French Passion (39 page)

His obvious sincerity touched me. My tears stopped. “I … I'm all right,” I said.

“Do you forgive me?”

“If you'll get up.”

“Then you do?”

I nodded.

He pushed to his feet, gazing down at me, his large, florid face ablaze with the same tenderness he'd shown to me in the rose garden at Foxwarren, as if I were the Madonna. “Comtesse, you have my last breath at your service.”

“Thank you, Sir Robert.”

He watched as I went down the dimly lit corridor. I was seized with an odd sense of guilt, as if I owed Sir Robert the apologies, not the reverse.

Izette was laying my night shift on the bed as she used to, the waist cinched tight. Seeing me, she held a hand to her mouth, gasping. “What did he do?”

“Tried to comfort me,” I said numbly.

“That's his idea of comfort? Ripping the clothes off your body?”

“It was my fault,” I sighed. “I was miserable, and let him hold me, and he, well, he got excited. Afterward he was utterly ashamed.”

“I'll wager,” she said sourly. “Men!”

I fumbled at the tiny pearl buttons in back of the ruined gown. My fingers shook so badly that Izette had to help me.

And so, unconsciously, we slipped back into our past. Mistress and lady's maid. My marriage and the years of exile might never have been. We were as good friends as ever, and as she brushed out my hair I unburdened myself.

“Goujon's different,” I said.

“He's become a real somebody behind the scenes of the Jacobin Club. And the Jacobins is taking on more and more power. There's talk the Jacobins'll run the Assembly soon. They've worked a lot of delegates into thinking France'll be better off with the King out of the way.”

I said, “But Goujon has always done everything in his power to keep André respected in the Assembly. And André's said from the beginning that he doesn't want to depose King Louis.” Blushing with disloyalty, I wondered how I could mention my love while I was trying with all my heart and soul to rescue my husband. “André's always planned a constitutional monarchy, like in England.”

“Right after the Bastille fell, before the Assembly was much, Goujon's seen how important men like Égalité was, to organize the government and make the Assembly powerful. Well, now the Assembly is got the power. And the Jacobins wants all that power to run things
their
way. Without no royalty.”

She went behind the screen. I heard rustlings as she undid her dark gown and the corset that confined the voluptuous curves. She hadn't put Goujon in the wrong, yet she had added to the fears that Sir Robert had already planted in my mind.

“Izette, can we trust Goujon?” I climbed up the cool wood of the bed steps. “Will he help us?”

She replied in almost the same words I'd used with Sir Robert. “He's a good friend. And he's a deputy, which makes him an important friend.”

She emerged in her loose chemise, used the candle snuffer on wall sconces and climbed into bed.

“Don't you worry none about Goujon,” she said. “Even if he don't work hard at rescuing the Comte, we'll make out.” She was quiet for so long that I decided she had drowsed. Then, out of the darkness, came her voice. “I ain't never forgot how much you done for Joseph, giving him a decent home, all the food he wanted, teaching him his letters. And at the end, not sending him to Hôtel-Dieu, but letting him die like a human being.” She drew a deep breath. “Manon, I owes you my life.”

And after that she did fall asleep. I lay in the open-curtained bed, cloud-filtered moonlight falling over me My mind was in a ferment. All I could think of was the impossible task of rescuing my unwilling husband from the sharp mercies of St. Guillotine.

It will work, I told myself. It's a good plan. It'll work.

Yet a feather of doubt kept tickling my brain. For who were to carry out this plan? An Englishman on a lark, who desired me. A laundress who, out of her early degradations, hated men. A huge, red-bearded peasant who, as a member of the Jacobin Club, wanted to end titles and nobility. Each of my fellow conspirators had a reason to want the plan to fail.

Chapter Four

The next morning Sir Robert stayed late in his rooms.

Izette snorted, “Ashamed to face you.”

She and I decided to take a stroll in the quiet streets around the hotel. The clouds were gone, leaving the sky a clear, soft blue, unhazed by smoke from chimneys. The city shone as if reborn in this July sunlight. The air was laden with strong smells of leeks and a huge sow that rolled in mud, yet the faint, delicate odor of lilacs persisted. Children shouted as they played a game with a ball and stick. Behind stout fences chickens clucked. I could almost imagine myself in the Paris I'd known on my arrival.

There were very few people about. We talked—plotted and planned—without fear of being overheard.

We were up the street from the hotel, in front of the smithy. The shop gave off great heat. The smith, his torso bare under his strapped leather apron, was using his grindstone, and from a scythe sparks showered like falling stars. All at once Izette gripped my arm.

“Look!” she said urgently. “It's Goujon.”

He raced toward us, his snuff-colored coat aflap around his huge, pumping thighs. Seeing us, he sped faster, and we began to run toward him. He was holding his bowl-shaped hat, and when he reached us, he held it over his heart, as if to confine the wild beating.

“Too late,” he gasped.

“What, what?” I cried.

“The Comte de Créqui,” he gasped.

“What about the Comte?” I demanded.

“He went before the Tribunal this morning. And was found guilty.”

“Then we must work fast,” I cried. “We have to arrange it all today.”

There was a long, ominous pause, as if he didn't want to speak.

“What is it?” I asked, and my voice trembled.

“Manon, I'm sorry, very sorry. They sentenced him to be executed this afternoon. As soon as I found out, I ran here.”

“But that can't be. Izette said—you yourself said—there's a twenty-four-hour wait.” I gazed helplessly into the red-bearded face.

He mopped his kerchief over his wet forehead. “The Tribunal decides the time of death, Manon.” His voice was very deep. “And the Comte is to die in the Place de la Révolution at one this afternoon.”

“The Place de—where?”

“Place Louis XV,” Izette explained. “Now we calls it Place de la Révolution. The guillotine—that's where the guillotine is.”

I could feel the blood drain from my head, feel my knees buckle. Everything happened slowly. There was none of the dizziness that had preceded the blank spells I once had suffered. Easing into unconsciousness, I watched Goujon reach out for me.

I came to almost immediately.

Goujon held me in his arms, the same as when he'd taken me from my cell in the Bastille. I could feel his pounding heart, the heaving of his chest from his recent run. I could smell his sweat. His body swayed from side to side as he carried me to the Hôtel des Anglais. Izette walked alongside. Her forehead was creased with anxiety.

“I'm all right. You can put me down,” I said. My voice came from far away, and this frightened me. I let Goujon carry me into the public room. He set me in a large armchair. “Boy!” he shouted.

And almost immediately Izette held a glass of cognac to my lips. The fiery drink burning my throat, I coughed, sitting up.

“Take some more,” she said.

I sipped the tiny glassful.

Then lay back in the must-odored tapestry seat. Weak, too weak to move. I had come so far, risked so much, gotten my friends to risk much, and it had come to nothing. The time was too late to save the Comte. An emotion larger than grief overwhelmed me. I had a sense of being pulverized to nothingness. For raging at the Comte, holding him in passion, amusing him, learning from him, leaning on his strength, trying to escape him, battling his domination, I was his. He had imposed his will on me and made me utterly his. And now he was to die.

Wtihout him, what would I be?

I pushed to my feet.

Izette asked, “Where d'you think you're going?”

“Place de la Révolution.”

“Oh no you ain't.”

“Manon,” Goujon said, “it's terrible to see.”

Izette asked, “Don't you remember how ill you was, brain fever, about seeing them heads on pikes?”

“I must go there.”

“This is someone you know,” said Goujon in that old gentle voice. “It'll be far worse.”

“It's too dangerous,” Izette said.

Goujon added, “Showing that you mourn someone who is executed is a crime against the Republic.”

The cognac had burned through my veins, giving me strength, and I sat up. Goujon's huge hands pinioned my shoulders against the chair. “You're bound to show some emotion.”

“It's my own business what emotion I show or don't show.”

Goujon's jaws hardened and his beard moved, and I had the odd feeling as he stared down at me that he was reading me as a book and had come to a misprinted paragraph. Finally he said, “You're very lovely, very stubborn, and I can understand full well
why
he had you locked in the Bastille.” His words were spoken with affection, and he released my shoulders.

With the strength the brandy had given me, I was able to stand.

“I'll go with you,” Izette said.

“Come on, then.” My voice was urgent.

“In a minute.”

“But Goujon said one! It's after eleven already.”

“There's time aplenty. And we can't have you looking like a fancy princess,” she said.

And she took me by my hand, tugging at me as she had pulled at a reluctant CoCo.

In my room she took off her own ruffled cap, shoving my curls beneath the coarse cotton. She worked swiftly, yet her every movement seemed endless. I was in a state of panic. My mind circled like a rabid dog around the fact that the Comte was going to die. Die. Death. The brilliant mind stilled, the quick eye dulled. No more sharp parries of wit. Izette took the green cloak from where it had been hung to dry. The wool was puckered, the hem caked with mud. She didn't even shake it. She put it over my shoulders, and as she did, I remembered the Comte taking it from me yesterday in his cell.

With practiced fingers she braided her own hair.

In the mirror I saw our reflections. Her blue dress showed the curves of her body. I looked a frump. We could have been a pair of servant girls, I decided. The tall and the short.

“You're still far too pretty.” Izette paused, tying her ribbon slowly.

“Come on!”

“This moving up of the trial, it's strange,” she mused. “Sometimes they sets a trial back, but I ain't never heard of one moved forward. It's a very funny business here.”

I had opened the door.

As she came out, she said in a low voice, “No grief. If you cries, you're done for.”

Chapter Five

“Hurry, Izette,” I said. “Please hurry.”

She was trailing me down the quiet of Boulevard des Anglais.

“Calm down,” she said. “We'll be there before … well, before it starts. It ain't safe for us to be seen flying down the streets.”

Realizing, as I should have before, that Izette had placed herself in jeopardy to accompany me, I forced myself to slow to a walk. As we wound along the streets, I began to consider the wild impulse that had drawn me, despite warnings and the obvious dangers, to the Comte. And my feverish efforts to rescue him.

“Izette, I don't understand myself. It's, well, as if I love him.”

“Don't think. It'll be bad enough without thinking.”

“I've never given love a chance, not with the Comte. From the first there was always a battle between us. He's so much older. And dominant. He's used every means to force me to love him. And I—I wouldn't give in.”

Izette said nothing, but her glance was sympathetic.

We turned on Rue St. Honoré. The street, lined with mansions and fine shops, was crowded with poorly dressed folk. Some waited on carriage blocks, eating hunks of sausage; others were like us, hurrying toward the Place de la Révolution. Men shouted greetings at one another, women swung along arm in arm, carrying knitting or a loaf of bread. Couples pulled small children by the hands. A group of rough-looking men bawled a spirited march. “Them's from Marseilles, and that song is new, ‘The Marseillaise,'” Izette told me. This rough group leered at us, shouting their song louder in our direction. We jogged by them.

A woman told her child, “Today,
ma chère
, you'll see St. Guillotine perform her miracles.”

A man asked, “Who is it today?”

And his one-legged friend replied, “Two ordinary traitors. But I hear tell at the last minute they added a great plum. General de Créqui himself!”

The odor of excitement, the laughing anticipation, sickened me. Yet I couldn't blame the carnival atmosphere on the Revolution, for in the Old Regime when one of gentle blood had bowed to the axe, high and low had turned out, with stands erected for the Court.

Neither Izette nor I had seen an execution.

Noon sun burned hot, and I sweated into my muddy cape. Rue Royale was packed. We clasped hands to prevent being separated as the crowd bore us into the Place de la Révolution.

The vast square was filled with groups of people laughing and chatting in the sunlight. Vendors circled with huge pitchers, crying, “Lemonade! Who'll buy my lemonade!” Others sold small loaves of bread. Newsboys, clutching moist, newly printed sheets, hawked, “Read the life and loves of Comte de Créqui!”

And, presiding over us all, stood the hideous new saint.

By now everyone has seen pictures and replicas of the guillotine. This was my first inkling. On a high scaffold rose a tall oblong framework. Between grooved boards was raised a heavy blade that glinted in the sun, and far below a plank was topped with another plank. Cut in these two pieces of raw wood were matching semicircles that formed a hole the size of a human neck. In front stood a wicker basket filled with sawdust.