Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [75]
I thought it was only a passing fancy, this passion for revolution, but I was wrong. It tightened its grip on the city every day until Paris, my bright, brilliant city, became as tedious as a circus girl who’d gone into a convent.
There was one place that hadn’t changed, though—the Palais-Royal. Always a home for rogues and rebels, it now served as a meeting place for the most radical voices of the revolution. Desmoulins was often there, drinking coffee at the Foy. Danton, too. He was anywhere that boasted good food and pretty women. I saw Marat and Hébert there, handing out their gutter rags, whispering to this one and pointing at that one. One could say whatever one wished there. One could go too far—call the king an ass and the queen a slut—and none could do aught about it, for the Palais belonged to the rich and powerful Duc d’Orléans and Orléans answered to none.
I knew I could make money there by giving speeches from Molière, Voltaire, and Shakespeare, but for a long time I did not go. I remembered Orléans sitting in the grove at Versailles, a man in a wolf’s mask. I remembered his warning to me and his eyes, dark as midnight, and I stayed away, for I did not wish to look into those eyes ever again. But then Bette and her baby took ill, and my mother, too, and all the money we’d earned at Versailles went to pay doctors, and there was no choice.
I found the Palais as lawless as ever, full of freaks and firebreathers, gamblers, whores, and dandies. I performed in the courtyards there every night in my britches and cap. Like a hunter, I would sight my quarry and pursue it. I avoided all smiling persons, left drunks and lovers to their revels. Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?
I changed my roles to suit my audience. I spoke Hamlet for brooding lawyers. Figaro for thrusting clerks. Tartuffe’s words I once gave out as I followed a bishop into a brothel, and they earned me a shower of coins from the ladies within.
Another time, a hoary sir in mourning dress approached the corner where I was reciting. His eyes were downcast, his shoulders hunched. I stopped spouting Molière and gave him Lear’s rat speech—the one he makes after his beloved Cordelia dies. At first he tried to sidestep me, but then he stopped and listened, wooed by the words. His old face creased with grief. Tears filled his milky eyes. When I finished, he rained coins into my cap.
Another time, a girl came out of Gaudet’s, a shoemaker’s. Two women—her mother and aunt, by the looks of them—walked on either side of her like jailers. The girl’s eyes were downcast, her face a stiff mask. She carried a pretty box in her gloved hands. A pair of satin slippers to wear under her wedding dress, I guessed. She was no more than fifteen, probably not long out of the convent. In love with her handsome music master but betrothed to a sausage-fingered lecher three times her age.
I loosed my hair, tucked a flower behind my ear, and I was Juliet. I ran to the girl. The mother tried to swat me away but I dodged her hands. Give me my Romeo, I said, and when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.
At these words, the girl’s face crumpled. Before her gargoyle mother could stop her, she dipped her hand into her purse and tossed me a coin. It was an act of rebellion. Her one and only. I snatched the coin and bowed to her. She smiled at me through her tears, and I knew the words I’d spoken to her would stay with her always and that years hence—while the old man she’d married slumbered next to her, snoring and farting and muttering about his accounts—she would look at the stars through her bedroom window and think on them.
The coins I earned bought bread and butter. They bought onions, wine, chickens—and the wood to cook them. They bought herbs