by H. G. Parry
His teachers told him that he had done very well. It was just how royalty was.
The stone courtyard around him rippled, changed; the battery of rain became a blast of heat.
He was on an island, standing on white shores surrounded by high, leafy plants. The hills were dotted with white colonial houses, incongruous European additions to the landscape. The sun scorched overhead and glared off the perfect water. That might have accounted for the heat, but there was in fact another cause. The island was on fire.
The houses were burning; in the far hills, the green of the trees was licked with orange flame and black smoke. Ash blew down to the beach in gusts; the taste caught in his throat and made him cough. He could hear shouts, some in French and some in languages he could not understand.
And there was more. Beneath the sand and the trees and the fire, hotter than any of them, was a throbbing pulse of hatred. It was too strong for mere emotion. It was tangible, physical, intense; the pressure of it made Robespierre wince involuntarily. He had felt it somewhere before.
He was in the garden. His benefactor was a darker shape amid dark trees.
“At last,” his benefactor said. “Wake up. The royal family have fled the palace. This is it.”
The city was in tumult at the news of the king’s flight. Robespierre had to fight his way through crowds on the rue Saint-Honoré to make it to the National Assembly of Magicians. His usually meticulous wig was knocked askew, which left him flustered and off-balance; if it had been at all possible, he would have taken the time to go back and set himself to rights, but the news was too urgent.
The royal family had been all but under house arrest for months as the Assembly negotiated the terms of the new government. It had taken far longer than anyone had hoped. Nobody in the Assembly, much less the king, had been able to agree on what that government should be. It had seemed so simple after the fall of the Bastille. The National Assembly of Magicians had risen up, exactly as Robespierre had hoped. They had issued a proclamation declaring it the right of all citizens to be free to practice their own magic: a Declaration of the Rights of Magicians. Within a day, the Temple Church in Paris had been stormed, and the spell that held the alchemy in the bracelets active had been broken. The Knights Templar had tried to intervene, but it had been a long time since they were knights in anything but name. Like the monarchy, their power was symbolic when it came down to it. Symbols had power only as long as people gave it to them. It seemed that the time of the people had come.
And yet few other than Camille were truly ready to break with the king and the Temple Church and forge a French Republic of Magicians in cold blood; even Camille, whose revolutionary pamphlets were now flying off the shelves faster than he could stock them, was not quite prepared to suggest stringing up the king from a lamppost, as he was wont to recommend for other Aristocrats. As long as the king was safe and compliant, then most agreed France should become a constitutional monarchy, with the Temple Church still enforcing magical restrictions in a limited capacity. The only questions were how much power the king would have and how restricted magic would be, and these were discussed every day by the National Assembly at the Tuileries. They met in the old riding school, the only building large enough to accommodate them: it was hot in summer and drafty in winter, and every day Robespierre went home tired, hoarse, and discouraged. For too long since the Bastille, Paris had been basking in a theoretical revolution only, with demands for reform and uprisings more fashionable commonplaces than matters of liberty or death.
If the king had escaped with the help of royalists, and was prepared to come back and fight with an army from Austria, then everything was in jeopardy. For the first time in two years, there was a real threat of counterrevolution on the streets of Paris. And yet—if there was no king… if the monarchy had disappeared like a thief in the night… that, of course, would be an entirely different matter.
In fact, as Robespierre learned when he slipped into his seat, the royal family had already been caught again. They had made it to within thirty miles of the border before the National Guard apprehended them: the face of the king was too well-known to pass by incognito, and his attempts to impersonate a valet were not very convincing. Another king, in another time, would never have allowed himself to be taken by Commoner forces. But Louis had no magic, and though the Commoners of France still wore bracelets and in theory were not permitted to use magic, it had been more than a year since those bracelets had been cursed with their old spells. Marie Antoinette, it was true, sent a burst of fire in the direction of the first guards to approach the carriage, but they had been prepared for that. A water-mage intercepted her magic with a quick fountain, and Louis put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Stop, my dear,” he said. He was kind and gracious in defeat, as he was at all times, but not very bright. “It was worth a try, at least.”
“This doesn’t alter our negotiations,” Bailly, the mayor of Paris, insisted at the Assembly that day. “We present this to the people as a kidnapping. We get the king back in place as soon as we can. That must be an end to it. We can still be a constitutional monarchy within weeks.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Robespierre protested. “The king abandoned his duties. He tried to betray France to its enemies. Can’t you see this is it?”
Nobody heard him in the chaos that had followed Bailly’s words; if they had, his words would have been dismissed anyway.
Camille was waiting for him on the street when the Assembly finally broke open and spilled into the evening. With last night’s dreams still fresh in his mind, Robespierre was momentarily startled to see that his friend was no longer a skinny fifteen-year-old. In fact, the fall of the Bastille had pushed him into the public gaze. He had no trouble selling even his most startling political writings now, and his dark-eyed, tousle-haired figure was a familiar fixture in revolutionary salons across the city. He had been married recently: Robespierre had been one of the chief witnesses at the wedding. And yet in every important sense, he really did often seem as though he had not changed since school.
“God,” Camille said before Robespierre could even speak. “Royalists and hypocrites and fools.” He made it sound like a song title. “At this rate, we’ll be back where we started in no time, with a king on the throne and the knights in their temples.”
Robespierre wasn’t in the temper to calm his friend down this time. The frustrations of the last few hours were boiling in his veins. “They’re bringing the king home. He’ll be at the palace again by the end of the week. The negotiations for the constitution will carry on as before.”
“The French Constitutional Monarchy of Magicians,” Camille snorted. “It hardly has that ring of freedom to it, does it? I mean, it’s hard to fit into a poem.”
“It’s ridiculous. This isn’t just a matter of abstract principle anymore. The king betrayed us. I told them. He’s dangerous.”
“Fools always are.” Camille glanced at Robespierre. “You’re uncharacteristically ruffled, by your standards.”
He knew he was—physically, for that matter, as well as mentally. It didn’t improve his mood. Camille, of course, looked as though he’d tumbled out of bed five minutes ago, but that was intentional, and possibly even accurate. Robespierre liked to be more controlled, however unfashionable that was these days. But…
“I told them the king was dangerous,” Robespierre repeated. “I told them we can trust neither the monarchy nor the Temple Church. They wouldn’t listen to me.”
It was something working with the National Assembly had taught him and that was particularly aggravating now: too often, even with mesmerism, even with status, people still didn’t listen to you. He was getting better at employing magic now, better at speaking, better at articulating his visions. They knew he was right, and they heard him. They simply resisted both magic and ideas because what he said wasn’t what they wanted to hear. With stronger mesmerism, perhaps, they wouldn’t be able to resist. But he couldn’t
keep the entire Assembly mesmerized forever, and as soon as it wore off, they would start to wonder what they had agreed to, and why. Magic was free now, in practice if not by law, but laws and practices changed all the time.
“They’ll listen to you in the Jacobins,” Camille said. He sounded suddenly serious. It distracted Robespierre briefly out of his anger.
“They might listen more to you, if you’ll speak.”
Camille laughed. “Me? I’m a celebrity in that room—they tolerate me, even love me, because of what I am. But what I am is the spark that lit a revolution. You don’t listen to a spark—you just catch fire. That’s why I’m best on paper. It burns so quickly.”
“You’re best on paper because outside of it you trip over your own tongue.”
“And you don’t. I don’t think you’ve ever let anything trip you over in your life.”
“Tell that to the Assembly.” His dark mood was back.
“Don’t bother with the Assembly,” Camille said. “Tell that to the Jacobins. They’ll listen to you. They hear you. I’m not sure you’re aware of the following you’ve been gathering lately. If you set yourself against the Assembly, the Jacobins will set themselves with you.”
Robespierre turned that over in his head for a moment. “Would you set yourself with me?”
“I already have. Didn’t you read the last issue of the Revolutions? Or are you asking if I’d support you now, tonight, this hour?”
“Yes.”
“Which?” Camille relented before Robespierre had to answer. “Yes, I’ll support you against the Assembly. Why wouldn’t I? You’re right. Of course you’re right. The constitution is dead. The king killed it himself when he turned for protection to the enemies of France.”
“It will be dangerous. There are plenty who would kill us for saying so.”
“Not if we kill them first.” Camille, as far as Robespierre knew, had never killed anyone in his life, not even during the fall of the Bastille. Yet somehow, nobody ever had questioned that he meant what he was talking about. “I keep telling you, Maximilien. As long as there are too many of us, they can’t stop us.”
“But who are we?” It was what was beginning to trouble him. “When you said that before, we were the Assembly and the people against the king and the Temple Church and the worst of the Aristocracy. Now we’re all revolutionaries, in name at least. How can we tell our allies from the rest?”
“Stand up and denounce the Assembly,” Camille said unconcernedly, “and you’ll know.”
The Jacobin Club was one of the many radical clubs that had sprung up around Paris in the wake of the fall of the Bastille, and it was by far the most powerful. It met in the library of the old monastery on the rue Saint-Honoré—a strange place for the birth of a new order, amid old books and religious dust, but it was convenient. More than that, it felt appropriate. The arched ceilings and high windows invested their discussions with order and seriousness, while the old riding school where the Assembly met always made procedures slightly absurd. Their membership had been increasing rapidly lately, with affiliated clubs springing up all over the country, so Robespierre expected it to be busy when he and Camille arrived. After today’s events, everyone would be in attendance. What he was not expecting was upward of eight hundred people crammed into the room. The sheer number of eyes stopped him short in astonishment.
“There are your listeners,” Camille said.
And they were. He had known, of course, that he had authority in the Jacobins; he had carefully cultivated it. In the two years since the Bastille, he had shone brighter and brighter, and here at least they respected his hard stance in favor of Commoner magic. But standing in front of eight hundred people, his voice going out to them in the flickering candlelight, he felt for the first time just what he had gained. It was more than respect. They believed in him.
“This should have been the greatest day of the Revolution,” Robespierre told them, amid an angry rumble of agreement. “It might yet be. But we need to take action. The Assembly, despite my protests, is trying to tell you that the royal family were kidnapped against their will; you know that isn’t true. The king has abandoned his post and his country. We need to put him on trial, as we would any other citizen.”
“He was fleeing to the borders,” someone said. “He wants to mount a foreign invasion to take back France.”
“I’m not afraid of the enemy outside our country,” Robespierre said. “We’re a country of free magicians and patriots; they would be no match for us. The threat is from within, from those in the Assembly who are secretly conspiring to see a return to monarchy and repression. What scares me is the same thing that seems to reassure everybody else: it’s that since this morning, all of our enemies speak the same language as us. Everyone is united; everyone has the same face. And yet the king would not have fled had he not known that he would find support in the capital. A king who still had a most secure crown on his head could not have renounced so many advantages without being sure of recovering them. Look around you, and share my fear.”
He didn’t need mesmerism this time. His pale, quiet face was fired with purpose. It spilled over and animated his audience like necromancy.
“I know that in thus accusing almost all the members of the Assembly of being counterrevolutionary, I raise up against me all the prideful; I sharpen a thousand daggers; I offer myself to all the hatred. So be it. I am ready to sacrifice my life for truth, liberty, and France. I have just put the nation on trial. I dare it to do the same to me.”
Camille, caught up in the excitement, leaped to his feet and cried, “We would all give our lives to save yours!”
And, by the flickering candlelight in the old stone chamber, eight hundred Jacobins all swore an oath to protect Robespierre’s life at the cost of their own. Over the next few days, letters trickled in from other branches across the country, declaring that they, too, would rally to save him. A group of the more powerful magicians offered to serve as an armed guard at all times. It was all rather hysterical. It was terrifying. It was wonderful.
“Now the king has aimed at the Nation,” Camille wrote in his paper, the Revolutions of France. “It is true that he has missed fire, but it is the Nation’s turn now.”
It didn’t happen that way. Instead, things spiraled dramatically out of control, then, as Robespierre felt he should have anticipated when Camille was involved, caught fire. Overnight, radical pamphlets were flying off the presses, followed quickly by petitions and calls to arms. They called for the removal of the king outright, and with him an end to France’s Temple Church and all distinction between Aristocratic and Commoner magic. It was Camille’s writing—that bewitching cocktail of sincerity, classical allusion, and playful cruelty—that spilled out into the crowds, but Robespierre suspected there were other forces at work behind it. Camille had a good many friends among the revolutionaries, all of whom had agendas of their own. Robespierre firmly believed that his school friend was loyal to him, but he was also under no illusions that he was loyal to him alone. Camille’s neighbor Georges-Jacques Danton had been growing in influence of late, and his taste for uprising was far more in line with Camille’s natural tendencies than Robespierre’s caution.
Perhaps it could still work. But Robespierre couldn’t help but be alarmed at how quickly the protests became violent and how ugly they were. Part of him had wanted the people of Paris to rise against the Assembly, though he would have preferred them to do it more quietly; had Camille’s words set the entire city on fire, they might have been well and good. As it was, though, they lit up only a small faction of the population: the most radical and powerful Commoner magicians. And they blazed far too brightly.
“You have to tell them to stop,” Robespierre told Camille as his friend sat writing at his desk. “This is going too far, too fast.”
“For whom? For you?”
This was closer to the truth than he cared to admit, so he did not admit it. “For the majority of the country. We
need to reassess the Assembly, put the king on trial, refine the laws. This is frightening people.”
“You told us we should be frightened.”
“Of the king’s supporters. Of the counterrevolution. The last thing we need is for people to fear Commoner magicians again, or us. And people will, if you have them on the street calling for the removal of the king by force. What’s more, you’re attributing to me things I never said—and would never say in public. I never said that the royal family were a millstone around our necks.”
“You did to me, in conversation—or near enough. I might have made it sound better. You certainly thought it. Do you mean to be one of those people who say one thing in public and one in private? Your friend Rousseau would have something to say about that.”
Robespierre gritted his teeth. He hated it when Camille flung the words of his favorite philosopher back at him in an argument, and Camille knew that only too well.
“What on earth is going on in here?” Lucile Desmoulins put her head through the doorway of Camille’s office. If Robespierre had been listening, he would have noticed earlier that the lilt of the piano she had been practicing had faded from the parlor; he hadn’t, so it startled him. “Are you two fighting amongst yourselves now? I did say that was how it would end.”
Robespierre liked Lucile very much—everybody did. She was a bright, vivacious, romantic twenty-one-year-old, far too good in every way for Camille except that she had decided to appoint him the love of her life. With her pointed face, dark eyes, and fashionable tumble of curls, she looked like a Renaissance angel—an illusion instantly dispelled as soon as something displeased her. Like her husband, she was a powerful fire-mage under her silver bracelet; her emotions raged fast and turbulent, and always near the surface.
“Lucile,” Robespierre said, “would you please tell your husband that I’m trying to keep you both safe?”