Madame Tussaud

Convention abandoned the rustic sanctuary to the honeysuckle and ivy? “But Lyon must be much like Macon,” I say, picturing the thriving city between Paris and Marseille. “The cities are close.”

“Yes. It was. Of course, now there is almost nothing left of it.”

I tell him about the Salon de Cire, and he tells me he was an engineer. “So we were both builders,” he says. “Except now there’s nothing to build in Lyon.”

“Why? What happened?” I ask.

I can see that the memory pains him. “It was a massacre,” he reveals. “The city refused to support the Committee of Public Safety and wanted a return to the Constitution of ’Ninety-one. It was civil war. The papers in Paris never reported it?”

“No.” I am certain of this. “I would have heard.”

“It was Robespierre’s doing. When our citizens refused to support the committee, he instructed his generals to ‘exterminate every monster in Lyon.’ ”

“He used those words?”

“Yes. And that’s what it was. An extermination of two thousand people: women, children, even the old and feeble. Because my family were metalworkers, the men were chained together and executed on the Plaine des Brotteaux. I escaped because I was in a neighboring village. When I returned, I saw that the Convention’s soldiers had razed every house and apartment to the ground. Any store or building that looked as if it belonged to the wealthy, they destroyed. But they kept the slums standing. The poor were allowed to remain in their shacks as the true patriots and victims of the aristocracy. Ten days later, Robespierre ordered a column to be erected over the site of the largest burned building. It read, LYON MADE WAR ON LIBERTY, SO LYON IS NO MORE.”

My eyes are filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” Francois says. “I should not have spoken of this to a lady. You will never have seen such blood—”

“I have seen it all, and more.”

I tell him about my brothers in the Tuileries Palace and my task of visiting the charnel house each night, searching through the baskets of mutilated bodies for the heads wanted by the National Convention. “When Lucile Desmoulins was sent to the scaffold, I refused to go back to the Madeleine Cemetery.”

“And that is why you are here?”

“And why they arrested my mother. My father doesn’t know,” I say. To explain what Curtius truly is to me would be too long, too complicated. “He is stationed on the Rhine. I can’t imagine his horror when he returns to discover that we have been arrested.” Or worse, that we have died and been buried, like Gabrielle Danton. I am weeping openly now.

I must look as sad and helpless as Rose.

IN THE MORNINGS, Francois sits with me and my mother in the back of the hall, and when the carts have rolled away, he leads us into the garden, pointing out the herbs and describing their uses. When my mother becomes sick from the water they serve, he brings her some peppermint. He tells us that after his family was murdered, he lived off the land for more than six months. “Eventually, the soldiers discovered me and I was sent here,” he says. “They might have killed me right then, but a single soldier took pity. He was a school friend of mine.”

At night, before we are locked in our cells, I spend time with Francois in his chamber. He shares a room with fifteen other men. Most of them are seated on their beds with female prisoners, playing cards made from paper and talking about the old days when anything could be bought in the Palais-Royal and the cafes were filled with coffee and bread. We are always thinking about food, and you can pick out the prisoners who have been here longest by the sharpness of their cheekbones and the looseness of their clothes. The Revolution has truly made us equals. Now we are all poor and hungry and ill-clothed.

It is stifling in these cells. We pretend not to smell the fetid latrine buckets collecting flies in the hall, but none of us can escape the rising heat. It has been two weeks since I have had a bath, and for many in here it has been much longer.

“I have something for you,” Francois says one evening. He pulls a newspaper from under his pillow and puts a finger to his lips. “One of the guards gave it to me. I won it at cards.”

“It’s today’s paper,” I say, shocked.

“Did you think I would bet on old news?”

Chapter 62

JUNE

15, 1794–JULY

1794

[I] cut off my hair myself; it is the only remembrance I can leave my children. Now I am ready to die.

—PRINCESSE DE MONACO, PRISONER IN LES CARMES

TEN DAYS LATER, FRANCOIS BURSTS INTO MY CELL BEFORE the guards can lock it for the night. The other women are in various states of undress, but none of them bother to cover themselves. The men have seen it all at Les Carmes. What is there to hide?

“I have the Chronique de Paris!” he exclaims. He comes to my bed, and the women quickly gather around us. He watches my face as I read the first article. “They have guillotined Madame Sainte- Amaranthe,” I whisper, “along with her children, Emilie and Louis.”

There are cries of horror, and Rose nearly collapses. Her skin is clammy, and her hands are shaking. “I knew Madame Sainte-Amaranthe,” she says.

“She was a well-known royalist,” Grace whispers. “I played cards in her salon last year, and she still had a portrait of the king above her mantel.”

The women shake their heads. So foolish, to risk your life like that. “I modeled Emilie five years ago,” I say. “She would be nineteen now and her brother sixteen.”

“Every day the list is getting longer. First four, then eight, now it’s ten per day. What is that, Marie?” Rose asks. “What are our chances?”

“One in eighty.” I should never have told her about odds. I should have left my calculations behind with the Salon de Cire.

“There is a second article,” Francois points out, “you may want to read. The Committee of Public Safety has passed the Law of 22 Prairial.”

I skim the contents. “Those who stand before the Revolutionary Tribunal,” I say, “are no longer permitted to have anyone speak in their defense. And all citizens who are found guilty are to be sentenced to immediate death.”

“Immediate?” Rose grips my arm. “But that doesn’t mean us. We have already been sentenced. That will only apply to those who come after.”

Grace looks over my shoulder and reads aloud, “Every citizen is empowered to seize conspirators and counterrevolutionaries, and to bring them before the Revolutionary Tribunal. It is the duty of every patriot to denounce all traitors to our patrie as soon as they know of them.” She continues, “For slandering patriotism, for inciting rebellion with dangerous words, for corrupting the purity of the Revolution, and for spreading false news.”

“It is the second Inquisition,” Francois says.

He is right. The next morning as we assemble in the hall, several hundred new prisoners are brought into the room. There is no space at the back, so we are forced to sit with Grace and Rose and listen as the names are called. First five, then ten, then fifteen in total.

“The blood will pool so thick beneath the guillotine that it will take an ocean of water to wash it clean,” Grace predicts.

And every day it is like this. More prisoners, more victims, until in the middle of July there are forty women sharing our cell. The mood in the hall every morning becomes frantic. Grace believes there will be another prison