Where the Light Falls(5)

When it had come time for Jean-Luc to plan his own future, he’d taken his father’s advice and had applied himself to the study of law. What else was there for him? The land was gone; there was no longer wealth to be had in farming, unless you were a nobleman who skimmed the profits from the peasants and then paid no taxes on that bounty. His mother had died in his early boyhood; his only sibling, a sister five years older, had married at the age of sixteen and had been living an ocean away in the New World colony of Saint-Domingue. Other than the handful of letters he’d received from her over the years, Jean-Luc St. Clair, prior to beginning his legal studies in Marseille, had been occupied chiefly by attending to his elderly father.

Jean-Luc had enjoyed his time at school, which offered more excitement and opportunity than he could find in his lonely, quiet home. Having excelled in his studies at Aix-Marseille University, the ambitious young lawyer sought something greater than the small hometown magistrate’s office. He applied for a position as a low-level attorney at a reputable law practice closer to Marseille. Meeting and falling in love with Marie Germaine, his employer’s pretty daughter with thick brunette curls and quick, pert opinions, had been an unexpected but happy windfall.

Jean-Luc had been employed in his new office, his bride happily installed in their comfortable cottage on her father’s estate, when the news reached Marseille that King Louis and Queen Marie-Antoinette had been plucked from their gilded palace at Versailles and moved back to Paris, where they’d been forced to live among their people. Jean-Luc, a budding idealist whose family’s hopes had been nearly extinguished under an inept monarch, and who had followed with great interest the crafting of a nascent republic in the American colonies, had longed to ride to Paris like so many of his young fellow countrymen. He did not hide his desire to join the people and sacrifice his worldly comforts and, if necessary, his life, in the name of liberty. Would it not be shameful, he asked Marie, to be born in this era of history and yet shrink from the glorious undertaking of a free people rising up in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity?

Mathieu arrived six months after their relocation to Paris, and Jean-Luc had been grateful of it. Marie was less lonely with the dark-haired little boy, who shared her coffee-colored eyes and spirited personality, to fill the long hours while Jean-Luc worked as a low-level administrative attorney for the new government. They had settled in this two-room garret—drafty in the winter, stifling in the summer—as it was all that his modest government salary could afford. His father-in-law, furious at Jean-Luc for taking his daughter so far north, had refused to support the move. If he could only see how she was living now, Jean-Luc thought, looking around at their cramped quarters. They, being from the south, had never known the bitterness of a northern winter until this past year. Nor had either of them ever passed a summer without the salty sea breezes and shade of the fragrant citrus trees. It had been a trying year for both of them.

But Marie, bless her, never complained; she never held it against Jean-Luc that he had removed her from her father’s comfortable home to this loud, dirty city. A place where, on more than one occasion, they’d had to choose between food and fuel. She was tough, yes. But that was also because she was, Jean-Luc suspected, as much of an idealist as he was, even if she would never have dared admit it.

“Mr. Bigwig, you are, with your own carriage this morning.” Marie had risen from the table and was looking out the small window, Mathieu fussing as she tried to burp him.

Jean-Luc took a last bite of rough bread and drained his coffee. “It’s Gavreau. He plans to send me out on one of his cases. Knows I won’t mind as long as I’ve got the carriage.”

“What’s the case?”

“Another mansion. This one belonging to a nobleman who lives…well, used to live, in Place Royale.” Jean-Luc collected the remaining papers strewn across the table and stuffed them into his packed portefeuille. “The Jacobins want to use the house.”

Marie nodded, arching an eyebrow. “So they’ve sent the carriage for you.” He was privileged to have the job he had, even if the salary was insufficient. More than half of Paris was starving, and he rode a carriage to work some days.

His work dealt in cataloging property as it was seized from the wealthy families, former treasure of the ancien régime, now as obsolete as the old order itself. Daily inventory of seized goods—perhaps it was not as stimulating or significant as the work he had hoped to find; perhaps he was not playing a tremendously important role in building the new France—at least not yet. But before they could build the new country, someone had to figure out the proper way of dismantling the former one. For now, that was his work, to manage the spoils until the state had decided what to do with them. As for the former proprietors whose treasures he now cataloged, Jean-Luc rarely heard mention of them, and perhaps he did not want to.