The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  As he came up to the Tuileries, he was suddenly overrun by another crowd helter-skeltering down across the rue de Rivoli from the place Vendôme. There were thousands of them shouting their lungs off. And now behind them came the clanging of bells, not from a single belfry but from half a dozen churches or more. And though the crowd were so noisy, the queer thing was that three-quarters of them were wearing black coats and hats, and were waving black banners. With the deafening clamour of the bells the whole procession was like some huge funeral cortège that had gone desperately wrong. Well, Wm thought, perhaps that was what it was, the funeral of the old regime.

  Then he saw something that froze his blood. The ringleaders of the mob were carrying human heads stuck on long poles. The dead heads wobbled and juddered above the heads of the living, a terrible earnest of the bloodshed that might be to come.

  Horrified yet fascinated, Wm ran to get a closer view of these grisly relics. Closer up, one of the heads bore a frightening resemblance to the flabby features of Monsieur Necker. It was only a couple of days since the King had dismissed him. What a hurtling fall from First Minister of France to a bloodstained head on a pole. And there, surely the other head could not be, yes it was, the dissipated Duke of Orléans. But how strange that these two should be the first victims, for they surely should be the darlings of the mob, not the most urgent targets of its anger.

  Then, as the mob tumbled past him through the gates into the Tuileries, he saw that the heads were only waxworks. They must have been looted from Curtius’s museum down the street in the Palais-Royal. These greasy busts were borne aloft as emblems of the people’s cause, not as sacrifices to it.

  He gaped at this curious spectacle, then shrugged his shoulders and navigated his way past the tail of the mob and on down the street. It was not his quarrel after all and he had other business, to him the most pressing business in the world.

  It was past five o’clock in the afternoon as he crossed the river by the Pont-Royal. Looking back diagonally from the bridge as he stopped to buy some flowers for her, he could see the dark line of the cavalry at the end of the gardens and the mob surging round it. Even from this distance the noise was hellish and the bells now seemed to be ringing right across Paris. Then he saw the line of cavalry begin to move forward in an irregular wavering motion, like the shuffling of a giant caterpillar. He saw the puffs of smoke first. The noise of the shooting and the cries came to him an instant later. The fragrance of the roses in his arms was clouded by the tang of gunpowder.

  It was quiet in the rue de Seine. As he went up the stairs by himself – he had assured the footman he knew the way – the silence seemed stifling. He could not help listening to his own steps, first creaking on the wooden floor, then muffled by the carpet, as though the sound had some ominous meaning to it.

  She was sitting in the library in the same place as when they had said goodbye almost a year before. She stood up in that quick way of hers, looked at him for a moment, not long, then threw her arms round his neck, crushing the roses between them so that his nostrils were filled with their fragrance and he could feel the thorns through his light summer coat.

  ‘It is so wonderful to see you, Weellyarm,’ she exclaimed, resurrecting the mocking way she had said his name the first time they met.

  ‘And I suppose I shall have to call you Rosalie though you know I don’t care for it.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said, burying her dark head in the roses. ‘Oh, these are such terrible times, I do not know what to think any more. My husband is at Versailles. I hope he is all right; the people are so inflamed though I cannot say I blame them, the winter has been so hard.’

  ‘If it is any comfort, I think the scene of the action has shifted. I heard, well, I saw gunfire in the Tuileries as I came here.’

  ‘How awful it all is, how fragile our hopes look now. It is so stupid to make plans when we cannot know what is going to happen from one moment to the next. Sometimes I am confident that our dreams will be realised in the end, though perhaps after terrible things have happened. Then I am simply fearful, and dread the slightest thing and cannot believe that any of us will ever be safe again.’

  As she was speaking, the happiness that had flooded over her when he came into the room seemed to evaporate and he saw how tired and anxious she was.

  ‘My grandmother is so frail now. I dare not leave her alone in the country for too long, yet someone must be here to see to this house and my husband is so utterly consumed. I do not think he has slept more than a couple of hours together since the States first met.’

  And he saw that she too was consumed by her anxieties for the welfare of those she loved and for the survival of her whole world, and he wondered how much place there would be for him in it.

  ‘Oh, but I have your friendship’ (his face was easy enough to read), ‘do not think that I do not value that and I am so sorry for the cruel misunderstanding, that was all my fault. I have behaved so childishly and I have no right to expect your forgiveness. But when you wrote back to me from Naples, it was the happiest day of my life.’

  Well, this was the moment, there would not come a better one. He moved a step forward – how quiet the room was, even in that briefest instant he was conscious of his footfall – and he put his arms round her and kissed her with everything he had, but she twisted away.

  ‘No, not now, you must see, I cannot, not now.’

  ‘But surely, I thought – no, well, I suppose I had no right to anything.’

  ‘Oh, you do, of course you do. But I cannot.’

  He had meant to be gentle, was not so puffed up as to think that her resistance was sure to melt in the delirium of their meeting. He knew after all – how painfully he had won that knowledge – how much in herself she would have to put aside if she was to give way to him, what a cat’s cradle of loyalty and affection she would have to disentangle herself from. He had even dared to imagine himself comforting her if she should feel pangs of guilt afterwards. But every inch of that pale distraught little figure told him now that there was to be no afterwards. All the hopes that he had been hugging during that breakneck ride to Paris were callow illusions. He was no nearer his ambition than he had been a year ago; further back, in fact, because he could see now that this was as far as she would ever go. Friendship she had said and friendship was what she meant, no less but certainly no more. He had been a fool from the very first moment he met her and misread her bright and charming way as directed at him especially and so had begun to think that she felt or might come to feel for him something she had never felt and would never feel for anyone else.

  And so he lost it, that imperturbable coolness that he schooled himself so hard to maintain. It had never come naturally to him. His mother thought there had once been a touch of carrot about his sandy hair and at the age of ten or eleven he was easily provoked into wild rages. His Skipwith cousins would stir him up, dancing round him chorusing ‘Short temper, Short temper’. These days his temper was to be seen in nothing worse than a fretful impatience when he was kept waiting or a servant made an annoying mistake.

  But now he raged as he had not raged since he was half his age. It was as if the depth of his frustrations had called up from some forgotten zone of his being the old volcanic force. No accusation was too cruel, no language too vile. She had abused and exploited his feelings, treated him like a plaything, a dribbling lapdog. He should have expected it, of course, he should have known better. Beneath her absurd intellectual pretensions she had all the old stupid arrogance of her class. She talked of friendship, she had no more idea of friendship than a rabbit. As for love, her insipid twitterings were meaningless chaff from an empty heart. How could he have wasted all these years listening to her idle nonsense? She was a futile, spoilt, trivial character, what they called back home a cockchafer (he broke into English for this choice noun), but of course she would not know what such a word meant, even in French, because she was so well-bred, so refined, too damned refined to underst
and that other people, even people not of her own sort, common people, still had feelings and that their feelings could be hurt, as if she cared. And so on, until he ran out of breath.

  She had collapsed sobbing in a heap on the sofa, incapable of uttering a word. He had no more to say and hurried out of the room, if anything boiling even hotter because he could hear himself saying all those shameful things and he was angrier still that she had made him say them.

  The anger did not ease off as he strode along the river. He called in at a café, a gloomy deserted place by the bridge, and threw back a couple of brandies.

  ‘I wouldn’t cross the river if I were you,’ the waiter said. ‘There’s fifty killed already by the Germans.’

  ‘Frankly, I could not care less,’ Wm said, ordering another brandy and gulping it down as he picked up his hat.

  After he had crossed the Seine, he tried to skirt the trouble by keeping to the bank, past the scene of Mr Jefferson’s mishap and along under the trees towards the next bridge. Even so, the shouting of the crowd came to him on the warm evening breeze, incoherent roars and wailings that rose and fell and rose again. The bells had stopped but there were other noises now, bangs and strange knocking tumbling sounds as though a series of walls were falling. As he came to the bridge he met a straggle of rioters running to cross the river with wild looks on their faces, of fear or exultation or both. Some had clothes ripped or smeared with dirt or blood, a few were carrying the tatters of the black banners now torn away from their poles, one or two still clutching their black hats, battered now and dusty and broken. As he threaded his way through them, he suffered an elbow across his windpipe and kicks and scuffs from the frantic fleeing rabble. A big dark fellow gave him a deliberate hack across his shins and Wm retaliated with a full-blooded kick at his lurching form.

  This relieved his feelings a fraction and he pressed on, taking a loop to avoid the mob in the Champs-Elysées until the last turning before the rue de Berri. But in his distracted state he went on too far out to the west and found himself slap up against the great serpentine barrier of the farmers’ wall, that monstrous invention of the bloodsuckers.

  Here he found the explanation of the strange tumbling noises. For there were dozens of men hacking away at the wall with any tool they could lay their hands on, picks, spades, shovels, sticks, stones. One little old man was even belabouring the masonry with the flat of a rusty sword. As the more effective demolishers dislodged the stones, gangs of women, by now like the men covered in dust and dirt, were piling them up to serve as ammunition. Already there was a huge hole gaping in the enceinte between the Chaillot and the Longchamp gates (he had his bearings now), and little boys were jumping through the hole and sliding down the chute of debris on the far side.

  It was a superb spectacle of chaos and Wm’s rage responded to it and the honourable secretary to the American ministry picked up a couple of stones and chucked them with delirious abandon at the egregious monument to greed and oppression. The stones bounced back without inflicting any visible damage, but a stringy woman with a mottled face, who was standing, almost naked to the waist, by a wine barrel under the tree cheered him on and offered him a tin cup of harsh red wine, which he swallowed with a courtly bow.

  ‘No more bowing,’ she said, ‘but I’ll forgive you this time. I like your anger.’ And she passed him another cupful as a reward.

  He rushed on along the wall towards the Etoile gate, followed the whole way by the noise of the hammering as though he were being pursued by a flock of angry woodpeckers. The dust that fell on his clothes only added to his manic mood. It seemed like a kind of baptism.

  Finally he reached the Champs-Elysées and cut across the swirling throng. It was growing dark now and the crowd was noisier, rougher, even less predictable. He saw to his relief that there were a couple of guards posted at the gates of the Hôtel de Langeac and through the railings he could see old Vendôme peering out anxiously.

  ‘Thank heavens, monsieur, we had no idea where you had got to. They have already broken through the garden and stolen four of master’s best candlesticks. This lot would skewer your guts for a sou.’

  Inside it was cool and the noise of the crowd died away.

  ‘Here, drink this, monsieur.’ Vendôme had the brandy bottle ready and handed him a bumper ration, not out of a tin cup, of course, but from one of the brandy glasses Mr Jefferson had ordered from Bohemia and was pleased with, though he considered the stems too long. Wm drained the glass and ran up the stairs two at a time, thinking only of a hot bath and fresh clothes. But when he reached his little back bedroom overlooking the rue de Berri he realised how tired he was, lay down on his bed and, without intending it, went straight off into a doze.

  He woke with a jump. He had no idea whether it was the middle of the night or just before dawn or even whether he was really awake at all and not still caught up in a violent disordered dream full of cries of pain and people running. Then suddenly the running feet had gone and he seemed to be in the middle of a quite different dream. There was a girl standing by his bed in a long white dress and she was beckoning to him, or perhaps beseeching him. He could not make out her face and her voice was too low for him to understand what she was saying, but she did appear to be appealing to him in some way.

  ‘Sir, sir, it’s me, Sally.’

  ‘Who? Oh, Sally. What are you doing out of bed at … what time is it?’

  ‘Mr Short, I’m so frightened. Patsy and Polly are asleep and I don’t like to wake Mr Jefferson. But there’s such a racket and a hollering outside and Mr Vendôme says they are pulling the wall down and they’ll come and get us and cut our throats, I’m sure they will.’

  Her voice was trembling and he put out his hand to her and he felt her body trembling too under the thin white nightshirt.

  ‘I don’t want the wall to come down, it was keeping us safe,’ she moaned, and even in his half-drunk stupor William reflected that Sally must be the only person in Paris who actually liked the wall.

  ‘Sally, it’s all right, no harm will come to us here.’ He put his arm round her and she curled up beside him on the bed as if this were the most natural place in the world to be. The white nightdress was all rucked up now and his hand found the bare curve of her hip. He could feel her heart beating against his ribs, as quick as a trapped bird’s. It was she, or so he said to himself later, whose lips went towards his, as though seeking comfort from his mouth. But the first violent movement was his. He pulled the thin white material away from her body and felt down, and all the anger of the day came back with the desire of the night and there was no thought of her, only a cruel impatience as he tore open the dusty flap of his breeches and went at her as hard as brass. When she cried out the first time, he thought it was from surprise but the second time there was no mistaking her pain and he pulled out and she slipped away from under his tense arched body. She fled across the floor out to the little antechamber, rapid and silent like a white moth. He lay there still fuddled with sleep and drink, not too drowsy to feel the first flush of shame but not too ashamed to forget how beautiful she was in the half-light of the curtain chink.

  The next morning she had already gone from the little vestiaire. She must be over the other side of the building with Patsy and Polly. Mr Jefferson had given orders that the girls were not to venture out that day, but TJ himself could not wait to see more of the action. All day long he ranged the streets, as far down as the Marais and up to see the troops encamped on the Buttes de Montmartre, clocking up record mileages on the pedometer. Sullen workmen piling stones to throw at the German hussars would look up and see the tall American with his shambling gait coming down the street with his curious watery blue eyes and his notebook. Back at the Hôtel de Langeac William was thankful to be deluged with panic-stricken requests for visas, imperative appeals for help from stranded Americans who just had to be on the next Havre boat, and letters and pamphlets from all the reformers of the Faubourg, the La Rochefoucaulds and the Lafayette
s and a dozen hostesses and salonnières, all desperately seeking advice, encouragement, comfort and even cash from ‘les Américains’ who knew all about this business of revolution if ever anyone did.

  All day the press of business distracted him from what had happened or not quite happened the night before. In the brief moment that it flicked through his mind, just as he was tending to the complicated needs of Mrs Van Fleet’s nephew who had exhausted his letter of credit, he could almost imagine that it had not happened at all, that the whole thing had been brewed up in his fuddled dreams. When he went to bed that night, as tuckered out as an Alabama mule, he went past the little hooped doorway into the vestiaire without a second glance, after the first glance had told him that the door was shut.

  At noon the next day news came that thirty thousand muskets had been looted from the Invalides. All they needed now was the powder and shot, and there was only one place for that. The garrison commander, Besenval, who wasn’t quite as clever as he thought he was, had had all the city’s powder moved down from the Arsenal to the Bastille. That sounded like a wise precaution, except that it had the effect of concentrating all minds on a single fortress, which was now both the grim embodiment of royal oppression and the biggest magazine in France.

  ‘The girls must stay indoors again, William, and I fear I must ask you to continue as their jailer. I dare say you have enough business to attend to here in any case.’

  ‘And you, sir?’

  ‘I am bidden to dine at Mr de Corny’s. He is leading a deputation of the volunteers to the Bastille. He hopes for a truce from the governor, though he doubts whether the crowd will be satisfied with a peaceful resolution of the matter.’