Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [98]
I will not leave.
It is useless. You risk your life for nothing.
I risk my life for him. While he lives, there is hope. He may yet go free. Times change. Men’s hearts change.
Orléans’ laughter sounds like dead leaves on the wind.
Nothing changes except the names of the rogues in charge, he says. Tell me, sparrow, what are these pages? A last will and testament? A confession? Expiation for your many sins? What do you write in them?
An account, I tell him. A chronicle of the revolution.
Whatever for?
So that I might find an answer to all of this. It must be here. Somewhere in these pages, in all that has happened. There must be a reason for it. I shall find it out.
Another chronicle? How tedious, Orléans says. Every nobody in Paris writes a chronicle now, or worse yet, a memoir. They write, The revolution began because the king spent too much money. Or, The revolution began when the king locked the estates out of the assembly hall. But they are wrong. Do you know why it began, sparrow? No, I cannot imagine you do. You cared nothing for liberty, equality, or fraternity. You cared only for fame and wealth and would have sold your soul to get them. Would have? What am I saying? Did!
Pray, sir, leave me.
But he does not. Instead, he walks about the room, hands clasped behind his back.
If it is an answer you want, then an answer you will have, he says. I shall tell you about the revolution, sparrow. Listen closely—it had nothing to do with the king. Kings have little to do with revolutions. Revolutions are not in their best interests. It began with small things happening to small people. It began with Collot d’Herbois, the bad actor, getting booed off a stage. And Marat, the quack, getting laughed out of the Académie for his idiotic theories. It began with Fabre d’Églantine, the worst playwright in France, reading his bad reviews.
Most of all, it began with Maximilien Robespierre. Picture him at seventeen—a charity boy at Louis LeGrand, motherless and shabby amongst the sons of the rich. Well-spoken, full of ideas, he is chosen to give the school’s speech before the king and queen. It rains that day. He waits outside as etiquette demands. For an hour. Two. Four. Finally, the royals arrive. They cover their yawns as he speaks and leave the second he finishes. Cold and bedraggled, his shoes ruined, Maximilien goes back to his room and never forgets.
None of them does. They wait. For what, they do not know. But they can feel it coming. Splashed by carriage wheels, they feel it. Outside cafés looking in, they feel it. At night in their narrow beds, counting the day’s snubs and mocks, they feel it. And it thrills them.
I turn my back to Orléans but it does not silence him.
It is spring of 1789, he says. The country is bankrupt, and everywhere—on street corners and clubs, in cafés and salons—there are angry speeches, made by men with silk coats and soft hands—Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Hébert, Marat. None of these is Paris born, yet all come here. Every malcontent in France comes here, his heart packed with hurts and grudges, his head stuffed with visions of glory and revenge, and everything he has failed at in his life he lays at the feet of the king.
They are good with words, these men. They stir the people up. By summer, there are riots in the streets. The Bastille falls. The fishwives march on Versailles. And suddenly, there it is—the revolution. It promises us a new day, dawning fair. A golden age with liberty for all. And we believe those promises with all our hearts. For a little while. Before a thing called guillotine appears in the Place Louis XV. Before the tumbrels take thousands away.
Now it is after. After the revolution. After the Rights of Man. After the constitution. After the massacres. After the monarchy. After this faction and that one. After the wars. After the Terror.
We wear muslin now, not satin. We close our shoes with black ribbons instead of silver