Creative writing about my life before and during the Revolution.

[tearosefury.livejournal.com]

I imagine this is appropriate to post here, as we are all French Revolution buffs, and I highly doubt none of you have had similar fantasies :). Enjoys.
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Author’s introduction: so wow; this started out as intending to be merely a one or two paragraph long thing; but as I wrote details started filling in the rough outline, and then my imagination really got out of hand. But this has been the most fun thing to write in months. Note that, if you find the prose somewhat preposterous, it was because I was writing with eighteenth century rhetoric in mind.  

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In my sections this quarter, I stole an “ice breaker” question from a fellow teachers assistant and asked my students (yes, they are all mine; I own their souls) what time and place they would go back to in history if they should somehow possess such an awe-inspiring and divine power.

We’re not going to concern ourselves with their answers here, beyond the fact that they often included Medieval times, which to me merely conjures images of rolling about in shit and screwing my husband in the presence of my children. But besides that. I know precisely where and when I would return, and have had this thought of, in fact, for quite a while.

It may come as a surprise, due to my Anglophilia, that I would live in France; but let me qualify. I would live in France in the mid-eighteenth century, as the finest of the philosophers would be there, and the best access to them I could hope for. I would be an aristocrat of the first order, schooled in all the arts and driven by personal passion to be as erudite a woman in the Age of Enlightenment as any in Paris. I would marry well, but my husband, poor thing, would die soon after, leaving me merely with a personal residence and fortune, under the legal care of a close cousin, who I would adore like a brother. We would throw fabulous parties nearly every month, and I would have my very own Salon to which all the greats of the new science and new philosophy would flock to. I would spend my evenings at a deliciously long French dinner, having brilliant conversations with the most brilliant of men, and afterwards my favorite for the evening would take me for a long, moonlit walk through French gardens, where we would discuss the possibility of men on the moon and all the latest philosophic discoveries. They would be dazzled by my wit and I, in return for their illumination and graces, would only be too happy to supply them with endless amounts of it.

I would, of course, have many affairs. The most brilliant philosophers of Europe would court me, some merely to add to their repertoire but others out of passion or love. I would only choose who I deemed worthy of my attention, of course, and never without a substantial level of affection. However, surely one of them would reign supreme in my heart, so that in solitary times I would compose love poems as well as clandestine philosophical tracts (written under a male pseudonym, of course). However, whatever inevitable pain I may experience due to love, it would be drowned out by the glory of my own existence, and the sense I would always carry of standing on the precipice of the new world, fully confident in my merit as being worthy of it. The darkest of despairs that I’ve known in my own, real life in the here and now would be absent, for I would never feel as though I was a singular exception, an unusual and lonely creature in the midst of mediocrity; rather, I’d be surrounded by the most brilliant and beautiful Europe had to offer, and there would always be someone to beckon to my quarters when I desperately needed to discuss Rousseau over a five-course meal or, merely dance with in unqualified merriment.

So you must be thinking by now, of course, my, what an aristocratic snob you sound like you would have been, Robin Marie. And sure enough it is true – for anyone who knows me well knows that I am, at heart, an elitist, and have a passion for individuals rather than any larger body that hardly seems real or inspiring to me. But do not think me insensible of my sins on this count, nor expect me to shy away from their consequences. With my blatant indulgence in the aristocratic lifestyle, I would be the perfect target for the Revolution, when it came. Of course, I would welcome the Revolution whole heartedly at first; my very soul would be excited to such frenzies of ecstasies, and so blessed would I feel to be viewing what I would certainly know to be the inauguration of the modern world, that no one could be more sincerely enraptured with the new politics and constitutional monarchy than I.

But alas, times would grow darker and the bloodshed begin gaining more ground and more heads, without any seeming end; in this frenzy of paranoia would some old philosophical tract of mine be discovered, found in my bed drawer of my most recent of lovers, a Jacobin closely aligned with the Mountain and the Committees. The pamphlet would include a denouncement of pure democracy, a refutation of “the people” as a trustworthy source of power, promoting rather an aristocratic republic as the key to both civil liberty and public peace. It would be an old tract, written in the early days of the Revolution, but it would damning enough evidence nonetheless. My lover would betray me instantly, and within a day’s time I would be locked into a cell, gazing through a hole in the stones to catch a glance at a fellow prisoner – none other than Camille Desmoulins himself.

“Camille, is that you?” I would ask in wide-eyed astonishment.

“Ah, my fair Marie, so you are here too?” he would say, turning his chin and eyes slightly away and downcast, as though staring into an abysses as solid as the wall that faced him. “So it is only fitting, that they might take you too.”

“Camille,” I respond, “what is to become of us, in time? For surely we shall die soon, and join those before us at the guillotine; but what of after? What of the rights of man? Are they perishing in the bloody moment of their birth?”

“Man has what rights he can defend,” Camille would say, abjectly and as though he was quoting; at that moment a guard would come to take him away, and that would be the last I would ever see of him, or any friend.

There would only be two more nights until it was my turn. My cart would wheel and rattle through the streets of Paris, while silent, fearful, and disdainful eyes followed me. The people of Paris would be fearful to see yet another person roll to the guillotine – yet they would be able to see by my elaborate hair and remnants of my fine clothes that I was an aristocrat, a leech upon their lives, their families, and their bread. And so they would decide to shuffle back inside, recommitted to avoiding notice by the authorities but also reassured that the Terror had some justice in it.

As I approached my instrument of execution, fear of death would become mingled with the sensation of eternity; with the consciousness that I, at this moment of my death, would be part of the inaugural moment of modernity, would die at the hand of a Revolution which would change the world forever, beyond anything that had come before it. Yes, that I would be sacrificed for the moment of history; the moment that would encapsulate everything we had been, and everything we could be, and laid bare both the heights of divine philosophical ecstasy that man could reach and his basest, more desperate desires and impulses. As they laid me on the wooden plank that would soon slide under the blade, I would realize fully for the first time how inseparable this beauty with the darkness was; a fond memory of my most beloved lover would flash into my mind, and as the blade dropped down, I felt thankful, nay honoured, to die by this, the most beautiful and tragic moment that mankind was to know.