In Search of Mary (14 page)

Wollstonecraft brushes off inconvenient stories about prison massacres: it’s the Revolution, and she must be there. She’s also keen to escape an awkward love affair with a hot-tempered artist who already has a wife. So off she gallops, boasting in a letter:

She also makes some teasing remarks about finding a hubby out there, then dumping him again. It doesn’t quite happen like that though.

The first few days are tense and fearful. The acquaintances in whose house she’s staying are away. She can’t speak the language, and she misses her cat, and she daren’t blow out the candle at night. She has a hallucinatory premonition of the Terror:

During this uncharacteristic wobble she even feels sorry for the King. The monarchy has fallen, but not yet been slaughtered. Witnessing Louis XVI passing in a carriage on his way to trial seems slightly to dent her faith in the Revolution. It may well be “the most extraordinary event that has ever been recorded”, but up close to the blood-slippery pavements perhaps things aren’t as clear-cut as they appeared from London.

So she’s alone, and it’s daunting in the extreme, but don’t worry. This is Wollstonecraft.
Neck or nothing
. Up she springs, meeting people, soaking it up in revolutionary salons and learning French. She gets teased by an unnamed gentleman who warns her not to say “
oui oui
” too often. This silver-tongued rogue must surely be Imlay. And only a few months later the internationally-renowned author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
will be pregnant.

Paris may be where she blossoms, produces and reproduces, but it’s also the hardest place to track her – as Roberta found, there are so few textual clues. Unlike Norway, this won’t lend itself to footstep-seeking. Our train pulls out through the gentle countryside. After a mighty struggle and a bellow, Will gives up the fight and falls asleep in my lap. I push my back into the velour Eurostar seat and make a decision: I’m not going to do any of that foot-stepping ghost-hunting stuff. I’m just going to find out the facts.

What was the Revolution, and what was it like to be inside it? Were the rights of women vindicated? And while we’re at it, what about “
la condition féminine
” today? Back in my student texts, the French feminists were the world’s most fearsome. These days they’ve got Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
Which supports my suspicion that it’s not easy to be a French woman. You have to look good and be thin for starters, plus your hubby is likely to be a bit of a dog. That’s me setting off with an open mind then.

Satisfied sigh and I look down at my boy and his peachy cheeks. I shift him around – my arm is going numb. I love his heavy form. After the battle to get him to sleep, I invariably get the urge to play with him and touch him. He’s so soft, lying there. I lean as close as I can and sniff in his warmth – stare at him close up. He changes shape as he falls asleep: he seems to sink down and get longer. How clever that my elbow is a place to sleep, that my body makes a bed for him still. I get a tender sense of perfection and rightness that I can’t properly explain. We doze.

Blink and you’re already there. I love Eurostar, the most satisfying way to arrive in a city. We step lightly out of the Gare du Nord and walk straight down Paris, due south. It’s a waste not to walk in Paris. And it’s a good walk, taking in a sprinkling of African nail bars and groups of immigrants, as though a hint of the
banlieues
has made it downtown. Over the Seine, and here it is. Hotel Esmeralda. It’s a small, quirky delight, with friendly Latino staff.

“Ah you are writing? Your English writer, Jeanette Winter-son, she stayed here too.” Hmm. No pressure then. We creak up some tiny wooden stairs that smell of polish and, I hate to indulge a stereotype, but onions – definitely onions and garlic. The room is old and funny: it feels like staying in a friend’s aunt’s house. We overlook a tiny pigeony park to the south of Notre Dame. Will has a cot and I have a bed – what more
do we need? Maybe some food. Luckily this is Paris: we will dine like the gods every day.

Walking alongside the Seine to a play area with Will, I realize he’s now in a different league of babyhood. If he’s awake I can do very little apart from attend to his myriad and changing desires. We chase each other round a slide and kick up the yellow-gold leaves heaped round. I eagerly offer him the swings, but he runs back to the slide. I show him the roundabout, and he runs back to the slide. A shadow of dread falls across my mind: what if this slide is the only thing he’ll approve of in the entire city?

Our first encounter is a feminist demo. Over the Seine and up to Place de la Bastille, the traffic is all cordoned off. Thousands of women from all over the country are uniting here to march across town, demonstrating about violence against women. Nosing Will’s buggy through the campaigners, we negotiate a place near the front of a large group surrounded by banners. I catch myself noticing how well-groomed they all are, and smile guiltily at my neighbouring women. We hang about as more marchers gather. No one seems to wonder why I keep muttering into a Dictaphone. It’s not a diverse crowd, and Will is the only bloke amongst us.

The group I’ve sidled up to and am now marching, indeed chanting with, is called
Osez le féminisme
. I ask one of them for an interview, and she agrees. Alice, like most of the marchers, looks like an office worker on her lunch break. She’s a white, twenty-five-year-old blonde with a serious air. Alice tells me proudly that
Osez le féminisme
is only two years old but has over 1,500 members. “You are writing a book? What
is it about?” She asks me with a steady gaze. “It’s about what feminism means today,” I say confidently. She narrows her eyes slightly and I hurry to my next question: why did she join up?

“There is an illusion of equality: we think that we are close, but equality is an illusion now. We have a country where 75,000 women are raped each year and only 2% of the rapists are condemned. We have salaries for men and women differing by up to 27%, so you can’t speak about equality.” Alice handles the data impressively. “The average age of our group is twenty-seven. We were born in the ’80s and we have been educated into thinking that our grandmothers gained the equality, but now when we are on the labour market we discover that it’s not the case.”

“And when do we discover that it’s not the case?” I ask. “Is it when women have children?”

“Yes, but men have children too,” she asserts, not missing a beat.

“True, but…” I edge towards traitor territory, “but maybe there’s a physical reason for women stopping working too, and some women want to—” I trail off.

“
Non
.” Her certainty is complete. “This can only explain why the firms act like this, it’s an excuse. The maternity leave in France is four months, so how can we explain that men and women do not have the same salary? Four months in the life – it is nothing! You know: men can have cancer and leave their job for more than four months, but they are not discriminated against.” I bet Alice gives it loads down the pub. This woman has no doubt. “Men and women must have access to the labour market equally. We are in a country now in France
where 80% of domestic labour is done by women. How can we explain that?”

“Well how
can
you explain it?” I cut in. “Isn’t there a chance that some of that, if it’s childcare, is something people might love doing? Not the dishes obviously, but the good stuff. Maybe not all labour is… labour?”

“
Non
– they do it because of the patriarchy, and masculine domination. It has to change so that women can access the labour market in the same way that men do today. Discrimination has to stop, and we have to share domestic labour.”

I can’t help myself: “Aren’t you worried about having babies?”

“I want to have babies, yes, but I’m not worried.”

“You don’t fear a change in your career or your position in society?”

“There is a risk, but that’s why we want to change society – that is why we demand that our politicians and our president enforce real equality. We have formal equality, but now we need real equality.”

Equality. Will and I peel off after three hours of chanting and marching, and I trundle us back along the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, thinking about the labour market and domestic labour all the way. I very much like Alice and her twenty-five-year-old vigour, but it makes me feel suddenly aged. Part of me admires her; the rest is thinking: “Just you wait, love.” Because it goes to the crux of why we don’t have what Alice wants. It’s those pesky babies.

If they arrived in the post, there’d probably be greater work-place equality. But they don’t. They grow from scratch inside our bodies. That’s pretty insane when you think about it.
Has this made me less enamoured of a life on the labour market? It’s troubling that I might be a willing participant in what I previously considered inequality. But being in the new, ever-changing baby world instead of being out at work is not downsizing, and it’s not downgrading. It’s a different planet, incomprehensible to non-residents.

Occupying both planets simultaneously is a privilege. I don’t want to compare my children to having cancer – a reason to lose four months on the labour market. I’m lucky to have my job and I’d go nuts without it. But the labour market does not have comically small feet, and it will never write me a love letter in smudged glitter-glue. Alice is not wrong. But the way she thinks is how I thought before kids. Maybe I’m further down the line from her. Maybe further down the line from me is a whole new something else.

Early the next morning I wake up before Will and sit quietly, contemplating the atrocious night from which I’ve just emerged. Hours lying there with my very soul churning in recollection of the food we’ve eaten. Where Wollstonecraft is haunted by nocturnal images of bloody fists, my nightmares are gastronomic. In fairness, we’ve been limited to places with baby chairs or buggy access. But even so. Top three offenders:

Curling-at-the-edges croque-monsieur with slopping centre of white cheese.

Molten dish of microwaved cheese with alleged core of pale lasagne.

Smelly grey chicken with damp chips.

Coming in a close runner-up was an improbably costly tray of dips, yoghurt and fruits in syrup. These Parisians are having a laugh. My stomach writhes and squeaks with these gurgling gastro-memories – but it’s also fear. Fear that I’m wasting my time. I’m wasting time and money. Each time you sit down in Paris it costs about twenty euros. What’s the point? What are we doing here?

It’s unrealistic to try to get close to Wollstonecraft on this trip. I can’t meander around in her pages, and we’re not remotely in the same vein or life chapter. Last time we were both travelling with our babies, even if the similarity ended there. Here in Paris she is discovering great sex in the middle of the biggest political earthquake in history. I’m just a tired mum wandering about in a bad mood.

And Will’s no longer the angel baby who charmed his way around Norway. He makes insistent noises like an alarm clock and head-butts me in the face. Will has become a toddler. He doesn’t want to be in his buggy: he wants to be out, climbing things. He used to be pleasantly distracted if I let him play with my phone. Now he unlocks it and dials Emergency Call, laughing as I lunge to grab it back.

Truth is, I don’t like toddlers. I mean of course I love
him
, but he’s currently occupying the least adorable phase of childhood. Newborn babies all creamy and magical? Yes. Small-limbed children who say: “Mummy, I want to sleep in your hair”? Oh, yes. Swollen-headed anger machines who fall over all the time and can’t wipe their own bums? No, thanks very much. Poor Will has become a challenge – an active impediment. I can barely interview people or look at anything for
any length of time. All that stuff I said about how bringing a baby along makes everything easier and shinier and better? Big fat nonsense.

The Musée Carnavalet is the experience that brings it home. Will’s had his breakfast, and I’ve timed it so he won’t be tired. We arrive as soon as it opens, and I plan to go straight to the Revolution Rooms. I will take photos and make recordings of their Audio Guides, so that I can listen to and observe it all properly later. Fiendishly clever, I congratulate myself. But my carefully laid plans are no match for Will. I am asked to leave the buggy at the cloakroom, at the bottom of a sweep of marble stairs. I then carry my bag, camera, Dictaphone, audioguide and boy back up the stairs.

“The Revolution Rooms,
s’il vous plaît
?”

“Up two more flights of stairs madam, and along a corridor and upstairs again.”

Oh great. I drag him up and get to the top pouring with sweat. He is bored already and wrestling in my arms. People laugh at us, and I decide that they are laughing in kindly sympathy. I set him gently down on the floor so he can steady himself, and a familiar meaty waft reeks out of his clothes. I don’t believe it. All the nappy changing stuff is back downstairs in the buggy. We go back down again.

“Where can I change him?”

“In the toilets,
madame
, down the stairs.”

Even more stairs? We smell the toilets before we see them. I look inside. No way. I change him right there in the middle of the stairs, almost urging someone to tell me off so I can ask how they’d like to lie down on that toilet floor. No one tells
me off. I slam-dunk the heavy warm nappy into a bin, wash hands as Will scarpers out the door, sweep him into my arms and stomp all the way back up.

We make it, hot and flustered, back up to the Revolution Rooms, and the first thing I see is a miniature version of the Bastille. I put Will on the ground, take a photo and record some of the audioguide. As I’m doing this, Will totters round the corner, and I see the museum guards spring to life as they watch him lurch towards a priceless Revolution-era chair, once sat upon by a queen awaiting the guillotine.