Paris

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “Each day. I pray that my leg may get better.”

  “And what caused you to come into this chapel?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “Did you know that this chapel was dedicated to Saint-Gilles?” As she looked uncertain, he continued. “Saint-Gilles, my child, is the patron saint of cripples. You have chosen well to pray here.”

  He turned back to the de Cygnes, and they moved a few feet away.

  “Did you hear?” he murmured to them. “The child was passing, and did not know that this is the chapel of Saint-Gilles, nor that he is the patron saint of cripples. Voilà. Even in such times as these, the providence of God is manifested. Perhaps the saint himself summoned this child to his church.” But now he turned to the matter in hand. “Oh, my dears,” Father Pierre began, “what terrible news I must share with you.”

  Claudie listened carefully. The priest was very upset. Sixteen women from a Carmelite religious house had just been executed today, near the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. They had refused to obey the Clergy Law. They had declared that they would sooner be martyred for the faith.

  “They went to the guillotine chanting,” the old priest declared. “They were martyred every one.”

  “Martyrs indeed,” said the man, and the young lady agreed with him. And they both said it was a disgrace, and that it should not have been done.

  Then they asked the priest to come home with them for a little while. The lady said the old man needed a hot drink. “Laced with brandy,” said the young man.

  Claudie went back to where her mother was waiting, and told her exactly what she had heard.

  “Follow them, Claudie,” said her mother. “I’ll keep a little way behind you. Let’s find out where they live.”

  Following them was easy. The old priest couldn’t walk very fast. The place they went into was a mansion with a courtyard in front of it, in the Saint-Germain quarter. A regular aristocrat’s palace, her mother said.

  After that, it had taken only a few inquiries along the street to discover who lived in the mansion. A tavern keeper said that the family owned a château in the Loire Valley, down in the west.

  “That is interesting,” her mother said. “You go home now,” she told Claudie. “I’ll be back later.”

  The widow Le Sourd walked swiftly. She had not far to go. Back to the Pont Neuf, across to the Right Bank, then northward up to the rue Saint-Honoré. For that was where the man she sought was living.

  The house that the widow Le Sourd was seeking belonged to Monsieur Duplay the cabinetmaker. But it was not Maurice Duplay that the widow sought. It was his longtime lodger. As she had hoped, he was at home.

  The room was not large, but pleasant. There was painted paneling on the walls and a small chandelier. He was sitting, very straight, at a table. She had heard that he had not been in the Convention for three weeks. Some had wondered if he might be sick. Others believed he was preparing an important speech. He looked perfectly well, so she concluded that it was probably the latter. They had met only a few times, but he had evidently remembered her and knew that she was loyal.

  “How can I be of service to you, citoyenne?” he asked.

  Some people said that he was ugly. But the widow Le Sourd didn’t think so. His broad brow suggested a fine and quick intelligence. His jaw protruded slightly, but that told her that he was tenacious.

  He was small, but wonderfully upright. She liked that. Truth to tell, the large-boned woman had a secret desire to scoop him up and take him home with her.

  But above all, as the whole of France knew, he was incorruptible. He was pure. He was unyielding. Men like Danton might have been impressive, spoken louder and been more loved, but the lonely figure of Maximilien Robespierre was superior to them all.

  It did not take her long to tell him about the old priest and the young de Cygnes. It was evident from what they had said in front of Claudie that they were enemies of the Revolution.

  “I’m only surprised,” she said, “that they have not been arrested already.”

  “I have heard the name of de Cygne before, citoyenne,” Robespierre replied. “I think Danton answered for them.” He shrugged. “Perhaps he was paid.”

  He said nothing more for a moment, and seemed to be thinking. Could it be, she wondered, that the evidence she had brought was not enough for him?

  “There is more,” she continued. “He told the old priest that he had encouraged the peasants on his estate to join the insurrections in the Vendée. His estate is close to the Vendée, as you may know.”

  It was a lie. Yet she felt no guilt at making it. The two de Cygnes must die. She was quite persuaded of it. The lie was merely the vehicle—like providing a cart to take someone to their destination.

  And in telling it, she was just doing her duty. Wasn’t she a guardian of the Revolution, after all?

  “Ah.” The eyes of Robespierre fixed upon her. Did he know that she was lying? She wasn’t certain, but she thought that he probably did. He nodded slowly. Then he spoke. “You know, citoyenne,” he said in his high-pitched voice, “when the great debate took place about whether the king should be executed, I reminded the assembly of a very important fact. We were not there to try the king, I said. We were not there to decide if he was guilty of this, or of that. We were there for a greater cause, which was the cause of the Revolution. And it had become abundantly clear by that time that the Revolution was in danger, both from forces inside France and outside, so long as the king lived. Therefore, it was simple logic that the king must die. There was really nothing else to discuss.”

  “You were right, Citoyen Robespierre,” she said.

  “And now the case is the same again. The Revolution is in danger. And until these nobles are eliminated, it will remain in jeopardy. By themselves, the de Cygnes are perhaps not important. But their existence is a threat. That is the point.” He took out a sheet of paper. “Will you oblige me, citoyenne, by taking this note to the Committee of Public Safety?”

  “At once, citoyen,” she said proudly. “At once.”

  After Father Pierre had gone, young Étienne de Cygne paced restlessly. His wife had taken up a piece of needlework. She did not interrupt him.

  The de Cygne mansion was very quiet these days. Étienne and Sophie used the big old salon in the summer months, when it did not require heating. In winter, they used a smaller sitting room. Most of the other rooms were under covers so that the housekeeper and the handful of servants could keep the place running.

  “It was wonderful to walk with you today,” he suddenly said.

  “I am happy we went, too,” she answered.

  “It’s difficult being cooped up,” he remarked.

  “But we have our occupations,” she reminded him.

  Had they not still been so much in love, this close proximity, with little to do, might have become irksome indeed. But fortunately, quite early in the Revolution, as social life fell away, they had each found projects to keep themselves occupied; and these had been most helpful during their recent seclusion.

  Sophie and the housekeeper had decided to take every piece of linen and lace in the house, to mend and embroider it all. This, as she told her husband, was a task that might possibly go on forever. For two hours a day, she practiced the piano, mastering it in a way that she had never dreamed of doing before.

  Etienne, deciding that he would attend to the furniture, had gone to a local restorer to learn how the fine old tables and fauteuils from the reign of the Sun King should be properly cleaned and waxed. Having learned that, he decided to try his hand at carpentry. His first efforts were clumsy enough, but by now, he could make quite a creditable kitchen table or chair, and he was amazed to discover the sense of achievement and peace this simple craftsmanship brought him.

  “I can do things,” he laughingly told Sophie. “I’m not an aristocrat anymore.”

  And during the long summer evenings, they would sit together very contentedly, and read to each other, as the sinkin
g sun made the polished wood of the old chairs and tables gleam softly, like ancestral friends, in the high salon.

  But one other thought was troubling Étienne that evening.

  “Sometimes, you know,” he said, “I wonder if I made a mistake. Perhaps we should have gone down to the château long ago, instead of staying here in Paris. At least we could have walked in the park.”

  “I don’t think we made a mistake. I think we are safer here, Etienne,” Sophie replied.

  “Why?”

  “The château is too near the Vendée. At the moment the rebellions there have mostly been crushed, but they could start again. What if the fighting came to the château? I think the local people would all join the rising. They love their religion. And they don’t hate us. Then we’d either have to oppose our own workers and tenants, or be called traitors to the Revolution.”

  “That is true. All the same …”

  “We are quiet as mice.”

  “I feel we are alone.”

  Sophie held out her hand.

  “At least,” she said sweetly, “we have each other.”

  And so it was that evening that they sat together quietly. But before the sun sank, as the room filled with a warm, red light, Étienne put his arm around his wife, and in no time at all they were in a close embrace, only disengaging from each other enough to reach their bedroom, where their embrace became complete.

  The battering at the outer door soon after dawn took them completely by surprise.

  Dr. Émile Blanchard rode along the edge of the big open square. In its center stood the guillotine. The Place du Trône was just one of several sites where guillotines had been set up. Or to be precise, since the Revolution had changed the name of the old ground to the Place du Trône-Renversé—the square of the overturned throne. Its guillotine had devoured sixteen Carmelites the day before, and the grim blade had been kept busy for weeks. Thirty, often fifty, heads a day had fallen to its rattle and thud.

  Ahead of Blanchard lay the cheerless prospect of the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, like a long stone furrow, leading westward from the poor quarter toward the distant Louvre.

  Blanchard urged his horse forward. There was no time to lose. The only question was: Might he already be too late?

  He’d gone out early to visit a craftsman in Saint-Antoine. The fellow had been one of his first patients when he began.

  Émile Blanchard was an ambitious man. In the early days of the reign of Louis XV, when the financial affairs of France had unfortunately been entrusted to the hands of a clever Scotsman named John Law, the country had suffered a financial collapse quite as terrible as the South Sea Bubble in England. Émile’s grandfather had lost the family’s modest fortune, and his father had become a bookseller on the Left Bank of the Seine, whose liberal ideas had grown ever more ambitious as his means had grown less. Determined to set himself up in a more solid existence, Émile had studied medicine.

  Since starting modestly, he’d done well. He had numerous wealthy patients like the de Cygnes, who paid him handsomely.

  The old man he’d gone to see that morning couldn’t afford to pay him much, but Émile was proud of the fact that he had never dropped a patient because they were poor. And he had just been finishing his visit when his son had arrived with the message.

  “The de Cygnes have been arrested. Their housekeeper came to the house looking for you.”

  “Where have they been taken?” There were many prisons in Paris housing enemies of the Revolution.

  “To the Conciergerie.”

  “The Conciergerie?” This was grave indeed. No wonder the doctor rode swiftly.

  He had a particular fondness for the young couple. The lovebirds, he privately called them. He knew how much they longed for a family together and it had pained him to attend Sophie when she suffered first one, and then another miscarriage. But as he had assured the two young people on several occasions: “I have seen so many couples suffer in the same way, and go on to have a large and healthy family.”

  The question now, however, was very different. Could he save their lives at all? He doubted it. He doubted it very much. But he continued to think, as he rode along.

  Ahead of him lay the remains of the old Bastille. He’d gone by the place, on that famous day when the mob had stormed it. They’d gone there, he knew, because, having got arms from Les Invalides, they needed the gunpowder that was stored in the old fort. But for some reason, nowadays people claimed the aim had been to liberate the elderly prisoners, mostly forgers, who lived in the place.

  If they’d stormed it a few weeks earlier, he thought wryly, as he rode past it, they could have liberated the Marquis de Sade.

  From the Bastille, his journey led him westward past the Hôtel de Ville. Beyond that was the Louvre.

  How many happy evenings he’d spent in that area, during the delightful final decade of the old regime. Just north of the Louvre, to be precise, in the welcoming gardens of the Palais-Royal.

  The king’s liberal cousin the Duc d’Orléans, who resided there, had turned its huge courtyards and colonnades into an open camp for all those who believed in enlightenment and reform. Philippe Égalité, everyone called him, some mockingly, others with admiration.

  What had Orléans really been up to? Some had thought he wanted a republic, others that he wanted the throne for himself. You could discuss anything you liked in the cafés and taverns under those colonnades. His princely protection had allowed revolutionary literature to be printed in the presses there. Half university, half pleasure ground, the Palais-Royal had been the happy seedbed of the Revolution.

  But it hadn’t done the Duc d’Orléans any good. A few years later, the revolutionaries meeting in their great hall, only yards away, had sent him to the guillotine, just like his royal cousin.

  He was lucky to be a doctor himself, Blanchard considered. His own politics were republican. But he was a moderate. He could have lived with a constitutional monarchy if he had to. But where would he have sat in the Assembly and the Convention which succeeded it? Not with the monarchists, certainly, who were still there at the start. With the Girondins probably, the majority of liberal republicans. Not with the extremist Jacobins. He was sure of that. And if so, as the Revolution became more and more radical, he would have been sent to the guillotine himself, by the Jacobins who had bullied their way into power. And now, these Jacobins were even executing each other.

  Politics was a slippery and dangerous business. Even La Fayette himself had not been able to weather the storm. A hero of the Revolution when it began, and given military command, he and the Jacobins had fallen out, and he had been forced to flee from France.

  No, Blanchard did not think he would have survived in politics.

  But as a doctor, as long as he kept his head down, he was outside the fray. He had treated Danton, and many others. They seemed to like him.

  And that fact, he realized—as he turned down toward the river to cross to the Île de la Cité—that fact might give him the one chance of saving his young friends.

  Well, not both of them. One of them, perhaps.

  But it would take cool nerves.

  Was any building in Paris more fearsome than the grim old prison of the Conciergerie? Sophie didn’t think so. It stood beside the lovely Sainte-Chapelle, but there was nothing gracious about it. Its bulky turrets and massive walls housed the waiting rooms and dungeons where prisoners were finally brought before their trial and execution. Upon any day, there might be more than a thousand prisoners housed in the Conciergerie somewhere. And few of them had any hope.

  Sophie already knew that she was going to die.

  The trial, if trial it could be called, had lasted scarcely minutes. They had been taken from the heavy stone halls of the Conciergerie into the Gothic old Palais de Justice next door. There, two large, bare rooms had been set aside as special courts. And they were special indeed.

  She had wondered if they might be summoned together, but they were not.
Étienne went in first. The big door closed, and she heard nothing of what passed behind it. After a long, cold silence he came out, looking ashen. He tried to smile and moved across to kiss her. But the guards would not let him, and pushed her through the door into the courtroom, and she heard the heavy door thud.

  They took her to a wooden rail, upon which she could rest her hands, and told her to stand behind it. Opposite her was a table at which several men were sitting. In the middle was a small man with a pointed face and sharp eyes, who reminded her of a rat. On each side of him were others. These were the judges, she supposed. At the end sat a tall, thin man, all in black, who looked bored. Several men were sitting at another table. She supposed they were the jury. At one side of the room there was a row of chairs. One of these was occupied by a large, ugly woman with black hair, whom Sophie had never seen before.

  Now the small man at the center of the table spoke. It seemed he was the principal judge.

  “Citizen Sophie Constance Madeleine de Cygne, you are charged under the Law of Suspects with treason, as an enemy of the People and of the Revolution. How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty,” Sophie said, as clearly as she could.

  Now it was the turn of the tall man. He did not bother to get up, but asked her whether she had been in the company of the priest known as Father Pierre the day before.

  “I was,” she replied, wondering what this could possibly be about.

  “Call the witness,” he said.

  The big, black-haired woman at the side of the room now rose and stood before the judge’s table.

  The widow Le Sourd was soon established by the tall prosecutor as a citizen of good character, and she told her tale. With horror, Sophie heard her harmless expression of shock at the death of the Carmelites turned into an attack on the Revolution. But then, to her astonishment, she heard that she and her husband had told their laborers and tenants to join the rising in the Vendée.

  “Your daughter was in the chapel with them when she heard these words?” the prosecutor asked.