The Secret Life of Madame Defarge

During the French Revolution people still expected love to save them. Or failing that, some brand of loyalty inbred from friend to friend; servant to master; lover to lover; man to God. They expected love or loyalty at every last moment; at every last second just before the guillotine’s blade sliced its way through their necks. How many called for God then or at least for someone to miraculously save them? A hand of God or an angel’s wing. It was the fear that killed most of them before the blade did. That gut-sick fear of watching your own feet walk you to your death. The buckles on your shoes that used to glint your riches now shone up shit and blood and the stink from your own person and the grinning spit smeared on the mob’s faces.

If you were to ask any one of those that faced their death that way, they would say something similar … how the faces of the crowd crept into each other’s. The laughter and the seething hunger of blood and the sound of neck bones snapping was echoed in the chittering of the mob’s teeth; as if small, carnivorous insects had crawled from separate tongues and set up an orchestra of death and hate.

Madame Defarge seemed no different and although she did not exist in anything other than an ancient novel, she existed well-enough on the sidelines of the guillotine as she knitted away the lives of the filthy aristocracy. Her breasts puffed over the frilled neckline of her new dress which she had been careful to raise above the running blood and the crowd’s universal spit and urine.

Her friend Rosa sat next to her underneath the guillotine. Rosa was easily bored and was tired of waiting. She had a lover, she said. Big with muscled arms that her fingers could not get around. She tapped her foot, looked this way and that and winked at Madame Defarge.

‘Eh Therese, do you want to know his name?’

Madame Defarge ignored her. She was also bored but she hid it under her smile. Rosa said nothing else but her eyes stayed too long on Madame Defarge’s face.

‘He’s a good lover, Therese,’ she said, eventually.

Madame Defarge shrugged. She decided to say nothing.

‘But he says things in his dreams,’ Rosa added.

Madame Defarge leaned forward and gazed at the far edge of the crowd. There were dark birds in the blue sky, waiting for blood and meat. Madame Defarge grunted a little. She had liked the guillotine for months but death was rampant now. Aristocracy had to be erased. Priests and nuns also and those who insisted that all of this was against God’s order must be put to death in the same way, but they were killing others too. People who asked questions; people who read the books priests had read; people who wondered why the leaders of the Revolution still looked richer than others; people who said that maybe Robespierre was getting too big for his boots. Even Madame Defarge, with her new petticoats and her fancy walk, well … no wonder people sometimes look at you, Rosa had accused once.

Madame Defarge focussed on her knitting. She had lost count of all the names and now she just used colours. Red, white, green, and the colours of the rich; magenta, aubergine, crimson. Burnt sienna like mustard on an aristo’s dinner plate and blue like the hottest sky; the sort of blue that seemed to reach inside your lungs and make breathing a hard pleasure.

These were the things that made Madame Defarge uneasy. Death could not satisfy her. It stank, it dirtied her new clothes, clothes that she had tried to hide in the beginning but Rosa had noticed. Rosa with her quick, insect eyes and plucking fingers. Rosa who had joked: ‘Therese Defarge has aristo bones hidden beneath her skin.’ Rosa whose nails smelt of ingrained shit from wiping her own arse with her fingers. Rosa who had not changed. Rosa who had not kept up with her best friend but Rosa had not needed to.

‘His name is Ernst … like your husband,’ Rosa whispered.

Madame Defarge felt a terrible fear finger the edges of her heart. Something she had suspected yet never dared take as truth. Her husband inside Rosa’s thighs. She smiled and said nothing. She wound some wool around her finger and readied it for the needle. She glanced up at the congregating birds that fluffed out their wings, picked fleas with their beaks and looked back at her with dead, black eyes.

Madame Defarge plucked at the neckline of her dress to cover her breasts from the sudden chill. A man in the crowd caught her eyes and licked his lips.

‘Here they come,’ Rosa sang.

In the beginning Madame Defarge had relished the guillotine. It suited her grief to have a blood-lust underlying her sorrow. It made her get up in the mornings. It made her serve beer and march each day to the place de Revolution to cheer on the executions. It made the memory of her son settle in her heart. His soft black hair and his green eyes; his mouth on her breast when he was a baby and his thin, narrow chest against her stomach when he was older and still not man enough to ignore her.

Oh, Madame Defarge knew love. She knew how it had burned in her grief and had turned into a hot hate at night in her husband’s arms, when she pleaded with him to fuck her so that a new child would grow. She even prayed to God to make her husband someone who could save her in this way. She had watched Ernst’s teeth tear meat from chicken bones, watched his tongue fight its way through gristle and fat and she had longed for his teeth and his tongue.

He did not kiss her anymore. After their son’s death, Ernst Defarge had remained quiet. His eyes said nothing, as if they had turned dark at their roots. Madame Defarge thought of her son; soft and warm against her and his breath bubbling at her breasts. She thought of her husband covering himself up. She thought of Rosa opening her legs. Rosa, whose belly had never grown full no matter how many men had got inside her.

Madame Defarge pressed her fists into her stomach. She closed her eyes and imagined that she was a different woman. Someone Ernst would love. Someone he would never expect to discover in his old wife’s kitchen or in their bedroom in the secret night when she whispered her craving to him. She had tried to be any kind of woman to him. He liked them gentle, she knew. Soft and sweet like birds with velvet breasts.

Rosa was smaller. Rosa had fairer skin and thin wrists and a body that looked too much like a child’s. She leaned forward like a child to watch the tumbrel as it made its way to the guillotine’s steps.

Madame Defarge shifted within her own large hips and noticed how her new dress stretched tight across her knees. It smelled of roses and lavender. The woman who had worn it before her had been smaller; delicate arms and breasts with thin collarbones under white skin. Perhaps she had listened to poetry under lamplight with the sour smell of wine in a glass beside her fingers; pretty fingers, small like those of a porcelain doll.

Or perhaps she looked like the young girl who had now stepped from the tumbrel. Madame Defarge stopped knitting. She stared as the girl was pushed forward in the queue. She waited as the girl drew level and then Madame Defarge reached out with one knitting needle and tapped the girl’s forearm. The girl turned like a broken doll turns on its final hinge and smiled at Madame Defarge who smiled back.

The girl’s face was swollen. Her teeth were crushed and her bottom lip had been torn out. Madame Defarge murmured at the girl as you would at a frightened kitten.

For all those seconds that she stared and smiled at the girl, Madame Defarge wanted many things. She wanted this girl’s once lovely face and body. She wanted the sound the air made as this girl would have danced through it all those times before. Madame Defarge longed for the smell of perfumed candles and goose hearts in jelly. She longed for a gilt bed and bread as white as clouds.

Yet at the edge of her longing was a sound that Madame Defarge recognised. It was the crowd’s silence. It breathed in against her.

‘Kill the bitch,’ Madame Defarge screamed. She jabbed her needles into the girl’s arm and thrust her face close to the girl’s destroyed mouth then she spat hard.

‘Kill the bitch,’ she screamed again.

Her knitting group took up the chant. Their needles clacked in time. Kill the bitch, kill the bitch, kill the bitch.

The girl was lifted by her elbows and Madame Defarge crowed with joy. Her blood-lust blackened the inside of her mind so that she thought and smelled nothing else but the hot iron odour of blood. The mob joined in Madame Defarge’s scream for death. Their eyes swivelled from watching the girl being positioned at the edge of the guillotine to the woman roaring into the air and stabbing her needles into the sun.

‘Kill the bitch. Kill the little whore,’ Madame Defarge screamed.

‘Kill the bitch. Kill the whore,’ the mob ranted.

The stench and sticky smell of blood made the mob sniff death like a lover. The girl’s beauty was exaggerated against the executioner’s bulk and the sun caught the line of her limbs through her shift. Madame Defarge glanced at the crowd. She could not see her husband but she knew his face would have the same look that was on every other man’s face. The girl was laid on the board and then slid forward so that her head and neck hung over the waiting basket. The mob were quiet. The girl’s lips were moving.

Out of nowhere, Madame Defarge cried out, ‘What’s your name? What’s your name?’

‘Who cares?’ said Rosa and elbowed Madame Defarge into silence before smiling up at the girl. ‘Bye, bye, Pretty,’ Rosa called up to her. ‘Don’t forget your prayers, little bird. Don’t forget to fly away when your head is gone!’

The girl stared down at Madame Defarge who held up her hands as if to pluck the girl from her death. The girl was praying so hard now that her vision had melted the crowd into a dark sea that murmured like a lullaby. Madame Defarge saw the blade and stuck out her fingers to stop it. She wanted a name. She thought: a new name instead of Therese and a new dress, a new perfume. A new woman for Ernst. A new child.

‘Tell me your name,’ she screamed, right into the heart of the mob’s stillness.

The girl’s head dropped into the basket.

The mob cheered. The head was lifted. It looked too small to be real. Madame Defarge stared at it. No name, she thought. No name.

‘Like a pretty plum,’ Rosa laughed. ‘Eh, Therese? Plopped like a pretty plum.’ She poked her knitting needles into Madame Defarge’s new dress, paused, then stepped closer to Madame Defarge’s ear and whispered:

‘You are in the way, Therese.’

Madame Defarge stepped back. Her knitting had fallen into the slime underfoot. The birds had settled down to eating. The sky was still blue and hard. Ernst was either in the tavern or waiting for Rosa. Madame Defarge sat down on her bench. She was tired. The guillotine thudded down on the necks of the remaining prisoners and, after a while, Madame Defarge stopped counting.