Madame Tussaud

In the privacy of the workshop, I tell Isabel what happened. She puts aside her broom, and the color drains from her face. “It was a warning,” she says.

“Yes, but who told him?”

“Obviously, the girl.”

That is what I think as well.

“Marie, they will be watching you,” Isabel warns. “First the model of Saint Denis, then your fichu.” I have told her about Charlotte Corday. “They are going to think you are a conspirator!”

I am thinking of the young woman who murdered Marat. Of her strength and courage. “They plan to execute her today,” I say. In the restaurants, her name will be on the back of every menu, among a list of others who have been sentenced to die. The crowds have been gathering since early this morning, and as soon as the bells chime noon, she will be brought to the scaffold.

“Have you been asked to model her?” Isabel asks.

“Yes.” I think of her request that I remember her as the true martyr, and not Marat. What must it be like for Charlotte to know that I will be the last person to touch her face, her hair?

That evening, before we leave for the Madeleine Cemetery, I stand in the hall and look at myself in the mirror. As hard as I try, I cannot find the woman I saw in the glass of Henri’s salon. That woman had been confident and single-minded, filled with lofty ideas about her place in the world. She was as deluded as men like Camille and Marat. Now I see where my talent has taken me. I am dressed almost entirely in black. Only the apron around my waist adds any color, and tonight, when I return from the charnel house, my mother will have to wash it again and again, rinsing the blood from the cotton and the dirt from the trim. I am thirty-two years old without a husband or children, and when I lie down tonight, it will be in a bed empty of warmth and love. Who will inherit everything that I have learned?

I go the the cassier’s desk and take out a quill and paper. I must write to him. Then at whatever the cost, I must find a ship that can take a letter to London—either through Belgium or Spain. Tears blur my vision, falling onto the paper and smearing the ink so that twice I have to begin again. The night I refused to leave with Henri will shape my life. Like my brothers’ deaths, there will be before love and after love. I will never love a man like Henri again. But I do not write this. If I am to free him, I must tell him that there is someone else. Unless there is another man, he will wait. Seven years, ten years … Now his life in London may go on without me.

When Isabel finds me, I am sealing the letter. She looks at my face, then down at the name on the top of the envelope.

“I have freed him,” I whisper.

She understands. Isabel never needs an explanation. She links her arm through mine and we walk silently to find the corpse of a young girl who was much braver than I. But we are not alone in the Madeleine Cemetery. When we reach the charnel house, a group of men are standing above the headless body of Charlotte Corday. They are dressed in black, and a bearded man is in the process of undressing her.

For a moment, I am paralyzed by fear. Then I realize what is happening. I have heard of men like this. “Isabel,” I shout, “run and find the guards!”

“Wait!” the bearded man stands. “We are physicians.”

Isabel pauses at the door.

“We have been sent here by Robespierre,” he explains.

I back away. “I don’t believe you.”

The old man holds up a white-gloved hand. “We are here to inspect her virginity.”

I step closer to Isabel.

“Robespierre has been elected to the Committee of Public Safety. It is now his job to investigate any enemy of the patrie. He believes that this woman may have had a lover, and if that is the case, this man may have helped her plan the assassination of Marat.”

And these are the lengths he is willing to go to, to discover conspirators? I think again of Robespierre’s words to me in the Rue des Cordelieres and shiver. “We will wait outside.”

Five minutes later, the men emerge, their faces solemn.

“Well?” Isabel whispers.

The bearded man turns to us, and I can see disappointment in the lines of his face. “She was a virgin.”

Chapter 58

AUGUST

–OCTOBER

1793

Courage! I have shown it for years; think you I shall lose it at the moment when my sufferings are to end?

—MARIE ANTOINETTE

IT IS UNTHINKABLE. A QUEEN, OUR QUEEN, THE QUEEN OF France, has been separated from her family and moved to the Conciergerie prison to await a trial on the charge of treason. When the criers begin to shout the news, I turn to my mother in the doorway of our Salon. “Curtius warned me that this would happen,” I whisper.

“This is the Committee of Public Safety’s doing,” she accuses. “They are the ones who have voted for this.” Her lower lip begins to tremble. “I think of the monsters we have sheltered in here …”

“None of us could have known it would come to this.”

“But Robespierre! He was so polite, so well-spoken. Curtius trusted him.”

We are both silent. In a little more than a month, it will be Michaelmas. But every week, a letter comes to us from the front. There is another general they would like Curtius to investigate. Then another, and another. Each report he sends to the Committee is positive. Every man is a patriot, no man is an enemy. But how long before the Committee grows tired of innocence and begins to suspect him as well?

Throughout August and September, I hear news from the soldiers in the Madeleine Cemetery of what life is like for the queen. They have imprisoned her in the darkest, dampest cell, without any changes of clothes or a bath to keep herself clean. They say that she walks barefoot for want of shoes, and that the black gown she wears is so tattered that, as summer turns to fall, she will feel the change on her skin. “While she was strolling across Versailles in her fancy silk shoes,” the guard outside the charnel house says with a laugh, “my wife was wearing rags. Let’s see how she enjoys it.”

But the silks and taffeta were expected of her. When she went barefoot in the tall grasses of her Hameau, every paper in France mocked her as a peasant. So what did they want? When she tried to economize, her own courtiers turned against her. Whom is a queen supposed to please? Her people? Her court?

On the twelfth of October the queen’s trial begins. My mother does not come, but Isabel and I find seats the night before in the Salle de Spectacle, where the Convention now meets. We sit in the public galleries until morning, watching the gloomy space fill with spectators, lawyers, and eventually the members of the National Convention itself. Of course, it is all a grand farce. They will find her guilty, and nothing she can say or do will change that. The only surprise will be where they send her. Either back to Austria or to some convent in the Alps.

When the trial begins, a man announces, “Madame Capet,” and the doors are thrown open for the woman who once held Europe in her thrall. Every spectator in the Salle de Spectacle gasps. An old woman appears in a simple white gown; her shoes are worn and her white hair is cropped carelessly at the neck. Yet for all her misfortune, she moves with the dignity and grace of a queen.

She sits and listens to their accusations in silence, even when they charge her with molesting the dauphin. “Still no reaction?” the prosecutor thunders from his podium. “Even when you are charged with corrupting your own son?”

There is a murmur in the galleries. Then, for the first time, she speaks.

“Because Nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a mother. I appeal to all the mothers in here! Do you truly believe this?”