French Passion (40 page)

I shuddered.

Izette clenched my hand tighter. Dragging her after me, I began shouldering my way forward.

“What d'you think you're doing?” she asked.

“I have to be close.”

“You're crazed!”

But I was hauling her around groups of picnickers and revelers. Some had brought stools, others waited on quilts. The crowd grew more dense near the guillotine.

My elbow jabbed a man with warts on his nose.

“Who're you shoving?” he howled.

“Pardon her, Citizen,” Izette explained. “She ain't never seen the guillotine before. She's from Champagne.”

“Ah, so the pretty little bit's from the country.” He nodded. “Come on, Citizeness.” And the warted man grasped each of us by the waist, hustling us forward until we were at the base of the scaffold with a row of knitting women.

“The little one's from the country,” he told them.

The knitters glanced up at me, beaming welcome.

Said the warty man, “You're in luck to be here today, Citizeness. You'll see the national razor shave one of them high nobility, friend of King Louis, and of the old King, too. A general to boot.” He beamed proudly at me as if he were responsible for the Comte's credentials.

From the direction of Rue Royale came a roar. Two mounted soldiers moved forward, making a scraggly path. A plow horse pulled the crude cart while paired horsemen guarded either side. Clocks began chiming one. The ragged path closed behind the tumbrel.

Everyone in the vast Place de la Révolution had risen, craning to get a glimpse. Eating, drinking, selling halted. The knitters set aside needles and yarn. Children were lifted up so they could see.

The tumbrel held three men with hands secured behind their backs, linens loosened, necks shaven. One, by his clothing an ordinary tailor, sat abjectly on the crude bench, his heavy cheeks jouncing with each turn of the wheel. The second, very tall and bony, clutched at the rail of the open cart.

The Comte stood, his legs apart, bracing himself. His head was erect in that old arrogant way. Wigless, he seemed oddly naked. He gazed with amusement at the crowd as if they'd gathered here for his pleasure, and he cocked a black eyebrow, laughing as a newsboy held up his print-smeared sheet: “The Life and Loves of Comte de Créqui.”

The unoiled wheels lurched. The tall bony man lost his balance, falling. Those nearby gave a happy roar. The Comte, grasping the rail with his bound hands, managed to use his foot to help the man up. The fat-cheeked tailor, not appearing to notice, gazed ahead, maybe at the guillotine, maybe at the faraway rooftops of the Louvre, or maybe at nothing. Izette had said many of those approaching execution appeared drugged by terror.

The tumbrel halted, and the scaffold hid it from us. Three drummer boys appeared. After a long drumroll, the fat-cheeked man was hauled up the steps by two assistants. The executioner pulled a bloodstained smock over his trim nankeen suit. The shuddering yet nerveless victim was pushed down on his stomach against the bottom plank. “Don't look,” Izette said. Again drums rolled. But I was so close that under this tattoo I could hear the upper plank go down. The neck clamp dropped into place. The blade fell. And I thought: I am the Resurrection and the Life saith the Lord: he that believeth in me.…

When I looked up, the body was being wheeled away in an ordinary wheelbarrow. The Comte appeared on the scaffold, looking out with wry detachment.

He saw me.

For an endless moment our eyes met. His smile faded. I saw only those dark clever eyes. The Place de la Révolution, the sunlit revelers, the guillotine, the laundry basket seeping blood, everything melted and there were only those dark eyes. And I was remembering a little country girl on her sixteenth birthday coquetting with one of the great lords of France, a man who ruled the finances of a kingdom, a man who was completely knowing, witty, and brilliant, a man who gazed at her with admiration, lust, amusement, and—though neither could know it yet—an all-consuming passion that would shape and mold both their lives.

Without thinking, I mouthed,
I love you, I love you
.

Words I'd never spoken to him. His expression softened. His lips were gentle, tender. Even bald, he looked young.

Young?

And for the first time I was wondering how it would have been if we'd met without the chasm of thirty years. If we'd been of an age, would I have understood him, his pride, the enigmas of his diamond-sharp brain? If we'd come together when he was still tender enough to forgive and to bend, would I have loved him? Would I have looked past the clever-ugly face and seen his brilliance and courage? Would I have charted the quirks of his personality? Would he ever have been as accessible for me to love as André?

Gazing into the Comte's eyes, hypnotized, I found myself in a time and a place that never had existed.…

Through the emerald meadow a breeze rustles, dancing with blue gillyflowers and golden buttercups, and along a path in the spring grass move a girl of sixteen, a boy of seventeen. Her abundant silver-gilt hair flows down her back. The boy is neither tall nor handsome, yet his features have quick intelligence, and his dark eyes snap with wit. There is a proud lift to his dark head, and he holds himself with an erectness that might be considered arrogant if it weren't so obviously the pride of masculine, virile youth. He leaves the path, his slender black military boots catching spangles of dew as he picks her a small bouquet. With a bow he presents the flowers, they smile at each other, and, hand in hand, they proceed to a line of poplars
.

The Comte, stepping forward, still gazing tenderly at me, made a small bow. Then, I guessed so as not to incriminate me, he bowed with that overelaborate courtesy in all directions. The women next to me laughed, but without the ugly derision with which they'd greeted the bony man's fall. A man behind me shouted, “Hooray for General de Créqui and his men!” And all around the vast square rose masculine cries and quavers for “Good old No-Retreat de Créqui.”

In the shaded dell at riverside wild violets of the palest lavender grow amid lush ferns. Poplars twin themselves in the slow-moving river. The girl throws a pebble, and in the ripples the reflected green branches sway and bend. She and the boy laugh, their laughter fading slowly into the watery silence. Tenderly, he touches her lips, she kisses his finger. As each gaze into the other's eyes, wonderingly, a rosy flush suffuses her cheeks, and her thick lashes draw over her clear green eyes. He takes her in his arms. A lark trills its springtime ecstasy
.

The Comte knelt. Drums rolled. Mechanism whirred as ropes lifted the blade.

The girl and boy notice nothing, for they stretch on their bed of soft ferns, locked in an embrace that is old as life, as new and tender as the little bouquet of discarded flowers, as ecstatic as the trilling bird, as eternal as the sun whose rosy golden light filters through poplar branches onto naked, beautiful bodies …

I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet still shall he live: And whosoever loveth and believeth in Me shall never die.

I was weeping, but then, Izette told me later, so were a good many older men, doubtless soldiers who had served under the Comte. She led me away. But not before I'd seen the sight that will haunt me the rest of my days.

The executioner held up the severed head of my husband. The dark eyes glittered as if they saw me still. And I gazed back at the bleeding head of the boy I had loved in another, far better time and place.

Chapter Six

“I've hired a carriage for tomorrow,” Sir Robert said.

Goujon replied, “Impossible. You and Manon can't leave Paris now.”

“Can't we! Tomorrow, Mr. Goujon, the Comtesse and I quit this city for good.”

Goujon had just arrived to visit me in my sitting room. And as usual when Goujon visited, Sir Robert had stamped across the corridor, the two of them sparring, as Izette put it, like a pair of game cocks. (
Over you
, she invariably added.)

It was late afternoon on September 2, a warm, quiet Sunday five weeks after the Comte's execution. For those five weeks I'd been sunk in a torpor. My muscles refused to obey my will. My brain sloughed off thought, yet I had none of the merciful forgetfulness that used to terrify me; there was only a slow, endless reliving of the moment when the executioner held up his grisly trophy.

I was but dimly aware of the momentous happenings that had shaken Paris. One sultry-red August day the Tuileries Palace had been stormed, and now the King and Queen were imprisoned. Mansions and fine houses were set to the torch. The jails were packed with those suspected of Monarchist leanings.

Goujon said to Sir Robert, “Come across to your rooms. We'll discuss this in private.”

Sir Robert turned his florid face questioningly to me.

“I'm quite well now, Goujon,” I lied. My hands were folded in my white muslin dress. My brain kept plodding in futile circles around the waste of the brief years of my marriage. I was sick with the thought of the happiness I could have had, the children I might have borne the Comte. I shared Sir Robert's longing to get back to England. I yearned to be with Jean-Pierre, for it seemed to me if I could retreat into my quiet studio and grasp my brother's hand, I'd be well again.

Oh, I yearned with all my weakened self to see André, but he didn't want to see me. He must have heard through Goujon, his fellow deputy, of my illness, yet he'd never visited me. André still hates me, I thought dully. Another reason to leave Paris.

“I don't have to tell you what an upheaval we're going through,” Goujon said. “The King and Queen in prison. Foreign armies reported advancing—”

Sir Robert interrupted, “All the more reason to quit Paris.”

“Don't you understand?” Goujon asked with terrible, gentle patience. “Manon's safe in this hotel. Otherwise—name of God! If there's any upheaval, how long do you expect the Comtesse de Créqui would last?”

“Nobody, hardly, knows I married the Comte,” I put in tonelessly. “My identification papers are made out for Manon d'Epinay.”

And then, coming from far off, I heard the sound of male voices raised in a howling song. The two men glanced at each other, and, as at an unheard command, each went to stare out a window. Trembling, I moved to the third window.

Up the street they whirled, about thirty men writhing, contorting, twisting, shaking weapons. Bare-armed, they were decked out in laces and satins, gauze fichus, plumed hats. Red stained their stolen finery. Red shone on their hands and arms. Red stained their weapons. Like an army of vocal, blood-intoxicated ants, they danced up to the smithy. The smith's two apprentices, long hair wildly aflap, turned the double handle of a huge grindstone. Sparks streamed in the warm afternoon air as each weapon in turn was held against the stone. The song being howled was the new march I'd heard on the way to the Comte's execution: “The Marseillaise.”

Sir Robert, his cheeks for once ashen, pulled me from the window, jerking three pairs of shutters closed.

In the dimness Goujon looked a huge, solid bear. “These past few days many traitors have been arrested,” he said. “They're being tried and executed immediately.”

“You mean to tell me those spawn of hell have official sanction?” Sir Robert muttered.

“They're paid twenty-four livres apiece,” Goujon replied.

My mind was swelling with perverse gratitude that the Comte had been executed in an orderly, if horrible manner at Place de la Révolution.

“Foul,” Sir Robert said.

“It's the people's justice,” Goujon said.

Who had decided, I wondered, that the people should have their justice?

Goujon said, “All prisons are being emptied.” He glanced at Sir Robert. “Now do you understand why Manon can't leave—at least for a few days?”

Outside, the keen of voices rose, punctuated by the beat of wooden sabots and the whine of metal on stone.

“By Jove, I do understand. Will you send word when travel is safe?”

“I'll send word,” Goujon promised.

The next six days Sir Robert, leaving the hotel for short intervals, gathered news of the massacres. The rest of the time he remained with me in my sitting room. Whenever those drunken men howled to the smithy, he would close the shutters, talking loudly to me. The rest of the time, his florid face in a brooding expression, he wrote letters to England. By night, bonfires reddened the sky, and the murders continued. Insane asylums and orphanages were ravaged. Little girls were raped and so, ugly as this sounds, were the boys. Sir Robert recorded it all in his round English hand.

Where, I wondered in my numbness, where were the idealistic Revolutionaries, the decent men who had worked to end old injustices? The men who hated death and killing?

Where was André?

I moved with the crowd in the early-morning hubbub of the opening of stalls and shops of the Palais Royale arcades.

It was several days since the massacre had ended. Yesterday Goujon had come to the Hôtel des Anglais, telling Sir Robert that the road from Paris to Calais was relatively safe. So at this minute the Englishman was arranging the hire of a carriage. And what was I doing? Shopping for a present for Jean-Pierre. Sir Robert had thrown up his hard-muscled hands, denouncing this foray as preposterous, utterly preposterous! I agreed with him. Yet a gift for my brother was the first idea that had roused me from my torpid grief, and I'd argued back. In the end Sir Robert, glad to see my apathy lifting, had agreed to let me come here. I wouldn't be alone for long. Izette was to meet me nearby, at Café de Foy, for early-morning chocolate.

Shoppers bargained too vigorously. Market women bawled too-loud attention to their vegetables and cheeses. Shopkeepers in their doorways smiled too enticingly at prospective customers. Everyone overreacted, intent on blocking out the past terrors.