Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution

Chapter 43

APRIL

20, 1792

Men of limited intelligence lack the imagination to be touched by inner suffering.

—ÉLISABETH VIGÉE-LEBRUN, ROYAL PORTRAIT ARTIST

IT IS ROBESPIERRE WHO BRINGS US THE NEWS. THE QUEEN’S brother Leopold II has also died, and the Jacobin Club has now voted for war on the emperor’s successor, Francis II.

“Against the Holy Roman Emperor!” Robespierre is beside himself with grief. We offer him a place at our table, and he seats himself between Henri and Jacques. He holds his head in hands. “No one would listen to me,” he says. “No one would listen!”

“Then we must hope the Legislative Assembly will vote differently,” Henri offers.

“It’s too late!” Robespierre is distraught. “They have already voted.”

“Does Curtius know this?” my mother asks. He is on duty and will not be home until midnight, perhaps later.

“If he doesn’t, he will,” Robespierre says darkly. “All of France will know it when the emperor comes storming to Paris, to crush everything we have achieved! Now there will be enemies within as well as without. Foreign war as well as civil war.”

“And where will the soldiers come from,” Henri asks, “to fight off an enemy a hundred thousand strong?”

“Is it to be a conscripted army?” Jacques questions.

“I don’t know,” Robespierre admits.

I think of Edmund and Johann in the king’s service. Certainly, they will not be asked to fight. But what about men like Wolfgang and Curtius? This will be a war of brother against brother. And these foolish men of the Jacobin Club are betting everything on the peasants of the Holy Roman Empire rising up and joining forces with our revolutionaries. If they don’t rise, what then? We will be a leaderless nation with a misfit army taking on the greatest power in Europe.

For days, this is all anyone talks about. Lafayette has been convinced to turn our army into a respectable fighting force the way he did with the Americans. It’s to be expected that there will be many prisoners of war, and the question of how to humanely dispatch them has been taken up by the Legislative Assembly.

“A guillotine,” Robespierre informs us at our Tuesday salon.

Lucile frowns. “And what exactly is a guillotine?” she asks.

“I …” Robespierre hesitates. “Perhaps …” Lucile is seven months pregnant, and obviously this is not something he hopes for her to know. But she persists, and he is forced to explain. “It is a device built by Dr. Guillotin,” he says. “A wooden contraption that will make for a swift death whether the criminal is rich or poor.”

Ah, so that is why the Assembly has adopted this. Whereas before, noblemen were beheaded with the ax and commoners were hanged, now there is to be equality in death as well as life.

“But how does it work?” The scientist in Jacques wants to know.

Robespierre shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “There are two high pieces of wood and a board in the middle where the criminal lies.”

“Facedown?” Camille asks.

“Yes.” Robespierre is not comfortable talking about death, I realize. “There is a blade at the top with a rope attached. When the executioner lets go of the rope, the blade comes down and the criminal is executed.”

“Decapitation?” my mother cries.

“Apparently so,” Jacques says.

“Tomorrow,” Robespierre continues, “the guillotine will be erected outside the Hôtel de Ville at the Place de Grève. We are executing a criminal, and that is something every patriot should be concerned about. I hope you will all be there.”

“At an execution?” I ask.

“It is a matter of the nation’s security,” Robespierre replies.

THE NEXT MORNING, Henri and Jacques join our family in hiring a coach bound for the Place de Grève. “I have never been to an execution,” I admit.

“Never?” Jacques asks. “But they’re everywhere—”

“Yes. And I’ve tried to avoid them.”

“When the blade is about to fall,” Curtius promises, “you can look away.”

“Who is the criminal?” my mother wants to know.

“A killer named Pelletier,” Curtius replies. “He will be either very lucky or very unfortunate today.”

I had not thought of this. What if this guillotine should fail? What if dying by the blade is slower and more painful than dying by the ax? This is a show staged to convince the populace that the war will be won and vengeance will be swift. But I do not want to see it. I don’t care how it may vouch for our patriotism or how many Jacobins will see us and know that we are friends. When the coach stops before the Place de Grève, my palms are damp.

“Don’t worry,” Henri says. “There will be so many people, it will be impossible to see anything anyway.”

But when Robespierre notices we have come, we are given places in front of the scaffold.

“Have you ever seen so many tricolor cockades?” he asks eagerly. He is not expecting an answer, and I don’t give him one. Thousands of people have come to witness this first execution by guillotine. Some in the crowd are carrying children on their shoulders, and women are selling roses like they do outside of theaters. Every guardsman in Paris must be here today. I search for Wolfgang among the phalanx of soldiers dressed in blue and red.

“Do you see him?” my mother asks.

“No. But then he could be anywhere,” I tell her.

The drums begin to roll, and an expectant hush falls over the square. The sound of hooves echoes over the cobblestones, and the guards clear the way for a pair of horses carrying a man in an open wagon. He is perhaps twenty-four, with a dirty face and a dark red shirt provided to him by the executioner. I wonder whether he killed out of self-defense or something more sinister.

Someone in the crowd shouts, “There is the murderer!” and abuse assails him from every side. A woman throws a heavy stone at his head, and it misses by only the breadth of a hand. The guards around the scaffold begin to laugh. Tomorrow, many of them will be leaving for war, so today they’ll get their entertainment where they can.

“I don’t want to see this.” I shake my head. Henri puts his arm around my shoulders. When Robespierre looks in our direction, I see the line along his jaw tighten.

The victim is led onto the wooden scaffold. I can see he is surprised that the machine has been painted red. He looks up at the heavy blade, and if his hands were not bound behind his back, he would probably shield his eyes from the sun on the metal. The executioner leads him to the board, and Pelletier doesn’t fight as he’s instructed to lie down. He is facing the wicker basket that will receive his head, and his neck is held in place by a wooden lunette. After a few moments, he will never have another thought. Whatever hopes and dreams he once had will be finished. Although this is when I should be closing my eyes, I can’t look away as the drumroll intensifies and the executioner releases the rope.

It is over in a second. The moment the blade falls, Pelletier’s head is separated from his body, and the spray of blood is disguised by the color of the guillotine. The executioner bends down to retrieve Pelletier’s severed head from the basket, but as he holds it by the hair for the crowds to see, there are angry cries.

“Is that it?”

“Bring back the wheel!” someone shouts.

The executioner has done his job too well, and the audience isn’t satisfied. The gallows at least provided twitching and slow death by strangulation.

“The people want what is good, but they do not always see it,” Robespierre says. It is a phrase of Rousseau’s. “They wish to see criminals punished,” he adds, excusing their behavior.

Or they are simply barbarians, I think.

The next day, it is guillotine madness. Customers flood into the Salon asking whether the guillotine Curtius has built for the window is available in miniature for purchase.

“You would like to buy a miniature guillotine?” I repeat.

A tall woman in a lavender gown giggles. Her curls hang in clusters on either side of her head, and her necklace is made up of a large Bastille rock with the word Liberté engraved in diamonds. “I would like it for my table,” she admits.

Her companion adds, “Think how surprised guests would be if we brought it out to slice the cucumbers!”

“Or better yet, the bread, now that the harvest is coming!”

The pair of them laugh.

“It would be at least thirty livres-assignats,” I warn them.

Lavender dismisses my concern with a wave. “It would be worth it to see their faces!” she gushes.

When he returns home, I ask Curtius what he thinks.

“If our customers want guillotines, then that’s what they’ll get. I can take this week off and teach Yachin how to assemble them.”

The next morning, the pair of them are out in the courtyard, sanding toy guillotines to amuse the rich.