Chapter 7
Seven
There was a mark on the door? What kind of mark?
And who had put it there? Some part of Marguerite’s brain knew there were more important things she should be thinking of or doing as the sound of voices and pounding feet grew ever closer, but she found herself unable to move as her sitting room filled with men in red caps and sashes, waving clubs, sabers, and pistols.
Trying to stop them would have been like trying to dam a flood with a feather.
“See!” one of them shouted triumphantly and pointed at her. “There she is. Citizeness Rouvroy. The enemy of the State!”
The open mouths, the gesturing hands, the odors of their bodies, their breath; it was almost more than her senses could absorb.
“Search the place!”
Instinctively she moved to clap her hands over her ears.
The movement seemed to shatter the fugue that had been settling around her.
Grabbing her right wrist with her left hand, she brought both down.
Then she straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and faced the men.
Were there four? Five? They spread out to search her rooms.
“Enemy of the state?” she raised her voice loud enough to be heard over the scrape of drawers being opened, the bang of cabinets thrown wide, and the clatter and thud of her belongings being hurled to the floor. “On what grounds are you bringing such a charge?”
A man with gray stubble on his cheeks and a red sash across his broad chest stepped forward. “Are you Citizeness Rouvroy?”
“I am.”
“Formerly known as Mme de Joley de la Rouvroy, wife of the Chevalier de la Rouvroy?”
“My husband and I gave up our titles in June 1789—at the time of the tennis court oath. If you know anything about my late husband, or of me, then you know we have been supporters of the Republic since the beginning.”
“Your late husband was a Girondist, was he not?”
As focused as she was on her art, she wasn’t so cut off from the world that she didn’t know about the orders that had gone out to arrest the Girondins.
But what did that have to do with her? “Gerard died seven months ago.” Well before the Girondins had voted to appeal to the people on the subject of whether to execute the King, laying themselves open to charges of being monarchists and counterrevolutionaries.
And well before they’d tried to rally provincial support to break Paris’s domination of the National Convention.
The fools, underestimating the power of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre. “What possible transgression could my husband have committed that would bring you here now?”
“Ah,” the man smiled, gray stubble glittering in the sunlight. “Who says it is your husband’s crimes that have brought us here?”
Despite the prickling heat of the June sun spilling through her windows, the man’s emphasis on the words ‘your husband’ and ‘crimes’ chilled Marguerite as thoroughly as if her skin had been painted with ice.
Was this somehow tied to her father? She’d had no contact with him since last October.
After the September massacres, she’d wondered if she’d been wrong to reject his offer to leave, but then Gerard had gotten sick.
And after her husband’s death? She’d known all too well that her father would never allow her to paint professionally.
A young man, a boy really, with strands of greasy brown hair beneath his red cap, entered the room carrying a desk drawer full of papers.
He turned it upside down, spilling correspondence, receipts, envelopes and quills across the floor.
“We’ve gone through all of these,” he said with disgust. “There’s nothing here but household accounts. ”
Marguerite worried at her bottom lip, aware that if she said the wrong thing, guessed incorrectly about why she’d been denounced, she might give these men more reasons to arrest her.
And yet, if she remained silent, would they think she was admitting guilt?
“There’s nothing there because there’s nothing to find. I’m a loyal supporter of the Republic.”
“Loyal?” A man who’d been flipping through the portfolios of drawings stacked against the wall, wrinkled his bulbous nose and repeated the word in a mocking imitation of her voice.
Her stomach clenched, not just at his sneering contempt, but at the sight of his rough hands, with their dirt-rimmed fingernails, on her work.
“Lying aristo,” said the greasy-haired boy with the now-empty desk drawer.
Dropping it atop the pile of scattered papers, he strode over to the vitrine bookshelf and opened it rudely, rattling the glass panes.
He began searching the books; pulling them out one by one, shaking them by the spine, then dropping them on the floor when he found nothing between their pages.
“Liar. Aristocrat.” The filthy-fingered canvas-flipper snickered. “Same thing.”
“I would never do anything to harm the Republic.” Marguerite forced her gaze away from the splayed profusion of her beloved books. The battered brown tome with its ridiculous declaration of scorned love lay open beside a table leg.
“As you can see, I paint,” she said, gesturing towards her easels, the paints on the tables, the portfolios stacked against the wall.
“I’m preparing for the Louvre Salon in August. I barely leave my home except to buy food and more art supplies.
” She glanced over at Victorine, hoping the woman would affirm her statement, but her neighbor remained silent.
Of course Victorine hadn’t spoken up. If she did, they might think she was involved in…whatever this was about. Marguerite was on her own. But then, she had been for months. Marguerite tried again to defend herself. “What could I, a simple woman, have possibly done?”
“Possibly?” The gray-stubbled man laughed. “We have evidence of your crimes in your own hand, citizeness. It will be revealed to the people soon enough.” He turned to his men. “Take her.”
The boy who’d been rifling through her bookcase and the man who’d searched her portfolios stepped forward seizing her wrists.
Victorine, too, stepped forward.
Marguerite’s heart lifted. Then fell. She couldn’t allow Victorine to get into trouble, too. “Victorine, don’t…”
Victorine swept past her, pointing an accusatory finger at the shawl-wrapped bundle on the floor. “She was packing that when I arrived.”
The stubble faced man lifted the bundle, peered inside, and laughed again. “I do hope she’s packed something suitable for a rendezvous with Madame La Guillotine.”