Cécile, here’s another moment this letter varies — each new draft I say to myself, “What do I include?” Priests, forbidden to wear ecclesiastical costume outside of church. The moment Louis XVI bowed to the new constitution, or when we went to war (Austria and Prussia, Hungary and Bohemia) — it’s not as if you didn’t live it, Cécile. You know how France festered.
April 1792 — Sanson and I built le mécanisme in the street in front of my new shop: the device that would behead both commoners and nobility with Liberté, égalité, fraternité!
We drew a crowd. An audience, rather, despite the weather. Rain drummed the roofs of the terraced apartments and the signs and heralds of businesses (clinic, dentist, printer); it flowed in rivulets down the sides of buildings to spit from the carved ram’s head below each scrolled window ledge. Sanson piqued the voyeurs of Paris. His horses, harnessed to the family carriage and content with their bags of feed; the broken bell-crest that stated “headsman”; the bull-calf and the three meaty, mutton-bred, Bleu du Maine sheep Sanson had brought with him — all these promised a diversion, I suppose.
Typesetters leaned against the double-wide print shop door, their hands and aprons black with ink. Above them, servants peered at us from apartment windows, and down the street café patrons sipped coffee or spooned gelato at the indoor tables. Drink peddlers hawked wine to curious bystanders seated on crates under the eaves. Even some of the wealthy idled under wax-coated parasols.
By noon Sanson and I had the straight-edge blade screwed into the weight and yanked to the top of the bald uprights. Sanson, drenched, buttoned his tunic and straightened his cuffs. We would test the device on the livestock he had provided.
Have you ever sat a sheep, Cécile? I know your brother became a pork butcher, and your mother was a grocer’s daughter, so although your father was répétiteur for the Elector Palatine, you might have gone to the fields with your cousins. If you haven’t: sheep are surprisingly solid — heavy. Sanson grabbed the muzzle of the first and eased the wet animal onto its tail, where it remained in a daze, while the other two sheep — a lame wether and a botched castration with maggoty wool, both polled — looked on. Once the sheep was strapped to the bascule we slid the plank and animal under the blade and clamped the lunette on its neck.
The first drop cut cleanly. The second, the blade hooked into the wooden beam as it fell, and the lurch took down the speed. (With the heft of the thirty-pound weight the blade still managed to slice the wether’s neck.) But by the time we had the calf cinched to the bascule the wood of the device had swollen with rain and blood, and friction slowed the fall. Sanson finished the calf with a knife, which brought taunts and an “Is that all, then?” from the crowd.
“Steel grooves,” I said. “And the mechanism won’t stick.”
Sanson tucked his fingers into the nick the blade had gouged into the beam. He was pleased and gave le méchanisme a name: “Louisette,” he said. “After the King.”
Indoors, I threw my wig onto a box of kapsels and wire and poured wine into pewter mugs. Violins, recently varnished — I took what work I could, as did you, Cécile — hung from the ceiling, and I’d purchased and repaired a spinet for practice in the new shop.
Sanson folded his jacket over a chair. He lifted his cello from its case and rested the butt of the instrument in the crook of his calves. We drank and played operas — mostly Gluck — until the oil burned down and the scores became illegible.
I lit a candle. Sanson rested his cello beside his chair and eyed the Louisette. The clock ticked and vied with the rhythm of rain in the gutters. We refilled our mugs and set the drinks on the wood stove to heat. I moved from the spinet to an armchair and stretched my legs.
“At eighteen,” Sanson began.
“This again.”
He pointed his bow at me and I raised my hand — all right, I’d listen. He went on: “We botched an execution, my uncle and I,” he said. “We had the condemned strapped between horses, and the horses straining in four directions. The crowd in the auditorium reduced to silence and vomit — rare for them. Of course the man wasn’t coming apart. I didn’t know, neither I nor my uncle knew, to slice the ligaments first. How often did we draw and quarter? Never.”
He ran his thumb over the hair of the bow and continued. “Sanson Père, my father, angry as fuck, and paralyzed down his left side, tried to correct us — the language he sprayed. I’m chuckling over it now, I know. What else is there to do? I was trying my best, barely eighteen. I cut the tendons, and the limbs finally ripped. We burned the torso at the stake.” Sanson swirled his wine in its pewter cup. “Ah,” he said. “Well. What comfort could I expect?”
I closed my eyes and listened to the wind, the dripping gutters. With wine and the smell of sawdust and varnish, I could have been back at the Blanchet workshop.
“But comfort came,” I prodded.
“Comfort did follow,” Sanson mused. “That was the final quartering.” The diagram for the Louisette sat between us, tall pillars of wood, blade, a lunette to clamp around the neck of the condemned. The real device, dismantled and stored at the back of the room, had a faint smell — meat, and fresh-cut cedar.
He tapped the paper with his bow. “A simpler execution. Good will come of this, too.”
It was close to midnight when Sanson left my shop, and nearer to dawn when my city-wandering brought me to your house, Cécile. You weren’t expecting me, and I caught you returning from some masque — you stood on the street near a lamppost, a carriage rattling away.
“Tobias.” You pinched your cloak around your throat. “If you must. Follow me, then.”
In your apartment I threw my coat on a striped sofa and scanned the curiosities and books in your library. Jewellery caskets decorated the side table. The smallest was two inches square, and on the lid, mother-of-pearl Greek nudes. (Did you acquire the box before or after the explicit costumes, I wonder?) Delicate work, with well-cut miniature forms, but the box was empty. I set it down and opened the largest, ornamented with flowers — nothing of value inside. You were pawning your jewels, I realized. And I hadn’t seen a servant, either. I closed the box. Standard marquetry materiaclass="underline" bone and turtle-shell stems, thickly petalled peonies, and roses heavy with jasper and jade — veneers that carried with them all the weight of their composition.
I reached for your hand, but you were humourless and asked for money. I said I didn’t have any. You told me you knew I had been given the contract.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
You unbuckled your shoes and pried them off your feet. “You would lie to me,” you said, and set a paper from the print shop next to the jewellery caskets.
It read: “It’s been asked by us, ‘What manner of man is Sanson, with his steady hand at sword or gallows?’ Now, though, we predict the crowds will cry out for a return of his ‘dash, panache, and impeccable timing’ (we quote ourselves) — and, indeed, are citizens not entitled to the spectacle of justice? The so-called Louisette is too quick to the cut.”
“He’ll hate it,” I said.
“You demonstrated in front of your own shop, Tobias.”
The brocade of your footwear and gown flickered lavender in the candlelight. Your face, pale with a coating of powder and paint, became suddenly tired. I caved and gave you money. Admitted the contract.
“Do you remember the aerostat?” I asked.
“I suppose so, Tobias.” Cécile, you looked bored, and, at the same time, beautiful. Your violet skirts filled the chair and spilled over the arms and on the floor. The heel of one silk stocking had worn thin enough to see through, and you folded your fan and tossed it to the table.