Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  This constitution is not the document I prayed for. How I wish my loyalty and duty to the king did not require me to witness his formal acceptance of it.

  Someone raps for attention on the Assembly floor. It must be time. As we wait for Louis and the president of the Assembly to enter, I gaze at the small, circular dais below and realize for the first time that two simple armchairs are placed there. Where will the king sit? I look for a throne suitable for my brother. Finding none, my eyes return to the chairs and notice one is painted with fleur-de-lys.

  Dear God, they will seat Louis beside the president of the Assembly, with his head at the same level!

  If the king is bothered by this insult, his face does not show it. He speaks well and briefly. But even as he swears to maintain their demeaning constitution, to defend it against foreign attack, the deputies cannot show the simple courtesy of taking off their hats.

  Behind my fixed smile, I clench my teeth until my jaw hurts. At last the thing is over. As deputies file out, Louis sits unmoving.

  “I must go to the king,” Antoinette declares. I ought to follow. But I cannot bear to. Instead, I twist and turn through the crowd until I am free of the Salle du Manège. A guard at the westerly entrance to the palace gardens opens it for me. Inside, I pick up my skirts and run so hard that I am winded. I lose a shoe, but, rather than stopping, I kick off the other. The pain of the gravel on the soles of my feet distracts me from the more pressing pain in my heart. It also forces me to slow then stop. In the distance something catches my eye—a great balloon floats in the direction of the Champs-Élysées, streaming with an endless number of tricolored ribbons.

  I sit on the nearest bench, put my face in my hands, and cry.

  “Madame Élisabeth.” The voice is gentle. I look up to find Monsieur Moustier standing before me, hands clasped behind his back, thinner than when last I saw him.

  “Monsieur, you are released!”

  “All of us, Madame Élisabeth,” he replies. “The others are inside awaiting His Majesty, but I came away to thank you, on behalf of us all, for your kind care. The food and wine fed more than our bellies—they let us know we were not forgotten.”

  I take the handkerchief from my sleeve and wipe my cheeks. “Monsieur, you could never be forgotten, not after the care you took of us on the road to Varennes and the ignominy you suffered on the road back. The members of our royal party decided, eyes open and risks weighed, to ride out of Paris hoping to improve our situation. You followed out of loyalty and duty, expecting nothing for yourself, and risking much.”

  “That is what true Frenchmen ought to do for their king, and for his family.” He smiles broadly. “And I did expect something—I expected to feel as I did during my years in the gardes: vital, useful, alive.”

  “I am so glad, monsieur, that you are alive. But how did you know it was I who paid the prison warden?”

  “I only know one Mademoiselle Rosalie.” Again the smile.

  When the abbé took my money to the prison, I knew he might be required to say on whose behalf he acted. I also knew my real identity might harm our guards. So, on the spur of the moment, I decided to adopt the identity used on our journey.

  “Shall I escort you inside?” Moustier asks with a slight bow. “Unless I am mistaken, these are yours.” The hands that were behind him come forward, holding my lost shoes.

  “Thank you.” I laugh. Not in the contrived manner of the court, but heartily as I have not in a long time. My mood changed, thanks to this good man, who looks conscientiously away to preserve my modesty as I reveal my feet to put on my shoes.

  * * *

  Palace of the Tuileries, Paris, November 1791

  “Have you new shoes to show me?”

  That voice! Casting my book aside, I spring up and close my arms around the Princess de Lamballe, still in her traveling cloak. “I would give every pair of shoes I own to have you in England again,” I tell her.

  On the day we were discovered missing, Lamballe began her own journey out of France. She has been in fashionable Bath, soliciting help for the king and queen—alas without success. Then last month Antoinette wrote, begging the princess to come home. The queen and I quarreled bitterly about that.

  “We must have a high-profile émigré return,” Antoinette argued. “Since we were dragged back to Paris, the number of aristocrats fleeing France has increased to a frenetic pace.”

  “Can you blame those who go?” I had retorted. “France roils, so they go despite being deprived by law of three-fifths of their income by departing. And now the moderates think to persuade them back? Are the émigrés supposed to believe what they have lost will be restored if they return? I would not believe it.”

  “They would be fools to trust the deputies, but they must put trust in their king,” Antoinette had flashed back. “If Louis regains his powers, they will be made whole. But he cannot do so with so many titled French men and women gathered outside our borders where they are perceived as a threat. Some portion of the scores who have fled must return.”

  And our loyal, darling Lamballe has.

  “That’s a fine welcome.” Lamballe answers my somber face with a light laugh, but when I hold her at arm’s length the red rims on her eyes are strikingly obvious. “I’d forgotten what it was to be caged until the gates of the city closed behind me,” she confesses. “Still it is a blessing to see you, and I will be glad to be with the queen.”

  “She has missed you greatly.” It is the truth, and as it must be Lamballe’s consolation, I infuse my voice with as much warmth as I can. But I cannot help feeling that if Lamballe and others like her are encouraged to return and things go badly, their fates will be on our heads.

  As though reading my mind the princess says, “I have made my last will and testament, and my peace with God. I cannot say this to the queen; it would feel like a betrayal, as if I do not believe in her. And it is not that.”

  “Of course not,” I reply gently. “You do not lack faith in Their Majesties, but in France—in the thousands who ought to be my brother’s subjects but now imagine themselves his equals or even his masters. I feel the same.”

  It is not only Louis’s subjects who disappoint. My brothers, the Counts of Provence and Artois, also give me much cause for vexation. Provence, having successfully escaped even as we were captured, has set up his own court in Coblenz, a city of the Rhineland, where Artois, abroad for months, joined him. Their behavior in Coblenz is being compared to the worst excesses of Versailles by those in the Assembly who oppose the constitutional monarchy. Do Provence and Artois never think of His Majesty? Never think how their behavior might deepen his danger?

  “If only the queen could make Emperor Leopold understand how dire our situation becomes,” I continue, offering Lamballe a second embrace. “Could persuade him that if the French monarchy falls others will follow. But he seems willfully blind.” I cannot keep moroseness from creeping into my voice.

  The queen is bitterly disappointed in her brother’s tepid response to her endless appeals. She is equally frustrated with the Bourbon king and queen of Spain. Even the king of Sweden equivocates, and he has the Count von Fersen at his elbow arguing for help for Louis. It seems we are completely abandoned by Louis’s fellow sovereigns, who stand to lose just as much as he should the contagion of republicanism spread beyond France’s borders. Yet Antoinette does not give up. Only yesterday she showed me her hands, ruined with calluses from the many letters she writes daily.

  “Or perhaps Leopold has other political interests,” Lamballe replies. “But our interests, yours and mine, will always lie with Their Majesties. That is why I came back. Antoinette wrote that she hopes my return will set a fashion. I would prefer to set a fashion for a new hairstyle.” She places both hands on her coiffure and strikes a playful pose. “But I will not say that to the queen. No, from this moment I shall be light of heart and witty of conversation. If we are all in a cage, I will act the brightly colored bird.”

  La
mballe is a better woman than I. Only this morning I told Abbé de Firmont I find it hard not to meet whatever optimism is left in Antoinette and Louis with a myriad of facts that would undermine their hopes. For we had clung to desperate hope once before, and I feared this moment was Varennes all over again. By way of penance, the abbé instructed me to rise each day determined to live without bitterness and be useful to those around me.

  I try to be useful to Louis, truly I do.

  But my brother’s largest fault is his goodness; or rather his inability to perceive what is not good in others. Intrigue is foreign to his soul. So even as Antoinette and I point it out all around him—the disloyalty of his ministers, the constant shifting of factions in the Assembly, and the duplicitous nature of the deputies who make a show of compromise with Louis to his face but mock him in other quarters—he often cannot, or will not, see it.

  But to say any of this to Lamballe would be to fail in my penance, and a cruel repayment to a woman who sacrifices so much. So instead, I embrace her again and say, “That is all we can do, dear one: make the best of our captivity . . . and pray for freedom.”

  “I CANNOT UNDERSTAND why the Assembly is so angry!” My brother stamps into the queen’s apartment. “They wrote the constitution, not I, and it clearly promises religious freedom.”

  “Ah, but they did not write it, Louis,” Antoinette reminds him, looking up from the tapestry we are working on. “Their predecessors in the Constituent Assembly did.”

  “But they can read.”

  “Presumably”—I stick my needle into the work—“some of them.”

  “So they know freedom of conscience is enshrined in that document, which also gives me the veto. They should not be surprised then that I veto a decree stating that any priest still not willing to swear an oath to the constitution will lose his pension and be driven from his parish. Do priests, like every other Frenchman, not fall under the constitution’s protection? Have not holy fathers consciences?”

  “They most certainly do, but many deputies do not,” I reply.

  Louis’s veto of the latest law punishing priests is the king’s second in as many weeks. The first involved a dreadful decree sentencing émigrés who fail to return to death in absentia, and providing that lands belonging to other members of their families, even those who themselves remained steadfastly in France, would be confiscated. The king could not permit that, for it punishes the innocent for the actions of their relations.

  Yet despite the sound logic and moral footing of my brother’s vetoes, the more radical members of the Assembly use them to defame the monarchy.

  “This is the work of the Brissotins,” Antoinette says.

  The latest of France’s political factions is made up of men expelled from the Jacobins immediately after the constitution was adopted. They are trying to make a name for themselves, and the quickest way to do that is by bringing decrees to the assembly floor.

  “They create laws to bait you, Louis,” Antoinette continues. “Then publish broadsheets attacking you for exercising the royal veto.”

  “I cannot do otherwise but veto, no matter how they portray me,” the king responds. “Surely you see that. Barnave does. He told me he himself would veto this measure.”

  Antoinette looks studiously at her needle and I wonder, Will she tell the king that Barnave begins to suspect her support of the constitution is a ruse?

  “Monsieur Barnave is leaving Paris.” The queen says it matter-of-factly as if it did not have larger implications.

  Louis stops walking and his mouth falls open. His eyes take on a pained look. Barnave ought to have confessed this when encouraging Louis’s vetoes—ought to have admitted that he would not be here to share the consequences. I’ve thought Barnave intelligent, and naive, but now see him for a coward.

  “So the Feuillants cede the field of battle to these new upstart Brissotins,” I say, weary from trying to keep up with the ever-changing realignments among the political clubs.

  “Yes,” Antoinette replies. “But we will not. There is increasing talk of war, and the Brissotins beat the drum most loudly. Let it come.”

  Louis looks stricken. “Let it come? But my dear, given the way the constitution is written, I would be required to declare it! To declare war against your brother, whose help we have so ardently sought.”

  “I will write to Leopold and explain that it is an expedient.” The queen’s tone is entirely matter of fact. “You will lead France’s patriotic defense. If France wins, all will celebrate you and your influence will be greatly restored.”

  “And if France loses?” My brother begins to pace again.

  “I suspect it will.” Antoinette shrugs. “And that may be better for us, because the radicals who invited the war will be destroyed, and the monarchy will be reborn of the ashes.”

  “Élisabeth,” Antoinette says, suddenly noticing me, “why do you smile? What could possibly be funny?”

  “I am sorry, not the thought of war I assure you. It is just so strange to hear you agreeing with Robespierre.”

  Among the papers gathered for me by my dame d’atour these last weeks there have been dozens trumpeting war as a “school of virtue” for the citizens of France. But one voice has been absent from those braying for battle.

  Robespierre opposes war.

  Since the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly he has been working as the public prosecutor for Paris. But no matter his position, his word carries great weight with all the worst sorts of people. Radicals and revolutionaries called him “incorruptible” for his alleged purity of principles, modest way of living, and refusal of bribes. As if any man who suborned radical revolution could be said to have pure principles.

  “Robespierre says that war will play into our hands,” I say.

  “How fortunate then that, for once, no one listens to him.” This time it is Antoinette who smiles.

  * * *

  The Streets of Paris, April 25, 1792

  The streets are crowded. “I should never have agreed to bring you,” Moustier says, looking around in the manner of a man accustomed to assuring the safety of others.

  “How could you say no to Mademoiselle Rosalie?” I glance into his worried face and smile. That is who I am today, dressed in the clothing I wore to flee Paris—clothing I never thought to don again. But when I heard about the guillotine, I had to see it.

  And these clothes were the only way.

  “Mademoiselle Rosalie was very persuasive,” Moustier concedes. “But if you are harmed, I do not believe His M— Monsieur Durand will absolve me of guilt.”

  “Monsieur Durand will not miss me, and we have both been in more dangerous crowds.” I momentarily recall the twisted, horrible faces lining the route on our ride back from Varennes. How members of the mob murdered an elderly count—shot, trampled, and cut him to ribbons—merely for taking his hat off to his king as our carriage passed.

  There is none of that today—no anger in this mob. Instead, there is a jovial mood and a tremendous amount of patriotism.

  The Brissotins have had their way. We have declared war on the House of Austria.

  But, in a twist of fate, that house is no longer headed by Emperor Leopold. Odd, I think, as we make our way through the throng, while I thought Leopold useless, his death overwhelmed me. Perhaps it was only the suddenness. But it felt like something more—a presage of further ills. I suspect the king felt a similar portent, because when he stood before the Assembly reading out the declaration of war, his voice faltered, and when the queen and I went down to him afterward, he kept murmuring “sentenced to death” in an odd, absent way. As for Antoinette, as unnerved as she was by the loss of Leopold, she still hopes this war will save us. Given the report of fifty thousand Austrian troops massed at the Belgian border, perhaps she will be proved right.

  “What should a lawyer and a lady’s companion—good citizens both—have to fear on a day such as this?” I smile at Moustier again. The last time I left the Tuilerie
s, it was to be displayed alongside the queen and the children at the theater. I do not like to be used as a prop. This outing, being of my own invention, however, makes me feel liberated. “We even have our tricolor cockades.” As we stop to let a cart go by I touch his, pinned to the lapel of his coat.

  “Tell me,” Moustier asks, “why do you wish to see a man executed? I have seen men die, by swords, musket, and, er . . . other ways. But surely you have not.”

  “No. But I have seen animals die on my farm.” I have killed chickens myself—being someone who wished to understand every aspect of the raising of my animals. I do not say this because it might shock Moustier, and he is looking rather shocked already. “Besides, I once met someone concerned with the cruelty of France’s methods of execution, and it has been a matter of interest to me ever since.”

  When word of this new device reached me, my first thought was of Madame Condorcet, and of the pamphlet she gave me. As I promised her, I’d read the whole of it, and a few others on the same subject besides. The wheel, hanging, and many of the other things described seemed brutal to me, even if I could not accept the premise that death as punishment ought to be banned. I was very glad when my brother, after a man was saved from death on the wheel by an angry crowd, abolished that manner of execution. And I would like to think that my reflections on that topic, which I shared candidly with him, had some influence on his decision. I almost wrote to Sophie telling her what I had done. I wish now that I had.

  “If I would not kill an animal in a manner that prolonged suffering, I surely wish those people found guilty of crimes and sentenced to die might do so swiftly, after seeking God’s grace,” I say to Moustier.

  This is a rare point of agreement between myself and the Legislative Assembly—for it is they who decreed decapitation the only acceptable manner of executing the guilty. Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed this change of law and promoted the machine we will see today. I wonder how he feels about it being named for him.

  Will Sophie Condorcet be in the crowd to witness this enlightened improvement—a manner of execution that is swift, sure, and without suffering? Might she recognize me, even after the passage of years? I never considered that. And if she does, will Sophie reveal me despite our former sympathetic discussion? No, it is foolishness to think she might espy me where none will reasonably expect me to be. And besides, I have already promised the vigilant Moustier we will stay at the fringes of the crowd.