Where the Light Falls(148)

André’s thoughts turned to Sophie, and he felt a pang of longing that outweighed the pain of his wounds.

“We have won a great victory,” Bonaparte continued. “No man, alive or dead, can ever take that honor from you.”

An aide passed the general a curved saber and a silver eagle pendant hanging from a blue ribbon. The general took the pendant and draped it around André’s neck. The sword he placed on the cot at André’s feet. Before André even understood what was happening, a scroll was unfurled and the orders for an award were read aloud to the tent by one of Napoleon’s adjutants. “For intrepid gallantry in the face of the enemies of France, the Award of the Grand Saber is awarded to Major André Valière on this day, Ivraie in Thermidor, Year Six of the French Republic.”

With that, Napoleon Bonaparte offered one more nod in André’s direction. “Congratulations, Major.”

“Thank you, sir,” André stammered, fingering the medal that hung heavy around his neck. Glory is fleeting and must be seized while it lies before you. Funny, André thought to himself, he would have said the same thing about love. About his very life. And now, suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to return to France and, at last, begin living that life.





Fall 1798

André Valière had not been directly heard from in more than a year. In that time, Jean-Luc had saved Sophie from her imprisonment and torment by Lazare. The old man had perished in the deed, but the relief that Jean-Luc should have felt from the release of that vicious citizen’s torments was wholly replaced by the shock of Marie’s passing. She had been through all of Jean-Luc’s struggles, both successes and failures, and her journey made all the more difficult by her exclusion from his work. She had been left to raise their child, tend to their home, and share in the strain of Jean-Luc’s labors, all while carrying out her own work for the Revolution in silence and in secret. She, as true a patriot as any, had had no legal or public authority to share her gifts on behalf of the nation. No rights as a citizen, even. Even in his grief, Jean-Luc reflected on this for many days after her passing. How a woman was expected to obey the laws and thrive in society, with virtually no say in the very existence and promulgation of those same laws or that society. Was that not itself an injustice, Jean-Luc wondered, itself perhaps worthy of a revolution? But he had had enough of that word for now, and his thoughts turned to his remaining family. He would leave Paris.

Sophie decided to remain, to wait. She said farewell to Jean-Luc and the children with a promise that she would send word—as soon as she had any, if she ever had any—of her fiancé.

Once he had loaded the carriage—the children, the luggage, his wife’s casket—they made their quiet departure from the city. Near the barrier, Jean-Luc looked back over his shoulder at the receding silhouette of the capital. Paris, the place to which he had come so many years ago, a young lawyer who believed in his countrymen and his nation and the principles of liberty and equality and fraternity. All of that was before; before the guillotine had been installed in La Place de la Révolution, before the king had lost his head and a movement borne of the Enlightenment had taken a turn down a dark path.

There, against the distant backdrop of the city, Jean-Luc made out the French tricolor flag that hung over the wall, its three-colored cloth flapping in a strong breeze. Red and white and blue. The flag billowed back and forth—shifting, wavering, as the sun’s rays rippled over it with the soft glow of coming dusk. Tenuous, and yet somehow durable. A thin, fragile symbol, its presence hopeful, its shape as illusory in the breeze as the ideals for which it waved. From his vantage point, Jean-Luc paused, transfixed. He stared at the city he had called home these many years, half of it covered in the veil of the evening’s darkening shadow, the other half illuminated by the last rays of the vanishing sunlight, glorious, a burnished mirage of so much beauty that it gave Jean-Luc a final ache in his breast.



Jean-Luc was alone when they buried Marie, her body gently dropped into the soft earth. He had left Paris and brought her home, as he had promised; back to her beloved south, where the air smelled of the sea and of the citrus groves and the faint perfume of lavender. A priest read from the Book of Wisdom, and Jean-Luc tried to remember her as she had been—warm, bright-eyed, blooming with strength and vigor—and not as he had found her, cold, limp, in a stained bed on the day she had brought his daughter into the world.

After her burial, Jean-Luc had returned to the home of his father-in-law and wrapped his two children in a long embrace. Something inside him told him it was better to stay here, where his children might bathe in the sea and the warm light of the Mediterranean sun, and learn more of their mother than they ever could in Paris.