Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution

by Michelle Moran

  The barber arrives and, after locking the door behind him, announces that he is here to prepare Anna and Marie Grosholtz. He cuts our hair short for the guillotine. When the job is done, he asks if there is anyone we might like to leave it to.

  “I left mine to my daughter,” Rose says from her bed. “It will be her inheritance.”

  I do not want my nephew to remember me by my death, and I shake my head. The barber looks to my mother, who is just as vehement. The old man shrugs. He sweeps our long hair into a bag, and I wonder if it is destined to be used on a wax head someday. But I refuse to cry.

  “When they first cut off my hair, I wept all day,” Rose admits.

  “It is only hair,” I tell her. “It will grow back.”

  “If you have enough time! The carts are coming right now. It could be me, or you, or—”

  “Stop that,” Grace snaps, and I think Rose will die of fear before they take her to the guillotine.

  “Twenty-one,” Rose says. Her voice rises. “To die at twenty-one?”

  “Or forty,” Grace retorts. “Or fourteen. There is a boy in here who is thirteen years old. ‘Kill them all, and God will know His own,’ ” she says. “That is their motto.”

  There is the sound of a key turning in the lock, and many of the women stand from their beds. Rose whispers, “It’s time.”

  “The carts are here!” the jailer shouts before he leaves us to open the next door in the hall. Hundreds of prisoners fill the corridors, and we join the crowd as they make their way to a giant hall where the monks must have gathered to eat. My mother and I sit next to Rose and Grace. There are at least eight hundred people here. “How many names do they call each day?” I ask Rose.

  “Three. Sometimes four.”

  “Then your chances of being called are only one out of two hundred,” I tell her.

  She stares at me with her wide, dark eyes.

  “I spent a good amount of time counting money and balancing books,” I say. I want to tell her, At least you weren’t arrested by Robespierre himself. He didn’t stare at you and say that only Saint Denis could save your life now. Then I think of Madame Royale living alone in the Tuileries Palace. I heard that, after Madame Élisabeth’s death, they separated Marie-Thérèse from her brother, and that the soldiers were treating young Louis-Charles with particular cruelty. Whatever Madame Royale’s deeds against me were, and only God truly knows them, I am willing to forgive her. Today, if my name is called, I will go with a clean heart.

  I search the hall for familiar faces. There are just as many men as women, both old and young, culottes and sans-culottes. A young man seats himself next to me, and I am struck by how similar to Henri he appears. He catches me staring and asks, “You are new here?”

  “Last night.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says with genuine sympathy. “They do this on purpose,” he reveals. “Gather everyone and make them wait. It’s a sad spectacle,” he adds critically.

  The chief jailer appears with a list in his hands. Immediately, the entire room is silent. I can see the way he makes us wait, searching the hall and letting his gaze rest on particular prisoners, who immediately bury their heads in their hands. “Today’s list,” he says slowly, “has eight people.”

  “Eight?” Rose turns to me. “What are our chances now?”

  “One in a hundred.”

  My mother makes the sign of the cross, and the chief jailer begins to read. He pauses after each name, searching for the victim so he may see the reaction. When he reaches the end of the list and we have not been called, I am suddenly elated. We have survived! Our first day in Les Carmes and we will live to see another.

  But there are devastating cries across the room as loved ones are parted and must make their good-byes. At once, I feel terrible guilt for my joy. A woman is forcibly parted from her husband as she is begging him to look after their daughter. I cover my eyes with my hand, and the man next to me says gently, “Don’t sit at the front tomorrow. When you sit in the back, there’s almost nothing you can hear. It’s better that way.”

  I lower my hand. “So then why are you up here?”

  He smiles. “Because I saw you.”

  I know I’m blushing, and I realize I should introduce myself. But is it possible to court this way in a prison? “I am Marie Grosholtz,” I reply.

  He takes my hand and kisses it tenderly. “I am François Tussaud.”

  ONCE THE HALL is cleared of the condemned, the prisoners are given carafes of dirty water and bowls of soup.

  “We can go outside,” François suggests. “If we leave now, we might find a bench.”

  I look to my mother. “Go,” she says. I follow François into a little herb garden where we are allowed to sit on the wooden benches. There are guards posted along the wall, grateful for the chance to stand in the sunshine rather than inside, among the latrine buckets and bloodied floors.

  “So you were born in Strasbourg,” François guesses. He must hear my accent.

  “Yes, but I remember almost nothing of it,” I say.

  “Like Mâcon. That’s where my people are from. But they moved to Lyon when I was four, and all I can remember are the water mills.”

  I think of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau, with its pots of lilacs and clusters of hyacinths. The water mill was Madame Élisabeth’s favorite place in Versailles. Is someone still feeding the sheep and milking the cows, or has the Convention abandoned the rustic sanctuary to the honeysuckle and ivy? “But Lyon must be much like Mâcon,” I say, picturing the thriving city between Paris and Marseille. “The cities are close.”

  “Yes. It was. Of course, now there is almost nothing left of it.”

  I tell him about the Salon de Cire, and he tells me he was an engineer. “So we were both builders,” he says. “Except now there’s nothing to build in Lyon.”

  “Why? What happened?” I ask.

  I can see that the memory pains him. “It was a massacre,” he reveals. “The city refused to support the Committee of Public Safety and wanted a return to the Constitution of ’Ninety-one. It was civil war. The papers in Paris never reported it?”

  “No.” I am certain of this. “I would have heard.”

  “It was Robespierre’s doing. When our citizens refused to support the committee, he instructed his generals to ‘exterminate every monster in Lyon.’ ”

  “He used those words?”

  “Yes. And that’s what it was. An extermination of two thousand people: women, children, even the old and feeble. Because my family were metalworkers, the men were chained together and executed on the Plaine des Brotteaux. I escaped because I was in a neighboring village. When I returned, I saw that the Convention’s soldiers had razed every house and apartment to the ground. Any store or building that looked as if it belonged to the wealthy, they destroyed. But they kept the slums standing. The poor were allowed to remain in their shacks as the true patriots and victims of the aristocracy. Ten days later, Robespierre ordered a column to be erected over the site of the largest burned building. It read, LYON MADE WAR ON LIBERTY, SO LYON IS NO MORE.”

  My eyes are filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” François says. “I should not have spoken of this to a lady. You will never have seen such blood—”

  “I have seen it all, and more.”

  I tell him about my brothers in the Tuileries Palace and my task of visiting the charnel house each night, searching through the baskets of mutilated bodies for the heads wanted by the National Convention. “When Lucile Desmoulins was sent to the scaffold, I refused to go back to the Madeleine Cemetery.”

  “And that is why you are here?”

  “And why they arrested my mother. My father doesn’t know,” I say. To explain what Curtius truly is to me would be too long, too complicated. “He is stationed on the Rhine. I can’t imagine his horror when he returns to discover that we have been arrested.” Or worse, that we have died and been buried, like Gabrielle Danton. I am weeping openly now.

  I mus
t look as sad and helpless as Rose.

  IN THE MORNINGS, François sits with me and my mother in the back of the hall, and when the carts have rolled away, he leads us into the garden, pointing out the herbs and describing their uses. When my mother becomes sick from the water they serve, he brings her some peppermint. He tells us that after his family was murdered, he lived off the land for more than six months. “Eventually, the soldiers discovered me and I was sent here,” he says. “They might have killed me right then, but a single soldier took pity. He was a school friend of mine.”

  At night, before we are locked in our cells, I spend time with François in his chamber. He shares a room with fifteen other men. Most of them are seated on their beds with female prisoners, playing cards made from paper and talking about the old days when anything could be bought in the Palais-Royal and the cafés were filled with coffee and bread. We are always thinking about food, and you can pick out the prisoners who have been here longest by the sharpness of their cheekbones and the looseness of their clothes. The Revolution has truly made us equals. Now we are all poor and hungry and ill-clothed.

  It is stifling in these cells. We pretend not to smell the fetid latrine buckets collecting flies in the hall, but none of us can escape the rising heat. It has been two weeks since I have had a bath, and for many in here it has been much longer.

  “I have something for you,” François says one evening. He pulls a newspaper from under his pillow and puts a finger to his lips. “One of the guards gave it to me. I won it at cards.”

  “It’s today’s paper,” I say, shocked.

  “Did you think I would bet on old news?”

  Chapter 62

  JUNE 15, 1794–JULY 1794

  [I] cut off my hair myself; it is the only remembrance I can leave my children. Now I am ready to die.

  —PRINCESSE DE MONACO, PRISONER IN LES CARMES

  TEN DAYS LATER, FRANÇOIS BURSTS INTO MY CELL BEFORE the guards can lock it for the night. The other women are in various states of undress, but none of them bother to cover themselves. The men have seen it all at Les Carmes. What is there to hide?

  “I have the Chronique de Paris!” he exclaims. He comes to my bed, and the women quickly gather around us. He watches my face as I read the first article. “They have guillotined Madame Sainte-Amaranthe,” I whisper, “along with her children, Émilie and Louis.”

  There are cries of horror, and Rose nearly collapses. Her skin is clammy, and her hands are shaking. “I knew Madame Sainte-Amaranthe,” she says.

  “She was a well-known royalist,” Grace whispers. “I played cards in her salon last year, and she still had a portrait of the king above her mantel.”

  The women shake their heads. So foolish, to risk your life like that. “I modeled Émilie five years ago,” I say. “She would be nineteen now and her brother sixteen.”

  “Every day the list is getting longer. First four, then eight, now it’s ten per day. What is that, Marie?” Rose asks. “What are our chances?”

  “One in eighty.” I should never have told her about odds. I should have left my calculations behind with the Salon de Cire.

  “There is a second article,” François points out, “you may want to read. The Committee of Public Safety has passed the Law of 22 Prairial.”

  I skim the contents. “Those who stand before the Revolutionary Tribunal,” I say, “are no longer permitted to have anyone speak in their defense. And all citizens who are found guilty are to be sentenced to immediate death.”

  “Immediate?” Rose grips my arm. “But that doesn’t mean us. We have already been sentenced. That will only apply to those who come after.”

  Grace looks over my shoulder and reads aloud, “Every citizen is empowered to seize conspirators and counterrevolutionaries, and to bring them before the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is the duty of every patriot to denounce all traitors to our patrie as soon as they know of them.” She continues, “For slandering patriotism, for inciting rebellion with dangerous words, for corrupting the purity of the Revolution, and for spreading false news.”

  “It is the second Inquisition,” François says.

  He is right. The next morning as we assemble in the hall, several hundred new prisoners are brought into the room. There is no space at the back, so we are forced to sit with Grace and Rose and listen as the names are called. First five, then ten, then fifteen in total.

  “The blood will pool so thick beneath the guillotine that it will take an ocean of water to wash it clean,” Grace predicts.

  And every day it is like this. More prisoners, more victims, until in the middle of July there are forty women sharing our cell. The mood in the hall every morning becomes frantic. Grace believes there will be another prison massacre, like the one that resulted in the Princesse de Lamballe’s slaughter. She tells us how the revolutionaries placed the beautiful princesse’s head on a pike and shoved it through the window of her cabriolet. “It was only because I was Scottish that they did not murder me right there.”

  Of course, that is no protection now.

  To escape, I spend much of my time in the gardens. In the mornings, François walks with me, and in the evenings, I go with my mother and Grace. But as July’s heat intensifies, no one feels like moving. “What is the point?” Rose asks. “It is cooler in the cells than it is out there.” When I ask her about the smell of festering waste, she replies, “At least there is nothing to remind us in here of the world we will never rejoin outside.”

  So I go alone to the garden in the middle of the day and am not surprised to see an empty bench. It’s directly in the sun, but why should I care about my complexion? Will the executioner’s job be any different if I am dark or pale? My mother and I have been here now for two and half months, but there is no one I recognize in the garden. New prisoners arrive every day, replacing the ones who are sent away in carts. But someone thinks he recognizes me.

  “Marie?”

  The voice is immediately familiar. I turn, and as I shade my eyes with my hands, my vision blurs. It’s impossible. I rise from the bench. No … I am dreaming.

  “Marie,” Edmund says, “it’s me.”

  I grab the back of the bench in case my legs give out, then look around the garden for help. Is this real? Do the others see him as I do? But when my brother steps closer, I know that it is him. He is dressed as a common sans-culotte, with a loose white shirt and dirty brown pants. His hair is longer than I have ever seen it, even when we were children, and instead of being tied back with a band, it hangs around his shoulders. I am caught between the desire to beat him and the impulse to embrace him.

  “Marie, I am a coward,” he whispers. “I escaped,” he says in German. “I fled the Tuileries after Johann was killed.”

  I back away from him.

  “You have to understand—”

  “That you left Maman in agony? That you let us believe you died in the worst possible way?” The other prisoners are staring, but I do not care. He reaches out to touch me, but I slap his hand away. “You betrayed us!” I cry. “Where have you been? Did you ever think of Maman’s suffering?” I ask. “Did you ever wonder what happened to Wolfgang and Abrielle and Michael?”

  “Please, sit,” he begs. He is a different man. Tired, beaten, full of regret. “They died.”

  “No, they are living in London—with Henri!”

  Now it is his turn to be shocked.

  “You were prepared to let Maman believe she had lost three sons.”

  “I was a coward, Marie. Why would Maman want to see a coward?”

  “Because you are her child.” I am weeping, and the guards are watching us. They probably believe this is some lovers’ spat. “So while we were marking your grave,” I confirm, “you were hiding in Paris?”

  “For a week. I knew if I came to the Boulevard they would find me. But I was arrested on the eighth day. I gave them a different name, and they took me to La Force.”

  “And you didn’t think to send word?”
r />   “They were going to kill me. Why would I make Maman suffer twice?”

  In the heat of the day, it is difficult to think. I put my hand to my head.

  “I was imprisoned at La Force until last week,” he says.

  “Two years?”

  “Twenty-two months. They think I am the son of a farmer. It’s the only reason they haven’t executed me.”

  I stare at him in the harsh light of the sun. His face is pale, and his broad chest, which once filled out his Swiss Guardsman’s uniform, is no longer well muscled and defined. “I assumed you were among the first to die.”

  He flinches. “It was a massacre. I am not proud of what I did.”

  “What does it matter?” I ask sharply. “Johann is dead because he remained.”

  We watch each other, and a lifetime of bitterness hangs between us.

  “I am sorry, Marie. There were many things I could not appreciate before I was imprisoned. Family, love …”

  My throat closes. Perhaps we were more alike than I believed. “Henri asked me to go with him and I refused.”

  My brother nods. “We were married to our ambition.”

  It hurts to hear this from him. But he is right.

  “How long have you been here?” he asks.

  “Two and a half months. Curtius is at the Rhine, and Maman was arrested with me.”

  “She is here?”

  “You must not go and see her! She lost you once. She cannot lose you again. What if your name is called tomorrow?” I ask. “Or the next day? Or the next?”

  Though I can see how this pains him, he understands. “Of course. I will make sure she never sees me.” It is difficult to reconcile this Edmund with the Edmund I knew. He must guess at what I am thinking, because he adds, “Two years can change everything.”