Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  To my surprise, he briefly touched my shoulder, a gentle smile on his face. “I will consider your advice.”

  One of the market women promptly fainted. The others tended to her while the amused guards looked on. Apparently the king’s presence still had the power to awe his subjects, and I had to admit I, too, was pleased by the simple gesture. Perhaps he meant what he’d said.

  “The change will come what may, Your Majesty, but we, your subjects, hope you will lead it, not resist it.” I knew that speaking to the king this way broke etiquette. I looked to the Assembly president, and he wouldn’t meet my gaze, confirming my thoughts. Inwardly, I cringed. Yet I didn’t regret my words.

  King Louis began to pace. I watched him as he moved, taking in his elegant breeches and coat, his perfectly coiffed wig, and the way he hunched slightly.

  “Please, Your Majesty”—I curtsied again hastily—“there will be violence if I do not return with some news to tell the women who have marched all the way here from Paris.”

  “She’s right,” Mounier said quietly.

  The king nodded. “Tell those who are with you, mademoiselle, that I will ensure all have a ration of grain from the royal reserves. I will let no one in the kingdom go hungry. You have my word.”

  A rush of relief washed over me and the other women smiled. “Thank you, Your Majesty.” I hesitated a moment, wanting to push the issue of our Declaration, but I sensed this was the limit to his goodwill for now. At least I could deliver a hopeful message to the crowd, one they would be grateful to hear.

  We curtsied and were then ushered out of the room and shoved unceremoniously into the courtyard. The crowd cheered when they saw us reappear.

  “The king has promised rations of grain,” I shouted.

  Cheers arose and tears streaked the faces of many. We hadn’t come for nothing.

  “He promises his citizens will not go hungry! He listened carefully. I can attest that he cares for his people.” When I finished speaking, many shouted questions at a furious pace.

  “And what of our rights?” someone called.

  “Did you see the queen, or was she too busy eating cakes?”

  Laughter rippled through the crowd.

  “Did he agree to our Declaration? Do you have his promises in writing?”

  “The king is a liar! He’s plotting against us.”

  “L’Autrichienne wants us dead.”

  “I want her dead!”

  The crowd devolved into a shoving match, and many were jostled or knocked to the ground. The king’s guards pressed closer, roughly handling those who would not calm themselves. A soldier fired his pistol into the air, but his attempt at quieting the crowd backfired. A skirmish broke out between several royal guards, citizens, and militiamen.

  The people didn’t stop until we had the king’s promises in writing, for anyone to read. Only then did some of the marchers retreat out of the courtyard and away from the palace, some heading back to Paris, content that we’d won the day.

  But I wasn’t leaving.

  There was still too much at stake. They were right to question the king’s commitment to our rights and the Declaration. Grain rations addressed only the simplest of our needs. We wanted liberty! I could not allow our march to amount to nothing. No, we could not leave, I urged those around me. Not until the king came with us to Paris to live amongst his people and share our sufferings.

  THE RAIN CONTINUED to pour from the night sky on those who chose to remain, but it didn’t dampen our fervor. For hours, we chanted, shouted, and sang to push away the exhaustion that beat at us.

  Around midnight, Lafayette finally arrived with the National Guard, and I wondered whose side he would take now. Had the king merely been waiting for his general to come and crush us? Perhaps the royal family had simply climbed into warm beds while we stood here shivering and soaked to the bone.

  If I couldn’t sleep, neither could they.

  “Come, mes amis, let’s remind them we’re here,” I said as I eyed Lafayette’s guard. Pikes, broomsticks, and spears in hand, a group of women followed me toward the gates.

  My hand tightened on the hilt of my sword, and I felt something snap inside me. All at once I advanced on a royal guardsman at the palace entrance, only to see that it was Lieutenant Colonel de Sainte-Amaranthe. If he recognized me, too, he was not so smug now, and I wasn’t helpless anymore. I decided to show him a thing or two about a woman’s strength.

  “Now that Lafayette is here, he can escort the king. The king must come to Paris!” I insisted and when he and his men tried to push us back, I swung my sword.

  A fight erupted all around me. I fought, like a soldier—no, like a warrior queen—and drew blood.

  But they drew blood too. First on my right arm, then my left. And the last thing I felt was the stinging slash of a saber across my breast. Like a warrior queen, was my last proud thought before I fell to my knees.

  While the royal guards retreated under the surge I’d inspired at the gates, someone dragged me to safety, draping me over a cannon so other women could bandage my wounds with strips of cloth they tore from their own skirts. I lay there bleeding, exhausted, hungry, and furious. But still alive. Maybe more alive than I had ever been.

  Dawn approached at last, and the king had still not appeared. Would he address his people, or did he hope we would tire and give up?

  When the first rays of sunlight brightened the sky, our cries gained momentum once again.

  “Bread! Bread! Bread!” we shouted, hearts in our throats, rage filling our empty bellies.

  Your Majesty, I pleaded inwardly, when will you do something?

  Though I was weak both from hunger and loss of blood, I staggered upright to lead the chants. But as I would later learn, while the crowd parted for the Queen of the Markets, the Queen of France had narrowly escaped with her life. A group of commoners found an unguarded entrance to the palace and broke into the queen’s rooms. Finding it empty, they stabbed her mattress with pikes and swords. But all I saw was the aftermath. Several women with clubs and pikes bolted away from the crowd, and it was then I spotted Pauline among the pack who had called for the queen’s murder during the march from Paris. Eyes wide, I watched as three armed soldiers on horseback raced after them. More gunfire rang out and screams echoed against the golden walls of the palace. I said a quick prayer that Pauline was safe.

  A new chant began, one of endearment for His Majesty. We beseeched him to speak to us. To be the leader he was meant to be.

  “Papa! Papa! Papa!”

  “Come on, Louis,” I muttered under my breath, hoping he would not make those of us who had put our faith in his word look like fools.

  Just then, General Lafayette stepped onto the balcony overlooking the courtyard.

  He raised his hand in the air and shouted, “Citizens! Silence!” None obeyed, and he attempted it several times until, at last, we quieted. “Your king,” he began in a commanding voice, “wishes to speak with his people, and to confer glad news for all.”

  A shadow filled the doorway on the balcony for an instant. Lafayette retreated, and the king stepped outside.

  My heart leapt into my throat. He wore the tricolor cockade. Many bent to their knees, others bowed their heads.

  “Citizens of Paris.” He paused a long moment. “I accept your Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. I shall go with you to Paris to rule from our beloved capital. It is to my good and faithful subjects that I confide all that is most precious to me.”

  The throng roared.

  Tears pricked my eyes and I shot my wounded arm into the air in triumph. We had done it! “Vive le roi! Vive le roi!” I screamed along with my fellow patriots. Our king would not betray us—he had seen reason—and he would curb the excesses of his wicked nobles. “Vive le roi!”

  “Papa! Papa! Papa!”

  The king stood proudly, soaking up the love his people professed for him. After a long moment, he left the balcony. Yet the chanting cont
inued, this time for the queen’s submission, lest she try to change the king’s mind. Lafayette motioned to have the queen and her children step out together, which was when the chants became darker.

  “No children! Only the queen! Make her come out alone!”

  I held my breath in spite of the pain of my wounded breast. Would the queen do it? Would she dare, even knowing that some in the crowd had muskets aimed and ready? I didn’t think she had the courage.

  But she did.

  The door opened a second time. An elegant and gleaming figure emerged, pale in her beauty and immediately recognizable from the hundreds of pamphlets that had littered the streets like fallen leaves. Queen Marie-Antoinette stood before us.

  Silence fell.

  We stood frozen in disbelief and awe as she looked out over her subjects, who clamored at her feet with muskets and pikes; who had published every foul thing imaginable about her; who had abused her name on the long road from Paris to Versailles. Yet despite all this, her presence exuded a calm self-assuredness. As though she believed she was in her rightful place, as our queen.

  Riveted by the sight of this infamous woman, I stared at her, swells of emotion crashing over me. From hatred to reverence and back again.

  She touched the tricolor cockade on her gown as she stared down upon us. At that moment, General Lafayette appeared and knelt at her side, theatrically pressing a kiss to her hand in homage. Was it a show for her or for us?

  “Vive la reine!” someone called. Some followed suit. But the respect shown in deference to King Louis did not hold, and within seconds, the good-natured cheering shifted to a furious chant.

  “À Paris! À Paris! À Paris!” To Paris, the royal family must go!

  The queen ducked inside to safety.

  I stared after her, wondering what it must be like to be born into such privilege and responsibility. I could scarcely fathom it.

  HOURS LATER, THE royal carriage pulled down the drive, with the National Guard acting as escort. We marched with the procession, heads high, and song on our lips. As the royal carriage passed me, it stalled for an instant on the uneven path. I caught sight of a woman’s face inside, her features forlorn. I recognized Princess Élisabeth. For a fleeting instant, her haunted face and obvious suffering struck me, and I doubted what we had begun.

  Yet I knew her birth and status had trapped her in this moment. Despite her wealth and her brother and her fancy shoes, her status as princess forced her to bend to our will. The same way my poverty had forced me to bend to other wills.

  But the carriage continued forward, and her face disappeared from view in a blur of my countrymen. And all I saw was their faces—victorious, unified, free. My doubt faded.

  Maman would have been proud to see her daughter fight for what she deserved, what we all deserved. Prideful tears stung my eyes. I would see this through, come what may, for her and for my friend Marion. For Pauline and my sisters-in-arms. Squinting into the sunlight that poured over thousands of heads and shoulders, glinted off sabers and pikes and cannons, I smiled. The women of Paris guided their king home.

  Part III

  The Princess

  We should not say I will until we are sure of being right. But once said, there should be no yielding of what has been ordained.

  —Madame Élisabeth de France

  Palace of the Tuileries, Paris, May 1791

  An escape is being planned.

  After nearly a year and a half of captivity in his own palace, my brother, King Louis XVI, sees reason. He is not truly king in Paris. He is not safe here, nor is his family.

  The truculent crowd that blocked us from traveling to Saint-Cloud last month finally tipped the scales in favor of our departure. The mob charged that Louis sought to flee the city. They were wrong—he only wanted to hear Mass with a priest loyal to Rome. But their shouts were prescient, because after hours trapped in our carriage with the National Guard unable to disperse those blocking our way, Louis returned to the palace finally convinced that he must indeed leave Paris.

  And so, we will withdraw to a part of France where the air is clear of virulent revolutionary rhetoric. When Louis is among loyal subjects, supported by loyalist troops, he will be king again and make France sane.

  Louis came to Paris in good faith. The queen and I both thought it the wrong decision, and when we arrived at this ruin of a château—a palace of dust, disuse, and disrepair uninhabited by kings for many years—we despaired. Not so Louis. My brother took a hopeful view and did all in his power to cheer us. He helped move furniture to barricade doors that would not lock. He urged us to ignore the insults hurled by crowds beneath our windows. And when one of those dreadful market women, the same sort that drove us from Versailles, climbed up the balcony into my room as I slept, Louis ordered new lodgings made ready for me so that I would feel safe.

  Again and again, Louis urged us to be as sanguine as he generally appeared, to believe in the inherent goodness of his children, the people of France.

  Louis still believes the majority of his subjects are good. He blames not the mobs but the men who he insists mislead and direct them—the deputies of a Constituent Assembly so diseased with revolutionary philosophies that they cannot come to any practical understanding with their king; the leaders of Paris’s political clubs each with a different name but all with the same mission: the destruction of France and the holy church.

  But I am not fooled. A true and heedless wickedness runs like an illness through the veins of the French people, infecting those at every level of society from street urchins to certain damnable members of the aristocracy.

  We have proof of this in the thousand little cruelties inflicted on the king and queen by our officious jailers. And perhaps such disrespect might be forgivable. But the broader proofs are damning. The new government of France casts aside the greatness of her centuries-old heritage. They have abolished the hereditary titles and privileges of the nobles; replaced the fleur-de-lys flag with the republican tricolor; and redrawn the map of my brother’s kingdom as if this were their right, dividing it into “departments” in place of the former great provinces.

  And all this—all of it, comes from a rejection of God’s divine order.

  Sitting at my desk, I riffle through the day’s pile of political flyers collected for me by my dame d’atour. It is a terrible chore and quickly makes me oblivious to the sunny spring sky and the songs of the birds outside my open window. Like their predecessors, these flyers are filled with horrible attacks on Louis and Antoinette. They also savage God’s holy servants, alleging unspeakable acts by priests and nuns. Thanks to such scraps of paper, holy sisters are now regularly pulled from their convents and whipped in the streets. Why, only this morning I penned a letter of encouragement to a sweet young woman named Charlotte Corday who is secretary at the Abbey of Sainte-Trinité in Caen. She was formerly a pupil there and wrote to me first in that guise, sharing her dreams of being a holy sister in due course. But now poor Charlotte worries that the time for such vows is over in France. And she fears for the safety of the sisters there who have already consecrated themselves to our Lord.

  Those who turn on their divinely appointed king and the servants of God are not good. I cannot see them as such, even to please my brother.

  Casting the ugly pages onto the desk, I rise and walk to my bookcase: the one concealing a secret door completed only last night. I run my hand over the face of it, remembering the thrill and the apprehension I experienced these last few evenings, ear pressed to the outer door of my apartment, ready to signal the workmen to be silent at the sound of any approaching footfall.

  Before they departed, one of the men showed me how to make the door open. I have only done so once—with his eyes upon me. The urge to touch the hidden lever is very great . . . and surely I ought to practice . . .

  The door to my apartment swings open without warning. I pull my hand back from the gilded carvings of the case as if it were made of fire not wood. How glad I am
that I did not give in to the temptation to trigger the door merely for the thrill of doing so! I spin round, expecting the captain of the National Guard who constantly shadows me. I hope that the color in my cheeks will not make him suspicious.

  Instead, the Princess de Lamballe enters at an unladylike pace, her own face flushed. “They burn the Holy Father in effigy!” she says, quite oblivious in her distress to the great sigh of relief that escapes me. “If the mob was any closer, we would smell the smoke!”

  “Then it is a mercy they are not. Have you told the queen?”

  The princess lowers her voice. “She is with the count.”

  She means Swedish Count Axel von Fersen. I know what infamy those who defame the queen would infer from such a tête-à-tête. Only theirs is not a romantic meeting, but a logistical one. The count is one of those most intimately involved with planning our exit from Paris.

  I cannot say this to Lamballe, who is dear to Antoinette but also related by marriage to the Duc d’Orleans, who makes shameful common cause with the revolutionaries. This is a time for extreme reticence, so the princess will not know we are going until we are discovered gone.

  Lamballe stands looking forlorn, and I wish to cheer her. So I say, “Come see the shoes that have arrived! I will put a pair on and we can walk in the garden.”

  “More shoes! How many pairs is that this month? It must be at least one for every day.”

  Shoes, books, my farm—after my family, these are my earthly loves. Fortunately, none of them are included in the seven deadly sins. And at a court where so many pursue more morally compromising ambitions and desires, I hope to be forgiven my desire for divine and decorative footwear.

  “I do not apologize.” I say to Lamballe. “In these grim times we must take our pleasure where we can.” I open the box with the two pairs of taffeta shoes that arrived this morning from the rue Neuve des Augustins.