Chapter 19
Nineteen
“Hang the aristocrats from on high! Oh! It’ll be fine, be fine, be fine.
The aristocrats, we’ll hang ‘em all,” the spectators in the gallery exuberantly sang.
The refrain of the popular revolutionary anthem, which had been sung more times than Marguerite could count, was accompanied by waving fists, stamping feet, and applause.
“We will now hear from Phillipe Boyaval, who will recount his heroic actions against the Austrians at the battle of Jemappes last year,” announced a justice seated at the front of the court room.
A man in a tattered military uniform strode forward, waving the half-empty sleeve of his right arm at the crowd.
His gesture was met with more cheers and applause, and cries of “Death to Dumoriez,” the general who’d led his troops to victory at Jemappes, then defected to the Austrians. There were also scattered shouts of “Death to the Girondists;” the party who had championed Dumoriez.
If she hadn’t been on trial for her life, Marguerite might have thought she was in a Molière play enacted by madmen.
At the front of the room, five members of the committee, serving as prosecutors and judges, and the chief prosecutor, were seated before a long table piled high with papers, glasses of wine, and plates of half-eaten food. A jury sat to their right.
She and her fellow accused sat in rows facing them. Periodically, one among them would be called forward to have their charges explained, or to hear their sentence being passed—almost always guilty with the penalty of death.
On either side of the courtroom were the galleries, filled with members of the public celebrating what passed for justice being served.
Today was what her cellmates had explained was the ‘act of accusation.’ This was the moment in which she’d finally discover what evidence had been presented against her.
After it, she would be given time to seek out witnesses and additional evidence, before her sentence was handed down.
She told herself she had a fighting chance, even though her cellmates had assured her the process was a sham.
“The Austrians held the high ground with over fifty big guns,” the one-armed soldier, Boyaval, declaimed. “Our troops were spread thin…we were half their number, but unlike the monarchist slaves, filled with the fire of freedom…”
Marguerite glanced discreetly to her right, studying the people in the gallery.
Some had brought baskets of food and bottles of wine.
A woman in a mob cap trimmed with red ribbons handed a chicken leg to a man in an already-grease-stained waistcoat.
He tore into it with relish, revealing several missing teeth.
Beside him, a narrow-faced woman was mending a torn shirt; her needle flashing in and out as she nodded her graying head approvingly at the soldier’s tale.
A giant of a man with honey-blond hair was holding out a cleverly designed toy windmill and spinning its blades to the giggling delight of the child sitting next to him.
On the other side of the room, a sable-haired man dressed in buff-colored breeches, a buff and red-striped waistcoat, and a plain shirt, leaned broad shoulders against the wall.
His spine was a lazy curve, his right knee bent.
In one hand, he held a sketchbook, in the other, a pencil.
An almost physical wave of desire swept over Marguerite as she watched his graceful hands moving confidently over the page; her fingers curled as if, she too, held a pencil.
She wanted his sketchbook, wanted to be an observer, to view the people around her as if they were nothing more than artist’s models.
If she hadn’t been on trial for her life, she would have been thinking about drawing him, the flow of the line of his shoulders, his biceps, the curve of his hip.
Her fingers began to move.
And then the man looked up. At her. She registered a slash of dark brows, high cheekbones, and an aristocratic nose. His lips were pressed together in a tight line, as if he were trying to keep some deeper emotion in check.
With a spinning sense of unreality, Marguerite realized she had drawn him. Her fantasy lover. It couldn’t be. And yet, how could she fail to recognize him? When she had an entire portfolio of erotic studies of him?
Marguerite shook her head. Her ‘artistic fantasies,’ as her father called them, were clearly running away with her. She gripped the edge of her seat, grounding herself–she was in a courtroom. About to go on trial. She straightened her spine. And she looked again.
No question about it. It was him. His hand was poised above his sketchbook. His eyes were fixed on her with an intensity that made her shiver; as if he were intimately familiar with her, too.
“Citizeness Rouvroy formerly known as de Joley de Rouvroy?”
The sound of her name and the ensuing chorus of “death to aristos” from the gallery left her no time to wonder why.
The one-armed soldier, having finished his oration, strode down the aisle separating the rows of the accused from the gallery. Spectators reached out to pat his shoulder, grip his good hand, or kiss his cheek as he passed by.
She would have traded both of her arms to follow him out.
“Citizeness Rouvroy, step forward.”
Releasing her grip on her seat, Marguerite rose with an unhurried grace that been beaten into her by more than a decade of governesses and nuns.
She did not smooth her skirts. Don’t fuss Marguerite.
Or pat the twist of hair her cellmates had helped her arrange.
She glided forward towards the table of prosecutors, repeating to herself, as the nuns had taught her, I am a swan on a lake.
“You know that you are suspected of aristocracy, collaborating with emigres, and bad citizenship?” A square-faced justice queried, when she reached the bench. He had protuberant eyes and lips like slabs of liver.
She lifted her chin. “I love this country. I believe in the new Republic. I swear, I would never do anything to harm her citizens.”
“That’s what they all say,” a voice from the gallery called out. The crowd jeered its agreement.
“What proof of your innocence do you have?” The prosecutor, or ‘public accuser’ as the position was called under the new regime, looked up from a pile of papers he’d been leafing through.
He had shoulder-length brown hair, a long thin nose, and winged eyebrows that gave him a look of permanent skepticism.
Dipping his quill into an ink bottle by his elbow, he began to write as she responded.
“I renounced my titles in 1789. Donated my jewels to the Assembly.”
“Her jewels.” Another voice from the gallery called out mockingly. “So generous.”
“I’ll show you some proper jewels. My family jewels,” called another. The crowd roared with laughter.
The wing-browed prosecutor scratched something with his quill. Then held it up for silence.
“I’ve marched with the people,” Marguerite said. “I stand with the people. I’ve always supported the people.”
“Your husband was a Girondist,” the liver-lipped justice said; it was a statement, not a question.
“Traitors! Counterrevolutionaries!” Voices in the gallery rose again.
“Gerard was my former husband,” she said, pulling a paper with an official seal from a packet she’d brought with her. “We were divorced in August 1792.”
The prosecutor, whom Marguerite was beginning to think of as ‘Antenna Brow,’ took the decree and skimmed it with a look of only the vaguest interest. He scribbled something else in the margins of the paper in front of him.
Handing the paper back, he observed, “and yet you continued to live with him.”
“He died of influenza last December.” She resisted the urge to add, before you voted to execute the King. The last thing she needed was for them to question her views on that decision. “He fell ill in September. What sort of woman would refuse to nurse a dying man?”
There were murmurs of assent from the gallery.
“Your father was the former minister of finance, Amaury de Joley, Comte Verignac.” Antenna Brow added, “Unless you divorced him, too?”
The gallery’s murmurs turned to hoots and snickers.
“I have not spoken with or received word from my father in over two years.” She pulled another sheaf of papers from her packet.
“My certificate of good citizenship. As you pointed out, I spent most of last year nursing my former husband. I also have a letter attesting to the fact that I haven’t left Paris in all that time.
I have no idea where my father is,” she added, her heart beating faster.
“You consider yourself a loyal citizen of the new republic?” Antenna Brow asked, in a tone like a trap door sliding open.
“Yes, citizen, I do.”
Setting down his quill, he reached into the pile of papers and pulled out a book with green cover that looked far too much like the one she’d been searching for when she’d been arrested. “Is this yours, Citizeness Rouvroy?”
Mouth suddenly dry, she ventured, “I would have to examine it more closely…”
Opening it to a page bookmarked with a red ribbon, the prosecutor demanded sharply, “If you are so very loyal, Citizeness de Rouvroy, how do you explain this?”