by Hunter, Seth
Sara had almost reached the Rue Honoré when she heard the drum. She knew at once what it meant and quickened her pace but she was too late. There were guards lining both sides of the street and already she could see the start of the procession winding its way towards her. She hesitated, wondering whether to turn back and linger in the gardens until it passed—she had no desire to watch the latest batch of human misery on its way to the guillotine—but then she heard a voice she recognised.
“Good day, Citoyenne. Anyone you know today?”
Eleanor Duplay. One of her fellow students. And though her eyes were mocking there was the suggestion of a threat there, too—or a warning.
“No. Why should I?” Cursing her lack of wit as soon as the words were out. Overhasty, defensive . . . Why could she not make a joke of it? Laugh in her face. Except that you did not laugh at Eleanor Duplay. And if you made a joke you had better make sure it could not be misconstrued as unpatriotic.
One such joke—incautiously told in Paris—was that wherever two people were gathered together, one would be an informer. But it was surely the curse of the Setons to have as your own personal sneak the daughter of Robespierre’s landlord. Further incautious rumour suggested that she was also Robespierre’s lover but Sara could not believe it of so cold a fish. But perhaps this was what they had in common.
“We all seem to know someone these days who has betrayed the Revolution,” observed Eleanor reprovingly.
“What, even you, Eleanor?”
Eleanor looked at her searchingly a moment, to see if she was being ridiculed. Then, apparently satisfied that no one would dare, least of all none as inconsequential as Sara Seton, she added: “We have trusted too many who have proved false in the past. And doubtless will in the future. They all wear masks to hide their corruption.”
One of the other students had whispered to Sara that when Eleanor said “we” she meant Robespierre and that she spoke as a kind of priestess or oracle, echoing the voice of the god.
“But at least some have been found out,” she added with satisfaction, gazing past Sara towards the approaching convoy.
It was led by the drummer, beating the step. Next came a file of National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets and behind them, flanked by more guards, the death carts and those that were to die.
Sara was gripped by a fascinated horror that would have kept her rooted to the spot, even without Eleanor Duplay at her side.
What would it be like to be one of them?
It was more than a ghoulish curiosity. It could happen at any time. It was like living in a city ravaged by the plague except that you usually knew if you were likely to become one of the victims. She had nightmares about it. Going through this macabre ritual. The death march of the beasts, marked for slaughter. Through that door, along that corridor, into that yard . . . Bowing your head so they could cut your hair, placing your hands behind your back so they could bind your wrists. Climbing into the waiting cart . . . The frightful inevitability of it; nerves screaming against acceptance but your feet moving obediently along the destined route, closer and closer to the waiting blade.
How could they do it? Only because they had no choice. It was too late for choices. You had made the wrong choices a long time ago. Too late to change them now. Now you were in the death cart and the drum was beating and the wheels were trundling over the cobbles. She could hear them, beyond the sound of the drum,
louder and louder. And now they were level with her. Five in the first one—three men, two women—all young, gazing stoically ahead. No imagined fate for them; this was their reality. Sara began to pray for them, silently, keeping her eyes open, the prayers she had been taught by the nuns at her convent school in Provence. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death . . .
She had seen it all before, of course. It had become a daily ritual. Sometimes just one victim—someone special like a king or queen. Other days there would be a whole batch of them, thirty or forty, even more. And they always took the same route—out of the Conciergerie, across the river and along the Rue Honoré past the art school. The students would crowd at the windows looking down and it was unsafe to be the only one to stay away, carrying on with your work as if disinterested or disapproving. But there was a sense of being distanced from it all when you were in a room, up above. Here at street level it was more tangible, more terrible.
Three carts today. She stopped counting the people in them, no longer speculating on who they were or what they could possibly have done to merit such a fate. Aristocrats or peasants, priests or prostitutes . . . they were all beasts to the slaughter. And now, increasingly, more and more were revolutionaries themselves. The Indulgents or the Enragées, moderates or extremists, any who deviated from the strict path laid down by those in power, were sent down this other road—to the dread Machine in the Place de la Révolution.
“Shall we go—or do you want to stand here praying for them?”
The procession had passed and they were letting people cross the street and Sara was still there, staring into space.
“I wasn’t praying,” Sara said. “What makes you think I was praying?”
But Eleanor just smirked and shrugged and picked up her skirts and stepped into the street and Sara followed, hating herself for being so frightened, and wishing she could slap her.
The painter, Jean-Baptist Regnault, was one of the few acknowledged rivals of the great Jacques-Louis David who had his own studio in the Louvre. Sara was surprised Eleanor Duplay wasn’t one of David’s students because apart from his fame as an artist he was a Jacobin and a friend of Robespierre. But perhaps she was. Perhaps she studied at both schools. She was keen enough, you had to give her that: a dedicated student, she wasn’t playing at it. There were some who considered Regnault a better painter than David; certainly he was a better teacher. Even at this time of the year he made use of what little light there was, posing the model close to the fire to show them how the light from the flames fought with the light from the window.
“Two sources of light,” he told them, “one warm, one cold. One red, one blue, but of course far more subtle than that. See how they coil around the body like serpents.”
The model was a young man, pale and undernourished. You could see the bone beneath the skin like a fledgling fallen from the nest. Perhaps that was why Regnault had chosen him so they could see how his body was made. More likely, though, he was just cheap. Poor enough to pose near naked for a meal and a small fee. He shivered, even close to the fire. Sara did not know where Regnault found his models and did not like to ask. It was said that some of the men—the healthier, more muscular ones—were Savoyards who ran messages round the city and that the women, old and young, were mostly prostitutes. They did not have many women lately in the life classes. Most of the prostitutes had been rounded up by the police. It was considered “uncivil” to be a prostitute, a betrayal of the principles of the Revolution. Regnault said that he would soon have to call for volunteers from among the students. This was taken as a joke. But why not? Sara knew there were rumours that she had posed nude for the artist—even for some of his students—but they were untrue. She had been almost nude but with a sheet artfully draped across her private parts and there had been no impropriety. It had been a foolish thing to do though. But even as she regretted it she wondered how she would feel about posing nude in front of the class. It would be shameful of course but the thought excited her all the same. One of her fantasies was to imagine the American, Nathan Turner, among the students painting her. She had thought of him a great deal since he had left Paris. Much of the time, in fact. In some ways the model reminded her of him. They did not look at all alike except that they were both young with long, dark hair but there was something similar in their eyes—a kind of . . . vulnerability. No—a wariness, like a feral cat, distrustful, always looking out for itself and the possibility of danger or betrayal . . .
Like the folk tale they told in Tourrettes of the cat that walks alone. But she was being fanciful.
Regnault made them draw the figure first in charcoal, using their fingers to shade in the warm light from the fire and leaving pale, bare patches for the light from the window. Only when he was satisfied that they had captured the difference in charcoal did he let them start mixing up the paints they would use. They had to work very fast, because the light was always changing. That was part of the test, Regnault said.
But long before they had finished the firelight was winning, the daylight retreating fast, even from the window. The boy huddled close to the fire, the flames licking his meagre flesh.
Sara was hurrying to clean up her palette at the sink when Eleanor Duplay came up to her.
“Where are you off to, in such a hurry?” she said. She made it sound like an accusation, and Sara felt like a suspect, hurrying off to an assignation, up to no good.
“I have to be home,” she said. “Before it is dark.”
“And where is home?”
My God, this was serious. In her nervousness she dragged her sleeve across the palette. “I have an apartment,” she said, “in the Rue Jacob.”
Was that a crime? It was not a good address from a revolutionary point of view. She dipped a corner of cloth in terpentine and rubbed at her sleeve. The smear was like blood.
“You must come back one day for coffee,” said Eleanor. “I live just up the road. Perhaps when the days are longer.”
She drifted off, leaving Sara staring after her, astonished.
She was still thinking about it when she emerged from the studio and saw Nathan on the opposite side of the road.
They stared at each other for a moment and then she walked across the road towards him, her legs a little unsteady. As she reached him she stumbled and he reached out for her and it became an embrace. Later when she thought about it she was shocked at how easily it had happened but at the time it appeared natural. They walked into the gardens of the Tuileries hand in hand. They spoke a little. They made polite conversation. She thought she asked him what he was doing in Paris and that he told her that he had brought a cargo of soap and she said she could use some soap. And all the time they were holding hands and looking for a cab. Normally she walked home but today a cab seemed appropriate.
They found one and got in and began to kiss.
“I am become a strumpet,” she said, breathless, in a tangle of limbs.
He put his hand under her skirt but she moved it back.
“No,” she said. “Wait.”
They sat side by side holding hands until they reached her house in the Rue Jacob. She was shivering but she felt as if her clothes might melt from her body.
In the event they came off less easily. There was even some tearing. She remembered thinking she would have to sew them herself; she could not possibly give them to Hélène. There seemed to be some level of detachment, of rational observation. She observed his body—not at all like that of the model she had been sketching but weightier, more solid, especially at the shoulder and chest. But you could see his ribs, feel them with your hand. She loved the line of dark hair that ran down his stomach, lower.
It was . . . an impossible delight. To be making love in the afternoon. Three hours since she had seen the death carts rolling down the Rue Honoré. The detached, rational, thinking part of her wondered at it and her own insensibility. Her recklessness. With Alex in the schoolroom and the cook in the kitchen and Hélène at whatever she was doing at this time of the afternoon. And she with a young man in her bedroom and lately widowed. She should be whipped . . .
But the greater part of her was lost, wild, wanton . . .
They lay across the bed, spent and heedless, soaked in sweat. After a while she moved over to him and stared down, brushing his face with her hair.
“You are beautiful,” she said.
“No, you are beautiful,” he said. “In England, we do not say that a man is beautiful.”
“We do in France,” she said. “Though I have never said it before, not to a man.” Then she remembered and swung her body astride him, looking down with a fierce expression. “But what was it you said to me? In English. I think it was harlot.”
“I am sorry,” he said, “It was in the height of my passion and I did not mean it critically.”
“You are not then critical of harlots?”
“Not at all. I expect they are driven to it.”
She slapped his face though lightly and then bent to kiss him.
“I think I am a harlot—at heart,” she mused thoughtfully.
He looked at her a little warily. She kissed him again, laughing.
“But only for you.”
“I will have to marry you,” he said. “I cannot possibly have you behaving like that and still a maid.”
“Good, I’ll fetch a priest,” she said, moving to get off and then squealing as he threw her down. He reversed their positions, pinning her down and regarding her pensively in the pale light. He plucked at the thin red ribbon around her waist with its silken pouch, now empty.
“What is this?”
She wondered whether to tell him. It was for her sponge that she soaked in vinegar. Somehow she had found the sense to leave him for a moment and run to the screen to put it in.
But perhaps not. Perhaps some other time.
“It is for luck,” she said. “Do they not wear them in England?”
“I would not know,” he said. “I was a virgin before I met you.”
“Liar,” she said.
“Well, almost a virgin.”
“You cannot be almost a virgin,” she informed him.
He kissed her again.
“I love you,” he said. Je t’aime. Easier in French.
He rolled off her.
“J’ai faim.”
“I love you and I am hungry,” she said. “Well, I suppose you got the order right. Shall I ring for Hélène to bring us some scraps from the kitchen?”
“Would she not be shocked?”
“Oh my God!” she laughed. “You think I am serious. My God, what do you think we are, we Frenchwomen?”
She rolled off the bed and stood up, looking down at him.
He hooked his finger through the ribbon again and pulled her to him gently.
“I like this,” he said. “It is very useful.”
“Very useful indeed,” she said. “I could not do without it.”
“When you came out from behind the screen, naked except for that thin piece of ribbon, I thought I would die.”
Love and death. Why did people so often speak of them together? She shivered. It was unlucky. She gently freed herself and walked to the screen and dressed in a robe. When she came back he was looking at the book next to her bed.
Phaedra by Racine.
She had a taste for the tragedies of Racine. He seemed especially appropriate to the times. She sat beside her lover on the bed and looked to see what page he was reading.
“Great crimes grow out of small ones,” he read, slowly translating:
If today
A man first oversteps the bounds, he may
Abuse in time all laws and sanctities:
For crime, like virtue, ripens by degrees . . .
“I will go to the kitchen,” she said, “and see what we have.”
“I could eat a toad,” he said.
She returned with a loaded tray and an expression of the utmost satisfaction.
“No toad,” she said. “But better than I anticipated. The good Marie has been foraging in the black market.”
There was bread and cheese, some cold sausage, half an onion tart and a flask of red wine.
“Amazing,” he said, reaching out the moment she set it
on the bedside table, “and what favours did she give for this?”
“Watch your mouth,” she warned him primly. “I’ll have none of your salty humour, here, thank you.”
He looked abashed and apologised with humility and she let him have some sausage.
“Still,” he said when he had taken a bite, “it is wonderful what a little money can provide, even at a time of want.”
She looked at him, wondering. Did he have any idea of the price of things in Paris on the black market? Some of her remaining jewellery would have gone to pay for this little feast.
When they had finished they lay side by side again more content than she could ever have imagined but melancholy too.
“What has been happening in Paris,” he said, “while I have been away?”
“Oh nothing much,” she said. “A few hundred more have had their heads chopped off. But nothing unusual that I can recall.”
“Can you not get away?” he said. She looked at him. He had the look she had seen on the face of the model.
“It is too dangerous,” she said, “without the right papers. Besides . . .”
But she did not want to discuss her family affairs with him, not now.
“Danton went to see Robespierre,” she said.
A sharp look—and furtive. The cat that senses a threat, betrayal . . .
“Lucille Desmoulins told me. It did not go well.”
Danton had gone to see if the two men could be reconciled and stand together against the “Terrorists.” He was unusually humble. He begged for the liberty of the seventy-three deputies who had been arrested but Robespierre said they were all criminals and the only way to obtain liberty was to cut off their heads. Danton had burst into tears.
“Robespierre would hate that,” said Sara as she repeated the story. “He dislikes any display of emotion. Then Danton tried to hug him and made it worse.”
He frowned. “You know Robespierre?”
“No. I was repeating what Lucille told me who had it from Camille. But everybody knows what these men are like. Robespierre is cold and Danton is too warm.”