . Her mother pushed her in the small of the back and left her alone in the dimness with the asthmatical breathing of the elderly man. Father listened, turning his one good ear, to the convulsive sobbing of what he took to be a violated child.
The curious thing was this: they did not dismiss the boy. They were afraid of scandal. They were afraid that should the business become known the mischief might be attributed to her. She had to see the boy every day, though he no longer ate with the family. She knew she was to blame now; it was not a question of what other people said or thought, it was a question of an inner reconciliation, and one that could not take place. It could, her mother said, have been very much worse; she was
When she was twenty-two, her mother was dead; in the mornings she attended to the running of the household, in the afternoons she studied—mastering Italian and botany, rejecting the systems of Helvetius, progressing with her mathematics. In the evening she read classical history, and sat with closed eyes over the books, her hands still on the pages, dreaming of Liberty. She dwelled—forced herself to dwell—on what was great in Man, on progress and nobility of spirit, on brotherhood and self-sacrifice: on all the disembodied virtues.
She read Buffon’s
Seven or eight years after the boy had left her father’s employment, she met him again. He had just married; he was, she saw, a perfectly ordinary young man. It was a brief meeting, no time for private talk, not that she’d have wished it—but he whispered to her, “I hope you don’t still blame me. I did you no harm.”
In 1776 her life altered. It was the year the Americans proclaimed their independence, and she brought her affections to be bound. There had been offers of marriage—from tradesmen mainly, in their twenties and early thirties. She had been polite to them but very, very discouraging. Marriage was something she avoided thinking about. The family began to despair.
But in January that year, Jean-Marie Roland appeared on the scene. He was tall, well educated, well traveled, with the kindness of a father and the gravity of a teacher. He belonged to the minor nobility, but he was the youngest of five sons; he had a little land and the money he earned, nothing more. He was an administrator: to that estate born. In his capacity as inspector, he had traveled Europe. He knew about bleaching and dyeing and making lace and using peat for fuel: about the manufacture of gunpowder, the curing of pork and the grinding of lenses; about physics, free trade and ancient Greece. At once, he sensed her own voracity for knowledge—for a certain type of knowledge, at least. At first she did not notice his strange, dusty coats, his frayed linen, his shoes fastened not with buckles but with old scraps of ribbon; when she did, she thought how refreshing it was to meet a man quite without vanity. Their talk was earnest, full of a kind of quibbling, wary courtesy.
He had kissed her fingertips, but that was politeness. He sat across the room from her. He attempted nothing. It would have been as if a statue of Saint Paul had leaned down and chucked you under the chin.
They exchanged letters, long, absorbing letters that took half a day to compose and an hour to read. At first they penned judicious essays on subjects of general interest. After some months they wrote of marriage—its sacramental aspect, its social usefulness.
He went to Italy for a year, and reported his travels in a published work of six volumes.
In 1780, after four thoughtful and diffident years, they married.
On the night of their wedding it had not been possible to communicate by letter. She did not know what she thought might happen; she would not allow herself to think of the apprentice and his fumbling, or to construct a theory about what, after all, had taken place behind her back. So she was unprepared for his body, for the hollow chest with its sparse, graying hair; she was unprepared for the haste with which he pulled her against that body, and for the pain of penetration. His breathing changed, and jerking her head up over his shoulder she asked, “Is that
