Jim Shepard - Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Robespierre finally doomed him with the argument that if the King was absolved, what became of the Revolution? If he was innocent, then the defenders of liberty were malefactors, the royalists the true inheritors of France. To those who said that the state had no right to execute the King, he countered that the Revolution had been “illegal” from the outset. Did the deputies want a Revolution without a revolution?

We were both awake the entire night before the execution. The day before, I'd been authorized to oversee the digging of a trench ten feet deep, along with the procurement of three fifty-pound sacks of quicklime. The machine was moved to the Place de la Révolution, near the pedestal from which the bronze equestrian statue of the King's father had been hacked down.

I had asked the prosecutor to relieve me of my responsibilities in the King's case. That request had been denied. I then asked for more detailed instructions: would the King require a special carriage? Would I accompany him alone, or with my assistants? I was informed that there would be a special, closed carriage, and that I was to await the King on the scaffold. The latter instruction I understood to suggest that I myself was suspected of royalist tendencies.

I asked Legros to rouse me at five, the same hour that the King's valet, Clery, would be waking him. I heard his step outside my door and called that I was awake before he could knock. “Please don't do this,” Anne-Marie whispered from her side of the bed. Her fist pounded lightly on my rib. But knowing the danger in which we already found ourselves, she only held the pillow over her face while I began to dress.

Clery reported to me later that the King's children had been rocking in agony as he'd prepared to depart under guard. For the previous hour they had consoled themselves with the time they had left together, the little Dauphin with his head between his father's knees.

Would the population rise in revolt against such an act? Had the allies planted agents in order to effect a rescue? These questions and more terrified the deputies, who ordered each of the city's gates barricaded and manned, and an escort of twelve hundred guards provided for the King's coach. The streets along the route to the scaffold were lined with army regulars. The windows were shuttered on pain of death.

The crowd throughout was mostly quiet. The King when he arrived seemed to derive much consolation from the company of his confessor. A heavy snowfall muffled the accoutrements of the carriage.

Before mounting the steps, he asked that his hands be kept free. I looked to Santerre, commander of the Guard, who denied the request. The King's collar was unfastened, his shirt opened, and his hair cut away from his neck. In the icy air he looked at me and then out at the citizenry, where the vast majority, because of weakness, became implicated in a crime that they would forever attribute to others.

I was assisted by my eldest son and Legros. That morning I had received absolution from a nonjuring priest — the new term for one who has not yet forsworn his allegiance to the church. I had checked and rechecked the sliding supports on the uprights, and resharpened the blade. The King tried to address the people over the drum roll but was stopped by Santerre, who told him they'd brought him here to die, not to harangue the populace. Henri-Francois strapped him to the plank. Legros slid him forward. He died in the Catholic faith in which he had been raised. In accordance with the custom, the executor of justice then found the head in the basket and displayed it to the people. He lifted it by the hair, raising it above shoulder height. He circled the scaffold twice. The head sprinkled the wood below as it was swung around. There was an extended silence followed by a few scattered cries of “Long live the Republic.”

The executioner did not accompany the wicker basket to the cemetery. He was told that it fell from the cart near the trench, where the crowd had then torn it to pieces. He ordered more expiatory Masses said on his own behalf. He made certain that the King's blade was never used again.

And he also made certain that his wife never discovered his trade in packets of the King's hair: his eldest son's idea. Though for months afterward she saw the broadsheets of his hand holding the King's severed head over the caption May this impure blood water our fields.

Thereafter there seemed to be no space anywhere in the country for moderation. All dangers and all proposals conceived to counter them partook of the dire, the drastic, and the headlong. The nation was in peril, and what constitutional safeguards remained had to make way for emergency measures. Danton claimed that if a sufficiently severe Revolutionary tribunal had been constituted that September, there would have been no massacres. The government's discipline had to be terrible or the people themselves would again spread terror. A tribunal empanelled to punish with death all assaults on the indivisibility of the Republic could operate, as he put it, with an irreducible minimum of evil.

Anne-Marie by then was a wraith, disappearing from rooms, a cough the only evidence of her presence in the house. One night she didn't come to table at all. Legros had to fetch our dinner from the kitchen. Henri-Francois informed me that she'd had an altercation with another woman at the bakery about her place in the breadline. He was no help with details. I waited while together we watched the shoveling motion of his spoon. Finally I asked if she'd been hurt, and he shrugged, saying, “Well, she got the bread.”

I found her sorting through potatoes in our root cellar. Many had already sprouted. The skin under her eyes was blue.

“Are you well?” I asked.

“I'm unable to eat,” she told me. “I'm sure it will pass.”

“Are you injured?” I asked.

“I'm sound in body and mind,” she answered. As if to prove her point, she showed me a potato. We could hear someone above us who'd returned to the kitchen for a second helping from the pot.

We said nothing for some minutes, sharing the close darkness. The damp smell of the dirt was pleasant. I sorted potatoes with her.

“It's not assumed that the wife of the Executor of State Judgments will be found brawling in the street,” I joked, gently.

“You thought you married a lady,” she said.

“I only meant that this was not a time for public demonstrations,” I told her.

“They know you by now,” she said. “You're as suited to take a hand in political faction as you are to arrive on the moon.”

But she underestimated me. I attended commune sessions when I saw fit, ready to speak if the occasion warranted it. The Law of Suspects was promulgated that September to speed the work of terrorizing foes of the Revolution. Suspects of any sort could now be denounced and detained by local committees formed on the spot and unfettered by the sorts of legal concerns that had no doubt already allowed too many culprits in league with our enemies to escape. This category of suspects extended first to all foreigners residing in France; then to those who speculated in any way with foreign currencies; next to those who spoke too coldly of their enthusiasm for the Revolution; and finally to those who, while having done nothing in particular against the cause, hadn't seemed to do much for it, either. A prisoner might be accused at nine, find himself in court at ten, receive sentencing at two, and lose his life at four. Anyone's neighbor might be the allied agent already at work to engineer famine or defeat. The Law of Suspects was a reminder to the populace that a nation at war might have to exterminate liberty in order to save it. Prisons like the Con-ciergerie tripled their detainees. In some rooms the sewage fumes were so strong that torches brought into them went out.