confess the dereliction to me now, but only laughed at the idea.
To Melanie I said: 'Your son told me where I could find you.'
She paused in her work, and looked vaguely alarmed.
I hastened to be reassuring. 'Pray do not be concerned; he was quite safe when I saw him, at the museum. He seemed a charming lad.'
'Thank you, m'sieu.'
'Who is his father? Excuse me, you may be sure that I do not ask such a question out of idle curiosity.'
'Then why do you ask it, sir?' Marie Grosholtz demanded.
Melanie shot her cousin an anguished look. 'Oh, what does it matter now? The gentleman is a friend of Philip's, and has his reasons, I am sure.'
While Marie, who had known about her cousin's troubles for ten years and more, looked on sympathetically, Melanie told me the story of how she had given birth to this child about ten years ago, a few months after the kindly (in this instance, anyway) Dr. Curtius, at the urging of his niece Marie, had taken in a pregnant fourteen-year-old, and set her to work at easy tasks in his establishment.
The father of Melanie's baby was, or rather had been, a careless aristocratic youth named Charles Dupin, the scion of a well-to-do family, who at first had declined to acknowledge his paternity of the child. Later, she thought, he might have been inclined to do so, but before he had taken any definite steps in that direction he had allied himself with the wrong political faction and been beheaded.
'I had thought it possible,' I observed, 'that young Auguste's father was Philip Radcliffe.'
'No.' Her fists clenched, and she stared at me. 'Oh God, do you bring me any news of Philip?'
I shook my head and gestured soothingly. 'All I know with certainty is that he has been arrested. I was hoping you could tell me in what prison he can be found.'
'He is in La Conciergerie. We have been able to find out that much.'
'Ah. That gives me a place to start. He is a foreigner, and I think that will give us a few days' grace at least, before they turn him over to Sanson.'
Meanwhile, Marie worked on steadily, wiping dried blood and bits of bran from her subject's face. The baskets on Sanson's platform usually contained four or five inches of either bran or sawdust, intended to absorb blood. Having cleaned her subject as well as was practical, she then smeared it with a mixture of Linseed oil and lead oxide, in preparation for the plaster of Paris, which when dry would make the mold.
With the rats held in abeyance for the time being, the three of us were soon chatting with something like a natural freedom. When I asked the two women why they had chosen this spot to do this work, they were ready with a simple explanation. If an impression of the face was made at graveside, there was no need to carry the head away. It could be tossed back into the pit.
The young women explained to me that if they did not make the molds at the cemetery, then, after finding the heads they wanted, it would be necessary for them to change their clothes, or put on clean garments over the bloodstained ones, and wrap the heads somehow or put them away in hatboxes. There would be nothing particularly conspicuous about the pair of women as, riding in a wagon or light carriage, they carried their finds back to the wax museum in the Boulevard du Temple.
But then, when they were through with the heads, they would be faced with the messy problem of getting rid of them.
'We might be able to bury one or two in our backyard, and no one the wiser. But with the numbers that we must handle… already there have been dozens, and there is no end in sight to what the Committee wants…'
As we conversed, Melanie had gone on crouching, digging, peering, up to her knees in muddy earth and decaying humanity, enduring the pervasive smell while going about her ghastly but (as I now realized) relatively innocent business. Meanwhile Marie, the more skillful modeler, went on using oil and plaster of Paris to make a mold in which the dummy head of the night's first subject would later be cast in hot wax.
Then the younger woman gave a little cry of triumph. 'Ah, here he is!'
Melanie had found the head she had been looking for. There had been twenty-eight executed in the previous day's batch, and the search had not been particularly easy.
'But I think I recognize that face,' I ejaculated suddenly. 'Is it not Lavoisier?'
Yes, even I had heard of Lavoisier, the man who now, two hundred years later, is called the father of chemistry, and even I was shocked. Why should the artistic authorities, or the political, have wanted to execute a man of science and then immortalize their crime in wax? Of course the two fields of endeavor were still nowhere near as sharply demarcated as they have recently become.
It was Lavoisier who proposed the name 'oxygen' for the dephlogisticated air required to support a fire. He had worked diligently for the Revolution in its early stages, perfecting its gunpowder and its cannon. But he had been overtaken by a period in his past when he had served as a kind of tax-collector for the old regime, and yesterday had received his reward.
Marie observed: 'Someone pointed out his name on the list to Robespierre, and our leader said: 'The Revolution has no need of scientists.' '
And that, I thought, should have been chiseled on his tombstone.
I felt that Melanie deserved some reward for the assistance she had earlier given me, or attempted to give me, through her medical efforts. It was no fault of hers that those efforts were misguided. But I was not as greatly and as formally in her debt as I was in Radcliffe's.
'I understand now, Mademoiselle, the purpose of your work, and I find nothing discreditable about it. I regret having suggested—what I did suggest. My sincere apologies.' I made a slight bow, including Marie, who nodded in return.
'Your apology is accepted, Citizen Legrand—and what of M'sieu Radcliffe? Is there… is there…'
'Is there any hope? I think so. You have told me where he is. Now we shall see what we can do.'
'You mean…?'
'I mean to help him. As to how, that has yet to be decided.'
The prison called La Conciergerie, like most of the others in the city, was busy day and night during the climactic summer of the Terror. I think that not a single cell stood empty for more than an hour or two. The population fluctuated less than you might think, given the high turnover. On average the count stood at about three hundred souls, during the peak years of '93 and '94. The place stank, of course, of fear and sweat and unwashed bodies, though not as badly as most of the prisons of that epoch. An extra excitement seemed to vibrate in the air. I gathered that if one had to be in prison, this was definitely the place.
Conducting a preliminary reconnaissance on a rainy afternoon, I walked around the prison section of the Palace, or rather I covered three sides of it by this method, looking over the vast gray building from the outside.
I also made a flying trip, by night. Both methods of scouting had their advantages.
This prison formed part of the Palais de Justice, which stood on the same island in the Seine as Notre Dame, and at one time or another during the Terror its cells accommodated very many of the most famous victims, including Hebert, Corday, Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, and Danton—besides Charles Darnay, who later achieved a certain literary fame, and a few other foreigners.
Victims were brought in at all hours, while others were hauled away to attend their trials, most of the latter soon returning under sentence of death. Of the many who were taken from their cells never to return, all but a very few went to their executions. Also coming and going constantly were police and lawyers, along with members of the new hierarchy of bureaucrats, including some of the many priests who had sworn allegiance to the Revolution. As at any other institution where numbers of people dwelt, tradesmen came and went, food and other necessities were delivered.
I soon learned, somewhat to my surprise, that there seldom passed an evening in this house of horrors when at least one feast was not in progress. These banquets and parties were always rude and raucous but sometimes elaborate and expensive, hosted by one or more of those who were to lose their heads on the next day. Often these affairs were amazingly lavish. As a rule the guards and other officials, following a tradition established during the Old Regime, could easily be persuaded to go along with this practice, while maintaining the essentials of tight security. People who had experienced both prisons said that this one had a conviviality lacking in even the most luxurious quarters of the Bastille.
On occasion La Conciergerie even welcomed the efforts of musicians and other entertainers, hired by the
