Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Yesterday there was a hard frost and we woke to discover the waste plug had burst and covered the corridor in filth. Some of it had already frozen, and we scraped and chipped at it in the early morning darkness. The smell from what hadn't frozen drove us back. It was unclear to me, working beside my wife, which in me was stronger: hatred of my profession or hatred of myself. I asked her opinion and she didn't answer until later when making her toilet, when she remarked that she found my self-contempt understandable, given the minuteness of my self-examinations.

  Even with my family, she told me as she served my supper before leaving the room, I craved the advantage of invisibility. My supper turned out to be beef and cabbage and runner beans.

  I eat alone. I sit alone. Without her I have no intimate friend. No affectionate relations. For three months she's remained close-buttoned and oblique, her expressions lawyers' expressions. Some nights I sleep, when Heaven has pity on me.

  The night before the waste plug, she woke to my weeping. She remained on her back and addressed the ceiling. She told it she'd overheard a boy on the rue de Rennes tell his wet-nurse that he'd gone to see a guillotining, and oh, how the poor executioner had suffered. Her tone prevented any response.

  She knows that the exclusion of our profession from society is not founded on prejudice alone. The law requires executions, but compels no one to become an executioner.

  So now I carry an emptiness with me like the grief of a homesick child. I understood my wife's misery and, under the compulsion of duty, added to it. Each night I take a little brandy, hot lemonade, and toast. My belly is in constant ferment. I'm a pioneer in a Great New Age in which I don't believe. My profession has grown over us like a malevolent wood.

  Another frost this morning. In our window box, frozen daisies.

  The executioner has the uncontested title to all clothing and jewelry found on the men and women put to death. He pays no taxes. The condemned are subcontracted to him by the nation. The trade in cadavers with the medical profession brings in some additional revenue. But in terms of expenses there's all household costs plus salaries and repairs to the carriages and feed for the horses and any number of other constant vexations. And of course the expectation that the machine will be maintained and housed. My father wore on execution days a brocaded red singlet with the gallows embroidered across his chest in black and gold thread. In bright sun onlookers could make out a heavily worked panel of darker red satin along his spine. His culottes were of the finest silk. What do I own? A coat of black cloth, a satin waistcoat from an old-clothes shop, a pair of black breeches, a pair of serge breeches, two clothes brushes, four shirts, four cravats, four handkerchiefs. Two pairs of stockings, two pairs of shoes, and a hat.

  This morning in the courtyard, Anne-Marie was doing no work at all. The sun was out but it was very cold. Clouds issued from the mouth of our sleeping neighbor in his iron chair. She sat with her back to the plaster, wrapping and rewrapping a shawl. I tucked it behind her and she thanked me. We sat for half an hour. Sometimes when addressed she seemed as if she were alone. I told her that I had stopped for wine on the way home the previous evening, and had overindulged. She responded that it was probably a part of my unconquerable rejection of anything that might cause me to think. And what was it I should be thinking about? I wanted to know. The world and my place in it, she said. And what was my place in it? I asked, and touched her cheek. She stood, composing her carriage. Around me now she carries herself like the Holy Sacrament. She returned to the house. We've had two weeks of her working in silence, the Austere Isolate, while the rest of us come and go, playing off one another like members of a mournful choral trio.

  Perhaps, I told her at dinner, my curse from God was that I lacked that stone tabernacle within the soul in which I could treasure absolute truths. We were having soup, skate, and artichokes. She answered, after some thought, that I was killing her, but that I was also teaching her how to die.

  We kept to ourselves the rest of the evening. At one point we had to consult over the household's ledger books.

  Ask any soldier what his profession entails. He'll answer that he kills men. No one flees his company for that reason. No one refuses to eat with him. And whom does he kill? Innocent people who are only serving their country.

  Together Anne-Marie and I have negotiated, like wood chips in a waterfall, the Revolution itself, with its shocks and transformations; the trial and condemnation of the King; his execution; and all the deprivations of the war with the allied powers. We covered our heads and hurried past each disaster, sometimes speaking of it afterward, sometimes not. The poor King's troubles began when he was dragged into the unhappy affair with America. Advantage was taken of his youth. In financing his support of America's revolution, he fell victim to that belief of monarchs that expenditure should not be governed by revenue, but revenue instead by expenditure. Then nature provided its additional burden: the summer of 1788 and its unprecedented drought. We saw starvation in our own neighborhood. Suddenly everyone was busy holding forth on the subject of just which radical changes needed to be made, each to his own attentive audience.

  So events took their course, thanks to that crowd of minor clerks and lawyers and unknown writers who went about rabble-rousing in clubs and cafés. From such crumbling mortar was the Edifice of Freedom built. After the Bastille's fall de Launay was decapitated by a pocketknife used to saw through his neck.

  Foulon, accused of plotting the famine, had the mouth of his severed head stuffed with grass. It was proclaimed that the great skittle row of privilege and royalism had been struck to maximum effect, revealing a newly cleared space for civic responsibility. The treasury was refilling, the corn mills turning, the traitors in full flight, the priests trampled, the aristocracy extinct, the patriots triumphant. The King did nothing, apparently believing the more extreme sentiments to be a fever that had to run its course.

  Anne-Marie took up needlework, then abandoned it as unsatisfying.

  The National Assembly had announced only the abolition of royalty. Everyone saw clearly what needed to be razed or pillaged, but no one agreed on what to erect in its place. Not a man near the wheels of power was equal to the task at hand, with ever greater tasks impending. The more radical, sensing conspiracies, wanted evermore surveillance, evermore wide-ranging arrests, evermore extremity. The maintenance of civic virtue, they insisted, was impossible without bloodshed. They learned the hard way that government was impossible if the bloodshed was not monopolized and managed.

  First the King's Swiss Guards were slaughtered defending him at the Hôtel de Ville. Some were thrown living into a bonfire. Others from windows onto a forest of pikes. My assistant Legros, passing the Tuileries, saw furniture together with corpses being pitched from the upper stories into the courtyard. He met us on our way home, and Anne-Marie and I had to wait at each city gate so he could shout “Vive la nation!” like a good sansculotte, thereby diffusing the murderousness of those roaming the streets around us. Four times we were stopped and made to swear an oath to the new regime. At the entrance to our courtyard we found half a corpse, which I dragged out of the archway by the feet.

  Then in September it was deemed necessary to weed out royalist sympathizers after the Prussians had enjoyed some success against our armies, and people's tribunals, set up in each of the prisons, began handing prisoners over to crowds gathered outside with butchers' implements and bludgeons. In four days thirteen hundred—one half of all the prisoners in Paris—were massacred, including the Mme de Lamballe, whose body was dragged behind a wagon by two cords tied to her feet while her head was carried on a pike to where the royal family was imprisoned, so that it might be made to bow to the Queen. One of the killers was said to have used a carpenter's saw. Each neighborhood seemed to have its own mob of National Guards and sansculottes, a few of them mounted, on their horses bearing fishwives and bacchantes, filthy and bloody and drunken, their clothes all at sea. At the Quai d'Or-say hung a whole row of men mangled
and lanterned, their feet continually set in motion by people brushing past. Garden terraces were ashine each morning with smashed bottles in the sunlight. It was said that Mme de Lamballe's head was found wedged upside down on a cabaret bar and surrounded by glasses, as if serving as a carafe. She'd been famous for her fragile nerves and her penchant for fainting at the slightest unpleasantness.

  As was the King. We followed his trial through the newspapers and broadsheets. Talking with Henri-François, our eldest, was like conversing with a rock garden, so Anne-Marie was left with me. During meals we were circumspect because Legros shared our table, but at night in bed some of our old intimacy returned. She argued the King's side: perhaps the mildest monarch to ever fill the throne had been precipitated from it because of his refusal to adopt the harshness of his predecessors. Throughout the proceedings the Jacobins—men and women alike—ate ices and bawled from the galleries for the death penalty. Legendre proposed to divide the accused into as many pieces as there were departments, so as to mail a bit of him to each. My wife was at a loss, reading such news: where did such ferocity originate? I had no answer for her. Just as the King had no ally in the Assembly willing to risk his own life on his sovereign's behalf. Having refused to become the patron of any one side, our helpless monarch had become the object of hatred for all.

  Robespierre finally doomed him with the argument that if the King was absolved, what became of the Revolution? If he was innocent, then the defenders of liberty were malefactors, the royalists the true inheritors of France. To those who said that the state had no right to execute the King, he countered that the Revolution had been “illegal” from the outset. Did the deputies want a Revolution without a revolution?

  We were both awake the entire night before the execution. The day before, I'd been authorized to oversee the digging of a trench ten feet deep, along with the procurement of three fifty-pound sacks of quicklime. The machine was moved to the Place de la Révolution, near the pedestal from which the bronze equestrian statue of the King's father had been hacked down.

  I had asked the prosecutor to relieve me of my responsibilities in the King's case. That request had been denied. I then asked for more detailed instructions: would the King require a special carriage? Would I accompany him alone, or with my assistants? I was informed that there would be a special, closed carriage, and that I was to await the King on the scaffold. The latter instruction I understood to suggest that I myself was suspected of royalist tendencies.

  I asked Legros to rouse me at five, the same hour that the King's valet, Clery, would be waking him. I heard his step outside my door and called that I was awake before he could knock. “Please don't do this,” Anne-Marie whispered from her side of the bed. Her fist pounded lightly on my rib. But knowing the danger in which we already found ourselves, she only held the pillow over her face while I began to dress.

  Clery reported to me later that the King's children had been rocking in agony as he'd prepared to depart under guard. For the previous hour they had consoled themselves with the time they had left together, the little Dauphin with his head between his father's knees.

  Would the population rise in revolt against such an act? Had the allies planted agents in order to effect a rescue? These questions and more terrified the deputies, who ordered each of the city's gates barricaded and manned, and an escort of twelve hundred guards provided for the King's coach. The streets along the route to the scaffold were lined with army regulars. The windows were shuttered on pain of death.

  The crowd throughout was mostly quiet. The King when he arrived seemed to derive much consolation from the company of his confessor. A heavy snowfall muffled the accoutrements of the carriage.

  Before mounting the steps, he asked that his hands be kept free. I looked to Santerre, commander of the Guard, who denied the request. The King's collar was unfastened, his shirt opened, and his hair cut away from his neck. In the icy air he looked at me and then out at the citizenry, where the vast majority, because of weakness, became implicated in a crime that they would forever attribute to others.

  I was assisted by my eldest son and Legros. That morning I had received absolution from a nonjuring priest—the new term for one who has not yet forsworn his allegiance to the church. I had checked and rechecked the sliding supports on the uprights, and resharpened the blade. The King tried to address the people over the drum roll but was stopped by Santerre, who told him they'd brought him here to die, not to harangue the populace. Henri-Francois strapped him to the plank. Legros slid him forward. He died in the Catholic faith in which he had been raised. In accordance with the custom, the executor of justice then found the head in the basket and displayed it to the people. He lifted it by the hair, raising it above shoulder height. He circled the scaffold twice. The head sprinkled the wood below as it was swung around. There was an extended silence followed by a few scattered cries of “Long live the Republic.”

  The executioner did not accompany the wicker basket to the cemetery. He was told that it fell from the cart near the trench, where the crowd had then torn it to pieces. He ordered more expiatory Masses said on his own behalf. He made certain that the King's blade was never used again.

  And he also made certain that his wife never discovered his trade in packets of the King's hair: his eldest son's idea. Though for months afterward she saw the broadsheets of his hand holding the King's severed head over the caption May this impure blood water our fields.

  Thereafter there seemed to be no space anywhere in the country for moderation. All dangers and all proposals conceived to counter them partook of the dire, the drastic, and the headlong. The nation was in peril, and what constitutional safeguards remained had to make way for emergency measures. Danton claimed that if a sufficiently severe Revolutionary tribunal had been constituted that September, there would have been no massacres. The government's discipline had to be terrible or the people themselves would again spread terror. A tribunal empanelled to punish with death all assaults on the indivisibility of the Republic could operate, as he put it, with an irreducible minimum of evil.

  Anne-Marie by then was a wraith, disappearing from rooms, a cough the only evidence of her presence in the house. One night she didn't come to table at all. Legros had to fetch our dinner from the kitchen. Henri-Francois informed me that she'd had an altercation with another woman at the bakery about her place in the breadline. He was no help with details. I waited while together we watched the shoveling motion of his spoon. Finally I asked if she'd been hurt, and he shrugged, saying, “Well, she got the bread.”

  I found her sorting through potatoes in our root cellar. Many had already sprouted. The skin under her eyes was blue.

  “Are you well?” I asked.

  “I'm unable to eat,” she told me. “I'm sure it will pass.”

  “Are you injured?” I asked.

  “I'm sound in body and mind,” she answered. As if to prove her point, she showed me a potato. We could hear someone above us who'd returned to the kitchen for a second helping from the pot.

  We said nothing for some minutes, sharing the close darkness. The damp smell of the dirt was pleasant. I sorted potatoes with her.

  “It's not assumed that the wife of the Executor of State Judgments will be found brawling in the street,” I joked, gently.

  “You thought you married a lady,” she said.

  “I only meant that this was not a time for public demonstrations,” I told her.

  “They know you by now,” she said. “You're as suited to take a hand in political faction as you are to arrive on the moon.”

  But she underestimated me. I attended commune sessions when I saw fit, ready to speak if the occasion warranted it. The Law of Suspects was promulgated that September to speed the work of terrorizing foes of the Revolution. Suspects of any sort could now be denounced and detained by local committees formed on the spot and unfettered by the sorts of legal concerns that had no doubt already allowed too many culprits in league with our enemies
to escape. This category of suspects extended first to all foreigners residing in France; then to those who speculated in any way with foreign currencies; next to those who spoke too coldly of their enthusiasm for the Revolution; and finally to those who, while having done nothing in particular against the cause, hadn't seemed to do much for it, either. A prisoner might be accused at nine, find himself in court at ten, receive sentencing at two, and lose his life at four. Anyone's neighbor might be the allied agent already at work to engineer famine or defeat. The Law of Suspects was a reminder to the populace that a nation at war might have to exterminate liberty in order to save it. Prisons like the Con-ciergerie tripled their detainees. In some rooms the sewage fumes were so strong that torches brought into them went out.

  By such measures idlers and thugs had now become the People. Histrionic patriotism was the only requisite for public speaking, so those especially compromised by shameful pasts rushed to demonstrate their worthiness by addressing their Popular Societies, agitating in all corners, disrupting the courts and trials, searching homes themselves, denouncing and condemning and turning France into one boundless parade ground of calumny. The solution for all national troubles was understood to be an unflagging austerity of purpose in the form of an evermore passionate embrace of ruthlessness. There've been mass cannonadings in Lyon. Carrier, the Revolutionary representative at Nantes, sealed hundreds into the holds of barges and sank them in the Loire in what he called “vertical deportations.” Saint-Just announced that the Republic consisted of the extermination of everything that opposed it. The Marquis de Bry offered to organize a force he called the Tyrannicides: freedom fighters dispatched to foreign capitals to assassinate heads of state or anyone else the Committee might stipulate.