Sophie Vincennes
Curious, Jean-Luc thought, reading it a second time. The letter was unaddressed, with no hint as to how Jean-Luc might respond to this Sophie Vincennes. But then, her intent had been to remain unfound, Jean-Luc reasoned.
This poor woman, as hopeful as the man she loves. Fools, the pair of them, Jean-Luc thought to himself. And as he collapsed his head into his hands he felt the overwhelming desire to hold Marie. It wasn’t a desire; it was a need. An urgent, implacable need. This life was too mad, too tragic, and it all might change so quickly; he couldn’t allow for the recent estrangement that had hardened between them to persist. He pushed his chair back from the desk and stood up, determined to go home and take his wife in his arms.
Outside, the chaos surrounding the Tuileries had spread so that an impromptu assembly of city folk stood in front of his building. There were several dozen, a number of them holding muskets, a handful of others bearing pikes, saws, and fire pokers.
“Citizen, what is the latest?” Jean-Luc asked a mustached man who stood several feet apart from the men holding muskets. This onlooker appeared less dangerous than his companions, with his arms crossed casually in front of his chest.
The man looked at Jean-Luc and signified, with a jerk of his chin, to watch his associates. Jean-Luc’s eyes couldn’t help but rest a moment on the man’s mustache, which had an elaborate, unnatural quality about it. The man noticed him staring, and Jean-Luc averted his eyes, gazing back toward the crowd.
Standing atop a bench, one of the apparent leaders of the gang held his musket aloft and cried out. He, too, Jean-Luc noticed, had the same dark, unnatural mustache. They all did, Jean-Luc realized, as he paid closer attention to the individual faces of the crowd now surrounding him. Even the women, he noticed with a quick gasp.
“We showed that countess what we thought of her national treasure, did we not?” the leader on the bench shouted in a raspy voice. The crowd erupted in cheers and jeers, their fake mustaches flopping about on their lips in response. Several of them began to dance, a macabre dance that looked better suited for wild bonfires than a Paris street full of free citizens.
Good God in Heaven, Jean-Luc thought, don’t let them mean what I think they mean. He’d heard about the uprisings in some of the other cities—uprisings during which unspeakable acts of vengeance had been carried out against the nobility. Children being tossed from château windows and women being deflowered and then defamed, their pubic hair turned into jests and playthings for the incensed mob. But those reports could not actually be true, could they?
“Those royalists thought they could take our city back!” the musket-wielding leader roared from his bench.
“Citizen?” The man to whom Jean-Luc had first spoken, the man who had stood apart, was now beside him. He leaned forward, and Jean-Luc saw through the glare of the full moon that a giddy, febrile excitement colored the man’s dirty face. Jean-Luc could not wrest his eyes from that horrid mustache.
“You look as if you might need some cheering up, citizen. Care to get a whiff of the dear Comtesse de Beaumonde?” Beneath the vile mustache, the man’s lips spread apart into a broad, toothless smile, and Jean-Luc turned away, walking, as fast as he could, toward the river.
On the southern half of the Pont Neuf, another impromptu assembly was gathering, and Jean-Luc groaned, pausing. What hateful villainy were these people up to? But their gathering seemed to be of a more subdued nature. They were perhaps two dozen in number, with several small children clutching their mothers’ skirts and fathers’ hands.
“Citizens, what news?” Jean-Luc approached them slowly, cautiously.
“We’re waiting for him.” One of the mothers, passing her fingers through a young child’s hair as if to improve his ragged appearance, turned and watched Jean-Luc approach.
“For whom?” Jean-Luc asked, pausing before the group now.
“Him!” Another member of the group pointed across the river in the southern direction, as if that might solve Jean-Luc’s confusion.
“I beg your pardon, on whom do we wait?” Jean-Luc repeated his question, straining his eyes to peer through the nightscape of Paris. He began to hear the slow rumble of many horses approaching.
“Bonaparte,” the first woman answered, her voice heavy with reverence. “He’s coming!” The group was now spreading out, forming a single file along the side of the bridge to clear a passage for the approaching horsemen. It sounded to Jean-Luc like an entire squadron of cavalry.
“General Napoleon Bonaparte!” one of the fathers in the group cried, hoisting his son atop his shoulders. The little boy began to wave the tricolor flag.