Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  This question is followed by cries of “Find him one!” Until, again on the end of a pike, one of the despicable hats is held out.

  Plucking the bonnet from the pike, Louis puts it upon his head. It is too small and, to my eyes, makes the king ludicrous. But for the first time some of the sounds from the crowd are appreciative rather than derogatory.

  “We shall toast France, mother of us all,” the king declares with gusto.

  Wine and glasses are quickly found and handed about. The toast is made. The glasses, like the wine, disappear—likely to be pawned by whichever rioters have pocketed them.

  Surely, I think, the crowd will now disperse, appeased. And the crowd does begin to move, rotating as the hand of a clock, but as some marchers pass out of the antechamber, more enter, and we remain trapped as if reviewing troops. Only these troops are endless, and they do not fight on the same side of things. As this mass—sans-culottes; market women; tradesmen; even a handful of those I might, under other circumstances, consider respectable—parades past, each new assemblage repeats the demands of those who went before. Each must be treated to the same explanations by Louis, although he must be weary of making them, and although the idea that a king should explain himself to his subjects is, in itself, demeaning.

  I give up listening and, fixing what I hope is a look of convincing composure on my features, watch the hands on Louis’s tortoiseshell and gold ormolu clock. As the second hour of our horrible vigil draws to a close, a change in the atmosphere of the room commands my attention.

  The mayor of Paris arrives. He is known to me, for he was another of those men deputized by the Assembly to bring us back from our failed escape that began one year ago today. He casts me a lewd glance, and I remember how he opened his knees when he sat next to me in the berline, pressing his thigh into mine until I felt dirty and humiliated. Recalling this unwanted contact, and how he bragged to the other deputy present that I fancied him, my cheeks grow hot where I stand.

  The man was loathsome then, and has not changed. After tilting his head and smiling at me to let me know he sees my discomfort, he heaps accolades upon the creatures who torment us, commending the “dignity” with which they came. Then he finishes by inviting those who were not asked to enter the Tuileries in the first place to leave, and by calling the whole of the day a “civic fete.”

  The nerve!

  But he is a man—being overly confident of his own worth and utterly without honor—precisely perfect for this crowd and this moment. And when he finishes, people begin to file out without being replaced, their shouted threats giving way to loud shows of good humor and bold assertions of “victory.”

  When the dreadful rioters are at last gone, I collapse on the coffer while my brother’s face whitens. “The queen,” he whispers, and a flurry of activity whirls us to Louis’s bedchamber to wait as Colonel de Sainte-Amaranthe leads a search for Antoinette and the children. Neither Louis nor I are inclined to go to the windows and watch the retreat of the crowd; hearing their shouts is enough . . . or rather too much.

  I do not know what to say to my brother. I have no advice left. So instead of exhorting, I ask, “What will Your Majesty do?”

  “Take this off, before Antoinette sees it,” Louis replies, sweeping the bonnet rouge from his head.

  The flash of red transports me—I see not the crimson bonnet, but the red of the tall, stretched beams of a guillotine, of a condemned man’s shirt, chosen to match the blood that would be spilt. I sway slightly and reach out to steady myself, eyes falling to the floor where they come to rest on the toes of my shoes: bright scarlet.

  And I know a true moment of resignation, fearful in both its content and its power.

  There will be no restoration for our royal house. God will not save us. Our foreign allies will not save us. Our Royalist subjects, bless their loyalty, will not save us either.

  And we cannot save ourselves. The taste for blood is too strong in the people of France.

  This revolution will end for Louis as the English one did for Charles I—whose history my brother reads obsessively these days—in dethronement and death. I wish it were not so, but wishing changes nothing. All I can do from this moment is look toward the life of the next world and step forward boldly in this one as I did today: standing beside my brother—my king—until the bitter end.

  Part IV

  The Politician

  It is easier to avoid giving a man power than to prevent him from abusing it.

  —Manon Roland

  Caen, August 1792

  The Revolution has become a great whore, and I fear so have I.

  We began the same. We began with vows: the Revolution with oaths recited to France on a tennis court, and I with oaths recited to Jean-Marie Roland in a church. We both began with such shining aspirations: to mold a nation, to mold a marriage. How did we both go wrong?

  I walked slowly along the river, a dirt path soft beneath my shoes, which were better suited for city cobbles. I had come from Paris to Caen on the pretext of needing a few days of sea air and calm after the city’s heat and violence, but in truth I had run here to escape my conscience. The river’s lapping seemed to whisper accusation. Harlot, it said. You and your new nation both.

  I cannot say where the Revolution began to careen off course—to splinter from a passionate, united call for change into bitter factions clawing at one another and baying for blood. I was not in Paris to see it all begin—I was not in Caen, either, but in Lyon, helping build my husband’s career as a wife should, both of us poring eagerly over newspapers full of Paris politics. So I did not see the Bastille fall; I did not see the women of Paris march to bring the king from Versailles—I only read about such things and wrote about them, too, as my husband began with my urging to enter politics, to correspond with leading assemblymen. It was only a year and a half ago that we arrived in Paris to set foot on the revolutionary stage.

  There was nothing wrong then in my marriage, but I could see what was wrong with the Revolution. “It is absolute folly to put any faith in the king.” Walking along the alien river here in Caen, I could hear the words I’d spoken in private to my husband, back in the days when there was still hope Louis would work with us all in good faith. “He has no belief in our constitution or our Legislative Assembly. Does no one realize that?” Perhaps the Revolution’s spiral toward chaos wasn’t entirely Louis’s fault, but his stubbornness blocking every sensible move the Assembly made just gave the radicals more to froth about, as if anyone needed that. “The sooner he is put aside, the better.”

  My husband had laughed. “Hasty words, my dear. If the king is not sincere, he must be the biggest liar in the kingdom. No one can pretend to that extent!” Roland had been made minister of the interior by then, an appointment that had surprised many but certainly not me. I knew the worth of the man I married—naturally others would see the value of this man come from Lyon with his plain black suit and his heron-stooped posture from years of patient work over a desk and his shining faith in the new world we were creating. But in those days my husband and so many of his colleagues still believed we could have both a king and a constitution, and it nearly drove me to distraction waiting for them to wake up.

  “Every time I see you go off to the council with that confident look on your face, I feel sure you are going to commit some folly,” I said, dryly. I’d been going over my husband’s papers in preparation for one of those useless meetings, highlighting the points for Roland to make to His Majesty. “You and the other ministers come home in a state of euphoria simply because the king has been polite to you. I fear you are all being fooled.”

  “But things are going quite well . . .”

  Roland stopped saying that soon enough. August’s heat had brought crisis and confusion to Paris in its wake: the National Guard storming the palace, the massacre of the Swiss Guard, the hero Lafayette forced into exile—there simply didn’t seem to be an end to the things that could go wrong this summer. The day th
e royal family was at last placed under arrest, I prayed we’d finally seen the last of the bloodshed.

  “I wish the king no ill will,” I’d said softly, gripping my husband’s hands tight. “He is not a bad man.” Truly, I had taken no pleasure in the sight of Louis Capet’s bewildered face as he and his draggled little family entered the ancient Temple’s tower. But how could any man born and bred to be a despot believe in a cause other than his own power? How could anyone so steeped in luxury understand the desperation that drives the hungry? Royalty were all like that, even the most well-meaning—the king’s sister, Madame Élisabeth, with her saintly reputation for generosity and good works had, according to her household accounts, bought sixty-three pairs of shoes in the span of less than three months! How can such people have any real notion what world their subjects live in?

  No, it was far better to put them aside and let us rule ourselves. When the royal family went to the Temple, I pitied them but breathed a vast sigh of relief. Let the sun set on the Capets; the people of France no longer needed well-fed, diamond-decked kings and queens to determine their fate. France was moving forward now into a new government under an Executive Committee, a National Convention, and a Revolutionary Tribunal.

  More committees, I couldn’t help thinking. More committees to disagree with one another, when you already couldn’t round a street corner in Paris without tripping over a cluster of moderates chanting slogans at a cluster of radicals shaking fists. But I had done my best not to be cynical. At least now we had a nation made new, and the bloodshed would be stopped.

  And for myself, I had a marriage to a great man, a man who would help lead France forward, and the wicked feelings inside me would be stopped.

  So why wasn’t any of it stopping? When did the slide become impossible to halt? A thousand steps from vows on a tennis court and vows in a church to the betrayal of all those vows—where did the fatal step happen?

  I did not know.

  But the Revolution was no longer cleaving to her new government like a faithful wife, but selling herself to every divisive new faction rising from within—to men who craved violence, power, and vengeance against the former ruling class more than they ever craved stability, peace, and prosperity.

  And I had become unfaithful too. There was a letter hidden in my writing table in Paris that proved it—a letter from a man I could no longer pretend I did not desire—and I had run to Caen to get away from it, but there was no escape.

  “Are you well, citizeness? You have gone quite pale.”

  I blinked, realizing that my footsteps had halted as I stared blind out at Caen’s river. A woman had paused beside me—no, a girl; she did not look much more than twenty with her gray eyes, her dimpled chin, and her blue muslin gown. “I am quite well, thank you.” From the book tucked under her arm, she had come to the river to read and stumbled instead on Manon Roland and her useless brooding. “I’m sorry to have intruded upon your reading.”

  “I’ve read it before.” She showed me the book: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. I’d read it too. “Are you from Paris, citizeness? I could not help but notice your newspaper—”

  She indicated the papers tucked under my arm. More from habit than anything else, I had carried on my aimless walk the latest newspapers from Paris. Seeing the eagerness in the girl’s forthright gray eyes, I passed them over.

  “Le Père Duchesne, only two days old! It takes so long to get news out here . . . ugh, why bother with L’Ami du Peuple? It’s such a rag, nothing but Citizen Marat ranting.”

  “Listen to an enemy rant and you can learn much about him,” I said, liking her energy, her decisive contempt. I, too, had been a girl who devoured political journals rather than society gossip.

  “If you detest the ranters as I do, then perhaps we should be friends.” She smiled. “I am Charlotte Corday.”

  And I am a harlot, I thought. Even standing by this pretty river, talking politics to a gray-eyed child with a volume of Plutarch under her arm, there was no getting away from either the Revolution or my own sin.

  “Are you staying in Caen long? I have so few people to discuss politics with—my cousin says a girl my age should be circumspect about such an enthusiasm.” Anger glinted briefly in young Charlotte’s eyes. “I say she is wrong.”

  “So she is. To take open interest in the shaping of a nation is the most appropriate enthusiasm imaginable.” I put my hand up as she made to pass the newspapers back. “Keep them. I must return to Paris.”

  The flash of anger turned to wistfulness. “I wish I could go to Paris, Citizeness—?”

  “Roland. Manon Roland.”

  She knew of me; I could tell from the blink. I made myself smile as I bid her farewell. Much as I wished I could stay here, I could not hide forever—not from the letter on my desk in Paris, not from the roiling of the Revolution, which threatened to spin out of control.

  It was time to go home.

  * * *

  Paris

  It had only just turned September, and the noise of yet another angry crowd drifted up from the street below the ministry. What makes them riot this time? I thought, pushing aside the speech I was drafting and running to the window. Perhaps two hundred men had flooded into the courtyard below, all tricolor badges and reddened faces, waving crude cudgels and shouting. Surely all Paris was weary of mobs and bloodshed by now—what had brought them screaming and maddened to my doorstep?

  “Maman—” My daughter tumbled white-faced through the door of my private study, blond curls flying. “They’re shouting for Papa. Is he—”

  “He is in session with the council, mignonne.” As she ran to bury her face in my side, I shriveled in shame. An artist might have seen the picture I made before the window—a small, auburn-haired woman of thirty-eight clutching her ten-year-old daughter, muslins trembling as her eyes raked the crowd below for the face that mattered most—and titled the picture Wife Prays in Virtuous Terror for Her Husband. But a truer title would be Harlot Swoons in Base Longing for Her Lover. Because even as I cradled my daughter, I could not pretend my thoughts had flown first to her father with his receding hair and earnest expression. No, I searched in terror for a head of dark curls above broad shoulders, for bold dark eyes above a mouth that quirked in rueful humor. I knew he was not there, but my heart clutched in fear for him, anyway—the man who had penned the short letter that had sent me fleeing to Caen.

  Manon, I love you. I cannot pretend I do not. I love your straight brows and your eager way of jumping from a carriage and your fine mind like a diamond. Tell me you love me too. Say the word and I will come to you.

  God help me, I thought, though it had been a long time since I called upon the God in whom I did not truly believe. I had come back to Paris and to my duty, but passion was still unraveling us both—Paris with her passion for blood, and Manon Roland with her passion for—

  No, I thought, bringing myself up sharp. Do not think his name. Nothing has unraveled that cannot be knit back up. So I put my daughter from me with firm hands, saying, “Hide upstairs, ma petite.” I had no illusions as to what a crowd of Enragés might do to my sweet girl with her virginal looks and lovely fair hair. I’d been the same age when—but that was another thought to be cut off sharply.

  Sweeping past the gilded cornices and Venetian mirrors to the antechamber below, I found my maids clutching each other and whimpering. They fell on me with a torrent of words.

  “—riots in the prisons—the National Guard is killing prisoners in their cells—”

  “—they’re saying our men will march to defend Paris against foreign armies, and they cannot leave prisons full of aristos and counterrevolutionaries behind to seize the city—”

  “Really, now,” I scolded, trying to inject sense into the panic. “No pack of royalist sympathizers who has spent the last months sitting in prison straw is going to storm out of the prisons and seize the city.”

  But no one was listening. This was more fear whipped up in the streets by
radical Jacobins, fear they could use for their own ends. Men like Citizen Danton, Citizen Robespierre—I’d invited those men to dine at my table in better days, and now their names made me want to spit.

  “—the men outside are demanding to see the minister,” a valet whispered.

  “Send word to the crowd that the minister is not here,” I said crisply.

  “They are not listening, madame—I mean, citizeness.”

  The noise outside had grown uglier, but my blood pulsed coolly. Alarms, guns, and street agitation never sent me into hysterics as they did many women. My blood rose at such sounds in a kind of enthralled fascination, and now I was grateful for the distraction. I could put the letter upstairs out of mind as my heart beat to the familiar pulse of Listen—this is the sound of great events happening, and you are privileged to find yourself at the center. If danger came with that privilege, so be it.

  I clasped my hands before me, noting that they were steady as granite. It was never danger that made me tremble, it was sin. But I hadn’t sinned yet, not past all reckoning, and neither had the Revolution. “Go to the crowd below, and invite ten men upstairs to see me. Ten only.”

  “Madame—”

  “Ten men,” I repeated, sweeping up to my husband’s study. I had never liked this ostentatious palace, which came with my husband’s appointment, but I let the sumptuous gold-corniced ceiling and inlaid desk give me the weight of Roland’s authority as I arrayed myself: white-clad, calm, and implacable.

  They prowled into my presence, grinning: ten men in trousers, vests, and bonnets rouges, shirts open to the navel, restless with unslaked appetites. Frightening, yet I also had the urge to laugh—because I had never seen anything so second rate in my life. It was so difficult to make a revolution without becoming emotional; radicals like Danton and that frothing lunatic Marat were always whipping themselves into a frenzy, stirring panic and chaos in their followers—in men like these—to overcome any obstacle. Who needed to pass a vote in committee when you could get it done faster by whipping up a mob?