Paris: The Novel (127 page)

“Is there room at the Temple prison?” he asked the judge, who nodded.

“De Cygne has been sentenced to death. Let it be done at once, then. I think his wife should go to the Temple … for the moment.”

Blanchard saw the judge make a note.

Robespierre turned to leave. Then he seemed to think of something.

“Citizen Blanchard: You have said that you are sure this woman is pregnant. Very well. In a little time, we shall see.” He paused, and raised his hand in admonition. “But, should it turn out that you have lied, that you have made this claim in order to pervert the course of justice, then you yourself will go before the Tribunal. I shall see to it myself.”

He turned, and left the courtroom without another word.

Later that afternoon, Dr. Émile Blanchard stood in the huge open square between the Tuileries Gardens and the great avenue of the Champs-Élysées. The Place Louis XV, it had been named, but now it was called the Place de la Révolution. And in its center stood the guillotine.

He knew the route that the tumbrils followed. From the Conciergerie, across the river and around the streets where the crowds could watch, and curse, or mock, as they chose. The tumbril which bore Étienne de Cygne was the last of the day. Blanchard caught sight of his young friend as he entered the square.

The crowd made little sound as the tumbril entered, probably because
they did not recognize its occupants. And perhaps, Blanchard supposed, they could even be growing tired of the endless bloodletting enacted before them each day. However that might be, Étienne entered the Place de la Révolution with no particular indignity. He was staring toward the guillotine, high on its scaffold, and looking very pale.

It was ironic, thought Blanchard, that the great engine of death should have been invented by a medical man—the good Dr. Guillotin—as a more humane way of executing criminals. For as the great blade fell, death was instant, and clean. And for that reason, many had objected to its present use, saying that the enemies of the Revolution should be made to suffer more, and that they should be torn apart as traitors in the good old way, to give the virtuous onlookers more pleasure.

But as he watched, Blanchard was filled by another, terrible realization. In a month or two, or three at most, he himself would be passing that way.

Robespierre had seen through him. In his desire to save a life, he had diagnosed a pregnancy that was not there at all.

Sophie herself had not wanted to accept this subterfuge. “I will die with you,” she told Étienne. But he would not hear of it, and told her that she must at least take the chance that Blanchard had provided. “If you do not,” he told her, “you make my death still harder for me to bear.”

So she would live a short while more, in prison. Then the truth would be known, and she would be executed anyway. And Blanchard, too, would be taken before the Tribunal and placed on a tumbril, and brought, like as not, to this very place, and go under this same terrible blade. And his wife and his children would be left without a protector.

A single act of kindness, a single act of folly. A well-meant but horrible miscalculation that would cost him his life. How could he have done such a thing? He cursed his stupidity. And it seemed to Blanchard, at that moment, that there was no justice, no purpose in the world at all, but only the operation of strength and caution, speed, concealment and chance, to cheat extinction for a little while, no different from the animals in the forest or the fishes in the sea.

So he watched, both with sorrow, and pity, and great fear, as they took Étienne de Cygne up onto the scaffold, and laid him down flat, far under the fearsome diagonal blade which, in no time at all, rattled down.

He saw Étienne’s head fall down into a basket below. And then he saw a big, black-haired woman, standing below the guillotine, reach into the basket, seize the head and, holding it by the hair, raise it high, in triumph.

The week that followed was hard for Dr. Blanchard. Sometimes, because he always shared everything with her, he wanted to tell his wife. Part of him was too ashamed to do so. What would his poor family feel when they discovered that he had so carelessly given up his life, their home and their security? Had he given no thought to them, before he put everything at risk for Sophie de Cygne? What kind of husband and father was he? Even worse: the gesture was completely useless. Sophie was going to die anyway. It was all for nothing. He was a fool.

So he said not a word.

He told himself that he was protecting them. Why plunge his family into despair months before it was necessary? Let them all enjoy the time remaining before the world came crashing down around them. He would dedicate himself to making these the best, the happiest, months of their family life.

And up to a point, he thought he was succeeding. On the very first evening, when his daughter asked him to play cards—and when he would normally have told her that he had work to do—he had sat down and played the foolish game for over an hour. When his son had carelessly torn his best coat, he had smiled sympathetically and told him it could have happened to anybody. With his wife, he was loving and solicitous. After three days, he was feeling quite proud of himself. Whatever his faults, he considered, he was at least showing grace under pressure, and in the terrible times to come, this would be remembered. So he was rather taken aback that very evening when, once they were alone, his wife turned to him and asked: “What’s the matter?”

“Why, nothing,” he answered. “Why do you ask?”

“You seem tense. You look unhappy.”

He had almost broken down and told her everything that moment. But instead he had cried: “Not at all,
ma chérie
. These are difficult times, certainly. But my greatest comfort is my wife and family.” And he had redoubled his efforts the following day.

Another day had passed, and another. Each day more instigators of plots, real or imagined, were brought to trial, and the tumbrils rolled. But Dr. Blanchard continued on his way, maintaining his outward cheerfulness, and concealing his private hell.

Nearly ten days had passed since the execution of Étienne de Cygne
when news came from the Convention. After a month’s absence, Robespierre had returned to speak. But instead of the usual rapturous reception of his every word, an extraordinary thing had occurred. Blanchard heard it from a lawyer who had witnessed the scene.

“They shouted him down,” the lawyer told him excitedly. “They’d had enough of him. He’s gone too far. It’s got to the stage that nobody knows who he’s going to turn upon next. After he presided over the Supreme Being Festival, some of the Convention are saying he thinks he’s God. And Danton had a lot of friends, you know. They didn’t dare speak before, but they’ve never forgiven Robespierre for destroying him.”

“All the same,” Blanchard cautioned, “Robespierre’s a formidable opponent. The people who shouted him down may live to regret it.”

But he was wrong. For the next day came news that was even more startling. Someone with a grudge had tried to shoot Robespierre and wounded him in the face.

And then it happened. Perhaps the resentments that had been secretly brewing would have burst out soon in any case. Blanchard didn’t know. But now, seeing Robespierre defied and then wounded, like a pack of wolves turning upon their leader when they see him falter, the Convention suddenly turned upon him with an animal ferocity. It was the speed of the savagery that was so breathtaking. He had been denounced and sentenced. Then, his jaw tied up and bleeding still, the indomitable, the incorruptible, the Jacobin High Priest of the Revolution was taken in a tumbril, as so many of his victims had been before, and guillotined on the Place de la Révolution while the crowd roared.

Within a day, dozens more of his closest followers had gone the same way.

The guillotine had claimed the Terror itself. The Terror was at an end.

But what does that mean for me? Émile Blanchard wondered. Sophie de Cygne was still supposed to be pregnant. When it was finally discovered that she was not, would they carry out the execution to which the Tribunal had sentenced her? Would his own role be remembered? There had been witnesses, after all, to Robespierre’s probing questions, and his threat. Might he still be arrested? It was hard to guess.

He went about his business quietly. Nobody was bothering him yet. He visited Sophie in her prison, and brought her food each week. Even
three weeks after the execution, she told him that she was still troubled by nightmares, and shaking fits, and indigestion. “Nothing seems to be right with me,” she told him mournfully. But he explained to her that these symptoms were only to be expected after such a terrible shock and that in time they would pass.

And he was confident that they would. She was a healthy young woman. What the future might hold he still could not foresee, and he took care not to speak to her of such things. During the next month, each time he visited, though she still suffered various small complaints, she seemed to have grown a little calmer.

The prison in which Sophie was kept was a curious old place. Long ago, it had been the tower of the Knights Templar in their great compound on the city’s edge. Some of the royal family had been held there too. Sophie was lucky because her cell was high enough above the ground to give her a view of the city and the sky through a narrow window.

It was a fine day in early September when Dr. Blanchard went up to the Temple. By now he had made friends with the prison warders. A few small presents, the speedy and effective lancing of a boil from which the chief warder was suffering, for which Blanchard refused any payment, and the good doctor was greeted with smiles. No objection was made to the small posy of flowers he brought Sophie that day, as well as the usual sustaining provisions—and a bottle of brandy for the warders themselves, of course.

But he found Sophie in a somewhat distracted mood.

How did she feel? he asked.

“You remember I was still a little nauseous last week,” she said, “and you gave me a potion for it.”

“Indeed. Is it better?”