A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 1

A Lucky Hand

Manon Roland sat by the window, turning her cheek to catch the fading warmth of the late October sun. Slowly, with deliberation, she dipped her needle through worn cloth. Even in our circumstances, there are domestic servants for such tasks. But nothing is ever done quite so well as when you do it yourself. Then again—she bent her head over the work—what could be more soothing, more ordinary than a linen sheet? In a fractious world? There will be more need to darn and patch, to mend and make do, now that, as her husband puts it, “the blow has fallen.”

What is it with these metaphors of domestic work? Does she resist them, or do they resist her? The center is frayed, worn, gone to threads; so, turn edges to middle. “ça Ira.” She smiles. She is not, she likes to think, without humor.

Her husband, late fifties now, ulcer, liver complaint, is prevented by her nursing and her strength of will from sinking into invalidity. He had been an Inspector of Manufactures; now under the new dispensation, September 1791, his post is abolished. They had applauded the death of the old regime; they were not self-interested people. But the applause must be muted, when you have no retirement pension, and nothing ahead but genteel poverty.

You have been ill, she thought, fevered and drained by the Paris summer, sickened by the blood of the Champs-de-Mars. “It has been too much for you, my dear; see how excitable you have become. We must leave everything and go home, because nothing is more important than your health, and at Le Clos you were always so serene.” Serene? She serene? Since ’89?

That was why they had come back to the run-down little estate in the Beaujolais hills, to the vegetable beds and faded hangings, and the poor women coming to the back door for advice and herb poultices. Here (she had read a great deal of Rousseau) one lived in harmony with nature and the seasons. But the nation was choking to death, and she wanted … she wanted …

Impatiently she hitched her chair away from the window. All her life she has been a spectator, an onlooker; the role has brought her nothing, not even the gift of philosophical detachment. And study has not brought it, nor self-analysis, nor even, she thought wryly, gardening. Some would think that it ought to come in the course of nature to a woman of thirty-six, a wife and mother. A little calm, a little quiet within—little chance. Even after childbearing, there is blood in your veins, not milk. I am not passive in the face of life, and I do not think I ever will be, and—considering recent events—why should I be?

This latest misfortune, for instance; of course she will not lie down under it. They have just come from Paris; they must go back. Either they must obtain a pension, or a new position under the new order.

Roland did not look forward to the trip. But she thought, Paris calls me. I was born there.

Her father’s shop was on the Quai d’Horloge, near the Pont-Neuf. He was an engraver—fashionable trade, fashionable customers—and he had the manner shaped to go with it, assertive yet sufficiently obsequious, artist and artisan, both and neither

She had been baptized Marie-Jeanne, always called Manon. Her brothers and sisters all died. There must be some reason (she thought at eight or nine) why the good God spared me: some particular purpose? She looked narrowly at her parents, measuring with callous child’s eyes their limitations, their painstaking veneer of refinement. They were overcareful of her; held her, perhaps, a little in awe. She had a great number of music lessons.

When she was ten her father bought her several treatises on the education of the young, reasoning that any book with “education” in the title was the kind of thing she needed.

This clever child, this pretty child, this child for whom nothing was too good; what carelessness of theirs was it to leave her alone one day in the workshop? Yet the boy, the apprentice (fifteen, too tall for his age, raw-handed, freckled), had always seemed well mannered, harmless. It was evening, he was working under a lamp and she stood at his elbow to look at his work. She was not disturbed when he took her hand. He held it for a moment, playing with her fingers, smiling up at her, his head tilted; then forced it under the workbench.

There she touched strange flesh, a damp swollen spike of flesh, quivering with its own life. He tightened his grip on her wrist, then turned in the chair to face her. She saw what she had touched. “Don’t tell,” he whispered. She tore her hand away. Her eyebrows flew up to the curls bouncing on her forehead, and she strode away, slamming the door of the workroom behind her.

On the stairs she heard her mother calling her. There was some small errand or task to perform-she could never remember afterwards what exactly it had been. She carried out her mother’s request, her face dazed, her stomach churning. Said nothing. Did not know what to say.

But in the weeks that followed—and this was what, later, she found hard to understand, because she could not believe that she was a child of vicious inclination—she went back to the workshop. Yes: she took the occasion. She made little excuses to herself; it was as if she had decided, in those days, to walk around with eyes half-closed to her own nature. It was only curiosity, her grown-up self said: the natural curiosity of the over-protected child. But then her grown-up self would say, you made excuses then and you are making them now.

Each evening the boy ate with the family; because he was so young, and far away from his own people, her mother was anxious about him. She couldn’t afford to be different, in his presence; they would wonder about it, might ask questions. After all, if they do—I did nothing wrong, she would tell herself. But she began to wonder if life were fair; if people were not often blamed when they were not at fault. Of course, it was so in childhood; every day there were careless slaps and nursery injustices. Grown-up life, she’d thought, would be different, more rational—and she was on the verge of grown-up life now. The closer she came, the more risky it all looked, the less it seemed that people were amenable to reason. A nagging inner voice told her: you are not at fault, but you can be made to appear at fault.

Once he whispered to her: “I didn’t show you anything your mother hasn’t seen.” She flung her chin up, opened her mouth to quell his impertinence; but then her mother came in with a plate of bread and a bowl of salad, and there they were side by side, good children, shy children, eyes on the tablecloth, thanking God for salad and cheese and bread.

In the workshop, where she lurked around, there was tension between them, an invisible wire drawn tight. Had she perhaps tormented him a little, scampering in and out when the presence of other people protected her? She kept thinking of that strange flesh, blind and white and quivering, like something newborn.

One day they had of course found themselves alone. She kept a distance from him; she was not to be trapped in that way again. This time he had approached from behind her, while she stood looking out of the window. He slipped his hands up under her arms, then pulled her backwards onto his knees, folding into a chair strategically placed. Her skirt was rucked up; he touched her once, between her legs. Then his freckled arm, full of its scrawny nascent strength, was locked across her body; the hand formed a fist. She gazed down at that fist; he held her there like a doll, inanimate like a doll, her pretty lips parted, whilst he wheezed and puffed his way to satisfaction. Not that she knew it was satisfaction: only that some kind of climax to this activity had been reached, for he released her, and muttered a few distracted kindnesses, and never once (she thought later) did he look at her face, he had held her quite deliberately backwards so that he did not need to see whether she was pleased or horrified, whether she was laughing or whether she was too stunned to scream.

She ran; and soon after—at the first, rapid request to know what was wrong with her—she began to splutter out her story. Tears poured out of her eyes as she told it, and her legs felt weak, so she allowed herself to totter to a chair. Her mother’s face seemed to fly apart in horror. She reached for her, dragging her back to her feet; her mother’s hands gripped her arms with a crushing pressure. She had shaken her—her, the precious child—shrieking questions: what did he do, where did he touch you, tell me every word he said, every word, don’t be afraid, tell your mother (and all the time she was shaking, distorted face inches from her own), did he make you touch him, are you bleeding, Manon, tell me, tell me, tell.

Dragged along the street, she wailed like a three-year-old; inside the church her mother snatched at the bell pull that brings the priest quickly if you have done a murder or are dying, then the priest comes at once and he gives you absolution so that you won’t be damned. And he did come … . Her mother pushed her in the small of the back and left her alone in the dimness with the asthmatical breathing of the elderly man. Father listened, turning his one good ear, to the convulsive sobbing of what he took to be a violated child.

The curious thing was this: they did not dismiss the boy. They were afraid of scandal. They were afraid that should the business become known the mischief might be attributed to her. She had to see the boy every day, though he no longer ate with the family. She knew she was to blame now; it was not a question of what other people said or thought, it was a question of an inner reconciliation, and one that could not take place. It could, her mother said, have been very much worse; she was intact, her mother said, whatever that meant. Try not to think about it, her mother advised; one day, when you’re grown up and married, it won’t seem so bad. But however hard she tried—and perhaps trying so hard was part of the problem—she did think about it. She would blush and begin to shake inside, and she would jerk her head with a little involuntary movement, a flinching.

When she was twenty-two, her mother was dead; in the mornings she attended to the running of the household, in the afternoons she studied—mastering Italian and botany, rejecting the systems of Helvetius, progressing with her mathematics. In the evening she read classical history, and sat with closed eyes over the books, her hands still on the pages, dreaming of Liberty. She dwelled—forced herself to dwell—on what was great in Man, on progress and nobility of spirit, on brotherhood and self-sacrifice: on all the disembodied virtues.

She read Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle; there were passages she felt forced to omit, and pages she turned quickly, because they contained information that she did not want.

Seven or eight years after the boy had left her father’s employment, she met him again. He had just married; he was, she saw, a perfectly ordinary young man. It was a brief meeting, no time for private talk, not that she’d have wished it—but he whispered to her, “I hope you don’t still blame me. I did you no harm.”

In 1776 her life altered. It was the year the Americans proclaimed their independence, and she brought her affections to be bound. There had been offers of marriage—from tradesmen mainly, in their twenties and early thirties. She had been polite to them but very, very discouraging. Marriage was something she avoided thinking about. The family began to despair.

But in January that year, Jean-Marie Roland appeared on the scene. He was tall, well educated, well traveled, with the kindness of a father and the gravity of a teacher. He belonged to the minor nobility, but he was the youngest of five sons; he had a little land and the money he earned, nothing more. He was an administrator: to that estate born. In his capacity as inspector, he had traveled Europe. He knew about bleaching and dyeing and making lace and using peat for fuel: about the manufacture of gunpowder, the curing of pork and the grinding of lenses; about physics, free trade and ancient Greece. At once, he sensed her own voracity for knowledge—for a certain type of knowledge, at least. At first she did not notice his strange, dusty coats, his frayed linen, his shoes fastened not with buckles but with old scraps of ribbon; when she did, she thought how refreshing it was to meet a man quite without vanity. Their talk was earnest, full of a kind of quibbling, wary courtesy.

He had kissed her fingertips, but that was politeness. He sat across the room from her. He attempted nothing. It would have been as if a statue of Saint Paul had leaned down and chucked you under the chin.

They exchanged letters, long, absorbing letters that took half a day to compose and an hour to read. At first they penned judicious essays on subjects of general interest. After some months they wrote of marriage—its sacramental aspect, its social usefulness.

He went to Italy for a year, and reported his travels in a published work of six volumes.

In 1780, after four thoughtful and diffident years, they married.

On the night of their wedding it had not been possible to communicate by letter. She did not know what she thought might happen; she would not allow herself to think of the apprentice and his fumbling, or to construct a theory about what, after all, had taken place behind her back. So she was unprepared for his body, for the hollow chest with its sparse, graying hair; she was unprepared for the haste with which he pulled her against that body, and for the pain of penetration. His breathing changed, and jerking her head up over his shoulder she asked, “Is that … ?” But he had already rolled away from her into sleep, his open mouth breathing in the darkness.

The next day he had woken to lean over her with apology and concern: “Were you entirely ignorant? My poor dear Manon, had I known …”

One child (both thought) justifies a marriage: Eudora, born October 4, 1781.

She had an ability—she was proud of it—to grasp the essentials of a complicated matter within minutes. Name her a topic—the Punic Wars, let us say, or the manufacture of tallow candles—and within a day she will give you a satisfactory account of it; within a week she will be capable of setting up her own factory, or drawing up a battle plan for Scipio Africanus. She liked to help him in his work, it was a pleasure to her. She began on the humblest level, copying passages he wished to study. Then she tried her hand at indexing, proved careful and competent; then she applied her retentive memory and dogged curiosity to his research projects. Finally—since she wrote with such fluency and grace and ease—she began to help him out with his reports and letters. Oh, let me have that, she’d say, I’ll polish it off while you’re humming and hawing over the first paragraph. My dear, clever girl, he’d say, how did I ever manage without you?

But I want, she thought, more than a meed of praise; I want a quiet life, and yet, I want to move on to a larger stage. Knowing the place allotted to a woman, and content, respecting it, I want the respect of men. I want their respect and their approbation; for I too make schemes, I reason, I have my ideas about the state of France. She wished she could feed them, by some imperceptible process, into the heads of the nation’s legislators: as she feeds them into her husband’s.

She recalled a July day: flies clustering and buzzing about the casement of a sickroom, her husband’s yellow face above the white sheets, and her mother-in-law, a tyrant of eighty-five, nodding in a corner, breath whistling. She saw herself, in a gray dress: gray-minded by age and sickness and heat, creeping through the rooms with herb tea, the summer going obdurately on outside the windows.

“Madame?”

“Quietly. What is it?”

“Madame, the news from Paris.”

“Has someone fallen ill?”

“Madame, the Bastille has fallen.”

She dropped the cup at her feet and let it shatter. Later she thought: I did it on purpose. Startled from his doze, Roland lifted his head from the pillow. “Manon, has some dreadful calamity occurred?”

In the corner the Old Regime woke up, clucking at the disturbance, and fixed with a baleful eye the intemperate joy of her son’s wife.

She began to write for the press now: first for the Lyon Courier, then for Brissot’s paper the French Patriot. (Her husband and Brissot had corresponded at length, these two years.) She signed herself “A Lady from Lyon” or “A Roman Lady.” In June 1790 she received a charming if not very legible letter, seeking permission for the Revolutions de France to reprint one of her articles. She agreed at once: not knowing, then, the character of the paper’s editor.

In Paris the great opportunity had come, and she had taken it; she had made herself useful to the patriots. Waking and sleeping, she had dreamed of such a chance; dreamed of it in her lonely hours of study, dreamed of it pregnant with Eudora, watching the grave diggers at work in an Amiens cemetery. The salon of Mme. Roland. So, perhaps in detail the dream had disappointed; the men were lightweight, frivolous, wrongheaded, and she had to bite her lips to keep from interventions that would cut them down to size. Yet, it was a beginning; and soon they would be on their way to Paris again.

She had not divorced herself from the situation, these last months. In a locked drawer she kept letters from Brissot, from Robespierre, from that grave and prepossessing young deputy François-Léonard Buzot. From these letters she had learned of the aftermath of the Champs-de-Mars. They had told her (she would hate to be synoptic, but events press so fast) how Louis, restored to the throne, had sworn to uphold the constitution; how Lafayette, no longer commander of the National Guard, had left Paris for an army post. The new Legislative Assembly was called, former deputies barred from it; so Buzot had returned to his home in Evreux. Never mind; they could still exchange letters, and no doubt one day they’d meet again.

Their friend Brissot was a deputy now: dear Brissot, who worked so hard. And Robespierre had not left for his hometown; he remained in Paris, rebuilding the Jacobin Club, bringing in the new deputies, inducting them into the rules and procedures of the debates that shadowed the Assembly’s own. A diligent man, Robespierre; but he had disappointed her all the same.

On the day of the massacre she had sent a message to him, offering to hide him in their apartment. She got no answer; she heard later that he had been taken in by a tradesman’s family, and was living with them now. She felt flat, let-down, when the moment of danger never came. She saw herself out-facing a regiment; she saw herself talking down the National Guard.

During this exile, also, she had followed with some interest the career of M. Danton and his friends. She had been relieved to learn that he was in England, and hoped he would stay there. Yet still, she sought information; and as soon as there was rumor of an amnesty, M. Danton came bouncing back. He had the nerve to put himself up for the Legislative Assembly; and in the middle of one of the election meetings (she had heard) an officer had arrived with a warrant for his arrest. Abused verbally and physically by the mob that seemed to attend the lawyer in all his activities, the officer was carried off to the Abbaye prison, where he was shut up for three days in the cell reserved for Danton.

The amnesty had been passed; but the Electors had seen through the lout’s pretensions. Rejected, Danton had retired to his province to brood; and now he had decided he would like to become Deputy Public Prosecutor. With luck, there too he would be thwarted; the time was far distant (she hoped) when France would be governed by thugs.

For the future … It irked her to think that in Paris the silly people were once more cheering the King and Queen, simply because they had put their names to the constitution: as if they had forgotten the years of tyranny and rapacity, the betrayal on the road to Varennes. Louis was plotting with the foreign powers, that much was clear to her; there will be war, and we would be foolish not to strike the first blow. (She turned the cloth in her hands and caught a loop of thread with the needle to make a knot.) And we must fight as a republic, as Athens did and Sparta. (She reached for her scissors.) Louis must be deposed. Preferably, killed.

Then the reign of the aristocrats would be over forever.

And such a reign it had been …

Once, long ago, her grandmother had taken her to a house in the Marais, to call on a noblewoman with whom she had some acquaintance. There was a footman to bow them in; on a sofa reclined an old woman, opulently gowned, with a stupid, rouged face. A small dog rose from among her draperies and yapped at them, bouncing on stiff legs; the noblewoman swatted at it, perfunctory, and motioned her grandmother to a low stool. For some reason, in this household, her grandmother was addressed by her maiden name.

She herself was left to stand, hot and silent. Her scalp still burned from the tortures which her grandmother, early that morning, had inflicted on her hair. The old woman shifted on her cushions, rasping on in her dictatorial, oddly uncultivated voice. Urged forward, Manon had bobbed a curtsy inside her stiff best dress. Thirty years later she had not forgiven herself for that curtsy.

Watery eyes regarded her. “Religious, is she?” the noblewoman said. The dog subsided, snuffled by her side; a discarded tapestry lay over the arm of the sofa. She had dropped her eyes, “I try to perform my duties.”

Her grandmother shifted painfully on the stool. The old woman patted at her lace bonnet, as if she were before a mirror; then she turned her hard eyes on Manon again, and began to ask her questions, schoolbook questions. When she answered correctly, with studied politeness, the creature sneered. “Little scholar isn’t she? Do you think that’s what a man requires?”

The catechism over—still standing, feeling faint in the airless room—she had to hear her merits and faults enumerated. A good figure already, the noblewoman said; as if to imply that when she was grown up she would be fat. Sallow complexion, the noblewoman said; might freshen up, in time. “Tell me, my darling,” she said, “have you ever bought a ticket in the lottery?”

“No, Madame, I don’t believe in games of chance.”

“What a prig she is,” the old creature drawled. A hand shot out; grasped her little wrist in a vice of bone. “I want her to buy a lottery ticket for me. I want her to pick the number, you understand, then bring it here to me and give it to me herself. I think she has a lucky hand.”

In the street she gulped in God’s clean air. “Please, I needn’t go back, need I?” She wanted to race home, back to her books and the reasonable people inside them.

Even now, when someone said the word “aristocrat”—when they spoke of “a noblewoman” or “a titled lady”—it called to her mind the picture of that malignant gambler. It was not just the lace cap, the hard eyes, or the crushing words. It was the pervasive odor of a heavy musk, it was the reek of scent which overlay (she knew) the sweetness of bodily decay.

Lottery ticket, indeed. There would be no gambling under the republic, she thought; it would not be permitted.

Paris: “Look,” said the judge to the Clerk of the Court, “I don’t care if they’re retaining John the Baptist. They’ve infringed the gaming laws and I’m giving them six months. Why do you suppose Desmoulins has come back to the Bar, anyway?”

“Money,” said the clerk.

“I thought Orléans paid well.”

“Oh, the Duke is finished,” the clerk said cheerfully. “Mme. de Genlis is in England, Laclos has gone back to his regiment and the Mistresses are making up to Danton. Of course, they get money from the English.”

“What, you think the English have bought Danton’s people?”

“I think they are paying them, but that’s a different matter. They’re an unscrupulous lot. Time was in this country when you paid a man a bribe you could rely on his honesty.”

The judge shifted uneasily in his chair. The clerk was becoming aphoristic; when that happened, they always got home late. “Still,” he said. “To the matter in hand.”

“Ah yes, Maître Desmoulins. He took his father-in-law’s investment advice and went in for City of Paris bonds. And we all know what’s happened to them.”

“Indeed,” said the judge feelingly.

“And now the authorities have closed the newspaper he wants another source of income.”

“He can hardly be poor.”

“He has money, but wants more. In that, if in no other particular, he resembles the rest of us. I understand he’s playing the stock market. While he waits for that to pay off he intends to recoup his fortunes from the handsome fees he can now command at the Bar.”

“I was told he hated the business.”

“But it’s different now, isn’t it? Now if he gets in difficulties we have to sit and wait for him to finish his sentences. We’re a bit afraid—”

“Not I,” said the judge stoutly.

“And he is able.”

“I don’t deny it.”

“And when milords find the police interfering with their pleasures, how convenient for them to have one of their own to argue the case. Arthur Dillon, de Sillery, that lot, they’ve put him up to this.”

“And he associates with them quite openly—you’d think the patriots—”

“Will tolerate most things from him. After all, in a manner of speaking he is the Revolution. I believe there are mutterings, though. Yet after all—this is Paris, not Geneva.”

“I take it you’re a gambling man yourself.”

“That’s by the way,” the clerk said breezily. “Perhaps, like Maître Desmoulins, I am interested in limiting the interference of the state in the private life of the individual.”

“You agree with him?” the judge said. “I shall see you soon with your boots up on the table, sansculotte in homespun trousers, a red cap on your reverend pate and a pike against the wall behind you.”

“Every possibility,” said the clerk. “Such are the times.”

“I shall tolerate much, but I shall not permit you to smoke a pipe, like Père Duchesne.”

Camille made a small gesture to his clients, of rueful apology, then turned his smile on the judge. The man and woman looked at each other, allowing their shoulders to sag a little. “You will not escape imprisonment,” their counsel had told them, “so we may as well use your case to discuss some wider issues.”

“I wish to ask the court—”

“Stand up.”

The lawyer hesitated, did so, wandered across to the judge to stare at him at close range. “I wish to ask for permission to publish my opinion.”

The judge dropped his voice. “Are you intending to start some sort of public controversy?”

“Yes.”

“You could do that without my permission.”

“It’s a formality, isn’t it? I’m polite.”

“Have you any quarrel with the verdict on the facts?”

“No.”

“On the law?”

“No.”

“Then?”

“I object to the use of the courts as instruments of the intrusive moralizing state.”

“Really?” The judge leaned forward; he liked to argue generalities. “As you seem to have wiped the church out of the picture, who is going to make men what they ought to be, if the laws do not do it?”

“Who is to say what men ought to be?”

“If the people elect their lawmakers—which, nowadays, they do—don’t they depute that task to them?”

“But if the people and their deputies were formed by a corrupt society, how are they to make good decisions? How are they to form a moral society when they have no experience of one?”

“We really are going to get home late,” the judge said. “We shall be here for six months if we are to do justice to the question. You mean, how are we to become good when we’re bad?”

“We used to do it through the agency of divine grace. But the new constitution doesn’t provide for that.”

“How wrong can you be?” the judge said. “I thought all you fellows were on course for the moral regeneration of humankind. Doesn’t it worry you that you’re out of step with your friends?”

“Since the Revolution you’re allowed to dissent, aren’t you?”

He seemed to be waiting for an answer. The judge was disconcerted.