by Kate Quinn
Let us now begin the real business of building, of creating, of putting things to right.
I STARED AT my husband. “Resign as minister of the interior?”
My husband toyed with his pen. “At once.”
“No—” I came to the desk, looking at the reports still to work on. “There is so much to do. Now that the problem of the king is solved, we can work in earnest.”
“How?” Roland looked at me wearily. “I have only to rise in the Convention to be hooted and derided until I sit down. As soon as I raise my voice I am drowned out. The Jacobins and Montagnards, you have no idea how they tighten their grip every hour.”
“Of course I know—”
But my husband wouldn’t listen to me. “Robespierre and Marat and Danton are the ones listened to now. They’re edging more of their men into new appointments and militia posts every day, and they won’t hesitate to point that same militia at me—”
“Then we will find a way to be heard.” I took his bony hand between my own. “We will not leave France in the hands of these rabid demagogues. We will speak for a national system, gain support from the provinces, reintroduce our notion of moving the center of government to Blois to break up this Paris cabal.” I thought of my time in Caen, the chance meeting with a gray-eyed girl named Charlotte Corday who had devoured my newspapers so eagerly—why should her life in Normandy be ruled by those who legislated as though Paris was all that mattered? “There are practical measures we can suggest.”
“The deputies in the provinces are too afraid of Robespierre’s spies and Marat’s tongue to speak for change. Anyone who does would find a mob on his doorstep by morning, and everyone knows it.”
“I don’t care. I am not afraid of Marat. I am not afraid of Robespierre or Danton or their mad dogs.” I squeezed his hand as fiercely as I could. “I do not care if our table is heaped with threats of assassination. They do me honor to hate me. If our deputies must go about armed to the teeth, so will we—I will put a pistol in my muff and carry on. This is what it means to build a republic. No matter how hard the fight, we press onward—or else leave France to the madmen. Is that what you wish?”
“Yes,” he whispered. “Let them have it. I am tired.”
For the first and last time in my life, I shouted at my husband. “I do not care if you are tired!” I roared. “You are minister, Roland! That is what being a minister means. Working when you are tired, speaking when you are tired, fighting when you are tired. Looking down the barrel of a pistol and dying tired if that is what is needed! You are minister! You serve the republic, you serve those who love you, and you serve those who vilify you. It does not matter if you are tired.”
It was how I would see it were I minister. I would chain myself to my desk, fill my lungs on the floor of the Convention as I did when I was called to defend myself against treason, and roar as loud as a lion over any who would drown me out. I would never, ever, give up.
Roland’s eyes swam with tears as he looked at me. “If only you’d been loyal—”
“Oh, for—” I nearly flung his hands away in my frustration, but he couldn’t take another rebuff from me, even the slightest gesture. “Roland, surely there is more at stake here than the state of our marriage.”
“You are my wife. There is nothing that should matter more to you.”
There is, I thought. France was more than this marriage; the republic was more than this marriage. But my husband could not hear that. “I am loyal and I am here and I will never leave you.” I dropped to my knees, gripping his hands so tight our knuckles whitened. “Together we can win this fight. Believe it.”
I believed myself. Danton and Robespierre were not putting us aside with slander and rumor. For the first time in my life I did not care if I was called a whore—they could call me anything they liked, all they would make me was angrier. All the rage of this revolution was bottled in its women: in me, in the women with pikes like Pauline Léon and Louise Audu who had marched to Versailles to bring the king to Paris, in the hopeless idealists like young Charlotte Corday who devoured revolutionary newspapers like holy writ and snorted her contempt for the men who ranted in those pages rather than reasoned, in the dimpled salonnières like Sophie Condorcet who would fling mercy into the teeth of an entire hissing Convention. We were all so angry.
Perhaps that was why so many hated us. Why they called us names. The men of this revolution could raise their fists and ask for more, but not its women. We would have what we were given, when anyone got around to giving it to us, and we would say thank you.
I was done saying thank you. I wanted to rend and claw and scream and fight for my small corner, my small place on this stage.
“Fight alongside me,” I begged my husband. “Please fight.”
“No.” He took his hands from mine, picked up his pen again, began to sharpen it. “Leave me. I have my final speech to prepare.”
IN THE END, I wrote it.
Roland delivered my words two days after the king’s execution, hardly audible through all the derisive hissing. I would never have thought, if I had not seen it with my own eyes, that good judgment and fine character would be such rare commodities in this room, that so few men were fit to govern. As for expecting those qualities to be combined with honesty, it was asking for the moon.
The Jacobins looked pleased as they disposed of the last honest minister in Paris, while the Girondins on our own side shifted and fussed as they looked ahead to their own advantage. If our party of moderates ate itself and left the field to the madmen, it would be our own fault. We squabbled and jostled and fretted ourselves to pieces searching for the impossible, while Robespierre and his sans-culottes looked only for granite unity.
My lover caught us on the steps outside, bareheaded in the cold wind. “I am sorry,” he told my husband, but his eyes looked to me. “I fought for you as hard as I could. I wish I could have done more.”
If Roland had been willing to fight too . . . I pushed that thought away, for it was useless. “It is up to you now to lead the fight against the Jacobins,” I said when my husband only sighed. “Brissot is too much the journalist—it must be you.” My lover was the one they were calling the General, for all his marshaling to break the hold of the fanatical Paris faction. I wondered in a clutch of terror if he’d be the next to be eaten alive by Marat’s gutter press.
A final kiss from the eyes of my lover, and he strode away after a bow to my husband. For one wild moment I wanted to pull my arm away from Roland’s and run in pursuit. I wondered what it might have been like to soldier alongside a different kind of man, a man with my appetite for the fight. For an instant’s shameful imagining I saw myself in my lover’s apartments, him in his shirtsleeves, me wearing his blue coat over my nightdress to keep out the chill as we wrote at desks pushed side by side, passing the ink bottle back and forth. Trading drafts of our articles and reading, me scolding my lover for being too florid, him scolding me for being too dry, both of us laughing, sharing a cup of wine as we underlined and crossed out each other’s words.
As quick as my mind painted that picture, I washed it away, and leaned my cheek against my husband’s shoulder as we turned back toward the ministry. The servants must begin moving our things out at once, I thought. We were moving to the rue de la Harpe, a simple set of rooms. No more sleeping beneath a canopy of ostrich feathers. I’d never liked it anyway.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Roland asked. “It’s François Buzot.”
I flinched, but I made myself speak. It didn’t matter now; we were no longer public figures with alliances to maintain. “Yes.” Just once I let myself speak his name. “It is François Buzot.”
General Buzot, to whom our party must now look for leadership.
Roland sighed. I expected him to recoil and offer angry words, but he did not. “Has the world gone mad?” my husband asked instead, almost idly.
I considered the question. “Perhaps society calls any man mad who is not suffering fr
om the general madness.”
Through a mad new world, we walked in silence.
* * *
With madness came civil war and terror.
As winter advanced to spring, Marat incited his rabble to tear two Girondin newspaper offices to scraps as our currency dropped in value and grain prices soared.
Within months of the king’s execution, a permanent guillotine loomed over the city.
In April there was a Committee of Public Safety, with not a Girondin to be seen on its roll. Our faction retaliated by having the Paris Commune investigated, which merely gained us a new enemy, and Marat arrested, which only built his status to mythic proportion once he was tried and released.
By May there was turmoil over the price of bread and calls from Robespierre for the people to rise up against the corrupt Girondin deputies of the Convention.
And then on the eve of June, there was a knock upon our door.
SIX MEN LOOMED on the step. I remembered the ten men who came into the ministry the last time an arrest warrant had been threatened. I had stared them down, and no warrant had been produced. Not this time, I thought as the leader read the condemnation aloud in a toneless voice. This is the end.
Silence fell. For a moment, my husband appeared frozen. I touched his shoulder, and he cleared his throat. “I know of no law setting up the authority to which you refer, and I shall not comply. If you employ force, I can only offer you an old man’s resistance, but I shall protest until the last.”
For a moment the threat of violence hung in the balance. Would they seize him and drag him away? I met the eyes of the leader, summoning all the stone in my soul. His men behind him shuffled. He looked at me, back to Roland, and, at last, touched his cap. “I have no orders to employ force. Your reply will be reported to the Council of the Commune, but I must leave my colleagues here.”
The thud of the door seemed very loud. My husband and I were left gazing at each other. His face was drained and gray, his hands worked. A dead calm swept over me. For so many months we had imagined this moment, had started at every knock on the door. Now that the moment was upon us, I was almost relieved. Vigorous characters like mine hate uncertainty more than anything else.
“Just a few more days,” Roland muttered, glancing up the stairs to the chamber where our daughter worked at her sewing. We had been trying to get permission to leave Paris, but we were stymied at every turn, and Roland had become distracted by his crusade to get the Assembly to ratify the accounts he’d kept as minister. He didn’t want to leave Paris under a cloud, he wanted his name at least cleared of any financial wrongdoing in office. I wondered where we might be if we had let the accounts go. But it had meant so much to him, to be counted an honest man . . .
An honest man, and now likely a dead one. Because the leader of the five men left outside would return with proper orders to make the arrest.
I reached for my veil and shawl. I would not stop fighting, not while I had breath. “We made plans for this,” I said, keeping my voice brisk. “I will go to the Convention to denounce the situation publicly. With enough public outcry we can avoid your arrest or see you promptly released if they dare seize you.”
He nodded. “I—I should stay here?”
“If you can get away unseen, leave word with the servants and go.”
Armed men were everywhere at the Tuileries, which was surrounded by a growing crowd. I jumped down from the hired cab (You never step from a carriage, you always jump down . . . no, Manon, do not think of that!) and flew like a bird. Inside, the rooms were all shut up; guards kept anyone from entering. I managed to talk myself into a hall of petitioners and pass on a letter, but got no farther: I strode up and down for an hour, hearing the roar of men shouting.
“Paris is oppressed by tyrants who thirst for blood and dominion!” came one voice.
“Down! He defames Paris! He insults the people! Will we have a counterrevolution now?” came another.
“Citizeness, there is nothing to be done!” A colleague of Roland’s came out at last, but he snapped at me before I could finish my plea. “The Assembly is in indescribable tumult. The petitioners now at the bar call for the arrest of the twenty-two.” Twenty-two who? Roland would have asked, but I knew. The twenty-two that those in the high seats of the Mountain called their chief enemies. The Girondins. My husband would be on that list. My lover would too. And so many others, friends all . . . I swallowed, heart hammering as the man went on. “The Convention is surrounded by an armed force and no longer capable of doing good.”
“It is perfectly capable!” I cried. “The majority of the people in Paris are simply asking to be told what to do. If I am admitted, I shall have the courage to say what must be said.” If they would just allow me to defend my friends as I had defended my own good name. “I am afraid of nothing. Even if I cannot save Roland, I shall proclaim what the republic must hear.” The man stared at me uncomprehending. I could feel the hair almost lifting off my head in my rage, blood boiling in my veins. All I loved in the world stood in mortal peril, and I could see my country’s ruin before my eyes. “Let me in!”
“But there is a draft bill in six parts to be discussed—”
I nearly screamed my fury at the ceiling, but screaming would only mark me a hysterical woman fit for nothing. “Then I will go to warn our friends,” I said and forced my rage into strength to carry me forward as long as I needed this terrible night. There is no bitter endurance like a woman’s. Men call us fickle, yet we are the ones to bear witness, to bear warning, and to bear up when the world denounces us. And to bear it all silently, because we are not allowed to speak. Just once, my enemies had let me speak on the floor of this Convention, and I left with honors like victory laurels. The men in power at the moment would not make that mistake twice.
Because who knows what a woman will say when she is angry enough?
I flew to the various lodgings of our Girondin friends, leaving letters where I could not find servants to pass warnings. It was pitch dark by the time I returned to the Tuileries. Approaching the Carrousel by light of the streetlamps, I saw there were no more armed men, only a cabal of sans-culottes clustered about a cannon. For a moment I hesitated—these were the kind of people who had spit on me on the street—but it was dark and I was veiled; just another woman of Paris eager to know what had happened. “Citizens, did everything pass off well?”
“Marvelous well,” a woman hiccuped. She smelled of gin and blood. “The Paris delegates were all embracing each other and singing ‘La Marseillaise’ under the tree of liberty.”
“And the twenty-two?” My heart thudded. Let me hear that order has been restored, that some measure of sanity has prevailed.
“Kicked to the ditch,” the woman snickered. “The municipality will arrest them. Robespierre says so.”
My stomach sank. “He does not have the power to do that—”
“’Course he does. He does what needs to be done, to sort out those bastards—”
I took a moment to wonder just why there were so many women who worshipped Robespierre. Sophie Condorcet or perhaps her philosopher husband had commented that it was because the people of Paris had taken the Revolution as their religion, and Robespierre for their priest. The comparison was apt enough—like any good priest, Robespierre preached and censured; he could be furious or serious, melancholy or exalted. He thundered against the rich and the great, lived on little, and had only one mission: to talk. “And he talks all the time,” I muttered, already running toward the street. I had to return to my husband; he would be wondering what to do without me.
Ahead I saw the dark shape of a coach for hire and lengthened my step—only to see the shadowy figures of a man and woman beside the wheel, their discussion a low, heated hiss. “Pardon my intrusion, but may I beg use of the cab—” I began, only to fall back a step as the man turned toward me as if summoned here by my thoughts. “. . . Citizen Robespierre.”
“Citizeness Roland.” He tipped his silk
hat, immaculate even at the end of this terrible day where he must have been hours in the Convention whipping up his mob against my husband, my lover, and all my friends. His striped coat hung from his small frame in perfectly tailored folds, his hair was frizzed and powdered, his voice high and precise. “You should be home, surely.”
“As should you,” I parried. “A man who accosts women on the street in the night does not long keep a nickname like the Incorruptible.”
“We will both depart,” the woman at his side said quietly. “By your leave, Citizen Robespierre—” She touched his arm, the arc of her pale neck pure and beseeching in the lamplight, and I saw his face flicker. A curt nod, and he handed her up into the cab, me behind her. Another instant and we were rattling away. I could see Robespierre watching us go, spectacles reflecting two blank circles of light into the night.
I shivered, turning my gaze back to the girl quietly settling her skirts opposite. “Thank you,” I said. “I feared I would be forced to walk home.”
“You are the famous Madame Roland. I am happy to do you a service.” A very young woman, surely not yet twenty—and beautiful, that I could see even in the shadowed coach. A slender, graceful figure, soft tumbles of hair, a passionate mouth.
“I do not know you, citizeness,” I confessed, although she looked familiar.
“I am Madame de Sartine, but I was born Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe.” She smiled faintly at my start of recognition. “You might know my mother—the famous courtesan who ran the Cinquante gambling club. Having failed to earn an invitation to le monde elegant of Maman’s salons and club, Robespierre seems to have set his sights on earning me.” She sniffed and shrugged one shoulder as if having one of Paris’s most influential Jacobins pursuing her was nothing more than a mere annoyance.