Paris The Novel

Chapter Twenty-four




• 1794 •


It was the age of hope. The Age of Reason. The dawn of Freedom, Liberty, Equality. The time for all men to be brothers.

And now it was the time of the Terror.

In France, when the eighteenth century began, that grim, magnificent autocrat the Sun King still sat upon the throne. The long reign of his successor, Louis XV, had brought a financial collapse, it was true, but there had also been a gilded luxury that would be remembered with pleasure for centuries to come.

And the Enlightenment, and the Romantic spirit: these too, Frenchmen could say—for they claimed both Voltaire and Rousseau as their own—had been born in France during that mighty century. Voltaire had taught the world to love reason; Rousseau had taught the natural goodness of the human heart.

Hadn’t these ideas inspired the American Revolution? Hadn’t French support, and French arms, made possible the independence of the grand new country in the huge New World?

Now, in the reign of Louis XVI and his not-very-popular Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, France itself had begun its own revolution. But where the American Revolution had promised an honest freedom from oppression, this French Revolution would be something altogether more radical, more philosophical, more profound. After all, it was French.

In France, a new world age would be born.

First they had stormed the Bastille. Then they had taken the king from Versailles to Paris, and made him obey their will. And when he had tried to flee, they had cut off his head. And after that?

After that, the world had turned against them, and they had argued among themselves.

And now, it was the time of the Terror.



The Terror had already continued for many months that sunny afternoon when the widow Le Sourd, after crossing the Pont Neuf, arrived with her daughter, Claudie, on the Left Bank of the Seine. She was on her way to visit an old acquaintance who lived below the Luxembourg Gardens.

She was walking down the rue Dauphine when she saw the young couple.

As they turned into a side street, she saw them only for a moment before they were out of sight.

A casual observer might have supposed the man was a young clerk or attorney, out walking with his wife. But the eyes of the widow were not so easily deceived.

It was the seventeenth day of July in the year of Our Lord 1794—but not in France. For the last two years, since the proclamation of the Republic in the autumn of 1792, France had used a new calendar. The twelve months had been renamed. Gone were the pagan gods of the old Roman calendar, and in their place, the seasons of the year. Winter thus contained the month of snow: Nivôse. Autumn had Brumaire, the month of mists. Spring contained months of germination and flowers: Germinal and Floréal. Summer boasted months of harvest and heat: Messidor and Thermidor.

The date that day in Paris was therefore the twenty-ninth day of Messidor, in the Year II.

The widow Le Sourd was a big-boned, black-haired woman. Her ten-year-old daughter, Claudie, was thin, and pale, and had stringy hair, and walked with a slight limp ever since breaking her leg as a child. But she got about the place with astonishing speed.

“Come,” she said to her daughter. “I want to see where those people are going.”

When she and Claudie reached the corner, the young couple were still less than a hundred yards away. The widow stared after them.

There was no doubt as to what they were, despite their pitiful attempt at disguise.

She could always spot aristocrats, no matter how they tried to conceal their identity. Those fresh-faced people with their dainty ways. Aristocrats, untouched by sun or rain, who’d never done a day’s work in their lives. Aristocrats, who thought themselves superior. She could smell them. She despised them.

But they could be dangerous.

Ever since the storming of the Bastille, the logic had been inescapable. The enemies of the Revolution would never give up. When the king had been dragged from Versailles to Paris, he had promised to be a constitutional monarch. But then what had he done? Tried to flee the country with his wife, to raise an army in Austria that would restore the rotten old autocracy to France again. He’d been caught, and rightly executed, and his Austrian queen as well. But had that been enough? Of course not.

Were the other monarchies of Europe going to tolerate a revolutionary republic in their midst? Never. They were preparing to attack her even now. Would the Catholic Church and the many aristocrats in exile accept the new regime? They were dedicated to destroying it. Those aristocrats remaining were constantly plotting in secret. The Terror was uncovering new conspiracies all the time. Even the peasants in some areas couldn’t see that the Revolution was for their own good. Down in the Vendée, that huge, traditional region spreading out from the lower reaches of the Loire, the ordinary peasantry had been in armed insurrection—a virtual civil war—because they wanted their medieval Church restored, and refused to be conscripted into the army to defend the new regime. Many had been massacred. But even while the Vendée region smoldered, Brittany, Maine and Normandy had broken out into another revolt.

One couldn’t even trust the Convention. There were backsliders and traitors there, who had to be rooted out.

For there could be no doubt: Once the Revolution had begun, there could be no turning back. Either the business must be carried through to its conclusion, or everything would be lost.

Sometimes it seemed to the widow Le Sourd that it was the women who were the true guardians of the Revolution. In its early days, it had been the women who led the march down to Versailles. Women were the practical ones. Men made fine speeches, but women got things done. She’d lost her own husband to sickness three years ago. So she was head of the family now. And she was going to make sure that her daughter Claudie and her little son Jean-Jacques received the inheritance of Liberty and Equality that was now their birthright.

She kept her large eyes constantly open, to protect the Revolution.

So here was the question. Who was this pair of young aristocrats, trying to disguise themselves, and walking the streets of Paris? Why were they there? And what were they up to?



In the small chapel of Saint-Gilles, Father Pierre was still shaking. He had witnessed so many terrible things. Who had not, in these recent godless years? But the sight he had witnessed today had shocked him deeply.

He tried to pray.

At least he was lucky to have a chapel where he could do so. For most of the churches of Paris were closed. Some were used as barns. The great cathedral of Notre Dame had been horribly abused and turned into a Temple of Reason. But his little chapel on the Left Bank was so insignificant that no one had bothered to do anything about it.

Not that it was obviously a house of God anymore. No bell was rung. No crucifix was to be found under its dark old arches. Even the few brave souls who were his congregation came there quietly, surreptitiously, to join together in their secret prayers.

Was it legal? The priest himself wasn’t quite sure. When the Revolution had passed its terrible statutes, seizing the Church’s property, forbidding monasteries and stopping all payments to Rome, it had made the priesthood one concession. Priests might continue to reside in France, if they gave up their duty to the pope and became salaried officials of the state. If they refused, they must get out of France at once, or face prison and possibly the guillotine.

Most of the clergy had refused. But some in Paris had reluctantly accepted, thinking it was better to serve their congregations as best they could, rather than abandon them entirely.

Father Pierre was one of these. He was not proud of himself. He did not know whether he had made the right choice or not.

He had been praying for some time when he rose to his feet. He felt stiff. He was getting old. He was also a sociable man. He loved to talk to people, and it was hard for him to be so often alone as he was nowadays. He went toward the door which gave onto the street.



It was a long time since Étienne de Cygne and his wife, Sophie, had dared to go out. And they would not have done so now, except that it was Sophie’s birthday, and the weather was so fine, and she had confessed that she would so love to see the river and look across to the noble pile of Notre Dame again.

They’d taken great care, gone by quiet streets. None of the people they had passed seemed to take the least notice of them. And they had held each other’s hand and gazed at the old river, and the cathedral’s Gothic towers. And they had been glad that they had done it.

Now they were returning with equal circumspection. And they were right to be careful. For they had lost their protector, and they were not safe anymore.

Étienne Jean-Marie Gaston Roland de Cygne was thirty years old. His wife Sophie was twenty-five. And they loved each other very much.

Étienne was just above average height, slim, fair, blue-eyed. His features were perfectly regular, and his expression soft. Seen away from his wife, he might have been called pretty. But when seen together with his wife, an inner strength appeared: one could see at once that he would defend her with his life.

They had been married five years, and their only regret was that, after two miscarriages, God had not yet granted them a child. But they still had hope. For their faith was strong.

They were also enlightened.

It was quite the fashion of their generation. After the pleasure-seeking luxury of the old court, many of their friends had taken the ideas of Liberty and Reason to their hearts. Young ladies had begun to favor simpler, classical dress, like the women of Republican Rome. Men spoke of reform. Glamorous heroes like the Marquis de La Fayette, who’d gone to seek glory with Washington when the American colonists had sought their independence, spoke of the honest, natural virtues of the New World. Perhaps, some had said, France should combine the best of the traditional and the new, and change its creaking old autocracy for something more modern, like the constitutional monarchy of Britain.

Having come into his father’s estate at the age of twenty, it had seemed to Étienne that he should use his good fortune to make the world a better place.

He loved the old family château and the people who lived and worked there, and they liked him. When he went to Paris and encountered a larger world, he realized that he was full of love for all his fellow men.

He was sorry that he had been born too late to take part in La Fayette’s American adventure. But perhaps some great advancement of the human spirit was about to begin in France, and if so, he hoped that he might play some modest part in it.

With all of this, his young wife was in perfect agreement. Sophie had a round face, rosy cheeks, red lips, and big brown eyes. Her hair was dark. Her father had been a general; and although Sophie had never harmed anyone in her life, when she believed a thing was right, she would dig in and defend her position with a determination her father would have been proud of.

For Sophie, it was all about justice. It couldn’t be right, she declared, that her own class had so many privileges, when ordinary people had none; or that poor people could starve in the rich land of France. One of the first things that had made her fall in love with her husband was his desire to do good. Her dream was that one day the ordinary people of France should elect men to a parliament and, perhaps with a kindly king as figurehead, the elected parliament would rule the land. She felt quite sure that the people in the area around the family château would gladly elect her handsome husband to represent them, and she was probably right.

So it was hardly surprising that when, in July of the year 1789, news came that the Bastille had been stormed, and the French Revolution had broken out, the young de Cygnes were excited.

They had been spending the midsummer months down at the château. Étienne had immediately gone to Paris, passing through Versailles, to discover all he could.

“Nothing is decided yet,” he told Sophie on his return. “La Fayette and his friends believe there will be a constitutional monarchy.”

“And the king and queen?”

Étienne had shrugged. There had been scandals at the court in recent years. Most were invented by mischief makers, but his opinion of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was not high.

“They mean well,” he said, “but I don’t think they know what to do.”

It had seemed to both Sophie and Étienne that they should return to Paris as quickly as possible.

“We don’t want to miss anything,” Sophie had said excitedly.



How naive they had been, Étienne thought, as he looked back now. Many nobles had fled the country right at the start. Étienne knew of plenty of men whose property had been confiscated, and who’d been condemned to death in absentia. But he and Sophie had believed in the ideals of the Revolution, and had faith that a workable new government could come out of it.

And perhaps a transition to limited monarchy or to a republic might have been possible. But it seemed to him now that none of the parties in France were ready. Perhaps Europe itself wasn’t ready.

So they had stayed, and endured five years of increasing misery. Five years of confusion, failed governments, intrigues, invasion from the angry monarchs of Europe, the king and queen executed, even risings in parts of rural France itself. And now, driven by fear of all these enemies, within and outside France, the Convention had approved a fearful purge, the witch hunt of the Terror.

It was the most radical of the Jacobins who had conceived it. Robespierre, their guiding spirit. They had vowed to destroy one category of people. But it had turned out to be a large category.

Enemies of the Revolution. They were all sorts of folk. Aristocrats were suspect first, of course. Their servants, too. Tradesmen. Peasants. Conscientious Catholics. Members of the liberal Girondin faction, who had opposed the radical Jacobins in the Convention. Even other Jacobins, who’d fallen out with Robespierre and his clique.

No one was safe. Anyone might be accused. And if the Tribunal judged that they were guilty, then execution followed rapidly, by the guillotine.

Month after month, using several guillotines in different parts of the city, the huge bloodletting had continued. Nor were there any signs that it would cease. It seemed that Robespierre and his friends were determined to purge France of every enemy and every error.

So what chance had a well-meaning young aristocrat who had believed in justice, and kindness, and compromise? Probably none.

Could they, even then, have escaped? Virtually impossible. All the ports were watched. To be caught in the attempt would mean instant execution.

By the previous autumn, Étienne and Sophie had been expecting to be thrown in jail on any day. And perhaps that would have happened, if it hadn’t been for the help of a wise friend who had shown them how to survive.

How innocent they were, even about that. For whatever its horrors, Étienne had still assumed, somehow, that the new republic would be different from the governments of the old regime that had gone before.

But Dr. Blanchard had known better. He’d shown them how to save their lives.



He was a sturdy, kindly figure. If Blanchard was successful, it was not only that he was a good doctor, but that his patients trusted him. They felt safe in his care. He’d been the family’s physician for a decade now, and had become a trusted counselor and friend.

“You need a protector,” he’d explained. “And I have the perfect man for you.” He’d smiled. “He’s a patient of mine too, and I know him quite well. Would you like me to arrange something?”

Danton, the giant. Danton the Jacobin. Danton the hero of the sans-culottes in the streets. Danton, whose stentorian voice carried all before it in the Convention. Danton, who set up the Committee of Public Safety.

“You mean he’d help us?” Étienne asked in astonishment.

“Yes. Probably. For a price.”

“Danton the Jacobin takes bribes?”

“His loyalty to the Revolution is total, I assure you,” Blanchard continued. “But he has huge appetites. And no self-discipline.” He grinned. “The poor fellow’s always in debt.”

“How do we go about this?” Étienne asked.

“I’ll tell him you’re a good fellow. No threat to anyone. You’re not planning to threaten anyone, are you?”

“Heavens, no.”

“He’ll give you protection. He’ll put out the word you’re not to be touched, and that should do the trick. Then you give him a present. Make it a good one. I’ll guide you, if you like.”

“I wish you would.”

So Danton had received his money, and all through the previous autumn and winter, Étienne and Sophie de Cygne had received no harm.

Then, in March, came the blow.

The fall of the mighty Danton had been sudden and spectacular. He’d fallen out with Robespierre. Suddenly, he was accused of being an enemy of the Revolution. It was asserted that his management of the finances was chaotic and that he had taken bribes—both probably true. He was a popular man and he defended himself, but Robespierre had outmaneuvered him. And to Étienne’s horror, Blanchard had arrived at his house to warn him.

“They are taking Danton to the guillotine. You have lost your protection.”

“What can we do?”

“Stay out of sight. They may not even remember you. Above all, stay away from anyone who could get you into trouble. Remember, they’re looking for conspiracies.”

Since then, Étienne and Sophie had lived almost like hermits. They stayed mostly indoors. They had liked to go discreetly to Father Pierre’s little chapel of Saint-Gilles, but they stopped doing even that. Apart from the housekeeper and a few old retainers in the house, who’d known them all their lives, they saw no one. To all intents and purposes, for the last four months, Étienne and Sophie de Cygne had disappeared.



They came to a crossroads. They had been meaning to go straight on, but a small crowd had gathered outside a house ahead of them. It looked as if someone was being denounced. They turned off down another street. It was only when they had gone a dozen yards that they realized this route would take them past old Father Pierre’s little chapel to Saint-Gilles.

All the same, they hadn’t expected to find the old priest at the chapel door. Seeing them, he insisted that they step inside. With a quick glance up and down the street, they followed him in. It would have been discourteous and unkind not to do so.



The widow Le Sourd watched. She had only just come to the end of the little street. When the young couple glanced furtively back, she did not think they had noticed her.

A priest. It might mean nothing. Or it might be a conspiracy. She turned to Claudie.

“Go into that chapel down there. Pretend to pray. See if you can hear what the priest and those people are saying. Can you do that?”

Claudie nodded. Claudie was good at doing things like that.



Father Pierre was so glad to see the two de Cygnes. He had wondered what had happened to them. Of all the loyal Catholics who came to his little chapel, these two were his favorites.

He had gone to their house a couple of months ago, and the housekeeper had told him that they were away in the country.

“I am so delighted to see you,” he cried. “But what terrible events are happening all around us. Have you heard about the Carmelites today?”

They hadn’t. And he was just about to inform them when a skinny young girl with a limp came in. Moving to a bench only feet away, she sat down, and seemed about to pray.

Father Pierre looked at her. No doubt she was harmless, but in the awful world in which they were living now, one had to be careful. He moved to her side.

“Are you all right, my child?”

“Yes, Father. I was passing, and I came in here to pray.”

“Ah.” He smiled. “It is a house of God. Do you pray often?”

“Each day. I pray that my leg may get better.”

“And what caused you to come into this chapel?”

“I cannot say.”

“Did you know that this chapel was dedicated to Saint-Gilles?” As she looked uncertain, he continued. “Saint-Gilles, my child, is the patron saint of cripples. You have chosen well to pray here.”

He turned back to the de Cygnes, and they moved a few feet away.

“Did you hear?” he murmured to them. “The child was passing, and did not know that this is the chapel of Saint-Gilles, nor that he is the patron saint of cripples. Voilà. Even in such times as these, the providence of God is manifested. Perhaps the saint himself summoned this child to his church.” But now he turned to the matter in hand. “Oh, my dears,” Father Pierre began, “what terrible news I must share with you.”



Claudie listened carefully. The priest was very upset. Sixteen women from a Carmelite religious house had just been executed today, near the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. They had refused to obey the Clergy Law. They had declared that they would sooner be martyred for the faith.

“They went to the guillotine chanting,” the old priest declared. “They were martyred every one.”

“Martyrs indeed,” said the man, and the young lady agreed with him. And they both said it was a disgrace, and that it should not have been done.

Then they asked the priest to come home with them for a little while. The lady said the old man needed a hot drink. “Laced with brandy,” said the young man.

Claudie went back to where her mother was waiting, and told her exactly what she had heard.

“Follow them, Claudie,” said her mother. “I’ll keep a little way behind you. Let’s find out where they live.”

Following them was easy. The old priest couldn’t walk very fast. The place they went into was a mansion with a courtyard in front of it, in the Saint-Germain quarter. A regular aristocrat’s palace, her mother said.

After that, it had taken only a few inquiries along the street to discover who lived in the mansion. A tavern keeper said that the family owned a château in the Loire Valley, down in the west.

“That is interesting,” her mother said. “You go home now,” she told Claudie. “I’ll be back later.”



The widow Le Sourd walked swiftly. She had not far to go. Back to the Pont Neuf, across to the Right Bank, then northward up to the rue Saint-Honoré. For that was where the man she sought was living.

The house that the widow Le Sourd was seeking belonged to Monsieur Duplay the cabinetmaker. But it was not Maurice Duplay that the widow sought. It was his longtime lodger. As she had hoped, he was at home.

The room was not large, but pleasant. There was painted paneling on the walls and a small chandelier. He was sitting, very straight, at a table. She had heard that he had not been in the Convention for three weeks. Some had wondered if he might be sick. Others believed he was preparing an important speech. He looked perfectly well, so she concluded that it was probably the latter. They had met only a few times, but he had evidently remembered her and knew that she was loyal.

“How can I be of service to you, citoyenne?” he asked.

Some people said that he was ugly. But the widow Le Sourd didn’t think so. His broad brow suggested a fine and quick intelligence. His jaw protruded slightly, but that told her that he was tenacious.

He was small, but wonderfully upright. She liked that. Truth to tell, the large-boned woman had a secret desire to scoop him up and take him home with her.

But above all, as the whole of France knew, he was incorruptible. He was pure. He was unyielding. Men like Danton might have been impressive, spoken louder and been more loved, but the lonely figure of Maximilien Robespierre was superior to them all.

It did not take her long to tell him about the old priest and the young de Cygnes. It was evident from what they had said in front of Claudie that they were enemies of the Revolution.

“I’m only surprised,” she said, “that they have not been arrested already.”

“I have heard the name of de Cygne before, citoyenne,” Robespierre replied. “I think Danton answered for them.” He shrugged. “Perhaps he was paid.”

He said nothing more for a moment, and seemed to be thinking. Could it be, she wondered, that the evidence she had brought was not enough for him?

“There is more,” she continued. “He told the old priest that he had encouraged the peasants on his estate to join the insurrections in the Vendée. His estate is close to the Vendée, as you may know.”

It was a lie. Yet she felt no guilt at making it. The two de Cygnes must die. She was quite persuaded of it. The lie was merely the vehicle—like providing a cart to take someone to their destination.

And in telling it, she was just doing her duty. Wasn’t she a guardian of the Revolution, after all?

“Ah.” The eyes of Robespierre fixed upon her. Did he know that she was lying? She wasn’t certain, but she thought that he probably did. He nodded slowly. Then he spoke. “You know, citoyenne,” he said in his high-pitched voice, “when the great debate took place about whether the king should be executed, I reminded the assembly of a very important fact. We were not there to try the king, I said. We were not there to decide if he was guilty of this, or of that. We were there for a greater cause, which was the cause of the Revolution. And it had become abundantly clear by that time that the Revolution was in danger, both from forces inside France and outside, so long as the king lived. Therefore, it was simple logic that the king must die. There was really nothing else to discuss.”

“You were right, Citoyen Robespierre,” she said.

“And now the case is the same again. The Revolution is in danger. And until these nobles are eliminated, it will remain in jeopardy. By themselves, the de Cygnes are perhaps not important. But their existence is a threat. That is the point.” He took out a sheet of paper. “Will you oblige me, citoyenne, by taking this note to the Committee of Public Safety?”

“At once, citoyen,” she said proudly. “At once.”



After Father Pierre had gone, young Étienne de Cygne paced restlessly. His wife had taken up a piece of needlework. She did not interrupt him.

The de Cygne mansion was very quiet these days. Étienne and Sophie used the big old salon in the summer months, when it did not require heating. In winter, they used a smaller sitting room. Most of the other rooms were under covers so that the housekeeper and the handful of servants could keep the place running.

“It was wonderful to walk with you today,” he suddenly said.

“I am happy we went, too,” she answered.

“It’s difficult being cooped up,” he remarked.

“But we have our occupations,” she reminded him.

Had they not still been so much in love, this close proximity, with little to do, might have become irksome indeed. But fortunately, quite early in the Revolution, as social life fell away, they had each found projects to keep themselves occupied; and these had been most helpful during their recent seclusion.

Sophie and the housekeeper had decided to take every piece of linen and lace in the house, to mend and embroider it all. This, as she told her husband, was a task that might possibly go on forever. For two hours a day, she practiced the piano, mastering it in a way that she had never dreamed of doing before.

Etienne, deciding that he would attend to the furniture, had gone to a local restorer to learn how the fine old tables and fauteuils from the reign of the Sun King should be properly cleaned and waxed. Having learned that, he decided to try his hand at carpentry. His first efforts were clumsy enough, but by now, he could make quite a creditable kitchen table or chair, and he was amazed to discover the sense of achievement and peace this simple craftsmanship brought him.

“I can do things,” he laughingly told Sophie. “I’m not an aristocrat anymore.”

And during the long summer evenings, they would sit together very contentedly, and read to each other, as the sinking sun made the polished wood of the old chairs and tables gleam softly, like ancestral friends, in the high salon.

But one other thought was troubling Étienne that evening.

“Sometimes, you know,” he said, “I wonder if I made a mistake. Perhaps we should have gone down to the château long ago, instead of staying here in Paris. At least we could have walked in the park.”

“I don’t think we made a mistake. I think we are safer here, Etienne,” Sophie replied.

“Why?”

“The château is too near the Vendée. At the moment the rebellions there have mostly been crushed, but they could start again. What if the fighting came to the château? I think the local people would all join the rising. They love their religion. And they don’t hate us. Then we’d either have to oppose our own workers and tenants, or be called traitors to the Revolution.”

“That is true. All the same …”

“We are quiet as mice.”

“I feel we are alone.”

Sophie held out her hand.

“At least,” she said sweetly, “we have each other.”

And so it was that evening that they sat together quietly. But before the sun sank, as the room filled with a warm, red light, Étienne put his arm around his wife, and in no time at all they were in a close embrace, only disengaging from each other enough to reach their bedroom, where their embrace became complete.



The battering at the outer door soon after dawn took them completely by surprise.



Dr. Émile Blanchard rode along the edge of the big open square. In its center stood the guillotine. The Place du Trône was just one of several sites where guillotines had been set up. Or to be precise, since the Revolution had changed the name of the old ground to the Place du Trône-Renversé—the square of the overturned throne. Its guillotine had devoured sixteen Carmelites the day before, and the grim blade had been kept busy for weeks. Thirty, often fifty, heads a day had fallen to its rattle and thud.

Ahead of Blanchard lay the cheerless prospect of the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, like a long stone furrow, leading westward from the poor quarter toward the distant Louvre.

Blanchard urged his horse forward. There was no time to lose. The only question was: Might he already be too late?

He’d gone out early to visit a craftsman in Saint-Antoine. The fellow had been one of his first patients when he began.

Émile Blanchard was an ambitious man. In the early days of the reign of Louis XV, when the financial affairs of France had unfortunately been entrusted to the hands of a clever Scotsman named John Law, the country had suffered a financial collapse quite as terrible as the South Sea Bubble in England. Émile’s grandfather had lost the family’s modest fortune, and his father had become a bookseller on the Left Bank of the Seine, whose liberal ideas had grown ever more ambitious as his means had grown less. Determined to set himself up in a more solid existence, Émile had studied medicine.

Since starting modestly, he’d done well. He had numerous wealthy patients like the de Cygnes, who paid him handsomely.

The old man he’d gone to see that morning couldn’t afford to pay him much, but Émile was proud of the fact that he had never dropped a patient because they were poor. And he had just been finishing his visit when his son had arrived with the message.

“The de Cygnes have been arrested. Their housekeeper came to the house looking for you.”

“Where have they been taken?” There were many prisons in Paris housing enemies of the Revolution.

“To the Conciergerie.”

“The Conciergerie?” This was grave indeed. No wonder the doctor rode swiftly.

He had a particular fondness for the young couple. The lovebirds, he privately called them. He knew how much they longed for a family together and it had pained him to attend Sophie when she suffered first one, and then another miscarriage. But as he had assured the two young people on several occasions: “I have seen so many couples suffer in the same way, and go on to have a large and healthy family.”

The question now, however, was very different. Could he save their lives at all? He doubted it. He doubted it very much. But he continued to think, as he rode along.



Ahead of him lay the remains of the old Bastille. He’d gone by the place, on that famous day when the mob had stormed it. They’d gone there, he knew, because, having got arms from Les Invalides, they needed the gunpowder that was stored in the old fort. But for some reason, nowadays people claimed the aim had been to liberate the elderly prisoners, mostly forgers, who lived in the place.

If they’d stormed it a few weeks earlier, he thought wryly, as he rode past it, they could have liberated the Marquis de Sade.

From the Bastille, his journey led him westward past the Hôtel de Ville. Beyond that was the Louvre.

How many happy evenings he’d spent in that area, during the delightful final decade of the old regime. Just north of the Louvre, to be precise, in the welcoming gardens of the Palais-Royal.

The king’s liberal cousin the Duc d’Orléans, who resided there, had turned its huge courtyards and colonnades into an open camp for all those who believed in enlightenment and reform. Philippe Égalité, everyone called him, some mockingly, others with admiration.

What had Orléans really been up to? Some had thought he wanted a republic, others that he wanted the throne for himself. You could discuss anything you liked in the cafés and taverns under those colonnades. His princely protection had allowed revolutionary literature to be printed in the presses there. Half university, half pleasure ground, the Palais-Royal had been the happy seedbed of the Revolution.

But it hadn’t done the Duc d’Orléans any good. A few years later, the revolutionaries meeting in their great hall, only yards away, had sent him to the guillotine, just like his royal cousin.

He was lucky to be a doctor himself, Blanchard considered. His own politics were republican. But he was a moderate. He could have lived with a constitutional monarchy if he had to. But where would he have sat in the Assembly and the Convention which succeeded it? Not with the monarchists, certainly, who were still there at the start. With the Girondins probably, the majority of liberal republicans. Not with the extremist Jacobins. He was sure of that. And if so, as the Revolution became more and more radical, he would have been sent to the guillotine himself, by the Jacobins who had bullied their way into power. And now, these Jacobins were even executing each other.

Politics was a slippery and dangerous business. Even La Fayette himself had not been able to weather the storm. A hero of the Revolution when it began, and given military command, he and the Jacobins had fallen out, and he had been forced to flee from France.

No, Blanchard did not think he would have survived in politics.

But as a doctor, as long as he kept his head down, he was outside the fray. He had treated Danton, and many others. They seemed to like him.

And that fact, he realized—as he turned down toward the river to cross to the Île de la Cité—that fact might give him the one chance of saving his young friends.

Well, not both of them. One of them, perhaps.

But it would take cool nerves.



Was any building in Paris more fearsome than the grim old prison of the Conciergerie? Sophie didn’t think so. It stood beside the lovely Sainte-Chapelle, but there was nothing gracious about it. Its bulky turrets and massive walls housed the waiting rooms and dungeons where prisoners were finally brought before their trial and execution. Upon any day, there might be more than a thousand prisoners housed in the Conciergerie somewhere. And few of them had any hope.

Sophie already knew that she was going to die.

The trial, if trial it could be called, had lasted scarcely minutes. They had been taken from the heavy stone halls of the Conciergerie into the Gothic old Palais de Justice next door. There, two large, bare rooms had been set aside as special courts. And they were special indeed.

She had wondered if they might be summoned together, but they were not. Étienne went in first. The big door closed, and she heard nothing of what passed behind it. After a long, cold silence he came out, looking ashen. He tried to smile and moved across to kiss her. But the guards would not let him, and pushed her through the door into the courtroom, and she heard the heavy door thud.

They took her to a wooden rail, upon which she could rest her hands, and told her to stand behind it. Opposite her was a table at which several men were sitting. In the middle was a small man with a pointed face and sharp eyes, who reminded her of a rat. On each side of him were others. These were the judges, she supposed. At the end sat a tall, thin man, all in black, who looked bored. Several men were sitting at another table. She supposed they were the jury. At one side of the room there was a row of chairs. One of these was occupied by a large, ugly woman with black hair, whom Sophie had never seen before.

Now the small man at the center of the table spoke. It seemed he was the principal judge.

“Citizen Sophie Constance Madeleine de Cygne, you are charged under the Law of Suspects with treason, as an enemy of the People and of the Revolution. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty,” Sophie said, as clearly as she could.

Now it was the turn of the tall man. He did not bother to get up, but asked her whether she had been in the company of the priest known as Father Pierre the day before.

“I was,” she replied, wondering what this could possibly be about.

“Call the witness,” he said.

The big, black-haired woman at the side of the room now rose and stood before the judge’s table.

The widow Le Sourd was soon established by the tall prosecutor as a citizen of good character, and she told her tale. With horror, Sophie heard her harmless expression of shock at the death of the Carmelites turned into an attack on the Revolution. But then, to her astonishment, she heard that she and her husband had told their laborers and tenants to join the rising in the Vendée.

“Your daughter was in the chapel with them when she heard these words?” the prosecutor asked.

“She was. She has a perfect memory, and she told me at once.”

“But this is absurd,” cried Sophie. “Let me call Father Pierre and he will tell you I said no such thing.”

“The prisoner will be silent,” said the judge.

“I may not be defended?”

“By the law of 22 Prairial, enacted by the Convention this year,” the judge intoned, “those brought before this court are not allowed any counsel for their defense.”

He turned to the jury.

“How do you find?” he asked.

“Guilty,” they said all together.

He nodded and turned back to Sophie.

“Citizen Sophie de Cygne,” he announced, “you are sentenced to death at the guillotine. The sentence may be carried out at once.”

And that was the end of the matter.



She had been sitting in a cell with Étienne and four other unfortunates for two hours when Dr. Blanchard appeared. The guard let Blanchard in and he embraced the de Cygnes warmly, but his face was grave. He knew already what the sentence of the court had been, and he told them that there was a priest visiting the prison, and that he would arrange for the priest to come to their cell, if they would like to see him.

Then Blanchard took Étienne to one side and whispered to him earnestly for a minute or two. Sophie could not hear what they were saying, but she saw Étienne nod. After this, Blanchard told her that there was another, empty cell nearby, in which he wished to see her alone, and calling the guard to open the door, he motioned her to follow him. Étienne told her she should go. So, still rather puzzled, she accompanied him.

Then he told her that he wished to examine her.



It was a long shot. He would have to be convincing. And it was not certain that the Tribunal would take any notice. But there had been a number of examples recently when they had canceled or deferred the execution of women who were pregnant. Even a stay of execution would be something. A delay might bring another chance of life, at least.

After returning Sophie to her cell, Blanchard went quickly out of the Conciergerie and across to the Palais de Justice. He had to wait an hour before the Tribunal would see him.

He knew how to speak to them. His tone was respectful, but professionally firm.

“I must inform you at once,” he told the presiding judge, “that the de Cygne woman is pregnant.”

“How do you know?”

“I have just examined her.”

“It seems suspicious.”

“I don’t think so. She is a young married woman.”

“In these cases, Doctor, we normally send the women to our old people’s home, where they are examined by the nurses.”

“As you wish. But forgive me if I say that my diagnosis is more likely to be correct than that of some old midwives. I have made this a particular field of study.”

“Hmm.”

The judge was considering his decision when Blanchard heard the door opening behind him and saw the judge’s eyes look up alertly, and then saw him bow his head. Then a high-pitched voice cut through the quiet.

“I sent two aristocrats to you. Named de Cygne.”

“They are already dealt with, citizen,” said the judge.

And Blanchard turned, to find himself staring into the face of Maximilien Robespierre.

What a strange, enigmatic figure he was, Blanchard thought. Most men feared him, and with good reason; but as a doctor, he found the incorruptible Jacobin an interesting study.

Most of the Jacobins were atheists. If they worshipped anything, it was Reason; if they were impelled by any emotion, it was probably as much a hatred of the old regime as a love of Liberty. But not Robespierre. He believed in God. Not the old God of the Church, to be sure, but a new, enlightened God, that he had invented: a Supreme Being whose vehicle was the Revolution, and whose expression would be the new world of free and reasonable men.

He was quite open about it. Just recently, on the great open space of the Champ de Mars south of the river, he had organized a huge Festival to the Supreme Being which thousands had attended. Some found it pretentious, even laughable, but as Robespierre had given his long and grandiloquent speech, it was clear that this extraordinary Jacobin was not just a soldier of the Revolution, but a visionary, a high priest.

Perhaps this was his strength. Perhaps this was what made him so ruthless, so unbending. The servant of a Supreme Being has little fear of hurting mortal men.

Yet he was still a mortal himself. He could be jealous, even petty.

“There is a problem, however, citizen,” the judge continued.

“What problem?”

“This doctor says the woman is pregnant.”

Maximilien Robespierre looked at Émile Blanchard calmly. His face gave nothing away.

“Do I know you?” he asked at last.

“I attended you once,” said Émile, “at the request of your own doctor, Souberbielle, when he was indisposed.”

“I remember you. Souberbielle thought highly of you.”

Blanchard bowed.

“You say she is pregnant?”

“I do.”

Robespierre continued to stare at him.

“Was Danton one of your patients?”

“Yes. For a while.”

The question was obviously dangerous, but it would be unwise to be caught out in a lie. Robespierre seemed to be satisfied.

“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?”

She shook her head.

“There is something else. You remember I said that nothing seemed right with me at first, and you told me these things would gradually pass. And it is true that I am better. But something is still not right.” She paused. “My time of the month has not come. This is the second time.”

He stared at her.

“I will examine you,” he said.

Some doctors and midwives swore that they could tell from a woman’s urine. He would make the inspection if the patients seemed to want it, to keep them happy. But Blanchard was never entirely convinced by this test. If a woman had missed two periods, however, he considered it highly likely that she was pregnant. False pregnancies could occur, occasionally. But he had developed an instinct, which he could not explain himself, which he had come to trust. A few minutes later, therefore, he told her:

“It seems, Madame de Cygne, that after all, you are going to have a child.”



The months that followed were strange times. The moderate Girondins were in the ascendant now, the Jacobins reviled. Even when gangs of gilded youths, some claiming to be royalists, attacked Jacobins in the streets, no one seemed to care.

True, the Committee of Public Safety and the Tribunal were still in existence, but their power was much muted now. Some of the unfortunates that the Jacobins had thrown in jail remained under lock and key, but others were released. Even some aristocrats who had fled abroad were allowed to return.

And as 1795 began, some of the churches—so long as they rang no bells and displayed no crosses—were being allowed to operate discreetly again.

They were times of confusion, and contradiction. But at least they were not the Terror anymore.

And so it was, in March 1795, when to add to all this chaos there was a shortage of bread on the Paris streets, that Dr. Blanchard was able to obtain permission to remove Sophie de Cygne from the Temple tower into his safekeeping, in order that she might safely have her child. After all, as he pointed out, it was one less prisoner to find bread for. And when the boy was born, no one bothered to object when he removed the baby and his mother quietly to the family château in the valley of the Loire.

Sophie called the baby Dieudonné—the gift of God. And truly, it seemed to Blanchard, that was what the baby was.



For a time, in the years that followed, Émile Blanchard and Sophie kept in touch. He was rather proud of the fact that it was he, Blanchard, to whom the noble family of de Cygne owed their continued existence. For her part, she was determined to bring up her son away from Paris, which she had come to fear. And this the doctor could well understand. Dieudonné de Cygne was brought up in the quiet of the country, therefore, and there could not possibly, Blanchard thought, be any harm in that.

Not that life in Paris was so bad. The Revolution had learned a lesson from the Terror. Gradually, a legislature with two chambers emerged, themselves subject to election and law. There were problems. Members of the Convention dominated the legislature. There were riots, effectively put down. But for four years, the new system, with a small Directory acting as a cabinet government, brought some order to the land.

Émile kept meaning to go down and visit Dieudonné and his mother, but somehow other business always intervened.

For his own life in Paris kept him very busy indeed. His practice thrived. He treated a number of politicians and their families. But perhaps the most important patient he ever acquired was a charming lady, a widow with two children, who was the mistress of Barras, one of the members of the Directory.

In itself, this was a most useful contact, but it was to lead further than Blanchard could have imagined.

For when Barras decided that it would be a good idea if Joséphine transferred her attentions to a rising young general, who was proving most useful to him, and who was clearly fascinated by her, Blanchard found himself the friend of young Napoléon Bonaparte.

“And from then on,” he would tell the younger members of his family in years to come, “I never looked back.”

For whatever the faults of the future consul and emperor of France, Napoléon was a loyal friend. Having decided that the doctor attending Joséphine was an honest and capable man, he sent patients to him throughout his reign. Often they were powerful and rich. Blanchard was well rewarded.

By the time that the emperor Napoléon’s extraordinary reign of conquest, imperial grandeur and tragedy was finally brought to an end in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo, Dr. Émile Blanchard was a wealthy man and ready to retire to the pleasant house he had purchased in Fontainebleau.

Not that the fall of the emperor affected him professionally. He was secure, he was fashionable. The restoration of the monarchy brought him more aristocratic patients than he could possibly accept.

It also caused him, quite inadvertently, to do a final good turn to the family of de Cygne.

In the year 1818, one of his noble patients asked the good doctor if he’d like to be presented to the king. Naturally, Blanchard was happy, and somewhat intrigued, to accept.

He found the king much as he’d expected: very corpulent, but with a certain nobility and dignity in his face. When the nobleman told the king that Blanchard had treated such people as Danton, Robespierre and others in the days of the Revolution, Blanchard was a little taken by surprise.

He was afraid that this information would not make him a very welcome visitor with the king, and he would hardly have blamed him. But not at all. The king was rather curious, and asked him to tell him about them. Then he asked what had been Blanchard’s most memorable experience from that time. And Émile was just wondering what to say when he remembered poor Étienne de Cygne and his son—whom he hadn’t thought about for several years.

He told the king the whole story, start to finish.

“And so this lie you told, that the lady was pregnant, not only saved her life, but turned out to be true?”

“Exactly, sire. Conception must have been a day or two before, I think.”

“It was a miracle.”

“The boy was named Dieudonné, sire, since he was clearly a gift from God. Thanks to his birth, the family continues.”

“A family, my dear doctor, who have served my own for many centuries. I had not known of this wonderful circumstance.”

He seemed quite delighted.

“Well,” he suddenly declared, “if God shows such favor to the de Cygnes, then so should their king. I shall make the boy a vicomte.”

And it gave Dr. Blanchard great pleasure, soon afterward, to write to Dieudonné and his mother to congratulate them on this happy addition to the family’s ancient honor.