Where the Light Falls(2)

“Ha! Old bitch cares about her necklace ’til the very last!”

A mother clutching a newborn in one arm uses her free hand to hurl a fistful of cabbage that strikes a prisoner toward the front of the tumbril, and the crowd erupts once more. “Rot in hell, you glutted rich pigs!” The guards, some holding old muskets and others armed with newly sharpened pikes, strain to hold back the vengeful crowd.

“Make way, I said!” The driver lifts his whip, and the people clear a path as the mounted guards escorting the tumbril struggle to master their nervous horses. As they cross the river, the crowd lining the old bridge follows behind, running with the procession toward La Place.

The cart rounds the corner and the narrow cobblestoned street opens up into the large, packed square. The mob spots the approaching carriage and erupts. No monarch of France, not even the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, had ever entered La Place to such an uproar.

The noise is deafening as Valière hears voices roar the nation’s new anthem. Several men triumphantly wave the new tricolor flag with its streaks of red, white, and blue, the standard of the young nation. Some shout curses, but most of the voices remain an indistinguishable and menacing din to the prisoners quaking in the rolling carriages.

The crowd gathered around the scaffold is so thick that the old man would not be able to see the murder apparatus were it not mounted on its large wooden stage. Raised up, Valière muses, death exalted.

The carriage lurches to a halt. A guard lowers the tumbril’s back gate and waves a gloved hand. “All right, step off. Move lively now.” For a moment, none of them moves. Valière takes the first step, lowering himself down onto the street.

The crowd jostles to get near them—vying for an opportunity to scratch a bit of noble flesh, pull a strand of noble hair. The mounted guards push back against the onslaught, and a guard on foot swings his elbows and brandishes the butt of his musket to escort the dozen prisoners nearer to the scaffold. Valière ducks in time to miss the assault of a soft rotting apple.

“You first.” The guard points at the young man with the wide eyes, the one who had remarked at the large number in the crowd.

The man puts his hands to his chest as if to ask, “Me?”

The guard nods, waving his hand. “Go on up,” he says, putting special emphasis on the words that come next: “Best not to keep them waiting, Monsieur le Duc.” The young man, whom Valière now knows to be a duke, shuts his eyes and begins to cry, and Valière notices a patch of moisture as it seeps across the groin of the young man’s breeches.

Please, don’t let me shame myself, Valière thinks. Let me depart with just a final shred of dignity.

The young duke is practically carried up the creaking steps, his thin frame trembling between the guards. His sobs and protestations are audible, even over the noise of the crowd. “But why must I go first? Why me? What on earth have I done?”

“What difference does it make, Seigneur?” The guard is impatient; he’s seen enough of this useless pleading to be bored by the last-minute hysterics. He needs to get the show going before the crowd grows unruly.

Valière watches as the man’s smooth hands are bound and he is marched to the center of the stage, and notices a woven basket that rests below where the blade will crash down. The duke is forced to kneel, and his neck is taken in the thick fingers of the guard, who settles the prisoner facedown, sliding his throat into a wooden cradle where a smooth semicircle has been carved. A matching wooden plank is placed on top so that the two semicircles form a perfect wooden noose, holding the man’s head in place. The nobleman is sobbing now, trying to resist, but the base of his neck remains fixed against the bracket. The crowd, witnessing his writhing and his pleading, grows even more frenzied.

Valière stops breathing, but he can’t pull his eyes away. A priest makes the sign of the cross over the writhing prisoner, an absolution which the damned man can’t see. Finally, when the latch is pulled and the blade flies downward, Valière shuts his eyes. He hears a quick noise, a brief slice, followed by a thunderous roar. In the din, the thudding sound of the severed head dropping into the basket is lost.

“Encore! More!”

“Le prochain! Next!”

Having caught this first whiff of blood, the crowd becomes even more ravenous. The guard calls for the old woman, the frail, praying woman who had steadied herself on Valière’s shoulder. He can’t watch. He doesn’t wish to know what her face looks like as she is escorted up the steps to the jeers and curses of the crowd. Again, he hears that sickening noise that slices through the moment of brief, anticipatory silence, followed by the shrill cries of elation. “Encore! Encore!”