by H. G. Parry
“Well, make it someone with a title,” Camille advised, then kissed her quickly. He must have tasted the tears on her face. “Oh, Lolotte. You shouldn’t love me so much, not if it’s going to make you so unhappy.”
It made her smile weakly. “As if it was my doing! You were just a boring failed lawyer when I first met you. I had no intention of falling in love with you. You just wouldn’t leave me alone.” Her own words caught up to her, and she held him close. “Please, please don’t leave me alone. Be careful.”
“I will,” he said. She knew he wouldn’t be.
By the early hours of the morning, twenty thousand Commoners were assembled outside the Hôtel de Ville. They were armed with rifles, with pikes, with their own magic, and their blood was up. The relentless gong of the bell could barely be noticed anymore: it seemed to have sunk through the pores of the crowd and blended with its heartbeat. At the Tuileries, the king had been rushed to the safety of the old riding school, where the Assembly had gathered to argue furiously about what to do. They heard the approach of the crowd from a long way away. It sounded like the wild hunt of legend, a thunder of footsteps and a baying for death.
As the dawn began to tint the sky, Lucile Desmoulins curled up by the window at the Dantons’. She no longer cared about sounding artificial, as though quoting from a romance. She was in one.
What will become of us? she wrote in her journal. I can endure no more. Camille, O my poor Camille, what will become of you? I have no strength to breathe. This night, this fatal night! O God, if it be true that thou hast any existence, save the men who are worthy of thee. We want to be free. O God, the cost of it!
All that morning, the palace was a battlefield.
It wasn’t until afternoon that Robespierre emerged from the Duplays’ house, where he had spent the long night and day. The Duplays protested strongly that the streets were still in chaos, but he couldn’t stand to be within those walls a moment longer. He had slept fitfully that night, and worked more fitfully still that day, half expecting at every moment that his friends might send for him. There had been no word. His curiosity at last burned away his fear.
“I just want to go around the corner and look,” he told Madame Duplay. Babette clutched his arm in a death grip; he disengaged it gently. “I’ll come straight back.”
The trees in the Tuileries had been the yellow green of late summer when he had walked down the streets only yesterday: as he turned the corner now, they were red gold, and many littered the ground. Autumn, come early—the aftereffects of strong weather magic. He remembered the way the wind had whipped and wailed past his window that morning. It had gone now. The trees stood tall, eerie in their straight military lines.
Around them was a scene of carnage. The gates of the Tuileries lay in ruins: blasted apart not by stonemancers this time, but by cannons. The walls, the gardens, the streets, the palace swarmed with thousands upon thousands of people. It resembled nothing so much as a nest of ants covering a human corpse.
There was a terrible smell in the air, of smoke and ash and charred flesh. His necromancy, so active these days, writhed inside him, but he didn’t need it to tell him what was burning on the bonfires that littered the grounds.
“It’s over,” he told the Duplays. “We won. The palace is ours. But don’t go out quite yet.”
He stopped by Camille’s house on the way to the Jacobins that evening. The house was shut up, but he managed to catch his friend there. Camille had stopped by only to wash and change his clothes before going out again; his family were staying with friends across town. Lucile had refused to return to the Dantons’ that night, exhausted as she was, yet she insisted their own home wouldn’t be safe.
“I think she’s probably being irrational,” Camille said. He was pale and half-drunk with fatigue, yet still talking brightly. Perhaps a little too brightly. “But I’m feeling irrational myself. I think it comes of overthrowing the monarchy on an empty stomach.”
“She must have been very worried about you,” Robespierre said, and felt the familiar twinge he couldn’t quite name. Lucile’s revolutionary leanings were more romantic than ideological, yet somehow their marriage struck Robespierre as the kind that could be forged only in the same smithy as revolution: fiery, tender, exultant, equal parts soul and intellect and animal heat. It made him wistful without knowing why.
“Very,” Camille agreed, with more seriousness. “I was worried about me too, here and there. I promised her I would stay close to Danton, but I’m not sure that close to Danton was the safest place to be. I certainly think I was protecting him more than he was protecting me. I had the air around us thick with shadows by the end.”
“And set a few things on fire, no doubt,” Robespierre said.
He meant it lightly, but his friend’s face went quiet. Robespierre, too late, remembered the bodies of the Swiss Guard amid the premature autumn leaves.
“There was some fire,” Camille said at last. He flicked a spark at Robespierre and managed a quick smile. “That’s about all I have left, I think. It was a long night, and a long day after it.”
“How many dead?” Robespierre asked, as neutrally as he could. He had heard varying reports.
“I didn’t count personally. There were nine hundred guards; I think our forces must have killed most of them. I don’t quite know how we managed it. We had more magic on our side, of course. Perhaps that was it. It was a massacre, afterward. A lot of screaming. And yes. Burning. I saw Suleau hacked to pieces by the crowds. Do you remember him? He was at school with us. Royalist, of course.”
“Camille…”
“It was glorious, really,” he interrupted. “The royal family have been taken prisoner—real prisoners, this time. France is in our hands. We won. I just need to get the smell of smoke out of my lungs.”
Robespierre remembered, suddenly, the day the Bastille had fallen. Not the parts he usually remembered: the magic and the crowds and the stone shattering into a fall of dust. He remembered instead getting home—to his dark rented rooms, not the warm haven of the Duplays’—and taking off his jacket. There had been a splatter of blood on his shirt cuff—not his, and not particularly large. It could have come from anywhere, or anyone. But for some reason, he had panicked. He had torn the shirt from him as though the touch of it was toxic; his flesh had crawled; he had scrubbed at his hands again and again, shivering convulsively with cold or horror or something else.
“I hope you didn’t take it amiss that I wasn’t there,” he said awkwardly.
“What could you have done?” Camille said. It was perhaps a little too dismissive for Robespierre’s liking. “It was pistols and magic and corpses. Not your sort of revolution at all. It would have wounded your delicate sensibilities.”
His pride, always sensitive, flared. “I’m not as squeamish as you think I am.”
“How squeamish do I think you are?” Camille held up his hands before Robespierre could reply. “I didn’t mean that. Nobody expected you to be there, Maxime. It was Danton’s show. And you would have got yourself killed venturing near the Tuileries today—which might have been an effective piece of martyrdom, come to that, but we didn’t need any more martyrs. You’re more valuable alive.”
“So are you and Danton,” Robespierre pointed out.
“I know it. That’s why we’re both alive.” He yawned hugely. He had managed to snatch only a few hours of sleep the night before, most of it leaning against Lucile’s shoulder. “If you want to help next time, you can take care of your godson.”
Robespierre was placated by that. He realized that part of his irritation had been borne of jealousy of the closeness that had grown between Danton and Camille and that, after today, would doubtless continue to grow. But it was not Danton who had been primary witness at the wedding of the Desmoulinses, or who had been named godfather to little Horace Camille. That, amid all the politics and heads on pikes, still mattered.
“Is he well?” he asked.
“Mm. He wok
e at the sound of the tocsin bells last night, like a true revolutionary, but he slept through the sound of violent uprising this morning, like a true politician. Could go either way. Either way, he should make an orator, judging by the strength of his lungs.”
“The France in which he’ll grow up will no longer need revolutionaries,” Robespierre said. He had already disregarded the disquieting memory of the Bastille. He was bursting with hope and purpose. This, finally, was it. “It may not even need politicians or orators, of the kind you’re thinking. It will be a republic. Moral, virtuous, incorruptible.”
“Normally, I would say that sounds rather dull,” Camille said. “But tonight, I’ll take it.”
Paris
September 1792
The fall of the monarchy changed everything.
That night at the Jacobins, Robespierre stood and gave one of his greatest speeches yet, praising the attack as the promise of the fall of the Bastille come at last to glorious fruition. He knew his words were laced with mesmerism, but he could barely distinguish the glow of magic in his chest from his own exultation.
“In 1789,” he said, “the people rose up to overthrow a prison. Now, in 1792, the people have risen up to implement a new world. In 1789, we were a revolution. Now we are a republic.”
The Jacobins cheered.
The French Republic of Magicians, at last, had been born.
Things began to happen after that. Once again, mob magic was alive on the streets of Paris. Aristocrats attempted to flee the country in droves: many were stopped at the border and imprisoned for treason. It was announced that a new government would be elected: elected, for the first time, by any Frenchman over the age of twenty-five, regardless of class, occupation, or magic. The Assembly, with its conciliatory ways, had lasted only a year.
Robespierre’s younger brother Augustin came from Arras to run for office, bringing Charlotte with him. There was little time to prepare for their arrival: their carriage pulled up at the Duplays’ with barely a day’s warning. Robespierre came through the courtyard to be rewarded by the sight of his two siblings, hot and flustered from the long journey, and the ecstatic greeting of his dog Brount, who had made the journey with them.
“Maximilien!” his brother called. His young face, like Robespierre’s own but rounder and more good-natured, was alight. “We’re together at last!”
“It’s so good to see you, Maxime,” Charlotte said sincerely—then, when he took her hands to welcome her, added with a frown, “You’ve been biting your nails again. I warned you about that.”
For a fortnight or so, Robespierre dared to think it might all work. The king had not been killed in the attack on the palace, it was true, as the darkest, guiltiest part of his heart had hoped. It had not stopped the war, though he hoped the change of government would bring about peace faster. But the uprising was over, and they had won. He had achieved some measure of what his benefactor had asked, and he had done so without compromising his own reputation. Surely that would be enough.
But the violence didn’t stop with the fall of the palace. In early September, as elections for the new government reached their summit, news came to Paris that Prussia had invaded the outskirts of France, seeking to place the king back on the throne. It threw the Commoners of Paris into a panic. In their panic, they turned to the prisons filled with Aristocrats and royalist sympathizers and Knights Templar. These people were all potentially dangerous; if an invasion came, any one of them could conceivably give aid to the enemy. And so, one by one, they killed them.
Makeshift tribunals were set up to sort the enemies of the people from the innocent, but in practice few were spared. Judges rushed prisoners through the courtroom into the yards outside, where hordes of Commoners were waiting and baying for blood. Magic, it turned out, could be used in creative ways by those with a mind to it. Bodies were set on fire; severed limbs levitated in an ever-growing constellation above the prisons; men and women drowned on dry land. The British ambassador, writing to Pitt at Downing Street, reported only “circumstances of barbarity too shocking to describe.”
One of those killed was Marie Antoinette’s friend and cousin by marriage, the Princess de Lamballe. She was torn apart by a mob, and her head was mounted on a pike. The Commoners took the head to a local barber; amid a host of knives and grins, he styled her beautiful golden hair, and it streamed behind her head like a banner. Marie Antoinette hadn’t been content to watch then. Her fire magic had blazed from the palace. The trees had burned; several of the mob had gone up in flames. But it had done no good.
It was said that Danton and his government, Camille included, were masterminding the slaughters for their own ends. Danton himself gave no sign of this, but certainly he didn’t move to help the victims.
“To hell with them,” he said, or was reported to have said. “Let the prisoners take care of themselves.”
Robespierre didn’t know what Danton’s involvement was, or Camille’s. He tried not to look or to listen. He was very busy. The formation of the Republic meant he was once more eligible to serve in office, in what was going to be called the National Convention. He needed to campaign; more important, he needed to work behind the scenes to ensure the elections themselves went smoothly. But one day, walking home, he passed a group of men playing chess outside the Conciergerie. His eyes lingered just a little too long, perhaps hungry for a scene of normality, and he saw that the board was set on a mound of mutilated corpses. At that, bile rose in his throat. When he reached the Duplays’, he was still pale enough even by his standards that Éléonore stopped short.
“What’s wrong, Maximilien?” she asked in alarm. She had been painting a self-portrait for her art class: one day, she hoped to make a living as an artist. She dropped the brush in a hurry.
He managed a smile for her, as he would have for his sister. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
She wasn’t fooled, just as Charlotte wouldn’t have been. Her concern was softer but no less determined. “It’s something. You’re shaking. You saw something, didn’t you? We all see things we don’t want to these days. Was it someone you knew?”
“No,” he said, though it might have been. People all looked the same with no heads. “It just took me by surprise. They were counterrevolutionaries, I suppose. For all I know, they were Prussian agents. I don’t know why it should bother me.”
“Because you’re not like those people out there. You’re kind. Too kind, perhaps, for what you have to do.” She hesitated. “Do you want to stop it? All the killings? You could, you know. People listen to you; they respect you, really, more than Danton.”
“I don’t think I could stop this,” he said. “Danton isn’t even trying.”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know.” He looked over at the canvas, where the unfinished self-portrait watched him with unfinished eyes. She’d made them a touch darker than they were in life.
“Can we stop it?” he asked, in the garden of his sleep.
“Do you want to?” his benefactor said, in a horrible echo of Éléonore. He had been in a better mood since the monarchy had fallen, but Robespierre suspected he was still not content. “You asked for the voice of the people. Well, this is the voice of the people. This is what they want.”
“They don’t know what they want. They’re angry. They’re not thinking clearly.”
“So your idea of Rousseau’s social contract is to supply the people with what they would want, if they were thinking clearly.” His benefactor shook his head, amused. “I do enjoy your ideological gymnastics, Robespierre. But it’s you who has failed to think. You need mob violence. You would have nothing without it. The storming of the Bastille. The attack on the Tuileries.”
“Those were different. Those had purpose.”
“So does this. These prisoners are too dangerous to be allowed to live. France is facing invasion.”
“Some of them are dangerous, perhaps. But this is mass slaughter. There’s no real judicial p
rocess; it’s all just a mess.”
“Then you don’t want to stop it. You want to give it order. You can’t stop the people from exacting revenge. It’s human nature—true human nature, not that nonsense in your Rousseau. Your mesmerism could never be that strong: you’d have to control all of France from your study, day and night. But you can use their anger. It could be a weapon.”
“How?”
“You’re an intelligent man. Work something out. But do it quickly, and do it decisively. Danton has surpassed you, since he delivered the country from the monarchy.”
Against his will, he felt again that sharp, insidious stab of jealousy. “I did that. Danton wouldn’t have moved on the palace without me.”
“He doesn’t know that. Nor does anyone else. I thought that was what you wanted.”
It was, of course. He didn’t even want to know it himself; he wasn’t sure it was even true, because he didn’t want to be sure. Perhaps Danton had needed no encouragement. But still…
“We can do something about Danton later,” his benefactor said. “The palace was stormed and taken. On the whole, your move worked. But you need to gain ground, and do it fast.”
“I don’t want to do something about Danton,” Robespierre said, with a jolt of alarm. “For all his faults, he’s a patriot. I consider him a friend. We share a vision of France, at least in part.”
“You don’t want to,” his benefactor agreed. “Yet you know you may have to. As I said, you’re an intelligent man.” He paused. “And yes. You can stop the killings, if you want to. You can stop a good deal more than that. You’ve tried to keep your hands clean by letting Danton do it his way. It hasn’t worked. You need to do it our way.”
“And what is our way?”