There is Mirabeau, the thunderer, who wore jeweled buttons on his coat while the children of Paris wore rags. Danton, our last hope, laughing on his way to the blade. And Robespierre, the Incorruptible, who loved us so much he cut off our heads so we would not be troubled by too many thoughts.
Can you not see them?
Late last night, while I was out with my rockets, I saw another. No doomed queen nor fiery rebel, this one, but one who loved me—my grandmother. She was sitting under a streetlamp, a needle in one hand, thread in the other.
God has need of me, Alex, she said. His angels have no heads. If it takes me all eternity, I will stitch back every one that prancing shit of a Robespierre cut off. There will be no need for ribbons or chokers, either. Not when I’ve finished. There’s none in Paris can hide a seam better.
Do they have gold thread in heaven, Grandmother? I asked her.
Good Arras silks are all I need.
There was a basket at her feet. She reached into it and lifted out the head of a young woman, a marquise. She wore Bourbon white to her death, but wears the tricolor now—white cheeks, blue lips, red dripping from her neck. Long live the revolution.
It will be your head next, my grandmother told me. Tumbled into the basket like a muddy turnip.
Only if they catch me.
And they will, said another. You cannot slip them forever.
Orléans. Dead two years, yet still resplendent in silk and lace. He went to the blade as if to a ball.
I will survive them, I told him. Did I not survive you?
Go. Now. Before the watch sees you.
I cannot. I have business at the tower.
This is madness! What are you playing at?
Tragedy, my lord. As you instructed.
Then, as if playing Shakespeare in the courts of the Palais, I broke into my best Chorus voice.…
Quiet! Quiet all! Settle and be still.
Send your man for more oysters now if you’ve a mind to.
Wink at your mistress, piss on the floor, and be done.
For this is Prologue, where I tell you what’s to come.
A tragedy in five acts—revolution, counterrevolution, a devil, the terror, death.
Is anybody listening? Or am I wasting breath?
The boy is finished, Orléans said. Let him die. Or you will.
He lives, sir! I shouted.
Who’s there? a voice bellowed from the end of the street. No ghost, that one, and it silenced the others. Who are you? Speak!
I am LeMieux’s girl, citizen! I yelled. From the Rue Charlot. I’m bringing his infant son to the doctor. His wife died this afternoon. Consumption. We fear the baby has it now. Look … look here.…
I ran to him as if I’d just run a mile, stumbling and breathless. Overacting. As I always do when I’m afraid. I put down my lamp and reached into my basket, making as if to pull back the linens. They were splotched with crimson. I’d sliced my palm with a paring knife just minutes before and dripped blood upon the cloth.
The man stepped back in fear of contagion. Go! Now! he said, waving me on. Long live the Republic!
Long live the Republic! I replied, hurrying past him.
I whispered to the baby as I made my way down the dark street, but he made no response. He could not, for he was not flesh, that child. He was charcoal and powder. Paper, cotton, and wax.
There is a house on the Rue Charlot. I let myself into its courtyard with a key I bought from the landlord’s daughter for two silver spoons I once stole from Orléans.
I climbed the stone stairs, passing landing after landing. There is a narrow door at the top. I knotted my skirts and stepped through it onto the roof. The pitch was steep. I moved like a dung beetle, nudging my basket ahead of me, the lamp’s handle clenched between my teeth. There is a row of chimneys just below the peak. I braced myself against them and lifted the cloth from my basket.
There were two dozen rockets in it and two dozen shafts to keep them true. I bent to my lamp, inserted the shafts one by one, then leaned the rockets against a chimney.
I could not see the tower in the darkness. But I knew it was there. As I knew he was there—a child, broken and alone.
A church bell struck two. I wiped my eyes. Tears would damp the powder.
I picked up the first rocket and sank its shaft into a gap between the tiles. I took a candle from the basket, held its wick to the lamp’s flame, then touched it to the rocket’s fuse. The rocket coughed. It sputtered and farted and then it was gone in a great, whistling rush.
I waited, hands clenched, and then there was a sky-rending boom, louder than cannon fire. Windows shattered. Birds flew screeching from their roosts. A woman screamed. And suddenly the black night was gone, vanquished in a blaze of light.
I grabbed another rocket. Jammed the shaft into the tiles. Lit the fuse. And then another. Over and over again, as fast as I could.
There are no songs left for me to sing you, Louis-Charles, I said. No games to play. But I can give you this—this light.
I will rain down silver and gold for you. I will shatter the black night, break it open, and pour out a million stars. Turn away from the darkness, the madness, the pain.
Open your eyes. And know that I am here. That I remember and hope.
Open your eyes and look at the light.
18 May 1795
I dare not go out tonight. Bonaparte has doubled the patrols, hoping to catch me. He is furious about my last fireworks display. As well he should be, for they were magnificent. I must not be caught. I shall wait. I shall sit at my table at the Foy and eat a bowl of soup—the very picture of a law-abiding citizen—and write.
I go back now. To 1791. To the Tuileries. After spending nearly two miserable years there, watching the revolutionaries grow only stronger, the king decided he would flee the palace and Paris and his people. At the start of the summer, when the rains had finished and the roads would be dry. He would go to Montmédy, on the border of the Austrian lowlands. There, with the help of the loyal Marquis de Bouillé, he would rally troops.
They would leave Paris in the dead of night, the king and his family. Madame de Tourzel, the royal governess, would pose as a Russian noblewoman. Louis-Charles and his sister would be her children. The queen would play the part of governess and the king was to be disguised as a valet. It was all arranged with the help of the queen’s brother Leopold of Austria, the Swedish ambassador Count Fersen, a handful of chambermaids and guards, and me.
All through the spring of 1791 I carried coins and jewels, wrapped in cloth and stuffed down my britches, to a carriage maker. An ostler. A seamstress. I smuggled in a plain black dress for the queen, a linen waistcoat for the king, a dress for Louis-Charles, who would be disguised as a girl. I knew not when they would leave. That was known only to a few.
Tell no one what you do, the queen said to me, even those most sympathetic to us, for a maid or manservant might overhear. There are spies everywhere. Promise me that you will not. Our very lives depend on it. She took out a Bible then and bade me place my hand upon it. Swear to me, she said, and to God.
I trembled inside. How could I do it? How could I swear an oath to God to say nothing when I had promised the devil I’d tell him everything? Yet if I refused to do it, the queen would know me for a spy.
I must lie to one—but which one? Orléans or the queen? If Orléans found me out, I would suffer for it. If the queen did, I would lose her favor. She was a prisoner now and without the power she’d once had, but that might not always be so.
I placed my hand upon the Bible and made the oath. I had figured out what to do. After news broke of the king’s escape, Orléans would surely question me. I would pretend to be as shocked as he was and tell him that I knew nothing about it, that I’d seen nothing, heard nothing. I would say the king and queen had been most secretive and that if they’d involved any of the servants in their plan, they must’ve paid them well, for none had whispered of it.
I would pull
it off, I told myself. I was a player, was I not? Orléans would believe me. Perhaps he would not question me at all. Wishing the king well, as he said he did, he would likely be overjoyed that he and his family had got safely away.
Night after night I met Orléans in his chambers to give my reports, and there I lied to him. And to others. To Desmoulins and Marat, Danton, Robespierre, Collot d’Herbois, D’Églantine, and to their strongmen—a revolving pack of Jacobin brigands including Santerre, a brewer from the St-Antoine; Fournier, a failed rum maker from Ste-Domingue who was somehow present at every march and riot; and Rotonde, a teacher of English who circled the Jacobin Club while Robespierre spoke, marking any who sneered or heckled so he could later beat them silly.
The presence of these men unsettled me. I did not understand why Orléans entertained them. He, who wished to help the king, why would he sit with those who wished to do away with kings? Why would he give them food and drink and sometimes gold? My old misgivings returned and I wondered if he’d been sincere when he’d said he wanted only to help the king. He must have sensed my uneasiness because once, after Danton had left, he put his arm around my shoulders and said, Always remember this, sparrow, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I understood. He wished to play one off against the other and by so doing, gain some sort of advantage. His words calmed me some. They gave me one less thing to worry about, though I still had plenty. It took all the cunning of the actor’s art to keep my voice steady and my legs still as I told Orléans my lies. I’d felt his hands upon me once before and knew I would feel them again if he found out about my falsehoods. Afterward, when I was alone in my garret room, high above his own, I would often puke in my basin from the fear of it.
I had wanted a stage. I had wanted roles. Orléans gave them to me—boy, spy, servant, citizen, bastard, royalist, rebel, patriot, Jacobin. I played them all. There were mornings when his servant, the old man, Nicolas was his name, would bang on my door to wake me and I would jump out of my bed bleary-eyed and terrified, knowing not who I was.
When my hands stopped shaking, I would wash my face, bind my breasts, and dress. I’d breakfast on the rolls, butter, jam, and coffee Nicolas had left outside my door and then I would leave for the Tuileries.
On my way, I’d read the bills and hear boys crying the news. It was always the same—bad. The winter was brutal again. The Seine had frozen solid. Wolves were seen on the edges of the city. Workers in the provinces had struck. Austria and England, furious about the king’s imprisonment in the Tuileries, threatened war.
In the evenings, I would go to the political clubs—the Cordeliers and the Jacobins—as Orléans instructed, and listen to Danton and Robespierre speak. On my way home, raggedy men would thrust pamphlets into my hands that showed the king and queen as goats and pigs, devouring France. The harvest was good this year, the pamphleteers said, so why is there no grain to be had? Because the king secretly orders it held up to starve Paris into submission. The king’s accounts had been made public, they said. He’d paid twenty-eight million livres last year to cancel his brothers’ gambling debts. He’d poured money into his own family’s pockets while the children of France cried for bread.
Most days, I still did not know who I was, but one thing I did know—things did not go well for the king.
When I arrived at the Tuileries on the twentieth of June, I felt immediately that something was afoot. The queen was pale and vexed. Madame Elizabeth was waspish. The king would not eat. I knew then that they would leave that very night and a cold dread gripped me at the thought.
Had they any idea what they were doing? Had they forgotten the Bastille? The march on Versailles? And the Paris mob’s fondness for severing heads from bodies? Had they not heard the rudenesses and threats called at them through the Tuileries gates? Had no one told them of the talk at the market halls, where fishwives promised to rip out their livers and eat them?
The palace walls that kept them in also kept the harsh world out. And now they would step outside, into the very heart of that world, with their white hands and soft feet and gentle words. They would be safe at Montmédy but they had to get there first.
I was very tender with Louis-Charles that day, braving the wrath of the chambermaids to steal sheets to make forts for him. Filching his favorite sweets from the kitchens. Coaxing bite after bite of beefsteak into him at supper to fortify him for what lay ahead.
That night, I helped him wash, put him in his nightshirt, and—after he’d kissed his parents, his aunt, and his sister—tucked him into his bed. He was uneasy and could not settle and demanded many stories from me.
Never leave me, Alex, he said, after I’d finished the last one, the White Cat. You promised you wouldn’t.
I will not, Louis-Charles, I said, but there may come a day when you leave me.
Never. I will never leave you. And when I am king, I shall make you my chief minister, so you will always be near me.
I smiled at this, reminded him that underneath my valet’s uniform I was but a girl and that girls could not be ministers. Then I said he must rest now or his mother would be unhappy. After he had fallen asleep, I quietly packed his favorite soldiers and horses, his lotto and draughts, into a small wooden box and left it at the foot of his bed, hoping that whoever came for him would see it and take it so that he might have something to amuse himself with on the long journey.
Good night, Alex, he murmured as I left his room. God bless you.
God would not bless me. I knew that. For I had cast my lot elsewhere. But for Louis-Charles’ sake, I turned in the doorway and whispered, God bless you, too, little prince. And God speed you.
20 May 1795
It was early morning. The sun was not yet fully up. I was in my room, dressing for work. And then suddenly, I was on the floor, with Orléans standing over me. His blows were so hard that for days after I wore the imprint of his ring tattooed in purple on my cheek.
Where are they? he shouted. Where did they go?
Who?
Do you think me a fool? he bellowed, and hit me again.
Stop, please! I cried, trying to crawl away from him.
They are gone, all of them! They escaped during the night. You knew they would and did not tell me! he shouted.
I knew nothing! I lied.
They had accomplices. They must have. There would have been letters. Money changing hands. You must’ve seen something.
I told you all that I saw. I swear it!
There were more blows, a great many more, until finally I told him the truth. About the king’s plans and his destination. And how the queen had sworn me to silence.
You damned fool! he shouted at me. What have you done? He grabbed hold of my jacket and pulled me up off the floor until my face was only inches from his own. Pray that they are caught, sparrow, he said. Pray like you have never prayed in your whole miserable life.
He let me go and I fell back to the floor. I could not see, there was too much blood in my eyes, but I heard him leave my room. It hurt to move, to breathe, to think. I lay on the floor I know not how long, until finally, I heard footsteps.
Poor player, a voice said from the doorway. My master has used you badly.
It was Nicolas, the old man. He set a basin of water down beside me and wrung out a cloth. I cried out as he wiped the blood from my face.
Things go badly for the duke, he said. The king is gone, and the duke’s hopes with him.
Things go a damned sight worse for me, I said.
The duke is angry, and he has cause to be. If the king reaches Austria, he will get up an army. He will retake France.
Then why is he not glad? He said he wished to help the king. What better help than freedom?
Nicolas laughed.
I do not see what is so funny, I said.
No, you do not, and that is why he uses you. You are blind, child. Blind to all but your own ambition. Orléans is the first prince of the blood and next in line to the throne should the king�
�s own Bourbon line die out. Did you not know it?
I did not know it and I did not care. I wasn’t listening anymore. I’d had enough. Enough of Orléans. Enough of Nicolas. I tried to get up.
What are you doing? he asked.
Leaving this place. And the devil Orléans. Since the king is gone, he has no further need of me.
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