Revolution

by Jennifer Donnelly

  “Cool,” I say, smiling even harder. It makes my face hurt.

  “There’s going to be a dinner on Wednesday. At the Élysée Palace. You could come. If you wanted to,” Dad says.

  “Wow. Yeah. The only thing is, I’ve got a plane ticket for a flight on Sunday night. Remember?”

  “Oh. Right. Are you going to be finished with your outline by then?”

  “I am.”

  “And it’s going to be good?”

  “I think it is.”

  He nods, turns his attention back to his laptop. I do the same. Dad got home early tonight. We ate some takeout Thai food with Lili. Afterward, she went to work in her studio, and Dad and I took over the dining room table. Now he’s sitting at one end and I’m at the other. We’ve both been working quietly for hours. Not fighting. Which is good. All I have to do is get through tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday without another big blowup.

  I finish with the nose ring and decide to give Ludwig some green hair, too. It suits him. He’ll make a good visual in the intro. I’ve already extracted the measures I needed from the Allegretto of his seventh symphony and mashed them up with a chunk of the Stones’ “Paint It Black” to give an example of my premise. It nicely illustrates an A minor-E7/C-G7 parallel harmony. I also recorded myself on my cell phone’s camera, explaining how Malherbeau’s use of A minor in several of his earlier works likely influenced the Allegretto. I sent the clip to my e-mail and imported it to PowerPoint. The quality’s lacking a bit, but it’ll do to show Dad. When I get home, I’ll redo it on St. Anselm’s video equipment.

  I finish with Ludwig and log off. I’m beat. I’ve been working like mad ever since I talked Yves Bonnard into letting me back into the library. Begged him to let me in, actually, promising on my life that I’d be mindful of others and nondisruptive. I photographed Malherbeau’s papers all afternoon, came home, and started on my outline as soon as I finished dinner. I banged out a rough draft by eight, then worked on the introduction.

  I think I’m actually going to do this. I’m going to be done with both my outline and intro by tomorrow night—in plenty of time for Dad to read it and sign off.

  I tell him goodnight now, scoop up my stuff, and head to my room. As soon as I get there, I dump my bag out on my bed and paw through everything, searching for Virgil’s CD. I’ve been wanting to listen to it ever since he tossed it to me at the catacombs. When I got back here, I asked Lili if she had a CD player and she gave me an old Discman.

  I load the CD, hit play, and listen. A voice comes on, a lone man’s, singing what sounds like an African chant. The voice fades, drums come up, then lots of voices singing the same chant, like a hundred, and then Virgil comes in rapping. It’s good. Really good. Shivers-down-your-spine good.

  The next song’s about America, about a rapper promising to take it by storm. “Banloser” is on there, sounding different than it did the other night—a lot more polished. He’s got one called “I’m Shillin’” about selling out. And one called “Morning Light,” about watching the sun come up over Paris on the hill at Sacré-Coeur. I recognize it. He sang it to me last night.

  The rhymes are strong and the music’s even stronger. He’s got reggae guitar going in one. Seventies funk in another. Samples of American gospel. A sitar. A muezzin’s call. French schoolkids singing a nursery rhyme. Chinese violin. Songs with the whole world in them, just like he said.

  I grab my cell the second the CD ends. To call him and tell him how much I love his songs.

  “What!” he barks.

  “Um, hey. It’s me. Andi,” I say, a little uncertainly.

  “Hey. Hold on a minute.”

  I hear the sound of brakes squealing, then Virgil lets fly, telling some guy to do something to himself that isn’t physically possible.

  “Sorry,” he says to me.

  “Bad day at the office?”

  “The worst. This fu—this city is totally out of control tonight. Can I call you back? In half an hour?”

  “Sure. Yeah.”

  I hang up and stare at the ceiling, not sure what to do while I wait. I’m kind of hungry. It’s been hours since I had dinner. I could head to the kitchen. Eat some leftover pad thai. An orange. A piece of cheese. I could wash up and get ready for bed. Which might be a good idea, as tomorrow’s already Saturday and I still have a lot of work to do. I plan to visit Malherbeau’s house and take more pictures. And I have to get a second draft of the outline done.

  My eyes drift to my bed and the stuff I dumped all over it. The diary’s there, lying under my keys. I was not to die that night. That would have been a mercy. I was to be reborn, Alex wrote. Reborn as what? To do what?

  I want to keep reading, and I don’t. I’m curious, and I’m scared. I need to find out what happened to Alex, and to Louis-Charles, but what if it makes me crazy again? Like it did in the catacombs?

  I walk away from it and into the bathroom. It’s not the diary that caused the freak-out in the catacombs, I tell myself as I’m brushing my teeth. Because it can’t be. It’s a diary. Words on paper. That’s all. It was the Qwellify that did it. I have to face up to the fact that I’m taking too much, really and truly.

  I head back to my bedroom, pick the bottle up from the night table, and shake two pills out of it. I want to back the dosage down. I do, but I’m nervous about it. I’ve been pretty steady the last few days, pretty stable. As far as the sadness goes, at least. I’ve been seeing things, and hearing things, but I haven’t found myself standing at the edge of anything. Not the Seine and not anyone’s roof. I don’t want that darkness back. But I don’t want whispering skulls and shrieky puppets and old guys turning into young guys right before my eyes, either.

  I’m standing here, still trying to decide. An orange? Some cheese? Bed? The diary? Suicidal impulses or hallucinations? Two pills? Or one?

  I pop one Qwell and put the other back.

  I’ll have the diary, thank you. Straight up, please, and hold the crazy.

  41

  12 May 1795

  Only the hopeless love God.

  Have you ever seen a beautiful girl spend a second more at Mass than she must? Will a rich man kneel if there’s no one to see him?

  The ugly, the fat, the poor, and malodorous. Lepers dropping bits of themselves. The cheese-breathed and pock-faced. St-st-stutterers. Droolers and twitchers. Lunatics. The scrofulous. No one loves them, not even their mothers, yet they will tell you—with rapture in their voices—they will say, God loves me. Desperate for love, any love, even His meager offerings.

  You will ask why I did it. You will judge me. But only a saint would have done otherwise, and I am no saint.

  I was tired of His endless silence. I wanted noise. I wanted the hurricane swell of applause. Whistles and shouts and ringing bravos. The pattering of roses flung onto the stage.

  I did not want His cold love. I wanted human love—clasping, selfish, and hot. I wanted to smell the rank sweat of the men in the pit as they bellowed and stamped and the rich perfume of the high-priced whores in their boxes. I wanted fishwives to bare their breasts and merchants to throw their purses. I wanted love—reeking, drunken, hungry love.

  What player ever wanted less?

  This is how it was for me before. Before the devil looked my way. Before Orléans made me his own …

  I stood alone onstage at the shabby Theater Beaujolais, head down, picking at a callus on my palm. I’d escaped my uncle and his damned puppets to come here. I’d just given Audinot, the owner, lines from Juliet. It was good, my audition. So good that the prompter stopped eating. The stagehands stopped hammering. And up in the rigging, the lantern boy wept. But it didn’t matter. It never mattered.

  She is not beautiful, Audinot said. And she has no bosom.

  He didn’t even try to keep his voice down. I hated him for it.

  She recites well and her expression is most sensitive, said the lackey at his elbow.

  The parterre does not pay to see sensitive girls. Only pretty
ones, Audinot replied. He smiled at me, oily as a mackerel. Thank you, miss. Next!

  And this is how it would be after. In a year, perhaps two. When the revolution was over, the madness ended, the king back at Versailles. This is what Orléans promised me if I would do his bidding.…

  A summons would come from the National, addressed to Alexandre Paradis, for Alexandrine was no more. None mourned her, least of all me, for Alexandre made a far prettier boy than Alexandrine had a girl. I would be given small parts at first—servants and soldiers, fools and gravediggers. Then Chérubin in Figaro, and with it a good review. Orléans himself would see to it. Next I would do Shakespeare’s Tybalt. Claudio and Ferdinand. Then Damis in Tartuffe. Rodrigo in Le Cid. Until one night, I would stand in the glare of the footlights, applause breaking over me like thunder for my Romeo. There is stamping, clapping, shouting—and none of it paid for. A man is crushed in the pit. Women faint in the stalls. The next day, a critic writes that my naturalness rivals that of the great Talma himself. Another that my delivery is unmatched in the history of the theater. A third compares me to a young god.

  Though it is December, there are flowers in my dressing room. There are cakes and wine. A ring from Boehmer’s. Women and men come to stare at me as I wash off my paint. They press coins into my hand and kiss me. There are proposals of marriage. And of other things, too, but I’ve paid surly Benôit to protect me. He sits in a chair, one leg thrown over the arm. We pose as a pair of bloods and pay the ushers to put about stories of our wenching and fighting. And I, who have been hungry and cold, eat capon and sleep upon a feather bed.

  I tried to be goodly. I tried to be godly. But I got so tired of being ignored.

  Cry your grief to God. Howl to the heavens. Tear your shirt. Your hair. Your flesh. Gouge out your eyes. Carve out your heart. And what will you get from Him? Only silence. Indifference.

  But merely stand looking at the playbills, sighing because your name is not on them, and the devil himself appears at your elbow full of sympathy and suggestions.

  And that’s why I did it. Why I served him. Why I stayed.

  Because God loves us, but the devil takes an interest.

  13 May 1795

  The queen did not know me. I barely knew her. Only one year had passed since last I saw her, yet she had aged twenty. Her blond hair was turning white. There was a gauntness in her face and deep lines about her eyes.

  I was brought to her apartments by the Tuileries’ governor. He informed her that a new page to the dauphin had been appointed. She gave the man a disdainful glance and asked him about my family. He informed her that I was from good Republican stock, knew the Rights of Man and my duties, and turned on his heel.

  Majesty, it is I, Alex, I whispered, after he’d slammed the door behind him.

  She looked at me again. Her eyes widened. She smiled. I told her that I tried to get in to see Louis-Charles many, many times, but was always turned away. I told her I never gave up and though it had taken me a very long time, I’d finally found a way. I told her all these things, just as I’d been instructed.

  She called for Louis-Charles. He knew me right away. He ran to me, kissed me, and hung about my neck. I hugged him tightly, lifted him off the ground, and spun him around. The queen laughed to see us. His happiness was her own. From then on, we spent every day together. I did my duties—helping Louis-Charles rise and dress, attending him at meals, keeping his chambers tidy. But mostly, I sang songs for him, told him stories, played games, as I had at Versailles. He was lonely and so glad of my companionship.

  I love you, Alex, he told me as we played tin soldiers. You must never leave me again.

  I love you, too, Louis-Charles, I said. I won’t ever leave you again. I promise.

  I kept that promise. For love him I did. For nearly two years I spent almost every waking hour with him. Until he was taken from me. But I never left him. And I never will.

  Orléans bought me the position. He bribed the governor of the Tuileries. Told him I was his bastard son and that he wished to help me make my way in the world. He assured the man that I was a good Republican and a Jacobin. Like he himself.

  He wanted me to be his eyes and ears in the palace. To go where he—a revolutionary now, who had distanced himself from the king—could not and tell him all I discovered. What did the king do that day? Whom did he receive? To whom did the queen write? Who tutored the dauphin? Did any send him gifts? Rumors swirled about Paris—whispers of counterrevolution, of foreign intrigues, of plots to liberate the king.

  I was to be Orléans’ spy.

  Why me? I asked him the night he took me to his rooms. Why do you not get a boy to do boy’s work?

  I have, he said, three times over. The first—a stable boy—got a maid with child. The second—a footman—joined the army because he liked the uniform better. The third—a cook—was killed in a brawl. I need a boy who thinks with his big head, not his little one. Since they do not exist, I have fashioned my own.

  He had watched me all along. At Versailles, cavorting for Louis-Charles in my cap and britches. At the Palais, giving out Hamlet and Romeo. I, I myself, had given him the idea.

  Do this for me, he said. Do it well, and when I no longer have need of you, I will put you onstage. At the National. The Opéra.

  I was not quite the fool he thought I was.

  I will never be on a Paris stage, I said, and well you know it. I am too plain to play Juliet or Iphigénie. And too good to play chambermaids.

  Then play Romeo. Benedick. Philinte. You can do it. Have you not done it a hundred times? Nightly at the Palais-Royal?

  This was a novel idea. I thought on it, then said, And if I will not do this thing?

  Then you will go to prison. Four guards saw you take my purse. Have you forgotten my promise of the Ste-Pélagie?

  Promise is it? I said, snorting. I call it threat.

  Orléans smiled. I have no need of threats, he said.

  Something bloomed inside me then—a black and fearsome dread. I did not want to be a spy, a telltale. I was worried my reports might somehow harm Louis-Charles and his family. But there was something else inside me, too, something far less noble, and oh, how his words fanned its fading embers.

  Orléans saw it in my face, he must have—some pale flicker of conscience warring with my ever-burning ambition—and hurried to damp it.

  Hear me, sparrow, he said. I mean the king no harm. He is my cousin, my blood. I wish only to help him. Your reports will aid me in this. If you tell me the Spanish ambassador has sent a tapestry to the queen or toys to the dauphin, I know there may be hope of aid for the king from Spain. Do you not see what occurs all around you? Even you cannot be so blind. The nobles have been toppled. The clergy, too. The revolutionaries will not stop there. It is the king’s turn next. Yes, the king.

  I wanted so much to believe him. To believe he meant to do good. To believe I did.

  But the king has his people’s love again, I said, testing him. He went to the Assembly last winter. He made an oath there to defend liberty. He promised to support the constitution. He went to the Celebration of Unity in July and swore to uphold the decrees of the Assembly. All of Paris was there and all saw him do it.

  Not all of Paris heard him, Orléans said. I did. I heard the words stick in his throat. It is not enough, the oaths he made. For Roland, yes. For Desmoulins and Danton. But not for Robespierre. He is the most dangerous sort of man, Robespierre—one who will do good at any cost. The king is in great danger, and his family with him. That is why you must do this. To help me help him. To help all of them. There may yet be time to avert disaster.

  I was still suspicious. You do not really care what happens to the king, I said. You wish to trade on the love I bear Louis-Charles. To use that love for your own ends. Whatever they may be.

  How he laughed then. Ah, sparrow, tell yourself that if you must, he said. It is an easier thing than the truth.

  And pray, sir, what is that?

  Tha
t I trade upon one thing, and one thing only—the love you bear yourself.

  14 May 1795

  I went back to my family’s room to tell them I was leaving, that I’d found employment with the Duc d’ Orléans. Theatrical work, I said. It was not completely a lie.

  My grandmother was against it. She knew what Orléans was. He will ruin her, she said. Perhaps he already has.

  Ruin her? my uncle snorted. For what? Marriage? What man would have her? She is no beauty and we have no money. She is better off with him and so are we.

  I looked at them. At my thin brothers. At my weary mother. I loved them in my way, I did. But I was hungry. And so were they.

  Orléans had given me a room high above his own. He had given me money with which to keep myself. I put most of it in my mother’s hands, kissed her goodbye, and left. Some months later, I heard my grandmother had died. I heard that my father had staged a play that mocked the new tyrant, Robespierre. An order was given for his arrest and they all fled to London.

  That is what I heard. I do not know for certain. I never saw any of them again.