Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [145]
I can’t answer him.
“You’re mad. Perhaps it’s from the fall you took. Perhaps you always were mad. I don’t know. What I do know is that you must never again do what you did today. They’ll kill you next time.” He stops speaking abruptly, looks as if he’s weighing his words. Then he says, “You must also stop what you do at night.”
“Um … what do I do at night? Snore?”
He brings his fist down on the table, startling the hell out of me. “This is no joke!” he shouts. “There is a bounty on your head! General Bonaparte wants you dead! You must stop setting off the fireworks, or you soon will be.”
I don’t get it. Not at all. And then I do.
“Wait a minute,” I say, laughing. “Amadé, you don’t think I’m the Green Man, do you?”
He doesn’t answer right away. He just stares at me. After what seems like a really long time, he says, “Why do you think I helped you? Took you in? Kept you off the streets so the guards would not find you? I guessed who you are when first I met you in the catacombs. From the key around your neck. I saw the L on it. For Louis, the orphan in the tower. He’s the one for whom you light the rockets, isn’t he?”
“No, Amadé, you’re wrong. I’m not—”
He doesn’t let me finish. “And then today, at the Temple. If I had any doubts, what you did there took them away. I knew you for the Green Man then. You risk your life for the child. You light up the sky so that he will know he is not forgotten.”
“Look, I’m not the Green Man. I swear to God I’m not.”
He shakes his head, disgusted. He puts his guitar down and goes to the mantel. There’s a wooden box sitting on top of it. He takes something out of it and places it on the table in front of me. It’s a small ebony frame that contains two miniature portraits. They show a man and a woman, regal and elegant, both holding roses. I’ve seen them before. They’re in the portrait of Amadé, the one hanging in his house near the Bois de Boulogne. The plaque on the wall next to the portrait said they were thought to be Amadé and his fiancée, but looking at them now, I’m not so sure.
“Who are they?” I ask him.
“The Comte and Comtesse d’Auvergne. My parents,” he says.
“Amadé, you’re a noble?” I say, stunned.
He nods.
“But the books … they don’t say that. They just say you came to Paris in 1794.”
“I do not know of which books you speak, but yes, I came to Paris in 1794. I had no choice,” he says.
He sits down then and tells me how they lived—his father, his mother, and him—in an ancient château in the countryside of Auvergne. It was beautiful there. He was happy. His parents were both musical and saw to it that he, too, studied music. He had lessons on the piano, the violin, and the guitar from a very young age. He showed great promise and was composing by the time he was eight. There were plans for him to go to Vienna to further his studies shortly after his fourteenth birthday. In the autumn of 1789.
“A few months before I was to leave, however, my father, as a member of the nobility, was summoned to a meeting of the Three Estates at Versailles. I put off my trip—just for a few weeks, or so I thought—so my mother would not be alone. It was the beginning of the revolution. And the end of my family,” he tells me.
“What happened?” I ask, dreading his answer.
“Like many of the nobility, my father supported the reforms the revolutionaries were demanding,” he says. “The country was bankrupt. The old regime was corrupt. France needed change and he saw that. However, after the attacks on the Tuileries, after the massacres, he’d had enough. He realized a monster had been created but it was too late to kill it. At the end of the year, the king was put on trial. Nearly all the delegates voted for his death. It was suicide to vote for clemency, but my father did it anyway. He was always loyal to his king. My family had a motto. It was on our coat of arms. It said—”
“From the rose’s blood, lilies grow.”
“You know the motto?” he asks me, surprised.
“Yes, I do,” I reply. I know it from the Auvergne coat of arms hanging in the stairwell