“Misterss of the revolution” by Catherine Delors
Saturday night, I’m reading my book but it’s hard to ignore the echoes of the weekly demonstration a few streets away from my apartment. At the same time I keep getting pushups about cars set on fire in faraway Paris. Oh, and there’s a global pandemic as well. History has a way of happening whether or not we go on with our daily lives. Our responsibilities, chores and even what we do for fun, they are all still here, dirty dishes in the sink waiting to be washed. We wait for 2020 to be over as if January 1st will bring something completely different. Just like the citizens of Paris in the year 1789 were glad to see that eventful year ending, not knowing the worst is yet to come.
In “Mistress of the Revolution” Catherine Delors takes us on a carriage ride in the turbulent decade between 1784 and 1794 through the eyes of the redheaded beauty Gabrielle de Monserrat. Later nicknamed Belle, she falls in love with her Beast, a young man she meets by the river. Belle is nobility, he is a commoner. Her family, like many other of the provincial nobility of the time, is impoverished. The young man is already a doctor of medicine, representing the growing power of the upward mobile former peasants. Belle is fictional but her paramour will be part of Robespierre’s reign of terror as a judge on the revolutionary tribunal. Among the many he has ordered to be guillotined is “the father of Chemistry” Antoine Lavoisier. That makes Pierre-André Coffinhal a curious choice as the long lost lover in a romantic story. He is described as big bodied and not very handsome, indeed a beast to Gabrielle’s beauty. In one of the best scenes of the book the horrors of the mass executions are juxtaposed against acts of individual kindness and humanity, establishing the notion that those two, the beauty and the horror can exist at one and the same time.
Her family objecting to the commoner suitor, Gabrielle is forced to marry a widowed member of the nobility. She has a daughter and is widowed by age 17. She Forrest Gumps her way in pre-revolution Paris, becomes a kept woman to a libertine aristocrat, meets queen Marie-Antoinette and other celebrities of the time, and has her portrait taken by the same artist famous for the queen’s portraits, Élisabeth Le Brun. The novel is a fun ride for anyone interested in history, does what a good history lesson should which is make the reader fall in love with the subject. But this is not meant to be a book recommendation. Between loosening libertine morals and the blood of the enemies of the revolution, someone has to cook, clean and launder.
Young Gabrielle goes through quite a montagnes russe of changing economic status. She is brought home at the age of 11 from the convent where she was educated, but her mother treats her as hired help and she spends her time sewing or in the kitchen. Her marriage has the sole purpose of begetting an heir to her husband, transforming her from unpaid servant to property, while her lord and husband does not hesitate to use the women under his employ for his sexual pleasures. The son he wanted so much is born to a servant and therefor ignored. As a widow Gabrielle flees to Paris with her daughter where she finds refuge at the home of an older relative, another widow, her children all grown up. She has a roof over her head and the little money her husband left her, but she needs to plan ahead. She attracts the attention of the libertine Villers, who offers her to be his kept lover. Gabrielle agrees and moves with her maid, Manon, to a house of her own paid for by her new lover. As the revolution progresses Gabrielle is offered a position of service in the Tuileries palace, a risky move on her part which makes her an accomplice in the events of august 10th 1792. Villers is dead, she is arrested and tried but acquitted. The jewelry she has is worth nothing in the new political climate. She needs help from her first love and the two reunite at great risk for both of them. Coffinhal finds her and her daughter a house. Coffinhal himself has a maid, his former maid was also his lover, but he let her go when he reunited with Gabrielle. His current maid is a woman he found begging and felt sorry for. The lovers don’t share a home, Gabrielle is a self confessed terrible cook. She finds work a seamstress in a theatre. Before his death, the stern judge shows Gabrielle his treasure trove and tells her its hers if and when something happens to him, being the first man in her life to make sure she will inherit him. Ladies, this is romance done right. How do I know if he loves me so? It’s in his will. When Gabrielle finally manages to émigré to England where she remarries a local gentleman, we can guess there is hired help in this not-happy ending.
The happiest time of Belle’s life are the two years she spends with Coffinhal, the years of the reign of terror, which ended with the revolution “devouring the heads of its children” as predicted the royalist journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan. Coffinhal was guillotined, and it is to the credit of this writer that as a reader I felt sorry for this righteous bureaucrat’s demise. Here’s a nice lesson for you future revolutionaries: abolish the taxes and the oppressive institutions, however do not kill off the scientists and chemists. In the words of the poet Yehuda Amichai:
“From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.”
Delors manages to show us the state of the “fourth estate” that did not benefit from the years of the revolution — women. Royalty, nobility, maids, rich or poor, women of faith, faithful wives and whores, all got the short end of the stick. The only way forward for Gabrielle, her daughter and her lover’s crippled maid is the road out of France, until it gets its shit together.
(Spoiler — women’s right to vote in France had to wait until the end of WW2).
