She always believed it was George’s ugliness that allowed her to survive. It’s always a mistake to live off your looks. It was like eating nothing but sweets your whole life. Eventually it begins to rot your smile. George’s ugliness made her clever. Madame believed that staying alive always involved a level of spitefulness. But Madame’s joy and delight in her existence didn’t exactly equate to love, did it?
George never longed for a mother so when she was little. In general, mothers were terrible people. She saw mothers allow their daughters to become prostitutes at eleven years old. They took their frustration out on their children. They beat them over the head with slippers. Generally, children put up with more abuse from their mothers than from anybody else in the world. Ordinarily if someone were to hit you with a shoe, you would either run away or try to defend yourself. But when a mother did it, the appropriate response was to cower. And ask her how she was feeling. And tell her not to feel bad for beating you.
Whenever George did something stupid as a child, she sat by herself and contemplated her actions. She berated herself for her stupidity. She made herself feel worse and worse as a form of punishment. Often in these moments, she isolated herself from all the other children. She sometimes took a chair to the corner and sat in it, facing the wall. She had no idea when she was supposed to get up from the wall since it was a mother who always determined whether you had stayed there long enough.
* * *
George realized that to be able to reject Sadie, she would have to become a writer herself. She had taken so much joy working on Sadie’s projects. She was not prepared to give up on the literary arts even if she had been abandoned. It was now time to find her own subject matter.
George began to write about Marie. Her quill moved furiously, like the tail of a fox that was halfway down a rabbit hole murdering a family. George took the same subject as Sadie, ironically, but her approach was different. She wrote a pamphlet about the shocking expenditures Marie had made on a single afternoon. She thought the world had a right to know this young woman had purchased every variety of stocking in the shop. That she had purchased forty stockings at once. She said Marie’s carriage was filled with similar purchases she had made throughout the day. That this was only one of her many stops, that the carriage was filled with fur coats. George naturally embellished the story a little. There was a rare white monkey she had purchased as a pet that was rummaging through a box of jewels.
Since the only establishment George had specified was the stocking shop, if anyone went there to check its veracity, the whole of her story would be certified true. She considered this to be fine journalism. It was certainly a cut above what any of her gentleman peers were doing. George left out Sadie from the spending spree. She wanted to destroy Marie and bring her down in the eyes of the world, and perhaps Sadie’s as well.
Hyperbole was a necessary part of belles lettres. It wasn’t really lying. Everything needed to be exaggerated in print to capture the emotions evoked in real life. That was why there were so many murders and high-stakes adventures with pirates in books. Otherwise, how else would you be able to convey the emotions that went on in a girl’s head from the time she woke up in the morning until the time she went to bed?
When she was done, George looked at the letters on the page. They seemed to twitch like limbs that had recently been torn off insects.
* * *
George had never acted in a spiteful and malicious way before. But George had also never been heartbroken before. She knew there was a benefit for working-class people to learn how radically different the lifestyles of the upper class were from their own. That while the workers toiled and toiled away at the factories, achieving a bare level of sustenance, the owners were squandering the fortunes built on their backs in extremely lavish ways. Although she could justify her action by all these political reasons, she knew her motives were pettiness and jealousy. She knew she had to make a strike against Sadie or she would feel destroyed by her. She had to hurt Sadie so she could feel like a person again.
George set off down the street in her top hat. It joined the other top hats moving down the street, and they all looked like a group of chimneys on rooftops against the sky.
* * *
George brought her writing to the printers of broadsides on Saint Jacques Street. The man behind the desk looked her up and down dubiously, prepared to reject her efforts outright.
“This is very interesting. We’ve been publishing a series of broadsides attacking politicians and court hearings, but this is different. There’s a heroine here. This is a beautiful woman behaving badly. Is it news? Is it something our readers need to know about? I’m not sure. But it might be a hit with female readers. And lord knows when they start reading something, they can’t stop.”
The broadside sold very well. Everyone wanted to heap scorn on Marie. She was a celebrity immediately. No one knew how to respond to her as a character in the broadside though. Whereas the publication of Justine and Juliette had caused the discussion around Marie to be smutty and glorious and exciting, the broadside made the city’s sentiments to turn to hatred rather than awe. And this hatred was shared by a much wider audience than the young women who read the novel.
And truly the city became carried away in their gossip about Marie that fall. It was as though she had no feelings. She was allowed to be observed and speculated about. Everyone believed they had a right to judge her. And this was what, in part, made her so lovable. They loved that they were allowed to hate her.
* * *
More broadsides and chapbooks about Marie began to be published. Some George had written, but most she hadn’t. The stories had escaped her and had become wildly inventive.
Everyone knew Marie from her profile on the sugar bags. It represented sweetness. It represented being able to eat cake instead of bread. So she was familiar enough to destroy. She was well known enough to want to topple. Because they had once loved her, they were more than delighted to tear her down.
One pamphlet described how Marie would have relations with five men a night. She was insatiable. She invited a duke from England over to make love to her. He was a very famous satyromaniac. She was always looking for new lovers. She sent a maid down to the lower quarters in order to find one for her. She sent her to the Squalid Mile because there was an unending supply of disposable bodies there. She slept with both women and men. Her preferred lovers were neither men nor women but virgins. She liked to instruct virgins in lovemaking. She had a twelve-year-old male lover. She made him call her Mama and she would pretend to breastfeed him. People imagined her toes twitching as she came like the feet of a girl hanging from the gallows.
* * *