Part One: Paris
August 1789
François
As François carried his coughing protégé through summer grasses, the dry fronds swarming about his knees, more smoke left his lips than he breathed. Behind them, the stone and timber chateau that had once been his manor home blazed high into a blackened night sky, encircled by the flickering silhouettes of denizens from the nearby village, chanting cerise curses as by witches performing an unholy rite. Streams of smoke curled the air, fed by crimson flames rising from scorched ground; François saw it as closely as if he were standing inside of the crumbling remains.
He blinked away rapid tears and kept running, forcing focus to his breath alone—to not give into the fire his country was speedily melting into. It claimed nearly everything inside him. He could not think of the scarlet, infuriated faces outside his window, or the bright explosion that had sent his servants flying to be impaled or crushed beneath the jagged rubble strewn across the kitchens and dining room. The scorched ground outside, the flour dust rent from the air, morphed by a single spark into stinging soot. François could not suffer any of it, though his broken ribs ached with the memory of falling through the floor with the boy cradled against his chest. He still didn't know how he managed to reach him in time to shove him beneath his arms, or how they avoided further injury from the piano as it crashed into pieces beside them, screaming a storm of sound amid angered shouts all around.
In those moments, the only thing he had known—and knew still—was to protect Matthieu from the mortal harm these villagers intended. And so François had grabbed him and run—run like an aristocrat whose sole credit to his name was the money he purchased his title with, not a franc like the decorated knight he was.
Dodging the blaze and seeking, dirty hands, François sprinted for the forest—for the guarded safety he knew lay beyond the coppice of trees—and within minutes caught glimpses of the golden lights of Versailles Palace, its lambency warm and familiar, its baroque splendor out of reach from the chaffed and ruddy crowd chasing him.
Now, if only he could reach it—
Something flared in the corner of his vision, and Matthieu yelped a warning. François ducked to the right in time to avoid the flaming torch as it soared past. He chanced a glance backward and quickly paid for it by tripping over a hunched tree root. Matthieu flew out of his grasp and landed in a heap several feet away, rolling to a stop as François cracked his head on a thick branch. For a moment the world faded, but then Matthieu's strained and flushed face screamed at him to get up, and they were running again. Away from another fire igniting in their wake, heedless of the amount of noise they made as they trampled through the underbrush when the mob behind them grew so much louder—and ever closer.
In moments, the thicket fell back and tossed them into another, smaller field devoid of any vegetation taller than trimmed grass blades, and they flew across the flat land on sure feet. François swiped the blood from his eyes and tried to focus on where they were going—where Matthieu was guiding him—but it was becoming laborious to breathe—too laborious—and when he looked down, the wine color blossoming on his white satin shirt gleamed like a fresh spill beneath the clouded moonlight.
Merde. One of the bones from his broken rib cage had torn skin—so he thought; the fall must have pushed them down. François would heal—he hoped he would heal—but it wouldn't do to collapse in the middle of an open field and leave Matthieu to fend for himself against the mob.
He followed the boy again through thick bowers that served as a wall into the extensive palace gardens and spilled onto a long, clear avenue, racing along it without breaking stride. Their shoes smacked the uneven ground to the tune of his haggard breath, the only other sound now to fill François's ringing ears. He pushed himself harder, ignoring the pang that sprang beneath his sternum and how his suspirations started to sound like less of a wheeze and more fluid, and overtook Matthieu with long strides. His rattled brain took an unnervingly long moment to register that the boy was leading them all the way to the palace itself—perhaps the servant's entrance nearest them, along the northwest corner of the gardens, but—
"I cannot—climb the wall—" François gasped. Dieu, his voice sounded monstrous, like something caught between the whip-thin saplings flying past them in penumbra blurs, battling death.
Awaiting death. He forced himself to swallow, breathe in—death shall never await you—and coughed. Blood spattered the sides of his mouth.
Without pause, Matthieu shot him an incredulous look. It widened when he caught sight of the spreading red over his mentor's body. "But we cannot go through the front gates. A mob awaits there, too—"
"I know." François could hear them, chanting for bread and money they could actually keep—soon to be joined, he was certain, by the crowd harrowing them. They would be distracted by it, drawn into their desperation. Logically, François and Matthieu could cease running and look for quieter means of entry, but, drowned of reason, full of reactive emotion, François did the first thing—the only thing—his addled brain could generate, and jerked them both right into the climbing roses.
They crashed through the trellis work, landing in a heap on a bed of snapped wood, pithy vines and soft petals. François heard Matthieu hiss as dozens of thorns pierced his skin, and he staggered to his feet with gnashing teeth, crushing the petals in every which way beneath his body as he yanked the boy up onto solid ground. The pair raced through the labyrinthine pathways of the palace gardens, moving south by sheer memory along the hedged-in pentagonal clearing that comprised the Star Grove, past one of the many gurgling fountains and through the botanic maze beyond, its trimmed hedge walls garnished with dozens of jewel-toned roses and creamy lilies, their cloying scent congealing in François's lungs, already struggling against the blood he felt filling them steadily.
His heart pounded in time with his feet on the stone promenade. He didn't know if the mob was pursuing them any longer—if they would find the break in the border, wail their way into the palace with their torches and set it aflame, too. A darkness far deeper than the unlit night was creeping into his vision, and François began to measure his moments of consciousness, trying to force it back. Stay awake, stay awake, stayawakestayawakestayawakestayawakestake—were they in the English Gardens, or the French Gardens? One of the Parterres? He hadn't any clue. All he smelled were the bloody roses.
When the grand back entrance of the square Petit Trianon emerged into view, François gave one last push of his body and cried out to the sentry stationed at the mullioned doors, who jolted awake and reached for his sword. Upon blearily recognizing that it was François and his son who hurtled onto the sprawling stone portico towards him, his jaw fell slack in shock.
"Monsieur comte—"
"Open the doors, Etienne! Now!" François bellowed, and the guard rushed to comply, throwing them open and leaping aside as the two flew through and shuddered to a stop before they ran into the round table stationed in the middle of the entryway, against the wall. Atop it sat a porcelain vase of more ruby and garnet roses.
"What happened?" Etienne demanded as he shut the doors, holding aloft his guard's lantern to illuminate all of their faces, shining with sweat in the summer heat. This late at night, the flickering taper was the only illumination in the dark hall, and both men shook uncontrollably in its inconstant light. Their clothes and skin were smeared with ash, smelt acrid and brimmed with unseemly cuts.
Etienne stared between them with bugging eyes, the damp russet curls on his head alight with a dim but fiery glow. "Need I wake the King?" he concluded, hushed in the rutilant gloom despite the amount of gold and silver the single candle's beam cast in coruscating slivers of flame all around them. As though François and Matthieu hadn't escaped the fire at all; it had merely found a way to blaze in silence.
"They're…burning—everything." François collapsed to his knees, and then his stomach, one side of his flushed face pressing into the cold marble. It was the only answer he could give. His breath came now in viscous wheezes, and he could think of nothing else besides the flickering shadows in the corners of his vision, engulfing those tiny, clinquant little bursts.
He heard Etienne's frazzled response through ringing ears. He saw Matthieu's gasping reflection in the coral-veined marble. He felt something warm spilling onto it, enveloping him. He smelled roses and the sharp tang of copper. He tasted blood.
Then…
Everything inside him burned. Red, bleeding over everything, everywhere. He saw it when he fell asleep, a fine satin film over the entire landscape. He saw it when he opened his eyes, when he looked around. Saturating the stone, the earth, the profane graves with its fiery heat.
He had never loathed the color more.
-/-
August 1792
François
François awoke, as he always did these days, to an ache in his abdomen and a pair of indigo eyes staring at him from the edge of the bed. He grinned. "Bonjour."
"Good morning, Papa." Matthieu stood and moved across the sunlit chamber to the silver tea service set on the wooden table by the door, pouring a cup of dark brew. Steam rose up in welcoming tufts that vanished in the air above Matthieu's head. "You were talking in your sleep again."
Sitting up, François smoothed out his hair, swiped the uneasy sleep from his face, and—while Matthieu's back was turned—checked the scar beneath his nightshirt. It was still inflamed, infected with an illness no anemic or emetic could cure, but as of this moment, wasn't bleeding. "And you were trying to discern what I was saying, oui?"
Matthieu gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Listening for clues, I suppose." He dropped a teaspoon of loose sugar into the tea and stirred as he carried the cup over, placing the spoon on the saucer with a quiet clink. He said nothing else of the question.
François accepted the cup and drank deeply, privately relieved for the hot liquid to diminish the constant ache all over his body, if only momentarily. When done, he returned the cup and saucer to Matthieu and tossed off the enormous duvet, throwing his legs over the side of the bed and eyeing his adoptive son's impassive face. "You do not have to wait upon me like a servant. You must know you are more than that."
Matthieu finally grinned, though it was brief. "I don't mind. It provides opportunity to occupy myself with an activity besides sitting."
Now that, François knew immediately, was not the entire truth, but as Matthieu walked away, he chose not to argue. Stretching his arms over his head, François rose and padded on bare feet to the tall, mullioned window that made up a portion of the wall on the south side of the chamber. The patterned ciselé velvet curtains framing it had been drawn back and tied with twisted satin rope, leaving only a thin chiffon gauze underneath that proffered both privacy and natural light for the an otherwise pale-lit bedchamber. François lifted this with two fingers and peered cautiously out to the street.
An omnipresent mob clogged the narrow entrance, flooding the rectangular patches of green lawn on either side, where the grass had long been trampled beneath hundreds of feet and the bushes around each border were mere husks of the flourishing growth they once were, burnt victims of protest. It was a gardener's nightmare, should any of those still serving the royal family dare to go beyond the interior courtyard. Looking down upon dozens of upturned faces smeared with the filth of the street, twisted with pain, rage, and desperation, François felt his grip on his own body begin to loosen, threatening to join them in their collective demands for change. He couldn't hear their voices through the glass, but he sensed an eagerness about them that hadn't been there for months, as though they finally had a new plan to achieve what they wanted. Someone, then, had planted a seed and then stood back to watch as it grew, boosting them with more terrible ideas.
François's eyes narrowed, scrutinizing the most prominent and visible faces among the crowd for signs, gestures or unspoken signals passing between them. If he so desired to suffer it, François could nudge the answers straight from their minds without ever needing to open his mouth, but that was an iron gate he closed long ago and had no intentions of reopening, no matter the consequence.
Dropping the curtain before any of the mob spotted his face, François turned back to the high-ceilinged room that had been his and Matthieu's cell for well over a year now.
It was a glamorous prison they occupied at the Tuileries—resplendent with all the gold, brocades and furs they could desire—yet it was a prison all the same, caging more tightly than the laces of a corset. After aiding the King and Queen in their escape attempt the previous summer, the only thing that stood between François and the mob were the savoir faire of a few influential people depreciating him and Matthieu to a servant and stable boy merely doing as they were bid. Like rabid animals the mob bought it without question—believing, or made to believe, that privately, quietly, the two were on their side—and François and Matthieu were locked up in the palace with the royal family under the pretense of maintaining sufficient staff to keep their routine.
In reality, the Brissotins who spoke for them and the Montagnards who came later hoped to acquire a couple of spies out of the deal. Both of them had been approached more than once in the courtyard over the past year by staff and members of the National Guard, offering immunity in exchange for rumors of coups proposed by the king to fan the sansculottes outside into a high enough rage for destruction.
Each time, François kept his mouth sealed. As far as he knew, so had Matthieu.
Nothing could guarantee their safety for however long the revolt lasted. François thought he had never been as fearful for Matthieu's livelihood as when his chateau was set alight with them inside it, and he was proven wrong time and again these past three years. From the hot autumn day they were dragged to Paris inside a jostled and harassed carriage to the glowing night they were caught at Varennes and nearly separated in the hassle, François knew that their time—both his and the family's—was limited; he felt it down to the bones that comprised his foundation.
How limited? Their holdings offered little in the way of escape should anyone come for them—the door was the only means unless they desired a plunge through the glass onto the front lawn and surely into the arms of the mob—albeit there were many angles to view intrusion from, scattered as the heavy wood furniture was about the open room. François made certain the exposed marble below the patterned Persian rug was polished to a reflective shine every week and kept the fireplace poker under the bed at night. When they first arrived, he placed small pieces of looking-glass shattered and thieved from Versailles moments before their capture along curves in the burgundy wallpaper and gilded cornices to catch changing shadows. They glittered dimly in the morning sun, easily mistaken for chipping flakes of gold paint.
The swish of fabric in his periphery drew François's attention, finding Matthieu carefully laying out his clothes in what had become a daily routine between them. A pang of guilt rustled through him at the sight.
It had occurred to him before, the idea that he could simply leave. It would be quite easy: gather the boy, their clothes and as many valuables as they could carry, sneak out a servant's side door, and vanish into the streets. François had traveled great distances in the blink of an eye. Even with an inexperienced companion, such an escape would be feasible.
And yet, something kept him here—a gnawing he didn't understand. Pride? An old habit of chivalry and affection for the Capetian line? Perhaps a desire to aid his people because, despite his precautions to protect the King and Queen, he believed they possessed valid and truthful objections to the existing state of taxation and division of government?
It was ridiculous. Any man with common sense could see that the longer they stayed here, the more likely it was that François's head would be put on a pike and paraded about the Parisian streets—and all that while François remained very much alive to feel it.
They needed a way out, desperately. If not for his own sake, then for Matthieu's.
The boy deserved better, at least.
"Papa," he said, and François's attention shot back to him from the door. Matthieu was positioned by the folding screen in the corner adjacent, behind which stood a claw-foot tub, an empty pail painted with gold leaf on the outside, and a basin for rinsing one's face, already filled with cooling water. On the duvet, a pair of off-white breeches and a cream silk shirt with an oily sheen were laid out, along with gaiters, beside his steel-blue general's coat, adorned with ribbons and medals earned from centuries of combat. Without the proper care to which it was accustomed by laundresses no longer in attendance, the gold-threaded epaulets were fraying and the color was beginning to fade. His medals, which ordinarily he cleaned himself until they shone, had become dull, the ribbons clinging to them soiled. Roving his fingers over them lightly, one caught on the scarlet band of the Ordre de Saint-Louis, prominent beside his accolades from the American boy's revolution.
François grinned, though it felt forced. He hoped Matthieu did not see through it. "Do we have somewhere to be today?"
"Monsieur Rouget came with the water and tea maids while you slept," answered Matthieu, as solemn as a page. "He said that His Majesty wishes to see you."
The smile dropped from François's mouth, eyebrows furrowing in its place. To not wake him immediately after receiving this summons was one thing. To keep the King waiting while he simply dozed was quite another. Amid the heightened discontent and excess of violence in these uncertain days, it was not difficult for the monarch to presume that François had deserted his service to join those executing the forceful policing of the mob.
"How long?" he requested.
"Nearly one-quarter hour."
"Dammit." François ripped off his night gown and grabbed the clothes Matthieu had so carefully laid out, bolting behind the folding screen to change.
"I only wanted…" The boy's voice was subdued, a whisper struggling to rise above the sounds of whipped threads emitting from the hidden side of the screen. He didn't finish the statement—or, if he did, then François didn't hear what was left.
Matthieu stayed quiet in the remainder of time it took François to dress and make himself presentable, dunking his hands in the water basin and running them through his hair. In spite of the fact that he hadn't bathed in days and the pale strands were lank and smooth with oil, his fingers caught in endless knots. Grimacing, he ripped through them, then seized the frayed purple ribbon beside the bowl and wrapped it around his hair. François moved more out of habit than actually watched himself in the looking-glass. His gaze focused instead on Matthieu, following cautiously as the boy, face long, moved to the window and gazed onto the street below. His frown deepened.
What is it you do want, child?
François only just finished securing his cuffs and straightening his lapels when a furious knock came upon the door. Before either of them could move, it burst open and one of the sentries spilled in, flushed and heaving for breath.
(It was not Etienne. He had been drawn and quartered by the mob while defending the palace on that torturous day three years ago, when they were all brought to Paris.)
François struggled to recall the sentry's name—not uncommon, to be frank. He was young—an apprentice of sorts, based upon his attire—barely old enough for the spot of peach fuzz on his chin and possessing a dark mole on his perspiring forehead.
He was too young, François thought, to be placed in the position of the readily dying.
"What is it?" he asked, with as much calm and hauteur as he could muster. Inside, his heart began to beat wildly, out of pace with the rest of his breath and body. Beyond the door, he heard an eruption of cries echo through the corridor, and felt any floridity leave his face.
The page swallowed painfully and blurted, "It's—it's—th—the—oh, I've forgotten to bow, I'm—"
"There's no time for that—out with it!" François bellowed. The page ceased his ridiculous stuttering and obeisance and snapped to attention, though his face remained a map fraught with fright.
As did his voice, still tremulous and high when he spoke. Too young to die.
"It's the King, sir. The mob has broken in. They declare their intentions to be the arrest of the royal family—and they are going to kill the rest." His brow crumpled at the same moment further cries—strangled, pained shouts—blew into the chamber, and before François could blink, the young man was gone, off to defend what little lives he could until he found his own gallant death.
François turned to Matthieu. The boy stared back at him, shocked in the eyes yet solemn in face. A single question rose in François's mind.
Me, or Him?
He supposed it was the spirit of the day that crafted such weight into a necessary and immediate decision at all, and yet for François there was no deliberation or torturous confusion. There was only the conclusion. For he knew, deep within and rising to the surface, that he had made this choice long ago.
Historical Notes:
Title translation: "So much the better". These were General Montcalm's dying words upon being informed that he was not going to survive his wounds, obtained on the battlefield in Quebec (Plains of Abraham) on 14 September 1759 (Clarke 212).
Le Grande Peur (The Great Fear): In August 1789—around the same time The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was adopted—a rumor arose that the French aristocracy had invited England to invade the nation, resulting in the peasantry burning down the chateaux of various landowners and seigniories across France. Many members of the nobility began to flee the country due to this.
Brissotins aka Girondins: These were the moderate "faction" (noted to be a loose conglomeration of republicans rather than a designated group) that possessed a leading role in government from the beginning of the French Revolution until their decline following the arrest of the royal family and eventual overthrow in May – June 1793. The denomination "Brissotin" stems from the spokesman of this group, Jacques-Pierre Brissot. The term "Girondin", stemming from the provincial French département Gironde, alluding to the extensive backing they had from more rural areas of the country, was not popularly used until 1793.
Montagnards aka Mountain Men: Composed of a more devoutly democratic (some might say "radical") group of députés (parliament members), this was the group led by Maximilien Robespierre that governed with an iron fist during the climax of the Revolution in 1793-1794, depending primarily on the backing of the "petty bourgeoisie" and Parisian sansculottes (extremist revolutionaries). Their name allegedly stems from their seating position in Parliament/National Convention, assembled in the higher benches of the gallery. Originally considered part of the Jacobin club, they split into a separate group following a division of the moderate and leftist elements in 1791.
National Guard: the guard for the Legislative Assembly (as opposed to the palace guard), the name for the French government at the time this chapter takes place.
"the hot autumn day they were dragged to Paris": On 6 October 1789, a mostly female mob broke into Versailles Palace and brought the royal family in a procession to Paris, where they would be imprisoned in the Tuileries until their formal arrest on 10 August 1792 (Clarke 372).
Ordre de Saint-Louis, technically the Ordre royal et militaire de Saint-Louis: a dynastic chivalry order established in 1693 to award exceptional officers, signified in three classes by a bright red ribbon or sash with an accompanying medal. This was notably the first decoration that could be awarded to non-noble officers.
Selected Sources:
1. 1000 Years of Annoying the French, by Stephen Clarke
2. "French Revolution" - History .com editors, History Channel website, last edited 26 October 2020
3. "Girondins" - Encyclopedia Britannica editors
4. "Jacobin Club" - Encyclopedia Britannica editors
5. "Montagnard" - Encyclopedia Britannica editors
