You let me in. “You’ve had the news, then.”
You stood under the chandelier in your townhouse. You played with a fan, opening and folding a swath of worn ostrich feathers. Your powdered hair was embellished with ribbons and faux topaz, and you’d painted bold eyebrows and enhanced your small lips.
“How did you hear already?” you said. “I just returned.”
“What news?” I stepped inside. “There’s news?”
“Oh.” You touched a beauty mark on your chin. “Taskin’s dead.” The candles flickered in the cut and leaded crystal above. You ran a pale hand over the stomach panel of your gown and said, warmly: “There will be room for your instruments at the Conservatoire again. The palace.”
“How did you hear? You saw him? Did he have anything, a letter, for me?”
“No,” you said. “It’s dark. And late—”
“He would have said something. A curse, if he didn’t apologize.”
“Tobias, I’m trying to be kind.” You set down the fan and untied your cloak. “I don’t think he thought about you at all.”
I sat on the sofa and watched you shift your feet — the back of your brocaded gown and grey wig cleanly reflected in the mirrors along the wall.
“They found him in the river,” you said. “But he had some wasting disease, and wouldn’t have lasted long.”
“No,” I said — and I meant, Cécile, that I’d seen him at the river, watched him bob under and thought nothing of it. I should have told you; I didn’t. But I was losing you, and I had to say something, so I tried: “I suppose, with the illness, it was the decent choice.”
“Decent,” you said. “You know they have imprisoned the Queen. The children.” You looked like you wanted to say more, but bit your lip. You didn’t ask me to leave, and I didn’t offer.
Cécile — I woke that night in your bed. The room was on the top floor of the townhouse and never quiet. The sounds of the city, coming from the streets and the neighbouring apartments, habitually slipped through the thin windowpanes. But that night it was silent. Paris held its breath. The curtains were drawn and you stood facing the mirror, naked, lit by the moon. You didn’t see me, not from that angle, but I saw your body in the mirror, your skin so pale as to seem translucent. I could’ve mapped the blue veins that ran through your skin as Cassini de Thury mapped the rivers and topography of France. Your small hips, the red compression lines from your corset.
Cécile, I saw you take an inch of skin at the bottom of your left breast — the same breast you’d bared in front of Louis and Marie and the courtiers of Versailles all those years ago in that opera — and I saw you pinch the flesh until your knuckles turned white.
I left for Sanson’s before you woke.
He was sitting on a bench in his garden with his cello and a bottle of wine next to him on the grass, and his bow on his lap. The sun hadn’t hit, but the ground held the heat from the day before, and I could smell the herbs. Mon dieu, how the heat built on itself that summer—
“Sanson,” I began. “I’m so sorry—”
“My wife says she will leave.” Sanson lifted the bow from his lap and loosened the hair. “She will go to her sister’s house in the country. Young Gabriel — she says at least he won’t live this cursed life.” He rested the bow on the cello and drank wine from the bottle. “I hear Taskin is dead.”
I sat on a bench across from him. Black-beaked chiffchaffs and a tiny goldcrest kinglet flitted in and out of the blackberry bushes.
He set the bottle aside. “Tell me about the Low Country.”
The Low Country near the Rhine where I was a child — I can’t bring myself to reminisce. Would I have been happy if I stayed? Is that something you ask yourself, Cécile?
Five months passed — a long five months — January 1793, a new year.
“There’s always been blood.” Sanson unbuttoned his vest and reclined in a high-backed chair in my workshop (still in the Cour du Commerce, rue Saint-André des Arts, Paris). “The sword on the block. Or standing. Last year there was time between executions. We’d clean the blade. Get a fresh noose.”
I poured myself wine and offered him a glass — he declined. Shook rain from his hat. I drank my cup and drew another. The candle in the window guttered and flamed, throwing light over cattle bones, upended clavichord cases, shelves of scores, and the gold-leaf, ground-gypsum and rabbit-skin glue that I’d scraped together when I received a few elaborate commissions that’d turned out to be pranks.
“These days, we throw a bucket of water over the bascule,” Sanson said. “When we run dry, the condemned lie in it. That muck.” He pinched his nose and closed his wide-spaced eyes. “And they’re about to increase the workload without compensation. Tobias, I’m underpaid. I make less. The costs of the extra jobs — we have to build three more carriages and a tumbril. Pay six hundred livres each for messengers to answer magistrates. And then there’s the utensils — tongs and sulphur, you know. I’m expected to act as carpenter and repairman, and now, multiple executions in one day? I need help.”
“The crowd seems keen,” I said.
“The crowd, oh, they’re riled. But they cross themselves if they fall under the scaffold’s shadow. There’s no willing extras.” The rain on the windows turned to slush, and I found a fresh candle.
“Will you help?” he asked. “I move the guillotine tomorrow and I don’t have the people.”
“You go with the new name? Guillotine over Louisette?” I said. And to lighten the mood: “How would the King feel?”
Sanson leaned forward and cupped his face in his hands. “He’ll feel relieved.”
I came to see you first, Cécile. No answer. Nothing. Not in the townhouse or the winter garden, where the bench and pathways were slick with freezing rain. At the pond, only the silver carp. A bedraggled mess of vines gripped the gazebo, and a few confused rose blossoms tried their best, but drooped under the weight of their own heavy petals. Finally, in your chamber — a sealed letter.
I sat on the sofa in the drawing room and read it. You’d left for London as Comtesse d’Antraigues. Married months ago. The jewellery caskets were gone — how had I missed that? What else had I missed? In daylight, with the curtains drawn, the striped upholstery had obvious wear. Candle wax pocked the carpet below the chandelier.
You are better off out of it, Tobias, you wrote. I returned the letter to its envelope and tucked it into my coat.
“I knew that years ago,” I said aloud. At our last meeting, the beauty spot you wore probably covered a canker. Your eyes would have been strained by candlelit masquerades, hair thickened with wool, and the glow to your skin was mashed apple and lard. But — we were both pariahs.
“Remember?” I told the empty room. “You bared yourself on stage.”
After I found your letter, I wrote the Montgolfier brothers and asked them how they had imagined their aerostat in the first place.
“It’s as simple as this,” they wrote back. “We burned scrap paper for years, and then we noticed what had been there all along: the ash caught on the gases and rose inside the chimney. It was time, anyone would have seen it.”
An accident of time and place. You can believe that of the invention of the fortepiano, and you convinced yourself of it in your costume design. Could you give me as much with the guillotine?
January 21st, 1793. You would have been in England.
Picture the Place de la Révolution from a position on the scaffold. A crowd so thick there is no sign of the cobblestones under the collage of red-capped cockades, bare heads and wigs, faces and elbows held at eye level — Parisians fill the flagstones from the pillars to the river, to the perimeter of red-and-blue uniformed guards that surround the scaffold in the centre of the square. The most-watched stage in Paris.