In Search of Mary Read online

  What was the Revolution, and what was it like to be inside it? Were the rights of women vindicated? And while we’re at it, what about “la condition féminine” today? Back in my student texts, the French feminists were the world’s most fearsome. These days they’ve got Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Which supports my suspicion that it’s not easy to be a French woman. You have to look good and be thin for starters, plus your hubby is likely to be a bit of a dog. That’s me setting off with an open mind then.

  Satisfied sigh and I look down at my boy and his peachy cheeks. I shift him around – my arm is going numb. I love his heavy form. After the battle to get him to sleep, I invariably get the urge to play with him and touch him. He’s so soft, lying there. I lean as close as I can and sniff in his warmth – stare at him close up. He changes shape as he falls asleep: he seems to sink down and get longer. How clever that my elbow is a place to sleep, that my body makes a bed for him still. I get a tender sense of perfection and rightness that I can’t properly explain. We doze.

  Blink and you’re already there. I love Eurostar, the most satisfying way to arrive in a city. We step lightly out of the Gare du Nord and walk straight down Paris, due south. It’s a waste not to walk in Paris. And it’s a good walk, taking in a sprinkling of African nail bars and groups of immigrants, as though a hint of the banlieues has made it downtown. Over the Seine, and here it is. Hotel Esmeralda. It’s a small, quirky delight, with friendly Latino staff.

  “Ah you are writing? Your English writer, Jeanette Winter-son, she stayed here too.” Hmm. No pressure then. We creak up some tiny wooden stairs that smell of polish and, I hate to indulge a stereotype, but onions – definitely onions and garlic. The room is old and funny: it feels like staying in a friend’s aunt’s house. We overlook a tiny pigeony park to the south of Notre Dame. Will has a cot and I have a bed – what more do we need? Maybe some food. Luckily this is Paris: we will dine like the gods every day.

  Walking alongside the Seine to a play area with Will, I realize he’s now in a different league of babyhood. If he’s awake I can do very little apart from attend to his myriad and changing desires. We chase each other round a slide and kick up the yellow-gold leaves heaped round. I eagerly offer him the swings, but he runs back to the slide. I show him the roundabout, and he runs back to the slide. A shadow of dread falls across my mind: what if this slide is the only thing he’ll approve of in the entire city?

  Our first encounter is a feminist demo. Over the Seine and up to Place de la Bastille, the traffic is all cordoned off. Thousands of women from all over the country are uniting here to march across town, demonstrating about violence against women. Nosing Will’s buggy through the campaigners, we negotiate a place near the front of a large group surrounded by banners. I catch myself noticing how well-groomed they all are, and smile guiltily at my neighbouring women. We hang about as more marchers gather. No one seems to wonder why I keep muttering into a Dictaphone. It’s not a diverse crowd, and Will is the only bloke amongst us.

  The group I’ve sidled up to and am now marching, indeed chanting with, is called Osez le féminisme. I ask one of them for an interview, and she agrees. Alice, like most of the marchers, looks like an office worker on her lunch break. She’s a white, twenty-five-year-old blonde with a serious air. Alice tells me proudly that Osez le féminisme is only two years old but has over 1,500 members. “You are writing a book? What is it about?” She asks me with a steady gaze. “It’s about what feminism means today,” I say confidently. She narrows her eyes slightly and I hurry to my next question: why did she join up?

  “There is an illusion of equality: we think that we are close, but equality is an illusion now. We have a country where 75,000 women are raped each year and only 2% of the rapists are condemned. We have salaries for men and women differing by up to 27%, so you can’t speak about equality.” Alice handles the data impressively. “The average age of our group is twenty-seven. We were born in the ’80s and we have been educated into thinking that our grandmothers gained the equality, but now when we are on the labour market we discover that it’s not the case.”

  “And when do we discover that it’s not the case?” I ask. “Is it when women have children?”

  “Yes, but men have children too,” she asserts, not missing a beat.

  “True, but…” I edge towards traitor territory, “but maybe there’s a physical reason for women stopping working too, and some women want to—” I trail off.

  “Non.” Her certainty is complete. “This can only explain why the firms act like this, it’s an excuse. The maternity leave in France is four months, so how can we explain that men and women do not have the same salary? Four months in the life – it is nothing! You know: men can have cancer and leave their job for more than four months, but they are not discriminated against.” I bet Alice gives it loads down the pub. This woman has no doubt. “Men and women must have access to the labour market equally. We are in a country now in France where 80% of domestic labour is done by women. How can we explain that?”

  “Well how can you explain it?” I cut in. “Isn’t there a chance that some of that, if it’s childcare, is something people might love doing? Not the dishes obviously, but the good stuff. Maybe not all labour is… labour?”

  “Non – they do it because of the patriarchy, and masculine domination. It has to change so that women can access the labour market in the same way that men do today. Discrimination has to stop, and we have to share domestic labour.”

  I can’t help myself: “Aren’t you worried about having babies?”

  “I want to have babies, yes, but I’m not worried.”

  “You don’t fear a change in your career or your position in society?”

  “There is a risk, but that’s why we want to change society – that is why we demand that our politicians and our president enforce real equality. We have formal equality, but now we need real equality.”

  Equality. Will and I peel off after three hours of chanting and marching, and I trundle us back along the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, thinking about the labour market and domestic labour all the way. I very much like Alice and her twenty-five-year-old vigour, but it makes me feel suddenly aged. Part of me admires her; the rest is thinking: “Just you wait, love.” Because it goes to the crux of why we don’t have what Alice wants. It’s those pesky babies.

  If they arrived in the post, there’d probably be greater work-place equality. But they don’t. They grow from scratch inside our bodies. That’s pretty insane when you think about it. Has this made me less enamoured of a life on the labour market? It’s troubling that I might be a willing participant in what I previously considered inequality. But being in the new, ever-changing baby world instead of being out at work is not downsizing, and it’s not downgrading. It’s a different planet, incomprehensible to non-residents.

  Occupying both planets simultaneously is a privilege. I don’t want to compare my children to having cancer – a reason to lose four months on the labour market. I’m lucky to have my job and I’d go nuts without it. But the labour market does not have comically small feet, and it will never write me a love letter in smudged glitter-glue. Alice is not wrong. But the way she thinks is how I thought before kids. Maybe I’m further down the line from her. Maybe further down the line from me is a whole new something else.

  Early the next morning I wake up before Will and sit quietly, contemplating the atrocious night from which I’ve just emerged. Hours lying there with my very soul churning in recollection of the food we’ve eaten. Where Wollstonecraft is haunted by nocturnal images of bloody fists, my nightmares are gastronomic. In fairness, we’ve been limited to places with baby chairs or buggy access. But even so. Top three offenders:

  Curling-at-the-edges croque-monsieur with slopping centre of white cheese.

  Molten dish of microwaved cheese with alleged core of pale lasagne.

  Smelly grey chicken with damp chips.

  Coming in a close runner-up was an impr
obably costly tray of dips, yoghurt and fruits in syrup. These Parisians are having a laugh. My stomach writhes and squeaks with these gurgling gastro-memories – but it’s also fear. Fear that I’m wasting my time. I’m wasting time and money. Each time you sit down in Paris it costs about twenty euros. What’s the point? What are we doing here?

  It’s unrealistic to try to get close to Wollstonecraft on this trip. I can’t meander around in her pages, and we’re not remotely in the same vein or life chapter. Last time we were both travelling with our babies, even if the similarity ended there. Here in Paris she is discovering great sex in the middle of the biggest political earthquake in history. I’m just a tired mum wandering about in a bad mood.

  And Will’s no longer the angel baby who charmed his way around Norway. He makes insistent noises like an alarm clock and head-butts me in the face. Will has become a toddler. He doesn’t want to be in his buggy: he wants to be out, climbing things. He used to be pleasantly distracted if I let him play with my phone. Now he unlocks it and dials Emergency Call, laughing as I lunge to grab it back.

  Truth is, I don’t like toddlers. I mean of course I love him, but he’s currently occupying the least adorable phase of childhood. Newborn babies all creamy and magical? Yes. Small-limbed children who say: “Mummy, I want to sleep in your hair”? Oh, yes. Swollen-headed anger machines who fall over all the time and can’t wipe their own bums? No, thanks very much. Poor Will has become a challenge – an active impediment. I can barely interview people or look at anything for any length of time. All that stuff I said about how bringing a baby along makes everything easier and shinier and better? Big fat nonsense.

  The Musée Carnavalet is the experience that brings it home. Will’s had his breakfast, and I’ve timed it so he won’t be tired. We arrive as soon as it opens, and I plan to go straight to the Revolution Rooms. I will take photos and make recordings of their Audio Guides, so that I can listen to and observe it all properly later. Fiendishly clever, I congratulate myself. But my carefully laid plans are no match for Will. I am asked to leave the buggy at the cloakroom, at the bottom of a sweep of marble stairs. I then carry my bag, camera, Dictaphone, audioguide and boy back up the stairs.

  “The Revolution Rooms, s’il vous plaît?”

  “Up two more flights of stairs madam, and along a corridor and upstairs again.”

  Oh great. I drag him up and get to the top pouring with sweat. He is bored already and wrestling in my arms. People laugh at us, and I decide that they are laughing in kindly sympathy. I set him gently down on the floor so he can steady himself, and a familiar meaty waft reeks out of his clothes. I don’t believe it. All the nappy changing stuff is back downstairs in the buggy. We go back down again.

  “Where can I change him?”

  “In the toilets, madame, down the stairs.”

  Even more stairs? We smell the toilets before we see them. I look inside. No way. I change him right there in the middle of the stairs, almost urging someone to tell me off so I can ask how they’d like to lie down on that toilet floor. No one tells me off. I slam-dunk the heavy warm nappy into a bin, wash hands as Will scarpers out the door, sweep him into my arms and stomp all the way back up.

  We make it, hot and flustered, back up to the Revolution Rooms, and the first thing I see is a miniature version of the Bastille. I put Will on the ground, take a photo and record some of the audioguide. As I’m doing this, Will totters round the corner, and I see the museum guards spring to life as they watch him lurch towards a priceless Revolution-era chair, once sat upon by a queen awaiting the guillotine.

  “Non madame, he cannot touch!”

  I pick him up again and try to look at a painting of Olympe des Gouges. Will head-butts me in the chest and shouts. I put him on the ground, and he runs off in a flapping penguin-like way, straight towards the original version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, his fat hands outreached.

  Another guard pops out. “Madame, NON – he must not touch it!”

  “Well, can you stop him?” I bleat, knowing that’s really not good enough.

  And so it goes on. A sixteen-month-old child versus the collective might of the French Revolution. Room after room of things I can’t look at properly; room after room of unsmiling guards. Mothers of toddlers will often get the feeling that people are staring disapprovingly, when they’re probably not. But right now they definitely are. My arms are aching and my chest tightens. Finally I give up, and don’t look at any exhibits at all, but merely follow in the random trail of my mini-dictator. “Quite another version of Footsteps,” I think bitterly.

  We get outside. Will chases a pigeon onto a lawn with signs saying something like “Babies Who Tread upon This Grass Will Be Decapitated”, and I phone up Justin and burst into tears.

  “This trip is rubbish! My whole idea is rubbish! You can’t get stuff done with a baby after all!”

  “Stick with it, Bee,” he encourages, and I’m too upset to get indignant about his over-kindly tone. “Will was just bringing some authentic mob rule to the Revolutionary showcase. Sounds like he did a great job.”

  Chapter Ten

  Allons enfants de la matrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé

  The next morning we set out with purpose and defiance. Paris, you won’t get the better of us. For starters, the biggest twos-up I can think of is to have breakfast in Starbucks. Ha. It’s reasonably priced. There’s somewhere for Will to sit. And we can fill his baby cup with milk for free, instead of being charged €4 as per everywhere else. This morning is about droits du bébé as well as droits de l’homme. I smirk at the city as we emerge, caffeine-charged and ready for action. “A dish of coffee” recruits our spirits once again. Today we will get some answers. Answers to questions like: the Revolution, what was that all about?

  Hannah Callaway does tours for Context Travel, a tour-guide agency for clever rich people. Today she’s making a charitable exception. Hannah is a New Yorker, researching her Harvard PhD on the French Revolution here in Paris. She’s primarily interested in Tom Paine. I don’t begrudge him. His life story makes even Wollstonecraft’s look pedestrian. How can you resist a carpenter who becomes a global political rockstar – the daddy of not one, but two revolutions – then ends up dying a pauper’s death in New York?

  The Norfolk lad turned American founding father isn’t only a key figure here in Paris, but also in Wollstonecraft’s private life. The first time she meets her future love, the philosopher William Godwin, they’ve come to a dinner back in London to hear the celebrated and notorious Paine speak. But he doesn’t get a word in edgeways, because Wollstonecraft won’t shut up. This pricelessly crap first date is later described by Godwin:

  The interview was not fortunate. Mary and myself parted mutually displeased with each other. I had not read her Rights of Woman. I had barely looked into her Answer to Burke… I had therefore little curiosity to see Mrs Wollstonecraft, and a very great curiosity to see Thomas Paine. … The conversation lay principally between me and Mary. I, of consequence, heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine.

  Hannah has wayward mid-brown hair, unruly eyebrows and busy eyes. We smile and introduce each other, shaking hands formally. She is warm and keen to help, but she isn’t much of a one for small talk. Within very few seconds she is telling me, as I gulp down the last of my rebellious Starbucks, that “Rousseau’s vision of the formation of government and the way that democratic government should work differs from a more Anglo-American view. That is, Rousseau focused on the general will, and so the idea is that everyone comes together over a consensus that emerges from political discussion. Whereas the Anglo-American tradition emphasizes contention within politics, where dissent is not only allowed but expected, and is built into the system. So that our system envisions that there will be conflicting views, and it tries to balance them out – and that’s the classic theory of the American Constitution. While the French idea of general will is that politics is essentially consensual. So there is a pr
oblem when you have people with dissenting views, because either they must be against the common interest or they must be wrong. There’s no way to envision that they could potentially be correct if they’re the voice of the minority. So. Let’s get started with the Bastille, as we are standing right here”.

  I inspect my coffee dregs, wishing for an extra shot. It’s barely nine o’clock and she’s speaking in rapid-fire paragraphs without commas. I decide not to mention coming as a student to see the Bastille, only to find it was no longer here. How cheated I felt that it’s now basically a roundabout. We stand at the brink of the screeching traffic.

  “It’s wild,” she says. “I’ll show you: over here we can see in the paving stones the outline of the Bastille. If we cross the street, here you can see it comes all the way across, then over there, look, there’s another one. These are the imprints of the outer turrets, occupying this entire space.”

  Hannah sweeps an arm around as we teeter on the edge of the vortex of cars and buses swerving past Will’s buggy. Stepping back from the pavement edge she continues: “If you steal a loaf of bread and you’re convicted and put in jail, you don’t go to the Bastille, you go to a regular prison. People who go to the Bastille are different – they’re imprisoned at the King’s will. Or they could also be imprisoned by a lettre de cachet.”

  “Elettra de Who?”

  “A lettre de cachet – it’s a document that any man, any father of a family in France can get issued against a member of his family. So if your son is wasting your fortune with gambling debts, or he won’t marry the right person, you can get the King to throw him in the Bastille.”

  “And only fathers could do it?”

  “Only fathers, or the King. So the reasoning is that the King is the father of the country, and every family is modelled on the monarchy, because every father is a little king.” She enjoys my horrified look. “They’re all mini-kings, yeah. And what the Bastille symbolizes for the people is the arbitrary power of the absolute monarchy. So it has an extremely strong symbolic power.”