Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  What trip to Paris later this year? Was Leo coming back with Nina?

  “What’s the name of that town?” said Susanna Rose. “Help me. My memory’s going. Somewhere near Lyons? It was the staging place for the deportation of all those children. And the commemorative plaque doesn’t even mention the fact that the kids were Jewish.”

  “Izieu,” said Leo.

  “That’s right,” said Susanna Rose. “That’s right. Izieu.”

  This was vile. Vile! Nina couldn’t believe it! Using the deportation of the French Jews as a sexual come-on!

  Yet everything they were saying was true. And was it any more outrageous than Nina standing in this vast hall from which so many thousands of wretched innocents were dispatched to their deaths and having a jealous fit because her boyfriend was flirting? No wonder every new day presented a new ontological challenge as you kept trying to see the world as it really was, while the world’s face kept changing, and sex kept you from seeing at all, kept your eyes from focusing unless you had the beloved beside you, covering you with kisses and signs of physical devotion.

  What did Nina expect to happen now? Did she for one moment imagine that Leo would leave her for Susanna Rose, exchange her right here in the prison like a worn-out pair of sneakers? I think I’ll wear the new ones, you can wrap up the old ones, or better yet, if you wouldn’t mind, just toss them in the trash. Anyone but the deeply disturbed would predict that they would have their little conversation, take their little guided tour, and return to their separate lives: Susanna Rose to her daughter and her play, Leo to his magazines and Nina.

  Leo and Nina would never mention this. And when he wrote about the Conciergerie for Allo! it would not be as the place where he’d flirted shamelessly with a fellow tourist, but as the historic landmark in which Marie Antoinette spent her historic last night on earth.

  “Allons,” said the tour guide, and everyone nervously regrouped as she shepherded them from the huge reception-detention hall into a corridor that was slightly less dark but exceedingly narrow. Not so narrow, Nina hoped, that Leo would get claustrophobic, though she assumed he’d keep it together around Susanna Rose and the others.

  The passage was only wide enough for two. Suppose Leo and Susanna Rose paired off and left Nina to tag behind, like their duenna, their chaperone, like Eurydice again, this time with Orpheus walking ahead to chat up another woman.

  Susanna Rose left off her desultory conversation with Leo and peered anxiously over the heads of the crowd. As if summoned, her daughter sidled up and burrowed under her arm.

  “On the third of Thermidor,” said the guide, “one hundred and thirty-eight prisoners…”

  “Did you hear what the guide said before?” Isadora asked.

  “What, dear?” said Susanna Ross.

  “They guillotined this woman? And after they cut off her head, they picked it out of the basket and one of the jailers smacked her face? Slap slap.” The little girl backhanded the air.

  “Please, dear,” said Susanna Rose. She and the child skipped off, arm in arm, down the hall.

  “Wait!” Leo called after them, and they paused for him to catch up. “Remember Orpheus! The one rule is: Don’t look back.” Leo’s voice was low and confiding, but even so, Nina heard.

  They had made it through the corridor and were walking along a portico and had just picked up speed when the guide stopped short and once more raised her hand.

  “The so-called rue de Paris. Four hundred and fifty meters long, it was for many prisoners the last march to the guillotine. During the worst of the Terror, the condemned were obliged to walk past as many as five hundred prisoners sleeping on the rue de Paris, as well as a miniature city of errand boys, barbers, cooks, vendors, nurses, and lawyers who lived off the prisoners housed here. At one point there were two hundred and sixty lawyers for half that many prisoners.”

  The tourists laughed harshly, placatingly, but the numbers were not to be stopped. Numbers were their guide’s true subject, the statistics of the dead. Meticulous records had been kept, all very proper and bureaucratic.

  They passed a guillotine blade no bigger than a meat cleaver. Were human heads smaller then? The rusty iron inspired the guide to a new barrage of numerals, the precise dimensions and weight of the axe, the bills for daily corpse removal, carting, and disposal.

  It was perfect for “Paris Death Trip.” But Leo seemed to have forgotten the article he was researching. At that moment, he wasn’t brooding on death. Which was a blessing…or was it? Which was preferable, sex or death, if the sex was with someone else, if he wanted Susanna Rose…?

  “Through that door,” said the guide, “was the prison kitchen. The wealthiest prisoners brought their own cooks, but in some cases that was denied. For example, in the case of Danton, the great orator and cruel revolutionary leader who sent so many innocents to the guillotine…”

  “Bullshit,” Susanna Rose said, just loud enough for Leo and Nina—but not the guide—to hear.

  “Hardly bullshit,” Leo said. “The guy was heavy-duty.”

  “With Marie Antoinette,” the guide continued, “known during her imprisonment here as the Widow Capet, there were very rigid controls on what the prisoner could eat. A servant girl tried to make the Queen some unsalted chicken broth. But that was not permitted.”

  The college students shook their heads. Now they saw how bad this was. No Big Macs, no French fries, no Mom’s chicken soup…

  “Animals,” said the man who didn’t know about French kissing.

  “Relax, hon,” said his wife.

  At last they reached a bottleneck, a tunnel-like cul-de-sac they had to venture in and out of to see Marie Antoinette’s cell. Moving in an orderly line, they approached the opening where they waited for the others to inspect the Queen’s last room and to come back through the corridor and pop out like champagne corks. Couldn’t the Revolution have foreseen this eventuality and housed the Widow Capet in a cell with a separate entrance and exit so that a line of tourists could have filed past in one direction?

  Once more, Leo and Nina separated from the group. Susanna Rose and Isadora also stopped, a short distance ahead.

  “When they took the Queen’s son away,” Susanna Rose told Isadora, “when they came for the little Dauphin, Marie Antoinette kissed him and told him to be very brave. And then she let him go. But when they tried to take her daughter, the beautiful little Princess, the Queen grabbed her and wouldn’t give her up and offered to die for her child.”

  “What happened then?” breathed Isadora.

  “They took the Princess anyway.”

  “And after that?”

  “Well, er, the mommy died, and the little girl lived.”

  Though Susanna Rose directed this intensely at Isadora, there was an aspect of theater about it, an address to a larger crowd as she labored to entrance her daughter and Leo, both at once. Nina recalled how, when they’d sat on the bench and Leo described the royal family’s failed escape attempt, his voice had risen to involve Susanna Rose and her daughter.

  A group of college kids emerged from the corridor, looking chastened and perturbed, blinking until their bland faces set like individual puddings. Leo held Nina back and let Susanna Rose and Isadora precede them to see the Queen’s cell.

  In their absence, Leo and Nina could hardly look at each other. It was as if the two of them were rejected spouses whose more attractive partners had just run off together.

  Finally Leo said, “Did you hear that crap? That was pure feminist bullshit! I’ll bet that’s not what happened. No one in those times gave a flying fuck about little princesses, Marie Antoinette included. It was the Prince—the royal heir—she tried to save, the Prince she offered to trade her life for. What’s her name, Susanna Rose, was just jacking that kid around, inventing some elaborate psychodrama so that poor girl would believe that her mother would gladly die for her, too.”

  Leo’s handsome jaw clenched. Why was he so enraged? Was he jealous of Isadora?
Otherwise, what did he care if a woman told a harmless lie about a long-dead mother and daughter?

  And what did Leo imagine that everyone was doing: he and Nina, Susanna Rose, her daughter, the tour guide, and her group? Drifting like a pack of zombies around this monstrous prison, madly pushing each other’s buttons, trying to distort or manipulate their listeners’ sense of the world with appalling statistics and selected snippets of information? And how was that different from people everywhere since the beginning of time, from the revolutionaries who’d spread lying gossip about Marie Antoinette, from the TV stations showing documentaries intended to persuade you that peasant couples killing their pigs and making their blood sausage would lose their whole way of life if France allowed foreign workers and oranges from Morocco?

  And what about Leo, the mind-control king! What had he thought he was doing, preparing Nina to adore the disgusting Hotel Danton? Where had he gotten his information? From that bigoted slut, Madame Cordier? Who in turn had wanted Nina to know some important facts about Leo.

  And now Susanna Rose and Isadora reappeared with staring eyes and nearly identical looks of exaltation and distress. Both seemed on the verge of tears, and when Leo said, “How was it?” Susanna Rose held up one hand and steered her daughter past them.

  At last it was Leo and Nina’s turn to peek in at Marie Antoinette’s cell. Two mannequins shared the cramped room with a cot, a table, a washbasin, a pen, an inkwell, and paper. In a black dress and bonnet, the Queen sat in a woven rush chair with an ebony rosary pinched between her hinged fingers. Diagonally across, a statue in a military jacket and breeches stared absently through the glass, standing guard over empty space.

  Marie Antoinette was meant to look either composed or dejected, Nina couldn’t tell which. It wasn’t a lifelike dummy. There was no illusion of suspended motion, no waxy skin seeming to breathe. Just two grimy mannequins behind a dusty window.

  The Marie Antoinette dummy was wearing plum-colored suede shoes. Somehow Nina knew that these same shoes had belonged to the Queen. This was the only touching detail: the idea that she had kept those shoes until the end, an extreme example of women’s faith in the magic of shoes to change their luck and save them.

  What had so transformed the college students that they’d come out blinking like possums? What on earth could have moved Susanna Rose and Isadora too profoundly to speak? For Nina, seeing the tableau had reduced the tragedy of Marie Antoinette’s final days to moth-eaten taxidermy.

  Nina and Leo trudged out of the corridor to find that they were alone; their so-called guide and her ragtag band had wandered ahead and left them. For a couple that hadn’t wanted to take the tour, they were unreasonably disturbed by the prospect of being left behind. Hurrying, they caught up with the group in a pebbled courtyard landscaped with a few patches of dead grass and a scrawny tree beside a dry fountain and a stone trough.

  “La cour des femmes. The courtyard of the women,” said the guide. “Here the female prisoners came to wash their linens and groom themselves in whatever pitiful fashion they could manage. Sometimes two hundred women were packed into this yard. And there, behind that iron grill, the male prisoners gathered to watch. Even at the hour of their death, they took time for harmless flirtation.”

  Well, speaking of flirtation, here was Susanna Rose again, dragging Isadora behind her as she zoomed over to Leo.

  “Did you see it?” Susanna Rose asked breathlessly.

  “See what?” Leo asked.

  “Danton’s cell,” she said.

  “Marie Antoinette’s,” corrected Leo.

  “No, no,” said Susanna Rose. “Not that. Not those stupid dummies. You were meant to keep going past the Marie Antoinette room and on to Danton’s cell. It was unbelievably powerful. Really incredibly moving.”

  “We must have missed it,” Nina said glumly. “We didn’t know there was anything beyond—”

  Leo wheeled on her in silent fury. Missing something by accident was Leo’s personal hell, worse than capricious changes of plans, worse than someone else having an experience he envied.

  The guide’s voice dropped and faltered as she reeled off one last list of statistics: deaths from starvation, malnutrition, disease, from torture and execution. Probably her job required that she offer the facts of French history without praise or blame, free from partisan sympathies for Jacobins or Girondins, above pity for the victims or censure for their killers. But that could hardly be possible after spending day after day in this prison, serving out a sentence not unlike that of the Revolution’s casualties, though with the hope of parole every evening, Sundays, and national holidays. The staggering numbers were her way of giving her story emotional content, of adding moral judgment to a presentation that was meant to be factual, unimpassioned, and historically objective.

  They left the courtyard for another large stone hall, a shade less dark than the others. The show was over. The house lights had come up. The guide stood near the far door, expressionless and glazed over. She wasn’t even going to tell them what this room was for.

  Before she’d finished thanking them for their time and attention, the college students were tripping over each other in their rush to escape. The other tourists trudged past, mumbling “merci merci,” without looking at the guide, their faces frozen in the abashed social smiles exchanged by flight attendants and passengers filing gratefully from an airplane.

  Leo and Nina, Susanna Rose and Isadora paused to thank the guide. Had they become a group of four? Oh, please, God, no, prayed Nina. Don’t let anyone suggest that Nina and Leo and their new best friends go out for a drink or a meal.

  “Plus ça change,” said Leo.

  “Pardon?” The guide’s moist eyes found Leo.

  “There are always massacres,” Leo said. “What happened here was simply standard operating procedure. Actually quite neat and orderly compared with what was going on in the rest of Paris. Isn’t it true, Madame, that no one knows how many people were hacked to death in the streets?”

  The guide knew Leo was talking to her. She wanted to be polite but couldn’t control her yearning gaze after the departing tourists.

  Leo went on. “The mobs were grabbing everyone in nice clothes or a fancy hat, bludgeoning and dismembering them, cutting out their hearts and stuffing their testicles in their mouths, while people danced on the corpses, up to their ankles in blood, and for months the whole city reeked of rotting flesh. That was only two hundred years ago. Hardly prehistory, right? But now everyone acts so shocked when it happens in Europe, Bosnia, Russia. And by the form it takes in our country: some nut goes into a fast food joint and blows away fifty kids…”

  Nina, Susanna Rose, Isadora, the guide—one by one they forgot themselves and let their jaws go slack as Leo raved on. Finally, he ran out of steam. No one said a word. A low thrumming could be heard from the depths of the prison, like the sound of the ocean trapped inside a shell.

  A long time passed. Then Susanna Rose said, “God, you’re right. I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  What was the little girl making of all this? And the guide? Was she marveling that this addled American was comparing the glorious Revolution to a shoot-out in a McDonald’s? None of them could have known what Nina was thinking about: Leo’s earlier speech that day on the subject of bloody mass murder.

  That afternoon, at the hotel, they’d just finished their sandwiches and were satisfied and sleepy from lunch and the bottle of good wine. Leo started talking about the fact that their hotel had once been a famous abbey. Not just a famous abbey, but the site of a famous slaughter, the massacre of more than fifty priests during the Revolution. A mob had dragged them from their cells and herded them into the courtyard—the same garden where now, in the warmer months, guests enjoyed their coffee, croissants, and jam. Several monks tried to hide in the cellar. But the killers dragged them out and hacked them into chunks. The courtyard was littered with body parts, the paving stones slick with blood.

  Somehow this sto
ry had segued into Leo and Nina having sex. Not in some obvious corny way: the violence turning them on. It was all more accidental, less linear, less clear. Leo had fallen silent a moment, and something in their glance just caught, the way a sleeve or a lock of hair can snag on a button or coat hook.

  Leo had reached out and taken Nina’s legs and lifted them onto his lap. It was exciting in itself that he could do that if he wanted, the intimate hint of possession implicit in his freedom to move her around.

  At some point (they were kissing) Nina thought about the abbey, and it did make Leo’s kisses seem more caustic and sweet. It intensified her desire to have so much pleasure in a place that had seen so much pain. Sex obliterated all that, along with everything else: the history of the hotel, Nina and Leo’s past, the room, the pillows, the cool crisp sheets, time, everything but their bodies. All five senses were distilled into one molten drop of sensation. Then Nina was outside herself. Absent. Visiting Cathedrals.

  You had to trust someone to let yourself get to that place where you were so wide open, so dangerously unprotected that anyone could sneak up on you and bop you over the head with a mallet. You could wind up like the French pigs, let’s say the Auvergne pig, lumbering over for apples and love and taking a bullet instead. The farmer’s wife’s voice had been so musical as she sang out her darling pig’s name. “Mizu mizu mizu,” she had called. Nina could hear it still.

  And what if no one killed the pig but just tortured it awhile, alternately stroking and cuffing it, making it behave one way, then changing the rules completely. The poor pig would go mad, like Camille Claudel, better off in the nuthouse, or like Nina, who chose to think of herself as a sensible person even as she drifted through an unreliable world that might transform its whole appearance at any given moment, depending on what Leo said, and if she thought he loved her.

  A rubbery snap of awareness recalled Nina to herself. How amazing that she was here—not in their room, in bed with Leo, but in the vast dark chilly hall of the Revolutionary Prison.