She dragged herself from his grasp, ran into the bedroom and slammed the door. Her chest heaved, her heart rose and throbbed in her throat. With all the desperate passions in our heads and bodies, one day these walls will split, one day this house will fall down. There will be soil and bones and grass, and they will read our diaries to find out what we were.
9 Brumaire, the Palais de Justice. Brissot seemed to have aged. He was more papery and stooped, and the hair at his temples had receded further. De Sillery looked old; where were his gambling passions now? He would not bet on the outcome of this; this was a certainty. Only, sometimes, he wondered how he got made into a Brissotin. He should be sitting beside Philippe; Philippe, the lucky devil, has another week to live.
He leant forward. “Brissot, do you remember? We were witnesses at Camille’s wedding.”
“So we were,” Brissot said. “But then you know, so was Robespierre.”
Vergniaud, who was always careless about his clothes, was immaculate tonight, as if to show that imprisonment and trial had not broken his spirit. His face was carefully devoid of expression; he would give nothing away, give his tormenters no satisfaction. Where was Buzot tonight, he wondered? Where was Citizen Roland? Where was Petion? Alive or dead?
The clock struck 10:15. Outside it was pitch black, raining. The jury was back; at once they were surrounded by officers of the court. Citizen Fouquier, his cousin with him, strolled across the marble, into the light; there were twenty-two verdicts to be pronounced, twenty-two death sentences to be read, before he could go home to a late meal and a bottle.
His cousin Camille was very pale; his voice shook, he was on edge. For six days he, Fouquier, had been quoting his cousin’s assertions at the jury, his accusations of federalist conspiracy, of monarchist plots. Occasionally, when some now-famous phrase fell on their ears, the accused would turn as one man and look at Camille. It was as if they had rehearsed it; no doubt they had. It had been a strain, Fouquier supposed. He had already ordered the tumbrels; when there were twenty-two accused, you had to be mindful of these details.
There is, Fouquier reflected, something theatrical about the scene, or something for an artist’s brush; the black and white of the tiles, the flare of candle flames, the splashes, here and there, of the tricolor. Light touches his cousin’s face; he takes a chair. The foreman of the jury rises. A clerk flicks from a file a sheaf of death warrants. Behind the Public Prosecutor, someone whispered, “Camille, what’s the matter?”
Suddenly, from the ranks of the accused, there was a single sharp cry. The accused men leapt to their feet, the guards closed in on them, the officers of the court threw down their papers and scrambled from their places. One of the accused, Charles Valaze, had slid backwards from his bench. There were screams from women in the crowd, a rush to see what had happened; guards struggled to hold the spectators back.
“What a way to end it,” a juryman said.
Vergniaud, his face still impassive, motioned to Dr. Lehardi, one of the accused. Lehardi knelt by the fallen body. He held up a long dagger, which was bloody to the hilt. The Public Prosecutor immediately removed it from his hand. “I shall have something to say about this,” Fouquier complained. “He might have used it on me.”
Brissot sat slumped forward, his chin on his chest. Now Valaze’s blood trailed scarlet over the black and white. A space was cleared. Valaze, looking small and very dead, was picked up by two gendarmes and borne away.
The drama was not over yet. Citizen Desmoulins, attempting to get out of the courtroom, had fallen over in a dead faint.
17 Brumaire: execution of Philippe, known as Citizen Egalite. At his last meal he consumed two cutlets, a quantity of oysters, the greater part of a good bottle of Bordeaux. To attend the scaffold he wore a white pique waistcoat, a green frock coat and yellow buckskins: very English. “Well, my good man,” he said to Sanson, “let’s hurry it up, shall we?”
The executioner. His overheads have gone up shockingly since the Terror began. He has seven men to pay out of his own wages, and soon he will be hiring up to a dozen carts a day. Before, he managed with two assistants and one cart. The kind of money he can offer doesn’t attract people to the work. He has to pay for his own cord for binding the clients, and for the big wicker baskets to take the corpses away afterwards. At first they’d thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale. Do the powers-that-be understand just how much blood comes out of even one decapitated person? The blood ruins everything, rots things away, especially his clothes. People down there don’t realize, but he sometimes gets splashed right up to his knees.
It’s heavy work. If you get someone who’s tried to do away with himself beforehand, he can be in a mess, maybe collapsed through poison or loss of blood, and you can strain your back trying to drag him into position under the blade. Recently Citizen Fouquier insisted they guillotine a corpse, which everybody thought was a lot of unnecessary work. Again, take someone who’s crippled or deformed; they can’t be tied to the plank without a lot of sweat and heaving, and then the crowds (who can’t see much anyway) get bored and start hissing and catcalling. Meanwhile a queue builds up, and the people at the end of the queue get awkward and start screaming or passing out. If all the clients were young, male, stoical and fit, he’d have fewer problems, but it’s surprising how few of them fall into all those categories. The citizens who live nearby complain that he doesn’t put down enough sawdust to soak up the blood, and the smell becomes offensive. The machine itself is quiet, efficient, reliable; but of course he has to pay the man who sharpens the knife.
He’s trying to make the operation as efficient as he can, get the speed up. Fouquier shouldn’t complain. Take the Brissotins; twenty-one, plus the corpse, in thirty-six minutes flat. He couldn’t spare a skilled man to time it, but he’d got a friendly spectator to stand by with his watch: just in case he heard any complaints.
In the old days the executioner was esteemed; he was looked up to. There was a special law to prevent people calling him rude names. He had a regular audience who came to see skilled work, and they appreciated any little troubles he took. People came to executions because they wanted to; but some of these old women, knitting for the war effort, you can see they’ve been paid to sit there, and they can’t wait to get away and drink up the proceeds; and the National Guardsmen, who have to attend, are sickened off after a few days of it.
Once the executioner had a special Mass said for the soul of the condemned; but you couldn’t do that now. They’re numbers on a list now. You feel that before this, death had distinction; for your clients it was a special, individual end. For them you had risen early and prayed and dressed in scarlet, composed a marmoreal face and cut a flower for your coat. But now they come in carts like calves, mouths sagging like calves’ and their eyes dull, stunned into passivity by the speed with which they’ve been herded from their judgement to their deaths; it is not an art any longer, it is more like working in a slaughterhouse.
“I write these words to the sound of laughter in the next room … .”
From the first day they took her to prison, Manon had been writing. She had to record a justification, a credo, an autobiography. After a time her wrist would ache, her fingers stiffen in the cold, and she would want to cry. Whenever she stopped writing and allowed her mind to dwell on the past itself, rather than on means of expressing it, she felt a great void of longing open inside her: “ … we have had nothing.” She would lie on her prison bed, staring up into the darkness, consciously fitting herself for heroism.
