by Kate Forsyth
Every day the mandarins tried to convince the ambassador to perform the adoration at the emperor’s feet. Proudly Lord Macartney told them he fell to his knees only before God.
‘The emperor is the son of Heaven,’ Father Li told them. ‘He is God incarnate.’
Lord Macartney gazed at him in astonishment.
‘Or so it is believed,’ Father Li said with his usual composure.
On the tenth day of the eighth lunar month in the fifty-eighth year of his rule, the Great Emperor and Son of Heaven, Kien Long, at last permitted the English ambassador and his entourage to appear before the celestial court.
They were roused at three o’clock in the morning and hurried through pitch darkness, only the occasional paper lantern showing the way. For an hour they stumbled through the mist-wreathed night, in wild confusion, like children playing blindman’s bluff. Then they were left to wait in the cold and dark for hours, stamping their feet and blowing into their hands, muttering testily to each other.
At dawn, a long procession of minor nobles and court officials rode in upon horses, their rank expressed in the embroidered panels upon their robes and the tiers of the jewelled finials upon their hats. They were accompanied by standard-bearers holding aloft long silken banners.
Then the emperor was carried into view, seated in a gilded chair borne by sixteen men. He was thin, a little hunched, with smooth skin and dark eyes. He wore a loose robe of yellow silk embroidered with five-clawed dragons and stylised clouds, mountains and waves. On his head was a black velvet cap decorated with pearls and peacock feathers. A servant held a long-handled parasol above his head, while musicians playing their strange instruments followed behind. As he came into view, every single man in the crowd dropped to his knees and banged his head to the ground again and again.
With great dignity, Lord Macartney dropped to one knee, removed his hat and bowed his head. David and the other men did the same. The emperor ignored them.
The Son of Heaven was carried within a vast vaulted tent of yellow silk, and Lord Macartney, Sir George, Father Li and Tom were ushered inside. The other Englishmen had to remain outside. There was a great feast, and performances by wrestlers, acrobats and tightrope walkers. David, however, was only interested in what was happening within. He and Scotty lurked by the tent entrance, sneaking glances inside. He saw Lord Macartney led up the stairs, where he bent his knee and handed, in a casket set with diamonds, the formal letter written by King George. The emperor passed it to a mandarin with a polite smile, then offered Macartney a ceremonial sceptre in return. Speeches were made, translated awkwardly between the ambassador, Father Li and one of the court officials who seemed to add a great many unnecessary genuflexions and prostrations.
When the emperor heard Sir George’s son had learned to speak Mandarin, he beckoned Tom forward and bade him speak. His back very straight, his hands behind his back, Tom said a few words without a single stammer or stumble. The emperor gave his first genuine smile, and unfastened from his belt a golden purse with the figure of the five-clawed dragon embroidered upon it. Tom went red, and took it with shy thanks.
No formal meeting was granted to the ambassador.
That banquet, shared with many hundreds of other vassals and tribute bearers, was the closest Lord Macartney came to the emperor. He continued to try for a private audience but was politely but firmly rebuffed.
David and the other men, meanwhile, amused themselves by riding around the vast imperial park, which was named the Garden of Innumerable Trees.
‘It should be called the Garden of Innumerable Temples,’ Scotty muttered, after they were shown to yet another little pavilion set on the edge of a pool filled with lotus flowers. ‘Why does the emperor need so many temples?’
‘Many gods, many temples,’ Father Li replied rather curtly, when asked.
David spied a most unusually shaped mountain peak on the horizon. It looked like a monumental obelisk, balanced precariously on the edge of a huge boulder. At once he wanted to explore it, but the mandarins shook their heads in a most emphatic manner.
‘It is called the Thumb of God,’ Father Li translated. ‘It is sacred. Not for white devils to climb.’
‘Is that what they call us?’ David said.
‘Of course,’ the priest responded.
Some of the pavilions held the imperial collection of curiosities. Lord Macartney was mortified to realise that the emperor had all kinds of toys and clocks and music boxes, so that the gifts of Great Britain must seem rather unexceptional.
Each evening was spent attending stiff formal banquets and watching theatrical performances. The actors wore masks on both the front and backs of their heads so that they may never be seen to turn their backs on the emperor. Afterwards there were fireworks, which filled the air with clouds of smoke.
During all this time, the emperor did not speak more than polite formalities to the British ambassador or any of his entourage. All of Lord Macartney’s requests for further meetings were denied. At last he wrote the emperor a letter, and asked Father Li to deliver it. Dressed in Western-style clothes, Father Li did his best but was seized and roughed up by the guards. In the end, Lord Macartney’s letter was delivered and polite responses made, but no further meeting with the emperor was allowed. Discomfited, the embassy quit Zhe-hol and returned to Peking, where they were greeted with inexpressible joy by those who had been left behind. They had been kept as prisoners, Dr Dinwiddie reported, not permitted to even look over the wall of their residency.
On the first day of October, almost exactly one year after they had sailed from Portsmouth with such high hopes, the British embassy was told it was time for them to return to England. Everyone was startled and upset.
Lord Macartney protested. ‘What about all our gifts?’ he said rather petulantly at one point.
The next day word came that the emperor would inspect the tribute, since it meant so much to the ambassador. Kien Long looked the gifts over with an unsmiling face. ‘Such things,’ he said, ‘are fit only for a child’s amusement.’
On the third of October, Lord Macartney received a long letter from the emperor. Father Li read the scroll aloud, translating the Chinese characters into his precise Latin. Slowly, and with many hesitations, Tom then translated his words into English.
‘We, by the Grace of Heaven, Emperor, instruct the king of England to take note of our charge. Although your country, O King, lies in the far oceans, yet inclining your heart towards civilisation, you have specially sent …’
‘Wait just one moment,’ Lord Macartney said, his face darkening. ‘Did the emperor just say that China is civilisation? Implying Europe is not?’
‘In Mandarin, the word for China and civilisation is the same,’ Tom explained.
‘Go on,’ the ambassador said.
‘You have specially sent an envoy to our Court to ko-tow and present congratulations for the imperial birthday,’ Tom translated. Macartney’s frown deepened, but he did not interrupt again. A long passage of formal courtesies followed, listing all the gifts and kindnesses lavished on the Englishmen.
One by one, all of the ambassador’s requests were denied. ‘How can we go so far as to change the regulations of the Celestial Empire because of the request of one man – of you, O King?’
Finally, the emperor’s letter concluded, ‘The Celestial Empire, ruling all within the four seas, concentrates on carrying out the affairs of government and does not value rare and precious things.’
‘Now you, O King, have sent us gifts of tribute from a long distance and offered them with profound sincerity. Therefore, I ordered my officials to accept them. The virtue and power of the Celestial Dynasty is known, however, throughout the world, to many other kingdoms who have also come to render homage to us. All kinds of precious things are sent to us over mountain and sea. We have never valued such things, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s produce.’
‘Therefore, O King, as regards your request to send
someone to remain at the capital, it is neither in harmony with the regulations of the Celestial Empire nor of any advantage to you. Hence we have commanded your tribute envoys to return safely home. You, O King, should act in conformity with our wishes by strengthening your loyalty to us and swearing perpetual obedience so as to ensure your country continues to share the blessings of peace.’
There was a long silence. Then Lord Macartney said, in a shaking voice, ‘We cannot take such a missive back to His Majesty. It must be moderated in tone, softened somehow. It is an offence!’
He looked around at the small group of Englishmen gathered in the pavilion, with its red-lacquered doors and latticework, its rafters carved with writhing dragons and demons. ‘No word of this must leak out, else we shall be at war!’
27
Practising Dying
8 October – 17 December 1793
Viviane’s twenty-fifth birthday was a sad and lonely affair.
She spent the day the same as every other day. A scanty breakfast – black bread and a little bitter coffee – and then she walked around and around the small courtyard set aside for the women’s exercise yard, listening to the gossip and rumours.
‘A law has been passed to make it illegal for any woman not to wear the tricolour cockade. I’m almost glad I’m in here, so no-one will see me dressing like a barmaid!’
‘Did you know the queen’s little spaniel followed her here from the Temple, and is now sitting outside the prison gates? The guards keep driving it away with kicks and threats, but it keeps coming back, poor little mite. You think they’d let it in to comfort her.’
‘I heard they’ve been to the Temple and cross-questioned His Majesty the King for hours upon end. How could they be so cruel? He’s only eight years old.’
Viviane listened, but did not speak. She feared some of the women were spies who reported conversations back to the gaolers.
The day ended with another sparse meal, and the clunk of iron bars being bolted.
Viviane had been permitted a few personal belongings. She kept the miniature of her mother, the rose-enamelled ring David had given her, and his signet ring hidden on her in case of theft. She did not know why she guarded these things so carefully. Her mother was dead, David was dead – what did any of it matter?
Yet somehow it did.
Sometimes Viviane saw the queen’s thin white face peering out of the window of her cell. She was never permitted outside with the other women. Her trial would begin soon, it was rumoured.
On the morning of the 14th of October, the queen was taken from her cell and accompanied through the dark echoing corridors to the Revolutionary Tribunal. The news flew fast through the prison exercise yard. Many women wept.
That afternoon, the guards were mobbed for news.
‘What happened, what did she say?’
‘There were a great many accusations,’ one of the guards said hesitantly. ‘She denied them all.’
‘She was accused of molesting her son,’ another said, brutally frank. ‘The little Capet swore to it.’
Cries of horror and alarm. ‘Such a thing is impossible,’ one grey-haired lady said.
‘What could they have done to His Majesty to make him say such a thing?’
‘What did Her Majesty say?’
‘The woman Capet did not answer. When she was pressed, she said she had not replied because Nature itself refuses to answer such a charge laid against a mother,’ the guard said. ‘She turned to the crowd and appealed to any mothers most piteously. Quite a few called out it was a damned shame, and the proceedings should be stopped. They were made to sit down and be quiet.’
A loud buzz of conversation.
‘What would make him say such a thing?’ one woman said.
‘He’s just a little boy,’ Viviane cried. ‘He’d say anything they told him to!’
She found she was so choked up she could not say another a word. She went back to her cell, lay on her damp stinking mattress, and tried to stop shivering.
The queen was condemned to death, and taken from the Conciergerie in an old wooden cart. Viviane watched with her face pressed against the bars, wiping away tears with her sleeve. Marie-Antoinette was dressed in a shabby white gown, and her hair had been roughly cropped. Her hands were tightly bound behind her back. Huge crowds lined the bridge and the street. They shouted and shook their fists and spat at her. She sat calmly, her head a little bent.
The cart turned the corner and was gone from Viviane’s sight. Once again, she knew the moment the blade of the guillotine fell by the great shout of exultation that echoed over the city.
Later that night, one of the guards told her the queen’s little dog Mignon had followed the tumbril the whole way to the guillotine and had begun to howl when the queen’s head had fallen. A soldier had run the spaniel through with his bayonet, shouting, ‘So perish all that mourn an aristocrat.’
Viviane did not know if it was true, but it had made her cry all the harder.
After the execution of the queen, the pace of prisoners taken to the guillotine accelerated.
The former deputies of the National Convention were executed on the 31st of October. It took only thirty-six minutes to chop off all twenty-two heads.
Olympe de Gouges followed a few days later, doing her best to be gallant.
Women were taken to the blade still breastfeeding, their child wrested from their arms moments before they knelt to lay their heads upon the block. Sometimes the scaffold was so slippery with blood, people fell as they stepped forward. Some people died in the overcrowded tumbrils on their way through the screaming crowds. Their corpses were decapitated anyway. The Duc d’Orléans – the man who had financed the revolution – died in the same way as his cousin, the king. The former mayor of Paris was guillotined, and a former mistress of King Louis XV, and a man who had taught his dog to howl at the word ‘republican’, and his dog too.
In the midst of all this madness, a solemn procession of young girls clad in white, laurel wreaths on their hair, burning torches in their hands, crossed the Pont Notre-Dame and marched, singing, to the cathedral. It had been renamed the Temple of Reason. An actress, dressed provocatively, played the role of Goddess of Reason, carrying a flaming Torch of Truth. The smoke stained the sky black. The air reeked of sulphur. It made Viviane’s eyes sting, her throat catch. The sun setting through the fumes made the Seine shine like a river of fire.
Everything was hellish.
Winter came, and Viviane’s breath hung like smoke above her mouth. She felt as if her heart had frozen. Carts came every day, bringing the accused to face the tribunal and taking the condemned to the scaffold. Death haunted her dreams.
One day Viviane saw a familiar face in the crowd of women clustered in the prison yard, stamping their feet and blowing into their hands.
‘Clothilde?’ she asked incredulously.
Her stepmother turned a woebegone face toward her and said her name in a tone of weary surprise. ‘We thought you were dead,’ Clothilde said. ‘You disappeared after the September massacres – we could find no trace of you.’
‘You abandoned me!’ Viviane cried. ‘You left me there to face the mob alone.’
‘Your father wanted to make sure I was safe,’ Clothilde said. ‘I thought … we thought … I was with babe. He planned to return for you later. But he could not find you. He was most displeased to find you gone.’
‘I was in prison,’ Viviane said flatly. ‘As I am sure he could have ascertained if he had truly wished to find me.’
‘Well, it was a great bore,’ Clothilde said crossly. ‘Everything is!’
Suddenly her pretty face screwed up, and she began to sob. Viviane patted her shoulder, and gave her a crumpled handkerchief to blow her nose.
‘What of my father?’ she asked.
‘He is here too, somewhere.’ Clothilde waved her hand vaguely. ‘It is all his fault. If only we had fled to Austria when we could! Madame de Ravoisier tells me the émigrés ar
e all the rage in Vienna. Balls every night, and the opera and the ballet. But, no, he had to stay and make stupid plots and spend all my money on schemes to save the king.’
‘My father is here?’ Viviane looked around in sudden and unreasonable dread.
Clothilde nodded. ‘But not for long. I expect they’ll chop his head off any day now.’ She began to weep again, and Viviane thought for a moment her stepmother was overwhelmed with grief at the thought of losing her husband. But then Clothilde said, ‘They’ll chop mine off too, and I’ve done nothing wrong. Oh, I don’t want to die!’
‘Neither do any of us,’ Viviane said dryly. She did her best to comfort her stepmother and arranged for Clothilde to share her cell, for the young heiress was now a pauper, unable to afford even the eighteen sous a day needed to pay for a bed.
That night, as she lay with her arms about her weeping stepmother, Viviane remembered how – long ago – she had wondered if she might befriend and comfort her father’s young wife. It had never occurred to her they might share a cell one day.
Every morning, at ten o’clock, the gaolers came in and read out a list of names. As each name was pronounced there were groans and gasps, prayers and pleas. Some fainted and had to be carried away. Others stood, white-lipped and silent, and went stoically to face the tribunal. Most were executed the same day.
After the condemned women were taken away, a feverish gaiety broke out amongst those left behind. Some danced and sang, some gambled with desperation for more food or blankets, some crept to the guards and begged to be taken to see their husbands, promising them whatever they wanted for just a few moments with their beloveds.
Many began to practise their last moments. They all wanted to die like the queen, with grace and composure. As snow began to drift down from a leaden sky, they took turns in playing the roles of prosecutor, executioner, victim.
