“Then how am I endangered?”
“The mistake was mine,” he said. “I never should have let us start meeting again.”
This was the kind of infuriatingly oblique hint that the Comte had once tossed at me. I fingered the two rings, the ruby wedding band, the heavy antique gold, that hung on a thin chain around my neck. I traced the ring André had given me. And all at once I knew something. The knowledge came intuitively, without thought, and yet I knew that it was the truth.
These engraved initials, L and J, the heart of the mystery of André’s birth, were also the root of his anguish. His long-dead parents in some unknowable manner caused his inner pain.
“André—” I started.
He cut me short by placing two fingers over my lips. “Darling, all day I argued before the Assembly that King Louis and his family be allowed to seek haven in Austria. I don’t want to argue with you, too.”
I left the narrow warm bed, moved to the red glow of the living room fire, and dressed slowly.
In December the Jacobins, headed by Goujon and Robespierre, demanded that Louis Capet, as the imprisoned King was known, be brought to trial. André increased his efforts, working day and night in his determination to rouse opposition. He visited deputies in their homes, he drank with them in cafés, he buttonholed them on the streets.
As Christmas neared, the Jacobins turned virulent, petitioning the Assembly for a decree to execute King Louis without a trial.
André, the Monarchists, the Gironde, and all the other moderate factions were forced to insist there be a trial. Thus they fell into a shrewd trap. I couldn’t help wondering whether Goujon, clever at maneuvering people, had engineered the plan. For the Jacobins never had wanted a hasty execution. They desired the publicity of a trial.
For two bleak January days, while the King of France answered his accusers, people fought to get inside the Palais de Justice. Those outside tore at news sheets. And many wept forbidden tears when the Assembly found King Louis guilty.
Sentencing took all night.
That night, January 16, I went to André’s rooms, for I knew that whatever the sentence, he would be revulsed. Miserable. I built a small fire, set out a loaf of bread and his favorite Brie cheese, a pitcher of white wine. I had added logs twice and the birds had been up and chattering for an hour when footsteps sounded on the wooden staircase.
At first I couldn’t believe this tread could be André’s. Normally he moved with quick, easy grace. These dragging footsteps belonged to an old man. Yet the key was being fitted in the lock. I ran to open the door. André moved past me, hunching on the fire stool, gazing bleakly into the flames.
“So it’s death,” I whispered, and my shoulders, too, bowed with a sense of dread. The Comte had told me all about King Louis. Unregal, clumsy, nearsighted, vacillating. Kindly and generous. Enjoying food and the craft of locksmithery. Louis was a man like any other man. Yet he was also our King. And the crime of regicide seemed so awesome that the earth must open up and swallow all of us.
André said, “He’ll go to the guillotine within twenty-four hours.”
Remembering the Comte, I made an inward prayer that King Louis would mount the scaffold with his minister’s bravey. “How cruel it is,” I said.
“Killing is the ultimate evil.”
“André, you did all in your power to stop this. You’ve barely slept in weeks.”
“My blood guilt,” he said, gazing up at me with an expression of horror. “We didn’t start to vote until long after it was dark. There we were, like men in a great, shadowy purgatory. Some slept. Others huddled in their coats or drank brandy against the chill. Each deputy took his turn, walking up to the pool of light where the Tribunal sat. The President would call out, ‘What sentence has Louis, King of the French, incurred?’ And most were so terrified that they could barely get out the one word, ‘Death.’ A brief moment in the light, one frightened man condemning another man for the accident of his birth, then scurrying again into the shadows.”
“What did you say?”
“You know what. Against death.”
“How? What words did you use?”
“I said, ‘Let Louis and his wife and children be banished. Enough blood has been shed in the name of liberty!’” He grimaced painfully. “It didn’t sound so melodramatic in that shadowy place.”
He’s in danger, I thought. They don’t arrest deputies now, but if the day comes when they do, then he’s in danger. And in this new France, danger meant only one thing: that narrow, raised mechanism with its glittering blade. My skin crawled at the thought of André’s head being held up by Sanson, the executioner.
“André! You must leave France! Go to your farm in America!”
My anxious voice faded into the still room. The aromas of Brie and wine mingled. André bent his face into his hands.
The gesture meant both grief and refusal.
André’s reasons for staying were far different from the Comte’s. My husband’s prideful courage had kept him in the country of his ancestors. André remained out of obligation. He had helped deliver this newborn Republic and now he must stay for as long as he had it in his power to speak for human decency and goodness.
After a minute I saw with surprise that his shoulders were quaking. I’d never seen André weep. Swiftly I knelt by the fire stool, my arms around him. He buried his face in my breasts. His was far more than the normal grief for a lost King—or a lost dream. André wept as for a near kinsman, and if I hadn’t been caught up in comforting him, I would have at last guessed the secret of his birth.
Chapter Eight
Thunder roared through my dream.
It was two days after the King’s drum-muffled execution, and both nights I’d insisted on staying with André, sleeping with him in my arms. Now, we both jerked awake. The thunder was a sharp gun retort. There was an acrid smell of powder and the front door swung open. The lock had been shot off. The rumble of many feet.
André was pulling on his breeches and I holding the sheet over my breasts as the curtain between the rooms was yanked to one side. A half-dozen gendarmes crowded into the small space. One carried a candle stick, and in its flickering, shapes lurked, pistols and knives glinted.
“Citizen Égalité?” asked the man holding the candle.
“I am he,” André replied.
“You are a prisoner of the Republic.”
I gave a sharp, terrified wail, and began quivering all over. “Do you always arrest deputies in the middle of the night?” My voice shook a little.
Nobody replied. The candle flame glinted on eyes and teeth, and I pulled the sheet higher.
André, busy stuffing his shirt into his breeches, asked, “Of what crime am I accused?” He sounded utterly calm. Was he? Had he been expecting this midnight summons for so long that the reality came as relief?
After a long pause the gendarme holding the candle replied. “The Tribunal will inform you in good time.”
“When? Are the preliminary hearings set?”
“Citizen Égalité, you of all men know that the Republic demands obedience of its citizens, and you, a good patriot, will accept its will. Now, we are pressed for time. Please to finish dressing.”
From the dim shadows at the curtain came a lewd voice: “Better to see the citizeness get out of bed.”
There were snickers.
The candle bearer, who appeared to be the leader, said sternly, “The Republic denounces such lascivious remarks as a product of the Old Regime. Citizen Égalité, we’re in a hurry.”
André, pulling on his coat, left his stock untied.
“May I bid the citizeness goodbye?” he asked.
“Against the rules,” replied the leader. “But in your case.…” He shrugged.
“In privacy?”
“No.”
André bent over the bed. “My darling,” he said, and as he kissed my trembling, unresponsive flesh, he whispered, “I love you. If you love me, let your Englishman t
ake you from this awful country.” He raised his voice a little. “All will be well.”
This pitifully inadequate goodbye roused laughter.
“Wouldn’t mind keeping his place in bed warm.”
“Pretty wench, isn’t she?”
“The Incorruptible, hah! He’s just been keeping the good ones tucked away, private.”
“Citizens!” The leader’s prudish anger almost doused the flame. He bowed jerkily to me. “Citizeness, you may rest assured that as soon as Citizen Égalité has proved himself without guilt, he will be freed.”
“Where do you take him?”
There was no answer. He nodded. Men stationed themselves on either side of André, marching him from the room. The rumble of feet echoed up from the narrow stairwell.
I began throwing on clothes and stamping into my shoes, so distraught that I didn’t bother to shut the door or pull the curtain. My cape was the same green one I’d worn that morning I’d visited the Comte at the Conciergerie, the same cape Izette had made me wear, muddied, to his execution. Is this an omen, I thought, racing downstairs.
The lodgers, in their nightshirts and nightcaps, had gathered in the hallways. As I bolted by, they shrank back as if I were infected by the plague. Something far more deadly had touched me: the shadow of the guillotine.
The cape was summer weight, the night so cold that fountains and horse troughs were frozen. Breathing in painful gulps, I ran. Sometimes clouds hid the moon, and twice I took the wrong turn, blundering around in the darkness, retracing my steps along unlit alleys.
At the Hôtel des Anglais I pounded on Sir Robert’s door. This time the capped heads poking from doors were English and therefore unafraid.
Sir Robert opened his door, tying the belt of a crimson velvet robe de chambre that was embroidered with gold, like a hunting jacket. He stared at me, then pulled me into the sitting room. He held a candle, and the flame lit the mirror. My hair uncombed, my chest heaving from my run through the night, I looked as terrified as I felt.
While I gasped, catching my breath, Sir Robert poured from a decanter. “Here,” he said. “Sherry.”
I didn’t take the wine. “Once you promised to help me. Will you?”
He pressed the glass into my hand. “Drink this, then give me my orders.”
I gulped the sweet wine as once I had downed Aunt Thérèse’s medicinal potions, in one swallow.
“André—Égalité—he’s been arrested.”
Sir Robert’s mouth opened in surprise. “Is André … Égalité, then?”
“Yes.”
“He’s your, arrumph, friend?”
I had never told Sir Robert the name of the lover that I’d remained in Paris for, yet at this moment my surprise was as great as the Englishman’s. How could a fact so central to my being as my relationship with André remain unknown?
“Always,” I said. “The gendarmes came for him tonight. They refused to give the charges.”
“He defended King Louis,” said Sir Robert, reporter on matters political to Prime Minister Pitt. “Good show there. Still … would they arrest him for that? Others voted nay, too.”
“I don’t know why, I just know they arrested him! They took him away. They didn’t say to what prison. Or when he’d come up for trial. They just took him away!”
“You were present?”
I nodded, too distraught to be embarrassed.
“Then first thing tomorrow we’ll get you out of the country. Your papers—”
“Out of the country!” Hadn’t André used those very words? “Are you mad? Andrés in danger!”
“Comtesse, think,” he said gently. “Where’s the point, you risking all? Manon, we learned from that unfortunate experience with the Comte that once the trap is shut, there’s nothing to do. You mustn’t let your heart rule your head.”
“So you won’t help André because I love him?”
“What sort of fellow do you think I am? I’ll give this Égalité every assistance available to me—once you’re safely away. That should be no problem. Your English papers are signed by Pitt himself.”
“Tomorrow,” I said, my voice hard, “I’m going to every prison in Paris. I’ll find out where he is. And, Sir Robert, I’m aware of the danger. So if you’re afraid to be seen with me, you needn’t come.” Only my panic for André’s safety could make me speak this way to so good a friend as Sir Robert.
He made a hurt noise somewhere between a cough and a throat-clearing. “Outside this very room I promised you my deepest, most unswerving effort. I’m a man of my word.”
“I’m sorry.” The apology came thin through the large lump in my throat.
“You’re tired and worried. Now, go inside and take the bed. I’ll make do with this sofa.”
I was too shaky to argue. Besides, what was the point? We couldn’t set out until morning. I lay on the bed, not undressing, listening impatiently for roosters to crow in nearby gardens.
As Sir Robert’s man served us a huge English breakfast—I took only a dish of tea—Sir Robert suggested that rather than making the rounds of prisons, we visit Goujon. The Englishman appeared to have forgotten all his earlier reservations about the bull-like peasant from Brittany. “This Goujon chap friend of yours,” he said, “is emerging as a big man in the Assembly. He’s as important as Marat and Danton. He’ll know what’s what.”
Each deputy had offices in the Tuileries, where the Assembly now met. In a hired cabriolet Sir Robert and I rattled between the two tall, rearing stone horses that guard the gates of the Tuileries Gardens. I stared at the tall yellow grass, remembering how lovely this park once had been, remembering CoCo. Was there anywhere left in Paris that I could escape my losses?
A National Guard clanked ahead of us through the halls of the palace. Windows had been boarded. The tapestries were ripped, unmended. Most heads on the statues had been broken off, a grim reminder of the former owner. On the hot day last August when the King and his family had fled, the guards and servants had been murdered, their blood running, pooling in these halls. And there seemed in my imagination to be rusty stains on the marble.
We passed a door with a gold-printed name: DEPUTY ÉGALITÉ
In Goujon’s antechamber a secretary took my name. It was a measure of Goujon’s importance that even so early, the room was crowded with people waiting to see him.
Every bench was full. Sir Robert led me to the window alcove. I stood thinking of the old days at the Inn of St. Antoine. André, Goujon, and I had been friends. That was before Goujon was a deputy, but often he’d helped André plan how to get a piece of legislation through the Assembly. The memory cheered me. They were friends then, I thought, and they’re friends now. Only a political label separates them.
I was even more cheered when, in less than ten minutes, Goujon’s secretary called my name. Amid envious stares of other petitioners, I entered the office.
“Well, Manon,” Goujon said, rising behind his desk, As always, his size made me feel like a doll, fragile, breakable. An almost palpable force emanated from that great body, a force that always had been apparent, yet now was stronger. I remembered the rumors and scandal sheets hinting at Goujon’s extraordinary ways with women. Power, they say, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Goujon had become a powerful man—and knew it. I wondered if what he’d always felt for me was as simple as lust.
Holding my chin higher, I greeted him.
He smiled, that calm, gentle smile. Why was I worrying? Goujon remained my friend. He was my firm, plebeian rock in this maelstrom.
“André’s been arrested,” I said.
“Yes, I know.”
“Where is he?”
“The Conciergerie.”
The skin on my arms rose in bumps. The Comte had gone to his death from the Conciergerie, and so had almost everyone else ever imprisoned there. Not for nothing was the Conciergerie known as the antechamber of death.
“So it’s serious,” I murmured.
“Yes. Very.”
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br /> “What are the charges?”
“Treason.”
Abruptly I sat in the chair opposite his desk.
“Treason?” I said. “But why? Because he wanted to banish King Louis, not kill him? Because he voted against death?”
“It goes deeper than that,” Goujon replied. His eyes were luminous with some unreadable emotion.
“What do you mean?”
“Manon, I can’t discuss this with you.”
“Treason?” I asked, staring into the red-bearded face. “How treason? André helped mold the Revolution, he wrote half of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, he worked on the Constitution. He’s given his life—he could be a gentleman on an estate in the Americas. Instead, he’s lived poorly here. He sleeps on a servant’s cot. He’s The Incorruptible. How is any of that treasonous?”
“There’s a list of charges. Name of God, Manon, you don’t expect me to go over an official case with you?”
“Official?”
“The Assembly has charged him.”
“But you yourself told me how important André is to the Assembly. You asked me to leave France so André could remain the voice of moderation.”
“The time for moderation has swept by,” Goujon said. “Even you, who has no interest in politics, must see that.”
“You never wanted moderation,” I said slowly. “Always you favored getting rid of royalty.”
At this, he leaned his elbows on his desk, for a long minute peering into my face as if he were searching for some recognition, some knowledge.
He didn’t seem to find what he sought. Resting back, he said, “Royalty has no place in the new France.”
“So it does have something to do with Andrés stand on King Louis. Did a Jacobin denounce him? I’ll go to whoever it is—Marat?”
For the first time Goujon was alarmed. He reached across the desk, gripping my wrist with a hand as large as a ham. “You must not go to anyone else. Otherwise you’re doomed.”
I pulled free of him. “Then you’re telling me that André is doomed?”
“As a deputy, he’ll receive a fair trial before the Assembly.”
“There aren’t any fair trials!” I cried in anguish. “Goujon, we’re friends. You, me, André. Please, please, you must help.” I closed my eyes and when I opened them, tears clung to my thick brown lashes. Goujon’s lips softened. He took a sheet of paper that carried an official imprint and began to write. Left-handed, he held his massive forearm so I couldn’t see the words.
French Passion Page 33
