Lucile put her basket over her arm. She draped a jacket around her, though it was warm, because she wanted to put her little knife into the pocket. No one knew she had this little knife; she hardly allowed herself to know, but she kept it on her person in case of need. Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I’m on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.
She looked into the eyes of her familiar neighbors. Who would have thought our Section contained so many royalists? “You murderer’s whore,” a man said to her. She kept a smile on her face, a particularly maddening smile that she had learned from Camille, a smile that taunted and said, all right, just try it. In imagination, she eased the knife’s smooth handle into her palm, pressed its point against yielding flesh. As she was on her way back, and outside her own front door, another man recognized her and spat in her face.
She stopped inside the front door, to wipe the saliva away, then wafted up the stairs, sat down, the bread in her lap. “Are you going to eat that?” Jeanette said, wringing her apron between her hands in a pantomime of anguish.
“Of course I am, since I went to such trouble to get it. Pull yourself together, Jeanette, put some coffee on.”
Louise called from the drawing room “I think Gabrielle is going to faint.”
So possibly she never got her breakfast; afterwards she didn’t remember. They got Gabrielle onto the bed, loosened her clothes, fanned her. She opened a window, but the noise from the street was agitating Gabrielle even more; so she closed it again, and they endured the heat. Gabrielle dozed; she and Louise took turns at reading to each other, and gossiped and bickered gently, and told each other their life stories. The hours crept on, until Camille and Freron came home.
Freron flopped into a chair. “There are bodies—” he indicated a height from the ground. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Lucile, but Louis Suleau is dead. Yes, we saw it, we saw it happen, we saw him killed before our eyes.”
He wanted Camille to say, Freron saved my life; or at least to say, Freron stopped me doing something very very stupid. But Camille only said, “For the love of Christ, Rabbit, save it for your memoirs. If I hear any more about this morning I’ll do you an injury. And not a trivial one, either.”
At the sight of him, Jeanette pulled herself together. The coffee was produced at last. Gabrielle came staggering from the bedroom doorway, fastening the bodice of her dress. “I haven’t seen Francois since early morning,” Camille told Louise. His voice was unnaturally flat, without the trace of a stutter. “I haven’t seen Georges-Jacques, but he is signing decrees from City Hall, so clearly he is alive and well. Louis Capet and all his family have deserted the palace and are at the Riding School. The Assembly is in permanent session. I don’t think even the Swiss Guard knows the King has gone and I’m sure the people attacking the palace don’t know. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to tell them.” He stood up, held Lucile in his arms for a moment. “I am going to change my clothes once more, because I have got dried blood on them, and then I am going out again.”
Freron looked after him gloomily. “I’m afraid the reaction will set in later,” he said. “I know Camille. He’s not cut out for all this.”
“You think not?” Lucile said. “I think he thrives on it.” She wants to ask how Louis Suleau died, how and why. But now is not the time. As Danton had said, she is not a silly girl; no, no, she is the voice of common sense. Maria Stuart, on the wall, approaches the headsman; nubile, shapely, Maria wears a sickly Christian smile. The pink silk cushions are looking the worse for wear, as Camille could have predicted but didn’t; the blue
When Gabrielle felt strong enough, she said that she would like to go back to her own house. The streets were packed and noisy. The porter had panicked and closed the big gate to the Cour du Commerce; Gabrielle hammered and banged and rang the bell, yelling to be let into her own home. “We can go in through the baker’s if he’ll let us,” she said, “in at his front door and out through his back kitchen.”
But the baker wouldn’t even let them into his shop; he shouted into their faces and pushed Gabrielle in the chest, bruising her and winding her and sending her flying back into the road. Dragging her between them, they retreated to the big gate, huddled against it. As a group of men crowded around them Lucile reached into her pocket and felt that the knife was there and caressed it with her fingertips; she said, “I know you, I know your names, and if you approach one step nearer your heads will be on pikes before nightfall and I will take the greatest pleasure in helping to put them there.”
And then the gate opened for them; hands pulled them inside; bolts slammed home; they were inside the front door, they were on the stairs, they were in the Dantons’ house, and Lucile was saying crossly, “This time we’re staying put.”
Gabrielle was shaking her head—lost, utterly exhausted. From across the river the gunfire was heavy and constant. “Mother of God, I look as if I’ve been three days in the tomb,” Louise Robert said, catching sight of herself as they once again plumped pillows and disposed Gabrielle to the horizontal.
“Why do you think the Dantons have separate beds?” she whispered to Lucile, when she thought they were out of earshot.
Lucile shrugged. Gabrielle said in a drugged voice, “Because he lashes his arms about, dreams he’s fighting—1 don’t know who.”
“His enemies? His creditors? His inclinations?” Lucile said.
Louise Robert raided Gabrielle’s dressing table. She found a pot of rouge, and applied it in round scarlet spots, as they used to do at Court. She offered some to Lucile, but Lucile said, “Come, you minx, you know I am beyond improvement.”
Midday passed. The streets fell silent. This is what the last hours will be like, Lucile thought; this is what it will be like when the world ends, and we are waiting for the death of the sun. But the sun did not fail; it beat down, and beat down at last on the blazing tricolor, on the heads of the Marseille men, on the singing victory processions and the loyal lurking Cordeliers who’d had the sense to stay indoors all day and who now poured onto the streets, chanting for the republic, calling for the death of tyrants, calling for their man Danton.
There was a pounding at the door. Lucile threw it open; nothing could worry her now. A big man stood propping himself in the doorway, swaying a little. He was a man from the streets: “Forgive me, Monsieur,” Louise Robert said, laughing. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”
“They’re smashing the mirrors at the palace,” the man said. “The Cordeliers are kings now.” He tossed
