Mistress of the Revolution (35 page)

The Duchess was right. I should have known myself better. The truth is that my mood matched the uncertainty of the times. I felt lost. I was on occasion tempted to leave Villers but had not the courage to do so. At other moments I reflected that our differences were trifling and that we were indeed quite happy together. Another event soon added to my confusion.

Emilie seemed to believe that the various political clubs that flourished at the time were kept open, like the theatres and the Opera, for the sole purpose of entertaining society ladies. She had once dragged me to the Cordeliers, who, she had assured me, were “very funny.” That club had settled in the church of the former convent of the same name, which had been stripped of all religious artifacts. In the middle of the chancel was a rough wooden table serving as a platform from which the orators made their speeches. The pews remained. They were filled with men and women of the lower classes, who were not shy about expressing their opinions. Some men, armed with rifles, shot in the air when making their point. Before starting their speeches, the orators had to don a red bonnet, symbol of the freed slaves in ancient Rome, which was kept for that purpose on the table. I shuddered at the thought of the vermin that must infest that piece of fabric. I left without regret.

Emilie also suggested that we go to the Club des Jacobins.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I did not much enjoy our excursion to the Cordeliers.”

“Yes, but the Jacobins are different. They are bourgeois, you know, but with extreme views. I do not want to go there alone. Be a friend, Belle, and come with me.”

“Curiosity will be your downfall, Emilie.”

“Please, Belle. I do not know of anyone else who will go with me.”

“Maybe everyone else is right. You can read an account of the speeches in the newspapers. Why go there?”

“Just this time, Belle dearest. I am sure you will like it. And you make me laugh with your newspapers. It is not the same as listening to the orators in person.”

“All right, just this time then.” She kissed me on both cheeks.

The Jacobins were indeed quite different from the Cordeliers. The Club was fitted to resemble the hall where the Legislative Assembly convened. The orator’s lectern was situated below the president’s pulpit. The regular members, all male, sat on benches in the hall itself, while a large audience, composed equally of men and women, gathered in the galleries. We found seats there.

At first, we listened to a speech by a thin man who, in a rather shaky voice, attacked Robespierre for having advocated the abolition of the monarchy. He was greeted by hoots from part of the audience. The president rang his bell, and ushers tried to restore order, to no avail. A tall man rushed to the pulpit. His voice dominated the uproar.

“President,” he said, “let me respond to this scoundrel.”

I did not hear the president’s response in the middle of the racket. The tall man ran up the stairs to the lectern and pushed the first orator out of the way. He was now facing the public. I recognized Pierre-André Coffinhal.

“Friends and brothers,” he said, “who among us, except Maillard here, still doubts that the so-called King is a traitor? Louis is the ally of the assassins of the Homeland; he is the worst enemy of the Nation. He is the accomplice of Lafayette and Bailly, the butchers of the people of Paris at the Champ de Mars. Have we forgotten how much innocent blood was shed that day? Some say that Louis is meek. They say that he has seen the error of his ways at last, that he will now abide by the Constitution. They are fools or rogues. Louis is a consummate liar; we all know it. He hides his duplicity under false airs of imbecility. Where do the
émigrés
, the unsworn priests, the conspirators of all stripes, within and abroad, find their warmest support? In Louis and his wife. We all know it. That Court of his is a viper’s nest.”

Cheers erupted. Pierre-André paused for a moment, surveying his audience.

“Yes,” he continued, “the Court is a putrid sore on the face of Paris, an infection in our midst. It is the refuge of the hideous remnants of the nobility. We all know it, yet we are complacent. We are lulled into security while in Germany, in Austria, in the Palace itself, evil never sleeps. There, less than a mile away, plans are being drawn at this very minute to slaughter the Patriots. Let me ask you: how many more of us will have to die before we wake up? It is time, friends and brothers, time at last to overthrow the hated remains of the Old Regime. Let us begin with that most gothic of institutions, the monarchy itself.”

Some men rose from their seats and cheered, while others cried in horror. Pierre-André’s voice was echoing throughout the hall and drowning the shouts, friendly and unfriendly, the clapping of hands, the stamping of feet and the president’s bell. He went on unfazed and in a thunder of applause demanded that a motion be put to the votes to exclude from the Club the prior orator, in whose direction he pointed an accusatory finger, and “all like-minded scoundrels.” I was stunned by the violence of his tone.

“I have had enough,” I told Emilie. “I want to go.” I had to shout to make myself heard.

“Already? But we just arrived, Belle. I want to listen to this man. Are you not curious to find out who he is?”

She turned to the man seated to her other side. I rose without waiting for the end of their conversation. She caught me by the arm to stop me, but I shook her off. Our movements attracted Pierre-André’s attention and for a moment my eyes met his. I looked away before I was able to determine whether his features reflected astonishment, anger or any other feeling. I was overcome by embarrassment. There was a short pause in his voice before he resumed his speech with undiminished energy. I ran away.

Back in the carriage, Emilie chatted on. “You are no fun, Belle. I take you to the Jacobins, and you spoil my pleasure! Why did we have to run like thieves when things were becoming amusing?”

“You found that speech
amusing
? Did you happen to notice that the orator was speaking of us when he was berating the nobility and the Court?”

“But have you ever seen anyone so ugly? His name is Corigal, or something like that. According to the man seated next to me, he was just elected Commissioner in the Second District. I would have learned more if you had not bolted. I have not heard anything so vicious; I am still tingling with excitement.” She put her hand on my arm. “I have an idea, Belle. We will go watch one of his trials. I would love to see how he behaves on the bench. What do you say?”

“I say that we leave him alone.”

“What is the matter with you? You are all pale.”

“I am fine. I guess it was too noisy in there. That man frightened me, but, unlike you, I do not intend to follow him all over Paris.”

That was the first I had heard of Pierre-André’s election as Commissioner. He would, in addition to managing the police officers in his district, sit as a judge in Municipal Court. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this could hardly be considered a function of the first magnitude. Yet Pierre-André was not yet thirty, and his career was taking a promising turn for someone so young. I had already read in the papers about his brothers. The eldest, Jean-Baptiste, my family’s former attorney, had become the first
Procureur-Syndic
of the Départment of Cantal, which made him one of the highest officials in Auvergne. Another brother, Joseph, who had been a barrister in Paris before the Revolution, had become a justice of the new Supreme Court. Altogether, the Coffinhal brothers seemed to be doing very well under the constitutional regime.

The mood was changing. The bawdy celebrations of the Old Regime, such as the ones that had attended Mardi Gras, were now banned as indecent. Fashions too were different. Ladies’ dresses became simpler and narrower. No one wore hoopskirts anymore, even at Court. The difference for men was still more striking. They wore their hair shorter, untied and without powder. They dressed in dark clothes of plain cloth, cut in the American style. Embroidered garments, for males and females, would now have looked very odd.

I was taken aback the first time I saw Villers go out with his hair loose on his shoulders and its natural reddish blonde colour, for there was no grey in it although he was past forty. Until then, I had seen him in this manner only in our intimacy. Oddly enough, Robespierre, the most extreme advocate of reform in some regards, remained faithful to the old fashions and wore his hair long, tied and powdered.

Many other changes of greater import occurred. The new Assembly was controlled by a group who would come to be known as the “Girondins,” after the Department of Gironde, around Bordeaux, whence many came. They tended to be Republicans in their ideals, and were wary of the King’s intentions. At the same time, they distrusted the people of Paris and wanted to reduce the influence of the capital to that of any other department.

The Girondins’ grossest mistake was to declare war on Austria to “spread the ideals of the Revolution.” The King signed a declaration of war against his brother-in-law, Emperor Leopold. I heard the Queen gloat about the superiority of the Austrian army. Both the King and Queen seemed to believe that the French would be speedily defeated, and welcome the foreign invaders as liberators, who would then restore the Old Regime. Everyone would then rally around the throne. Although I disapproved of the war, the Queen’s words outraged me and gave me yet another reason to avoid the Court.

Villers and I were of one mind on this subject.

“This is one of the very few occasions,” he said, “when you will hear me agree with Robespierre: spreading liberty by military force is a notion that could only have taken root in the head of a fool. No one abroad will welcome armed missionaries.”

Indeed that war, which the Girondins expected so easily won, and the King and Queen hoped so speedily lost, raged on, interrupted only by brief truces, for twenty-two years. It ended last year, long after all of those who had wished it had perished.

The war had an unexpected consequence. Villers, now deprived of his seat at the Assembly, was supplying the army with horses, which often required his presence in Normandy. Aimée and I accompanied him there. I was happy to see Madame de Gouville again and never failed to be entertained by the sight of the aristocratic Villers turned horse trader. He greatly increased his already ample fortune during these months. Such an interest in business affairs would have been deemed unbecoming, if not disgraceful, in a nobleman before the Revolution. Times were different now.

The Assembly decreed all assets of the émigrés forfeited. I sometimes thought of Villers’s son, Charles-Marie, who had joined the army of the Prince de Condé in Germany. Although Villers never spoke about that topic, and I did not feel free to broach it with him, I knew that it caused him great pain to be estranged from his only legitimate offspring. I did not know what provisions he had made in his will, but he now had to disinherit his son, who, as an
émigré
, could no longer own property in France. I knew that he had large sums of money secretly transferred by his attorney to London, no doubt for the benefit of Charles-Marie. Villers still paid my rent and my servants’ wages. I no longer expected to receive anything else from him.

In early June of 1792, I received another letter from Hélène.

Hélène’s assurances did little to cheer me. Who could tell whether she would find a lasting refuge in her new home?

The news from the front was no better. The Austrians and their Prussian allies were advancing into French territory. Reports of their atrocities spread to Paris. Along their path, villages were set ablaze, women were violated by entire battalions, civilians were slaughtered. All over France, Patriots volunteered to defend the Nation at this hour of desperate need. A law mandated the creation near Paris of a camp of 30,000 such soldiers. The King chose to veto this measure. I had opposed the war, but once it had been declared, I wanted my country to win and strongly supported the idea of the volunteer camp.

The populace was incensed by the King’s veto. A mob, some said 100,000 men and women, invaded the Tuileries on the 20th of June, carrying signs of the most offensive nature. I was later told that among those was a miniature gallows from which hung a doll with a banner reading “String Marie-Antoinette from a lamppost.” There was a display composed of a pig’s ears, tail and genitals, referring to the King’s lack of virility, and another with the horns of an ox, the symbol of cuckolds. The King drank from a wine bottle offered to him by an insurgent to toast the Nation, even donned the red hat of the
sans-culottes
, but refused to withdraw his veto. The crowd grudgingly retired at night.

Villers was outraged at the behaviour of the populace. He even requested an audience with the Queen to present his condolences for the insults she had suffered. To my surprise, she received him. He did not tell me what transpired, but I assumed that she was now desperate enough to accept the help of a man she had not long before wanted executed. Villers took Aimée and me to Vaucelles in June and spent most of his time there with us, only occasionally returning to Paris to attend to his horse supply business with the army. I would probably have remained the whole summer of 1792 in the country if word had not reached me that the Duchess’s health was failing.

Over Villers’s objections I left Vaucelles for Paris in early August to be close to the Duchess during what seemed to be her last days. I took Aimée to my friend’s mansion. We arrived immediately after Dr. Jansaud had bled the Duchess. My daughter blanched at the sight of the red liquid in the porcelain bowl on the nightstand. The Duchess looked wan. Her blue eyes, which I remembered sparkling with kindness, were now dull, their light extinguished. Life had already deserted her. As we left, Aimée asked me tearfully why the Duchess had not recognized her. I pressed my daughter’s hand without answering.

Thereafter I alone visited the Duchess every day, usually in the morning, because Dr. Jansaud’s potions tended to make her drowsy later on. I returned to my lodgings and Aimée in the afternoon. I had not seen Morsan for over six weeks, although I had heard through Emilie that he was enquiring often about me. I had not many opportunities to think of him, absorbed as I was by the sorrow of losing a beloved friend of many years.

I was surprised when, on the 9th of August in the late afternoon, Junot announced that Monsieur de Morsan requested the honour of an interview with me. The footman should have turned him away, as he had been instructed to do with all male callers. The poor man was becoming forgetful and sometimes barely remembered the names of my visitors long enough to announce them. I would normally have refused to receive Morsan, but I reflected that he had too much delicacy to call on me without a compelling reason. I asked Junot to show him in.

“I beg your forgiveness,” Morsan said. “I would have never, under normal circumstances, have taken the liberty of intruding upon you. The current situation justifies, I hope, my presumption in coming here.” He hesitated. “A new attack against the Palace will take place within days. You must be aware of it.”

“Monsieur de Villers mentioned it. I would not have left Vaucelles but for the Duchess’s condition.”

“I shudder, My Lady, when I think of you crossing the Seine every day to visit her.”

I frowned. “Pardon me, Sir, but what gives you the right to be so solicitous of my safety?”

“Nothing, I am afraid. Yet I worry about you, Madam, with or without the right to do so. You do not seem to measure the gravity of the situation. Those of us who remain here are going to die.”

“I will return to Vaucelles as soon as the Duchess no longer needs me.”

“Going to Vaucelles is not going to do a thing. Do you think the Jacobins’ reach does not extend to the suburbs of Paris? Forgive me for being blunt, Madam, but you are blind to your own danger.”

“The Jacobins do not control the Assembly.”

“They control Paris, and it is all that matters. We will be swept away by the coming storm. By
we
, Madam, I do not mean only those who, like me, have remained faithful to their King. I refer to the whole nobility, including Monsieur de Villers and his friends. The great French Nation has tired of us, even of those of us who flatter the rabble. They will soon string us all from lampposts without making any distinctions between the ones who supported the Revolution and the others.”

“Is it to share those dire predictions that you are disturbing me at this hour, Sir? They could have waited until our next meeting.”

“I think not, Madam. In a matter of days it will be too late. Once the Palace is stormed, the royal family will be massacred, along with all of the nobility in town. I secured false passports this afternoon. I will be leaving by the stagecoach for Lille tomorrow and from there try to reach the Austrian Netherlands.”

I stared at him. “You are going to emigrate?”

“If anything, I have delayed too long. Such a journey would have been safer a few months ago. You can probably guess at the reason why I was reluctant to leave Paris. I have secured, in addition to my own passport, another one for a Widow Durand, a lady traveling with a little girl. It is at your disposal and that of your daughter.”

Morsan fell to his knees and seized my hand. “Please, Madam, hear me. I expect from you neither gratitude nor fondness. I know that you do not, you cannot love me. I am asking only that you to trust me enough to let me lead you to safety. I cannot bear the thought of you being hanged or torn to pieces by a mob. In my nightmares I see your head paraded through the streets by those cannibals. Horrible as it is to say, this is the fate that awaits you if you stay in France. Please, Madam, I beg you, save yourself, save—”

Villers, who must have been alerted to Morsan’s visit by his spies within my house, burst into the room. I was wearing a light summer dress, made of several layers of lilac gauze. Startled, I rose from the sofa where I was seated. The flimsy fabric of my skirt was caught beneath one of Morsan’s knees and tore with a loud noise. Villers ran to us, slapped the other man full in the face and seized my arm with such violence that I felt it pulled out of its socket.

Morsan rose. “You may hit me, Sir,” he said, glaring at Villers, “but I forbid you to mistreat this lady.”

“Forbid me? This lady, if you want to give her that name, is mine. I have kept her for years and will do what I please with her.”

“Calm yourself, Sir,” I told Villers. “There is no need for such language. Monsieur de Morsan was asking me to emigrate with him, and I was ready to decline.”

“How clever of him! He knows he could never hope to approach you otherwise, but on the straw of a barn, while you are both hiding at night, he would only have to extend his hand, and then who knows…Maybe, with the excitement of fear, and under cover of darkness, you would not be too cruel. Or do you already feel for him a craving like that of a woman with child?”

Morsan drew his sword. “This I absolutely forbid,” I said, looking into his eyes. “There will be no duels on my account. You can see that Monsieur de Villers is no longer his own master. You must leave, Monsieur de Morsan. I will not emigrate with you. You may be right in your assessment of our situation and I may be a fool not to avail myself of your offer. I thank you and wish you from my heart the best of luck, but I will not follow you. Please go, Sir.”

Morsan was shaking with anger. After a moment, he sheathed his sword, bowed to me and before leaving, gave Villers a most unfriendly look.

“You should leave too,” I told Villers. “I cannot reconcile myself to what I heard you say.”

He was still holding me by the arm above the elbow and pulled me closer. “Not so fast, my pretty. I am not done with you. You have humiliated me by allowing the attentions of the most repulsive man in Paris, and now you dismiss me from your presence like a lackey? You will hear me first, Madam. Your ingratitude astonishes me. Have you forgotten what you were when I found you that night at the Opera? A little provincial goose, without any education, any experience of the world. A little nobody. The youngest daughter, unwanted and unheeded, of one of those families of aristocratic paupers still found in the most remote provinces of the Kingdom, with nothing to show for their arrogance but their titles. And what did your brother do for you? Give you, at the age of fifteen, to a brute like Peyre, and then abandon you after your husband left you penniless.”

Villers’s grip on my arm was so tight that it brought tears to my eyes. I tried to use my free hand to disengage myself. He began to shake me. “For all your family cared, you could have starved to death or ended in a brothel, which might have been, come to think of it, the right place for a little trollop like you. You would have been hard-pressed to find a decent establishment to take you, though, because you had not even a maidenhead to peddle. A fine man, the Marquis de Castel, that brother of yours, who did not awaken until after I had bedded you, and then only because his honour was at stake.”

I coloured from anger. “Do not speak in this manner. You know nothing of my brother’s motives.”

“The less I know of them, the better, I am sure. God knows what depravity lurks behind all that pride. But you are right, we were talking about you. You were pretty, you were eighteen and you were ready to sell yourself to me. That was all.”

“It seemed good enough for you then.”

“Like an imbecile, I had fallen in love with you. You were fortunate to look as fresh as you did after having passed through the hands of another man, and not any man, but Peyre! I should have made you confess what your husband made you do. I am sure such a tale would be entertaining enough. It might even have cured me of my infatuation. Yet it is not too late. Do not be shy, my sweet, tell me everything. Or, still better, you are going to show me.”

My arm was hurting so much that I felt faint. “You are no better than him,” I said, quivering with pain and anger, “if you can entertain the thought of tormenting me as he did. How dare you speak to me in this manner after I have shared your life for all these years?”

Villers stopped shaking me. His grip became still tighter. The pain took my breath away.

“The more I know you, Madam, the less I like you. Oh, you have given me my money’s worth, I will grant you that. I was smitten in the beginning. Not enough, however, to be blinded to your limitations. As soon as I had decided to keep you, I had to give you some rudiments of education. Without me, you would still be more ignorant than the lowliest scullery girl in my kitchens. You could not open your mouth in society for fear of shaming yourself. Have you forgotten it? I made you what you are. You owe me everything.” Villers was now shouting. “Do you hear me? Everything. And now this is how you are thanking me. Maybe you have not let that toad Morsan fuck you yet, although I would not swear to it, but you have been deceiving me since I started keeping you. I have for years shared your favours with Lauzun and half of the Court.”