The two clerks supped with gusto; only Madame Durand had no appetite. Yet questions were bandied back and forth in between mouthfuls. The war clerk asked his colleague, with a truly remarkable curiosity in these times of everyday tragedy, what went on in the Palais on days of judgment and what were the means of surveillance. The Palais registrar, delighted to have such an attentive audience, happily supplied answers, rabbiting on about the practices of the jailers, those of Fouquier-Tinville, and finally those of Sanson,1 the star performer in the tragedy staged on a daily basis in the place de la Révolution.
Then, addressing himself to his colleague and host, he asked him in turn about his ministry.
“Oh!” said Durand. “I’m not as informed as you are, being a person infinitely less important. I’m just the secretary of the appointed clerk of the place; I do the hard work for the chief clerk. As an obscure employee, I get the pain, the illustrious get the gain: that’s how it goes in all bureaucracies, even revolutionary ones. The earth and the sky may shift one day, but bureaucracies won’t.”
“Well then, I’ll lend you a hand, citizen,” said the Palais registrar, won over completely by his host’s good wine and especially by the beautiful eyes of the host’s wife.
“Oh, thank you!” cried the man to whom this gracious offer was made. “Any change of routine or location is a distraction for a poor employee, and I fear my work at the Conciergerie will end sooner rather than later. But as long as I can take Madame Durand with me every night, since she’d be bored on her own here …”
“I don’t see why not,” said the Palais registrar, delighted with the lovely distraction his colleague promised him.
“She can tell me which nuts to remove,” continued citizen Durand.
“And then, from time to time, if tonight’s supper wasn’t too terrible, you can come and have the same again.”
“Yes, but not too often,” said the Palais registrar fatuously, “for I must tell you there’d be hell to pay if I came home any later than usual to a certain little house in the rue du Petit-Musc.”
“Well then, we’ve got ourselves an excellent arrangement,” said Durand. “Wouldn’t you say, darling?”
Madame Durand, extremely pale and extremely sad always, looked up at her husband and answered:
“Let your will be done.”
Eleven o’clock struck. It was time to go. The Palais registrar got up and took his leave of his new friends, effusively thanking them for the dinner and expressing his pleasure at getting to know them. Citizen Durand led his guest to the door, then returned to the room.
“Go, Geneviève, go to bed.”
The young woman stood up without a word, picked up a lamp, and went into the room on the right. Durand, or rather Dixmer, watched her go, standing lost in thought for an instant with a black scowl on his face after her departure, then he took himself off to his room, which was on the opposite side.
42
THE TWO NOTES
From then on, the clerk from the War Ministry went to work assiduously every evening in the office of his colleague from the Palais. Madame Durand recorded their activity concerning removal of the nuts and bolts on registers prepared in advance, which Durand copied zealously.
Durand examined everything without appearing to notice anything. He had noted that every evening at nine o’clock a basket of provisions was brought by Richard or his wife and dropped at the door. When the registrar took leave of the gendarme with an “I’m off then, citizen,” the gendarme, either Gilbert or Duchesne, would come out, grab the basket, and take it to Marie Antoinette.
During the three consecutive nights Durand had remained tinkering later than usual, the basket also remained later in its place, since it was only on opening the door to say good-bye to the registrar that the gendarme would take hold of the provisions.
A quarter of an hour after introducing the new full basket, one of the two gendames would put the empty basket of the day before at the door, in the same place as the other one had been.
The evening of the fourth day—it was the beginning of October—after the usual session, when the Palais registrar had retired and when Durand, or rather Dixmer, had stayed behind with his wife, he let his quill drop and stooped to pick it up, looking around and listening as intently as if his life depended upon it. He then swiftly got to his feet and dashed to the door of the wicket, where he took up the napkin covering the basket and drove a tiny silver case into the soft bread loaf destined for the royal prisoner.
Then, pale and trembling from the emotion that even a man with the most powerful nervous system is rocked by when he has just accomplished some supreme act long prepared and strongly longed for, he went back to his place with one hand on his forehead, the other on his heart.
Geneviève watched him all the while, but without saying a word. Ever since he had taken her from Maurice’s place, she always waited for him to speak first. But this time it was she who broke the silence.
“Is it for tonight?” she asked.
“No, tomorrow night,” Dixmer answered crisply.
He looked and listened once more, closed the books, and knocked on the gendarme’s door.
“Huh?” said Gilbert.
“Citizen,” he said, “I’m off.”
“All right,” called the gendarme from the back of the cell. “Good night.”
“Good night, citizen Gilbert.”
Durand heard the grinding of the keys in the locks, realized the gendarme was about to open the door, and took off. In the corridor that led from the apartment of old man Richard to the courtyard, he bumped into a clerk coiffed with a fur cap and brandishing a heavy bunch of keys. Fear seized Dixmer; this man, brutal like all men of his station, was about to say something to him, was peering at him, was perhaps about to recognize him. He shoved his hat down, while Geneviève pulled the trimmings of her black mantle over her eyes.
Dixmer was wrong.
“Sorry!” was all the clerk said, even though he was the one that had been knocked into.
Dixmer gave a start at the sound of the man’s voice, which was soft and polite. But the clerk was no doubt in a hurry and he slipped into the corridor, opened the door to old man Richard’s, and disappeared. Dixmer continued on his way, dragging Geneviève behind him.
“That’s odd,” he said when they were outside with the door firmly shut behind them and the fresh air had cooled his burning brow. “Oh, yes! Very odd!” muttered Geneviève.
In the days when they had been close, husband and wife would have communicated the source of their amazement to each other. But Dixmer shut his thoughts away in his mind, battling with them as he would some hallucination, while Geneviève simply threw a backward glance over the somber Palais when they had turned into the pont-au-Change. As she looked back, something like the phantom of a lost friend materialized, stirring up a whole host of memories both bitter and sweet at once.
They reached the place de Grève without having uttered a single word.
During that time, the gendarme Gilbert had stepped out and taken the basket of provisions destined for the Queen. It contained fruit, a cold chicken, a bottle of white wine, a carafe of water, and half of a two-pound loaf of bread.
Gilbert removed the napkin and recognized the normal arrangement of things packed in the basket by citizeness Richard. Then he shifted the screen and spoke loudly to the Queen.
“Citizeness, here is your supper.”
Marie Antoinette broke the bread, but scarcely had her fingers made an impression in it than she felt the cold contact of silver and understood that the bread enclosed something out of the ordinary. She looked around, but the gendarme had already withdrawn. For a moment the Queen didn’t move, measuring as she was Gilbert’s gradual retreat. When she was sure he had gone to sit down next to his comrade, she pulled the case out of the bread.
The case contained a note. She unfolded it and read the following words:
Madame, be ready tomorrow at the same time as you re
ceive this note, for tomorrow at this time a woman will be introduced into Your Majesty’s prison cell. This woman will take your clothes and give you hers; then you will walk out of the Conciergerie on the arm of one of your most devoted servants.
Do not worry about the commotion that will occur in the neighboring room, do not stop at the cries or groans; concentrate only on quickly putting on the dress and mantle of the woman who is to take Your Majesty’s place.
“What devotion!” murmured the Queen. “Thank you, Lord! So I am not, as they claim I am, an object of execration for everyone.”
She reread the note. The second paragraph suddenly hit her.
“ ‘Do not stop at the cries or groans,’ ” she murmured. “Oh! That means they’ll strike my two guardians, poor fellows, who’ve shown me so much pity. Oh, never! Never!”
She tore off the bottom half of the note, which was on white paper, and as she had no pencil or quill with which to reply to this unknown friend who so concerned himself with her, she took the brooch from her fichu and pricked the paper to form the letters that composed the following words:
I cannot and should not accept the sacrifice of anyone’s life in exchange for mine.
M. A.
Then she slipped the note back into the case and drove the case into the untouched part of the broken loaf of bread.
This operation had only just been completed when the clock struck ten. The Queen was holding the piece of bread in her hand and sadly counting the notes ringing out the hours as they vibrated slowly and distinctly, when she heard a jarring noise such as a diamond would make scratching glass at one of the windows overlooking what was known as the Women’s Courtyard. This noise was followed by a faint shock at the windowpane, a shock repeated several times and covered deliberately by a man’s cough. Then a small piece of rolled-up paper appeared at a corner of the window, slid slowly in, and fell to the foot of the wall. The Queen heard the sound of keys jangling and footsteps ringing on the cobblestones as they moved away.
She realized that a hole had just been made in a corner of the window and that the man moving away had slid a piece of paper through this hole. The piece of paper was, no doubt, a note. This note lay on the ground. The Queen looked longingly at it, all the while listening to hear if one of the guards was approaching. But she could hear them jabbering away together, as was their wont—softly, through a kind of tacit agreement not to disturb her. So she got up as quietly as she could and, holding her breath, retrieved the note.
A thin hard object slid from it as though it were a sheath and rang out with a metallic sound as it fell to the brick floor. This object was a file of incredible fineness, a jewel more than a tool, one of those steel implements with which the feeblest and clumsiest hand can cut through the thickest iron bar in a quarter of an hour.
She read the note:
Madame, tomorrow night at half past nine a man will come and chat with the gendarmes who guard you through the window on the Women’s Courtyard. While they are so engaged, Your Majesty will saw through the third bar of her window, cutting diagonally from left to right.… A quarter of an hour should suffice Your Majesty; then get ready to go through the window.… This note comes from one of your most devoted and faithful subjects, who has dedicated his life to the service of Your Majesty and would be happy to sacrifice it for her.
“Oh!” murmured the Queen. “Is this a trap? But, no, I think I recognize the writing. It is the same as at the Temple; it is the writing of the Knight of Maison-Rouge. Well, well! Perhaps God wants me to escape after all.”
With that the Queen fell on her knees and took refuge in prayer, the prisoner’s supreme balm.
43
DIXMER’S PREPARATIONS
The next day finally dawned, preceded by a night of insomnia; but the dawn was alarming, appearing as apocalyptic red streaks that could only be described, without exaggeration, as the color of blood. Every day in those days and in that particular year, the most beautiful sun had livid spots.
The Queen hardly slept a wink and what sleep she did get was not restful; barely had she closed her eyes than it seemed to her she could see blood and hear screaming. She had actually fallen asleep with the file in her hand.
She spent part of the day in prayer. The guardians were so used to seeing her praying that they took no notice of the increase in pious devotion.
Now and again the prisoner drew from her bosom the file that had been sent to her by one of her saviors; she would compare the delicacy of the implement with the strength of the bars. Luckily, the bars were sealed into the wall only at one end, that is, at the bottom. The top fitted into a crossbar. With the bottom part sawed through, one had only to yank the bar for it to come away.
But it wasn’t the physical difficulties that froze the Queen’s blood in her veins; she knew perfectly well that the thing was possible, and it was this very possibility that turned hope into a bloody flame that dazzled her.
But she realized that to reach her her friends would have to kill the men who guarded her, and she would not have consented to their deaths at any cost. Those men were the only ones to have shown her some pity for a long, long while.
On the other hand, beyond those bars she was instructed to saw, on the other side of the bodies of those two men who would bite the dust trying to prevent her saviors from reaching her, were life, liberty, and perhaps vengeance, three things so sweet, especially for a woman, that she asked God to forgive her for desiring them so passionately.
Furthermore, she believed she saw no sign that the guardians were agitated by any suspicion; they didn’t even seem to be aware of the trap they hoped to catch the prisoner in, supposing the plot was a trap. These simple men would have given themselves away to eyes as practiced as those of a woman used to sniffing out evil, having suffered so much of it.
And so the Queen almost entirely gave up thinking about the twin openings that had been presented to her like a trap. But the more the humiliation of being caught in a trap faded, the more she became apprehensive about seeing blood shed for her sake.
“Strange fate, sublime spectacle!” she muttered. “Two plots come together to save a poor queen, or rather a poor woman prisoner who has done nothing to lure or encourage the plotters, and they are going to break at the exact same time! But who knows? Perhaps they are one and the same plot. Perhaps it’s like drilling two tunnels that are meant to meet up at the same point.
“I would thus be saved—it is up to me!
“But a poor woman sacrificed in my place!
“And two men killed so the woman can get to me!
“God and the future would not forgive me.
“I can’t! I can’t!…”
Yet her mind kept being visited and revisited by those great notions having to do with the devotion of servants for their masters, along with the antique tradition of the rights of masters over the lives of their servants; phantoms almost effaced of a dying royalty.
“Anne of Austria1 would have said yes,” she told herself. “Anne of Austria would have placed the grand principle of the salvation of royalty above all else. Anne of Austria was of the same blood as I am and almost in the same situation as I am in. What madness to have come to pursue the royalty of Anne of Austria in France! And anyway, it wasn’t I who came! Two kings2 said: ‘It is important that two royal children who have never seen each other, who do not love each other, who perhaps will never love each other, be married at the same altar, and die on the same scaffold.’ ”
“And then again, won’t my death entail that of the poor child who, in the eyes of my few remaining friends, is still King of France?
“And when my son is dead as my husband is dead, won’t their two shades smile with pity to see me stain the throne of Saint Louis with my blood to spare a few drops of common blood from spilling?”
The Queen grew increasingly fretful, her doubts increasingly feverish as the day wore on, until finally, full of the horror her fears engendered, she made it to the even
ing. Several times she had examined her two guardians; never had they looked more tranquil; and never had the small attentions of these coarse but good men struck her more forcefully.
When darkness came to the prison cell, when the marching feet of the rounds could be heard, when the sound of arms and the howling of dogs gave the echo throughout the somber vaults new life, when, finally, the whole prison showed itself fearful and without hope, Marie Antoinette stood appalled, overcome by an inherently feminine weakness.
“Oh! I will flee,” she said. “Yes, yes, I will flee. When they come, when they start to talk, I’ll saw the bar and I will await what God and my liberators command of me. I owe myself to my children; they will not kill them, or if they kill them and I am free, oh! Well then, at least …”
She did not finish, her eyes closed, her voice was bitten off. It was a frightful dream, the dream of this poor Queen in a room sealed with locks and bolts and iron bars. But soon, in her dream, bars and bolts fell away; she saw herself in the middle of a great army, somber and pitiless; she ordered the flames to burn, the blades to shoot out of their sheaths; she took her revenge on a people who were not, in the end, her own.
Meanwhile, Gilbert and Duchesne chatted quietly as they prepared their evening meal.
Meanwhile, too, Dixmer and Geneviève entered the Conciergerie and as usual set themselves up in the office. After an hour, also as usual, the registrar of the Palais completed his work and left them to it. As soon as the door had shut on his colleague, Dixmer rushed to the empty basket placed at the Queen’s door, waiting to be exchanged for that evening’s basket.
He seized the bit of bread left over, broke it and found the case with the Queen’s message hidden in it. As he read what she had pricked, the color drained away from his face. Geneviève watched as he tore the paper into tiny pieces, which he tossed into the fiery mouth of the furnace.
The Knight of Maison-Rouge Page 36