Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  Testimony of Roederer, Prosecutor-General of Paris: the King’s complacency was his undoing. In any case, gentlemen, he could not have overcome the will of the Revolution, could he? I’d been in the Tuileries all night – you’ll say it was reckless of me, that I was in danger, but this was my duty, and a man does what he must, eh? Well, it was chaos right enough. The women were flapping and refusing to go to their rooms, what with the rumours that were slipping into the palace, but most of the King’s party seemed more sleepy than anything else. I fancy they’d supped better than usual. Monsieur le Maire, dear Petion, turned up promising to defend the King – one doesn’t want to impute counterrevolutionary sentiments to the fellow – probably felt it was the sort of thing he ought to say. But he obviously didn’t feel too comfortable because in the small hours he managed to escape the palace – lucky fellow! – and find safety in the Town Hall. I’ll be honest with you, gentlemen: I didn’t want too many Frenchmen to shed their blood on a point of constitutional order, not if the thing could be managed peaceably. The problem was the National Guard who were still in the Tuileries: if they held for the King, I could see there’d be a hell of a fight. But I managed to persuade their commander that he himself should come to the Commune to negotiate, which I’m happy to say he did, and revolutionary justice caught up with him pretty fast there, didn’t it? That left the King himself. Not that he was looking so regal any longer, gentlemen, but Frenchmen are good soldiers and he might have rallied them. I confess I’d not expected an actual attack on the palace – you’ll pardon me, gentlemen, but surely none of us had anticipated the bravery of men and women impassioned by the revolutionary ideal, had we? Right through to dawn the palace was restless, but no one believed there’d be a physical threat against the King; they’d had a couple of years of this sort of thing, Varennes and so on, turned the poor man grey, but no one had ever been touched, had they? Then with dawn we saw the crowds gathering: endless lines of people coming out of the side streets and gathering around the palace – wonderful sight, gentlemen! A new dawn indeed! No longer individuals: this was Paris – this was France! – as one mass, determined and unstoppable. This was when I advised Louis to abandon the palace and seek the mercy of the Assembly. This he did in an instant: no debate, no hesitation – he could see right enough the danger outside the walls – just gathered his immediate family and away they went across the palace garden. Well, gentlemen, you may say it was deception of a sort, but can you blame me for it? Condemn me if you will, gentlemen, but I stand proud that I saved the lives of many Frenchmen, who might have died at French hands and may now instead offer themselves against the foreign foe.

  And so it begins. The National Guardsmen begin to drift away, twos and threes from the backs of detachments, from the farthest cannon: officers are still rallying them, but everyone knows the King’s gone and all that’s left to defend is an empty palace so what’s the point, and bugger it, why would you? The crowd’s gathering, alive with shouts and bayonets and coming on straight; they’re divided by units, and you can tell them by their uniforms – tell ’em by their stink – spot the difference between a unit of salty Bretons and a unit of Picardy peasants a mile off – and among them, rougher and madder, are the Parisians. Fewer bayonets among the Parisians: they brandish the tools of their hundred trades, and they mean to do violence with them, and suddenly a bayonet don’t look too bad a way to go compared to a cleaver or a hammer or a dose of the pox so rancid the smell alone’d kill you, and blimey, ain’t that your old woman over there? In the front ranks of the Guard, men look at the endless relentless swarming of the mob and reckon this ain’t for me; you worry about your own carpets, Louis. When the mob reaches the National Guardsmen, it does so with cheerful insults and slaps on the back.

  Not so the men of the Swiss Guard. Perhaps it’s a mercenary’s commercial probity: it don’t do for word to get around that a Switzer’ll take a gold piece but then drop his musket at the first sign of a riot. More it’s desperation: the Swiss Guard don’t have comrades and relatives on the other side of the lines; even their employer has hooked it, and with tens of thousands of angry peasants all that blood-boiled energy’s got to go somewhere, and the Swiss know where. They stand and fight, from the windows and alcoves and doorways of the Tuileries palace. And as the crowd pauses, roars, and comes on euphoric the Swiss are annihilated, shot and bayoneted and clubbed and hacked to pieces.

  Fouché replayed it all, indifferent. His interest had stopped on one point only. There was no time to prepare their escape; no time to tidy their indiscretions.

  Testimony from June of the previous year showed no great destruction of documents before the flight to Varennes: the King too hesitant about the proposed escape, and then someone sensible in the royal entourage warning against any unusual action that might give them away before they’d even left. So whatever correspondence had collected since 1789 and the family’s installation in the Tuileries was still there when they were dragged back from Varennes last year, the summer of ’91. Throughout which time Louis’s treacherous correspondence with the enemies of the Revolution and the enemies of France would have been most active. And since which time he’d had another year to fester and plot. And when the Tuileries had been attacked on the 10th of August, and the family had fled, they’d had no time to tidy their indiscretions.

  Since the Convention had set up shop in the Tuileries, Fouché had become confident about walking in regardless of its history. Now he walked towards the great dome with nerves alight. He needed to walk back into a moment of its past. As he came nearer, the dome soared and fell over him and he was swallowed by the old palace.

  The palace was silent. He was used to it all chatter, he and his colleagues in the Convention hurrying to and fro, the rustle of business between them. The silence emphasized how cool it was: tall white walls, long windows, pale air. The air was so clear he knew he could hear for miles; could hear for years. Invariably he turned right as soon as he entered. Today he turned left. The floor seemed cleaner. Where the Convention now gathered, the palace parquet had felt more boots in a month than in the previous century. Not in this part.

  He was on new ground now. Curiosity was the untidy habit of the undisciplined and under-employed, and it had never led him away off the direct path to the Convention chamber. Indeed, he’d felt an unspoken sense among the nation’s new legislators that to stray into unnecessary parts of the building would reflect an unhealthy interest in the luxuries of monarchy. As if even the most ardent revolutionary, finding himself suddenly alone among the gilt and the grandeur, might begin to dream forbidden dreams of power. An unnatural inclination to solitude was, after all, the first step to a crown.

  For a man alone in the Tuileries, strange perils lurked.

  Fouché reached the foot of a vast staircase; stopped; kicked at the first step with his toe. The stone echoed. There’d been carpet on these stairs, but it had been taken somewhere. A flinch in his mind: there’d been rumours of pilfering, of corruption in the administration of seized state assets, and he must remember to pursue the matter.

  The plasterwork was spotted with musket fire here, angry white blotches and a plume of dust on the floor below. The Swiss Guard had tried to mount a defence from the landing; they’d held for two exchanges of fire, and been overwhelmed.

  The stairwell was bigger than any house he’d ever lived in. It seemed lighter, airier, than the sky. A mirror, a full storey high and miraculously undamaged, dominated the space and doubled it. No one had known what to do with it, presumably.

  He took the first step onto the stairs, and again heard the echo of his trespass all around him. He tapped onwards and upwards, tiny in the vast space and wondering who was looking down on him. He was straying into the histories of kings now, into their lives. The staircase split, and he had to decide whether to circle left or right to reach the same point. A trivial choice, yet one that few men would ever have had to make.

  He turned left. At the top a gallery, st
retching away left and right, polished parquet floor glowing in the sunlight. Occasional stains on the floor, where someone had died and vanished. Like the mirror, the larger items of decoration remained: curtains gathered in golden columns beside the windows for which they’d been specially made; tapestries showing men and beasts two or three times life size. He walked on, feet louder on the parquet than on the stone, sole inhabitant of this monstrous space. He was treading the steps of kings now. They had strolled, and played, and looked down on Paris from these footprints. The gallery had heard their daily movements, over centuries. It had heard their latest descendant’s panicked flight, a month back. Its scale had surely shaped their twisted belief in their own greatness.

  Fouché hesitated; looked up and around himself at the luxury. Felt a treasonous twinge of enjoyment at possessing it all for a moment.

  And heard footsteps.

  The echoes of the kings of France, no doubt. Their ghosts, searching in vain for their inheritors.

  Fouché felt a stab of panic; realized that the panic wasn’t fear, but shock at how the cursed place had made him fanciful. Cold Fouché, Joseph le mort, two minutes in a palace and walking with ghosts already.

  The footsteps were coming louder. No good would walk alone in this place. He walked on, trying to keep his own steps quieter, but the answering steps grew louder as he neared a corner. The tap and tap snapped at each other like duelling foils. A few steps from the corner, footsteps clattering and heart matching them, ready to confront whatever the worst of this corrupted place might be, and then he was at the corner and turning.

  Danton.

  Kinnaird and Lucie were escorted to a cabin a minute’s walk off the forest track. Gestured to enter. Told to sit.

  They sat. Lucie had relapsed into silent passivity. A wooden cabin, one lantern on a tree-stump in the corner.

  A whole community was here, in the dark heart of the forest. Among the trees were stone buildings repaired with branches and cloths, wooden huts, and shelters that were becoming part of the trees they leaned and twined into. In a few minutes’ walking they’d seen at least two dozen people, men and a few women, dressed in every variety and mixture of clothing – rags and ragged finery. Most watched from a distance; turned away. A bold solitary child had stood in the open, watching them pass. A big blank face; a big blank stare. It increased Kinnaird’s feeling of loss. The world wasn’t even suspicious of him any more; the world was become indifferent to Keith Kinnaird. Or perhaps it was just pale Lucie that so absorbed the child.

  The door to their cabin opened, and a shadow filled the space. Filled it: a man, tall, and broad in the shoulder. The lantern-light flickering on his face found its crags: a handsome face, pale – but the eye sockets were black.

  He sat and faced them. He said nothing.

  Deep in the sockets, Kinnaird began to perceive the glimmering of his eyes.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  The voice was a shock after the silence. The mouth was another black hole.

  He’d spoken to Kinnaird, but it was Lucie who replied. Neither her face nor her voice were focused on the man.

  She said: ‘There is a place inside France that is outside France.’ Kinnaird stared at her. Her voice seemed far away.

  Now her eyes flicked up from her lowered head. ‘That is the place I was told of once. That is the place we’re looking for.’

  The man nodded. No emotion showed in the shadows on his face.

  Lucie said, ‘Me a night or two. Him . . . ’ – she shrugged. Another nod.

  At last Kinnaird’s bewilderment found its voice: ‘What is this place?’ The other two looked at him as if surprised that he could speak at all.

  ‘Part of the estate of the Château de Pierrefonds,’ the man said quietly. ‘Until the owner joined the mécontents and Richelieu had the château destroyed. Left a ruin for a century and a half. Otherwise just a few outhouses left. The forest is reclaiming them. Now . . . Now it is a place that does not exist, for people who do not exist. Who are you?’

  Kinnaird shifted on the bench. Lucie was sullen.

  ‘If you are to enjoy this place with us, we must know the worst of you. Who are you?’

  He knew to turn to Lucie first. ‘Lucie. Father an apothecary. I carry messages. Today I help him.’ She nodded towards Kinnaird.

  The eye sockets turned back to Kinnaird.

  ‘I’m . . . I’m Keith Kinnaird.’

  ‘My greeting to you, Keith Kinnaird.’ The unfamiliar names were remade with difficulty. ‘Now who are you?’

  Kinnaird’s face screwed up in discomfort. ‘I am . . . I am falsely accused of – ’

  ‘Everything is false now. And here we all think ourselves virtuous.’

  ‘I am accused of conspiracy against the Revolution.’ Best not to mention Greene and the link to the Garde-Meuble, and the suggestion that he knew where the royal jewels of France were hidden.

  ‘Congratulations.’ There was no life in the sarcasm. This was a man who’d lost those sparks; he was becoming part of his forest.

  They sat in silence. The man gazed at them.

  Kinnaird heard voices outside. Everything in the forest was murmur.

  ‘You can stay. I think there’s a shelter a hundred paces or so to the west; two men moved on yesterday. No one owns property in here, not any more. You find a place to sleep, you sleep.’

  Kinnaird nodded.

  ‘Here we are fallen aristos, evicted priests, thieves, frauds, bankrupts, murderers, beggars and whores.’ He grunted. ‘All beggars now. Perhaps all whores.’

  ‘Dangerous men, then?’

  ‘Naturally. But on the whole not to each other.’ The eye fixed on Kinnaird. ‘And not to you, presuming that’s your concern. Each of us has his enemies outside of the forest. None has any call to make new ones inside.’

  ‘We’re safe here, then?’

  The man shrugged, and turned away.

  ‘What name do you go by, sir?’

  The man stopped in the doorway, turned, and considered Kinnaird. ‘I am Aucun,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘You are . . . No one?’

  The man nodded slowly. ‘I am now.’

  ‘Your pardon, Minister.’ Roland’s face came up, ever-mild, ever-cautious. ‘I seek your advice: your ... experience.’ Fouché’s flattery had no obvious effect; Roland’s face stayed mild and cautious. ‘I have continued to contemplate the lost papers of Louis: his secret royal correspondence.’ Roland licked his lips. It might have been a gesture of uncertainty; it certainly hadn’t been pleasure. Why would this worry him? ‘I conceived the idea that some documents might still be in the Tuileries – there having been no opportunity for the royal family to remove them or destroy them. Perhaps I am wrong; perhaps it is unlikely.’ Roland made a noise; an attempt at encouragement. ‘Or even were they not there, the fate of the papers might be known by those familiar with the routines of the palace.’

  Roland waited.

  ‘I wondered Minister – as you yourself were once – ’ Roland’s eyes went wide and his lips thinned: the fear that lurked in all men who had had any association with the old regime had leapt up and caught him by the throat. Fouché saw it and hesitated and waited for Roland to control his face again. ‘In your constant effort to work for the interests of France and her people against the tyranny of the King, Minister, perhaps you saw something of the routines.’

  Roland considered Fouché. And then considered his words. ‘Only a very few in the palace – the King himself, and one or perhaps two men – would have known what was actually done with secret correspondence. The only likely men are fled or dead.’ Then, just in case: ‘We, ah – We can’t interrogate the King; not like that.’

  ‘Mm. I was thinking though, Minister, not of the King’s confederates. I was thinking of servants. Simple men. Not privy to the correspondence, but seeing the habits and procedures of the King.’

  Roland pursed his lips, a brief pose of contemplation. Then a little
shake of the head. ‘No. I doubt they’d know anything.’

  Fouché nodded. ‘Ah well.’

  He watched the top of Roland’s head, bent over his papers once more. Contemplated the head, the man, as a factor in his investigation.

  And again he saw Danton. Saw his face, in the Tuileries.

  Of all the revolutionaries, the one who best suited a palace was Danton. He might not profess to like monarchy, but his mighty size and his mightier vanity demanded a palace.

  There’d been a moment, as they first stared at each other, when Fouché had wondered if Danton hadn’t after all taken up residence in the palace. Why not, since he ruled the Paris mob more than Louis had ever done?

  But Danton’s face had been wrong. No satisfaction, no ease, as the two men had stood at bay across the parquet, the sunlight through the window panes setting out the chess board between them.

  Surprise first. Danton hadn’t expected to be found in the palace – and then, second, he wasn’t comfortable about it. And as Fouché had registered the surprise, he’d seen something else: a trace of what the surprise had replaced, perhaps, or an echo of Danton’s strange situation, wandering the Tuileries alone. Danton reflective; Danton perplexed.

  And then, as ever, Danton’s self-control had reasserted itself. Eyes never leaving Fouché, his face had spread into a monstrous smile. And then he had turned aside and beckoned Fouché onwards with an elaborate bow.

  ‘What you want, dear Fouché’ – Roland’s voice was distant, distracted – ‘is old Xavier.’