Revolution (28 page)

But the king did not abdicate. Danton, furious, accused the Assembly of ignoring the will of the people by not forcing him to, then drew up a petition to dethrone him. He and his followers asked citizens to join them on the Champs du Mars to sign it. Thousands came. It was an orderly gathering at first but fighting soon broke out. The guard was called to quell it and they fired upon the crowd, killing fifty. Arrests were made. Martial law was declared. Newspapers were banned. It went on thus through fall into winter. Snow fell, the cold winds blew, but even they could not cool Paris’s heat or her fury.

The kings of Europe, unhappy at how France had treated her own king, declared war on us. Prussia, England, Austria, and Spain—all were against us.

In the Assembly, the radicals grew bolder. They attacked the church and took its riches. They attacked the émigrés. Nobles who’d left France were declared traitors and their lands and possessions seized. Those who’d stayed also came under suspicion. Clever Orléans renamed the Palais-Royal the Palais Égalité. He renamed himself Philippe Égalité. He became a deputy, renounced his noble title, sent his eldest sons to fight the Prussians. It bought him a little time.

1791 became 1792. Spring came again, and with it more unrest. In the west country, people rebelled against the revolution. They threatened civil war. In June the king refused to sign orders to garrison twenty thousand troops in Paris—troops that could protect the city from foreign invaders. It was put about that he welcomed an invasion, for it would help him save his throne. Parisians, angered anew, marched on the Tuileries. They broke into the king’s chambers, shook sabers and pistols at him, and forced him to wear a liberty bonnet. They berated him for hours, but he stood fast and brave. At six o’clock the mayor of Paris finally arrived and persuaded the crowd to leave.

But before he did, it had felt to me as if the fall of Versailles was happening all over again. I was there, back at my job as valet to Louis-Charles. When the mob began streaming in, the queen had told her guards to take Louis-Charles and Marie-Thérèse to her bedchamber and lock them in. She told me to go with them. I played with Louis-Charles throughout the day as Marie-Thérèse did her needlework. I did my best to show the children a face both cheerful and unconcerned—all while expecting the mob to break down the door at any second and murder us all.

In July, the Prussian Duke of Brunswick promised that if there was another assault on the king, all of Paris would pay for it, and dearly. His words were printed in every newspaper for us to read, and talked about on every street corner, and we knew they were no idle threat, for his armies were daily advancing through France. Even so, Paris was not cowed. On August 10, spurred on by the hot words of Danton, maddened by the howlings of the gutter press, the people attacked the Tuileries again.

I had not gone back to the Palais the night of the ninth. I was afraid for Louis-Charles and begged to be allowed to stay with him. Alarm bells had been ringing throughout the night, calling together the people of Paris. I heard them and again I remembered Versailles and how the fishwives had run shouting into the palace with murder in their hearts.

The king heard them, too. His own troops were mobilized and the palace fortified, but by morning he could see that it was hopeless. All of Paris had come out to march against him. I dressed Louis-Charles quickly and got him breakfast and then we were hurried out of his rooms, and out of the palace, to the Assembly House.

The king had decided to seek sanctuary for himself and his family with the Assembly, and its deputies, after some consideration, gave it to them—by confining them in the Temple, an ancient and ugly stone fortress.

I was ordered to go with them, as manservant to the king and Louis-Charles. I helped make up their rooms that night. I put sheets on their beds, served them a hasty supper, and then again refused to leave them, for I had heard the gunfire at the Tuileries and knew it was not so far from there to the Temple. I slept on the floor next to Louis-Charles’ bed. Someone offered me nightclothes but I did not take them. I said I wished to be dressed and ready for whatever might occur, but the truth was I could hardly undress in that place. The other servants, or a guard, would find out I was no boy. They would haul me off to the warden. He would know I was a spy and then I would find myself in prison, too.

By the time I did go back to the Palais, late the next night, I was certain the violence was ended. The Tuileries had been taken. The king’s guard had been slaughtered. The king himself was powerless now. What more could they do to him? I hoped they would send him to the country, to his house at St-Cloud. There he could hunt and fiddle with locks, both of which he loved. The queen and Marie-Thérèse could stroll in the gardens. Louis-Charles could run free.

Orléans was waiting for me at the Palais. He grabbed me the second I entered his apartments and marched me to his study.

Where the devil have you been? he shouted.

I told him all that had happened. He would not sit while I spoke, but paced about the room.

Their ordeal is ended now. It must be, I said when I’d finished my story. Surely now the fighting is over?

If I expected an answer from him, I did not get it. Instead he said, I’m pleased you were ordered to the Temple. Do your work there and do it well, as you did at the Tuileries. Give the warden no reason to get rid of you. Give me no reason to doubt you. Come here at night after you finish, no matter how late, and give me your report. Whom the king sees. To whom he writes. When he sleeps, eats, and shits.

But why? I said. I thought it was over now. I thought that—

He wheeled on me. You thought wrong! he thundered. The king has fallen, yes, but who will take his place? Who will rule? The hothead Danton? The serpent Robespierre? They will fight each other for the privilege, and whoever wins might well rule Paris but he will never rule France. In Lyons, in Nantes, in the whole of the Vendée, the people clamor for their king. Over? My God, what a fool you are. It’s not over. It’s barely begun.

Orléans was right in this, as in many things. After the Tuileries fell, the alarm bells never stopped ringing. The Prussians battled their way through France. The city gates were closed. Citizens were ordered to stay in their homes. Brigades from the St-Antoine patrolled the streets, rounding up anyone suspected of being an enemy of the revolution. Thousands were thrown in jail. Nobles were arrested simply because they were noble. Priests because they would not put the revolution before God. They joined forgers, thieves, beggars, and prostitutes in the rat-ridden cells of Paris’s prisons.

Late in August, the fortress at Valmy, the last defense between Brunswick’s armies and the capital, fell. Citizen volunteers armed themselves and hurried out of Paris to the front. The people left behind, wild with fear, took up whatever weapons they could find, certain the Prussians would march through the city gates at any moment and slaughter them all.

And then it came. Not the Prussians. Or the English. Or the Austrians.

Something far worse.

The second of September, 1792.

25 May 1795

It was as if someone had gone down into the graveyards of Paris, down into the bowels of the catacombs and farther still, to the gates of Hell itself to release Lucifer’s demons upon us.

Who had done it? I wondered as I stumbled to my room, sick with the horror of it. Who had opened the gates of Hell?

It started with a hoarse and fearful whisper. On the streets. In the cafés. Over walls. At the market stalls. The prisoners are plotting an uprising—the royalists, the priests, all the enemies of the revolution, the whisperers said. When Brunswick’s armies get here, they will join with them and murder everyone in the city. The whispering grew louder and louder until it became a battle cry.

I was at the Temple serving supper when first I heard the shouting. A mob had gathered under the windows in the room where the king and his family dined. A smirking guard looked out, then said the queen must come to the window to see her friend, the Princesse de Lamballe. As he did, we saw a head go by—a blond head, floating along on top of a pole. The queen fainted. I rushed to the window to draw the curtains and saw the mob below, howling and laughing, and I hoped dearly that the walls of the Temple were stronger than those of the Tuileries.

For hours they stayed, singing their songs, drinking, calling down death upon the king, threatening to invade the Temple and kill him themselves. The warden finally went out to them, his guards about him, and warned them off. They told him that they, the good people of Paris, were emptying the city’s prisons of traitors to the revolution and that the king was the greatest traitor of all. The warden told them that many of the king’s misdeeds had yet to be uncovered and that they themselves would end up in prison if they dared to rob the French people of proper justice against him.

This sobered them. They stopped their threats and marched off and the warden came back inside. They are not the good people of Paris, he said to one of his men. There are many among them I recognize, many who’ve spent time in prisons themselves.

He gave orders to double the number of guards at the gates, then sent me, a maid, and three who worked in the kitchens home. I walked south down the smallest streets in hopes of avoiding the market halls and anywhere else crowds might gather. But I went down one with a wine shop on it and they were there—some of the mob. I tried to turn back before I was seen but it was too late. A woman had spied me.

Ah, what a pretty lad! she shouted. Come here, my fine fellow! The princess would like a kiss from you!

They had pulled the head off its pole and had placed it on a table. A drunken man pinched its bloodless cheeks. Another kissed its slack lips. A third caressed its hair. I wanted to scream. To cover my eyes. To run. But I dared not. I knew they would chase me.

Are you not a player? I whispered to myself. Play.

Fie! I will kiss no damned aristocrat! I shouted back. The princess can kiss me instead. Right here! I turned and slapped my ass. They screeched with laughter. One clapped me on the back. Another gave me wine to drink. One, not drunk, not shouting, questioned me. Who are you, boy? Where were you going? he asked.

I told him I was a servant at the Temple on my way to my room to sleep. He asked was I a patriot and I told him yes. I had the tricolor pinned on me and buttons on my jacket with words on them that said Live Free or Die. Seeing this, he called me a true son of France. He told me his name—it was Jean—and bade me stay. For more than an hour, I drank with them, laughed with them, sang with them.

And then he, Jean, said it was time to go back to the nation’s work. He roused the others, promising there would be more wine but first work. I tried to leave but he would not hear of it.

I must sleep, I told him.

Enemies of the revolution never sleep, he said. Its defenders must not either.

Where are we going? I asked as we walked along.

Back to La Force.

He turned then to talk with another and I was glad of it, for I could playact no longer. A desperate fear had gripped me. I knew what La Force was—a prison, the very one where the Princesse de Lamballe had been held. I tried to hang back, to break away, but I was carried along by the mob. I first heard the screaming as we neared the prison wall.