Part XXX (2)

[montagnarde1793]

Something random I noticed when I was browsing: that ridiculous picture from the Antoinette movie with Antoinette wearing stockings tied up by blue ribbons... did anyone else notice that they're tied above her knees? This was a convention in drawings from the era of women putting on their stockings, but this was only done to increase the drawings' worth as erotica (on a rather tame level, of course, mostly): the higher the stockings were tied on, the higher they could lift the skirt. However if one were to try to tie stockings on above the knee, unless by some bizarre freak of nature one's knees were larger than one's thighs, they would fall down. So basically, it's just one more instance of the makers of that movie unwittingly using the imagery of caricatures of Antoinette. Idiots.

Page 353

                […] Now Elisabeth and Lebas were engaged. When Max had time off on Sunday, often the new couple and Eléanore and he went to the country together, or at least stole a couple of hours to sing and relax.

                Elisabeth was fairer than Eléanore, conventionally pretty and not as intense or as bright. She would make Lebas an excellent wife. Lebas was a reliable Jacobin, often sent on mission by the Convention because of his common sense, his ability to get along with a wide variety of people and his innate honesty. Max liked to attend the weddings of his friends. He was well settled himself, cared for in the Duplay household, with Eléanore, with his dog Blount. He had a strong and secure domestic scene as his grounding.

 

Page 387

SEVENTY-ONE

Max

(July-October 1793)

                Max had no time for anything superfluous. Everything light and pleasant and casual had burned away. He could not remember what it was like to walk in the sunlight, to dine with his adopted family, to talk with Eléanore, to sleep more than four hours. Often he was up all night and worked the next day.

 

Page 389

                “None of us will marry,” Augustin said. He was handsome, Max thought, an open masculine face. “Not me, not Charlotte, not you.”

                “I can’t offer a wife anything but death. But you, Augustin, you’d make a wonderful father. Charlotte? She has no politics but vanity.”

                “We’re all the children of our mother who died screaming, after that pig stuffed her full of too many babies and took off. I’m told he’s in Germany.”

                “To me, he’s dead,” Max said. “That’s all I want to hear on the subject.”

                Augustin shrugged. “Charlotte drives me crazy. Every time I get involved with a woman, she becomes insanely jealous….I like a nice married woman who’s separated from her husband. Or a widow. Really, why don’t you marry Eléanore? Everybody knows about her.”

                “I have too little time, Bonbon. In two years, there won’t be ten of us alive who made the Revolution.”

                “You need to get more sleep. Relax. Maybe we could steal a day in the country, while the weather’s warm.”

 

Page 391

                To Eléanore in one of the precious moments they could be alone, lying face to face fully clothed on his bed, he [Robespierre] said, “It’s like being married to twelve men. A marriage of convenience. I would not choose them—”

                “Except perhaps Saint-Just.” Eléanore was sometimes jealous of him.

                “Twelve men do not make a good marriage, but the volume of work forces us to march over our differences, to crash through what we dislike about each other. It doesn’t matter I consider Billaud a cutthroat and Collot a demagogue and Barère a weathercock. We are the Committee. We must save France. Nothing else signifies. We’ll die to save France as clearly as soldiers must.”

                She held him tightly, her face intense, her grip hard. “Won’t you be disappointed if you survive this period of crisis, retire covered with glory and have to deal with me?”

                “Then I’d dare to marry you. We’ll move out of Paris. Trees and clean air, clear water, and many dogs. We’ll take the stray dogs of Paris with us. Blount will be a patriarch.” Blount, sprawled across the foot of the bed, wagged his tail at the mention of his name and eyed his master. Max hardly even got to walk Blount lately. Eléanore took care of him.

                “I want to believe in that future.”

                “Danton is retiring to the country with his child bride.”

                “Good riddance. Max, I never told you this. But that time we were all in the country together, Danton tried to seduce Elisabeth. If you can call it that. He put his hands all over her. Elisabeth screamed and ran away—”

                “Why did the two of you keep this from me? Does Philippe know?”

                “I doubt it. Elisabeth made me promise not to tell. She was embarrassed. She was afraid she had somehow given him encouragement. I hate keeping secrets from you. Now that he’s leaving Paris, I see no reason not to let you know.”

                “I wish you had told me at the time. I will not forgive this.”

                “It doesn’t matter, Max. Nothing happened.”

                They rarely made love now. He was too exhausted. He assured her that he did not care for her less. He had nothing left inside.

 

Page 417

                He [Robespierre] was furious. How dare Camille stand in the Jacobins and quote Rousseau at him? Rousseau was his. He had based his adult life on Rousseau’s teachings and example, while Camille was indulging his senses and his curiosity and the patience of his friends. Something in Max began to recoil. His pride was injured. That night when he got home from the late and stormy session, Eléanore was waiting to let him in. She looked the image of peace, reading a book at the table, wearing a white nightgown with a dark red robe thrown over it.

                One thing he appreciated about Eléanore was that she always observed him carefully, then attuned herself to his moods. Not for her the selfish tirades and emotional outbursts of his sister Charlotte. Eléanore had discipline. Most nights she would light his way up the stairs, light the candle in his room, then retire gracefully. But she always knew when he desired her company, either the tension release of intimacy or the intimacy of conversation. Quietly they got into bed, leaving the candle flickering. In candlelight the blue walls looked almost black.

                “Camille takes advantage of me. He assumes I will always protect him no matter at what cost to myself.”

                “You can’t sacrifice your reputation to him. He was cheeky tonight. I was shocked he answered you back when you trying to save him.”

                He had not known she was in the gallery. He was pleased not to have to explain. She held him gently, saying, “You have to do what your conscience bids you. If that’s to save a man who barely appreciates you, then you have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve acted with kindness. If you need to cut him loose, then it will because that is the correct action.”

                He took her quickly, then fell asleep in her arms, knowing that when he wakened, she would have crept off to her room. It was a measure of polite discretion they maintained. Everyone in the house was aware they were lovers. It was condoned but never mentioned.

 

Page 419

                Eléanore served as his [Robespierre’s] secretary. For a whole week, he worked on the speech until his eyes watered, but it was a pleasure to grapple with large issues. This speech had to be so lucid that the Convention would hear it and say, Ah, yes, here we are and there we must go. The house smelled of new wood under the saw, cherry, pine, walnut, cooking odors from the kitchen. Often Elisabeth Lebas was around, just showing her pregnancy. Max was surrounded by women of his ideal family, coddled, fussed over, adored, the arbiter of whatever small differences arose. At his side always was Eléanore, dark, attentive, often silent; at his feet, was Blount, idiotically happy, his tail pounding the floor.

 

Page 421

                Max was persuaded, against his better judgment, to go to dinner at the house of an old friend. The occasion was an attempt to reconcile Danton and himself. He brought Eléanore; Danton his child bride. Camille and Lucile were there, Camille attempting to coerce both men into believing they were in fundamental agreement. Max listened. Too much champagne was served. His glass kept being filled. Eléanore would quietly pour it out or drink it herself. She was wary, for he was not used to drinking more than a little watered wine.

                He considered that more than Danton or Camille, he had done well in the woman he had selected. Louise and Lucile got their men into trouble; Eléanore was his helpmate. She was an intense dark presence at his side watching out for him. She did not flirt with the men as Lucile and Louise did. Danton was always dropping comments about Max’s lack of sexual prowess, which Max noted, filed away. He would never be a man who threw himself upon women. Rather he usually ducked when women threw themselves at him. Yet he possessed his woman more thoroughly, they were more of a unity, than any couple at this drunken dinner. If he survived, he would marry her. But no children.

 

Page 423

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Georges [Danton]

(March-April 5, 1794)

                Georges thought the evening with Robespierre went well. As they had planned, champagne flowed like a river into all the glasses. Probably Robespierre had never drunk so much in his life. Camille and Robespierre had embraced. Robespierre seemed moved when they talked about the past. Georges had to say that Robespierre’s girlfriend or whatever she was did not add to the company. Scarcely a smile out of her. She sat there like a statue of dark wood, probably terrified to open her mouth and make a fool of herself. Georges must have met her seven times by now, but she was still as cold and formal as the first day. A real stick: skinny and mute.

 

Page 448

                One Sunday late in Messidor—early July—Max went to the country with Philippe and Elisabeth, the Duplays. They picnicked near the Seine. Afterward he withdrew with Eléanore. It was cooler under the trees. He spread his jacket. They made love in nature for the first time. He was tempted to spend in her. He was tempted again to marry her. It would please the Duplays. If he managed to get through the next crisis, perhaps the government would be stable. He could withdraw. He spoke his fantasies aloud as they lay together, reluctant to leave this soothing grove.

                “We’ll live in the country. We’ll have a small house,” Eléanore promised him. “If you still don’t want babies, we could adopt.”

                “We could adopt the orphan of a hero of the army or a murdered sans-culotte.” He could see them in a small clean house with roses growing around it, children studying under the arbor. Doves in a coop. Blount chasing rabbits. They would grow lettuce. Perhaps they could grow oranges under glass. Their fragrance was his favorite smell.

 

Page 455

                In the tumbrel, Saint-Just stood erect, immaculate. He exuded a stoic calm. He was quite beautiful standing straight in the cart, not even swaying with the rough jouncing. Couthon lay in a heap of mangled limbs. Max sat up but could not stand. The pain roared in his mind. The route lay down the Rue Saint Honoré past the Committee, past the Jacobins, past the Duplays. The house was shuttered. Someone had thrown red paint or blood on the closed gates to the courtyard. Upstairs, he saw the shutters open a chink. Eléanore looked at him. He could hear Blount barking furiously. He could not turn his head to keep her in sight. The tumbrel moved on through a crowd shouting for his death as they had cheered him so often.

 

Page 462

EIGHTY-FOUR

Claire [Lacombe]

(August 1794-August 1795)

                Claire could read the political complexion of the government by who entered the prisons and who left. Victoire never tired of petitioning the various bureaucracies for her release, but months passed, summer into winter, and she was still a prisoner. Elisabeth Lebas and her baby boy were locked up in the Luxembourg, along with her sister, Eléanore Duplay, who had been Robespierre’s fiancée. Eléanore was intense and very quiet. She observed Claire carefully for two weeks before beginning to speak to her.

                “My mother hanged herself. My father’s in La Force prison. When the news came that Philippe was dead, my sister fell into a dead faint. Her baby had to be put to a wet nurse. She was unconscious for two days. We thought she’d die. She had just come to and got her baby back when we were arrested.”

                “Your crime was giving a home to Robespierre?”

                “We all loved him,” Eléanore said. “I most of all. His idiot sister Charlotte renounced him. I will never cease to be faithful.”

                “Being faithful to a dead man is useless to both of you,” Claire said. She did not bother telling Eléanore how much she had grown to mistrust Robespierre and his virtue.

                “If you loved a great man, would you ever be satisfied with a little man?” Eléanore asked, her dark eyes glittering in her thin pale face. “He is my fate.” She seemed pleased to have settled that for herself.

 

Page 463

                Elisabeth had regained her color. She was far prettier than her sister, although less bright.

 

Page 470

[Fall 1812]

                “Sometimes I [Claire Lacombe] remember, Pauline, all the people we knew. I think of Jacques. Olympe de Gouges. Danton. And that boy who never grew up—Desmoulins with his pretty, silly wife. None of them ever got to be middle-aged. They were all so young. We were all so young. Even Robespierre. Do you remember when you had a crush on him, Pauline? I met his girlfriend in prison. She got out not long after I did.”

Comments

[rainofthenight.livejournal.com]

That's priceless! You know, I still haven't seen the movie.

And I read attentively, of course.

[estellacat.livejournal.com]

I thought so--especially since they're probably completely oblivious. I wouldn't bother if I were you; it's not worth wasting one's time to see it.

Thank you: it's good to see someone is.