“Everyone gathered on the marble courtyard — the King and Marie. How your tailor fussed.” I reached down and picked your shoe off the floor. “Do you ever regret the costume innovations—” I started to ask. I often wondered, Cécile, if you would take back that costume change, the gasp your naked legs and breast caused the audience. If you regretted being shunned, performing less, and that you became known as erratic. Your forced retirement in Paris.
“Yes, yes. I remember the aerostat.” You slid down the chair and rested your head on the crest. “I remember the rope broke and the Montgolfier brothers chased the balloon over the palace into the gardens, and when it landed the basket was green with duck shit.”
“Are you still sleeping with Taskin?” I asked.
You took your shoe from me and set it with its pair. “There’s wine,” you said, but didn’t bring it, and you didn’t let me touch you.
The walk back to my new workshop took me by the lumberyards and the swimming dock — still rowdy that late in the night. Some of the nudes called out, but I only thought about accepting their invitation.
There was more than one test to the Louisette, Cécile, but with the gossip and newsmongering on promenades in the parks, you would have known. The test took place at the Asylum de Bicêtre, a huge building with two pavilions, gardens, and several ornate wings that showed their age — new bricks were tightly packed between older, yellow slabs of stone. Superintendent Pussin greeted Sanson and me at the stairs, and had some of the able-bodied residents carry the Louisette down the halls of the seventh ward and assemble it in a small courtyard. The people in the Asylum — men who rambled when we passed their rooms, or sat absent and listless for purges and leeches; others with scrofula behind the ears: bluish-purple tumours, and open abscesses that overtook their face and neck. (Startling, thinking back, that within half a year the patients and prisoners would be dragged into the street and onto bayonets.)
An account of those present: Superintendent Pussin and his assistant Pinel; Antoine Louis — the developer of the angled blade we were about to test; Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, on whose recommendations the National Assembly brought in changes to execution; Sanson, Headsman; myself, harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt of the Low Country ébénistes.
Guillotin had arranged for three cadavers and directed our attention toward a linen sheet under a row of chestnut trees. Sanson lifted the sheet and noted the bodies were as he had specified: strong, male, and victim of sudden death.
We contemplated the dead men and the Louisette in silence. Although the quiet was ours alone — Bicêtre was full of the despair of its patients.
The blade struck the neck of the first cadaver — the head leapt from the body, carried through the air several feet, and rolled over the stone slabs until it stopped at the courtyard wall. Similar details with the additional two corpses — the extended height, steel grooves, and angled blade allowed a clean cut.
Guillotin dabbed sweat and powder streaks from the edge of his wig. Antoine removed his own wig and scratched his scalp.
“There you have it,” I said.
The Superintendent bowed slightly. Guillotin adjusted his lace cuffs.
We carted the Louisette back to my workshop for a few final alterations. I scrubbed the stains with wire brushes.
Sanson stood back and crossed his arms. “We’ll need thicker restraints.”
“A basket, maybe,” I said.
He nodded. The watery smell of the cadavers clung to the dismantled wood. I gave up on the dark stains and tossed my brush to the wash pail.
“And,” I added, “you should paint it red.”
Spring to August, 1792. The summer air, that pottage of sewer and bodies, breads and coffee, and piss and wine. The Swiss Guard was massacred. The Revolutionary Tribunal began, the royal family hid in the Legislative Assembly. The Louisette took position at the Place du Carrousel.
August 27th, the heat. I stood beside Young Gabriel Sanson — you’ll remember him as Headsman Charles-Henri Sanson’s son and apprentice — on the scaffolding. Young Gabriel, in brown trousers and tri-colour cockade, rubbed lard into the Louisette’s rope. Sanson, of course, wore his sweat-stained red. The square had its wilted hedgerows, green-grey with dust, but otherwise it was overly bright, bleached by the sun so that the cream walls of the Tuileries were painful to look at. A crowd, small for Paris, had gathered, and made way for the tumbril that carted three gentlemen: L’Abbé Sauvade, and Messieurs Guillot and Vimal, convicted of forging assignats.
I would have left the scaffold for the shade near the walls of the square, but Headsman Sanson put his hand on my shoulder and the moment to descend was gone. Young Gabriel grabbed the abbot by the upper arm and helped him step from tumbril to narrow stairs. We belted the abbot to the bascule and lowered the plank. The lunette closed over the man’s neck. The abbot panicked as we locked the clamp, and thrashed against the restraints. Young Gabriel knelt at the front of the Louisette and pulled the abbot’s ears to keep the man steady, but the abbot tugged out of Young Gabriel’s grip. The blade fell; the head came off through the jaw. Young Gabriel lifted it. I stood next to Headsman Sanson, and we watched his son hold the head by the abbot’s small tuft of hair — with the chin missing, the tongue hung down and got a few cheers. And then Young Gabriel mis-stepped in the blood slick that pooled from the open neck, slipped, and smashed in his own head on the corner of the scaffold.
Cécile—
The floating baths: the best development of the century. Not the maps or water pumps or the fortepiano — in the new Republic, who would need such an instrument?
I had the docks to myself — all of Paris wanted a glimpse of Young Gabriel Sanson spitting blood, twitching into death beside his father’s Louisette. I stripped and stood barefoot on wooden steps that led into the river. When I looked up, a man stepped onto the far end of the dock.
“Taskin?” I called. Only no, when he turned to me I realized it wasn’t him. The man seemed too old, his face so gaunt his eyes bulged painfully from sunken sockets. (Since my expulsion from Blanchet’s I’d “seen” Taskin everywhere.)
The man watched me, fiddled with his laces, and then overcame whatever battle raged in his head and untied his shirt and trousers. Open sores clustered his ears, and I couldn’t make out the jawline from his swollen neck. I kept my distance. There was no way it was Taskin; every rib was visible. He eased himself into the water. I did the same, and with the length of the dock between us, we looped ropes around our wrists and floated.
“Brutal,” I called to him. “The heat.”
He stared at me, and then looked across the river at the lumberyard. Huge felled trees lay piled on each other on the shore: Italian spruce; ebony from black stands in the French African colonies; cypress flitches nearly forty years old that had aged to a warm, brownish hue — I remembered it from when I selected wood for the Louisette.
The sound of the city, the roar of Paris, carried over the river.
“Have you been to the executions?” I asked.
The man drew a breath and bobbed under the murky water, and his pale figure vanished in the muddy Seine.
I swam and tried to forget the oil — the waste that dribbled from cemeteries and animal yards and drained into the river — and picture the lakes I swam in as a boy.
At times I forget that you too, Cécile, came from the Low Country.
I don’t know how to describe the next six hours. That’s a lie: between the river and my visit to your house that night I gambled and lost the rest of the purse I’d received for the Louisette.