Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution

Chapter 61

MAY

1794

The antechamber of the guillotine.

—ANONYMOUS REFERENCE TO LES CARMES

I CANNOT SLEEP. AFTER THE CANDLES ARE BLOWN OUT, I LISTEN to the rats scurrying across the floors. Somewhere on the other side of the room, a woman is weeping softly. For all their brave faces, everyone is afraid. Tomorrow, the carts will come, and there is no telling whose beds will be empty by night. There are seventeen of us in this chamber. Will we all die at the same time? Or will they take us one by one?

When the sun rises, I look across at my mother and can see that she has not slept either. Because our beds are so close, I am able to reach out and take her hand. “Do you have regrets?” I whisper in German.

She closes her eyes, and I imagine that she is picturing Paschal. How he screamed when we were taken away and begged his mother to bring us back. “Grand-mère!” he cried. “Tatie, don’t go!” I had planned for our arrest in a dozen different ways, but I had not planned for what we should do if the soldiers came and Paschal was still awake. My mother opens her eyes, and her voice is firm. “No,” she says. “I have no regrets.”

The barber arrives and, after locking the door behind him, announces that he is here to prepare Anna and Marie Grosholtz. He cuts our hair short for the guillotine. When the job is done, he asks if there is anyone we might like to leave it to.

“I left mine to my daughter,” Rose says from her bed. “It will be her inheritance.”

I do not want my nephew to remember me by my death, and I shake my head. The barber looks to my mother, who is just as vehement. The old man shrugs. He sweeps our long hair into a bag, and I wonder if it is destined to be used on a wax head someday. But I refuse to cry.

“When they first cut off my hair, I wept all day,” Rose admits.

“It is only hair,” I tell her. “It will grow back.”

“If you have enough time! The carts are coming right now. It could be me, or you, or—”

“Stop that,” Grace snaps, and I think Rose will die of fear before they take her to the guillotine.

“Twenty-one,” Rose says. Her voice rises. “To die at twenty-one?”

“Or forty,” Grace retorts. “Or fourteen. There is a boy in here who is thirteen years old. ‘Kill them all, and God will know His own,’ ” she says. “That is their motto.”

There is the sound of a key turning in the lock, and many of the women stand from their beds. Rose whispers, “It’s time.”

“The carts are here!” the jailer shouts before he leaves us to open the next door in the hall. Hundreds of prisoners fill the corridors, and we join the crowd as they make their way to a giant hall where the monks must have gathered to eat. My mother and I sit next to Rose and Grace. There are at least eight hundred people here. “How many names do they call each day?” I ask Rose.

“Three. Sometimes four.”

“Then your chances of being called are only one out of two hundred,” I tell her.

She stares at me with her wide, dark eyes.

“I spent a good amount of time counting money and balancing books,” I say. I want to tell her, At least you weren’t arrested by Robespierre himself. He didn’t stare at you and say that only Saint Denis could save your life now. Then I think of Madame Royale living alone in the Tuileries Palace. I heard that, after Madame Élisabeth’s death, they separated Marie-Thérèse from her brother, and that the soldiers were treating young Louis-Charles with particular cruelty. Whatever Madame Royale’s deeds against me were, and only God truly knows them, I am willing to forgive her. Today, if my name is called, I will go with a clean heart.

I search the hall for familiar faces. There are just as many men as women, both old and young, culottes and sans-culottes. A young man seats himself next to me, and I am struck by how similar to Henri he appears. He catches me staring and asks, “You are new here?”

“Last night.”

“I’m sorry,” he says with genuine sympathy. “They do this on purpose,” he reveals. “Gather everyone and make them wait. It’s a sad spectacle,” he adds critically.

The chief jailer appears with a list in his hands. Immediately, the entire room is silent. I can see the way he makes us wait, searching the hall and letting his gaze rest on particular prisoners, who immediately bury their heads in their hands. “Today’s list,” he says slowly, “has eight people.”

“Eight?” Rose turns to me. “What are our chances now?”

“One in a hundred.”

My mother makes the sign of the cross, and the chief jailer begins to read. He pauses after each name, searching for the victim so he may see the reaction. When he reaches the end of the list and we have not been called, I am suddenly elated. We have survived! Our first day in Les Carmes and we will live to see another.

But there are devastating cries across the room as loved ones are parted and must make their good-byes. At once, I feel terrible guilt for my joy. A woman is forcibly parted from her husband as she is begging him to look after their daughter. I cover my eyes with my hand, and the man next to me says gently, “Don’t sit at the front tomorrow. When you sit in the back, there’s almost nothing you can hear. It’s better that way.”

I lower my hand. “So then why are you up here?”

He smiles. “Because I saw you.”

I know I’m blushing, and I realize I should introduce myself. But is it possible to court this way in a prison? “I am Marie Grosholtz,” I reply.

He takes my hand and kisses it tenderly. “I am François Tussaud.”

ONCE THE HALL is cleared of the condemned, the prisoners are given carafes of dirty water and bowls of soup.

“We can go outside,” François suggests. “If we leave now, we might find a bench.”

I look to my mother. “Go,” she says. I follow François into a little herb garden where we are allowed to sit on the wooden benches. There are guards posted along the wall, grateful for the chance to stand in the sunshine rather than inside, among the latrine buckets and bloodied floors.

“So you were born in Strasbourg,” François guesses. He must hear my accent.

“Yes, but I remember almost nothing of it,” I say.

“Like Mâcon. That’s where my people are from. But they moved to Lyon when I was four, and all I can remember are the water mills.”

I think of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau, with its pots of lilacs and clusters of hyacinths. The water mill was Madame Élisabeth’s favorite place in Versailles. Is someone still feeding the sheep and milking the cows, or has the Convention abandoned the rustic sanctuary to the honeysuckle and ivy? “But Lyon must be much like Mâcon,” I say, picturing the thriving city between Paris and Marseille. “The cities are close.”

“Yes. It was. Of course, now there is almost nothing left of it.”

I tell him about the Salon de Cire, and he tells me he was an engineer. “So we were both builders,” he says. “Except now there’s nothing to build in Lyon.”

“Why? What happened?” I ask.

I can see that the memory pains him. “It was a massacre,” he reveals. “The city refused to support the Committee of Public Safety and wanted a return to the Constitution of ’Ninety-one. It was civil war. The papers in Paris never reported it?”

“No.” I am certain of this. “I would have heard.”

“It was Robespierre’s doing. When our citizens refused to support the committee, he instructed his generals to ‘exterminate every monster in Lyon.’ ”

“He used those words?”

“Yes. And that’s what it was. An extermination of two thousand people: women, children, even the old and feeble. Because my family were metalworkers, the men were chained together and executed on the Plaine des Brotteaux. I escaped because I was in a neighboring village. When I returned, I saw that the Convention’s soldiers had razed every house and apartment to the ground. Any store or building that looked as if it belonged to the wealthy, they destroyed. But they kept the slums standing. The poor were allowed to remain in their shacks as the true patriots and victims of the aristocracy. Ten days later, Robespierre ordered a column to be erected over the site of the largest burned building. It read, LYON MADE WAR ON LIBERTY, SO LYON IS NO MORE.”

My eyes are filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” François says. “I should not have spoken of this to a lady. You will never have seen such blood—”

“I have seen it all, and more.”

I tell him about my brothers in the Tuileries Palace and my task of visiting the charnel house each night, searching through the baskets of mutilated bodies for the heads wanted by the National Convention. “When Lucile Desmoulins was sent to the scaffold, I refused to go back to the Madeleine Cemetery.”

“And that is why you are here?”

“And why they arrested my mother. My father doesn’t know,” I say. To explain what Curtius truly is to me would be too long, too complicated. “He is stationed on the Rhine. I can’t imagine his horror when he returns to discover that we have been arrested.” Or worse, that we have died and been buried, like Gabrielle Danton. I am weeping openly now.

I must look as sad and helpless as Rose.

IN THE MORNINGS, François sits with me and my mother in the back of the hall, and when the carts have rolled away, he leads us into the garden, pointing out the herbs and describing their uses. When my mother becomes sick from the water they serve, he brings her some peppermint. He tells us that after his family was murdered, he lived off the land for more than six months. “Eventually, the soldiers discovered me and I was sent here,” he says. “They might have killed me right then, but a single soldier took pity. He was a school friend of mine.”

At night, before we are locked in our cells, I spend time with François in his chamber. He shares a room with fifteen other men. Most of them are seated on their beds with female prisoners, playing cards made from paper and talking about the old days when anything could be bought in the Palais-Royal and the cafés were filled with coffee and bread. We are always thinking about food, and you can pick out the prisoners who have been here longest by the sharpness of their cheekbones and the looseness of their clothes. The Revolution has truly made us equals. Now we are all poor and hungry and ill-clothed.

It is stifling in these cells. We pretend not to smell the fetid latrine buckets collecting flies in the hall, but none of us can escape the rising heat. It has been two weeks since I have had a bath, and for many in here it has been much longer.

“I have something for you,” François says one evening. He pulls a newspaper from under his pillow and puts a finger to his lips. “One of the guards gave it to me. I won it at cards.”

“It’s today’s paper,” I say, shocked.

“Did you think I would bet on old news?”