They stuck their scrawny arms in the air. Although girls were supposed to be weak, these ones had been working in factories since they were twelve. And their arms were muscular and capable of anything. Their bellies always emitted a low rumbling. It sounded like the canons being dragged along with them.
They were on their way to Marie Antoine’s house.
CHAPTER 43
A Group of Women Is Called a Hailstorm
Sadie and Marie never discussed the revolution happening below, or the injustices of the women Sadie had lived with. Sadie had never really understood their plight. She had never been one of them. It wasn’t the absinthe or the opium or the Champagne that was making the two women oblivious of the world around them. It was love, that great opiate. They became so entranced with each other that the rest of the world seemed irrelevant to them. It seemed like something that existed in the past before they had reunited and could never have any bearing on the present.
* * *
Marie awoke one night to the sound of a rock breaking a window at the front of the house. Although she never spoke of the revolution to Sadie, Marie knew exactly what was happening. It was the girls from the factories. She had been expecting them. Marie got out of bed. She quickly dressed herself in something simple. She didn’t want help getting dressed. She was going to face these girls alone. She was going to meet them because she was one of them. Whether they wanted to admit it or not.
She left her hair down. She did not actually know how to look like one of them. She stopped for a moment to see her reflection in the mirror. Even though she was clothed, without her usual trappings she looked naked and too plain. It made her feel uncomfortable in her own skin. It was like she was looking at a stranger when she, of course, needed to feel like herself at the moment. She put a rose in her hair.
She opened the door of her balcony. It was a balcony that had been constructed to make whoever was standing on it appear stately. In fact, Marie had rarely gone out on this balcony during her whole life in the house.
If you were to take a peek at the balcony behind the house, you would find it littered with books and fans and a chess set, and a raccoon eating leftover cake on a tray. You would find a lounge chair covered in pillows that had the indentations of resting heads and etchings of strands of hair. But this front balcony was bare and unused.
Marie stood there quietly. The cold winter wind blew through her dress, but she didn’t feel it. It was as though the window had been left open and a snow drift had blown in. The mob was already shouting demands at her. She could hardly make them out because everyone was screaming all at once. She did hear that they wanted her to come to her factory.
“Yes, I will go tomorrow,” she said.
And they all went quiet. She was up on a balcony with a rose in her hair. But for a moment they all thought they were on the same level as her. They had spoken and she had listened. Marie turned and went back into her house. And the crowd decided to return home. They weren’t quite sure what to do with one of their own.
If she were a man, they would have broken the windows and knocked down the doors. And dragged her outside onto the street to humiliate. When they humiliated men, they felt disgust and contempt for them. They then recognized this was how men regarded them all the time. And it made them even more enraged and merciless. But they didn’t know what to make of Marie and her body. No one ever did.
They were also suddenly frightened of where they were. When they were in the Squalid Mile, they were able to escape easily into the walls and alleyways like fleeing insects. They had known how to dart in and out of sight since they were little girls. But here they were too exposed. The crowd dispersed.
When Marie looked back out the window, at the empty street, she noticed three young girls standing there still. They had black bags over their heads. They were small and seemingly weak. But they were all her executioners. The girls all held their hands up with their fingers spread. She shuddered. If you were to count the number of fingers on each girl’s hand, none of them would add up to ten.
* * *
Marie climbed into bed with Sadie, who stirred in her sleep and asked, “Who were you talking to?”
“The revolutionary girls were at the window.”
“Really?” Sadie said. “You should have woken me up.” And she fell back to sleep.
The next day, as Marie climbed into her carriage, Sadie ran after her and hopped into the seat next to her friend and said, “I have an errand to run.” Marie let her off a few blocks before the factory, and they agreed to meet later.
Marie stood in the office of her factory dressed in her business wear. She wore a dark-blue dress and a large navy-blue hat that tipped severely over one eyebrow.
She wanted to speak to the foremen about the state of the factory before addressing the workers. She felt the tension from all the workers on the factory floor below her. She felt the spell she once weaved was still able to hold them. But she felt it was less. She felt it begin to let up. There was a stillness. But it was the stillness before a storm. It was a pregnant silence. It was a vicious silence. It was the silence of someone biting their tongue.
The foreman explained there was great unrest in the factory. There was practically an uprising of sorts. The perhaps unusual aspect of this insurgence was that its most radical contingent were young women. She must know there were women all over the city who seemed to be engaged in a collective insanity.
“It might be better to hold off on the Philadelphia acquisition and use the money to meet some of their demands,” he said.
Marie had been presented an opportunity to purchase a sugar factory in Philadelphia. It would be her first expansion into the United States. It required an enormous investment on her part. This money could have been spent to improve the conditions and pay at her Montreal factory.
Marie wondered about what she had implicitly promised the girls the other night. She wondered if she owed them anything. Then she thought about Mary Robespierre. No, she decided. Like Mary, what they wanted deep down was to take her place. They would be rotten to her if they had the chance. She had been given a unique opportunity to rise above the lot of the common girl. If they wanted to get ahead, they would have to find another way than spoiling her dreams. She and Sadie were different from these girls, and she would keep it that way.
“No,” she said. “I’m moving forward with the Philadelphia acquisition.”
“Are there any of their demands you could meet? Perhaps a shorter working day for the children?”
“Not now. If they worked harder, we would have money for it. I’m not giving up my plans for them.”