Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (30 page)

Manon assured Buzot that she was being well treated and told him she spent her days rereading her favourite authors and writing. Her almost elated composure in prison, she said, was something only he could understand:

If they attempt some sort of trial, I shall be able to defend him [Roland] in a way that will enhance his reputation. Thus I shall be able to acquit myself of a debt I owed him for his sorrows…Don’t you see that by being alone, it is with you that I remain? It is through confinement that I sacrifice myself for my husband and save myself for my lover, and it is to my tormentors that I am indebted for this reconciliation of duty and love; don’t pity me! Others may admire my courage, they do not know my joys; you who must share them, preserve all their wonder by the steadfastness of your valour.

Two days after Buzot’s letters arrived, the gaoler’s wife came to Manon’s cell and told her that a prison administrator wanted to see her. Manon followed her down the corridor and found two men waiting for her. After confirming that she was Citoyenne Roland, they informed her that she was to be set free. All the papers were in order: she was to be permitted to return home, and the seals on her apartment were to be lifted. ‘With a smooth smile’, one of the men asked her if she knew where her husband was. Manon did not deign to answer. She excused herself and returned to her cell to gather together her few belongings.

Her maid, who had been allowed to visit her regularly, wept with joy as she packed Manon’s bundle, but Manon felt weirdly impassive. The physical effects of being released from gaol could be inconceivably powerful. When another prisoner, Jacques-Claude Beugnot, was being moved between the Conciergerie prison and La Force, he did not understand why he and his guard, who had waited for hours for a carriage, could not walk the short distance. The guard told him that
when he breathed fresh air he would find himself unable to walk. When Beugnot finally got outside his legs buckled beneath him and he had to sit down in the street, overwhelmed by his temporary liberty and the sweet air of freedom.

Leaving the Abbaye–her vacated cell to be inhabited that same day by Brissot and three weeks later by Charlotte Corday–Manon set out for the nearby rue de la Harpe in a hackney cab, flying out of the carriage and up the stairs of the house ‘like a homing pigeon’. She had not taken four steps when she heard a voice behind her saying, ‘Citoyenne Roland?…We arrest you in the name of the law.’ Her release had been a ruse: because she had been detained irregularly on 1 June, she had been set free only to be arrested again by indisputable order of the Committee of Public Safety, charged with conspiracy against the revolution and complicity with her husband and the rest of the wanted Girondins–her punishment for presuming to step away from the hearth.

The Rolands’ landlord’s son rushed to the local ward office and returned with two commissioners, who made a formal objection to Manon’s new arrest. She wrote a few quick notes to her daughter and to friends who might pass the news on to her husband, and then the entire party crossed the river en route to the Hôtel de Ville, where the commissioners planned to register their protest against the arrest and argue Manon’s case.

From behind closed doors, as she sat in a bustling anteroom, the distressed and frustrated Manon could hear the debate becoming increasingly heated. Eventually she opened the door and asked to be admitted, if not to participate in the discussion at least to be present during it. ‘You would have thought the office was under siege simply because a well-behaved woman wanted to hear what they were saying about her,’ wrote Manon. ‘I had to withdraw for fear of being thrown out.’ Finally a superintendent asked her to follow him. She threw open the office door again and shouted, ‘Commissioners of the ward of Beaurepaire, I give you notice that I am being abducted.’ They replied that they could do nothing about it except try to ensure she faced a proper trial. Manon was taken to her second prison, Sainte-Pélagie.

The good bourgeoise was ‘not at all reassured by my new abode’.
Sainte-Pélagie was a former hospice for prostitutes, located, as Manon put it, ‘in a very undesirable quarter’, isolated and remote. Notable recent inhabitants had included the Scottish courtesan and mistress of the duc d’Orléans, Grace Dalrymple Elliott, and Louis XV’s former mistress Mme du Barry. When Manon was being signed in, she made the mistake of protesting indignantly at a ‘man of sinister appearance’ poking around in her night-case with ‘indecent curiosity’; he turned out to be her turnkey.

She was allocated a cell six feet by twelve containing two beds, two very small tables and two chairs, for which she was asked to pay 30 livres a month (she had it reduced by half for single occupancy), and she bought a writing-desk, paper, pens and a jug. Her neighbour was a procuress–‘one of those creatures who seduce the young and sell the innocent’–and the woman living above her was a forger and murderess. Every morning the women’s doors were opened by the gaoler and they were allowed to spend the day moving freely through the prison’s corridors, stairs and hall.

The windows of the men’s section were so close that male and female prisoners were able to communicate unrestrainedly. ‘Gesture supplies the want of contact and these windows become theatres for the enaction of the most lewd and shameful debauchery,’ wrote Manon. The other prisoners’ wanton behaviour provided a stark contrast to the purity of her feelings for Buzot, yet this atmosphere of frenzied lustfulness–revolutionary prisoners were notorious for the passionate intensity of their love affairs, snatched beneath the shadow of the guillotine–was a sardonic reminder to her of ‘animal’ pleasures she had glimpsed but never enjoyed. In the section of her memoirs written in Sainte-Pélagie, where she described her looks and ‘natural sensuality’, she concluded feelingly, ‘if my conscience would allow me today to make fuller use of the attractions which I still possess I should not be sorry’.

Appalled by the ‘indescribable’ conversations of ‘these dregs of humanity’, Manon spent her first days at Sainte-Pélagie in her cell. It is hard not to think that she was sent to Sainte-Pélagie–out of the multitude of prisons in Paris–deliberately, by men who knew how proud she was of her morality and who delighted in her fabricated
reputation as a lascivious man-eater. ‘This is where the respectable wife of a distinguished public figure is made to lodge! Such is my reward for a virtuous life!’ she burst out, in one of her less controlled moments. ‘It is not surprising that I am ready for death.’

Although she tried at first to eat the portion of beans and the pound and a half of rough stale bread provided to each prisoner daily by the state, Manon was forced to pay the keeper’s wife to cook for her: ‘a cutlet and some spoonfuls of vegetables for dinner, some greens in the evening; no dessert, nothing for breakfast but bread and water’. In this she was modest, as she was well aware. At the Luxembourg prison, formerly a royal palace, where
le tout
Saint-Germain were housed, aristocratic prisoners either sent out for tavern food or had their own chefs prepare their meals and bring them to the gaol.

The cruelty of being allowed to glimpse freedom only to have it snatched away upset her even more than the thought that she was still in prison, and when she first arrived at Sainte-Pélagie Manon could not sleep, spending her nights in a kind of wakeful nightmare. But her self-discipline and determination not to allow her enemies the satisfaction of seeing her defeated soon reasserted itself. ‘All they had done, after all, was add to their own crimes,’ she reflected. ‘They had not substantially altered the conditions which I had already learned to endure.’

Strict routine helped soften the monotony of her days. In the mornings Manon studied English, reading the poetry of James Thomson and the philosophy of the Earl of Shaftesbury; in the afternoons she sketched. Her old friend Bosc d’Antic faithfully brought her flowers from the nearby Jardin des Plantes; Luc-Antoine de Champagneux, a friend from Lyon days, encouraged her to write; Grandpré brought Sophie Grandchamp to see her. One day when Helen Williams visited Manon she found her reading Plutarch, the sweetness in her dark eyes unchanged. The most notable absence was eleven-year-old Eudora, whom Manon did not dare to summon. ‘These tyrants hate even the children of victims, and my poor girl…can scarcely appear in the streets without despicable creatures pointing her out as the offspring of a conspirator!’ When Helen asked her how Eudora was, she burst into tears.

Her cell, in the July heat, was so hot that after a few weeks the gaoler’s wife began to allow Manon to use her room during the afternoons, and then moved her into a room beneath her own. Mme Bouchard treated her as a guest, allowing her to forget her incarceration. She planted jasmine outside Manon’s windows so that the scented tendrils would curl around the bars; Manon sent for her pianoforte. Knowing that Roland and Eudora were safe, that her friends in Normandy were gathering their forces and that she was in contact with ‘the man who was most dear to me’, she began to feel a strange contentment.

In the Abbaye, and continuing in Sainte-Pélagie, Manon began to record her memories of the events of the past few years in a memoir that is a bold defence of her own and Roland’s actions. She wrote on cream or pale green paper, in thin notebooks, with carefully numbered pages; her writing is swift, sure and elegant, with very few mistakes. Her thoughts raced on to the page.

She devoted much of her energy to character sketches, describing the men she saw as agents of her downfall, Danton and Robespierre, in particular detail. Manon had loathed Danton on sight, but she had been one of Robespierre’s most ardent supporters when she first knew him, and she covered many pages analysing her early view of him. In 1791, she explained, she had attributed all his faults to excessive patriotism and love of liberty: she had thought him reserved, for example, because he was modest, not because he trusted no one and looked down on everyone. Time had shown her, however, that Robespierre spoke rarely and never gave a straight opinion because he was devious and secretive, and that he stole other people’s ideas because he hoped to get the credit for them. Still she conceded that he had ‘defended his principles with heat and obstinacy and had the courage to continue doing so when there were very few others still on the side of the people’.

Manon’s handling of Robespierre is fascinating because their ideas and attitudes were so close: what she admired in him was often what
she was proud of in herself. Both had rushed to participate in the revolution and championed it from its first days; both were inspired by Rousseau’s egalitarianism and devoted to the classical republican ideal, in which the self is sacrificed to the state; both were spiritual but anticlerical, but believed in religion’s social utility; both equated private morality with public happiness and exalted the role of virtue above all other traits. Both were egotistical, uncompromising and prone to dreams of martyrdom; both, in words the historian Alphonse Aulard used about Manon, at heart ‘believed nothing good could come to the revolution save from’ them. In 1793, what divided them were specific political issues more than general philosophical ones.

One crucial point where their ideas diverged was the issue of women in public life. Robespierre was a true Rousseauian segregationist. He never acknowledged women who stepped out of the domestic sphere. In the National Assembly’s early debates on citizenship, although Robespierre was celebrated as a champion of the rights of previously passive male citizens like black men, Jews and servants, he did not even address the subject of women possessing natural and inalienable rights. When Olympe de Gouges or Théroigne de Méricourt challenged him publicly, he scorned to respond.

During the Rolands’ time away from Paris in the autumn of 1791, when Manon had made overtures to Robespierre implying that their correspondence might be useful to him in formulating his political theory and decisions, he pointedly had not replied. Mme Roland, quietly sewing by her husband’s hearth, had been no threat to him; Roland
née
Phlipon (as she proudly signed herself to him in these letters), running her husband’s ministry, arguing with those who disagreed with her, beating on the doors of the National Convention and demanding to be heard, was quite another proposition.

Outwardly, she and Robespierre agreed on the issue of women. When Manon declared that women were valuable to society because of their virtues rather than their intelligence, it might have been Robespierre himself–or Rousseau–speaking. But, as with Germaine de Staël, another devotee of Rousseau’s who insisted she did not want to play a part in public life and then strove with every fibre of her being to do so, Manon’s words said one thing, her actions another.

Although as the wife of a minister Manon had lived as modest a life as possible, her obvious interest in and aptitude for politics escaped no one. It was as if she thought that without the powdered, scented flirtatiousness of ancien régime boudoir politics no one could suspect her of intrigue. Her scathing dismissal in her memoirs of the men with whom Roland had worked must have been daily evident on her face, exposing how thoroughly she believed she could do their jobs better than them: ‘the thing that has struck me most has been their universal mediocrity…it is hardly surprising that we have fallen step by step under the dominion of crass ignorance and shameful incompetence’. She treated Danton–whom she misjudged with the most serious of consequences, preventing any kind of reconciliation between Girondins and Jacobins when a rapprochement was still possible–with a shameful mixture of arrogance and disdain. The Jacobins she opposed would have found it hard not to see her as another scheming salonniére in the mould of Germaine de Staël or the influential royal mistresses.

For Manon, too, admitting that she liked being near power and wanted to wield it herself would have been a confession of corruption. For her–as for Robespierre, Marat and many other revolutionaries–one of the defining characteristics of the ancien régime’s immorality was its domination by women. As the historian Dorinda Outram observes, ‘to the degree that power in the Old Regime was ascribed to women, that meant that the discourse of the Revolution was committed to anti-feminine rhetoric’. The revolution became a crusading instead of a destructive force: it would replace the unnatural world of boudoir politics with virtue–government by men alone, whose intrinsic qualities (so the argument went) made them the natural leaders of society.