Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow (2 page)

Others know precisely what, and who, they are waiting for, even though officials have refused to announce the date and time of the spectacle in order to discourage the formation of a mob. The justices of the Parlement might have known better, for that’s precisely what they’ve wrought.

Inside her narrow cell within the Conciergerie, the prisoner has lain awake since dawn on the straw pallet that serves as her bed, her stomach thrumming with anticipation, the armpits of her shift moist with sweat. Although she has made friends with her jailers, Madame and Monsieur Hubert, she has deflected their sly inquiries about her husband and her lover. For now, her mind is not on their fates, but on her own. She, too, has heard the hammering, but she hopes it has been in vain, that there will instead be a
lettre de cachet
exiling her to some remote precinct or consigning her to a convent for the rest of her days. Until now she has been certain she could never endure the solitude, the hypocrisy, of an existence amid godly penitents of her own sex, the comforts little better than what she currently enjoys at the hands of the State.

Having lapsed into the twilight between sleep and wake she is rudely startled by the rapping of a truncheon against the wooden shutter covering the small barred window set within the door. The panel affords her a modicum of privacy from the inquisitive eyes of the prison guards.
“Allez-vous,”
a gruff voice commands.

Nothing more? From the tone of those two curt words the woman tries to parse out her destiny. Has she detected a note of cheer? Perhaps the hours ahead will secure her release. Perhaps there will be no convent. Perhaps there will be no punishment at all. The people—the people believed in her innocence. At the trial, she could see it in the spectators’ faces; they expected an acquittal instead. Perhaps these past three weeks behind the stone walls of the Conciergerie have been enough to satisfy the authorities.

“Get dressed. And hurry.” The guard lingers outside her cell. She patters across the cool earthen floor in her bare feet and reaches onto her tiptoes to slide open the shutter, peering through the bars at the soldier. He grins back through tobacco-stained teeth.
“Bonjour, ma belle.”
He flatters her; she knows she is more handsome for her thirty years than pretty.

For modesty’s sake she slides the shutter back across the bars, allowing just a sliver of light to illuminate her toilette while she makes her ablutions at the only furnishings in the cell, a small trestle table and a ladder-back chair. She splashes water that has been sitting all night in a porcelain bowl on her face and
poitrine
, under her arms, and between her legs. She removes her nightcap and runs her fingers through her tangle of brown curls. In a moment of vanity, she inserts a gold hoop into each ear, lending her the defiant appearance of a
gitane
. Appraising her image in a shard of mirror, she is pleased. Then she quickly rolls on her hose, securing them with garters of black ribbon, shoves her feet into a pair of worn leather shoes, and slips her stays over her chemise, lacing them tightly in front so that her bosom juts prominently from the contours of the simple morning dress she hastily dons. A wool cape the color of drying blood, trimmed in silver
passementerie
, crowns her slender shoulders. Sliding open the wooden shutter,
“Suis prête,”
she announces. “I’m ready.”

The guard, Lieutenant Gabin, ominous enough in his uniform—the deeply hooded blue cape that all but obscures his features—unbolts the iron door and leads the way, down the steeply winding back stairs, the usual path by which the woman descends each morning to take her breakfast—a cup of chocolate and a crust of bread—with the Huberts. He enters a room opposite the jailers’ apartment. The woman, close on his heels, follows him, but no sooner does she pass through the open door than she hears it slam shut behind her, and the jagged scrape of an iron bolt imprisons her in the chamber as though she is an animal needing to be caged.

Her heart leaps into her throat as she wheels about to face the sound, only to be brutally spun around again, seized under the armpits by a pair of gendarmes. Her toes scrabble against the stone floor and kick at her captors’ shins as she is hauled into the adjacent Hall of Records, where the men bind her hands and
arms with cording. But they have not silenced her mouth, and she spews invectives like vomit, calling them curs and sons of whores, insulted when they only chuckle at her distress.

Tossing her head about in search of a champion, her eyes light on the saturnine face and burly figure of Monsieur Breton, the Court Clerk, and suddenly she recalls a conversation with her jailer; Monsieur Hubert had informed her that the secretary would be reading the official pronouncement of her sentence this morning. Surely if there were to be a reprieve she would not have been treated so violently. Aware now of what is to come, her anguished cries echo off the walls and columns of stone.

“
Non, non
, I will not listen to that wicked verdict! I refuse to bend my knee while you read a judgment rendered by a corrupt Parlement bribed by my enemies to rule against me!”

No sooner do these words issue from her lips than her tormentors attempt to force her to her knees. But she is determined to resist them, and is far fiercer than they have anticipated. She fights back with every ounce of strength until she is caught by the elbows and suspended between the guards like an unruly brat while her legs, kicking angrily beneath her skirts, ineffectually pummel the air.

Monsieur Breton’s words are never heard, drowned out by the screams of the accused. Her efforts to break free of the gendarmes leave her exhausted, and she is nearly hoarse from shouting when she is dragged out of doors into the bright sunlight of the courtyard. A halter is thrown over her neck and she is tethered inside a cart that draws her to the scaffold like a calf driven to market.

What a rabble has gathered to witness her disgrace! If her hands were free she would lift one to her eyes to shield it from the sun. She would gaze at the rooftops and into the windows of the houses across the
rue
from the Palais de Justice, for at every
fenêtre
people are pressed against the glass, ogling her. It is not
merely the canaille, the riffraff of the capital, who have come out to see her shamed, but members of the aristocracy from which she descends, who paid heavily for the privilege. She does not know what a brisk trade there has been selling prime places both in and out of doors from which to witness the execution of her sentence; does not notice a finely dressed gentleman standing behind one of the windows in the company of a particularly attractive young lady. The courtesan’s back is pressed firmly against his torso and thighs as one of his hands absentmindedly toys with her breast through her blue silk bodice. In the duc de Crillon’s other hand he holds a quizzing glass, usually an accessory for operas and dances, but today it offers a better view of the accused and of her public punishment.

Below the duc, the shadows lengthen as the hour nears noon. The cart draws to a halt near the foot of the scaffold and two gendarmes in their blue coats drag the accused up the wooden staircase to the platform where the
bourreau
, the executioner, awaits. As she fights them every step of the way, they nearly lose their footing, and when they reach the summit she scans the crowd, seeking a friendly face among the thousands of ruddy cheeks and broad grins, among the countless children pressing against the entrance gates and gilt-tipped iron railings that rim the courtyard.

“Save me!” she implores. “Save an innocent woman, a descendant of France’s former kings!” Her eyes are wild with panic and she jerks her body to and fro in an effort to break loose from her bonds. Her cries of despair rend the air, but the people—her countrymen and -women who these past few years she has foolishly accounted her friends—have come for a show.

Like a magician revealing an illusion the
bourreau
whisks a black velvet cloth across a table, and at the sight of his instruments of torture, the accused woman unleashes another torrent
of abuse against the judges of the Parlement and the Cardinal de Rohan.

But her shouts are drowned out by the din of the crowd as the guards begin to disrobe her. For this they must first cut the cords that bind her arms. The steel blade of a knife flashes, drawn from a gendarme’s leather sheath, and in an instant her wrists are free and her nails fly, aiming for the faces of her captors.

“Don’t worry,
ma chère
,” the executioner soothes, in a tone one might use to calm an unruly child, but she is sobbing too loudly to hear him. He removes the whip from the table. “It will all be over very soon.”

The sight of the lash sends the woman into another agonized frenzy. She recalls the words of her sentence:
Condemned to be flogged and beaten, naked with rods, by the public executioner …

A rough hand grasps the back of her gown, holding it away from her body, and one clean slash of the knife cuts through the layers of silk. But she will not slip her arms from the sleeves, and her flailing fists are too quick for her captors to clasp. The officer warns her, ridiculously, “Stop moving! We do not want to hurt you,” but she is like a frightened animal and will not heed.

The sleeves are sliced open, revealing her sweat-stained chemise. The woman tosses her head; errant tendrils fall into her eyes, eyes that are filled with tears of terror and fear. “Snatch me, I beg you, from my executioners!” she cries, reaching toward the onlookers. “It is my own fault that I suffer this ignominy—I had only to speak one name and could have made sure of being hanged instead.”

Her back must be exposed in order for the sentence of flogging to be legally fulfilled. With the bravado of a showman at a carnival the lieutenant takes his dagger and splits the laces down the front of her stays. Whistles and catcalls of approval greet his performance. From there it is a simple matter to rend the flimsy
batiste of the woman’s shift, baring her entire torso and her high breasts.

From his vantage at the window opposite the courtyard the duc de Crillon feels his heartbeat quicken and he pulls the courtesan to him so that her derrière presses against his silken breeches. He had used the privilege of rank to secure this optimal view, having written to the cardinal’s attorney, Monsieur Target,
I am consumed with curiosity to see this woman scourged with the rods which you, in a manner of speaking, have prepared for her
. The outer rooms of the lawyer’s office, those of the duc de Brissac’s
hôtel
next door, and many other edifices with a view of the courtyard, are crowded with men and women of means, nibbling macarons and sipping brandy or champagne as they enjoy the ignominious display.

The accused struggles to cover her nakedness; mothers amid the crowd try to shield the eyes of their children; but the two lieutenants grasp the woman’s arms, and by extending them, unwittingly pose her in the tableau of a martyr. Derisive laughter from the rabble degenerates into all manner of blasphemous remarks. “Some Madonna,” shouts one man. “
I’d
worship her!” hollers another in reply.

The
bourreau
orders the soldiers to spin the woman around so that the hooting will cease and the crowd may witness her flagellation. His victim’s guilt or innocence doesn’t keep him awake at night; it is not within his purview. At the first crack of the whip upon her bare back, the woman cries out, “Save me, my friends! It is the blood of the Valois they are desecrating!” The lash falls nineteen times more and with each subsequent stroke, the throng becomes less exhilarated, even bored, daring to surmise that the flogging is being carried out in a most perfunctory way. There is not enough blood. A cabbage head, lobbed from within the crowd, glances off the edge of the scaffold. The catcalls are now aimed at the executioner.

“Rather pro forma, that,” remarks a disappointed English journalist, who has traveled across the Channel purely to cover the spectacle for his London broadsheet.

The woman would disagree. She can feel the raw welts rising on her skin with every stinging stroke. At last, the torment is over and she collapses to the floorboards in an incoherent blizzard of curses, cries, and tears. Her hair tumbles down her flayed back in loose ringlets.

But her punishment is only half completed. The clamor of the crowd has drowned out the sizzle of the brazier. The lieutenants hoist the woman to her feet to receive the balance of her public penalty.
To be branded upon both shoulders with a hot iron …
The head has already been heating and the executioner raises it aloft so that the crowd can see the shape of the brand: V for
voleuse
—thief. Some cheer; others gasp; still others can be heard weeping.

There is a moment of dreadful, deafening silence as the
bourreau
approaches the woman with the glowing iron. Behind his hood, his small eyes are grim. As he clasps her by the arm the soldier relinquishes his grip, and in that fleeting moment the prisoner slips from their grasp. She bolts across the scaffold and down the wobbly flight of steps as the executioner, branding iron in hand, gives chase. Tripping on the final step the woman falls headlong, scraping her palms, and begins to writhe in agony from the lashing she has only just received. She rolls away from the scaffold, bumping across the uneven cobbles, as if by doing so she could stop the pain, but she only increases her torment. Her mind is a jumble; her only thought, to escape the executioner.

In this she has no prayer. The
bourreau
quickly hauls her to her knees, pressing the brand into the tender flesh of her left shoulder; a pale bluish vapor floats about her mane of curls. The stench causes two onlookers to vomit onto the paving stones. A nearby child hides her face in her hands.

At that moment the woman’s body is seized with such a violent convulsion that the executioner is unable to steady the branding iron. The red-hot instrument misses her back entirely. The second V does not land on her right shoulder but upon the delicate flesh of her breast.