Gabriel I usually assigned to the remaining condemned. He moved about his responsibilities like a child resignedly attending a new school. The third head pitched from its lost shoulders. It was his turn to reach his arm down into the basket. I could not see from where I stood whether his expression as he held it up by the hair was one of fascinated horror or queasy forbearance or distracted indifference. The rain and the three men's blood made the front of the scaffold slick as soap. There was no rail.
Perseus hoisted Medusa's head. Judith, Holofernes's. David, Goliath's. The head warns of the consequences of violating the sovereign peace. Held by the hair and presented at the scaffold, it represents the government's discharge of its promise to maintain order. An executioner's reputation depends to a large extent upon his efficiency and elan with that display. Doing his best to manifest the head to as much of the crowd as he could, and failing to look where he put his feet, our Gabriel slipped and split his head open on the cobblestones. The head he'd been holding scattered the crowd. We carried him back to the house in the cart that had brought the condemned.
It's said that, losing his wife and crazed with grief, Robespierre's father abandoned his four children, the eldest being only seven, and traveled in turn through England and the German states, eventually dying in Munich. And so young Robespierre became at seven the implacable and unhappy figure he remains today. All through the early morning hours of that terrible night, Anne-Marie lay like one of the Furies on her bed and would not be consoled. I was not allowed into the room.
A week passed before she addressed me. Her misery was a well from which her spirit refused to surface. I saw only stiffness and mistrust when I got too near. All her gestures seemed devitalized, as if viewed in dim candlelight. If not for her capacity for work, she would have seemed imprisoned in a perpetual exhaustion.
It was a busy time for the executioner. She observed without comment my unimpaired predilection for order, my consistency of demeanor, and my undiminished capacities of concentration.
We both remembered a time, after the imprisonment of the King, when I'd been of a sudden possessed by an ungovernable rage with all of those in power who had brought our nation to her present catastrophe, and had resolved to leave Paris. Gabriel in particular had loved the idea. But my passion had subsided, and I'd understood just a bit of what such a decision would involve. Was everyone to abandon his post every time the country took a turn for the worse? Was it left to each servant of the state to decide which laws he would carry out, and which he would not? Did anyone but the highest ministers have sufficient information on which to base their opinions?
Yesterday there was a hard frost and we woke to discover the waste plug had burst and covered the corridor in filth. Some of it had already frozen, and we scraped and chipped at it in the early morning darkness. The smell from what hadn't frozen drove us back. It was unclear to me, working beside my wife, which in me was stronger: hatred of my profession or hatred of myself. I asked her opinion and she didn't answer until later when making her toilet, when she remarked that she found my self-contempt understandable, given the minuteness of my self-examinations.
Even with my family, she told me as she served my supper before leaving the room, I craved the advantage of invisibility. My supper turned out to be beef and cabbage and runner beans.
I eat alone. I sit alone. Without her I have no intimate friend. No affectionate relations. For three months she's remained close-buttoned and oblique, her expressions lawyers' expressions. Some nights I sleep, when Heaven has pity on me.
The night before the waste plug, she woke to my weeping. She remained on her back and addressed the ceiling. She told it she'd overheard a boy on the rue de Rennes tell his wet-nurse that he'd gone to see a guillotining, and oh, how the poor executioner had suffered. Her tone prevented any response.
She knows that the exclusion of our profession from society is not founded on prejudice alone. The law requires executions, but compels no one to become an executioner.
So now I carry an emptiness with me like the grief of a homesick child. I understood my wife's misery and, under the compulsion of duty, added to it. Each night I take a little brandy, hot lemonade, and toast. My belly is in constant ferment. I'm a pioneer in a Great New Age in which I don't believe. My profession has grown over us like a malevolent wood.
Another frost this morning. In our window box, frozen daisies.
The executioner has the uncontested title to all clothing and jewelry found on the men and women put to death. He pays no taxes. The condemned are subcontracted to him by the nation. The trade in cadavers with the medical profession brings in some additional revenue. But in terms of expenses there's all household costs plus salaries and repairs to the carriages and feed for the horses and any number of other constant vexations. And of course the expectation that the machine will be maintained and housed. My father wore on execution days a brocaded red singlet with the gallows embroidered across his chest in black and gold thread. In bright sun onlookers could make out a heavily worked panel of darker red satin along his spine. His culottes were of the finest silk. What do I own? A coat of black cloth, a satin waistcoat from an old-clothes shop, a pair of black breeches, a pair of serge breeches, two clothes brushes, four shirts, four cravats, four handkerchiefs. Two pairs of stockings, two pairs of shoes, and a hat.
This morning in the courtyard, Anne-Marie was doing no work at all. The sun was out but it was very cold. Clouds issued from the mouth of our sleeping neighbor in his iron chair. She sat with her back to the plaster, wrapping and rewrapping a shawl. I tucked it behind her and she thanked me. We sat for half an hour. Sometimes when addressed she seemed as if she were alone. I told her that I had stopped for wine on the way home the previous evening, and had overindulged. She responded that it was probably a part of my unconquerable rejection of anything that might cause me to think. And what was it I should be thinking about? I wanted to know. The world and my place in it, she said. And what was my place in it? I asked, and touched her cheek. She stood, composing her carriage. Around me now she carries herself like the Holy Sacrament. She returned to the house. We've had two weeks of her working in silence, the Austere Isolate, while the rest of us come and go, playing off one another like members of a mournful choral trio.
Perhaps, I told her at dinner, my curse from God was that I lacked that stone tabernacle within the soul in which I could treasure absolute truths. We were having soup, skate, and artichokes. She answered, after some thought, that I was killing her, but that I was also teaching her how to die.
We kept to ourselves the rest of the evening. At one point we had to consult over the household's ledger books.
Ask any soldier what his profession entails. He'll answer that he kills men. No one flees his company for that reason. No one refuses to eat with him. And whom does he kill? Innocent people who are only serving their country.
Together Anne-Marie and I have negotiated, like wood chips in a waterfall, the Revolution itself, with its shocks and transformations; the trial and condemnation of the King; his execution; and all the deprivations of the war with the allied powers. We covered our heads and hurried past each disaster, sometimes speaking of it afterward, sometimes not. The poor King's troubles began when he was dragged into the unhappy affair with America. Advantage was taken of his youth. In financing his support of America's revolution, he fell victim to that belief of monarchs that expenditure should not be governed by revenue, but revenue instead by expenditure. Then nature provided its additional burden: the summer of 1788 and its unprecedented drought. We saw starvation in our own neighborhood. Suddenly everyone was busy holding forth on the subject of just which radical changes needed to be made, each to his own attentive audience.