Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [94]
The presence of these men unsettled me. I did not understand why Orléans entertained them. He, who wished to help the king, why would he sit with those who wished to do away with kings? Why would he give them food and drink and sometimes gold? My old misgivings returned and I wondered if he’d been sincere when he’d said he wanted only to help the king. He must have sensed my uneasiness because once, after Danton had left, he put his arm around my shoulders and said, Always remember this, sparrow, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I understood. He wished to play one off against the other and by so doing, gain some sort of advantage. His words calmed me some. They gave me one less thing to worry about, though I still had plenty. It took all the cunning of the actor’s art to keep my voice steady and my legs still as I told Orléans my lies. I’d felt his hands upon me once before and knew I would feel them again if he found out about my falsehoods. Afterward, when I was alone in my garret room, high above his own, I would often puke in my basin from the fear of it.
I had wanted a stage. I had wanted roles. Orléans gave them to me—boy, spy, servant, citizen, bastard, royalist, rebel, patriot, Jacobin. I played them all. There were mornings when his servant, the old man, Nicolas was his name, would bang on my door to wake me and I would jump out of my bed bleary-eyed and terrified, knowing not who I was.
When my hands stopped shaking, I would wash my face, bind my breasts, and dress. I’d breakfast on the rolls, butter, jam, and coffee Nicolas had left outside my door and then I would leave for the Tuileries.
On my way, I’d read the bills and hear boys crying the news. It was always the same—bad. The winter was brutal again. The Seine had frozen solid. Wolves were seen on the edges of the city. Workers in the provinces had struck. Austria and England, furious about the king’s imprisonment in the Tuileries, threatened war.
In the evenings, I would go to the political clubs—the Cordeliers and the Jacobins—as Orléans instructed, and listen to Danton and Robespierre speak. On my way home, raggedy men would thrust pamphlets into my hands that showed the king and queen as goats and pigs, devouring France. The harvest was good this year, the pamphleteers said, so why is there no grain to be had? Because the king secretly orders it held up to starve Paris into submission. The king’s accounts had been made public, they said. He’d paid twenty-eight million livres last year to cancel his brothers’ gambling debts. He’d poured money into his own family’s pockets while the children of France cried for bread.
Most days, I still did not know who I was, but one thing I did know—things did not go well for the king.
When I arrived at the Tuileries on the twentieth of June, I felt immediately that something was afoot. The queen was pale and vexed. Madame Elizabeth was waspish. The king would not eat. I knew then that they would leave that very night and a cold dread gripped me at the thought.
Had they any idea what they were doing? Had they forgotten the Bastille? The march on Versailles? And the Paris mob’s fondness for severing heads from bodies? Had they not heard the rudenesses and threats called at them through the Tuileries gates? Had no one told them of the talk at the market halls, where fishwives promised to rip out their livers and eat them?
The palace walls that kept them in also kept the harsh world out. And now they would step outside, into the very heart of that world, with their white hands and soft feet and gentle words. They would be safe at Montmédy but they had to get there first.
I was very tender with Louis-Charles that day, braving the wrath of the chambermaids to steal sheets to make forts for him. Filching his favorite