Where the Light Falls

by Allison Pataki

  Where the Light Falls is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure into the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2017 by Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  THE DIAL PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Title page art from an original photograph by FreeImages.com/gselmes

  Part title art, map of Paris, 1792 provided by www.RareMaps.com—Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Pataki, Allison, author. | Pataki, Owen, author.

  Title: Where the light falls : a novel of the French Revolution / by Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki.

  Description: New York : The Dial Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016053057| ISBN 9780399591686 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399591693 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: France—History—Revolution, 1789-1799—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | FICTION / Romance / Historical. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.A8664 W44 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016053057

  Ebook ISBN 9780399591693

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Mumtaz Mustafa

  Cover art: plainpicture/LIQUID

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1: Paris

  Chapter 2: Bois de Valmy, France

  Chapter 3: Paris

  Chapter 4: Bois de Valmy, France

  Chapter 5: Paris

  Chapter 6: Bois de Valmy, France

  Chapter 7: Paris

  Chapter 8: Paris

  Chapter 9: Paris

  Part 2

  Chapter 10: Paris

  Chapter 11: Paris

  Chapter 12: Paris

  Chapter 13: Paris

  Chapter 14: Paris

  Chapter 15: La Place de la Révolution, Paris

  Chapter 16: Île de la Cité, Paris

  Chapter 17: Paris

  Chapter 18: Le Temple Prison, Paris

  Chapter 19: Paris

  Part 3

  Chapter 20: Mediterranean Coast, Southern France

  Chapter 21: Southern Mediterranean Sea

  Chapter 22: Paris

  Chapter 23: Mediterranean Sea

  Chapter 24: Le Temple Prison, Paris

  Chapter 25: Alexandria, Egypt

  Chapter 26: Giza, Egypt

  Chapter 27: Paris

  Chapter 28: Giza, Egypt

  Chapter 29: Giza, Egypt

  Chapter 30: Le Temple Prison, Paris

  Chapter 31: Outside Cairo, Egypt

  Chapter 32: Paris

  Epilogue: Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris

  Where the Light Falls: Authors’ Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Allison Pataki and Owen Pataki

  About the Authors

  “On this day and at this place a new era of world history has begun.”

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Valmy, France, September 1792

  “The ship of the revolution can arrive safely at its destination only on a sea that is red with torrents of blood.”

  —Louis de Saint-Just, the “Archangel of Death,” political and military leader during the French Revolution

  Paris, Winter 1792

  He hears them before he sees them, a swell of thousands, young and old, male and female, clamoring from the other side of the prison walls. They sound impatient, shrill with the heady prospect of fresh blood to wet the newly sharpened guillotine blade.

  His skin grows cold where the rusty shears touch his neck, creaking and groaning as they clip his locks. He watches as the limp wisps of gray float to the ground, harbingers of what is to come for the head that had grown them. He would be sick, but nothing remains in his stomach to be emptied.

  “Can’t have the hair getting tangled on the blade.” The old jail keeper’s sour breath reeks of wine as he makes quick work of the prisoners’ hair, snipping the line of ponytails in brisk, well-rehearsed succession. Most of the hair, even that from the young heads, is laced with gray. Funny, he thinks, how terror ages a man much more quickly than any passage of time.

  “This way, old man, move along.” The guard jerks his pockmarked chin toward the far end of the hallway, and Alexandre de Valière, now shorn tighter than a springtime lamb, shuffles his chained feet one final time down the dark corridor. The inmates whose names weren’t called peek through the small slits in their doors, watching the march. Grateful, for the moment, to be on the other side of their doors. Their tiny square cells feel safe, even cozy, compared to the brown courtyard toward which Valière now walks.

  And now, he waits. Standing alongside the others in the courtyard, he cups his hands and tries to blow some warmth into his cold, aching fingertips.

  “Must be thousands of them out there.” A nervous-looking man at least thirty years his junior looks at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Valière nods in reply.

  “You think this lot are loud, wait ’til you hear them gathered on the other side of the river,” one of the other prisoners grunts, spitting on the frosted ground. He was already bald and therefore hadn’t required the same shearing as the rest.

  The crowd had come out early this morning, as they had for several weeks now, assembling just beyond the walls of the prison that had once been the residence of the ancient kings. They’ll line the entire route: across the small island that sits in the middle of the Seine, over the bridge in front of city hall, lining Rue Saint-Honoré before opening into the great square of Place Louis XV, recently renamed La Place de la Révolution, where a deafening roar would erupt from the masses assembled in view of the scaffold.

  A guard emerges from the prison. “All right, it’s time. Up you go,” he says, pointing his musket at the tumbril that awaits. “Let’s not keep Madame waiting.”

  Valière recalls Dante’s passage, mumbling the words to himself, “His sworn duty is to ferry the souls of the damned across the infernal river.”

  “No back talk, you!” A nearer guard raises the butt of his musket as if to smite the old man across the face, and Valière notices with a flash of bitter humor that he had winced, instinctively, in the face of the threat. As if a beating could do any harm at this point.

  Valière waits his turn to climb into the tumbril, helping an old woman before him. When the last of them are aboard, a guard lifts the gate and the driver cracks his whip over the horses. The wheels groan as they slowly begin to turn, stiff like aching bones on this cold morning, lurching the cart forward. Valière steadies himself on the railing, offering a faint smile to the old woman, who had reached for his shoulder to regain her balance. She smiles wanly back at him, her trembling hands betraying her own terror. As the prison gates grind open, the guards posted along the entrance look on, bored, as the human cargo rolls past; the tumbrils passed this way yesterday, and more will pass tomorrow.

  Just then the feeble disc of the sun slices through the thick cloud cover and the city is illuminated in stark winter daylight. The old man is momentarily blinded. He squints, his eyes adjusting as he beholds the great crowd t
hat has come out to witness his final passage through the city. There are even more than he would have guessed.

  The old woman beside him is praying to the Virgin, clutching an ivory rosary that she has somehow slipped past the prison guards. She holds Valière’s eyes for just an instant, and he gives her a small, barely perceptible nod.

  A whirring noise glides past his ears, followed by a dull thud. He looks over his shoulder at the prisoner immediately behind him and notices the man’s gray shirt, splattered with the brown juice of a rotten tomato. A head of lettuce follows, bouncing off Valière’s shoulder before it knocks into the old woman, sending her string of beads loose from her hands and over the tumbril railing to the filthy street. She cries out, “My rosary!” The crowd lets out a chorus of jeers and sniggers. One of the more eager onlookers, braving the wrath of the guards, rushes forward to scoop the ivory beads from the grimy street. The old woman mumbles quietly to herself, “My rosary. It was my mother’s rosary.”

  “Ha! Old bitch cares about her necklace ’til the very last!”

  A mother clutching a newborn in one arm uses her free hand to hurl a fistful of cabbage that strikes a prisoner toward the front of the tumbril, and the crowd erupts once more. “Rot in hell, you glutted rich pigs!” The guards, some holding old muskets and others armed with newly sharpened pikes, strain to hold back the vengeful crowd.

  “Make way, I said!” The driver lifts his whip, and the people clear a path as the mounted guards escorting the tumbril struggle to master their nervous horses. As they cross the river, the crowd lining the old bridge follows behind, running with the procession toward La Place.

  The cart rounds the corner and the narrow cobblestoned street opens up into the large, packed square. The mob spots the approaching carriage and erupts. No monarch of France, not even the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, had ever entered La Place to such an uproar.

  The noise is deafening as Valière hears voices roar the nation’s new anthem. Several men triumphantly wave the new tricolor flag with its streaks of red, white, and blue, the standard of the young nation. Some shout curses, but most of the voices remain an indistinguishable and menacing din to the prisoners quaking in the rolling carriages.

  The crowd gathered around the scaffold is so thick that the old man would not be able to see the murder apparatus were it not mounted on its large wooden stage. Raised up, Valière muses, death exalted.

  The carriage lurches to a halt. A guard lowers the tumbril’s back gate and waves a gloved hand. “All right, step off. Move lively now.” For a moment, none of them moves. Valière takes the first step, lowering himself down onto the street.

  The crowd jostles to get near them—vying for an opportunity to scratch a bit of noble flesh, pull a strand of noble hair. The mounted guards push back against the onslaught, and a guard on foot swings his elbows and brandishes the butt of his musket to escort the dozen prisoners nearer to the scaffold. Valière ducks in time to miss the assault of a soft rotting apple.

  “You first.” The guard points at the young man with the wide eyes, the one who had remarked at the large number in the crowd.

  The man puts his hands to his chest as if to ask, “Me?”

  The guard nods, waving his hand. “Go on up,” he says, putting special emphasis on the words that come next: “Best not to keep them waiting, Monsieur le Duc.” The young man, whom Valière now knows to be a duke, shuts his eyes and begins to cry, and Valière notices a patch of moisture as it seeps across the groin of the young man’s breeches.

  Please, don’t let me shame myself, Valière thinks. Let me depart with just a final shred of dignity.

  The young duke is practically carried up the creaking steps, his thin frame trembling between the guards. His sobs and protestations are audible, even over the noise of the crowd. “But why must I go first? Why me? What on earth have I done?”

  “What difference does it make, Seigneur?” The guard is impatient; he’s seen enough of this useless pleading to be bored by the last-minute hysterics. He needs to get the show going before the crowd grows unruly.

  Valière watches as the man’s smooth hands are bound and he is marched to the center of the stage, and notices a woven basket that rests below where the blade will crash down. The duke is forced to kneel, and his neck is taken in the thick fingers of the guard, who settles the prisoner facedown, sliding his throat into a wooden cradle where a smooth semicircle has been carved. A matching wooden plank is placed on top so that the two semicircles form a perfect wooden noose, holding the man’s head in place. The nobleman is sobbing now, trying to resist, but the base of his neck remains fixed against the bracket. The crowd, witnessing his writhing and his pleading, grows even more frenzied.

  Valière stops breathing, but he can’t pull his eyes away. A priest makes the sign of the cross over the writhing prisoner, an absolution which the damned man can’t see. Finally, when the latch is pulled and the blade flies downward, Valière shuts his eyes. He hears a quick noise, a brief slice, followed by a thunderous roar. In the din, the thudding sound of the severed head dropping into the basket is lost.

  “Encore! More!”

  “Le prochain! Next!”

  Having caught this first whiff of blood, the crowd becomes even more ravenous. The guard calls for the old woman, the frail, praying woman who had steadied herself on Valière’s shoulder. He can’t watch. He doesn’t wish to know what her face looks like as she is escorted up the steps to the jeers and curses of the crowd. Again, he hears that sickening noise that slices through the moment of brief, anticipatory silence, followed by the shrill cries of elation. “Encore! Encore!”

  The guard is looking at him now. Pointing at him. He lets out a slow, long breath. So this is what it means to stare into the face of death.

  One foot in front of the other, he makes his way to the stage and up the steps. He no longer feels his own footsteps, nor thinks about how his legs manage to carry him. The roar of the crowd seems to recede, to grow somehow distant, and a strange sensation takes hold of him, almost as if he were floating outside of himself.

  He kneels on his own, preempting the guard’s gruff handling. On his knees, he glances out over the crowd: a sea of jeering faces, contorting in lusty anticipation. And then his stare lands on one face in particular. Colorless eyes, skin and hair as white as parchment. He’s come to gloat, even now? Even in this last moment? In spite of himself, the old man begins to tremble, the pale face of that one onlooker doing more to inspire terror and fury than any guillotine blade could. Lazare. Lazarus. The man whom Jesus raised from the dead; and now, this man sends so many others to their own deaths. Valière holds the man’s eyes briefly, swears that those pale lips pull apart in a sinister grin. But then Valière blinks, forcing himself to look away. He won’t have that face be the last sight his eyes rest upon while on this earth.

  He turns his gaze to the apparatus before him, beckoning him to his death, and his head is slid into the groove. There’s the woven basket again, below him now and stained scarlet. The old woman’s head is facedown, so that all he sees is her thin, silvery hair, tangled in red and reaching for the body from which it has been severed. But he can’t avoid the wide, vacant eyes of the young nobleman killed moments before. They stare at him without blinking, without light, frozen in fear.

  The eyes are so distracting that he no longer notices the crowd. He does not hear the droning tap-tap-tap of the drums. He wills his mind to envision something else, something other than this present hell. To forget the pale hair and colorless face of his enemy. To forget the stunned eyes of the dead young duke beneath him. He thinks of the face of his wife, conjures her image, her beautiful features uncreased by time or worry. And then his mind flies to his greatest source of happiness: two boys, dark-blond curls, happy faces reflecting the lost joy of his own life back to him. He sees them chasing each other in the garden, squealing with childish abandon. At this thought, he smiles one last time.

  His vision turns to black,
and he feels nothing as the crowd erupts for the third time, rejoicing in the death of the old nobleman Alexandre de Valière.

  September 1792

  The heat had finally broken, ushering in what the Parisians were calling “le répit.” The reprieve. If spoken in another context, it meant grace, though there was little of that to be had in the city that summer. Not now—now that the new invention had been permanently installed in La Place de la Révolution. Crosses had been torn from the altars of churches, cross-shaped pendants ripped from women’s breasts and tossed into the filthy gutters that emptied red into the Seine. In many public places, the image of the cross was replaced by the nation’s new holy icon: the guillotine.

  On the Left Bank, in a narrow street of sunbaked houses, every window was ajar, so that any resident could tell you with some precision about the comings and goings of each occupant in the adjacent flat or home. On this morning, the couple living on the east corner, above the tavern, was quarreling—fighting over money, or the heat, or the stale bread that was supposed to have lasted for days. The couple across from them, based on the sounds issuing from their bedchamber, had made up from last night’s quarrel. And a dog on the street, its ribs jutting out from under its tawny coat, had found a prize stew bone, which it had dragged out of the tavern and onto the street, where it now sat gnawing, hoping to coax every last bit of marrow from within.

  “Why, you mangy beast, that’s where it’s got to!” Madame Grocque, the wife of the tavern keeper, lurched out of her door and swiped at the dog with her broom. Seizing on the mutt’s momentary shock, she stooped down and snatched the bone with her thick, dirty fingers. The dog, recovered from its beating, jumped at the woman, fixing his teeth on the treat she would deny him.