The Sparks Fly Upward (53 page)

To be
merdeux
was the phrase applied to those, and there were quite a few, who sank so deep into apathy that they sat all day in their own ordure.

The ordinary Frenchwomen kept away from him so that his clientele declined as the number of aristocrats dwindled—the number being brought in no longer kept up with those going to their death.

The ones who remained had a game they played in a corridor before lights out. They put a chair on a table, saluted each other in Latin and a beaker of wine: ‘
Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant
.' One by one they stepped onto a bench and from there to the table where they knelt and rested their head on the chair, stretching their arms out behind them as an imaginary blade fell. The others applauded.

‘Aren't they
wonderful
?' Lulu said. ‘Do you think they'd let me join in?'

‘No.' The pantomime distressed and irritated her. As she told Ffoulkes, ‘They're stiffening their resolve not to show fear when the time comes but what's wrong with showing fear?'

‘One doesn't.'

‘Well, one should. If they howled and screamed, like Lulu says Mme du Barry did, they might move the crowd to pity and this
danse macabre
would stop. But no, we mustn't share human emotion with the mob, must we? We never have and we're damned if we start now.'

‘You're getting sansculottish,' Ffoulkes said. ‘It's called style, Mrs Fox.'

‘It's called exclusivity and it's what caused the bloody trouble in the first place.'

It was the nearest they got to quarrelling. It was hot and she had a new worry; she'd missed a period. For the tiniest part of a second she'd almost screamed with joy,
I'm having his baby
, before reality clawed her back. It would die with her, the tiny heart stopping as hers stopped. The matrons at the Tribunal hospital refused to examine and pronounce on a pregnancy before it had advanced three or four months. Even if she survived until then, she would have to make the choice between declaring the pregnancy and letting Ffoulkes go to the scaffold alone. Dying with him or living without him—but with his child.

Ffoulkes had picked up the paper and was reading it to her, presumably his way of leaving a ticklish issue. ‘What do you think of that, Mrs Fox?'

‘I'm sorry, I wasn't listening.'

‘Are you all right? Aren't you interested in the Convention's latest decree?'

‘I was thinking about Mary Wollstonecraft.'
There
was an Englishwoman who'd become pregnant under the Terror. She wondered if Mary had found her survival worth it when she got back to England and the calumny thrown at unmarried mothers. A better terror, perhaps, but still terrible.

‘Very sansculottish.'

At least the Republic had abolished that stigma; married or unmarried, mothers were to be given the State's assistance.

It might just be that her period was late; a lot of the women in the Women's Court said they were irregular. Anyway, with a Damocles sword over one's head, there was no point in crossing bridges one wasn't likely to arrive at. Mixed metaphors; it was time to stop thinking. ‘Go on reading,' she said.

The latest decree, it appeared, defined enemies of the People as those who'd once worked for the royal government, compromised the war effort, reduced food reserves, who'd spread false rumours or defeatism or sedition, who—as dishonest contractors, vexatious officials, or in any other capacity—had compromised the liberty, unity and safety of the Republic.

‘In effect, anybody,' Ffoulkes said, throwing the newspaper to one side.

The Conciergerie was always ahead of the papers, its information from the daily intake of prisoners more reliable. The immediate news was the weather. The summer was becoming the hottest Paris had known, as if God was taking His revenge for having been abolished. The Seine had shrunk from its banks and revealed islands of silt in its course. Women fainted in the food queues, dray-horses collapsed in their traces. The words ‘bad harvest' filtered in from outlying farms like a warning that the enemy was at the gates.

In the Hall of Arms the names called out rarely included that of a
ci-devant
—there weren't many left. Now those going to the guillotine were neither aristocrats nor treacherous generals nor dishonest officials, but shopkeepers, clerks, innkeepers, day laborers, clock-makers, agricultural workers—people who worked life's machinery.

The new intakes talked of a dull, deep resentment rising with the heat from the very pavement as people saw a friend, a relative, employer, employee, arrested and taken away.

As with the ground itself, fissures were opening in the Convention, multiplying and cracking so that deputies divided into groups, distrusting each other and the ever-growing power of the Tribunal.

There were madnesses. Someone at the Convention proposed raising the daily output of executions by constructing a gargantuan-wide guillotine that would cut off a hundred heads at a time. Robespierre rejected the suggestion; he said it wouldn't be good for public morale.

Those coming into prison who'd had any contact with Robespierre said he was becoming increasingly isolated, suspicious and, therefore, terrifying. Ffoulkes learned of a deputy who, trying to please his chief, had organized a street party to celebrate the Republic. ‘It turns out that Citizen Robespierre does not approve of street parties,' Ffoulkes told Philippa. ‘My informant says the deputy has been forced to make an apology that couldn't be deeper if he'd raped Robespierre's sister. Mark my words, Mrs Fox, even frightened deputies,
especially
frightened deputies, won't tolerate this shame much longer. They'll rise against him.'

‘Don't say it, don't say it.' As time went on she'd begun to believe that perhaps the authorities were keeping Ffoulkes alive for political motives, a bargaining counter that Pitt would take notice of, but she tried blanking her mind against the thought. Hope was the ultimate cruelty; she saw it being taken away every night.

Lucile, Desmoulins's wife, had been arrested for protesting against her husband's death and was executed almost immediately, leaving her baby in the care of her mother. A young woman, Cécile Renault, who'd made a half-hearted attempt to assassinate Robespierre, went to the guillotine with fifty others who'd had any connection with her, all dressed in red to denote parricide. Malesherbes's seventy-six-year-old sister went, so did his two secretaries—one of them having been found to have a bust of Henri IV on his mantel-piece. They were taken to the Place de la Révolution in the same tumbrels as former enragés, latter-day Dantonists, farmers who'd hoarded a bushel of grain for themselves.

The joke in the Conciergerie was that the only democracy left in France was the guillotine's.

And Lulu went. Philippa hadn't recognized the name; she didn't know it was him until his voice rang out as Fouquier-Tinville finished reading the list. ‘Thank you, my good fellow, thank you. The same tumbrel that the Her Majesty had, if you'd be so good.'

She ran up to hold his hand as they led him away. The simpering mask he wore slipped away, leaving weariness. ‘Don't mind,' he told her. ‘Dying's easy. Living was
much
more difficult.' He touched her hair. ‘Keep that style, dear, it suits you.'

She collapsed and Ffoulkes had to carry her back to their cell.

‘I can't bear it, any of it, not any more.'

He rocked her like a baby. ‘Yes, you can.'

‘It's going on and on. I want it to end.'

‘Come on, now, Mrs Fox. This won't do. What would Mary Wollstonecraft say?'

He made her laugh; he always could. Later, in the darkness, he said, ‘As hells go, this could have been worse. I found you in it, which was better than not finding you at all. Taken by and large, I wouldn't have missed it.'

‘I love you, Ffoulkes. More than life.'

‘That's what I mean.'

The next night, when his name was read out among the other men's, she couldn't believe she'd heard it—not until her own name was included in the women's, at which point she knew her greatest terror had been that he'd be taken and she'd be left.

 

 

THERMIDOR 9 (July 27, 1794)

A terrible day, full of noise, marching, running feet and the ringing of tocsins. The political storm that had been gathering so long burst like a giant bubo—and the sky with it, overlaying everything with the shriek of the rain that inhibited vision and confused the ear.

It brought no relief to the Conciergerie. The electricity in the atmosphere penetrated even the deepest cells where men and women, separated from each other, were being prepared for the tumbrels. Prisoners became restless, pacing their cages. Heat was imprisoned with them, as if the layers of water running down the windows upstairs formed a barrier that stopped the outside cooling air from getting in. Night jailers were told to stay on duty in case of an attempted mass breakout.

Rumor blazed in brief flashes, like the lightning. The Convention had turned on Robespierre. Arrested him. No, it hadn't, somebody'd just seen him walking through the Palais de Justice. The Convention was calling on all Paris sections to bring their guards and loyalty to the Tuileries. No, it was the other way round; the sections were in insurrection against the Convention and calling on their guards and loyalty to go to the Hôtel de Ville.

It was both. It was neither. The English had invaded.

In the preparation room, Philippa and the four other listed women were having their hair sawn to ear level. Their chemises were torn to free their neck, hands were tied behind their backs with twine, feet hobbled.

The jailers showed neither sexuality nor harshness; they'd been doing this too long. As each woman was prepared, she was slapped amiably on her rump, like a cow being sent to market. ‘Off you go now, girl.'

They were taken out into the passageway where the clerk of the court checked their names against Fouquier-Tinville's list. ‘Off you go now,' he said.

They were escorted down the passage to the arcade that led into the Cour de Mai and fresh air.

The eponymous tree in the court's center around which medieval queens had danced on May Day had been cut down to facilitate the passage of the carts as they went in and out, but there was a reminder of countryside in a new intake of prisoners—a batch of Bretons, to judge from the women's caps and aprons—who waited, clutching their bundles, to be taken inside for registration. Haybags hung from hooks ready to refresh today's horses when they came with the tumbrels, and there was a light smell of the manure left by yesterday's teams that the rain hadn't quite swept away.

The storm had left a fine, clear day. The midday sky had been laundered to its cleanest blue and the sun shone, dazzling the prisoners. There was a group of men, handcuffed and hobbled, standing in one corner.

‘Hello,' Philippa shouted.

‘Good morning,' Ffoulkes shouted back. ‘What in hell have they done to your hair?'

His shirt had been dragged down to expose his neck. She shuffled over to him and rubbed her cropped head against his shoulder. ‘You're nothing to write home about yourself.'

She was astonished by her contentment. That was one thing about death; it resolved your problems. They'd been allowed to find completion of body and soul in one another; some people lived out their lives without that gift.

He looked down at her, catching the thought. ‘Can't complain, I suppose,' he said.

‘No.'

After a while, it occurred even to them that procedure was being breached. The tumbrels were late. Faces peered out of the windows of the palace offices, a group of officials stood in the arcade to the Conciergerie entrance talking worriedly.

The jailer who'd brought her out was grumbling to another. ‘National bloody Guard,' Philippa heard him say. ‘Well, I'm not working extra bloody hours.'

One of the women who'd been prepared with Philippa, a prostitute from her dress—though they all looked like prostitutes with their gowns pushed down to their cleavages—betrayed her sentiments and her nerves by shrieking: ‘Long live the bloody King and get on with it.'

Some of the men prisoners began to shout and one of them, a fat and dapper little man, said loudly: ‘I demand to see the clerk of the court.'

Ffoulkes caught sight of a familiar figure crossing the court and shouted at it. ‘Hey, Albert, what's up?'

‘National Guard's late. Can't go ahead without the National Guard.'

Now the carts were arriving, four of them, each with two horses and a driver, but no National Guard. Jailers let down the tailgates. There were twenty-one prisoners—it was a slow execution day. Philippa's ambition in what remained of her life narrowed down to being included in the same tumbrel as her lover. By keeping close and hanging back, they made two of the six in the rear cart.

Fouquier-Tinville had joined the group in the arcade and there was more discussion.

‘Something's up,' Ffoulkes said. ‘Look.'

From the tumbrel's vantage point, they could see the Seine set like marquetry between its curving banks of silt. People were swarming across the bridges towards them.

‘Hey, Albert,' Ffoulkes said. ‘Anybody special dying today?'

‘There's you,' Philippa said.

He shrugged. ‘Flattering, but I don't think so.'

A crowd was forming just outside the gates, others still streaming across the bridges to join it along the Quai de l'Horloge.

The little fat prisoner was complaining loudly. ‘I demand to see the clerk of the court, this is most inefficient.'