Part VI

The Beauty

It was a sensual delight for l’homme rouge to see fall in the basket these charming heads and their ruby blood streaming under the hideous cleaver.

—Archives Nationale

Sucy-en-Brie, France, March 1794

When love came to me, it was in the dead of night, under cover of darkness, and always in disguise. For those were the indignities that marriage and revolution had imposed upon me, and both had done violence to the gaiety of society at the exact moment when, by the dictums of youth, fashion, and inclination, I should have been at the center of Paris’s le monde élégant.

But, alas, nothing was as it should have been.

Which was why I found myself moving stealthily about our country château in Sucy-en-Brie, where my family had for months been in self-imposed exile from the paranoia of the Jacobin government, the great mobs of sans-culottes, and the willingness of neighbor to turn against neighbor to win favor with both. Trusting not even my lady’s maid to assist me, I went from room to room and window to window to set up the signal of lights that would tell my love it was safe to come to me, then I snuck outside into the gardens to wait.

Finally, he was there, slipping through the secret little door into the park beside our home. “Oh, my Georgette,” he whispered, pulling me into his arms.

“Oh, Philippe,” I said, allowing myself to be swept up into his kisses for only a moment. “Come, we must hurry.”

Hand in hand, we raced among the early spring blooms cloaked in twilight dew until we reached the château. Inside, I removed my slippers and he his boots, and we made ghosts of ourselves until we were finally shut up in my suite of rooms, laughing and kissing.

“Did you have any trouble, my love?” I asked, feeling almost as if I could exhale in his warm, familiar presence.

He shed his short carmagnole coat and cap upon the bed, revealing to me his handsome face and rakish brown curls. Along with the pantalon he wore, every part of his outfit was borrowed costuming from the Théâtre Favart where he frequently performed. For everything was theater in France now, and Philippe and Georgette were but code names we used to hide all that we’d become to each other since I first saw Jean-Baptiste-François Elleviou sing his famed one-act opera, Philippe et Georgette, from Maman’s box at the Comédie nearly five years before. Our love had been fast and intense and exciting, full of late-night parties at the theater and stolen, heated moments wherever we could find them—our secrecy the result of my mother’s disapproval and my need to maintain an image of availability for my work at Cinquante, Paris’s most famous gambling house.

“The patrols were heavier tonight,” he said. “Executing the latest faction seems to have done little to assuage the Committee of Public Safety’s belief that a foreign conspiracy plots to invade France, assassinate Robespierre, and overthrow the Revolution.” François took me into his arms again. “But I missed you too much to stay away, mon trésor.”

“The whole of France has gone mad,” I said, concern for him—for all of us—making it hard for me to relax into his embrace. And I’d come by that concern honestly after what’d happened to my papa . . .

“It has,” he said, soothingly stroking his fingers through the long, loose golden curls of my hair, almost chasing away the troubling thoughts. “From day to day, it’s impossible to know what will happen. But we have this day, when you possess all those beaming charms that inspire the most ardent passions. Which is why I must have you now.”

François’s words wove a spell that bade me to forget the world as his mouth dipped to mine. Clever fingers went to the pink silk sash tied about the waist of my gauzy chemise à la reine. I sighed in surrender as he walked us toward the bed, toward oblivion, toward—

An insistent pounding upon the front door echoed through the château. Then again. “Open in the name of the republic!” came a loud command.

On a gasp, I broke free of the embrace and dashed for the window. A group of men gathered upon our portico while a patrol waited in formation just outside our gate, sending a shiver of cold dread down my spine. No good ever came from the arrival of self-styled patriots at one’s door. It wasn’t the first time and probably wouldn’t be the last, though we’d hoped our flight from the city would not only remove us from their sights, but also from their minds.

Someone permitted them entrance, and then the crier’s voice boomed from inside our parlor. “Search the premises!”

“Come,” I said, pulse racing as I grabbed the discarded pieces of my lover’s costume and pulled him to the closet.

François stumbled into the hanging fabric of my outdated robes à la française and the wide-hooped panniers that went beneath them. “Émilie, wait—”

“Say no more,” I whispered, hearing footsteps upon the grand staircase. “And stay hidden behind the gowns until I return for you.”

If I returned.

For the Jacobins had long been resentful of my mother for being the daughter of a marquis and for running Cinquante—the favorite gambling establishment among the city’s aristocracy and, therefore, of its royalists and moderates. That resentment extended to me, too, not only for helping her run the club, but also for not returning the interest of the men who frequented it—or wished to. Men who had now gained power, like Robespierre, recent president of the National Convention and primary defender of la Terreur, a man so powerful he’d created his own religion by proclamation a few months before; and Louis Saint-Just, the revolution’s so-called Angel of Death and the National Convention’s youngest delegate, who’d done more than anyone to convince that body to execute Louis XVI. Many times I’d dreamt of Robespierre pinning me against the wheel of a carriage the night the Convention had turned on the Girondins and ordered their detainment, except in the nightmare, Madame Roland never interrupted and I had no safe way to deny his desires . . .

I shuddered and forced the memory away, because closing Cinquante and leaving Paris hadn’t lessened that resentment. Though it’d been months since our family had retreated to Sucy, Maman still possessed enough friends in elevated places for us to learn that we were even now denounced to the Committee of General Security. After all, in a moment when everyone coveted more than what they had—not just freedom and rights, but more influence, more power, and more status, too—spiteful jealousy ran wild.

So I knew not which of us might be the patrol’s intended prey. Maman? Myself? I might not have run our club, but I’d committed the additional sin of being known for my supposed dazzling beauty.

The latter had always been for me a double-edged sword. Attracting the unwanted attention of admirers in one moment, but providing a blessed distraction in another. I only hoped it might somehow save us now.

Wrenching open the carved doors to the armoire de mariage my dear papa had given me years before, I tore through the piles of antique linens, ruffles of delicate lace, and other parts of my trousseau to find the basket of tricolored ribbons I’d worked into rosettes. Mine was the last suite on the long hallway, so I took just another moment to pin one of the cockades to the gauzy muslin at my breast. My hands trembled so much that I pricked the skin over my heart, but I couldn’t give that a thought as I spilled into the hallway with my basket. The door closed behind me just as three municipal officers emerged from my younger brother Louis’s neighboring suite.

Upon seeing me, the men nearly knocked into one another before falling into bows. It would’ve been comical were the situation not so precarious.

“Mon dieu!” I said, pressing my hand to my heart as if their presence had given me a fright, an impression beneath which there was some truth. “Is something the matter?”

“We didn’t mean to startle you, Citizeness de Sainte-Amaranthe,” the senior officer said, stepping forward. I didn’t bother to correct him, though I hadn’t gone by that family name for nearly two years. In this moment, I preferred for him to think of me as innocent, virginal, uncorrupted . . . “We received a report of a suspect upon the property.”

“Oh, dear.” I held the basket in front of me so that the fine satin tendrils of blue, white, and red spilled over the edge in plain sight. Had someone seen François? Certainly, he’d make the Jacobins a notable prize as he’d become one of the most celebrated singers in France—and though that brought him fame and stature, it also brought jealousy and a desire to be the one to take a notable down a few pegs. But if he was their prey, that would mean we were being watched even here in the country. I swallowed hard. “A suspect? Have you found anything? Are we in danger?”

“Do not worry. All appears as it should,” the man said in an officious tone as his fellows nodded.

“Well, you deserve our gratitude.” I swallowed back bile and smiled at each of them in turn. I moved closer so they could smell my rose water perfume, and I fingered the ribbon upon my breast, inviting their gazes to linger there. “I was just on my way to present these cockades I made to my family. But I would be honored if such fine citizens as yourselves would wear one.”

“The honor would be ours,” the first officer said. With sheepish nods, the commissioners agreed, and I made a little project of pinning the ribbons upon each man’s lapel, making sure to give them the same private smile I used to give Maman’s players at Cinquante. The one that made the men believe they might receive even more special attention later—and in the meanwhile, order another round of drinks or play another set at the tables. Sometimes it felt as though my whole life had been about learning to trade one mask for another. At the club, in polite society, with men . . . When I was done with the cockades, the senior commissioner gave me another bow and gestured to the grand staircase. “Merci, mademoiselle. Now, may we escort you down to your family while we complete our business?”

Still playing the innocent coquette, I readily assented and descended ahead of the men, who followed seemingly without realizing they’d never searched my rooms. Just as I’d hoped, the beautiful, innocent façade I presented hid all my secrets—not just François’s presence in my chamber, but the misgivings I shared with Maman about the Jacobins’ extremism in our revolution. Then again, how could we not question it when the Jacobins had cut down faithful servants like my papa, an officer in King Louis’s guard who’d been butchered nearly two years ago in the insurrection of 10 August?

I blinked away the sudden rushing threat of hot, angry tears.

The commissioners led me to our parlor, where they’d gathered the rest of my family—Maman, my brother, and my husband of almost two years, Charles de Sartine, at whom a sentry glared and pointed his bayonet. Despite working for the revolutionary government as a senior judicial officer in the Council of State, Charles lived forever under the shadow cast by his father. Antoine de Sartine had served as lieutenant general of the police and had the detestable habit of imprisoning people without trial. After the fall of the Bastille, the mob meant to seek their revenge against him, and so Antoine had fled to Spain, leaving Charles to prove his loyalty to the republic, which he’d done quite admirably.

But still, the people remembered.

“Are you all right, mon amour?” Charles asked as I rushed to his side.

“Quite.” I dropped my basket onto an armchair and heaved a calming breath. “The commissioners explained everything and I’m grateful to them for being so diligent.”

“As are we all.” Charles slanted me a glance that suspected too much.

Our praise made the commissioner puff up, putting his cockade on display. “It is nothing more than our duty to protect our citizens from enemies of the republic.” Just then, a clang rang out from the hallway, and the officer turned on his heel. “You there, be careful!”

On hands and knees, a boy, perhaps my brother’s same age of sixteen, gathered our kitchen utensils from where they’d scattered upon the marble floor, confiscated, no doubt, to be melted and made into weapons as was the custom whenever the authorities conducted a search. I smiled serenely until the commissioners and their patrolmen finally took their leave.

“Why would they suspect us of harboring enemies?” my brother fumed. “This revolution promised liberty, equality, and fraternity, but all it seems capable of is tyranny and death!” Louis stormed out of the room. Ever since Papa’s murder, he’d harbored a simmering anger that took little to ignite into outright rage. Not that I could blame him.

With a sad, resigned smile, Maman squeezed my shoulder. “I’ll talk to him.” Nodding, I watched her go. With her golden curls and still-pleasing figure, my mother was as beautiful as she’d ever been, with grace and polish and a pointed wit that could hold a whole salon in thrall. But as she turned away, I couldn’t help noticing how she seemed to have aged—silver now streaked through the gold here and there, and she braced her hand against the back of the settee as she passed it, as if she required the support. Once, at the zenith of French society, men had attempted to flatter Maman by telling her she and I must be sisters. But whatever youthfulness had occasioned those fawning compliments had given way under the weight of widowhood and the loss of our lives and livelihood in Paris, not to mention all her friends who had disappeared over the last year . . .

When her footsteps retreated upon the stairs, my husband pulled me aside. “He’s here again, isn’t he?”

Guilt stirred in my belly. “Charles—”

He shook me by the shoulders, dark eyes flashing and his handsome mouth set in a hard frown. “Damn it, Émilie. Now is not the time for recklessness. If this regime is willing to execute radicals like Jacques Hébert and his faction, then God help us all.”

I shuddered upon hearing the man’s name, though I regretted his death not at all. Like Marat, Hébert had begun as an angry newspaperman, aiming his poison pen first at the royal family, then at moderates like the Marquis de Lafayette, and then against the reasonable Girondins. In the process, he’d been catapulted into the political leadership of the Montagnard extremists who favored martial law, a system of Terror to root out so-called counterrevolutionaries, and a program of dechristianization for all France. And now that all the reasonable men and women had mostly been silenced, the radicals were turning on one another. “Hébert died for charging that Robespierre was not radical enough.”

“That is exactly my point,” Charles said. “France’s leaders have spent the year since Marat’s death convincing themselves that assassins and counterrevolutionary plotters lurk around every corner. And Robespierre himself has become a tyrant used to getting his way at any cost. In such an atmosphere, no one is safe.”

Weariness weighed upon my shoulders, and I sighed. Must even love wither and die because of this damnable revolution? “I know, but—”

“I told you what Marie said. As long as the Committee of Public Safety believes that some foreign faction plots Robespierre’s assassination, suspicion and calumny are having their day. The longer they cannot catch the leaders of this supposed conspiracy, the more their frustration leads them to seize anyone who could, rightly or wrongly, be suspected of intrigue, corruption, or even merely lukewarm support. You must be smart.”

At that, I flashed him a look. “I kept them from finding him, didn’t I?”

After a moment, the anger bled out of my husband’s expression. “The cockades?”

A slow grin crept over my face. “‘I’d be so honored if such fine citizens as yourselves would wear one,’” I said mockingly. But my smile fell away again. “It’s not fair that you can go to Paris to see your actress whenever you wish while François and I can only see each other at great risk.”

“It’s not,” Charles agreed as he pulled me into a comforting embrace, for we’d been friends long before circumstance had forced us to marry. Friends who’d first come to know each other through the community of Théâtre Favart, where I’d met François, and Charles had courted Mademoiselle Marie Grandmaison, an Italian actress who’d risen in popularity here in France.

When the Jacobins murdered Papa, Maman determined that the security of our family necessitated that I give up my lover and marry, preferably someone serving the new government. She’d gone so far as to invite her recommended choices to join us on a sojourn to the country, where I’d allowed her to introduce me to Monsieur Charles-Louis-Antoine de Sartine as if Charles and I hadn’t been drinking wine together with our lovers and other theater friends several nights a week. And so I married him in hopes that I could secure my family’s future—without either Charles or myself having to give up the love we’d found in others, making my marriage just one more role I played.

Now I wondered how much more of ourselves we’d have to sacrifice in an effort to make ourselves free.

“When is it all going to end, Charles?” I asked, because I couldn’t see a way out of the madness. Despair threatened to dig its claws into my heart.

He sighed and shook his head, and his voice was gentle when he spoke. “I don’t know. Marie hears that, privately, some officials are questioning la Terreur, so maybe sooner rather than later.” Charles’s work in the city allowed him opportunities to see his mistress, who was now a source of vital information. For the theater had become a hotbed of Jacobinism, and Marie passed to us secrets of policy and intrigue from inside the Convention that were recounted by several actors who’d become fiery patriots and befriended Robespierre himself.

Pulling away, I nodded. “I’ll tell François not to come for a few weeks until we know better how the winds are blowing.”

Charles tilted his head and gave me a little smirk. “And tell him I’ll give him a good knockabout if I need to.”

I rolled my eyes but appreciated Charles’s playfulness and camaraderie in that moment. For our long friendship and unconventional understanding made him the only person in whom I could confide about François. “I don’t think that will be necessary,” I said, retreating to the doorway.

“Wait.” I turned to find Charles bringing my basket of cockades. “Wouldn’t want to forget these.”

“Indeed.” I took it from him, making the blue, white, and red strands flutter. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” I said with false enthusiasm. And then I turned and raced back to the arms of my lover.

Where I could finally take off all my masks and be myself—and try to forget just how close we had come to losing it all.

THIS IS TOO great a risk, I thought as the carriage came to a hard stop before the grand town house. I wasn’t sure whether it was the night air or my own dread that caused me to shiver. I tugged my blue jacket tighter around me.

We hadn’t been in the city in weeks, yet Maman had readily accepted a coded invitation to a private gathering of those wishing to be initiated into Robespierre’s new religion, which he called the Cult of the Supreme Being. Ever since Robespierre had first announced it last December—when he’d issued a surprising proclamation prohibiting all measures contrary to the freedom of worship—Maman had begun looking at him with a sense of hope that he might be the one to restore some order after all. I feared it was her flirtation with the Jacobin’s brother, Augustin, that had helped cast the demagogue in a new light.

In my experience with the man, he did nothing that didn’t benefit himself. So I remained skeptical.

After all, how could we ever trust Robespierre when he’d built France’s current government upon a foundation coated in my father’s blood? To say nothing of how many times the so-called l’Incorruptible had tried to press his advantage upon me in the back hallways of parties or in dark shadows upon a nighttime street, transgressions I’d kept from Maman fearing she’d be so unwise as to try to defend my honor. Already, I worried that my resistance might have earned his ire, for it had never been riskier for a woman to reject a man’s advances or reveal the limitations of his self-control. Especially when anyone who crossed Robespierre ended up losing their head.

“Are you sure this is a good idea, Maman?” I whispered, finally giving voice to my misgivings.

The footman helped my mother and me alight from the conveyance, and we held up our white silk chemise dresses to keep the hems from dragging through puddles leftover from a springtime rain. Charles followed closely behind, also in a blue coat over a white outfit—all of us in the attire specified in the invitation.

Only when the carriage pulled away did Maman finally respond. “The Cult of the Supreme Being stands for ending religious persecutions, abolishing the scaffold, and restoring peace, whereupon we’ll finally be able to return to Paris and reopen our house. If anyone can bring these things about, it is Robespierre. Why, with a single proclamation, he made it safe to believe in God again. And even now, he has the Convention debating recognition of the cult as our new official religion. So we must play the odds, darling.”

She walked ahead, her stiff posture and the regal tilt of her chin forbidding further discussion. For Maman was not used to being questioned. Indeed, it wasn’t so many months ago that her influence had been such that men sometimes joked about which of their younger children they might sell off to receive an invitation to join Cinquante.

But my teeth ached from how tightly I clenched them, and I saw my own uncertainty reflected in Charles’s dark gaze. I took his arm and found a small measure of comfort in his steadfastness as he guided us up the tall staircase to the grand front doors. “I fear they’re bad odds,” I finally muttered under my breath.

“Perhaps, but we must nonetheless be entirely convincing in our enthusiasm,” Charles whispered, though we could say no more before we were being greeted and ushered inside, where all was oddly dark and quiet.

Occasional candles cast just enough light to allow us to make our way to a large parlor where perhaps a dozen others were congregated. Notable among them was Monsieur de Quesvremont, who came immediately to Maman’s side and kissed her cheeks. Formerly an intimate of the House of Orleans and a friend of Papa’s, the man had been whispering in Maman’s ear about being initiated since the Proclamation of the Supreme Being. Monsieur de Q was convinced that the end of religious persecutions, as well as Robespierre’s much-rumored design to reign over France, raised legitimate hopes of clemency for royalists.

Monsieur de Q was not alone in these hopes. Indeed, some darkly jested that Robespierre was at this moment more popular among the party of the victims than that of the executioners!

We’d barely exchanged hushed greetings before our hostess stepped to the front of the assembly. Only a few years older than me, Victorine, the Marquise de Chastenay, was as devout a believer as she was beautiful. She extended her lithe arms and seemed to hold the whole room rapt. “Come, mortals, share the immortality of the Mother of God.”

Our shoes barely made a sound upon the carpets as we moved en masse into another parlor. Three knocks rang out upon the far wall, and then a curtain billowed despite the stillness in the room. It hid yet another door through which our silent assemblage passed. I clutched tighter to Charles’s arm.

The only illumination in this new chamber was a single tall candelabra, which cast just enough light to reveal the silhouettes of several who waited for us within. We formed a line, whereupon Victorine presented each of us with a necklace. “Truth and strength,” she said, giving me a warm, vivacious smile as she helped me fasten mine on, as if we were meeting amidst the gaiety of one of Baron de Grand Cour’s magnificent suppers. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the dimness sufficiently to make out the pendants that now hung around my neck—a mirror and a dagger. The truth of reflection and the strength of the blade.

Three figures stepped into the ring of light cast by the candelabra—two young girls, who immediately knelt, and an elderly woman dressed in a nun’s black habit. I gasped.

It was the Mother of God.

Catherine Théot was her name. But she was better known among the people for declaring herself the second coming of the Virgin Mary, the new Eve, and the Mother of God. For her claims, she’d been imprisoned for years, but her persecution only strengthened some people’s belief in her. After her release, believers flocked to her, along with those who wished to hear her prophecies for a price—and we counted more than a few of our aristocratic friends among her clients. And then, after Robespierre’s proclamation, she’d proclaimed the arrival of the Messiah, the one who would comfort the poor, redeem mankind, and create a government inspired by the divine.

Most believed they knew exactly whom the Mère de Dieu meant, which was, of course, why we were here.

My pulse raced, and perspiration broke out across my brow. Whether that was from the heat quickly overtaking the dark, shrouded room or from being in the presence of the famed prophetess with whom Robespierre had joined forces in this new religion, I didn’t know.

The flickering candlelight revealed a pinched, severe face beneath her veil. She held out her hands as if in invitation. Victorine guided the first supplicant through the appropriate gestures. I watched as Monsieur de Q kissed the prophetess’s cheek and hands, then got down on his knees and bent to kiss her feet. One by one, the others did the same, until finally it was my turn to stand before her petite form. A shiver ran through me and I was intensely aware of being watched.

But the elderly woman radiated a confidence that almost promised to wipe away all my misgivings, and there was a certainty in her pale blue eyes that made me feel exposed, as if she knew the fears harbored deep inside my heart. “You are most welcome, child.”

Her words spurred me to do my duty before her. I hesitated only for the space of a breath, for I heard Charles’s voice again: We must be entirely convincing in our enthusiasm . . . So I kissed her weathered cheeks, bent to kiss her gnarled hands, and knelt upon the thick, woven rug to kiss her feet. When I rose, the infirm Sybil placed a kiss of peace upon my forehead, and though the mystic seemed kindly, I couldn’t help but count my dignity as another casualty of the times.

When everyone had presented themselves, Victorine stood before us once more. “Friends of God, prepare to meet the Supreme Being. Do you swear obedience to the Mother of God and submission to her prophets?”

“I do,” came the others’ reply a half beat before I, too, gave my answer. Charles slanted me a deep frown that told me to do better.

“Do you swear to pour the last drop of your blood for the sake of the Supreme Being, either weapons in hand or by all possible kinds of death?” Victorine asked in a tone that almost mesmerized.

“I do,” I said, hastening to answer in time with the rest despite the feeling that we were not being asked to make this vow to God at all. Years before, the Revolution’s Cult of Reason had declared God dead, and heralded liberty, equality, fraternity, freedom, and justice as supreme. Now we were allowed to believe in the deity again, but was that who these people now believe reigned above all? Or was it instead someone of this mortal plane?

After we gave our pledges, the Mother of God was escorted away and more candles were lit, revealing that none other than Maximilien Robespierre sat off to the side in a gilded beechwood armchair upholstered in blood red silk, as if he’d been orchestrating the whole of this strange ceremony. And perhaps he had. Other men sat around him, but I could only look into the assured brown eyes of the man who’d once delighted in making sport of me. But now he seemed to gaze at me with what I could only describe as reverence.

He made a show of rising slowly, gracefully. He, too, wore white and blue, though his silks were finer, his lace necktie was more delicate, and the indigo dye of his coat was bolder. Then he spoke to the newly initiated one by one. When it was our turn to receive his attention, I knew not what to expect.

He kissed Maman’s cheeks. “Grace is poured on all those who embrace the Supreme Being.”

“As I now do,” she said, bowing her head.

“And it is a credit to your whole family,” he said, making me wonder if the words contained a promise of safety. “Please also allow me to convey greetings from my brother to you, madame.” Everything in his round-faced expression read as sincere.

“Merci.” Maman gave him one of her secret, knowing smiles.

He turned next to Charles, and they shook hands. “Sartine, welcome. The whole of nature awaits its salvation, and it is only we who can deliver it.”

“Yes, sir,” Charles said stiffly. “It will be our privilege.”

We? So Robespierre saw us as all on one side? Kissing the prophetess’s feet was well worth it if that was the case.

“Indeed.” Next, he moved to me, placing kisses on each of my cheeks. “Paris’s most celebrated beauty.” My stomach clenched, for standing out as superior in any way was these days an unpardonable transgression. “Is it not the Supreme Being whose immortal hand engraves on the heart of man all things? The code of justice and equality? The decrees of liberty, faith, and justice?”

“Yes,” I whispered, wondering whether such a being truly existed, and, if so, what he might have engraved on this man’s heart.

“Yes,” he repeated fervently, brown eyes blazing as he stared at me for a moment that stretched on uncomfortably long. Finally, he continued, “He created men to help each other, to love each other mutually, and to attain to happiness by the way of virtue. That is what we do here, madame. And I am delighted to count you among us.”

This reserved and devout Robespierre was so different from the man I remembered and expected that I hardly knew how to reply. “Thank you.”

Afterward, Robespierre invited a few of us to stay for a supper of cured ham, foie gras terrine with a conserve of figs, rillettes of suckling pig, and warm, poached asparagus. I was already surprised that we’d been among those singled out for this honor, but I was further astounded when he bade Victorine, Maman, and me to sit closest to him. But perhaps what was most astonishing was the offer he made as we savored the fine meal, of which he ate very little.

“Ladies,” he said, addressing my mother and me with a glance. “I invite you to interview me, that I might make my views clear to you.”

I nearly dropped my fork upon Victorine’s fine porcelain. Maman gave a little cough as she worked to swallow a bite of the savory ham. For one did not simply question Robespierre. Not if they wished their head to remain attached to their shoulders. Was this some kind of trick?

“Citizen Robespierre,” my mother began. “Surely we could not—”

“Come now, madame.” He sat forward with his elbows upon the table. “You were until not very long ago a renowned salonnière. Your gift for sparkling conversation on the great ideas of the day is well known.”

My mother actually blushed, and her knuckles went white where she gripped the armrest of her chair.

As much as one couldn’t question l’Incorruptible, Maman also couldn’t safely refuse him. So I rushed to cover her rare speechlessness. “Is . . . is it true that the Cult of the Supreme Being stands for extinguishing religious persecutions and abolishing the scaffold?” I asked, my voice soft and meek.

A slow grin crept up his face. “Ah, leave it to you, Madame Sartine, to go right to the heart of it, oui?” He nodded to himself, clearly enjoying the way all our gazes were riveted upon his every expression, gesture, and word. “The answer to the first is unequivocally yes. A republic requires public virtue, something that can only be obtained by perfecting private virtue. Thus, religious faith and the grace of the Supreme Being are indispensable to orderly, civilized society.”

I sipped my wine and hoped he wouldn’t notice how my hand shook around the goblet. But his words made clear exactly why Hébert and his faction had been killed, for the most radical revolutionaries’ program of dechristianization ran directly counter to what Robespierre was saying now.

“As to your second . . .” He hummed and tilted his head as if in thought. “What is the goal for which we strive?” His gaze swept the table, holding the whole room in his thrall. “The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, the rule of justice and law, and a nation that safeguards the welfare of each individual. A France where all can enjoy the prosperity and glory of the republic.”

Nods and murmurs of approval circled the table, urging Robespierre on. And though I, too, nodded, something about the coolness with which he spoke unleashed a shiver down my spine.

“What kind of government can realize these marvels?” He stabbed at the table with his finger. “A democratic government. But to build this requires the public virtue of which I spoke before.” His gaze returned to me. “Democracy requires a virtuous people. Anyone who does not support democracy lacks the requisite virtue and is an enemy of the people—and is therefore deserving of the tyranny of the Terror.”

He sipped at his wine, then stared at its movement in his glass for a long moment, as if working the problem and looking for the solution.

Finally, he said, “Our peaceful republican citizens deserve all the protection we can afford them, but those who ally with foreign conspirators and seek to restore the monarchy are not true citizens but strangers and enemies among us. For them, the scaffold is swift, severe, indomitable justice. Any delay in rendering judgment against them is equal to impunity, and any uncertainty of punishment encourages the guilty. Virtue without Terror is defenseless, and so we see that the Terror flows, then, from virtue.”

For a moment, the whole table hung in a suspended silence. And then one of the men in Robespierre’s entourage rose to his feet and raised his glass. “Vive la république!” It was all I could do to keep from clutching my throat.

Still, I joined the others in rushing to rise and offer the salute. “Vive la république!” I cried with the truest enthusiasm I’d mustered all night. For nothing short of complete sincerity—or at least the convincing feigning of it—would suffice. Despite the naive dreams of my mother and my father’s friend, I perceived no hope of clemency for royalists or even moderates in the thinking of a man who believed that his political opponents deserved death. To say nothing of the warm, thoughtful charm with which he’d talked about the Terror as if he wasn’t discussing cutting off the heads of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, in front of one another and a bloodthirsty crowd!

Which was when I knew for sure what surviving this revolution would require of me. Not just that I accept my papa’s death and the precariousness of life without him. Not just the sacrifice of my love, or the gaiety that should’ve been the right of a young belle of nineteen. And not just my belief in God, the practice of my religion, and my dignity. Nay, the price of my and my family’s survival was the complete submission of my selfhood to the role of rabid patriot.

The truth of that had been staring me in the face for months. Perhaps even years. But having heard Robespierre spell out his intellectual intolerance in such brutal plainness after praising our initiation into a society that demanded the sacrifice of our very blood, I finally understood. And it was as if my whole life of learning to play my part and exchange one mask for another had been preparing me for this role.

In the space of one moment, I felt as if I’d aged a lifetime.

And in the next, I donned the costume of my warmest and most adoring smile and turned it upon the man at the head of the table basking in our praise and adulation.

If keeping my family and myself alive meant that I had to act the part of Robespierre’s faithful admirer every second of every day until someone finally cut his head off, I would gladly do just that.

“I HAD A terrible nightmare last night,” Maman said two mornings later after having remained abed until noon. “You will laugh at me, but I dreamt I was the mother of three bats.” She blinked back tears and gave off such a doleful and dejected air that I was immediately alarmed.

“It was just a dream, Maman,” I said, going to her and feeling her forehead. “Are you unwell?” I despised seeing her brought so low.

Just yesterday we’d received word that the Revolution had devoured yet another old friend and great mind—the Marquis de Condorcet, who used to hold everyone in his thrall at the gambling tables with his predictions for the future. Some months ago, a warrant had been issued for the arrest of the marquis for the unpardonable crime of debating the language in France’s new constitution, despite being a member of the committee that’d been tasked with drafting the document. He’d been forced into hiding but had been found out—or betrayed. And died in a jail cell.

Already people whispered that his jailers had murdered the old philosopher because he was too well loved and respected to be publicly executed.

His poor wife! I remembered with great fondness the marquise’s kindness and wit, and the friendship we’d struck up after she’d bade me to call her Grouchette and I’d covered for her speechlessness with the Marquis de Lafayette, with whom she’d seemed to be desperately infatuated. But that was before she’d married Condorcet. From all accounts, it had become a true love match.

My heart ached for my friend’s loss, especially when Maman said, “She had to divorce him, you know. He pleaded with her do it. Otherwise, they’d have seized everything and put their poor little orphaned daughter on the street. She had no choice, even if it broke her heart. Mothers have no choices—not even mothers of bats.” Shaking her head, Maman stepped to the windows of the solarium and stared out at the ornate gardens beyond. “Bats are creatures of the night. Symbols of death and rebirth . . .”

I exchanged a glance with my husband, where he sat playing backgammon with my brother, whose attention was also on our mother. Maman had rarely been one to give in to melancholy, even after Papa died, and it was plain that her unusual sadness distressed Louis as much as it did me. I put my arm around her. “The weather is glorious. Let’s take a turn about the gardens.”

“Not now, darling.” She managed the faintest of smiles before drifting away like a wounded bird. And I could only let her go, for there was no role I could play that would change the reality of our friends disappearing one by one by one . . .

Despite the beautiful sunshine, the lively conversation occasioned by the arrival of one of Charles’s friends, and a lovely al fresco dinner amid the new blooms of our garden, a feeling of darkness hung over the whole château, as if the house knew something we didn’t and was trying to warn us.

But the true warning came from another quarter altogether. A most surprising quarter.

We were lounging in robes and slippers in the sitting room when there was a sudden knocking upon the back door. At ten o’clock at night . . .

Charles jumped immediately to his feet. “Stay here,” he commanded, rushing into his study from whence he quickly returned, flintlock pistol in hand. The candlelight flashed off the bright steel surfaces of the barrel and lockplate, causing my heart to thunder against my breast, and I thought to beg him not to leave us there. But before I could, my husband disappeared.

“It’s all right,” I said aloud, though I knew not whether I meant to comfort myself or my mother, whose face had gone pale.

After an impossibly long minute, Charles returned with an envelope. “It’s addressed to you, Mother,” he said, taking the missive to Maman. “Whoever delivered it made off through the deer park as soon as I opened the door. I heard the retreating mount.”

My mother carefully unfolded the letter. Her eyes and mouth grew wide with shock. “We’ve been denounced.”

“Again?” I asked, even as dread lanced through my veins. Because while we had been denounced repeatedly—for everything from running our gambling parlor, to hosting dinners for one hundred crown per head, to Maman’s supposed impertinence and haughty manners, and many other supposed offenses besides—I’d never seen her react with such utter fright.

Charles took the page from her shaking hand and read aloud:

“Your family has been caught in the tempest of denunciation. Charges of complicity in a foreign conspiracy are being drawn up even now. Fly with all haste.”

Charles blinked at me, his face ashen.

Heart in my throat, I flew to his side and peered at the letter for myself, half hoping Charles had somehow misunderstood. But of course he had not. Moreover, a splatter of ink revealed the obvious haste with which the missive had been written, lending its warning all the more credence. “It’s unsigned,” I managed.

Charles peered at me with desolation in his dark eyes. “It doesn’t need to be signed. It’s the handwriting of Robespierre himself.”

I gasped. The man whose libidinous advances I’d many times fended off, and who spoke so calmly of the justice of murdering royalists . . . was warning us? I was immediately suspicious.

As if hearing the man’s name roused Maman from the melancholy that had gripped her all day, she rose to her feet. “Are you certain?”

He gave a single nod. “I’ve seen enough of his correspondence come through the Council of State office to recognize it.”

“Then we must heed his advice.”

The decisiveness of my mother’s words sent my pulse into flight. “But why would l’Incorruptible warn us? What if this is a trick or a test?”

“I don’t know,” Charles said. “Perhaps because of our vow to the Cult of the Supreme Being? Or perhaps he warns us as an admirer of the women in this family. His fondness for Paris’s two Sainte-Amaranthe beauties was on plain display the evening that we pledged.” Charles took my hand and looked at me with a devastating mix of sadness and affection. “What if it’s not a trick? Ever since the execution of Charlotte Corday, the National Convention has suspected foreign conspiracies and assassination plots coming from every quarter, even as the police have been unable to apprehend even one aristocratic conspirator. The failure of their investigation is an embarrassment for them, and it’s made it permissible and even necessary for them to suspect everyone.”

That was true enough. The general feeling of apprehension over conspiracies to restore the monarchy was so strong that no one in Paris would have been surprised to learn one morning that the entire Convention had been massacred and King Louis XVII had been installed on the throne! But Charles was right, we had far more to lose by assuming the warning was false if it was not.

“Do we go to Grandpapa’s then?” I asked, for when we’d first retreated to the country, Maman had told me that if we had to flee farther, her ancestral home was where she wanted to go as it was so far distant from Paris.

With steel in her spine and in her voice, my mother had a ready answer. “Yes, we go to Besançon, and from there into Switzerland. Charles, have the groom prepare the carriage.” She turned to me. “Émilie, wake Louis. Both of you pack just like we discussed. Take only what you must.”

We flew into a panicked rush of preparations to leave our lives and all our worldly possessions behind. Not to mention our country, which in trying to cure one disease, had caused another. And its malignancy finally threatened to consume us.

It was the moment that we’d secretly feared but never allowed ourselves to fully believe would arrive.

“Louis, wake up,” I said, lighting the candle on his bedside table. “Louis!”

He came awake on a gasp, eyes squinting at me as he lifted his head. “What are you doing?”

“Get up and dress, then pack a satchel with a few essentials.” It was only searches like the one we’d endured weeks before that kept us from having bags packed and ready for flight.

His feet hit the floor. “There’s trouble?” The shadows on his face made him appear older. A younger version of our beloved papa.

“Yes. Make haste, we leave for Grandpapa’s as quickly as we can.”

“Grandpapa’s?” He rose. “But that’s a three-day ride.”

“All the more reason to hurry.” I rushed into my own room and donned the gauzy dress I’d worn earlier. I threw an empty valise upon the bed and rushed to collect the few pieces of my wardrobe and trousseau I couldn’t do without. Was this really all one packed for the rest of their lives?

But neither the answer nor my efforts mattered, because at that very moment, pounding at the front door nearly shook the whole château. “Open in the name of the republic!”

And this time I knew that neither my beauty, my acting, the truth, nor even our innocence could save us.

* * *

Sainte-Pélagie Prison, Paris, France, April 1794

Just as we’d been warned, we were charged with conspiring with Jean, the Baron de Batz, in a vast foreign conspiracy against the republic with the aim of restoring the monarchy. Myself, Maman, Charles, and even my sixteen-year-old brother, Louis.

The baron had been an adviser to King Louis XVI before the insurrection of 10 August, so my papa had many occasions to see the man at the Tuileries. But Maman and I had only met him socially a handful of times before the king’s imprisonment and Papa’s murder. At the king’s execution, the baron had reportedly attempted to stir the crowd of onlookers to save their king and been forced to flee France when he failed.

We were beside ourselves trying to understand how we were supposed to have known him well enough to have conspired with him, since we hadn’t seen him in nearly two years!

Neither had the French authorities, despite a six-month-long hunt for the baron and his ringleaders. Since the Committee could not discover the true offenders, they diverted the accusations toward the innocent, whom they made to bear the consequences of their own incapacity.

Which was how we found ourselves imprisoned at the infamous Sainte-Pélagie, with its thick stone walls, oozing dirt floors, bone-rattling cold, and bottomless despair.

“You have a visitor,” one of the guards said, calling to me as he came to the bars of the cell my family had been moved to just that morning. “Ten minutes.” He retreated to reveal a voluptuous black-eyed beauty with cascading brown ringlets and a yellow gown that looked out of place amid the dreariness and next to our shabbiness, even after just two days.

Marie!

I traded glances with Charles as we all huddled at the bars to see why my husband’s lover had come.

“Mademoiselle Grandmaison, what news?” my husband asked, his voice strained. His barely concealed emotion made me a little jealous that it wasn’t my François who’d come. Then again, it was a risk for anyone to associate with us now, which made me especially grateful to Marie.

“I’ve learned the main evidence against you,” she said in a hushed voice, and then she turned her pained, sympathetic gaze on me. “First, there have been reports of a disguised man coming and going from your country house, and they are persuaded it was the baron.”

“That’s preposterous,” Maman bit out.

My stomach plummeted, and sudden dizziness forced me to grip the bars. “I’m sorry,” I said. Were we truly all to lose our lives because of who I loved? “This is all my fault. I’m so sorry.”

Maman frowned, confusion plain on her face as she looked from me to Marie to Charles. Then understanding dawned, and her suspicious gaze cut to me again. “Who was it?”

Tears threatened, but I blinked them away as I looked into the eyes of the woman who’d taught me how and when and which masks to don throughout my life—and with whom I’d worn the biggest mask of all in having spent the last two years going against her wishes. “Monsieur Elleviou.”

My mother blanched and glanced at Charles as if astonished I’d admitted to my infidelity before him, but he was shaking his head and peering at me with sad understanding. “This isn’t your fault, Émilie.”

He was generous to say it, even though it wasn’t true. “You warned me, Charles.” Sadness welled up inside me, and it was the first time since the patrol had arrived at our house the night before that despair threatened to overwhelm me.

“Am I to understand that you knew about this?” Maman asked my husband.

“Maman.” I winced at the depth of her shock and censure. For though I knew she’d disapproved of François, as the mistress to more than one influential aristocrat, I never expected her to have such a care for the propriety of the situation. “This isn’t his doing—”

“Ladies, please,” Charles said in a rare show of temper. “The guard will be returning to escort Marie away. If we must discuss the private understanding that exists between myself and my wife, let us do it after we hear all there is to know.” Without waiting for our response, he turned back to his lover. “What is the other evidence?”

Her gaze locked with his, some intimate communication passing between them. “That . . . that I facilitated meetings between you and the baron at Théâtre Favart.”

Charles sighed, then looked to me again. “See? Not your fault after all. Years ago, the Baron de Batz frequently attended performances there and became a supporter of the stage. So they think they’ve connected me to him as well.”

I took his hand, heartbroken for the both of us. That love should be responsible for our predicament was as ludicrous as it was devastating.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Only whispers.” Marie looked both ways down the empty stone corridor, then leaned closer. Her voice dropped into a whisper. “That the bitterness of important men who Émilie rejected made her a target.”

I gasped. “Robespierre?” If so, it made his assistance last night even more confusing—or it confirmed that there’d been even more skullduggery afoot than we realized. And, by God, after we’d prostrated ourselves before him by joining his cult! Had he been mocking us the whole time?

“I’ll bet it was that ruthless disciplinarian, Saint-Just,” Maman said. “That puppy always had an eye for you and was jealous that despite all his social climbing he never rose sufficiently to attend my salons.”

Saint-Just? For a moment I was stunned. Could the so-called Angel of Death have really been so wounded by the nervous rejection of a naive fifteen-year-old girl that he’d employ such brutal revenge for it four years later?

If that was the character of France’s new republican citizens, then there was no hope of justice for anyone except the demagogues, tyrants, and deplorable opportunists among us.

“I cannot believe it,” I managed, my head spinning at the thought that I should be punished for how my appearance made men react. So the value of my life was truly to be determined by whether I’d spread my legs for the right man. It was one thing to know such ideas about my sex existed, but a whole other thing to bear the application of such a principle to the question of my very survival.

Maman breathed a sigh of resignation, and I hated the defeat in it. “If it’s true, then I must accept the blame. For I was the one who displayed your beauty as an attraction at Cinquante.”

“No, Maman. Our evenings there were nothing but a delight.” I shook my head, anger steadily replacing the sadness and shame inside me. “If my supposed beauty is the cause of our arrest, what it truly reveals is that this revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity are meant for men alone.” It’d only been five months since the Jacobins had executed playwright and philosopher Olympe de Gouges for daring to argue that if a woman had the right to mount the scaffold, she must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform—a right that she exercised again and again until they silenced her altogether.

The realization sweeping over me now ought to have come upon me then. But even as the injustices had mounted against others over these past months, we’d allowed some part of our hearts and brains to rationalize them away until we’d all but accepted as normal the political persecution of one group after another. Perhaps it was naivete or disbelief or fear. Any means of coping with la Terreur all around.

Until it came for us too.

And de Gouges wasn’t the only woman whose independent thinking forced her to kneel before the nation’s razor. Madame Roland, the wife of the former minister of the interior, was rumored to have authored some of his official correspondence with such a sharp pen that it cost Monsieur Roland his ministry. Worse, after her husband’s fall, the Jacobins blamed his wife’s influence for every word and act they found objectionable. Olympe’s blood had barely dried upon the blade before Madame Roland, who once rescued me from a difficult moment, met the same fate.

And to think that I perhaps stood in the same cells that had confined both these ladies. Perhaps their spirits roamed within this ancient prison, ill at rest for the injustices done to them and the ongoing misogyny of the Revolution’s leaders. For a moment, I imagined they were still here with us, silent witnesses to the struggles of the living—and I wondered how they might judge me.

Or how they might influence me . . .

“Marie,” I said, inspiration striking, “will you carry a message to François for me?”

“Of course.”

The guard appeared behind her. “Time’s up.”

My heart took flight as the words rushed out of me. “Tell him all that has transpired and implore him to ask for an interview with the members of the Committee.” It was a risk, I knew, but perhaps François’s fame and popularity would offer all of us protection.

“Come now unless you wish to join them, mademoiselle,” the jailer groused.

My plea spilled out faster as she took halting steps toward the door. “If he confesses that he was the mysterious individual, his testimony could clear our names.”

“I will,” she said as the guard all but dragged Marie through the doorway.

FOR DAYS, WE heard nothing. And then it was as if every prisoner’s outside eyes and ears brought news.

Another faction of Robespierre’s opponents, this one under the leadership of National Convention deputy Danton, had been executed. Their crime: vying with Robespierre for power and advocating that France attempt to make peace with its continental neighbors. Naturally, such an idea made the faction vulnerable to charges of complicity with the foreign conspiracy. But the Dantonists weren’t the only ones to find their heads separated from their shoulders. Word reached us again and again that the pace of arrests and executions escalated, touching every sort of people until there was almost no family in all France that didn’t feel the sharp edge of the blade.

Which seemed increasingly likely to be our fate too.

For when Marie finally returned, it was with tears in her eyes as she relayed her conversation with François. “He finds such a measure repugnant and believes it would be useless, and says his grief for you leaves him in no fit state to take action. I’m so sorry, Émilie.”

He wouldn’t even try? It was one thing to have risked all for love, but quite another to learn that only one of us was truly willing to take that risk. And after I’d protected him that day at our château. The coward! My chest ached with a gripping hollowness that turned white hot, and I found his grief not even a cold comfort, especially as I realized that having spread my legs for a man hadn’t guaranteed my safety after all. I scoffed. “Was that all he had to say?”

His expression as dark as a gathering storm, Charles put his arm around my shoulders, his strong embrace keeping me from flying to pieces.

Marie forced a smile and a false cheer into her voice. “He . . . he still hopes that a thorough inquiry will bring light to your innocence or that you’ll be forgotten in prison like so many others until the revolutionary troubles are over.”

Hopes? He hopes? “Merde!” I spat, for I put no stock in such wishful thinking, nor in the speculation running rampant that the killing of the factions was a sign that the Revolution was coming to an end. Because if that wasn’t true, François’s cowardice might’ve just signed our death warrants. And I wasn’t willing to do nothing until it became clear whether I was right or wrong. That night, I whispered to Maman, “Perhaps if you appealed to the brother of l’Incorruptible.”

She touched her forehead to mine. “You are my daughter, aren’t you? I’ve already done it.”

But no reply came from Maman’s admirer.

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, we were suddenly informed that all the members of our family were to be moved across the city to a house of detention called the Anglaises. The jailer’s cart was cramped and jolting, and our countrymen skirted their gazes away from the slatted windows as if merely looking upon us might bring trouble their way. But we could hardly be bothered by such a thing when it was the first time in weeks that we’d breathed fresh air or felt the sun on our faces. So it was a crushing torment to return to confinement, this time within the small barren cells of a former Benedictine convent confiscated by the Jacobins for government use.

And then my mother fell ill with a rattling cough that drained her energy and her appetite until I feared she might never again rise from her sickbed. More than a month had passed since our arrest, and between my worry for Maman, my fear for all of us, gnawing hunger, and the unending monotony of this horrible place, I sometimes feared I might go mad. So I attempted to distract myself and rouse Maman by recounting to her the news as it reached us.

“Maman, Robespierre did it. He had the Cult of the Supreme Being established as the official religion of the Republic.” There was no questioning the man’s ability to see an idea through from germination to reality, and now I acknowledged that perhaps Maman had been right to think we should align ourselves with his mysticism. “I think that could be good news for us, don’t you? Just as you suspected.”

“We can only hope,” she said in a flat, quiet voice before looking away.

But not all the news was of a hopeful nature. For we learned a few days later that the king’s sister, the devout Madame Élisabeth, had been executed. And supposedly against Robespierre’s will!

Like Condorcet, much of the public respected and loved the princess, viewing her very differently than her belle-soeur the former queen. But unlike Condorcet, who had undeniably been active at the center of the Revolution’s political whirl, Élisabeth’s life had been devoted to charity not politics. So she was widely regarded as innocent and the accusations at her trial that she had molested her nephew the dauphin had horrified many. Moreover, stories already multiplied about how she’d kept her faith until the end, going so far as to comfort and reassure her fellow victims that they would soon lay down the trials, injustices, and pains of this life for a more glorious one in heaven.

“Maman,” I said, hoping she, too, would find some solace in this part of the tragic story. “When they took her head, the crowd did not cheer. And people say that the scent of roses filled the square. Some say it was a miracle.”

When my mother finally spoke, her voice was weak. “Are the people aroused against Robespierre for this?”

I nodded, and Maman turned over to face the wall beside the narrow pallet we shared. “Give Louis my rations” was her only response.

Other news that reached us filled me with a sense of righteousness. After years of debate, the National Convention had several months ago outlawed slavery in its colonies—an expedient step the growing revolution on the far-off island of Saint-Domingue had forced them to take. But it was apparently too little too late, because I’d heard the guards whisper that France had lost control of nearly the entire colony now as the British and the Spanish came to the aid of the black forces with the goal of expelling the French.

“An actual foreign conspiracy,” Charles said, wryly. “One the Jacobins brought on themselves.”

“Yet here we sit in this miserable place,” I bit out, “imprisoned because of an imaginary one.” I found myself hoping the black rebels broke free of France, if for no other reason than to hurt the corrupt Convention.

I couldn’t arouse Maman at all to relate this news, as she was too weak with fever to remain awake. What could I do?

I found myself thinking about the dignity of the princess’s last hours. Élisabeth might have railed against the injustice of the accusations against her, or complained about her ill-treatment, or broken down in a dozen other ways. Instead, she’d turned her care and concern outward toward her fellow victims.

I resolved to do that too.

I mopped Maman’s sweaty forehead with a cool cloth I begged from one of the guards. I tried to cheer and distract my brother with stories from our childhood and by playing a made-up game using naught but little pebbles we found upon the hard floor. And I showered my husband with affection and appreciation, for he struck a deal with a guard to bring us extra rations of food and herbal medicines from the apothecary in exchange for payment from Marie at the theater.

“You’re a good man, Charles. I am fortunate to have you for my husband,” I said one night when I awoke to find him sitting in the corner instead of on the little pallet he shared with Louis.

He bumped my shoulder and gave me a rueful smile. “Have a care, Émilie. You’ll make me think you’ve fallen in love with me at long last.”

I stared at him in the darkness, only the moonlight through the small window offering any illumination, and was stunned to feel a welling pressure in my chest. “I do love you,” I whispered. Sudden tears filled my eyes at the realization that I’d come to cherish him as much more than a friend. When had that happened? “You’re the only one who has ever accepted me just as I am and valued me for more than the youthful beauty that nature must soon diminish.”

“Oh, my darling girl. My heart is yours and always has been.”

I gasped. “What do you mean?”

He kissed me and pulled me against him. “I have loved you from nearly the moment I first met you.”

His words made me ache utterly. “But then . . . why . . .” I struggled to untangle the knot of memories and thoughts and emotions inside me. I’d already been with François when first I’d met Charles and Marie, who found each other soon thereafter. “. . . why didn’t you—”

His fingers fell upon my lips. “I was happy as long as you were happy. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

And though he’d had me before, the way we came together in the darkness of that cell was altogether different. For the first time, I wasn’t playing a role with Charles. Instead, I could be and could give him my true self—who was just a girl daring to hope that she’d found a happy future in the arms of the man she loved. Our hushed union was full of understanding and soul-deep connection. A moment of perfection amid the ruins of France.

Afterward, Charles cradled me against him, and I whispered, “Do you think, if we are released—”

“When,” he said, stroking my hair. “When we are released.”

I nodded, finding strength in his certainty. “Do you think, when we’re released, that we might come to a new . . .” In a rare fit of embarrassment, I searched for the words that expressed my desire and worried that he’d think my request selfish. For his lover hadn’t abandoned him as mine had.

Charles’s fingers tipped up my chin so that he could look into my eyes. “Charlotte-Rose-Émilie Davasse de Sainte-Amaranthe, would you consent to be my wife? And mine alone?”

“Yes,” I managed, utterly overwhelmed. Elation filled me with such a lightness of being, and it was as vital as it was out of place amid all this despair.

“And I pledge to be your husband, forsaking all others,” he said before sealing our vows with a kiss.

But in the days that followed, circumstances threw more and more shadow over the lightness I’d found. We learned that there’d been assassination attempts on both Robespierre and Collot d’Herbois, the butcher who’d killed thousands in Lyon last autumn and was now a member of the Committee of Public Safety. Suspicion gripped all Paris and the arrests again accelerated, crowding our cells with so many new arrivals that our already meager rations of corn and a watery vegetable soup were halved. And then, in the wake of Robespierre’s election to the presidency of the National Convention, that body passed a law that made me tremble. For the Revolutionary Tribunal that adjudicated the cases of all those accused in the Terror was transformed into a court of condemnation without need of witnesses.

More than two months had passed since our arrest. Occasionally, I allowed myself to believe that we had been forgotten after all. But if we were still to be tried, our chances for acquittal would be far worse than if we’d been tried under the old system. Maybe Maman’s letter to Augustin Robespierre explained our long neglect. If so, perhaps we’d never stand before any tribunal at all. It was that slender hope to which I clung.

THE MIDDLE OF June brought an unusual heat wave that turned the old convent into an oven. Prisoners died in such numbers that the stench of rotting flesh combined with the reek of unwashed bodies and overfull chamber pots was enough to make us retch. Finally, the warden offered us the smallest of mercies—the opportunity for groups of prisoners to take the air in the square green courtyard that sat at the center of the Anglaises. Our respite lasted only fifteen minutes, but the reprieve from the horrors accumulating inside the jail lifted my spirits enough that I could imagine surviving for one more day. And then one more day after that.

Standing in the dappled sunlight, I tipped my face to the sky and inhaled a deep, cleansing breath. Once I’d prized the finest silks and collected pearl strands and every manner of paste jewelry . . . now I could’ve fallen to my knees in worship of the sun.

My spirits were further lightened when I recognized a face amidst the strolling prisoners one day. For a moment, I struggled to place the wraith of a young woman, her brown locks long and scraggly, and the hollows beneath her eyes a deep purple. And then, in my mind’s eye, I saw her. The fearless fruit seller who’d risked our butler and my mother’s ire by forcing her way into a party at our salon so that she could deliver a letter from François . . .

Louise something . . . Louise Audu!

“Mademoiselle Audu,” I said, recalling how much I’d appreciated her pluck.

She whirled on me and charged, holding out a stick as if it were a saber. “You think you will sneak up on me as you did them?”

I stumbled away until my back came up against the wall of the convent. “I’m sorry,” I cried, my pulse racing as confusion swamped me. “I didn’t mean to sneak . . . Louise, please, I only meant to say hello.”

Glaring, she held the tip of her stick a mere inch from my chest, eyes wild and distant. And that was when I noticed the rat’s nest of her hair and the way her dirty shift hung on the too-apparent frame of her bones. “You aristocrats are all alike. Thinking you can use us and discard us. Just like you did to my maman and my friend.” She spat on the ground. “Well, not me. You won’t use and discard me.” She jabbed the stick against the bare skin above my breast.

I choked back a cry, for the volume of Louise’s ranting had caught the notice of a guard who appeared to be debating whether it was worth his time to intervene. I hoped he wouldn’t. Something terrible had happened to the spirited girl I’d met, and my heart was just sick over it, sick of all the ways in which this revolution had used and discarded so many of us.

Perhaps that was why I managed to offer her kindness instead of anger at her treatment of me when I said, “Louise, I mean you no harm. I’m still grateful for the way you risked yourself to deliver a letter to me years ago. Do you recall? You shouted my name and brought the entire party to a halt, and then you stayed to eat.”

Her gaze narrowed and roamed over my face, and her head twitched in what seemed an unconscious tic. “And I swiped a whole plate of macarons into my basket.”

I laughed. “So that’s what became of them.”

Her mouth slid into a slow smile. “You were amiable.”

“Of course,” I said.

Just as soon, her glare returned. “But you’re an aristocrat, which means you can’t be trusted.”

I shook my head. “Are we really so different, Louise? Look around, we’ve suffered the very same fate.”

For just a moment, it seemed as though I might’ve gotten through to her, but then hatred twisted her harsh features once more. “We are nothing alike.” She emphasized her point with another jab of the stick, and then she stepped back. “Stay away from me, royalist scum. Or I’ll run you through like it’s the tenth of August all over again.”

I gasped at the reference to the attack on the Tuileries. “You were there?”

“I was no mere bystander,” Louise sneered in offense, and her head jerked in another tic. “I was a decorated soldier. The Paris Commune recognized my bravery and patriotism with the ‘Sword of Honour.’”

Trembling, I stared at her anew, caught between horror on the one hand and defeated resignation on the other. Thank God Maman hadn’t been up to taking the air, because I wasn’t sure she had strength enough to face the girl whose very sword might’ve put an end to my father’s life. It was almost more than I could bear myself. My breath caught and my hands fisted, and it was all I could do to keep from launching myself at her and throttling her delicate neck.

But what would that get me? Perhaps a beating from the guards, or separation from my family. And Papa would still be dead . . . as would Louise’s maman and sister.

It was that last thought that drained the fight from my body. I hated the Jacobins for what they’d done to my father. And if she hated royalists for what they’d done to her family, how could I blame her? Especially when, in the end, Louise had fared no better than I had. Finding this grace of understanding wasn’t easy, and the grief I still carried wished to rise up in outrage against her. But it struck me with such clarity—there were angels and demons on both sides, and I wondered if anyone truly knew the full accounting of good and evil that’d occurred these past five years, or if anyone ever would . . .

I thought once more of Princess Élisabeth’s dignity and compassion and decided that whatever wrongs Louise might’ve perpetrated had been revisited upon her enough already.

The guard rang the bell signaling the end of our respite.

“Adieu, Louise,” I managed.

She blinked and her eyes narrowed. “How do you know my name?”

The question brought tears to my eyes, but I dashed them away. If I allowed tears to fall in this place, over a once-fierce girl losing her senses or anything else, I might not ever get them to stop.

We’d all lost so much. Too much. But still, the Revolution raged on, taking even more.

* * *

Conciergerie Prison, Paris, France, June 17, 1794

“Did you make an attempt upon the lives of Robespierre and Collot d’Herbois, representatives of the people?” the president of the Revolutionary Tribunal asked.

I sat trembling, my head still spinning over how fast our lives were unraveling. One moment, we were asleep in our cramped cell. And the next, we were being hauled out of the Anglaises and roughly shoved into a prison cart by an angry usher to the Tribunal who’d grumbled that he’d never before had to visit seven different jails to find prisoners gone missing from the Tribunal’s register.

We arrived at the Conciergerie just before daybreak, and I shuddered as the cart rolled through the foreboding gate of the prison that was also the home of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Inside, the registrar was frustrated by the apparent disorder of our paperwork, and he fired a series of impatient questions at us about why there’d never been an inquiry into our case and how we’d been so long imprisoned without taking part in even preliminary proceedings. We knew no more about these violations of judicial procedure than he did . . . unless la famille Robespierre had, after all, been trying to protect us by erasing our confinement from the record so thoroughly that none of the authorities even knew where we were.

Yet, even if such a ruse had been going on during these long months, it now appeared that not even the Robespierres had the power and influence to shield us forever. When the clock tolled ten in the morning, we were lined up with dozens of others, more than fifty in all, as haggard and terrified as ourselves. A narrow wooden door opened at the front of the line, letting in the warm glow of sunlight and the loud roar of shouts and applause. One by one, we were pushed out of doors onto an immense tier of benches overlooking the public enclosure of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

The registrar shouted a roll call of all our names.

Each new victim received a new round of hooting, hissing, and jeering from the spectators crowded all around the platform.

Then it was my turn.

“Émilie de Sartine, née de Sainte-Amaranthe,” a man called out.

For the space of one heartbeat, I was shamed by the dirty, limp cascade of my hair, and by the way the white gauze of my dress had turned a dingy brown. But such things no longer mattered, did they? Appearance—even beauty itself—meant nothing in a world in which innocence was no defense from accusation. So I lifted my chin, straightened my spine, and stepped into the light.

The sheer number of eyes upon me was in itself overwhelming, for there was not a free space in the entire courtyard. Red-capped spectators pushed one another and strained for a chance to see the most beautiful girl in all Paris brought low. Lewd taunts rang out from some quarters, but enough others fell silent that the roar dulled to a low rumble. And then the dizzying moment of presentation was over, and a gendarme accompanied me to a seat next to my mother.

When my family had been reunited upon the rough-hewn benches, I clutched Charles’s hand on the one side, and Maman’s on the other. Poor Louis lost his fight against tears and buried his face in Maman’s shoulder. And, dear God, there were familiar faces among the other victims. The Vicomte de Pons, a warm and generous man and another of Maman’s admirers, to whom Louis and I bore such a striking resemblance that tongues wagged about our true parentage, now sat just behind me and gave me the saddest smile of affection and greeting.

And, oh, poor Marie, who’d been such a friend and a help to us, along with her most trusted servant and her landlady, were presented in their turn. For less than a heartbeat, my gaze locked with Marie’s, and I felt a pang of guilt that, in what could be our final hours, I’d won Charles’s love at her expense. But then Charles squeezed my hand and looked at me with such longing that I cast away that guilt, because to find love amidst terror was too miraculous a thing to ever regret.

I couldn’t decide if it was a solace or a further outrage that François was not among the crowd of the accused, but even his cowardice was no reason that he should die.

But there was one person whom I was grateful into my very soul was not there. For the first and only time, I found myself glad that Papa was dead. To be happy about my father’s murder was so despicable a thought that a sharp pain momentarily seized my breast. But I was certain that his death would’ve been all the more painful if he’d fallen at the hands of this mockery of justice than having fallen in defense of king and country. Certain, too, that seeing his beloved family here awaiting their fate would have been worse to him than death.

When all the prisoners were seated, the Court entered. Jacobins all, of course.

An usher commanded silence, and then the president of the Tribunal, wearing a tricolored ribbon around his neck and a black-plumed hat, rose and read from a document: “This session of the Revolutionary Tribunal is now called to order. The cases before us today prove the existence of the Foreign Conspiracy dated from the end of July 1793 to the present, which had as its principal objects to carry off the widow Capet, to dissolve the National Convention, and to effect a counterrevolution. All the levers that were intended to overthrow the republic were moved by a single man, who prompted numerous allied tyrants—de Batz, baron and ex-deputy of the Constituent Assembly, is the atrocious brigand who directed the blackest crimes of kings against humanity.” The crowd booed at the baron’s name, forcing the official to wait until the clamor died down. “Batz had intermediary agents in every section of Paris, in the country, in the municipality, in the official departments, and in the very prisons, many of whom will stand before this Tribunal today.” This time, the crowd cheered.

My stomach rolled and I trembled, for the scenario playing out around me was the very one that had kept me awake in our cell many nights. With all we’d heard from those newly imprisoned at the Anglaises since the assassination attempts on d’Herbois and Robespierre, we knew that the Committee of Public Safety was under great pressure to prove it could protect the republic by capturing the nearly mythological Baron de Batz. But if they couldn’t catch the baron, they could distract the public with a spectacle of a trial against a large group of notables. No matter if denunciations against them bore the faintest of connections to the baron or not.

One by one, we were brought forward to sit and face the Tribunal’s accusation.

First, a man they called Admiral, who boldly answered, “Yes!” to the accusation of the attempted assassination of Citizen d’Herbois. “I have but one regret, and that is that I missed that scoundrel,” he said belligerently, earning the boos of the spectators. Undeterred, he continued, “I would’ve been admired by the whole of France if I’d achieved my purpose!”

Next upon the stool was a girl who appeared not quite my age. But that was where the similarities ended, for where I was terrified, she was entirely self-possessed. Moreover, she spoke with utter calmness and not a little disdain as she insisted upon her innocence, adding, “I never intended to kill Robespierre. I merely regarded him as one of the principal oppressors of my country.” Her father, brother, and aunt each faced the Tribunal after her.

They were followed by a comte who imagined himself to be in a court of justice and attempted to present evidence and read a written defense. But the president cut him short, refusing to accept the documents. And why would they accept them, when the Convention’s recent law had made it legal for the Tribunal to pass judgment without consideration of evidence? No evidence was wanted. So instead they merely asked the comte the question that would be put to each of us in our turn: “Did you engage in the attempted murder of Robespierre and Collot d’Herbois?”

“No!” the comte shouted. Outraged and desperate, he turned to the crowd. “I am suspected merely because I am an émigré. This so-called conspiracy is a falsehood and a calumny! How could we have conspired when we have been kept apart in prison, and when most of us are entirely unknown to one another before today?”

But the crowd wanted blood, and so did the Tribunal.

Which was why the Court went through the farce of asking the rest of us that same question, and nothing more.

All we could do was defend our innocence even as this court connived at an appalling massacre. Mama’s voice was strong when she offered her refutation. And then it was my turn to sit before them. Heaving a calming breath, I met the gazes of the closest onlookers and let them see the truth of me.

“No,” I replied to the Tribunal.

I rose from the stool, but did not immediately make way for the next prisoner. Resisting the gendarme, I stood there for a long moment, meeting the gazes of my curious countrymen. If beauty was truly to be the reason for my death, then I wanted them to look. To see and appreciate. And then to watch that beauty be desecrated, just as France was being desecrated by tyrants bent on covering the whole of our country in blood.

It was over in an instant, this singular moment to speak in defense of a whole life. But instead of feeling despair, I felt the oddest sense of peace. If I was judged innocent, I would live in happiness with my beloved Charles. And if I was found guilty, then I was naught but a ghost, already dead in every way but one.

It took the jury mere minutes to decide.

“The verdict of the jury is in the affirmative on all the questions concerning all the prisoners!”

A storm of anger and despair rose up from the prisoners all around me.

“We have not been tried!” one man shouted.

“You are murderers!” another cried, shaking his fist in the air.

Amid the sobbing and curses, I turned to Charles and said the only thing that mattered, “Je t’aime.” I love you.

For the first time of our whole ordeal, he had tears in his eyes. “Oh, my love. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.”

I shook my head. “Let’s not waste a single moment on apologies.” I kissed him, then pressed my forehead to his. “Our life together would’ve been so beautiful.”

A tear escaped from the corner of his eyes. “Would there have been children?” he asked, his voice tight with emotion.

“Oh, yes. Two, I should think. A boy and a girl.” I let the pain of the imagining tear through me.

“With my dark hair and your blue eyes,” Charles said, seeing it with me. “Oh, Émilie,” he rasped, hugging me tight until I lost the fight with my own tears.

In a confused rush, the whole group of us were herded into the registrar’s office, where it was explained that we would prepare for the scaffold. There were so many prisoners that the authorities had to open a second room, the office of the head jailer, who was quite taken aback as more than twenty prisoners, wailing and shouting, spilled into his space.

Four hours passed in this horrible place between life and death. Many fell into such despair that they wouldn’t speak and their eyes refused even to focus. Others attempted to negotiate for another outcome with the jailers and guards. All the while, the loud murmur of the crowd that thronged the court buildings was ever present. For a long time, I sat in a little circle with Charles, Maman, and Louis, all of us clutching tight to one another as we struggled to confront that the worst had come to pass. It seemed impossible, unbelievable, so utterly unjust that I labored to breathe. My heart thundered within my breast, as if even my blood raged against my fate.

“Maybe your friend will help us yet again, Maman,” Louis said, tears straining his voice.

My mother appeared so fragile that I told the lie for her, “Perhaps he will, Louis. Why keep us alive this long only to allow us to perish now?” If my sixteen-year-old brother, whose age should’ve shielded him from the guillotine, required lies to get through his final hours, I would give them to him again and again.

After a while, assistants of the public prosecutor came around with a pair of sheers and a basket filled with hair—dark, fair, and gray together. When it was my turn for the sheers, I sat and held out my hand, then serenely gathered the long lengths of my once marvelous hair and cut it off as close to the neck as I could. When it was done, I held my tresses out to the jailer. “Take it, monsieur. I am robbing the executioner, but this is the only legacy I can leave to our friends. They will hear of it, and perhaps someday they will come to claim this souvenir of us. I rely on your honesty to keep it for them.”

The man carefully clutched at the long rope of my hair as if he were holding strands of gold. “You have my word,” he said solemnly.

I cut the hair of the rest of my family, too, and when I was done, one of the prosecutor’s assistants called me over toward the far door and handed me a note. Bewildered, I opened it to find a message from Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville—the purveyor to the guillotine—himself.

Madame de Sartine, you might be spared if you would declare yourself enceinte.

~Fouquier

My eyes flashed to those of the messenger, and my heart ached at the idea that a pregnancy might be the thing to save us after Charles and I had just imagined the very thing. “And my family?”

A single shake of his head. “The offer is for you alone, madame.”

The momentary flare of hope now was like a dagger sinking slowly, but no less violently, into my chest. “And what would be the payment for this clemency?” I managed, knowing such a favor would never come for free. Not from a man like Fouquier, who seemed exactly the type who’d require a woman to buy her liberty without recognizing the hypocrisy. To say nothing of how the offer revealed what this brave new republic valued about women.

In that regard, it seemed to me there had been no revolution at all.

The assistant gave me a meaningful look, which decided it for me entirely. If the only way I could live was by lying with one of the most evil men in all France, I would rather face the guillotine.

Let them destroy me and every beautiful thing in this country until they stood among nothing but ash and ruin.

Without another word, I left the assistant at the door and returned to find my Charles and Louis already bound, their hands tied behind their backs with cords still damp with blood from an earlier execution. Nausea rolled over me so harshly that I clutched my stomach. And then one of Fouquier’s assistants tied Maman’s hands. To see my proud, beautiful, witty mother treated in such a manner was a thing that couldn’t be borne, and only a desire to shield her from the depths of my grief kept me quiet.

An official came to me next—the same man who’d passed me Fouquier’s offer. “What a waste,” he muttered as he trussed my wrists.

“Yes, killing fifty-four of your countrymen is a terrible waste, monsieur,” I said.

He cinched the bindings unmercifully tight, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of voicing my discomfort. And then he came to stand in front of me, where he wrenched the fabric of my sleeves from my shoulders, exposing them.

“Don’t touch her!” Charles shouted before nearly charging the man. Only the restraint of another of the prosecutor’s assistants held him back.

Louis sobbed aloud, and then Maman let out an anguished shriek and swooned to the floor.

“Maman!” I sank to my knees beside her. But I couldn’t rouse her or stroke her face or help her up because of the damned restraints.

“Let me help her,” the Vicomte de Pons said in a kindly voice. Still unrestrained, he stroked his hand over her forehead and stared down at her with an ancient longing. “Madame. Madame, please.” He squeezed her hand. “Jeanne, it is I, your old friend, Pons.”

Her eyelids fluttered. For just a second, a smile began to grow on her face at seeing the vicomte, but I saw the moment awareness returned to her, because she let out a sorrowful sob. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just so . . . sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, Maman,” I said from beside her. “Never apologize for giving me a life I loved.”

“It is time!” a deep voice rang out. “Line up, women first.”

Mon Dieu, this was really the beginning of the end.

Rough hands pushed us this way and that, and the mob seemed to know the time was upon them, as it roared with renewed vigor. But from my position near the door to the courtyard, raised voices reached my ears. A debate or an argument of some sort, complete with curses.

Fouquier marched through the door, his gaze taking me in even as he spoke to all. “We are postponed. Be seated.”

Cautious elation rolled through the assembled prisoners. More than one person shouted, “Have we been pardoned?”

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but wonder if the delay was Robespierre’s doing yet again. No matter how many times I attempted to smother that dangerous hope, it managed to take root. Meeting Maman’s gaze, it was clear that she wondered the same. Long minutes of suspension between hope and despair stretched into more than an hour, and a few who hadn’t lost their senses already were on the verge of doing so now.

Suddenly, the courtyard door opened again to reveal Fouquier’s assistants carrying sacks that they placed upon a table.

Shirts and even shawls in every kind of material and varying shades of red, as if they’d grabbed whatever red clothing they could on such short notice.

Which was when I recalled that after reading the verdict, the Tribunal had decreed that we should be dressed in red for our executions, as assassins and murderers of the people’s representatives.

There was to be no reprieve, then. They had merely been waiting for our absurd costumes.

A hollow pain racked through me, even as I donned a fine handwoven shawl, which reminded me of another young woman who’d been forced to don this mark of shame. I hadn’t known Charlotte Corday, who’d been executed last summer for murdering that terrible Marat, but I’d secretly held this young lady in high regard for risking all for something bigger than herself. “I knew that Marat was perverting France,” she’d said at her trial. “I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand.”

From the Terror, she’d meant. The very thing leading us to our deaths even now.

For perpetrating an act that many people believed transgressed societal norms for a woman—not so much murder, as making a political statement by murdering a representative of the government—some whispered that Corday’s actions had made the Revolution more dangerous for women. Others went so far as to blame Corday for the executions of Olympe de Gouges, Madame Roland, and even the queen herself, all of which came in the months that followed Marat’s assassination. But since Corday had been attempting to exorcise the very same radical Jacobinism now using the Terror to kill my countrymen in the tens of thousands—to kill us this very day—I couldn’t help but think that she’d been right and her actions just.

Because as much as they killed my countrymen, they seemed to take a sick, perverted glee in killing my countrywomen.

They killed us for being too political, too intelligent, too opinionated, too daring, too pretty.

At long last, as the church bells marked the four o’clock hour, we were loaded into carts for the procession to the scaffold. Under the hot June sun, spectators lined the rue de la Vieille-Draperie, with women in bright dresses carrying gaily-colored parasols. Everywhere there was laughter and merriment intermixed with jeers and shouts, giving the whole affair an almost festive air. And it was a fresh wound to see the people enjoying the imminent death of innocents as if it were mere entertainment.

Louis had been permitted to ride with us on account of his age, and between Maman and me, we tried to support and encourage him despite our bound hands. As we turned on rue de la Lanterne toward the Pont Notre-Dame, I sat as straight and proud upon the cart’s hard bench as I had upon the accused’s armchair. I met the gazes of those I could, wanting them to see me as a person, and not an object for their entertainment. And with my eyes, I willed them to see something else. It was me today, but it could very well be them tomorrow.

Something curious began to happen then—instead of celebrating or jeering as our cart trundled by, the crowds began to hush.

“There she is, there’s Émilie!” someone shouted.

“Adieu, beautiful madame!” someone else cried out, doffing his bonnet rouge. The gesture lit an ember of hope in my breast—not for myself, nor for my family. But for the future of France.

“So many victims to avenge Robespierre!” a third voice dared say.

“Some are too young to die!” came another bold cry. The bravery behind these subtle criticisms sparked that ember brighter inside me. Perhaps, one day, enough people of compassion and courage would come forward and say, It is enough.

Hours passed as we made our sad, slow procession across the city, over the bridge, passed the quays, and through neighborhoods, where people hung from the windows and parapets and lined the streets so densely that sometimes our carts could barely move. Finally, we approached the place du Trône-Renversé, which was when I noticed a woman at the edge of the crowd, her head bent over a drawing canvas. Just then, she looked up, as if the weight of my gaze had called to her.

She looked so broken. So grief-stricken. But I knew her.

Oh, Grouchette!

She held up her hand in a small sympathetic wave of recognition before pressing her trembling fingers to her mouth. And then she gathered up her belongings and rushed into the crowd.

I was at once overwhelmed and utterly heartened to know our old friend had come to witness our parting. I tried to watch her as she made her way toward the street, but I lost sight of her as the crowd pushed and the carts rolled. Finally, she reappeared, closer now, and I cried out, “Oh, please, let the citizeness pass.”

The people closest to the cart relayed my wishes from one person to the next, until a gap opened through which Madame Condorcet passed until she was walking alongside us. “My dear girl,” she whispered, her eyes filled with tears. “How has it come to this? It should be me, not you.”

It might well be you next, I thought, leaning toward her. She’d aged in the years since we’d last met, and her hair was shot through with gray. Maybe that was just an impression created by the drab workaday dress she wore, or maybe it was the result of all she’d lost. “Promise me, Grouchette, that you will survive this madness.”

“I will try,” she said.

“And promise me you’ll remember us,” I pleaded.

She reached up and squeezed my shoulder. “I will never forget.”

It was seven o’clock before the cart jolted to a halt, and what I saw before me was so terrifying that, for a moment, my legs wouldn’t work.

Eight guillotines sat in a line. The wood of the machines was stained red with the blood of countless other victims, the blades gleaming darkly in the sun as they were loaded into the killing position. Beneath the platforms sat blood-soaked baskets that would soon hold the heads of everyone I loved.

It was a thing too despicable to contemplate.

Shouted commands directed us to alight from the carts and sit upon rows of wooden benches around the guillotines. I found myself seated between Maman, who trembled violently as Louis cried into her neck, and the Vicomte de Pons, who pressed his shoulder to mine and said, “You are a dear girl, Émilie.”

I blinked against the sudden rush of tears, and then couldn’t hold them back when Charles stopped before me, smiled, and recited a line from the opera:

“La mort même est une faveur,

Puisque le tombeau nous rassemble.”

Even death is a favor, since the tomb brings us together. He kissed my forehead before being pushed toward a bench.

And then it began.

Upon the guillotine beside our own, the young woman who had been so brave before the tribunal matter-of-factly ascended the steps and dropped herself upon the plank. The blade fell, and I flinched away as the crowds gathered closest to the machines reacted, some with cheers and others with disapproval. But Maman did watch, and the sight of the girl’s decapitation left her shrieking and crying. “Take me first, please. Please let me die before my children!”

I wanted to scream, to wail, to tell my mother that it would soon be all right, but I could do none of those because the executioner grabbed a now sobbing Louis. Breathless with fright, I cried out for him. “Louis! Louis, I love you!” Everything inside me raged against what would transpire within the very next seconds. And then it did. Maman slumped to the ground in a dead swoon. I knew not whether she was even alive.

The executioner came for me.

I didn’t make him grab me, but rose on my own and held my head high. The breeze caught the edge of my red shawl, sending it fluttering off one shoulder as I climbed the steps. And then I stood upon the platform and looked out at the faces surrounding me. Beloved Charles, who managed a heartbreaking smile, as if he wished to offer strength until the very last. Dear Grouchette, who had made her way boldly close to the guillotine. And then there were the thousands of strangers besides.

How would I be remembered by them, or would I be remembered at all? For memories were soon all that was to be left of me. And the sole, final hope I had was that somehow the memory of me would matter—to my friends, to my lovers, to my country.

The wind kicked up, pulling the shawl free of my shoulders, and I met Sophie’s tear-filled gaze as it sailed on the breeze toward her, a ribbon of scarlet upon the wind.

The executioner urged me toward the plank, and I lay upon the sun-warmed wood. The weight of a yoke held me in place. I hadn’t the time to react to the gore beneath me nor to succumb to the grief inside me. Instead, I found Charles’s face again and returned his smile.

The crowd around my guillotine hushed and cried, but around others the people cheered and celebrated. Beautiful, terrible humanity. Capable of the most inspiring and creative genius and the greatest and most unimaginable abominations.

And as the blade fell, I knew France’s revolution was both.