The guard is looking at him now. Pointing at him. He lets out a slow, long breath. So this is what it means to stare into the face of death.
One foot in front of the other, he makes his way to the stage and up the steps. He no longer feels his own footsteps, nor thinks about how his legs manage to carry him. The roar of the crowd seems to recede, to grow somehow distant, and a strange sensation takes hold of him, almost as if he were floating outside of himself.
He kneels on his own, preempting the guard’s gruff handling. On his knees, he glances out over the crowd: a sea of jeering faces, contorting in lusty anticipation. And then his stare lands on one face in particular. Colorless eyes, skin and hair as white as parchment. He’s come to gloat, even now? Even in this last moment? In spite of himself, the old man begins to tremble, the pale face of that one onlooker doing more to inspire terror and fury than any guillotine blade could. Lazare. Lazarus. The man whom Jesus raised from the dead; and now, this man sends so many others to their own deaths. Valière holds the man’s eyes briefly, swears that those pale lips pull apart in a sinister grin. But then Valière blinks, forcing himself to look away. He won’t have that face be the last sight his eyes rest upon while on this earth.
He turns his gaze to the apparatus before him, beckoning him to his death, and his head is slid into the groove. There’s the woven basket again, below him now and stained scarlet. The old woman’s head is facedown, so that all he sees is her thin, silvery hair, tangled in red and reaching for the body from which it has been severed. But he can’t avoid the wide, vacant eyes of the young nobleman killed moments before. They stare at him without blinking, without light, frozen in fear.
The eyes are so distracting that he no longer notices the crowd. He does not hear the droning tap-tap-tap of the drums. He wills his mind to envision something else, something other than this present hell. To forget the pale hair and colorless face of his enemy. To forget the stunned eyes of the dead young duke beneath him. He thinks of the face of his wife, conjures her image, her beautiful features uncreased by time or worry. And then his mind flies to his greatest source of happiness: two boys, dark-blond curls, happy faces reflecting the lost joy of his own life back to him. He sees them chasing each other in the garden, squealing with childish abandon. At this thought, he smiles one last time.
His vision turns to black, and he feels nothing as the crowd erupts for the third time, rejoicing in the death of the old nobleman Alexandre de Valière.
September 1792
The heat had finally broken, ushering in what the Parisians were calling “le répit.” The reprieve. If spoken in another context, it meant grace, though there was little of that to be had in the city that summer. Not now—now that the new invention had been permanently installed in La Place de la Révolution. Crosses had been torn from the altars of churches, cross-shaped pendants ripped from women’s breasts and tossed into the filthy gutters that emptied red into the Seine. In many public places, the image of the cross was replaced by the nation’s new holy icon: the guillotine.
On the Left Bank, in a narrow street of sunbaked houses, every window was ajar, so that any resident could tell you with some precision about the comings and goings of each occupant in the adjacent flat or home. On this morning, the couple living on the east corner, above the tavern, was quarreling—fighting over money, or the heat, or the stale bread that was supposed to have lasted for days. The couple across from them, based on the sounds issuing from their bedchamber, had made up from last night’s quarrel. And a dog on the street, its ribs jutting out from under its tawny coat, had found a prize stew bone, which it had dragged out of the tavern and onto the street, where it now sat gnawing, hoping to coax every last bit of marrow from within.
“Why, you mangy beast, that’s where it’s got to!” Madame Grocque, the wife of the tavern keeper, lurched out of her door and swiped at the dog with her broom. Seizing on the mutt’s momentary shock, she stooped down and snatched the bone with her thick, dirty fingers. The dog, recovered from its beating, jumped at the woman, fixing his teeth on the treat she would deny him.
“You worthless creature, I’ll skin you and throw you in the stew alongside this bone! It’d do us good to get a bit o’ fresh meat.” Madame Grocque kicked at the animal, but the mutt refused to release the first morsel it had scrounged in days.
From a window on the top floor of this dwelling, a young man, not quite thirty years of age, dropped his quill and listened to the raucous activity below. Rubbing his eyes, he sighed. “Soon. Someday soon we’ll get out of this neighborhood.”