by James Tipton
“Soon thousands of fédérés were at them, hand to hand, and had penetrated the palace—that’s when the mob charged in too. And that, said the count, is when a bayonet thrust entered his right shoulder. He said he had fallen to the ground, with others around him, when he saw limbs of the fallen being struck off by some eager victors with swords and hatchets. He crawled into the garden, then ran toward Louis XV Square. He shed his coat and waistcoat, even his shoes with silver buckles. He had already witnessed the mob stripping, even mutilating, the bodies of the Swiss and the aristocrats, and now the disheveled count could have passed, perhaps, as a wounded tradesman, part of the mob.
“He was losing a great deal of blood. He skirted the side of the square, where fédérés on horseback were running down any fleeing troops from the Tuileries, where he saw a pike festooned with an arm of a Swiss Guard, waving as in a parade. And in the attention fixed on that arm raised on high, and the cheers and shouts that went with it, the count got by the edge of the square, across the bridge that runs into it, and somewhere in the alleys of the Latin Quarter, as he dripped blood in the gutters, the idea came to him that he was nearing where he had left me, a week earlier.
“Now, I had stayed indoors at the first sound of shots. That is what one does in Paris if one is at all prudent. The shots have now lessened; I am thinking, whatever new revolution has happened is over for now, and I’ll find out about it later, when I hear someone slowly hauling themselves up my stairs and pounding on my door.”
I couldn’t believe that this was my brother telling me all this, and that it was the count, whom I had known most of my life, who had just been stabbed with a bayonet by another Frenchman and had shed his coat and shoes so as not to be caught and mutilated. It was like something out of Candide. It was unreal. Things like this happened in fiction or to people you didn’t know on faraway battlefields. Not to us.
I looked at Paul, and he seemed not to believe it either. He was leaning forward with a look of horror on his face, sometimes shaking his head.
“The count practically fell in, when I opened the door,” Etienne continued. “I closed and locked the door, took care of his wound then and there—my first live patient; I had only practiced on cadavers! I felt the count had to be evacuated because of the seriousness of his injuries—and who knows what else could happen to him, waiting to heal in Paris. I bid him rest, and as I now heard shots closer by, in the faubourg Saint-Germain, I had to go in that direction, to the marquis’s residence on rue de l’Université, where Benoît and the carriage were. In the street I lifted up a fallen, bloody pike myself and ran along, cheering, in order to fit in. I couldn’t have been more grim, on the inside. It is not wise to wear knee-breeches in most sections of Paris now, and in working man’s trousers I could appear as one of the sans-culottes, the breechless ones, as they call themselves. I stepped over bodies of the Swiss Guard, naked and missing limbs, in the gutters.”
Here Etienne stopped and took a long drink of brandy. This is my little brother, I thought, whom I used to protect. I wanted to run a poker through any sans-culottes who threatened him, as I had once used a poker to pin against a wall his thirteen-year-old friend, whom I had caught cheating Etienne at cards so long ago.
My brother put the glass back on the table. “I found Benoît at the house of the marquis,” he said. “He hitched up the carriage, and I directed him through narrow backstreets. Together we carried the count down the stairs and into the carriage, and the fighting was still going on as we left. I do not doubt that it went on the rest of the afternoon, until all the Swiss were dead and the palace had been ransacked.
“I gave Benoît directions through more side streets, past the church of Saint-Sulpice and the Luxembourg Gardens into the Val-de-Grâce quarter, and past the Observatory to the Porte d’Orléans. He drove fast and sure. Everyone was still too busy with the carnage along both banks of the river to worry about a carriage lumbering through streets barely wide enough for it to pass. It’s good we left when we did, though. I’m sure soon they were stopping all traffic leaving Paris, to make sure some stray Swiss Guard—or some old aristocrat—did not leave intact. The count revived near Orléans, where we stopped for water for him, soup for Benoît and me. Benoît deserves a lot of praise. He kept his sangfroid.”
“So did you,” said Paul. “Few men could have done as well. The count owes you his life. Your father would be proud of you. So are we all.”
Etienne stood up, and they embraced. “Now rest well in chez Vincent,” the older man said. “Let Paris stay in Paris.”
I embraced my brother. “I wish I had been there to help you,” I said. “Somehow, in some way—”
“My big sister. I could have used you, if only for company in the long voyage with a wounded man who told grisly stories and then passed out. Annette, it’s good to see you. It’s good just to be here.”
“Don’t go back,” I said. “Not just yet.”
“Not just yet,” he said.
The candlelight behind him cast his face in shadow. “I’m finally tired,” he said. “I can sleep.”
But I didn’t know if I could. I knew when I closed my eyes I would see the images he described again and imagine cries to go along with them. I would lie awake worrying about Etienne in Paris, worrying about us all.
Revenge Will Prosper
I wish this chapter I had read in a book and not lived through. You’ll hear different stories—justifications or attempts at reasons—for the first part of what happened; but as there was no reason for the fédérés to attack the Tuileries, as my brother said, just blind hatred, the only reason for the prison massacres was blind fear. The patriot army had had steady losses at the front. A for-tress had surrendered. Now the Austrians were on French soil. More and more people had been indiscriminately arrested—anyone whom anyone else thought was a counter-revolutionary. And the prisons were full, overcrowded. Someone had the thought, What if the Austrians arrive in Paris, and the prisoners get free and join them? Then Paris would truly be laid waste.
You can see, I am making the same attempt to reason that I indicated was a fallacy—for there was no reason. Someone got word, William told me later, that Jacobins who had been wrongfully arrested were to be released, and they were. That implied, said William, that the Jacobins were behind what happened. They knew the massacres were coming.
In any case, they— sans-culottes, men who considered themselves great patriots, I don’t know—quickly set up tribunals, as they called them, in halls in Paris prisons, and held sudden judgments on whether someone was such a threat to national security that he should be immediately killed, or whether he was a minor threat or—rare enough—a mistaken threat, and could be merely imprisoned longer or perhaps even let go. I heard one English writer whom William knew had been arrested as a royalist, but he was a revolutionary writer. They had arrested him because all Englishmen were thought to be royalists, since they had a king. Someone spoke up for this famous writer at the last minute, and his judges were instantly his friends—clapping him on the back, calling him “Citizen”—but it could just as easily have gone the other way. And most of the time it did.
I heard that people passing the prisons heard the cries, and kept on going. I heard they were told that dangerous counter-revolutionaries were being dealt with. Well, one thinks, that’s all right, it’s for the good of the nation. It only became a scandal later. And it was only a scandal because the Girondins blamed the Jacobins for the massacres. If the Girondins hadn’t made a case of it, perhaps no one would have heard much about it at all. Then of course the Jacobins blamed the Girondins for using the massacres politically. No one really knew who was to blame. I think it was fear, and the great license that was given and was to be given to anything that was done in the name of the security of la patrie.
William, informed by his friends in Paris, told me that as soon as the outcome of each swift trial was decided, doors were flung open, and the victim was thrown to a group of patriots, who
weren’t executioners—no black masked professional, no soldiers doing their duty, just common drapers, carpenters, butchers, carried away by an extreme sense of national duty combined with the excitement of spilling blood. Perhaps one was the butcher who had offered the King a bull’s heart in June. I don’t know. But they didn’t have an executioner’s axe or a soldier’s firing squad to do the deed. Like a firing squad, though, no one person was responsible. I think they didn’t have an officer, either, or any one person who gave the order. Their cue was only the opening of the door, the flinging of the enemy of the state into the small enclosed courtyard, or even the anteroom of the tribunal chamber—and the convict was dealt with efficiently by all, with whatever means they had on hand. A knife, a hatchet, a pike. Muskets were very rare—this was no military matter, but a citizens’ tribunal, a citizens’ cause, and a citizens’ execution.
Once these tribunals started, they spread rapidly through one prison and another. The prisoners didn’t know if they were to be called before the tribunals or not. Apparently the tribunal started with a list but didn’t always keep to it, or improvised upon it. Each killing justified the last and led to the next, for the great fear required that bloodshed call for more bloodshed. There wasn’t time to call witnesses or listen to attorneys. The citizens decided, and they acted with an absolute and infallible sense of justice, for everything was for the greater cause. If there were some mistakes, well, Paris was going to be invaded. The citizens were not to blame. Their intentions were right.
The September massacres, as they came to be called, spread to Orléans. No one knows what goes on behind prison walls, but, as I said, people heard. And some people spoke, who had been released, or who had witnessed the bizarre rites. After about a week, the Girondins finally put a stop to it by daily denouncing the massacres as Jacobin-inspired anarchy. The tribunals that were to come later would be conducted with a greater semblance of law and protocol, not by citizens in red caps—although the lawyers and politicians who were later to design what we would afterward call the Terror might just as well have been butchers or carpenters, with silk neckcloths instead of red woolen caps. I heard some three thousand were killed in the prison massacres in Paris alone—and disposed of with lime and a quick burial. They did not keep meticulous records.
The pear tree was brilliant gold now in the September sun. The leaves fell in the wind onto the gravel paths of Marguerite’s garden. It wasn’t a good time to be carrying a child, but anything that threatened her would have to threaten me first. I didn’t know how, but I would keep it from our door. But William—I couldn’t come between the world and him so easily. He courted the world and its dangers with his writing and his speaking up at his club. He believed in Plato’s Good more than anyone I ever knew, and I was especially worried for him now.
In that atmosphere of fear and even hysteria of the autumn of 1792, I met Monsieur Leforges once again. Marguerite and I were returning from the château de Beauregard, where we had been visiting the convalescing count. But now we were stuck in cart traffic on the bridge into Blois, with the river moving slowly below us, and Monsieur Leforges sat on horseback beside my window, peering down at me. I would have done anything for the carriage to move on, but with carts and carriages stopped before and behind us, we were immovable, next to a smiling man for whom there was no difference between charm and malice.
He had traded his black silk coat and breeches, his bamboo cane and powdered wig for blue-and-white-striped trousers, a red-and-white-striped waistcoat, and a blue coat with a tricolor cockade on it.
He doffed his black hat, which also had a cockade on it, and bowed.
“My dear Mademoiselle Vallon. I would have recognized you anywhere. Still the most beautiful bourgeoise one could imagine. Do you still prefer the decadent Austrian music? Do you still sing foolish Mozart duets? Have you heard news of the music master of Blois? It turns out he was a dangerous counter-revolutionary. His mother was German; he came from Metz, near the Prussian frontier. You can’t always tell. His name was French. He seemed a nice man. But there he was, plotting away with the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie in their salons. I hear even some of his students, some of the homes that invited him in, are now suspect. It’s a great service to our town and nation that he was imprisoned last month.”
“What do you mean, ‘our town’?” I said. I was drawn into his net, despite myself.
“Oh, I live here now. I am the new music master. I only go to the homes of patriots, where we learn French songs. Don’t you think that’s better?”
I peered out the window, toward the front of the carriage. The line of traffic was still unmoving.
“Oh, I’m afraid we ’ll be here awhile. There’s a cart overturned up ahead. Horses down, harnesses broken. You haven’t introduced me to the lovely lady at your side.”
“Monsieur Leforges, this is Marguerite Vincent, my sister,” I said coldly. She nodded but did not say anything.
“Ah, the wife of the proprietor of a vineyard. You see, I know the people of Blois already. In fact, Mademoiselle Vallon, I have even heard that you are often seen in the company of an Englishman, a frequent guest at chez Vincent.”
“Monsieur Leforges, do you ever tire of inquiring into other people’s business?”
“Ah, many things are a citizen’s business that were mere gossip before. Now—”
“Since when have your politics so radically changed? Why, just in January, at Orléans—”
“One must adopt the disguise of an aristocrat when one is in their company,” he said. “Just as they adopt a number of disguises in ours.
For instance, a poet. A poet, a scholar, is a very convenient disguise.
One can enter the most patriotic clubs, saying one is a scholar doing research on the new constitution. One could write an essay about the constitution, publish it in a traitorous Girondin newspaper, and be extolled as a patriot, when really one is an English royalist.”
I laughed. “If you’re referring to Monsieur William, he hates the monarchy in England. He’s no royalist—”
“People are not what they seem. Why would a foreigner be in France at this time, unless he were a spy?”
I felt my sister squeeze my hand, warning me to be quiet.
“Monsieur Leforges, you are ridiculous.”
“And he has friends who are now challenged in the Assembly as being secret monarchists. They are trying to preserve the monarchy when all of France is ready to throw it off.”
“The Girondins hold the Jacobins responsible for the prison massacres, and for that they are called traitors?”
“Annette,” my sister whispered behind me, “say no more.”
“You had best exercise your own prudence, Mademoiselle. Consorting with a foreign royalist, a Girondin supporter, a writer of monarchist articles—yes, he supported a constitution that had a place for a king; his later article clearly was an attack on Citizen Robespierre and puts your foreign friend under suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities.”
I felt a cold fury gripping me. “Monsieur Leforges, I am tired of listening to you. Go back to your martial music. Just go away.”
“Mademoiselle Vallon, you misunderstand me. It is not I who must go away. It is your friend. I have seen the order for his arrest. It is being drawn up now at the Committee of Surveillance, by the sub-committee that overseees the activities of foreigners. Do you forget how your family has wronged me?”
“Monsieur Leforges, you jest clumsily. You are not on any Committee of Surveillance.”
“Oh, but I am. How do you think that music master was denounced?
I knew the good man in Orléans. We were colleagues, after all. We shared all sorts of personal information. His mother was German—Metz, his hometown, even has a German-sounding name.”
He suddenly doffed his hat again. The traffic was breaking up.
“It’s a pity,” he said, “he has peculiar talents. But he should have stayed in England. He should have stayed away from
the woman who is the object of my revenge in this town. You know what Laclos says, Revenge will prosper sooner than love. Laclos is an officer in the patriot army, now, by the way. He knows on which side his bread is buttered.” Monsieur Leforges rode through the throng toward the end of the bridge. He wasn’t a very good rider.
Stream of Fire
Monsieur Leforges did not threaten idly. When I asked Paul at chez Vincent, he said, Yes, he had heard that the previous music master was arrested as a counter-revolutionary. He was either still in prison, or had been killed in the massacres in the prison in Orléans. “Monsieur William has to leave tonight,” he said. “He no longer has Captain Beaupuy to speak for him. You yourself said others at the Friends of the Constitution have lost their membership because they were Girondin sympathizers, and the club is now Jacobin and has even changed its name to the Patriot Club. These are not times to hesitate. I must ride to his lodgings tonight.”
“He won’t come,” I said. “He ’ll think he can protest his innocence and loyalty and talk his way out.”
“He ’ll come,” Paul said.
I’m not sure of all that Paul said to Monsieur William. He would have tried to avoid telling him who denounced me and why and just impress upon William the urgency of the situation. While I waited for them, I knew that William, though, would be leaving. I knew he would return as soon as possible. But what if that “as soon as possible” was months, or even years, from now? What if the rumors of England joining the Allies were true? What if England wouldn’t let him leave, or France wouldn’t let him return?
So Monsieur William, against his will, appeared at the door of chez Vincent in his battered tricorne, with nothing but a rucksack, the same one he had carried the frying pan and the bread in for my birthday dinner a few months ago. “I’ll be back soon,” he said to me, alone in my room, after a quick supper. “I have friends in Paris. I am not going all the way to England, as you suppose. I am going to Paris to sort this out, get new papers with the help of Brissot—”