by Kate Quinn
When everyone had presented themselves, Victorine stood before us once more. “Friends of God, prepare to meet the Supreme Being. Do you swear obedience to the Mother of God and submission to her prophets?”
“I do,” came the others’ reply a half beat before I, too, gave my answer. Charles slanted me a deep frown that told me to do better.
“Do you swear to pour the last drop of your blood for the sake of the Supreme Being, either weapons in hand or by all possible kinds of death?” Victorine asked in a tone that almost mesmerized.
“I do,” I said, hastening to answer in time with the rest despite the feeling that we were not being asked to make this vow to God at all. Years before, the Revolution’s Cult of Reason had declared God dead, and heralded liberty, equality, fraternity, freedom, and justice as supreme. Now we were allowed to believe in the deity again, but was that who these people now believe reigned above all? Or was it instead someone of this mortal plane?
After we gave our pledges, the Mother of God was escorted away and more candles were lit, revealing that none other than Maximilien Robespierre sat off to the side in a gilded beechwood armchair upholstered in blood red silk, as if he’d been orchestrating the whole of this strange ceremony. And perhaps he had. Other men sat around him, but I could only look into the assured brown eyes of the man who’d once delighted in making sport of me. But now he seemed to gaze at me with what I could only describe as reverence.
He made a show of rising slowly, gracefully. He, too, wore white and blue, though his silks were finer, his lace necktie was more delicate, and the indigo dye of his coat was bolder. Then he spoke to the newly initiated one by one. When it was our turn to receive his attention, I knew not what to expect.
He kissed Maman’s cheeks. “Grace is poured on all those who embrace the Supreme Being.”
“As I now do,” she said, bowing her head.
“And it is a credit to your whole family,” he said, making me wonder if the words contained a promise of safety. “Please also allow me to convey greetings from my brother to you, madame.” Everything in his round-faced expression read as sincere.
“Merci.” Maman gave him one of her secret, knowing smiles.
He turned next to Charles, and they shook hands. “Sartine, welcome. The whole of nature awaits its salvation, and it is only we who can deliver it.”
“Yes, sir,” Charles said stiffly. “It will be our privilege.”
We? So Robespierre saw us as all on one side? Kissing the prophetess’s feet was well worth it if that was the case.
“Indeed.” Next, he moved to me, placing kisses on each of my cheeks. “Paris’s most celebrated beauty.” My stomach clenched, for standing out as superior in any way was these days an unpardonable transgression. “Is it not the Supreme Being whose immortal hand engraves on the heart of man all things? The code of justice and equality? The decrees of liberty, faith, and justice?”
“Yes,” I whispered, wondering whether such a being truly existed, and, if so, what he might have engraved on this man’s heart.
“Yes,” he repeated fervently, brown eyes blazing as he stared at me for a moment that stretched on uncomfortably long. Finally, he continued, “He created men to help each other, to love each other mutually, and to attain to happiness by the way of virtue. That is what we do here, madame. And I am delighted to count you among us.”
This reserved and devout Robespierre was so different from the man I remembered and expected that I hardly knew how to reply. “Thank you.”
Afterward, Robespierre invited a few of us to stay for a supper of cured ham, foie gras terrine with a conserve of figs, rillettes of suckling pig, and warm, poached asparagus. I was already surprised that we’d been among those singled out for this honor, but I was further astounded when he bade Victorine, Maman, and me to sit closest to him. But perhaps what was most astonishing was the offer he made as we savored the fine meal, of which he ate very little.
“Ladies,” he said, addressing my mother and me with a glance. “I invite you to interview me, that I might make my views clear to you.”
I nearly dropped my fork upon Victorine’s fine porcelain. Maman gave a little cough as she worked to swallow a bite of the savory ham. For one did not simply question Robespierre. Not if they wished their head to remain attached to their shoulders. Was this some kind of trick?
“Citizen Robespierre,” my mother began. “Surely we could not—”
“Come now, madame.” He sat forward with his elbows upon the table. “You were until not very long ago a renowned salonnière. Your gift for sparkling conversation on the great ideas of the day is well known.”
My mother actually blushed, and her knuckles went white where she gripped the armrest of her chair.
As much as one couldn’t question l’Incorruptible, Maman also couldn’t safely refuse him. So I rushed to cover her rare speechlessness. “Is . . . is it true that the Cult of the Supreme Being stands for extinguishing religious persecutions and abolishing the scaffold?” I asked, my voice soft and meek.
A slow grin crept up his face. “Ah, leave it to you, Madame Sartine, to go right to the heart of it, oui?” He nodded to himself, clearly enjoying the way all our gazes were riveted upon his every expression, gesture, and word. “The answer to the first is unequivocally yes. A republic requires public virtue, something that can only be obtained by perfecting private virtue. Thus, religious faith and the grace of the Supreme Being are indispensable to orderly, civilized society.”
I sipped my wine and hoped he wouldn’t notice how my hand shook around the goblet. But his words made clear exactly why Hébert and his faction had been killed, for the most radical revolutionaries’ program of dechristianization ran directly counter to what Robespierre was saying now.
“As to your second . . .” He hummed and tilted his head as if in thought. “What is the goal for which we strive?” His gaze swept the table, holding the whole room in his thrall. “The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, the rule of justice and law, and a nation that safeguards the welfare of each individual. A France where all can enjoy the prosperity and glory of the republic.”
Nods and murmurs of approval circled the table, urging Robespierre on. And though I, too, nodded, something about the coolness with which he spoke unleashed a shiver down my spine.
“What kind of government can realize these marvels?” He stabbed at the table with his finger. “A democratic government. But to build this requires the public virtue of which I spoke before.” His gaze returned to me. “Democracy requires a virtuous people. Anyone who does not support democracy lacks the requisite virtue and is an enemy of the people—and is therefore deserving of the tyranny of the Terror.”
He sipped at his wine, then stared at its movement in his glass for a long moment, as if working the problem and looking for the solution.
Finally, he said, “Our peaceful republican citizens deserve all the protection we can afford them, but those who ally with foreign conspirators and seek to restore the monarchy are not true citizens but strangers and enemies among us. For them, the scaffold is swift, severe, indomitable justice. Any delay in rendering judgment against them is equal to impunity, and any uncertainty of punishment encourages the guilty. Virtue without Terror is defenseless, and so we see that the Terror flows, then, from virtue.”
For a moment, the whole table hung in a suspended silence. And then one of the men in Robespierre’s entourage rose to his feet and raised his glass. “Vive la république!” It was all I could do to keep from clutching my throat.
Still, I joined the others in rushing to rise and offer the salute. “Vive la république!” I cried with the truest enthusiasm I’d mustered all night. For nothing short of complete sincerity—or at least the convincing feigning of it—would suffice. Despite the naive dreams of my mother and my father’s friend, I perceived no hope of clemency for royalists or even moderates in the thinking of a man who believed that his political opponents deserved death. To
say nothing of the warm, thoughtful charm with which he’d talked about the Terror as if he wasn’t discussing cutting off the heads of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, in front of one another and a bloodthirsty crowd!
Which was when I knew for sure what surviving this revolution would require of me. Not just that I accept my papa’s death and the precariousness of life without him. Not just the sacrifice of my love, or the gaiety that should’ve been the right of a young belle of nineteen. And not just my belief in God, the practice of my religion, and my dignity. Nay, the price of my and my family’s survival was the complete submission of my selfhood to the role of rabid patriot.
The truth of that had been staring me in the face for months. Perhaps even years. But having heard Robespierre spell out his intellectual intolerance in such brutal plainness after praising our initiation into a society that demanded the sacrifice of our very blood, I finally understood. And it was as if my whole life of learning to play my part and exchange one mask for another had been preparing me for this role.
In the space of one moment, I felt as if I’d aged a lifetime.
And in the next, I donned the costume of my warmest and most adoring smile and turned it upon the man at the head of the table basking in our praise and adulation.
If keeping my family and myself alive meant that I had to act the part of Robespierre’s faithful admirer every second of every day until someone finally cut his head off, I would gladly do just that.
“I HAD A terrible nightmare last night,” Maman said two mornings later after having remained abed until noon. “You will laugh at me, but I dreamt I was the mother of three bats.” She blinked back tears and gave off such a doleful and dejected air that I was immediately alarmed.
“It was just a dream, Maman,” I said, going to her and feeling her forehead. “Are you unwell?” I despised seeing her brought so low.
Just yesterday we’d received word that the Revolution had devoured yet another old friend and great mind—the Marquis de Condorcet, who used to hold everyone in his thrall at the gambling tables with his predictions for the future. Some months ago, a warrant had been issued for the arrest of the marquis for the unpardonable crime of debating the language in France’s new constitution, despite being a member of the committee that’d been tasked with drafting the document. He’d been forced into hiding but had been found out—or betrayed. And died in a jail cell.
Already people whispered that his jailers had murdered the old philosopher because he was too well loved and respected to be publicly executed.
His poor wife! I remembered with great fondness the marquise’s kindness and wit, and the friendship we’d struck up after she’d bade me to call her Grouchette and I’d covered for her speechlessness with the Marquis de Lafayette, with whom she’d seemed to be desperately infatuated. But that was before she’d married Condorcet. From all accounts, it had become a true love match.
My heart ached for my friend’s loss, especially when Maman said, “She had to divorce him, you know. He pleaded with her do it. Otherwise, they’d have seized everything and put their poor little orphaned daughter on the street. She had no choice, even if it broke her heart. Mothers have no choices—not even mothers of bats.” Shaking her head, Maman stepped to the windows of the solarium and stared out at the ornate gardens beyond. “Bats are creatures of the night. Symbols of death and rebirth . . .”
I exchanged a glance with my husband, where he sat playing backgammon with my brother, whose attention was also on our mother. Maman had rarely been one to give in to melancholy, even after Papa died, and it was plain that her unusual sadness distressed Louis as much as it did me. I put my arm around her. “The weather is glorious. Let’s take a turn about the gardens.”
“Not now, darling.” She managed the faintest of smiles before drifting away like a wounded bird. And I could only let her go, for there was no role I could play that would change the reality of our friends disappearing one by one by one . . .
Despite the beautiful sunshine, the lively conversation occasioned by the arrival of one of Charles’s friends, and a lovely al fresco dinner amid the new blooms of our garden, a feeling of darkness hung over the whole château, as if the house knew something we didn’t and was trying to warn us.
But the true warning came from another quarter altogether. A most surprising quarter.
We were lounging in robes and slippers in the sitting room when there was a sudden knocking upon the back door. At ten o’clock at night . . .
Charles jumped immediately to his feet. “Stay here,” he commanded, rushing into his study from whence he quickly returned, flintlock pistol in hand. The candlelight flashed off the bright steel surfaces of the barrel and lockplate, causing my heart to thunder against my breast, and I thought to beg him not to leave us there. But before I could, my husband disappeared.
“It’s all right,” I said aloud, though I knew not whether I meant to comfort myself or my mother, whose face had gone pale.
After an impossibly long minute, Charles returned with an envelope. “It’s addressed to you, Mother,” he said, taking the missive to Maman. “Whoever delivered it made off through the deer park as soon as I opened the door. I heard the retreating mount.”
My mother carefully unfolded the letter. Her eyes and mouth grew wide with shock. “We’ve been denounced.”
“Again?” I asked, even as dread lanced through my veins. Because while we had been denounced repeatedly—for everything from running our gambling parlor, to hosting dinners for one hundred crown per head, to Maman’s supposed impertinence and haughty manners, and many other supposed offenses besides—I’d never seen her react with such utter fright.
Charles took the page from her shaking hand and read aloud:
“Your family has been caught in the tempest of denunciation. Charges of complicity in a foreign conspiracy are being drawn up even now. Fly with all haste.”
Charles blinked at me, his face ashen.
Heart in my throat, I flew to his side and peered at the letter for myself, half hoping Charles had somehow misunderstood. But of course he had not. Moreover, a splatter of ink revealed the obvious haste with which the missive had been written, lending its warning all the more credence. “It’s unsigned,” I managed.
Charles peered at me with desolation in his dark eyes. “It doesn’t need to be signed. It’s the handwriting of Robespierre himself.”
I gasped. The man whose libidinous advances I’d many times fended off, and who spoke so calmly of the justice of murdering royalists . . . was warning us? I was immediately suspicious.
As if hearing the man’s name roused Maman from the melancholy that had gripped her all day, she rose to her feet. “Are you certain?”
He gave a single nod. “I’ve seen enough of his correspondence come through the Council of State office to recognize it.”
“Then we must heed his advice.”
The decisiveness of my mother’s words sent my pulse into flight. “But why would l’Incorruptible warn us? What if this is a trick or a test?”
“I don’t know,” Charles said. “Perhaps because of our vow to the Cult of the Supreme Being? Or perhaps he warns us as an admirer of the women in this family. His fondness for Paris’s two Sainte-Amaranthe beauties was on plain display the evening that we pledged.” Charles took my hand and looked at me with a devastating mix of sadness and affection. “What if it’s not a trick? Ever since the execution of Charlotte Corday, the National Convention has suspected foreign conspiracies and assassination plots coming from every quarter, even as the police have been unable to apprehend even one aristocratic conspirator. The failure of their investigation is an embarrassment for them, and it’s made it permissible and even necessary for them to suspect everyone.”
That was true enough. The general feeling of apprehension over conspiracies to restore the monarchy was so strong that no one in Paris would have been surprised to learn one morning that the entire Convention had been massacred
and King Louis XVII had been installed on the throne! But Charles was right, we had far more to lose by assuming the warning was false if it was not.
“Do we go to Grandpapa’s then?” I asked, for when we’d first retreated to the country, Maman had told me that if we had to flee farther, her ancestral home was where she wanted to go as it was so far distant from Paris.
With steel in her spine and in her voice, my mother had a ready answer. “Yes, we go to Besançon, and from there into Switzerland. Charles, have the groom prepare the carriage.” She turned to me. “Émilie, wake Louis. Both of you pack just like we discussed. Take only what you must.”
We flew into a panicked rush of preparations to leave our lives and all our worldly possessions behind. Not to mention our country, which in trying to cure one disease, had caused another. And its malignancy finally threatened to consume us.
It was the moment that we’d secretly feared but never allowed ourselves to fully believe would arrive.
“Louis, wake up,” I said, lighting the candle on his bedside table. “Louis!”
He came awake on a gasp, eyes squinting at me as he lifted his head. “What are you doing?”
“Get up and dress, then pack a satchel with a few essentials.” It was only searches like the one we’d endured weeks before that kept us from having bags packed and ready for flight.
His feet hit the floor. “There’s trouble?” The shadows on his face made him appear older. A younger version of our beloved papa.
“Yes. Make haste, we leave for Grandpapa’s as quickly as we can.”
“Grandpapa’s?” He rose. “But that’s a three-day ride.”
“All the more reason to hurry.” I rushed into my own room and donned the gauzy dress I’d worn earlier. I threw an empty valise upon the bed and rushed to collect the few pieces of my wardrobe and trousseau I couldn’t do without. Was this really all one packed for the rest of their lives?