Daughters of the Storm (63 page)

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All afternoon the dull thuds of the guillotine at work echoed in the city, until at last it lay silent and the crowds went away. The executioner removed the knife from the guillotine and packed up his things. His assistants sluiced down the platform. The carts containing the bodies lumbered their gore-stained way to the cemetery up at the Madeleine, where they disgorged their burden and the bodies were stripped and thrown into the trenches. As luck would have it, the three who had been linked in life were entwined in death. Marie-Victoire, Héloïse and de Choissy lay sprawled together in the final embrace of the grave.

The shadows lengthened, throwing dark patches over the silent square. A child appeared and skipped up to the scaffold where he danced around it, humming a tuneless song. After a while, he grew bored with his game and ran for home, his feet leaving bright, red footprints wherever he trod.

The smell of blood lay over the city. In the evening the mist came, stealing white and heavy up from the river, silently cloaking the shadowy square. Tall, fearful and ugly, the guillotine loomed out of it, casting a shadow over the land.

A figure got up from where he had been sitting on the terraces of the Tuileries. He moved slowly, dragging his feet as though his exhaustion was bone deep. Louis turned once to look again at the guillotine, and then he gestured in a hopeless, defeated way, before melting into the shadows to be seen no more.

Sophie and William Jones
reached England after a storm-tossed crossing when Sophie feared for the life of her babies. The Luttrells welcomed her warmly, though they never quite forgave her for her defection to France and for marrying William.

Six months later, the Joneses left for America, leaving Ned ruling High Mullions and the Luttrells in possession of the dower house. It took some time for Sophie to settle in her adopted country and to recover from her experiences, but in the end she grew to love America and the life that she made there. Despite William's encouragement, she never tried to write about the Revolution, although she was the author of a popular book on practical housekeeping. William became a successful and progressive farmer and Senator for Virginia and was a member of Jefferson's government which bought Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803. He and Sophie had six children in all and their descendants may be found in Virginia today.

Louis d'Épinon
left Paris the night of Héloïse's death and took to the country, where he lived rough for many months before rejoining a royalist force in Germany. He lived in exile throughout the Napoleonic era and returned to France after the restoration of the Bourbon Louis XVIII. He retired to one of his family's smaller estates where he lived quietly for the rest of his life. He never married, and when he died a letter, brittle and yellow with age, containing a lock of dark hair, was found in a casket by his bed.

Adèle de Fleury
escaped in a laundry basket to Brussels just before the Terror reached its height. Her husband was not so fortunate and lost his head early in 1794. Adèle soon found consolation and married an immensely rich Belgian aristocrat. She spent the rest of her life quarrelling with her embittered sister, who lived in extreme poverty in England, over the de Choissy estates. Adèle's son, born of her second marriage, eventually succeeded to what remained.

The Marquise de Guinot
died of a prison fever in the Abbaye not long after the marquis' murder.

Miss Edgeworth
sailed to America with the Joneses, and after helping her ex-pupil to settle into her new life astonished everybody by marrying a rich widower. She lived, happy and respectable, into a ripe old age.

Sir Robert Brandon
survived the Revolution and Napoleon's empire. When the French monarchy was restored in 1815 he was decorated by the king. He lived in Paris until he died.

Jeanne,
Marie-Victoire's friend, died of syphilis at the age of thirty-five. Her body was flung into a pauper's grave.

Many of the figures who dominated the French Revolution met violent ends. Both
Marie-Antoinette
and
Danton
were guillotined. Most of the Girondins were hunted down and brought to the scaffold, and on July 28th, 1794,
Robespierre
and his fellow Jacobins met the same fate. By the time the Terror was over 3,000 executions had taken place in Paris and 14,000 in the provinces.