by Tanith Lee
Nadia van der Westhuizen works at UCL and Kingston University. She is currently assisting in editing The Fairy Tale World, a collection of essays for Routledge in their Routledge Worlds series.
After the Guillotine
In the 1980s I wrote a huge novel on the French Revolution – my only ‘straight’ historical novel to date.
Off shoots from that book gave me several ingredients for fantasy stories, of which this is one.
The characters are based on four actual people sent to the blade by Robespierre. In one case at least, the invented name casts a very thin veil over the original – Danton.
The men went to the scaffold singing the Marseillaise, or shouting, or in tears, or – all three. At any rate, they made a great deal of noise about death. The girl went sweetly and quietly, dressed like a bride. There was a reason for that. There were, of course, reasons for all of it.
To die at any time when you are not prepared to die is objectionable. To die when you are comparatively young, when there are things of paramount importance still to be accomplished, when, in dying, you will lose spring and hope, and those who love you, that also you love; these are fair causes for commotion. The famous figure, D’Antoine the Lion, however, did not roar en route to la Guillotine. He had done his roaring in the courtroom, and it had achieved very little good, and actually some harm. He had presently been ‘legally’ silenced, and that had shut up every one of them. D’Antoine’s enemies were terrified of him, his speeches, his voice, his presence. Just as his friends loved him to distraction.
As the tumbrils jounced slowly along over the cobbles of Paris, (a form of traffic that had become quite banal), the Lion only occasionally grunted, or flexed his big body with bitter laughter. D’Antoine, bully, kingly master, charmer, conniver, atheist.
“I’m leaving things in a muddle,” he had said after they condemned him. For himself, he reckoned on nothing, once the blade came down, hence his bitterness, and his lack of confusion. He was not afraid, or only very little. He had made his mark in the living world. “Show my head to the crowd,” he would instruct the executioner. “It’s worth looking at twice.” Let us agree with that.
Héros, in the same cart, was one of those who sang, but rather negligently. The others who did so were mostly trying to keep their courage up, for while they sang, some of their terror and despair was held at bay. But Héros did not seem to be either depressed or afraid. His name, in this instance, is perfect for him, combination that it is of Hero and Eros. Lover and gallant, the image that comes to mind is appealing. One of the handsomest men of the era, he is everything one would wish to be at the hour of one’s public death: beautiful, couth, composed. In his not-long career, he had enjoyed most of the sins and pleasures of his day. He had been in the beds of princesses, perhaps even of a prince or two. Aristocrat to his fingertips, he knew how to face this final couching. He sang melodiously. To the screaming rabble he was aloof, to his friends remotely kind. He kissed them farewell at the foot of the scaffold, and went up first to demonstrate how quick and easy it all was, not worth any show. Thereby offering a faultless one.
But in his heart, handsome peerless Héros had kept a seed of the Catholic faith, which refused to wither. He believed, in some subdued, shallow bottom of his brain, that he was bound for Hell hereafter. As he disdained to fuss over the loss of his elegant head, just so he would not throw a tantrum at a prospect of centuries of torment in the inferno. His coolness was therefore even more admirable. Let us pause a moment to admire him.
The third man we examine in the forward tumbril, Lucien, rather than being what one would wish to, on the day of one’s public death, is more what one fears one would be. As some of his biographers politely put it, there had been some ‘difficulty’ in persuading him from the prison to the cart. Once installed, raw-eyed from weeping, only the neighbouring strength of the Lion kept him upright. Then, as the reeking, railing crowd pressed in, anger and terror mingled, and rather than sing Lucien began to shout. As the rabble screamed insults at him, so he screamed back. Ugly, where Héros was handsome and D’Antoine was grand, thin from prison, white and insane, and tearing his shirt in his struggles to escape the inescapable, or to be heard by the voluntarily deaf, he hurled charges and pleas until his voice, never strong, gave out. He had some justification. His was the spark that had initially fired the powder-keg of the Revolution. But no one listened now. The gist of all his words: Remember what I did for you and set us free – or, in short, Let me LIVE! – was entertaining, but no rallying point for the starving unanswered masses who, like vampires, had taken to existing on blood. There was, too, the matter of Lucien’s wife, whom he adored, and who he feared, rightly, was on the same road to the guillotine as himself. To no avail, naturally, he was also trying to shout for her life.
We may be unpleasant here and say Lucien shouted his head off. Or we could say, journalist and pamphleteer that he was, that he wrote it off, by going into print with unwise assertions and demands.
As for an afterlife, he wrote, too, that he believed in the ‘immortality of the soul’. So he did, but in a somewhat scattered, indefinite way. He had been anxious to impress, through his prison reading, the notion of continuance upon himself, as if he would need it where he would be going.
Let us, for the moment, stop talking about Lucien. And go on to that far more visual creature, his wife, the lovely Lucette.
There must have been something about Lucien. There he was, ugly, and there Lucette was – exquisite – and they were blissfully in love through several years of marriage. Maybe she preferred older men – he was ten years her senior. Or younger men – ten years her senior in age, he was in many other ways younger than everyone. The crime which sent Lucette to the scaffold was love. Because of love she had attempted to save her husband’s neck, and thus proved troublesome to his powerful enemies. Thereafter it seemed to them she might become, through love, a focus for strife.
She made the journey to the guillotine some days after Lucien, Héros and D’Antoine. She travelled with an air of calm pleasure. She said, “Lucien is dead and there is nothing further I want from life. If these monsters hadn’t murdered him, I would now thank them with tears of joy for sending me to join him in eternity.” Lucette’s inner secret was that she was by nature a priestess who had made Lucien her High Altar. She expected, after her sacrifice, to fall straight from the blade of the guillotine into her husband’s arms. Despite, or because of, his rather Dionysian leanings – religions of music, drama, lilies in fields – Lucette believed in Heaven. That Lucien, regardless of his faults, was already there, she did not doubt.
So, in her white dress, her fleecy golden hair cut short, she went blithely up to the platform and lay down for the stroke, barely seeming to notice, they said, what the executioner was doing.
The guillotine is very swift and supposedly humane, but who knows? Stories are told of severed heads which winked malignly from the basket, and even of one that brokenly whispered a request for water. Doubtless the climate has an effect on an outdoor apparatus of this type – shrinking or swelling the metal parts; on some days it might do its work an iota more slowly, or more quickly, or more neatly, than on others. Nothing the crowd would notice, of course. And then the physique of the victim must be taken into account. A large neck makes its own demands, and the fact that long hair, collars and neck-cloths were removed indicates even such as these could throw the blade. Louis Capet required more than one stroke; an unreassuring if unusual occurrence. Nor should one forget the condition of the subject’s nerves – as opposed merely to his nervousness. No two human things are quite alike. One ventures to suggest that there have been as many different sorts of death under the guillotine as there have been heads lopped by it.
D’Antoine, for example. Who could judge splendid powerful D’Antoine would experience that partitioning in the same way as anyone else?
It seemed, when it came, like a blow, the blow of a sledgehammer, but not quite hard enough
– so there was an instant’s appalled thought: Those bloody fools have botched it! Then the perspective altered. The eyes glimpsed the basket as the head fell into it, and other faces, already forgotten, looked up at it with anxiety as it came to meet them. After this, the light went, and there was only one odd final sensation, the head lying where it was, but the last reflexive relaxing spasms of the body eerily somehow communicated to it. Is this what a chicken feels? And a moment of horror, wondering how long one must endure this this. Followed by oblivion.
Oblivion of course, for D’Antoine the atheist had reckoned on Nothing. And here nothing was. All senses gone. The void. Blackness not even black, silence not even silence. Sans all.
There is a certain smugness attached to finding oneself perfectly right, even if one can no longer experience it.
Héros, who had been dispatched a short while before, was experiencing something similar.
In his case, the passage of the blade had been sheer. To use the analogy of hot knives through butter is in bad taste, but there. It is the best one. Stunned, Héros lost consciousness instantly. He may have expected to. When he opened his eyes again, everything was altered, but still he saw only what he expected.
The way to Hell was gaudy, festive almost; the lighting, to say the least, theatrical. Flames leaped crimson on the subterranean cliffs that lined the path, and a grotesquery of shadows danced with them. Héros was, on some unrecognised level, gratified to see that it had all the artistry of a good painting of the subject, indeed, some of it was so familiar that it filled him with a slight sense of deja vu. Presently, a masked devil swooped down at him on bat-wings, with a shriek. Héros, unprotesting, elegant, moved towards his punishment.
The bright entrance and the gradients beyond were littered by howling, pleading, rioting or bravely joking damned. Among them he caught sight of certain prior acquaintances, just those he would, in fact, have anticipated. He also partly expected to see D’Antoine arrive at any moment, ushered in behind him. D’Antoine, who had led a magnificently licentious life, had believed that only oblivion followed death. His friend would have been interested to see D’Antoine’s face when he discovered he was wrong. On the whole. Héros did not think Lucien would make up the party. Although Lucien had done a thing or two that would doubtless disqualify him from eternal bliss, he had a sort of faun-like innocence that would probably keep him out of the ultimate basement area.
Occasionally goaded, though never prodded, by appalling devils, Héros walked on and found himself at length in a sort of waiting-room with broad open windows. These gazed out across incendiary lakes and lagoons, and mountains of anguished structure. Actual torments were visible from here, but, being in the distance, not very coherently. It was a subtle arrangement, threatening, but restrained. If questioned, Héros would have confessed that he approved of it. At a stone table in the waiting-room, a veiled figure sat dealing cards. Héros, who had been inclined to cards in life, sat down opposite and, without a word, they began to play a hand.
The game seemed to last a very long time. An extraordinarily long time. Abruptly, Héros came to from a kind of daze, and with a strange feeling to which he could assign no name – for he felt, absurdly, almost guilty. It appeared to him at that moment as if, rather than being kept waiting here, most cruelly, to learn his exact awful fate, he himself – but no, that was plainly ridiculous. Just precisely then, a tall flame burst through one of the windows, and out of the flame a demon stared at him with a cat’s wild eyes. Beckoned, somewhat relieved, Héros abandoned the cards, and went towards the demon, which suddenly grasped him and bore him out into the savage landscape beyond the room. A backward glance showed the veiled figure had disappeared entirely.
They did not exchange small-talk, the demon and Héros. Hell spoke for itself. They passed over laval cauldrons in which figures swam and wailed, and emaciated moaning forms chained to the sides of mountains and tormented by various... things. Others of the condemned crawled about at the edges of retreating pools, croaking of thirst. Some toiled like ants, great boulders on their backs. Still others were being flayed or devoured by fiends, from the feet up. Allusions both historic and classical were nicely mingled. There was something, in a dreadful way, reassuring about it all.
At length, the demon chose to hover in mid-air close to a weird contraption, a kind of swing. Back and back it flung itself, then forth and forth, with a tireless pendulum motion, until about a mile away it plunged into a torrent of fire, and far off screaming was detectable. But now it was swinging back again. Seated in a froth of summery dresses – the height of Revolutionary French fashion – two young women, quite unscathed, toasted each other in white sparkling wine.
As they drew nearer, Héros noticed that there was room on the swing for one more person. Just then, the blonder of the two ladies glanced up and beheld him. “Why, it’s Héros – Héros!” she cried; the darker girl joined in with: “We saved a place for you, Héros darling.”
Héros smiled and greeted them. Both looked familiar, although he was not sure from where. Instead, each of them seemed like an amalgam of certain aspects of all the women he had known, the dark and the blonde, the coarse and the refined, aristo and plebeian – delightful. And no sooner had he concluded this, than his demon escort dropped him. There was no sensation of falling. One moment he was in the air, next moment in mid-flight on the swing, a girl either side, soft arms, warm lips, curly hair, and very good champagne being held for him to drink. “Knock it back quickly, lovely Héros. In a minute, we’ll be into that again.”
“The fire?” queried Héros. The swing had reached its furthest backward extent, paused, and now began once more to fly forward.
“Oh, the fire. The pain! The terror!”
“But it only lasts a moment,” said her friend and, indeed, his.
“You get used to it.”
They toasted the monarchy, something it had long since ceased to be sensible to do upstairs. Then they embraced.
The swing was broad and comfortable enough for almost... anything.
After a few extremely pleasant minutes, his two companions clutched at him with exclamations of fright and boiling red flames enveloped them. They all screamed with pain. Then the swing rushed out again and the pain vanished. They had not been burned, not even blistered. The champagne too retained its refreshing coolness, nor had any of it evaporated.
Héros relaxed amid the willing human cushions. Three seconds of agony against several minutes that were not agonising at all seemed an excellent arrangement. Of course one suffered. One was supposed to. But the ratio could only be described as – civilised.
The next time they went into the fire they were all singing a very lewd song of the proposed Republic. They screamed briefly, though in perfect tempo, and came out again on the succeeding verse.
In perfect tempo too, Lucien felt the pain of the guillotine’s blade. It was swift and stinging, not unendurable, leaving an after-image of itself that grew in intensity, not to greater pain but to a terrible struggle. Physically, the guillotine had deprived him of sight, hearing and speech – but not totally of feeling. He hung there, formless, and for a long ghastly eternity fought to breathe, tried to swallow, and most of all to cry out.
When he broke from this, he did not know where he was, but that he was somewhere seemed self-evident. Still blind and deaf and dumb, he had convinced himself that he was now breathing, and because of this thought that he had somehow been rescued by the crowd, who must have pulled him clear of the crashing blade – by unimaginable means – at the last moment. But of course, there was no one near him, nothing. When he attempted to reach out, his hands found only emptiness, and besides, they were not hands. All that was done with. His body had been lost. Only he remained. And for a horrible second he was not even sure of that. But he held to himself grimly, to everything he could remember. This was the second struggle, and in the middle of it he managed to open his eyes, or at least, he began to see.
What he
saw was not encouraging. It was truly a scene of total emptiness, a skyless desert made solely of the absence of things and yet there seemed to be matter in it. For example, to stare at something was to produce a sort of illusory smoky shape. And then again, there was nothing to be stared at in the first place. His feeling now was of depression, a fear and misery he had never known to such a degree even on the volatile emotional seesaw of his life. And of loneliness, which was the worst of all.