“There's nothing to refuse, yet,” I told her.
“You have to refuse,” she cried.
I told her I would attend as much of the trial as I could. On those days I did attend, she demanded a full recounting. I spared her very little. In those chambers, the Queen was the Austrian she-wolf, the arch-tigress, the cannibal who wanted to roast alive all the poor Parisians. It was claimed she'd bitten open the cartridges for the Swiss Guards in their defense of the royal family to help speed their slaughter of the oncharging patriots. She sat alone in the dock, a childlike figure further diminished by her incarceration. Her eyesight had begun to weaken and her hair to turn white. She looked twenty years beyond her age. She'd been made to reply to accusations of incestuous relations with the Dauphin. The poor boy had been made to parrot unspeakable things, and his testimony was read back to her.
Everything about the Dauphin injured Anne-Marie. She knew a wife of the assistant jailer and learned the boy had just passed his eighth birthday alone. Apparently he was chronically ill and had been ministered to by his mother with unceasing tenderness until he'd been made a ward of the Republic and dragged to a cell immediately beneath hers, from which she could hear him shrieking in his terror and loneliness. He was left to himself for weeks at a time. The shoemaker appointed to be his personal jailer looked in only every so often. Even he found the boy's cries hard to take. But he also made him wear the red bonnet and sing the carmagnole and the Marseillaise and to blaspheme God from his windows.
My wife lay awake nights, mute with suffering as she considered various aspects of his plight, until she burst out with wailing, jolting me from my half drowse. When I embraced her she demanded a promise that I wouldn't be a part of this. She needed to be sure that I wouldn't be a part of this. I wouldn't be a part of this, I assured her, and reapplied my embrace.
Only weeks after the inauguration of the machine, the medical community found itself grappling with the controversy concerning the survival of feeling and consciousness in the separated head. Did the head hear the voices of the crowd? Did it feel itself dying in the basket? Could it see the light of day above it?
The question became more urgent following Charlotte Cor-day's execution for the assassination of Marat, when Legros, apparently communing with his inner brute, saw fit to slap the severed head while he was displaying it. And the face, hanging by the hair, showed the most unequivocal signs of anger and indignation in response. There was an uproar from those in front of the scaffold who could see it, and afterward many medical eminences were interviewed on the phenomenon for the newspapers.
Eventually I was asked to assist a Dr. Seguret, professor of anatomy, who'd been commissioned to study the problem. He set up an atelier on the same square as the machine and my assistants delivered to it a total of forty heads. We exposed two — a man's and a woman's — to the sun's rays in his back courtyard. Their eyelids immediately closed of their own accord, and their faces convulsed in agony. One head's tongue, pricked with a lancet, withdrew, the face contorting. Another's eyes turned in the direction of our voices. One head, a juring priest's named Gardien, dumped into the same sack with the head of one of his enemies, had bitten it with such ferocity that it took us both to separate them.
Other faces were inert. Seguret pinched them on the cheeks, inserted brushes soaked in ammonia into their nostrils, and held lighted candles to their staring eyes without generating movement or contractions of any sort.
His report was suppressed, and he refused to have any more to do with such experiments, or with me.
“What have you decided?” Anne-Marie took to asking each day as the Queen's trial dragged itself on. In addition to all of the other charges, there were the letters abroad, many of which had been intercepted. All military defeats were being blamed on her treachery. Her son's illness on her sexual demands. As proof of the latter, his hernia was displayed.
In bed with my weeping Anne-Marie, I tell her I see no way out: the letters demonstrate conspiracy, and for all other charges, the accusers invent the evidence they lack. We must be resigned to God's will and summon the strength to prepare ourselves to endure the terrible stroke.
“Your terrible stroke,” she responds. “You must not do this. You understand that.”
But she knows, I tell her, that God alone can alter the course of events at this point. It's His mercy for which we must ask, even as we submit to His decrees.
“I'm not appealing to you to save her,” she answers. “You know what I'm requesting.”
A few nights later, lying beside me in the darkness, she palms my cheeks and moves her face so close that her lips graze mine.
“Listen to me,” she says. “Don't dismiss me like this.” She moves our bodies to their newlyweds' position. But then she says nothing else.
Henri-Francois brings us the news as we're sitting down to some pigeon, red currants, apricots, and wine: the tribunal, according to the declaration of the jury, and in compliance with the indictment of the public prosecutor, has condemned the said Marie Antoinette, called Lorraine d'Autriche, widow of Louis Capet, to the pain of death, the judgment to be carried out in the Place de la Révolution, its dictates printed and exhibited throughout the Republic.
On the appointed day, my wife is missing when I awake. Our drunken neighbor across the courtyard claims not to have seen her. She's nowhere to be found when I return. The Queen flinches upon seeing the open cart in which she'll ride. She explains she'd been hoping for the enclosed carriage that carried her husband. She apologizes for treading on my foot as she climbs the steps.
My wife does not return that evening, or the next. Henri-Francois notes a missing trunk but mentions nothing else, contemptuous of my agony. Legros takes over the cooking. In the wee hours I occupy my fireside chair, swigging wine. The future unfolds in the flames like a gameboard dotted with opponents' pieces. I envision new laws abolishing the accused's right to any defense; the frightened seeking to outpace one another with the zeal and homicidal efficiency of their patriotism; and prisoners condemned in groups, identities muddled in the confusion, as sons die in the name of fathers, alongside entire families decimated by misspellings and clerical errors. At the scaffold, a nightmarish constancy, with only the actors changing. Chemists. Street singers. Fifteen-year-old servants. An abbé who founded and ran the orphanage for the city's chimney sweeps, most as young as five or six. Carmelite nuns. Peasant women from the Vivarais, unintelligible in their patois and bewildered at their arrest. One boy in a forgeman's cap. One in a hat of otter skin. One already bloodied and bareheaded. One with little guillotines on his suspenders. One who'd drawn in ink on his neck: Cut on the dotted line. The executions proceeding at such a pace that the heads tip from the filled baskets and roll from the scaffold's lip. Never enough in the way of carts, straps, bran, hay, nails, soap for the grooves, or tips for the gravediggers. Baskets changed every two weeks, the bottoms rotted through, the sides chewed by teeth. The machine frequently moved as a menace to sanitation. An old man taking in the great pile of clothing discarded by his predecessors and extending me his compliments, and noting that I must have the most extensive wardrobe of anyone in France.
A man climbs the stairs. He's strapped to the plank. The plank slides forward. The half-moon is brought over his neck. There's a frightful second. His open eyes see the basketful below.
And when the blade comes down, a fiery mist explodes about his eyes. It's radiant with reflected light. The light converts to pain. The pain saturates all that follows. The head suffers for three days and nights, its spark finally extinguished beside its body in the lime pit.