by Suzanne Weyn
I’m not sure who has it worse, Ernestine or me. Just as she is a prisoner of the revolutionaries, I am a prisoner of the streets.
Most of my days are spent fishing through garbage for food. Once in a while I find work sweeping out a store or cleaning up in a café. Some days I beg.
As often as I can, I come to the Tuileries and watch my family in the courtyard inside. How I miss them all!
* * *
Today, as Ernestine walks in the Tuileries courtyard, I mingle with the crowd that hounds her from behind the fence. Louis-Charles seems to be in his own world as he sits nearby reading. He doesn’t look well. Thank goodness he has our governess, Madame de Tourzel, to look after him.
Aunt Élisabeth sketches on the ground with a piece of charcoal. Mama and Papa seem saddest of all as they stroll together, talking quietly, their heads bowed. Ernestine is the only one brave enough to come close to the crowd, which jeers at her. She’s so regal one would never guess she wasn’t born to it. It’s because she comes so near, that we see each other.
Our eyes meet, though she gives me only the merest flicker of acknowledgment. I barely recognize her; she’s grown so thin and pale. She’s still pretty, though, in her white muslin dress with the blue sash and her beautiful blonde hair flowing freely down to her waist. How sad she looks.
* * *
I never stay long because I’m too scared that someone will notice the resemblance between Ernestine and me. It’s probably an empty fear since our differing circumstances have made us dissimilar: she so delicate and frail-looking, yet lovely; me dirty, disheveled, and bug-eyed with hunger.
Out here in the streets I see things that I wish with all my heart I had never witnessed. Just weeks ago the prisons were besieged by a mob that tore open the cells of those jailed for being loyal to the royals. I saw women with ears pinned to their dresses, dismembered limbs lying in the road. The gutters ran red with blood.
I stood in the street and watched a cart with the carnage piled in the back and I began to cry. A man approached me wearing a kindly expression. “This is a terrible business,” he said, “but they are our deadly enemies, and those who are delivering the country from them are saving your life and the lives of all the dear children of France.”
I don’t know what to say to him. How could this misery and horror save anyone? Could his words really be true?
And still, I am lucky. No one threatens to kill me. I’m free to go where I want. It’s not right that Ernestine took my place. I didn’t think so when it was proposed, and I still don’t think it’s fair. I have to find a way to get in, to be with my family.
Henri comes to find me. “Want to go to the Place de la Concorde?” he asks.
No. I don’t. But I go with him because he wants to see if Mademoiselle Grosholtz is among those being beheaded that day. They’ve held her in prison for months and months now, but every day could be her last. Henri has learned that Dr. Curtius is trying to have her freed but with no success.
* * *
“Why must we go to the guillotine every single day?” I complain. I can’t stand to see the people killed, and yet the crowd can’t get enough of it. The Place de la Concorde is always mobbed with cheering “citizens.” Now they call it Place de la Révolution, which only makes me despise it all the more.
But Henri insists on going. He says that if Mademoiselle is doomed, our presence will comfort her.
“Why do you care so much about Mademoiselle?” I ask him, thinking of her unsmiling face, her severe, frightening manner.
“She’s all the family I have left,” Henri explains after a thoughtful moment. “She saw I was starving and hired me. The money I earned saved me and my brothers’ lives at that time. I’m not a person to forget that kindness.”
“And yet this revolution that you believe in will kill her for no reason,” I challenge. “Whose side are you on?”
My voice rises, and some in the crowd turn to look at us.
“I believe in the Revolution!” Henri shouts. He stares meaningfully at me. “Just as you, too, believe in the Revolution. Long live the Revolution!”
I realize his show is for the benefit of those around us, and I try to force a smile but my attempt fails.
People nod and wave their arms in the air. “To the Revolution!” some echo.
Henri grabs my arm and leans in close. “Do you want to get us killed?” he hisses softly. “Cheer the Revolution.”
Opening my mouth, the words won’t come.
Henri shakes me.
I break free of him, running into the crowd, tears running down my face. This thing threatens to destroy all I love.
I hate the Revolution! Despise it!
Blinded by my tears, I stumble into an alley and trip over a bundle lying in my path. I’ve tripped over a woman wrapped in rags, a baby on her lap. Her dirty hair is matted, and the languid child is also filthy.
“I’m sorry,” I apologize, regaining my balance.
“Have you any food for my baby?” the woman croaks. “My milk has dried up.”
“I don’t, nor money, either,” I reply honestly. A picture of the royal kitchen flashes in my head: the smell of newly made tarts being pulled from the oven, the roasted game birds, the savory scent of casseroles and stews. I gave them no special attention when I lived at the palace. How my mouth waters for that luscious food now! I would gladly share it with this ragged woman and her hungry baby.
The baby begins to whimper, and I can’t stand the pitiful look on its face. Looking around, I see people on the street. “Wait,” I say. “I’ll get some food or money for you.”
Returning to the street, I look around for a well-dressed person to approach. There are few to be found. These days it’s dangerous to come out looking even a little well off. A person of affluence might be set upon by a mob merely for seeming to be middle-class. Finally, though, a man in a brocade jacket and velvet breeches comes into view. “Can you spare some money for a poor beggar?” I implore him.
“Go away, beggar girl,” he snarls, hurrying past me.
“But her baby is starving,” I say, trailing behind.
“Whose baby? I see no baby,” the man snaps irritably.
“There’s a woman in the alley,” I say pivoting back to point. When I turn to face the man once more, he has walked off.
I approach each well-dressed person who comes along, begging for something to give this baby, and am ignored or pushed away time and again. One woman even kicks me for daring to talk to her.
“Curse you!” I shout at her, infuriated, shaking my fist. “I hope someday you starve the way that baby starves now!”
That’s when I hear the fury of the crowd reflected in my own outburst — the rage, the frustration. It’s so unfair! Why should some have so much while others get nothing?
The world shifts for me in that moment. I see myself, Madame Royale, and my entire family, as the people of France see us, and my stomach clenches.
How they must hate us. How they do hate us. And I suddenly understand why.
But my parents didn’t create the world they were born into. The world of kings and queens wasn’t their invention. It’s been this way for centuries. Have other royal families done a better job of it?
It’s more than I can understand.
Now that I’ve had an experience of the deep anger and truly felt it, the emotion terrifies me. I’m stunned by it.
Finally, I sit on a curb, miserable, defeated.
After a while I see Henri searching for me and call to him. I tell him what I’ve been doing and he pulls a chunk of bread from the pocket of his pants. “Give her this. I stole it from a woman’s market basket,” he reveals.
“You stole it?” I ask. Begging is bad enough. But stealing?
He shrugs. Heading back into the alley with Henri following, I look around for the woman and her baby, but they aren’t there anymore.
Ernestine tried to warn me. You don’t want to see the real France, she insist
ed, but I had no idea of what she meant. How I wish I still didn’t.
Day after day we watch the guillotine. Mademoiselle Grosholtz doesn’t appear at the Place de la Révolution, but many other people do.
I wish that I could wipe the beheadings from my memory.
Today the crowd pushes us closer than usual, right up front. I recognize the first victim, a woman who runs an umbrella stand at the Palais-Royal. She’s charged with spying for the king and queen. She is tied to a plank with her hands trussed behind the piece of wood, and then lowered so that her neck is directly below the blade.
Henri and I stand in front, and I cast my eyes downward, not wanting to make eye contact with the terrified woman who glances around wildly, desperate for someone to come forward who can save her from this awful fate.
The blade falls with a terrible thunk. It makes me jump, and for a second I don’t realize that Henri and I have both been spattered in a hot, red spray.
But then I taste the iron-tinged sweetness of blood on my lips. It’s in my hair. On my hands.
My horror rises.
In the crowd around me, some cheer, others laugh. The woman’s head rolls to the ground in front of the guillotine, leaving a trail of red before it settles.
My disgust and fear race through my body like a runaway wagon, and I vomit. Repulsed by the stench of the bile spewing from me, those nearby jump away.
Wiping my mouth with my sleeve, I straighten to see a thin young man, not too much older than me, being tied to the plank, the next to be beheaded.
Head after severed head lands in a pile at the base of the guillotine. My horror lessens with each death. Something is dying inside me, becoming dull and hard. I don’t like the sensation, but it enables me to tolerate this and so I let the internal callousness grow without a struggle.
* * *
At night Henri and I snuggle on a park bench, staying close as much from a need to stay warm as from affection. Henri holds my hand, saying nothing, until I fall asleep.
“How can you stand it?” I ask him one night.
“It’s for the freedom of France,” he says, but his voice trails up at the end of his sentence, as if it’s more of a question than a statement.
“Even freedom can’t possibly be worth all this, can it?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “When I see the aristocracy as a group, they seem evil to me, enemies of the working and impoverished citizens of France. When I think of an individual like Mademoiselle Grosholtz being killed, it doesn’t seem right.”
* * *
The next morning, Henri finds us a croissant to split for our breakfast. I no longer ask where he gets the food.
“I want to go to the exhibit this morning to see if it’s been reopened,” he tells me, nibbling at the flaky bread to make it last longer. “Maybe I can find work there again.”
We go to Dr. Curtius’s exhibit and find it dark and padlocked. “I have a key to the back workroom,” Henri says, already heading for it. He opens the door and we enter.
Mademoiselle Grosholtz stands beside a small stove, stirring a pot of melting wax.
I stagger, wide-eyed, disbelieving my own eyes. How can this be?
“You’ve escaped!” Henri cries.
Something akin to a smile plays across Mademoiselle’s pale, serious face. “Not entirely. Uncle Philippe — Dr. Curtius — knows a man who has influence with the revolutionaries.
“He finally convinced them that I’m not dangerous and that I am more useful to them alive than dead,” she goes on, still stirring her pot of wax. She scrutinizes me but says nothing.
Henri takes a seat at a long wooden worktable and I sit beside him. “What will you do for them?” he asks.
Mademoiselle’s attention is diverted by a woman she sees lingering outside the upper window of the back door. “Rose,” she cries softly and a glint of happiness lights those steely eyes as she hurries to let the woman enter.
Rose appears tall, though she is not much bigger than Mademoiselle. Rather, she is regal, square shouldered, and lithe, with her tumble of black curls gathered in gold cord atop her head. Perfectly arched black brows frame eyes like sparking coals, and a softly curving mouth tips up on both sides into something like a permanently amused smile. To me she’s like a goddess from another world as she shrugs off her feather-trimmed burgundy velvet coat.
“My dear friend, it’s been too long,” Mademoiselle Grosholtz says, her voice a warm caress of sincerity. “How have you been since last I saw you?” Her solicitude makes me believe that these two have shared some terrible ordeal, awful suffering.
Rose’s smile bends into chagrin. “Not well, I’m afraid. They are still holding Alexandre. The Revolutionary Guard decided that he was attached somehow to the royals just because he is wealthy.”
Mademoiselle gasps. “Your poor husband! I’m so happy that they didn’t keep you, as well. How did you get away?”
“If it were not for the gallantry and influence of Dr. Curtius and some of his friends, I might well have been beheaded.”
Suddenly, I know where I’ve seen Rose — in the prison cart that day with Mademoiselle.
“How did you keep your hair?” I blurt, and immediately blush with embarrassment. I know that those headed for the guillotine have their hair shorn to be sold for wigs. It seems such a frivolous question, though. But, still, I am dazzled by the luxuriant raven curls that are piled atop her head.
Rose throws her head back, laughing at my impulsivity before she answers. “I convinced them that the longer they let it grow on my head, the more money they’d get for the wig. I persuaded them so well that I think they might have kept my severed head just for the curls growing from it.”
Rose studies the effect her words were having on me. How was I receiving the grotesque tale? Was I being tested? “Hair grows even after one is dead, you know,” she adds.
“I wasn’t as lucky,” Mademoiselle says, pulling off her cap to reveal a nearly bald skull. Shutting her eyes, a tremble runs through her, as though recalling the terrifying moment when she must have been certain she was destined for the guillotine’s blade. “I didn’t have your lovely curls to bargain with,” Mademoiselle adds.
“Oh, you had something much better,” Rose insists as she settles into a chair by the table. “Your skills! Your wax faces!”
“Thankfully you were there to think of it,” Mademoiselle says. “It gave Dr. Curtius something to offer the brutes. But now I must pay the gruesome price.”
“What price is that?” Henri asks.
“I’ve been ordered by the revolutionary regime to collect the heads of people of note who are guillotined.”
“Why?” I cry, horrified.
“Death masks,” Mademoiselle reveals glumly.
I recall Henri telling me about death masks. “That’s horrible,” I mutter.
“Where will you make them?” Henri asks. “Here?”
“Here,” Mademoiselle confirms. “I’ll need your help, Henri, and that of your friend there.” Mademoiselle Grosholtz focuses on me once more. “I know you from the palace … don’t I?”
I feel like a trapped animal. Frozen and unaware of what to do next.
How do I answer? This is a woman who studies faces, remembers the details. She’s already rendered my face in wax — twice! Once as Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte sitting at the royal table, and then again the evening that I sat across from her at the servants’ table.
“You’re the maid’s daughter,” Mademoiselle says, “the one who so strongly resembles Madame Royale.”
“Yes,” I agree quickly, struggling to stay composed, not to let my relief show. “They call me Ernestine.”
“That’s an ugly name,” Mademoiselle remarks, eyes still locked onto my face. “Is it your real name?”
I shake my head. “My true name is Marie-Thérèse, like the princess. That’s why the queen nicknamed me Ernestine. It was after a character in a novel she was reading.”
�
�Every female in France is named Marie,” Rose says. “My name is Marie Rose de Beauharnais, though my given name is Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie. Mademoiselle Grosholtz is Anna Marie. We have to call ourselves by other names or there would be mass confusion.” This strikes her as funny and she laughs.
“What’s the difference what we’re called?” I ask lightly, wanting to keep the merriness afloat.
“It matters very much,” Rose says with a sharp new solemnity. “Your name is at the heart of things.”
“What things?” Henri asks.
Rose’s eyes narrow at him. “I was born on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean Ocean,” Rose says after a moment. Her voice has lowered and taken on a dark, distant tone.
“My parents were Creole plantation owners who had turned on their own kind and kept slaves to work the sugar crop,” she continues. “Their treachery and disloyalty to their own people mortified me, and I wanted to escape them as much as the slaves did. At night I would steal away from the plantation and watch the slaves practice the magical ways that they’d brought with them from their homes in Africa. A priestess made me her apprentice and taught me her ways of getting to the heart of the magic ways of the spirits and the dead.”
I shiver listening to her words. Rose seems to vibrate with a power that emanates from her very being.
“What did she teach you?” I dare to ask.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Mademoiselle says with force. Despite her harshness, I sense that she’s protecting me from some unpleasantness.
Rose disregards her and continues, “The first thing I learned was to work with roots and herbs.”
“To do what with them?” Henri asks.
“Potions, poisons, spells,” Rose replies.
“Did you ever poison someone?” Henri is eager to know.
“I never did it myself, but I’ve seen it done,” Rose says. “I saw a man who had toyed with the affections of a voodoo priestess turned into a zombie. She used the poison from a certain fish. The poison paralyzed all his organs and made him seem to be dead, and he was buried alive. By the dark of night his body was exhumed and he was brought back. From then on he was a zombie, a mindless creature, and for the rest of his days, he served the voodoo priestess he had wronged.”