Revolution

by Jennifer Donnelly

He picked up a salt dish and turned it over. I shivered. Spilled salt brings bad luck. His, I hoped. He tossed the dish at me. I caught it.

  That is silver. The shine is more subtle. Can you learn to be?

  He poured two glasses of wine, handed me one. I reached for it warily, like a rabbit sniffing a trap. Finally I drank it and it tasted like rubies melting on my tongue.

  Sit, he told me, kicking a chair out from the table. He took a seat on the side opposite me, near the fire, and loosened his neckcloth.

  It was nearly midnight, with most of Paris abed, yet before five minutes passed, a servant—an old man—carried in a feast. I ate oysters, langoustines, a mousse of smoked trout. A plate of ortolans was brought. Orléans picked one up, cracked its tiny skull between his teeth. A dish of courgettes with mint came. Tender new potatoes, no bigger than my knuckle. And then lamb. An entire leg. Rubbed with rosemary and sprinkled with salt. The cook had slit the fat and nudged slices of garlic under it. The meat, oily and sweet, tasted so good tears leaked from my eyes as I chewed it.

  You are hungry, Orléans said, watching me across the table. And yet, the hunger in your gut is nothing compared to that in your soul.

  I stopped eating. I, who was starving, stopped eating and stared at him, astounded that he had seen inside of me. He, who was nothing to me.

  You are the street actor. The dauphin’s companion. The sparrow in the grove. You flew high, little sparrow, but now you’ve fallen back to earth. Instead of playing for the prince of France, you now play puppets for Paris urchins.

  My mouth was full of food. All I could do was nod.

  And when you finish with the puppets, you come here to recite lines from plays. I’ve seen you many a night. You are a changeling—a girl who can make herself into anything—boy, monster, beggar, sprite. Why do you do it?

  I swallowed my food. ’Tis far easier to get along in this world as a boy or a monster than a girl, I said.

  True, Orléans said. But that is not why you do it.

  I looked away. All right, then, I said. I do it for money. I must eat.

  If it was merely money you wanted, you could earn ten times as much singing bawdy songs. Why Shakespeare? Why Molière? Answer me truthfully now. No more lies or I shall hand you back to the guards. He had risen from his chair and walked about the room as he spoke.

  I can’t help it, I said. The words…

  Ah, the words. You are in love with the beauty of the words.

  Yes.

  More lies! If you loved words so, you would write plays, not act them. Come now, the truth! It’s the playwright’s characters you are in love with, not his words.

  Yes, I said, very softly.

  Because … he prompted.

  Because when I am them, I am not me.

  Orléans nodded. Not a sparrow in the gutter, he said. Not desperate and hungry. Not dirty. Ignored. Dismissed. Passed over.

  Again I could not speak. It was not food I had in my mouth then, but my heart.

  More food was brought. I ate slices of sweet melon and a dish of roquette with slivers of Parma cheese and cakes soaked in rum and chocolates flavored with clove and marchpane and sugared plums and candied peel, and like a drowning man pulled from the sea, I was only glad to be saved and never once thought to ask why.

  It was only when I was so full I could barely breathe that I stopped eating. It was only then I realized the servants were gone, the music had stopped, and the candles were guttering. And then it was too late, for suddenly he was near me. Behind me. So close, I could smell the lamb in his teeth.

  Though I was terrified, I remembered the knife. The one I’d stolen. I pulled it from my sleeve, whirled round in my chair, and pressed it to his throat.

  Slowly, carefully, he pushed my hand away and took the knife. Then he pulled me out of my chair and hit me. The blow was staggering. His white duke’s hands were as strong as a tanner’s. I stumbled backward and fell. He hauled me up and dragged me to a mirrored wall. He still had the knife. It glinted silver.

  I closed my eyes, so afraid I could not even scream. The Palais whores all said he was a man of dark tastes, and I knew it would not go easy for me. I felt his hands in my hair, a sharp tug. Something had come loose. Fallen away. Something was lost. My life.

  I opened my eyes. There was no blood. No wound. It was not my throat he’d cut, but my hair. My brown curls, once halfway down my back, now barely grazed my shoulders. He tore a piece of lace from his cuff and tied them back in a pony’s tail.

  Next, his fingers worked what buttons remained on my waistcoat. He opened it and pushed it off my shoulders. Then he tore my shirt apart and pulled it off me. My patched and filthy britches were the last thing to go. He bade me step out of them and kicked them into a corner.

  I stood naked in the mirror, helpless, waiting to feel his rough hands on me. Instead I felt the shock of cold water. I gasped, blinking it out of my eyes. More dripped from my hair, my chin, my shoulders. I saw him put a silver water jug back on the table. He picked up a napkin and rubbed my face and neck with it until the cloth was black with grime.

  When he finished, he opened a cabinet, took a narrow length of linen from it, and bound it around my chest, flattening my small breasts. Next he handed me a shirt of white cambric. Wool stockings. Nankin britches. A blue waistcoat with silver buttons.

  He poured himself more wine as I dressed, and when I finished, he walked round me, taking in the transformation.

  He smiled, dipped his thumb in his wine, pressed it to my forehead, and made the sign of the cross. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, he said mockingly.

  And then I understood. And the understanding frightened me more than anything that had come before it.

  I was not to die that night. That would have been a mercy.

  I was to be reborn.

  39

  “Excuse me, please.”

  I look up into a pair of midnight-dark eyes. For a few seconds, I panic. I don’t know where I am. Or who I am.

  “The line … she moves,” says a man with an Italian accent.

  “Oh, yeah. She does. Sorry,” I say.

  The EverReadies are ten feet ahead of me. I put the diary in my bag and catch up with them. I can’t stop thinking about the last few entries. Why did Orléans change Alex into a boy? What did he have her do that made her think dying would have been a mercy in comparison?

  I’m going to have to wait to find out because I’m only a few feet away from the catacombs’ entrance now. A sign by the door tells me the price of admission, and that there’s a lot of walking involved, and that the catacombs are not for small children or those of a nervous disposition.

  I pay the unsmiling cashier, walk past the guard, and head to the mouth of a steep and spiraling stone staircase. Down I go, into a cold, damp half-light. A guy ahead of me makes a joke about Dante’s Inferno and says we’re heading into the first ring of hell. Somebody else says, “No, that’s the Louvre.” Everyone laughs. Too loudly.

  We keep descending, down eighty-odd steps, and come out in a room, a kind of gallery, full of informational displays. I walk around, reading the history. Turns out there are miles of abandoned tunnels under Paris—and not, like, seven or eight, but 186.

  People mined gypsum and limestone under the city from the time of the Romans to the nineteenth century, leaving a huge network of tunnels and rooms. All that mining turned the bedrock into Swiss cheese and that’s why there are no skyscrapers in central Paris—the remaining rock can’t support their weight. Most of the tunnels are unstable and dangerous and off-limits to the public. The ossuaries, or graveyards, I’m about to enter occupy a 780-meter block under the fourteenth arrondissement and contain the remains of approximately six million people. Six million.

  I walk on through the galleries and read about some of the people whose bones are thought to be in here. Madame Elizabeth, the king’s sister. Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress. Robespierre and Danton. The writer Rabelais and the
actor Scaramouche. I bet there are some interesting conversations down here at night.

  I keep reading and learn that after Robespierre fell, there was a backlash against the political group he led—the Jacobins. Young aristocrats who’d survived his reign launched the White Terror and beat up Jacobins in the streets. They also gave Victims’ Balls—dances for people who’d lost a family member to the guillotine. Dancers wore their hair cut short, like the condemned, and tied red ribbons around their necks to mark where the blade fell. Some of the balls were even held in the catacombs.

  I look for more information, trying to find out if people used the catacombs to hide themselves during the Revolution, stupidly hoping that there might be something—a paragraph, a line—on a crazy girl who dressed like a boy, set off fireworks, and kept a diary. But there isn’t.

  The galleries end. A sign on the wall points the way to the ossuaries and tells me that in the event of a power failure, emergency lights will come on and I should follow the black stripe spray-painted on the roof of the tunnels to the exit.

  I walk on, behind an older couple, a group of teenagers, and the Americans, and find myself in a low-ceilinged stone corridor, a former quarry. It’s cold and I have to crouch as I walk. A few more yards, and I’m in the Port Mahon gallery, where a quarryman who was a soldier in Louis XV’s army carved a model of a fortress where he was once kept as a prisoner. Next I pass the quarryman’s footbath—a deep, still well of clear groundwater—and then I’m at the entrance to the tombs.

  The panels at either side of the doorway are painted black and white. There’s an inscription above them. Stop! This is the empire of death, it says. And suddenly I want to go back. Back through the gallery, back up the staircase, into the light. But I don’t. I get a grip because I want to know what this place is. I want to know where Alex was.

  I walk through the doorway. And then I see them, the bones. Wall after wall of human bones. The sight of them all stops me cold. There are skulls piled on skulls. Femurs on femurs. Some are neatly stacked. Others are worked into decorative patterns—stripes and bands and crosses and flowers. It feels like I’ve stumbled into the basement of a mass murderer with a flair for interior design.

  The people around me, the ones who were joking and chattering just seconds ago, are silent now. Some are walking around in a hushed sort of awe. Some can’t take it and want to go back. I hear a sniffle, a sob. I turn around and see that the EverReadies weren’t prepared for everything after all. The mother is upset. Looks like microfleece only wicks away sweat, not death.

  I keep going. So do the tunnels. They go on and on. I walk for ten minutes, twenty, thirty, and still there are more bones. There are fountains, too, and headstones, crosses, and obelisks. There are poems and lamentations. There are warnings and iron gates to keep us from going the wrong way. Plaques explain that the bones I’m looking at are from the Cemetery of the Innocents or the Cemetery of St. Nicholas, but they don’t explain how there can be so many of them.

  Who were they all?

  I keep walking. And I must be going too slowly or taking too long, because everyone else is way ahead of me. I’m by myself and it’s so quiet. I think of Alex as I walk, and what it must’ve been like to be down here alone, with only the light from a lantern. And the thought’s so awful, I walk a little faster. A few minutes later, I come to a split in the tunnel and I’m not sure which way to go. The black line on the ceiling veers off to the left, but I hear voices, whispery and low, coming from the tunnel to the right, so I take that one.

  It’s darker, this tunnel, and narrower. The bones are much closer to me. I pass by a large skull perched on top of a wall, and suddenly I can see the man it belonged to. He’s a big, brawny butcher, singing bawdy songs as he hacks up a pig. And the skull next to his, with a high forehead—that one belonged to a schoolmaster, pale and stiff-necked. The one over there, the small one, it was a little girl’s. She was pretty and pink-cheeked and full of life. Skull after skull. With their empty, unseeing eye sockets.

  The voices I heard, they’re getting louder, more urgent. I tell myself it’s people up ahead. That or the sound of water dripping. I’ve seen wet patches on the ground and droplets on the walls. But there are no people. And the walls are dry. And then I realize what it is—it’s the skulls. All of them. They’re whispering to me.

  “I want to smell the rain again,” one says, close by me.

  “I want to taste melons. Warm from the sun,” says another.

  “I want the sound of my husband’s laughter. The feel of his skin against mine.”

  More join in until it’s one sad chorus of longing. They want roast chicken. Silk dresses. Lemonade. Red shoes. The smell of horses.

  I’m losing my mind. I must be. And then a breeze blows through the tunnel, which is impossible, because we’re twenty-five meters underground, and I catch a strange smell, spicy and strong—cloves. I’m totally freaking out now. The voices are in my ears and the smell is in my nose and in my mouth and it’s so strong it’s suffocating me.

  “Help me,” I say. “Please.”

  “Miss? Excuse me, miss, but you’re not supposed to be down here.”

  I look behind me. A security guard is standing in the tunnel, shining his flashlight on me.

  “Miss? Are you all right?” he asks.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He walks up to me and takes my arm. “This way, please,” he says. “Lean on me if you need to.”

  I need to. I stumble along next to him and after a few minutes, we’re back at the fork. He swings a metal grille closed over the tunnel’s entrance and locks it. There’s a red-and-white sign on it that says GENERATORS—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I didn’t even see the door before. When I was trying to decide which way to go.

  “I’m sorry. I … uh … I couldn’t catch my breath,” I say, embarrassed.

  He smiles. “It happens. Some people react badly. They feel ill or faint or become disoriented. This place can be overwhelming.”

  But it’s got nothing to do with my breath. I lied about that. It’s Alex. She wanted me to come down here. To go down that tunnel. She wanted me to follow her. To find her.

  The guard walks me down the proper tunnel and leads me to a folding chair. There’s a first-aid box next to it and a telephone. He tells me to sit down for a few minutes. I do, with my head in my hands.

  It’s the Qwell. It has to be. I’ve been taking too much for too long and it’s built up inside me and it’s really screwing me up. Making me see things and hear things. On Henry Street. On the quai. And now here, in this freaky-ass spookhouse. It’s making me think I’ve got some sort of weird connection with a dead girl.

  The guard has me sit for a few more minutes, then escorts me the rest of the way through the tunnels and up a staircase to the exit.

  “I’d advise you to get some water once you’re outside. And to eat something,” he says.

  Another guard checks my bag to make sure I didn’t take any mementoes. As if. And then I’m out. Aboveground. Back into the world of the living.

  I get a cheese crêpe and a bottle of water right away, and then sit down on a bench under some trees in a park and eat. When I’m finished, I close my eyes. Lift my face to the sun. Take a few deep breaths. After a little while, I feel saner. Calmer. What happened in the catacombs was just an episode of weirdness brought on by too many pills. Like every other weird thing that’s happening to me lately. I have to back off the Qwellify. I have to take even less. And I will. Starting tonight.

  I open my eyes and look at my watch. It’s ten past one. I’m going to get up now, head back to the archives, and humbly beg Yves Bonnard’s forgiveness. If I’m successful, I’m going to photograph as many of Malherbeau’s papers as I can, and then I’ll go back to G’s and work on my outline. And everything will be cool.

  As I’m gathering up my lunch garbage, a little kid toddles up to my bench. Her mother calls to her, tells her to come back. She stops, swaying a bit on her l
egs, like she’s still getting used to them.

  She looks at me, her eyes big and solemn, then takes a few wary steps in my direction and thrusts her fist out at me. She’s clutching something in it.

  “Hey there,” I say to her. “What have you got?”

  She uncurls her fingers one by one, until I can see it, lying flat on her fat little palm.

  A feather, small and brown. From a sparrow.

  40

  “I heard from Dr. Becker today,” Dad says.

  I stop what I’m doing, which is Photoshopping a nose ring onto Beethoven, and look up.

  “What did he say?”

  “That your mother’s doing a bit better. She’s tolerating the new drugs. She’s eating and she’s participating in group therapy.”

  “Did he say if we can talk to her yet?”

  “He said give it another day or two.”

  “Okay,” I say agreeably.

  Sure. Why not? In fact, I’ll give it two—Saturday and Sunday. But on Monday I’ll be at the hospital. And then Dr. Becker will need every security guard in the place to keep me from talking to her.

  “How are you doing on your outline, Andi?” he asks. “Are you making progress?”

  “Yeah, I am. I’ve got a first draft. It still needs work, but it’s a start. And I’ve got a good chunk of the intro,” I say, smiling.

  “That’s great,” he says, smiling back.

  “Yeah,” I say. “How’s the testing going?”

  “Quite well, actually. We’re hoping for results by Monday.”