Where the Light Falls

by Allison Pataki

  The light of the nearby lanterns flickered on the cobblestones of the Rue Saint-Honoré as Jean-Luc approached the door. He studied a shadowed building that had the appearance of an abandoned monastery. Gothic and imposing—like so many other Parisian structures whose function had once been religious—its façade was a vast expanse of soot-covered stone and dirty windows. A mere hint of illumination gave the vague indication that life stirred within. There was little to signify that there, on the other side of the rattling windowpanes, the most powerful—and radical—figures of the Revolution assembled on a nightly basis.

  The street was quiet, the muffled sound of horse hooves clopping on a parallel lane. Jean-Luc glanced over his shoulder as he climbed the two steps in front of the door. Following Merignac’s guidance, he knocked three times, slowly. Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité. He stood still, alone in the silent evening, for several minutes. Perhaps he had been mistaken about the hour, or the date. And then, from within, the doorknob turned and the wide oak panel groaned open, away from the street.

  Jean-Luc was greeted by a diminutive figure in a plain black suit and white wig. The man barely acknowledged his presence, standing stiff and straight against the wall to allow passage for Jean-Luc.

  “Good evening. I’m Jean-Luc, er, Citizen St. Clair, here as a guest of Maurice Merignac.”

  Without looking Jean-Luc in the eye, the footman said: “Wait here.” Then he retreated into the house, disappearing from the foyer. Jean-Luc, standing alone, tried to gaze farther into the interior of the residence, but the lone candelabrum that lit the space before the front door did not cast a wide enough halo, and so Jean-Luc clasped his hands behind his back and waited.

  “Citizen St. Clair?” The footman reappeared several minutes later, his expression expectant, indicating that Jean-Luc should follow him, which he did. The small man, holding a single candle to illuminate their path, led Jean-Luc into a spacious front hall, its ceiling high as a curving staircase, carpeted in red velvet, swept upward from its center. Jean-Luc followed the man into a smaller room, a parlor of some sort, off the left side of this central hall. His heeled shoes clicked heavily on a bare stone floor, but other than that, the entire space was silent. The parlor had a door on the far side of it, and it was toward that door that the footman led Jean-Luc now. Without a word they crossed the threshold, and Jean-Luc found himself in a spacious study.

  It was a dark-paneled room with a low-hanging chandelier, its candles casting a murky glow on the bare walls and uncarpeted floor. In the far corner of the room sat a group of men at a small rectangular table. The dim shadows in which they sat, with books and papers surrounding them, gave their gathering a rather haunting aspect; the chandelier lit the center of the room adequately, yet they occupied the darkened corner, beyond the light, as if they shunned its illuminating effect.

  Or perhaps their eerie appearance was due to the chalky whiteness of several of their faces; they wore la poudre, the same white powder once beloved by the noble courtiers of the old Versailles and the ancien régime, those same people whom they had now condemned to the guillotine.

  None of them spoke a word, either to Jean-Luc or among themselves, but they turned in unison at the sound of the door shutting behind him, closing him into the room. The footman was gone. Jean-Luc, alone, hovered on the threshold, fidgeting under the blank stares of twelve sets of eyes.

  “Citizen St. Clair.” Merignac was one of their number, and he alone rose at the entrance of the newcomer. “Good evening.” Merignac strode across the study, reaching Jean-Luc and extending a hand in greeting.

  “Won’t you come sit with us at the table?” Merignac, too, had his face masked in white makeup, giving him an appearance somewhat foreign from that to which Jean-Luc was accustomed. “We are just waiting for Citizen Lazare. He is resting now, but soon he will join us.” And then, expectantly, Merignac reopened the door that the footman had just closed.

  Jean-Luc followed his friend to the table, where the Committee members sat. On top of the glossy oaken surface, a candelabra held four nearly expired wicks, the spent wax dripping down onto the table in molten dollops. A half-finished bottle of red wine stood uncorked amid piles of papers, news journals, and opened books. A couple of the seated men wore the red cap of the revolutionaries on their heads. The Committee members to whom Jean-Luc was introduced greeted him with hushed voices and stolid stares, and he could not help but feel as though they were studying him with a restrained but intense inquisitiveness.

  Merignac leaned forward and retrieved an empty wineglass, which he now placed before Jean-Luc. “Citizen St. Clair is a brilliant young legal mind. He came to Paris from outside of Marseille during the early days of our Revolution and has been working for our new Republic for over a year.”

  Several of the men nodded; others had turned back to their papers. Jean-Luc shifted in his chair, wondering why Merignac was speaking so softly. “You are too kind, Maurice,” he said. “But the work I do is humble compared to the tasks you all have before you—ensuring the liberty of the people and facilitating the many tasks of the Republic.” Humble indeed. Cataloging the confiscated furniture and artwork of imprisoned noblemen, defending penniless widows. In truth, he had little right to be at this table, in this study on the Rue Saint-Honoré, and he lowered his eyes, noticing a rip in the side seam of his pants.

  “Wine, citizen?” To his left, a gray-haired man wearing a red cap tipped the bottle toward Jean-Luc. The man was seated in a wheeled chair, the likes of which Jean-Luc had only seen in journals or drawings. The man faced Jean-Luc with a blank look, turning a lever on his chair to move slightly forward.

  “Please,” Jean-Luc said and nodded, his voice sounding brutishly loud in the dim, quiet study. His neighbor filled the glass with the burgundy drink. “To the Republic,” he offered, lifting his glass and looking around the table at his companions.

  “To the Revolution,” several of them offered in reply, raising their own glasses to pale, expressionless lips. Merignac drained his cup. Jean-Luc wished in that moment that he might ask them the meaning of their chalky white makeup—why would members of the democratic Committee be dressing in the fashion of the Bourbon court? But their eyes had turned from him back to the papers on the table, and so Jean-Luc sat, mimicking their wordlessness.

  After a prolonged period of silence Merignac rose, and the others at the table followed him in doing so. Jean-Luc looked up, startled by the sudden movement, and noticed a new figure. There, two rooms away and framed through the opened doorways that separated them, a small man stood atop the red-carpeted staircase.

  The Jacobins around Jean-Luc snapped to, standing in stony silence as the man took hold of the railing and slowly descended.

  The man looked older than the rest, his frame built of narrow, birdlike bones. He was not attractive, Jean-Luc acknowledged to himself, with limp yellow hair pulled back in a ponytail, its mass insufficient to cover the entirety of his pale, balding head. His skin was an ashen shade approaching utter colorlessness, with an almost papery quality, and his light eyes were tucked back, deep-set, under a wide brow. In the hand that didn’t clutch the banister he held something round and red: an apple, Jean-Luc saw. The man continued his slow, steady descent, his eyes not yet fixing on the twelve men plus Jean-Luc who watched him from two rooms away.

  His heels clicked on the stone floor as he crossed the final step, and now he turned toward the study. The apple in his hand appeared unnaturally red and bright in his grip, his fingers drumming the fruit’s glossy surface. How had he found such a perfect apple in Paris in December? Jean-Luc wondered, realizing that he could not remember the last time he’d had the luxury of eating such a fine piece of fruit.

  Nobody spoke as the man entered the study. Merignac gestured toward the empty chair, offering a wordless, reverential bow as he did so. Pausing before the table, his pale hands resting on the back of the wooden chair, the old man smiled broadly. Jean-Luc noted that his teeth appeared slightly yel
low against the stark whiteness of his skin. “Citizens.”

  “Citizen Lazare,” the men around Jean-Luc answered in unison. Lazare’s pale eyes landed on the visitor.

  “A new face,” he said, his voice soft, even silky. “You must be Citizen St. Clair.”

  Jean-Luc inhaled to answer, but Merignac beat him to it: “Indeed, Citizen Lazare. May I introduce to you Citizen Jean-Luc St. Clair, a legal counselor for our government and a very capable—”

  Lazare lifted a hand and Merignac fell silent. His eyes still fixed on Jean-Luc, the older man asked: “Did I hear that you are from the south?”

  Jean-Luc cleared his throat and replied, “Indeed I am, from a village just outside of Marseille.”

  With that, Lazare lifted a hand like a conductor leading a symphony and began to sing in a soft, barely audible voice the chorus of the “Marseillaise,” the new anthem of the French Revolution. “You must be proud of your city for providing us with our nation’s rallying cry.”

  “Yes, Citizen Lazare.”

  “I, too, come from the south. Near Toulon.”

  Jean-Luc nodded.

  “But of course,” Lazare sighed, “nothing of import happens in Toulon. If one wishes to be at the heart of our Revolution, or anything else, really, one must come to Paris.”

  “Yes.” Jean-Luc nodded again, crossing and then uncrossing his hands in front of his waist. Then they had something in common, this esteemed man and himself. Jean-Luc suppressed the urge to smile.

  “Shall we sit?” Lazare looked around the table, and without a word, the group assented, lowering themselves back into their chairs. No one looked at the papers now. Merignac retrieved another bottle and refilled several of the men’s cups of wine, including Jean-Luc’s, and yet Lazare took none himself. Jean-Luc looked at the large chandelier looming over the center of the hall, then turned back toward the cluttered table, which seemed dimly lit with only a few candles.

  “I see your confusion, citizen, as to why we do not conduct our affairs directly under the chandelier.”

  Jean-Luc felt unnerved by Lazare’s shrewd observation, but the old man continued: “Just some days ago, the Committee of General Security removed their meeting chambers into the salon down the hall, that way.” Jean-Luc peered down the hallway Lazare indicated and saw only creeping shadows from the windows that looked out onto Rue Saint-Honoré.

  “Citizen Robespierre likes to keep them in his sights. As do I.”

  Lazare, still clutching the apple in his left hand, raised the fruit to his lips and took a bite, his teeth sinking into it with a crunch that seemed to reverberate off the bare walls around them. He chewed slowly—the noises of his jaw audible. After what seemed like an interminable silence, Lazare spoke. “You work for our new government, Citizen St. Clair.”

  “I do.”

  “Then we are brothers.” Lazare lifted his hands as if in an embrace of all at the table.

  “Indeed,” Jean-Luc agreed.

  “I hope you don’t mind if I cut through some of the silly pleasantries and bare my most honest thoughts to you. Our time is precious, you see. Will that be agreeable to you?”

  “St. Clair always speaks frankly with me on politics,” Merignac interjected, but Lazare did not divert his gaze from Jean-Luc.

  “Is that agreeable?” Lazare repeated the question, and Jean-Luc nodded.

  “Good.” Lazare smiled, a soft smile of papery white skin and yellow teeth. He took another bite of apple. “How about a riddle?”

  Jean-Luc nodded. “All…all right.”

  “Can you tell me…what is the one force most powerful on earth? The only force capable of driving a people, a people bound by millennia of servitude and piety, to rise out of their dark slumber and slaughter their own sovereign?” Lazare paused to chew his apple. “What storm of madness could possibly drive a people to perform this great and terrible deed?”

  Jean-Luc considered the question. After a moment, he ventured: “Hope.”

  Lazare pressed the apple to his pale lips, smiling behind the round shape of the fruit. “Come now, citizen. The unfortunate multitudes of any nation care little for such lofty ideals. Hope is a luxury. I’m talking about a much more base, primordial thing. There is one force that will lead a man to kill, even murder to survive. Do you know what that is?”

  “Fear?” Jean-Luc responded in a faint voice, almost a whisper.

  “Close.” Lazare nodded. “Now you are on the right path. But I’m talking about something even more basic. The most basic of all human needs. The need for which a newborn baby first learns to cry out. It is?”

  Jean-Luc thought of Mathieu in his first moments, of Marie tenderly pulling their newborn son to her breast, and he looked down at the table. When he answered, his voice was a whisper. “Hunger.”

  “Hunger!” Lazare clapped, and Jean-Luc started in his seat at the sudden, giddy eruption. “There you have it! It is very simple. Hunger will bring a man into contact with his most basic instinct—the will to survive. The masses? Their interest is in their bellies, in the care of their own lands or means of industry—a constant struggle for their very survival. And while that mongrel Capet and his viperous widow dined on truffles and figs brought to them from the farthest Oriental satrapies, the poor citizens outside their gates crawled back to their hovels each night with empty stomachs. And as the days and years crept by, their pain turned to anger, and their anger darkened into hatred.” Lazare raised the apple once more to his colorless lips, taking another bite. “Hunger—it drives us all. I can see that you have it within you. As do I, though perhaps of a slightly different kind.”

  The room fell silent as each man mulled over the meaning of this soliloquy, and Jean-Luc swore the others must have heard his heart beating within his chest.

  Lazare broke the silence in the shadowed room. “Tell me, if you please, citizen, more about your work?”

  Jean-Luc leaned forward, tugging on his suit coat that felt uncomfortably tight. “Of course, Citizen Lazare. I am an attorney for the new government.”

  “Yes, Maurice just said as much, but I wish to know what it is that you actually do.” Lazare’s soft voice held no hint of derision, merely a deep and genuine interest.

  Jean-Luc cleared his throat. “I catalog and manage the inventory of confiscated goods—the property of the nobility and clergy as it is seized.”

  “I might dispute your usage of the term ‘confiscated goods,’ Citizen St. Clair,” Lazare said, arching a pale eyebrow. “By what right did those noblemen come into their plush carpets and glistening porcelain to begin with? That property belongs to the people. It has always belonged to the people, and has finally been returned to them.”

  “Of course, I did not mean that the goods were seized unduly, Citizen Lazare, I simply meant to explain—”

  “No need, I understand your point well enough.” Lazare waved his pale hand and offered a conciliatory nod, his mind already turned to the next point. “So you are a glorified clerk, it would seem.”

  Jean-Luc felt his cheeks redden. He looked around the table and noticed the smirks tugging on several of the Committee members’ lips. “I wished to serve the Revolution, Citizen Lazare. This was the opportunity that arose.”

  “Of course.” Now Lazare, too, smiled, his light eyes darting around the table as he held the apple before his lips. “And someone must do that work. But tell me truly…are you an idealist?”

  Jean-Luc sat up in his chair, throwing his shoulders back. “I suppose you might say I believe in the ideals of our Revolution, yes. Ideals such as liberty and equality.”

  “So we have an idealistic clerk among us,” Lazare said. The men at the table now shared muffled laughter, and Jean-Luc got the distinct sense that few in this company ever indulged in deep, mirthful laughter.

  Lazare fixed his gaze directly on Jean-Luc now, a direct, appraising look. And then, exhaling, his voice quiet, he said: “I do apologize. I meant no offense, Citizen St. Clair. I was merely ma
king a poor attempt at humor.” Lazare lifted the apple to his lips and took another bite. He chewed the apple, a series of sharp crunches. “So then, Citizen St. Clair, I suppose, like all idealists, you are acquainted with the philosophies of Monsieur Rousseau? Do you agree with his assertion that ‘we are miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing good’?”

  Jean-Luc tried to spool together his errant thoughts, this latest philosophical question catching him unaware. But before he could reply, Lazare continued: “And what of Rousseau’s pupil, Monsieur Thomas Jefferson? I’m sure you have followed the events of the revolution in the New World?”

  Jean-Luc nodded now, eyeing the cup of wine in front of him. He restrained himself from taking a drink, whether out of a habit of work or the vague feeling that he needed his full wits about him to keep up with Citizen Lazare. But then he reminded himself he had no reason to feel inadequate in the task of discussing politics or philosophy, even with a man such as Guillaume Lazare.

  As Marie would have told him, had she been here: this was his life’s passion. He straightened his spine against the back of his chair, meeting the older man’s gaze as he answered. “I am familiar with the writings of Monsieur Jefferson, yes. As well as the writings of John Adams, Thomas Paine, and our friend Monsieur Franklin.”

  “Ah.” Lazare lifted his fingers. “Some of the greatest disciples of the Enlightenment.”

  “I was but a young student at the time, but I took great heart in following the events in the former British colonies. The revolution there.”

  “I think that the rebels in America are falsely venerated,” Lazare said, his tone suddenly expressionless. “They began with such promise. But they fell short.”

  “Short of what?” Jean-Luc asked, noticing with no small shock that he and Lazare were alone in speaking. The remaining men simply watched the exchange, sipping their wine and staring so intently that Jean-Luc felt as if he were speaking before a jury panel.