Time of Terror

by Hunter, Seth

They turned her back and prodded her towards the carts.

  “My little boy,” she said. “I have to see my little boy.”

  And then she began to cry.

  Chapter 44

  the Theatre of the Tuileries

  Nathan joined the crowd outside the Convention waiting to take their place in the public gallery. It was already hot and the sun barely up. He watched the first of the delegates arriving. Perspiring faces, limp collars, frayed tempers. Make way, make way there, for the representatives of the people. A buzz of rumour. And a distant rumble of thunder. The tricolours drooping in the heat and a sky like molten lead, a burnished lid on the overcooked city. Paris playing up the drama, as usual.

  He had asked Imlay to send someone to the Palais de Justice to take down the list of those coming before the Tribunal. But if Paine was on it there was precious little Nathan could do to save him. Le Mulet said it was useless to attempt a rescue on the way to the guillotine; there were too many guards.

  The crowd started to shuffle forward and the guards checked their passes. Some were pulled aside and checked for weapons. Nathan had papers supplied by Le Mulet’s men. He was now a stonemason called Antoine Pomme. Anthony Apple. He thought they could have done better.

  He was a little more hopeful than he had been in the House of Wax—at least as far as the Convention was concerned. Robespierre appeared to have succeeded in uniting his enemies on the left: the surviving Dantonists in hatred, the terrorists in fear that they would be next on his list. And if the Mountain moved against him, the men of the Marsh would join them, for they had always both hated and feared him.

  But if the Marsh could be relied upon for once, the Street was a different matter. Even Le Mulet was not sure whose side the Street was on and he was closer to it than most.

  “No one’s side but its own,” was his terse comment on the politics of the mob. But he was puzzled by its mood. Sullen and brooding like the weather, rumbling with discontent, ready to erupt but wonderfully indecisive, trying to make its mind up.

  “It’s Saint-Antoine that really counts,” he told Nathan. “They can put twenty thousand men and women on the streets in a matter of minutes.”

  “I thought you’d bought them,” Nathan said, “with Danton’s gold.”

  Danton’s gold. Even he was saying it now.

  “We’ve bought the Section leaders,” Le Mulet corrected him, “but will they do the business? It’s tricky.”

  And then there was Hanriot and the National Guard.

  There was a roar from the opposite gallery as the leading players made their entrance. Robespierre in his blue coat and yellow breeches: the clothes he had worn for the Festival of the Supreme Being; Saint-Just in grey and white, the Angel of Death, gold rings glinting in his ears; and Couthon in his wheelchair, furiously winding the twin handles that turned the wheels and glowering at the delegates on either side. The Triumvirate that ruled France.

  The spectators surged forward, craning their necks for a view. Le Mulet seemed to have packed one gallery but there were plenty of Jacobins in the other and already a fight had broken out. The ushers were struggling to get through and break it up. The President ringing his bell for order. It was no longer Vadier but someone Nathan did not recognise.

  Instead of heading for his usual seat high on the Mountain, Robespierre seemed to be making for the benches at the very front of the chamber. Was this deliberate? Some kind of a statement? But Saint-Just made straight for the people’s tribune, clutching his speech.

  The script is written; the play begun.

  But at once an interruption.

  “I demand to be heard!”

  A man rushed up to the tribune, pushing Saint-Just aside.

  A shout of “Tallien!” from Le Mulet’s men in the gallery. They know their theatre, the crowd; they are familiar with all the principal players and some of them even seem to know the plot.

  Tallien struck a dramatic pose. “The curtain must be thrown aside!”

  Cheers, stamping of feet. Robespierre looked puzzled; this was not how it was meant to be. Saint-Just was frowning, searching through his papers as if he had lost his place in the script.

  “I was at the Jacobins last night, ” roared the man at the tribune. “As I watched I shuddered for my country. I saw the army of the new Cromwell. I have armed myself with a dagger that will pierce the tyrant’s breast if the Convention lacks the courage to order his arrest.”

  Sensation! He has armed himself with a dagger! Weapons are forbidden in the Convention. Why do the guards permit it? Is this a good sign?

  And now all the delegates were on their feet. They brandished their fists: “Down with the tyrant!”

  Robespierre made a dash for the tribune. Already he had begun to speak. But the President was ringing his bell, drowning out his words. And a thunderous voice rose from the crowd: “I demand the arrest of Robespierre!”

  It sounded like Danton. But Danton was dead.

  Pandemonium.

  Nathan leant perilously over the edge of the gallery, the crowd pushing at his back. People fighting in the crush. Robespierre was screaming at the President but the only word that reached the gallery was “Assassins!”

  Outrage.

  “The monster has insulted the Convention!”

  Robespierre fled up the slopes of the Mountain. But the Mountain hurled him back.

  “Scoundrel! Get away from here. The ghosts of Danton and Camille reject you.”

  Again he tried to speak but his voice was too thin for such a heated atmosphere.

  “The blood of Danton chokes you!”

  He fled to the far side of the chamber and sank panting on a bench. The delegates of the Right withdrew from him in horror.

  “Murderer—you sit in the chair of Condorcet!”

  In despair he appealed to the gallery. But Le Mulet had triumphed, the Jacobins were in flight. Overwhelmingly the Convention voted for Robespierre’s arrest and his friends with him. And Vadier’s waiting policemen marched into the chamber.

  “The brigands have triumphed,” declared Robespierre as they led him away.

  His last words to the Convention he has ruled so long.

  It is over. And like the good Frenchmen they are, they go off for their dinner.

  Nathan found Imlay in the Café Carazzo just off the Rue Honoré, much patronised by members of the Convention. The atmosphere was festive, the wine flowing, the noise deafening.

  “It is over,” Imlay shouted at him, his face flushed and beaming. “The tyrant is no more.” He was at a table with a group of delegates. Nathan recognised one of them as Tallien—the man who had waved the dagger at the tribune. “Here is my friend, Turner, a fellow American,” Imlay announced to the table at large. They cheered and someone poured Nathan a bumper of wine.

  “What happened in court?” Nathan asked him.

  “Don’t worry. All executions are suspended by order of the President. Everyone will be released.”

  “So Paine . . .”

  “Paine was not in court. I heard from my man.” He fumbled in his pocket and produced a crumpled piece of paper. “Here is the List. See for yourself.”

  Nathan scanned the scrawled names. He was right. Paine was not on it. Perhaps they had decided he was too ill.

  “I tell you, it is over,” Imlay assured him again. “The order has been sent to the Tribunal. No one else will die.”

  “Besides Robespierre,” said someone, “and a few hundred of his friends.”

  This amused everyone.

  Nathan brought a stool over from the bar. He might as well join in the celebrations, he thought. Imlay clapped him on the shoulder and leaned close to his ear.

  “You can tell your boss we did it,” he said. “The Terror is over.”

  Nathan
was not sure this was what his “boss” wanted to hear.

  “So who are the new rulers of France?” he said.

  But Imlay was not listening. He had bent his head to the man on his right. The Dagger Man. Youngish-looking and handsome. Was he one of them, the new rulers of France? Nathan drank his wine and looked around the room and was startled to see a man he knew. Vadier. The Grand Inquisitor. But of course. And was he another? Vadier looked up and met his eye. He looked startled for a moment and then winked, raising his glass.

  A sudden commotion at the door. Messengers rushing into the café . . .

  “Robespierre is released! The tyrant is freed!”

  Panic. Everyone shouting at once. More men running in from the street. Some running out. Gradually Nathan made sense of what had happened. The mayor—an ally of Robespierre—had sent to the prisons instructing the governors to admit no new prisoners without an order from the Commune. When Robespierre arrived at the Luxembourg he was turned away—and his escort took him to the Hotel de Ville. The Commune was calling for an insurrection.

  And right on cue they heard the distant sound of a bell.

  They were ringing the tocsin at the Hotel de Ville: the call to arms. Aux armes, Citoyens. And then an answering peal, louder and closer, from the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the district of Robespierre and the Jacobin Club. And again, across the river, and to the east, in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, the powder keg of Paris.

  The call to the people—to rise up and defend the Revolution.

  Chapter 45

  the Place of Honour

  Sara was waiting to have her hair cut when she heard the tocsin.

  All the condemned prisoners were gathered in the records office while one of the guards called out their names and ticked them off on a list. He was stumbling over the pronunciations and struggling to make himself heard above the din. One of his colleagues had a dog that kept barking and straining at its leash. Two of the other guards were drunk and were staggering from prisoner to prisoner taking anything of value—rings, necklaces, even handkerchiefs—and putting them in a sack, shouting and sometimes striking out at anyone who resisted. There were about forty prisoners, sitting in benches against the walls, some sobbing and praying, some in hysterics, others clinging to each other. Two men were lying on straw pallets, their eyes staring into space as if they were already dead. But others were singing and laughing and appeared to be as drunk as the guards. If prisoners had enough money they could have as much food and drink as they wished. Bits of bread and meat littered the floor—and empty bottles. Someone offered Sara a drink from his brandy flask but she shook her head. A song kept running through her mind: a song she remembered her father singing and that she had sung to Nathan after they had become lovers:

  Last nicht the Queen had four Maries

  This nicht she’ll hae but three,

  She’d Mary Beaton and Mary Seton,

  An’ Mary Carmichael an’ me.

  It was six o’clock and as hot as noon. The prison door was open and she could see into the courtyard to where the charrettes were waiting, the death carts. Three of the executioner’s assistants were cutting people’s hair and ripping back their collars to leave their necks exposed.

  When they heard the tocsin everything came to a stop. No one seemed to know what was going on.

  There were reports of disturbances in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine on the route to the guillotine. The executioner, Sanson, wanted to postpone things until tomorrow but the jailers wanted to get on with them; they were anxious to get rid of people. There was nowhere to put them, they said, the prison was overcrowded enough already.

  Then Fouquier arrived from the court on his way home from work. He lived in one of the towers of the Conciergerie—the Caesar tower overlooking the river—and he had seen the charrettes still waiting in the yard. What was the delay he wanted to know, why were the prisoners still here? Sanson started to explain about the trouble on the streets but he was more diffident than he had been with the jailers and Fouquier overruled him.

  “Get them out of here,” he said, turning away. “Am I wasting my time? Justice must be done, do your duty.”

  There was a wild look in his eyes as if he too were drunk.

  So Sara took her place on one of the stools and they began to cut her hair. She stared down at the dark locks lying on the dirty floor, frowning as if trying to make sense of it all. Did she want to save it for anyone, they asked her but she shook her head. Then she thought, was it something Alex might want to keep? But it was too awful, too ghoulish. She was trying not to think of Alex or she would not be able to bear it.

  They tied her hands behind her back and led her out into the yard and helped her up the steps into one of the charrettes. It was full of women, half of them screaming, hysterical, the rest drunk and singing. There was one she recognised. They had spent several hours together in the same cell, waiting for their trial. She was a prostitute called Catherine Halbourg, nicknamed “Egle.” She had been picked up the previous summer with one of her women friends in the Rue Fromenteau. Later she had found out that the Queen’s trial was coming up and a man called Chaumette, an influential member of the Commune, had suggested putting a couple of prostitutes in the dock with her—presumably to make some kind of a point. The Austrian whore and the Paris whores. But the Committee of Public Safety thought it was a stupid idea and the Queen was tried—and executed—alone. But instead of being released Egle had been held in the prison of the Carmes ever since, without charge. She did not know why they had condemned her now. She seemed strangely exhilarated, like an actress about to go on stage.

  “I am ready,” she told Sara. “I have been rehearsing.”

  They had held mock executions in the Carmes, she told Sara, and they had practised with their hands tied behind their backs, laid out on a plank of wood. They had also held séances, when they conjured the Devil.

  “He is not like the priests say he is,” she told Sara earnestly. She spoke in the voice of a little girl—it was something that appealed to her clients, perhaps. “He is very handsome. I am to be his bride. He has many brides but I am the only one that is French. He told me. Believe in me and you will be saved.”

  Sara moved away from her. Faces swam in a haze of heat and flies. The sky was now the colour of a corpse. A terrible sky, a sky like a painting of the apocalypse. It was not real, it was too close to her nightmares to be real. Her brain was playing tricks with her. She could not breathe. A fly settled on her nose and it was all it took to upset her fragile composure and she shook her head wildly and cried out. And then suddenly the car jolted forward and her legs went from under her. She fell into the lap of one of the women seated on the bench that ran around the sides of the cart.

  “Steady, my dear,” said the woman calmly.

  She was very beautiful, even with her hair shorn and she seemed entirely composed. Not drunk, not hysterical, not even sad. She made room for Sara beside her.

  “What is your name?” Sara asked her, almost shyly.

  The woman smiled.

  “I am Princess Catherine of Monaco,” she said.

  Another lunatic. Another prostitute with delusions of grandeur. Was she too going to marry the Devil? The cart swayed round a corner and onto the bridge across the Seine and Sara began to cry; silently, the tears rolling down her face.

  “Don’t cry,” said the woman next to her. “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my little boy.”

  She felt the woman’s lips against her ear. “Move your back to me,” she said. “I am going to try to undo your hands, and then you can undo mine. We should not die with our hands tied.”

  Sara drew apart from her and stared at her through her tears. But she did not seem mad.

  They squirmed around so their backs were almost turned to each othe
r, looking out over the side of the cart. There were cavalry riding along beside them but they were staring straight ahead. A few people lined the streets but not many, nothing like the crowds that had lined the Rue Honoré when the guillotine had been in the Place de la Révolution and Sara had been at her art classes. She felt the woman picking at the cord around her wrists. She had strong fingers and nails that dealt skilfully with the knots.

  “Sing,” the woman said. “Sing with me so the guards do not see what I am doing.”

  She began to sing a verse that Sara recognised, a troubadour song of Provence that she knew from her childhood:

  Je vous aime tant, sans mentir

  Qu’on pourrait tarir

  La haute mer

  Et ses ondes retenir

  Avant qu’on puisse me prévenir

  De vous aimer…

  It was one of the songs Sara had sung in the fiacre on her way to Tourrettes-les-Vence with her father on their way to market. She must have been eleven or twelve, just about aware that she was singing a love song.

  “Who are you?” she asked again, mystified.

  “Sing,” commanded the woman.

  They were winding through the narrow streets behind the Hotel de Ville. There were a few people here but still not many. She looked at the faces, thinking she might see Nathan among them. Or even that he would come to her rescue. Defiantly, thinking only of the sunshine and the road to Tourrettes, Sara sang:

  Vous parler, vous regarder

  Votre mien tenir, font fuir et haïr et détester

  Toute vice et tout ce qu’est chérir et desirer

  The way you talk, the way you look,

  Your whole being makes me detest

  All vice and desire all that is good.

  It could be a song to your lover, or your God. The God of Provence, the God of the Cathars.

  Je veux rester fidèle, garder votre honneur

  Chercher la paix, obéir

  Craindre, servir, et vous honorer

  Jusqu’ à la morte

  I would stay faithful, guard your honour

  Seek peace, obey