Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  Benjamin turned, and for the first time his eyes took the long journey up the wall that Pinsent’s had done.

  From the Memoirs of Mlle Pauline de Tourzel

  (first manuscript version, unpublished)

  Of our confinement I can say little more. For my poor dear mother and myself, life was nought but empty hours and fear and the search for sleep – oh, vain hope of oblivion in our trials! The days passed with ghastly monotony – we were cold, and constantly afraid – and we fought to preserve our spirits with memories of little incidents from happier days, and with prayer.

  We insisted to each other that we must strive somehow to bear our torment with the dignity that became our station – most particularly my mother’s – in the closest intimacy with the royal family and as sometime guardian of their dear children. We recollected moments of His Majesty’s magnificent grace during the most tiresome episodes of His oppression at the hands of the upstart bandits, and swore that we would aim in our littler way at His example, and carry ourselves as if we were always in His presence.

  The atrocious events of recent months – and, lately, the frightful deaths of persons most close to us – had given me at once a feeling of the greatest fragility – but also a kind of grace. If I could no longer control my fate – and who would claim to control that which the true God has ordained? – I would face it proudly.

  With my mother’s assistance, I took the greatest care of my appearance, and I likewise assisted her. I found a pride – and the Lord must judge whether it was vanity or gratitude for His mercies – in what I knew to be my physical advantages.

  I was determined that our dignity of bearing would grow in exact proportion to the growing indignity of our circumstances. We might with justification suspect that our fate was to be some fraudulent proceeding of their illegitimate law, and then – my poor mother! – murder. We might, as all good Christian souls, fear that infinitely greater judgement that must follow, and approach it with humble faith. But we need show no fear nor humility before the mob and their tribunes, and we vowed to prove the falseness of their malformed world by maintaining the virtue of the greater world.

  And yet, for all my attempts at womanly bravery, I confess that I was not prepared for – indeed, how could I have foreseen? – the surprises of my last night in that infernal place.

  La Force: the blank soot-scoured prison of Paris since 1780; if the Bastille was the symbol of the Revolution’s hope, La Force was the symbol of its despair.

  La Force was five storeys of stone, and wherever there was a window there was iron in a tight harsh grille. By this time it was reserved for political prisoners; at night you could hear the occasional cry from the whores’ prison next door. On 3rd September the mob had attacked. When they’d attacked the Bastille it had been to release the inhabitants; when they attacked La Force it was to quicken the inhabitants’ punishment. After an informal tribunal in which she refused to swear for liberty and against the King, the Princesse de Lamballe – closest companion to Marie Antoinette – was dragged into the street outside the prison and hacked to death. It was said that her head was cut off, and then recoiffured by a local barber and presented on a pike outside the window of the imprisoned Queen. In the course of a few days, dozens of prisoners from La Force had been slaughtered in its environs.

  At the gate Benjamin turned up his lapel to show the button underneath it, and the sentry, chin buried in neck and indifferent, nodded him past.

  I’m in.

  And then, with the hollower sound of his feet on the cobbles under the vault of the arch, came the realization that this achievement might not be such a clever thing.

  Into the yard, head down into collar but walking steady, into the yard and immediately left; up three steps. The door opened under his hand. To the right, and suddenly his footsteps had an echo and he looked up and a figure was walking towards him.

  Benjamin kept going, even pace, and the other figure’s head was down into its collar too, and the reflections neared each other and passed and Benjamin wondered if he’d passed right through the other. Are we all at the same sport this evening?

  An archway in the corridor ahead; an archway where a sentry should wait. He kept onwards, and the arch shrank around his shoulders – and there was no sentry and the arch lifted away behind him. The turn in the corridor was where it was supposed to be, and he followed it without breaking stride. Confidence. I should be here. And for a heartbeat his mind found a perspective wider than the dank walls. I should be here because none else could be. But now the perspective was blocked: the corridor was interrupted by a table, a man sitting at that table, and every step carried Benjamin closer to that man’s question.

  Benjamin kept walking. Even pace. Indifferent glance. The unavoidable justice of the Revolution: if a man is in La Force, it is because he should be in La Force. The desk, the man, was five paces away now and he glanced up – and then glanced down again as if he himself were the English intruder; three paces, one, and Benjamin slowed. He murmured the phrase he’d been given, waited, but the man at the desk said nothing, didn’t even move his head. If they do not want to see me then I shall not be seen. Benjamin swallowed and strode on.

  Door after door seemed to open in front of him, pulled silently by hands unseen; his feet seemed to glide. He was untouchable, unstoppable, a spirit of the air, a whisper penetrating the trickiest keyhole.

  From the Memoirs of Mlle Pauline de Tourzel

  (first manuscript version, unpublished)

  It was the greatest of shocks: we were drowsy, in the gloom and the despair, and so the more startled by the crack of the latch and the immediate opening of the door and the appearance of a man. For the hundredth time we readied ourselves for the order that would send us to destruction – our hands found each other’s – we stared, with what defiance we could summon, towards the intruder.

  But the surprise was not to be resolved. This figure was no gaoler known to us from our days in the prison, and nor did he seem dressed for a gaoler: his clothes were of quality – but his face was obscured behind his collar and his hat and what may – the darkness of the corridor was forbidding – have been a mask.

  I cannot properly recollect our exchange: it was urgent on his part, and desperate on mine. I must fly with him now – I refused – this was madness – some new trick – but he assured me and my mother insisted that I had no alternative – but I could not conceive of leaving her behind me – unthinkable betrayal of the soul most dear to me, and most vulnerable! – but our spectre insisted that only one could leave at a time – that he would return for my mother – and she urged me with the most desperate pleas to heed him. Mother wrapped a cloak around my shoulders, pulled up the hood, and laid the gentlest of kisses upon my forehead. And with a sob I wrenched myself from her and presented myself to the man at the door.

  Our departure from that vile lair was a sickly dream: I scarce knew where I went or how I trod; I seemed to see no one – no thing – but the broad back of the mysterious man leading me. Through a maze of stone and gloom we came at last into the air – I thrilled at the sight of the stars, high and pure above me – and thus miraculously via some unwatched postern into the street. Immediately in front of me was a carriage, the door open, and my deliverer was with a firm word and a brusque hand pushing me up into its darkness. Barely had he joined me than the carriage lurched forwards and away, with the most ferocious speed, and we began to sway and bounce with sickening jolts through the city night.

  The new ideas of liberty and equality, and some very old ideas of fraternity, were good news for the whores of Paris. The bustle of the House Under The Clock – a constant ballet of feet on stairs and doors opening and doors closing and abundant curtains swaying and liquid pouring and petticoats glimpsed and flashed and moans – was become routine.

  On the top floor, a knock at a door and it opened. But there was no face in the doorway, no smile, no breasts in no bodice and no enticement. The visitor took one uneasy
step forwards.

  Then the door swung wide and hands grabbed at collar and arm and wrenched him in, and the door closed again. The visitor went stumbling down, scrabbling on hands and knees on the boards and his head squashed into the mattress for which he’d had other plans. As he clambered round to a sitting position the hands were on him again, driving him down against the floor. A pair of masks loomed over him in the gloom, something flashed, and he felt the blade at his throat.

  ‘Where did La Porte put what he was sent?’

  Gabbling: ‘What? – What are – ’ The blade pricked his throat. ‘Fore-’

  ‘Where did La Porte put what he was sent?’

  ‘Wha-? I – I don’t know!’ Again the prick. ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘What did he do with what you gave him?’

  ‘He just took it! I – I never saw.’

  ‘And if he wanted to send something?’

  ‘He’d hang a cloth in his window – a – a sign. Then a rendezvous by the Luxembourg Gardens.’

  The eyes behind the mask behind the blade consider this.

  ‘You must forget it all; you hear me?’ Frantic nodding. ‘That time has passed. If you ever talk of – ’

  ‘I swear it! You can trust me, you must! Tell Dant-’

  The knife pushed through the throat, a squawk, and blood, and then nothing. The man behind the mask wiped his blade, then rummaged in the dead man’s coat for the purse. The house would be eager to hush up a robbery that had gone too far, and would know how to.

  The second man watched the performance wide-eyed behind his own mask, the last words clear in his head. The first turned to him, and the look dared him to speak the syllable.

  The second man dropped his eyes, and turned away to check the door. It is not a time to talk. It is not a time to hear.

  From the Memoirs of Mlle Pauline de Tourzel

  (first manuscript version, unpublished)

  The next episode was perhaps the strangest, and it brought me new alarms and mysteries.

  We were still in the heart of Paris – I had lost my bearings, but I could see through as the cloth over the window flapped with our brisk progress the houses rattling past, and these were the comfortable buildings of the centre of the capital – and yet the coach stopped. Was this to be some new precaution, or – I could not overcome my fears – was my faint hope at last to be extinguished? My companion stepped over me, his cloak brushing my clamped knees, and opened the door and descended.

  He beckoned to me.

  I hesitated, not unnaturally I think, and he spat an urgent command. Startled, and not a little affronted, I followed him into the street. I felt that many eyes must be watching me, and I knew that one alone would be my downfall. But mercifully the street was deserted. And I had but moments in the gloom to take in the grease of the cobbles and the impression of unremarkable bourgeois dwellings before my companion had grabbed my upper arm and quite dragged me towards one of them. I writhed at this unnatural treatment, but his fingers were iron in my flesh and I followed bitterly, my legs clumsy in my sadly tattered dress.

  He pulled me up the step and in through a doorway that opened in front of him by some unseen power. We were in a dark hallway: it stretched away in front of me, with the suggestion of a candle in the distance adding subtleties to the gloom; beside me was a staircase.

  The finger pointed upstairs. Here was I, in a gloomy and unknown house, still the prey of every revolutionary agent in France, with a silent ghost directing me further into peril.

  Gathering myself, I mounted the stair. A step creaked halfway up, I remember, and it was as thunder. On instinct I turned to my shadowy companion, and I sensed the greater tension even in him. I resumed my climb. At the top there was a single door, half open. I summoned a deeper breath, and entered. It was a small room, I think, although the very little light from a lamp on a bare table showed little of its dimensions, and it seemed uninhabited. On each side of the table was a chair. I felt as though I had interrupted some secret conversation. I waited on the threshold.

  ‘Sit!’ said a voice, and it came from the shadows of the room! I hesitated – for a moment I think I considered escaping down the stair again – and the single word was repeated.

  I sat, looking into the gloom for the source of the words.

  A figure emerged from the shadows, and sat opposite me. But with a gasp I saw that it was cloaked and masked, and the pitiful lamp gave me no aid.

  ‘You will be safe, Mademoiselle.’ In my predicament – hunted through revolutionary Paris, the prisoner of anonymous spirits – it was a laughable statement, and yet the gravity of the voice gave me some confidence.

  The words, I should say, were in the English tongue, but I felt that the voice was nonetheless that of a Frenchman.

  ‘But in return you must be of some assistance to your rescuers.’

  I believe I said something courteous but without commitment.

  ‘You must trust that we are friends to you, and friends to His Majesty.’ I bowed slightly at the name. ‘We seek his papers, Mademoiselle. His correspondence. We know that when the mob attacked the Tuileries and the royal family fled, the royal papers were shared among the most trusted of the Queen’s women: Madame Campan; no doubt your mother and yourself. Where are these papers?’

  ‘I know no-’

  ‘The papers!’

  ‘I assure you, sir’ – I confess a little heat in my reply – ‘that in my possession or my mother’s there are no such papers.’

  The next morning came into Paris on a fresh breeze. Fouché found himself noticing it as he stood by the coach, unwilling to let the postillion haul his box onto the roof unsupervised. A rare treat in the city: ninety-nine days in a hundred the streets were clogged with soot and stench. Today some freak of the climate had made the sky seem clearer and blown away the reek from the gutters and the Seine. A day for a journey, perhaps. Fresher air; the beauties of nature.

  Fouché had never seen the point.

  His mind was not in the beauties of nature.

  Dear Friend,

  I hear today from my old pupil Delambre, and I fancy that his experiences may offer you some interest, and even some weary amusement at the nature of our time.

  For the project of triangulating the meridian, Delambre is now en route on its trajectory north from Paris, while Méchain ventures in the directly opposite direction, south for the border with Spain and Barcelona beyond. I speak of the route and the trajectory, but in truth of course Delambre’s has the essential anarchy of the triangulator’s path, yet perceiving within it the perfect arc of the meridian, just as we insignificant astronomers, from our diverse humble stations at the feet of chords dropped from its curve, may observe, note and define the magnificent orbit of a celestial body through the firmament.

  Poor Delambre had trouble enough following his star beyond the city walls! For as much as the triangulator’s path must be logically eccentric, and practically interrupted by the difficulties of identifying and negotiating appropriate vantage points, so much must it spiritually be hampered by the obligation to navigate the obstacles of ignorance and confusion that lie in the path of all such as we. On the night of the 4. September, near Belle-Assise, he was with his assistants detained overnight by the militia, this after some interruptions and ugly scenes in the darkness when he was accosted by men of the worst sort, their superstitions having been stirred by his activities during the day, so strange to their brute minds, and by the alarming phenomenon of the signal flares he must perforce use to pierce the northern atmosphere. On the 6. he was obliged to secure a certificate of safe passage from the district office at Saint-Denis, after more alarms and incidents, and then to conduct a public lecture impromptu among the peasants on the rudiments of surveying, and still he must return to Saint-D., and be confined to a cupboard while the mob rummaged in his instruments. By now he was beginning to perceive some malice behind his interruptions, one of his assistants having informed him that he had seen, during
a scuffle on the evening of the 4., a man of apparent quality among the peasants, stirring them and perhaps even spreading coin.

  Such mysterious forces we may choose to perceive as true physical phenomena, or as superstitious projections, the fancies of a tired and junior mind, as insubstantial and obscure as the gods that govern the peasants’ crops and the witches that turn their milk. Yet it is sure that Delambre will have slow going through their domain, even though the Convention has now made the two men official emissaries of the Republic, we may say gilding the lily of their original royal appointment.

  I hear from other sources that Méchain is making swifter going on his southward journey. He is a more experienced man, and perhaps the peasants of the middle Loire are more phlegmatic, or better-read in trigonometry, than their brothers of Picardy!

  Bailly.

  1!6

  Such the letter that had not caught Lavoisier before his ejection from his offices at the Arsenal. Fouché knew of the triangulation of the meridian, of course; and now he recalled a police report of disturbances around St-Denis because of the activities of one of the men involved. He felt the usual hungry insistence of a coincidence. But it was followed by its usual hollowness: the disappointing sense that there was not, after all, anything to it; coincidence did not mean significance. One distinguished man of science writing to another, about the most substantial scientific activity of the moment. Why shouldn’t natural philosophers gossip as much as shopkeepers, or members of the Legislative Assembly? He wondered what ‘1/6’ meant.

  The letter, with the sheaf of notes and the ledger, should have been sent on to Lavoisier. A courtesy would do no harm, even if it involved someone out of favour.