Not Being Equal

by Mary Byrne

1789-1791

For a while, Jacques and the other priests weren’t troubled by the Revolution. The parish priest was Jacques’ uncle, a man of singular energy. However, the increasing savageness of events knocked the life out of him and within a year he died, parishioners said of grief. A replacement priest was sent, but by early 1791 the question of whether priests would swear the oath of loyalty to the new Revolutionary Constitution drove a schism into the heart of the French church. Thenceforth, priests were known as juring, those who swore the oath, or non-juring and refractory.

One Sunday, before a crowded church full of municipal officers and blue-uniformed national guards, Jacques read—at first haltingly, his throat parched, then with increasing confidence—a text that he and his fellow-priests had worked on for days. It was a kind of Yes, but …, a version of loyalty that could in no way satisfy those in charge in Paris who had specified a text of their own.

That summer, all three priests were officially replaced.

They did a couple of final burials and marriages in early July, before “The Usurper”, as they dubbed the new priest, took over. He arrived one weekday flanked by national guardsmen. One of these ran ahead to ring the church bell as for a major disaster, bringing the young in from the fields and the elderly out of the houses. But instead of the welcome he expected, people booed him, hoping this would be enough to make him leave.

A month later the local administration wrote to the government in Paris complaining about all the unsworn priests still ministering to parishioners who weren’t asking The Usurper to conduct any marriages or burials.

Paris reacted quickly. Within a week all refractory priests were banished. If they didn’t go they’d be put in prison.

Jacques and his two colleagues, lodged here and there throughout the parish, came together to make a decision. Jacques wasn’t surprised when the other two decided to leave. One went to England in September. He would later return to die in prison. The second went to his sister’s family in a nearby village, where he would eventually be hauled from underneath a bed and deported to die on one of the misery ships off the coast at Charente.

1792-1793

Jacques had always had a fear of not being equal to any occasion in which he found himself. Just before he left for the seminary, his mother said, wiping her hands on her apron at the stove, “Do the best you can, Jacques,” as if somehow his best might not be good enough. Near the open fireplace, his blunt father had muttered his favorite phrase, “Like a donkey at the hunt.”

Both had since passed away. Jacques was pleased they didn’t have to see what was happening now.

Now it seemed the Revolution was giving Jacques a chance to measure up. After the other priests fled, he agonized for a while, but finally decided to stay. He got rid of his soutane and dressed in workmen’s clothes, changing house every night. People said, “If I were you I’d leave.” Jacques replied, “I don’t know where to go.”

They suggested he go home to the farm, and after some time of this, he did.

It was several days’ walk away. As the countryside changed to tiny fields, big ditches and the huge rounded stones they called “cats’ heads”, he realized how he’d missed it. He sat on one cat’s head and studied the others, like friends not seen in ages.

When he arrived in the family yard he found his cousin Pierre. Normally reserved, Pierre hugged him for longer than was comfortable. They’d been without news. Rumor was rife, although they’d heard that their uncle had died. Pierre was nursing various lumps and wounds received a week earlier. A former schoolteacher and anti-Revolution bigmouth, he’d been beaten badly by “patriots”, as they called themselves, by way of warning.

The two cousins sat in the kitchen and shared some snuff, a habit Jacques had developed from his uncle.

It was decided to hide Jacques in a hayloft. Here he would be alerted of “patriot” visitors by the dogs. Then the family would ply the patriots with home-made cider and calvados until they forgot why they’d come.

One day Jacques was saying Mass in a local barn when the lookout shouted, “Patriots on the road!”

Jacques quickly removed and hid his surplice and soutane and headed off, as did the massgoers.

He met the “patriots” on the road.

“We’re looking for the Abbé Jacques,” they said.

“He’s saying Mass back there in a barn,” Jacques replied, “but it’s full of men and there’s only a handful of ye. Why don’t ye wait till he appears—there’s only one door.”

They thanked him as he went his way, ragged trousers flapping in the breeze, an extra spring in his step.

That summer the national government wrote to the local government, again complaining about the number of unsworn priests still at work.

Jacques and Pierre had late-night chats about the world, God, and what Pierre liked to call the “human animal”. Pierre was enthusiastic about the new sciences. He spoke of Reason as if it were a person. When the tobacco was really rough-cut and moist, Jacques wanted to try smoking it in a clay pipe, but was severely warned against this by his cousins: “Do you want to set fire to the place and announce your presence to all and sundry?”

The Revolution continued its course. Divorce was legalized. Hundreds of unsworn priests and bishops were massacred by crowds in Paris. News came that the word for Sunday (dimanche) was banished.

The King was executed. A festival was held in every town to celebrate “the rightful death of Louis Capet.” Refractory priests were now condemned to death. Surveillance committees were set up in every region. Twenty livres were offered for any information leading to their discovery and arrest.

One day the others had all gone to work in the fields or the foundry, leaving Jacques alone. Depressed by inactivity, he was studying the seemingly aimless behavior of the hens while simultaneously mending a length of rope.

Lost in thought, it was too late for him to make it up the ladder when he noticed the urgent barking of the dogs tied near the gate.

He watched in horror as a small crowd of revolutionaries—as they were then calling themselves—walked cautiously down the yard.

When they realized he was alone, and above all who he was, they were very pleased with themselves.

They pretended they had come to hear him swear loyalty to the Revolution. When he refused, they abused him, in coarse language that shocked him. The nastiest of them grabbed him roughly and tied him to an old chair with the rope he’d been mending.

A rougher looking character approached him carrying a saber. Jacques prayed silently. Up close, the man stank of sweat. He grabbed Jacques’s hair and began shaving one side of Jacques’s head with the saber.

Jacques stopped praying. He was very close to the man’s sleeves which he noticed were flecked with dried blood. He decided this must be a preliminary of some kind to execution.

The others watched attentively, as if attending a scientific experiment.

When a rustle invaded the group, Jacques didn’t allow himself to move his head for fear of the blade. He concluded that there had been a hidden signal, perhaps from the colleague watching near the gate.

The shaving stopped.

The group rose. They moved quickly up the yard to the gate, where the dogs set to barking again. Jacques, still tied to the chair in the barn door, could see them clearly.

Once outside, the leader faced back towards Jacques. He had to shout above the noise of the dogs.

“I’ll be back for your head in a week,” he roared.

Surprised to have escaped so lightly, Jacques sat tied to the chair for ages after they had gone. He had managed to untie himself before Pierre arrived.

Pierre congratulated him on his sang-froid.

“I’m putting everyone’s life at risk,” Jacques said sadly, “the whole family.” He could no longer stay, Pierre had to agree.

After days of desperate thought that appeared to Pierre like silent meditation, causing further mistaken admiration, Jacques decided to flee.

“Where will you go?” Pierre asked.

“I can only think of the forest,” he replied.

* * *

On the appointed day, Pierre presented Jacques with a soft leather pouch.

“By way of adieu,” he said. “It’s the last of the snuff—keep you company,” he shrugged.

“What about the rest of you?”

“Divided between us, it’ll come to nothing. Besides, if we’re stuck, we can always start smoking cigaritos, like the patriots,” Pierre laughed. “As a social statement. That’d fox them!”

Pierre was pulling something else from another pocket. It was a small hinged box in pewter. He’d made it himself.

“Keep it fresh for you,” he said. “Now you can snuff like a lord.”

* * *

Jacques reckoned the barrel could hold several thousand pints. It was the size of a small room. He wondered often what such an object was doing in the forest at all, and suspected something illicit. As the weather improved he slept nearby but not actually in the barrel. But little by little he occupied it. It was breeze-proof, and dry. He camouflaged its exterior with branches and leaves, and sometimes found himself tidying and cleaning it as a woman would her kitchen. After his snuff ran out he found himself doing this more often.

For a while he still said Mass in local houses, but people were more and more frightened. They sometimes came to see him, but this too was increasingly dangerous. That summer, there were more and more people outdoors, and he was obliged to stick to the darkest corners of the forest. He could no longer minister even to the more confident of the faithful. Nobody could be trusted. He felt useless, unable to work out what it was that God wanted him to do.

He got news from the odd hunter. He found it more and more difficult to talk, as if his voice and brain had forgotten how to communicate with each other.

In autumn, a man came collecting mushrooms.

“I know who you are,” he said. He gave Jacques one of the new cigaritos. “Doesn’t mean I’m a revolutionary,” he added. “You just can’t get anything else now.”

When he’d smoked it, in three sessions, Jacques found he wanted another more than anything in the world.

Winter arrived and his birthday. Years of eager ministry had produced a touch of rheumatism, now aggravated by damp and cold. He moved like an older man, and found this eased the pain. A bronchitic cough frightened him, in case someone heard it. His hair had grown long and uneven after the saber.

In piecemeal news from the odd visitor to the forest, it was clear that Terror was reaching its apogee in the cities. He felt utterly alone, unequal to the situation. It had been a mistake to isolate himself in this way.

In October a boy collecting mushrooms told him that Marie Antoinette had been guillotined.

He tried to pray but lost track of the words. He began to think he might have been more useful abroad, with the rest of his unsworn colleagues, grouped together across the Channel in places like Reading.

He tried to analyze why such hatred had grown among the people. Over years of ministry to honest country men and women, shouldn’t he and his colleagues have noticed that the church was losing ground? Why hadn’t they observed the discontent with nobility and what was now being called feudalism? Plodding muddy roads the length and breadth of a far-flung hilly parish to tend the sick and dying, leading and foddering horses, checking the few other animals they possessed, he and his colleagues had noticed nothing. Their parishioners too had little time for the finer points of power struggle, theirs a daily combat with the physical and animal world. Jacques hated the harnesses, the heavy belts and the mud more than he hated the meningitis, witchcraft and possession-by-demons from which their parishioners suffered. Aborted calves and a cheesy fungus in the fields were all attributed to the evil eye, although the last execution for witchcraft went back fifty years. He also hated the woodwork his uncle loved, although he admired the wooden benches his uncle conjured with love for the rascals who attended school irregularly.

Jacques’ great pleasure had been teaching. He’d always had a hand in it from his earlier days post-ordination. Pierre had given him tips. He greatly regretted the scarcity of books, as he did the preponderance of Latin that was useless for such boys, not to mention the farm calendar that ate up their schooling. He loved nothing better than a cold winter’s day, a stack of logs for the stove and the smell of drying wool as the boys concentrated on a task. He wanted them to master at least the minimum skills that would enable them to calculate weights and cuts and land, estimate fodder and crops, then protect themselves by writing it all down and signing it with a flourish that meant they couldn’t be cheated. He gave them what little science he knew to counter the ambient belief in witchcraft. He hoped it would strengthen their faith if they could read their prayers, and counter the effects of wily Reformers, who made sure their flocks could read the Bible.

While his uncle was teaching catechism to benches of giggling boys, Jacques learned embroidery with the girls and women. This caused much hilarity at first, but he persisted because it calmed his nerves. When he didn’t have a piece of fabric, he experimented on soft paper. In rare moments of idleness he sat in the garden and tried Argentan needlepoint or the more complex Alençon stitch. He shied away from the spectacular curves of Caen lace, finding in them something almost sexual. His uncle expressed at first shock, then thorough disapproval of this “woman’s pursuit” as he called needlepoint. By then it had become a habit, and the girls and women enjoyed their sessions and talk. They consulted Jacques on many subjects that puzzled them. Finally, his uncle could only admire Jacques’s patience.

What had happened to all their work, now that the world had gone mad? The Revolution might ban needlepoint, as it had the word “Sunday”, but had the lunatics already burnt his uncle’s benches and their scant books? Would France ever come to its senses?

As memories of the presbytery garden flooded in, he caught his breath: the corner with sweet pea and bees, the twisted pear trees he’d pollarded badly—angering his uncle—and the tenacious ivy on the old walls. One day he’d discovered a mole, energetically burrowing and reappearing again in broad daylight, fur like black velvet, its comical feet and nose a surprising pink. He recalled the outraged roars of his uncle. “Whack it, man! It’s vermin!” Jacques allowed the little mole to escape. For days his uncle studied him under his brows, silently.

* * *

On Christmas Day a child came with stew in an earthenware jar tied at the neck with rope and muslin, and a leg of roast goose. The warm vapors made him want to weep and retch at the same time. The boy pulled a few crumpled cigaritos from his pocket, and told the latest news. Crucifixes had been removed from churches. Even priests considered loyal to the Revolution were ordered to stop wearing their vestments. Silver and gold had been inventoried and removed and the churches locked up. At one point people found a church open in Falaise, and flocked in. In no time hordes were running from the church declaring they’d seen the statues moving and crying.

1794

Jacques spent most of his time seeking out and dealing with sufficient food to stay alive. He often just sat for hours, so still that squirrels approached to see if he had anything to eat. Hares forgot him and posed carelessly in the middle of shorn wheat. Foxes and boar were regular night and dawn visitors.

One day a huge buzzard swooped towards him. He sheered away in fright and the great bird flew off. He thought it might have settled on his head if he hadn’t moved.

The incident turned him into little Jacquie again, his deceased mother’s timid boy. He walked in circles, cried to himself and slapped his cheeks in despair.

After a day of this he prayed there might be hope in Falaise.

He tidied the barrel for the last time and put his few affairs in a cloth bag. While he still had any energy left, he began walking towards the town stiffly, skirting all human habitation. It took all day.

He arrived in Falaise at dusk. Few people were about. The buildings seemed to tower, to close him in. He slid along walls, avoiding the most frequented areas.

In a narrow street, he saw a woman coming in his direction. As she came level he saw she was elderly, frail, hesitant. Everyone looks frightened these days, he told himself.

Moving towards her, he spoke.

“Do you know anyone who would take me in?” he asked.

She didn’t scurry away as he expected. She came closer, her head in a listening position.

In a rush, he told this stranger who he was, and why he needed help.

She said, “Wait here,” and walked away with a new firmness of step.

As he hovered in the narrow street (it was called rue de l’Enfer but he was unaware of this), he considered how bedraggled he must appear to town-dwellers, his clothes threadbare, grubby, badly mended, his boots ruined, his feet blistered.

After what seemed an age, the woman reappeared and beckoned him to follow her. She led him to a house where her soft but urgent knocking was immediately answered by a woman roughly his own age who ushered him into the hall and shut the door before hearing any explanations. She introduced herself as Marie-Jeanne. He found he was unable to speak.

Marie-Jeanne fed him vegetable soup and put him to bed in an attic room. She took away his clothes, his canvas bag.

He didn’t utter a prayer for days. He thought he might have lost his faith.

When he was strong enough to leave his room, Marie-Jeanne cut his hair and gave him fresh clothes. Those he’d been wearing when he arrived were neatly washed and pressed and laid out on a little table. Still she asked no questions.

There was no snuff to be had, but she had procured a clay pipe and some tobacco, and the first draft almost knocked him sideways. When it was over, they had to open all the windows and doors. It seemed the odor hung in the air for days.

“We mustn’t repeat that,” he said, and Marie-Jeanne replied, “I can pretend I’ve taken up smoking, if you like.”

“Wander the house as much as you like when there’s just the two of us,” she told him, “I’m afraid that’s the only exercise you can be allowed.”

Marie-Jeanne went about her affairs quietly, shopping at the market and cooking. Jacques never approached the street windows, although he occasionally spent time at a high narrow window to the back which had a ledge on which he could sit. The house had once been part of the ramparts and the window might once have been a meurtrière, he speculated, a killing window where a marksman would sit in medieval times. When Marie-Jeanne managed to get hold of some of the now relatively common cigaritos, he smoked one at the little window, looking out on the garden and the backs of the neighboring houses. A little path led between garden walls.

When he had first gone to live with his uncle as a new priest, it took maybe a year or two before he established in what direction home lay. He knew where the cardinal points were, and he knew where all the weather came from (the West, over the stable and the bread oven). The house hunched its outhouses against the weather, exposing itself and the gardens, to the sun and the south. He learned his way around the parish, but all the things he knew were mere patches of a puzzle—he could never discern the overall or build any sense of a pattern that satisfied him. He would die not knowing, of this he was now sure. He didn’t fear death itself and even violence, but he prayed that it would be swift. Since he had no right to take his own life, sometimes he almost prayed for death to come and put an end to the waiting.

When they received news of Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, Jacques was amused and almost relieved to think that the Terror too had doubts, needed pattern and certainty. He remembered his uncle say, before he died, “Reason is what stopped them from revolting earlier, when they should have.” Surely Reason hadn’t been the cause of everything that had happened since?

Marie-Jeanne insisted on doing his washing herself because he made such a mess when he tried it. He wondered why she encouraged his smoking, to which he was seriously addicted, when anyone coming into the house must surely notice the smell.

A little maid did the washing in the yard. He watched this industry from his small window. A cauldron was heated on an open fire and sheets were boiled in it for hours before being fished out with giant wooden pincers. He recalled his mother making the same gestures and knew that the others mocked him for helping her wheel the barrow of clothes to the river for rinsing afterwards.

The girl in the yard was slight, her face plain, her hair mousey and thin. God bless her, he thought, each time he noticed. As she became seriously intent on her task, her tongue protruded slightly. He saw damp hair on the back of her neck. Jacques had no idea if she knew he was there.

* * *

By July even Robespierre was guillotined.

It all could have ended there. But that was Paris, and old scores had yet to be settled in the provinces.

One day it seemed to Jacques that a young woman looked up at his high window. He drew back suddenly.

Afterwards, he told himself it was nothing, and was afraid to mention it to Marie-Jeanne.

* * *

A teenage girl told her parents she thought she saw the silhouette of a man against the curtains of Marie-Jeanne’s house when she’d passed in the lane. This was the story her parents told the authorities next morning. No one knows if the twenty livres reward changed hands or if the parents invented the story.

After supper the following evening a delegate came alone to the house and demanded Jacques.

“Follow me,” he said when Jacques appeared.

The man led Jacques to the Hotel de Ville, where others were waiting. They clearly hadn’t expected him to cut and run.

They carefully wrote Jacques’s answers to their questions: When had he left his parish? It was several years already. He didn’t say it seemed like ten. Did he have a residence permit? No. Why not? Because he hadn’t sworn allegiance to the Revolution. Why not? He replied, almost insolently, that he hadn’t wanted to.

He didn’t know the name of the old woman he’d met in the street, so he couldn’t betray her.

Much later that same evening they arrested Marie-Jeanne. Several delegates made a careful inventory of the contents of each room in her house, including worn socks and broken furniture she’d relegated to an attic. Then they sealed the doors and windows.

Jacques spent two days in the prison. Marie-Jeanne spent them in the former seminary, now the women’s prison.

After that, they were both taken to Caen for further interrogation. The open cart rumbled heavily through a countryside hot with scents of happier times. Nearing Caen, the driver said, “Smell the sea.”

Jacques’s interrogators placed great weight on some texts they said they’d found in his bag, like “The Cries of Rachel Desolate.” Jacques had kept lots of texts in his bag for the solitary times. He couldn’t be sure if he’d had this particular one or if they’d perhaps planted them in the sack. This was a sign of how his faculties had declined. The texts they mentioned seemed particularly apt to the situation, and he guessed they were considered subversive or were perhaps used by some resistance or other.

The prisoners heard a revolutionary festival outdoors. A cart passed before the prison, carrying women representing Céres, Égalité, Liberté and various other chanting goddesses.

On Monday, Marie-Jeanne and Jacques were condemned to be guillotined within twenty-four hours, their goods confiscated to the nation and their papers burnt at the foot of the scaffold.

They would be among the very few to be guillotined in Caen, and the last to be executed there.

In the late afternoon, as he was thinking what he’d give for one of the cigaritos all the guards seemed to be smoking, Jacques heard heavy footsteps on the stone corridor.

He and Marie-Jeanne were taken outside. The stonework emanated the day’s heat.

She went first. When it was done, her head was thrown into a basket of bran. Jacques thought of the waste of enough bran to feed several donkeys, just a few years after a famine.

While the guillotine was adjusted and prepared again, Jacques decided Marie-Jeanne would have taken the same risks for anyone in trouble. Some people were like that. Even Pierre, with his human animal, would have agreed. Jacques wondered what he himself wanted, now or ever. He didn’t really hope, or think that things would go back to where they had been, although he regretted the world into which he had managed to fit himself, however awkwardly. It had been difficult, and he knew he couldn’t start again. He’d been tried, had done his best, and now it was over.

In the seconds it took to mount the steps, Jacques tried to think of God. He apologized for being unworthy. He remembered his father’s description of him as a “donkey at the hunt”, and with a little smile that no one understood, he made thanks for his own grace.

Their hands were almost gentle as they laid him on the board and he went willingly to death.

About the author

Mary Byrne is the author of the short fiction collection Plugging the Causal Breach (Regal House 2019). Her short fiction has been published, broadcast and anthologized widely. She was born in Ireland, lives in France, tweets at https://twitter.com/BrigitteLOignon

About the illustration

The illustration is "Matter for Reflection for Crowned Jugglers" by an unknown artist, ca. 1793. Location unknown. Internet Archive Book Images, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons.