Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

Terror was the order given by Robespierre on behalf of the Convention. And we took that order gleefully in hand.

  Marat’s death hadn’t been in vain, for more politicians and citizens alike began to embrace the radical beliefs and approaches that the Enragés and Hébertists championed. Between Corday’s murderous actions and local revolts and the threat of looming foreign invasions, it was clear that Terror was the only way to protect the Revolution’s achievements—including our new constitution, which promised a breathtaking array of rights and the redistribution of wealth. And though only men had been permitted to vote on the new constitution, it was in all citizens’ interest to protect such sweeping changes, so I firmly believed that the republic’s enemies had to be repressed at any cost.

  Just before noon, as we readied for a protest at the Tuileries, an eclipse covered most of the sun, putting Paris into near darkness. An omen, not to us, but to those who were against us, that soon we would unleash darkness on them.

  Hundreds of sans-culottes crowded in front of the Tuileries, fists raised, bodies pressed closely together, smelling of determination and sweat, shouting for bread. “Du pain! Du pain!”

  We demanded the arrest of anyone noble, anyone hoarding wheat. We demanded their heads.

  All the while the men inside decided our fates.

  Pawns. All of us, waiting hungrily with our hands outstretched, and there was nothing we could do. The power I’d felt when I led the march on the Champs de Mars, when women and men, too, counted on me, had slowly been chipped away, until it felt like I stood here with nothing left.

  * * *

  Paris, October 26, 1793

  “Down with bonnets rouges! Down with Jacobin women! Down with cockades! You are all scoundrels and whores who have brought misfortune upon France!”

  I jerked my gaze up when the market woman barged into our Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires meeting, pointing her finger at us. Her hair was disheveled, and the first thing I noticed on her dingy gray cap, besides its color, was the missing cockade. The second thing I noticed was that it was Louise, my once dear friend, leading the disturbance. Behind her were what looked like dozens more women. For weeks now, we’d been divided with the working-class women of Paris who thought we were too extreme. Run-ins on the streets had even gotten us noticed in the Convention, and they were not happy with what they saw as riotous behavior not conducive to their own plans.

  The men were scared we women were going mad.

  The divide between Louise and I had been growing for months, but never once did I think she would turn against me, against our cause. Why? What had happened? She was barely the woman I’d known before, and the way she stared at me now . . . I might not have recognized her had I passed her in the marketplace.

  “Pull off their bonnets!” Louise shouted, then stared right at me. “You cannot tell us what to wear. You cannot tell us what to do. You are the reason we’re being attacked by men in the streets. Did you know that? Just last week a man tore the red bonnet off my head and shoved me to the ground, kicking me in the ribs. We’ll not conform to your militant ways any longer. We’ll not risk our own livelihoods in the process.”

  The tragedy of women turning against women, because men had forced them to, was not lost on me.

  “The men are the ones making you choose, Louise. All of you. Do not bow to them.”

  Louise shook her head, her scowl deepening. “It is too late.”

  “What happened to us?” I pleaded, searching the vacant eyes for the friend I’d once known.

  “You went too far.”

  “Whores!” came a chant from the market women behind Louise, the venom in their voices enough to stun us all.

  And with that one word, Louise was lost to me.

  Did they not realize what we did, we did for them? Did they not realize they’d once stood beside us?

  “There she is, the new Corday!” They pointed at Claire, their accusations of her being a counterrevolutionary loud and clear. “Get the terrible woman and tear her to pieces!”

  Claire startled beside me. Our run-ins with the market women had become ever more violent as they defied the wearing of cockades and bonnets rouges, claiming violence against them for wearing the symbol of freedom, never mind men were calling it militant. They despised us for our desire to see women’s rights grow. Through it all, Louise had avoided me. She must have felt the tightening noose because she stood beside such women daily to earn enough coin to feed herself—was that why she’d turned? But I knew it had to be more than that. Louise was lost inside herself.

  And now, these ungrateful wretches had come into our meeting attempting to start a riot. Well, if it was a fight they wanted, we would give them one.

  “To arms, citizenesses! Do not let these bitches tear us down,” I shouted.

  The battle was bloody; women leapt over chairs and overturned tables in an effort to rip one another apart. Our opponents ripped off our cockades, and we raked our nails over their flesh. Heads were bashed, and clothing torn, lips bloodied and eyes blackened. The vicious invaders tried to destroy our society’s symbols, and when Théo’s fellow Enragés leader ran in to intercede, shouting for them to stop, they turned on the man as well like a pack of wild animals.

  I was no less wild. My fists were bloodied and my head pounded from where someone had hit me with a broken chair leg. The cockade from my bonnet had been stripped, the ribbons unthreaded in wrinkled red, white, and blue waves at my feet. Indiscriminately unraveled the way our revolution seemed to be coming undone around me.

  When the police arrived, breaking up the bloody scene, I stood panting, my sleeve torn off, my lip bleeding, and all I could think was, is this what we’ve become?

  I leapt into this revolution to protect women, not fight them.

  Breathing hard, I regarded Claire. She looked more furious than I’d ever seen before, even when she was arrested the previous month, accused of being a counterrevolutionary. Citizen Maillard, once our friend, was behind her arrest. He now had spies all over the city. It would seem that friends turned on one another these days. Maillard had certainly learned that in his turn, for even as I stood pressing the cut on my temple that pulsed with pain, Maillard sat in prison. Claire joined me, one eye already swollen shut. This wasn’t the first brawl we’d been in, and I hazarded a guess that it wouldn’t be our last.

  She smirked. “Market bitches.”

  Where could we go from here, when it would seem we could so easily turn on one another? We’d marched with these market women, to Versailles, to the Bastille, to the Tuileries. Fought side by side. When had we become enemies?

  * * *

  Paris, November 8, 1793

  They would silence us all.

  One woman at a time.

  First the Angel of Assassination. Then Widow Capet, who had once been queen. Olympe de Gouges five days ago. Now proud Manon Roland.

  A professed Girondin, Manon was still against tyranny and had been an advocate for the republic since the dawn of the Terror. Once, I wouldn’t have been able to admit that, but I could admit it now. Now that it’s too late.

  I heard later that Madame Roland’s pathetic husband shot himself as soon as he heard she was dead, and even her lover didn’t make it much longer. Though it was never confirmed Buzot was her lover—the bitch kept her lips tight around that secret—they say that a miniature of her was found on Buzot’s body. If that wasn’t proof enough of their liaison, then I don’t know what is. Who could blame her for taking a lover considering the stick she was married to? But even Buzot was a coward. He’d taken his own life rather than be captured and face the Tribunal after an attempt to raise troops against the Convention failed.

  As I watched her mount the scaffold at the place de la Révolution, this woman who, to her very last, was confident in her political views, her activism, and her political achievements, I could not help seeing myself. For I, too, was once confident in all those things. I lived for them.

  Man
on glanced toward the clay statue of Marianne, Goddess of Liberty, who stood tall on her pedestal, looking down on the proceedings, judging our hypocrisy. Manon’s last words clawed at my heart. “Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!”

  And then she was lain out, her head put in position, and rather than thirsting for the spurt of blood I knew was coming as I had in the past, inside I rebelled. I wished for someone to come and break that guillotine, like years ago a crowd had broken a wheel and stopped an execution.

  But the blade dropped, and as it cut short Manon’s life, a sob escaped my throat and I bit hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from letting out another sound. If anyone noticed, they did not let on, and thank goodness, else they drag me away in chains demanding my head too.

  Would I be next? Already I was embroiled, my name high on the flapping tongues of men who wished to crush any rights of women’s liberty.

  “Pauline?” Théo’s voice cut into my thoughts, and he looked at me as though I might have suddenly sprouted the former queen’s ridiculous hairpieces.

  “I am pregnant.” The words were out before I could stop them. Just over a week had passed since I’d talked with Claire, and I’d not had the courage yet to tell him, and she’d surprisingly not betrayed my trust, nor hated me for it.

  “Is it . . . mine?” His brows raised, and whether real or imagined, I saw dread.

  “Oui.”

  Théo let out a curse under his breath. “I should have been more careful.”

  For the first time at an execution, Théo was silent, even as the crowd around us screamed with delight at the executioner holding up Manon’s once brilliant head.

  “I didn’t want . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence; there were so many things I didn’t want.

  “We must marry. You’ve no other choice,” he continued when I didn’t respond. “What will your mother think? You cannot abandon her, or your brothers and sisters.”

  “And you would have me abandon my cause?”

  Théo shook his head. “Together, we will see this revolution through to the end.”

  Théo kissed my knuckles in an absurd gesture of chivalry, so much in opposition for the way in which I’d found myself in this situation—captured by lust and weakness.

  We had wanted liberty in France. But what freedom was there now? I had none. Théo would possess me utterly. I knew it, because the look he gave me had me wanting to crumble to the ground. All the choices I’d fought years for had been stripped away.

  And now, I was nothing.

  Part VI

  The Beauty

  It was a sensual delight for l’homme rouge to see fall in the basket these charming heads and their ruby blood streaming under the hideous cleaver.

  —Archives Nationale

  Sucy-en-Brie, France, March 1794

  When love came to me, it was in the dead of night, under cover of darkness, and always in disguise. For those were the indignities that marriage and revolution had imposed upon me, and both had done violence to the gaiety of society at the exact moment when, by the dictums of youth, fashion, and inclination, I should have been at the center of Paris’s le monde élégant.

  But, alas, nothing was as it should have been.

  Which was why I found myself moving stealthily about our country château in Sucy-en-Brie, where my family had for months been in self-imposed exile from the paranoia of the Jacobin government, the great mobs of sans-culottes, and the willingness of neighbor to turn against neighbor to win favor with both. Trusting not even my lady’s maid to assist me, I went from room to room and window to window to set up the signal of lights that would tell my love it was safe to come to me, then I snuck outside into the gardens to wait.

  Finally, he was there, slipping through the secret little door into the park beside our home. “Oh, my Georgette,” he whispered, pulling me into his arms.

  “Oh, Philippe,” I said, allowing myself to be swept up into his kisses for only a moment. “Come, we must hurry.”

  Hand in hand, we raced among the early spring blooms cloaked in twilight dew until we reached the château. Inside, I removed my slippers and he his boots, and we made ghosts of ourselves until we were finally shut up in my suite of rooms, laughing and kissing.

  “Did you have any trouble, my love?” I asked, feeling almost as if I could exhale in his warm, familiar presence.

  He shed his short carmagnole coat and cap upon the bed, revealing to me his handsome face and rakish brown curls. Along with the pantalon he wore, every part of his outfit was borrowed costuming from the Théâtre Favart where he frequently performed. For everything was theater in France now, and Philippe and Georgette were but code names we used to hide all that we’d become to each other since I first saw Jean-Baptiste-François Elleviou sing his famed one-act opera, Philippe et Georgette, from Maman’s box at the Comédie nearly five years before. Our love had been fast and intense and exciting, full of late-night parties at the theater and stolen, heated moments wherever we could find them—our secrecy the result of my mother’s disapproval and my need to maintain an image of availability for my work at Cinquante, Paris’s most famous gambling house.

  “The patrols were heavier tonight,” he said. “Executing the latest faction seems to have done little to assuage the Committee of Public Safety’s belief that a foreign conspiracy plots to invade France, assassinate Robespierre, and overthrow the Revolution.” François took me into his arms again. “But I missed you too much to stay away, mon trésor.”

  “The whole of France has gone mad,” I said, concern for him—for all of us—making it hard for me to relax into his embrace. And I’d come by that concern honestly after what’d happened to my papa . . .

  “It has,” he said, soothingly stroking his fingers through the long, loose golden curls of my hair, almost chasing away the troubling thoughts. “From day to day, it’s impossible to know what will happen. But we have this day, when you possess all those beaming charms that inspire the most ardent passions. Which is why I must have you now.”

  François’s words wove a spell that bade me to forget the world as his mouth dipped to mine. Clever fingers went to the pink silk sash tied about the waist of my gauzy chemise à la reine. I sighed in surrender as he walked us toward the bed, toward oblivion, toward—

  An insistent pounding upon the front door echoed through the château. Then again. “Open in the name of the republic!” came a loud command.

  On a gasp, I broke free of the embrace and dashed for the window. A group of men gathered upon our portico while a patrol waited in formation just outside our gate, sending a shiver of cold dread down my spine. No good ever came from the arrival of self-styled patriots at one’s door. It wasn’t the first time and probably wouldn’t be the last, though we’d hoped our flight from the city would not only remove us from their sights, but also from their minds.

  Someone permitted them entrance, and then the crier’s voice boomed from inside our parlor. “Search the premises!”

  “Come,” I said, pulse racing as I grabbed the discarded pieces of my lover’s costume and pulled him to the closet.

  François stumbled into the hanging fabric of my outdated robes à la française and the wide-hooped panniers that went beneath them. “Émilie, wait—”

  “Say no more,” I whispered, hearing footsteps upon the grand staircase. “And stay hidden behind the gowns until I return for you.”

  If I returned.

  For the Jacobins had long been resentful of my mother for being the daughter of a marquis and for running Cinquante—the favorite gambling establishment among the city’s aristocracy and, therefore, of its royalists and moderates. That resentment extended to me, too, not only for helping her run the club, but also for not returning the interest of the men who frequented it—or wished to. Men who had now gained power, like Robespierre, recent president of the National Convention and primary defender of la Terreur, a man so powerful he’d created his own religion by proclamation a
few months before; and Louis Saint-Just, the revolution’s so-called Angel of Death and the National Convention’s youngest delegate, who’d done more than anyone to convince that body to execute Louis XVI. Many times I’d dreamt of Robespierre pinning me against the wheel of a carriage the night the Convention had turned on the Girondins and ordered their detainment, except in the nightmare, Madame Roland never interrupted and I had no safe way to deny his desires . . .

  I shuddered and forced the memory away, because closing Cinquante and leaving Paris hadn’t lessened that resentment. Though it’d been months since our family had retreated to Sucy, Maman still possessed enough friends in elevated places for us to learn that we were even now denounced to the Committee of General Security. After all, in a moment when everyone coveted more than what they had—not just freedom and rights, but more influence, more power, and more status, too—spiteful jealousy ran wild.

  So I knew not which of us might be the patrol’s intended prey. Maman? Myself? I might not have run our club, but I’d committed the additional sin of being known for my supposed dazzling beauty.

  The latter had always been for me a double-edged sword. Attracting the unwanted attention of admirers in one moment, but providing a blessed distraction in another. I only hoped it might somehow save us now.

  Wrenching open the carved doors to the armoire de mariage my dear papa had given me years before, I tore through the piles of antique linens, ruffles of delicate lace, and other parts of my trousseau to find the basket of tricolored ribbons I’d worked into rosettes. Mine was the last suite on the long hallway, so I took just another moment to pin one of the cockades to the gauzy muslin at my breast. My hands trembled so much that I pricked the skin over my heart, but I couldn’t give that a thought as I spilled into the hallway with my basket. The door closed behind me just as three municipal officers emerged from my younger brother Louis’s neighboring suite.

  Upon seeing me, the men nearly knocked into one another before falling into bows. It would’ve been comical were the situation not so precarious.