The Chateau on the Lake

by Charlotte Betts

  The news that greeted us on our arrival in France, that King Louis has been charged with treason and sentenced to death in a few days’ time, has alarmed us all but we dare not discuss it in front of our fellow passengers, several of whom wear the red, white and blue cockade of the revolutionaries.

  In a whispered aside as we waited to board the coach, Mr d’Aubery said that any hint of concern for the king might cause our new travelling companions to condemn us as well.

  ‘You must call me Monsieur d’Aubery, and if you must speak at all make sure it is only in French. And do not let your guard down,’ he instructed, ‘even for a moment.’

  I’ve had plenty of time whilst travelling to mull over my misgivings about this journey and my thoughts on the Revolution. Whilst I still believe that France has no room for a simpering, extravagant queen and a spoilt king utterly out of step with his people, it has shocked me to the core that they are to be executed and not merely exiled. It appears that Monsieur d’Aubery is right and I lack the necessary knowledge, at present, to make proper judgements.

  Monsieur d’Aubery, looking annoyingly healthy and well groomed this morning, pulls down the window of the coach and peers outside.

  Tall houses line the mean streets and a gang of ragged street children race past, banging their fists on the sides of the diligence, shouting demands for sous. The coachman swears and cracks his whip, scattering the screaming urchins.

  Sophie, her eyes fever-bright, presses her fingers to her mouth, her face so pale it’s almost green. ‘Please, the smell…’

  Monsieur d’Aubery closes the window and the elderly woman sitting opposite hastily draws back her skirts as Sophie is wracked by another coughing fit that makes her retch into her handkerchief.

  I sneeze violently into mine.

  ‘Mademoiselle Moreau, I cannot in all conscience leave you both in your current state of health to seek accommodation once we arrive in Paris,’ says Monsieur d’Aubery.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll manage.’ But I dread the thought of tramping the streets to find lodgings.

  ‘You shall come and stay with me until you are both well,’ he says.

  His tone might be dictatorial but I’m more than happy to accept his invitation, at least until we have recovered from our chills.

  A stout gentleman eating raw onions and pungent goat’s cheese is pressed against me and I peer around him to look out of the window. We travel slowly, our coach’s progress impeded by hawkers of all kinds shouting their wares, selling everything from lottery tickets and kindling wood to rabbit skins. An oyster seller with a large basket on her back wrenches open the diligence door and offers us a dripping oyster shell. One of the young men casually kicks her off the step and slams the door again.

  Suddenly we grind to a halt as a noisy group of men in loose trousers swagger down the narrow street, their hoarse cries reaching us even through the closed windows.

  ‘Give us bread! Give us candles! Give us soap! Give us sugar!’ they chant, over and over again.

  The diligence rocks as they surge past us and two of the male passengers wearing the cockade rise to their feet and hang out of the windows, waving their fists in the air and shouting their support.

  The elderly woman sniffs. ‘The grocers who hoard supplies to inflate prices should be hung up by their ears above their own doorways.’

  Once the protesters have passed, the two young men plump down in their seats again, eyes bright with excitement.

  The diligence moves off and after a while the crowded, refuse-strewn thoroughfares give way to wide streets of shops and fine houses. Before long we draw to a halt.

  We alight, stiff from hours of travelling, and the coachman throws our baggage down from the roof.

  ‘It’s not far,’ says Monsieur d’Aubery, picking up Sophie’s bag out of the mud. He sets off and I take her arm, shivering in the cold, damp air.

  Rue de Richelieu is lined with substantial stone houses several storeys high and soon we arrive before an elegant mansion. A footman admits us and we are shown into the salon while Monsieur d’Aubery goes to find his housekeeper.

  Sophie and I sink into red velvet chairs and regard the delicately carved and gilded boiseries on the walls, the high ceiling and ornate chandeliers. Our feet nestle into claret and gold carpets set upon intricately patterned parquet flooring.

  ‘I hadn’t realised that Monsieur d’Aubery lived in such grandeur,’ I whispered.

  ‘At least we can expect clean sheets here,’ says Sophie.

  All I want is to lie down quietly somewhere, anywhere, until my thunderous headache has gone.

  Monsieur d’Aubery rejoins us, bringing his housekeeper. ‘Madame Guillet will take you to your rooms. Please ask for anything that will make you more comfortable.’

  He dismisses our thanks with a wave of his hand and leaves us to follow the housekeeper upstairs.

  Sophie’s room adjoins my own and Madame Guillet casts a sharp-eyed glance around to check that all is in order. Ewers of hot water are steaming on the dressing table and snowy white towels warm by the fire.

  ‘Please use the bell if there is anything you require.’ The housekeeper closes the door behind her and I strip off my travel-stained clothes, wash and fall into bed.

  The sheets, of exquisitely fine linen, are indeed not only clean but lavender-scented. I fall into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  Chapter 8

  I awake during the night to hear Sophie coughing. The fire has died down to glowing coals. Padding barefoot across the soft rug, I open the door to the next room.

  ‘Sophie?’ I whisper.

  She mutters something I can’t understand and her forehead is very hot. I curl up beside her on the bed in case she needs me but when dawn comes I creep back into my own room.

  I awake when a maid brings in fresh hot water. A fire already crackles in the marble chimneypiece.

  ‘Good morning, Mademoiselle. Shall I open the shutters and bring you some chocolate?’

  Later, in spite of a continuing headache, I’m miraculously fortified by a cup of chocolate and a freshly laundered dress. I knock on Sophie’s door and hear her feeble response. When I go in I see that perspiration beads her forehead as she’s caught up in a paroxysm of coughing.

  I prop her against the pillows and help her to sip water. ‘Sophie, you need a doctor.’

  ‘I don’t want to be any trouble…’

  ‘You’ll cause even more trouble if you don’t get better soon.’

  I go out into the corridor and look over the balustrade into the cavernous hall below. I creep down the curving staircase and tiptoe across the black and white marble. Hesitating, I turn the handle of the salon door and start when I hear a voice behind me.

  ‘Good morning, Mademoiselle Moreau. I trust you slept well?’ Monsieur d’Aubery is freshly shaven and lightly scented with lemon verbena.

  ‘I’m worried about Sophie,’ I say, coming straight to the point. ‘The chill has settled on her chest and she should see a doctor.’

  ‘Then I shall send for Dubois,’ he says. ‘He is the family doctor and we can trust him.’

  I return to sit beside Sophie, whose breathing is laboured. Nothing I do eases her discomfort so I greet the arrival of Dr Dubois with relief. A jovial man with shrewd grey eyes, he questions Sophie patiently while he takes her pulse and listens to her chest.

  ‘We’ll soon have you right again, Madame Levesque,’ he says. ‘I’ll send round the apothecary’s boy with some bronchial mixture.’ He snaps his bag closed, bows to Sophie and nods to me before leaving the room.

  Soon after, I slip away from her bedside and follow him. The door to the library is open and I stop in the action of raising a hand to knock on the door when I hear the deep tones of Dr Dubois.

  ‘The king has his appointment with Madame Guillotine at ten o’clock tomorrow morning in the Place de la Révolution,’ he says. ‘They’ll bring him from the Temple prison and parade him through the streets.’


  ‘So soon, Armand? Is there no prospect of a reprieve?’ asks Monsieur d’Aubery.

  ‘Unlikely. And afterwards there is no going back.’

  ‘There will be bloodshed while the different revolutionary factions fight for control. I fear for everyone, from the highest aristocrat in his château to the paupers scrabbling for crumbs in the gutter.’

  ‘History will be made tomorrow,’ says Dr Dubois.

  Suddenly the door opens. I step back, my hand still raised to knock. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I stammer. ‘I came to ask if I could fetch Sophie’s medicine from the apothecary, to save time?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ says Monsieur d’Aubery. ‘The streets of Paris are no place for a lady at present.’

  ‘You would be wise to take heed of your host’s warning,’ says Dr Dubois. ‘But never fear, Mademoiselle Moreau, I shall attend the apothecary immediately.’

  The doctor is as good as his word and within the hour Sophie’s medicine has arrived. The day drifts by in the routine of sick-room care. I read to Sophie from my book of poetry and watch the clock to be sure she has her medicine on time. In the evening when she’s asleep, I join Monsieur d’Aubery in the dining room for supper.

  I feel a certain awkwardness in dining with him à deux. It’s perfectly proper as there are two footmen in attendance but, apart from a short journey in his carriage, we have never been alone together until now. We sit formally at either end of a long table with glittering candelabra set between us. The table is set with starched linen and gleaming silverware just as if we are at a banquet, even though the food is simple: soup, bread and cold chicken.

  Monsieur d’Aubery smiles wryly. ‘My mother would have been mortified to see such plain fare,’ he says, ‘especially when a guest is present. But life is different now.’

  ‘And we dine in comparative luxury while so many in Paris are hungry,’ I say, remembering the ragged children who chased after the diligence.

  ‘Bread is criminally expensive and soap and other necessities are scarce.’ His eyes gleam in the flickering candlelight. ‘I always think that, without soap, man is quickly reduced to the level of the beasts.’

  As I finish my dinner I wonder how much soap his housekeeper has squirrelled away and what would happen if the protesting sans-culottes came to look for it. I cannot imagine my urbane host, murderer or not, behaving like a beast.

  ‘I must thank you again, Monsieur d’Aubery,’ I say, ‘for your assistance in accompanying us on this journey and for your kind hospitality. Truthfully, I don’t know how Sophie and I would have managed if you had simply left us to fend for ourselves.’

  ‘Perhaps I am not so unmannerly as you first thought me?’ There is a hint of amusement in his eyes.

  I’m covered in confusion. Perhaps he sees more than I have imagined. ‘Please rest assured,’ I say, ‘that we have no wish to trouble you for longer than necessary. I’m anxious to meet my father’s relatives as soon as Sophie is well.’ I blot my mouth with a napkin and smother a yawn.

  ‘Tired?’ His voice is kind.

  ‘I do beg your pardon,’ I say. ‘Although my chill is better it has left me fatigued.’

  ‘Then I suggest you retire.’

  We say goodnight and I experience a brief moment of regret that I’m not joining him in lingering over a glass of brandy.

  Upstairs, Sophie is still asleep and I go to my own room. The bed has been warmed and I sigh with pleasure as the sheets enfold me. I lie in the dark, illuminated only by the fire, and ponder on the conversation I overheard between Monsieur d’Aubery and Dr Dubois. History will be made tomorrow. The knowledge reverberates around my head. History will be made tomorrow. At last I fall asleep, my thoughts full of vivid pictures of King Louis mounting the scaffold.

  The following morning as soon as I’m dressed I visit the sick room.

  ‘The king is going to the guillotine today,’ I say as I pour out a spoonful of Sophie’s medicine. ‘It’s hard to believe that such a terrible thing can happen.’

  ‘I only want to sleep,’ she says, swallowing her medicine.

  I plump up her pillows and wash her face and she’s asleep again as soon as I’ve straightened the sheets.

  Outside the church clocks strike the hour. Nine o’clock. In one hour, on the twenty-first day of January 1793, history will be made.

  In the Rue de Richelieu below a number of people are hurrying by and I wonder what King Louis is thinking in the Temple prison. Are the soldiers coming for him even now, to tear him from the arms of his sobbing wife and children and bundle him into a coach for his final journey? Has his priest listened to his last confession? It’s impossible to grasp that these momentous events are taking place less than a mile from here. When I am old my grandchildren will ask me what I recall of this long-ago day. And what will I tell them: that I sat by a sick friend’s bedside watching her sleep, while less than a mile away history was being made?

  Almost without thinking, I find myself hastily buttoning on my coat and tucking my hair inside the deeply frilled cap that has become the revolutionary wear de rigueur. Closing Sophie’s door behind me, I skitter downstairs and across the vast hall. The front door is locked. Nonplussed, I set off down the corridor towards the back of the house. I hear vegetables being chopped and the clatter of dishes through the open door to the kitchen and slink past before anyone notices me. The back door is unlocked and outside, at the end of the walled yard, is a bolted gate. The bolt draws back smoothly and a moment later I’m in an alley. I lose my bearings for a moment but then weave my way through a maze of lanes until I’m in the Rue de Richelieu again.

  Men and women are running past and the frosty air vibrates with their excited chatter. In the distance I hear the tramp of feet and the banging of drums, and a wave of exhilaration washes over me. I’m swept up with the hurrying throng past the Palais Royal and into Rue St Honoré, carried along by the high spirits of the crowd. The wide road is lined with sans-culottes and soldiers of the National Guard, while the teeming mass of people behind jostles at their backs.

  I stand on tiptoe and catch a glimpse of thirty or so militiamen marching towards us, banging their drums as if on the way to a battlefield. The clamour is deafening and I put my fingers in my ears but the sound still resonates in my head. The crowd is shouting but the beat of the drums, the stamp of marching feet and the clatter of the cavalry who ride past with swords held aloft, drown the cries.

  A woman standing next to me wearing a drab brown coat clutches at my arm and says something I can’t hear. I shake my head and she shouts in my ear.

  ‘The king’s carriage is coming!’

  I jump up to peer over the heads, my heart thudding in time with the drums. Amongst the cavalry escort I see a green coach making its way slowly along the road and the roar of the crowd swells.

  I’m knocked flying by a great bull of a man carrying a fearsome pike. He curses at me. ‘Get out of my way, Citoyenne!’

  Suddenly frightened, I drag myself to my feet from the muddy cobbles before I’m trodden underfoot by others racing past. Catching my breath, I lean against the window of an umbrella shop and glance at the patriotic display of red, white and blue silk parasols. Then I’m caught up again by the noise and the excitement and the sense of urgency, and shoulder my way through the horde rushing towards the king’s destiny. Today history is being made and I’m never, never going to forget the heart-stopping excitement of this moment.

  Battered and bruised, at last I reach a great open square surrounded by classical buildings. The Place de la Révolution. Some way off is a raised scaffold surrounded by blue-coated soldiers with revolutionary cockades in their hats, all armed with rifles and fixed bayonets.

  The square is heaving with a teeming multitude carrying pikes and guns and the noise is overwhelming. I elbow my way determinedly through the crowd and after twenty minutes or so I have a place near the front and can see the scaffold clearly now. It’s higher than the height of a man and the guillotine loo
ms fifteen feet above it. I supress a shiver as I see four executioners waiting impassively below, with their arms folded. They wear coats in the revolutionary style and tri-coloured cockades in their three-cornered hats.

  The insistent drumming is growing faster, and louder, and in only a moment the soldiers step back to make way. The king’s carriage rolls slowly into view and halts at the foot of the scaffold. A guard wrenches open the door and King Louis descends while the crowd roars in delight.

  I see only a glimpse of his pale face before the executioners step forward to take off his coat. The king shrugs them off and calmly removes his own necktie and arranges his shirt to expose his neck. He’s slightly plump and looks disappointingly ordinary. The executioner ties his hands with a handkerchief and then the king slowly climbs the ladder to the scaffold while the drums throb and the crowd jeers and shrieks in a hideous cacophony.

  Once upon the platform King Louis crosses from one side to the other with a firm step and stares at the twenty or so drummers. They falter and one by one fall silent. The crowd, too, settles into an expectant hush. I hold my breath.

  The king throws wide his arms. ‘I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge,’ he declares in a clear, strong voice. ‘I pardon those who have occasioned my death and I pray to God that the blood you are about to shed may never be visited upon France.’

  Sudden tears spring to my eyes at his last-minute bravery but then there is a great bellow from a cavalry officer.

  ‘Beat the drums, damn you!’

  The drummers begin to pound furiously again and hoarse shouts come from the crowd.

  ‘Get on with it!’

  ‘Death to Citoyen Capet!’

  My mouth is dry as I watch the executioners grapple with the king and drag him under the blade of the guillotine. Suddenly I feel sick and my heart rattles rapidly behind my ribcage.