when I step outside and whistle for a carriage, I can still feel the chill through my clothes. Because Curtius is on duty in the Place de la Revolution, only Isabel and I are going. We kiss my mother and Paschal good-bye, and when a cabriolet arrives, we climb in.
“Do you want to check your bag?” Isabel asks.
My mother packed it this morning with everything I should need, but I haven’t looked inside. “No. I trust her.” I put it on the seat next to me. It is the same as any physician’s leather case, only this will be for death.
“Do you think Robespierre will be there?” Isabel asks.
“In the Place de la Revolution or at the graveyard? My guess is neither. He faints at the sight of blood. He’s not a strong man.”
Though we are several blocks from the Place de la Revolution, our carriage comes to a sudden stop. The streets are filled with too many carriages to go any further. “You will have to walk the rest of the way,” the driver shouts. We pay the old man in livres-assignats, and he tips his hat to us as we leave. “A historic day,” he says. It’s impossible to know exactly what he means, whether he is for the king’s death today or against it. No one gives their opinion now.
Twenty thousand people have filled the public square, and it is a sea of red, from the brightly painted guillotine to the liberty caps that both men and women are wearing. Thousands of soldiers line the route where the king will be taken from his prison to the scaffold, and somewhere among those men is Curtius. If there are royalists who are hoping to save the king, there is no chance that their uprising will succeed.
The clouds are low and dark in the sky, and fog has obscured much of the courtyard. “Perhaps God is already in mourning,” I say. We stop at the edge of the crowd. More people will be coming. It is nine, and the king will not appear until ten. “I don’t think we need to go any farther.”
“I’m glad your mother isn’t here,” Isabel tells me.
We huddle against our cloaks and listen to the people talking around us. They are commoners mostly, dressed in long trousers and ill-fitting coats. They are curious to see what the king will look like, since most of them have never laid eyes on him in person. “I heard he’s enormously fat,” one woman says, and her family hurries to agree. “What else would you be on a diet of cake and wine?” Another woman offers, “I bet they will sing
But when the king arrives, there is silence in the Place de la Revolution. His coach is pulled through the crowds by a pair of horses made skittish by the number of people. And when the door to the carriage opens, it is no fat man in ermine who climbs the narrow steps to the scaffold. In the six weeks since I have seen him, the king has lost a great deal of weight. His simple suit and cloak hang loose on his frame, and he looks older than his thirty- eight years. His white hair has been cropped at the neck for the guillotine, and as he stands before the masses who once adored him, it is a pitiful sight.
Charles Sanson, the executioner, has allowed him to speak his last words. Although we cannot hear them, they are repeated through the crowd. He is declaring his innocence, and is using the last breaths he will ever take to pardon those who are about to shed his blood. Although it’s clear he wants to say more, a captain of the National Guard orders the drumroll to begin and he is taken to the plank. His hands are tied behind his back, and his neck is held in place by a piece of wood. The drumroll quickens. Isabel looks away, and in a moment it’s over. Sanson pulls the string, and the blade comes crashing down.
There is silence. Then Sanson reaches into the wicker basket and holds up the king’s head. Cheers resound throughout the square, and the crowd surges forward. “What are they doing?” Isabel cries.
We are carried along by the momentum of the crowd. They are pushing from behind us, and from what I can see, they are struggling to reach the scaffold. “They want to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood!” I shout. I grab Isabel’s arm so that neither of us falls in this moving tide of people. We struggle for an hour to leave the square, and when we finally escape, Sanson has already sold the king’s belongings. It is an executioner’s right to strip the corpse and sell its clothes. In this case, he has even sold King Louis’s wig.
We begin the walk to the Madeleine Cemetery. Neither of us speaks about what we have witnessed. Nine hundred years of august tradition died on the scaffold today, yet every
“We are here on the orders of Robespierre,” I tell him.
“You are Citizeness Grosholtz?” He peers into my face.
“I am.”
He gestures with his toothpick to Isabel. “And who is this?”
“My assistant,” I lie.
He studies her, and his eyes come to rest on her tricolor cockade. “Follow me.”
Isabel takes my arm as we pass through the graveyard. Thunder echoes in the distance. It will rain at any moment. A fitting tribute, I think, to regicide. We reach a small house at the edge of the cemetery, and the guard says, “The charnel house. The body is in there. I will stand here while you work.” He hands Isabel a lantern, and she holds it out before us.
“Thank you for coming with me,” I whisper.
“I would never have let you come alone.”
We enter the room together. It is dark and cold, and immediately we are assaulted by the stench of rotting flesh. It is almost sweet and cloying, a scent that will remain in our hair and clothes until we wash. There are a dozen bodies waiting for burial, but I hardly notice them. All I see is the dismembered corpse of the king in his plain wooden coffin. Isabel has never been so close to him, and to see our monarch like this is both humbling and horrifying. She crosses herself. But someday, this is what we shall all come to. I open my leather bag.
“I’ll need water,” I say.
Isabel goes to the door and asks the guard for a cup.
“Thirsty work?” He laughs.
She does not laugh with him. “It is for the plaster. A bowl will do as well.”
I am finished in a few minutes. I replace the king’s head between his legs—there is no room for it anywhere else in the coffin—then wrap the plaster death mask in a cotton shawl.
“I thought it would take longer,” the guard remarks. He takes the toothpick from his mouth and casually investigates what he’s pulled from his teeth.
“I am taking the cast to my workshop,” I reply. “The wax head will be created there.”
“As long as it’s somewhere. Those men from the Convention were eager to have it done.”
“And the body?” I ask quietly. “What will happen to it?”
“Quicklime, I suppose. That way there’s nothing left to dig up. We’re not looking to have his bones made into relics.”
“And it will be an anonymous grave?”
“Of course. He was a tyrant.” The guard smiles. “That mask is the last that anyone shall see of him.”
JANUARY
25, 1793
—MARIE ANTOINETTE
THE GUARDS SCRUTINIZE MY PAPERS AND ASK ME AGAIN WHAT I am doing here.
“I am visiting on the orders of Robespierre. I am to report on the conditions of the royal family.”
“I can read that,” the younger one snaps. But he has searched my basket and discovered the wax miniature of Saint Denis, the patron saint of Paris, and become suspicious. “And what business does Robespierre have in sending a woman? Did he ask that you bring a headless saint?”
