Daughters of the Storm (27 page)

‘Riot?' she called over the clamour.

‘I can't tell,' Pierre replied. ‘Sit tight.'

Instead, Marie-Victoire stood up and peered through the mêlée.

‘It's soldiers,' she shouted through cupped hands. ‘They're marching this way.'

Pierre edged the cart closer to the wall. ‘We will just have to wait,' he said resignedly.

‘I don't like the look of it.' Marie-Victoire sat down again. ‘There seems to be trouble.'

A group of men armed with pikes forced their way through to the area where Pierre and Marie-Victoire waited. They were followed by more men in varying types of dress. Some were in their shirtsleeves and breeches. Others wore ticken trousers and stout boots and were carrying a weapon of sorts, either a pike or a crude wooden stave. Some had knives stuck at angles into their belts. In the main they appeared to be both surprised and dazed, and only a few were stepping out with any semblance of purpose. Several women ran alongside. They were shouting and sobbing.

‘Halt.'

A command rang through the hubbub and the untidy group shuffled to a standstill. Dressed in a stained white uniform with blue cuff-flaps and muddy gaiters, a sergeant pushed his way to the front. Pierre, watching with dawning comprehension, shrank back with a quick movement against the wall. The sergeant turned to consult with a figure who had materialised out of the crowd.

‘Jacques.' Marie-Victoire felt the word burst from her, and she could have bitten out her tongue for her stupidity.

It was indeed Maillard, looking considerably more prosperous and better-fed than the last time she had seen him. He was wearing a short red coat over his striped trousers and a huge tricolour cockade, and he appeared to be acting in some official capacity. Marie-Victoire lowered her head and prayed as she had never prayed before that Jacques had not seen her.

‘Ten more,' shouted the sergeant. ‘I need ten more for the honour of serving
la patrie.
If I don't get any volunteers, I'll just have to choose.' He leered expectantly at the crowd, which fell back nervously. ‘Come, my friends, is no one going to offer to thrash the Austrians?'

A woman burst into frantic sobs. Marie-Victoire peered at her between her interlaced fingers. She looked neat and respectable but her hair was tumbling in disorder from under her cap and she had obviously been running. A second woman threw her arm around her and told her to shut up.

Maillard considered the scene and then he raised his hand. An expectant hush fell. Maillard pointed a finger at some youths who had had the misfortune – or the imprudence – to be standing quite close to him.

‘They'll do,' he said in unmistakably authoritative tones. Marie-Victoire's heart gave a warning thump.

Before they had time to protest, the ‘volunteers' were pushed forward by their friends. The sergeant gave each of them a piece of paper and they were chivvied into line with the rest.

Again Maillard raised his hand. Then he paused. As if drawn to a magnet, Marie-Victoire unwillingly raised her face and read in Maillard's the flaring triumph and revenge that she knew would be there. Maillard's hand pointed briefly and it was done.

With a curse, Pierre was hustled by the sergeant forward into the line.

‘No!' shouted Marie-Victoire. ‘Jacques, no! For mercy's sake!'

Maillard did not answer her but signalled to the sergeant to take Pierre's name.

Pierre thought swiftly. Perhaps he could make a run for it? But that would not serve. Maillard knew who he was and it would be difficult to operate in such a small city as Paris if the authorities were looking for him. Better to let the army take him and then to arrange a convenient, but temporarily incapacitating, flesh wound at a later date and get himself invalided out. It was a nuisance this, and put paid to his plans for Marie-Victoire and himself. Pierre made up his mind definitely to get his own back on Maillard, and not to be squeamish about it. The man was a menace.

Marie-Victoire's nails had made white crescents on her palms and she was gazing at him in agony. Pierre shrugged and mouthed a kiss over the crowd, and cast a warning glance towards Maillard who was affecting not to be watching them. The sergeant barked out the order to march and the ill-assorted band of recruits moved up the streets and out of sight. Only then did Maillard make his way over to Marie-Victoire.

‘Why?' she sobbed at him. ‘Why did you do it? Could you not have left me alone?'

‘You know why, Marie-Victoire,' he replied with a shrug. ‘I have been waiting for some time now to get rid of him.'

‘Where are you taking him?' she asked through stiff lips.

He ignored her question. ‘I will come to get you when I am ready,' he said. ‘I am about to move into rooms in the Rue St Honoré. You will live there with me.'

‘Never,' said Marie-Victoire and spat in his face. Maillard did not even blink.

‘I will allow you that,' he said oddly.
‘Au revoir,
Marie-Victoire.'

He left her staring dully over the horse's head, and vanished.

*

Hours later, Marie-Victoire flung herself on to her mattress and lay wide-eyed and too exhausted to sleep. It had taken all her energies to get home, unload her wares and see to the horse. Not that she cared about them now.

She thought of Pierre, and then for some reason of her mother. So happily anticipated only a few hours ago, the future stretched out ahead, frightening and unpredictable. The tallow taper beside her mattress spluttered its acrid odour into the small room. Little blobs of yellow grease rolled down on to the floor and she watched them listlessly.

Rolling over, she buried her head in the mattress. But sleep would not come. Instead, the phantoms of fear and hunger raised gaunt heads and issued awful warnings. A picture of Pierre lying wounded on a battlefield took their place which was so horrible and so real that Marie-Victoire imagined that she smelt the gunpowder and heard the screams. Worse... far worse... she could feel Pierre in pain and see his life-blood trickling away. With a little gasp, she pressed her hands over her eyes

She did not, at first, hear the knocking, until it grew more insistent and demanding. At last, she got slowly to her feet and unlocked the door.

‘Who is it?' she asked without interest.

‘Pierre.'

Somehow she managed to open the door. Pierre stood on the threshold.

‘I have arranged it till morning,' he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. ‘They'll let me stay here until then. Then I must go.'

She drew him to her and buried her head in his breast so that he should not see her crippling fear. Nothing, she told herself, must betray her anguish – that much at least she could offer. Her restraint would be her gift to him, and her body and her warmth must be the only memories that he took away. Pierre ran his lips down the small face blotched with tears and tasted their salt. He kissed the tip-tilted nose raised up to his and then her lips.

‘If I don't come back,' he said harshly, ‘get yourself someone else. But promise me one thing. It won't be that bastard Maillard.'

Marie-Victoire pulled his face to hers.

‘Need you ask?' she said softly.

‘Promise, then.'

‘I promise.'

‘With all your heart?'

‘With all my heart.'

He seemed then to sink into her, demanding her strength and a part of her soul, and she acquiesced. They did not say much through the night that followed. Speaking was a waste of energy and time. It was enough that, entwined in the threadbare blankets, flesh lay on flesh and, it seemed to Marie-Victoire, that the strength of their feelings and passion would leave behind in this small, shabby room a memory that would linger.

Towards dawn, Pierre rose, donned his army-issue white coat with its blue and red epaulettes and slung a leather strap over his shoulder. He then left, leaving Marie-Victoire huddled on the mattress.

Lying aching and hollow-eyed, Marie-Victoire knew that part of her had gone with Pierre – a small, thin shade who would follow him down dusty roads into green woods and yellow cornfields, and into the heat and din of battle.

A ghost from the past.

By the summer of 1792 most of the aristocrats had disappeared from the Assembly. Their place was taken by the Feuillants, Girondins and Jacobins, among the last a precise little lawyer from Arras called Robespierre. The Feuillants wanted a constitutional monarchy. The Girondins were noted for their love of liberty and their wish to sweep away the old repressive social hierarchies. The Jacobins were more extreme but less influential and, unlike the Girondins, anti-war. ‘Peace will set us back...,' said Madame Roland, the wife of the new Girondin minister of the interior. ‘We can be regenerated through blood alone.'

But with fewer than 140,000 men France was under threat from allied royalist forces. Despite the frantic efforts of the revolutionary authorities, equipment was scarce, defection rife and mutiny simmering. There was no ammunition, very few officers and little enthusiasm. The results were disastrous for the French.

In Paris the rumours sifted through streets, houses, meeting places and markets. The war coincided with a serious economic crisis and the government-issued paper currency, the
assignat,
declined alarmingly.The demand for fixed prices to be fixed.. Riots broke out. Accusations of counter-revolutionary activity flew thick and fast, and accusing fingers pointed to the Tuileries. ‘They are the ones who have betrayed us,' shouted the orators, and a deluge of obscene pamphlets flooded the city, tearing what remained of the queen's reputation into shreds. The clergy went into hiding, terrified that they would bear the brunt of popular fury. The Girondins tried then to force the king to accept a decree whereby all priests who had not sworn the constitutional oath could be deported. The king used his veto to refuse and dismissed his Girondin ministers.

The Parisians decided on their own way of making their feelings plain. On June 20th, 8,000 shopkeepers, artisans, porters, market-women and itinerants came pouring out of the faubourgs. Armed with muskets, pikes, pitchforks and staves, they swarmed into the Assembly. They shouted abuse and waved their weapons (on to one of which was affixed a calf's heart with a notice reading ‘the heart of an aristocrat') for upwards of three hours. Then, bored with this sport, they forced their way through the Porte Royale and headed for the Tuileries.

They discovered the king in an anteroom. ‘Here I am,' he told the mob, as his sister, Madame Elisabeth, threw her arms round him to protect him. The queen hurried to join them and they stood together while their subjects harangued them. The king accepted a red Phrygian cap of liberty and stuffed it on to his head. He was still wearing it when, weary hours later, the crowd dispersed. He sank exhausted into a chair, snatched off the cap and threw it on to the floor.

This time the royal family had survived, but everyone knew that worse was to come.

By July, France had also declared war on Prussia. The alarm guns sounded daily over the city, booming out from the Pont Neuf and the Arsenal. The recruitment teams swept their nets wider, proclaiming the message,
‘La patrie en danger.'
The watchers yielded up their sons and brothers, some with bitter tears.

On July 14th, the city gathered once again to celebrate. On the Champ de Mars, eighty-three tents stood arranged around the royal marquee. Outside Paris, a contingent of
fédérés,
many of them from Marseilles, waited to parade through the fields. They were rough, determined men who had listened to the provincial agitators spreading their gospel of insurrection.... The royalists are working for the counter-revolution. The king is in league with the enemy. The queen has sold France to the Austrians...

Chapter 8

To begin with, I understood very little but after a while I began to see more clearly. Here are a people, face to face with Privilege and Corruption, fighting for Liberty and Justice, and my heart cannot but approve...

Sophie wrote quickly, her fair head bent over the paper. She wanted to finish her work before she left for the celebrations.

The time is coming when there is no longer a Distinction between Classes. The Rich will mingle with the Poor and the King will rule in Perfect Accord with the Will of his People. A King there should be, for without a Head of State the Country will be open to Anarchy and Discord. But He must rule with His People...

She paused to repair the ravages wrought on her quill and smoothed down the feather. Had she got her thoughts into the correct order? Would Miss Williams consider Sophie's arguments for a constitutional king in France sufficiently well argued? They sounded well enough when she read them out aloud to herself, but she needed to be sure.

Sophie had been gratified by the poetess's encouragement of her efforts. She had never intended to confide her secret to Helen – or to anyone – but Helen had prised it out of her at one of her breathless salon evenings which she and William had attended. Helen had swooped down on Sophie.

‘Do, please, Miss Luttrell, let me see anything you write. I have a friend who is very anxious to publish the opinions of sensible people. It is so important that we all have a clear view of what everyone thinks. And you, I am persuaded, my dear Miss Luttrell, being half-French yourself, will have a particularly useful point of view. Do say yes to my notion.'

And Sophie, not proof against this charming flattery, could not but find it in her heart to oblige. She soon discovered that she had an unsuspected talent for neat phraseology, and she had settled down to produce a series of documents, each divided into headings:
Les Droits des Peuples, Lettres aux Anglais
and
Sur les Droits des Femmes.
She presented these faithfully to Helen.