Briefly, she hearkened back to the days when she would clean Gagnon’s closed room, shut away by his grief. And then, for just a moment, the oppressive heat in the room gave way to a single, sharp, cold breath piercing the center of her lungs, and she remembered long, cold winter nights, Gagnon’s warmth close by.
She ran her hands along the pages, amazed that mere printing on paper could bring her to this place. That it would move Marcel to such anger and passion, enough to capture her in its wake. Still—she knew nothing. None of it, the speeches, the songs. Hunger she understood. Nakedness and fear and poverty. But this? She held up a picture of a woman draped in a sash of three broad stripes, tricolore, and remembered the afternoon of celebration on the square, filthy hands grasping for swatches of red, blue, and white wool with the same eagerness as if such flags could be fed to their children.
Papers arranged, she closed the cover of the portfolio, only to have another small note fall from it. This was not like the others. Even with her roughened touch she knew the paper to be of fine quality. It was folded—and had been over and over, given the softness of the creases when she opened it. A useless gesture normally, as she had never mastered reading beyond a smattering of letters, but this she recognized.
“Renée?” She spoke aloud, as if her cousin could answer back in the printed words. She traced her finger along the name. The message, benign as it was, remained elusive. She saw only that her own name appeared nowhere, yet Marcel, for all this time, had been carrying this precious memento. What else was he hiding? “And why did you keep this?”
All this time, they’d made no attempt to find Renée. “We are in Paris, my love,” Marcel said every time she asked if they might not venture out that day. “She is not here. And if she were, how would we ever stumble across her?”
“Is Versailles so far away?” Her ignorance, genuine.
“In distance, not so much. But in ideology—far enough that we wouldn’t be welcome.”
She’d persisted, waiting for sweet moments between them to see if he wouldn’t take her to the palace, just for a glimpse. A peek at the opulence, a chance of catching her cousin’s eye. But as time passed, as Marcel became consumed with his secretive late-night gatherings, as the soot of the city ingrained itself into her pores, the thought of reunion with her pretty little cousin dropped away like any other abandoned task. Consumed with the fear for the child growing within her and the man growing away, she’d given Renée little thought in weeks.
And now, nothing more than a name scrolled before her, she roared back to life.
Carefully she folded the note, imagining the truth it carried—that he loved Renée still. Pushing away the feeling that the words were intimate scribblings for his eyes alone, she stuffed the note in her skirt pocket and shoved the portfolio into the sack, no longer caring if the papers within were unduly distressed. She snaked her hand under the mattress to retrieve the green vest. This was not a day to wear such a fine garment, not with the lingering residue of Jaunir’s touch. But, perhaps, someday . . .
Someday what? A reunion of cousins? An opportunity to present herself a lady? An event worth celebrating? Would she wear it as a bride?
Instead she ripped a strip of twine from the mattress seam and used it to tie the bag. The next tenant could wear the vest in good health.
A final glimpse around the room revealed nothing else to take. All erased, save for the bag she carried on her hip and what she and Marcel had created within her. She walked into the dark hall and down the narrow, waste-strewn steps, emerging under the white-hot summer sun. Immediately she lifted her hand to shield her eyes, but it was not the light that burned. The air smelled of smoke from unnatural fires, peppered with explosions. The shouts she heard from the window amplified a thousand times once she was down among them. She could feel the pounding of the footsteps in the street but could not bring her own to join them.
“What is happening? Somebody! What—?” But no one would respond. Men and women rushed by as if she were a phantom in the street, their eyes wild with unfulfilled violence. Laurette pressed herself against the wall, determined to wait until Marcel came back. Otherwise, how would they ever find each other? Then Jaunir’s voice sounded over the surrounding chaos, his threats renewed. The memory of his breath on her flesh cut through the heat; his words and her muffled screams loomed beyond the noise of the crowd.
“I told you! Slut—if I saw you!”
She didn’t wait to hear another word. Clutching her bundle, she took a single step into the street, and like a twig dropped into a running stream, was overtaken, swept along, propelled, her feet barely touching the ground. The crowd babbled nonsensically around her:
“La Bastille! It is ours!”
“Liberté!”
“Destruction stone by stone!”
She continued, stumbling, afraid to fall, knowing death by a thousand footfalls would follow.
Onward, and the shouts lost all vocabulary. A series of twists and turns through narrow ways and they burst through to a familiar image—la Bastille, the great, round stone structure. The prison. She’d walked here with Marcel often enough, heard him speak with disgust about the men hidden here. Locked away. Enemies of the state, held without trial. Voices for equality silenced by stone walls. “It will be their seat of murder,” he’d said.
At once, the forward momentum stopped, and Laurette found herself trapped within walls of foul-smelling flesh. Using her bundle as a shield, she pummeled her way through, working toward a place where a low wall bordered the path to the prison. She scrambled up on it and stood, waist high above the crowd, her stomach lurching at the sight. Men—women, too, but most were men—with crude weapons raised high above their heads. Guns, yes, but swords and axes and clubs rushing across the footbridge, disappearing through the door. Soldiers wearing tricolore sashes over dirty uniforms mingled with men wearing the same over their rags. They fired shots over the bridge and ran with bayonets poised to plunge into the hearts of still more soldiers on the other side. A burst of cannon fire, and those charging in were scattered, limbs torn.
This was not a thousand men. Nor a hundred. What she saw was a single body, driven by a single purpose, shouting with a single voice. Covered in soot and blood, their features disappeared. What vanity it would be to search for Marcel—to pass her eyes from face to face in hopes of landing on his familiar visage. But she knew he was here. Everything he ever said, his dreams and ambitions, led to this moment. “What use are words without action?”
Finally he had his bloodshed. All of his words sprang to violent life.
Surely he was over the bridge. Surely he was through the door, never wanting to be the one left back. Left out. And what would he be at the end of this day? Would he return to their room on the boulevard de la Madeleine? Would he walk up the stairs, expecting to find her there? Would he be covered with the blood of the battle raging before her, empty-handed and expecting her to listen to the details of the day? Had they not the misfortune of eviction, she would have sat perched on the end of the bed, listening to the heroic tale as he paced the room, proudly displaying his marks of war. Maybe a bullet wound in his shoulder. Or a cut to his beautiful face—something that would leave a scar and inspire a story.
But she didn’t want to hear this story. She didn’t want to watch it. As often as Marcel tried to explain, she couldn’t understand how rebellion would lead to food. How revolution would bring rain, how a new regime would end famine. These people, she knew, were hungry. Like her. Before her eyes, another fell in expedited death, a wound opening in his throat to issue blood.
“Liberté!”
“La mort à la Bastille!”
“La mort!”
The tone changed to one of celebration in a single, sustained note. She rose up on her toes, held one arm out for balance, and brought the other to shield her eyes and increase her focus on the scene ahead. A man, his clothing tattered and stained, held a pike before him. At the top of the pike, a sev
ered head, mouth gaping, gore trailing in the open air.
“Mon Dieu.” She clapped her hand over her mouth to stop the bile rising from her empty belly. No, not empty. Full—with a life too precious to look on such a thing.
Not wanting to be swallowed by the now-hysterical sea, Laurette walked the length of the wall, her back to the scene, retracing the route that led to a road that—if followed long enough—would take her to one of the city gates of Paris. The same that brought her in would take her out, and away. By the time the wall came to an end, so did the throng. She leapt down and found a much easier time working her way up the stream. Occasionally someone asked, “Did you see? The governor, I heard, lost his head in the battle.” This, taken for a joke, produced laughter from great, empty maws.
Laurette, though, said nothing. She kept her head down, her bundle close beside her, trying to retrace the steps that brought her into this city. She’d been riding a stolen horse, Marcel walking beside. Others, too, La Roche with his silent girth, and nameless companions who came and went according to the supply of stolen food. Those days held the promise of spring, of love. Who knew but the girl of that day wouldn’t have been in the middle of this fight? Other women were, wielding weapons alongside their men. Had Marcel told her that day to rise up, to charge forward and butcher an enemy, she might have obeyed without question. But today she was hungry, and hot, and lonely, and frightened.
Jaunir predicted she and the baby would be dead within a week, and nothing before had ever seemed so true. But they wouldn’t die in Paris, not in the shadow of the death she witnessed today.
Here, the road became wide and smooth. Abandoned, with the people engaged in, or hiding from, the great rebellion. As she walked, she became aware of short, shuffling steps coming up from behind. She did not turn, would not stop. The steps grew closer until, from the side of her eye, she caught sight of a flash of gold—soft golden curls, and then a pair of deep-brown eyes looking up from behind them.
“Allô?” Smoke and heat gripped her voice.
“Allô,” he said, keeping pace.
He was dressed, inexplicably, in clothing better suited to a prince. Clean tan breeches, white shirt—understandably not as clean—and a rich blue velvet vest. He wore shoes without stockings and had the bulk of his golden curls tied in a ribbon. In short, he was a beautiful boy, and had she not felt the soft touch of his hand taking hers, she might have thought him altogether a mirage.
“Where is your maman?”
“With God in heaven.” A statement of practical truth.
“And your papa?”
He pointed vaguely behind them. “He lost me.”
“Why are you following me?”
He thought for a moment and said, “Because you look like you’re going away. And I want to go away.”
No response could be more satisfactory. She squeezed his hand and led him.
L’épisode 23
Renée
* * *
VERSAILLES
* * *
“Everybody’s leaving,” Marie-Thérèse says. I am brushing her hair, careful not to let the bristles near her neck, as the red marks will last for days. She is not exaggerating. In these last weeks she has said good-bye to her aunt, uncle, cousins, and her beloved governess, Madame de Tourzel. Though without official permission, I’ve ingratiated myself into that abandoned post, as Madame Royale and I have always enjoyed each other’s company. I cannot offer the same in the ways of courtly instruction or education, but there is no mood for such.
Since the death of Louis-Joseph, she and Louis-Charles have taken to sleeping in their mother’s chambers, and the queen watches from her sofa—the very one on which she reclined the first day I entered this room. She has diminished to an almost unrecognizable degree, her hair faded with powder, her skin the same color—a wash of near-white, the same as the nightdress that encompasses her wasted frame.
She is drained in the same way her power has been drained, as her husband the king and the very idea of royalty and the rule of monarchy crumble like the stones ripped from the Bastille at the hands of bloodthirsty rebels. The day after the fall of the Bastille, Louis was paraded in front of the rebels and forced to listen to chants of “Vive la Révolution”—this from the same mouths that once called for the long life of the king, believing him to be some sort of god, that the issue of an heir embodied immortality.
The people are their own god now. Their desires, law. The intangible supremacy of royalty now displaced by an elected National Assembly. Young, healthy Louis-Charles will not be the heir to King Louis’s reign. That honor will go to the collective thoughts penned as la Déclaration des droits de l’homme. The Declaration of the Rights of Man. The philosophy declares first and foremost that all men are equal. Born equal and entitled to equal treatment. That prosperity will not hinge on birth or station. And that all men must live for the greater good of all other men.
When I hear these words, it’s as if I’m hearing memories of Gagnon. This was true Christianity, that men love one another. And if they could not love one another in Christ, they could be compelled to do so through law. He always said that, in the eyes of God, he and the king were brothers. Now, with la Déclaration, France herself made it so.
People of the ruling class have always lived within arm’s reach of the poor, with nothing more than an agreed-upon sense of superiority to insulate them from the physical touch of the masses. As the summer progresses, that barrier recedes, and the nobles who once lounged within the finery of Versailles scatter like a flock of geese at the sound of a gunshot.
“Well, they won’t make me leave, I can tell you.” The queen speaks as if making a proclamation to those who might influence such a decision. Instead, it is only her children, two remaining ladies, and I who attend. “They forced me to learn their stupid language, to hold my head high while they spread lies and vulgarities about me, to erase every memory of my childhood. They mock my family and my country now; after I have given everything to be their queen, they spit on it. Vive la Révolution.” She spat, muttering something in her native tongue. “I will not wear the tricolore. Do you understand, couturière? Never.”
I am wrapping a delicate sausage curl around my fingers, gently brushing it into smooth perfection, but her tone calls me to look up. She is flushed, her chest and cheeks the same shade as one of the three detested colors.
“Not in a rosette, not ribbon-trimmed, not in a hat, not a silk shoe buckle, not in jewels, or buttons, or any conceivable accessoire.”
“Oui, madame.”
“They’ll try, you know. They’ll try to use Bertin as their puppet. All those cowardly bureaucrats who wet themselves at the voice of the rabble will climb into her ear and whisper that I must appear to be sympathetic. Minister of Fashion, they call her. Always, always it is that the people grumble and my wardrobe pays the price. Not again. If she asks you to stitch me up in the garb of the rebellion, refuse.”
“Bien sûr, madame.” Though I hope to never have such a confrontation.
The family is called in to breakfast, and I am left to my own devices for a short while, which has become the time I spend with Bertrand. Since that awful day in July, when we all learned of the people’s capacity for violence, his duties have narrowed to the strict guard of the queen. Day and night he is at her side or in front of whatever door she is closed up behind. He is at attention while she sleeps, half a step behind her when she walks, keeping her always within his field of vision. From the day King Louis came back from his humiliating display, he—and all—have been urging her to take residence elsewhere. To take the children to Meudon, where the people of la république have no expectation of access. The palace at Versailles has always been open to all—not just the halls and galleries, but even the most intimate of spaces. More than once we have found people in all states of uncleanliness wandering through the royal family’s private chambers. “They used to be in awe,” Bertrand told me, “but now, nothing but contempt.”<
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But Meudon holds too many sad memories, and whether because of pride or foolhardy stubbornness, our queen refuses to leave this place, her home. Thus Bertrand’s duties have taken on a far greater sense of urgency. These hours of breakfast and dressing and consulting the agenda for the day mark the entirety of his freedom. Generously, he allows one half hour for me.
As usual, we walk out into the gardens. At the first opportunity of fresh air, he stops and fills his lungs, and I cannot help but think of the life he longs for. I have procured a bit of bread and fruit for our breakfast. We don’t venture far, as I do not want to waste a moment of his precious time walking to an ideal spot. But there is a bench, the shade of a tree, and a sense of isolation.
When he comes to sit beside me, I tell him of the queen’s tricolor decree. He laughs at my imitation, for I have perfected her tone and accent, delivered with the utmost respect and affection.
“It is a dangerous thing she’s asking you to do, Renée.”
“How so, dangerous? She has always had her own mind for such things.”
“And it has won her no favors. The people—our people, Renée—we cannot underestimate the anger. The power. You know they dismantled the Bastille with their bare hands. This is not a gathering of disgruntled citizens anymore. This is an army. A war.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Does she? Does she really think she can dismiss it all by refusing to acknowledge the colors of their flag?”
“She is our queen, Bertrand. Still.”
“A queen whose own army is divided. Every day, more soldiers have deserted. I’ll be fighting against my own brothers in arms. And they’ll have no hesitation in killing me.” He takes my face in his hand. “They’ll have no hesitation in killing anyone. You have to leave, Renée.”
The Seamstress Page 26
