Paris: The Novel (123 page)

The Terror had already continued for many months that sunny afternoon when the widow Le Sourd, after crossing the Pont Neuf, arrived with her daughter, Claudie, on the Left Bank of the Seine. She was on her way to visit an old acquaintance who lived below the Luxembourg Gardens.

She was walking down the rue Dauphine when she saw the young couple.

As they turned into a side street, she saw them only for a moment before they were out of sight.

A casual observer might have supposed the man was a young clerk or attorney, out walking with his wife. But the eyes of the widow were not so easily deceived.

It was the seventeenth day of July in the year of Our Lord 1794—but not in France. For the last two years, since the proclamation of the Republic in the autumn of 1792, France had used a new calendar. The twelve months had been renamed. Gone were the pagan gods of the old Roman calendar, and in their place, the seasons of the year. Winter thus contained the month of snow: Nivôse. Autumn had Brumaire, the month of mists. Spring contained months of germination and flowers: Germinal and Floréal. Summer boasted months of harvest and heat: Messidor and Thermidor.

The date that day in Paris was therefore the twenty-ninth day of Messidor, in the Year II.

The widow Le Sourd was a big-boned, black-haired woman. Her ten-year-old daughter, Claudie, was thin, and pale, and had stringy hair, and walked with a slight limp ever since breaking her leg as a child. But she got about the place with astonishing speed.

“Come,” she said to her daughter. “I want to see where those people are going.”

When she and Claudie reached the corner, the young couple were still less than a hundred yards away. The widow stared after them.

There was no doubt as to what they were, despite their pitiful attempt at disguise.

She could always spot aristocrats, no matter how they tried to conceal their identity. Those fresh-faced people with their dainty ways. Aristocrats, untouched by sun or rain, who’d never done a day’s work in their lives. Aristocrats, who thought themselves superior. She could smell them. She despised them.

But they could be dangerous.

Ever since the storming of the Bastille, the logic had been inescapable. The enemies of the Revolution would never give up. When the king had been dragged from Versailles to Paris, he had promised to be a constitutional monarch. But then what had he done? Tried to flee the country with his wife, to raise an army in Austria that would restore the rotten old autocracy to France again. He’d been caught, and rightly executed, and his Austrian queen as well. But had that been enough? Of course not.

Were the other monarchies of Europe going to tolerate a revolutionary republic in their midst? Never. They were preparing to attack her even now. Would the Catholic Church and the many aristocrats in exile accept the new regime? They were dedicated to destroying it. Those aristocrats remaining were constantly plotting in secret. The Terror was uncovering new conspiracies all the time. Even the peasants in some areas couldn’t see that the Revolution was for their own good. Down in the Vendée, that huge, traditional region spreading out from the lower reaches of the Loire, the ordinary peasantry had been in armed insurrection—a virtual civil war—because they wanted their medieval Church restored, and refused to be conscripted into the army to defend the new regime. Many had been massacred. But even while the Vendée region smoldered, Brittany, Maine and Normandy had broken out into another revolt.

One couldn’t even trust the Convention. There were backsliders and traitors there, who had to be rooted out.

For there could be no doubt: Once the Revolution had begun, there could be no turning back. Either the business must be carried through to its conclusion, or everything would be lost.

Sometimes it seemed to the widow Le Sourd that it was the women who were the true guardians of the Revolution. In its early days, it had been the women who led the march down to Versailles. Women were the practical ones. Men made fine speeches, but women got things done. She’d lost her own husband to sickness three years ago. So she was head
of the family now. And she was going to make sure that her daughter Claudie and her little son Jean-Jacques received the inheritance of Liberty and Equality that was now their birthright.

She kept her large eyes constantly open, to protect the Revolution.

So here was the question. Who was this pair of young aristocrats, trying to disguise themselves, and walking the streets of Paris? Why were they there? And what were they up to?

In the small chapel of Saint-Gilles, Father Pierre was still shaking. He had witnessed so many terrible things. Who had not, in these recent godless years? But the sight he had witnessed today had shocked him deeply.

He tried to pray.

At least he was lucky to have a chapel where he could do so. For most of the churches of Paris were closed. Some were used as barns. The great cathedral of Notre Dame had been horribly abused and turned into a Temple of Reason. But his little chapel on the Left Bank was so insignificant that no one had bothered to do anything about it.

Not that it was obviously a house of God anymore. No bell was rung. No crucifix was to be found under its dark old arches. Even the few brave souls who were his congregation came there quietly, surreptitiously, to join together in their secret prayers.

Was it legal? The priest himself wasn’t quite sure. When the Revolution had passed its terrible statutes, seizing the Church’s property, forbidding monasteries and stopping all payments to Rome, it had made the priesthood one concession. Priests might continue to reside in France, if they gave up their duty to the pope and became salaried officials of the state. If they refused, they must get out of France at once, or face prison and possibly the guillotine.

Most of the clergy had refused. But some in Paris had reluctantly accepted, thinking it was better to serve their congregations as best they could, rather than abandon them entirely.

Father Pierre was one of these. He was not proud of himself. He did not know whether he had made the right choice or not.

He had been praying for some time when he rose to his feet. He felt stiff. He was getting old. He was also a sociable man. He loved to talk to people, and it was hard for him to be so often alone as he was nowadays. He went toward the door which gave onto the street.

It was a long time since Étienne de Cygne and his wife, Sophie, had dared to go out. And they would not have done so now, except that it was Sophie’s birthday, and the weather was so fine, and she had confessed that she would so love to see the river and look across to the noble pile of Notre Dame again.

They’d taken great care, gone by quiet streets. None of the people they had passed seemed to take the least notice of them. And they had held each other’s hand and gazed at the old river, and the cathedral’s Gothic towers. And they had been glad that they had done it.

Now they were returning with equal circumspection. And they were right to be careful. For they had lost their protector, and they were not safe anymore.

Étienne Jean-Marie Gaston Roland de Cygne was thirty years old. His wife Sophie was twenty-five. And they loved each other very much.

Étienne was just above average height, slim, fair, blue-eyed. His features were perfectly regular, and his expression soft. Seen away from his wife, he might have been called pretty. But when seen together with his wife, an inner strength appeared: one could see at once that he would defend her with his life.

They had been married five years, and their only regret was that, after two miscarriages, God had not yet granted them a child. But they still had hope. For their faith was strong.

They were also enlightened.

It was quite the fashion of their generation. After the pleasure-seeking luxury of the old court, many of their friends had taken the ideas of Liberty and Reason to their hearts. Young ladies had begun to favor simpler, classical dress, like the women of Republican Rome. Men spoke of reform. Glamorous heroes like the Marquis de La Fayette, who’d gone to seek glory with Washington when the American colonists had sought their independence, spoke of the honest, natural virtues of the New World. Perhaps, some had said, France should combine the best of the traditional and the new, and change its creaking old autocracy for something more modern, like the constitutional monarchy of Britain.

Having come into his father’s estate at the age of twenty, it had seemed to Étienne that he should use his good fortune to make the world a better place.

He loved the old family château and the people who lived and worked there, and they liked him. When he went to Paris and encountered a larger world, he realized that he was full of love for all his fellow men.

He was sorry that he had been born too late to take part in La Fayette’s American adventure. But perhaps some great advancement of the human spirit was about to begin in France, and if so, he hoped that he might play some modest part in it.

With all of this, his young wife was in perfect agreement. Sophie had a round face, rosy cheeks, red lips, and big brown eyes. Her hair was dark. Her father had been a general; and although Sophie had never harmed anyone in her life, when she believed a thing was right, she would dig in and defend her position with a determination her father would have been proud of.

For Sophie, it was all about justice. It couldn’t be right, she declared, that her own class had so many privileges, when ordinary people had none; or that poor people could starve in the rich land of France. One of the first things that had made her fall in love with her husband was his desire to do good. Her dream was that one day the ordinary people of France should elect men to a parliament and, perhaps with a kindly king as figurehead, the elected parliament would rule the land. She felt quite sure that the people in the area around the family château would gladly elect her handsome husband to represent them, and she was probably right.

So it was hardly surprising that when, in July of the year 1789, news came that the Bastille had been stormed, and the French Revolution had broken out, the young de Cygnes were excited.

They had been spending the midsummer months down at the château. Étienne had immediately gone to Paris, passing through Versailles, to discover all he could.

“Nothing is decided yet,” he told Sophie on his return. “La Fayette and his friends believe there will be a constitutional monarchy.”

“And the king and queen?”

Étienne had shrugged. There had been scandals at the court in recent years. Most were invented by mischief makers, but his opinion of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was not high.

“They mean well,” he said, “but I don’t think they know what to do.”

It had seemed to both Sophie and Étienne that they should return to Paris as quickly as possible.

“We don’t want to miss anything,” Sophie had said excitedly.

How naive they had been, Étienne thought, as he looked back now. Many nobles had fled the country right at the start. Étienne knew of plenty of men whose property had been confiscated, and who’d been condemned to death in absentia. But he and Sophie had believed in the ideals of the Revolution, and had faith that a workable new government could come out of it.