The air felt charged as they drove into Paris, as if lightning sizzled through it. Julienne looked out the window, upward, but saw not a cloud in the sky. Why then this electricity sparking along her nerves?
Her own anxiety, no doubt. Even the soothing caress of Isaac’s thumb over her knuckles could not erase the gnawing sensation in her stomach. She drew her bottom lip between her teeth and wished she weren’t seeing the familiar buildings of Paris, wished they were rather headed for the port from which they would sail. She wanted only to be away.
Mère let out a startled gasp when they turned a corner. “What is going on?”
Isaac’s face had gone grim. Julienne stretched to look ahead of them out the window, her eyes widening when she saw the churning crowd at the end of the street. Their shouts echoed her way, but she couldn’t make out the words. “A mob?”
Isaac muttered something she didn’t catch and leaned out his window when the carriage came to a forced halt. “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur,” he said to a man rushing away from the crowd. “We just arrived in the city. Can you tell me what is happening?”
The man paused, but he looked as though he might sprint away at any moment. “The Bastille.” His voice came out in a ragged pant. “They have surrounded the Bastille!”
“What?”
“Why?” Mère leaned forward, face aghast. “To free the prisoners? But there are hardly any kept there anymore…”
The man was shaking his head. “Non, non. There are only seven held within. It was for the arms and ammunition stored there, madame. They have demanded—”
A loud crack filled the air, silencing the man and sending him running in the opposite direction. Even over the tumult of the crowd, Julienne could hear the rattling of metal upon metal, and then another cracking thud.
“The drawbridge!” came shouts from the crowd. “They have cut the chains! Into the courtyard!”
Isaac leaned out the window. “Turn around now!”
It seemed Julienne’s stomach twisted into a merciless knot, and all the blood abandoned her head as their driver tried to maneuver the horse and carriage around on the narrow street. She clutched her mother’s outstretched hand and Isaac’s with her other. She shook her head. “Has it really come to this? Rioting in the streets of Paris?”
A muscle in Isaac’s jaw pulsed. “’Twas only a matter of time, my love,” he said in English. “Reports of peasants rioting through the countryside have been filtering in for days, and the soldiers who have been sent to the city will have been seen as a provocation. Then with the king dismissing Necker the other day—”
“What?” She frowned and looked to her mother. “The finance minister?”
Mère’s face was white as a lily. “Père said he was doing nothing to help with the financial problems, that…well, the whole ministry was reconstructed.”
“But Jacques Necker was sympathetic to the Third Estate. They will not have taken well to his ousting.” Isaac’s face hardened still more as the carriage headed down another avenue, equally choked with fist-waving pedestrians.
Julienne watched the transformation of his countenance with an interest she knew was desperate—a clinging to something, anything other than the shouts coming from the streets. Though even apart from that, she would have found it intriguing. The way his eyes went calculating, his features somehow shifted from handsome to fearsome.
This, then, was the brigadier general. A man with lines of responsibility around his mouth and determination turning his eyes to steel. A man whose hand gripped a pistol with all the comfort a courtier’s would a fork. A man who surveyed the raging masses outside his window as if able to divine exactly what they would do next.
A man she would trust with her life as completely as she trusted Isaac with her heart.
“Are you quite certain you need those items from your house, madame?”
Mère’s lips quavered. “Surely the crowds will be less in that part of town.”
“Assuming we can get to it.” He kept his face turned to his window, his fingers poised on his weapon.
The next half hour seemed an eternity as the driver took them forward and then backtracked, trying to avoid the throngs of angry men in the streets. There must have been thousands—non, tens of thousands—in the avenues, their shouts angrier with each passing moment.
Cries for sympathy. Cries for justice. Cries for bread.
Bread? The knot turned to nausea in Julienne’s stomach. Never in her life had she gone without a meal. How could it be that the people were starving? She’d heard Grandpère say how the nobles had all simply refused to pay higher taxes. How had the burden then fallen onto the poor?
“What have we done?” The question she whispered out was swallowed by the invading shouts from outside.
Mère seemed not to have heard her. But Isaac looked her way and squeezed her hand. “They have seen freedom won by America and have heard tales of equality and democracy. They want that too, but they fail to care that it will coat their hands in blood.”