Madame Tussaud

He sobs. “Seven days.”

I have never seen a body preserved like this. What would he have done if she had deteriorated completely?

“Can … can you model her?” he asks.

I look down at his wife. How strange to think that the birds above us will wake up tomorrow to blue skies and life but she will never open her eyes again. Even the fichu around her neck will outlast her. “Yes,” I say quietly. “I can.”

He holds the lantern while I work, and when I am finished, he asks how long it will be before he will have her back. It is not healthy, what he is doing. But I ask him, “A bust or an entire figure?”

“Her entire figure. With the same dark hair,” he adds desperately.

I think of the models still left to do, including a replacement for General Dumouriez, whose defeat last month has resulted in his disgrace. “Two weeks.” I stand, and he closes his eyes. “Danton,” I say gently, “she has left this world.”

“She has not left my world!” His voice echoes through the cemetery, and I take a step back. “I am sorry,” he says at once. “I don’t know … I can’t control …”

“I have known loss,” I tell him. “I understand.”

He searches my face. He must know of the event I am referring to, and his voice is full of emotion when he replies, “I am sorry.”

But we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.

Chapter 55

APRIL

7, 1793

In order to ensure public tranquillity, two hundred thousand heads must be cut off.

—JEAN-PAUL MARAT

TERROR. THIS IS WHAT DANTON HAS UNLEASHED IN THE WAKE of his wife’s death. He is urging the National Convention to establish a committee to root out every enemy of the patrie and send them first to prison, then to the guillotine. He is like a man possessed, preaching about enemies wherever he goes, from the Jacobin Club to the floor of the Convention. This war against conspirators has given him a new reason to live, and he is not alone in his crusade. In one of his recent placards, Marat has calculated how many criminals can be guillotined in a single day. Even Robespierre has joined the call for a committee responsible for hunting down the enemies of equality.

On the sixth of April, the Convention takes Danton’s advice, making him the first member of the Committee of Public Safety. Now he and eight other men are given the task of finding traitors by any means necessary, and only the Chronique de Paris is brave enough to write the truth. It begins by attacking Marat and Danton. Then, the author moves on to Robespierre.

There are some who ask why there are so many women around Robespierre: at his house, in the galleries of the Jacobin Club, in the galleries of the Convention. It is because this Revolution of ours is a religion, and Robespierre is leading a sect therein. He is a priest at the head of his worshipers. He thunders against the rich and the great, and prides himself on how he lives on next to nothing. Then he talks of God and of Providence, creating his own disciples in the process. He calls himself the friend of the humble and the weak, yet happily receives the adoration of both women and the poor in spirit. He is a false priest and will never be other than a false priest.

I burn the paper in the fireplace. That evening, when the patrol comes to our house, they search our cabinets, our storeroom, the glass jars in our workshop. They scour our shelves for royalist books and make themselves comfortable in our salon, going through newspapers. When the men are finished, they congratulate us. “Not every house is filled with such dedicated patriots as yourselves.”

We watch them leave, and I could cry with relief when they are gone. Not everyone is so fortunate. The news that comes to us every night through Curtius is terrifying. They have arrested a general who surrendered to the Prussians and sentenced him to death. When his young wife heard of this, she ran into the streets screaming, “Long live the king!” Tomorrow, they will both be executed in the Place de la Revolution.

“They are sending women who have just given birth to the guillotine,” Curtius reveals. “Yesterday, a mother with an infant still at her breast was led to the scaffold. The executioner handed the child to an old man in the crowd, then bound the mother’s hands and executed her.” He lowers his head. “And everyone watched in silence.”

We are all guilty. Every one of us. When Danton’s Committee of Public Safety arrests fourteen girls discovered dancing at a Prussian ball in Verdun, not a single voice speaks out for them. Instead, the masses watch as the girls are led through the public square, their red chemises blowing in the warm spring breeze. Every day there is another story of a woman crying “Vive le Roi!” at her sentencing before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Wives are marching to the guillotine with their husbands, and daughters are going with their fathers and brothers. When the news comes that Madame Sainte-Amaranthe has been arrested for once gambling with royalists, I know that the world has gone mad. Where does it end? Who will risk death to tell the truth that the Committee of Public Safety is worse than any king who ever ruled in France?

“They have arrested her children as well,” Curtius tells me. We both look across the room to the models of Madame Sainte-Amaranthe and her daughter, part of our Parisian Beauties tableau. I remember the morning when Emilie Sainte-Amaranthe came to sit for me. It was four years ago. The king’s courtier came with the invitation for me to be Madame Elisabeth’s tutor, and Robespierre advised me to turn it down. Emilie declared that to refuse would be insane.

Lucile once warned me that Robespierre never forgets an indignity or a slight. Has Robespierre remembered this and sentenced her entire family to death? “You don’t think—”

He knows what I am about to say. “They still call him The Incorruptible,” he says wryly.

But that is only a name. A reputation he has built for himself.

Chapter 56

JUNE

1, 1793–J

ULY

5, 1793

Clemency is also a revolutionary measure.

—CAMILLE DESMOULINS

NO ONE CAN TELL ME WHY THE SAINTE-AMARANTHE FAMILY has been arrested. Finally, when I pay a visit to Lucile, she closes the doors to her salon so that no one may hear us speak. “I would not appear too interested in their fate.”

I study her face. “The day you gave birth,” I say, “you said that Robespierre never forgets a slight.”

She moves her hand through the air. “That was nearly a year ago.”

“And has Robespierre changed? He sits on the Revolutionary Tribunal,” I remind her. “He’s as responsible for their fate as Danton and his Committee. Perhaps Camille—”

“No.” She is firm in this. “He has other problems. We need more soldiers.”

“From where? There are no young men left in the streets.”

She puts a hand to her forehead. “I know. But they must be found somewhere.”

I discover where they will be found the next morning. When my mother hands Curtius his morning coffee, he