Revolution (29 page)

Come, boy! Jean shouted, pulling me through the gates. We will water the tree of liberty with the blood of her enemies!

There were men inside the yard already. A huge bonfire was burning. Next to it were piled the bodies of men and women, all dead. As I stood there, dumb with shock, a woman ran by me. Her dress was torn. Three men chased her, laughing. She cried out as one grabbed her. Please, she screamed. Help me! And then a club came down on her head and she screamed no more.

Jean pressed something into my hands. I looked at it. It was a barrel stave, stuck with nails. To work, citizen! he shouted.

I threw it down. He grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. Bade me pick it up. Punched me in the face when I refused. I was struggling against him, shouting and kicking, certain I would be the next one killed when I heard someone yell, Jean! Hold off! He is one of the duke’s!

It was Rotonde. I’d seen him in Orléans’ rooms. Many times.

Why should I? I do not trust him, Jean said. He is no patriot. He’s soft as a woman and a traitor.

I tell you, he is one of Orléans’. Kill him and you answer to the man himself, Rotonde said.

Jean spat. Go, boy, he snarled, shoving me so hard I went sprawling onto the cobbles. Go back to your master. Tell him our work goes well.

Wild with fear, barely hearing him, I scrambled to my feet and ran off. The streets I stumbled down were dark and so were the houses along them. I knocked on doors, hoping someone would let me in, for I did not know if I could make my legs carry me all the way to the Palais. No one answered. The decent people of Paris had hidden themselves behind closed doors as decent people always do. Massacres could not happen if it were not for decent people.

I stayed in the shadows as I ran, ducked into alleys whenever I heard voices or footsteps. When I arrived at the Palais, I staggered upstairs and collapsed on my bed. A minute later, Nicolas came to fetch me.

Tell me, Orléans said as I walked into his bedchamber.

So I did. In a dull, hollow voice, I told him all I had seen. The princess’s head. The mob at the Temple. And at La Force.

There were so many bodies, I said. Bodies with their arms and legs hacked off. Some with their heads gone. Men’s bodies. Women’s bodies. One was a boy’s. He couldn’t have been more than twelve.

Orléans was readying himself to go out, dressing in his mirror. He chose not his usual rich attire but plainer things. He put on a gray coat and a simple felt hat and looked a different man entirely. A man I might pass in any Paris street. A man who could go amongst the people unnoticed. The hat’s brim threw a shadow across his face, but I could still see his eyes in the mirror, glinting in the candlelight, darker than midnight.

And suddenly, I could not breathe.

I had seen this same man before. On another terrible night, the night Versailles fell. I remembered one who went among the crowd then, his hat pulled low on his brow, handing out gold coins, spreading devilry and murder. His eyes, too, had been darker than midnight.

Orléans turned to me. Ah, sparrow, he said. What times we live in.

I nodded, unable to speak.

I believe that Paris has gone mad.

Yes, I whispered. I believe it has.

He came close, cocked his head. You look unwell, he said. He poured a glass of brandy and handed it to me. Drink it, he said. It will do you good.

As soon as the door closed behind him, my legs began to shake. The glass fell from my hand and smashed against the marble. For I knew then who’d unleashed hell upon us.

Why? I whispered, in the stillness of the room. Why?

As if in answer, voices pressed in upon me. Voices in my head. I pressed my hands to my ears, but could not silence them.

Jean the murderer’s—Go back to your master. Tell him the work goes well.

My grandmother’s—One day you’ll go walking with the devil, my girl.

Louis-Charles’—Mama does not like him. She says he plays the rebel but wishes to be king.

And his, Orléans’—The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

All along, he had lied to me. He had never wanted to help the king. The king was his enemy, and the king’s enemy—the revolutionaries—were his friends. His gold had paid for their marches and their riots. His gold had paid for the things I’d seen tonight.

I drove the heels of my hands against my head, wanting to drive the knowledge from my brain. Why? I shrieked in the silence of his room. Why, damn you, why?

A violent rage took hold of me. I grabbed a candlestick and threw it at the wall. I smashed a vase. Swept bottles and brushes off a table.

Suddenly, I felt hands upon me, heard a voice yelling, Stop it! Stop, I tell you!

It was Nicolas. I shook him off and kept at it—rending Orleans’ clothing, chucking handfuls of his jewels—until the old man slapped me across my face.

What is it? What has happened? he asked me.

It is him, Orléans, I said. He is the one behind the massacres. He has paid for them.

Hold your tongue, he said. You speak of things you do not understand.

All this time, I believed I was helping him to help the king, I said. That is what he told me—that he wished to help the king.

Nicolas laughed. Believed, child? Or merely wished to believe? I suppose it does not matter. Either way it is the player who has been played, he said. There is only one thing the duke wishes—to rule France. Tonight he helps the revolution’s leaders rid themselves of their enemies. His gold pays the scum of Paris for their ugly work. The revolutionaries owe him a great debt and soon they will make good upon it. Soon they will make him king.

I do not believe you. The revolutionaries want to do away with kings. They have said so a million times.

What the revolutionaries want to do and what they must do are two different things. The revolution teeters at the edge of an abyss. If the Prussians don’t destroy it, the royalists will. We must have a strong man to rule us. One whom all can accept. Orléans is that man. He is the rarest of creatures—a Jacobin Prince of the Blood, both royal and revolutionary. Who better to unite a divided France?

But France has a king. Louis is still king, I said.

Not for much longer.

You mean that they will send him away. To the country.

They will send him away, yes, but not to the country. There will be a trial first. For appearance’s sake. Then the guillotine.

The rage I’d felt trickled away. Fear took its place. But the king has a son, I said, grabbing hold of Nicolas’ sleeve.

He nodded. Yes, he does, and it is he, Louis-Charles, who will be declared king, but the duke will rule for him, as regent.

Until Louis-Charles comes of age. He can only rule until Louis-Charles becomes king himself, I said. My voice sounded like a beggar’s, desperate and pleading.

The dauphin is a delicate boy as his brother was before him. Many believe he will not see his tenth year, never mind manhood.

No, I said, shaking my head, not wanting to hear anymore.

All along, Orléans had been working against the king, plotting his downfall. Every mistake the king had made had helped him. Every victory for the revolutionaries helped him. Bad harvests helped him. Cold winters. Bread shortages. Foreign threats. Civil war. It all helped him.

And I, I myself, had helped him.

The knowing of it felt like a dagger to my heart. Had I given him names I should not have? Had someone been killed this night because I told Orléans he had visited the king or written to the queen? Were Louis-Charles and his family in prison because of something I had seen? Something I had said? I moaned like an animal and sank to the floor, weeping.

Nicolas leaned over me. It is too late for tears, he said. Get up. Pick up the things you have broken. Do not be here when the duke returns.

I did not get up. I lay on the floor for some time, until the candles burned low. Until the first light of morning appeared in the sky. And then I remembered my work at the Temple and that Louis-Charles would be waiting for me.

I got to my hands and knees and was about to stand when I caught sight of myself in Orléans’ mirror. It seemed as if a stranger stared back at me. A stranger whose face was as white as chalk. Whose cheeks were stained by tears. Whose eyes were sunken and dead.

I crawled closer, through the broken glass, the torn clothing and scattered jewels, and touched my fingers to the stranger’s.

Is it Paris that’s gone mad? I asked her. Or is it you?

I stop reading, devastated. Alex witnessed the massacres. Worse yet, she thinks she may have played a role in them. I remember learning about them in class. They were horrible. After we did a segment on them, our teacher, Ms. Hammond, told us there was a lot of spin directed at them—at the time they actually happened and ever since.

“Some historians call the massacres a spontaneous outburst of violence, a shameful aberration fueled by fear and hysteria. Others said the butchery was planned, that it was orchestrated by those in power in order to rid Paris of counterrevolutionaries,” she said.

“Well, which is it?” Arden Tode asked.

“One or the other. Both. Neither.”

“Are you, like, trying to be funny?”

“What I’m trying to do, Ms. Tode, is show you that the answer depends on where you stand. Marie-Antoinette undoubtedly saw the massacres in a different light than, say, a stonemason who’d watched his child die of hunger and who expected to be killed any second himself by a Prussian soldier. To the former, it was a depraved act of butchery. To the other, perhaps a necessary evil.”

“Um, can I put that on the final?”

Ms. Hammond sighed. “History is a Rorschach test, people,” she said. “What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past.”

I remember Ms. Hammond’s words and I think about Alex. She was there. A part of it all. She saw history up close and personal. And what she saw made her insane.

26 May 1795

I sit by the river tonight waiting for darkness. The sky is clear and I have my basket with rockets in it at my side.

Madame du Barry, an old courtesan, sits beside me and clasps my hand in hers. I remember her death. All of Paris does. She screamed her head off. Quite literally. Please, she wheedles now, think of apricots, the scent of roses, the pricking of champagne bubbles on the tongue.