Revolution (17 page)

They are inside the palace! I shouted at him.

He grabbed me cruelly. Where?

The queen’s staircase. Hurry!

He ran into the dauphin’s bedroom and threw back the bedcovers. Louis-Charles woke with a fright. He jumped out of his bed and crawled under it. The captain tried to pull him out, but he howled and kicked and would not come. From the floor above came the sound of screams and rifle shot.

Get him out! the captain shouted at me.

I knelt by the bed. Louis-Charles, come out, I said. You must come out now.

I won’t! Tell the guard to go away!

He’s not a guard, he’s a field marshal, I said, trying to make a game of it. England is at our borders. We must fall back.

Louis-Charles popped his head out at that. Knave! he shouted. A prince of France never retreats!

We do so only by the king’s command, my general, I said. We are outnumbered here, but reinforcements await us at Harfleur.

More shots. Then screaming.

Damn you! There is no time for this! the captain yelled.

I crouched down, playing the horse. Louis-Charles scrambled out from under his bed and leaped upon my back. I grabbed a candlestick from his night table and handed it to him.

Company, fall back! he shouted, waving the candle like a sword.

We bolted from the room, with guards ahead and behind. Up a servants’ staircase we ran, into the Hall of Mirrors. I heard more gunfire. The sound of glass smashing. I glanced out a window and saw a guard shot, another stabbed. A head stuck on a pike was being paraded about while screeching women danced a rigadoon around it.

The captain stopped at a mirrored panel and pounded upon it. I thought him mad until I saw the hinges. Your Majesty! he shouted. It’s Captain Barère! I bring the dauphin. Majesty, please open the door! He pounded again, but got no answer. We must try another way. Hurry! he barked, urging us on to the far end of the hall.

When we got there, he sent three of his men ahead through the exit. They returned immediately. It’s no good, one said. They’re in the staterooms.

We tried to go back the way we came, but cries and shouts carried up from the other end of the hall. We were trapped. Gilt nymphs gazed blindly at us as we wheeled and turned. Painted gods looked down upon us, unmoved. Our image was reflected a thousand times in the mirrors—a dozen guards and a girl in britches, commanded, it seemed, by a small boy with a candle.

The captain ordered his men into formation. They knelt in rows on either side of us and raised their rifles. What chance had we? A few of the horde would fall with the first round, and when the guards reloaded the rest would be upon us.

Louis-Charles was no longer shouting orders. He had dropped his candlestick. I’m frightened, Alex, he whispered in my ear, his arms tight around my neck. I no longer wish to play this game.

So great was my own fear that I could not answer him, nor make my legs move. In my mind’s eye, I saw again that severed head, and the bloodstained hands of those dancing around it. I saw those same hands reaching for Louis-Charles and that unfroze me. Like one possessed, I threw myself at the mirrored door. Silvered glass shattered against my pounding hands.

Open the door! Open it! I have the dauphin! Can you not hear me? Open the bloody door!

I picked up a stool and swung it into the door. How Louis-Charles stayed on my back, I do not know. Again and again I swung. The shouting of the mob grew nearer. They were everywhere. I heard the captain telling his men, Hold! Hold your fire! Not yet … Steady now, hold! The stool splintered. I picked up a leg and battered at the door like a savage, and finally, it opened.

Papa! Louis-Charles cried.

Louis-Charles! the king shouted. Oh, thank God you’re safe!

The king swept his son into his arms. Behind him the queen came running. The guards pushed me into the king’s chambers. They locked the door and moved furniture against it. Had the mob seen us? Had they reached the hall before we got through the door?

I stood perfectly still, barely breathing, waiting for the sound of battering. The king, greatly agitated himself, tried to calm his weeping wife. He had gone to bring her to safety, I learned. That was why he had not heard our pounding. She had nearly been killed. The mob had broken into her chambers and she had only just escaped them, running barefoot through the halls of the palace. She held tightly to both Louis-Charles and Marie-Thérèse and would not let them go.

But Louis-Charles broke free. Mama, Papa, look! he said, pointing at me. Alex is hurt! Her hands are bleeding!

I looked down at my hands. They were covered with blood. I did not know it.

She pounded on the door so you would hear us. And the mirrors broke and cut her, Louis-Charles said.

I had run back into the palace when it would have been better for me to stay out of it. I had risked my own life for Louis-Charles. I had sliced my hands to ribbons and felt nothing. No pain, only fear—for him.

I think it was then that the revolution began.

Not for Paris or for the French.

But for me.

My heart’s pounding as I finish the entry. I was so afraid for them. So afraid they wouldn’t make it. I felt Alex’s fear. For a moment, I was there. I was right there with her, running up the steps to the Hall of Mirrors. I felt
her
heart pounding. I heard the shouts of the mob as they came closer.

Who was the man in the tricorn? The one who stirred the crowd up outside the palace? What happened to Alex after Versailles fell? Did she stay with Louis-Charles?

I page to the next entry, desperate to find out. I’m maybe two or three paragraphs into it when the PA system suddenly crackles and a voice announces that the library will be closing in fifteen minutes and will everyone please return their materials to the front desk.

What the hell?

I look up. There’s no more line. It’s totally gone. Yves Bonnard is stacking boxes onto a trolley. The people who’ve been researching here all day are zipping up their bags, putting on their coats, carrying their materials up to the counter. I look at the clock on the wall. It’s 4:45. I’ve been reading for the last forty-five minutes. I forgot where I was, and what I was supposed to be doing. I missed my chance to get Malherbeau’s music.

I can’t believe this. Where was I? In a trance?

I get up and walk over to my place at the reading tables. I gather up my notebook and folder and pens and stuff them into my bag. A woman in pearls and squeaky shoes straightens a wayward chair, whips a rogue pencil off a table, rattles the exit door.

“We close in a few minutes,” she says briskly.

On the other side of the front desk, Yves Bonnard wheels his trolley into an elevator. The door whooshes shut behind him. One by one, the overhead lights start going out. I’m so angry at myself, I could scream. Tomorrow’s Friday. The library is closed over the weekend. I have one more day. Just one. How will I get it all done in just one day? At this rate, I’m going nowhere on Sunday.

I stuff the diary into my bag, and as I do, a thought grips me, a really weird one: Alex wants it that way.

“Yeah, right. Alex wants it that way,” I say to myself. “Alex, who’s been dead for over two hundred years. Now who’s crazy?”

The last light winks out. The reading room is empty.

There’s no one left to answer me.

31

L
ili’s home.

I’m still two streets away from her and G’s house but I can already smell her cooking on the wind—butter, onions, warm bread. I pick up my pace, and five minutes later, I’m bounding up the stairs to the loft.

“Andi? Is that you?” she shouts from the kitchen as I open the door. “I’m so glad you are here! Turn on the TV, will you? Channel four. G just called. He and Lewis are about to be on
Agenda
. Lewis is in the Paris studio. G’s on a live feed from Brussels.”

“What’s
Agenda?
” I ask, hanging up my jacket and putting my bag down on the table. Dad does a lot of TV but I don’t think he’s ever done this program.

“It’s like
Larry King,
” she says.

I turn on the TV. The program’s already started. As I sit down on the sofa, the host, Jean-Paul Somebody, a hipster in a black turtleneck and emo glasses, is talking about the night’s rundown. Lili hurries over with two steaming bowls of soup on a tray. She sets the tray down on the coffee table and hands me a bowl.

“Thank you,” I tell her, taking it from her hands.

It’s onion soup—my favorite—with a big fatty of a crouton under a blanket of cheese. It smells so good. I attack the crouton, my eyes on the TV screen, waiting to see if Dad and G are introduced, but the first guest is Carla Bruni, talking about her latest album.

Lili hurries back to the kitchen for her glass of wine. Carla talks, she sings, and then it’s time for a commercial. When the show resumes, Jean-Paul is sitting across a table from my father. G’s face is on a screen behind them.

“Viewers at home, and here in the studio, I would like you to take a look at this image,” Jean-Paul says. The camera zooms in to show the black-and-white photo he’s holding. “You can see a glass urn. Look closer. Do see what the urn contains? It’s a heart. Yes. A human heart.” There are murmurs from the audience. A gasp or two. “My reaction exactly,” Jean-Paul says. “This heart, so small and delicate, symbolizes a great and enduring mystery—a mystery that began in Paris over two hundred years ago, in the final days of the Revolution, and will hopefully end in Paris in a few days’ time.”

The camera returns to Jean-Paul. “To whom did this tiny heart belong?” he says. “Some claim it is the heart of Louis XVII, the lost king of France. Others dispute that claim. Why was the heart removed from its body? How did it survive, intact, for over two hundred years? To help answer these questions, France’s Royal Trust has enlisted the help of the renowned American geneticist Dr. Lewis Alpers, winner of a Nobel Prize for his work on the human genome, and the eminent French historian Guillaume Lenôtre, author of
Liberty
, an acclaimed history of the French Revolution. Tonight we are privileged to have both men with us. Please welcome them.”

There’s applause, then Jean-Paul says, “Professor Lenôtre, let’s start with you. Give us the history of the heart. Why is the Royal Trust involved?”

“The Trust’s involvement started in the nineteen seventies, when descendents of Don Carlos de Bourbon, a former duke of Madrid and a distant relative of Louis XVI, gave the heart to the Trust,” he says. “They said it had come into their ancestor’s possession in 1895, and that he’d believed it had belonged to Louis XVII, the young son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.”

“Both of whom were imprisoned and guillotined during the Revolution,” Jean-Paul says.

“Indeed. After his parents were killed, Louis-Charles remained in prison under the care of a brutal man, Antoine Simon—a shoemaker and a member of one of the ruling factions at the time.”

“Why did the boy remain in prison?”

“Perhaps I should not have suggested this, Andi,” Lili says, doing her best to talk over G—no easy feat—who’s answering Jean-Paul’s question and describing Louis-Charles’ life in prison. “Are you sure you want to keep watching?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s okay, Lili.”

I want to listen. I want to know. That heart is no longer just a sad photograph to me. It’s real. I’m getting to know the little boy to whom it may have belonged. And the girl who cared for him. Fought for him. Kept him safe.

“… and was, in effect, walled up alive,” G says.

“My God, how horrible,” Jean-Paul says.

“Yes, it was.”

“Did no one help him?”

“Eventually word of the conditions he was kept in started to leak out, but those who spoke out against his treatment endangered their own lives.”

“How so?”

“I will give you an example,” G says. “After Robespierre was overthrown, in 1794, the boy was allowed a doctor—Pierre Joseph Desault. According to his reports, Desault went into the cell and found … and I quote, ‘a child who is mad, dying, a victim of the most abject misery and of the greatest abandonment, a being who has been brutalized by the cruelest of treatments.’ The boy was dirty, ragged, and covered in sores. He could no longer stand and could barely speak. Desault, a kindly man, was furious about Louis-Charles’ treatment and said so. In fact, he called it a crime. Shortly after making these statements, he was invited to a dinner held by the ruling party. A few days later, he was dead. Of poisoning.”

“Were the ones who did it charged?” Jean-Paul asks.

G laughs. “It’s likely that the ones who did it were
in
charge. You must remember that this was a very difficult time for France. We are talking about the death and rebirth of a nation. The country had just transformed itself from a monarchy to a republic and had endured a long and bloody revolution to do so. Many still hated the former king and his family. And so it was very unwise to show concern for this royal child.”

“What became of him?”

“He died, very miserably, at the age of ten. An autopsy was performed and one of the officiating doctors, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, stole the heart.”

“To take it to St-Denis. Because it was the tradition—no?” Jean-Paul says. “Before the Revolution, the hearts of kings were embalmed and placed in the basilica at St-Denis.”

“Yes, that’s correct,” G says. “However, the basilica had been desecrated during the Revolution. Many of its crypts had been opened and the remains they contained thrown into the streets. It’s thought that Pelletan wanted to keep the heart until it was once again safe to take it to St-Denis. He put it in a jar and covered it with alcohol to preserve it.”

“When did he take it to St-Denis?”

“He didn’t. He kept it. For so long that the alcohol evaporated and the heart dried out. In the meantime, France had again become a monarchy. Pelletan tried to give the heart to the new king, but he didn’t want it. Eventually the Archbishop of Paris took it. In 1830, a second revolution broke out and the archbishop’s palace was looted. A rioter smashed the urn and the heart was lost. Days later, Pelletan’s son went back to the palace grounds to search for it. He found it, put it in a new urn, and locked it away. Years later, the heart was given to Don Carlos de Bourbon. He put it in the chapel of an Austrian château where Louis-Charles’ sister, Marie-Thérèse, who survived her imprisonment, had lived for several years. During the Second World War, the château was looted, but the duke’s family rescued the heart, and, as I have mentioned, returned it to France. To the Duc de Bauffremont, who runs the royal memorial at St-Denis. It was placed in a crypt there, where it rests now.”

“An amazing story, Professor Lenôtre. But if we know all this, if we know the heart belonged to Louis-Charles, then why—Dr. Alpers—are you here? Why is the Royal Trust going through the trouble and expense of performing the DNA tests?” Jean-Paul asks.

“Because we
don’t
know it,” Dad says.

“But the history books—” Jean-Paul starts to say.

“History is fiction,” Dad interrupts.

“Ah! Here we go,” G says.

“Uh-oh. Tell me they’re not going to start arguing on TV,” I say to Lili.

Lili shrugs. “Why not? They argue everywhere else.”

“I beg your pardon, Professor Lenôtre?” Jean-Paul is saying now.

“I was wondering how long it would take him,” G says.

Jean-Paul, smiling uncertainly, turns to my father. “Dr. Alpers, you state the opinion of a man of science.”

“Not at all. The opinion I stated was first stated by Robespierre.”

Jean-Paul tries to say something, but G cuts him off. “Come on, Lewis, you don’t really believe that history is fiction.”

“Of course I do. History is an art, one that depends on interpretation and conjecture. Science relies solely upon facts,” Dad says.

“Facts, yes,” G says hotly. “Facts that tell us what we are—so many chains of chemicals. But do they tell us
who
we are?”

“If the chains of chemicals happen to include genetic material, then yes, they do,” Dad says.

“You are being purposely obtuse, Lewis. I can only think you are doing it for the cameras,” G says.

“Obtuse? Why? Because I don’t confuse hearsay with analysis?” Dad says, his voice rising. “Because I know the difference between stories and truth?”

“Because you refuse to recognize any truth other than that which comes out of a petri dish!”

“Oh, please!”

“Professor Lenôtre—” Jean-Paul says, but G cuts him off again.

“This heart we are all talking about,” he says, leaning so far forward in his chair it looks like he’s going to burst through the screen, “does it have meaning because it is made of this and that protein? No! It has meaning because of its context. It has meaning because of the so-called stories that surround it. It has meaning because we know—or soon will—that it came from the body of a defenseless child who was imprisoned by the revolutionaries, who was denied the very things they sought to obtain for all humanity—namely: liberty, equality, and fraternity—and whose immense, unspeakable suffering shames every politician, every strategist, every academic, think-tanker, and policy wonk—then and now—who claims that the Revolution’s idealistic ends justified its violent means.” G sits back in his chair, glaring, then suddenly leans forward again and says, “And all the fucking DNA in the world cannot express that as eloquently as I just did!”

I nearly choke on a mouthful of soup. I can’t
believe
G just dropped the F-bomb on national television.

Dad snorts. “Now who’s playing for the cameras?” he says.

He and G bicker some more. Jean-Paul taps his earpiece.

“How are they even friends?” I say to Lili, shaking my head. “All they do is argue.”

“It has always been their way. Ever since they were students,” Lili says.

“I guess opposites really do attract.”

“They are not opposites,” Lili says. “They’re exactly the same—driven and passionate. It’s why they are such close friends.” She smiles, then adds, “That and the fact that no one else can put up with them.”

The camera has moved back to Jean-Paul, who’s still tapping his earpiece and looking frantic. I feel sorry for him. I bet he had no idea what he was getting into. Dad and G finally take a breath, and Jean-Paul attempts, yet again, to speak.

“There are many … uh …
stories,
” he says, flinching at the word, “concerning this heart. One of them concerns a substitute child. At the time of Louis-Charles’ death, there were people who insisted that the little prince did not die in the Tower, as was stated by the authorities. They believed he was smuggled out of the prison and that a dead child was put in his place, autopsied, and buried. Professor Lenôtre, tell us more about this idea of a switched child.”

“Certainly. After the Revolution, in the early eighteen hundreds, several men came forth, each claiming that he was the lost king of France, that he had been smuggled out of the Temple prison in 1795. The most convincing of them was a man named Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. Several former servants of the royal family believed he was indeed Louis-Charles.”

I stop eating, surprised. I had no idea this had happened. For a few seconds, I’m excited and hopeful, thinking that maybe Louis-Charles escaped somehow. Maybe he got out of the Temple, changed his name, and came forth years later, after the danger from the revolutionaries was over.

“Did Naundorff turn out to be the lost king?” Jean-Paul asks.

“No,” my father replies, dousing my hopes. “In the nineteen nineties, DNA from his hair and from one of his bones was tested against DNA from Marie-Antoinette’s hair. Results disproved any connection between him and the queen.”

“But his descendants do not accept the results. They still claim he was the lost prince,” G adds.

“Which has great importance for France, no?” Jean-Paul says.

“Very much so,” G says. “If Naundorff was the son of Louis XVI, well, that would change the history books quite a bit. It would also bring up some thorny issues of inheritance. In fact, the president himself has taken an interest in the case. The extreme significance—and sensitivity—of our findings is why we have asked Dr. Alpers, an American, to lead the testing. By not choosing a French geneticist, we hope to avoid accusations of advancing any particular agenda. We know Dr. Alpers’ methodology will be precise and his findings unquestionable.”