Where the Light Falls(7)
“How are the streets this morning?” Jean-Luc asked. The driver, adjusting his leather gloves, pretended not to hear the question.
Jean-Luc noted a lone piece of paper on the cobbled sidewalk, stirred by Madame’s angry sweeping. A political pamphlet from the looks of it, one of thousands floating around the city; these days any literate man with strong views and access to a printing press could churn out such political discourse. Nevertheless, some of them proved to be interesting reads, even enlightening, and Jean-Luc leaned over to snatch up the leaflet before opening the carriage door and hopping up the step. He perused the pamphlet’s headline: Citizens of America Rally Around President George Washington for Second Term. The writer went on to urge his own French countrymen to look to that new nation as an example of a republic that safeguarded the liberty of the people, a place where free citizens with the ballot wielded the power, not brigands and foreign mercenaries. The column was written anonymously, this writer evidently hoping to eschew the glory or notoriety of publication, his screed signed only by the cryptic alias “Citizen Persephone.”
Jean-Luc looked up from the pamphlet and out the window as the coach driver raised the whip to spur the horses forward. “Let’s avoid La Place. I hate to see…well, the crowds…too much traffic,” Jean-Luc called out. Though it would be treasonous to admit, he had no stomach for the throngs on an execution day; he did everything he could to avoid that blood-soaked square. The driver barely nodded as he directed the horses east, out of Jean-Luc’s neighborhood.
Jean-Luc lived among fervent supporters of the Revolution, to be sure, his quarter being one of the last neighborhoods where the students, fishmongers, and prostitutes could afford rent. Perhaps due to all the time he’d spent recently among the confiscated goods of the old nobility, the street urchins who chased after his carriage that morning appeared especially wretched. Glancing out the window, Jean-Luc watched as one little boy in cropped pants and bare feet hoisted himself up alongside the carriage window. Just inches from him, the little boy extended a tiny palm caked in dirt. “Please, monsieur, citizen, spare a sou for me mum.”
“Off there, you filthy rat!” The driver—eager to expedite his delivery so that he might make his way to the tavern before the execution crowds filed in—brandished his whip, and the child scurried down. As his dreary little frame receded from their moving carriage, Jean-Luc tossed a sou in his direction, hoping as he did so that the money would make its way to his mother’s palm to buy a loaf rather than a cup of watered-down wine.
The neighborhood improved as they crossed the river to the Right Bank. It was a clear morning in Paris, the sunlight reflecting off the water that lapped the shores of the two small islands: Île Saint-Louis and Île de la Cité. Once over the bridge, the driver followed the quay that hugged the northern bank of the river. They were avoiding La Place. And yet, as the carriage crossed over the Rue Saint-Florentin, Jean-Luc couldn’t help but glance down the wide boulevard. There, in the distance, he saw them: brown-clad, dirty figures, men in red caps waving the tricolor flag, women in red caps with their knitting in their laps, as if watching something as mundane as a street play. There were thousands of them. Even after a year in the city, Jean-Luc was still staggered—terrified, if he was admitting the full truth—by the bloodlust of the Parisians.
The glorious tales that had come from Paris to his home in the south had stirred within him an exhilaration and sense of patriotic duty that he had answered—tales that had quickly turned dark and macabre when he beheld the street executions for himself. But the past few weeks had brought rumors of even more sinister events, stories that curdled his blood. Whether or not two thousand prisoners from across the city had been dragged from their cells and torn to pieces in the middle of the night, he could not be sure, but he had to believe that this was just a passing fever. A scourge of bloodletting that would soon be over, replaced by the original ideals of hope and freedom. It was as he had just told Marie: they could not give up on freedom, on the new nation. Not yet.
His law offices were a few blocks north of the Seine and a stone’s throw from the hulking carcass of that infamous tower of torment, the Bastille. Indeed, if he needed a reminder of why he was here, Jean-Luc could look to the Bastille for affirmation. For four hundred years that great stone fortress had served as a prison, the physical embodiment of the great and arbitrary power of the ancien régime of Bourbon kings. With nothing more than a dreaded royal summons, anyone of common birth, whether guilty of a crime or not, could be accused, seized from his home, and locked away forever. On a hot summer’s day three years prior, a massive and well-armed mob had marched from the Saint-Antoine quarter and laid siege to the great fortress. After a ferocious struggle, and with the aid of rebellious National Guard soldiers, the poor men and women of Saint-Antoine eventually succeeded in lowering its drawbridge and seizing the structure. Thus the Revolution had been born out of a desperate struggle, consecrated in the blood of its weary and starved citizens.