Thermidor

Siobhan Carroll

 

 

From a window overlooking the Rue de Reuilly, Justine watches the aristocrats preparing to die. The men fuss over their wigs, trying to straighten them as the clods of earth rain down. The women mostly pray or clutch their children. A wild-eyed young woman stands up in the wobbling cart and shakes her fist. “Vous monstres!”

Justine doubts the woman will shout so when she sees the throng in the Place. The voices of the condemned usually give out when they see the seething crowd, the stained platform, and at the top of it all—the machine.

“Monstres!” The shouting woman is thrown down by one of the sans-culottes. The urchins cheer.

“What do you see?” The Marquis is impatient, as always.

For a moment Justine is tempted to answer honestly, quoting the words of her previous master: ‘Monsters, from the Latin mōnstrum: a portent or warning.’ But she knows better.

“I see a young woman, fresh from a convent,” she begins. The Marquis’s quill begins its quiet scritch scritch—the sound a fingernail makes inside a coffin lid. It would raise the hair on Justine’s neck, if her hair was still capable of rising. “Her hair is shorn. The soldiers have torn her blouse off. She is exposed to the elements now—you should see how she clutches herself.”

She continues in this vein for a while. The Marquis will embroider her description: he has a better imagination for depravity. But Justine is better at describing cruelty, at itemizing the things that happen as a woman’s body comes apart. Absently, she runs her hand over the seamed arm that is not hers. Somewhere in the churn of the North Sea, her real arm, swollen and puckered by barnacles, braces itself against a wave.

“Do you think she will do? Can we get her?”

Justine rolls her eyes at the window. Providing they are fresh and pretty, anyone will do. The Marquis is not interested in them for their minds, after all.

“We can get her.”

“Well,” he throws his quill down and opens his hands theatrically. “What are you waiting for?”

Ever the good servant, Justine throws on her stained cloak and wades outside. The runoff from the Place splashes up her boots, soaking the hem of her dress an inch deep in blood. In the heat, the smell of rot is oppressive; even the burning juniper branches can’t mask it. Justine adjusts her cockade and pushes her way through the clammy jostle of the crowd.

At the Picpus garden she pays the ditch-diggers the usual amount of livres. The bodies are all young and pretty, as requested. She does not see the spirited one who shouted. Perhaps her body was too battered, or perhaps she has been set aside for another buyer. Justine picks a sweet-faced girl with a flower bracelet still twined around her wrist. She is more the Marquis’s type, anyway.

The grim-faced carter looks away as she gives him directions, frowning at her Genevan accent. He does not love the new order, she reflects as she climbs up beside the corpse. He should be careful. It’s not only aristocrats whose heads end upon pikes these days.

But Justine’s head has stayed attached to her shoulders. A miracle, given Master Frankenstein’s taste for improving things. Long hours Justine spent on the slab, unable to move or speak, while her former master decided what parts of her were worth keeping.

Justine’s face and torso Frankenstein apparently thought pretty enough, or at least good enough for his Creature. Her legs Justine does not miss so much, but she sometimes gets a nagging pain in her right foot, and she wishes she could scratch it. Dr. Séguret tells her this is a delusion. But Justine knows Frankenstein left her foot in the permafrost, where it twists sideways, blue skin jabbed against a stone. Its toes flex uselessly at the frozen earth.

Imagine if Victor had severed her head from her shoulders. Without a body to control, her head might have been battered into slow ruination on the Orkney rocks, or endured the gnawing of fish. Far better to be left with head, torso, and arm intact when Victor decided to abort his feminine creation.

“It could be worse,” she says to the corpse beside her, and her words serve for both of them. She shrugs the blanket over its glazed eyes. Why dwell on the past? Justine is at the center of things now, in the city that dominates the headlines of Europe. The city that is birthing the future.

 

Citizeness Grosholtz is a pale woman with bovine eyes. Wisps of her shorn hair poke out from beneath her mob cap, testifying to the artist’s close shave with the national razor. Grosholtz’s eyes flick over the cart and she turns hurriedly away, motioning Justine to follow.

The laboratory is tidier than last time. Having spent so many hours learning the peculiarities of the Frankenstein household, Justine appreciates the cleaning of laboratories. She wonders which of their shuffling creations takes the grim task of scrubbing the floor for Dr. Séguret. Slow-witted Philippe perhaps? The seam-faced servant deposits the corpse on the table as the Madame directs, his yellow eyes turned to her in mild inquiry. Citizeness Grosholtz presses a handkerchief to her nose—an aristocratic gesture. She should be careful of it.

Dr. Séguret bounces into the room. He is an energetic young man, given to hand-clapping and shouts of excitement. His assistant, François, slinks in behind him. François reminds Justine of her former master, drab and pale, like a bent lily. His silence makes her nervous.

Dr. Séguret laughs in delight as he peels back the blanket. He picks up the corpse’s arm and lets it fall—“You see how fresh?”

François circles like a fish in a murky bowl. “I see. Maybe we try—here?”

“You prepared the models?”

Citizeness Grosholtz gestures to the wax corpse beside her, its rib cage exposed to show the organs that challenged the anatomists in last week’s experiment. Dr. Séguret and François lean in to inspect them, muttering the odd compliment to Grosholtz for her handiwork. The artist stares straight ahead, her gaze focused on another world.

Dr. Séguret examines the model’s rib cage, pointing out where François should make the incision. Holding the scalpel like a pencil between his thumb and two fingers, François traces the line down from the sternum. They will try to avoid removing more integuments than necessary, because exposure to air makes the parts dry and indistinct.

Justine lets her gaze drift away from the dissection. She has seen it all before—the Vena Saphena, the whitish surface of the womb, the greyish lungs. She is not truly needed here, not anymore. From time to time, Dr. Séguret will ask her a question—how Master Frankenstein had placed the electrode or how much of the green formula he applied—but now that he is confident of the process, the questions have become rarer.

In the cages around the laboratory, the anatomists’ creations watch the dissection in stupefied terror. Rat-headed pigeons flap awkwardly against the bars. The hybrid-mechanicals, cogs turning underneath their wax skin, whir nervously to themselves. Some of the former dogs forget themselves and try to howl, filling the laboratory with wheezes and birdlike whistles.

The experiment is concluded, the corpse sewn up. Now the galvanic switch is thrown. The liquid in the table cylinder glows electric blue as a surge of something moves around them. Citizeness Grosholtz makes a noise that might be a sob.

The crackle of vitalic machinery falls silent. Dr. Séguret leans in, studying the exposed limb dangling from the table. Its finger twitches.

“It worked,” Dr. Séguret whispers, his face still flushed with awe after all this time. “It’s alive.”

She, Justine thinks to herself. She’s alive. But the men are already turning to each other with congratulations on their lips.

 

Upstairs, in the doctor’s fine parlor, the men discuss the future. They have made marvelous advances, shattered barriers never before thought possible—but where can they present their discoveries? The Royal Academy of Sciences has been abolished, its luminaries extinguished.

“We can reverse death itself,” Dr. Séguret exclaims. “Surely that is of interest in a time of war!”

“La République n’a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes.” François inclines his wine glass to emphasize his point—it is engraved with the crest of a dead family.

“But to hide such innovations from the world. If we had connections, someone to speak for us…”

Dr. Séguret directs his last plea to his patron, who has arrived, as usual, fashionably late. The Marquis smiles thinly at the doctor’s enthusiasm. “Citizen François is correct,” he remarks, sipping his wine. “Now is not the time to attract attention.”

“Rumor is,” François says, “the tigers are quarrelling.”

The men swirl the deep, red burgundy in their glasses and contemplate things that are unwise to speak aloud.

The Marquis downs the rest of his glass and deposits it on a table. Gillette, one of the doctor’s earliest experiments, staggers to collect it.

“And where is our newest creation?”

Dr. Séguret laughs nervously. For all his embrace of the new morality, he seems unnerved by the Marquis’s presence, much as an atheist might be at coming face to face with the Devil. “The… experiment has been moved to a secure room.”

François’s lips purse. “Would you care to view her?”

“Justine will be my escort.” The Marquis turns on his heel.

In the hallway, the Marquis snorts. “These knock-kneed philosophers,” he mutters to the walls. “They boast of their violations of nature. But they turn green at my experiments. Imagine!”

Justine nods, though she knows the Marquis is not really talking to her. He rips off a dangling shred of wallpaper and drops it contemptuously on the stairs.

“They have no real understanding of nature,” he continues as they arrive at the bedroom. “Or violation.”

Reassembled from one of the suicides, stitch-mouthed Marie flinches as the Marquis approaches. He does not look at her. A worn-out toy, she is beneath his attention. Justine nods, and Marie steps aside, her face as blank as one of the Marquis’s precious sheets of paper.

Unclipping the key from her belt, Justine inserts it in the lock. It turns.

 

Sometimes, when the Marquis is at his pursuits, Justine likes to think about glaciers. In the Alps, Elizabeth would rattle off the latest news from Victor while Justine posed for her sketches. Justine remembered one letter in which Victor detailed the theories of Buffon, a philosopher who predicted that glaciers would devour the world. Standing with the ice at her back, Justine had found the idea disturbing. Now, on the other side of death, she feels nostalgic for Buffon’s apocalypse.

The Marquis does not believe in slow destruction. His violence is the violence of spectacle. Before, when Justine considered her body hers, his slashes and splatters would have horrified her. Now she knows it is not hers, and this has made all the difference.

The woman scrabbling on the floor has not yet learned this lesson. Her hands flail uselessly at the floor. Death, as Justine knows all too well, undoes one’s coordination. The woman moans, her drooling mouth trying to form words of protest. When the Marquis releases her, she staggers upright and lurches forward. The leg iron snaps her to the floor. The Marquis squints, irritated, then lashes the riding crop across her face. The mark it leaves gapes, but does not bleed.

“The little fool wants to escape,” the Marquis says. “Grab her, Justine.”

On a pebbled beach, Justine’s severed hand is drawing itself out of the waves, inch by inch. She thinks the cruel gusts of air on its skin might be seagulls, swooping closer.

In the squalid chamber Justine grabs at the woman. Her shorn hair offers little purchase, so Justine grabs the woman by her neck and hauls her backwards. She is not concerned about breakage, knowing herself how quickly reanimated bodies heal.

The woman’s fingers claw at Justine, but they can do no lasting damage. These are not Justine’s hands, after all. Her hand is on a beach in the Orkneys.

They are not hers.

They are hers.

 

At the corner of the Rue Moreau, Justine watches the courier sort through the Marquis’s letters. In addition to the usual pleading correspondence, the Marquis also receives foreign news and pornography. Sometimes he collects tidbits for Justine. This was how Justine learned of the death of her former mistress, in a letter from one of the Marquis’s procurers, sandwiched between descriptions of prostitutes.

As she listened to the Marquis hypothesize the tortures inflicted on the bride’s body, Justine had felt only an odd hollowness in her chest. Elizabeth was the one who had saved her from poverty; who’d taught her to read. When Justine was condemned, Elizabeth was the only one who’d spoken in her defense. How could Justine be kept awake by the nagging ache in a former limb, but feel only this dull sadness at Elizabeth’s murder?

She can almost hear the doctor’s voice in her head. Perhaps your new body is alive to sensations of heat, but not of compassion. Her mind veers towards—then skids away from—the image of the woman in the chamber. Justine may have no pity left, but in this, she is not alone.

The courier re-wraps the letters in wax cloth. As he hands them over, Justine sees something in his face.

“What is it?”

The man hesitates, licking his scabbed lips. “They arrested Robespierre.”

Justine is thunderstruck. She thinks of the blinking, green-spectacled man she’d seen at the Festival of the Supreme Being. “Arrested?”

“Along with other members of the Committee.” The courier smiles a death’s head’s grin. “We’ll see what tomorrow brings, will we not?”

As Justine walks back the streets are already seething. On the corners, clusters of sans-culottes mutter in low voices. Passersby keep their eyes on their feet, trying to avoid attention.

Suddenly a portly man—perhaps a butcher?— stumbles onto the cobblestones ahead, pressing a bloody hand to his face. And yet he straightens and tries to join with the crowd, an uneven, weaving stagger. A gray-haired woman strolls up behind him. To help? No. Raising a bucket high, she brings it down on the man’s head with a decisive crack. He staggers to his knees, hands raised in a mute plea for mercy.

The urchins surge forward, burying the man with flailing fists. The sans-culottes break off their conspiracies and wander into the street. Sensing the oncoming spectacle, some well-dressed footpads start towards the man, one lifting a club. The crowd closes in.

Justine walks past the ferment, wondering what prompted the woman’s attack. An insult? Why not simply denounce the man to the authorities?

But with Citizen Robespierre arrested, who knows what tomorrow could bring? The guillotine could be silenced. The world could be turned right-side up.

The old woman is right, Justine reflects. If the poor want to get their blows in, they should do so tonight.

Like a good servant, Justine thinks of warning the Marquis. But the old fox can look after himself.

Justine turns her movements over to the crowd. Together they flow in a different direction.

 

The doctor’s eyes are wide as he lets her in. He looks behind her, half-surprised, for the Marquis.

“Have you heard?” He means Robespierre, the arrest. “Does your Master have news? What does he plan to do?”

“Nothing.” Justine pushes the servant’s door shut behind her. She lowers her voice. “He intends to wait it out. But he asks that you give him your papers for safekeeping. And he suggests you make arrangements to secure more bodies, in case the laws change.”

“Every day a new terror!” The doctor laughs and mops his forehead. “We have become like the dogs in François’s experiment.”

“What dogs are these?”

“François has been testing the effects of fear on animals.” The doctor leads her through the laboratory, up the narrow staircase that leads to his study. “We put a dog in a harness, yes? So it cannot move. And then we throw cold water on it. We beat it with a stick. We teach it to fear us, so that every time it hears François open the cage door, it almost dies of terror.”

Justine thinks of the woman upstairs, the wax cooling in yellow stripes over her blackened skin. “What is the point of the experiment?”

“Ah.” The doctor is warming to his theme. “The dog learns that escape is hopeless. When you remove the harness, it will endure your beatings, even though freedom is mere steps away.”

Justine accepts the documents and transfers them to her satchel. She knows what the doctor is talking about. On her last night of life, in her cell, the walls seemed to crush her in. At least death would be an escape, she’d thought. At least death would bring certainty.

The doctor pours himself a glass of wine. His skin is waxy; the heat is getting to him. “A toast,” he says, “to us dogs.”

Justine has no glass in hand. She watches him drink, the nobleman’s bastard turned natural philosopher.

“You need not worry so much about tomorrow.”

“You think so?” The doctor’s face, when he turns towards her, is surprisingly childlike. “There are so many rumors on the street.”

“I know so,” she says comfortingly. Swift as thought, she puts her mismatched hands around his throat. She begins to squeeze.

 

In the laboratory, the wax-skinned chimeras study Justine with taxidermied eyes. Rabbits with elongated monkey arms clutch the bars of their cages. A crow’s head swivels on the end of a jar. As she swings its door open, the crow-thing flinches, but stands its ground. Because of this, Justine relents, lowering the cage to the floor. The crow-thing scuds into the shadows, swift as a water beetle.

To the other chimeras she is less kind. If they hesitate at the open doors, she tosses their cages to the floor in noisy clatters. Some of the more delicate chimera shatter on impact. Others flail in tangles of badly sewn limbs.

She kicks one of the rabbit-beasts by accident, splintering ribs. The Creature howls. Irritated, she brings her foot down a second, decisive time. It is as Saint-Just said: The Goddess of Liberty is no smiling Madonna.

Sloping Philippe staggers away from her, yellow eyes alarmed as she lifts the keys to the forbidden room. Gray-skinned Marie watches, her sewn mouth twisted in amusement.

“Wait here,” she tells them, and the instruction reassures Philippe more than any explanation. He stands aside to let her pass.

The female Creature has grown filthier since Justine saw her last. She has smeared herself with her own excrement, no doubt in the hope the stench would keep the Marquis at bay.

On a different day, Justine might disabuse her of that notion. Today, she is glad that this one is still alive, still angry, still wanting freedom. There is nobody left to reassemble corpses, now that the doctor is gone.

“Hello, sister,” Justine says to the tattered thing. She shows her the keys dangling in her hand. “Do you want to get out today?”

The anger in the Creature’s eyes is palpable. Justine can almost feel the woman’s hands wrapped around her throat, the painful compression, the dimming of the light. Would that even work?

But once freed from their shackles, the woman’s hands find her own face instead, rubbing the cut on her cheek. Philippe hovers behind the two of them, mouth gaping. Outside on the street, a rough-voiced man sings “Ça ira.”

Les aristocrates à la lanterne!

Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,

Les aristocrates on les pendra!

Justine smiles. “Come,” she says to her fellow monsters. “I have something to show you.”

 

Twilight is falling, and the streets are full of smoke. Children dart back and forth, wearing the wooden carnival masks that mark the turning of the month. Sans-culottes march in irregular groups, singing. Some carry pikes. Some carry bottles. Nobody minds the monsters.

Justine and the other Creatures stand unnoticed in the crowd, which is its own nation in the streets of Sodome. Tonight, they still rule the city.

“Follow me,” Justine says to the monsters. She raises the doctor’s severed head like a lantern. Some of the urchins, seeing her bloody trophy, come whooping and laughing to join them.

“The Festival of Thermidor!” someone shouts. Justine holds her trophy higher.

“Follow!” she cries. And they come, screaming and singing to join her.

The mob surges forward. At its head, Justine smiles like Salome, dangling the Prophet’s head from her blood-stained fingers.