The unoiled wheels lurched. The tall bony man lost his balance, falling. Those nearby gave a happy roar. The Comte, grasping the rail with his bound hands, managed to use his foot to help the man up. The fat-cheeked tailor, not appearing to notice, gazed ahead, maybe at the guillotine, maybe at the faraway rooftops of the Louvre, or maybe at nothing. Izette had said many of those approaching execution appeared drugged by terror.
The tumbrel halted, and the scaffold hid it from us. Three drummer boys appeared. After a long drumroll, the fat-cheeked man was hauled up the steps by two assistants. The executioner pulled a bloodstained smock over his trim nankeen suit. The shuddering yet nerveless victim was pushed down on his stomach against the bottom plank. “Don’t look,” Izette said. Again drums rolled. But I was so close that under this tattoo I could hear the upper plank go down. The neck clamp dropped into place. The blade fell. And I thought: I am the Resurrection and the Life saith the Lord: he that believeth in me.…
When I looked up, the body was being wheeled away in an ordinary wheelbarrow. The Comte appeared on the scaffold, looking out with wry detachment.
He saw me.
For an endless moment our eyes met. His smile faded. I saw only those dark clever eyes. The Place de la Révolution, the sunlit revelers, the guillotine, the laundry basket seeping blood, everything melted and there were only those dark eyes. And I was remembering a little country girl on her sixteenth birthday coquetting with one of the great lords of France, a man who ruled the finances of a kingdom, a man who was completely knowing, witty, and brilliant, a man who gazed at her with admiration, lust, amusement, and—though neither could know it yet—an all-consuming passion that would shape and mold both their lives.
Without thinking, I mouthed, I love you, I love you.
Words I’d never spoken to him. His expression softened. His lips were gentle, tender. Even bald, he looked young.
Young?
And for the first time I was wondering how it would have been if we’d met without the chasm of thirty years. If we’d been of an age, would I have understood him, his pride, the enigmas of his diamond-sharp brain? If we’d come together when he was still tender enough to forgive and to bend, would I have loved him? Would I have looked past the clever-ugly face and seen his brilliance and courage? Would I have charted the quirks of his personality? Would he ever have been as accessible for me to love as André?
Gazing into the Comte’s eyes, hypnotized, I found myself in a time and a place that never had existed.…
Through the emerald meadow a breeze rustles, dancing with blue gillyflowers and golden buttercups, and along a path in the spring grass move a girl of sixteen, a boy of seventeen. Her abundant silver-gilt hair flows down her back. The boy is neither tall nor handsome, yet his features have quick intelligence, and his dark eyes snap with wit. There is a proud lift to his dark head, and he holds himself with an erectness that might be considered arrogant if it weren’t so obviously the pride of masculine, virile youth. He leaves the path, his slender black military boots catching spangles of dew as he picks her a small bouquet. With a bow he presents the flowers, they smile at each other, and, hand in hand, they proceed to a line of poplars.
The Comte, stepping forward, still gazing tenderly at me, made a small bow. Then, I guessed so as not to incriminate me, he bowed with that overelaborate courtesy in all directions. The women next to me laughed, but without the ugly derision with which they’d greeted the bony man’s fall. A man behind me shouted, “Hooray for General de Créqui and his men!” And all around the vast square rose masculine cries and quavers for “Good old No-Retreat de Créqui.”
In the shaded dell at riverside wild violets of the palest lavender grow amid lush ferns. Poplars twin themselves in the slow-moving river. The girl throws a pebble, and in the ripples the reflected green branches sway and bend. She and the boy laugh, their laughter fading slowly into the watery silence. Tenderly, he touches her lips, she kisses his finger. As each gaze into the other’s eyes, wonderingly, a rosy flush suffuses her cheeks, and her thick lashes draw over her clear green eyes. He takes her in his arms. A lark trills its springtime ecstasy.
The Comte knelt. Drums rolled. Mechanism whirred as ropes lifted the blade.
The girl and boy notice nothing, for they stretch on their bed of soft ferns, locked in an embrace that is old as life, as new and tender as the little bouquet of discarded flowers, as ecstatic as the trilling bird, as eternal as the sun whose rosy golden light filters through poplar branches onto naked, beautiful bodies …
I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet still shall he live: And whosoever loveth and believeth in Me shall never die.
I was weeping, but then, Izette told me later, so were a good many older men, doubtless soldiers who had served under the Comte. She led me away. But not before I’d seen the sight that will haunt me the rest of my days.
The executioner held up the severed head of my husband. The dark eyes glittered as if they saw me still. And I gazed back at the bleeding head of the boy I had loved in another, far better time and place.
Chapter Six
“I’ve hired a carriage for tomorrow,” Sir Robert said.
Goujon replied, “Impossible. You and Manon can’t leave Paris now.”
“Can’t we! Tomorrow, Mr. Goujon, the Comtesse and I quit this city for good.”
Goujon had just arrived to visit me in my sitting room. And as usual when Goujon visited, Sir Robert had stamped across the corridor, the two of them sparring, as Izette put it, like a pair of game cocks. (Over you, she invariably added.)
It was late afternoon on September 2, a warm, quiet Sunday five weeks after the Comte’s execution. For those five weeks I’d been sunk in a torpor. My muscles refused to obey my will. My brain sloughed off thought, yet I had none of the merciful forgetfulness that used to terrify me; there was only a slow, endless reliving of the moment when the executioner held up his grisly trophy.
I was but dimly aware of the momentous happenings that had shaken Paris. One sultry-red August day the Tuileries Palace had been stormed, and now the King and Queen were imprisoned. Mansions and fine houses were set to the torch. The jails were packed with those suspected of Monarchist leanings.
Goujon said to Sir Robert, “Come across to your rooms. We’ll discuss this in private.”
Sir Robert turned his florid face questioningly to me.
“I’m quite well now, Goujon,” I lied. My hands were folded in my white muslin dress. My brain kept plodding in futile circles around the waste of the brief years of my marriage. I was sick with the thought of the happiness I could have had, the children I might have borne the Comte. I shared Sir Robert’s longing to get back to England. I yearned to be with Jean-Pierre, for it seemed to me if I could retreat into my quiet studio and grasp my brother’s hand, I’d be well again.
Oh, I yearned with all my weakened self to see André, but he didn’t want to see me. He must have heard through Goujon, his fellow deputy, of my illness, yet he’d never visited me. André still hates me, I thought dully. Another reason to leave Paris.
“I don’t have to tell you what an upheaval we’re going through,” Goujon said. “The King and Queen in prison. Foreign armies reported advancing—”
Sir Robert interrupted, “All the more reason to quit Paris.”
“Don’t you understand?” Goujon asked with terrible, gentle patience. “Manon’s safe in this hotel. Otherwise—name of God! If there’s any upheaval, how long do you expect the Comtesse de Créqui would last?”
“Nobody, hardly, knows I married the Comte,” I put in tonelessly. “My identification papers are made out for Manon d’Epinay.”
And then, coming from far off, I heard the sound of male voices raised in a howling song. The two men glanced at each other, and, as at an unheard command, each went to stare out a window. Trembling, I moved to the third window.
Up the street they whirled, about thirt
y men writhing, contorting, twisting, shaking weapons. Bare-armed, they were decked out in laces and satins, gauze fichus, plumed hats. Red stained their stolen finery. Red shone on their hands and arms. Red stained their weapons. Like an army of vocal, blood-intoxicated ants, they danced up to the smithy. The smith’s two apprentices, long hair wildly aflap, turned the double handle of a huge grindstone. Sparks streamed in the warm afternoon air as each weapon in turn was held against the stone. The song being howled was the new march I’d heard on the way to the Comte’s execution: “The Marseillaise.”
Sir Robert, his cheeks for once ashen, pulled me from the window, jerking three pairs of shutters closed.
In the dimness Goujon looked a huge, solid bear. “These past few days many traitors have been arrested,” he said. “They’re being tried and executed immediately.”
“You mean to tell me those spawn of hell have official sanction?” Sir Robert muttered.
“They’re paid twenty-four livres apiece,” Goujon replied.
My mind was swelling with perverse gratitude that the Comte had been executed in an orderly, if horrible manner at Place de la Révolution.
“Foul,” Sir Robert said.
“It’s the people’s justice,” Goujon said.
Who had decided, I wondered, that the people should have their justice?
Goujon said, “All prisons are being emptied.” He glanced at Sir Robert. “Now do you understand why Manon can’t leave—at least for a few days?”
Outside, the keen of voices rose, punctuated by the beat of wooden sabots and the whine of metal on stone.
“By Jove, I do understand. Will you send word when travel is safe?”
“I’ll send word,” Goujon promised.
The next six days Sir Robert, leaving the hotel for short intervals, gathered news of the massacres. The rest of the time he remained with me in my sitting room. Whenever those drunken men howled to the smithy, he would close the shutters, talking loudly to me. The rest of the time, his florid face in a brooding expression, he wrote letters to England. By night, bonfires reddened the sky, and the murders continued. Insane asylums and orphanages were ravaged. Little girls were raped and so, ugly as this sounds, were the boys. Sir Robert recorded it all in his round English hand.
Where, I wondered in my numbness, where were the idealistic Revolutionaries, the decent men who had worked to end old injustices? The men who hated death and killing?
Where was André?
I moved with the crowd in the early-morning hubbub of the opening of stalls and shops of the Palais Royale arcades.
It was several days since the massacre had ended. Yesterday Goujon had come to the Hôtel des Anglais, telling Sir Robert that the road from Paris to Calais was relatively safe. So at this minute the Englishman was arranging the hire of a carriage. And what was I doing? Shopping for a present for Jean-Pierre. Sir Robert had thrown up his hard-muscled hands, denouncing this foray as preposterous, utterly preposterous! I agreed with him. Yet a gift for my brother was the first idea that had roused me from my torpid grief, and I’d argued back. In the end Sir Robert, glad to see my apathy lifting, had agreed to let me come here. I wouldn’t be alone for long. Izette was to meet me nearby, at Café de Foy, for early-morning chocolate.
Shoppers bargained too vigorously. Market women bawled too-loud attention to their vegetables and cheeses. Shopkeepers in their doorways smiled too enticingly at prospective customers. Everyone overreacted, intent on blocking out the past terrors.
Shutters clattered ahead of me. A small elderly merchant flung open his shop door. “Come, Citizeness, let me show my antiquities. No obligation.” His wink was too lewd for so old a man.
Piled in his window were ivory chessmen. The lovingly carved little figures reminded me, too forcibly, of the Comte’s miniature collection. Tears blinded me. Quickly I crossed to the Palais Royale gardens.
A newsboy started shouting, “Égalité! Read Égalité’s words on the massacres!”
At André’s name, a harsh, hot serum filled my body. A crowd gathered around the boy, and I elbowed and shouldered my way through, tearing a paper from his hands.
It was one of those Open Letters that the writer pays to have printed. Fresh ink smeared the yellow sheet. André, I thought, André. The love, which never had died, rose up in its full force, and my hand shook so I couldn’t read. I sat on a bench, holding the paper flat on the wood.
A DENUNCIATION OF THE SEPTEMBER MASSACRES
I was filled with hope and joy on the day feudal abuse ended, and the age of liberty and equality dawned. My joy, alas, has been shortlived … The most vicious political clubs now rule.… All around I see murder and the shedding of innocent blood. I see France divided into two groups. The vast number of decent, moderate people, and a small number of radical clubs who, for their own fell purpose of gaining power, terrorize our Republic.
Citizens, we must raise our voices against these bloodstained factions, now, before it is too late. The reign of kings has ended. Join me in speaking up before all decent people fall into an endless reign of terror.
I held the paper to my breasts, not caring that ink would smudge the delicate gauze tucked in the low bust-line of my white muslin frock.
André’s Open Letter roused in me such a wild conflict of emotions that I could scarcely sort them out. The old love was yet more strong, and admiration, too, of his honor and decency. I grieved at having lost him. I yearned to see him.
Two things stood to the fore. First, his words, a battle cry, frightened me. For the moderates no longer ruled, and though André was a delegate in the Assembly, surely writing this—I stared at the yellow paper—would draw danger from the murderers he denounced.
Second, I felt a fierce joy that the moderates were weak and powerless. My going to André wouldn’t damage his reputation. And as for sending me to prison on a trumped-up charge? He wouldn’t, I decided, reasoning that by now his hurt anger must have been blunted.
“So here you are!” Izette snapped. “And me waiting at the Café de Foy!”
Wordless, I handed her the paper. She held it close to her face, her mouth moving silently as she read.
Around us clustered people talking in low, excited tones about Égalité’s bravery. While Izette read the Open Letter, I came to a decision. The lethargy of mourning was gone. My still-raw grief I pushed into a closed-off part of my brain. The Comte’s last wish was that I not see André. I ignored this—indeed forgot his veiled hints at the dangerous mystery surrounding André. With piercing regret, I saw only that I had wasted the few brief years when my husband and I could have shared happiness.
“Mustn’t make the same mistake over,” I murmured aloud, resting back against the wooden park bench. “Must go to André.”
Having already concluded that André wouldn’t carry out his early threats to imprison me, I didn’t worry about danger. But my marriage to the Comte had wounded André deeply. He certainly would insult me, possibly spurn me. He might reject me entirely. That was a chance I had to take. Pride had no place here. I must go to him. The past bloodstained weeks had taught me one simple fact: each and every moment of life is unique, precious, not to be wasted.
Izette had finished reading. Neatly she folded the paper, handing it to me.
“Well?” I demanded.
“It ain’t the safest thing anyone could write,” she said. “He all but denounces the Jacobin Club for the massacres.”
“I’m going to him.”
She gaped in surprise. “You’re what?”
“Going to André.”
“Manon, after this”—she regained the Open Letter, tapped it crisply on the bench—“he’s got every Jacobin, including Goujon and Robespierre, after him.”
“André’s a delegate to the Assembly. They can’t harm him.”
“After last week, ain’t you realized that nobody’s safe, not here?”
“All the more reason, then. Who knows how much time we have.”
Sh
e glanced around, making sure nobody was near. “Go back to England,” she whispered. “You’re a worse case than most. An émigré, and the Comtesse de Créqui to boot.”
“Izette, I love him.” My voice shook. “It’s not reasonable, going to him, so don’t make me justify myself.”
The annoyance faded from her expression, and her voice, when she spoke, was filled with choking affection. “Well, when was you ever one to listen to reason? If you’d of listened, you wouldn’t of taken in a half-froze streetwalker. Or kept a crippled lad with the smallpox in your house.”
“What if …” My voice faded. “What if André refuses to see me?”
She gave me her sudden wide smile. “He’ll be the only man alive, then, who don’t want you.”
At the bottom of the Open Letter was André’s address. 30 Rue Grand. Rue Grand was part of the nearby warren of narrow streets. Before I went there, however, I had to tell Sir Robert that he must return alone to England.
The bluff Englishman stood in the courtyard of the Hôtel des Anglais surrounded by hatboxes and portmanteaus and my trunk. Nearby, on Sir Robert’s own silver-braced trunk, his stout serving man rested, waiting.
Sir Robert greeted me with, “Where’s that ripping gift for Captain d’Epinay? We have no time to waste. The carriage will be here directly.”
Not looking into Sir Robert’s honest blue eyes, I explained I’d be remaining in Paris.
“Comtesse, I don’t depart the city without you.”
“There’s someone I must see … an old friend.”
“A man?”
“Yes.”
His handsome, ruddy face dropped. But he was calling out to his man to hump the boxes back upstairs.
“No!” I cried. “This mustn’t alter your plans!”
“We English are bulldogs. Never give up,” he replied.
French Passion Page 31
