The Porcelain Dove (46 page)

"Buggering, verminous, crapulous . . . "

At this point I reached the bottom of both my tankard and my
patience. "Yves Pyanet," I called out. "Friend Desmoulins has clearly drowned his wits in your excellent wine. Doubtless he'd thank you to toss him in the horse-trough to clear his head for him."

Claude Mareschal squinted through the wrack of smoke. "Peste! If it ain't la poule Duvet playing off her mistress' airs like she was a lady born."

"And the blessing of God on you, too, père Mareschal," I said. "Jean, your arm to Mlle Boudin's, if you please, and with luck, you'll make it back to Beauxprés before some . . . ah, lover of horses brings it to Sangsue's notice that monsieur's stables are unattended."

Jean rose, stretched, grabbed Artide's coat collar and hauled him to his feet. "You're right, Duvet, and 'tis kind in you to give us warning. Come, Desmoulins, back to work, or we'll soon be bleeding like asses." Then he smiled cheerfully at the company, draped Artide's arm across his shoulder, and lurched out with him into the cold, pursued by much mirthful comment on sore heads, sore stewards, and horse lovers. Estienne Pyanet then twitted me on my thoughtfulness for my fellow servants, and I returned his compliments with interest. A few moments later I left, warmed, but not at all comforted.

I'd known the peasants of Beauxprés were discontented—how could they be otherwise, given the poor harvest and the perishing cold and the countless taxes that wrung them like so many sheets? Their fathers had suffered the same in the old king's time, and their grandfathers, and so on back to the days of Noah and beyond: generation upon generation of peasants suffering, grumbling, and enduring like cattle. 'Tis a peasant's nature to be discontented, as 'tis the nature of a noble to be arrogant or a peddler to be sly. Let the philosophes (who I wager have never spoken to a peasant in their lives) talk of reform and progress and uniform taxes, I thought. Talk is cheap. As for what good their reforms would do—well, there's a proverb in Beauxprés: "Sing to an ass and he'll fart in your face."

Oh, Beauxprés was a great place for proverbs: "One must howl with the wolves"; "Poverty is not a vice—it's a mortal sin"; "A goat must eat where she is tied." Artide had clearly taken the first to heart. I labored to come to terms with the last. Many things made this difficult—the weather, Sangsue, the cooking of the kitchen-boys, my friendless, loveless state, and above all, the letters of Mme de Bonsecours. I'd read them aloud to madame as she lay on her chaise longue, her eyes heavy with ennui and laudanum. When the marquise wrote of the war, the Assembly of Notables, and the Estates-General to which
M. de Bonsecours had been elected, she'd complain that Hortense was growing prodigious dull in her old age, and could I not skip to the gossip?

There was plenty of gossip, to be sure. Mme de la Tour du Pin was sufficiently recovered of her last miscarriage to sing contralto at one of M. de Rochechouart's musical mornings. The Irish were so droll! Imagine wearing a blue crêpe gown and feathers to the English ambassador's ball when the invitations specifically instructed all ladies to wear white! They call her the Blue Bird now. Better not mention it to monsieur your husband—he's likely to post straight up to Paris and fling her into a cage.

The queen retreated more and more to the Petite Trianon. One couldn't blame her, poor soul, with her son so ill, and so monstrous unpopular as she'd become. Did madame know Her Majesty had been hissed both at the Opéra and at the Théâtre Française? The people had never forgiven her for that affaire of the diamond necklace in '85. Surely madame remembered it—a squalid business for all it involved 10,000 livres, with both the abbé and the girl lovesick for the queen, and père Duchesne smacking his lips over it all like a glutton at a feast. His pamphlets were growing ever more scurrilous, until Mme de Bonsecours hardly knew whether to be outraged or diverted. The things he said about the queen! Messalina herself would have balked at such a variety and number of lovers. And Her Majesty was such a prude! Her only sin, in the opinion of Mme de Bonsecours, was her insistence upon playing politics when she'd no more aptitude for intrigue than the king for dancing.

These letters were a torment to me, the world they chronicled like a handful of sweet grass piled just beyond my tether's reach. I could see it, fresh and green, spangled with dew. I could imagine the smell and the intoxicating taste of it. And when I turned to my own small pasturage, what did I find? Mme Vissot's complaints that her husband was slipping the fish to Mareschal's youngest daughter. Mère Amey dead of starvation. Prodigies like the child born white as milk —skin, hair, and all, save for his eyes, which were pale blue and red like an Angora rabbit's. Unsettling, to be sure. But witty? Engaging? Interesting? Bah!

That spring, the marquise wrote that Englishness was all the rage in Versailles: English clothes, English walks, English accents. The duc d'Orléans ordered a silver service, light and undecorated in the English manner, and gave a brilliant supper to christen it. Her chef de cuisine
having taken employment with the comtesse de Fleuru, Mme de Bonsecours sought a replacement in Paris, which was all in a ferment over the price of bread. Hardly a day passed without a riot, suddenly begun and suddenly over, like a shower of rain. From time to time, the shower blew up into a storm.

April 29, 1789

       
Only yesterday, the worthy M. Réveillon's wallpaper factory was ravaged. He employs four hundred workers, and pays them well, I hear—upwards of thirty-five sous a day. Ungrateful wretches! I vow I'm so angry I can barely hold my pen. They destroyed everything. Not only the wallpaper, gum, and paint from his factory, but the furniture, linens, and paintings from his hôtel as well were smashed, torn, burnt to a cinder. M. Réveillon is a good man, too—they say he once sold everything he possessed to keep a stranger's family out of La Bicêtre. I've heard the mob was hired, in which case they richly deserved to be trampled by the French guards and shot down like the ravening swine they were. Yet there were so many killed.

       
Death lurks in every street, and the promise of violence in the most innocent word or action. Paris is like a loaded cannon, and I fear 'tis only a matter of time before it fires. We must pray, sister, that the charge doesn't level all of France.

If Paris was like a cannon, Beauxprés was like an experiment in phlogiston, the air quivering with anger, resentment, and hunger to the point of eruption. Tempers flared like summer lightning; sudden fights broke out over nothing. In May, Artide broke Sangsue's nose and disappeared as thoroughly as Pompey. I couldn't even find comfort in hearing Mass, so acid were the stares and mutters that greeted me at the church. Nicola Pyanet turned her shawled back when she saw me approach, and Clauda took and returned the linen at her door without meeting my eyes.

In June, the dauphin died at last. Mme de Bonsecours wrote that she'd not been able to bring herself to attend the funeral.

Here is France some twelve million livres in debt, people starving, bread at four sous the pound, the Estates unable to agree on anything at all, and our king proposing to spend 600,000 livres on
burying a child. Even M. de Bonsecours thinks it a pity that economy is of no account in the birth and death of princes.

Then, on the twenty-fourth day of July, 1789, Jacques Charreton delivered a thick and much-smudged packet to the kitchen door.

I didn't read it at once. Knowing now what it contained, 'tis hard to credit that I would put it in my pocket until madame awakened from her nap, then tidy her hair and check, as she asked, on her supply of laudanum in case 'twere time to order more from Besançon before I even thought of it again. Only when my mistress was settled to her embroidery did I draw the letter from my pocket, break the seal, and begin to read:

Versailles, 16 July, 1789

My beloved sister:

       
First, I am safe, and Bonsecours also, although more agitated than I have ever seen him since our wedding night. We may yet fly to Brussels as d'Artois, Lambesc, Breteuil, and the Polignacs have done. But M. Necker has been recalled, and as my husband has always agreed with his policies (although, I fear, not always in public), we remain in Versailles while awaiting events. This chaos in the Estates could be the making or the breaking of Bonsecours: as yet I cannot guess which. The one thing of which I am certain is that France is not altogether the same country she was before Tuesday last.

       
Do you recall my saying that Paris was like a cannon loaded and primed? Alas that I should have proved so great a Sybil, although, to be sure, I did not prophesy 'twould be the king himself who lit the torch. But there. Everyone knew he never liked Necker, and the saintlier our little bourgeois gentilhomme acted, the less Louis liked him. Monsieur my husband may talk of the queen's influence and Breteuil's ambitions all he pleases, but my reading of the matter is that Louis dismissed Necker in a sudden fit of Divine Right.

       
They say Necker tried to damp the powder by slipping out a back door on Saturday morning in the hope he'd not be missed before the Estates met on Monday. Had his intention been to condemn the king beyond doubt, he couldn't have acted more slyly. Before he was seated in his carriage, every petty secretary,
clerk, and footman in Versailles knew all about it, and the news made Paris before he'd reached Montmorency.

       
Like the rest of the Second Estate, I knew nothing. Blithe and ignorant as a milkmaid, I drove to Paris for the theater on Saturday. Sunday, I rose, went to Mass, returned to my apartment, looked for Louison to dress me for dinner, did not find her, had to dine at Mme Valence's in a plain Circassian gown, and returned ready to dismiss the minx on the spot. She met me at the door, full of tears and lamentations and a tale of a riot at the Palais-Royal, tumbling St. Bartholomew, Necker, chestnut leaves, the duc d'Orléans, and the Champs de Mars so freely together that I could make nothing of her account. 'Twas only yesterday, when I returned to Versailles, that I heard the full tale of the tabletop Demosthenes and how his auditors denuded the chestnuts of their leaves to make them green cockades. The color of hope, he said; also, he later discovered, the color of the comte d'Artois, whom the hoi-polloi hate worse than hunger itself.

       
In any case, Louison had not dried her eyes before my maître d'hôtel was telling me that the Bourse and the theaters were closed and self-proclaimed patriots running riot through the streets. I dared not set foot out-of-doors that night for fear of green-ribboned brigands in search of arms and powder. M. de Bonsecours, who had proposed to sup with me in Paris, prudently remained at Versailles. I vow I was quite vexed with him. Yet when Monday dawned, and I saw from my window the cobblestones torn up from the street and piled into barriers, I was glad he'd stayed away. My husband is a gentle man; the sight of smoke rising from all quarters of Paris must have caused him unutterable pain.

       
At ten, my maître d'hôtel brought the news that the merchants feared to open their stores.

       
Prudence had counseled lying low; now prudence dictated flight. I ordered my carriage and gathered some few letters and books I wished to save, only to be told that my carriage had been impounded by the French guard. Fresh from the fray, my coachman babbled of a ragtag army of citizens pillaging armorers and bakers' shops. The mob broke into Saint-Lazare, he said, and robbed the good brothers not only of every sack of grain in their stores, but of their wine, their cheeses, even of their vinegar and oil and, most curiously, of a dried ram's head.

       
All that heaving about of cobbles and flour sacks must have
exhausted them, for Monday night was quieter. Half in fear, half in fascination, I sat at my window and watched men in ill-fitting blue and red uniforms build small street-fires and harry the small clusters of dirty vagabonds drifting like restless ghosts among the rubble. From time to time I heard them calling out, their terrible voices flat in the heavy silence: "Armes et pain!" they cried. "Arms and bread!"

       
The events of the next day are unclear, though some few facts are certain. The Bastille fell. Its commandant and guards are most horribly dead, and their heads paraded through the streets on pikes. The Swiss Guard gave up rifles to the mob without a shot fired or the least resistance. Paris is an ant's nest overturned. Versailles is little better.

       
Rumors abound, and no one is able to distinguish truth from the merest invention. I've heard that M. de Launay's own guards turned upon him and forced him to open the Bastille to the mob, who first promised him safe conduct, and then hacked off his head with a pocketknife. Some say that the Swiss Guard massacred a thousand citizens in the Tuileries, cut old men's throats and trampled pregnant women. Others will have it that the Swiss Guard joined the mob in burning the wall of the Farmers General and pillaging Saint-Lazare. Jacques de Fleiselles was a traitor to the king. Jacques de Fleiselles was a traitor to the people. It doesn't matter which anymore: the poor old fool is dead and his head stuck on a pike next to de Launay's. I've heard there were eighty pensioners in the Bastille and fifty Swiss Guards. I've heard that there were twenty pensioners, or a handful; ten Swiss Guards, or a battalion. De Launay had promised the king not to fire on his subjects; he was too stupid to fire; he didn't want to risk damage to his new house across the square. Or perhaps that was M. de Besenval, who, fearing that the mob would sack his house—newly painted and provided with the most charming baths in Paris—tamely surrendered the Invalides' entire store of rifles.

       
Now that I've had time to reflect, I can only wonder at my own foolish astonishment. Have we not lived for a dozen years now in the midst of famine, foreign wars, scurrilous pamphlets, and taxes that rose like hawks? Twelve years ago, did not all Paris embrace Benjamin Franklin and applaud his American War? The Americans had their Concord Massacre; we French have our Fall of the Bastille. Paris and Versailles quiver as from an electric
shock, and a number of the resulting sparks, alas, seem likely to catch fire.