It was not so calm in the center of the town. There were crowds everywhere in the streets, and an air of excitement. Most people were wearing a cockade of red, white, and blue, and the rose and blue of Robert’s emblem seemed out of place.
“Fashion has passed you by,” I said to him. “The duc d’Orléans does not appear to be lieutenant-general of the kingdom after all.”
For a moment my brother seemed disconcerted, but he quickly recovered.
“General Lafayette was giving cockades of red, white, and blue to the citizen militia of Paris the day I left,” he said. “No doubt these colors will be adopted by the whole country with the duc d’Orléans’s approval.”
The order that had impressed us at the gates of the city was lacking at the hôtel de ville. Armed citizens, wearing the tricolor cockade, were doing their best to keep back the crowds, which took very little notice of them. There were the inevitable cries of “Vive la nation… Vive le Roi…,” but not a single “Vive le duc d’Orléans.”
My brother, prudently perhaps, removed the outmoded colors from his hat.
There were other vehicles drawn up at one corner of the place, and we left the carriole in charge of an old fellow who had roped off an enclosure with the words “Réservé aux Electeurs du Tiers Etat” written on a placard beside it. Robert’s air of authority, and his distribution of largesse, left the man in little doubt that my brother was at least a deputy.
We fought our way through the crowd to the interior of the hôtel de ville. Here were more armed citizens of the new militia, full of pride and self-importance, who directed us to a closed door behind which we waited for forty minutes or more, along with a small group of people as bewildered as ourselves. Then the door was opened, and we filed past a long table behind which were seated officials of various sorts—whether they were members of the new committee, and whether one of them was the mayor himself, I could not say—but all wore the cockade of red, white, and blue. Our names and addresses and the particulars of our business in Le Mans were noted down and immediately filed by a harassed individual who seemed far less concerned with the fact that Robert hailed from Paris (and might conceivably be a brigand in disguise) than with the revelation that we had no idea to which company of the Citizens’ Militia our brother Pierre belonged.
“But I have explained to you already,” said Robert patiently. “We have been three days in the Touraine. We know nothing of the Citizens’ Militia here in Le Mans.”
Our interlocutor looked at us suspiciously. “At least you know in what quarter of the city your brother lives?”
We gave the addresses of Pierre’s house and of his chambers, and this perplexed the man more than ever, for it seemed that recruits to the Citizens’ Militia were drawn from both business addresses and places of residence, and Pierre might thus be in two places at once. Finally we were allowed to depart, having been issued with passes to show that we were brother and sister to Pierre Busson du Charme, member of the Lodge of St. Julien de l’Etroite Union, which, when Robert remembered it, had an instant effect upon our official.
“Influence is all,” whispered Robert in my ear, “even when a city is swept by revolution.”
While we were surrounded by the militia and by officials we had been spared rumor, but once outside the hôtel de ville we were caught up in it again. Brigands, thousands strong, were known to be in the forest of Bonnétable. There were also bands of marauders from the forest of Montmirail terrorizing the countryside from la Ferté-Bernard to Le Mans. Hearing this, I was for returning home as soon as possible, despite the danger, but Robert steered me through the crowd and back to the carriole, making light of this latest piece of news.
“First, you and I and the horse cannot go further this night,” he said, “and secondly, Michel, François, and the whole foundry are very well able to take care of themselves.”
When we arrived at Pierre’s house near the church of St. Pavin we found it full to its rooftop, not only with his boys, who were sporting miniature cockades and shouting “Vive la nation” at the top of their voices, but with clients out of their luck who had come to my lawyer brother for support—an elderly merchant retired from business, a widow and her daughter, and a young fellow who, unable to earn his living in any other way, was paid by Pierre to be companion to his sons. Pierre’s youngest stood naked in his cot, which was draped in red, white, and blue.
My brother himself was out on guard with his section of the citizen militia, but his wife Marie soon had me upstairs and into the boys’ room—the boys, I was thankful to note, dismissed to the attic—and I fell at once into an exhausted sleep, only to be awakened the next morning by the hated tocsin ringing from the church nearby.
The tocsin… were we ever to be rid of it? Must its summons continually haunt us by day and night, only to foster greater fear? I dragged myself from bed and went to the window; I could see people running in the street below. I went to the door and called my sister-in-law. I had no answer, save a wail from the youngest child in his cot. I dressed slowly and went downstairs. There was no one in the house but the widow and her daughter, left to mind the baby; everyone else had gone out into the streets.
“The brigands have come without a doubt,” said the widow, rocking herself to and fro, and the cot as well, “but Monsieur Busson du Charme will repulse them. He is the only person in Le Mans with any integrity.”
Since she had lost her all in a lawsuit which Pierre had defended, and as recompense he had offered the hospitality of his home for as long as she cared to remain there, it was small wonder the widow thought so well of him.
I went to brew myself some coffee, but the boys must have overturned the pan, for everything was scattered, nor could I find any bread. If my brother expected dinner on his return from guard there was precious little to feed him, here in his own kitchen.
People were still shouting in the street outside, and the tocsin was sounding. If this is revolution, I thought, we were better without one—then I remembered the winter, and the families at the foundry, and anything, even fear, was preferable to what we had endured.
It was midday before Marie and the boys returned, and all the excitement was because the officer in charge of the artillery had been seen mounting the guns on the walls of the city, and rumor had gone around that as he was a member of the aristocracy the guns would be turned upon the people.
“Every cart entering the city is now being searched for hidden weapons,” exclaimed my sister-in-law. “The peasants from the countryside are having to turn out all their produce, and they have been rioting in the place des Halles, which has added to the confusion.”
“No matter,” replied the widow, “your husband will see to everything.”
Evidently she was as great an optimist as my brother Pierre himself, who, my sister-in-law informed me, could know nothing of what was going on in the town since his orders had been to guard the cathedral crypt. There was no sign of Robert, but it did not surprise me when one of the boys said that it had been his uncle’s intention to speak with the officials at the hôtel de ville. My eldest brother, true to type, believed in keeping his finger on the city’s pulse…
My sister-in-law set to work to produce a meal for all of us from the produce upset in the market place, and, as my brother Pierre insisted on every member of his household eating their vegetables raw and refraining from meat, this did not take long to do under the circumstances.
We then remained within doors waiting for our menfolk—for I was determined not to set foot outside if the peasants were still rioting—and, while the boys played leapfrog with the youth who was meant to tutor them, I nursed the youngest, my sister-in-law slept, and the widow told me the whole history of her lawsuit.
It was five or six o’clock before my brothers returned, and when they did they arrived together, Pierre resplendent with musket and tricolor cockade, and Robert also wearing the national colors. Both looked grave.
“What news? What has happened?”
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The same words sprang to all our lips, even to the widow’s.
“Two citizens of Le Mans butchered near Ballon,” said Robert—Ballon was a commune some five leagues from the city. “The brigands cannot be blamed for it,” he added. “These men were murdered by ruffians from a neighboring parish. Couriers have just ridden into Le Mans with the news.”
Pierre came forward to kiss me, for it was my first sight of him since our arrival in his house the night before, and he confirmed Robert’s story.
“It was a silversmith by the name of Cureau, the wealthiest man in Le Mans,” he told us, “detested by everyone and suspected of being a grain hoarder. However, that doesn’t excuse his murder. He had been in hiding in the château of Nouans north of Mamers these past two days, and it was broken into early this morning by a band of excited peasants, who forced him and his son-in-law, one of the Montessons, a brother of the deputy who lost his carriage the other night, to return with them to Ballon. There they battered the wretched Cureau to death with an axe, shot Montesson, and paraded through the parish with the severed heads on pikes. There’s no hearsay about this. One of the couriers saw it for himself.”
My sister-in-law, usually so equable and calm, had turned very pale. Ballon was only a short distance from her own home at Bonnétable, where her father was a grain merchant.
“I know what you are thinking,” said Pierre, putting his arm round her. “Your father has not been accused of hoarding… yet. And he is known to be a good patriot. In any event, once this news has spread, we must hope that every parish in the district will form its own militia to keep law and order. The priests are the trouble. Not a single curé can be trusted to keep his head in an emergency, but must run blabbing from parish to parish alarming the people.”
I went and sat by my sister-in-law and took her hand. Although I knew nothing of the murdered men, the news of their butchery by local peasants from a nearby parish, and not by brigands, made their death all the more horrible. I thought of our workmen at the foundry, Durocher and others, who had gone out that night in the winter to attack the grain carts. Could Durocher, blinded by resentment and hatred, be capable of committing murder too?
“You say they were peasants who did this terrible thing,” I said to Pierre. “Were they out of work and starving—what did they hope to gain by it?”
“A momentary satisfaction,” answered Pierre, “after months, years, centuries of oppression. No use shaking your head, Sophie. It’s true. The point is that bloodshed of this sort is useless, and must be stopped, and the culprits punished. Otherwise we have anarchy.”
He went to the kitchen to find the meal of fruit and raw vegetables that his wife had prepared for him, but his boys had been at it already and left him nothing. I thought of my father, and what would have happened if his sons had dared to interfere with the dinner kept hot for him when he came off shift. Pierre, however, did not seem to care.
“The boys are growing,” he said, “and I am not. Besides, by going hungry I can learn something of what those poor devils went through before suffering brought them to the point of murder.”
“The poor devils you are sorry for,” observed Robert, “were neither hungry nor desperate, as it happened. I had it straight from an official at the hôtel de ville who had spoken to one of the couriers. Two of the murderers were domestic servants—one of them servant to a colleague of yours, the notary at René, and exceedingly well fed. Their excuse was that they were egged on to do it by vagabonds from the forest.”
We were still talking of the murder when we went to bed that night, and in the morning the boys, who had been roaming the town though forbidden by their mother to do so, reported that people everywhere were discussing little else. The guard outside the hôtel de ville had been doubled, not through fear of bandits, who were now said to be dispersing, but because the peasants outside the town were threatening all folk decently dressed and accusing them of belonging to the aristocracy.
Pierre’s boys, brought up by their father to go barefoot, told me gleefully that they had amused themselves running through the streets shouting “A mort…à mort…” at the sight of every carriage, and had narrowly escaped arrest at the hands of the Citizens’ Militia.
Pierre himself, and Robert also, were somewhere in the city, Pierre on guard, supposedly, and Robert, for all I knew, making further enquiries at the hôtel de ville. I summoned up my courage and ventured forth, with the boys as escort, to pay a call on Edmé during the afternoon, but the crowds today, Friday the 24th, were even worse than on Wednesday when we had arrived, and despite the presence everywhere of the armed militia there seemed more disorder too. The national cockade, donned more for protection than for any other reason by the older generation of Manceaux (I was thankful for mine stuck prominently on my hat), appeared to be a symbol of defiance when worn by the young. Youths in groups of twenty or more paraded the streets carrying staves entwined with the tricolor, and at the sight of more timid wayfarers, the elderly, or women like myself, would dash towards us waving their banners and shouting, “Are you for the Third Estate? Are you for the nation?,” at the same time yelling and shrieking like creatures possessed.
When we came to the Abbey of St. Vincent, beside which Edmé and her husband had their lodging, I was alarmed to see an even bigger crowd surrounding the walls and building. Some of the bolder spirits had swarmed upon the walls, and they were waving sticks and staves, encouraged by the crowd, and calling “Down with the grain hoarders! Down with those who starve the people!”
A few of the Citizens’ Militia, posted by the Abbey doors, stood like ineffectual dummies, unable to control their own muskets.
“You know what is going to happen,” said Emile, Pierre’s eldest boy. “The crowd will overwhelm the militia, and break into the Abbey.”
I had the same thought, and turned to make my way out of it all as soon as possible. The boys, being small and agile, ducked their heads and squeezed their way under arms and legs and so out to the fringe of the crowd behind us, but I was caught up in a surge towards the Abbey and then carried forward, helpless and impotent, part of the human tide.
The supreme fear of every pregnant woman of being overwhelmed and crushed was now mine in full measure. I was packed tight, jammed against my fellows. Some of them, like myself, had joined the crowd as onlookers, but most were aggressive, hostile towards the inmates of the Abbey, and in all probability, did they know his lodging, towards Edmé’s husband, Monsieur Pomard, the contractor and tax collector to the monks.
We swayed backwards and forwards outside the Abbey walls, and I knew that if I fainted, which I was near to doing, there would be no hope for me; I should be overborne and trampled underfoot.
“We’ll have him out of it,” they were shouting ahead of me. “We’ll have him out and serve him as they served his fellows at Ballon,” and I did not know whether it was the Abbot they cried for or my brother-in-law, for the words “grain hoarder” and “hunger merchant” were yelled again and again. I remembered too that the unfortunates who had been butchered at Ballon were not aristocrats but bourgeois, incurring the enmity of the people because of their wealth, and the murderers themselves were not starving peasants but ordinary men like these now with me in the crowd, who, for a moment, had turned to devils.
I could feel hatred, like a tide, rise up from a hundred throats about me, and those who had been peaceable before were now infected. A woman and her husband who five minutes earlier had been walking casually towards the Abbey, even as I had done with my nephews, were now shouting in anger, their arms raised above their heads, their faces distorted. “Grain hoarder,” they yelled. “Fetch him out to us… grain hoarder.”
Then, just as a new surge from the crowd behind us drove us towards the Abbey, a cry went up, “The Dragons… The Dragons are here…,” and in the distance I could hear the clatter of hoofs coming in our direction and the high-pitched call from the officer in command. They were among us in an instant, sc
attering us to right and left, and the great burly form of the man beside me served, through no action of his own, as a barrier between me and the approaching horses. Somehow he thrust me sideways out of harm, but I could smell the warm horseflesh and see the raised saber of the Dragon menacing the crowd, and down on her face under the horse’s hoofs fell the woman who had been yelling just ahead of me. I shall never forget her scream, nor the shrill whinny of the horse as it reared, and stumbled upon her.
The people fell apart on either side, the Dragons in the midst of them, and I had blood on my dress—the woman’s blood. I began to walk stiffly, hardly knowing what I did, towards the door of Edmé’s lodging beside the Abbey. I knocked upon it and no one came. I went on knocking, and crying and calling, and a window opened on the floor above, and a man’s face, white with terror, stared down upon me without recognition. It was my brother-in-law, Monsieur Pomard, and he straightway shut the window once again and left me knocking on the door.
The shouting of the crowd, and the cries of the Dragons, and the singing in my ears all turned to one, and I sank down upon Edmé’s doorstep in sudden darkness, nor did I feel the hands that touched me afterwards, and lifted me, and carried me inside. When I opened my eyes I was lying on a narrow bed in the small salon that I recognized to be my sister’s, and Edmé herself was kneeling beside me. The unusual thing about her was that she was almost as dusty and torn as I was myself, with face begrimed and hair loose about her, but stranger still was the great band of tricolor ribbon she was wearing round her shoulders. Intuition told me what had happened. She too had been among the crowd, but not as a spectator. I closed my eyes.
“Yes, it’s true,” said Edmé, as if she had read my thoughts, “I was there. I was one of them. You don’t understand the impulse. You are not a patriot.”
I understood nothing except that I was a woman near her time, carrying a baby that might be born dead even as Cathie’s had been, and that I had narrowly escaped death myself through being caught up in a screaming mob which had no knowledge why it screamed.