Mistress of the Revolution (32 page)

Madame was under no such pall. She shared her time between the Palace of the Luxembourg in Paris, which had already been her residence before the Revolution, and her country house of Montreuil. Unlike her sister-in-law the Queen, she did not detest Paris. She and her husband dined almost every day at the Tuileries with the King and Queen, as they had done in Versailles. As part of my duties, I accompanied her during my week of service, which was, as before the Revolution, one out of three. After staying away as much as I could from the splendid Court of Versailles, I became part of its feeble shadow in the Tuileries.

Madame welcomed me warmly. She did the honours of her country house herself. Montreuil, although a pleasant retreat, was in my opinion less lovely than Vaucelles. Madame had successively added, following her whim rather than any design, a hermitage, a tower, a multitude of bridges over a tiny brook, a Chinese pagoda, an outdoors music pavilion and, needless to say, a mock farm, complete with dairy, barn, sheep, shepherds and henhouse. I expressed all of the expected admiration in spite of the artificial and haphazard air of the place, but was sincerely impressed by very fine vegetable gardens, which were the object of Madame’s utmost care. She liked to cook with the produce of her little estate and made an excellent
pesto
soup herself, after a recipe from her native Italy.

I played the pianoforte and sang for Madame, which seemed to bring her comfort in spite of the fact that she had not much of an ear. She asked many questions about Aimée and requested that I bring her with me. At first, I had noticed that Madame often gave off whiffs of liquor, spoke rather too loudly, walked with an unsteady gait and in general acted in such a way as to indicate that she had
du vent dans les voiles
, “wind in her sails,” as the saying goes. During those moments, the only company, beside mine, she seemed to tolerate with equanimity was that of Rosalie, a young Negress. She had been “given” as a little girl to Madame, as if she had been a canary or a lapdog. Rosalie was about my age, graceful and delicate, with the darkest skin I had ever seen. She showed endless patience with Madame’s bouts of temper. I did not want to expose my daughter, then only four years of age, to the sight of the poor princess in her cups, leaning on Rosalie for support. I have always found drunkenness unappealing, especially in a female.

Soon, however, Madame began to act in a more measured manner in my presence. Rosalie told me under the seal of confidence that Her Highness was indeed calmer and more manageable during my week of service than at any other time. After I became assured of her improvement, I humoured her by bringing Aimée with me on occasion.

After fulfilling my duties with Madame, I had to face Villers. He would wait for me at my lodgings, pacing the parlour, and demand a minute account of my day immediately upon my return. The same enquiries were renewed in bed.

“Why do you not trust me?” I asked, looking into his eyes.

“Trust you? You betray me with a woman, Belle, and you expect me to trust you?”

“I do not betray you with anyone. I never did. Never. Not once.”

I held him against me to comfort him, to appease him. I wanted to reach for the part of him that was in pain. He drew back. “You have always lied to me, Belle. You are lying to me now. What exactly have you done with that woman?”

I sighed. “I already told you all about my day.”

“Do you expect me to believe you?”

“Yes, I do. What have I ever done to deserve this? Please, my dear, trust me. You are making yourself, and me, unhappy over nothing.”

He seized me and kissed every inch of my skin with a sort of frenzy. I knew that love or lust had nothing to do with it. He was searching for traces of Madame’s odor.

“Please stop this,” I said, shuddering. “You are tearing us apart.”

One of the first acts of the Assembly after its arrival in Paris was to place the assets of the Clergy, worth hundreds, if not thousands of millions of francs, “at the disposal of the Nation,” another way of saying that they were confiscated. For the first time, the government issued paper money, the famous
assignats
, backed on the credit of ecclesiastical property.

Around the same time, I started noticing in the salons an ever-in-creasing number of nuns whose convents had closed. Some were still wearing the habit. Others had given up any pretense of religious vocation and mingled freely in society. The only indication of their former status was that they sometimes forgot to curtsey and instead bowed, their hands crossed on their chests, in the manner of nuns. I wrote Hélène to enquire about her plans. I offered her, after securing Villers’s permission, my hospitality in Paris. She responded promptly.

This letter saddened me. Selfishly, I regretted not to be able to enjoy the pleasure of Hélène’s company in Paris. I understood and respected the reasons that made her wish to stay in Noirvaux, but they filled me with foreboding.

The Assembly did adopt the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Almost half of all clerics, including Hélène, refused to pledge allegiance: they would be called
réfractaires
, or “unsworn.” They were allowed to practice the Catholic faith, provided that they do so without any financial help from the Nation.

In a desire to break from the Old Regime, the Assembly discarded the boundaries of the ancient French provinces, and instituted new territorial divisions called
Départements
. Likewise, the old Districts of Paris were replaced by forty-eight Sections.

All titles of nobility were also abolished. Commoners began to refer to us as
ci-devant
, meaning “former.” I became the
ci-devant
Baroness de Peyre. The word would soon become a term of derision and insult. Servants’ liveries were now forbidden, and coats of arms had to be erased from carriages, buildings and clothing. I had just finished embroidering a pair of white satin ribbons I used to tie my stockings. Out of habit, I had added a Baron’s coronet on top of the blue monogrammed
G
. I should have discarded these garters but was reluctant to do so. They were very pretty with their pattern of forget-me-nots, and it seemed that what I wore under my skirts was no one’s business but my own.

Preparations were made in Paris to celebrate the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. The Champ de Mars, until then a vast empty field reserved for military exercises, had been chosen as the location for the main event, during which the King himself was to pledge allegiance to the Constitution. An “Altar of the Homeland” crowned the summit of a huge step pyramid. Grandstands were built around it, creating an oblong outdoors stadium. A triumphal ark marked its entrance on the side of the river.

Parisians of all ages and all classes of society, crippled veterans from the
Invalides
Hospital, National Guards, butchers, their sleeves rolled up their muscular arms, charcoal deliverers with darkened faces, priests, students, children, society ladies participated in the construction. I shoveled dirt and pushed a wheelbarrow, with Aimée’s help, for a few hours. A tavern keeper had brought a barrel of wine to quench the thirst of the volunteers. The atmosphere was one of rejoicing and hope, although I heard a
sans-culotte
, “without breeches,” a man of the lower classes, so named because he was wearing trousers instead of knee breeches, sing a ditty I did not find to my taste:

He seemed ready with more verses in the same vein, but was silenced in mid-song. Other men told him that he was offending the ladies and threatened to flatten his head with their shovels if he did not desist.

Every regiment in the army, every
Département
sent delegates, called “Federates,” to witness the celebration. It was styled “Festival of the Federation,” to signify the union of the whole country as one Nation. The King was now a constitutional monarch, subject, like all of his fellow citizens, to the terms of the Constitution. The people, through their elected Representatives at the Assembly, were now the sole sovereign.

On the 14th of July, 1790, the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, 400,000 spectators waited in the grandstands under the rain for the arrival of the Federates. I was seated in the Court’s stands, in a white dress adorned with tricolour ribbons, to the side of the King’s box, facing the triumphal arch under which filed entire regiments, followed by the delegates of Paris and all
Départements
. Finally, under deafening cheers, the members of the Assembly joined the official stands. I searched among the numbers and finally saw Villers and Lauzun.

Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, a tricolour sash tied around his priestly vestments, celebrated Mass, no doubt an unusual occurrence for him. The huge stadium was filled with the delegates and complete silence fell when Lafayette pledged allegiance to the Constitution in a voice loud enough for all to hear. I joined the crowd in the grandstands in rising and repeating “I do.” Then it was the King’s turn to raise his right hand and swear allegiance to the new Constitution. The Queen forced a smile and held the little Dauphin aloft to present him to the acclamations of the crowd. The rain had ceased. The sun’s rays pierced the clouds to fall upon that unforgettable scene.

I joined Villers to a dinner of cold meats in the gardens of the château of La Muette, which thousands of Federates and other guests attended. A ball on the ruins of the Bastille concluded the festivities. Hundreds of trees, festooned with garlands lit by candles, had been planted for the occasion. Banners with the mottos “Liberty” and “Fraternity” floated in the warm summer breeze. Villers seemed to have forgotten our differences. We danced late into the night before returning to my lodgings. We then held our own intimate celebration in the privacy of my bedroom. It was my twenty-first birthday.

The royal family spent the whole summer of 1790 in the château de Saint-Cloud, two miles to the west of Paris. It had been purchased by the Treasury, a few years before the Revolution, as the personal property of the Queen. She had justified the enormous expense, made at a time of bankruptcy of the public finances, by the need for her to be “closer to the shows of the capital.” In 1790, she no longer cared about those entertainments. I am sure that she would have liked to be very far away from them.

The Count and Countess de Provence went to Saint-Cloud every night for dinner, as they had done to the Tuileries, and I accompanied them during my week of service. With the other ladies of the Countess and the gentlemen of the Count, I sat at the royal table, a familiarity that would never have been allowed before the Revolution. I noticed that the King, who had resumed hunting, and the Queen, who took long walks in the park away from the hated Parisians, seemed happier than in Paris.

At the beginning of September, I let out a cry of indignation as I read the
Moniteur
. It related the execution of mutinous soldiers quartered in Nancy, in eastern France. A court-martial, under the direction of the Marquis de Bouillé, entrusted with the mission of restoring order, had tried the rebels. Their leader was broken and exposed on the wheel on a scaffold around which twenty-three of his comrades were hanged. Another twenty-nine soldiers were executed by firing squad. The remains of the regiment were also punished: every seventh man, picked at random, was sentenced to hard labour for life. I handed Villers the newspaper.

“What did you expect?” he said after glancing at it. “This kind of behaviour cannot be tolerated in any army.”

“Those soldiers were only asking for their overdue pay.”

“It would have been fine if they had acted with measure.”

“That is what they did in the beginning, and all they received for their pains was a public flogging.”

Villers put down the newspaper. “Rightly so, because they presented their request in a disrespectful and arrogant manner. Then they proceeded to take hostages and revolt against their officers. Those rebels received the punishment they deserved.”

“But to have their leader broken on the wheel!” I shuddered. “One would believe we were still under the Old Regime. Such a hideous, protracted agony for the victim and such an infamy for those who ordered it. Bouillé is a butcher.”

“Nonsense. Bouillé is a respectable man and a good General. My son serves under him and has nothing but praise for him. If your late husband had been in Bouillé’s shoes, he would have had fifty men sentenced to the wheel, not just one.”

“Is that supposed to reconcile me to this atrocity?”

“An example had to be made of the scoundrels who led the mutiny, or it could have spread to the entire army. You know nothing of military matters, Belle, and should limit your opinions to subjects you can grasp.”

“This is not about military matters, but about common humanity. What a death for a soldier!”

“He should have remembered that he was one before rebelling. The Assembly, except for Robespierre and a few other rascals, is of one mind on this point. We are considering a special bill to congratulate Bouillé. I intend to vote for it.”

I left the room in disgust.

The Nancy affair marked my first difference over politics with Villers. Tens of thousands of Parisians shared my opinion and demonstrated the next day to protest Bouillé’s brutality.