I heard Robert’s footstep along the passage outside Pierre’s room, and his tread on the stairs—so he had been awakened too—and in a few minutes he had unbarred the door below and gone out into the yard. Then I turned and went back to my room, thinking, in foolish fashion, that François would be up to join me within a moment or two, full of concern for me, and I planned to be somewhat cool to make him sorry; but I waited for nearly a half hour, and he did not come.
Then anxiety got the better of my pride, and I put a wrapper on and went to the head of the stairs to listen. I could hear voices coming from the master’s room, Michel’s raised loud, as always when he was excited, and Robert’s laugh. I went downstairs and opened the door.
The first thing I saw was François lying on the floor with pillows beneath him. Robert and Michel were sitting astride two chairs, Michel with a bandage about his head. I ran at once to my husband and knelt beside him to see where he was wounded. His eyes were closed and he was breathing heavily, but I could see no blood, no bandage.
“What’s wrong, where is he hurt?” I asked my brothers.
They showed no concern, to my great astonishment and anger, and Robert made a grimace at Michel, half-laughing as he did so.
“N-nothing’s wrong,” said Michel, “he’s d-drunk, that’s all.”
I looked down again at my husband, whom I had never seen the worse for drink in the few years I had known him, and I saw then that they were right—I could smell it on his breath. François was stupefied.
“Let him lie,” said Robert. “No harm done. He’ll sleep it off.”
Then I saw the table, which they had dragged to one side of the room, and it was piled high with every sort of object from food to furniture. A great side of bacon lay on top of a satin stool, sacks of flour were wrapped about by brocaded curtains, a quantity of silver lay stacked beside bars of salt and jars of preserves.
They waited for me to speak. I could see their eyes upon me. I knew if I waited long enough Michel would break the silence.
“Well?” he said. “Aren’t you going to s-say something?”
I went over to the table and touched the brocade curtains. They reminded me of those that used to hang in the grande salle at la Pierre.
“Why should I?” I replied. “You didn’t find these in the forest. That’s all there is to it. If you choose to close the foundry and find your living this way, it’s your affair, not mine. But you might leave my husband behind next time you go fighting brigands.”
I turned to go back upstairs, when Michel spoke again.
“Don’t f-fool yourself, Sophie,” he said. “François didn’t need p-persuading, I assure you. And what you s-see on the table is nothing. We’ve got the f-furnace house stacked high. I’ll tell you one thing. Neither F-François nor I are prepared to see the men endure another w-winter like the last. That’s final.”
“You won’t have to,” I answered him. “If what Robert says is right, the whole world has changed. Paradise is round the corner. Meanwhile, I’d be obliged if the pair of you would carry François up to bed. Not to my room, but Pierre’s.”
I went away without looking back at them, and when I had shut the door of my room I heard them lumbering my husband up the stairs. He was protesting and mouthing nonsense in the way a drunk man will, and my brothers were hushing him to silence, laughing at the same time.
I lay back on my bed and watched the dawn come clear, and then after the first hush, and the stirring of birds under the window, heard the usual clatter and sound from the farm beyond the master’s house, the cows lowing before milking, the dogs barking, and all that went to make the start of another summer’s day.
It was a strange feeling, lying there in my mother’s room, in that same room she had shared with my father, which I had made my own since my marriage, believing that François and I would, though in a different fashion, continue in their tradition. Now, overnight—or was it in truth much longer, the events of the past week linking back to Cathie’s death and the riots in Paris, with the long winter overshadowing it all?—now, most unmistakably, I knew that a great gulf lay between our time and all that had gone before.
My brothers, my husband, even Edmé, my little sister, belonged to this moment, had waited for it, even, welcoming change as something they could themselves shape and possess, just as they molded glass to a new form. What they had been taught as children did not matter anymore. Those things were past and done with; only the future counted, a future which must be different in every way from what we had known. Why, then, did I lag behind? Why must I be reluctant? I thought of the winter, and how the families and ourselves had suffered, and I knew what Michel meant when he said it must never happen again; yet, even so, everything within me balked at what he had done.
I did not fool myself. The things that lay on the table below in the master’s room were stolen property, looted in all probability from that château at Nouans where the wretched silversmith Cureau and his son-in-law had hidden before being dragged forth to Ballon to die. What I did not know, what I might never know, was whether my husband and my brother had been among those who butchered them.
I fell asleep at last, all feeling numb within me, and when I awoke it was to find François by my side, begging forgiveness, so greatly shamed for being drunk that he was blubbering like a child, and there was nothing for it but to hold him in my arms, and comfort him.
I was not going to question him, but he came out with it, eager, I think, to be rid of secrecy. I had guessed right; they had been to Nouans. The patrol had marched far beyond the limit set for them, rumors of a plot by the aristocracy drawing them on. Panic was great in the whole district south of Mamers, down to Ballon and Bonnétable, no one knowing what was rumor, what was true—someone told them there were brigands dressed as friars, that same old story we had heard upon the road.
“It was this drove Michel mad,” said François, “a tale of friars armed, finding their way into the villages, frightening the people. We heard that the curé Besnard of Nouans was a grain hoarder, and that he was absent in Paris getting arms and ammunition to bring back to the château to use against his parishioners. So we went there, to the château. A crowd had already broken into it, seizing the silversmith Cureau and his son-in-law as hostages. They took them off to Ballon. We did not follow them.”
“You know what happened to them afterwards?” I asked.
He was silent a moment. “Yes,” he said at last, “yes, we heard.”
Then, raising himself up and leaning over me, he said, “The murder was none of our doing, Sophie. The people were mad. They had to have a victim. No single one of them was to blame, it was like a fever sweeping them.”
The same fever that had swept the crowd outside the Abbey of St. Vincent, so that a woman was trampled to death. The same that had gripped my sister Edmé, so that, caught up in it, she forgot her husband and her home.
“François,” I said, “if this goes on, murder, looting, taking life and property, it’s an end to law and order, a return to barbarism. This is not building the new society Pierre talks about.”
“It’s one way of achieving it,” he answered. “At least, so Michel says. Before you can build anything, you must first destroy—or, at least, sweep clean the ground. Those men who were… who died, Sophie, at Ballon, they were plotting against the people. They would not have hesitated to shoot them down had they possessed guns at the château. They deserved to die, as an example to the rest of their kind. Michel explained it all, the men were asking him.”
Michel said… Michel explained… It was as it had always been. My husband followed his friend, followed his leader.
“So you took what you wanted from the château and came home?” I asked.
“You can put it that way,” he replied. “Michel said that whoever had gone cold and hungry through the winter might make amends for it now. The men were nothing loath, you can imagine. We made camp in the forest for four nights, to let things quieten. We
had plenty of food and wine with us, as you saw for yourself. That’s when I…”
“Took what you did to quieten your conscience,” I said to him.
After that we lay still for a while without speaking. We both had traveled far in time, if not in distance, during the week we had been away from one another. If this was indeed the new society, it would not be easy to adjust to it.
“Don’t be too hard on me,” he said presently. “I don’t know what happened. We lit a fire there in the forest, and ate and drank, Michel and I beside the men. It was a strange feeling—nothing mattered but ourselves, we had no thought of yesterday or tomorrow. Michel kept saying, ‘It’s finished… it’s finished… the old ways have gone forever. The country belongs to us.’ It’s as I said before, a sort of fever swept us…”
Then he fell asleep, lying there in the crook of my arm, and later, when he awoke once more, and we dressed and went downstairs, we found the master’s room swept and tidied, the table in the middle of the floor again, and the only sign of change was that for our dinner that day we had fine silver set out, with monograms upon the forks and spoons, and the canister for sugar.
“I wonder,” I said to Madame Verdelet, to try her, “what my mother would say to this if she could see it.”
We were examining the cupboards in the kitchen, where the rest of the silver was now neatly stored. Madame Verdelet picked up a great candlestick and breathed upon it, polished it awhile, then set it down again.
“She would do as I do,” she replied, “accept such blessings, and ask no questions. It’s as Monsieur Michel says, folk who own such treasures, and starve the poor who work for them, deserve to lose everything they have.”
It was a comforting philosophy, but I was not sure why the benefit should be ours. I only knew that as the days passed I became used to the sight of that monogrammed silver upon the dinner table, and a week later it was I myself who helped Madame Verdelet to cut up the brocaded curtains to fit the smaller windows of the master’s room.
There was no more talk of brigands. The Great Fear that had swept the whole of France and ourselves after the Bastille fell petered out into oblivion. Born on rumor’s breath, spread by all our fears, the panic went as swiftly as it came, but the impression it left upon our lives remained indelible.
Something within each one of us had been awakened that we had not known was there; some dream, desire, or doubt, flickered into life by that same rumor, took root, and flourished. We were none of us the same afterwards. Robert, Michel, François, Edmé, myself, were changed imperceptibly. The rumor, true or false, had brought into the open hopes and dreads which, hitherto concealed, would now be part of our ordinary living selves.
The only one of us to rejoice wholeheartedly and stay uncorrupted by events was Pierre. It was he who came to tell us, in the second week in August, of the great decisions taken in Paris on the night of the fourth by the National Assembly. They had heard the news in Le Mans two days before, and he had taken the first chance to ride into the country and break it to us. The vicomte de Noailles, brother-in-law of General Lafayette, and one of the deputies of the aristocracy who held progressive views, had put forward a suggestion to the whole Assembly—that all the feudal rights should be abolished, that men should be declared equal whatever their birth or position. Titles were to be no more and men free to worship God how they pleased, office was to be open to all, privileges to go forever.
The Assembly had risen to their feet as one man to cheer the deputy’s suggestion. Many were in tears. One after the other, those deputies of the aristocracy who shared the same views as de Noailles swore that the rights they had held for centuries were theirs no longer. A kind of magic, Pierre said, must have come upon the Assembly gathered there in Versailles. The aristocracy, the clergy, the Third Estate—all three were suddenly united.
“It’s the end of all injustice and tyranny,” said Pierre. “It’s the beginning of a new France.”
I remember that as he told us the news, standing there in the master’s room, he suddenly burst into tears—Pierre, whom I never saw cry as a boy, except once, when a kitten died—and in a moment we were all of us crying and laughing and embracing one another. Madame Verdelet came in from the kitchen, and the niece who helped her. Michel rushed out into the foundry yard to ring the bell and summon all the workmen to tell them that he and François, Pierre and Robert, and all of them were brothers.
“The old laws are d-dead,” he shouted. “All men are equal. Everyone is made new and b-born again.”
There had been nothing like it, surely, since Pentecost. The happiness and desire for good that swept us all was like the hand of God upon each one of us. Robert, his eyes shining with excitement, told everyone that the duc d’Orléans must be behind it all—the vicomte de Noailles would never have thought of it by himself.
“Besides,” he added in my ear, “de Noailles has no possessions to give up anyway. He’s in debt to his eyebrows. If debts are to be abolished as well as privileges, we have reached the millennium.”
He was already making plans to return to Le Mans with Pierre, and take the diligence there next day for Paris.
The foundry bell kept ringing; no tocsin this time, thank God, but a peal for joy. The men and their wives, and the children, began flooding into the house, shyly at first, then more boldly, as we welcomed them and shook their hands. There was no feast prepared, but somehow we found wine for all of them; and the children, losing their awkwardness, started calling and shouting, and chasing each other about the foundry yard.
“Today everything is p-permitted,” said Michel. “The laws of adults are abolished along with f-feudal right.”
I saw François look at him and smile, and for the first time I watched it without jealousy. The hand of God must have been upon me too.
I have no recollection of the weeks that followed. All I remember is that the harvest was safely gathered in, the foundry furnace was started once again, and Edmé came to be with me when my son was born on September the 26th.
He was a lovely boy, the first fruit, so Edmé said, of the Revolution. Because he heralded good news, I called him Gabriel. He lived two weeks… By then our mood of Pentecost had passed.
Part Three
Les Enragés
12
My own grief has no part in this story. Many women lose their first child. My mother, in the days before I was born, lost two within as many years. I had seen it happen twice to Cathie, and with the last she herself went as well. Men call us the weaker sex. Perhaps it’s true. Yet to carry life within us as we do, to feel it bud and flower and come from us fully formed as a living creature, separate though part of ourselves, and watch it fade and die—this asks for strength and spiritual endurance.
Men stand aloof, helpless at such times, their very gestures awkward and ill at ease, as though from the beginning—which indeed is true—their part in the whole business has been secondary.
As to the two masters of the glass-house, I leaned most upon my brother Michel. He was roughly tender, practical as well, bearing away the cradle from my room so that I should not be reminded of my son. He told me too—I had once heard the story from my mother, long ago—of his first fears, when the infant brother and sister had died, that he might have contributed towards their death by plucking off their coverings for fun.
François made himself too humble for my comfort. He went about abashed, as though our child’s loss had been his doing; and, to show this, whispered, or trod on tiptoe through the rooms. When he spoke to me, half cringing in doing so, it nearly drove me mad. He would see the irritation in my face, or hear it in my voice, and naturally, though I could not help it at the time, this contributed to his abject look, making me disfavor him the more. I had no pity, and did not let him near me for six months or longer, and then perhaps—who knows?—it was more from lassitude than inclination. They say it takes a woman her full time again to recover from the birth of a first child, if she should lose it.
Meantime, the Declaration of the Rights of Man made all men equal, if it did not make them brothers, and within a week of its passing into law there were riots in Le Mans, and disturbances in Paris too, with the price of bread as high as it had been before, and unemployment rife. Bakers were blamed in every city for charging too dearly for their four-pound loaf, and they in turn put the blame upon the grain merchants; all men were at fault save those who leveled the accusations.
The Manceaux were still divided as to whether the murderers of the silversmith and his son-in-law should be punished or let free, and there were insurrections about this as well, with people going out into the streets armed with knives and stones to use against the Citizens’ Militia—now called the National Guard—and shouting, “Let the men of Ballon free!” I never heard if Edmé were among them.
The Abbey of St. Vincent had been taken over by the Dragons de Chartres, and as to Monsieur Pomard, Edmé’s husband, his title of tax collector to the monks was abolished, together with many other professions and privileges. He left the city, and where he disappeared to I do not know, for Edmé never followed him. The officers of the Dragons were quartered in her home, and she went to live with Pierre.
The municipality showed itself firm with the butchers of Ballon, and one ringleader was sentenced to death and another condemned to the galleys. The third, I believe, escaped. So the anarchy Pierre feared was stifled. The few times I went to Le Mans there was little to show for our fine new equality, except that the market people were more pert, and those who had the material for it draped their stalls with tricolor.