Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [105]
“Um, can I put that on the final?”
Ms. Hammond sighed. “History is a Rorschach test, people,” she said. “What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past.”
I remember Ms. Hammond’s words and I think about Alex. She was there. A part of it all. She saw history up close and personal. And what she saw made her insane.
26 May 1795
I sit by the river tonight waiting for darkness. The sky is clear and I have my basket with rockets in it at my side.
Madame du Barry, an old courtesan, sits beside me and clasps my hand in hers. I remember her death. All of Paris does. She screamed her head off. Quite literally. Please, she wheedles now, think of apricots, the scent of roses, the pricking of champagne bubbles on the tongue.
The dead are bigger thieves than ever I was. They steal the most precious things from me. The feel of silk. The sound of rain pattering on the cobbles. The smell of snow on the wind. They take these things and leave me with the taste of dirt and ashes.
I think not of apricots, but of guillotines and graves.
She frowns. For those I do not need your help, she says, and flounces off.
I told Benôit that I see them. He says it means I’m well and truly mad and he may be right, but I am not angry with the dead for it. It is not they who have made me mad.
It was not the massacres of September, either, though certainly they helped.
It was not the king’s death at the guillotine that did it. Or learning that Orléans was among the deputies who voted for it.
It was not the stories from the Vendée, where entire towns were burned and Frenchmen shot Frenchmen. And women. And children. Or chained them together and drowned them.
It was not during Robespierre’s Terror, when hundreds upon hundreds were guillotined in Paris and there was so much blood in the streets that people slipped in it and dogs lapped at it and flies swarmed over it in great black clouds.
Nor was it when Orléans was arrested for treason and jailed.
It was the day they took Louis-Charles away.
His jailers said they had learned of a plot to rescue the prince and his mother from the Temple and that the Assembly had decided they must no longer be together, for it would be harder to free them if they were apart. It was time to teach Louis-Charles how to be a good Republican, they said. Time to educate him in the ways of the revolution.
The queen fought them. She shielded Louis-Charles with her body and would not let them near him. She told them they would have to kill her first. They told her it was not she whom they would kill, but her daughter, and finally she had to surrender him, to spare Marie-Thérèse.
They dragged him away. He was only eight years old.
I was in a hallway when they took him. Near the room where the family dined. I had just come up from the kitchens with their dinner. The guards knocked me aside as they tore him from his mother. I fell. Food went everywhere. Dishes shattered. The tray clanged against the stone floor.
I remember little of that, however. What I remember is Louis-Charles’ face. His eyes were red with weeping. He looked back for his mother but could not find her. He saw me instead and reached for me, and I reached for him. For a second we clasped hands. There was terror in his eyes, and sorrow and innocence and something else—something I wish to God I had not seen, for it has doomed me.
It haunts me always, that instant. It tortures me. I wish I could go back and undo it. All of it. From the very beginning. I wish my family had never gone to Versailles. I wish the king’s carriage had never stopped in the town square. I wish I’d never heard that little boy’s laughter.
I am not afraid of beatings or blood anymore. I’m not afraid of guards or guillotines.
There