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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Eponine
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I was young, and in love. You can read into that that I was stupid- embarrassingly stupid, in that I stepped between “Monsieur Marius” and a musket ball. At first I had feigned fealty to his revolution, but eventually my adoration for him bled into an appreciation for his politics. And when I thought I was wounded in the cause, and that I had died in his arms, I was happy. I awoke hours later in pain; the defensive hole in my hand and the wound in my shoulder were stuffed with mud and ached. Marius was gone, returned to his dearest Cosette; I crawled from the stack of corpses where he'd abandoned my body. I slept that day in the alley.
I did not dare return home- my father was still angry with me from earlier, and he was not a forgiving kind of man. I’m not certain what I would have done, the following night, had I not been found by Madame Esmerelda, an attendant to the Duchess of Berry. She took my wounds to be proof of my fighting, and spirited me away to the duchess at Provence. I spent a week convalescing, and the surgeon wanted desperately to remove my hand, lest the infection spread, but as the infection in my shoulder was inoperable and further progressed, he decided against it. To my great shock, I did not die. To my greater shock, and indeed, delight, the duchess took a liking to me. In her I found a kindred soul, and a strong matriarch with a desire for reform. I was arrested with her after her failed revolution, and expelled with her to Italy in 1833. But I found I could not stay from France long; Louis-Phillipe continued to oppress my countrymen, and I found myself increasingly swayed by my own near-death two years before. Particularly, the forced “vacation” of the Parliament in August signaled the king’s intentions to rule without regard for the people of France. In my time as an expatriate, I discovered the Saint-Simonists, and though I rejected their sexual revolution as inescapably self-serving, through them I discovered the Tribune des femmes. During this time, I allowed one of the Tribune’s editors’ words to guide me, and tried to live “faithful to the laws of nature, [and to] love without pretense and laugh at prejudice.” Upon my return to Paris, I contributed a few pieces to the Tribune, but found myself just this side of Démar, and similarly disowned. After the dissolution of the Tribune, I joined similar thinkers in contributing to the also short-lived Gazette des femmes. Those years were prosperous enough that Volquin’s assertion that to be free, women must be “materially self-sufficient” was not tested. But the following decade was marked by economic decline, and at more than one point I found myself on the dole with a third of other Parisians, when employment in needlework became scarce. The 1848 revolution saw the return of power to the people, and many femmes became influential, though their influence waned when it was needed most; the revolution introduced universal male suffrage while snubbing our sex. The election of Louis Napoleon as the President of the Republic, which precipitated the coup that made him Emperor, saw the end of our agitation for some time. The Napoleonic Code was demonstrably hostile to our cause; of course, the Napoleonic territorial wandering eye proved just as hostile to Louis’ imperium. Louis was replaced, however briefly, by the Paris Commune, and perhaps the first real attempt to articulate in public and with power our needs, most prominently the equal rights to work, to divorce and to vote. The Commune collapsed, but even before it our support diminished among a majority who no longer required our aid. Our agitation during the Commune lashed back critically; shrill condemnations rang at us across Europe, where even like-minded activists sought to distance themselves from our “emancipationist” movement, and we were treated again to Proudhon’s tired bifurcation of femininity, that we must choose to be “housewives or harlots.” By 1878, it had become clear that momentum for change had shifted away from the continent, towards England and its former colonies. I married a Saint-Simonian scholar named Desprez. We enjoy one another well enough, but I consider our marriage a largely failed experiment; as neither of us have yet discovered another, truer love, we have found no reason to relinquish on another’s companionship. But still, I believe I shall see our gentle revolution won, if “settled by violence” as Elisabeth Cady Stanton warns. |
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