Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [46]
France will go bankrupt, the king will go hunting, and we’ll be the ones who pay. You and I. As always, my uncle said.
Levesque spoke again. His voice was urgent, but low, as if he wanted none but my uncle to hear him. Not this time, my friend, he said. There are calls to limit the king’s power. There are whispers of rebellion.
Every morning we went with our cart to the town square to give puppet shows. My uncle had hastily built a new theater out of our kitchen table before we left Paris. It sat atop our cart. Few came to watch, though. We had to take work at a laundry—my mother, my aunt, my sister, and myself—to keep from starving. And then it got worse.
Early in June, the king’s eldest son, the dauphin Louis-Joseph, died of consumption. He was only seven years old and his death cast the royal family into a terrible grief. The court mourned with them. The town, too. Shops and cafés closed. We, with our farts and farces, were as welcome in the town as the plague.
It went on thus through June. We ate hard bread and moldy cheese and sometimes strawberries I’d stolen from a field. My brothers grew brown from the sun. My sister grew fat. And my mother, longing for coffee and the chance to wash herself without the stable boys peeping, grew waspish.
One evening, Levesque ran into the barn, waving a broadsheet. He said there had been a revolt. He told us that the commons had finally persuaded the nobles and clergy to join them, and that they no longer called themselves the Three Estates, but the National Assembly, and that they meant to give France a constitution. The Duc d’Orléans, cousin to the king, was among them.
The king, furious at the renegades, locked them out of their meeting rooms, so they met in a tennis court instead and swore to one another they would not separate until they had a constitution. The king sent his soldiers to disband them, but still they would not go. Count Mirabeau stood up on a chair and shouted, Tell your master we are here by the will of the people and shall not yield except to the force of bayonets!
It was a brave thing to do, Levesque said, and a stupid one. Mirabeau might’ve been shot where he stood. But he was not, and to everyone’s shock, it was not Mirabeau who backed down, but the king.
The summer wore on. Temperatures, and tempers, rose. Another troupe of theatricals from Paris stopped at Levesque’s. They wore red, white, and blue cockades pinned to their clothes. These are revolution’s colors, one of them said. Everyone wears them now.
They brought us other news, too. The price of bread was sky-high. Hungry people had attacked the customs-houses to get at the grain inside them. It was shouted in the streets that the king had spent six hundred thousand livres on a funeral for his child, while thousands of French children died from hunger every day. They told us that the actor Talma, brash and heedless, played Brutus the regicide in Roman dress, with bare arms and legs. No one had ever done that. Characters, no matter their time, were played in the clothing of ours. Critics called him a revolutionary of the stage. Every seat in the house was filled.
My father said, This is a remarkable thing. I am going back to Paris to see it.
My mother begged him to stay. To try one more puppet show. Just one. They will come, Theo, she said, putting my littlest brother to her breast. How can they not? No one makes such beautiful puppets as you do.
At these words, my father smiled. My mother loved him, and he loved her, too—to the point of madness. I have no idea why. She was no pink-cheeked maiden. She was old—thirty-six—when last I saw her. She was no beauty, either. Her brown hair was threaded with gray. Her teeth clacked. She smelled always of sour milk and piss.
He bent down to her, and thinking no one saw, put his hand on her breast. He kissed the babe on his head and my mother on her