by Kate Quinn
“You should take witnesses with you to open it,” I could not help saying. “Marat, Danton, they might accuse you of tampering—”
But my husband strode from the room. He was done listening to me, and I could not blame him.
* * *
It was December before Louis Capet, our former king, was called to trial. These were long weeks when Danton let his mad dog Marat off his leash and pointed him at my family. The latest charges against my husband would have been laughable had not so many been willing to listen—that he had embezzled funds from the Republic, that he was a secret royalist. But I could not tell Roland to keep steady and hold his head high, because he would barely speak to me.
“Tell your husband to take care,” our friends muttered. “Neither of you is safe in that marble shell of a palace—”
But I could only shake my head. A minister must stay at his post; so must a minister’s wife. Even if the minister hated her.
It was with spittle clinging to the hem of my cloak that I passed before the hostile smirks from the Mountain and came to the gallery to watch the former king brought to trial. The appearance of Louis Capet was a shock to me after so many months spent listening to the Convention obsess over him—his specter had loomed like a Colossus over this room, yet he was just a pale, sickly looking man, blinking in his green coat as he heard the list of charges read. I could not help but pity him. Had he been born two hundred years earlier and married a sensible wife, he would have been no better remembered than many other French rulers who had come and gone without doing any good or any harm . . . But he had come to his throne in a time of change, and it was his ill fortune to suffer for it.
I wished he did not have to. I remembered the days of my husband’s first term as minister of the interior, when he had returned from council meetings with so much hope that all might be solved.
There need never have been a trial, I thought as the ugly spectacle ground on. The idea of attacking the monarchy would not have occurred to anyone had you sincerely backed the constitution, Louis Capet. If you find yourself here, it is your own doing as much as ours.
The year turned to an iron-cold January of 1793 before the trial was done and the voting could begin. Tedium had worn away the novelty until everyone seemed used to the idea that a king might be judged and executed like any other man. Now the crowd bubbled with hot anticipation, not unlike the crowds who flocked to watch a condemned man broken on the wheel before the king, in one of his rare sensible judgments, banned such torture. I imagined the spectators of ancient Rome had looked very similar, waiting for Christians to be pushed onto the sands of the Colosseum. What beasts men are . . .
It was past eight in the evening, the hall freezing and stuffy at once, when the voting began for the king’s sentence. Up in the gallery, I clenched my hands when the word, at last, was spoken.
“Death.”
The roll call went on as deputy after deputy rose. The watchers grew restless again as it became clear we would be here all night. I remained hour after hour, limbs growing numb, determined to see it to the end.
“May I join you, Citizeness Roland?”
I glanced up at the tall figure in white who had come through the throng at the rail. It was the former noblewoman Sophie Condorcet, her long dark hair loose over her shoulders in the republican way of the ancients, dimples set in a youthful round face. But she did not make those dimples deeper with a smile; her pink mouth was drawn tight and grave.
“Of course, citizeness,” I said. I had never met Condorcet’s wife publicly; she was one of those women who made herself a salonnière and mingled with men giving her opinion on all subjects—I couldn’t help but think that such women sounded like yesterday’s newspaper. But I liked her gravitas on this solemn occasion, so I made room for her at the rail.
She stared directly at her husband, awaiting his turn to vote, and nibbled at her lip. “How will Citizen Condorcet vote?” I asked.
“Justly,” she said, whether because she didn’t know, or because she didn’t wish to say, I couldn’t tell. That might have annoyed me, but my husband as minister of the interior had no vote, and I was not entitled to comment upon the vote my lover would cast. I could see him below, keeping his eyes from me, his shoulders tense when he stood and uttered “Death” with sorrow in his voice.
I hastily turned my thoughts and eyes back to my companion.
“Are you and Citizen Condorcet among those who believe Louis Capet should have been given no trial at all?” Such persons encompassed the opposing ends of French politics: one set were royalists bleating that the king could not be tried because of his God-given status, and the other set were those like Robespierre and Marat who stated that the king could not be tried because no red tape could make his death palatable, therefore he ought to be disposed of without a stage. Looking at both sets, I thought it would be hard to find stupider people.
Perhaps Sophie agreed with me, because she shook her head. “The trial was necessary. Everyone is entitled to the due process of law—wasn’t that the reason for our revolution in the first place?”
“Law, and bread.” I cast my eyes around the galleries, still packed and avid as the votes came. Death. Death. Death. “Though at times I wonder if our revolution has become bread and circuses.”
She did not smile, but I saw a flicker of agreement in her eyes. “When people are forced to labor so hard to survive, they have no time to reflect or educate themselves about the qualities they share with other human beings . . .”
She trailed off, because her husband had risen to his feet to cast his vote. Condorcet was a shambling man with a truly Roman nose, less fastidious in his clothing than a man with an attentive wife would be. Bookish and quiet in the clamor of assemblies, the renowned philosopher had never been a powerful orator, but he chose this moment to make his voice carry. “I will vote death for no man, in no instance.”
I looked at his wife, startled. Overwhelmingly through the long night hours, the votes had been for death. I had always found Condorcet timid—of all the times for the man to find a spine.
“Why would he give a dissenting vote to no purpose? The majority will still fall on the side of condemnation, and he risks being branded a counterrevolutionary.”
The word made Sophie wince and she turned upon me, cheeks reddening. “He risks it for principle, citizeness.”
“He should save his principle for a practical stance that will do some good. The streets run riot with sans-culottes; we can hardly afford to lose our philosophers.” Trying to convince philosophers of practicality—now there was a lost cause. “Is it from compassion, because Louis was a figure of sympathy at his trial? He was dignified enough, but there is no reason to give him credit for it. Kings are reared from childhood to act a part.”
“Whatever part he has played, he is still a human being. We owe compassion on that basis alone. Why do you think Robespierre did not wish to try the king? He knows there is no moral way to deprive a man of his life.”
“I disagree, when it is one life balanced against thousands. I see you despise such arguments,” I said, seeing the disgust that flickered across her face, “but I make them out of common sense, not a desire for revenge. A dethroned king will attract conspiracies of all kinds, until the end of his life, and we cannot afford any attempt to place him back on the throne. I pity Louis Capet, but our republic will never be safe while he lives.” I had clearly not convinced her, and I supposed I never would, but the hour was late, and with my nerves strained and jangling, I could not give up the argument. “We have the proof already that he was conspiring with Austria to regain his position. The letters from the iron safe in the Tuileries discovered by my husband—was that not clear enough evidence?”
Sophie’s jaw tightened as she watched Condorcet, who was now being jeered from the galleries, and hostile eyes turned her way too. Perhaps it rattled her, because her tone became sharper. “This evidence—how much weight can anyone put on it, when it is vuln
erable to the charge of having been tampered with? Could your husband have brought no reliable witnesses with him to retrieve the king’s letters from that safe?”
It was my turn to redden, but I could hardly defend Roland in this because he had acted foolishly. He should have brought impartial colleagues to open the safe, but he had ignored my advice on that, too eager to see what winning cards he might pluck from it.
And whose fault is that?
I stared down at the men below, mute and furious, and saw Condorcet in a sea of accusing eyes and turned backs raise his gaze to us.
Sophie smiled at him—a tender, bittersweet smile of reassurance in this awful moment. She knew how he would vote all along, I thought. And despite his hostile surroundings, Condorcet smiled back at his wife as if she was the only person whose opinion mattered.
A pang of envy pierced my anger. Sophie Condorcet was younger than I, but Fate had dealt us not-dissimilar hands: staid husbands twenty years our senior, a passion for politics, and a place at this railing. But she had been lucky enough to find love in her lot, not the barren place of honorable resentment I occupied, unable to meet my own husband’s eyes at all. Were he even to look, which he never did these days—except to ensure I was not looking elsewhere.
“Be careful.” The warning came out of me unbidden. “You have a young daughter to think of, I believe—as I do. Your husband’s vote won your family no friends today.”
“When tempers cool, they will remember that we were amongst the first to declare for a republic in our newspaper. How can we be thought anything but patriots?”
“There are many newspapers now besides your husband’s. What will they say of him, and you?”
“What they always say.” She shrugged. “That he is cuckolded by me. That he is led by me. That he is not man enough. Though today has surely put all that to the lie.” Another loving, prideful gaze downward before she asked, “What slanders do they pass about you?”
“The latest?” I gave a bitter-edged smile. “Marat barks at me; he never leaves me alone. I am a toothless hag who writes my husband’s every speech, and a Circe reclining among the drained bodies of my lovers.” Though there was no especial rumor singling out the one name I feared. “And really,” I couldn’t help exclaiming, “when does any busy woman during this revolution have time to recline anywhere?”
For the first time, amusement touched Sophie’s mouth. Then it faded. “They would say all this about you whether you were busy or not. My husband says the faults of women are the work of men, just as the vices of nations are the crime of their tyrants. They will say anything to punish us for stepping outside of the role in which they confine us.”
“But I have not stepped outside,” I said, startled. “I do not write in my own name, I do not voice public opinions on political matters. The one time I spoke in public was when I was called to the floor to defend myself. Otherwise I keep behind my husband in all things.”
“And it hasn’t spared you, has it?”
I stared at her. My lips parted, but I could think of no response.
“Nothing spares women,” Sophie said gently. “Whether we ask for the vote or only for bread, whether we march on the streets or keep to our salons, there are those who will find us at fault—and make us suffer for the crime of asking for more.”
“I do not ask for more,” I managed to say. “I have everything to which my sex entitles me.”
“Decline to use your vote, then, once you have it. That is your right. I will continue to argue that you are entitled to that vote, as are all the women of France. That is my right.”
I sealed my lips tight on hot words and turned back to the Convention floor. Sophie Condorcet and I traded no more conversation that night as the voting ground remorselessly on. Dawn broke to a pitiless morning as the final vote was cast, and an intake of breath was heard around the hall—around all France.
King Louis XVI would die.
* * *
Paris, January 21, 1793
“You are so eager to see royal blood flow?” Roland flung the question from his desk as I appeared at the study door in my cloak and muff, the revolutionary cockade at my bosom. “You will go to the place de la Révolution?”
“An era passes today,” I said. Yesterday placards had been distributed all over Paris, signed in my husband’s name, giving the time and place where a former king would meet his end. “We should bear witness. Come with me?”
“No.” He sat fiddling with his papers. “I have a speech to prepare.”
“Then I will stay and work on it with you—”
“No!” he said sharply, turning away.
I bit down my flare of anger and went alone.
I heard the king’s procession before I saw it: the sound of drums like heartbeats through the fog, wheels rattling like bones along the cobbles, and the hollow clopping of hooves. A silent crowd had pressed around the guard-enclosed carriage as it made its slow, agonizing way through the city toward the place de la Révolution, and I fell in among the tight-packed throng. Normally I might have been afraid; everywhere I’d gone for the last few months I had been glared at, spat on, called a counterrevolutionary slut, thanks to Marat and his gutter rag. But today there were bigger matters, and I walked unnoticed in the great crush as the people of Paris followed their king for the very last time.
A sudden commotion of shouts erupted around the carriage. I strained to make out the cause just as a man’s voice called out above the clamor, “Follow me, my friends! Let us save the king! Vive le roi!”
Here and there, scattered voices shouted support. But a swelling wave of jeers rose even as a handful of Louis’s foolhardy supporters tried to rally support for the condemned man. Another commotion as more National Guardsmen arrived, and the metallic clank of swords meeting swords made my heart hammer. Someone in the throng must have panicked and tried to flee, because guards were giving chase, running down the ringleaders.
And just as quickly, all was quiet again as the carriage rolled on toward the place de la Révolution.
It was nearly ten. I found myself wondering if Louis had taken a last communion this morning, if he had said farewell to his Austrian queen with anguish or with dignity. He was a husband and a father as well as a king, and I prayed his final parting with his family had brought him comfort—that his children had been spared the knowledge of what was coming, that frivolous Antoinette had been brave and sent him off consoled and at peace. That was what any wife should do, if her husband was called to die before her. As I would if Roland were taken . . . and I realized in dull horror that I would not be surprised if he was. This revolution was beginning to devour its children, and the honorable like my husband might make the first meal.
I shuddered, pushing that thought away as the carriage at last entered the strange, charged silence of the square. The entire waiting crowd drew breath as the hired cab rolled to a halt, surrounded by guards with drawn blades.
I felt a mass exhalation as the king appeared, gray-faced and drawn, looking around him in what seemed like bewilderment. He means well, I remembered Roland telling me from those early days when the Revolution had been young. He sees himself as the father of his people. We can work with a man like this. He means so well!
I wondered if that was what Louis was thinking as he mounted the scaffold. But I meant so well . . .
The executioner worked briskly, wasting no time. There was only one moment where the king reared back in protest, shaking his head. He would not have the rope bound around his hands, he was objecting fiercely, and I felt a moment’s keen sympathy. I would not want my hands bound either; I would want freedom to the end, even if just the freedom to flex my wrists. For the first time I allowed myself to look squarely at the machine of execution; Dr. Guillotin’s marvelous creation, its blade black-silhouetted in the strange light. Atavistic dread crawled up my spine. It was humane, I knew that—the quick descent of a blade took a head far more cleanly than a sword swung by human hands, to
say nothing of the slower, crueler methods like the stake or the wheel. But I had never in my life seen a machine that looked more threatening, looming like a tall narrow doorway to some ghastly unknown realm.
It is justice, I thought. It is necessary. I still believed that, with all my soul. But justice could be a hard thing to witness. Perhaps it should be.
The former king at last allowed his hands to be bound. He faced the crowd, tried to say something—but it must have been agreed upon that he must say nothing, because I heard no more than a few muffled words before a drumroll drowned him out. His chin dropped, and then the executioner was moving with brutal efficiency, laying the plump, unresisting figure on the broad plank, closing the boards about his neck to hold it in place. Louis looked down into the basket of straw that would hold his head, and I pushed back a surge of nausea.
I had not prayed in earnest for a long time, but I prayed for Louis. I prayed for us all.
With a rattling sound, the blade released. You would hear it coming down as you lay there, I thought. The last sound you ever heard. Until the next sound ended it all—the wet, indescribable crunch.
A roar rose from the crowd as the executioner’s assistant lifted the head. Bonnets rouges flew in the air, caps waved, a woman beside me tore off her tricolor sash and waved it ecstatically over her head. Then there was a different cry as a thin runnel of scarlet leaked from the edge of the scaffold, and I was buffeted on all sides as men, women, and children rushed forward to dip their fingers, their kerchiefs, their cuffs in the once-royal blood. I turned away, shoving down a surge of disgust, biting down hard on my own gloved knuckle to keep from vomiting.
The king is dead. The thought echoed inside my skull. The king is dead. Once, the responding cry would have been Long live the king! as a son took his father’s place. Now the son was an orphan and a prisoner, never to be more than another Louis Capet, and the cry was Long live the republic!
The nausea would not fade. I took myself slowly home, light-headed and swaying, looking at the streets around me and wondering why no one else seemed affected by it all. Because within the hour the citizens of Paris seemed to have resumed their course: men jostling in groups, women arm in arm, children dashing over the cobbles, everyone talking and arguing and going about their business as usual. Let this be the end, I prayed, clutching my cloak against the cold. The arrest of the royal family had not been the end of the Revolution’s violence; the September Massacres had not been the end—let this be the last of the bloodshed. Let one royal death see the end of strife.