Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [20]
“Are you sure this is the right address?” I’d asked my father when our cab pulled up outside. We’d driven deep into the eleventh arrondissement, well east of the city center, and had ended up in the middle of nowhere. I looked out the cab window and all I could see were two giant iron doors flanked by high stone walls. They were covered in graffiti and plastered with tattered posters touting car shows and strip clubs. The place looked abandoned. Across the street there was a body shop, a dingy Greek café, and a place that makes heating ducts. Nothing else.
“Number eighteen Rue St-Jean. I’m sure this is it,” Dad said as he paid the driver. “G told me it was an old furniture factory. He said he only bought it a few months ago.”
Dad found a battered buzzer hanging by its wires and pressed it, and a few minutes later G was unlocking a small door cut into one of the giant iron doors and kissing us on the street.
“This looks like the end of the world,” Dad says now. “Like the set for some apocalypse movie.”
“It is the end of the world, my friend! The eighteenth-century world. This way!” G says, leading us inside a tall stone building. “Straight back to the stairs. Come, come, come!”
He hurtles ahead of us. The ground floor, which is just one cavernous room, is filled almost to the ceiling with boxes and crates. A narrow path runs down the middle of it. I’m careful not to bump anything as I walk along.
“This is all still uncataloged,” G says, patting a crate. “The second floor is more organized,” he adds.
“What is all this?” Dad asks.
“The bones of old Paris, my friend! Ghosts of the Revolution!”
Dad stops dead. “You’re kidding me. This is all yours? I thought you had a couple boxes of the stuff.”
G stops, too. “I had fourteen storage rooms, all stuffed to the rafters, and then this place came on the market a year ago and I knew immediately it would be perfect. So I bought it and moved the entire collection here. I have sponsors now, you know. Six French firms and two American. Two years—three at most—and we’ll break ground.”
“For what?” I ask, wondering what he can possibly be planning to do with all this stuff.
“For a museum, my girl! One dedicated entirely to the Revolution. Here in this old factory.”
“Here?” my father says skeptically, taking in the cracked windows, the rotting wood.
“But of course. Where else?”
“Central Paris, maybe? Where the tourists are?” I offer.
“No, no, no! It must be here in the St-Antoine!” G says. “This was the workers’ quarters, the very heart of the Revolution. From here came the rage, the blood, and the muscle that propelled the struggle. Danton argued in the Assembly, yes. Desmoulins shouted in the Palais-Royal. But when the politicians needed something done, upon whom did they call? Upon the furies of the St-Antoine! The factory workers, the butchers and fishwives and laundresses. The wretched, angry poor. And so it must be here, the museum. Here, where the people lived and struggled and died.”
This is how G talks. Always. Even when he’s not filming for the BBC.
Dad nudges him aside to get a better look at something behind him. “Is this what I think it is?” he says, lifting up the edge of a tarp.
“If you think it’s a guillotine, then yes,” G says, throwing the tarp back. “It was found just a few years ago in an old warehouse. I’m incredibly lucky to have acquired it. There are very few left from the eighteenth century. Look how efficient the design is—a bit of wood, an angled blade, that’s all. During the old regime, nobles sentenced to death were beheaded. Commoners were hanged, which could be a good deal more painful. The revolutionaries wished for equality in all things—even death. Beggar, blacksmith, marquis—no matter their rank, all enemies of the republic met the same end. One that was thought to be quick and humane. This particular example, it appears, was put to heavy use. You see?”
He points to the front