“THE MOST ORIGINAL WORK I THINK I’VE EVER SEEN.
I never gave thought to the French Revolution before … and now I feel I’ve been there and lived through it—sounds, scents, views, feelings.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
“Passionate … Stirring … Electrifying … Thoroughly astonishing … A story of epic sweep and resounding authenticity.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
“Les Miserables (the stage version) has done much to expand our consciousness of [the French Revolution]. Similarly, Marge Piercy builds up our mind’s images of this cataclysm from the bottom up of society rather than the top down.… All the more poignant then is the universal message of her novel, the timeless, genderless anomaly of participation by thinking, feeling people in the repeated free-falls of the human race from the highest dreams and expectations of themselves and life, to the bloodiest quicksands of power gone mad.”
—Milwaukee Sentinel
“Piercy’s most impressive book since Gone to Soldiers … Five hundred pages of gripping, page-turning, blood-curdling, awe-inspiring prose … [Her] perceptions of these characters and events ring so true it’s almost as if she had actually been there.”
—Bay Guardian
“Read this book to discover what it was like to live through the years of the French Revolution, and blessed be the woman novelist working on a broad canvas, with ambitions of this sublime range.”
—The Baltimore Sun
ALSO BY MARGE PIERCY
POETRY
MARS AND HER CHILDREN
AVAILABLE LIGHT
MY MOTHER’S BODY
STONE, PAPER, KNIFE
CIRCLES ON THE WATER
THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE
THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING
LIVING IN THE OPEN
TO BE OF USE
4-TELLING
(with Robert Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie)
HARD LOVING
BREAKING CAMP
NOVELS
THE LONGINGS OF WOMEN
HE, SHE AND IT
SUMMER PEOPLE
GONE TO SOLDIERS
FLY AWAY HOME
BRAIDED LIVES
VIDA
THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME
SMALL CHANGES
DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP
GOING DOWN FAST
OTHER
THE LAST WHITE CLASS: A Play
(with Ira Wood)
PARTI-COLORED BLOCKS FOR A QUILT: Essays
EARLY RIPENING: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology
THE EARTH SHINES SECRETLY: A Book of Days
(with paintings by Nell Blaine)
For all the friends and acquaintances, the quick and the dead, who taught me through their lives in the twentieth century to understand the people of the French Revolution in the eighteenth
Author’s Note
For six days after Hurricane Bob, we were without electricity and therefore, in the country, without a working pump, without water. I was reminded every moment of the unending drudgery of life for the vast majority of people before cheap and plentiful labor not produced by slaves.
I was struck too by the authority, the tyranny of night. When the sun set, a thick and puissant darkness slid over us like pitch. This night was long, for there was little to do once we had eaten what food we had on hand (no stores were open) and wiped off the dishes. We made love and we talked. We sang till we were hoarse. Reading by hurricane lamp gave me a headache. We were bored. Looking out, we saw nothing but starshine outlining the tops of the pitch pines and the white oaks.
We are accustomed to a tamed night. Instead we sat with candles barely abrading that heavy darkness. When we returned from a candlelit house where they were sitting shiva for a friend who died in the hurricane, the countryside seemed uninhabited wilderness without the accustomed splashes of streetlamps, the lights of houses, without the occasional bloom of neon. Since many of the roads were blocked with fallen trees and torn power lines, few cars moved through the hills. We saw way off on the Truro moors someone walking with a flashlight, as once we would have seen a stranger with a torch passing.
Yet the night was not exactly quiet. Without TVs, radios, traffic, speakers, VCRs, the pump coughing on, the dishwasher churning, air conditioners humming, the whine of the refrigerator, we heard the great horned owl hunting close to the house as she normally does only in midwinter. The occasional human voice carried as if every word were significant, overtones of threat and promise. Raccoons fought in the compost pile over the rotten meat and sodden cakes and breads of our dead freezer. Furious yowling in the marsh brought all our cats to attention in the bay window.
One night as I lay in bed, our cat Jim Beam growled low. I heard something quick but heavy-footed in the rhododendrons, their big leathery leaves scorched by the hurricane. I shone a flashlight into yellow eyes. Wolf, said my blood. A coyote had come onto the patio to explore. I remembered that in the harsh and murderous winter just before the Revolution when the Seine had frozen solid, wolves came into the suburbs of Paris in search of food.
At twilight the day after, I saw a fox in this development for the first time in seven years. They abandoned their last den here when too many houses were built on this road during the mid-eighties boom. Many summer people and tourists had returned to their lives early, but even we locals were so quiet in our dark houses that the other animals reclaimed the earth.
After the second day, we lined up every morning at the dump, twenty thousand neighbors each with our two buckets to be filled. We dipped sparse rainwater out of the cistern barrel, bathing in a few cupfuls apiece. We had to bury our bodily wastes instead of flushing them into oblivion. Every small act of daily life took five times as long. Into the woods we scampered with our trowels to scatter pine needles over the mess we made. Without refrigeration or the ability we do not normally ponder to make ice, to turn on the tap and wash our hands twenty times a day, to wash after we relieve ourselves, after we cook, after sex, after touching dirt or stickiness, we became aware of odors. If we had no light and thus no color for hours from twilight to dawn, we had a great many pungent smells invading our consciousness. We all stank. How differently might I feel toward my body if I could never bathe, if washing my clothes were a major event, if even washing my hands and face used up precious water I had bought and carried up six flights of steps.
I had been brooding on the French Revolution for quite different reasons when the hurricane ripped through our town splintering houses and lives, but from that week I date the moment the eighteenth century became real to me.
All six of my viewpoint characters are historical. For four of them, Robespierre, Danton, Madame Roland and Condorcet, there is a great deal of biography available—and in Manon’s case, autobiography as well. Certain scenes, such as Max’s loss of his pigeon, are anecdotes in a life everybody includes. Others I have had to imagine from scratch. The lives of Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe are far less well documented, and I have been free to create their lives from those of other women in similar situations. I have deprived Pauline of the living mother I now think she had; but when I began the novel, I believed her to be an orphan. I knew her father had died. Once I had conceived of her so placed, I could not reimagine her when, during the fourth draft, I learned there were police documents that suggested a living mother.
Some of the fates of the survivors are my interpretation, for mostly they disappear from history and we can only conjecture what happened, especially to the women who lived on. I have therefore constructed my narrative from my understanding of their characters and what little we do know. I have genera
lly been accurate to what we know of history.
Of course there is always much we cannot know. I have changed minor names. For instance, the youngest Duplay daughter was named Victoire, not Vivienne, but I feared one too many Victoires would prove confusing; similarly, Manon was friendly with both Carnet sisters, not just Sophie, but she was closer to Sophie and I simplified. My versions of speeches are not literal translations, but try to give the effect for a modern audience as well as I can, as I have done in conversation.
Conversation presents a problem to any writer dealing with another culture, another time and place. On one hand, you do not want your people to sound quaint. “’Swounds, perchance I might roger the wench, milord.” We think and write about history because it has formed us, influences the choices we imagine available to us. On the other hand, if the people sound just like your coworkers, you won’t believe they are denizens of late eighteenth-century Paris. Contemplating the amazingly vigorous, obscene language of the sans-culottes of Paris, I tried using contemporary African American ghetto language. Fortunately I was persuaded to abandon this attempt to find a corollary. I have tried to give some flavor and to avoid anachronisms of metaphor, especially those coming from a later technology. As a working rule, I have tried to be true to my sense of the characters rather than to any purely linguistic verisimilitude to 1789. The reason I was drawn to these characters to begin with was because in many ways they were familiar to me.
Occasionally I have risked anachronisms in the service of creating living characters. It is simply not possible to create lively colloquial exchanges without using colloquial language, which evolves constantly. One generation’s colloquial language sounds dated in a decade or two. In some cases—for instance in referring to black people in the colonies and in France—I have translated literally, Blacks for noirs. At other times, I despaired of translating at all and used the French word. Sans-culottes means literally without culottes: culotte-less, if you prefer. Basically it meant the working people of Paris, since aristocrats and those imitating them wore tight silk culottes and silk stockings, and the working men wore looser trousers. You wore trousers if you did manual labor. This is a distinction lost to us, and I have just gone with the untranslated sans-culottes. I have generally not translated the place names.
On points about which there is controversy, I have chosen what I considered most likely: that Danton used royal jewelry to bribe the Prussians, for instance, and that Condorcet’s fate was as described.
Why write about the French Revolution? For me, modern politics, the modern left (even the terms “left” and “right” in a political context) began there, as did the women’s movement. I have a slight advantage over many previous storytellers in that I have been passionately involved in left and women’s politics, have taken part in many demonstrations and countless meetings, and I knew all of these characters very well indeed, under different names of course. What went wrong personally and politically is thus fascinating to me, and I hope to make it so to you. Americans live in an increasingly violent society that is becoming inured to violence (as eighteenth-century France was), and one in which the top is growing ever richer and further in every way from the vast bulk of the population. We have a permanent underclass about which we are generating myths to justify their poverty and misery and our neglect. The search for permanent thinness and permanent youth causes women—those who have the means—to distort their bodies in ways even more extreme than the fashionable ladies of the late eighteenth century. We have had no shortage of revolutions in our time that did not fulfil their promises. Women have fought again and again in causes, that, when won, have not given us the freedom, the benefits we expected. I thought looking at a society in crisis so very strange in some ways and so familiar in others might illuminate our own situation.
To the Reader
If at any point you find
yourself confused about who
a character is, please consult
the chart at the book’s end.
ONE
Claire
(1780)
CLAIRE Lacombe was fifteen when she determined she must find a way out. Her brother Pierre’s friend Albert pushed her down on the floor and tried to mount her. He threw her skirts up, almost choking her as his large callused hands pawed her. She broke a bottle of vinegar on his head. Then Maman punished her for breaking the bottle and wasting the vinegar. Grandmère said to her quietly, “Good thing. Always fight hard when you fight. Don’t be afraid of hurting the man. He isn’t afraid of hurting you. Always fight like you mean to win.” Claire listened, although she was covered with bruises, first from Albert, then from the beating. Whenever she was beaten these days, which was often enough, she planned to run away. But how? Where would she go? The only reason women ever left Pamiers was if they went off to be servants in Toulouse. If they entered a convent. If they married away.
Pamiers was small and dusty, with more history than wealth. From the edge of town she could stand and stare at the Pyrénées, crowned with snow even when the streets were sweltering. But it was a false promise. What would she do in the mountains? Hire herself out as a shepherdess? The river Ariège flowed by, a spot she frequented because Maman was a laundrywoman. Anne-Marie always had water boiling in the shed attached to their one-room house, but she washed the linens down at the river, using the wet rocks for a scrubbing board and the rocks above water level for a drying rack. Their house smelled of soap and smoke, from the fires under the huge kettles Anne-Marie had inherited from her own mother, who had been a laundress until crippled with arthritis. Now Grandmère sat by the bubbling cauldrons, stirring them or bidding Claire stir them with heavy wooden paddles.
Claire was the youngest of five surviving children. Anne-Marie had been twice widowed. The father of the three oldest boys, a hired man, died after being gored by a bull. The father of Claire and her sister Yvette and two babies who had not survived had been a bricklayer. It would have been better if she had done like the others, she heard her brother say. Died, Grandmère explained. Babies died easily of neglect. “I’m glad you thrived,” Grandmère said. “Who else would I talk to?” She understood that Grandmère had taken pains to keep her alive, slipping her crusts of bread dipped in broth. In bad years, when everyone was hungry and what food there was went to wage earners, children and old people died every week.
When her father was alive, the family lived comfortably. Most of the nice things in the house—the pots in the fireplace, the hangings on the wall, the warm curtains on the family bed—were from his reign. What goes up must come down, Grandmère was fond of saying, and down he came, while repairing the octagonal clocktower of the church of Saint Antoine. She had been carrying his lunch to him, bread and a bit of cheese wrapped in a kerchief and some beans heated by the fire under one of the cauldrons and seasoned with herbs. She loved to carry his lunch because he would come down to her or sometimes take her to where he was working, and she would sit with him and eat a bite of his lunch, always better than her own, and he might give her a swig of wine and talk to her about how the work was going. As the youngest daughter, she was a disappointment (another girl) but he was often nice to her.
She had been carrying his lunch and humming to herself. She was just eleven and already tall for her age. She was looking up at the octagonal clocktower, one of the most imposing things in the entire town, and she was thinking how fine it was her own papa was chosen to work on it, when she heard the cry and looked up in time to see him fall. He fell not straight down but in a little arc, and his legs moved in the air as if he were trying to run. Then he struck the paving stones with a sickening thud she could hear yet. She had run to him, pushing through the crowd that already began to gather, to cradle his bloody broken head in her lap. It was considered a bad death, a violent death without last rites, but Papa had not been a believer. He said the Church was a soft way for lazy men to grab a living.
He liked to sing. He would accompany himself beating on the table o
r on one of the big cauldrons. He did not have the thick Provençal accent of Maman and Grandmère, for he came from away. If he had not been a good bricklayer, nobody would have trusted him, since he did not speak like the other men of Pamiers. He came from the Loire valley, but he never said where or why he had left. Let sleeping dogs lie, Grandmère said. He was a good husband and a good father. Occasionally he got into a fistfight, for he had a temper and he would not let anyone insult him or his family. But he never hit Claire. He liked to tell her stories. He never talked about himself but about his travels and what he had seen. Claire wanted to go everyplace and see everything, instead of minding the kettles and scrubbing linen and eating only porridge and beans, when they had that. Rent came first and taxes and soap. Then food. Claire had only one skirt, two chemises and a shawl against the cold. She lumbered through the mud in wooden shoes and woolen stockings. Outside in warm weather the women were spinning. They took in wool to spin. Maman, Grandmère, most of the women wore greasy black clothes green with age. Sometimes the same worn skirts had covered the scrawny flesh of three generations of women.
Nowadays Maman hit her often. Maman felt sorry for herself and she was always tired. Anne-Marie was forty-two, an old woman with white braids and a deeply lined face. Her own hands were getting arthritic now and she was talking more and more about Claire taking over the laundry. Grandmère said, “Anne-Marie is angry because you remind her of how she used to be. She was a beautiful woman. Use your beauty, Claire, but don’t rely on it. It goes. Be strong. Tomorrow always does come, until you’re dead.” Claire had been told she resembled Grandmère when she was young more than Anne-Marie. It was hard to imagine Grandmère young, ever. She was a raisin.
Claire stared at the huge cauldrons bubbling on the fires that must always be fed. Wood was expensive, so the only brother left at home, that lout Pierre, had to go and cut it in the woods that belonged to the lord, whom they had never seen. That was forbidden and if he got caught, that would be the end of him. Sometimes Claire had to go with him, for Yvette had a gimpy leg, shorter than the other. Yvette was devout. Religion was a sore spot in her family. Grandmère was Protestant, as were many around here, some secretly, some openly. Claire’s father had been born a Catholic and had gone to mass a couple of times a year, although he made fun of the Church. Maman had turned Catholic for her first husband, pro forma. Both her parents shared a deep distrust of churches, priests, monks, the whole apparatus. Only Yvette attended church. Claire thought if she was anything, she was Protestant, like Grandmère. Grandmère was her history teacher, her book of lore and wisdom and anecdote, like the blue books Grandmère bought. Besides their Bible, they had an almanac, a history of Charlemagne and Roland, two song books and a book of fairy tales.