mother bends double with grief and cries.
THE ARTIST JACQUES-LOUIS David is the one who brings us the news. He is ashen-faced and has come to find out whether the Boulevard will now be closed, like the Opera Royal and the theaters. We have been up all night. None of us have had any sleep. Then Jacques asks if my mother would like to leave the room. She is strong, she promises. There isn’t anything she can’t hear. But when we learn that nearly every member of the Swiss Guard has been killed, she faints. Curtius springs from his chair, and Jacques rushes to find alcohol. She is taken upstairs and laid on the couch, but I do not move. I cannot move. I stare at Jacques-Louis and am sure I heard wrong.
“It was the king’s fault,” he says, desperate to explain. “He fled the palace without leaving any orders for the Swiss. So when the mobs came, they defended the Tuileries.”
“What?” Henri demands. “Without anyone inside? Without the royal family?”
“They had no other orders,” Jacques-Louis says. “And they were nine hundred against twenty thousand. They tried to surrender, but the mobs wanted blood.”
“Just tell us how many are dead!” I shout.
Jacques-Louis averts his eyes. “Seven hundred Swiss, and at least three hundred commoners. I am sorry, Marie.”
I will not faint. I will not fall into a swoon. “Where are their bodies?” I demand.
“Marie,” Jacques-Louis begins. “You do not want to—”
“Yes, I do! Where are the bodies?”
The painter looks at Henri, as if it is for him to decide.
“We must find them,” Henri affirms.
“They are in the courtyard of the Tuileries. But I warn you … they have been mutilated. And no one who can be recognized as family must touch them. If you send Curtius, they will murder him where he stands.”
I close my eyes. “Then I will go.”
Henri takes his pistol from the
Like a pair of butchers, we take a wheelbarrow and blankets. We travel through the back alleys to avoid being seen, but there is no one in the streets and the city is silent. It is the longest journey I have ever made. Henri takes the wheelbarrow from me, and I press my hand against my stomach and inhale. Breathe. All I must do is breathe. It is only midmorning, but the air is so humid that even in the shadows of the buildings I am perspiring. Perhaps we will find my brothers alive. Perhaps Jacques-Louis is exaggerating.
But when we reach the courtyard of the Tuileries, Henri puts a steadying hand on my elbow. “God have mercy,” he whispers.
It is a scene from a battlefield. Corpses litter the ground from the gates to the palace, naked, mutilated, in some cases hacked into multiple pieces. Not a single body has been left with its clothes. These men, the finest soldiers in France, have been given worse deaths than any criminal in our Cavern of Great Thieves. I stop at the gates and hold on to the posts.
“Let me go,” Henri says. His shoulders are squared and pulled back. He is ready to do battle, but I cannot burden him with the task of picking through the corpses alone.
“No.” I must simply catch my breath. “Wait.” In a moment I will be well. But the stench of the rotting bodies overwhelms me, and I bend low. Henri rushes to hold back my hair. I am sick three times, and when there is nothing left to heave, I gasp at the air.
“There is no reason you should have to come with me.”
“I can do this.” I stand. “I
“Why are you so stubborn?”
“Because they are my brothers!” And even if I must walk among these corpses like the Grim Reaper harvesting death, I will do it.
This time, Henri does not argue with me. We enter the courtyard, and I cover my mouth and nose with my fichu. Dozens of bodies have been piled, one on top of the other, and set ablaze. The scent of burning flesh is suffocating. But the soldiers whose corpses have escaped the flames are worse to see. There are men whose genitals have been removed, and bodies that have been eviscerated with the organs left to rot in the blazing sun. There is nowhere you can turn without seeing blood. It has seeped into the ground like water, staining the cobblestones and attracting flies, which have gathered like black clouds over the corpses. Henri rolls the wheelbarrow through this field of death. There are others among us with wagons and carts. But no one speaks. The only sound in the courtyard is the screaming of the birds. We are denying them their meals, and once we are gone, they will set to work.
I am not the one who finds Johann. It is Henri. But before I can see what they have done to him, he covers my brother’s body with a blanket, and he pushes my hand away when I move to pull it back. “It is nothing you want to see.”
“I
“There are some things you must simply trust!” he says forcefully.
The other mourners in the courtyard turn to stare at us, and I nod. I am too numb to fight. Too numb to cry. We move through the Tuileries Gardens, where children used to giggle beside the marble fountains. The towering statues are splattered with blood where soldiers clambered to escape, only to be struck down with halberds and pikes. And on the pretty gravel roads, even chambermaids and cooks have been slaughtered by the mobs. I wonder if I will remember their faces when I close my eyes. Brown-eyed maids, square-jawed ushers, heavily jowled cooks …
It takes hours to view all the unburned corpses. One young soldier has not been stripped. He has been left to lie in his shredded Swiss uniform, a pool of blood like a halo around his head. The sun reflects from his gilded epaulets, and this is the image I carry with me when we return my brother’s body to the Boulevard du Temple. Although I am conscious of my uncle’s sorrow, of my mother’s hysteria, and of Henri’s announcement that Edmund could not be found, it all passes as if it were a dream.
THERE IS A funeral the next morning. Johann is buried quietly in the Madeleine Cemetery, and our neighbors are told that Wolfgang and Abrielle have perished with him. A cross is provided for Edmund, but since there is no body, no services can be held. Curtius tells me that Marat and the giant Danton were behind this. That if not for their influence, the massacre of the Swiss Guards would never have happened.
I storm through the Salon and rip their figures to pieces in a rage. I would burn them in the courtyard if I thought it would not attract the attention of the Assembly. At night, Henri is strong for us both. I sleep in his chamber, where there are no images to haunt me, and in the morning, I return to the Salon to comfort my mother in her weeping. Then, as though our family has not suffered enough, Curtius tells me about Yachin.
I am sitting in the workshop when my uncle appears and closes the door. He sits on a stool across from me, and my grip tightens around my cup of coffee. In the two days since the massacre, there has been no word from Yachin or his family. “Marie,” he begins, and I shake my head. His eyes are filled with tears, and I will him not to say it.
“No,” I whisper.
Curtius reaches out to take my hand. “I am sorry.”
“No!” I cry. It is too much to bear. “How—”
He tells me how the mobs sought out foreigners, looting their homes and then burning them down. “They tried to board a ship,” he tells me, “possibly the same ship that Wolfgang took. They were caught at the port and killed.”
“But his siblings,” I protest. “They would not have killed children.”
Curtius’s face is grim. “They have been buried at Petit Vances.” A Jewish burial ground.
So this is anarchy. This is life without order or laws, the way our ancestors lived it before chieftains and kings. It is impossible to believe that everyone—Johann, Edmund, Yachin and his entire innocent family—is gone. Paris has become a city of ghosts, and everything I see reminds me of them. I sit at the window of the Salon and remember the France of only three years ago. Philip Astley’s circus was entertaining the king, and Rose Bertin’s shop sold powdered
