This time the whole populace of the city was roused. It might have been ’89 all over again. Tremendous crowds assembled in the place des Jacobins shouting, “Vengeance! Vengeance! The Dragons must go.” People began flocking into Le Mans from the countryside beyond, for as always the news had spread, and suddenly, as though from nowhere, came hordes of peasants armed with pikes and forks and axes, threatening to burn the city to the ground unless the inhabitants themselves took action and forced the municipality to dismiss the Dragons.
This time I stayed within doors, remembering the horrors of that riot before the Abbey of St. Vincent nearly two years before, but leaning from the window of Pierre’s house, with his excited boys beside me, I could hear the roar of the crowds. Nor did it make for ease of mind to know that Pierre, Michel, and Edmé too were there among them, shouting for vengeance in the place des Jacobins.
The National Guard, without orders from the municipality, had raised barricades in the streets, and mounted guns. If the officers commanding the Dragons had given but one hasty order to advance, the guns would have been fired against their men, and a bloody massacre would have followed.
The officers of the Dragons, all credit to them, kept their men in check. Meanwhile, the flustered officials of the municipality went from one headquarters to another, seeking advice from superior authority.
At eight o’clock in the evening the crowds were as thick and as menacing as ever, backed by the National Guard, and one and all shouted, despite the efforts of the officials to make them disperse, “No half measures. The Dragons go tonight!”
Once more they took up the old cry “Ça ira!” The whole city must have rung with the song that night, and still the officials hesitated, fearing that if the regiment left the city the ordinary citizens must be at the mercy of all the riffraff from outside.
Sometime between eleven and midnight the decision must have been taken, although how and where I never heard; but at one in the morning, with the crowds still waiting in the streets, the Dragons de Chartres left the city. I had gone to bed, anxious for the safety of François and my brothers who were still in the streets. The shouting died away, and all was quiet. Then, just after the church nearby had struck one, I heard the sound of cavalry. There was something ominous, almost eerie, about that steady clip-clop in the darkness of the night, the jingle of the trappings and the harness, loud at first, then fading, then dying right away. Whether it would bring good or evil to the city, who could tell? Two years ago I should have trembled for my life at their departure. Now, lying awake, waiting for François and the others to return, I could only smile at the thought that a regiment of soldiers had been defeated by a citizens’ militia without a shot being fired.
The departure of the Dragons de Chartres from Le Mans was a signal of victory for the Club des Minimes and others like it, and from that day forward their influence was paramount in the affairs of the city. Those officials of the municipality and others who had favored the retention of the regiment lost office, and the National Guard itself was purged of anyone who might have sympathy with the old régime.
To mark the change the very names of the streets were altered, heraldic signs were pulled down, and at the same time the sale of Church property began.
I saw the start of this before I left for home. Michel, hearing that workmen had begun demolishing one of the smaller churches in the city, and that the contents were on offer for anyone who cared to purchase them, suggested that we should step by out of curiosity.
It was a strange sight, and I did not care much for it. It seemed sacrilege to trade objects we had always looked on with respect. The actual demolition had barely started, but the church was stripped of its altar and screen and pulpit, which were being sold in lots to city tradesmen. At first bidding was slow, the people hesitant, no doubt, for the same reason as myself, staring with goggling eyes at such destruction. Then they became bolder, half laughing with a certain awkwardness, and one big fellow, a butcher by trade, stepped forward with a roll of assignats and bought the altar railings as a frontage to his shop. There was no more hesitation after this. Statues, crucifixes, pictures, all were for sale and briskly purchased. I saw two women staggering under the load of a fine picture of the Ascension, and a little lad, clutching a crucifix, whirled it around his head for a weapon, as children will. I turned away and went out into the street, dismayed. I had a sudden vision of Edmé and myself as children in the chapel of la Pierre, and the good curé blessing us after our first Communion.
Presently I heard laughter behind me. It was Michel, François, and Edmé, all bearing trophies from the sale. Michel had a vestment, a chasuble, flung over his shoulder like a cape.
“I’ve needed a new working blouse for some time past,” he called. “Now I can set the tone at le Chesne-Bidault. Here, catch this.”
He threw me an altar cloth, which he intended, I suppose, for the master’s table. As I held it with a burning face, the crowd around me watching curiously, I saw that François and Edmé had each one of them a chalice, and, with mock solemnity, gestured towards me as though to drink my health.
14
The news of the flight of the royal family from Paris in ’91 reached Le Mans on the afternoon of June the 22nd. The shock was considerable. Panic seized the municipality, and leading citizens, believed to be in sympathy with the old régime, were at once arrested and held for questioning. Our old enemy rumor spread through the countryside once more. The King and Queen, so it was said, were on their way to the frontier to join forces with the Prince de Condé, and once in Prussia would summon vast armies to their side to invade France, and then reinstate the old way of life.
The flight, so Michel said, would be a signal for a mass exodus. All the faint-hearts and the disgruntled, who up till now had shown a façade of patriotism, would try a similar escape and so help to swell the growing crowd of émigrés. We talked of nothing else for two whole days. I remember how the women gathered round to have their say, and one and all were sure the King had gone reluctantly; it was all the Queen’s doing, the King would never have thought of it but for her.
Then came the good news. The royal family had been arrested at Varennes near the frontier, and were on their way back to Paris under escort.
“That’s their f-finish,” said Michel. “No one will have any respect for them anymore. The King’s f-forfeited all honor. He ought to abdicate.”
We believed for a time that this would happen. The duc d’Orléans’s name was mentioned as possible Regent for the little Dauphin, and there was even talk of a Republic. Then somehow the scare died down, the Court resumed its life at the Tuileries, though heavily guarded, and later, in September, the King took his oath to the Constitution.
Feeling towards the royal family was never the same again. As Michel said, the King had forfeited respect. He was just a tool in the hands of the Queen and the Court party, whom the whole nation knew to be in secret correspondence with the princes and the émigrés abroad. Security tightened. A close watch was kept on those members of the aristocracy who remained in the country, and on the clergy who would not take the oath to the Constitution. Feeling ran so high in Le Mans that certain women, who refused to go to Mass when it was celebrated by the State priests, were publicly whipped in the place des Halles and forced to attend. This seemed to me excessive, but it did not do to express an opinion, and anyway my own life had more interest for me that summer.
My second baby, Sophie Magdaleine, was born on the 8th of July, and my mother and Jacques came up from St. Christophe for the event. It was a joy to have my mother with me once again, supervising the master’s house as if she had never left it. Wisely, she kept her own counsel on the changes, though I know she noticed everything, from the brocade curtains to the monograms on the silver. Nor did she speak of the work in progress at the foundry, where the engraving upon the glass was designed to please a different clientele from the one she had known. Gone were the fleur-de-lys, and the lettering interlaced.
These emblems were out of fashion, even decadent. We now had torches upon our glass, representing liberty, with hands clasped in friendship, and the words “égalité” and “fraternité” scrawled at the base. I cannot say they were an improvement on the past, but they fetched a good price in Paris and Lyon, which was our main concern.
Sitting up in her old room, watching me nurse my baby, listening to the happy laughter of Jacques, now a sturdy boy of ten, playing with the Durocher children in the orchard, my mother smiled at me and said, “The world may alter, but there’s a sight won’t change.”
I looked down at the baby at my breast, and stopped her feeding or she would have choked herself.
“One never knows,” I answered. “The Assembly might pass a law condemning this as self-indulgence.”
“It would not surprise me,” said my mother, “what any of those people did. They’re half of them only lawyers and little jumped-up clerks.”
It was as well Pierre could not hear her, or Michel either. Anyone who spoke one word in criticism of the Assembly was a traitor in their eyes.
“Surely you are not against the Revolution?” I asked her, greatly daring.
“I’m against nothing that benefits honest people,” she answered. “If a man wishes to get on in life, he should be encouraged to do so. I don’t see what that has to do with revolution. Your father became a rich man through his own efforts. He began at the bottom, like any apprentice boy.”
“My father had talent,” I argued. “Talented men will always make their way. The new laws are designed to help those who have nothing.”
“Don’t you believe it,” replied my mother. “The peasants are no better off than they were in the past. It is the middle men who are climbing to the top today. Shopkeepers and the like. I would not grudge it them if they kept their manners.”
Watching the baby feed, listening to the boys climbing the trees outside, the spirit of revolution seemed a world away.
“That child has had enough,” said my mother suddenly. “She’s feeding now from greed, like any adult. Put her in her cradle.”
“She’s a revolutionary,” I answered. “Revolutionaries always demand more, and are never satisfied.”
“That is my point,” said my mother, taking Sophie Magdaleine from me and patting her back for wind. “She does not know what is good for her, any more than all the so-called patriots in the country. Someone should have the nerve, and the power, to say ‘Enough.’ But they’re like a lot of sheep without a shepherd.”
It was good to hear her talk. Good to listen to her practical strong sense. Revolutions might come and go, whispers and rumors blow about the countryside, society, as we had known it, tumble upside down; my mother remained herself, never reactionary, never pigheaded, only most blessedly sane. She stood by the cradle, gently rocking it, as she had done for all of us in days gone by, and said, “I wonder if your brother has a little one like this?”
She meant Robert, and I saw by the expression on her face how much she yearned for him.
“I expect he has, by now,” I answered. “The last time he wrote they expected a child.”
“I’ve heard nothing,” she answered, “nothing for ten months. Jacques no longer asks after his father. It’s a strange thought; if there is a brother or a sister for him there in London, it will be English-born. Some little cockney, knowing nothing of his own country.”
She stooped and made the sign of the cross over my baby, then murmured something about dinner for the men when they came off shift, and went downstairs. The room was full of shadows when she had gone, and I felt suddenly bereft. All we had lived through during the past two years seemed valueless. I was dispirited, lost, for no good reason.
When she went away again, back to St. Christophe, taking Jacques with her, it was as though peace and sanity departed too. François and Michel stood about the foundry yard in lifeless fashion, and for all three of us it seemed that our whole day had grown dim. During her brief visit my mother had managed, without anyone realizing it, to establish her old authority. My menfolk came to the table groomed and clean, Madame Verdelet scrubbed the kitchen once a day, the workmen whipped off their caps and stood to attention when she spoke to them—and all of this by instinct, not through fear. There was not a soul in the foundry who did not have a regard for her.
“It’s a q-queer thing,” said Michel after she had gone, “but my mother achieves more with one l-look than we do with all our c-curses and cajolery. It’s a pity they don’t have women d-deputies. She’d be elected every t-time.”
I don’t know how it was, but during the four weeks of her stay with us my brother did not once call out the National Guard on an expedition, though he had them parade for her benefit before the church at le Plessin-Dorin.
In September, after the elections were held, and the new deputies to the Legislative Assembly, as it was called, took their seats in Paris, we were able to talk with some authority on public matters—or pretended to do so, to impress Pierre and Edmé in Le Mans—because my husband’s eldest brother, Jacques Duval of Mondoubleau, was elected one of the deputies for our département of Loir-et-Cher. Like all progressives, he was a member of the Club des Jacobins, and when he returned home from Paris François and Michel would either go to Mondoubleau to see him and hear the news, or he would spare the time to visit us at le Chesne-Bidault. He it was who told us of the divisions within the new Assembly, some favoring moderate measures, others, including himself, a more forward policy; and there was a continual jockeying for position among the leaders of each group.
There was still deep mistrust of the King, more so of the Queen, known to be corresponding with her brother the Emperor of Austria and urging him to make war upon France. It was felt by the progressive deputies, all of whom were members either of the Club des Jacobins or the Club des Cordeliers, that a far stricter watch should be kept on the aristocrats remaining in the country, and on the clergy who refused to take the oath. These people, my brother-in-law inferred, were a menace to security, provoking unrest and dissatisfaction in many parts of the country. As long as they remained at liberty they would hold up the work of the Revolution, and stifle progress.
Jacques Duval became a close friend of Marat, editor of L’Ami du Peuple, one of the most widely read and popular newspapers in Paris, and he used to send this down to us every week, so that we could keep abreast of all that was said and done in the capital. I was not sure what to make of it myself; it was an inflammatory sheet, whipping its readers to violence, and urging them to take action against the “enemies of the people” if legislation should be slow. Michel and François read every word of it, and passed it on to the workmen too—a mistaken gesture. They had enough to do in the foundry as it was, keeping production going and fulfilling our orders, without roaming the countryside in quest of erring nobles and refractory priests.
For myself, I let them talk, and shut my ears to argument. My baby took up all my time. Those nine months that I was blessed with her are bright now with her memory alone. Nothing else counted.
She caught a cold in spring that went to her chest, and although I nursed her day and night for almost a week, and sent for a doctor from Le Mans, we could not save her. She died on April the 22nd, 1792, two days after Prussia and Austria declared war on France; I remember we heard the news the same day we buried Sophie Magdaleine. I was quite numb with grief, and so were François and Michel and the people at the foundry, for the baby had been a radiant child, delighting all of us.
Like other persons suddenly bereaved, I heard of war with bitter satisfaction. Now I should not be the only one to suffer. Thousands would mourn. Let men fight and cut themselves to pieces. The quicker invasion came and we were all decimated, the sooner personal sorrow would be wiped out.
I think I hardly cared that spring what happened to the country, but, later, helpless misery at my baby’s death turned to hatred of the enemy. Hatred of the Prussians and the Austrians who dared to interfere in France’s
affairs and make war upon us because they rejected our régime, but above all hatred of those émigrés who were now bearing arms against their country.
Any sympathy I might have had for them in the beginning had now vanished. They were traitors, every one of them. My brother Robert, who had not written to me for a year, might even now be among the number enrolled in the armies of the duke of Brunswick. The very thought of it made me sick. Now, when Michel and François set forth with the National Guard on a tour of inspection, I cheered them on, and had as great a satisfaction as any woman at the foundry when they returned from seizing property for the nation’s benefit.
All the lands belonging to émigrés suffered the same treatment as those held by the Church, and it was about this time that we ourselves, François and I, bought the small property at le Gué de Launay outside Vibraye, with an eye to the future and our middle age.
Everywhere châteaux were standing empty, their owners having fled. The le Gras de Luarts had gone from la Pierre, the de Cherbons from Chérigny. Our landlord, Philip de Mangin, had been evicted from the château of Montmirail, but his father-in-law, Jean de la Haye de Launay, did not come under suspicion, and was allowed to remain in residence.
Day after day we would hear of more rats running, most of them to join the army of the Prince de Condé under the duke of Brunswick, and as their names were listed on the sheet of émigrés, and their property was sequestered, we had the dubious satisfaction of knowing that should they ever return they would find their homes given to others, if not burned down and pillaged, and every sou they possessed the property of the nation.
The Legislative Assembly was not hard enough on the traitors. François’s brother, Jacques Duval, and many others who thought like him pressed for stronger measures; every suspect in the country to be rounded up and questioned, and if necessary kept in custody unless they could prove their innocence. The country was in mortal danger, with two armies invading it from the east; nor was this the only threat, for in Brittany and to the southwest in the Vendée there was known to be strong royalist feeling and much sympathy for the émigrés.