by Hunter, Seth
Le Mulet expressed the hope that the rain would not be a problem.
“Why should it be?” Imlay demanded tensely. “We shall be under the ground.”
“The catacombs connect with the sewers at several points,” Le Mulet informed him, wearily, as if it was something he should have known, “and in heavy rain there is sometimes a flood. Especially if the river is high.”
Nathan looked up from loading his pistols. If there was a flood he wondered if he would get his money back. He rather doubted it.
He was still suspicious that the whole affair was a put-up job to cheat him—or rather the British government—of their treasure. Even the rain might be a part of it.
Imlay consulted his watch by the light of the lantern hanging from the beam above his head.
“Flood or not,” he said, “it is surely time we made a move.”
Imlay had explained the plan.
Le Mulet’s men had cleared the rocks from the stair above the Black Chapel and ensured that the door to the old theatre—now the prison store—was not locked. Imlay, Nathan, Le Mulet and several of his men would wait there until a few minutes before seven o’clock. At that hour the prisoners were due to be escorted into the inner courtyard, directly outside the store, to board the coaches procured for their journey to the Palais de Justice. At which point, Le Mulet’s gang would emerge from the store, overcome the guards and lead the prisoners back the way they had come.
Danton would be escorted directly to the Cordeliers Club where he would declare an insurrection. The people of the old Cordeliers and Saint-Antoine districts had been prepared. All they waited upon was the sound of the tocsin and the news that Danton was free.
That simple. The best plans, in Nathan’s experience, usually were.
If they had any basis in reality.
There was no way of knowing if the arrangements Imlay claimed to have made were a piece of theatre and that Le Mulet was playing a leading part. No way of knowing, for that matter if the Black Chapel lay beneath the Luxembourg palace or the Comédie-Française.
This was the main reason Nathan had insisted on accompanying Imlay on the enterprise, though a certain spirit of adventure also played its part. He had never before assisted in a jailbreak and this, if successful, would make history.
“Very well,” said Le Mulet, “let us be on our way.”
He pulled an oilskin over his head and lurched out into the rain. At once a number of other figures emerged from the various sheds and workshops scattered around the sides of the quarry, among them a diminutive figure that must be Bulbeau. They congregated in a sodden group around the shaft, water streaming from their waterproofs: seven men, Nathan counted, besides himself and Imlay. They tugged off the tarpaulin cover to reveal the tripod and its iron wheel, the bucket dangling above the black hole. Four of them inserted the wooden spokes into the windlass and prepared to take the strain when the brake was released.
“After you,” said Le Mulet to Imlay with a nod towards the cage.
Then the first shot rang out.
For a moment no one reacted. It might have been thunder, especially as there was an impression of lightning.
Then came the volley.
At least two shots struck the iron bucket with a ringing double clang like the opening chords of a demon drummer. Others splashed into the mud at their feet. Two found their targets in the huddled knot of men.
They scattered right and left but not before Nathan glimpsed the snarling face of Bulbeau thrust towards him in the rain and heard his angry cry: “Betrayed!”
Nathan and Imlay reached the door of the forge together and hurled themselves over the threshold. Flashes and bangs. A long splinter of wood torn away from the door lintel and something whining away across the interior of the forge. Nathan pressed his eye against a hole in the wall, saw two prone figures in the mud beside the deserted scaffold and the rain lashing down. Another crash of musketry and he flinched away and then put his eye once more to the crack and saw the long line of figures on top of the limestone cliff. There must have been over a hundred of them. He checked his pistols. Too long a shot for the soldiers but they might save him from Bulbeau. Where was he? He squinted around the site just as two figures broke cover: one squat, the other short—Le Mulet and Bulbeau. Others behind and from other buildings, firing as they ran at the men on the cliff. One went down, writhing in the mud.
Men at the windlass and Le Mulet waving his arms, shouting instructions. He and Bulbeau jumped into the cage and the others began to lower it down the shaft. Another volley from the ridge and sparks flew from the wheel. A man fell at the windlass and another leapt to take his place. You could not fault their loyalty for they were sitting targets in the bottom of the quarry. But the shooting was wild, very wild—or else the rain had soaked the powder and the guns were misfiring. But then two more men were down and the rest began to run for the cover of the buildings.
“The shaft,” yelled Imlay and darted forward into the rain.
It was a moment before Nathan understood, another before he decided to follow.
He was halfway there when he heard the trumpet. The trumpet and something like the thunder of hooves. He twisted round as he ran, stumbled and fell and looked up to see a sight to remember the rest of his life, long or short: a cavalry charge viewed from a position directly in its path. Then he was up and running. Another volley from the ridge, kicking up the mud at his feet and the wind of a shot past his ear. Imlay leapt and grabbed the cable, whirling round with his coat-tails flying, like a boy on a swing, and then he was gone. Nathan heard the horses bearing down on him; turned and fired his pistol. A trooper came straight at him slashing down with his sabre and Nathan leapt directly into the path of the horse and went flying backwards, all the wind knocked out of him, a sharp brutal pain in his chest and then a crack on the head that plunged him into a world of darkness as deep and as black as the Empire of the Dead.
Chapter 31
the Children of the Revolution
With a rising sense of panic Sara scanned the crowded courtroom for the faces of her friends. Nathan had gone off with Imlay the night before on some mysterious errand he clearly did not wish to discuss with her. All being well I will see you in the morning, he had said. But he had not come back to the house and he was not here in the courtroom. Nor was Imlay. She could not even see Lucille.
They fetched up the prisoners. Danton was on his feet almost at once but he looked terrible. His massive form was swaying in the dock; his great voice a harsh croak. For three days he had fought them but now he was finished and everyone knew it.
And Fouquier stood to deliver the coup de grâce.
“I have urgent information to lay before the court,” he began.
Astonished, Sara heard the name of Lucille Desmoulins . . . Why was he naming Lucille? She strained to hear what he was saying for though the court was silent for once, his voice seemed to be filtered through some thick distorting mask.
“Agents of a foreign power in concert with Lucille Desmoulins and others . . . plotting to free the prisoners from the Luxembourg . . . to raise an armed riot inside the Convention and assassinate members of the Committee of Public Safety . . .”
It took a moment to sink in. Even the judge and jury appeared amazed. Then a single anguished cry from Camille: “They are trying to murder my wife!”
And then uproar.
Most of the defendants were on their feet shouting to be heard, Danton’s harsh croak rising above them, pointing at the bench: “Murderers. See them. They have hounded us to our deaths.”
Camille was trying to climb out of the dock and Danton and Lacroix holding him back until he collapsed between them, a sobbing bundle of rage and despair. And Herman ringing his bell and Fouquier waiting for the din to subside and then reading out in his dry, deathly tones the emergency decre
e of the Convention:
“In response to the threat to national security the President shall use every means that the law allows to make his authority and the authority of the Revolutionary Tribunal respected . . . All persons accused of conspiracy who shall resist or insult the national justice shall be outlawed and shall receive judgement without any further proceedings.”
Danton was still on his feet, still demanding witnesses for the defence, but he had almost lost his voice and he was tugging at the stock around his throat as if it was a rope strangling him.
And Sara caught sight of two faces she knew: Vadier and the artist David, both members of the Police Committee, leaning on the back of the bench where the jury sat and looking towards Danton and laughing.
“Your rights, Danton, are in abeyance.” She heard the voice of the President, Herman, exultant in victory. He turned to the jury: “Have you heard enough?”
One of them stood. “Yes, we have heard enough.”
“Then the trial is closed.”
The mob was surging towards the doors, trying to get out and Sara thought there must be some hope of a rescue. The prisoners would have to be taken back to the Conciergerie and from there to the Place de la Révolution. Half the number that had crowded into the court to voice their support would be enough to free them.
Camille was on his feet waving a bunch of papers. She heard his voice with no trace of a stammer for once.
“I have not yet read my statement. I have been here three days and you have not heard my defence. I demand to be permitted to read my statement to the court. You cannot condemn people without hearing their defence . . .”
Herman said something Sara did not catch and then Camille threw the papers at him. They sailed like a dart across the courtroom and with surprising accuracy. The judge ducked so violently his hat fell off and the bunch of papers fell apart in the space behind him, floating separately to the courtroom floor. Before they had landed Fouquier was on his feet shouting, no longer calm or impassive, but the flecks of spit plainly to be seen in the light from the windows: “The prisoners have insulted national justice. Under the terms of the decree they may now be removed from the court.”
Herman putting his hat back on and ringing his bell more in a bid to recover his lost dignity than in any hope of imposing order.
“The jury will retire to consider its verdict. Remove the prisoners.”
There was a fight going on in the dock. The guards were trying to get the prisoners out and Camille was trying to stay. One of them was pulling at his long hair and then they knocked him down. The last Sara saw before she was borne back by the tide of bodies was his limp form being carried down to the cells.
She did not hear the verdict. By then it was impossible to get back into the court and she was carried in the surge of spectators across Pont Neuf to line the route along the Rue Honoré. She heard later that Fouquier had already told the executioner, Sanson, to bring three charrettes to the Conciergerie. She also heard that they did not bother to bring the prisoners back into the court and that the sentence of death was read out to them in the prison while Sanson’s men were cutting their hair. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and she was still looking for Nathan’s face in the crowd.
She joined the great tide of people flowing across the bridges from the Île de la Cite. She was still convinced they would storm the convoy. That was why she stayed with them; that was how she saw what she saw. It was inconceivable to her that the sans-culottes who had cheered Danton’s every word in court would just stand idly by and watch him die, much less cheer his executioners. But when they reached the Rue Honoré she found the National Guard lining the route forcing the crowd into the sides of the road. When the death carts came, hundreds tried to follow them, pushing and shoving their way along the narrow gap between the guards and the walls. It was impossible to stay in one place even if you wanted to. Sara went with the flow.
For at least part of the time she was in that section of the crowd moving in line with the charrettes and she would rise herself up to catch a glimpse of the prisoners, then lose them in the froth of heads and bodies. Later, she was not sure what she had seen for herself or what she had imagined seeing from the descriptions of others or read about in the press. She was sure she had seen Danton standing in the front of the cart like a primitive god: a giant figurehead with his arms tied behind his back and his shirt open to his chest, his great head unbowed, his expression defiant, the lips curled in what could have been a mocking smile or a sneer—you never knew with that mouth. But it was the same image as that captured by David who had once been his friend and who now managed to make a sketch of him in that immense crush of bodies; a last sketch: to record the death of Danton for history.
She definitely saw Camille, his shirt ripped from his back in the fight with the guards and wrapped like a ragged shawl around his shoulders exposing his thin, pale body, his face bruised and bleeding.
“I am thirty-three,” he had told the court, “the same age as the sans-culotte Jesus Christ when they nailed him to the cross.”
He was trying to exhort the crowd, to use the same desperate magic that had moved the crowd to storm the Bastille five years before.
“People, they have lied to you, they are sacrificing your servants! My only crime is to have shed tears.”
But then he gave up and slumped against the rock that was Danton. And later she read that Danton, ever the realist, had told him: “Be quiet. Leave that vile rabble alone.”
So Danton must finally have realised that the crowds were there simply for the spectacle and that no one would try to save them. Or perhaps he had known it all along. That the Revolution would devour its own children.
Towards the end of the Rue Honoré they passed the house of the Duplays and the prisoners began to shout up at the shuttered windows and she heard the voice of Danton again, restored for one last roar, the great voice that had dominated the Convention:
“Vile Robespierre, you will follow me! Your house will be levelled and the ground it stands upon will be sown with salt.”
Then they were in the great square and there was the Machine rising above the ranks of soldiers, black against the sky and the blade gleaming blood red in the last rays of the setting sun.
Sara did not watch the executions. She looked up only once, towards the end, when it was Danton’s turn to die. She saw him mounting the scaffold unaided, his hands still tied behind him, turning for one last moment to face the sun. He said something to Sanson, the executioner, whom he must have known well when he was Minister for Justice. Then Sanson’s assistants took hold of him by the hands and feet, and big as he was threw him down on the wooden plank. Sara turned her head away then and put her hands to her face but the crowd had gone very quiet of a sudden and she heard three distinct thuds: one as the plank was run forward under the blade; one as the brace was clamped around his neck; and the last when the blade hit the block.
She heard later that he had told Sanson: “Show my head to the crowd; it’s worth a look.”
She was running. Back along the far side of the river. She must have crossed by the Pont de la Révolution but she had no memory of it. There were no crowds. In fact she did not remember any people at all though there must have been some. She ran until she could run no more and then she walked, hobbling in her wooden clogs, pressing her hand against the stitch in her side. She had started with some idea of going to the Rue Marat, to see if she could find Lucille, but instead she found herself in her own street outside her own front door.
It was open and the police were there. They were carrying things out in boxes. She was frightened but not entirely surprised. She thanked God she had sent Alex away with Hélène to Mary’s house in Neuilly. She had thought it would be safer for him out of Paris.
“What are you doing?” she cried. “Those are my things. What right have you to take my t
hings?”
Then she saw the sketches of Nathan with his penny whistle: the charcoals she had made after they had saved him from the mob.
“What do you want with those?” she demanded, snatching at them. Then a hand seized her violently by the hair and pulled her back, so violently she felt a snap in her neck.
He had a knot of hair in his hand and he pulled her close to him and shoved something in her face: a paper with some writing on it, too close for her to read.
“You are Sara Marie de la Tour d’Auvergne, ci-devant Countess of Turenne and you are under arrest.”
She glared up into his face.
“Who are you?” She tried to keep the fear out of her voice: to stay calm and in command.
“My name is Commissioner Gillet,” he said. “Of the Bureau of General Security.”
“And what is the charge?”
“Conspiracy. Correspondence with the enemy. Congress with foreign powers.” He smiled as if it did not matter. They had plenty to choose from, after all, or they could make do with nothing at all.
III—THERMIDOR
the Time of the Heat
Chapter 32
the Grand Châtelet
Night. But no stars through the narrow slit of a window and no light, not so much as a candle. Not that he needed one. He had nothing to read and he knew his present quarters as intimately as he wished, having paced them out some several hundred times over the past month or so. Two paces one way, not quite four the other. Bare stone walls. The ceiling a little over two feet above his head. The floor covered with straw, changed every few days. The only furniture a plain wooden pallet and a bucket.
He sat on the pallet and ran his fingers through his beard. He was shivering though he had known colder nights. It was, he thought, a form of panic. He had to fight it but it was difficult at times, especially at night when he felt himself losing all sense of time and space and self. He had to maintain a very tight discipline or he feared he would go mad. In the daylight he did physical exercises. He would leap up to the tiny window above his head and grasp the solitary iron bar and heave himself up until his chin was level with the ledge. There was nothing to see—just the blank wall of the building opposite—but it was something to do and it strengthened the muscles in his arms. He tried to maintain a routine. He even cleaned the walls using a little of the water they gave him for washing and a piece of rag given him by one of the guards. Or he would sketch on the walls using a straw with a sharp point and an ink made from a mixture of water and dirt and a little of the gruel they brought him.