Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution

Chapter 51

JANUARY

20–21, 1793

You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic, and who does nothing for it.

—LOUIS ANTOINE DE SAINT-JUST, REVOLUTIONARY AND LAWYER

AS I AM ABOUT TO LOCK THE DOORS OF THE SALON DE CIRE, three men emerge from the darkness of the Boulevard. I recognize the middle figure at once. No one else wears powdered wigs or culottes on this street. But the other two are unfamiliar to me. “Robespierre,” I say.

“Marie.” He nods curtly. “These are my guards. May we come in?”

I open the door. It is dark inside, since I have snuffed out the candles. I call for my mother to bring us a lantern, and we wait in the hall’s shadows until light appears.

“Thank you, Maman.”

“Robespierre,” she exclaims, then stares at the strangers.

“His bodyguards,” I say in German. She is wise enough not to make any kind of remark. I turn to Robespierre. “Would you like to come upstairs?”

He looks nervous. His eyes are searching the shadows. “Who—who is that?” he cries. His guards withdraw their pistols, and Isabel shouts, “It’s me!”

“That’s my sister-in-law and her child,” I say angrily.

Robespierre looks behind him. “There are royalists who wish to kill me, Marie. They want to see me dead for voting to condemn Capet.”

“But hundreds of other men voted as well.”

“And I am the one they’ll blame!” Behind his glasses, his eyes are searching. Does he think we’re hiding assassins in the hall? “There are conspiracies being hatched throughout this city. Royalist conspiracies,” he snaps. He has never spoken like this to me. “I have come with a request for which the National Convention is willing to pay.”

I clench my hands nervously. “And what would that be?”

“We need proof,” he says, and I can see that this discomforts him. “There is no way of showing the world that Capet has died unless we have evidence.” He clears his throat. “We wish for you to make a mask,” he says.

A death mask. So they can see every hair on his head—brows, lashes, even a day’s worth of stubble. My mother has gone pale. Isabel steps forward and says, “This is too great an honor for our Salon. Perhaps the work should go to someone more deserving.”

“I can think of no family more deserving than this,” Robespierre replies. “The Convention will allow you to keep a copy to display in whatever way you see fit.”

“That is very kind,” I say. Henri would hear the sarcasm in my voice.

“And there would be others. Other traitors. We must have proof for our citizens that these criminals have died. Now, is the Salon de Cire willing to help our country in this way?”

Isabel takes my hand. I look to my mother and Paschal, who are standing together like a tableau of loss and sorrow. “Maman, why don’t you take Paschal upstairs?” I watch them go, then turn to Robespierre. “As always,” I say quietly, “our family wishes to serve the patrie.”

The corners of his lips turn upward. “Tomorrow, you will find Capet’s head and body in the Madeleine Cemetery. He will not be buried until your arrival.”

“And the other—traitors?” I ask.

“The Convention will send word the night before. The bodies will be delivered to the graveyard at nine in the evening. It would be advisable to visit before the corpses—”

“Rot?” I ask brutally.

He pushes his glasses back on his nose. “Yes.”

“Models are better taken from life,” I say.

“The purpose of these masks is to prove that they are dead. The Convention will not forget your service.” He moves toward the door. “I knew we could consider you a friend,” he adds gravely. “Good night.”

It is only when they are gone that the tears roll down my cheeks.

“Marie!” Isabel cries and puts her arm around my shoulders. But I sit behind the caissier’s desk and weep. I look out at my kingdom, and it is a vast stretch of darkness. So this is what I traded for love. This is what I traded for safety.

“I will come with you,” she says.

“I would never ask that—”

“I want to.”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I don’t care,” she swears. “I will not let you go alone.”

I dry my tears with the ends of my fichu. “You are too kind to me. I was not half as kind to the only man I ever loved.”

To this, Isabel is silent.

“He isn’t coming back,” I tell her. “I made my choice, and now he isn’t coming back.”

“You don’t know this—”

But I nod. “I do. He sent a letter.”

“To this house?” She is surprised. She is the one who greets the mail carrier when he arrives.

“It came by private courtier last night. I was outside, sweeping the steps.” I think now of all the times when Henri would sit outside waiting for me. “He is staying in London.”

“Oh, Marie. In a year, in two years, when all of this is over—”

I give her a long look. “You heard Robespierre. One day, he will come with a request I cannot honor. And what will I do then?”

We watch each other in the red glow of the lantern.

“We can think about that tomorrow,” she says.

I DO NOT sleep. I lie in my bed imagining the many terrible scenes transpiring somewhere in the Temple. By now, the king’s family must know what is happening. What will he say to Marie Antoinette, who traveled from Austria as a fourteen-year-old girl to be his bride? Louis XVI is the father of her children. She will be devastated.

And how will he tell his son, the little dauphin? I think of Paschal, who is the same age as Louis-Charles, and how he still asks every few weeks when his father will be coming home. How will the prince be made to understand that his papa is to die? That tomorrow, the guillotine will be moved to the Place Louis XV—now renamed the Place de la Révolution—and he will ascend the scaffold like a common criminal and lay his head beneath the blade?

The horrors are too many to imagine. I close my eyes and picture Wolfgang and Henri strolling the streets of London together with Michael and Abrielle. I imagine the bakeries where they buy as much bread as one person can eat. And the streets, all brightly lit with lamps. Somewhere in those streets there will be beautiful women, intelligent women, but Henri will wait for me. I know he will. My eyes begin to sting, and I squeeze them tighter. I have given away life for a career among the dead. I bury my face in my pillow and wish for sleep. But it comes only after many hours.

When I wake, a heavy fog hangs over the streets. I dress in my thickest cloak to ward off the damp, but when I step outside and whistle for a carriage, I can still feel the chill through my clothes. Because Curtius is on duty in the Place de la Révolution, only Isabel and I are going. We kiss my mother and Paschal good-bye, and when a cabriolet arrives, we climb in.

“Do you want to check your bag?” Isabel asks.

My mother packed it this morning with everything I should need, but I haven’t looked inside. “No. I trust her.” I put it on the seat next to me. It is the same as any physician’s leather case, only this will be for death.

“Do you think Robespierre will be there?” Isabel asks.

“In the Place de la Révolution or at the graveyard? My guess is neither. He faints at the sight of blood. He’s not a strong man.”

Though we are several blocks from the Place de la Révolution, our carriage comes to a sudden stop. The streets are filled with too many carriages to go any further. “You will have to walk the rest of the way,” the driver shouts. We pay the old man in livres-assignats, and he tips his hat to us as we leave. “A historic day,” he says. It’s impossible to know exactly what he means, whether he is for the king’s death today or against it. No one gives their opinion now.

Twenty thousand people have filled the public square, and it is a sea of red, from the brightly painted guillotine to the liberty caps that both men and women are wearing. Thousands of soldiers line the route where the king will be taken from his prison to the scaffold, and somewhere among those men is Curtius. If there are royalists who are hoping to save the king, there is no chance that their uprising will succeed.

The clouds are low and dark in the sky, and fog has obscured much of the courtyard. “Perhaps God is already in mourning,” I say. We stop at the edge of the crowd. More people will be coming. It is nine, and the king will not appear until ten. “I don’t think we need to go any farther.”

“I’m glad your mother isn’t here,” Isabel tells me.

We huddle against our cloaks and listen to the people talking around us. They are commoners mostly, dressed in long trousers and ill-fitting coats. They are curious to see what the king will look like, since most of them have never laid eyes on him in person. “I heard he’s enormously fat,” one woman says, and her family hurries to agree. “What else would you be on a diet of cake and wine?” Another woman offers, “I bet they will sing ‘La Marseillaise’ when he comes and force a liberty cap on his head.”

But when the king arrives, there is silence in the Place de la Révolution. His coach is pulled through the crowds by a pair of horses made skittish by the number of people. And when the door to the carriage opens, it is no fat man in ermine who climbs the narrow steps to the scaffold. In the six weeks since I have seen him, the king has lost a great deal of weight. His simple suit and cloak hang loose on his frame, and he looks older than his thirty-eight years. His white hair has been cropped at the neck for the guillotine, and as he stands before the masses who once adored him, it is a pitiful sight.

Charles Sanson, the executioner, has allowed him to speak his last words. Although we cannot hear them, they are repeated through the crowd. He is declaring his innocence, and is using the last breaths he will ever take to pardon those who are about to shed his blood. Although it’s clear he wants to say more, a captain of the National Guard orders the drumroll to begin and he is taken to the plank. His hands are tied behind his back, and his neck is held in place by a piece of wood. The drumroll quickens. Isabel looks away, and in a moment it’s over. Sanson pulls the string, and the blade comes crashing down.

There is silence. Then Sanson reaches into the wicker basket and holds up the king’s head. Cheers resound throughout the square, and the crowd surges forward. “What are they doing?” Isabel cries.

We are carried along by the momentum of the crowd. They are pushing from behind us, and from what I can see, they are struggling to reach the scaffold. “They want to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood!” I shout. I grab Isabel’s arm so that neither of us falls in this moving tide of people. We struggle for an hour to leave the square, and when we finally escape, Sanson has already sold the king’s belongings. It is an executioner’s right to strip the corpse and sell its clothes. In this case, he has even sold King Louis’s wig.

We begin the walk to the Madeleine Cemetery. Neither of us speaks about what we have witnessed. Nine hundred years of august tradition died on the scaffold today, yet every sans-culotte we pass is humming a tune and the children in the streets are waving flags. Now that the king is dead, we shall all be rich. No one will ever go hungry. There will be bread in the bakeries and cheap coffee in the shops and a respectable job for every patriot. We reach the cemetery gates, and a guardsman demands to know our business.

“We are here on the orders of Robespierre,” I tell him.

“You are Citizeness Grosholtz?” He peers into my face.

“I am.”

He gestures with his toothpick to Isabel. “And who is this?”

“My assistant,” I lie.

He studies her, and his eyes come to rest on her tricolor cockade. “Follow me.”

Isabel takes my arm as we pass through the graveyard. Thunder echoes in the distance. It will rain at any moment. A fitting tribute, I think, to regicide. We reach a small house at the edge of the cemetery, and the guard says, “The charnel house. The body is in there. I will stand here while you work.” He hands Isabel a lantern, and she holds it out before us.

“Thank you for coming with me,” I whisper.

“I would never have let you come alone.”

We enter the room together. It is dark and cold, and immediately we are assaulted by the stench of rotting flesh. It is almost sweet and cloying, a scent that will remain in our hair and clothes until we wash. There are a dozen bodies waiting for burial, but I hardly notice them. All I see is the dismembered corpse of the king in his plain wooden coffin. Isabel has never been so close to him, and to see our monarch like this is both humbling and horrifying. She crosses herself. But someday, this is what we shall all come to. I open my leather bag.

“I’ll need water,” I say.

Isabel goes to the door and asks the guard for a cup.

“Thirsty work?” He laughs.

She does not laugh with him. “It is for the plaster. A bowl will do as well.”

I am finished in a few minutes. I replace the king’s head between his legs—there is no room for it anywhere else in the coffin—then wrap the plaster death mask in a cotton shawl.

“I thought it would take longer,” the guard remarks. He takes the toothpick from his mouth and casually investigates what he’s pulled from his teeth.

“I am taking the cast to my workshop,” I reply. “The wax head will be created there.”

“As long as it’s somewhere. Those men from the Convention were eager to have it done.”

“And the body?” I ask quietly. “What will happen to it?”

“Quicklime, I suppose. That way there’s nothing left to dig up. We’re not looking to have his bones made into relics.”

“And it will be an anonymous grave?”

“Of course. He was a tyrant.” The guard smiles. “That mask is the last that anyone shall see of him.”