Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  “Two women together, what could be dangerous in that?” Antoinette gives a wicked smile. “Do you have it?”

  “Yes.” I draw the decree from one of my pockets and hold it out. “The Assembly officially declares that the king was abducted, and that is how he came to be on the road to Montmédy.”

  “Delightful fiction! We must have wine,” Antoinette replies, eyes glittering.

  It may seem an odd thing to celebrate—this story that must stretch the credulity of even the most simpleminded, but it is the first decree of the Assembly that I have ever applauded. For this is a most expedient lie: it may save my brother’s crown.

  Shortly after our return to a palace full of broken furniture, slashed paintings, and a stench that made it clear members of the mob—come in a rage on word the king was gone—had used the corners of our home as a necessary, Deputy Condorcet rose in the Assembly declaring that since the king had tried to free himself from France, France could, without compunction, be freed of the king. This maddest of ideas came from one of the mousiest of men, for Condorcet called for a republic not in grand ringing tones, but so softly that the other deputies had to sit perfectly still to be certain of hearing him. As Condorcet finished, the Assembly exploded with delegates leaping to their feet, and soon half of Paris was in the streets shouting for Louis’s overthrow.

  When word arrived at the Tuileries, I was terrified. But my fear woke me from the self-pity I had allowed to swallow me. “Let us not lose heart in doing good; for in due time, if we do not faint, we shall reap.” The passage from Galatians sprang to my mind and sent me running to offer Antoinette help in cultivating a young Assembly deputy named Monsieur Barnave. We met Barnave—if you can call it that, given he was a travel companion forced upon us by the Assembly—during our torturous ride back to Paris. And over those ghastly hours sweltering in the berline, Antoinette and I discovered the deputy was intelligent and far more pragmatic than many of his ilk. Certainly he has a better head on his shoulders than Condorcet.

  I suspect it would horrify Condorcet to hear he helped us greatly in wooing Barnave, and in our scramble to preserve my brother’s throne. Condorcet’s radical rhetoric reminded men like Barnave—with property or prosperous businesses—that a complete overthrow of everything that has gone before would assure many months, perhaps years, of uncertainty, marches, and violence, all of which disrupt commerce. Such gentlemen might soon find themselves reduced to the poverty of the sans-culottes. An unappealing thought. So Barnave led the more moderate members of the Jacobin Club in breaking from it. These more reasonable men are in the process of forming a new political faction, a club that he tells us will be called the Feuillants. And this new brotherhood of more moderate delegates is the reason that the declaration Antoinette now peruses declares the monarchy inviolable.

  Finished, Antoinette lays the pages on the settee beside her. “I can guess one of your favorite details—our guards were not named among our abductors.”

  “Yes!” Monsieur Barnave gave me his word that he would protect those faithful men who aided us in fleeing Paris. And it seems he has kept that word, although true-hearted Moustier and the other former members of Louis’s Garde du Corps might easily have been made scapegoats.

  What a blessed relief. I’ve worried about our guards since we descended the step of the berline in the courtyard of the Tuileries and I saw them dragged off. I sent Abbé de Firmont to inquire after them and bid him to say masses for them. The masses were said, but information on the men was not as easy to find. At last the abbé discovered where they were imprisoned, and I sent monies to make certain they had clean linens and food in case their families could not afford such niceties.

  “How I wish I could hear Barnave’s speech on the floor of the Assembly today in support of the Declaration.” Antoinette sighs. “He read me a portion of it arguing for Louis’s restoration under a conservative constitutional monarchy, and declaring republicanism contrary to France’s true interests.”

  “I am in perfect agreement with his views on republicanism,” I reply. “But I fervently wish no restoration was necessary.” I am thinking of a supplemental decree, enacted today alongside the one I brought the queen, suspending Louis’s political duties until a new constitution is adopted.

  “Élisabeth, we could not move forward without compromise,” Antoinette chides.

  “Perhaps,” I concede, “but no one has yet been able to satisfactorily explain how a king can be suspended from the duties placed upon him by divine right.” I know Antoinette will not take up the point, for it is philosophical and she is, to her core, focused on the practical in a way that I alternately finding admirable and infuriating.

  “You have not heard the boldest thing our Monsieur Barnave has planned.” The queen lowers her voice. “He will conclude his speech with an appeal to end the Revolution.”

  The flesh on my arms tingles. “May God open the ears of the deputies to that wisdom. Will Barnave come to tell you how things went?”

  “Yes,” the queen says, “but in the meantime what else do you have in those pockets of yours?”

  Antoinette has correctly concluded that the same servant who ran for the Declaration collected the latest slanderous flyers for me. How I wish I had told her to deliver the odious stack to my desk.

  “Just the usual slurs.”

  “Nothing on the rights of women?” Antoinette laughs lightly. She refers to a document we received yesterday—not among the flyers collected on the streets, but from a boy who came over the garden wall while we were walking and pulled a packet from inside his dirty shirt. A note on the first page, from an actress named Olympe de Gouges, declared it to be a draft of her soon-to-be published Declaration on the Rights of Woman, which she was dedicating to the queen as “the most detested of women.”

  “It is quite something,” the queen had said, more bemused than offended, “to be designated in pen and ink as the most detested of my sex, as if that were a badge of honor.”

  With a sigh I grudgingly pull the day’s flyers from my pocket, laying them in a pile on the settee beside the queen. “Nothing so well written as Mademoiselle de Gouges’s work,” I say.

  With a sweep of her hand Antoinette spreads the papers like a fan. A great many are primarily comprised of pictures not words. Variations on the common caricature of the queen, skirt lifted to reveal her sex, with some politician—the perceived enemy of whatever faction printed the particular handbill—pushing eagerly between her legs, abound.

  No matter how many times I see such depictions, I am mortified. Yet Antoinette merely says, “Apparently these artists have not heard how my appearance has changed; they still show my younger self.”

  The four nightmarish days we spent traveling back to our cage at the Tuileries aged the queen overnight. Antoinette’s once luxurious hair turned white, as if she were a woman of six and sixty, not six and thirty. She is noticeably shrunken, reminding me of a flower that, falling from a vase, becomes desiccated before some servant discards it.

  Antoinette slides one sheet from the jumble. “Poor Monsieur Barnave, this is the first time I’ve seen him depicted with me in flagrante delicto. His support of Louis is the reason behind his defamation.” She shakes her head.

  I quickly select another flyer and place it over the offending one. “Here is a novelty. What are you and my brother supposed to be?”

  Louis and Antoinette are shown as animals joined at the middle: my brother with hooves of a goat and white fur, the queen with spotted fur and cat feet. Snakes writhe on her head, among fashionable decorative plumes.

  “‘The two make but one,’” Antoinette reads the caption. “Who would consider this an insult? Is not every wife joined to her husband by the church so that the two are one?”

  “You have forgotten, these revolutionaries have no use for the church, and even as they idealize domesticity in every other family, they revile it in ours.”

  It enrages me how pious praters like Robespierre, who
insist politics is public morality, consistently overlook the happy domesticity of our royal family. Two nights ago I watched the queen sitting beside little Louis-Charles, holding his hand until he fell asleep because he suffers from nightmares. As I gazed upon mother and child wreathed in the light of bedside candles, I wished the villains in the Assembly could see what I saw. Then my stomach fell as I realized that even should there be deputies standing in the shadows with me, their eyes, clouded by misunderstanding and hate, would be blind to the touching scene.

  “Let me take these away,” I say, eyes pricking.

  As I hurriedly gather the papers, one catches my eye. I ignore the figure’s bawdy pose and one bare breast, in favor of the pleasant, round face with lively eyes under arched brows. I am transported to a better time: a warm day in the gardens of Versailles when I met a bright young woman who gave me a pamphlet on the need for judicial reforms. There is no mistaking her. But that girl’s name was Sophie Grouchy, and here, beneath the slanderous depiction of her as a common street whore, alongside the proclamation “res publica,” is the name Madame de Condorcet.

  Good heavens, could the girl I met be married to the republican who calls for the dethronement of the king? I knew Condorcet had a wife, and I’ve heard of their salon—a meeting place for every sort of dangerous upstart. She and I, then, are on opposite sides, but even so, this ugly bit of paper saddens me. It seems that royalist or revolutionary, if you are a woman, those who consider you their enemy will make free to call you a whore.

  Never mind, Sophie, you are no more “public property” than the queen. And like those slandering her, this piece of paper shall go on the kitchen fires.

  The queen reaches out to touch my arm. “Courage, Élisabeth, there are surely more in France who, like Monsieur Barnave, can be turned to reason. Stability is needed, and your brother and the long line of kings before him represent that. Why even the Marquis de Lafayette seems, in the light of recent events, to have become fonder of the idea of the monarchy.”

  “Has he?” I ask mildly.

  Taking my leave, I head toward the kitchens. As I walk, my mind wanders to General Lafayette, who came upon me in the gardens shortly after our return.

  I was burying the puce shoes ruined in our failed escape.

  Discarding a pair of shoes is common enough. I give the women who dress me two or three pairs each week. Burying a pair of shoes, however, was a unique act. But our return to Paris felt like a death. So I buried the shoes to have a grave to mourn beside.

  I was on my knees mounding dirt over them when Lafayette found me.

  “Madame Élisabeth, have you fallen? Let me help you.” He held out a gloved hand.

  “Monsieur,” I replied, “I do not need your help. In fact, I would never seek it.”

  “I am sorry to think that.”

  “Sorry, perhaps.” I rose so that I could look him in the eye. “But you cannot be surprised, for you dragged my family back to a city that would destroy us.”

  “Madame Élisabeth, would you believe me if I said I wish I had let you go?”

  His belated regret did no good, and only stirred my anger. “Why? Because men like Danton and Robespierre, who have long slandered and threatened my brother, now call you traitor?”

  He stood straight beneath my withering gaze, unflinching. “No, because I too easily dismissed such men as outliers, but they are able to command multitudes. I fear where they will lead. I want a constitutional rule of law, not anarchy and violence.”

  “And I want nothing but my peaceful life at Montreuil. I long to wake and find this time at the Tuileries a dream, and my family not in danger thanks to an angry populace you helped foment. I would suggest, Marquis, that we both resign ourselves to disappointment.”

  I shook the dirt from my skirt and prepared to go, but Lafayette stepped in front of me. “I will not ask for your trust or forgiveness, but I will tell you truly: I have never wished His Majesty harm and will do what I can to prevent his injury or abuse.”

  “If you do, Marquis, you will be blessed. Not by me, for I am an imperfect woman who holds many grudges, but by your far more forgiving Creator.”

  Leaning in, he lowered his voice. “Let me help you, Madame Élisabeth. You, I can help because you are not a crowned king or queen. I cannot return you to your farm, but quiet arrangements can be made for you to join friends in the countryside. Or if you prefer, is not your closest friend abroad?”

  I hesitated. To escape and be with my dearest friend . . . I swayed where I stood, tempted.

  “You can go tomorrow,” the marquis said.

  Tomorrow. The word echoed in my head, first in his voice, then in my own. But another voice interrupted—the voice of my abbé saying: You are Élisabeth Philippine Marie Hélène de France.

  “Marquis, your offer is well meant, but sacred duty keeps me with Their Majesties.”

  I shake the memory from my mind as I push the slanderous flyers into the kitchen fires. The heat on my face feels purifying. I turn toward my apartments with a firm step. Despair is not in my nature, and not in our interests.

  Let us see what the new constitution will say; what powers it will give the king, and which it will take away.

  * * *

  Salle du Manège, Paris, September 14, 1791

  We are now to be a constitutional monarchy.

  Antoinette and I take our seats to bear witness to its formal enactment. Autumn sun streams through high windows, playing upon the tricolored bunting decorating the side balconies. There is laughter among the members of the crowd, pressed shoulder to shoulder, and nearly all wear tricolored baubles.

  I liked the Salle du Manége so much better when it was a royal riding school filled with prancing horses instead of the wicked, prating men who make up the National Constituent Assembly.

  Below, deputies mill about. There is Condorcet. No matter how many times I see him, his mild appearance astounds me. This man who presses the most radical viewpoints looks more like the bookish tutor to some duc’s son. His expression is entirely pleasant, as if he merely discusses the weather with Robespierre.

  The latter’s hand can be seen plainly in all the worst parts of the new constitution. His Jacobin Club is much smaller since the Feuillant defection, but that does not lessen his confidence. No man likes to stand on the Assembly floor and hear himself speak more than Robespierre.

  Lately he has been ranting about Gouges’s Declaration on the Rights of Women. It seems that the greater number of even the most radical men find the so-called natural rights of citizens that they demand for themselves unpalatable as applied to the fairer sex. So Robespierre and his Jacobin rabble vilify Gouges. But in a twist to their ugly attacks, they fixate upon the work’s dedication to the queen, calling Gouges “Royalist” in a tone suggesting this is the worst of all infamies. Robespierre employs the same word against the Girondins, politicians he once considered allies, but whose recent desire for moderation has caused him to turn upon them. So the Royalist ranks swell in the agitated minds of the Jacobins, without those of us who are true Royalists gaining any genuine allies at a time when we could sorely use them.

  Thinking of allies, I turn my eyes from the avowed enemies of my brother to find Barnave. He meets my gaze and smiles.

  “He believes the Revolution is complete,” Antoinette told me last evening when I lingered after her coucher. “Once the constitution is sworn, we shall stop becoming a new France, whatever that term means, and simply be one.”

  I’d found myself wondering how Monsieur Barnave could be so optimistic when every day there continued to be violence in the streets of France. And violence begets violence, I’d thought. For word had recently arrived that while revolutionary and royalist landholders argued and clashed in the colony of Saint-Domingue, those enslaved there had risen up in their own sort of rebellion.

  “But will those who have found their life’s work in marching, shouting, and destroying accept that?” I’d asked. “The worst habits are o
ften hardest to break, and I suspect venting your anger through violence is one.”

  “I asked Barnave much the same,” Antoinette had replied, arranging her bedcovers. “I told him the constitution is but paper, and a disappointing, fragile bit of paper at that. He agreed it is imperfect and says that other laws will be needed. Political clubs must be taught their place. They are private organizations, not a part of the government, and will be ordered to confine themselves to helping citizens understand the new constitutional monarchy. Attacking that government will be treated as sedition.”

  I stare at Barnave again, wondering how he intends to effectively rein in the clubs. Or rather how his successors will. In a handful of days, the entire National Constituent Assembly arranged below will be disbanded in favor of a new body called the Legislative Assembly. Barnave will not sit in it. No current deputies are permitted to. They have done this to themselves, and I cannot make sense of it, though I suppose it fits with their general lack of appreciation for the value of continuity. Will the next Assembly’s deputies have the stomach to use prison and troops to suppress violence?

  I already know Louis will have no such means at his disposal. No, the time when my brother might have ordered royal troops to fire in his defense is gone. I will always consider it one of his greatest failures that he did not use that power while he had it.

  The constitution lay on Louis’s desk for ten days before he signified his assent. I made it my business to read the thing in its entirety. Our so-called constitutional monarchy leaves my brother a mere puppet. He is commander of the French army but cannot order troops without the Assembly’s consent. His ministers may argue for royal policies on the floor of the Assembly, as if their being heard was a privilege and not a king’s right. Perhaps the only true thing of value my brother has been given is the power of veto, although the Jacobins fought hard against it. There is every reason to believe this power will be needed.