French Passion

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  “André,” I said quietly, “look up there.” My hands supposedly bound, I jutted my chin toward the window.

  André saw Goujon. And, like me, he followed Goujon’s eyes downward to Izette. Her arms were still raised in that V.

  “She doesn’t know he’s there,” André said. “My God, he’s got a rifle!”

  “Is he planning to kill her.”

  “Us, far more likely,” André replied.

  “He’s watching her.”

  “But Goujon would kill me, then you.”

  I flushed. Naturally I’d never mentioned my bouts with Goujon, and the thought of acquiescently receiving him shamed me deeply.

  André was saying, “He’s vowed to get rid of everyone connected to the monarchy.”

  We were closer now. André was right. All reason said that Goujon would kill him, a king’s son, then me, in preference to Izette. Yet it was at her poised, immobile body that he gazed.

  “Izette! Above you! Look!” My voice skimmed over the shouts.

  Neither Izette nor Goujon showed signs of hearing.

  The long-jawed corporal, though, turned to me. “Shut up, you!” he snapped. Anger and fear mingled in his expression.

  “Izette! It won’t work!” I yelled.

  The corporal raised a clenched fist. I shrank back.

  Izette, head cocked, appeared to be listening to the tick of an inner timepiece. We had come to the entry of a courtyard, and I remembered that in the Hôtel des Anglais Izette had spoken of a house partially put to the torch, one wing burning, to leave an unseen path from Rue St. Honoré. Here, she’d said, a hidden cart could wait.

  The old horse plodded forward.

  Abruptly Izette’s arms went down. She tore off her red hat, releasing a flood of rich brown hair.

  This was the signal. Women began pushing and shoving into the street.

  Soldiers, six on either side, closed in on the tumbrel.

  “Halt, you bitches!” bawled the corporal. He raised his flintlock, firing over their heads. There was a loud retort. Acrid smoke hazed my eyes. The plow horse whinnied loudly. The soldiers’ horses, though, were trained to gunfire, and reared only a little. The men managed them with their knees. Several raised their flintlocks.

  At fourteen, my most ardent tomboy phase, I’d badgered Jean-Pierre into showing me how to load one of our father’s muskets, how to fire it. I’d learned to pour the coarse black powder and place the bullet and ram it home. I’d conquered that overwhelming recoil, my slender arms had become used to the weight. Yet I’d never been able to take aim at a living creature. Jean-Pierre, laughing, had gone hunting. I’d practiced on an old pewter plate hanging from the oak tree in the back pasture.

  A woman shrieked, “Sisters, take the tyrant Capet!”

  “The guillotine’s too easy for him and his whore!”

  “Over their heads, men,” shouted the corporal. “Fire!”

  A fusillade of shots rang out. The plow horse reared, the tumbrel lurched forward, and I fell against André, remembering to keep my hands clasped behind my back. The gunshots precipitated the women. Like one of the great, unstoppable waves in a night storm, they moved forward with cries and the roar of wooden sabots. Their bodies pushed against the soldiers’ horses. The soldiers, reloading, kicked and cursed. Women cursed back.

  “Get the oppressor tyrant! Kill him!” shouted a thin woman. I could see her scrawny neck pulse. I knew this was all a plan, yet I pulled back against André in real terror.

  Another woman tried to get between two soldiers, and as I stared at her, one of her brown eyes closed in a wink.

  Shots sounded again. The horse jerked forward.

  Izette whirled into the street. Instinctively I glanced up. Goujon had raised his rifle. A breeze ruffled his loose sleeves. Calmly he aimed down at her.

  “Izette!” I screamed.

  But she was grasping the bridle, halting the old beast. The tumbrel halted, jolting André and me.

  Another great wave of women poured toward us. Altogether there were over a hundred, pushing, shoving at the soldiers.

  “Hold your fire!” yelled the corporal. “Let ’em take the prisoners. We don’t want to kill patriots!” What he meant was he didn’t want patriots killing him.

  “My God!” I turned to the round-faced soldier. “They’re going to tear us limb from limb.”

  Women pushing under and around his horse, the boy struggled to remain mounted: he gave me a despairing glance as if he feared the same end. He held his weapon loosely.

  What happened after that was very swift.

  Overhead a shot rang. Not pausing to see what had happened, I reached forward to grab the boy’s musket. Believing me bound, he turned amazed golden eyes on me.

  In my life I had never aimed at a living creature, yet this was pure impulse, no thought. Goujon, behind a cloud of smoke, was ramming powder and a ball into his rifle. I raised the flintlock, staring up the barrel to the metal sight. The weapon was heavier than I remembered, and my arm shook a little as I squinted, aiming. Tense, I was barely aware of the howling, pushing women, the rearing horses, the odors of manure and sweat. I saw only the huge red-bearded figure who had planned the September Massacres. Goujon took another sight at Izette. My finger squeezed on the trigger. The roar almost deafened me. I fell back against the rail.

  The acrid blinding smoke attenuated the instant, making it endless. I saw Goujon’s hands release the rifle, go to his chest as if he were searching in one of his pockets. His body swayed. He leaned forward, slowly, onto the window ledge, seeming to teeter. He hurtled down to the cobbles. For a split second I saw his huge legs and arms outflung, limp. His thick neck was turned at an impossible angle. A cluster of women hid his body from me.

  Goujon was dead.

  I had killed a man.

  I, who couldn’t ride hunting with my brother, I, who ran from the hogs’ squeals at slaughtering time, I, who wept over fallen nestlings. I had killed a man. And my body shook with as great and vital a pleasure as I had ever experienced. The Comte’s severed head was avenged, and my nightly shame, the foolish yet gallant ghosts in the Conciergerie were avenged, as was the shot fired at Izette.

  André had risked his own life time and time again to halt France’s paroxysm of killing. He hated killing. And I, undeniably, had just killed. Defiant, I turned to him. To my surprise, he was gazing at me with warm approbation and love.

  The women had penetrated the cordon of our unwilling protectors. Two girls were mounting spokes of wooden wheels.

  Izette’s voice, weaker, called, “Hurry.”

  She’s alive, I thought, filled with relief.

  And then André and I were climbing over rails of the manure-scented tumbrel. To the mounted soldiers, it must have seemed we were rushing to meet a horrible death. They reined their horses, moving back, drawing their swords as though on the ready—should the necessity arise—to defend themselves, but not us. They were set to watch the women tear us apart. The crowd pressed, swaying from side to side, somewhere a shot was fired, and this increased the urgency. An old crone threw a long woman’s cape over André, disguising him, a tall matron wrapped a frieze shawl over my head, and as part of the mob, we were rushed forward. I glanced around to see four women propelling Izette.

  We were hustled into the courtyard.

  A flock of jackdaws rose from the ruined walls, sweeping the air with caws and rustling of wings. On the flattened, burned-out foundation grew pale, wintry weeds, and here stood a hay cart. The driver looked at me from under his round-topped hat. I paid no attention to him.

  In this calm spot I saw that Izette’s pitted face was the color of tallow, heard that her breathing was loud and labored. Rich red blood covered her magnificent bosom. Gently the women lowered her to sparse weeds.

  I knelt by her. Strands of loose brown hair drifted over her pinched features. She’s dying, I thought. I can’t let her die. My hand pressed down against the spouting arterial blood.

&n
bsp; “Get … in the cart,” she breathed.

  “I won’t leave you, Izette. I can’t.”

  “Hurry … ain’t planned much time.… Club’s got to … disperse.… You got to get away.…” Even now, even in this flat, almost inaudible tone, common sense laced her voice.

  “Oh, Izette.”

  “Always … pays my debts,” she whispered through white lips. “’Member, ma’am? I come back … done your ironing.… Done it good … didn’t I?”

  Tears streamed down my face. How proud she’d been of her skill with the fluting iron, how brave she’d been, that little girl under the gaudy streetwalker’s hat, how worried about her crippled brother.

  “Beautifully,” I said.

  “After … Joseph … I owed you my life.…”

  For years Izette had stood quietly in the background, my friend, my confidante, and when I was in the Bastille, she had nursed Auntie. On my return to Paris Izette had been my confederate in the doomed attempt to rescue my husband, she’d shared her quarters and her life with me, was giving me her heart’s blood—and even now, dying, she felt this obligation.

  Weakly tugging at my finger, she said, “I told … you when … we left … toolshed, ’member?”

  “You’ve never owed me anything.”

  “You … lost CoCo.… ma’am … till you’re clear … of the guillotine … we ain’t square.…”

  “We’ve always been square.”

  “No,” she said, and her eyes, though weary with death, were anxious. “Let me see … you in the cart.…”

  “Izette—”

  “Please?”

  I stood, sinking my teeth into the soft flesh inside my cheek to stop from keening. My eyes, wet with tears, on her, I moved toward the hay wain.

  She managed a hint of that old wide smile, then her head fell limp. Her eyes stared up at the gray sky. She was dead, and she had died repaying that most ancient of all debts, a life for a life.

  In my grief I was hardly aware of André lifting me onto the wagon, or of the women piling warm, moist hay over us.

  The lurching started.

  André’s hand clutched mine. A sharp point of straw stuck into one eyelid. There was no way to escape it, for to move could endanger André and the driver. Clenching André’s hand, I attempted to find some sense in the past few minutes.

  Goujon had tried to foil our escape. Why had he killed neither André nor me, but Izette? She was a woman of the people, the very type he’d desired to lift up, while André was of blood he’d sought to eradicate, and I was André’s beloved. Why had he killed Izette? It made no sense.

  I could only think, as I’d thought earlier, that this holocaust had unleashed devils in each of us, and Goujon’s devil was stronger and more irrational than most.

  How long we rode in that sweet, half-suffocating warmth, how long that straw tortured my eye, I don’t know. My grief was too intense to note passage of time.

  “Out!” called the jovial English voice. “Be quick.”

  Sir Robert, in the round-brimmed hat and loose clothes of a wagoneer, was pushing aside the hay. He’d been our driver. We were in a dim stable, empty of horses, yet redolent of horses.

  “These are for you,” said Sir Robert, handing André a pile of English clothes. “And those, Comtesse, are for you.”

  In the dim corner I made out a basket. I went to it and found a dark traveling outfit. We changed, me at a little distance. Sir Robert kept ordering, “Look sharp!”

  Placing a wig on Andrés dark, clipped hair, he announced in English, “You’re about to be rechristened—again. I dub you Sir Robert Gill. You’ve lived among the rebels long enough to sound a true Englishman.”

  He handed André folded papers.

  André, who leaned against a manger, stopped drawing on his boot. “Are these yours?”

  Sir Robert chuckled. “Who else’s?”

  “I won’t leave you without identification,” André said.

  Sir Robert paid no attention. He walked around the wain to where I was adjusting my brown wool skirt.

  “Here, Lady Gill, are your papers. By the way, Izette found this among your things and decided it would come in handy. That scoundrel Goujon wrote it. Executive Council—bah!”

  I remembered sitting in Goujon’s Tuileries Palace office, praying against all hope that this note was a reprieve for André.

  “It should get the two of you by the barricades—I hope.”

  André was drawing off his boot. “You’ll see Manon to England,” he said.

  At his tone of level determination, anxiety prickled on me.

  Sir Robert said, “You aren’t making yourself clear.”

  André replied, “Do you honestly think I’d leave you without identification? I’ve been a deputy too long not to know what that means.”

  Sir Robert’s chuckle made a lark of danger. “I’m an Englishman,” he said.

  “That doesn’t make you immune to punishment—if you break our laws. And having identification at all times is the law.”

  “I know you rebel colonists don’t think much of good King George. But he runs a most efficient government. Prime Minister Pitt’s already dispatched duplicates.”

  André’s dark brows drew together. By now I recognized his brief, hot spurts of temper as part of his royal inheritance. “I take no gifts,” he said. “I endanger no man.”

  My throat was dry. André had the strength of the decent, and was fully capable of remaining here to die that Sir Robert be safe. “André—” I started.

  He cut me off. “This is between Sir Robert and me.”

  Sir Robert’s enthusiasm had changed to gravity. “You saw Izette breathe her last. Do you believe the poor girl died that Manon should leave France with me, when you’re the only man she ever loved? Does the shedding of life blood mean so little to you as that?”

  Sir Robert inadvertently had touched André’s deepest faith, his belief in the sanctity of human life.

  In the moment that André wavered, Sir Robert said, “The fresh papers will be here tomorrow, the next day at the latest.”

  “I’ll wait then.”

  “By God, man, time is of the essence! Each minute counts. In a matter of hours the Duc de la Concorde will be the most hunted man in Paris—and even with these, you aren’t clear of the country! Does the girl’s sacrifice mean so little to you?”

  Slowly André began pulling on his boots.

  A minute later from the stables emerged a young English couple, he bewigged, she with a hood covering her hair. They walked a few steps to a rear entrance of the Hôtel des Anglais, emerging from the front door to the courtyard. A hired carriage waited.

  We halted at the barrier. The driver got down, slowly circling the light carriage, telling us the wait would be short since most people had remained within Paris, at the Place de la Révolution, to watch the National Razor shave royalty. We stayed inside. I didn’t dare glance at André. I feared he would change his mind. I feared a sentry might have been at the trial and would recognize us.

  Most of all, though, I feared that word of our escape had already reached the barriers. In a frenzy of impatience I pressed two fingers hard onto the aching eyelid that had been scratched by straw.

  A sentry thrust his mustachioed face in the window. “Papers?” he demanded.

  Silently we handed them to him.

  “Sir Robert Gill,” he read. “Where go you?”

  “Home to London,” André replied in English. “My purpose here is accomplished.”

  “And that purpose was?”

  “To bring me back as his wife,” I replied in French. “See? Lady Gill.”

  “Ah, a Frenchwoman.” The sentry stepped away to confer with two others and in a moment three faces pressed in the open window. The mustachioed sentry said, “Step outside, Citizeness.” He opened the door.

  Forcing myself to curb my impatience, I replied “Questioning is your duty to the Republic, Citizen Sentry, and I’m delighted to
oblige.” I held out my hand as if to let him help me down. Then, pausing, reached in my reticule.

  “Citizeness, others are waiting.”

  “A friend made this out for me … possibly, I’m not sure of course, but possibly it will assist you in identifying me.” Heart racing, hand steady, I held out Goujon’s letter.

  The mustachioed sentry unfolded it and read aloud, “‘Permit the bearer, female, age twenty-three, blond hair, green eyes, to pass this barrier. By order of Denis Goujon, Chairman, Executive Council.’”

  The sentries exchanged swift glances.

  My interrogator said. “Then you are a friend of Deputy Goujon?”

  “For many years. Do you know him, Citizen?”

  “Only by reputation, Citizeness.” Slamming the door, he saluted me with an expression of awed fear. “Proceed, driver,” he shouted. “Proceed!”

  We were hastened through the barrier.

  And we were galloping by little clusters of houses, the wind rushing around us. André reached to take my hand. He had fought for freedom, for equality, for bread that all might eat, and if this fight, through no fault of his, has lost all purity, it in no way diminishes him. I love him with all my heart, and I tell him so. The carriage rushes on, and soon it is night, and the dark countryside flies by us, tatters of dark clouds and the stars fly, André and I are flying, flying into the imponderable and unknown future.…

  Chapter Seventeen

  On the second day of April a breeze scudded white clouds across a bright blue sky. We had to hold our hats as we walked across the dock in Plymouth.

  “There she is,” André said, pointing to a large three-masted schooner flying the American colors. “The Joanna Lee, out of Charleston.”

  “No sane man—or woman—would set foot on that, my boy, much less travel aboard her for three months,” said Lady Gill.

  We had been in England six weeks, arriving on a foggy, chill night, immediately starting for Foxwarren. We wanted to see Jean-Pierre and await word from Sir Robert. After a week fraught with anxiety, Sir William Pitt had forwarded a letter. Sir Robert wrote in his large round hand that he was in excellent health, his identification papers had arrived, and he enclosed this quite interesting picture. It was a badly printed line drawing of a young woman holding a smoking pistol over a great bearded corpse. The caption read: “Beauteous Comtesse de Créqui as She Slays Perpetrator of September Massacres.” Sir Robert wrote that Marat and Robespierre, fearing a counterrevolution, needed someone to take full blame for the massacres. Goujon, dead, was the perfect scapegoat. And once again I was wrongly portrayed in the news sheets, this time as avenging heroine.