by Regina Scott
“Paris?” Danielle’s eyes lit up, and she moved Victor’s plate to the washtub while carrying the babe on her hip. “What was it like? I’ve never been.”
“Dirty and crowded.” Teeming with starving mobs that hated the aristocracy, and an aristocracy that ignored the masses and their needs.
“Maman had a book with paintings of Paris, but we left it in Calais. Did you see the Cathédrale Notre Dame?”
“Oui.” As it was being sacked. He stuck a finger into his collar and tugged.
“And the Palais-Royal?”
“It’s called the Palais de l’égalité now,” he snapped a bit too quickly, then clamped his mouth shut.
Brigitte stilled, her fork clattering against her plate. “The revolutionaries renamed it?”
“Ah…” Indeed they had. France could hardly call such a famous Parisian landmark by the name royal now that the country was a republic controlled by the people. But how to explain such a thing without sounding like a radical?
Which was rather difficult considering he was a radical, just not a radical who stood for the blind slaughter of innocent people. “Oui, I believe it got renamed.”
Believed it because he had seen it happen, round about the time the Duc d’Orléans had thrown off his hereditary title and started calling himself by the name, Philippe Égalité. And since Égalité had owned the palace, it was only fitting that the Palais-Royal be changed, as well.
“That’s doltish.” Danielle poked out her bottom lip, her face dark. “Why must everything get renamed? As if the changes in the calendar and holidays aren’t bad enough, now they’ve got to start renaming places? I no more than had the months memorized when we switch to the revolutionary calendar, and now—”
“Watch yourself, child.” He cast a glance toward the door, which was ridiculous since the Terror was well and truly over. People weren’t being guillotined for such careless statements anymore. But a year ago…
No. He refused to think on it. The girl had meant nothing by her words. She didn’t understand the need for the changes, the unarguable demand that every remembrance of the tyranny and oppression which had once dominated France be cut from the country’s future. She was growing up in the First Republic and likely wouldn’t remember the horrors and debt that had plagued the country under the reign of the Bourbon kings.
But the new France could hardly use a calendar designed by a church that had seen fit to tax peasants so its priests could grow rich and fat while people like Corinne starved. Though some priests had truly endeavored to help the needy, far too many clergymen had allowed greed to consume them, just as the aristocracy had.
“What shall Serge and Victor do if we ever change back to the old calendar?” Danielle asked. “They’ll have to memorize two, as well.”
“It’s not coming back.” It couldn’t. That would mean the Republic failed and the old system of government had been reinstated. And if such a thing ever happened, the average French citizen would once again be stripped of food and land and liberty.
He cleared his throat and glanced around at the serious faces watching him. “I see your mother hasn’t failed in her geography lessons. You know much of Paris for never having walked its streets.”
The austere look left Danielle’s face and she smiled brilliantly. “Maman’s never been. But Papa went often. I used to beg him to take me. He had the most amazing stories.”
“Mayhap you can go sometime, then. But I advise you to wait until the Révolution is over. You never know what the streets of Paris hold these days.”
“You were there during the Révolution?” Brigitte whispered.
He lurched to his feet, the well-intentioned comment giving away far more than he’d intended.
“Did you see when the people stormed that prison?” Serge glanced at his sister. “What was it called again, Danielle?”
“The Bastille.”
Serge climbed down from the bench and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. “Oui, did you see that? Maman told us all about it.”
Jean Paul swallowed and stared down at his hands, hands that had meted out far more harm than should ever have been allowed. Hands that could have been used for good, but had been bent on destruction instead.
“I was there to make furniture,” he rasped, the lie painful on his tongue. “When my wife died, I left to make furniture. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
He stormed across the chamber and burst through the door into the fading sun, any hope of a pleasant meal with a delightful family forever shattered. Better that he muck out the stables and eat salt pork after the Moreaus left. Because he couldn’t go back into that house, look into those innocent faces and pretend he was a normal, honest farmer.
So he’d work. His farm, his animals, the dirt, the straw, the feed. Anything to make him forget.
*
“Why’d he storm off like that?” Danielle scraped the food from Jean Paul’s half-eaten plate and plunked it into the washbasin.
“I know not.” Brigitte stared at the door, the echo of its slam still reverberating through the room. “’Twas almost as though the memories of Paris were too wretched for him to bear. But if his memories were that awful, then that must mean—”
“Is he coming back?” Serge gripped the side of her arm. “He promised to take us fishing again.”
She laid a hand over her son’s. “I doubt that shall happen tonight.”
Or ever again, if the suspicions churning in the back of her mind were true. What had Citizen Pagett said earlier that afternoon? Something about her doubting Jean Paul’s word as truth. She’d taken the older woman for a fool, but what if the widow wasn’t a fool at all? What if the woman was smarter than anyone in Abbeville knew?
Citizen Pagett sensed something amiss with Jean Paul’s story, just as Alphonse and the gendarme had.
A cold chill crept over her, stealing the warmth from her cheeks and the breath from her lungs. Jean Paul couldn’t be a murderer, not with how he fed the poor and cared for her and the children. ’Twas impossible to imagine.
But what if it was true nonetheless?
Chapter Fourteen
Jean Paul twisted and writhed on his bed, a state of half sleep and half wakefulness hazing his mind. The memories whirled and spiraled, a flowing river that raced across time and space, full of hidden eddies and deep pools, rocks and fallen logs and broken pieces of his life.
He stood again on the streets of Paris, hunkered against a building, his back pressed to the cool stone as he choked down the bit of cheese and bread he’d stuffed into his pocket. His stomach growled at the first taste of food he’d had in over a day, and he ripped a bigger chunk of bread off the loaf before shoving it into his mouth.
The food would hardly sustain him. He’d only the one loaf to last two days, and he’d had to wait in line outside the baker’s for three hours before dawn to get it.
He’d thought they’d had little food in Abbeville, but he hadn’t known the half of it. People might starve by the dozens in the provinces, but they starved by the droves in Paris. He glanced across the street toward the muddy, churning waters of the Seine, its dirty banks filled with fishermen and washerwomen loitering rather than working. Who had money to buy fish these days? Or pay someone to wash their clothing?
The nobility and clergy. They had funds for such luxuries, but they would never leave their lovely palace and grounds at Versailles to enter the crowded, coal-blackened city of Paris. And why should they, when they merely needed to ring a bell and three servants would appear to take away their soiled silk culottes and stockings?
Jean Paul glared down at his own rough linen trousers, stained from the coal he’d delivered to the Palais-Royal last night. Silk culottes or linen trousers? The men of all France could be divided into two groups based on what they wore.
He scarfed down another bite of cheese then dragged in a ragged breath, heavy with the scent of coal and fish and muddy waters. The air was another thing no one had
warned him about. Abbeville had more clean air than its inhabitants could use, but half the Parisians likely suffered from some foul lung disease after daily breathing this air.
“Charron, there you are.”
Jean Paul turned instinctively at the name, the one to which he’d been answering for five months. He couldn’t say what had driven him to use a different surname when first arriving in Paris. Perhaps a desire to forget the cherished days he’d spent with his wife. Perhaps a desire to hide his anger and hatred.
But he’d little need to hide in Paris. People teemed in the streets and poured from the tenements. One got lost in the anonymity of it all, in the endless string of voices and faces and empty stomachs. And everyone was just as angry as he.
“Charron. Has your mind ceased functioning? I’ve been calling your name for the past block.” Jacques Lavigne, Jean Paul’s friend and fellow worker, approached, his hands and clothes smeared with so much coal one couldn’t identify the color beneath the grime.
He swallowed another bite of bread—what would likely be his last morsel of food until the morrow. “I was thinking.”
Jacque raised an eyebrow. “About the women at the Palais-Royal?”
“About home.”
The smile disappeared. “And why would you think of home when there’s much to do in Paris? Come, you’re about to miss the speech.”
“What speech?”
“Robespierre’s. At the Palais-Royal. And have you seen this latest report from Versailles?” Jacques shoved a paper in front of him.
Jean Paul took the sheets from that morning’s press and scanned the article, his blood burning hotter with each word he read. “She tells us to eat cake? Cake?” He crumpled the paper in his fist and stomped it beneath the heel of his shoe. “We have no bread, and our queen wants us to eat cake?”
Jacques grabbed his arm and tugged him down the street. “’Tis more than that. The king has called in soldiers from Flanders and Prussia and ordered them to surround the city. They’ll kill us all in our sleep if we don’t act.”
“Kill us? Why? Because we haven’t cake to eat?” Marie Antoinette should be stripped of her crown for such a statement. Did she think he liked being hungry, liked watching Corinne starve while the rich sat down to feast-laden tables every night?
“’Tis why we must rid France of the monarchy. Now make haste.”
And he did. Jean Paul stuffed the remainder of his bread in his pocket and quickened his steps. A mob of people had indeed gathered at the Palais-Royal, and Robespierre stood atop a table in the center of it all, shouting, “Liberty, equality, fraternity!”
“Liberty, equality, fraternity,” the crowd echoed back. “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”
Jean Paul lent his own voice to the chant.
“And what shall we do about the Swiss Guard?” someone cried above the melee. “How shall we defend ourselves from the soldiers who would steal our liberty?”
“They would cut off our heads in the night before they let us be their equals,” another voice shouted.
“We must act!”
The bodies grew restless and hot around him, fists pumping the air and unintelligible voices ringing out, but the mob was no longer just men. Now women and children surrounded him, and rather than shouting for liberty, they wailed and pleaded. Robespierre no longer stood at the front of the crowd. Instead, a guillotine loomed before the people, set up on its platform for all to see when the glaring blade fell.
“Save him. Save my husband.”
“Citizen, my son is innocent. He doesn’t deserve to die.”
A hand landed on his forearm, the feminine fingers slim and gentle.
He need not look to know who the hand belonged to, but he raised his gaze nonetheless. Redness rimmed Brigitte’s eyes and tears streaked her cheeks. Her hair fell in dark tangles down her back, and with her free arm, she hoisted Victor on her hip. “Jean Paul. Help us, please.”
“What do you need?” His voice sounded hollow, the empty words reverberating back at him.
She blinked a fresh bead of moisture from her eyes. “You have to stop this.”
Something tugged on his coat, and he looked down to find Serge, tears streaming openly down his smooth cheeks. “They have Papa. They have Papa.”
“Please save him.”
Jean Paul bolted up from the bed, his chest heaving with images from the nightmare. Brigitte. Serge. Victor. The only Moreau he hadn’t seen was Danielle. But then, she was probably off plotting a way to free her father rather than begging him to help.
He pressed a hand to the back of his neck and stared down at his quivering stomach. How had Brigitte’s husband died? He’d assumed the man had been a soldier, but what if he hadn’t? What if…?
No. His blood pulsed with the denial. Brigitte’s late husband, Citizen Moreau, couldn’t have been guillotined. Only criminals had been guillotined during the Reign of Terror, only people deserving of death.
Or at least that’s what he’d been told. But how many people had been led to the guillotine’s wooden platforms for some innocent reason? Some false charge of committing a “crime against liberty?”
Jean Paul threw off the covers and leaped out of bed. He needed fresh air, mouthfuls and mouthfuls of it. He stalked out of the bedchamber and through the house before bursting outside. The gray-tinged light of early dawn surrounded him, and he leaned against the house, sucking in heavy breaths.
How had his life come to this? How had a handful of revolutionary meetings six years ago led to the atrocities he’d committed during the Terror?
He’d hardly known what he was involving himself in when he’d started attending those gatherings. But one assembly had grown into two, and two into three, and eventually he’d lost count.
Somewhere amid all those meetings, the delegates to the Estates-General had announced that France now had a National Assembly. This new Assembly was somehow supposed to represent people like him, make sure bread didn’t cost a full day’s income and that the common worker wasn’t forced to pay exorbitant taxes that the nobility and clergy evaded. But while the delegates to the National Assembly made their elaborate speeches, people still starved and the king continued to move a hired army to surround the city. There had seemed only one option: to fight.
“Jean Paul?” a small voice questioned from the side of the yard. “What are you doing out here?”
He turned to find Brigitte, her forehead drawn into a subtle frown and her eyes dark with concern. The image from his dream flooded back. Her hair matted and tangled, dirt smeared across her face and eyes rimmed with tears as she begged him for her husband’s life.
“Your husband.” His voice rang loud and rough in the quiet morning air. “How did he die?”
“I beg your pardon?” She took a step back from him, her eyes darting about in confusion.
She should be confused, should move away. He was, after all, a murderer. “Was your husband a soldier?”
“Non. Non. He was a…” Her lips pressed together.
“A what?” He pushed off the side of the house and moved closer, but she took another step back.
“A merchant.”
Dread curled in his stomach. “Did he take ill?”
She ducked her head and stared at the ground.
“The Terror?” he rasped.
The air stilled around them, no faint breeze to rustle along the grass, or birdsong to float through the morning; no crickets to chirp and frogs to gurgle. ’Twas as though nature itself held its breath and waited for Brigitte’s reply.
But she didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. Her head came up slowly, her eyes red and brimming with tears—just like in his dream.
“Non,” he whispered. He wanted to shout it, bellow it, run into the fields and yell his denial until the word became true. Until the woman before him had her husband brought back. Until her precious children had a father once again.
“I’m sorry,” he offered inanely. As if his trite words could
restore her husband to life.
“Why are you apologizing?” She wrapped her arms around herself and stared hollowly up at him. “His death had naught to do with you…did it?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again. His feet ached to step forward, arms longed to draw her body against his and hold her close. But he couldn’t. ’Twas as though some invisible chasm stretched between them. Brigitte was from Calais, had told him so on numerous occasions. And if she was from Calais, if her husband had been there during the Terror…
His throat tightened. How could he answer her question? How could he stand here, meet her eyes and tell her he might well have taken part in her husband’s death? But that he would never know for certain, because there’d been too many people, too many deaths, for him to remember them all.
He forced his shoulders into a straight line and stalked off toward the stable.
“Jean Paul?” Brigitte’s wavering voice called to his back. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t turn and look, couldn’t bear the image of her standing there, eyes red and swollen as they discussed the husband he might have killed. “To the fields.”
“What about breakfast?”
“I’m not hungry.”
And after this morn, he doubted he’d be hungry ever again.
*
Brigitte stared at Jean Paul’s retreating form. It wasn’t true. It simply couldn’t be. Perchance he was gruff at times, and he could certainly be menacing when he wanted to, but he was all soft mush beneath.
If Jean Paul had been involved with the Terror, why would he return to a town like Abbeville and live the life he now did? It made no sense. He’d just stood before the entire town yesterday and defended an innocent young boy. He could have let Gaston face Citizen Pagett and the mayor on his own. Why expose himself like that if he was some hiding criminal?
Gaston, the townsfolk. Yes, they must be upsetting him, not some involvement with her husband’s death. Of course, Citizen Pagett’s sharp words yesterday would have bothered him. Who wouldn’t be ill-tempered after someone spouted false accusations about him before half the town? She’d ask him about it at the midday meal and they’d set everything to rights.