Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [57]
They look like stars breaking, he said. Like all the souls in heaven.
It sounds like something Truman would’ve said.
He loved fireworks, too. We spent so much time on the Promenade in Brooklyn watching them. Memorial Day. Fourth of July. Labor Day. Sometimes they would go off for no reason at all. We’d hear the booms in our house and grab our shoes. The memory of the four of us running down the street, laughing in the dark, is so clear in my head, and for a few seconds, I’m so happy. And then I remember it’s all gone. Truman’s dead. My mother’s in the hospital. My father left us.
I lower my head and start reading again. So no one can see the tears.
28 April 1795
He was stupid, the king, it’s true. He was high-handed, a ditherer, and far too free with the country’s money, but his gravest fault was none of these—it was that he lacked all imagination.
He had someone to hand him his underwear in the morning and someone to hand it back to at night. He had a palace with two thousand windows in it. Chandeliers of silver. Paintings above his privy. What was left for him to imagine?
If ever he caught sight of a child, thin as death, standing in a barren field, if ever he heard the wail of a poor, ragged mother kneeling by a tiny grave, he could always comfort himself with the notion, beloved of royals and other fortunates, that the child was a hungry child and the mother a grieving mother and he himself a fat king because God so willed it.
And yet it is hard even now for me to hate him, for I believe he meant no harm. You would not beat your dog because he is not a cat. He was born a dog and cannot change it. The king was born a king and could not change that either.
He had warnings. So many. And heeded none. He would sometimes gather his soldiers and threaten to put down the unruly Paris mob. Or talk about moving the court to the safety of a border town, where it could more easily be defended. Yet he did nothing. He would not act. The rioting in Paris could not make him do so. Nor the meeting of the Three Estates. Nor the oath his deputies had sworn at the tennis court. Nor July the fourteenth, 1789.
On that day the price of bread in Paris skyrocketed, and rumors were put about that battalions of soldiers were massing on the outskirts of the city. Angry and afraid, thousands of Parisians gathered at the Palais-Royal, where Desmoulins jumped up on a table and urged them to gather arms and ammunition in order to defend themselves and liberty. They attacked the Bastille—a fortress prison into which any might be thrown without trial—to get at its weapons and powder stores. It was a sign writ large, a prologue so unsubtle a bumpkin could grasp its meaning. Yet that evening, the king wrote NOTHING in his diary. I heard the queen speak of it in disbelief to one of her ladies.
In the days that followed, we read in the broadsheets how Desmoulins’ ragged army took the Bastille and how all of Paris, poor and rich, celebrated its fall. Men and women, from the rudest beggars to duchesses in silk, chiseled at the fortress’s stones and heaved them down from the ramparts.
* * *
The summer wore on. The rumblings from Paris grew louder. Workers from the St-Antoine swaggered through the city streets in their red caps and long pants, attacking anyone in fine clothes. Bakers who had no bread were pulled from their shops and beaten. The antiroyalist play Charles IX received standing ovations. Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.
In August, the Assembly decreed that nobles must pay taxes, and that they could no longer tithe peasants. Then they went even further. They published a thing called The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
I was visiting my family, taking breakfast with them, when first we heard of it. They were so changed, my family. My brothers were as plump as geese. My mother