Many of the most shocking scenes in the novel are based on contemporary accounts. The inspection of Charlotte Corday’s corpse to determine whether or not she was a virgin really took place, as did Danton’s desperate act of digging up his wife to make a final mask of her face. The last moments of Madame du Barry were recorded by those who witnessed her execution. Her desperate pleas so rattled the crowd—used to seeing people march to their deaths in dignified silence—that the executioner feared there would be a revolt. After her execution, the jewels for which she had unwisely returned to France were sold in London at Christie’s auction house in 1795. They fetched ?8,791.
It is tempting to imagine how different the course of events might have been had the royal family succeeded in their escape. But from the beginning it was a doomed plan. As Lafayette remarked, the queen seemed “more concerned about looking beautiful in the face of danger than about staving it off,” and for months before her flight, she planned the kind of wardrobe she would take. She placed lavish orders with Rose Bertin and, in the process, made one of her servants suspicious. If that was not enough, her husband was a man of great ambivalence. In 1791 the Marquise de Bombelles wrote in what are known as the Vaudreuil Papers, “The feebleness of our sovereign puts me in a rage … you cannot imagine how he is despised … or what his nearest relatives say of him.” The opportunity for escape had presented itself many times, but always he was uncertain. Looking back on the early events of the Revolution, Napoleon believed that if King Louis XVI had only “mounted his horse, victory would have” been his. But the king was a man of thought, not of action. When he finally decided it was time to flee, he left behind a note condemning the Revolution and ensuring his own demise should he be captured. The resulting fiasco when he was apprehended in Varennes began the quick and steady march to anarchy.
In the years after the royal family’s failed escape, France experienced rapid changes in government, beginning with the establishment of the National Convention. A new calendar was declared, along with a new method of counting the years. And while Jesus was regarded as an upstanding citizen and a fine example of a
Yet while I tried to convey these events as best I could, there were details I changed to better serve the story. The dates of Madame du Barry’s execution, of Lucile Desmoulins’s and Princesse Lubomirska’s arrests, of Robespierre’s whereabouts when the book begins, and the publication of Jeanne de Valois’s scandalous memoirs were all altered slightly. Similarly, Camille’s journal,
As for the guillotine, it was initially called
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin who stood before the Assembly and suggested that any criminal sentenced to die would do so painlessly if this new machine were used. Although personally against the death penalty, Dr. Guillotin wanted to see an end to messy executions by ax or breaking on the wheel. After he remarked, “Now, with my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye and you never feel it,” Guillotin’s name became associated with what is arguably the world’s most infamous device. Mortified by this connection, Dr. Guillotin’s family petitioned the government to change the guillotine’s name. When their petition was refused, they changed their family name instead. It is a common misconception that the guillotine ceased to be used once the Revolution was over. It actually remained an official method of execution in France until September 10, 1977, when the last guillotining took place.
Other changes were made in the book as well. What we would consider science, for example, was actually deemed philosophy, and scientists were called philosophers. There is also no evidence that Madame Royale ever informed Robespierre about Marie’s royalist sympathies, although her character in the novel is true to contemporary accounts of her personality. As for the men who were given the task of fighting the Revolutionary Wars, Luckner was not made a general until after Lafayette’s flight to Liege, and there is no evidence that one of Marie’s brothers became a captain in the National Guard. In fact, the fates of all three brothers remain unknown, although Marie claimed in her memoirs that all of them perished during the tragic massacre of the Swiss Guards. Last, because this period of French history is so turbulent, filled with frequent changes in government, some of the major influences on revolutionary politics had to be skipped, such as the presence of the Girondists and the establishment of the Paris Commune.
Yet however complicated and chaotic these politics may seem, Marie Grosholtz followed them all in her exhibition on the Boulevard du Temple. Even after Marie gathered her wax models and left for England, the Boulevard continued to play an important role in history. Only forty-four years after the Reign of Terror, it was on this street that the chemist Louis Daguerre took the first known photograph of a human being. In the picture, you can see the individual cobbles in the road and the tree-lined streets where Marie once walked. Although the photograph appears completely devoid of people, they are simply too blurry to see, because the exposure time was over ten minutes. If you look carefully, however, in the bottom left you will see a single man, his coattails and tricorn hat just visible. Although we will never know his name, his place in history is assured simply because he was standing still long enough for the image to develop. And if you look very closely, you can just make out why he was standing in one place: his boots were being polished. Chance placed him in the frame, alone in a street full of ghosts.
Sometimes, it is not the kings and queens who make for the most fascinating history but the shadowy souls who happen to be in the right place at the right time. While Marie certainly would not have considered herself lucky to have lived through such a devastating period, history is fortunate that she remained still for long enough to record the events that raged on around her.
THE BOULEVARD DU TEMPLE, 1838
GLOSSARY
Aristocrat: a member of the Second Estate, or nobility.
Armee Revolutionnaire: This force of
Assignat: a bond secured by the value of seized church property. After April 1790 assignats functioned as paper money but were soon almost completely devalued as the Constituent Assembly issued vast amounts of assignats to finance the deficits.
Cabriolet: a horse-drawn carriage with two wheels and a single horse, often used as a vehicle for hire.
