by Edward Carey
Our little room may as well have been at the bottom of the ocean. Time was heavy in there, filled with the last living of twenty women, all in together. In that room you took every breath seriously. One of us might say to another, “I’m so glad your dress has yellow in it. Otherwise yellow should not be here with us at all, and that would be a pity.”
Here were women, in this little room with its thick walls and doors. The youngest was a girl of twelve, the eldest an old countess in her seventies. I think some of the women, on behalf of the twelve-year-old, resented the seventy-year-old.
What a smell, all those women together.
Women came and women went. It was always certain where they were taken: to the Conciergerie, antechamber of death, from there to the Place du Trône, and then that final journey of all, onto the sliding planks and through the National Window. I kept hold of the widow’s hand. She couldn’t understand where she was, having lost what little sense she had left. Our bodies can be so kind to us.
They did not guillotine pregnant women. Girls yes, old madwomen certainly, but the pregnant were safe, for a while. After I had given birth, in all likelihood I would be taken away. So long as my baby remained inside me, so long was I safe. We kept each other alive. I should live then, by my calculation, another three months.
The room measured, I estimated, twenty by thirty feet. The floor was stone, but bundles of piled straw were offered as bed arrangements. There was not quite enough—sometimes you had to fight for a bed—but mostly people took turns. We were allowed to clean out the room once a week. There was a single horrible little window that looked out only onto a gray, mean-spirited wall. You could not see the sky. One of the walls had a bit of moss on it. I liked to look at the moss. Moss has color.
Our shared bucket was not regularly taken away. Some of the women were very nonchalant about using the bucket; some conversed loudly as they sat there; to others it was a daily humiliation, a profound torment. One mother had her daughter hold up a piece of clothing in front of her while she was at it, but that sorry cover was no wall, it hid none of the noises, merely drew attention to them. Some of the women could not understand the modesty of others. There was no solitude there. Or perhaps the only little solitude was inside the head of old Mother Picot.
I had never been with so many people. The younger women sat together and talked of men. There were fights, of course, over big things, over little. All the little relationships in that room were the last efforts of life. Sometimes we were cruel to each other, sometimes kind. Everyone wanted a little human warmth. I recall one woman, a former lottery-ticket seller, who would move around the room all day, asking one person and then another, “May I hold your hand now, please,” or, “It is your hand that I should like to hold next,” or, “Could I hold on a little longer yet?”
On occasion we were allowed to move around Carmes. There were men there too; the whole place stank of human waste and ammonia and damp. Everyone there moved about in thick, still air. In those moments outside our cell, pushed about among the others, seeing men as hopeless as we were, people whispered about who had been taken, how many yesterday, how many today. At Carmes I heard more stories of Jacques Beauvisage: he’d been seen here and there in the worst of the atrocities, waist-high in blood, murdering whole families, setting fire to villages. But in all these reports there was nothing of substance about Jacques, no solid fact: no mention of his limp, no talk of his tremendous grief for a dead boy. I believed none of them.
Giving form to our lives at Carmes were the lists, published nearly daily, of the people who would be next. Often, after a new list was published, there were twenty-four hours before those people were called for. The pain of those hours! And then the sounds of people being ushered out, goaded upstairs, the screams, the begging, the struggles. But out they went. At night we all sweated, and many cried. If only we could get some air, some new air.
We had so much time.
We had no time at all.
One by one, the women disappeared. No, that’s not true; sometimes three or more went at a stroke. And time somehow went on. And we were alive still, the widow and I. Sometimes a woman could not control herself, would scream or sob, but it made no difference, it only upset everyone else. We tried to live with what dignity we had, to behave well, to be civil and proper and nice. Sometimes we even laughed. For some there was even relief in being there; our lives out in the city had been lived under such pressure, waiting for the banging on the door, that when it actually came there was some comfort, a little peace: we had been taken, we could be ourselves again. Our minds were never far away from the door. Some tried never to look at it, but none of us could stop herself from contemplating the door.
There was one very handsome woman, utterly sensible and kind, who had such dignity that she inspired us all to braveness. The night before her name appeared on a list, I heard her whispering, “I know that I shall be next.” Before leaving she kissed us all good-bye and gave away everything she had left. I thought I would like to go like that.
Our days were punctuated by hard food, bread and peas and beans, which broke old teeth and made the jaw ache from sucking on it. My baby hurt with hunger. How like Elisabeth’s poor suffering people we all were, I thought. As if the misery were a type of mandatory uniform we had all been given. She’d mistake me for one of them if she saw me now, if she weren’t already dead.
We were all in that room together, and everything was precious. There was so little to love. All that noise of Paris people trapped, living with it day and night.
We had so much time.
We had no time at all.
The cast kept changing.
At first my time was occupied by the widow. We played together, and I talked to her of Edmond and of Doctor Curtius. Keeping her calm. Washing her. Wiping her. Holding her to me, letting her rest her wrinkled head on my shoulder. Trying to unpick the twisted nest of her hair with my fingers. Making her look pretty, and telling her so. She was softening so in her illness; I couldn’t hate her anymore. I tried to love her instead. She couldn’t understand the idea of being a grandmother, but she stared at my belly and looked very sad and was always upon the brink of remembering something, but was never quite able. How strange that it should end with us two together.
“You’ve a son. Remember? Edmond, he’s called. He’s alive and well. He is hidden and safe. No one shall find him.”
“Woooooo.”
Edmond skirted her consciousness, a misty figure, gone again soon enough. I so wanted her to remember him. Once I thought she recognized me, a rage showed on her face, but afterward tears flooded her vision; she had lost me again. From behind she didn’t look like a real person at all, poor old child, just a collection of sacks.
She didn’t understand, when her name came on the list. I didn’t tell her; how could she possibly understand. I kept very close the whole day. I sang to her. I never let her out of my sight. She slept a couple of hours with her head in my lap. I stroked her broken hair. Someone would be cutting it soon, before the final journey. Hair was always cut short around the neck. I hoped she would break the shears. When they called her name, she did not understand that that name was hers. I had to answer for her. She was happy enough at first, but she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t coming with her. She started crying when I said I wasn’t allowed. It’s a terrible thing when old women cry. I hope she’d forgotten me by the time she was taken up the stairs. I hope she understood nothing of that cruel process called her trial. I hope someone was kind to her in the tumbrel. I hope she was the first in her batch. I hope she didn’t understand that she would lose her head. Perhaps she thought all those people were being made into tailor’s dummies; perhaps she did not mind that she would be made into one too. I think the blood on the planks would have upset her. I hope it didn’t. I hope it was sunny. I hope it was warm. Big mad old lady. Oh, help me, help me, help us all.
We had so much time.
We had no time at all.
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br /> The cast kept changing.
Afterward, when she was gone, I would lie down with Marta very stiffly in the straw and pretend there was only sawdust inside me. For days I didn’t care to be spoken to. I ate for my baby, not for myself. I could only face Edmond again if I kept his child. I hadn’t kept his mother. There was a life inside me, and so I went on.
I began to speak to people again.
We told each other our stories. Again and again. You always knew the true ones from the false ones, for the false ones changed at every telling. The true ones remained constant. What is a life? That is what we were left with: stories. They were our clothes.
After one woman, the wife of an already executed deputy, had been called away, I heard another woman tell her story as her own the following night. The story thief was an actress from the Comédie-Française, arrested after she was heard quoting from a play about a king—not the beheaded locksmith, but some other king from long ago. It didn’t matter: a king was a king. She had listened to the story of the deputy’s wife, and now she repeated it, almost word for word, to two unsuspecting new ladies. We were furious. We called her a thief. But she just shook her head sadly. She was not a bad woman, she said. She merely wanted to collect all these stories, all that was left of these people, and to keep them safe in her prodigious memory. This was why she had become an actress, she saw now: so that she might tell other people’s tales, not the fictional people she had supposed but the real people of this one room, so that when they were dead they were not forgotten. Surely this meant it was her fate to survive, so that all the stories should be saved with her. But her name was called too, and her library left with her.
After I had been there a month, I too began to recite the lives of those other people who had gone before—not as my own, but pointing them out to newcomers. Over there, in that corner, there used to be an Elodie, and this is her story; over there was a Madame Grenlin from Marseilles; there by the window all day was a Mademoiselle Cossé, see the marks she made there with her fingernails. There were marks all over the walls; the whole place was crowded with poignant little messages, the sole remaining evidence of a life. Sometimes the women screamed at me to shut up, but many so feared being forgotten that they would come and tell me their stories, then question me in detail about what I’d learned. I had to remember freckles and dimples and a set of chairs, the flowers in gardens, old men and young men, boys in wigs and stockings, girls who loved strawberries and women who had faith, young backs, journeys to relatives, games of cards, soft-boiled eggs, monies earned and little houses and our first wallpaper, babies being born and children lost and deceased parents, all of it, so many stories, favorite dogs, favorite horses, an old song, who saw the king when, jewelry and splendor, family heirlooms, poems, the fairy tales “Cendrillon” and “Perlimpinpin and Persinette,” my son at the guildhall. Remember, will you, Marie? Do you remember now? Have you got that? Who was my first cousin? Where did I meet Pierre? What is my coat of arms? The little scar by his eye. What a lot there was. Slow down, slow down, or I’ll lose it.
There were too many stories to remember, I could not keep them all in. Little pieces from one story would get muddled up and appear somewhere else: Madame D.’s love of daffodils would be given to Mademoiselle P., whose great passion for a soldier named Augustin would surface in the confused biography of an elderly matron from the Faubourg San-Marcel, whose sister, her companion, would suddenly be found in the little history of a woman who sold refreshments at the Place de la Révolution during the executions.
I began to fear those stories. They came to me when I slept. They pushed themselves into my dreams. They were bad for my baby. I was certain of it. I stopped listening to the tales. I no longer wished to hear about anyone else. There was only me, my baby, Edmond. I tried to keep myself myself.
Now I have lost those stories; they come back to me in little pieces. At times my sleep is troubled by a great chorus of dead women, in various costumes, calling out their names and the names of the people they loved, their own little details. One woman told me she could never abide people who didn’t like the Brussels sprout. “Weak people, characterless people,” she said. One woman told me she had once danced with a bear at a country fair. The bear had been a tolerable dancer. A girl told me about an imaginary people and an imaginary island she’d made up herself, had drawn maps of and written laws for. Books’ worth of stories, they gave me.
Within that almanac of loss, one story is told by so many still that it shall not be forgotten yet. At Carmes, two months after I arrived, came a Creole woman from Martinique who’d grown up on a slave plantation. Her husband had also been at Carmes, but his name had been listed already. She was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, but she went by Rose then.
She was a solid woman. Slightly sullen, handsome but no astounding beauty, sloping shoulders, dark hair, thick eyebrows, large eyes and mouth, and the nose too, come to think of it, was not small either. Weeping was her usual state; later she would say she’d been brave, that she’d gone from woman to woman, comforting, but that was not how it was. She was terrified. Who could blame her? She sat with me and wept upon my shoulder.
“I’ll tell you, mademoiselle,” she would begin. “I will not call you citizen, that’s done with for good and all. I shall tell you who it is I miss most. It is not my husband, though I’m sorry for him, but he wasn’t always fair, he wasn’t loyal. I’m sorry he died, but I cannot bring him back. It is not my son or daughter. I love them both with a mother’s love, but they are being looked after beyond the city walls. I had them apprenticed, for their protection—Hortense with a needlewoman, Eugène with a cabinetmaker. They are safe enough, but how changed will they be afterward? Who will they become? No, most of all, I shall tell you who I miss: it’s my pug dog. Nothing’s better than Fortune. I like to see him scratching his ears, shifting his bottom, sleeping, barking, catching his breath, sneezing. It’s Fortune I miss most, my darling pug.”
Having no dog with her, it was not long before she took to calling me Pug. Small-nosed canine. What a joke that was, how she amused herself. She called out for me in the night. Inconsolable until I was with her, until she could pet me and stroke my hair. I didn’t mind. Sometimes she gave me food. I needed food.
I even got to meet Fortune myself. Rose charmed one of the guards, and he arranged for Fortune to come to us for weekly visits. His arrival gave us back a little life. He was a jolly little fellow, devoted to his mistress, and we were all pleased to see him. Here was innocence again. Little harmless thing with a sad black face and worried eyes, as if he understood our plight. He did us such good. His little noises. His openness. His blamelessness. We were sad to see him pad off again, and hoped that we would live to see him next week. Let us last at least till then, we said.
I was patted by Rose, my belly stroked by her. She did not help me with the mucking out, but she talked to me while I and the other women were about it. I suppose I fell in love with her a little. She in her turn fell for a military man imprisoned at Carmes, handsome, with an impressive saber scar. She spent a good deal of her time trying to look after herself, trying to keep herself pretty for the scarred man, whose name was Lazare Hoche. He was certain he wasn’t going to die by the guillotine, and his confidence was comforting to her. How she preened herself for him.
I was older than her by two years, but did not seem it. I’ve outlived her too. She died of complications of abdication in 1814, aged not quite fifty-one. I thought she had more stamina than that. She provided much diversion to my last days in prison.
On twenty-eighth July 1794, Tenth Thermidor, Year III, the door opened and the guard called out, “Anne Marie Grosholtz.” “I am pregnant,” I said. “Look at my belly,” I said. If they placed their hands down upon it, soon enough they’d feel a little kick. But they called my name again and said I must go. Now, I supposed, even pregnant women were no longer safe. It doesn’t come as such a shock in the end, I thought. It is not so sur
prising. Why, after all, should I be spared? What makes me so significant? Baby, off we go, I shan’t leave you. I can’t leave you.
I was taken upstairs to ground level again, the air so much thinner, my lungs shocked by the change. My hands filthy, my dress filthy, my hair filthy. I thought I’d been looking after myself; I supposed it didn’t much matter anyway. Holding my belly, apologizing to it. Up the stairs, out of the monastery entrance to a Parisian street, and there a National Guardsman said to me:
“This way please, citizen.”
“I am pregnant.”
“Yes,” he said. “Do not worry.”
“But I am worried, after all!”
“You are not going to trial.”
“No? Truly?”
“No, citizen, not at all. Something else.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
The shattered jaw.
I heard people on the Rue Saint-Honoré cheering, such holiday noise. What a sound! “It’s over!” I heard someone calling. “The Tyrant is no more!” “The Tyrant’s dead, and they’re rounding up all who were close to him!”
They took me to a room near the Place de la Révolution. People were crowded around certain objects there, on tabletops. Objects like at the butcher’s. Only these would not be weighed and eaten.
“Heads,” I said. “I do heads. I’m only called for at the end of people’s lives. Here’s heads.”
“Yes,” they said.
“Who’s this one?” I asked.
“This,” they said, giving the tour, “is Couthon the cripple. The angle of his cut is like that because they had to do him sideways. He’d been trodden upon by the other people in the cart, trampled over.”
“And here?” I asked.
“This mess was called Augustin Robespierre, the brother. When he knew all was up for him, he threw himself from a high window onto a courtyard. Must have hurt. Shattered himself, but did not kill himself—no, we did that later on, little nick in his neck, you might see that there. Beside him is the neat one, Saint-Just. So clean next to the others.”