We paid the proprietor of le Chesne-Bidault, Monsieur de Mangin of Montmirail, an annual lease of 1200 livres, which was not heavy, but we were responsible for the state of the buildings and for all repairs. We also had to pay manorial dues and tithes on top of this, and had the right to take only a certain portion of forest timber for our furnace. We were fined if our animals grazed beyond the foundry limits; and if any of the workmen were found pilfering wood in those parts of the forest reserved for hunting we were obliged to pay an indemnity of twenty-four livres for each of them.
Wages had increased since my father’s time because of the cost of living. The top craftsmen, the engravers and blowers, received about sixty livres a month, the less skilled men twenty to thirty livres, and the boys fifteen to twenty livres, or less. Even so, life was hard for them, for they had to pay a head tax and a salt tax; but what came heaviest upon all our workmen and their families was the price of bread, which had reached as much as eleven sous for a four-pound loaf during recent months. Bread was their main fare—they could not afford meat—and a man earning at the rate of one livre or twenty sous a day, with a hungry family to feed, paid half his wages on bread alone.
I realized now how much my mother had done during her time for the wives and children in the country, and what a heartbreaking business it could be to try and prevent near starvation among them, while striving to keep the manufacturing costs as low as possible.
It was impossible to stop the men from taking wood from the forest that hard winter, or from poaching the deer. Indeed, we had no desire to do so, for the state of the roads, and the difficulty of getting into la Ferté-Bernard or Le Mans, made living equally difficult for us.
There was much bitterness throughout all France because of the high prices, but at least in the country we were spared the strikes and disturbances that were continually breaking out in Paris and in the big cities. Nevertheless, the general feeling of apprehension reached us even in the forest, where rumors were magnified because of our very isolation.
Pierre, Michel, and my François had all become Freemasons during the past year, joining different Lodges at Le Mans—the Saint-Julien de I’Etroite Union, le Moira, and St. Hubert respectively. Here, before the hard winter made travel difficult, my two glass-masters would foregather with the progressive Manceau thinkers of the day, many of them lawyers and professional men like my brother Pierre, or merchants and master craftsmen like themselves. There was a fair sprinkling too of the more enlightened members of the aristocracy and the clergy, but bourgeois or middle-class interests predominated.
I knew little about municipal affairs, and less of how the country was run as a whole—which was apparently the topic of conversation at all these gatherings—but I could see for myself that taxes and restrictions made trading increasingly difficult for all of us, that the high price of bread fell most heavily upon the poorer workmen, and that those who had the greatest amount of money—the nobility and the clergy—were excused from all forms of tax.
Meanwhile France, like my brother Robert some few years previously, was, according to the general opinion, on the verge of bankruptcy.
“I’ve been saying this for years,” my brother Pierre would remark, when he came to visit us. “What we need is a written Constitution as they have in America, with equal rights for all, and no privileged classes. Our laws and legal system are out of date, along with our economy; and the King can do nothing about it. Feudalism has him in thrall as it has the whole country.”
I was reminded of the days when he used to read Rousseau and so annoy my father. Now he was a greater enthusiast than ever, and burning to put Jean-Jacques’s philosophy into practice.
“How,” I asked, “would having a written Constitution make any of us the better off?”
“Because,” answered Pierre, “by abolishing the feudal system the power of the privileged would be broken, and the money they take from all our pockets would go towards giving the country a sound economy. Prices would then come down, and your question would be answered.”
This seemed to me all in the air, like so much of Pierre’s talk. The system might one day change, but human nature remained the same, and there were always people who profited at the expense of others.
Just now we had a common hatred of the grain hoarders, those merchants and landowners who withheld large stocks of grain and then released them upon the market when prices reached their peak. Sometimes bands of hungry peasants and unemployed workmen would raid the granaries or even seize the grain from the carts on the way to the markets, and we had every sympathy with them.
“V-violence is the only thing that w-works,” Michel used to say. “S-string up a few g-grain merchants and l-landowners, and the price of bread would s-soon fall.”
Our business was almost at a standstill, and we were obliged to lay off workmen, some of whom had been with us for years. To save them from actual starvation we gave them unemployment pay of twelve sous a day, but there was no relaxation in the rents, taxes, and dues which we had to pay.
Robert wrote from Paris, where they were having continual strikes and risings, and it seemed business was equally bad for him. The glass-house at St. Cloud had changed hands and been closed down shortly after his imprisonment, and he now depended entirely on what he could sell in the boutique in the Palais-Royal, which he supplied with goods made by himself and a few pupils from a small laboratory he had set up in the rue Traversière, in the quartier St. Antoine.
In Paris he was close to the center of political thought, and as a Freemason, and living in the Palais-Royal, he was forever quoting my one-time host, the duc d’Orléans, formerly duc de Chartres.
“The man’s generosity is beyond all praise,” wrote my brother. “During the worst of this winter, with the Seine solidly frozen for weeks, he has given away more than a thousand livres’ worth of bread to the poor of Paris every day. Every woman in labor in our part of the Palais-Royal has been cared for at his expense. He has rented empty buildings in the St.-Germain district and set up food kitchens for the homeless, where the poor wretches are served and fed by his own servants in livery. The duc d’Orléans is, without a doubt, the most loved person in the whole of Paris; which is very much resented at Court, where he is detested—they say the Queen won’t speak to him. Next to the duc d’Orléans, Necker, the Minister of Finance, is the man of the hour, and it seems he has given two million livres out of his own funds to the Treasury. If the country can hold together until the States General are summoned in May, we may see great changes then, especially as Necker has succeeded in doubling the representation of the Third Estate, which will then outnumber in voting strength the aristocracy and the clergy. Meanwhile, here are several pamphlets which you might ask Pierre to distribute in Le Mans, and Michel and François in la Ferté-Bernard and Mondoubleau. They are being sent out from the duc d’Orléans’s headquarters here at the Palais-Royal, and give all the latest political information.”
So Robert too was following the fashion of the day and becoming involved in current topics. Ministerial intrigues had taken the place of Court scandal, and the question “What is the Third Estate?” was now a more burning one than “Who is the Queen’s latest lover?”
Like many others of my generation, I had never heard of the States General, and it was Pierre again who had to explain to me that they were deputies representing the entire nation, divided into three separate bodies—the aristocracy, the clergy, and the Third Estate, the last comprising all the other classes in the kingdom. These bodies were to assemble in Paris to discuss the future of the country for the first time since 1614.
“Don’t you understand,” said Pierre, “that it is people like ourselves whom the Third Estate will represent? Deputies from towns and districts throughout the whole of France will go to Paris and speak for us. This has not happened for over a hundred and seventy years.”
He was in a great state of excitement, and so apparently was everyone else in Le Mans, especially the law
yers and intellectuals among his friends.
“Did any good come from their meeting in 1614?” I asked.
“No,” he admitted, “none of the representatives could agree. But this time it will be different. This time the Third Estate, thanks to Necker, will outnumber the others.”
He, Michel, and François read the pamphlets that Robert had sent with lively interest, and so, I gathered, did Edmé behind her husband’s back—as a fermier général collecting taxes for the monks at St. Vincent, Monsieur Pomard’s profession was one of those most attacked. The pamphlets also suggested that lists of grievances should be drawn up in every parish and handed to the deputies when they were elected. In this way the whole mass of the people would be represented, and their views made known when the States General met in Versailles.
The idea of a new Constitution conveyed nothing to our workmen at le Chesne-Bidault. All they wanted was an end to the hated salt and head taxes, a promise of steady employment, and a drop in the price of bread. I tried to do as my mother had done, and visit the families and listen to their troubles; but the days were over when jugs of soup and wine and a few warm blankets from the master’s house were accepted as a welcome luxury in times of sickness. These women did not have enough bread to feed their children; I was met with poverty, sickness, and hunger in every dwelling. All I could do was to tell them repeatedly, day after day, that the winter would soon be over, trade would improve, prices would ease, and when the deputies got together with the King something would be done for all of us.
Conditions came hardest upon the old people, and the very young. There was hardly a dwelling in our community that remained untouched by death that winter. Lung disease, scourge of the glass trade in all seasons, trebled its victims now among our older workmen, while sheer privation took its toll of young children and babies.
I think my most vivid memory of that winter was when Durocher, one of our finest workmen, opened his lodging door to me with his dead baby in his arms, and told me the ground was too hard for burial—he was going to take the little corpse to the forest and conceal it beneath a stack of frozen timber.
“And another thing, madame Sophie,” he said to me, his rugged face set in lines of despair. “I have always been an honest man, as you know, but today some of us from le Chesne-Bidault are going to seize the grain carts on their way between Authon and Châteaudun, and if the drivers show fight we shall break their heads for them.”
Durocher… whom my mother would have trusted with all the resources of the glass-house any day of the week.
“Please,” I said to Michel, “do something to stop them. They will be recognized at once, and then reported. Durocher won’t help his wife and children if he is flung into prison.”
“They w-won’t be reported,” replied Michel. “The d-drivers won’t dare to do so. We’ve earned a name for t-toughness these days at le C-Chesne-Bidault. If D-Durocher seizes the g-grain carts, he does it with my b-blessing.”
I looked at my husband François, who glanced away from me, and I saw that he had assumed his old role of follow-my-leader to my brother.
“It isn’t that I don’t sympathize with what Durocher wants to do,” I told them, “but it’s breaking the law. How can that help any of us?”
“These l-laws were designed to be b-broken,” returned Michel. “Do you know what a b-bishop was reported as saying last week? That there would be enough b-bread for everyone if the p-peasants threw their children in the r-rivers. And that it d-didn’t hurt anyone to live for a t-time on roots and grass.”
“It’s true,” echoed François, seeing my look of disbelief. “It was the bishop of Rouen or Rennes, I forget which. These churchmen are the worst hoarders of grain. Everyone knows they keep sacks of it in their cellars.”
“Everyone knows…” This was on the level of “they say” and Court gossip. It was regrettable that Michel and François should spread rumors in their turn.
As to the grain-wagons, Durocher and his companions did what they had intended to do. Nor were they betrayed to the authorities.
In the middle of April, with the winter at last behind us, I received a sudden plea from Cathie to go to Paris. She was expecting another baby at the end of the month, and wanted me to be with her. Her parents, it seemed, had both been ill during the winter, and did not feel equal to taking charge of young Jacques, who was now a sturdy lad approaching his eighth birthday. As to Robert, besides the boutique in the Palais-Royal, and his laboratory in the rue Traversière, he had become much involved in the entourage of the duc d’Orléans, and was forever at political meetings. I was four months pregnant myself, and had little desire to go to Paris; nevertheless there was something about Cathie’s note that disturbed me, and I persuaded François to let me go.
My brother Robert met me at the terminus of the diligence in the rue Boulay, and making light of Cathie’s condition he at once passed on to the one topic of the day—the meeting of the States General within a few weeks—and how a national crisis was approaching, and all Paris was in a political ferment.
“No doubt it is,” I agreed, “but how about Cathie and your son?”
He was far too impatient to discuss such mundane matters as his wife’s near confinement or his boy’s birthday.
“You know what it is,” he said, hailing a fiacre and putting my traps upon it. “If the duc d’Orléans was at the head of affairs there would be an end to the crisis.” He appealed to the driver for confirmation. “You see?” he added. “Everyone agrees… I tell you, Sophie, I have my finger on the country’s pulse, living at the Palais-Royal. We have the rooms over the boutique now, you know. There is nothing I don’t hear.”
And repeat, I thought to myself. And exaggerate a thousandfold.
“We are all patriots at the Palais-Royal,” he continued, “and I get the news at first hand from the Club de Valois round the corner. Not that I am a member myself, but I have many acquaintances who are.”
He began to reel off a string of names of the highly placed individuals entrusted with the duc d’Orléans’s private and public affairs. Laclos—author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which my mother never allowed me to read—was apparently the prince’s right-hand man, and directed all.
“There are hundreds of smaller fry,” confided Robert, “closely bound up with the duke’s interests. Laclos has only to say the word and…”
“And what?” I asked.
My brother smiled. “I am talking too much as usual,” he said, folding his arms and cocking his hat sideways. “Suppose you tell me what they are saying in Le Mans instead.”
I preferred to keep my own counsel. There was unrest enough in our part of the country already, without stirring up Robert’s interest.
I found Cathie tired and strained, but pitifully glad to see me. Almost as soon as Robert had delivered me at the door he was off again, on what he termed lightheartedly “matters of State.”
“I wish it were false,” whispered Cathie, but could say no more just then, for my lively nephew Jacques burst in upon us—fair-haired, blue-eyed, my brother in miniature—and I had to exclaim at the playthings he had been given for his eighth birthday.
Later that evening Cathie told me her fears.
“Robert is forever with these agents and agitators of the duc d’Orléans,” she said. “Their whole purpose is to spread rumors and make trouble. Robert accepts money from them, I know this for a fact.”
“Surely,” I argued, “the duc d’Orléans does not need to stir up trouble. He is too much loved by the people. And when the States General meet everything will be settled, so Pierre says.”
Cathie sighed. “I don’t understand the half of it,” she admitted. “I believe, as you say, that the duc d’Orléans himself has no wish to make trouble. It’s his entourage that is at fault. These past months, since Monsieur de Laclos came to the Palais-Royal, the atmosphere of the whole place has changed. The gardens and arcades, where everyone came to amuse themselves, are now full of
whisperers, and groups of men talking in corners. I am certain most of them are spies.”
Poor Cathie. Her condition made her fanciful. How could there be spies in the streets of Paris? The country was not at war. I tried to distract her by talking of the coming baby, and of Jacques’s pleasure in having a young brother or sister, but it did little good.
“If only,” she confessed, “we could be out of Paris, and living with you at le Chesne-Bidault. Your winter was hard, I realize that, but you do not live in constant terror of riots as we do.”
I began to understand something of her fear during the succeeding week. Paris had changed since my last visit some four years previously. The faces of the people in the streets or in the shops were either sullen or withdrawn or tense like Cathie’s, or yet again excited and somehow expectant like my brother’s. And Cathie was right, there were whisperers everywhere. One came upon them in the arcades, or at street corners, or in small groups in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.
Once, I saw the duc d’Orléans himself, in his coach, leaving for the races at Vincennes with his mistress, Madame de Buffon, at his side. He had grown much fatter since our famous encounter at the theater, and I was disappointed, as his coach turned out of the palace gates and he waved a pudgy hand at the cheering crowd, who were crying “Vive le duc d’Orléans, vive le père du peuple!” I had expected our leader, if he was to be our leader, to look more alert, more alive to the crowds about him, not lounging back on his seat, laughing at some remark made by his mistress.
Robert would say I was provincial… I determined to say no word in dispraise of his idol.