by H. G. Parry
“Lucile,” Camille countered, “would you please tell Maxime how boring I am when I’m safe? Truly, I’m indescribably dull. You know this is true. You knew me before all this started, and all I used to do was drink, fail at my profession, and turn up at your father’s house when I ran out of money to beg for his charity.”
“Oh, is that what you were there for?” she asked dryly. “The rumor was that you were having an affair with my mother.”
“Well, I couldn’t have an affair with you. You were still a girl at the time, and you only cared about poetry and music and reading about Mary, Queen of Scots. I was a boring grown-up.”
She grinned. “You were never boring. But I can certainly verify that you never seemed likely to amount to anything before all this started. My father wouldn’t have let you within an inch of proposing to me before the fall of the Bastille made you a celebrity.”
“The Revolution doesn’t exist to make you interesting, Camille,” Robespierre said, a little too loudly. Something twinged inside him when Camille and Lucile talked to each other like that, as though nobody else existed. He was jealous of something he couldn’t quite understand. “Nor a celebrity. And this isn’t the fall of the Bastille. It’s the formation of a government. We need to act within the law.”
“It’s too late.” Camille kissed Lucile’s hand and took up his pen again. “The people won’t listen to me, not if I told them that. I don’t have the power to make people stop. All I’ve ever done is told them to go as far and fast as they can, and not to look back.”
Robespierre watched as his friend’s pen flickered over the page, leaving tiny, barely formed letters in its wake. Often it would jump backward to score through a sentence, or upward to dip into the lists of subjects and adjectives Camille kept pinned about his desk like ingredients; it would light on a period for a moment, then take off once more. The movement was as natural and graceful as the flight of a sparrow.
They had both written poetry at school, Robespierre remembered. Camille had been no better at it than him, perhaps worse. He was right about one thing: the Revolution had made him, as a person, a husband, and a writer. It had given him his language. The trouble was, it was a language far more permanent than Camille’s own convictions. He believed what he wrote at the time, fully and absolutely, but then moved on, leaving the afterimage of his words. And behind him, those words took on a life of their own.
“Please,” Robespierre heard himself say.
It wasn’t very eloquent, but it made Camille stop writing and turn to face him. His bracelet clinked audibly as he put his hand to the back of the chair. All bracelets were inactive now; Camille had been flicking around fireballs and playing with shadows for months. But they were still tight about the wrist of every Commoner magician in France. It would be too expensive to bracelet the entire population for a second time; once they were removed, they were removed for good, with no chance of reinstating the spell. And they had not been removed.
Camille caught Robespierre’s glance and followed it down to his wrist. His mouth quirked in a bitter smile. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d do almost anything for you, you know that. I’ll print a retraction on whatever I attributed to you that offended you, if it will make you happier. But I won’t tell them to give up.”
It ended, quite suddenly, in blood.
The day after the National Assembly voted to proceed with a constitutional monarchy, a crowd assembled in the sprawling gardens of the Champ de Mars with a petition calling for the removal of the king. It was a clear, warm Sunday, and the square had the excited atmosphere of a carnival. Families walked hand in hand, smaller children swinging between their parents so as not to get lost. Vendors sold hot food on the corners. Magic was being flung freely, and wondrously: sparks against a perfect blue sky, drops of water catching the sun in a cascade of light. Laughter was in the air. Only a close observer would notice, with a start, that two of the festive shapes hanging from a lantern were human corpses. The two unfortunate men had been caught earlier that day hiding beneath a seat and had been hung unceremoniously as spies.
By evening, six thousand men and women had signed the petition. It was then that the soldiers came.
The National Guard were led by General Lafayette. They had come accompanied by the mayor of Paris, Jean Bailly, and they had come to suppress the demonstration. Revolutionary fervor was running high, and most of the crowd laughed at the orderly rows of men with their buttons glinting in the sun.
“You can’t send us away.” The man who spoke up held his wife’s hand in his own, and the two of them wore the red caps that had become the self-chosen uniform of Commoner magicians. “We’re the true army of the Assembly of Magicians. We’ll defend it even from itself.”
“You’re not an army,” Bailly retorted, unwisely. “This isn’t the Bastille. You’re interfering with the lawful government of France.”
The man’s wife spat on the ground. “The law and the government is what the people says it is. We didn’t pull down the Bastille to listen to men like you.”
“The law and government is us!” Bailly had to raise his voice over the rumble of the crowd, which no longer sounded so amused. “You said it was, two years ago. Magic doesn’t make a government.”
Clouds were beginning to gather—weather magic, turned angry. All at once, a fireball burst out of the crowd. Lafayette, reacting with typical speed, pulled Bailly forward out of the way, so that the fireball fell in an exhalation of sparks where his horse had been only moments before.
One fireball, from one magician. Nobody knew who it was. It didn’t matter. Before the smoke had cleared, the National Guard opened fire.
What had moments earlier been a peaceful demonstration was now a battlefield. The air was rent with the crack of rifles, and then the shriller sound of screams. The occasional spark flew from the crowds at the guard in retaliation; one soldier’s hat ignited into a plume of flame. For the most part, however, the protestors ran, hands raised to shield themselves uselessly but instinctively from shots. People fell on the stairs, gasping and choking as their lungs filled with blood. One or two were trampled in the crush. As the paths cleared, bodies were left behind. Some were dragged to safety. Many lay where they fell, like flotsam after the turn of the tide.
Above the Assembly’s headquarters at the Hôtel de Ville, the red flag of martial law was raised. It fluttered in the same faint breeze that stirred the blood-soaked dust across the ground of the Champ de Mars. Nobody had bothered to remove the corpses of the spies hung that morning; the breeze caught them too.
The Jacobins was almost empty that night. Of the hundreds who had packed it on the evening of the king’s flight, most had withdrawn in fear to form a more moderate club across the street. They were cowards, but Robespierre could understand their fear. Even as he furiously denounced the massacre to the dark room, he was waiting for the National Guard to burst through the door. They had already been once, searching for those under arrest—Camille Desmoulins and Georges-Jacques Danton among them. They hadn’t found them, and Robespierre had no idea what had become of them. He had heard reports that Camille had been taken at the Champ de Mars and beaten almost to death, but after a sickening hour of worry the victim had turned out to be quite another journalist who had the misfortune of looking a little like him. Nobody had accused Robespierre of direct complicity in the petition, but that didn’t mean he was safe. The clash of arms and hate outside on the street struck a new, different chord from the savage joy of the riots around the Bastille. He feared it was only a matter of time before someone came to arrest him too.
In fact, the men who came for the Jacobins were off duty. They were also furious, drunk, and out for blood. Their pounding on the doors shattered Robespierre’s speech. The Jacobins could see them in the courtyard, dark silhouettes amid flickering lights. Perhaps thirty—not a great number, but armed.
“Dear God,” someone whispered; Robespierre couldn’t tell who. “They’re going to kill u
s.”
“Stay calm,” Robespierre advised, although his own heart was racing. “We’ve broken no law. Besides, they won’t get in. Those doors have withstood more than a few soldiers in their days.”
He doubted whether this was true, and he was right to doubt. As if to prove him wrong, the door burst open like a dam, and the room was flooded with soldiers. They were flushed with drink or with anger, probably a dangerous cocktail of both. The club rose at once to their feet; Robespierre, who was already standing, was grabbed by those nearest to him and shoved to the back.
“Stay down,” the closest told him. “We won’t let them touch you.”
At present, at least, the intruders didn’t seem about to touch anyone, or perhaps they were held at bay by the number of Jacobins pointing pistols of their own. It was common practice to go armed now. The air filled with angry catcalls.
“Traitors!”
“Revolutionaries!”
“Commoner magicians!”
The last was a typical enough slur these days, but in fact, many of those left in the Jacobins were Commoner magicians. Whether because those with magic in their blood really were more volatile, or simply because they were more fed up with being oppressed, they seemed to make up most of the more radical sects. And for some reason more mysterious yet, they seemed drawn to Robespierre. He was one of the more outspoken advocates of their rights, of course, but he wondered sometimes if they could somehow feel what he was.
If the guards felt what he was, they would kill him. They would kill him anyway, for being who he was.
“Do you think we wanted that massacre to happen?” someone retorted. “Robespierre told them to stop.”
“They didn’t, though, did they?”
“We should have killed them all—”
“They’re calling us murderers now! They’re saying we opened fire on women and children.”
“You are murderers!” one of the Jacobins called back hotly. “And your king is the greatest murderer of all!”
One of the guards raised his rifle; at once, it was whisked from his hand in a blaze of silver metalmancy and flung against the wall. A single shot reverberated from the barrel as it hit. The chamber surged; suddenly, half the members blazed with fire magic, rippled with water, buzzed with lightning. The other half, terrified, cowered at the far side of the table. Robespierre was crushed amid the crowd; his foot caught a chair, and he heard it fall to the ground as he stumbled.
This was going to be a second massacre. Robespierre gritted his teeth and pushed to the front. It was more of an effort than he foresaw: the crowd around him were so determined to protect him that they had become an impenetrable barrier.
“Stop it!” he demanded.
The soldiers knew who he was. There was a hiss at his approach. Robespierre felt the heat of their hostility on his face like a blast from an oven. He met it and tried to keep his gaze steady. “We are not your enemies. We didn’t start that protest. We didn’t sanction that protest. None of us were anywhere near the Champ de Mars.”
“You started all of this!” a soldier shouted, and the cry was taken up by the catcalls of his fellow men-at-arms. Still, they didn’t move forward. “You want to bring this entire country down!”
“I want to save it!” Robespierre paused before his voice could rise too much; he forced his tone back to low, calm, hypnotic. He had not used his secret magic in the Jacobins for a while—he hadn’t needed to, and it had seemed dishonest among fellow revolutionaries. These were not fellow revolutionaries. He let mesmerism spill into his words. “We all want to save the country. We are not your enemies.”
“What was that petition about, then? Why were you calling for the removal of the king?”
I am going to kill Camille, Robespierre thought. He didn’t mean it: he knew all this was hardly the fault of one petition or one revolutionary, and he was at this moment as terrified for his friend’s safety as for his own. But still. Really.
“You don’t want to murder me,” he said, and hoped with all his heart his mesmerism was holding. Without it, he suspected, they would very much want to murder him. “You’re soldiers. You obey orders. Nobody has ordered our deaths. Nobody will. Go home. If you kill us here, in our own club, you will start something that none of us want.”
The silence that followed was fraught with the tensions gripping the entire country. Royalist and Republican, Commoner and Aristocrat, Templar and magician, the monarchy and the people, the old order and the Revolution. Robespierre focused his magic on thirty armed soldiers who had that morning fired into a celebration, and they looked back at a slight, bespectacled revolutionary who had called for the trial of the king.
Then, dazed, one of the soldiers lowered his rifle. As though a signal had been given, the others followed suit. One or two of them hesitated, resisting, and Robespierre quickly washed them with all the mesmerism he could muster; at that moment, he didn’t care who noticed it. It took perhaps a minute, but at last, one by one, the soldiers filed out. Two of the Jacobin magicians at the front dashed past Robespierre, their hands still smoking, and flung the door shut behind them.
The chamber dissolved into relief. Robespierre, letting his mesmerism fade, felt suddenly as though he was in another world. The air that had been thick with conflict was now thick with cheers, all saying how magnificent he’d been. How clever and how brave.
He wasn’t brave at all, and never had been. He knew that, in that moment. Camille was brave. Even at school, he had said what had come into his head, followed the quick, eager impulses of his heart, and never cared what anyone thought or what might befall him. Robespierre was scared all the time. Fear was a vein of ice at his core, and it never melted. He had faced the guards only because he was terrified of what they might do. Now that it was over, he wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball and hide.
“Thank you,” he said, instead. He had to clear his throat to be heard over the chaos, but he was used to that. “I think it’s time we adjourned, don’t you?”
Mesmerism didn’t last very long. It probably wouldn’t take the mob long to reconsider their retreat. And if they didn’t come back, someone else would.
He didn’t curl up into a ball as the room emptied, but he did sink down into an abandoned chair and rest his head in his hands, just until his heart could calm down. He’d been playing at being in danger of assassination when he’d stood up and denounced the Assembly upon the king’s flight. But it was real. Those soldiers would have killed him. And, somehow, he had a long, dark walk through streets spilling over with rioters if he wanted to reach his lodgings tonight. He didn’t even think he had any food or firewood left at the other end.
Cries of “Vive Robespierre!” were coming from the street. He probably wouldn’t get far without being set upon one way or another, then.
I can’t do this, he said silently. He had no idea if his benefactor could hear him. You told me this would all be right. It’s not right. I’m not brave enough.
He had just got to his feet when a voice came from behind him. “Excuse me.”
The speaker was perhaps in his fifties, with a kind, wizened face. He had the voice and bearing of a gentleman, yet also the brown skin of a man used to outdoor work.
“Monsieur Duplay, isn’t it?” Robespierre asked, as the name fortunately came to him. He was a carpenter who had been attending the club for some months now. They had spoken only a few times, but it had always been pleasant. He rallied himself. “Can I help you?”
“I was hoping I might be able to help you,” Duplay said, which was not something anyone had said to him for a long time. “I wondered if I could offer you refuge for the night. My house is just around the corner—not very spacious, I’m afraid, and I have a large family with which to fill it. I could only provide you with a small room. But it will be comfortable, and my wife will have supper waiting. You shouldn’t risk traveling far tonight, not being who you are. And we’d be honored to have you, of course.”
&
nbsp; “Thank you,” Robespierre said, and tried to say it normally. In fact, he could almost have cried. In that moment, the offer felt like the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. “I’d like that very much.”
Maurice Duplay lived in a two-story house on rue Saint-Honoré, with his wife, three grown daughters, young son, and nephew. It was, as he had forewarned, a large number of people for the cramped, crooked rooms, yet when Duplay arrived with a young revolutionary leader in tow, the family showed no sign of finding it an imposition. They greeted Robespierre with pleasure and concern, as though he were an old friend unexpectedly in need of their protection and with every right to claim it. The eldest daughter, Éléonore, took his coat; she was a dark-haired, serious-looking young woman, with brown eyes that lingered warmly on his face. Something in his heart tightened briefly, a very different grip than fear.
“We’re so glad you could come,” she said, as though welcoming him for tea. “Father talks about you all the time.”
Duplay must have praised him highly: the younger ones were staring at Robespierre with something like awe. He managed a smile for them, and their faces lit in return.
“This man just talked down a garrison of soldiers come to murder us,” Duplay told his family with some pride. “It was the bravest thing I ever saw. He’s going to save the country someday very soon. We need to look after him.”
“Are the soldiers going to come here?” asked the youngest daughter, Babette. She looked perhaps eighteen and seemed to regard the prospect with more excitement than fear. “Do we need to give our lives for him, like it said in the Revolutions?”
“Don’t crowd him,” Madame Duplay scolded, shooing them away. Her daughters had clearly inherited their round faces and dark hair from her, though she had grown plump and motherly in middle age. “He won’t know what to do with this influx of family. The poor man’s used to living alone.”
But he wasn’t. He was solitary by nature, but in Arras he had always lived with at least one of his siblings, and away at school he had lived in a swarm of other boys. The two years he’d been in Paris were the most alone he’d ever been, and he wasn’t used to it at all. He didn’t say so, but perhaps something in his face did, for Madame Duplay gave him a thoughtful look.