The young boy was looking to his fellow prisoner as the guards called his name. Kellermann returned his stare, and André noticed the general give the boy a touch on the shoulder. He said something, its sound and meaning immediately lost to the crowd, but the boy heard it and nodded his head.
“Enough of that—get on with it!” The same toothless man near André was growing impatient, echoing the sentiments of the crowd around them. The guard responded to this mounting restiveness and jerked the boy from Kellermann’s side. The child appeared now as though he would cry, but he did not. As he neared the top of the scaffold, he turned his gaze back toward Kellermann, who offered a barely perceptible nod.
There were just two of them left now. Kellermann would go last, André suspected, and the other remaining prisoner was pulled forward: a white-haired man, much older than the others. And fidgety. But unlike the others, who had exhibited their fear openly, the old man seemed oddly at ease, even cheerful. He chattered toward the prison guards, gesturing with his bound hands as if to ask them to untie them. When the guards wouldn’t untie the bindings, the man laughed, looking out over the crowd and continuing to babble as if in the midst of a riveting conversation. He tittered to himself, turning back to the guards with a discordant smile, no light of understanding in his eyes.
“Good God,” André uttered, turning toward Sophie. The man had gone mad. Had it been the imprisonment? Or had he arrived at prison already spent? Whatever the case, he was still conversing with himself as he was tied into position. The guards, who had in small ways reacted and responded to the behaviors of the previous victims, were blank-faced and wordless with this man. They looked to one another, exchanging glances that André guessed—hoped—betrayed some unspoken shame.
The man was laughing as his head was fastened down. He cackled, oblivious, in the second before the blade met his neck.
Now it was Kellermann’s turn. The crowd, perhaps thrown off by the previous execution, was slightly less feverish now. They seemed more intrigued than excited as Kellermann was beckoned forward. With two guards at each side, the general walked himself up the steps.
On top of the platform, one of the executioners put a rough arm on his victim, as he had done with the five before. But as he did so, the general turned toward him with a look of such force that the executioner immediately withdrew his hand, as if Kellermann’s body had been hot to the touch.
The crowd grew even quieter, still enough that André and Sophie could hear Sanson when he said, with a nod of his chin: “All right, then. This way, General Kellermann.” But the executioner’s tone was more beseeching than authoritative.
Kellermann took a few steps forward and looked out over the crowd. André beheld his face one last time—the broad brow, the graying hair, the wide-set blue eyes. Eyes that showed not a trace of fear. Nor did they show anger. Or anguish. They showed, André realized, absolutely nothing. Was it resignation?
The quiet crowd seemed entranced now, hundreds of eyes fixed on the face of a doomed man. Without moving his body, the general’s glance passed over the mob and glided beyond them, into the distance. Perhaps he caught the glimpse of a place beyond this world, a place into which he hoped to be welcomed.
And then he looked back into his present surroundings. The red-stained platform. The waiting executioner, his face still blank, workmanlike. André saw Kellermann make the sign of the cross.
The crowd was so silent now that André could hear the groaning of the wooden beams, the click of the leather straps as the general’s body was fastened into place.
They stayed quiet as Sanson lifted his arm and tugged the lever. And still, the crowd was silent when the guillotine blade fell on General Christophe Kellermann, marking with collective breathlessness what Guillaume Lazare had declared “the necessary sacrifice and glory of our illustrious Revolution.”
Summer 1794
André did not leave Sophie’s rooms the following day, lest he encounter anyone in a revolutionary spirit. If he were to witness someone making a celebration of Christophe Kellermann’s death, André did not trust himself to restrain his anger.
Sophie, having received a summons from her uncle, thought it best to answer at once rather than risk Murat visiting her apartment to seek her out. “I’ll return as quickly as I can.” Sophie slid into her cloak, her eyes still fixed on André. “Are you certain you will be all right?”
“Yes,” André lied. “But the sooner you return, the sooner I’ll feel that much better.”