… ?” But he had already rolled away from her into sleep, his open mouth breathing in the darkness.
The next day he had woken to lean over her with apology and concern: “Were you entirely ignorant? My poor dear Manon, had I known …”
One child (both thought) justifies a marriage: Eudora, born October 4, 1781.
She had an ability—she was proud of it—to grasp the essentials of a complicated matter within minutes. Name her a topic—the Punic Wars, let us say, or the manufacture of tallow candles—and within a day she will give you a satisfactory account of it; within a week she will be capable of setting up her own factory, or drawing up a battle plan for Scipio Africanus. She liked to help him in his work, it was a pleasure to her. She began on the humblest level, copying passages he wished to study. Then she tried her hand at indexing, proved careful and competent; then she applied her retentive memory and dogged curiosity to his research projects. Finally—since she wrote with such fluency and grace and ease—she began to help him out with his reports and letters. Oh, let me have that, she’d say, I’ll polish it off while you’re humming and hawing over the first paragraph. My dear, clever girl, he’d say, how did I ever manage without you?
But I want, she thought, more than a meed of praise; I want a quiet life, and yet, I want to move on to a larger stage. Knowing the place allotted to a woman, and content, respecting it, I want the respect of men. I want their respect and their approbation; for I too make schemes, I reason, I have my ideas about the state of France. She wished she could feed them, by some imperceptible process, into the heads of the nation’s legislators: as she feeds them into her husband’s.
She recalled a July day: flies clustering and buzzing about the casement of a sickroom, her husband’s yellow face above the white sheets, and her mother-in-law, a tyrant of eighty-five, nodding in a corner, breath whistling. She saw herself, in a gray dress: gray-minded by age and sickness and heat, creeping through the rooms with herb tea, the summer going obdurately on outside the windows.
“Madame?”
“Quietly. What is it?”
“Madame, the news from Paris.”
“Has someone fallen ill?”
“Madame, the Bastille has fallen.”
She dropped the cup at her feet and let it shatter. Later she thought: I did it on purpose. Startled from his doze, Roland lifted his head from the pillow. “Manon, has some dreadful calamity occurred?”
In the corner the Old Regime woke up, clucking at the disturbance, and fixed with a baleful eye the intemperate joy of her son’s wife.
She began to write for the press now: first for the Lyon Courier, then for Brissot’s paper the
In Paris the great opportunity had come, and she had taken it; she had made herself useful to the patriots. Waking and sleeping, she had dreamed of such a chance; dreamed of it in her lonely hours of study, dreamed of it pregnant with Eudora, watching the grave diggers at work in an Amiens cemetery.
She had not divorced herself from the situation, these last months. In a locked drawer she kept letters from Brissot, from Robespierre, from that grave and prepossessing young deputy Francois-Leonard Buzot. From these letters she had learned of the aftermath of the Champs-de-Mars. They had told her (she would hate to be synoptic, but events press so fast) how Louis, restored to the throne, had sworn to uphold the constitution; how Lafayette, no longer commander of the National Guard, had left Paris for an army post. The new Legislative Assembly was called, former deputies barred from it; so Buzot had returned to his home in Evreux. Never mind; they could still exchange letters, and no doubt one day they’d meet again.
Their friend Brissot was a deputy now: dear Brissot, who worked so hard. And Robespierre had not left for his hometown; he remained in Paris, rebuilding the Jacobin Club, bringing in the new deputies, inducting them into the rules and procedures of the debates that shadowed the Assembly’s own. A diligent man, Robespierre; but he had disappointed her all the same.
On the day of the massacre she had sent a message to him, offering to hide him in their apartment. She got no answer; she heard later that he had been taken in by a tradesman’s family, and was living with them now. She felt flat, let-down, when the moment of danger never came. She saw herself out-facing a regiment; she saw herself talking down the National Guard.
During this exile, also, she had followed with some interest the career of M. Danton and his friends. She had been relieved to learn that he was in England, and hoped he would stay there. Yet still, she sought information; and as soon as there was rumor of an amnesty, M. Danton came bouncing back. He had the nerve to put himself up for the Legislative Assembly; and in the middle of one of the election meetings (she had heard) an officer had arrived with a warrant for his arrest. Abused verbally and physically by the mob that seemed to attend the lawyer in all his activities, the officer was carried off to the Abbaye prison, where he was shut up for three days in the cell reserved for Danton.
The amnesty had been passed; but the Electors had seen through the lout’s pretensions. Rejected, Danton had retired to his province to brood; and now he had decided he would like to become Deputy Public Prosecutor. With luck, there too he would be thwarted; the time was far distant (she hoped) when France would be governed by thugs.
For the future … It irked her to think that in Paris the silly people were once more cheering the King and Queen, simply because they had put their names to the constitution: as if they had forgotten the years of tyranny and rapacity, the betrayal on the road to Varennes. Louis was plotting with the foreign powers, that much was clear to her; there will be war, and we would be foolish not to strike the first blow. (She turned the cloth in her hands and caught a loop of thread with the needle to make a knot.) And we must fight as a republic, as Athens did and Sparta. (She reached for her scissors.) Louis must be deposed. Preferably, killed.
Then the reign of the aristocrats would be over forever.
And such a reign it had been …
