Revolution (7 page)

“Where’d you get it?”

“I bought it thirty years ago from a man who found it in the catacombs. A worker. There was a cave-in in one of the tunnels. It caused a lot of damage. The men who went in to clean the debris away and shore everything up found a small chamber. Its entrance had been hidden—blocked by layers of bones, actually—for quite some time. One of the men found the guitar lying under some skeletons. Headless ones. Which suggests the Terror. You would think the whole thing would be ruined—lying underground for over two centuries—but no. Perhaps the cool air preserved it. I paid a thousand francs for it. A good sum of money, especially then, but nowhere near what it’s worth. Play it, Andi.”

I shake my head, afraid that the whole thing will break or snap or crumble to dust if I touch it again.

“I can’t, G. It’s too fragile. It needs reconditioning. It needs an expert to—”

“Go ahead. Play it,” he says.

He wants to help me. I know he does. He probably thinks the guitar will be some kind of therapy. But I’m really bad at being helped.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “Really. I mean, I brought a guitar with me. I don’t need this one.”

G comes over, lifts the guitar from its case, and hands it to me. “Perhaps it needs you,” he says.

I’m not ready for that. It catches me off guard. Usually the last thing anyone or anything needs is me.

“Yeah. Um … okay,” I say.

I lay the guitar back in its case, get my bag, then hurry back, feeling like Gollum with his Precious, scared that G will suddenly come to his senses and take it away from me. But he and my father are wrapped up in their papers again. I pull out my spare set of strings, and a Ziploc filled with guitar crap—nut sauce, cleaner, lube, a string winder, wax, polishing cloths. Then I get busy. The pegs are stiff. The frets are grimy. The wood is dull.

Lili brings another bottle of wine. She disappears into the kitchen. By the time she’s bringing out plates and cutlery—an hour later—the guitar is waxed and restrung. I tune it and when I’m finished, G says, “Play something for us.”

I look up at him, still uncertain.

“It survived the Revolution. It will survive you,” he says.

I can’t decide where to begin. Making music on an instrument like this feels like being with a boy who’s so hot, you have to kiss him everywhere all at once. I take a breath and start with “Come As You Are.” I jump back in time to Rameau. Then Bach. Then a couple of tunes by Gomez. And then I stop because I’m sweating and breathless and the sound of clapping startles me. Because I forgot. Forgot they were here. Forgot I was.

“Brava!” Lili shouts.

“Encore! Encore!” G says, clapping like a maniac.

Dad’s clapping, too. In big wide sweeps. Like someone’s making him. I put the guitar back in its case and join them at the table.

“You have an incredible talent,” Lili says. “Where will you continue your studies when you graduate?”

“Um, well … I’ve looked at Juilliard and the Manhattan School,” I say.

G flaps a hand. “Forget New York. Come to Paris. To the conservatory.”

I look at my father, who looks at his wineglass. “Yeah, maybe,” I say. “I’ve got no firm plans yet.”

Lili pours more wine. “Guillaume, the chicken comes soon. Clear those things away, please,” she says, nodding at the papers and photos.

“I’ll get them,” I say. I start to shuffle the stuff together, but the image in one of the photographs catches my eye. I pick it up. It’s some kind of glass jar. It’s old and egg-shaped and has a sun with a scrolly
L
etched on its side. There’s something in it. Something small and dark. I can’t take my eyes off it. “What is that?” I ask.

G looks at what I’m holding. “A moving sight, no?” he says. “It’s not often we may look upon the heart of a king.”

12

I
didn’t hear him right. I can’t have.

A king’s heart? Kings have big hearts. Mighty hearts. How else can they fight wars and go on crusades? But this heart doesn’t look big. It looks small and sad.

“We don’t
know
it’s a king’s heart, G,” Dad says. “If we did, I wouldn’t be here. Its physical characteristics tell us it’s a human heart. Its size indicates that it belonged to a child. That’s all we know.”

“No mere child,” G says. “This is the heart of Louis-Charles, son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. The lost king of France.”

“You
think,
” Dad says.

“In my bones, I know,” G says.

“Your bones don’t count. The mother’s would, though, if we could get them,” Dad says.

“If?” I say. “You can’t?”

G shakes his head. “No. After her execution, Marie-Antoinette’s remains were thrown into a common grave. A servant later fished out what she thought might be the queen’s leg bones. They’re in a coffin at St-Denis, but”—G shrugs—“who knows.”

“So what will you use?” I ask.

“A few years ago, tests were run on strands of a lock of Marie-Antoinette’s hair that had been cut off before her death and preserved as a memento. The results were good and clean, so we’ll use them.”

“Guillaume, Lewis’s glass is empty. Pour him more wine,” Lili says, putting a basket of bread on the table.

G pours for himself and my father. He offers me a glass but I shake my head no.

“Where did the heart come from?” I ask him, still staring at the photograph. “I mean, how did it get in the jar?”

G looks at my father. “Have you not told her about it?”

“I did. Just now. I gave her the essentials. What we know to be true.”

“Which is what? That it’s a heart?”

“Yes.”

“Lewis, Lewis, Lewis,” G sighs. “Come, Andi. Sit,” he says, pulling out the chair next to him. “It’s a fascinating story. I will tell it to you.”

“G, I don’t think Andi wants to know—” my father starts to say.

“Yes, I do,” I say, annoyed that he’s speaking for me.

He gives me a pained look, then nods. “Fine,” he says. “But no stories, G. Give her the facts. Background and speculation are irrelevant.”

G leans back in his chair. “So my work and that of Aulard, Lefebvre, Schama, and Carlyle, and countless other historians … it’s all stories?” he says hotly. “The contemporary accounts? The letters and depositions, the prison records? Nothing but background and speculation?”

My father takes the photos from me. He moves them to the far end of the table. “A human heart isn’t made of stories,” he says.

“Every heart is made of stories,” G says.

“A heart is made of proteins built by amino acids, animated by electrical impulses.”

G snorts. “Your pretty, young girlfriend, Minna—you love her with all your heart, or some random combination of amino acids?”

Dad flushes. He blusters. Because his pretty—and pregnant—new girlfriend is twenty-five years old. “There’s nothing random about amino acids,” he says huffily, “and love—or any emotion—as much as we want to glorify it, is merely a series of chemical reactions.”

G laughs. He nudges me. “That is exactly why I recruited him!” he says. “Because the man has not one shred of fancy in him. He is exact and impartial and the world knows it.”

“What nonsense, Guillaume,” Lili says, putting a casserole dish on the table. “You recruited him because he is a famous Nobel Prize-winning scientist and all the papers will take his picture and there is nothing you love more than publicity.”

“I
need
publicity, my dear. There is a difference.”

“And I need to get the dinner on the table. Perhaps you would care to help me?” Lili says, with an edge to her voice.

“I’ll help you,” Dad says, following her into the kitchen.

“Is it true, G? Dad’s involved in this for a publicity angle?” I ask. It doesn’t sound like my father. He’s famous but he doesn’t care. All that matters to him, all that’s ever mattered to him, is the work.

“Yes, it’s true,” G says. “But it’s my publicity angle, not his. The museum will include a permanent exhibition on the story behind the heart and the process of testing it. Your father knows how much the museum means to me. That’s why he agreed to lend his name to this project. With his participation, we are certain of generating huge interest. From the newspapers, television, and the Internet. And interest brings money.”

“So what’s the story? You still haven’t told me.”

“No, I haven’t,” G says. “What you have to understand about the French Revolution, Andi, is this: though it was powerful enough to topple a centuries-old monarchy, it was also extremely fragile. Always under attack. And those who led the rebellion, those who fervently believed human beings deserved something better than the tyranny of kings, tried to defend it. Often quite ruthlessly.”

“Um, G?” I cut in. “I meant the story about the heart. I pretty much know the history part.”

G raises an eyebrow. “Do you?”

“Yeah. I studied the French Revolution in school. And the American, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions. Revolutions are really big at St. Anselm’s. I mean, even the preschoolers wear Che hats.”

G laughs. “So tell me, then,” he says. “What do you know?”

“Well, um … France was bankrupt, the workers were starving, the aristocracy was pissed off, yada yada. So the three estates—representatives from the commons, the clergy, and the nobility—banded together, called themselves the National Assembly, and overthrew the king. Austria, England, and Spain didn’t like that, so they attacked France. Some of the French didn’t like it either, so civil war broke out. Maximilien Robespierre took advantage of all the chaos to consolidate power. Then he sparked up the Terror and guillotined his enemies, which was pretty much everybody, including more moderate revolutionaries who tried to stop him—like Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. When the rest of the Assembly finally woke up to the fact that he was a psychopath, they guillotined him. A new government was formed, the Directory, but it didn’t last long. Napoléon Bonaparte made a power grab and declared himself emperor. And then it was kind of back to square one for France. So, yeah, that’s it. In a nutshell.”

“In a nutshell?” G says, wincing. “A
nutshell?
This is the French Revolution! There is no nutshell!”

G hates shortcuts. He hates synopses, sound bites, and short attention spans and blames them all on America. His book on the Rev is eleven hundred pages long.

“Come on, G, tell me about the heart,” I say. It’s so wrong, that tiny heart in a glass urn. I want to know how it got there.

“Very well,” he sighs. “We take up the story in 1793. The monarchy has fallen. War is raging. France has declared itself a republic and the royal family has been imprisoned in Paris, in an ancient stone fortress called the Temple. The king is convicted of crimes against the republic and guillotined. The queen soon follows him. After their deaths, their son Louis-Charles is kept in the Temple. He is a child, only eight years old, but as heir to the throne, he poses an enormous threat to the Revolution. There are those who want to free him and rule in his name. To prevent his escape, Robespierre essentially has him walled-up alive. He’s isolated in a cold, dark tower with little human contact. He has no fire to warm himself and only rags for clothing. He is lonely and terrified. He becomes weak and sick. Eventually, he goes mad.”

“That’s horrible! How could people let that happen?” I ask him. “He was only a kid. Why didn’t anyone stage a protest? Or lobby to have the place closed down? Like Gitmo.”

“Stage a protest? Lobby?” G says, chuckling. “Under Robespierre? Ah, my little American, you must remember that France at this time called itself a republic but it was in fact a dictatorship, and dictators don’t take criticism well. Shrewd Robespierre made sure that very few people knew what was happening to Louis-Charles. However, in 1795 … Wait a minute, I have a picture of him here … a photograph of a portrait. Where the devil did it go?” He reaches for the stack of black-and-whites and starts looking through them. “Where was I again?” he says.

“You were saying very few people knew what was happening to Louis-Charles,” I say.

“Yes. So the deprivation and the lack of food finally took their toll. In June of 1795, at the age of ten, Louis-Charles died. Which was exactly what Robespierre had wanted. He couldn’t have the child killed because that would have looked very bad—even for him. But he couldn’t let him live, either. The official cause of death was declared to be tuberculosis of the bones. An autopsy was performed and while the body was open, one of the doctors, Pelletan, stole the child’s heart. He wrapped it in a handkerchief and smuggled it out of the prison and … Ah! Here we are.”

G pulls a photo from the stack and hands it to me. “This is him—Louis-Charles. The portrait was painted while he and his family were prisoners in the Temple. You can tell, can’t you? You can see the uncertainty in his face, the wariness.”

I don’t answer him. I don’t say anything. I can’t. Because the boy in the photograph looks exactly like Truman. He had the same expression on his face that day. The last time I said goodbye to him. “Go on, Tru,” I said. “Just go. You’ll be fine.”

I push the photo away, but it’s too late. The pain hits me so hard, I feel like I’ve fallen into a pit filled with broken glass.

“So as I was saying, Dr. Pelletan took the heart and—”

“Good God, are we still talking about the heart?” Lili says, banging down a platter of chicken.

“—smuggled it out of the Temple.”

“Guillaume, serve the chicken, please,” she says tersely.

“It was thought that he wanted to—”

“Guillaume!” Lili snaps. She says more. I don’t catch every word because I’m focusing hard on keeping it together, but I do get that Guillaume should not have brought out these photographs. Not in front of me. Couldn’t he have waited? A dead boy! The same age as Truman, no less. What was he thinking? Why must he always be talking about the dead? Hasn’t this poor girl had enough of death? Look at her! She looks like a corpse herself! Can he not see that?

Dad looks at me as Lili’s chewing G out. There’s no anger in his eyes, or disappointment, as there usually is when he’s looking at me, just sadness.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I didn’t want to tell you about the testing. Or for you to see the pictures. I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Then why did you make me come here?” I ask him.

I feel a hand on mine. It’s G’s. “I am so sorry, Andi. I did not even think. I should not have told you this story. I’m so easily carried away by my passions,” he says.

“It’s okay, G,” I say, because what else am I going to say? But it’s not okay. I look at that photo again, quickly, before Lili sweeps it off the table, and all I can think of is a small boy, alone in the dark over two hundred years ago, hungry and cold and terrified. Because of a madman named Robespierre. And it makes me think of another small boy, staring up at the gray winter sky as he bled to death on a street in Brooklyn. Because of another madman.

G’s still talking. “It’s only because I want to find answers that I pursue the story so doggedly,” he says. “I want to find reasons why. I want to understand the most important lesson history teaches us.”

“That would be that the world sucks,” I say. Bitterly.

Dad nearly chokes on his wine. “God, Andi!” he says. “Apologize right now. You are a guest here and you don’t speak to—”

“No, Lewis,” G says. “She should not apologize. She is right. In 1789, when the Revolution began, there was so much hope, such a sense of possibility. And by the time it ended—after the riots, the executions, the massacres, the wars—little was left but blood and fear. The poor suffered, as the poor always do. The wealthy suffered, too; many went to the guillotine. But no one suffered more than this innocent child.”

G stares into his wineglass for a bit, then says, “I’ve spent the last thirty years of my life trying to understand it. To comprehend how the idealism that toppled a monarchy, that gave birth to the phrase
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
, could devolve into such cruelty. Thirty years of research and writing, and still I have no explanation.”

“That’s it. Finished. We are through with this topic,” Lili announces. “You want an explanation, Guillaume? I have one for you: Most of the mess that is called history comes about because kings and presidents cannot be satisfied with a nice chicken and a good loaf of bread. How much better it would be for all of us if they could.”

G pours more wine. We eat. Lili’s food—roasted chicken; a crisp, buttery potato cake; parslied carrots; and crusty bread—is delicious but I can barely get it down. I just want to get out of here and go to bed so the sadness can tear me apart in private.

During dinner, G, Dad, and Lili talk schedules. G won’t be around for the next few days, he says. He’s flying to Belgium tomorrow, then Germany—provided the airlines don’t strike—to meet with two other geneticists taking part in the testing. He tells Dad that there will be meetings with members of the trust, and press conferences, and that he needs to attend them all.