by Kate Quinn
But neither the answer nor my efforts mattered, because at that very moment, pounding at the front door nearly shook the whole château. “Open in the name of the republic!”
And this time I knew that neither my beauty, my acting, the truth, nor even our innocence could save us.
* * *
Sainte-Pélagie Prison, Paris, France, April 1794
Just as we’d been warned, we were charged with conspiring with Jean, the Baron de Batz, in a vast foreign conspiracy against the republic with the aim of restoring the monarchy. Myself, Maman, Charles, and even my sixteen-year-old brother, Louis.
The baron had been an adviser to King Louis XVI before the insurrection of 10 August, so my papa had many occasions to see the man at the Tuileries. But Maman and I had only met him socially a handful of times before the king’s imprisonment and Papa’s murder. At the king’s execution, the baron had reportedly attempted to stir the crowd of onlookers to save their king and been forced to flee France when he failed.
We were beside ourselves trying to understand how we were supposed to have known him well enough to have conspired with him, since we hadn’t seen him in nearly two years!
Neither had the French authorities, despite a six-month-long hunt for the baron and his ringleaders. Since the Committee could not discover the true offenders, they diverted the accusations toward the innocent, whom they made to bear the consequences of their own incapacity.
Which was how we found ourselves imprisoned at the infamous Sainte-Pélagie, with its thick stone walls, oozing dirt floors, bone-rattling cold, and bottomless despair.
“You have a visitor,” one of the guards said, calling to me as he came to the bars of the cell my family had been moved to just that morning. “Ten minutes.” He retreated to reveal a voluptuous black-eyed beauty with cascading brown ringlets and a yellow gown that looked out of place amid the dreariness and next to our shabbiness, even after just two days.
Marie!
I traded glances with Charles as we all huddled at the bars to see why my husband’s lover had come.
“Mademoiselle Grandmaison, what news?” my husband asked, his voice strained. His barely concealed emotion made me a little jealous that it wasn’t my François who’d come. Then again, it was a risk for anyone to associate with us now, which made me especially grateful to Marie.
“I’ve learned the main evidence against you,” she said in a hushed voice, and then she turned her pained, sympathetic gaze on me. “First, there have been reports of a disguised man coming and going from your country house, and they are persuaded it was the baron.”
“That’s preposterous,” Maman bit out.
My stomach plummeted, and sudden dizziness forced me to grip the bars. “I’m sorry,” I said. Were we truly all to lose our lives because of who I loved? “This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.”
Maman frowned, confusion plain on her face as she looked from me to Marie to Charles. Then understanding dawned, and her suspicious gaze cut to me again. “Who was it?”
Tears threatened, but I blinked them away as I looked into the eyes of the woman who’d taught me how and when and which masks to don throughout my life—and with whom I’d worn the biggest mask of all in having spent the last two years going against her wishes. “Monsieur Elleviou.”
My mother blanched and glanced at Charles as if astonished I’d admitted to my infidelity before him, but he was shaking his head and peering at me with sad understanding. “This isn’t your fault, Émilie.”
He was generous to say it, even though it wasn’t true. “You warned me, Charles.” Sadness welled up inside me, and it was the first time since the patrol had arrived at our house the night before that despair threatened to overwhelm me.
“Am I to understand that you knew about this?” Maman asked my husband.
“Maman.” I winced at the depth of her shock and censure. For though I knew she’d disapproved of François, as the mistress to more than one influential aristocrat, I never expected her to have such a care for the propriety of the situation. “This isn’t his doing—”
“Ladies, please,” Charles said in a rare show of temper. “The guard will be returning to escort Marie away. If we must discuss the private understanding that exists between myself and my wife, let us do it after we hear all there is to know.” Without waiting for our response, he turned back to his lover. “What is the other evidence?”
Her gaze locked with his, some intimate communication passing between them. “That . . . that I facilitated meetings between you and the baron at Théâtre Favart.”
Charles sighed, then looked to me again. “See? Not your fault after all. Years ago, the Baron de Batz frequently attended performances there and became a supporter of the stage. So they think they’ve connected me to him as well.”
I took his hand, heartbroken for the both of us. That love should be responsible for our predicament was as ludicrous as it was devastating.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Only whispers.” Marie looked both ways down the empty stone corridor, then leaned closer. Her voice dropped into a whisper. “That the bitterness of important men who Émilie rejected made her a target.”
I gasped. “Robespierre?” If so, it made his assistance last night even more confusing—or it confirmed that there’d been even more skullduggery afoot than we realized. And, by God, after we’d prostrated ourselves before him by joining his cult! Had he been mocking us the whole time?
“I’ll bet it was that ruthless disciplinarian, Saint-Just,” Maman said. “That puppy always had an eye for you and was jealous that despite all his social climbing he never rose sufficiently to attend my salons.”
Saint-Just? For a moment I was stunned. Could the so-called Angel of Death have really been so wounded by the nervous rejection of a naive fifteen-year-old girl that he’d employ such brutal revenge for it four years later?
If that was the character of France’s new republican citizens, then there was no hope of justice for anyone except the demagogues, tyrants, and deplorable opportunists among us.
“I cannot believe it,” I managed, my head spinning at the thought that I should be punished for how my appearance made men react. So the value of my life was truly to be determined by whether I’d spread my legs for the right man. It was one thing to know such ideas about my sex existed, but a whole other thing to bear the application of such a principle to the question of my very survival.
Maman breathed a sigh of resignation, and I hated the defeat in it. “If it’s true, then I must accept the blame. For I was the one who displayed your beauty as an attraction at Cinquante.”
“No, Maman. Our evenings there were nothing but a delight.” I shook my head, anger steadily replacing the sadness and shame inside me. “If my supposed beauty is the cause of our arrest, what it truly reveals is that this revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity are meant for men alone.” It’d only been five months since the Jacobins had executed playwright and philosopher Olympe de Gouges for daring to argue that if a woman had the right to mount the scaffold, she must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform—a right that she exercised again and again until they silenced her altogether.
The realization sweeping over me now ought to have come upon me then. But even as the injustices had mounted against others over these past months, we’d allowed some part of our hearts and brains to rationalize them away until we’d all but accepted as normal the political persecution of one group after another. Perhaps it was naivete or disbelief or fear. Any means of coping with la Terreur all around.
Until it came for us too.
And de Gouges wasn’t the only woman whose independent thinking forced her to kneel before the nation’s razor. Madame Roland, the wife of the former minister of the interior, was rumored to have authored some of his official correspondence with such a sharp pen that it cost Monsieur Roland his ministry. Worse, after her husband’s fall, the Jacobins blamed his
wife’s influence for every word and act they found objectionable. Olympe’s blood had barely dried upon the blade before Madame Roland, who once rescued me from a difficult moment, met the same fate.
And to think that I perhaps stood in the same cells that had confined both these ladies. Perhaps their spirits roamed within this ancient prison, ill at rest for the injustices done to them and the ongoing misogyny of the Revolution’s leaders. For a moment, I imagined they were still here with us, silent witnesses to the struggles of the living—and I wondered how they might judge me.
Or how they might influence me . . .
“Marie,” I said, inspiration striking, “will you carry a message to François for me?”
“Of course.”
The guard appeared behind her. “Time’s up.”
My heart took flight as the words rushed out of me. “Tell him all that has transpired and implore him to ask for an interview with the members of the Committee.” It was a risk, I knew, but perhaps François’s fame and popularity would offer all of us protection.
“Come now unless you wish to join them, mademoiselle,” the jailer groused.
My plea spilled out faster as she took halting steps toward the door. “If he confesses that he was the mysterious individual, his testimony could clear our names.”
“I will,” she said as the guard all but dragged Marie through the doorway.
FOR DAYS, WE heard nothing. And then it was as if every prisoner’s outside eyes and ears brought news.
Another faction of Robespierre’s opponents, this one under the leadership of National Convention deputy Danton, had been executed. Their crime: vying with Robespierre for power and advocating that France attempt to make peace with its continental neighbors. Naturally, such an idea made the faction vulnerable to charges of complicity with the foreign conspiracy. But the Dantonists weren’t the only ones to find their heads separated from their shoulders. Word reached us again and again that the pace of arrests and executions escalated, touching every sort of people until there was almost no family in all France that didn’t feel the sharp edge of the blade.
Which seemed increasingly likely to be our fate too.
For when Marie finally returned, it was with tears in her eyes as she relayed her conversation with François. “He finds such a measure repugnant and believes it would be useless, and says his grief for you leaves him in no fit state to take action. I’m so sorry, Émilie.”
He wouldn’t even try? It was one thing to have risked all for love, but quite another to learn that only one of us was truly willing to take that risk. And after I’d protected him that day at our château. The coward! My chest ached with a gripping hollowness that turned white hot, and I found his grief not even a cold comfort, especially as I realized that having spread my legs for a man hadn’t guaranteed my safety after all. I scoffed. “Was that all he had to say?”
His expression as dark as a gathering storm, Charles put his arm around my shoulders, his strong embrace keeping me from flying to pieces.
Marie forced a smile and a false cheer into her voice. “He . . . he still hopes that a thorough inquiry will bring light to your innocence or that you’ll be forgotten in prison like so many others until the revolutionary troubles are over.”
Hopes? He hopes? “Merde!” I spat, for I put no stock in such wishful thinking, nor in the speculation running rampant that the killing of the factions was a sign that the Revolution was coming to an end. Because if that wasn’t true, François’s cowardice might’ve just signed our death warrants. And I wasn’t willing to do nothing until it became clear whether I was right or wrong. That night, I whispered to Maman, “Perhaps if you appealed to the brother of l’Incorruptible.”
She touched her forehead to mine. “You are my daughter, aren’t you? I’ve already done it.”
But no reply came from Maman’s admirer.
SEVERAL DAYS LATER, we were suddenly informed that all the members of our family were to be moved across the city to a house of detention called the Anglaises. The jailer’s cart was cramped and jolting, and our countrymen skirted their gazes away from the slatted windows as if merely looking upon us might bring trouble their way. But we could hardly be bothered by such a thing when it was the first time in weeks that we’d breathed fresh air or felt the sun on our faces. So it was a crushing torment to return to confinement, this time within the small barren cells of a former Benedictine convent confiscated by the Jacobins for government use.
And then my mother fell ill with a rattling cough that drained her energy and her appetite until I feared she might never again rise from her sickbed. More than a month had passed since our arrest, and between my worry for Maman, my fear for all of us, gnawing hunger, and the unending monotony of this horrible place, I sometimes feared I might go mad. So I attempted to distract myself and rouse Maman by recounting to her the news as it reached us.
“Maman, Robespierre did it. He had the Cult of the Supreme Being established as the official religion of the Republic.” There was no questioning the man’s ability to see an idea through from germination to reality, and now I acknowledged that perhaps Maman had been right to think we should align ourselves with his mysticism. “I think that could be good news for us, don’t you? Just as you suspected.”
“We can only hope,” she said in a flat, quiet voice before looking away.
But not all the news was of a hopeful nature. For we learned a few days later that the king’s sister, the devout Madame Élisabeth, had been executed. And supposedly against Robespierre’s will!
Like Condorcet, much of the public respected and loved the princess, viewing her very differently than her belle-soeur the former queen. But unlike Condorcet, who had undeniably been active at the center of the Revolution’s political whirl, Élisabeth’s life had been devoted to charity not politics. So she was widely regarded as innocent and the accusations at her trial that she had molested her nephew the dauphin had horrified many. Moreover, stories already multiplied about how she’d kept her faith until the end, going so far as to comfort and reassure her fellow victims that they would soon lay down the trials, injustices, and pains of this life for a more glorious one in heaven.
“Maman,” I said, hoping she, too, would find some solace in this part of the tragic story. “When they took her head, the crowd did not cheer. And people say that the scent of roses filled the square. Some say it was a miracle.”
When my mother finally spoke, her voice was weak. “Are the people aroused against Robespierre for this?”
I nodded, and Maman turned over to face the wall beside the narrow pallet we shared. “Give Louis my rations” was her only response.
Other news that reached us filled me with a sense of righteousness. After years of debate, the National Convention had several months ago outlawed slavery in its colonies—an expedient step the growing revolution on the far-off island of Saint-Domingue had forced them to take. But it was apparently too little too late, because I’d heard the guards whisper that France had lost control of nearly the entire colony now as the British and the Spanish came to the aid of the black forces with the goal of expelling the French.
“An actual foreign conspiracy,” Charles said, wryly. “One the Jacobins brought on themselves.”
“Yet here we sit in this miserable place,” I bit out, “imprisoned because of an imaginary one.” I found myself hoping the black rebels broke free of France, if for no other reason than to hurt the corrupt Convention.
I couldn’t arouse Maman at all to relate this news, as she was too weak with fever to remain awake. What could I do?
I found myself thinking about the dignity of the princess’s last hours. Élisabeth might have railed against the injustice of the accusations against her, or complained about her ill-treatment, or broken down in a dozen other ways. Instead, she’d turned her care and concern outward toward her fellow victims.
I resolved to do that too.
I mopped Maman’s sweaty forehead with a co
ol cloth I begged from one of the guards. I tried to cheer and distract my brother with stories from our childhood and by playing a made-up game using naught but little pebbles we found upon the hard floor. And I showered my husband with affection and appreciation, for he struck a deal with a guard to bring us extra rations of food and herbal medicines from the apothecary in exchange for payment from Marie at the theater.
“You’re a good man, Charles. I am fortunate to have you for my husband,” I said one night when I awoke to find him sitting in the corner instead of on the little pallet he shared with Louis.
He bumped my shoulder and gave me a rueful smile. “Have a care, Émilie. You’ll make me think you’ve fallen in love with me at long last.”
I stared at him in the darkness, only the moonlight through the small window offering any illumination, and was stunned to feel a welling pressure in my chest. “I do love you,” I whispered. Sudden tears filled my eyes at the realization that I’d come to cherish him as much more than a friend. When had that happened? “You’re the only one who has ever accepted me just as I am and valued me for more than the youthful beauty that nature must soon diminish.”
“Oh, my darling girl. My heart is yours and always has been.”
I gasped. “What do you mean?”
He kissed me and pulled me against him. “I have loved you from nearly the moment I first met you.”
His words made me ache utterly. “But then . . . why . . .” I struggled to untangle the knot of memories and thoughts and emotions inside me. I’d already been with François when first I’d met Charles and Marie, who found each other soon thereafter. “. . . why didn’t you—”
His fingers fell upon my lips. “I was happy as long as you were happy. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
And though he’d had me before, the way we came together in the darkness of that cell was altogether different. For the first time, I wasn’t playing a role with Charles. Instead, I could be and could give him my true self—who was just a girl daring to hope that she’d found a happy future in the arms of the man she loved. Our hushed union was full of understanding and soul-deep connection. A moment of perfection amid the ruins of France.