Curious, Belle followed the soldiers out of the alley and found herself swept up into the crowd. She looked from person to person and could find no commonality among them; they didn’t all share a type of clothing that would mark their trade or their class. From what she could tell, they came from every stratum of Parisian society.
The sea of people crossed Pont Royal and spilled into the palace gardens on the other side with startling efficiency. Any soldiers who had followed them were stopped at the gates by red-coated Gardes suisses who turned them away brusquely. Belle slipped in past them, as much a part of the crowd as anyone else, and found herself in a place she had spent years only imagining.
The garden was a throng of people. Groups large and small clustered around tables, shouting over one another to have their voices heard. To her left stood a man on a makeshift pulpit, surrounded by a host of eager listeners. He wore the short-skirted coat and long pantalon of a working man, but he commanded the attention of the hundreds of people gathered around him like someone with authority. Perhaps he was a bourgeois, she thought, one of the wealthier members of the Third Estate. Belle fought her way to the front of the crowd and strained to hear what the man was saying.
“And King Louis hides away in Versailles, caring very little about our starving children, and then he has the audacity to ask us for more. He calls the Estates of France to his palace and pretends the Third Estate will have an equal voice, but we have never been equal! Not even on the foreign battlefields where France’s poorest sons fight and bleed and die for freedoms they themselves will never know.” He paused and waited for the crowd to settle once more. “We must be united in our opposition; we must not separate until France has a constitution!”
The crowd rippled to life around Belle, but a man next to her spat at the feet of the worker, stunning the people into silence. He looked out of place in his white wig and culottes.
“Canaille,” he hissed. Scum.
Only a few heartbeats elapsed before the crowd surged forward, united in anger. The man on the pulpit lifted his arms in the air.
“Calmez-vous,” he implored before looking directly at the wigged man. “When France is washed clean of la noblesse, it is the Third Estate scum that will survive, monsieur.”
Cheers drowned out the nobleman’s reply, but Belle caught bits of the threat spilling from his lips. The crowd was tipping toward chaos. All at once, the appeal of the Palais-Royal vanished. Belle wanted to be anywhere but there, trapped in a group of raucous, angry men. She pushed her way out of the center and hurried from the garden. A passing girl pressed a pamphlet in Belle’s hands before she reached the gate. Belle was back across the Seine when she glanced at the front page and realized it was a political pamphlet, not unlike the ones she had hoarded back in Aveyon that had been written by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émilie du Châtelet, Olympe de Gouges, and Nicolas de Condorcet. She hadn’t read this one before.
What is the Third Estate? Everything.
She recalled Bastien’s claims earlier that day, that the Third Estate were an annoyance to the king and nothing more. Merely rabble-rousers, he had assured them. She looked back to the pamphlet.
What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing.
What does it ask? To be something.
From what Belle understood of French politics, it was a deceptively simple desire. In France, the power was concentrated in the hands of the clergy and the nobility. Peasants had nothing. It had been that way for centuries. But what if they could take some for themselves? What if the Third Estate became something?
It would change the world.
It was bold for so-called rabble-rousers, she thought. But Bastien had already told them that the Third Estate had transformed into something new: the National Assembly. And King Louis had thus far been unable to quash it. To Belle, that sounded like power.
On her walk home, she realized she had been wrong. Paris was nothing like she remembered it. The city was a powder keg, and the peasants shouting for revolution in the gardens of the Palais-Royal held matches in their hands.
Belle may have grown up a peasant, and she may not have taken the title that was afforded to her, but she didn’t think either fact would be enough to convince the people of Paris that she wasn’t like the nobles they reviled.
She was a girl married to a prince. She lived in a castle and wanted for nothing. In that moment, as she thought back to the woman who had begged for coin to feed her hungry children, Belle wasn’t sure she could convince herself of it either.
On the walk back to Bastien’s home, Belle was lost in contemplation.
She found herself agreeing with the pamphlet in her hands, written by Abbé Emmanuel Sieyès. She thought the Third Estate deserved equal representation and that their votes should be counted by heads, not by estates. Belle had read enough of the Enlightenment thinkers to know where she stood on matters such as equality and freedom for all members of society, not just noblemen. And yet, she was married to a prince, so a part of her felt like her voice didn’t matter or shouldn’t be counted at all.
On the other hand, she wasn’t foolish enough to think that the revolution they were calling for would be free of violence. France had been part of the bloody war for independence in America. The men shouting for revolution in the gardens of the Palais-Royal were not shouting for peaceful talks or bloodless transitions. She recalled the threat she had heard earlier: When France is washed clean of la noblesse, it is the Third Estate scum that will survive. She was not naive. Belle knew that the Third Estate was expecting violence, just as she knew the king would respond in kind. Once the embers of revolution were lit, nothing could stop it. Aveyon was not like the roiling city of Paris, but borders would not stop a fire such as that.
A guard peered at her dismissively from behind the duc’s gate, noting her dress and dirty boots. He was about to leave her there.
“Hello,” she called out to him. “I’m a guest of the duc’s.”
He looked at her incredulously and waved another man over, one she recognized from earlier. They conferred for a moment before the first man opened the gate.
“Apologies, madame,” he muttered as she walked through. She didn’t have the energy to care that he didn’t think she belonged at the duc’s manor, not when she didn’t think she belonged either.
The house was larger even than she remembered. She meant to walk back to her room but got lost along the way in Bastien’s labyrinth of a home. She wandered aimlessly until she found something familiar: the duc’s office. She walked in and sat on a plush divan, intending to wait for him and Lio to return rather than pester a poor servant to help her find her way.
It wasn’t long before Belle was perusing Bastien’s shelves. They were filled with the typical dull tomes one would expect to find in the home of an aristocrat—the recorded lineages of France’s noblesse, a pristine copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan that Belle was sure Bastien had never once cracked open, bound hymnals collecting dust—and she was unsurprised to learn that he was as boring as she had assumed. She abandoned the shelves. Her feet ached. She was unused to walking as much as she had that day. Her time in Lio’s castle had made her soft. She had the feet of a noblewoman now. She made a mental note to tell Lio of her wish to expand the castle gardens so she could tend to vegetables and pigs and chickens like she used to.