Madame Tussaud

Chapter 55

APRIL

7, 1793

In order to ensure public tranquillity, two hundred thousand heads must be cut off.

—JEAN-PAUL MARAT

TERROR. THIS IS WHAT DANTON HAS UNLEASHED IN THE WAKE of his wife’s death. He is urging the National Convention to establish a committee to root out every enemy of the patrie and send them first to prison, then to the guillotine. He is like a man possessed, preaching about enemies wherever he goes, from the Jacobin Club to the floor of the Convention. This war against conspirators has given him a new reason to live, and he is not alone in his crusade. In one of his recent placards, Marat has calculated how many criminals can be guillotined in a single day. Even Robespierre has joined the call for a committee responsible for hunting down the enemies of equality.

On the sixth of April, the Convention takes Danton’s advice, making him the first member of the Committee of Public Safety. Now he and eight other men are given the task of finding traitors by any means necessary, and only the Chronique de Paris is brave enough to write the truth. It begins by attacking Marat and Danton. Then, the author moves on to Robespierre.

There are some who ask why there are so many women around Robespierre: at his house, in the galleries of the Jacobin Club, in the galleries of the Convention. It is because this Revolution of ours is a religion, and Robespierre is leading a sect therein. He is a priest at the head of his worshipers. He thunders against the rich and the great, and prides himself on how he lives on next to nothing. Then he talks of God and of Providence, creating his own disciples in the process. He calls himself the friend of the humble and the weak, yet happily receives the adoration of both women and the poor in spirit. He is a false priest and will never be other than a false priest.

I burn the paper in the fireplace. That evening, when the patrol comes to our house, they search our cabinets, our storeroom, the glass jars in our workshop. They scour our shelves for royalist books and make themselves comfortable in our salon, going through newspapers. When the men are finished, they congratulate us. “Not every house is filled with such dedicated patriots as yourselves.”

We watch them leave, and I could cry with relief when they are gone. Not everyone is so fortunate. The news that comes to us every night through Curtius is terrifying. They have arrested a general who surrendered to the Prussians and sentenced him to death. When his young wife heard of this, she ran into the streets screaming, “Long live the king!” Tomorrow, they will both be executed in the Place de la Révolution.

“They are sending women who have just given birth to the guillotine,” Curtius reveals. “Yesterday, a mother with an infant still at her breast was led to the scaffold. The executioner handed the child to an old man in the crowd, then bound the mother’s hands and executed her.” He lowers his head. “And everyone watched in silence.”

We are all guilty. Every one of us. When Danton’s Committee of Public Safety arrests fourteen girls discovered dancing at a Prussian ball in Verdun, not a single voice speaks out for them. Instead, the masses watch as the girls are led through the public square, their red chemises blowing in the warm spring breeze. Every day there is another story of a woman crying “Vive le Roi!” at her sentencing before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Wives are marching to the guillotine with their husbands, and daughters are going with their fathers and brothers. When the news comes that Madame Sainte-Amaranthe has been arrested for once gambling with royalists, I know that the world has gone mad. Where does it end? Who will risk death to tell the truth that the Committee of Public Safety is worse than any king who ever ruled in France?

“They have arrested her children as well,” Curtius tells me. We both look across the room to the models of Madame Sainte-Amaranthe and her daughter, part of our Parisian Beauties tableau. I remember the morning when Émilie Sainte-Amaranthe came to sit for me. It was four years ago. The king’s courtier came with the invitation for me to be Madame Élisabeth’s tutor, and Robespierre advised me to turn it down. Émilie declared that to refuse would be insane.

Lucile once warned me that Robespierre never forgets an indignity or a slight. Has Robespierre remembered this and sentenced her entire family to death? “You don’t think—”

He knows what I am about to say. “They still call him The Incorruptible,” he says wryly.

But that is only a name. A reputation he has built for himself.