Revolution (20 page)

36

S
o yeah, I’m out. Big-time. Yves Bonnard sent me packing.

It’s not even eleven o’clock. I should be in the library, photographing Malherbeau’s papers. Instead I’m sitting at a café, drowning my sorrows in a big bowl of coffee. The day’s warm and sunny and I’m sitting outside watching the world walk by.

I still don’t know what happened. I mean, not putting on the gloves was a stupid mistake. And the singing? Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that. But honestly, I didn’t know I was. The music just took over. And the cell phone—definitely not my fault. I
know
I turned the ringer off after I talked to Virgil. I was in a bakery, buying Yves Bonnard that croissant. I remembered the library’s no–cell phones rule as I was waiting to pay and I set the phone to vibrate. Then and there. Just to be safe. So what happened? Something in my bag must’ve knocked against the ringer button and reset it. The diary probably. It was lying on top of the phone. The weird thing is, the caller didn’t leave a message, and there was no callback number, either.

“You can’t throw me out. Please. I just got my documents. I need to finish reading them. And then I need to photograph them. And I need to do it today. Today’s Friday and I’m leaving Paris on Sunday and the Abelard’s closed on Saturday.”

“You should have thought of that before you disrupted the entire reading room. Three times. The people around you are here to work.”

“I am, too,” I tell him. “I really am. It’s just that my work tends to be on the noisy side, you know?”

He said he did not know and then he told me goodbye. And here I am. Totally screwed. If I don’t get those photos, I’m not going anywhere.

I take a deep breath and think it all through. I know what to do—I’ll stay away until after lunch. Give Yves Bonnard time to cool off. When the library opens again, I’ll slink in and beg him on my knees to give me another chance. Until then, I have two hours to kill. I have the diary with me, so I’ll sit here and read it.

“Just like she wants you to,” a little voice inside me says. The same little voice that piped up yesterday as the library was closing. “I mean, it’s kind of funny that your phone rang when you turned the ringer off, don’t you think?”

The words send a little chill up my spine, but I shrug it off. It’s the drugs, that’s all. Too much Qwell. “But you only took one pill this morning,” the voice reminds me. “You dialed it back again.”

“Shut up,” I mutter. I gulp my coffee and start to read.

6 May 1795

The king and his family rode to Paris after Versailles fell. My family and I walked.

We were exhausted when finally we reached the city. After a long search, we found a room in the Marais. It was small and damp, but it did not matter to me as I was rarely in it. I was out on the streets morning and night, in all weather, trying to get inside the Tuileries. Because I had come to love Louis-Charles and hoped to see him. And because I loved advancement, too, and still hoped that the queen might procure it for me.

I played my guitar by the gates, by the Queen’s Walk, and along the tall iron fences that surrounded the gardens, always hoping for a glimpse of Louis-Charles, but I never got one for the guards chased me away. I tied notes to stones and tossed them over the wall. And once a puppet, but I later saw the cook’s child with it. I disguised myself as a laundress and tried to sneak in with the washerwomen on a Monday morning. Another time I hid myself in a butcher’s wagon. Both times I was found out and beaten.

The Tuileries Palace is in the middle of the city. Its grounds are small and confined. They are nothing like the open lawns and shady groves of Versailles. Often whilst walking round them I wondered, How would Louis-Charles run and play there? Who would sit with him under the night sky, counting the stars? Who would filch squibs and crackers from the firemasters and shoot them off for him? He was a strange child, prone to sadness. The queen had asked me to keep his poor heart merry. If I could not, who would?

I wanted to find a way in. I wanted to keep trying but I had to stop for I was needed to help with the puppets. We were poorer than ever and hungrier than ever for it was harder than ever to earn our daily bread. Paris had changed. It was not the same city we had left only six months earlier.

On the streets, none talked of frivolous topics. The papers were no longer filled with the doings of actresses and courtesans. No one marveled at a duke’s new calèche or the matched pair he’d bought to pull it. No one argued over who served the best calves’ brains—the Chartres or the Foy. Women put off their powdered wigs. They stuffed their silk gowns into their closets and wore dresses of muslin. Men wore suits of sober fustian.

It was the goings-on in the Assembly that now captivated the city. What had Danton said this morning? Whom had Marat called bugger? What had Madame Roland written in her column? What was being said at the Jacobins, the Cordeliers? Would the king accept the Rights of Man? And who was this lawyer from Arras, Robespierre?

There was a new spirit in the air, a spirit of hope, of change. There was a new energy in the city, a true excitement. People no longer addressed one another as sir or madam, but citizen. They talked openly of a constitution for France, of equality and freedom.

It is a time of miracles, my father said. Anything can happen.

Miracles? my uncle spat. It will be a miracle if we don’t starve to death. This revolution of yours is bad for business.

He was right. Wig makers suffered. Silk weavers, too. Jewelers, flower sellers, and confectioners failed. In the fancy shops, gilt tables and marble statues could be had for a song. And we, too, struggled ever harder. The people of Paris, newly high-minded, no longer laughed at farting puppets, so we had to give new plays—my father’s plays. They were earnest affairs about the tyrant Caesar or the excesses of mad King George, and they were so dull, I usually fell asleep during the first act, or sneaked off to auditions. I cared nothing for citizens and constitutions. I cared only for playing. If I could not get back into the Tuileries, and the queen’s favor, I would have to find another way to the stage.

I thought it was only a passing fancy, this passion for revolution, but I was wrong. It tightened its grip on the city every day until Paris, my bright, brilliant city, became as tedious as a circus girl who’d gone into a convent.

There was one place that hadn’t changed, though—the Palais-Royal. Always a home for rogues and rebels, it now served as a meeting place for the most radical voices of the revolution. Desmoulins was often there, drinking coffee at the Foy. Danton, too. He was anywhere that boasted good food and pretty women. I saw Marat and Hébert there, handing out their gutter rags, whispering to this one and pointing at that one. One could say whatever one wished there. One could go too far—call the king an ass and the queen a slut—and none could do aught about it, for the Palais belonged to the rich and powerful Duc d’Orléans and Orléans answered to none.

I knew I could make money there by giving speeches from Molière, Voltaire, and Shakespeare, but for a long time I did not go. I remembered Orléans sitting in the grove at Versailles, a man in a wolf’s mask. I remembered his warning to me and his eyes, dark as midnight, and I stayed away, for I did not wish to look into those eyes ever again. But then Bette and her baby took ill, and my mother, too, and all the money we’d earned at Versailles went to pay doctors, and there was no choice.

I found the Palais as lawless as ever, full of freaks and firebreathers, gamblers, whores, and dandies. I performed in the courtyards there every night in my britches and cap. Like a hunter, I would sight my quarry and pursue it. I avoided all smiling persons, left drunks and lovers to their revels. Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?

I changed my roles to suit my audience. I spoke Hamlet for brooding lawyers. Figaro for thrusting clerks. Tartuffe’s words I once gave out as I followed a bishop into a brothel, and they earned me a shower of coins from the ladies within.

Another time, a hoary sir in mourning dress approached the corner where I was reciting. His eyes were downcast, his shoulders hunched. I stopped spouting Molière and gave him Lear’s rat speech—the one he makes after his beloved Cordelia dies. At first he tried to sidestep me, but then he stopped and listened, wooed by the words. His old face creased with grief. Tears filled his milky eyes. When I finished, he rained coins into my cap.

Another time, a girl came out of Gaudet’s, a shoemaker’s. Two women—her mother and aunt, by the looks of them—walked on either side of her like jailers. The girl’s eyes were downcast, her face a stiff mask. She carried a pretty box in her gloved hands. A pair of satin slippers to wear under her wedding dress, I guessed. She was no more than fifteen, probably not long out of the convent. In love with her handsome music master but betrothed to a sausage-fingered lecher three times her age.

I loosed my hair, tucked a flower behind my ear, and I was Juliet. I ran to the girl. The mother tried to swat me away but I dodged her hands. Give me my Romeo, I said, and when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.

At these words, the girl’s face crumpled. Before her gargoyle mother could stop her, she dipped her hand into her purse and tossed me a coin. It was an act of rebellion. Her one and only. I snatched the coin and bowed to her. She smiled at me through her tears, and I knew the words I’d spoken to her would stay with her always and that years hence—while the old man she’d married slumbered next to her, snoring and farting and muttering about his accounts—she would look at the stars through her bedroom window and think on them.

The coins I earned bought bread and butter. They bought onions, wine, chickens—and the wood to cook them. They bought herbs to cool fevers, rout pain, and clear pus. My mother survived her illness. My sister, too, though her child did not.

November gave way to December and December to the new year—1790. There were nights when I got nothing, not a sou, for it was cold and miserable and people stayed inside. But on those nights, I still played. With no one to hear me and no one to pay me, and it did not matter.

On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They slipped over my tongue and spilled from my mouth. And because of them I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer’s daughter, a mad and murderous king.

It was dark and it was cold on those nights. The world was harsh and I was hungry. Yet I had such joy from the words. Such joy.

There were times when I lifted my face to the sky, stretched my arms wide to the winter night, and laughed out loud, so happy was I.

The memory of it makes me laugh now, but not from happiness.

Be careful what you show the world.

You never know when the wolf is watching.

I put down the diary because I see her again. Alex. She’s playing Hamlet and Juliet and Cleopatra in an empty court on a dark, cold night. For no one but herself. Her breath steams in the air as she fences to the death with Laertes or dances with Romeo. Her pale cheeks glow. She’s thin and ragged, but she shines so brightly.

I touch her words with my fingers. Words written quickly. Written on the run. Written when she was hurt and scared and hiding in the catacombs.

What was it like to be down there? Alone and afraid in the cold and dark, with nothing and no one but the dead all around her. I’ve never been in the catacombs. I don’t know if the tunnels are wide or narrow. If you can stand straight in them or if you have to crouch.

And suddenly, I want to be there. In the catacombs. I want to be where she was. Like I wanted to be in Truman’s room after he died. Sitting on his bed and looking at his things. Like I wanted to be in my father’s study after he left, listening to the ticking of the clock on his desk. Like I wanted to stand in the kitchen after my mother stopped talking and press her apron to my face.