The Medusa Amulet

by Robert Masello

  Going ever higher, he passed several cell doors, where other prisoners of consequence were being kept. In the Conciergerie, there had always been varying levels of discomfort. For the wealthy and privileged, willing to fork over the necessary bribes, there were private cells with a bed, a desk, and even writing materials. For the less-well-to-do, there were pistoles, with a bunk and a table. And for the commoners-known as the pailleux -there were the rocky, underground caverns kept damp by the Seine, where matted hay, or paille, was strewn on the floor. In previous times, the prisoners there were simply left to die from malnutrition, or the infectious diseases that lingered in the gloomy vaults.

  The queen, Sant’Angelo knew, was housed at the top of the tower, not out of any pity or concern but because it afforded the greatest security. There was only one staircase up, and at the door to her cell, another pair of gendarmes was waiting. The marquis slowed his step and approached with his breviary in hand.

  “I am here for the prisoner to make her final communion.”

  “I don’t know anything about that claptrap,” one of them snapped. “You’ll have to see Citizen Hebert; he’s inside.”

  The marquis had not counted on this. Of all the bloodthirsty wolves of the Revolution, Jacques Hebert was the worst. Chief of the Committee of Public Safety, it was he who had published some of the most defamatory and revolting lies about the queen, and it was he who had declared, in his role as the champion of the sansculottes, “I have promised them the head of Antoinette! I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me.”

  Apparently, he had decided to monitor the execution himself.

  The marquis ducked his head to enter the cell (Hebert had had the doorway purposely lowered, so that the queen, whenever she came out to receive a visitor from the Convention, would have to bow her head to him), and found the chief and a couple of his minions from the Committee keeping vigil in the anteroom.

  “Who are you?” Hebert demanded, wheeling on him. He was armed, as usual, with a tasseled rapier hanging at his side.

  The marquis produced the letter and waited as Hebert read it. His eyes were close-set and red-rimmed, like a rodent’s, and his jaw was constantly grinding. His dark hair, wet with perspiration, was tied back with the tricolor cockade.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” Hebert said suspiciously. “Which one of those corrupt orders do you belong to?”

  “I follow St. Francis.”

  “And what makes you think the Capet woman will want to talk to you?”

  “I don’t know that she will,” the marquis replied, affecting indifference. “But this privilege is still established by law.”

  He knew that the mention of the law was a cunning stroke; these assassins liked to pretend that they were only upholding justice-equal for everyone in the new Republic-and that their bloody acts were simply the seamless working of the state’s machinery. Even the guillotine, now the dreaded symbol of the Revolution itself, had been invented as a swifter and more humane method of execution; in fact, however, it had become an indispensable means for conducting murder on an unprecedented scale.

  Monsieur Hebert tossed the letter back at Sant’Angelo, and taking an iron key from his own pocket, unlocked the inner door.

  “Be quick about it. She’s had thirty-seven years to make her peace with God. I don’t know how she can catch up now.”

  One of his minions laughed, and Hebert, too, seemed to enjoy his little jest. The marquis swallowed the anger that rose in his throat like a ball of boiling tar and went inside.

  The room was nearly bare, with just a few sticks of battered furniture and a rumpled sheet strung on a line to conceal the privy bucket. With the window blocked, and the sun in another quarter, the tiny cell was as dim as it was chill.

  Marie Antoinette lay on her hard pallet, with her hands folded under her cheek, her eyes glassy and staring at nothing.

  Sant’Angelo would hardly have recognized her. He remembered so well the shy, sweet, and bewildered girl who had first arrived at court twenty-three years before… and, of course, the gay, beautiful woman that she had become, known for her finery and sophistication.

  What he saw now was a haunted shadow of her former self, with wild, uncombed hair and a face that seemed an utter stranger to anything but sadness.

  But had she truly aged? He drew a stool close to the bed, but even then he could not be sure. It was only a few years ago that the Pope had sent her the true Medusa, and the haggard expression she wore now could be nothing more than the natural countenance of a woman who had had everything in the world taken from her and was about to lose her own life, too.

  “Your Majesty,” he whispered, knowing that there was not a second to waste.

  “I do not want you,” Antoinette said, never bothering to raise her eyes past his black cassock.

  “Look at me,” he said. “I pray you, look at me.”

  Wearily, as if obeying yet another of her persecutors’ commands, she raised her blue-gray eyes, then, after a second or two, understood that it was her old friend, the marquis, lurking under the brim of the priest’s hat.

  “How did you-”

  “You must do exactly what I tell you to do,” he said.

  “You cannot give communion.”

  “I can do better than that.”

  She looked at him without any expression at all, as if perhaps unsure that he was really there at all.

  “We can make our escape, if you will only believe me and do exactly as I say.”

  “My dear friend,” she said resignedly, “it is over for me. I am only concerned now that you have placed yourself in such danger.” She struggled to sit upright, and he held her by one delicate elbow until she had managed it.

  Reaching under his collar, as if merely to remove the purple stole, he withdrew the hidden garland and held it low, between his knees, where it would be concealed by the breviary.

  “I cannot ask you to understand this, but I can beg you to believe it. This wreath, placed upon your head, will render you invisible.”

  “Oh, now you sound like our old friend Count Cagliostro,” she said, dismissing his words with a sad smile.

  “His powers paled compared to mine,” Sant’Angelo said. “Don’t you remember that night at the Trianon?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” she said absently, “please take no offense. But even if I could escape, as you say,” and she spoke, as if trying to reason calmly with a madman, “I would not do so. Not so long as my children were held here, too.”

  The marquis had assumed she would say as much. “But they are merely children,” he tried to assure her. “They won’t be harmed.”

  “Are you so sure?”

  The marquis was not sure at all; the present barbarity knew no bounds. “But we can find a way to rescue them, too. For now, however, it’s you, the queen, that these savages want.”

  “And if my death will satisfy them, then my children may be spared.”

  “Once you are safely away,” Sant’Angelo urged, “there will be chaos and delay, endless recriminations and denunciations. They’ll have Hebert’s head on a pike, for one. And then I will come back-I promise you-and spirit your children to a safe hiding place, too.”

  Placing a cold and frail hand on top of his own, she said, “It is enough that you have come to see me off. They have refused to let me say good-bye to anyone, or to receive any friend or family member.”

  “But if you will just let me put the wreath on your head, and keep you close behind me, I swear you will be able to walk out of here under their very noses.”

  “You don’t think they would notice my absence?” she said, dryly.

  “I will create such confusion that I’ll have them believing a flight of angels just carried you off to Heaven.”

  “And where will we go instead?”

  “I will take you to my house, where a carriage is already waiting. We can be at my chateau by dusk, and from there-”

  But the
look on her face told him not to continue. No doubt she was remembering the last escape plan, when her carriage had been delayed at the town of Varennes and the king had been recognized; the royal family was escorted back to the Tuileries in disgrace. Ever since that fateful night-June 21, 1791-their captivity had been complete; the family had been systematically separated and imprisoned in one place after another, each one more dreadful than the one before.

  “I thank you,” she said, “but now I only wish for all of this to come to an end. I wish to be with my husband, and in the arms of God.” Bending her head, as if to make the present charade, for his sake, more convincing, she touched the breviary in his hand and murmured a prayer.

  “Time’s up,” Hebert said, striding into the room. Right behind him, he had a barber, carrying a rusty pair of scissors. “Move along now, priest.”

  Shoving Sant’Angelo aside, he yanked away the muslin fichu draped around the queen’s shoulders and said to the barber, “Start cutting.” The barber gathered whatever he could of her hair and sheared it off as if she were a sheep.

  “We don’t want anything to impede the razor, do we?” Hebert gloated.

  When the cutting was done, the queen was thrown a white linen bonnet, with two black strings to tie it behind.

  “Stand up,” Hebert barked, and the marquis could tell he took exquisite pleasure in every discourtesy he could show her. “Put your hands behind your back.”

  At this, even Antoinette seemed surprised, and said, “You did not bind the hands of the king.”

  “And that was a mistake,” he replied, pulling her wrists back, then knotting a rope around them. Her shoulders were so sharp, it looked as if they might pierce the cloth of her simple white dress.

  “Time to go,” Hebert said, nudging the queen with his knee, the way one might nudge a turkey toward the chopping block.

  With the Chief of the Committee of Public Safety in the front, and his minions on either side of her, Marie Antoinette was led through the anteroom and down the winding stair. For a moment, the marquis considered attacking them all right then and there, and dragging her off, but he knew that even the queen would resist him. She was reconciled to her fate and did not so much as look back at him.

  But he would not-he could not-abandon her. Even the king had been allowed the company and solace of his own abbe, Edge-worth de Firmont, on the way to his execution. Marie Antoinette had no one. Alone in the cell, Sant’Angelo tossed the black hat in the corner, along with the breviary, and lifted the garland to his own head. Made so long ago, from the bulrushes surrounding Medusa’s pool, twisted and gilded together in the solitude of his studio, he placed it on his own head.

  But the effect, as he knew, was not instantaneous.

  Rather, it was as if he had stepped beneath the cascade of water spilling over the lip of the Gorgon’s rock. The top of his head felt anointed, then his face, and neck, and shoulders. Slowly, the sensation, like a trickle of cool water, worked its way all the way down his body, and even as he looked on, his chest, then his legs, then his feet too, disappeared. He was as solid as ever-something he sometimes forgot, when he banged into a doorframe or stumbled over a stool-but he was utterly invisible to the mortal eye.

  By the time he had managed to get downstairs, carefully avoiding any contact with the turnkeys or the guards, the queen was being led toward a rickety tumbrel. Her husband, he knew, had been transported to his death in a closed carriage, safe from the howls and imprecations of the mob, but Hebert seemed determined to miss no opportunity to torment the widow Capet. Her steps faltered as she realized that this was to be the way in which she was conveyed to her death, and she had to turn to Hebert and beg him to untie her hands for just a moment.

  Hebert nodded at one of his men, wearing a red stocking cap with a white feather stuck in it, who undid the knot, and the queen, desperately seeking some corner of the courtyard that might afford her some privacy, scurried toward a wall, and lifting her hem, squatted there, her pale face reddening with shame, meeting no one’s eye.

  As soon as she was done, Hebert had her hands retied and she was thrust back into the open cart. Stepping into it, she naturally sat facing the front, as she had always done in her coach, but the driver, not unkindly, directed her to sit with her back to the horses. This, the marquis knew, was to keep the prisoners from catching sight of the looming guillotine until the last moments of their journey.

  And just as the cart jolted to a start, Sant’Angelo leapt up into it. For a second, the horses slowed, reacting to the added weight, but then plodded on, out of the Cour de Mai, where all was relatively silent and restrained, out of the Conciergerie, with its thick walls and lofty towers, and, finally, into the open streets of the city… where madness reigned.

  The marquis had never seen a more frightening sight, even in the underworld.

  As the cart lurched along the quayside and past the old clock tower, hundreds of people, their faces twisted with rage, shaking their fists, brandishing clubs and knives, pitchforks and bottles, poured toward them from every direction. The gendarmes accompanying the cart could barely keep them from overturning the tumbrel and tearing Marie Antoinette limb from limb on the spot. A famous actor, Grammont, rode in front, and attempted to divert the crowd by waving his sword in the air and shouting assuredly, “She’s done for, my friends! The infamous Antoinette! Have no fear-she’ll soon be roasting in hell!”

  But that didn’t stop the curses and the spittle and the rotten fruit from being thrown. The marquis could only wonder at the queen’s composure. She sat erect in the cart, her head high, her chin thrust out, determined, it would seem, to emulate the sangfroid displayed by her late husband. Sant’Angelo did whatever he could do, blocking what projectiles he could without giving himself away, and once, when one of the savages tried to leap into the cart, kicking him in the face so hard his teeth exploded like sparks. The man, not knowing what had happened, staggered back into the street, blood gushing between the fingers he held to his stunned mouth.

  The journey seemed interminable, and Sant’Angelo assumed that the driver had been instructed to take the more roundabout route in order to prolong the queen’s agony. On the narrower streets, heads poked out of windows above the procession, and in one of them the marquis saw the painter Jacques-Louis David perched on the sill, hastily drawing in a sketchpad on his lap. On the rue St. Honore, he saw a silent priest, nodding his head in a benediction to the passing queen. Only once did the mob thin, and that was as the tumbrel passed the Jacobin Club, where loitering was not allowed. Nearby, in the Maison Duplay, behind the shutters he always kept drawn, lived the ruthless mastermind of the Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre. But he was nowhere to be seen this day.

  Even the heavy, slow-moving horses, called rosinantes, were meant to be an affront to the queen’s dignity. These were not carriage horses, accustomed to city traffic, but lumbering beasts, used for drawing plows, and the driver had to calm them down and keep them from trying to bolt. Several times the queen was nearly toppled over by a sudden lurch, and the marquis put out a hand to steady her. But in her mind she was clearly so far away, her eyes focused on something no one else could see, that his touch did not even register.

  And then the cart slowly turned into the rue Royale, where the sound of the waiting mob, tens of thousands of them gathered in the Place de la Revolution, swelled like the crashing of an ocean wave. The cart rumbled on, past the palace of the Tuileries, where the king and queen had spent so many happy times with their children. The marquis himself had given an impromptu flute lesson to their daughter, Marie Therese, in a music room off the mezzanine there. Marie Antoinette’s gaze lifted at the sight of the gates and terraces and momentarily glistened with tears.

  And above the roar of the crowd, he could hear the guillotine, even now going about its business. Prisoners were being dispatched with grim regularity, their demise signaled by a succession of distinctive sounds. First, there was the dropping of the bascule, the plank o
n which the victim was laid flat. Then, after the plank was slid into place, there was the bang of the lunette, the wooden pillory, which locked the victim’s head, facedown, beneath the blade. And finally the swishing of the blade itself, as it plunged eighteen feet, then rebounded, splashed with blood and bits of flesh.

  Depending on the notoriety of the beheaded, all of this was immediately followed by general exultation, as the executioner wiped his instrument off and his crew threw buckets of water on the platform to wash it clean.

  Armed guards had to force a path through the mob for the queen’s tumbrel, which gradually drew to the foot of the scaffold and stopped. Antoinette, who had barely even seen the sun or breathed fresh air for months, struggled to stand up, and Sant’Angelo quickly put an arm around her waist and helped her to keep her balance as she stepped from the unsteady cart. For a moment, she seemed bewildered at this strange sensation of assistance, and looked around, but he said nothing to give himself away.

  Let her imagine it to be an angel at her side, he thought.

  With her hands still bound behind her, and unknowingly supported by the marquis’s unseen arm, she ascended the stairs, her plum-colored slippers sliding on the slick wood. Purely by accident, she stepped on the foot of the executioner.

  “I am sorry, monsieur,” she said instinctively. “I did not do it on purpose.”

  And then, as the marquis stood helplessly by, Marie Antoinette was laid on the plank and her neck was clamped into the lunette. Just below her, the eager spectators jockeyed for position, the better to dip their hats and handkerchiefs in her blood. Among them Sant’Angelo saw Hebert’s companion, the man with the long white feather in his cap. He was dancing a jig in anticipation.