by James Tipton
But most of the people I talked to in Blois were still surprised.
They thought the queen would be ransomed and sent to Austria. But the regicide had to be complete. I will not repeat here Hébert’s vicious and obscene accusations, which the queen would not lower herself to answer. She appealed to the mothers of France, and some of the market women in the courtroom even called for the trial to stop. But Hébert wanted her head as his own political trophy. When he himself mounted the scaffold six months later, his screams were far different than the quiet dignity with which Antoinette lightly stepped up onto it. Perhaps they both knew where they were soon bound.
The Noyades
That October we heard distressing news from the Vendée. The Royal and Catholic Army, about 40,000 strong, and with at least as many women and children in tow, had crossed the Loire, north, into Brittany. They were on their way to meet British troops and an émigré army from England that would land on the coast. Their new leader, the twenty-year-old Count Henri de La Rochejacquelin, inspired them. They had marched all the way to Granville by mid-November, in harsh weather, and found no trace of the British—some said the fleet was detained by contrary winds, others that the British had never intended to meet them. Then the huge, hungry army headed back south. Once out of the hedgerows and woods of their home territory, they lost the advantage and suffered loss after terrible loss, as Count Henri tried to attack cities. By Christmas, the remains of the 40,000 were starving in the marshy lands at the mouth of the Loire. The freezing river was now a barrier against their return home. By New Year’s we had heard of their final defeat near Nantes. The Republic was publicizing it as a great victory.
It was on the night of Epiphany, the sixth of January, that the marquis paid another visit to the cottage. He made his owl call, more as a greeting than anything else, and the next minute, as soon as I opened the door, he stepped out of the darkness with a bundle in his arms.
When he had seated himself at table and accepted some hot tea, he unfolded his package and showed us his gift of venison, ready for the cooking. “My Twelfth Night present,” he said.
“This is extremely kind of you, Monsieur le Marquis,” I said, “but we have nothing to give in return but our tea and what’s left of the Gâteau des Rois, the Three Kings Cake, that Claudette baked today. Who knows, perhaps you will be the one to get the elusive bean in his piece; we have not found it yet.”
“Thank you; I would be more than grateful. And the company of two civilized ladies is more than enough reward for bringing you this lean deer. I was hoping to bring you a wapiti—that’s a very big deer, in an Indian tongue.” I served him a piece of the cake, and he did find the bean.
“I think, with all your exploits, you could use the luck of the bean this year,” I said.
“It is on another matter that will require luck—but not mine—that I have come to talk to you.”
“Ah, no mere social visit from the busy marquis.”
“I’m afraid the news from the Vendée is taking up all my time. You’ve heard of the defeat at Savenay?”
“If one goes into town, one hears little else—‘Brigands defeated! Royal and Catholic Army destroyed!’”
“Well, they are not all destroyed, though their victors were ruthless, using their bayonets and the hoofs of their horses, but they could not stab or crush all of them—including, of course, many women and children—though they shot prisoners by the thousands in the next several days. Still, there are many left who now crowd the prisons in Nantes. That is what I have come to talk to you about.”
“Not to manage an escape from Nantes! That’s a hundred miles away, and one would need an army, more than an army—”
“Peace, Madame Williams; you do not have all the facts. The facts are not agreeable, and I will lay them before you plainly: Nantes was not made to keep thousands of prisoners, nor can the Republic afford to feed them, even though prisoners in Versailles were dining on rats. Word got out about the mass executions, and as that didn’t square with the professed morals of the government, they had to stop them. The representative-on-mission there, one Carrier—”
“Carrier! He’s the one who ordered the deaths of the people whom I helped escape from the Town Hall!”
“An enthusiast, this Carrier. He apparently has devised a new plan, a creative one, I’m sure he thinks, that would, in one stroke, empty the prisons, rid the Republic of deadly enemies—remember, many of these are still women and children—and do so in a manner that would not tarnish the principles of the Republic, for it would be done in secret.”
“How do you know about it?”
“We intercepted a messenger from Carrier to the Committee of Public Safety; his note referred to solving the problems of the prisons through cargoes. This was curious enough to lead us to make sure the next messenger, a week later, didn’t get through. Now Carrier was more specific. He had grown bold from his success. His plan uses nature itself as a means of solving his ‘problem.’ His letter read: ‘The miracle of the Loire has just swallowed up 360 counter-revolutionaries from Nantes. Others are going to follow them. Oh, what a revolutionary torrent is the Loire.’”
The marquis paused, but Claudette and I were silent. This was my beautiful river, which I had loved since I was a child. The Revolution had now invaded even its waters.
“There are a few witnesses,” the marquis continued, “even though it is done in the dead of night. It seems they bind the prisoners and take them out in old barges, which they then scuttle and let their ‘cargo’ sink.”
“What do you want me to do, Marquis? As I said, Nantes is a long way away.”
“I would not mention this to you, but if we are to do anything about this new terror—and nightly, I fear, more people are lost—we are in a desperate situation. Most of the Chouans of the West joined Count Henri’s expedition and are themselves dead or in the Nantes prisons; the ones who didn’t cross the Loire are hunted by the Revolutionary Army, and my men and I—have you heard of the Hell Columns, Madame?”
I shook my head. I hardly wanted to hear of more horrors tonight.
“In short, they are what they say they are. They march across the Vendée, killing all locals they come across as counter-revolutionaries—and this means largely widows, orphans, and the elderly, and even some republicans, but the Hell Columns have gone mad with killing and then burning villages and lands. Whatever one column doesn’t destroy, the next one will. I read one report. It ended, ‘Pity is not revolutionary.’
“So my Philanthropic Institute will try to save and hide villagers before a column comes, or, if we are late, between one column and the next. I cannot spare the time to go all the way to Nantes to rescue prisoners.”
“How can I? I cannot ride that far. I am only one person—”
“You are two, or more than two, with the formidable Jeanne Robin. And you would have a barge, fitted with hay and even some livestock, to make your journey downriver credible. That is, should you decide to do it at all. Your work for the Chouans of Blois has been fearless and constant. You do not need to do work outside your region for those who perhaps cannot be helped. But please think on it. I wish you good Day of the Kings and will await your answer tomorrow night, when I will pass by your gate.” The marquis rose, and I thought even he looked a little tired and worn. I walked him the few steps to the door, and he bowed deeply to us both.
“Thank you for the venison, Marquis. That was very thoughtful.”
“I wish I could do more. And I apologize for bringing you this news. It is an unnecessary burden. In retrospect, it was wrong of me to ask.”
“You were wrong, Marquis, when you said that Nantes, as far as it is, is outside of my region. I think wherever our river flows may be part of my region. An American, whom you fought for without knowing it, once told me, when I was a girl, to remember to be true to my own land. I’ve thought of that often lately. It is winter. I will need scores of blankets—all you can steal—and I suppose you have a crew
—”
“I’ll find a bargeman or two.”
“And, may I ask, how would one return upriver?”
“There is a group of gabares, sailing vessels, leaving Nantes in about a week. I can arrange passage for you and Jeanne Robin in the cabin of a barge.”
“And the prisoners? Once they are free?”
“If they can be ferried safely to the south bank, by the time you get there I can have Chouans who can emerge at night take them to safety. They are mainly local farmers who are willing to hide refugees, but not to ride a barge through Nantes and rescue the prisoners themselves. What happens to the prisoners is not your concern. Your task is to get the prisoners, bound and guarded, off a sinking barge in a freezing river, and onto your own healthy boat.”
“I see.”
“There are fortifications at the harbor at Nantes. You will have to float by them silently.”
“In any case, it is far better than riding between Hell Columns with your band.”
“If those are your only choices. You are a very odd and wonderful woman, Madame.”
“But you knew, once I heard about children being drowned, I really had no choice.”
“You are still rare, you and Jeanne Robin. Extreme times can also bring out honorable qualities.”
“And you?”
“If I weren’t fighting for a Philanthropic Institute, I’d probably be raiding vessels on the high seas.” And he kissed my hand and vanished into the cold night. I never learned, on the marquis’s unexpected visits, where he came from or where he went.
At dawn I was awakened by loud sounds like fireworks suddenly going off, and I realized they were volleys of muskets. I thought at first the civil war had come to Blois, then realized it was far away, and crushed, at least for now. No, I thought, as I sat bolt upright and stared at the closed shutters, these were executions of prisoners, now being held at the Château. The sound of the volleys echoed over the blue slate roofs of Blois all the way to my cottage, with its ripe pears on the boughs. These were prisoners I couldn’t save. There were probably women among them, taken upriver from Angers, which had full prisons now. No trials, no lawyers for the defense, no witnesses, just tribunals exercised by the representative-on-mission from Paris. “Pity is not revolutionary.” Jeanne Robin had mentioned to me something of the reports from Savenay, the highways piled high with corpses, in some places piled in pyramids. I counted twelve volleys before silence once again surged back over the town, wakening into another day of the Terror.
I was now riding with the current down the longest river in France, with the fragrance of hay and the earthy smell of cattle, and the cold winds blowing upriver from the Atlantic, the banks spotted with snow, and now, on my left, the stern château de Chaumont, where Queen Catherine de Médicis had exiled Diane de Poitiers, her husband’s favorite, after his early death. At least Diane still had the river as a view.
“Our river” was now taking on a new connotation for me. I did not know if it would ever be the same—La Rouge’s and my river, by which I had ridden in the summer by the luisettes, the trickles between the sandbanks, or in the rainy autumn, or snowmelt of spring, when its waters swirled high under the arches of the bridge; Gérard’s and my river, that we had watched, gray or blue, from Marguerite’s terrace and had made up songs about; and William’s and my river, by which we had walked and performed our make-believe and so serious wedding: the river that, like Monsieur Jefferson’s Shenandoah, ran through the heart of all that was dear to me. Now it was polluted near Nantes with the deaths of perhaps thousands. These drownings now had a name— noyades—and the Chouans had also reports of them at Saumur and Angers, and other towns. Citizen Carrier’s plan had been so successful, it was being copied.
But they were still performed at night, with no witnesses, as if the republicans were fearful that word of them would show the Revolutionary Tribunals and the Revolutionary Army for what they were.
The marquis’s feeling was that if just one noyade could be stopped, the Committee of Public Safety would fear that they were no longer secret and that public opinion, told constantly that the atrocities of the Terror were only conducted on a high moral plane, would be hard to manipulate in this case. The guillotine was one thing, ridding the Republic of dangerous counter-revolutionaries, one by one, in public view. Mass drownings of women and children in the dead of night was another. The Revolution would be finally hard-pressed to justify its actions. Perhaps the patriot Carrier had gone too far. But first the ubiquitous committees would have to know that people had found out about the noyades and were willing to do something about them: at least, two women on a barge full of cattle were going to try.
Jeanne and I slept in a cabin at the back of the barge and on a coal burner there cooked soup and porridge, which we also served to the two bargemen, who reminded us that they were just hired to man the boat: if there was any fighting, they would not participate; if we were captured, they would say we had forced them to ferry us downriver.
After all, we had weapons, and they didn’t. Jeanne had her cavalry sword and a pistol. I had my pistols and a stiletto.
It took five days to float downstream to Nantes, and in that time Jeanne Robin and I came to know each other better. She had joined the cavalry of the Royal and Catholic Army last June with her brother, father, and fiancé. Both her brother and fiancé were about to be drafted into the Revolutionary Army. The army had imprisoned their priest, whom they had known all their lives, and had taken their draft horses to pull their cannon, and before they could take their three best hunting horses and themselves, her father and older brother decided to ride against the army that would ride against them. They did not try to dissuade Jeanne from joining them. Her mother and younger brothers and sisters stayed behind at Loches—first protected by the successes of their local army, then having to flee. Jeanne had saved them all but her fifteen-year-old sister. Her father had been also killed, and when her brother and fiancé decided to move west with the army, Jeanne stayed behind.
She had no desire to traipse a hundred miles north to meet the British, and she couldn’t comprehend fighting outside of her region. She didn’t really care about la patrie, about the abstraction of a nation. She cared about her family, about the way of life that had been destroyed by outsiders, about the people of her village, and finally, about her horse. I liked her. She was pretty, selfless, and unbelievably brave.
She had seen horrors of battle that I did not want to imagine, and she spoke matter-of-factly about other horrors I would rather not have known about.
“You have not heard about what they call the ‘republican marriages’?” she asked me as we passed the mouth of the Cher, and I was thinking about a summer long ago, when my parents had brought us to a large fête at the château de Chenonceaux, along the Cher: a ball was going on in the large hall built on arches over the river, as Marguerite and I walked outside in the warm night, with two boys at our sides and a chaperone behind us, and on the other side of the hedge we heard the cries and laughter of the older girls and boys in the maze, and the music from the hall floated over the river, and the torches on the arches cast orange lines that quivered on the dark water. I thought, vaguely, that republican marriages were some type of wedding performed without a priest.
“I’m surprised you don’t know of them—they’ve been going on for a couple of months now, starting in this part of the river we ’re on now, west of Tours. They think it’s quite amusing. They strip a priest and a young royalist woman naked, tie them facing each other, and take them out in boats and lower the bodies into the Loire. You see, drowning prisoners in the Loire is not a new idea. I think Citizen Carrier came up with his plan after the popularity of the republican marriages.”
I had nothing to say. My river had changed utterly.
The next day it was hard to keep warm, and Jeanne and I stayed wrapped in our blankets, huddled over the small coal fire in the cabin.
“Have you heard of the ebony trade, Jeanne
?”
She shook her head. I could only see her black eyes. She held the gray blanket up over her nose. She had on a green woolen cap, and below that her black hair fell over her shoulders. She was a lot taller than I, and even sitting I had to look up when I spoke to her “Well, most people haven’t,” I said. “The ebony traders like it like that. It’s still going on. It’s very successful. People in Nantes, like my grandfather, became rich through the ebony trade. I visited him once in Nantes. He was about to die, and my father thought his father should meet his granddaughters. He and Papa had quarreled long ago over the ebony trade.”
Jeanne nodded. She pulled the cap down over her ears. “I can still hear you,” she said.
“He had a sugar cane plantation in Martinique. He was in the West Indies often and went there by way of Africa, where he picked up a black, or ebony, cargo. You understand? It’s all in the wording, like Citizen Carrier’s report about the noyades. If you call it ‘cargo,’ it’s all right. And in both cases the ‘cargo’ was human.”
Jeanne reached her hands out of the blanket to hold them over the coals. She was a farm girl who had become a soldier and who knew many horrible things. But that this business was conducted by people so close to her home was new to her. “Your grandfather traded slaves?” she said.
“And probably his father. Oh, they traded sugar too. But my father refused to go into the business. He was a disgrace to the family, the only son. He went to Paris to study medicine, and worked all his life. He could have been a gentleman of relative leisure. His name was respectable from his family’s wealth. And on my grandfather’s death, Papa still inherited most of the fortune. His friend once told me he thought Papa worked hard as a doctor as a type of penance for his family. I never knew about the ebony trade until this friend told me. I never knew why Papa worked when we had enough money. I think Maman always thought his working a little distasteful.”