* * *
Today Robespierre, cool as always, seeming impressively above most of the concerns of lesser men, was striking a pose of symbolic significance at one end of the green, cloth-covered table of the Revolutionary Tribunal, looming over everyone else including the judges, who were sitting.
The Incorruptible, chiding some judge for suspicious leniency, was saying calmly: “True innocence is never afraid of public vigilance.” Then, glancing around suspiciously, he added in a private whisper to Radu: “See me later at the house.”
The Tribunal met for most of its sessions in a huge, cave-like chamber with marble walls that in years past had accommodated the meetings of the Paris Parlement. Candles burned before the court clerk as he labored with a quill pen to keep up with the accusations made by the examining lawyers and the judgments handed down.
Frequently in attendance at the Tribunal, when bad weather or some other reason kept them from the guillotine, were Madame Defarge, and the rest of the bloodthirsty tricoteuses, the women who sat knitting through all the trials and executions.
(Narrator’s note: “I don’t see how those women can do that,” Constantia once commented to me, when we were speaking of these women. “No?” “No; I hate knitting.”)
* * *
Later in the day Radu, doing his best to fulfill his duties as a spy, showed up at the carpenter’s house, bringing Robespierre, for his eyes only, a new list of suspects. Heading the list was a name often used by his brother as an alias—Corday. And a description of Vlad, in his frequently adopted guise of a young breather.
Then, into the ears of these dedicated, incorruptible defenders of revolutionary virtue, he whispered his poisonous advice, suspicions, accusations.
Many others were doing the same thing, or trying! But Radu had access to Robespierre in his private lodgings.
* * *
Everyone in the house had seen Radu coming or going at one time or another, and everyone thought he was there as a companion or associate of someone else. Therefore he could come and go pretty much as he pleased, enjoying the situation immensely.
Duplay himself seemed under the impression that Radu was a member of the secret police, coming in at all hours anonymously to give the Incorruptible his secret reports. And Radu, struck by an inspiration, gradually maneuvered Duplay into starting work on a wooden guillotine blade, precisely shaped to fit the grooves in the machine, the edge filed and sanded as smooth and sharp as wood could be. Radu wasn’t yet sure just how he could possibly induce Vlad to lie down on the plank that fed the machine, but it would please him enormously to have some possibility along that line. He gave the cabinetmaker to understand that Sanson, the chief executioner, was eager to try out such a device.
“The danger of rust is eliminated, you see,” Radu improvised. “Despite the constant wetting.”
The woodworker frowned, picking absently at a sore on one of his own callused fingers, where the broken fragment of a wooden splinter was trying to work its way up out of the skin. “But the edge, citizen—surely a wooden edge will break and wear away much faster? One or two tough necks…”
“We will see; but they want to make a test using wood.”
“I suppose, if you say so, citizen—but in the name of the people, why?”
Radu ignored the question. Looking around, as if to see whether they were being overheard, he let an ominous undertone creep into his voice. “If I were you, Citizen Duplay, I’d work fast, and say nothing of this to anyone.”
Already the younger vampire saw several possible ways of turning these things to his advantage. If he played his cards right, it was not inconceivable that he should succeed in getting his older brother’s neck beneath the heavy—in his case, wooden—knife.
* * *
At about the same time an elated Robespierre, who seemed totally convinced he had the perfect society now almost within his grasp, was driving everyone to prepare for the Festival of the Supreme Being, which he had decreed would be held June 8,1794.
When that date came around, I, Vlad Dracula, made sure to be part of the audience in the cathedral. I was still stalking my brother, of course, and incidentally marveling at the blasphemy.
* * *
On 17 November, 1793, a week after the first great Festival of Reason, the Commune had ordered all churches in Paris closed For the Festivals of Reason that followed, Notre Dame cathedral and a number of lesser churches had been turned, at least for a few days, into pagan temples. Stained-glass windows bearing religious images were draped with canvas until their final fate could be decided. The interim effect was to dim the interior enormously, even in broad daylight, incidentally making the place vastly more comfortable for the nosferatu.
Of course every trace of Christian “superstition,” in the form of ornamentation, had already been expunged from the structure. Where the high altar had stood there now rose up an imitation of some Greek temple decorated with pikes and other weapons. The music which replaced the hymns may be imagined.
I remember hearing Hébert, one of the most vicious of the Revolutionary rabble-rousers, remark with a chuckle: “How angry the good God must be! No doubt the trumpets of judgment are about to sound.”
But now Hébert himself was dead, reduced to the status of a headless corpse. He and eighteen of his colleagues and supporters had been fed to Moloch a few months back, on the 24th of March.
I remember Reason, sitting in her litter, borne by drunken men in what were meant to be Roman togas, swilling wine and brandy out of consecrated chalices.
I remember the burning of saints’ relics, and ancient churchly books and documents, making a strange, rich incense. At such a time, I rejoiced that I was not compelled to breathe.
In the midst of all this sacrilege I moved, now wearing my own carmagnole as protective coloration, stalking my brother patiently, knowing that he would hardly be able to deny himself such sights and sounds as these.
Often I scowled at the blasphemous goings-on, and once or twice I came near doing violence. But in the end I made no move to interfere, thinking I could not allow myself to be distracted from my search.
* * *
On the 19th of the new month Prairial, all citizens had been invited to decorate their dwellings with flowers and live branches, a display of living things in honor of Robespierre’s new friend, the Supreme Being. In the Jardin National, an amphitheater had been created, and in the most prominent place a statue representing Wisdom was temporarily camouflaged as the dingy, ugly figure of Atheism.
Toward the end of the Festival, someone ritually set fire to the straw man of Atheism, which, having been made for the purpose, obligingly burst into flames. The symbols did not quite all fall into place for Robespierre, though, as Wisdom emerged from the trial somewhat blackened and obscured.
A wax bust of Jean-Paul Marat, the martyred Friend of the People, was hauled around in a triumphal chariot, labeled:
TO MARAT, FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE
THIS IS HOW THE PEOPLE HONORS ITS FRIENDS
The vampire had never met the murdered man in the flesh, but if the Friend of the People had really been as ugly as everyone said he was, then the wax image, which must have been modeled by Marie Grosholtz, was impressively lifelike.
By now the Terror was in full stride and threatening to consume Paris like a fire. The chief concern of many of the supposed leaders of the people was now nothing more than keeping themselves alive.
Indeed, I had begun to think that this Revolution of the French was something the world had never seen before, an event transcending ordinary wars, rebellions, and foolishness, far surpassing all the common outbreaks of bloodlust and madness. Casting my thoughts back through the three-hundred-plus years of my existence, I could come up with nothing very much like it. Mere horrors and blasphemies, of course, abound in every age. Wars come and go with the inevitability of thunderstorms, and rebellions and mutinies were not uncommon. But this…
Almost two hundred years earlier, at
the court of Ivan the Terrible, I had seen horrors unbelievable … but no, that had been different; Ivan and his terror prefigured Hitler, a case of one man’s madness infecting multitudes. This new French Terror had no such focal point. At the height of the infection, there was no individual, not even the Incorruptible himself, whose elimination would have broken the fever. Truly it seemed to swell up out of the People themselves. But it eventually proved self-limiting; the very individuals, the cells and organs of the body politic by which the game of guillotining was enforced, were the same ones on whom the blade fell with most dreadful frequency.
It is, I think, a significant fact that, as one historian has written, no high-ranking Revolutionary authority ever attended any execution but his own.
Chapter Eighteen
Sensing a great opportunity in the fact of Radcliffe’s sentencing, though not yet sure just how to take advantage of it, the younger Dracula began a personal search of all the prisons within several miles of Paris, trying to locate the American. In this task he proceeded warily, wanting to locate Vlad also, but afraid of being seen by him.
In Radu’s recent few years aboveground, it had become his habit, when things were dull, to cruise prisons and asylums in search of amusement. There was such a nice variety of such places now to choose from.
Anyway, the exquisite sufferings of … what had been the name of that last peasant girl? … of dear little Marguerite had put Radu in mind of a certain breathing prisoner he’d met, a year or two ago, in one of the asylums.
* * *
Radu, having identified the general character of the place from the outside, was not immediately certain whether he was entering an asylum or a prison; the clientele overlapped a great deal between the two kinds of institutions. Many of them were not really surprised to observe a man entering their rooms, despite locked doors and apparently solid walls, then later taking his departure by the same mysterious means. Nor would the authorities pay much attention when some inmates told them this had happened.
If Radu wanted to know about prisons, the former Marquis de Sade was the one to talk to—the man seemed to have spent most of his adult life in them.
Radu did not particularly wish to know more about prisons and asylums—only about certain of their clientele. Looking around him now, Radu noted that this place had the look of a converted convent. Religious images had been scrupulously torn down, in pursuit of Revolutionary orthodoxy. What had once been a well-tended garden was rapidly running to seed and ruin.
The man in the cell was of average height, about five and a half feet, and was now past fifty years of age. A rather jolly fellow, by all appearances. His light chestnut hair was thinning and going gray. His body was comfortably stout, his fair face marked by comparatively few smallpox scars. At the moment his pale blue eyes were wide with surprise under a high forehead.
Obviously the prisoner had been startled by the silent intrusion of an unexpected visitor. But he needed only a moment to recover.
“Welcome, Prince Dracula! Or is it Citizen Dracula now? It is more than a year since you have visited me.”
Radu made himself comfortable, choosing the softest-looking of two available chairs. “Suit yourself as to the form of address; I am indifferent as to which my true friends use— and I certainly hope to count the Marquis de Sade among my friends. Or do you now prefer to be called citizen, along with everyone else?”
The Marquis was undoubtedly glad to see his mysterious visitor. At Radu’s entrance to his neatly furnished cell, Sade had been seated (in his third chair) at a table, playing with a set of half a dozen little toys on the tabletop. Radu, looking at them with curiosity, observed that they were tiny waxen representations of human bodies, male and female, all naked, in various attitudes of fear, or menace. The two male figures, one a mere beardless youth, were both in a prominent state of sexual arousal. It was not the subject matter so much which interested the vampire—he thought that pretty tame—but the artist’s skill at modeling on such a small scale. The whole body of each figure was no longer than a man’s hand, and yet all the fine anatomical details were exquisitely rendered. Real, fine human hair had been affixed in little tufts in the appropriate places.
“You are interested in my little toys, prince? Ah, I yearn for the full collection I had with me when I was in the Bastille. There was a prison for you!”
“Not for me, thanks.”
“They are frightfully expensive. But what is one to do? One must have amusement.”
Radu observed him fondling the figures ardently. The pale fingers of the Marquis threatened to crush the wax, and must be heating it to slipperiness.
Radu raised an eyebrow. “I admit I am surprised that a man of your character must now content himself with wax images. Surely some of your fellow inmates here are women?”
“Ahh…”
“Or at least some of the visitors. And the men here must have sisters and daughters and wives. It would be easy to induce some of these fair ones to make themselves available for your enjoyment.”
“Ah, one would think so! But no, prince, it is not that easy. Besides, as I am sure you would agree, one needs to be sequestered with the women to derive the utmost of pleasure from them—and nothing short of the uttermost in delight is worthy of a gentleman’s devoted efforts. Do you agree, Prince?”
“The Marquis speaks wisdom, as always.”
Radu’s gaze returned to the little waxen figures.
“And who made these, my friend?” he asked. “They show great skill.”
“Ah, yes.” The former marquis gazed at the images fondly. “At the Cabinet du Cire, number twenty, Boulevard du Temple. You do not know the establishment? A man named Curtius is in charge—he runs it with a woman who is supposed to be his niece. Who models these miniatures I am not sure. Most of the waxen figures Curtius makes himself are lifesize, and, alas, fully clothed.”
“I see. Yes, perhaps I have heard something.” He suppressed a yawn; an affectation, now grown to be an unconscious habit, in one who was not required to breathe. In fact fits of yawning came upon him periodically. He supposed it had something to do with boredom; or possibly with his long sleeps and nightmares. Another thing he must remember to thank his brother for, as soon as the opportunity arose.
“Prince Radu?”
“Yes?”
The Marquis urgently, stumblingly, began to plead with the prince to arrange an escape for him. Radu smiled and nodded, and promised to see what he could do; but actually he had plenty of other things to think about just now, and foresaw that he would let the matter slide.
From the subject of escape and its difficulties, the conversation easily slid on to that of prisons. Radu was honestly curious. “But you have been in so many prisons! Are you able to keep track of them all?”
“Each has a different smell about it… It is totally unjust, of course, that I should be here at all!”
Ah, but I have heard something about the case. The young woman did die, did she not, after you and your valet were through with her?”
“Which young woman?” Sade seemed affronted. “Not all of them died, by any means!”
Radu was ready to change the subject. “Comfortable quarters,” he observed, looking about the room. “Of course it does not really compare to those you enjoyed in the Bastille, as a prisoner of the ancien regime. If memory serves me right, you had a desk there, and a wardrobe. Silk breeches, many shirts, coats, shoes, and boots … you had a fireplace, as I recall? Family portraits on your plastered walls, velvet pillows on your bed.”
Three kinds of perfume,” Sade himself murmured in a husky voice. Eyes gleaming, he was caught up in memory. “All the lamps and candles that I wanted … but that was long ago. In 1784.”
“Is it really ten years since you were first locked up in the Bastille? How time flies! For some of us, at least.” Radu pretended to suppress a yawn.
Sade was staring at him, with a delightfully perfect expression of hatred and envy.
Radu went on: “You had quite a library there, too. More than a hundred volumes, wasn’t it? And your poor, dear wife was allowed to visit you almost every week. Walking privileges in the garden … except that you would keep shouting your obscenities.” Radu shook his head, chided his companion with a mock tut-tut. “Then they let you out. Then they locked you up again. That time—let me see—they put you in Charenton? The asylum.”
“But they realized I was not at all mad, and they eventually let me go.”
“And then—?
Sade’s voice had grown tightly controlled. His best courtroom voice. “Last year I was arrested again. As a former aristocrat, of course. Bah!”
“So, political reasons this time. Even you … now that you mention it, I seem to remember hearing that you were accused of ‘moderatism’ … one of the most unlikely charges that the Revolution has ever brought against any of its enemies—or do you count yourself among its friends? Has anyone ever died of ‘moderatism,’ I wonder?”
“Only when Doctor Sanson treats the disease! Ah, hah, hah hah!” A huge coarse laugh.
But de Sade was not minded to discuss that subject at any length. Instead, he began to talk of his present accommodations: “What more could I have wanted here? It was like a paradise; beautiful house, superb garden, exclusive society, wonderful women—when suddenly the execution grounds were placed absolutely under our windows and the cemetery for those guillotined put in the very middle of our garden.”
A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) Page 20
