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“True. Then where are we going? ”

“To my place—where do you think?”

“You’ve lost me.”

“All the more reason. Follow me.”

And with that, Lorin dragged Maurice away.

47

PRIEST AND BUTCHER

When she quit the Tribunal, the Queen had been taken to the Conciergerie. When she reached her room, she took a pair of scissors and cut off her beautiful long hair, which had only become more beautiful due to lack of powder,1 which had been abolished for over a year now. She wrapped her shorn hair in paper and wrote on the outside: To be divided between my son and my daughter.

She then sat, or rather fell, on a chair and, broken by exhaustion—the hearing had lasted eighteen hours!—she fell asleep. At seven o’clock, the noise of the screen being moved caused her to wake with a start. She looked around in fright and saw a man whom she had never seen before.

“What do they want of me now?” she said.

The man came closer and greeted her as politely as if she were not the Queen.

“My name is Sanson,” he said.

The Queen gave a faint shudder and got out of bed. The name alone spoke volumes.

“You’ve certainly come early, monsieur,” she said. “Couldn’t you wait just a little?”

“No, madame,” replied Sanson, “I was ordered to come.”

These words out of the way, he took a step closer to the Queen. Everything about the man, and about the moment, was dramatic and terrible.

“Ah! I understand!” said the prisoner. “You want to cut off my hair?”

“It has to be done, madame,” said the executioner.

“I am aware of that, monsieur,” said the Queen, “and I wanted to save you the trouble. My hair is there, on the table.

“Sanson looked in the direction the Queen had pointed.

“Only, I’d like it to be passed on to my children tonight.”

“Madame,” said Sanson, “such niceties do not concern me.”

“But I thought …”

“All I have to worry about,” resumed the executioner, “are the belongings of … persons.… Their clothes, their jewelery—and then only when they give them to me formally; otherwise it all goes to la Salpêtrière2 hospital to be handed out to the poor there. It belongs to them after that. A decree of the Committee of Public Safety has ruled that that’s how it works.”

“Be that as it may, monsieur,” Marie Antoinette insisted, “can I count on my hair going to my children?”

Sanson did not answer.

“I’ll see to it that it does,” said Gilbert.

The prisoner threw the gendarme a look of ineffable gratitude.

“Now,” said Sanson, “I came to cut your hair, but since the job’s been done, I can, if you like, leave you alone for a moment.”

“Please do, monsieur,” said the Queen, “for I need to collect myself and pray.”

Sanson inclined his head and left the room.

The Queen found herself alone, for Gilbert had only looked in to say what he had said. While the condemned woman knelt on a chair that was lower than the rest and which served her as a prayer stool, a scene no less terrible than the one we have just recounted was taking place in the presbytery of the little church of Saint-Landry, on the île de la Cité.

The priest of that parish had just gotten up and his old housekeeper was laying out his modest breakfast when suddenly someone began hammering violently on the presbytery door.

Even these days, an unannounced visit to a priest always signals some event of moment, whether a baptism, a marriage in extremis, or a last confession. But in those days, the visit of a stranger could signal something even more serious. In those days, in fact, the priest was not God’s agent and had to account to men.

But the abbé Girard was among those juror priests3 who had least to fear from such a knock, for he had taken an oath before the Constitution: in him conscience and probity had got the upper hand of self-esteem and the religious spirit. Doubtless abbé Girard accepted the possibility of progress in government and regretted all the abuses committed in the name of divine power, for he had embraced the fraternity of the republican regime while holding on to his God.

“Go and have a look, Missus Hyacinth,” he said. “Go and see who’s banging on our door at