Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

He clutched the gift as if it were bricks of gold. “Thank you, Marquise.”

  I sucked in another ragged breath, faintly noticing I couldn’t seem to slow the blood pounding in my ears. “He stole another of my apples. If that little . . .” My words trailed off as stars filled my vision. Clasping my chest, I leaned against the countertop. The spells had worsened over the last weeks, as I barely managed to keep flesh on my bones.

  Both the marquise and the chocolatier moved to steady me.

  “Mademoiselle Audu, are you ill?” the marquise asked, concern shining in her blue eyes.

  “I haven’t eaten much in a few days,” I confessed.

  “Madame”—the marquise motioned to the shopkeeper—“a saucer of your best chocolate.”

  The shopkeeper disappeared into the back room and emerged moments later with a porcelain cup. “Here we are.”

  “Fancy dishes,” I said, accepting the cup gratefully.

  “Nothing but the best for the Queen of the Market Women,” the woman said, her voice dripping with scorn.

  Queen of the Market Women. It had a ring to it.

  I gulped the warm chocolate without tasting the thick liquid as it slipped down my throat. When I’d finished, I gave the marquise a rueful smile. “I suppose I should thank you for saving me from starvation.”

  She flashed her sweet smile set in a round face. The smile of someone who had never been hungry. “We must all look after one another in these times.”

  “You’re a saint among women, Marquise,” I said with a touch of my characteristic sarcasm. Then I grew serious. “Thank you, truly. I am indebted to you, as ever.”

  She nodded. “Pierre has had a difficult life. You must forgive the boy.”

  “He’s a thief.” I shook my finger at him, and he tucked himself farther into her skirts. “I can’t afford more lost sales. Do you hear me, boy? Steal from someone else.”

  A pair of bright blue eyes peeked out from behind the marquise once more. “Sorry, ma’moiselle. I was hungry.”

  “Me too,” I growled. But I felt myself soften. He was just a child, and had I seen him on the street instead of stealing from me, I would have given him a trifle or two.

  “Well, now, who is watching your cart, Mademoiselle Audu?”

  “My friend Jeanne. She sells vegetables. We set up together every day and help each other. It takes some doing, getting the cart wheeled from the Cordelier to the Palais-Royal, but it’s worth it. I make twice the livres as I did on the Pont Neuf.”

  A rumbling came from outside the shop.

  I knew that sound all too well by now—the sound of many voices mixing and mounting in fury. I followed the Marquise de Condorcet outside, and Pierre sped past us, disappearing into the crowd. A staggering crowd. The hundreds of people usually milling about the shops had grown to thousands.

  I whistled. “Sweet Jesus on the cross. What’s going on here?”

  A man stood atop a table outside the Café de Foy and was speaking.

  “It is Monsieur Desmoulins, the journalist,” the marquise said.

  As we waded toward Monsieur Desmoulins, we were jostled by prostitutes and butchers, pamphleteers and soldiers, and actors from the Théâtre Favart, including François Elleviou, and the Italian opera singer Marie Grandmaison with her lover, Charles de Sartine. All wanted to hear what the writer of La France Libre had to say. I had his pamphlets, which I could now read thanks to the marquise, tucked away in a cupboard at home along with other writings.

  Despite the short walk, I struggled for breath. I leaned into the marquise and she turned to me, her eyes deep blue pools of concern. “Are you unwell, Louise?”

  I must have looked a fright for the marquise to call me by my Christian name, so perfect were her manners. I inhaled a calming breath to clear away the stars crowding my vision once again. “I drank the chocolate too fast is all,” I lied, eager to dismiss her concern—and to hear what Desmoulins had to say.

  “Citizens!” he began, his dark eyes flashing. “I am just back from Versailles. The king has sacked Necker as finance minister! He was our only ally in the king’s service. Next, the king will put down our National Assembly and all we’ve worked to achieve.”

  A hush fell over the crowd.

  Desmoulins continued, “There is no time to waste! The king has called upon the Swiss and German battalions this very night to murder us all; our only choice is to take arms! To defend ourselves!”

  Fear rippled through the crowd in waves of shock, tears, and the terrified cries of children as their mothers gripped their hands too tightly.

  “Non,” Madame de Condorcet gasped, her pallor suddenly ashen.

  My heart tumbled to my stomach. Would the king call upon a foreign army to slaughter us, his own people?

  “We must take up arms and adopt a symbol by which we patriots may know each other. A cockade.” Desmoulins pointed to a green ribbon tied to his hat. “Our symbol of liberty!”

  “A symbol of hope,” someone shouted.

  Desmoulins waved his pistol in the air, his black eyes all afire. “To arms!”

  The crowd dispersed in every direction, ripping leaves off the trees to make their own symbols of liberty. I reached for the branches of a nearby chestnut tree, snapping off several twigs festooned with brilliant green leaves. “To wear, Marquise.”

  She hesitated, and I wondered if I’d been wrong to offer. If it came to a fight, would she side with the king, or with the people? There must be no wavering between sympathies. If the king was sending his soldiers to slaughter us, we needed to know who our friends and enemies were. Could we trust the nobles, even the good ones?

  To my relief, the marquise accepted the offering and, removing a pin from her hair, fastened the leaves on her bonnet. “We’re all in this together.”

  Once the crowd stripped the trees of the Palais-Royal, they raided the wax museum to demand the sculpted heads of Necker and the Duc d’Orleans, champions of liberty that we could carry as talismans of good luck. I followed, heart thundering in my ears, though I secretly wondered: What use was a wax head against an army? Were we going to throw them at the cannoneers?

  We needed weapons. But most commoners couldn’t afford a pike, much less a pistol.

  All around me, people grabbed stones, sticks, bricks—anything we could lay hands on. I loaded my apron with stones. Yet I didn’t believe for a minute a handful of pebbles would save me.

  “To the Hôtel des Invalides!” someone shouted.

  An order that was repeated in a great wave. The Invalides was more than a hospital and home for our aging army veterans; it was a place where we might find cannons and muskets. The mass surged in that direction, sweeping us along with it. I lost hold of the Marquise de Condorcet, and she disappeared in the crowd. I couldn’t fight the crush of bodies if I’d wanted to; there was nowhere to go but forward. In truth, I wanted to see how this would end. If the marquise was brave enough not to flee, I must be too.

  As we reached the place Vendôme, our number had grown into a mass larger than I’d ever seen. And that’s when we saw them.

  A troop of the king’s Swiss Guards posted about the square, weapons drawn, demanding we disperse. Tension crackled in the air. I wrapped my hand around a stone, waiting to see what would happen next. In that instant, a rallying cry arose from the crowd—To arms! A hailstorm of stones flew through the air. The soldiers descended upon us.

  My pulse pounded in my ears. My breath grew shallow. We were no match for the king’s army with our makeshift weapons. Chaos ensued, and people fled in every direction.

  In the confusion, I ducked into a doorway. An old man fell at my feet, clutching his bloody gut, cut open by a saber.

  We were going to die. In that moment I knew, the king was going to kill us all.

  “Run,” the old man croaked. “You’re just a girl. This isn’t your fight. Run!”

  I fled across the square, looking for a shrub to cower under and hating myself for it.

  I’m
just a girl. What could I do? For a moment, I wondered if my brothers were in the melee, if they had left their places of work and now tangled with the Swiss Guard. Would they be ashamed I cowered here in the bushes?

  The clatter of horses’ hooves, the crack of muskets, and the cries of the fallen sounded from the square, but I didn’t dare move. What had we done to deserve this treatment? We had asked our sovereign to look after us, as he was ordained to do by God.

  In spite of the prickly bush against my skin, I crouched for hours, my muscles aching, my ears straining for some sign it was all at an end. When the bells finally rang to celebrate that we had held the king’s troops at bay—at least for now—I went home, mind racing with dark thoughts, thoughts that threatened to disorder my mind.

  Through the night, I became accustomed to cries in the street and the sound of smashing glass as people took advantage of the chaos to loot the shops. And yet, I was consumed with memories of dear Maman, and of how much she’d longed for freedom from the lives we’d led.

  How I’d lost her at the hands of those who oppressed us.

  AT DAWN, I finally felt brave enough to go in search of my abandoned fruit cart.

  Once at the Palais, I found good patriot men gathered to form a citizens’ army they were calling a National Guard. “We’ll protect you, mademoiselle,” some of the swaggering boys in hastily assembled uniforms of patched-together cloth promised. They had traded their green leaves for cockades of blue, white, and red and carried pistols and knives stripped from the cutlery stalls and gun shops throughout the city. Yet in spite of having seized all these weapons, and some cannons and muskets from the Hôtel des Invalides, we didn’t have enough to truly arm a citizens’ National Guard.

  Monsieur Maillard pushed his way to the front of the new army. I wasn’t surprised to see him there. As a former soldier and emerging orator, he struck me as prepared to lead. “Something more must be done,” he said, pulling the hat from his head to run a hand over his sweat-dampened hair.

  Whatever it was would be done without me. I would stay out of this mess, at least until I had my own weapon. My hands shook as I dragged the empty fruit cart slowly from the gardens of the Palais, but I didn’t get far. Drums had summoned every able-bodied man out of his house to enlist. Including, apparently, the Marquis de Condorcet, the old philosopher who always appeared haggard with fatigue but was now garbed in the new uniform and carried an umbrella. Somehow, the sight of him made me fearful of what was to come.

  “How are you going to kill the king’s dragoons with that, Marquis?” I asked.

  “I could never bring myself to kill a man,” he said. “Violence isn’t the answer to any of this. But I must stand by my convictions as a patriot and join our citizens’ militia. Since that is my truth, I’ve decided my weapon of choice is an umbrella.”

  My mouth fell open, I closed it, and it fell open again. An umbrella to defend himself? Fat chance that would protect him. Or any of us. He’d be slaughtered like a lamb, like the old man who’d been cut down by a saber. Nobles really were mad, I decided, even the good ones. I admired Condorcet, but if he were the kind of soldier that had joined the citizens’ militia to defend our city, we were doomed.

  “Is it true what they say about the king’s soldiers, Marquis?” I asked. “I’ve heard they will attack again tonight.”

  He nodded grimly. “This is what I have been told. And the governor of the Bastille is pointing his cannons at the city.”

  I gasped. So we were to be attacked by foreign armies from the outside and by our own government from within? If the governor was willing to threaten us, then the Bastille, that ancient prison and depository for the king’s large store of weapons, might be our only answer.

  Nay, our only hope.

  The idea of storming the Bastille sparked like fire on dry tinder and raged across the city in mere hours. And it was as if hundreds of years of hatred, fear, and rage at that fortress, and all it represented, bubbled over at once. The ragtag army of National Guardsmen began to cry out, “À la Bastille!”

  Go home, I told myself as the fervor grew, and I pushed my cart once more. I am just a girl. Pauline Léon appeared in the crowd at that moment, wearing her chocolate-stained apron over a skirt she’d tied like trousers, and carrying a pike like an avenging goddess.

  Again, my mouth fell open, but this time in awe. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going with the men to the Bastille to demand the governor give up his weapons. He says he won’t without the king’s permission. He thinks we’re stupid. That we don’t know he’s holding those weapons for the king’s troops. He’s going to help them murder everyone in Paris unless we stop him.”

  We? Pauline wore a blue, white, and red cockade on her mobcap as if she considered herself part of the citizens’ militia. A woman’s battalion of one. And now she was looking at me, expectantly, like she meant for me to join.

  And so I did.

  We marched with the men to the Bastille. The entire way Pauline chanted, “Open the Bastille! Surrender the Bastille!” She wanted to fight, I realized—really fight—but the men thought she was some oddity and kept pushing ahead of her, pushing ahead of us both.

  As we rounded the corner of another street, a man shoved past me and lunged for Pauline’s pike.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Pauline kicked the man—hard—in the shin and then his groin.

  He dropped like a stone.

  I stepped over him and gave Pauline a bright smile. “I guess he won’t try to take a weapon from us again.”

  Resuming her chanting, she nodded and held her pike up in triumph. Yet, as we continued forward, the men slowly edged us out until Pauline and I were at the back of the crowd.

  I wouldn’t find out until later that some of our citizen soldiers cut the ropes of the drawbridge of the Bastille and sent it crashing down. That the king’s soldiers invited us to take weapons at first—then they opened fire.

  And a desperate fight began.

  For a second time, I started to run, but Pauline caught me by the collar. “We can at least throw up barricades,” she said, “bring water, or tend wounded . . .”

  But I was no soldier or nurse. I squirmed away, racing all the way home as fast as my legs would carry me. A lifetime of servility had taught me to survive, above all else. That was all I knew.

  The next day, I learned that we’d taken the Bastille. More than that, the people had dismantled it. Carried pieces of it away, stone by stone, destroying the symbol of our oppression. I felt both pride and regret; pride that for a second time the men of France had stood against the king, and regret that I hadn’t been a part of it. Not like Pauline had been.

  It was a regret I never wanted to feel again.

  * * *

  Paris, Late August 1789

  Soon, it came to be said on the streets of Paris and beyond that this was no revolt. This was a revolution.

  We flew as high as the king’s hot-air balloon on our chance at a new life, at freedom, as stated in our brand-new Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen drafted by our National Assembly. Rights for the common man, and for all. We were one and the same, whether clergy, nobleman, or commoner, each of us pulling on our shoes each day, filling our stomachs to survive. Free people of color and others in Les Amis des Noirs argued before the Assembly that they and their enslaved brethren on Saint-Domingue, too, deserved those rights. So it didn’t seem a stretch to believe that even women might benefit from the Assembly’s edicts. Or so they said. Especially now that the Marquis de Lafayette had taken command of the National Guard; the war hero would defend us from the king. Again, so they said.

  But six weeks after the fall of the Bastille I still found myself asking, what had all this come to? I was still a fruit seller and I was still hungry. The only difference was that my mood had worsened along with the bread shortages. I snapped at Jeanne all day, so we pushed the cart over the bridge and parted ways in complete silence.<
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  As I walked toward home at a brisk pace, a thick fog rolled in like a great puff of smoke from a pipe, shrouding the sky with early nightfall. A man in a cloak scurried from one lantern post to another, igniting the oil with a flame on the end of his pole. He whistled to himself as he walked along. In just a few more steps, his form disappeared into the fog. I could scarcely see the road in front of me.

  In spite of our new world of declarations and the National Assembly, the streets had grown increasingly unsafe. I supposed that was something that had changed. When it grew too late, beggars and thieves and all manner of scoundrels emerged from the shadows, ready to pounce on an unfortunate mademoiselle. I’d beaten off a weasel or two when I couldn’t avoid being out after dark. Carrying a switch usually put the fear of the devil in them.

  Shivering, I picked up my pace and, at last, ducked beneath a tattered cloth awning into Le Sanglier. Though my home was just next door, I didn’t need to look in the cupboard to know it was bare. My only hope for a decent meal was at my favorite tavern. I pushed open the door and was met with raucous laughter and a warmth that glowed from the first roaring fire of the season in the hearth on the back wall.

  “Mademoiselle Audu!” The barkeep motioned to the last space at the end of the bar top. To the lumps of red-faced men who looked as if they never left the bar, he said, “Move over, you cretins.”

  They grumbled but did as the barkeep demanded.

  “Thanks, Charlie.” I slid onto the last stool. “Have you got a spare crust of bread or some stew? I’ve two sous is all, but I’d take the end of the pot.”

  He grinned. “Not this time. Unless you make it worth my while.”

  “You swine.” I slapped his shoulder playfully. “You know I’m not a painted lady.”

  His round cheeks dimpled and a blush stole over his face. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What then?”

  He brandished a bare cheek and pointed to it. “Give us a kiss.”

  I rolled my eyes and leaned forward. Just as my lips brushed his skin, Charlie turned his face. His lips met mine in a firm but soft kiss.

  “Get off.” I shoved him in false outrage, but secretly warmed to his touch. Sorry for him—and perhaps sorry for me—I wasn’t interested in a sweetheart, and I certainly wasn’t foolish enough to get myself with child. Maybe it would be different when we saw what the future entailed. For now, a man at my side would only create a lot of nonsense.