Verdette yowled again, louder this time, and Marie-Anne reached down to pick her up, sobbing in sympathy and remorse. She cradled the cat to her chest; the cat felt heavier than she had only minutes before, and her fur—it was softer, thicker, and under Marie-Anne’s fingers it reflected the lamplight in the room, glistening. Verdette finally settled as Marie-Anne stroked and cuddled her, purring now: a low, loud rumble that she felt more than heard. She set Verdette on the laboratory table: yes, this was Verdette as she had been as a young cat: all lean muscle and gleaming fur, her eyes bright and alert. Her tail twitched as she sniffed the air, then—in a single, fluid motion—she leaped from the tabletop to the floor and padded away, tail held high.
Grinning despite herself, Marie-Anne capped the vial of the remaining elixir. She picked up a quill and dipped the sharpened end in the ink. Crouched over her notebook, she began to write.
*
“I can’t believe what I’m seeing with Verdette. It’s literally a miracle; as if she’s been reborn.”
Antoine marveled to Marie-Anne at dinner that night as Verdette purred on a chair next to Marie-Anne. The servants bustled around the table, placing the soup course in front of the two. Since she’d given the cat the elixir, it seemed that the animal wanted to always be in the same room she was in—she followed Marie-Anne around more like a dog than a cat. The trait, so unusual in Verdette, made Marie-Anne worry about how the elixir might have otherwise changed the cat, but she managed to smile at Antoine.
“Not a miracle,” she said. “I took some precipitate of mercury and heated it—you’ve always said that the air it gives off has wonderful restorative properties, and Verdette was failing so quickly. I collected the air and forced her to breathe it. I think it has given her back the energy she’d lost.”
Antoine gave a short, skeptical laugh. “Then you may have stumbled upon a rejuvenation process to rival the accomplishments of all the alchemists of the past. You and I will have to do some further experiments along this line.” He reached across Marie-Anne to stroke the cat, but Verdette hissed and slid backward in the chair, her tail puffing out and waving vigorously, the hair rising along her spine. She rose up and her front paws slashed at Antoine’s hand, leaving behind a trail of four bloody furrows before he could draw it back. Droplets of blood spattered the tablecloth and the soup bowls rattled on their plates as he recoiled. “Merde!” Antoine said, staring at the injured appendage in disbelief. The cat snarled as Antoine wagged a finger at the animal.
“Verdette!” Marie-Anne scolded. The cat’s head snapped toward her, the tail stopped lashing, and her fur relaxed again. She allowed Marie-Anne to scratch her ears without protest. Marie-Anne shook her head as the cat stepped from the chair and settled into her lap, obviously content again. “I don’t understand, Antoine. Could she smell something from one of the experiments on your hands?” The cat had never been anything but placid with both of them, and for that matter, with anyone who deigned to show her affection.
“I doubt it. I washed them thoroughly before I came to dinner.” Yet as Antoine tentatively reached for Verdette again, the cat stiffened in Marie-Anne’s lap, giving a low warning growl as her ears flattened against her head. “Perhaps the mercury precipitate affected her.”
Antoine pulled his hand back. He sighed and dabbed at the scratches with a napkin dipped in a water glass. “Excusez-moi,” he said to her, pushing back his chair. “I should bandage this …” He bent down to her, carefully watching Verdette, who peered at him suspiciously from Marie-Anne’s lap, and kissed his wife’s cheek. “I’ll be right back, my dear. Finish your soup; I’ll tell Josette to hold the entree for a few minutes. And perhaps Verdette should be discouraged from being at the table.”
“Certainly,” Marie-Anne told him. “Take care of your hand, and I’ll see to Verdette.”
As Antoine left the dining room, Marie-Anne looked down to see Verdette’s green eyes staring at her placidly. The cat rubbed its head against Marie-Anne’s hand. “What’s going on with you?” Marie-Anne asked the cat as she rubbed under her chin, the cat lifting its head and closing its eyes under her caress. She could feel the throbbing of the cat’s purr, but beyond that, the cat didn’t answer.
She would discover over the next several days that Verdette would tolerate no one else’s touch: not Antoine’s, nor any of the household staff, nor that of strangers. She continued to try to be wherever Marie-Anne was. When Marie-Anne left the house, the servants told her, Verdette would vanish in the recesses of the house and not reappear until she heard Marie-Anne’s voice again.
“We both have to pay for what’s been given us,” Nicolas had said. Marie-Anne was afraid that she was beginning to understand what payment the elixir had demanded of Verdette.
She went to the laboratory, Verdette padding along behind her, and took the blue vial from its place on the shelf. She held it for a long time. She’d thought that once she knew that the elixir truly worked she might give it to others. Antoine would have been her easy first choice: a good and compassionate person, an intelligent one, her lover. The gift of an eternal life in his scientific pursuits: she could only imagine what he might accomplish, the heights to which he could bring his passion. Even if they ended up apart decades or centuries later, she would never regret giving him that gift.
But … At what cost? The elixir had chained her to the green soul-hearts, to the creative energy that nourished her and kept her healthy. That wasn’t a horrible fate—she’d found love and companionship through that compulsion, and she could not say that she regretted it even in those times when the lack of a soul-heart around her made her weak and sick. But Nicolas—the elixir had done something even darker to him, binding him to pain and death and an irrational hatred of her.
And now poor Verdette, who had been so gentle and loving and who was still that way—but only with her.
The facets of the crystal dug into her palm as she squeezed the vial. Do you dare to give this to anyone else without knowing more? Would you risk creating another Nicolas?
She had no answer to that. Not yet. She took the vial and locked it in a small chest in the laboratory. Her notes she put together and bound up with a ribbon, placing them underneath the chest. She looked at the mice in their cages; their black eyes seemed to glare back at her accusingly.
Verdette jumped from the floor to the bench before which Marie-Anne stood. The cat rubbed against her, walking back and forth and meowing softly until Marie-Anne stroked her. “What did I do to you?” she asked the cat. “What did I do?”
Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier: 1793
ANOTHER FEW YEARS ON, and Verdette continued as she was without change. Not so the world around Marie-Anne and Antoine.
That world continued to deteriorate. Not long after Marie-Anne gave Verdette the elixir, food riots broke out in Paris. Austria and Prussia allied against France, beginning a war that France hardly needed, given its own internal turmoil. In the summer of that year, after the Prussian Commander, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto announcing that the allies would enter France to restore the monarchy of Louis XVI, the citizens of Paris stormed the Tuileries Palace, slaughtering the Swiss Guard protecting the king, and the royal family was taken into custody. In September, the kingship of France was dissolved and the First Republic proclaimed; in December, Louis XVI was tried, with Robespierre declaring that “Louis must die, so that the country may live.”
On a cold, late January day in 1793, Citizen Louis Capet—formerly known as King Louis XVI—was guillotined at the Place de la Révolution. Marie-Anne heard with horror that many in the vast crowd ran forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the former king’s blood as it gushed from his body. The two main political factions within the Republic, the Girondins and the Jacobins, began to tear at each other; in July the scientist and radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat, one of the Jacobin leaders, was assassinated. On October 18, Marie-Antoinette’s head was also struck from her body, and with that final purge of the r
oyal family, the political parties of the Republic began to look suspiciously at each other. The Revolutionary Tribunal, under the direction of Maximilien Robespierre, had already convicted several hundred if not thousands of citizens of treasons. Heads were being lopped from bodies by the dozens every day in the Place de la Révolution.
On the 10th of November (or, under the new Republic calendar, 20 Brumaire, Year II), Jacques-Louis David came to their house. Marie-Anne hadn’t seen the painter for some months, not since he’d shown them his painting of Marat’s death—a painting that Marie-Anne found disturbing both for the grisly subject matter and David’s idealization of Marat’s features. The Lavoisiers had met Marat in their scientific circles, and his face and skin were disfigured with a hideous blistering skin condition, yet his skin was unblemished in David’s painting. “You’ve made him look like a martyred saint,” had been Marie-Anne’s reaction to the painting.
“Oui. That’s exactly what he is,” David had answered in his slurred speech. The growth on his scarred face had become more prominent in the last few years, further interfering with his speech and giving his face an even more lopsided appearance. Marie-Anne had no adequate answer to his statement; she’d remained silent.
Now David was back in their house, and his excitement was evident. Marie-Anne, with Verdette in her arms, met him in the foyer as Etienne opened the door for him and took his cloak and hat. “Ah, look at this small miracle!” David said. “Verdette, you look as young and fit as one of your daughters.” He reached out toward the cat but Marie-Anne stepped back, shaking her head as she felt the cat stiffen in her grasp and growl.
“I wouldn’t,” she warned him. “Verdette’s become … temperamental of late.”
“Ah,” David said. He looked at her and Verdette quizzically, but he withdrew his hand. “You and Antoine should come with me and Marguerite,” he said. “Marguerite’s waiting in a carriage outside. Robespierre is speaking at the Celebration of the Goddess of Reason tonight—it would be good for the two of you to make an appearance with us.”
Marie-Anne nearly laughed. Earlier in the year, she knew, David had been named a member of the Art Commission as well as the Committee of Public Safety, making his opinion the preeminent one for painting. Marie-Anne had already heard David referred to as ‘the Robespierre of the brush.’ Now here he was at their door urging them to go see the genuine article. “Good?” Marie-Anne asked him. “In what way? Antoine and I have not been involved in politics; you know that.”
“That is precisely why you should come,” David answered. “Those who are not for the Republic are considered to be against it. And I’ve heard whispers …”
“Whispers, Jacques-Louis?” Antoine interjected. Marie-Anne turned to see her husband descending the stairs to the foyer, accompanied by Joseph Louis Lagrange, a mathematician, family friend, and possessor of a soul-heart similar to Antoine’s. “What whispers have you heard?”
David gave Antoine and Lagrange a small bow. “I hesitate to say,” he said to Antoine, glancing at Lagrange.
“You can say whatever you want in front of Joseph,” Antoine said. “He’s a friend of the family, as are you.”
David gave another small bow. “The gossip is that the Tribunal is starting to look at the former members of the Ferme-Générale, Antoine, and that arrests might follow soon. I worry about you.”
Marie-Anne gasped. “Is this true? Antoine did nothing—he wasn’t one of those collecting taxes for the king, after all. He was just a low-level administrator.”
“But all those in the Ferme-Générale profited from the taxes that were raised, and that, evidently, might be enough,” David answered. “Come with me to the Celebration tonight—I know Robespierre well, and I can introduce you to him; he’ll see you with me and know that you’re loyal citizens of the Republic, as much as I am. Monsieur Lagrange can come with us, if he wishes.”
Marie-Anne glanced at Antoine, who was frowning. “Antoine, perhaps we should listen to him. What could it hurt?”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Antoine told them all. “All I’ve ever done has been for my family, my science, and for France.”
“I know that,” David answered. “But it’s important that Robespierre knows this as well. He is a friend of science, as both you and Monsieur Lagrange should know. Have you met him yet?”
Antoine shook his head. “I certainly know of him, as does any citizen,” he said, with a curl of the lips that spoke of his opinion of the man. “But Marie-Anne and I have had no occasion to be introduced to him.”
“I’ll do so tonight,” David said. “Antoine, Marie-Anne, I tell you again—this is important for you. You can no longer hide away and pretend that all this turmoil will pass. France has changed; the world has changed. You must change with it or face the consequences. Please, get yourselves ready, and we’ll go.”
Marie-Anne glanced at Antoine, nodding slightly. Antoine took a long, slow breath. “Joseph?” he asked his companion.
Lagrange shrugged. “I’ve nothing else planned. It might be … interesting,” he said.
“Then we’ll go,” Antoine said, “since you deem it so vital, Jacques-Louis. Don’t leave Marguerite out in the cold; fetch her and wait for us in the dining room; Josette will bring the two of you some refreshment while we dress and make ourselves ready. Joseph, my closet is yours as well if you wish to change; we’re of the same size.”
“Excellent,” David said. “And all of you—no powdered hair and no periwigs. Not tonight. This is not a night for you to appear to be putting yourself above others.”
*
The Celebration of the Goddess of Reason took place at the Cathedral of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité, though since the several laws enacted by the National Council forbidding religious affiliations, the great cathedral had since been re-dedicated as the “Temple of Reason.” The initial ceremonies had already begun by the time they arrived; they could hear drums inside the cathedral and a choir singing the “Hymn of Liberty.” The crowd outside was large and raucous; inside, the noise was tremendous, with the musicians and choirs and people shouting. The interior of the cathedral had been stripped of anything that spoke of the Church: all the crucifixes and images of Mary and the saints were gone. The high altar had been similarly modified: there was a throne set there and the inscription “To Philosophy” had been carved over the doors of the cathedral.
As they approached the cathedral, Marguerite took Marie-Anne’s arm as they walked, letting the three men precede them. “I sometimes think this all feels wrong,” Marguerite whispered, inclining her slender neck toward Marie-Anne. Her dark hair was tucked under a bonnet adorned with silken flowers, and her high cheeks were reddened by both rouge and the cold night air. “After all the masses I attended here—why, this feels like desecration.”
Marie-Anne patted her hand. “I feel the same,” she told her. “But those words would be dangerous to speak too loudly.”
Marguerite had a short laugh at that, her fingers squeezing Marie-Anne’s arm. “Even thoughts are dangerous in these days.”
David took the lead as they entered through the wide, central double doors, escorting them through the throngs, hailing those he recognized and introducing Marguerite, Marie-Anne, Antoine, and Lagrange. He stopped midway up the aisle as trumpets sounded. At the high lectern, a short man dressed in black lifted his hands for attention, and the tumult under the great arched ceiling abated somewhat. “That’s him,” David whispered to them. “That’s Robespierre.”
Robespierre began to speak as the crowd quieted. Marie-Anne could barely see him over the top of the crowd and with the lectern in front of him—just a dark-haired speck at the far end of the temple, features indistinguishable in the dim light. “Citizens, we wish an order of things where all low and cruel passions are enchained by the laws, all beneficent and generous feelings aroused; where ambition is the desire to merit glory and to serve one’s fatherland; where distinctions are born only of equality itself; w
here the citizen is subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, the people to justice; where the nation safeguards the welfare of each individual, and each individual proudly enjoys the prosperity and glory of the fatherland; where all spirits are enlarged by constant exchange of Republican sentiments and by the need of earning the respect of a great people; where the arts are the adornment of liberty, which ennobles them; and where commerce is the source of public wealth, not simply of monstrous opulence for a few families.”
Marie-Anne found his delivery to be slow and measured, but his voice was weak and she was doubtful that those to the rear could hear him at all, though he was interrupted often by applause, especially by those closest to the lectern. David took Marguerite’s arm and pushed forward to hear him better; Marie-Anne, Antoine, and Lagrange followed. Robespierre’s phrases were so long that every time he paused she thought that he had nothing more to say, but after looking slowly and searchingly over the audience, he would then add more adornment to his sentences. She wondered how such a person could have come to hold such power. David finally stopped when they were nearly underneath the raised lectern, his arm around Marguerite’s waist, and Marie-Anne could see Robespierre’s face clearly for the first time in the lamplight.
The sight nearly made her faint. She knew the face. Knew it far too well even though it had been long decades since she’d seen it. Robespierre looked again at the crowd, but he’d not yet glimpsed her. She started to back away. Antoine noticed her distress and looked at her quizzically. “Marie-Anne? What’s wrong?”
“I’m not feeling well,” she told him, turning her face away from the lectern. “Please, can we go home?”
Antoine’s face reflected his concern. “Certainly, my dear,” he told her. “Let me just tell Jacques-Louis and Joseph …” He took a step back into the crowd toward where David and Lagrange were standing even as Marie-Anne tried to stop him.
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