Ribbons of Scarlet

by Kate Quinn

  I sputter in dark exasperation, nearly laughing at the idea. “Condorcet wasn’t a man for mockery or for duels.”

  Red anger spreads splotchy down his bare, muscled chest. “Oh, yes. Condorcet was a perfect man. A paragon of virtue—”

  “Don’t,” I warn. There are limits to how far I will let him go, even when I have pushed him there. “You are being unreasonable. It’s important his papers are published. And it will keep a roof over our heads.”

  In the years since Nicolas died, during the height of the Terror, I’ve sold portraits and lingerie to keep my daughter clothed and fed and educated. I’ve also published my translation of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, with my notes. My work has allowed me to buy this house in Paris near the Champs-Elysées and provided my lover support so that he, too, can write about the injustices of special tribunals. But he doesn’t like to be reminded of that. He reaches for my arm, a longing in his eyes. “I want to be rid of sad memories, to make a life for us together. I want to marry you, Sophie.”

  He’s said this before. This time, I know he means it. More’s the pity. I slip out of his grasp and go to my easel next to the fireplace and start smudging charcoal lines for my latest portrait. It is a woman. I don’t know which one.

  Maybe all of them.

  About the mouth, there is a touch of Manon Roland’s sardonic smile as she delivered her tart, well-chosen, final words on the scaffold. But the eyes are Madame Élisabeth—clear and royal and lifted heavenward like the nun she once wished to be. Of course, the assassin Charlotte Corday’s eyes were like that, too, now that I think about it, just before the executioner’s assistant slapped the cheek of her decapitated head.

  But I don’t think the woman I’m sketching is a politician, or a saint, or a self-proclaimed soldier. There is too much sadness, madness, and disappointment in the portrait. The kind of emotions that belong to the living. Perhaps I am drawing the so-called survivors of the Revolution, like Pauline Léon who once carried a pike at Versailles but now trails meekly after her husband, the army officer. Or my onetime student, Louise Audu, who is locked now in an asylum for lunatics if the gossip is true. Or the sans-culotte in a butcher’s apron I saw screaming in the crowd when Marie-Antoinette mounted the scaffold. Or the woman in a lace fichu who sobbed when Lafayette’s kinswomen were beheaded. So many women . . .

  Yet, I begin to believe I am drawing myself. “Our friends told me Condorcet slipped away from his attic hideaway,” I say. “He’s escaped to America. He will send for you.” My lover’s mouth thins. He’s heard this story before. He doesn’t want to hear it again. But I need to tell him. “Three months he was dead, and I didn’t know.”

  “Sophie, I said I want to marry you.”

  “I heard you,” I whisper, numbly, my fingers still trying to capture the essence of a person on the canvas. “It was an omelet that killed him. He went into a tavern, pretending to be a carpenter, and ordered one. I used to tell him that a hearty omelet gave me hope for a new day. Had he been hopeful that morning?”

  Raking a hand through his glorious hair, my lover replies, “He was probably hungry.”

  I glare. “How many eggs, the cook asked. Nicolas said a dozen. That’s how they knew he was a nobleman who had never cooked for himself . . . When they arrested him he gave the name of the boy we tried to save together. Pierre Simare. So that I would know him after he was dead even if no one else would. They beat him, and dragged him to jail, and there he poisoned himself so as not to give up anyone who helped him.”

  My lover nods, teeth clenched. “Condorcet was a brave man. I know. You loved him. I know. You had hope for the future and now you don’t. I want to give you some. Why won’t you take it?”

  Perhaps he believes me to be like Elleviou, who abandoned his love to the scaffold without a backward glance. I refuse to go to the Opéra-Comique where that man has gone on to earn great fame and fortune. The mere sound of that callow coward’s dulcet voice would make me retch with disgust. For him and for myself, both.

  But I do not say this to my lover. Instead, my reply spills free in a rush, more instinct than logic. “Hopes are dangerous. Reach for them and you can lose everything, even your life.”

  “Don’t reach for them and you are already dead,” he replies. “I’m going to say it a third time. I want to marry you. And so help me, Sophie, if you don’t answer—”

  “What will you do if I don’t answer?” I am defiant.

  And he is a wounded animal who lashes out. “You are not the only woman who loves me.”

  As much as it hurts, this doesn’t startle me. I have suspected a flirtation with one of my friends, but did not wish to hasten a painful parting with an accusation. “Then you should leave me. If there is someone else you want more, go to her. I will not stop you. You are not bound.”

  “Not like you?” he asks, stricken. “You are not married to Condorcet anymore, Sophie. You are not even his widow. Do you forget you divorced the man?”

  In an instant, all the air in the room is gone. I can scarcely breathe. He’s said the one unforgivable thing. He presses a fist to his mouth as if to call back the word, but it’s too late. “Mon Dieu, I’m sorry. I—”

  “Get out,” I say, quietly.

  I don’t see him go or even hear the door close behind him because I am already lost, lost in memories . . .

  A divorce will be nothing but farce and mummery, Nicolas promised. Only a piece of paper. A meaningless ritual.

  He’d been in hiding for several months, living in the attic of a tenderhearted widow who risked her life to shelter him. I would cross the city in beggar’s rags—taking a different path each time—watching over my shoulder to make certain I was not followed. I brought him food, if I could find it. Paper. Ink. What he needed was a warm coat, but I couldn’t get one for him. So we nestled together for warmth on the little attic bed and spoke of an enlightened future, in which he still believed. Always, though, he would end our visits by pleading with me to divorce him lest I leave our daughter an orphan.

  In the end, I did as he wished. I did as Émilie wished too. I survived. Part of me anyway.

  Because divorcing Condorcet had already killed some other part of me as brutally as a blade. I, who had never wanted to marry, wanted even less to dissolve my marriage. I, who had believed in the sanctity of nothing, had found faith in love. To divorce was to betray and defile that faith. I have never forgiven myself for it. I never will.

  “Maman?” My daughter knocks upon my door and peers inside, seemingly shocked to find me in robe and slippers, face in my hands. “Will we go to the salon tonight, or . . .”

  My daughter is fourteen now, on the cusp of womanhood, with dark, arresting eyes like her father. I think she is more worried about missing her first salon than about my lover’s absence. She has been trying on jewelry with her dress for weeks, pouting only a little when I told her that no daughter of republicans should wear a diadem upon her brow, even if it is now the imperial fashion.

  I rouse myself from my stupor. “We will go together, sweet girl.”

  Relieved, she smiles and holds up two ribbons against her gown. “The blue or the red?”

  “Red,” I say, thinking of her father—and remembering how, in the wake of Émilie’s death, red scarves, crimson shawls, and scarlet ribbons became a symbol of quiet defiance. “Definitely the red.”

  WE GO OVER the river to the old residence of Madame Helvetius whose heirs still allow me to host my salons in her spacious manor house where Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson once strolled. How the grand house survived the Revolution is a mystery, but it’s a comforting monument to the past. And I try to remake my salon there, cultivating young intellects and gathering together what remains of the old ones.

  Even those with whom I have had my quarrels.

  Lafayette sometimes comes with his daughter, who has become fast friends with mine. How he survived the Revolution is also a mystery—but he is another comforting monument
of the past, even bent and broken by his long imprisonment as he is.

  I should still hold against him that day on the Champs de Mars when he ordered his men to fire on the crowd. I was there, with my child in my arms, asking for a republic, being forced to run for my life. I have blamed him a very long time for that—sure that if he had been less torn between his republican values and his loyalty to the royal family . . . it might have all turned out differently. But now, I don’t know that any single moment or decision could have changed the course of things. And when I look at Lafayette, I wonder if he, too, lives with ghosts.

  So, once I have introduced my daughter to the most brilliant minds in the room, and left her chatting with other young thinkers, I seek out Lafayette where he sits quietly at the far edge of the crowd. Using his cane, he tries to rise in respect, but I wave him back into his seat and ask, without preamble, “Will you vote for the Corsican to be our emperor?”

  He rubs at the back of his neck. “What do you think?”

  Sitting beside him, I sigh to see Manon Roland’s daughter in the crowd. Though I cannot hear the word Girondin spoken without pain for the memories, the young lady is here at my invitation, as I made a promise to her mother to keep an eye on her. But she shows no interest in the political discussions that captivated her mother and me. And she is probably happier for it. “I think it doesn’t matter. People are tired of revolution.”

  The parties will never be as dazzling as they were before, but there is wine to drink and bread to eat again; I suppose that is why they will make Napoleon Bonaparte a tyrant over us. The people are happy to trade the freedom so many people bled for in exchange for security. And who am I to judge them given the way our revolution spoiled itself until there was more blood than liberty? In the end, it was all for nothing.

  “I still think it matters,” Lafayette says quietly, staring into his glass.

  I wonder if Lafayette really will defy the hard and wily Bonaparte when he could scarcely find it within himself to defy the soft and guileless King Louis. I wonder, too, if there is any point in doing so.

  “You would do it again, even knowing what we know now?”

  “Not all revolutions turn out this way,” he says, and I think he means his beloved America, where three men have already taken a turn presiding as president over a republic without blood running in the streets.

  And yet, women are not equal citizens in either of those places.

  As that thought occurs to me, my guests all rise to their feet. There is an uncomfortable murmur by the archway, and gasps can be heard as the crowd parts to reveal a newcomer. A man of only moderate physical stature, balding a bit, dressed in civilian garb that doesn’t suit. A man who is instantly recognizable anywhere.

  It is Napoleon Bonaparte, the very same man about whom all these fine thinkers have been gossiping for the past hour. Having been caught out at what might seem a seditious gathering, they do not seem to know whether to glare or bow in submission to the man who will soon be crowned above us.

  As he approaches, a lupine smile upon his face, I don’t know which I will do either. “What brings you to our gathering, General?” I ask, with a curtsy that fills me with indignation.

  “Curiosity, madame,” Bonaparte replies, “or do you prefer citizeness?”

  He is baiting me and I should not rise to it, but I see that, in cleaning up to be presentable in society, I have missed a line of charcoal dust on my thumb. And I am reminded of my unfinished sketch of the mysterious woman. I give a sweet smile, a little falsely. “I would prefer Citizeness if women had any rights of citizenship in France, but as we don’t . . .”

  Bonaparte laughs, also a little falsely. “You have not changed it would seem.” He looks at Lafayette, pointedly. “Neither has he. But the world has changed.”

  “Has it?” I ask. “It seems to me that we have only spun round again to the same place. And that our revolution is a great wheel of torture upon which women have been broken and silenced.” Marie-Antoinette. Princess Élisabeth. Olympe de Gouges. Manon Roland. Louise Audu. Charlotte Corday. Pauline Léon. Émilie de Sartine. The list went on and on.

  “And yet, you are not silent,” Bonaparte says. “You should know that I dislike women who meddle in politics, madame.”

  At this, the old fire kindles in my belly, the light of conviction that some things are worth risking for. I hadn’t realized the fire was even still there. And so I do not cower before Bonaparte. “Ah, but mon Général, so long as you men take it upon yourselves to behead us, we will want to know why.”

  I glance over to where my daughter stands, nervously holding hands with the daughters of Lafayette and Manon Roland, and I am struck by a pang. A bittersweet revelation that for them—for all of them—and for their daughters, too, I would turn that wheel again for the chance that, next time, it might turn out some other way . . .

  Acknowledgments

  No novel is ever the product of the author alone, and that is particularly true in a cowritten work such as this. As a group, we extend our thanks to our agent on this project, Kevan Lyon, who championed this book from the moment its idea was born. Thanks also to our editor, Tessa Woodward, for believing in and wanting to be a part of the sororité of the novel right from the start. We also extend our gratitude to the whole team at William Morrow, and to Kathie Bennett and her publicity team at Magic Time Literary, and to Kelly Simmon of InkSlinger PR for helping us get word out about the book—we appreciate all you’re doing! Our deep appreciation goes to Allison Pataki, whose schedule prevented her from participating as an author but who graciously agreed to write the foreword and did it with such style and panache.

  Among the many people we’d like to thank is historical figure Olympe de Gouges, the French playwright and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. She was always on our minds and at the heart of the story even though the structure of the novel didn’t allow us to give her a point of view. Her contributions were many, her shadow very large, and the sacrifice of her life at the guillotine too courageous not to mention.

  We are grateful to our friends, families, critique partners, beta readers, and individual agents for their unstinting support. Enormous thanks to Sheila Accongio, Brenna Ash, Lori Ann Bailey, Christi Barth, Desserts by Regine (of Carlisle, PA), Julianne Douglas, Adam Dray, Hazel Gaynor, Ashleigh Inglesby, D. and L. Inglesby, Hoff Inglesby, Brian Kamoie, Cara Kamoie, Julia Kamoie, Madeline Martin, Michelle Moran, Lea Nolan, Kelly Quinn, Margaret Rodenberg, Kerry Schafer, Andrea Snider, Jacques de Spoelberch, Jennifer Thomas, Kris Waldherr, Misty Waters, and Sonja Yoerg.

  For resources, we acknowledge that discussions about legal reform and Dupaty’s case in prerevolutionary France, including his quote about the criminal jurisprudence being barbaric, were used here, with permission, from Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France, by Sarah Maza, University of California Press. Biographical information about Condorcet came from Condorcet and Modernity, by David Williams, including the quote from Condorcet’s pamphlet about the matter of the three peasants, which appears with permission from Cambridge University Press. English-translation quotes from Letters on Sympathy (1798): A Critical Edition, Volume 98, edited by Karin Brown and James Edward McClellan, appear with permission from the American Philosophical Society.

  Finally, the Scarlet Sisters would all like to thank the Kraken. She knows who she is.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Authors

  * * *

  Meet the Authors

  About the Book

  * * *

  Authors’ Notes

  Reading Group Guide

  Recommended Reading

  About the Authors

  Meet the Authors

  KATE QUINN is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of Southern California, she attended Boston University, where she earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in c
lassical voice. She wrote four novels in the Empress of Rome saga and two books set in the Italian Renaissance before turning to the twentieth century with The Alice Network and The Huntress. Kate and her husband now live in San Diego with two rescue dogs named Caesar and Calpurnia.

  STEPHANIE DRAY is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of women’s historical fiction. Her award-winning work has been translated into eight languages and tops lists for the most anticipated reads of the year. Before she became a novelist, she was a lawyer and a teacher. Now she lives near the nation’s capital with her husband, cats, and history books.

  LAURA KAMOIE is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. She holds a doctoral degree in early American history from the College of William & Mary, and she published two nonfiction books on early America and, most recently, held the position of associate professor of history at the U.S. Naval Academy before transitioning to a full-time career writing fiction. Laura lives among the colonial charm of Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband and two daughters.

  SOPHIE PERINOT is an award-winning, multipublished author of female-centered historical fiction, who holds both a bachelor’s in history and a law degree. With two previous books set in France—during the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries—Sophie’s passion for French history began more than thirty years ago, when she first explored the storied châteaux of the Loire Valley. She lives in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area with her husband, children, and a small menagerie of pets.

  HEATHER WEBB is the internationally bestselling author of six historical novels set in France. Her award-winning books have received starred reviews nationally and have sold in more than a dozen countries worldwide. She holds bachelor’s degrees in French and education and a master’s in cultural geography. Once upon a time she taught high school and loved every minute of it, but the Muse called! Heather lives in New England with her family and one feisty rabbit.