The Blade of Eternity was busy flashing away out there in the weak Parisian sunshine. Monsieur Guillotin's brand-new idea, designed to sever the heads from the bodies of rich and poor alike in less time than it took to blink, or so Madame Campan informed me, having made a point of watching the trial demonstration on a petty criminal, a man convicted of forgery, in the Place de Grève, Nor did the forger's headless body commence to dance, as scientists predicted it might, nor did his bodiless head jabber in the basket.
Though who knows what ghostly thoughts kept flying through the hallways of the forger's brain?
A particularly challenging signature? The extreme forward slant of the capitalA? The ornate flourish trailing from the final letter?
Or maybe his mistress's mouth preparing to smile, her upper lip lifting to reveal the white tips of her teeth and on her breath the smell of the season's first apricots?
Maybe So this is what becomes of Eros.
Maybe OH NO OH NO OH NO OH NO.
One evening in February, I looked up and saw a tall man with a large dog walking into my room.
He was wearing a disguise but I recognized him immediately, just as he did me. Even without mirrors I knew I was no longer slim and pretty, or not so slim though still pretty and vivacious, or verging on fat though radiant; even without mirrors I knew I was pale and haggard and white-haired.
But you can't have let your defenses so thoroughly down with someone and not forever after know them, no matter if they're disguised as a common messenger, like Axel that February day, flying on his winged feet past twelve hundred murderous guardsmen. I saw the melting snowflakes in his black eyelashes. I saw the set of the mouth, a dimple to either side of the faintly trembling lips, the brow no longer smooth yet still wide and intelligent, the nostrils flaring a little with each breath.
The dog was as long-legged as its master, a snow-white creature with pricked ears and a beautiful plumed tail that made me think of the ostrich feathers on my bedposts at Versailles. As I stood there rigid with longing, it leapt up and licked my cheek.
"Odin," Axel said. "Mindyour manners."
And then he embraced me and, really, I thought a person could lose her head forever and what difference would it make.
Only later — much much later, the next day in fact — when Louis finally joined us, did the talk turn to politics. We were flirting with danger. Axel said. Flirting, he repeated and threw me a look; we were playing both ends against the middle, wooing every crowned head in Europe on the one hand, every bloodthirsty revolutionary on the other. It was too late, Axel said; our only hope was escape. Just because the last attempt had failed was no reason not to try again. "We could head northeast this time, concealed within the dark tunnel of forests that stretched from Paris to the marches of Flanders. Why not? he pleaded, but of course we all knew perfectly well that even if escape had once been possible it no longer was. Not only was every avenue fiercely watched, but Louis had pledged his word to the National Assembly that he would stay in Paris, and Louis was an honorable man.
"If you stay you will die," Axel said.
"When the counterrevolutionaries finally get here," Louis replied, "the revolutionaries will need to keep me alive as a hostage to save themselves."
The human heart is many-chambered; I loved them both. I loved the touch of both men, the one seeking to calm my blood, the other to heat it up. The one froglike in his unfashionable wig, the red sash of the Order of Saint-Louis straining across the immense hill of his belly. The other tall and thin. On edge, watchful. Like a racehorse. A beacon.
Resté là, Axel would later write in his diary. This was his usual method for recording an amorous liaison, the equivalent of Louis's got one, but without the bloodshed.
Marble Court
Quick, quick, along the Avenue de Sceaux. Quickly. Quicker. Sky the palest blue, every trace of color wrung from it by the heat, and off to the left on the far side of the stables and the tennis court, the Sun King's Kitchen Garden, its trees still standing in orderly rows, their boughs heavy with fruit. Pears, apples, apricots, plums. A drift of leaves underfoot, though it's too early, really, the second week in August, the wind from the east and hot.
An unendurably hot wind, breath of the Devil, ovens of hell. Eleven miles to the east, Paris is on fire. The Tuileries have been set ablaze, the royal family herded off to be locked in a tiny cage behind the rostrum of the Legislative Assembly, where everyone can keep an eye on them. "What a lot of leaves!" the King was heard to observe as he and the Queen were making their way along the crowd-filled Terrace of the Feuillants, her face red and blotchy, her bodice stained with sweat.
The wind raises dust from the cobbles of the Parade Grounds, dust and heat phantoms, transparent carriages, shimmering men and women, laughing, rippling, breaking apart.
Let us go, children of France, our day of glory has arrived…
Glory, yes! Let us go!
Four hundred steps from the first of two ornate golden grilles to the second, their gates padlocked, their gilt paint chipping off. Sun directly overhead and out of the wind now. Trash and leaves, dust and grit. Seventy-six steps across the Royal Court and then tap tap tap tap tap up five long stairs and you're almost there.
Almost.
Sun beating down. Down the row of wheat I've run and now my story's almost done…
Eleven miles to the east, the young Napoleon Bonaparte watches the goings-on at the Tuileries from the second-story window of a nearby furniture shop. The Knights of the Dagger, all of them old and infirm, together with a mixed bag of cooks and grooms and laun-drywomen and spies and members of the Swiss Guard, are being thrown from the flame-filled palace windows, sometimes their entire bodies, sometimes just their heads.
Day of glory! Let us go! Little children catch the heads and impale them on sticks. The greenery runs red with blood.
Even after Russia, Napoleon will say he never saw such carnage.
And what of the fat pig that has cost so much to fatten? Let him drink! Let him get drunk! Since Nature has given him a porker's character, let him live on as a porker!
And his tigress wife, meowing sweetly, biding her time till she can scratch again?
Lock them in the Temple, throw away the key!
Leaves and phantoms, Prudence and Mars.
Sun beating down and the way so long. Sun so hot and your heart so broken.
Fifty-seven steps to cross the Marble Court, from the top of the five stairs to the front entrance. All the doors and windows boarded up and the clock stopped at half past ten. Black paving stones, black ones and white ones, 11,520 marble paving stones in all.
Diligence and Peace, Wealth and Hercules.
Eleven miles to the east, the Tuileries turns to ash.
Eleven miles, no more, no less.
Let me in! Let me in! Let me in!
Geography Lesson
The Temple, an oppressive medieval fortress in the Marais. It is a rainy autumn night, the month of Brumaire, Year One of the new Republican calendar. As the curtain rises we see Louis Capet and his wife, formerly known as the King and Queen of France, seated with their two children at a candlelit wooden table, the Jacobins having papered the walls behind them to resemble the inside of a prison. Louis is in the process of making a puzzle map for his son, who is doing his best to stop coughing long enough to finish his bowl of soup. Antoinette is embroidering pink roses on a white seat cover; the Serious One is scowling into space.