Revolution

by Jennifer Donnelly

  They’re high. They must be. Which is great. Just great. I’m in the catacombs of Paris with a bunch of stoners on a most un-excellent adventure. I turn the flashlight back on and give it back to the hot guy. We hear a shout coming from the way we came and it gets us going again. We’re moving fast. After a few minutes, the tunnel narrows. We trudge through cold, black water, then the floor slopes upward and the ground is dry again.

  And suddenly, there is a stink—a stink like no stink I’ve ever smelled. It’s tangible. Evil. It’s so strong, it’s a physical entity. I drop my guitar and my bag, bend over, and throw up. I feel so insanely sick, I’m not even embarrassed. When there’s nothing left I stand up straight. I’m coughing and spitting and gasping for breath. My throat feels like someone poured acid down it. Tears are streaming from my eyes. I look at the others. And they’re fine. All fine. They’re looking at me with puzzled faces. Like they can’t figure out why I’m not.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I rasp. “Can’t you smell it?”

  “Yes,” one of them says.

  “What is it?”

  “Dead people, of course. We’re in the catacombs.”

  “Yeah, but—” I start to say.

  And then I see them. In the glow of the flashlight, I see the corpses. Stacks of them. Some are shriveled. Some are putrid. Most still have their clothes on. Not one has its head on.

  “No. No way. No way! This can’t be. Fresh dead people?” I shout. “I took the tour. No one said anything about fresh dead people. They said the bodies were two hundred years old. This is bad. Really bad. We’ve got to call someone. Frontline. Nightline. Anderson Cooper.”

  The four of them look at each other like I’m weird. Like I’m weird!

  I freak out then. Get a bit shrill. The hot guy shushes me. “Be quiet. The guard might still be around,” he says. “Why are you making such a fuss? Surely you’ve seen these and more during the balls.” He pulls a little muslin bag from inside his vest and hands it to me. “Here. Hold this to your nose.”

  I hold it over my face like a gas mask. It smells strongly of cinnamon and oranges. It helps a little. We start walking again. I keep my eyes trained on the goths. I don’t look left or right.

  I know the French like their funk. I know they like stinky cheese and truffles. I know that Napoléon wrote Josephine from the front to tell her not to wash because he was coming home in a few days. I know all that. But this defies all logic. I truly believe that I will die if I don’t get out of these tunnels very shortly, and these guys are acting as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary. I start humming to myself. I hum the Ramones. Because right now, I really do want to be sedated.

  Finally, we start climbing. The stone floor slopes sharply upward, and then becomes a set of spiraling iron steps. We go through an iron door like the one I came through earlier, then a passageway. The hot guy opens another door, small and wooden, and I find myself inside a crypt—a real crypt, dusty and musty. Fortunately, the dead people who reside here are all neatly sealed away. His friend—whose name, I’ve gathered is Henri—pushes open the crypt’s front door and we emerge inside a big, dark church. He closes the crypt’s door, then leads us outside, into a cobbled street.

  “I’m hungry,” the hot guy says.

  I feel like I will never eat anything again. Ever. “Can I have my flashlight back?” I say. I’m so out of here. I’m going home. And then I’m going to call the police and tell them about the big fat crime scene I just walked through.

  He hands it to me, shining it in my face as he does, and says, “Your head. It’s bleeding.” He touches his fingers to my forehead and they come away red. While I dig in my bag for tissues, he asks Henri if he wants to come with him to eat.

  “I can’t. I’ve got to get home. My wife will kill me as it is.”

  Wife? He looks like he’s eighteen. At the most.

  The other two goths say they have to get home, too. He asks me but before I can tell him no, Henri pulls him away from me but not far enough away. I can hear them whispering.

  “Leave him here. It’s too dangerous,” Henri says angrily.

  “I cannot leave him helpless on the streets. Haven’t we lost enough of our kind already?”

  “Look, guys, I’m not helpless,” I say, really fed up with the him thing. “I can get myself home. I just have to find a taxi stand. Or a Métro station. I’m cool. Really.”

  I look around hoping to spot Virgil. Jules. Someone I recognize. The hot guy kisses his friends goodbye, then takes the tissue from my hand and dabs at my head.

  “You must attend to this before it becomes septic.”

  “Do you think you could maybe drop the act for a minute and tell me where the nearest Métro is?” I say.

  He looks at me, a worried expression on his face. “I think you should eat something. I believe the fall you took addled your senses,” he says. “Come, the Café Chartres isn’t far. I know the chef there. He’ll cook something good for us.”

  “Thanks, really, but I’m not hungry and I have to get home.”

  “Let me at least walk part of the way with you.”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  “Wait,” he says. Before I can stop him, he takes my red ribbon and key and drops them inside my shirt. He takes his own ribbon off, then wipes the powder and rouge off his face with a handkerchief. “One cannot be too careful.”

  We walk east. I’m glad to be out of the catacombs. Glad this night is almost over. I want to get out of the bell jar. Most of all, I want to find Virgil.

  “I’m Andi, by the way,” I say.

  “A pleasure,” he says, bowing to me slightly. “My name is Amadé.”

  “Amadé,” I echo. “Weird. I’m studying an Amadé. He’s a musician, too, but he’s from the eighteenth century, and he …”

  At that moment, we turn off the side street we were walking down onto the Rue de Rivoli and my words trail away. Because at that moment, things get really strange.

  68

  The men all have ponytails. All of them. They’re all wearing short pants and long, fitted jackets. The women, the few that I can see, are tattered-looking, and I wonder if maybe I’m walking through another late-night rave. One woman approaches us. She’s wearing a long, old-fashioned dress. It’s dirty. She’s dirty. She smiles at us. Then opens the top of her dress.

  “Whoa! Tuck those back in!” I say. Breasts don’t usually scare me, but I’m still flinchy from my walk through Deadville.

  Amadé just waves her away as if this happens to him all the time. He’s walking fast. I have to trot to keep up with him.

  I see carriages go by. They look as if a fairy godmother made them. There’s no curb, no sidewalk. There’s only the street and it’s muddy. How can it be muddy? There’s no mud in Paris because there’s no dirt in Paris. It’s a city. The streets are asphalt. If they weren’t, the cars would get stuck. But there are no cars, either. No cabs. No buses. No mopeds. There are no signs, no traffic lights. There are a few streetlights, and they have flames burning inside them. The buildings look shorter. There are no airplanes in the sky. And it stinks. It stinks almost as bad as the catacombs did. Of old cheese and feet and rotten cabbage and sewers.

  It’s not a rave; there’s no music. It’s not Halloween, because it’s not October. And it’s not a costume party, because there’s no guy in a gorilla suit. So what the hell is going on?

  “Come on,” Amadé says, tugging on my arm.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” I ask him.

  “It’s not good to be seen. To get in their way.”

  And then I get it. And it’s so obvious I start laughing at myself for being so weird and stupid. This whole thing is one big movie set. They’re shooting a night scene in some big historical epic and the extras are running around and Amadé knows we’ll get yelled at if we mess up the shot.

  And the dead people were all props. That’s why Amadé and his friends didn’t get upset at the sight of them. And the stink? P
robably some kind of method-acting spray-on stuff to keep the actors in the moment.

  I start looking around for the giant lights that crews use to shoot night scenes. And the big fat cables and generators and the burly tech guys who operate them. I look for the trailers that shelter the stars between takes. And the tables covered with food in case the crew gets hungry and the angry little peons whose job it is to keep the great unwashed away from Rob Pattinson. But I don’t see them. I only see skinny, dirty kids swarming all over the place.

  “Isn’t it kind of late for child actors to be running around?” I ask Amadé.

  But he doesn’t hear me. He’s halfway across the street. I catch up. And then we’re at the entrance to the Palais-Royal.

  “Hey, it’s been real,” I tell him.

  “Have something to eat before you go. Please,” he says.

  “I’ve got to make tracks,” I say.

  “I fear for you. If the guards see you with blood on your face, they’ll want to know what happened. They’ll detain you. At least come inside and wipe the blood off.”

  Maybe he’s right. I really don’t want to get stopped by the police. “Okay,” I say, following him.

  The Palais courtyard is busy and raucous and filled with extras dressed as film characters. There are drunks and dandies and gamblers. We get to the Café Chartres and that’s hopping too. The studio must’ve hired it to be the canteen. As we sit down at a table, I look around at the actors. They have bad teeth. Scars. Zits. Greasy hair. Dirty nails. It all looks so real. Makeup’s got the Oscar nailed for sure. I look around for some sign of modernity—a cell phone, Gitanes, a wristwatch, a pen. I can’t even find the espresso machine. It’s remarkable. Every trace of the twenty-first century is gone.

  Amadé orders food. I tell him I’m not hungry but he insists. The waiter brings wine. I don’t want any. My head’s still woozy from the wine I drank at the beach. I push the glass over to him but he doesn’t drink it. Instead, he takes out a handkerchief, dips it in my glass, and rubs at my forehead with it.

  “Have you ever heard of water?” I ask him, wincing.

  He snorts. “You know as well as I do that you don’t want to rub your head or any other part of you with Paris water. The wound would be rotten within a day.”

  A man comes to our table. His clothes are covered with food stains. Amadé greets him warmly, calls him Gilles.

  “What happened to you?” he asks me.

  “A fall,” Amadé quickly says.

  I say hello to Gilles, who’s also in full-on actor mode, and take over cleaning my cut. There’s a lot of blood on the cloth. I must’ve hit my head pretty hard.

  Gilles gives Amadé a look. Amadé shrugs. “Too much to drink,” he mouths. They think I don’t see them.

  The two men talk. I don’t catch it all but I do hear the word trial and the name Fouquier-Tinville—again. I know that name. He was the chief prosecutor for the Tribunal during the Revolution. The movie must be about the French Revolution.

  They keep talking but I’m not really paying attention.

  Gilles says, “The bounty’s been raised again.”

  “Has it?” Amadé says. “When did that happen?”

  “Just this afternoon. Every man, woman, and child in Paris is trying to catch the Green Man now. After that huge fireworks display last night. Everyone’s dreaming of what they can buy with the money. The guards are very busy tonight. They’re questioning all who pass by.”

  I stop dabbing at my head. I’m paying attention now.

  “They wounded him, didn’t they?” Amadé says. “They shot him. That’s what the paper said this morning.”

  Gilles nods. “I’ll wager he crawled off somewhere to hide and died there. The guard will find him soon enough. By his smell.”

  The Green Man. That’s what they called Alex, but Alex lived over two centuries ago. There was a bounty on her, too. I start to shiver. I feel dizzy again. And scared. It’s too perfect, this movie set. This fake world. Something’s wrong.

  Amadé notices me shivering and tells Gilles to hurry with our food. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I just need something to eat. A few minutes later the food arrives. Roast chicken, he tells me, smirking, then he makes a joke about the lack of crows in Paris. I try some of it. It’s terrible. Nasty and stringy. Eating it doesn’t make me feel better at all, and watching Amadé eat with his hands doesn’t help, either.

  That’s it, I think. I’m out of here. I’m going to hit the ladies’, wash my forehead properly, and find a cab. I ask Amadé where the facilities are. He says I have to walk through the kitchen, so I do. The kitchen’s in character, too. Birds, the kind with feathers on them, are hanging from the ceiling. A bristly pig’s head lies on a table. Eels are squirming in a basket. I turn around in circles looking for a door with W.C. on it but can’t find one.

  “Out there!” a man snaps at me, pointing at an open door. I go outside but there’s nothing here—nothing but two men peeing on a pile of garbage.

  I start to panic. A thought, whispering in my mind ever since I fell in the catacombs, is shouting at me now. I run back to the table.

  “Look, I think I’m having a reaction,” I tell Amadé. “I think a drug I’m taking is mixing badly with some wine I drank. I need help. I need to find a taxi. I need to get home.”

  “Where are your rooms?” he asks me.

  I’m about to tell him when the dizziness hits me hard. I can barely stand up.

  “Come,” he says, wrapping his arm around my waist. “I’m taking you to my home.”

  I half walk, half stagger out of the Palais. On the street, we’re mobbed by children. They are so thin, and dressed in rags, and they seem to be everywhere. One of them runs up to us, begging for food. Amadé tells him he has none.

  “It is heartbreaking,” he says. “The orphanages of Paris are full now. These here must live on the streets. Their parents were guillotined, perhaps, or their fathers killed in the wars. Danton and Desmoulins, fathers both, tried to stop the worst of Robespierre’s excesses. They tried to appeal to him to show mercy. But Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon—none of them had children, only ideas, and there is little mercy in ideas. Poor things. They will likely be rounded up and sold off to factories or farms. To be worked to death. It is what happens.”

  “In the movie, right?” I say, desperately wanting him to agree with me.

  He frowns at me. “How is your head now?” he asks.

  “Still spinning.”

  We walk for some time. The route looks vaguely familiar, but I don’t see any shops I recognize. No Carrefours. No Paul bakeries.

  “Here we are,” he finally says.

  I look around. We’re on the Rue du Grand Chantier. I’ve never heard of it, but that’s what the street sign says.

  “You live here?” I ask him.

  “Yes,” he says. He’s busy trying to hold me up and open the outer door. He gets his key in the lock, turns it, and we’re in the courtyard.

  I know the Marais—my mother grew up here and we used to stroll the streets together whenever we visited Paris—but this house doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen here. It’s shabby and dark. Instead of the electric light above the door, there’s a lantern. I can smell horses. We go inside and walk up the stairs to the third-floor landing. His apartment is big and cold and smelly, with cracked walls and cobwebby beams in the ceiling.

  “Please, you must sit. You really are not well,” Amadé says.

  He leads me to a huge wooden table, pulls out a chair, and lights a candle. I sit down and close my eyes, trying, again, to make the dizziness stop.

  “Do you have any coffee?” I ask him.

  He says he does and that he just needs to heat it. I hear him clattering around. A few minutes pass. I grip the edges of the table, take a deep breath, and open my eyes.

  There’s a quill in front of me. A pot of ink. And an old newspaper, the National Gazette. I see the date—14 Prairial III. I try to work out the date
in my head and come up with the second of June, 1795. The day after Alex died. Six days before Louis-Charles did. It’s just a prop, I tell myself.

  Amadé puts a steaming bowl of coffee down in front of me. I thank him, sip it, and set the bowl down carefully. It looks like an antique. So does the table. There’s sheet music spread across it. It looks handwritten. My eyes follow the notes. It’s a rondo. A very old piece. There are two initials at the top of the first page—A.M. And suddenly I know where I’ve seen him—in a painting. A portrait. Hanging in an ancient mansion by the Bois de Boulogne.

  “You’re Malherbeau, aren’t you?” I ask, afraid of his answer.

  He smiles. “Yes, I am. Pardon me for not giving you my full name earlier. It’s a careful habit I have. You never know who is listening. I’m Malherbeau. Amadé Malherbeau.”

  “No,” I say, my voice shaking. “No, you aren’t. You can’t be. Because Amadé Malherbeau lived two hundred years ago.”

  And then I feel myself topple forward. Amadé shouts. He catches me, picks me up, and carries me across the room to a bed.

  What’s happening to me? I feel weak and helpless. It’s the Qwell. I’ve taken too much. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe someone spiked my wine. I feel Amadé unlacing my boots. Sliding them off my feet. I’m so scared. What if he’s the one who did it?

  I hear a clock strike the hour. The ceiling is swirling above me. Amadé is leaning over me. He’s talking to me, shouting at me, but he sounds so far away. His face is blurring, melting, fading.

  I’m so afraid. “Somebody help me. Please help me,” I whisper.

  Right before everything goes black.

  69

  I hear music. Someone’s playing a guitar. Working at a phrase. Over and over again. Not getting it right. It should be beautiful but it’s not. It’s annoying. I wonder who it is. G? Lili? I didn’t know they played.