Melanie would have chosen to put her case before Danton, but Danton himself had lost his head in April.
Another subject kept intruding: their recent strange encounter with the wounded man, now almost miraculously healed, who called himself Legrand. Melanie had an idea that this morning's change in the behavior of the servant girl, Marguerite, was somehow connected with the man's presence.
Radcliffe frowned. 'But the fellow was three-quarters dead when he arrived. You don't suppose he—?'
'I don't know.'
But never mind, there were plenty of other things to worry about.
Of course the main subject of the travelers' thoughts, whether they spoke of it or not, was the fate of Dr. Remain. As far as Melanie knew, her father was still alive, but he could easily have been beheaded this morning, or yesterday, or the day before, and she, at this distance from Paris, would be none the wiser.
'Philip, for the first time I am glad that my mother is dead. At least she was spared this torture.' And with that, Melanie fell into a long silence.
Philip could only admire his companion's courage in bearing up as well as she did.
The more time Philip spent with Melanie, the more she intrigued and sometimes irritated him. She was of course vastly, delightfully changed from the child he remembered—yet in some delicious sense she was still the same girl. A remembered trick of tossing her hair to one side, with a quick motion of her head. His small female playmate of those days, now transformed into womanhood.
Melanie and Philip considered stopping at the house of Melanie's family in the nearby village to get some of her things, but she decided that would be taking an unnecessary risk; the local Committee of Public Safety might decide at any time to resume operations. The house in town would be deserted anyway. Her mother had died years ago, and all her other relatives were either dead or absent.
Melanie was reluctant to give a firm estimate of the number of days it would take them to get to Paris. In these troubled days, travel times were hard to estimate.
Chapter Sixteen
For some five years now, ever since the fall of the Bastille, Paris had served France and the rest of the world as a seemingly limitless source of news. Tremendous events were reported from the capital almost every day—and the passage of time proved that some of them, including many of the most improbable, had actually occurred. For example, it had to be accepted as a matter of sober, historical fact that the king and queen—or rather, the individuals who had formerly borne those titles—had indeed been arrested, bullied, and locked up by mere commoners. And that some months later, by decision of the people, the royal couple were both dead. Their heads had rolled into the basket as easily as those of ordinary criminals.
Yes, it was still hard to credit. Citizen Louis Capet—the man who had once been called by the title King Louis XVI, who had been the ruler of all France by divine right, anointed by the Church and all but worshiped by vast numbers of the people—that man had been beheaded, slaughtered in public like an animal, in January of 1793. His queen, Marie Antoinette, had followed him to the scaffold in October of the same year, after she had been proven (at least to the satisfaction of her enemies) to be in treacherous league with the rulers of her native Austria, sworn enemies of all revolutions.
Once everyone understood that those events were really true, it was hard to set any limit at all on miracles.
Other unbelievable stories, which it would have been easy to dismiss as wild rumor, were actually confirmed: The tide of war, the real war of armies, had turned again in favor of France, riddled though her armies were with desertions, political harassment, and executions. But meanwhile the majority of citizens, at least in Paris, were convinced that the most dangerous threat to their lives and happiness lay close to home. Wild rumors, heard everywhere, declared that bands of brigands, in the pay of royalists and foreigners, were scouring the countryside, raping and pillaging.
Still, according to the latest word from the frontiers, the Austrian and Prussian armies, commanded by the Duke of Brunswick, appeared able to make little headway against the armies of the people of France.
Philip's private opinion was that the war might now be going better for France only because her enemies, watching the revolutionary turmoil, were content to wait for her to tear herself to pieces.
In rapid succession, one generation after another of Revolutionary leaders had risen to power and fallen again. The time of turnover was now measured in mere months instead of years, and each new faction on achieving mastery exhibited more savagery than the last. Each was more fanatically dedicated to the ruthless repression of treasonous plots. And the more plots were discovered, and their fomenters executed, the more new examples of treason sprouted into light. Danton, once the unchallenged champion of the people against their aristocratic oppressors, more lately Robespierre's rival, had been arrested on March 30, 1794 (10 Germinal, Year Two, of the Revolutionary Calendar), charged with excessive moderation, and taken to the scaffold on April 5.
On May 7, Robespierre the Incorruptible, the newest and seemingly invincible leader, disturbed by the atheistic tendencies shown by his colleagues and their spread among the people in general, had introduced worship of the Supreme Being. June 8 (17 Floral, Year Three) was officially proclaimed the Festival.
On June 1, British warships commanded by Lord Howe defeated the French fleet in the English Channel.
Amid the strains and excitement of the journey, and the disturbing joy of Melanie's presence, Radcliffe almost forgot about the mysterious stranger, calling himself Legrand, whose life he had saved.
For several years now, the routines of planting and harvesting across much of France had been neglected, and the distribution of food had been disrupted, while armed peasants and other workers gathered to exchange inflammatory ideas, fears, hopes, and plans.
Lying athwart the travelers' most direct route to Paris were certain towns and villages around which Melanie thought it wise to detour, whole districts she preferred to avoid because of their reputation for fanatical enforcement of Revolutionary decrees upon strangers. The American deferred to her judgment in such matters. In one place, the sentry was asleep in his box, no doubt risking a grisly execution if his new masters should discover him thus. The travelers quietly rode on through the unguarded checkpoint.
A day or two later the trio, with Old Jules praying continuously to the Virgin, were forced to outrace in their carriage a motley band of unidentifiable pursuers—whether some self-constituted Committee of Public Safety or simple robbers was hard to say. More than once they saw in the distance, on town gates and walls, heads mounted on pikes, in provincial imitation of the now well-established Parisian custom.
It was the first time Philip had seen such a display, and he stared in sickly fascination. The idea that the heads were artificial would not leave him, though he could see all too clearly that they were not.
'You seem upset,' Melanie commented.
'I have seen hanged men, of course.' The great majority of the citizens of America, as well as Europe, were no stranger to that sight. 'But beheading…' Radcliffe shook his head. 'That's something even more…'
Melanie appeared to be more thoughtful than shocked. 'Yes, it is terrible. Though they say it is humane, more merciful than any of the older ways.'
The travelers spent several days working their way through a countryside punctuated by the smoke of burning houses and barns. Enthusiasm for the Revolution was far from universal in the countryside. Black columns made ominous warning signals, visible for miles, at points spaced erratically around the horizon. When one fire died away, another sprang up somewhere else.
At night, the three travelers rested when and how they could. One midnight, on the verge of falling asleep in a haystack, Philip thought back to his recent stop in London, and told his traveling companions about his adventures there, where he had paused on his way from America to France. He told them also about his rough crossing of the Channel in a smuggler's small boat. England and France had been at war with each other for a year, but the secret commerce in goods and people was still thriving.
In a few days, after a journey that had afforded them no reassurance regarding the fate of France, Philip, Melanie, and Old Jules reached Paris. It bothered Radcliffe that conditions seemed no saner or quieter as they approached the capital.
Now Old Jules was rendered all but mute by unfamiliar wonders; and Melanie treated Philip like a visitor who had never seen Paris before. Indeed, his childhood memories of the great city were fragmentary and jumbled.
Of course the travelers' documents were examined at the barrier before they were permitted to enter the city.
