Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“It's not assumed that the wife of the Executor of State Judgments will be found brawling in the street,” I joked, gently.

“You thought you married a lady,” she said.

“I only meant that this was not a time for public demonstrations,” I told her.

“They know you by now,” she said. “You're as suited to take a hand in political faction as you are to arrive on the moon.”

But she underestimated me. I attended commune sessions when I saw fit, ready to speak if the occasion warranted it. The Law of Suspects was promulgated that September to speed the work of terrorizing foes of the Revolution. Suspects of any sort could now be denounced and detained by local committees formed on the spot and unfettered by the sorts of legal concerns that had no doubt already allowed too many culprits in league with our enemies to escape. This category of suspects extended first to all foreigners residing in France; then to those who speculated in any way with foreign currencies; next to those who spoke too coldly of their enthusiasm for the Revolution; and finally to those who, while having done nothing in particular against the cause, hadn't seemed to do much for it, either. A prisoner might be accused at nine, find himself in court at ten, receive sentencing at two, and lose his life at four. Anyone's neighbor might be the allied agent already at work to engineer famine or defeat. The Law of Suspects was a reminder to the populace that a nation at war might have to exterminate liberty in order to save it. Prisons like the Con-ciergerie tripled their detainees. In some rooms the sewage fumes were so strong that torches brought into them went out.

By such measures idlers and thugs had now become the People. Histrionic patriotism was the only requisite for public speaking, so those especially compromised by shameful pasts rushed to demonstrate their worthiness by addressing their Popular Societies, agitating in all corners, disrupting the courts and trials, searching homes themselves, denouncing and condemning and turning France into one boundless parade ground of calumny. The solution for all national troubles was understood to be an unflagging austerity of purpose in the form of an evermore passionate embrace of ruthlessness. There've been mass cannonadings in Lyon. Carrier, the Revolutionary representative at Nantes, sealed hundreds into the holds of barges and sank them in the Loire in what he called “vertical deportations.” Saint-Just announced that the Republic consisted of the extermination of everything that opposed it. The Marquis de Bry offered to organize a force he called the Tyrannicides: freedom fighters dispatched to foreign capitals to assassinate heads of state or anyone else the Committee might stipulate.

“The People make their demands,” Henri-Francois remarked one night at dinner, apropos of our ever-increasing workload. His hair fell across his forehead like a scrubbing mat. He always seemed to be nursing a grim new resentment against his mother.

“Their inner lives have been made bestial,” Anne-Marie said to him, after having been silent the entire meal.

“That's not entirely what she means,” I told Legros, who observed her as though she were a mouse in the grain supply.

“That's exactly what she means,” he answered, with some affability, and then went on with his meal.

I drove my assistants day and night, but we could not master our burden. Lethal misadventures and irregularities compounded daily as batch after batch moved out of the tumbrils and into the baskets. One Tuesday we dispatched twenty-two condemned in twenty-nine minutes. Pastry merchants divided their attention between the scaffold and their customers. Friends asked friends in the crowd if they were staying and were told, no, not today — they had things to do. So much blood ran down the front of the platform supports that boots there sank into the supersaturated earth as if into a mire. One woman in line among the condemned told me that the lunette's wet wood looked like it would be unpleasant on the front of her neck. When the blade dropped, her body jerked in the straps, as if abruptly trying to find a more comfortable position.

In our home, with Legros and Henri-Francois sent away on an errand, we received the Sacrament from our nonjuring priest.

“They're putting the Queen on trial,” Anne-Marie told me one morning, once the priest had left. She said that he had confirmed the rumor. In one stroke she seemed to have resuscitated all of her old intensities. She crossed and recrossed the room. She wrung her hands in a series of nervous contractions. She was beside herself with certainty that the Queen would be condemned.

“Not necessarily,” I told her, trying to get my bearings.

“You have to resign. You have to withdraw. You have to refuse to have any part in this,” she said.

“There's nothing to refuse, yet,” I told her.

“You have to refuse,” she cried.