It so happened that my brother would have ignored any remark made by me that evening, for he returned to the boutique from his laboratory in the rue Traversière full of a speech made at the Electoral Assembly of his particular parish of St. Marguerite. A Monsieur Réveillon, a wealthy wallpaper manufacturer, had held forth about the high cost of production, and its relation to wages—he lamented the days, it seemed, when his workpeople had managed on fifteen sous a day. Now, he had said, the higher wages interfered with production.
“It’s very true,” I told my brother. “We find the same at le Chesne-Bidault, but unless we increase wages our workmen will starve.”
“Quite so,” replied Robert, “but when these things are said in public they can sound unfortunate. Réveillon had best watch out for his windows.”
He seemed highly amused at the thought of a fellow merchant having the same trouble that he had experienced himself a few years back, and he went out again later that night to one of his mysterious gatherings—whether to one of the Clubs or to the Lodge of the Grand Orient we could not say. The next morning, when I went to market for Cathie, the talk was all of how some of the rich manufacturers in the quartier St. Antoine were going to cut their workmen’s wages down to ten sous a day, and one enormous fishwife, thrusting my purchase into my hand, declared loudly that, “It’s people like them who are robbing honest folk, and they deserve to be hanged.”
Regretting the days when wages were lower seemed a very different thing from cutting them down, and I wondered which was the true version of the story. I told Robert what I had heard, and he nodded approvingly. “It’s all over Paris by this time,” he said, “each version more garbled than the last. Someone told me Henriot, the powder manufacturer, expressed the same opinion as Réveillon. I wouldn’t be in either of those fellows’ shoes.”
Cathie glanced across at me and sighed. “But Robert,” she asked, “didn’t you tell us that Monsieur Réveillon had merely lamented the old days, and said nothing about cutting down his workmen’s wages?”
“Those were his words,” shrugged my brother, “but of course anyone is free to put what emphasis he likes upon them.”
Sunday was usually a busy day in the boutique, for the Parisians came to stroll in the arcades and in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, but it seemed to both Cathie and myself, on the Sunday of the 26th of April, that the crowds were more than usually thick, milling to and fro in front of the palace and down the rue St. Honoré towards the Tuileries. Robert’s fine display of glass and porcelain lured no purchasers, and that evening he put up his shutters early. The following day, Monday, was a workers’ rest day, when Cathie and Robert usually took Jacques for an outing to another part of Paris, to see his Fiat grandparents, perhaps, or to walk in the Bois. Today, however, my brother told us at breakfast that we were to remain within doors, to keep the boutique shuttered, and on no account whatsoever to venture out into the streets.
Cathie turned pale and asked him the reason.
“There may be disturbances,” he answered lightly, “and it is wiser to take precautions. I shall go to the laboratory and reassure myself that all is well there.”
We implored him to stay with us rather than run the risk of coming to some harm in the crowds, but he would not listen, and insisted that nothing would happen to him. I could see, and so could Cathie, that he was tense with excitement; he had hardly swallowed his coffee before he was off, leaving the shuttered boutique below in charge of the apprentice boy Raoul.
The femme de ménage, who usually helped Cathie with the house, had not come, which was another sign that something unusual was afoot. We went to the upper rooms above the boutique, and I tried to distract Jacques, who was protesting at being kept indoors on a holiday.
Presently Cathie, who had been in her bedroom, beckoned to me.
“I’ve been sorting through Robert’s clothes,” she whispered. “Look what I have found.”
She showed me a great heap of small change of deniers, twelve of which went to the sou; on one side of them was the head of the duc d’Orléans, with the words “Mgr le duc d’Orléans, citoyen,” and on the reverse “The hope of France.”
“These are what Laclos and the rest of them wish to spread among the people,” Cathie said. “Now I know why Robert’s coat pockets were bulging this morning. Who is to benefit by this?”
We stared down at the money, and then Jacques called to us from the adjoining room. “There are crowds running,” he said. “Can I open the window?”
We too heard the sound of running feet and opened the windows, but the stonework and arches of the arcades blocked our view; all we knew was that the sound came from the place du Palais-Royal and the rue St. Honoré. Besides the running feet there was a murmur, growing ever louder, swelling, like a river torrent, and it was something I had never heard before: the roar of a crowd in anger.
Before we could prevent him, Jacques had rushed downstairs to tell Raoul, and the apprentice had drawn back the bolts of the door and gone to the place du Palais-Royal to find out what was happening. He was soon back, breathless and excited, saying someone in the crowd had told him the workmen were out in strength in the quartier St. Antoine; they were going to attack the property of some manufacturer who had threatened to cut wages.
“They will burn everything on sight,” exclaimed the apprentice.
It was then that Cathie fainted, and when we had carried her upstairs and to her bed I perceived that worse was to follow; it was likely that her labor would start this very day, within a few hours, perhaps. I sent Raoul for the surgeon who was to attend her, and while we waited the roar of the crowd increased outside, all making their way towards St. Antoine. When Raoul returned, hours later, he informed us that the surgeon had been summoned with others to the district where the rioters were gathering, and at my wits’ end—for Cathie’s pains had started—I sent the lad out once more, to summon anyone from the streets who might have a knowledge of delivery in childbirth.
Poor Jacques was as scared as I was, and I put him to boiling water and tearing up old linen while I held Cathie’s hand and tried to comfort her.
Ages passed, or so it seemed—in reality some forty minutes—and when Raoul next returned he had with him, to my horror, the stout fishwife from the market. She must have seen the expression on my face, for she laughed with rough good nature, and introduced herself as “la femme Margot.”
“There’s not a surgeon anywhere in the quarter,” she told us, “nor likely to be this side of midnight. They say the riot has spread from the rue de Montreuil down to the royal glass foundry in the rue de Reuilly. They’re carrying dummies made to look like Réveillon and Henriot the manufacturers, and serve them right—they ought to burn the men themselves, not the dummies. What’s the trouble? A child on the way? I’ve delivered dozens.”
She pulled the sheets aside to examine Cathie, who looked at me in anguish, but what were we to do? We were forced to accept the woman’s help, for despite my own condition I was almost as ignorant as young Jacques. How I longed for my mother, or for any of our own workpeople from le Chesne-Bidault…
I now asked Raoul to go to the laboratory in the rue Traversière to fetch my brother, that is, if he could force his way through the crowds, and he dashed off, more excited to see what was afoot than filled with any concern for us. It was not until he had gone that our midwife announced cheerfully, “He’ll never get there, he’ll be swept off his feet.”
I kept the windows open in the top rooms, and despite our distance from the troublous quarters we could hear the far-off roar of the crowds, and now and again the clatter of horses as the troops rode to disperse the rioters.
The day wore on, poor Cathie’s sufferings increased, and there was still no sign of my brother. It was falling dusk when the market woman called me into the bedroom and asked me to assist her. I bade Jacques brew coffee in the kitchen—the poor child was distraught from hearing his mother’s cries—and between us the “femme Margot?
?? and I brought Cathie’s baby into the world, stillborn, poor infant, the cord about its neck.
“A pity,” muttered the midwife, “but the surgeon himself wouldn’t have saved it. I’ve seen too many so. Feet first, they strangle themselves.”
We made Cathie as comfortable as we could. I think she was too worn out to weep for her dead baby. I made much of Jacques, who, with a child’s curiosity, kept wanting to peep at the dead infant, which we had placed in its basket and covered. And then we became aware suddenly that it was now quite dark, and the sound of the rioting had ceased.
“There’s no more I can do,” said the midwife. “I’d best get home myself and see if my good man has come back with a broken head. I’ll look in tomorrow. Let her sleep. It’s nature’s best cure.”
I thanked her, and pressed some money into her hand, which she refused to take. “No call for that,” she said, “we’re all equal in times of trouble. It’s a pity about the baby. Still, she’s young. There’ll be others…”
I had never thought I could be sorry to see her go; but as I locked the door of the boutique below, I felt strangely chilled.
Robert did not return that night. Jacques was soon asleep, and Cathie too, but I sat by the open window, listening for footsteps.
Early the next morning, Tuesday, the rioting began again. I must have snatched a few hours of sleep, when I was wakened once more by the tramping of feet, and shouting, and presently someone thundering on the door. I thought it might be Raoul, but it was a stranger.
“Open up… open up,” he shouted. “Every working man is needed on the streets today. We’re to carry the riot across the bridges to the left bank. Open up, open up…”
I shut the window, and heard him thundering next door, and so on, into the rue St. Honoré. He was soon followed by others, yelling and shouting, and as the day lengthened we could hear the crowds first in one quarter, then in another, with increasing sound of shooting, and the riding to and fro of the cavalry.
There was no sign of our midwife today. Either she had joined the crowds or was bolted within doors like ourselves, for no one seemed to be abroad who had not some part in the disturbances. Jacques, craning out of his own small window high in the roof, said he had seen men with bandaged heads carrying others who were bleeding freely—whether this was his imagination or not I could not say.
We had been two days now without fresh food, and our bread was finished, but I dared not leave the house to go to the market for fear of the riots. Cathie awoke and seemed hungry, which I thought a good sign. I made her some soup, but she was instantly sick when she had swallowed it, and complained of pain something similar to the labor pains of yesterday. The pain increased as the day wore on, and she seemed much weaker. I did not know what to do, for I saw that she was losing a lot of blood, and this did not seem to be right. I could only tear up more linen to staunch the flow.
Jacques, now that his mother no longer moaned as she had done the day before, was content to lean from the window, shouting to me now and again that the sound of the rioters was increasing or decreasing, as the case might be, and he would cry out, “I can hear the troops—I can hear the jangle of cavalry, and the horses. I wish I could see them.” As each musket shot echoed in the distance, “Crack…” he kept shouting, in high delight, “… crack… crack… crack…”
Cathie was now deathly pale. It was once more between seven and eight in the evening, and she had lain still without moving since three in the afternoon. Jacques became tired of his game of “Crack… crack…” and demanded his supper. I made some more soup, but we had no bread to dab into it, and he continued to complain of hunger. Then, for he was only eight years old and had been penned indoors since Sunday, he decided to run up and down the stairs between the boutique and the upper rooms where we were living, and this sound seemed to me now more deafening than the distant rioting and firing that came from St. Antoine.
There was an acrid smell upon the air of burning straw—houses must be ablaze somewhere, or else it was the powder in the soldiers’ muskets—and all the while Jacques kept running up and down the stairs, jumping from one step to another, and it grew dusk once more in Cathie’s room, and I knelt by her bed holding her limp hand in mine.
Once again we heard the footsteps of the stragglers returning to our quarter—those who had gone forth to watch the riots—and at last there came a rattle on the door. Jacques gave a great shout of excitement, “It’s my father come home!” and ran down the stairs to let him in.
I rose from Cathie’s bedside and lit the candles, and I heard Robert laughing and talking with the boy below. I went and stood at the head of the stairs with a candle in my hands, and looked down upon my brother.
“Did Raoul not bring you word yesterday?” I asked.
He glanced up the stairs, smiling, and began to climb towards me, with Jacques at his heels.
“Word?” he said. “Of course he did not bring me word! There have been three thousand men or more between here and the rue Traversière for the past thirty-six hours. I did well to get back here tonight. Well, they’ve destroyed Réveillon’s property, and Henriot’s too, and done heaven knows how much damage besides—when a Paris crowd gets roused there are no half measures. I watched most of it from my windows in the laboratory, and a fine sight it was too, with the crowd shouting, ‘Vive le Tiers Etat!,’ ‘Vive Necker!’—though what the Third Estate or the minister have to do with the riots I cannot say! Anyway, poor fellows, dozens of them paid for this with their lives when the military fired on them. At least twenty dead and more than fifty wounded, from what I saw, and that was only in the rue Traversière.”
He had now reached the top of the stairs and stood beside me.
“Where’s Cathie?” he asked. “Why the darkness?”
We went into the bedroom together. I took the candle to the bedside, and I said to him, “We’ve been alone here since last night. I have not known what to do.”
I let the light shine down on Cathie’s face, and it was waxen white. Robert bent over and took her hand, and then he said, “O! Mon Dieu… Mon Dieu… Mon Dieu…” three times, just like that, and turned to me. “She’s dead, Sophie, can’t you see?”
Outside there was still the sound of tramping feet as the last of the straggling crowd made their way home. A group of them were laughing and singing:
“Vive Louis Seize
Vive ce roi vaillant,
Monsieur Necker,
Notre bon duc d’Orléans!”
Jacques came running into the room and climbed the windowsill, calling “Crack… crack…” after the marching men. Then the sound of the singing died away down the rue St. Honoré.
8
My first instinct was to take Jacques away from the unrest of Paris and home with me to le Chesne-Bidault, but Robert, after the first shock of Cathie’s death, said he could not bear to part with the boy, and that the pair of them would lodge for the time with Monsieur and Madame Fiat, Cathie’s parents, who now lived in the rue Petits Piliers in les Halles, within easy distance of the boutique at the Palais-Royal. The Fiats, having complained originally that they were too old to care for their grandchild during Cathie’s confinement, were now bowed down by remorse, and as anxious to have Jacques with them now as they had been reluctant before. Nevertheless, it was with a heavy heart that I bade goodbye to the little fellow, and to my brother too, who still hardly realized the loss that had come upon him.
“I shall work hard,” he told me, when he saw me to the diligence. “There is no other cure for grief.” But I could not help wondering whether it was some ploy in the affairs of the duc d’Orléans that concerned him, rather than the creation of glass and porcelain in his laboratory.
As I journeyed southwest from the capital, the talk in the diligence was all of the Réveillon riots, and how curiously they had arisen. Not one of the manufacturer’s own men had joined the riot, apparently—they were all workmen from rival foundries, along with men from other trades, loc
ksmiths, joiners, and dockers, while two had been arrested from the royal glass factory in the rue de Reuilly, only a short distance from my brother’s laboratory in the rue Traversière.
I kept silent, but was all ears for information, especially when one fellow traveler, well dressed and with an air of authority, said he had had it from a cousin employed as an official in the Châtelet that many of those arrested were carrying coins with the effigy of the duc d’Orléans upon them.
“One does not know what to believe,” echoed the traveler opposite me. “My brother-in-law tells me that members of the clergy, disguised as ordinary citizens, were bribing onlookers to join the riots.”
This, I thought grimly, should be recounted to Michel…
The diligence put me down at la Ferté-Bernard, where I had an uncomfortable wait for a half hour or so at the Petit Chapeau Rouge, as my conveyance had been ahead of time. This small hostelry was the meeting place of all the vagabonds in our part of the country: hawkers, tinkers, peddlers and mountebanks of all description, who used to earn a precarious living by knocking on farmhouse doors and selling worthless articles—trinkets, almanacs, and so on.
I waited in the small room set aside for passengers on the diligence, but I could catch some of the talk behind, where the drinks were served, and it seemed that Paris had not been alone in having riots. There had been insurrections at Nogent too, and at Bellême. I caught a glimpse of one fellow who appeared to be blind—until he raised his black patch and I perceived that he could see as well as anyone else, but they would disguise themselves thus to win sympathy when begging. He kept hammering the floor with his stick and shouting, “They should seize all the grain carts and hang the drivers; in that way we wouldn’t starve.”
I could not bear to think of good Durocher, and others of our workmen, being misled by men like these.
Presently François and Michel arrived to fetch me, and, like all stay-at-homes when a traveler returns, they were more interested in giving me their news than in hearing mine. Cathie’s death, the Paris riots, these, after quick expressions of sympathy, were soon brushed aside, and I had to hear how many seasonal farm laborers in outlying districts had been told there was no work for them, and were now going about in bands terrorizing the neighborhood. Farm animals were being mutilated in revenge, and early crops uprooted, and the wandering marauders were being joined by others from further west, from Brittany and the coast, as destitute as themselves.