The poor French is entirely my own fault.

June 9th, 1789

No one had seen her bolt from the Bazinière Tower to the Liberté Tower.

The plume of her nightgown, sticky with heat and sweat against her skin, danced like a floating cloud across stones as she made her way from one end of the prison to the other. In the blackness of night it was an ethereal sight: a shapeless, starched white form moving with a gazelle's grace and speed that pricked at the edges of peripheral visions. Muscle memory guided her in a world without torches, a world without light or ambient noises. The midnight June air cooled the sweat on her skin and made her melt into the incomplete slumber of Paris.

No one had seen her. She had memorized the geôliers rotations down to when they'd bring out the cook who'd dump the refuse not eaten during the day. She waited for voices to flutter up to her birdcage like hummingbird's wings, and with them the pacing of boots masking irritable French twangs. At 11 pm on the mark there would be banging on the bars of a cell in the Liberté, mock-wails of mercy flowing out like the tickle of a feather.

There was nothing else to do but memorize and watch.

It became easier to file away the hourly comings and goings because her jailer, Thomas, had provided her with a time-piece: a leftover, scuffed and meagre bronze thing with ticks that gave her small comforts at night. Her throat throbbed from the dead screams in her voice box, reminding her that after the world had had enough of your tears, your struggle, silence was what reigned in the end. Silence, the crown of nothingness. Be silent and wait, said the unknown. Be silent and be good for those unmoved by your useless protests.

No more. The isolation and the quiet tick-ticks of her timepiece clawed at her mind like a mole through wet soil, so aggravating and deep she needed to claw her way to the surface. So, when others were busy among themselves or had settled for their fitful bouts of sleep, she would scratch at the lock on her door, find the small piece of brass she hid under her blanket, and pick until the door gave way. She would open it until the hinges began to squeak, squeeze her body the rest of the way through, and run in feet adorned with stockings. Her boots would have given her away; going barefooted would be open evidence she had escaped. With stockings that hugged her mid-thigh rather than below the knee as was custom, she sprinted from tower to tower, silent and quick with every corner imprinted on her memory.

There was a nagging question, a curiosity in her mind that needed to be satisfied. That week she had mulled over it, watching her jailer's reaction as she answered 'Yes, of course I read it' in regards to that pervers (pervert) with the twelve metre long manuscript he kept away from searching eyes. She hadn't asked then why her jailer had read the manuscript himself; why he didn't report it to his superior, which was what he was required to do. It had been clear Thomas, an aged fifty-something with mismatched blonde hair and a square face resembling flatbread, had a decent repertoire among the prisoners so as to read their filthy secrets without gushing his guilty conscience to the man who paid his wages. Thomas had been easy to talk to, easy to confide the basics in. Easy enough to understand that certain things could not be explained or said, or how she simply could not handle being in this prison anymore.

Even witches can go mad with no one but their own company.

It had only been a week. Unless she found something to occupy her overactive mind, she truly would rip the bars off her cage and fly to the paradise she'd dreamt of since arriving here. Thankfully, such thoughts were put on hold the moment she learned she could open her own birdcage and flutter wherever she wished, provided she returned before anyone noticed. Such dissatisfied thoughts were satisfied more when she found the men she'd been separated from.

Two were clearly ill in the head through no fault of their own. One rocked himself to sleep in slow turns with his nails gripping the fabric of his chemise for comfort, while the other would sit at his side of the wall humming to no one's pleasure but his own. Their age couldn't be specified, but she had guessed they were in their thirties, provided the lines drawn by broken nails and premature age didn't muddy her guess.

Farther down were the more mentally well and physically fit men, including the fencers Thomas talked about. She had not seen their faces and they had not seen hers – yet. There was an incident several days before when she had crept too far down the hallway, gaining a clear view (as far as the wall torches would permit) of one of them sitting on his cot against the wall. There was a familiarity to that one: his large chest shown with a v-neck, dark if not messy hair dangling around his face and a gruff easiness in his surroundings. Only when his profile turned to a full frontal view, when she could see the trimmed beard hiding the weathered wrinkles and the frown tugging at his face, did she scramble into the darkness and rush back to her nest.

She hadn't stayed to see him peer after her in the dark, or hear his student ask him what he was staring at. She waited for Thomas to barge into her cell, demanding of her what was she doing in the men's quarters at that time of night? Didn't she know she was forbidden from ever seeing them, and them of her? How she was supposed to be one of the Bastille's best and worst kept secrets? Oh, she knew the secrets. The rumours. How the one who took her ring, the ugly one with a leering face and teeth jagged and pitted like the trunk of a termite gnawed tree, would ask after Thomas to see if she was getting better, fitter, prettier.

Let them talk, she reasoned. She was bred to evoke reaction and controversy. It was her blood and spirit. Her will took care of the rest. Before, she had been an anonymous person keeping her head down, avoiding the ravages of the world and trying not to upset the balance of a place she had no right to be in. Now? She was a witch. An outsider. Murderer of a playwright. What part she played in that fiasco - the man looking at her as if she was a resurrected corpse or a phantom of the night, cursing her very existence - was hitherto unknown. But if she had to survive in this new climate, this new terrain, she had to go along with it.

Survival didn't always mean playing smart to those who expected you to play their games. Still she did not give a motive to the man who self-immolated; still she did not speak of her innocence or her guilt. She did not give anyone her name. Yes, she was going to play that game, the game of Guess Who. No one said she couldn't be evasive. Name-dropping only helped if you knew your case was going to be vindicated, and vindication wasn't in the books or even the margins. Sometimes survival meant playing the self-destruct card, or in her case, the 'I'm-going-to-poke-the-bear-and-see-if-he-hits-me' card.

If poking the bear meant entertainment and excitement, she was going to do it.

She returned to Liberté Tower again that night. She wanted to satisfy her nagging questions, of which two took top priority: one was the métis Autrichien, the prisoner closest to her in age, and two, the ignominious Marquis de Sade.

It was wrong to refer to the young man as a 'half-breed', for she was equally a half-breed. She was half-Russian, as she constantly stressed to Thomas, because it was a nationality easily recognized. They wouldn't recognize the other half of her, a breed from the Caucasus mountains as disengaged and dormant from the world like the Siberian Traps. However, if the man was as haughty and undeserving of attention as she'd heard, maybe he did deserve the name. Still. She didn't know him. But that didn't mean she wasn't interested in what he was – the 'what' always made her drawn to people.

As for the latter, well that was self-explanatory. He would come second.

Were she to be spied again by the bearded man she would not have a second chance to escape. He would report her to Thomas, as he was her handler and by far the one with the most intelligence out of all the gardes. First-time luck ensured his complacency towards her, but second or third chances would make her appear untrustworthy. The bearded man and his student surpassed Thomas in his perceptiveness, with the younger one likely to tattle on her first, if everything she heard about his stuck-up and entitled attitude was true; if he'd be the one to rattle her cage with that wooden stick he used to practice with.

That last concern would turn out to be the most accurate.

Her name was Marceline.

No one had asked her for it, and she had not provided one when the maréchaussé found her on that Parisian street, a crumpled pamphlet in her hand and an eerie calmness on her face as she watched Luc Comtois collapse into a charred heap of striped breeches and stinking leather. Briefly, the refuse he landed next to caught flame, but was extinguished from the sheer filth and weight of the pile. He'd had wild, badly cut auburn hair; scarecrow's hair. There was an audience around him not thirty minutes before, listening to him speak about the Estates General and how keen politicians were to silence the people. The Third Estate, he had said, was all of them: all men and women and the generations yet to be born, crushed under the silk and gem-studded heels of those who never went a day without food on their plates, their wealth pronounced like game trophies on their walls.

The Third Estate needed people to lead it into a new life, a new direction. All of them had to take part; all of them had to poke the proverbial bear and slaughter the sacred lamb and cow that was government censorship. The crowd cheered, tossing up blue and red ribbons in silk and placing coloured roses made in simple glass at his feet, tributes to a man who was a breath away from being sent to the La Grand Force. It all occurred in the most convenient place: Faubourg Saint-Antoine, east of the Bastille and where a mirror factory suffered a riot when workers were told their wages would be cut not two months before.

Whether it was poetic justice or poetic irony, Marceline could not say. Comtois had been no Mirabeau or Lamourette, lacking the formal education of both and the erotic sensibilities of the former. He'd been, to that point, a general nobody to those in the know. To the citoyens et citoyennes, he was a celebrated playwright who broke the rules and waved a bayonet on stage, braying 'the best riot is a riot with knives!' to the excited crowd. Thirty minutes later, when the crowd thinned out and the last glass cockade had been tucked away, the crown of thorns had been nailed into his smoking forehead.

Comtois, the scarecrow man who was supposed to be a nobody, became a martyr. He had screamed like a swine with a blade to its throat, all to a woman who hadn't an inkling of who he was.

She told herself she needed a new name for her new life. It would be a cliché to say she never wanted this to happen. It'd be predictable that she would not receive a trial or see the books thrown at her pretty head. It'd be bizarre if the inhabitants of Faubourg Saint-Antoine, instead of demanding blood for blood, had been equally fascinated and horrified at the murder.

Marceline was equally a martyr herself in this instance: a woman wronged, an étrangerère (outsider) given the worst kind of welcome to their fair city, and a metaphor for the civil situation as a whole. It'd been a shock when she started receiving notes from learned women and gifts from the illiterate ones, all of them wondering who and what she was and wishing her well in such an awful predicament. "Be a symbol to the people" said one. "You are an inspiration for me. I left my horrible husband yesterday. Dieu vous bénisse! (May God bless you!)" "We learned women will always be seen as witches. Take the rope from around your neck and hang the bâtards (bastards) with it!"

Well. Definitely interesting. Perhaps it was a way to make people forget their own miserable lives by imagining hers as so great, a touch of inspiration and wonder that superseded the fact that she killed someone. Maybe they just didn't care and Luc Comtois - l'homme des épouvantails (the scarecrow man) - was a fraud. Who knew? Who knows? Who cared? Marceline didn't. She just wanted to get the Hell out of here and back home...but that was faraway, a goal so unattainable she was better off fighting the leprechaun for his gold at the end of a rainbow.

For now, she wanted to be entertained. Boredom was a greater killer than a brain fever, and like those brain fevers it pulsed from her forehead to the deepest reaches of her brain. In the calottes, she had the wind and the howls drowning out sounds of a city she visited once, years ago, in the crispness of December and warm in her furs. The memories bit at her skin like frostbite, and Marceline would have shivered if not for the June heat. All there was left in the name of comfort was the night, embracing and empty, and it satisfied her bored, wandering mind.

The scribble of a quill on paper told her that the Marquis was still awake. It did not surprise her; creative thoughts, especially lewd ones, would come in sudden bursts when the rest of the body yearned for sleep. Donatien was a particular man, even down to the "instruments" he inserted into his own body. The thing that interested – or disgusted, if she had an inkling of what he was writing and whom it featured – Marceline was how long the man could write. By now the other prisoners had accustomed themselves to his paper scratching long into the morning hours. Rolls of his manuscript bunched around his ankles like the spores of a mushroom; after a hearty 'rain', they'd sprout, erotic spores floating in the air.

Marceline watched as one after another fell to the floor. In his seat, the Marquis' back to her, the upholstery of red velveteen and carved wood hid most of his frame. His wig remained as still as a weather-vane in the absence of wind. Deep in his muse, he had not noticed her existence. The torches at this point were lit only at certain places in the hallway, giving the prisoners enough darkness for sleep and adding comfort for those who needed it. The gardes were in the kitchen playing cards with the cook. There were so few prisoners, they reasoned. They didn't need to watch them all of the time.

The swept stones were smooth under her feet. Violet and the scent of roses permeated the air up through the arches and around to her nostrils. Her nose twitched at the smells the way a mouse's did, careful and attuned, half enjoying the smell and half wanting to sneeze. She peered at the Marquis' back, at his pale skin and the unwrinkled back as another sheaf of paper fell to his feet.

He stretched with a yawn, the quill firmly in one hand and a manuscript coated in black ink in the other.

Marceline saw his arms, his back and shoulders stretching, and a realization came to her, unusual and out-of-place.

He isn't fat.

He wasn't fat. Just the opposite: he looked lithe and lean, with no loose skin or hanging folds of flesh which would have been signs he had lost the weight. He looked underweight by contrast, if his legs were anything to go by. Rather than consume exotic, rich foods by the plateful hour by hour, the food that sat on his small dining table went uneaten. The wine had been consumed in its stead, three bottles standing in a crate away from his precious manuscripts.

What in the Hell? Marceline thought. A man who loved eating eel pâté was content eating mere apples and dates? Drinking simple fruit juice and leftover Bordeaux wine instead of sparkling wine? Hiding his 120 Days of Sodom from everyone else bar Thomas, a man who didn't seem to be the least bit interested in matters of politics or erotica?

Someone had to hit her in the head with a frying pan or slap her cheeks to break her stupor. This was getting too bizarre.

"I told you not to stare, Pisspot."

Marceline froze, both at the brusque masculine voice and the slight tilting of the Marquis' head at the sudden outburst. Her eyes flicked to the cell over, seeing the man who'd spied her the night before. The light was reduced from the first time he'd seen her, and while Marceline was thankful for the cover, she wouldn't be able to notice if any of them were watching her. She was twenty or so feet away from the Marquis, who was still distracted with his work.

"I'm not even staring at you. I'm staring at the wall behind you."

Ah...there was the half-breed. Sarcasm flowed off his tongue as if it was syrup, natural and flowing. Impatience backed his tone as if all his time spent in one cell couldn't be wasted for another minute. There was little fatigue in his voice, and it was brusque in its own youthful way, without the drawl and bluntness of his mentor.

Marceline quite liked it, finding an allure in the arrogance and sass. The boy who cried out to his jailers on how he was innocent, how this was all a mistake, wasn't present. This was a young man defiant even with a collar of iron bars around his neck. And now, he was having a verbal bitch fight with his cellmate.

"Of course you are, boy. Figures you'd be paying attention to les éraflures des poules (chicken scratches) now and not earlier," the older one said.

"As if the first few weeks weren't enough, vieux cochon (dirty old man)?" the younger one shot back.

"And how much did it take to convince you that they weren't simple chalk drawings? What, did you think we decided to play with coloured chalk? It'd pass the time."

"Lâche-moi un peu (for Heaven's sake). This again? Reminder that I was the one who spotted them in the first place. You were the one playing the headless goose looking for them."

"If you want, Pisspot, I'll go ask the jailer for some of that chalk so you can make pretty pictures of your own to feel proud of. Maybe you can break into a few other prisons to draw some more, and say you did it to solve a puzzle."

There was an indignant huff from the younger man, equally displeased at the tête-a-tête. Far from throwing a tantrum and pulling the usual excuses, the young man didn't give any indication he was willing to give up; in fact, he appeared to enjoy such arguments like a wolverine poking at the steel trap meant to ensnare it.

Marceline could almost feel him rolling his eyes. "Bien sûr," he started, "I could always use that chalk to fill in the missing teeth from your jaw."

The atmosphere dipped in temperature then. Or had the stickiness on her flesh cooled enough for her to feel the change in the air? Marceline could sense the tension, felt it weigh on her forehead down to her ankles like a ball and chain. There was a sense that these two argued often, and intensely. It did not surprise her, for Marceline would have done the same if she had a cellmate with sarcasm that bit deep into the marrow and was salved with the smoothest honey.

Or would she? If her rival had spoken as richly as that, charming in its defiance, she'd have an even playing field...or she would be too distracted by the easy tone.

Ah, boredom had such an effect on lonely women. Now she was dreaming about arguing with a man she hadn't even seen...pitoyable (pitiful).

"Say that again, Pisspot," the bearded one rumbled. From her hiding place, she could see him lean forward, almost see his eyes narrowed in challenge.

"Ici (here), I'll be diligent and ask for the fancy colours myself - " A pause. A lowered tone coated with its own challenge, " - so I can fix your jaw."

The tension, coiled and tight like the suspenders on a bridge, snapped then. Just as the older one lunged to his feet, ready to strangle his younger cellmate, the Marquis de Sade decided to pitch in.

"Ah, monsieurs, have we not gone through this before? It won't be an enjoyable night if the geôliers return from their backgammon and faro card games to rough you two up again," he cooed, not turning his head.

"Every night is an enjoyable night with your incessant scratching," spat the younger one. "Nom de Dieu, what are you spending all those hours on? Another sensational work to drive the priests mad with your insults to the sacrosanct?"

"It is a splendid thing of beauty, mon ami. I hope one day you'll manage to discover my muse," de Sade purred. There Marceline saw him turn his head in their direction, a smirk flirting with his lips.

Marceline wasn't new to arguments. They'd been as common to her as a seasonal cold, and in most cases she initiated them. With her, if the argument came from her side of the table, she did it with the full intent to win. A veneer of aloofness with icy crispness would blanket her, unyielding and unbreakable. She would fight until she made her rival kiss her high-heeled, diamond-and-sapphire encrusted shoes.

Marceline just felt awkward here, because she wasn't the intended party nor was she invited (and sans shoes). She was eavesdropping on them solely because she was bored. She wanted to spy on them, keep a mental record of them and wonder who they were and what they did in their lives before the Bastille. Sure, she could have easily opened correspondence with them, but again, Marceline was supposed – read: supposed in emphasized language – to be a best-kept secret. Rather stupid to keep that mode of thinking, especially when candies and thank-you notes from the legion of female fans you didn't know you had kept pouring in.

These guys really are bundles of joy, Marceline thought. They'd sound better drunk -

" - You're lucky I don't have a spoon, Pisspot. I could kill you twelve ways with it."

An 'ooh' accompanied the threat, a lighthearted response to a man who probably meant every threat he ever made. "Why not make it thirteen? It's an unlucky number. Can you manage one more, old man?" The sassy one humphed. "You don't even have a spoon."

"If life is a bowl of soup, you're all goddamned forks."

There was a moment when Marceline felt like she'd wound chicken wire around her neck, barbs nicking at the tender flesh of her throat, the wire wrapping tight around tendons and arteries, and it was all because she'd done a stupid, unbelievably stupid thing. The realization of that stupid mistake came in that metaphor. Marceline wanted to garrote herself more than ever in that moment.

It hadn't even registered that the silvery voice with its dramatis personae was her own.

Marceline's statement had not been kept inside her head. She had said it out loud, and all of the men had heard it. Her hiding place, an alcove of shadow beneath an extinguished torch, was now useless.

Seconds, minutes passed before Marceline's legs willed her to bolt, to return to that gazelle-like speed and rush through the corridors back to her cage. Things happened in a slow, choreographed motion: the snapping shut of the older man's jaw, the pursed lips of the younger one hitherto unseen, the easy turn of the Marquis de Sade's head and the raised, darkened eyebrow. All heads were turning on slow moving necks, all of them focused in her direction.

When time quickened, the alcove was abandoned, and Marceline was darting past sleeping guards and rosebushes as she entered the open courtyard. The dancing white cloud had adopted the speed of a funnel cloud, sucking in air as it grew in power towards the ground. Marceline did not stop running until she found her cell, door ajar, and shut herself inside. She took the brass bar she used as a lockpick to re-lock the door, sitting on her cushions and trying to ease her heartbeat. Her pulse roared in her ears, battering her ear drums like hail stones on a window.

Her fingernails dug so deep into a cushion some of its stuffing came out. Teeth gnawed at her lips, brain burning with worry. A week into her imprisonment and the male prisoners knew she was more than a ghost, a rumour. She was a person, she existed, and she foolishly offered her own bit of sass to a pair of arguing fencers ready to open their throats.

The skin on her bottom lip opened, her tongue skimming over the thin trail of blood. It was a tiny price, a negligible price to pay.

The morning could not come fast enough.

Notes:

- According to the foreword for the '120 Days of Sodom', de Sade had become obese while imprisoned in the Bastille. The subtle change from history to in-game will have a larger purpose in this story.

- de Sade did indeed have a 12 metre long manuscript. His showing it to Thomas is again creative license on my part.

- The tri-colour cockades had not yet been made an official symbol of the Revolution, but other cockades made the rounds.