The Knight of Maison-Rouge_ A Novel of Marie Antoinette - Alexandre Dumas [6]
With that he shot a deadly look at the Girondins, one that made it clear they were not out of the woods. Indeed, as soon as the meeting of the Convention was over, the Montagnards fanned out to the other revolutionary clubs, eagerly taking to the Cordeliers19 and the Jacobins the proposition that traitors be declared outlaws and their throats cut that very night.
Louvet’s wife was at home in the rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Jacobins’ club. She came rushing downstairs when she heard the commotion and ran to the club to see what was going on. When she heard the proposal, she raced back upstairs as fast as her legs would carry her to warn her husband. Louvet swiftly armed himself and went running from door to door to warn his friends, all of whom were out. He learned from one of their servants that they were all over at Pétion’s place and flew there himself, only to find his cronies sitting around quietly debating a bill they were planning to introduce the following day and which they flattered themselves would be adopted, lulled as they were by a chance majority. Louvet20 told them what was afoot and that he feared the worst, since the Jacobins and Cordeliers were scheming against them even as they sat. He wound up by inviting them to take forceful measures of their own.
Pétion then rose, calm and imperturbable as ever, went to the window, and looked out at the sky. He stuck his hand out and whipped it back streaming with water.
“It’s raining,” he said. “Nothing will happen tonight.”
Through the open window, the last ringing stroke of the clock told them it was ten o’clock.
And that is what happened in Paris on the day before the tenth and on the tenth; which is why, on the evening of the tenth, in the rainy darkness and the unnerving silence, houses built to shelter the living became as mute and somber as sepulchres peopled exclusively by the dead.
Long lines of wary National Guards, preceded by scouts with bayonets at the ready; troops of citizens belonging to the sections, armed with whatever they could find and sticking close together; gendarmes poking into every nook and cranny, every gaping alleyway: these were, indeed, the sole inhabitants of the town to venture out into the streets, such was the overwhelming feeling that something unfamiliar and terrible was about to happen.
A fine, icy rain was falling. The same rain that had reassured Pétion only intensified the bad mood and malaise of the militia, whose every encounter had the feel of a prelude to a fight, with a reluctant mutual acknowledgment leading to an exchange of the password only begrudgingly and ungraciously. You would have thought from the nervous way people separated and sidled off, looking back over their shoulders, that everyone was afraid of being jumped from behind.
On that same night, when Paris was in the grip of one of those panic attacks that were by now so frequent you’d think people would have gotten used to them, that night when everyone knew without saying that the lukewarm among the revolutionaries were about to be slaughtered, since they had voted mostly with misgivings for the death of the King and now shrank from the death of the Queen (a prisoner, locked up in the Temple21 along with her children and the King’s sister); that very night, a woman wrapped in a cloak of lilac calico with black fur trim, her head covered by, or rather buried in, the cloak’s hood, glided noiselessly past the houses along the rue Saint-Honoré. She slipped out of sight in the odd doorway or in the shadow of a wall whenever a patrol appeared and stood as still as a statue, not daring to breathe until the patrol had passed; then she would dash frantically ahead again until danger once more presented itself and forced her to stop in her tracks, holding her breath.
The woman had already managed to make it part of the way down the rue Saint-Honoré, thanks to this uncommon stealth, when, at the corner of the rue de Grenelle she suddenly fell upon a troop—not one of the regular patrols but a small band of the brave volunteers who had dined