The Sparks Fly Upward

by Diana Norman

  ‘Very sansculottish.’

  At least the Republic had abolished that stigma; married or unmarried, mothers were to be given the State’s assistance.

  It might just be that her period was late; a lot of the women in the Women’s Court said they were irregular. Anyway, with a Damocles sword over one’s head, there was no point in crossing bridges one wasn’t likely to arrive at. Mixed metaphors; it was time to stop thinking. ‘Go on reading,’ she said.

  The latest decree, it appeared, defined enemies of the People as those who’d once worked for the royal government, compromised the war effort, reduced food reserves, who’d spread false rumours or defeatism or sedition, who—as dishonest contractors, vexatious officials, or in any other capacity—had compromised the liberty, unity and safety of the Republic.

  ‘In effect, anybody,’ Ffoulkes said, throwing the newspaper to one side.

  The Conciergerie was always ahead of the papers, its information from the daily intake of prisoners more reliable. The immediate news was the weather. The summer was becoming the hottest Paris had known, as if God was taking His revenge for having been abolished. The Seine had shrunk from its banks and revealed islands of silt in its course. Women fainted in the food queues, dray-horses collapsed in their traces. The words ‘bad harvest’ filtered in from outlying farms like a warning that the enemy was at the gates.

  In the Hall of Arms the names called out rarely included that of a ci-devant—there weren’t many left. Now those going to the guillotine were neither aristocrats nor treacherous generals nor dishonest officials, but shopkeepers, clerks, innkeepers, day laborers, clock-makers, agricultural workers—people who worked life’s machinery.

  The new intakes talked of a dull, deep resentment rising with the heat from the very pavement as people saw a friend, a relative, employer, employee, arrested and taken away.

  As with the ground itself, fissures were opening in the Convention, multiplying and cracking so that deputies divided into groups, distrusting each other and the ever-growing power of the Tribunal.

  There were madnesses. Someone at the Convention proposed raising the daily output of executions by constructing a gargantuan-wide guillotine that would cut off a hundred heads at a time. Robespierre rejected the suggestion; he said it wouldn’t be good for public morale.

  Those coming into prison who’d had any contact with Robespierre said he was becoming increasingly isolated, suspicious and, therefore, terrifying. Ffoulkes learned of a deputy who, trying to please his chief, had organized a street party to celebrate the Republic. ‘It turns out that Citizen Robespierre does not approve of street parties,’ Ffoulkes told Philippa. ‘My informant says the deputy has been forced to make an apology that couldn’t be deeper if he’d raped Robespierre’s sister. Mark my words, Mrs Fox, even frightened deputies, especially frightened deputies, won’t tolerate this shame much longer. They’ll rise against him.’

  ‘Don’t say it, don’t say it.’ As time went on she’d begun to believe that perhaps the authorities were keeping Ffoulkes alive for political motives, a bargaining counter that Pitt would take notice of, but she tried blanking her mind against the thought. Hope was the ultimate cruelty; she saw it being taken away every night.

  Lucile, Desmoulins’s wife, had been arrested for protesting against her husband’s death and was executed almost immediately, leaving her baby in the care of her mother. A young woman, Cécile Renault, who’d made a half-hearted attempt to assassinate Robespierre, went to the guillotine with fifty others who’d had any connection with her, all dressed in red to denote parricide. Malesherbes’s seventy-six-year-old sister went, so did his two secretaries—one of them having been found to have a bust of Henri IV on his mantel-piece. They were taken to the Place de la Révolution in the same tumbrels as former enragés, latter-day Dantonists, farmers who’d hoarded a bushel of grain for themselves.

  The joke in the Conciergerie was that the only democracy left in France was the guillotine’s.

  And Lulu went. Philippa hadn’t recognized the name; she didn’t know it was him until his voice rang out as Fouquier-Tinville finished reading the list. ‘Thank you, my good fellow, thank you. The same tumbrel that the Her Majesty had, if you’d be so good.’

  She ran up to hold his hand as they led him away. The simpering mask he wore slipped away, leaving weariness. ‘Don’t mind,’ he told her. ‘Dying’s easy. Living was much more difficult.’ He touched her hair. ‘Keep that style, dear, it suits you.’

  She collapsed and Ffoulkes had to carry her back to their cell.

  ‘I can’t bear it, any of it, not any more.’

  He rocked her like a baby. ‘Yes, you can.’

  ‘It’s going on and on. I want it to end.’

  ‘Come on, now, Mrs Fox. This won’t do. What would Mary Wollstonecraft say?’

  He made her laugh; he always could. Later, in the darkness, he said, ‘As hells go, this could have been worse. I found you in it, which was better than not finding you at all. Taken by and large, I wouldn’t have missed it.’

  ‘I love you, Ffoulkes. More than life.’

  ‘That’s what I mean.’

  The next night, when his name was read out among the other men’s, she couldn’t believe she’d heard it—not until her own name was included in the women’s, at which point she knew her greatest terror had been that he’d be taken and she’d be left.

  THERMIDOR 9 (July 27, 1794)

  A terrible day, full of noise, marching, running feet and the ringing of tocsins. The political storm that had been gathering so long burst like a giant bubo—and the sky with it, overlaying everything with the shriek of the rain that inhibited vision and confused the ear.

  It brought no relief to the Conciergerie. The electricity in the atmosphere penetrated even the deepest cells where men and women, separated from each other, were being prepared for the tumbrels. Prisoners became restless, pacing their cages. Heat was imprisoned with them, as if the layers of water running down the windows upstairs formed a barrier that stopped the outside cooling air from getting in. Night jailers were told to stay on duty in case of an attempted mass breakout.

  Rumor blazed in brief flashes, like the lightning. The Convention had turned on Robespierre. Arrested him. No, it hadn’t, somebody’d just seen him walking through the Palais de Justice. The Convention was calling on all Paris sections to bring their guards and loyalty to the Tuileries. No, it was the other way round; the sections were in insurrection against the Convention and calling on their guards and loyalty to go to the Hôtel de Ville.

  It was both. It was neither. The English had invaded.

  In the preparation room, Philippa and the four other listed women were having their hair sawn to ear level. Their chemises were torn to free their neck, hands were tied behind their backs with twine, feet hobbled.

  The jailers showed neither sexuality nor harshness; they’d been doing this too long. As each woman was prepared, she was slapped amiably on her rump, like a cow being sent to market. ‘Off you go now, girl.’

  They were taken out into the passageway where the clerk of the court checked their names against Fouquier-Tinville’s list. ‘Off you go now,’ he said.

  They were escorted down the passage to the arcade that led into the Cour de Mai and fresh air.

  The eponymous tree in the court’s center around which medieval queens had danced on May Day had been cut down to facilitate the passage of the carts as they went in and out, but there was a reminder of countryside in a new intake of prisoners—a batch of Bretons, to judge from the women’s caps and aprons—who waited, clutching their bundles, to be taken inside for registration. Haybags hung from hooks ready to refresh today’s horses when they came with the tumbrels, and there was a light smell of the manure left by yesterday’s teams that the rain hadn’t quite swept away.

  The storm had left a fine, clear day. The midday sky had been laundered to its cleanest blue and the sun shone, dazzling the prisoners. There was a group of me
n, handcuffed and hobbled, standing in one corner.

  ‘Hello,’ Philippa shouted.

  ‘Good morning,’ Ffoulkes shouted back. ‘What in hell have they done to your hair?’

  His shirt had been dragged down to expose his neck. She shuffled over to him and rubbed her cropped head against his shoulder. ‘You’re nothing to write home about yourself.’

  She was astonished by her contentment. That was one thing about death; it resolved your problems. They’d been allowed to find completion of body and soul in one another; some people lived out their lives without that gift.

  He looked down at her, catching the thought. ‘Can’t complain, I suppose,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  After a while, it occurred even to them that procedure was being breached. The tumbrels were late. Faces peered out of the windows of the palace offices, a group of officials stood in the arcade to the Conciergerie entrance talking worriedly.

  The jailer who’d brought her out was grumbling to another. ‘National bloody Guard,’ Philippa heard him say. ‘Well, I’m not working extra bloody hours.’

  One of the women who’d been prepared with Philippa, a prostitute from her dress—though they all looked like prostitutes with their gowns pushed down to their cleavages—betrayed her sentiments and her nerves by shrieking: ‘Long live the bloody King and get on with it.’

  Some of the men prisoners began to shout and one of them, a fat and dapper little man, said loudly: ‘I demand to see the clerk of the court.’

  Ffoulkes caught sight of a familiar figure crossing the court and shouted at it. ‘Hey, Albert, what’s up?’

  ‘National Guard’s late. Can’t go ahead without the National Guard.’

  Now the carts were arriving, four of them, each with two horses and a driver, but no National Guard. Jailers let down the tailgates. There were twenty-one prisoners—it was a slow execution day. Philippa’s ambition in what remained of her life narrowed down to being included in the same tumbrel as her lover. By keeping close and hanging back, they made two of the six in the rear cart.

  Fouquier-Tinville had joined the group in the arcade and there was more discussion.

  ‘Something’s up,’ Ffoulkes said. ‘Look.’

  From the tumbrel’s vantage point, they could see the Seine set like marquetry between its curving banks of silt. People were swarming across the bridges towards them.

  ‘Hey, Albert,’ Ffoulkes said. ‘Anybody special dying today?’

  ‘There’s you,’ Philippa said.

  He shrugged. ‘Flattering, but I don’t think so.’

  A crowd was forming just outside the gates, others still streaming across the bridges to join it along the Quai de l’Horloge.

  The little fat prisoner was complaining loudly. ‘I demand to see the clerk of the court, this is most inefficient.’

  From a tumbrel nearer the gates a woman shouted that she wanted to pee. A jailer told her to do it where she stood.

  The crowd outside was becoming denser by the minute and the jailers inside the court more nervous. Somebody came out with pikes and handed them round, but the faces at the gate weren’t so much hostile as . . . Philippa didn’t know what it was; curiosity, perhaps, intentness, as if waiting for some promised spectacle.

  They have, she thought, they’ve come to see Ffoulkes go to his death.

  ‘Something is up,’ he said suddenly and turned his back on her. ‘Get these bloody knots untied.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Use your initiative for Christ’s sake. And your teeth.’

  She turned so that they were back to back and felt the rope round his wrists with her fingers. It was tight. ‘Unclench your fists.’ When he did, she realized his hands were shaking. ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘Don’t hope.’

  ‘Just get the sodding thing off.’

  She worked at the knots. Beside her two men, back to back, were trying to release each other as well. The jailers were taking no notice of them, their eyes were on the gates behind her. She heard a kerfuffle. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Two horsemen coming in. Keep working.’

  She kept working, craning her neck to catch a sight of the newcomers. Their horses clopped by her towards the group at the arcade and she saw that one of the men was very large. Both wore big slouch hats with red, white and blue plumes. They were accompanied by a troop of armed men on foot; she didn’t recognize the uniform. The two men dismounted and joined in the discussion with Fouquier-Tinville.

  Ffoulkes was shifting so that he could look at the gates and then the arcade and she kept losing her grip on the cord round his wrists.

  She stopped as the two men approached the carts. Fouquier-Tinville came with them. As usual, he had papers in his hands and was splaying them like cards to show to the smaller of the newcomers. ‘. . . nor this one, nor this one,’ he was saying. ‘Citizen Robespierre signed none of them. All of them, all, bear the authority of the Tribunal. I don’t care what’s happened, these are legally authorized and must be obeyed.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand your position, citizen. Forty-eight went to the guillotine yesterday who shouldn’t have . . . Forty-eight.’

  ‘I was obeying orders.’

  ‘. . . you don’t want to add this lot as well. Who are they? Anyone special?’

  Fouquier-Tinville sorted through his papers.

  Philippa found that their conversation was failing to reach her brain in any sort of order; they might have been speaking Chinese. Instead she watched the big man stroll to the first cart and draw his sword, beckoning its occupants to come to the cart’s edge so that he could reach them. They’re going to stab us.

  Instead, the man was cutting the prisoners’ ropes. He went along the line doing it. The carts tilted as their occupants rushed to the side nearest the man and turned their backs, bending forward to extend their bound hands behind them—a posture that looked vaguely naughty.

  Nobody’s stopping him.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Fouquier-Tinville was saying, still consulting paper, ‘there are two English. Here we are: “Plotting to overthrow the Republic, enemies of the State.”’ He was relieved. ‘I think you’ll agree on those two at least. We must set an example.’ He looked up and saw the man cutting the prisoners free. ‘No, no. Stop that.’

  ‘We’ve been setting an example for ten bloody months,’ the other man said, ‘The people are sick of it.’ He pointed to the crowd at the gates. ‘Who’d you think they’re going to cheer to the guillotine? This lot? Or Robespierre?’

  The man with the sword had reached her cart. Obediently, she lined up with Ffoulkes to turn her back and hold her arms out. She felt hardly a pull before her hands were free. Must be a very sharp sword, she thought.

  Fouquier-Tinville was pestering her liberator. ‘You shouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Ah well,’ the big man said. ‘They might as well be comfy.’ He looked up at Philippa. ‘Miss Dapifer, is it?’ He gave a slight bow. ‘I’m a friend of your mother’s. You might say I’m here on her behalf.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. He spoke French with an Irish accent and his face was as round as it was amiable. She found herself saying, ‘And how is Mama?’

  ‘She’s well, very well.’

  Wiping the sweat from his face, Fouquier-Tinville had turned back to the other man. His head kept nodding as if attached to a spring. ‘Citizen, I’ve only been obeying orders ...’

  ‘I know,’ the man said. ‘You can tell them that at your trial.’ He was casually dressed, despite his splendid hat, and his cravat was orthodox in its grubbiness but he had authority and his face might have shown humor if Fouquier-Tinville hadn’t been trying him to the limit.

  He spoke to the clerk of the court, who’d come up. ‘We’ll have to release the prisoners in batches,’ he said. He jerked his head towards Fouquier-Tinville who was poring over papers that were shaking too violently to be read. ‘Let them go en masse and they’ll lynch him. Get these people down and free them. We’re
going to need the carts.’

  Next she found herself and the others milling around the clerk of the court’s office while a harried official scratched their names off a list. The little fat prisoner, almost affronted at the anti-climax of his release, wanted written assurance that he wouldn’t be arrested again.

  ‘It’s over?’ the prostitute kept asking. ‘The Terror’s over?’

  Nobody answered her, nobody knew or, if they did, their brains wouldn’t absorb the alteration.

  Philippa seemed to be in one place and then another without any physical effort in between. She was back in the Court of May now and caught sight of Ffoulkes. He was angry, furious. He marched up to the man who’d said he was a friend of her mother’s and was questioning him, looking slight but aggressive against the man’s bulk, like a dog yapping at a lazy bull.

  Don’t, she thought. Somehow a massive dome that had bricked them in was blowing away as lightly as if it had been constructed from feathers. Don’t. The wind might change and reconstruct it before they could get out.

  The little fat prisoner said, ‘I can go then?’ Nobody answered him and he began sidling towards the gates. The prostitute slipped through them and into the crowd like an eel returning to water. The chief jailer was trying to shoo the new intake of prisoners out into the Quai de l’Horloge. ‘You can go home,’ he was saying, ‘Go home to Brittainy.’ They stared at him and one of them asked, ‘How?’

  Philippa went up to Ffoulkes and took his arm to try and lead him away. He shook her off. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’ He spoke in English. ‘I’ve a right to know.’

  The Irishman said, ‘Well, no, not at the moment ye haven’t. Ah, here’s Citizen Deputy Barras. Be polite now.’

  Citizen Deputy Barras was the man he’d ridden in with and his authority was growing by the minute; jailers, officials were beginning to jump to his orders; only Fouquier-Tinville, still leaning against the cart and leafing through his papers as if El Dorado might be in them somewhere, was paying no attention.