Louder Going Back

V. April 17, 1794 — The Morning After

She is wearing the grey dress. Not the good grey, the one with the lace collar he brought from Arcis-sur-Aube wrapped in brown paper, pleased with himself for remembering that she’d mentioned it once, weeks earlier, in passing. The other grey. The one she wears when nothing matters enough to choose.

The room is very bright. Someone has opened the shutters — perhaps she opened them herself, perhaps her hands did it while the rest of her was elsewhere, the way her hands made coffee this morning, the way they tore bread, the way they continue to operate in the absence of instruction. The April light comes in clean and full, as if the day does not know what happened yesterday.

There is coffee. The cup is warm, which means it was recent. The bread is from yesterday — the crust gone pale where it dried overnight, a greyish bloom along the edge. She eats it anyway. Not because she is hungry. Because the bread is there and she is there and her mouth is still a mouth.

His coat is on the hook by the door. The brown one with the torn lining he kept meaning to have repaired. He wore the blue to the tribunal. She does not know what happened to the blue coat. She does not know who removes the clothing from a condemned man’s body, whether there is a person designated for this task or whether the clothing is simply taken, the way everything is simply taken.

She should take the brown coat down. She should fold it and put it in the trunk with his other things — his shirts, his stockings, the waistcoat with the ink stain on the pocket where he kept a pen he never used because Georges-Jacques did not write, Georges-Jacques spoke, writing was for men like Camille and Robespierre, men whose voices were insufficient for the scale of what they meant.

She does not take down the coat. She drinks the coffee.

A boy is selling something in the street. His voice comes up through the window, young and hoarse and certain — the price of radishes, or turnips, she cannot quite distinguish. He is shouting a number and a vegetable with the conviction of someone who believes the world still operates by numbers and vegetables.

The coffee is not good. Nothing is good coffee this year. The blockades, the war — the real beans come in only for certain tables now. She has heard this from Georges-Jacques, from the way he talked about Maximilien’s parsimony: the thin broth, the careful portions. Georges-Jacques found this admirable for about six months, then found it alarming, then found it irrelevant because by then the food on Robespierre’s table was the least of what Robespierre was rationing.

The coat on the hook does not move. She would like it to move. She would like the door to open and the coat to be lifted by his hand — the left one, the one he favors — and shrugged onto shoulders that are broader than the coat was built for. He bought it when he was thinner, before the Committee, before the constant dinners with deputies who needed to be persuaded of things.

The door does not open.

On the table, beside the bread and the coffee cup, there is a pamphlet. Today’s, printed on cheap stock that smells of wet ink. The headline announces something she already knows in language that makes what she knows into something else — a public event, a civic outcome, a sentence carried out. The language does not mention the sound of the crowd or the way the cart jolted on the cobblestones or the fact that he shouted something at the end, something she has heard about secondhand from a neighbor who said his voice carried even then, even at the last, that he said something to the executioner that made the executioner pause. The pamphlet does not contain this detail. The pamphlet contains facts. She tears another piece of bread. The crust flakes onto the table.

IV. March 1794 — The Weeks Before

He comes home and he is quiet. Not the quiet of thinking — she knows that quiet, has learned it by pressure and temperature and the angle of the wind. The thinking quiet has a forward lean to it, a compression behind the eyes, as if words are being packed tightly for later deployment. This is different. This is the quiet of having stopped. Something in the mechanism has ceased turning, and what remains is a man who sits at the table and looks at his hands as if they belong to someone he used to know.

She says his name. He looks up. His face does the thing it does when he is rearranging himself for an audience — even an audience of one, even her. What she sees is not a smile but the scaffolding of a smile.

“Camille is frightened,” she says. She will not pretend she has not been to the Desmoulins’ apartment this afternoon, has not sat with Lucile in the front room while Camille paced the back one. “He thinks the Committee —”

“The Committee.” The word comes out flat. “The Committee thinks many things. Most of them about me.”

“Then do something.”

He looks at her. She has been married to this man for fifteen months and she sees in this look, for the first time, that he is not going to fight. Not because he cannot but because the fighting would require him to become something he has already been, and becoming it again would mean the first time was not enough, and the idea that it was not enough is intolerable.

“Camille should be more careful with what he publishes,” he says.

“Camille publishes what you tell him to.”

“I don’t tell Camille what to publish. I suggest. Camille does what Camille does.”

This is true and not true. Camille’s journal, the Vieux Cordelier, has been saying what Georges-Jacques will not say from the tribune — that the Terror has eaten its purpose, that the blade has become habit. Louise has read every issue. She thinks Camille writes too much about Tacitus and not enough about the current price of bread, which is what people are actually afraid of — not ancient tyranny but the queue at the bakery on Rue Saint-Honoré that starts before dawn and sometimes ends in nothing.

She stopped giving opinions about strategy two months ago, after Hébert. Her opinion had been that he was a fool and would collapse if pushed, and this turned out to be correct, but correct in the way that a diagnosis is correct when it leads to the wrong surgery. The Committee heard her assessment relayed through Georges-Jacques — fool, unsupported, no institutional base — and they pushed, and Hébert collapsed, and the collapse was a tumbrel and sixteen necks and a crowd that cheered because crowds cheer.

She had meant the word fool dismissively. The Committee heard it as operational intelligence. The gap between her dismissal and their action was sixteen lives, and she has spent two months trying to determine whether the gap was her fault or the Committee’s fault or the revolution’s fault, and she has concluded that fault is not the right concept, that the revolution has moved beyond fault the way a flood moves beyond the broken levee.

Now she puts soup on the table. Turnip, mostly. A little leek. A knob of butter obtained through the kind of lateral exchange that Paris has become expert in — butter for information, information for access, access for safety, safety for nothing, because safety is the one thing no one in Paris can actually provide.

No meat. Meat is for citizens who have not been suspected of moderation, and Georges-Jacques has been suspected of moderation, which is the kind of sentence that would have been funny a year ago and is now the kind of sentence that gets written on warrants.

He eats the soup. He does not remark on it. Six months ago he would have — the flavour, the temperature, a joke about her cooking or his appetite, something to fill the space between them with the sound of his voice. His voice used to fill every space. It filled the Convention, it filled the Cordeliers Club, it filled the streets when he spoke from a balcony and made fifteen thousand people believe they were hearing their own thoughts spoken back to them in a voice bigger than any single throat should produce. Now it sits inside him, unused.

The soup is thin. He eats it. He goes to bed.

She hears him breathing in the dark. Not sleeping — just breathing. The lungs that could project across the Tuileries Garden now just moving air in a room on the Cour du Commerce. She lies beside him and does not sleep and thinks about the soup, about the sixteen necks, about the word fool and what it cost.

III. October 1793 — The Tribunal

The room smells of bodies and paper and candle tallow burned too long. The Revolutionary Tribunal meets in the Palais de Justice, in a chamber built for some function of the old regime she cannot identify — something involving wigs and ceremony and a different idiom of sentencing. The wigs are gone. The ceremony persists, altered. The sentencing continues.

She is in the gallery. Wives of Convention members are discouraged from attending; it is considered a distraction, it is considered unseemly, it is considered — the word they use is irregular, which in revolutionary Paris means anything the speaker dislikes that has not yet been made criminal. But Louise has a face that officials do not remember and a way of standing that suggests she belongs wherever she stands. These are useful qualities in a republic that is eating itself.

Georges-Jacques is not here today. He is at the Committee of Public Safety, which meets in the Tuileries, in a room with green wallpaper she has seen once — she came to bring him a coat during a late session, November, the corridors unheated because the republic does not heat corridors when there are armies to supply. The green struck her as wrong. It was the colour of drawing rooms and country houses, places where the worst outcome is a dull evening. In this room the outcomes included the Place de la Révolution and a blade that fell from a height she had once measured with her eyes — fourteen feet, from the top of the frame to the lunette.

The man on trial today is someone she recognizes but cannot name. A thin-faced man from the back row of the Jacobin Club who clapped when the room clapped and shouted when the room shouted. He is accused of hoarding grain. The evidence is a neighbor’s denunciation and a receipt for twenty sacks of flour dated August, which might indicate hoarding or might indicate that he is a baker who bought flour after the harvest, which is when bakers buy flour.

The prosecutor — Fouquier-Tinville, that narrow mechanism — reads the charge with the fluency of repetition. His voice does not vary. He has found a register that serves all occasions: treason, hoarding, insufficient enthusiasm, corresponding with émigrés. The calm is the most disturbing thing about the tribunal — not the verdicts, which are predictable, but the calm with which they are produced, as if the blade falls not because anyone is angry but because falling is what blades do.

Louise watches the thin-faced man’s hands on the dock rail. The knuckles are white. She wonders what those hands did this morning — whether they kneaded dough, or buttoned a waistcoat, or touched a child’s forehead to check for fever. The ordinary operations of hands that did not yet know they were performing for the last time.

She leaves before the verdict. Everyone in the gallery knows the verdict. The verdict was known before the trial began, and she has worked this out over weeks of attending: the trial is for the audience. The trial is pedagogy. The examinations are final.

Walking home across the Île de la Cité, she passes the Conciergerie. Beautiful from outside — pale stone, pointed towers, the late-afternoon light off the Seine catching the upper windows and turning them to copper. Inside, Camille’s sources say the cells are so full that prisoners sleep in shifts, the smell something the building now produces rather than contains.

At home, the room is empty. His chair is pushed back from the table at the angle he always leaves it — not square, not tidy, but diagonal, as if he departed in the middle of a thought and the thought is still there, waiting for him to return and finish it. She straightens the chair. Then she pushes it back to the diagonal.

She lights a candle. She sits in her own chair, the smaller one on the other side of the table, and she waits. The candle smells of tallow. She is twenty-one years old and sitting in a room in Paris waiting for a man to come home from a committee meeting, and the committee is deciding who lives and who dies, and the candle is burning, and outside the windows the city is getting dark earlier and colder faster and finding new reasons to be afraid.

II. January 1793 — The King’s Trial

Paris is cold and the river is grey and everyone is arguing about what to do with the king.

She knows what Georges-Jacques thinks because he has told her, at this table, with wine and the remains of a roasted chicken between them. A real chicken, obtained through a connection of her father’s — a bird that actually lived somewhere before it arrived on this table, unlike the grey anonymous flesh that passes for poultry in the markets. She has become a person who notes the provenance of food, because in revolutionary Paris food is a political fact, and she is eating a real chicken in a room with a man who is deciding whether a king should die.

“If we don’t,” he says, “every crowned head in Europe has permission to invade. The armies are already at the borders. The king alive is a flag they rally around. The king dead is — ” He pauses. He tears a piece of bread. “A fact.”

“A fact,” she repeats.

“The republic needs facts. It has too many opinions.”

She is twenty years old and newly married — three months — and she is still learning the rhythm of his thinking, the way an argument builds in him like weather, beginning as a pressure she can feel before the words arrive. He thinks in systems. He sees the revolution as a machine with interlocking parts, and the king is a part that has broken but has not been removed, and the broken part is jamming the works, and the solution is mechanical, not moral. She finds this reassuring and frightening. Reassuring because it means he is rational. Frightening because rationality applied to killing has always had a different name, and she suspects the name is justice, and she suspects justice is what people call it when they want to kill someone and need a word that isn’t murder.

“Will you vote for it?”

“I already know how I’ll vote.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looks at her. The candlelight makes his scarred face into a landscape — the pockmarks like craters, the jaw like a ridge, the eyes set deep in the terrain of old damage. She married this face. Not entirely by choice: her father arranged the match, persuaded that a man of thirty-four with a rising position in the Convention was suitable for a girl whose assets were a decent education, a pragmatic temperament, and a chin that her mother called determined and her sister called stubborn. But she chose to agree, and the agreement was not reluctant.

Six months before the wedding, she saw him speak at the Cordeliers. He stood on a table because there was no stage, and the table creaked under his weight — she remembers the creak, remembers thinking the table would break — and his voice filled the hall from every direction at once, rising, inescapable, and she thought: there is a man who is certain. Certainty, in 1792, was the most attractive quality a person could have.

“I’ll vote for death,” he says now. “I’ll argue for it publicly. I’ll stand at the tribune and I’ll say the tree of liberty requires — ”

“Don’t practice on me.”

The surprise on his face is genuine — a flicker that passes before the composure returns, but she sees it, because she is close enough to see it, and this is the advantage of proximity: you see the flickers. The Convention does not see the flickers. His first wife may have seen them, though Louise has no way of knowing this except from the absences in how he speaks about Gabrielle — the things he does not say suggesting a woman who was the ground his voice stood on. Louise is not the ground. She has not determined what she is.

“I am not a tribune,” she says. “I am your wife. Don’t rehearse.”

He puts down the bread. He reaches across and takes her hand — his hand enormous, hers disappearing into it — and holds it, and says nothing. The silence is the good silence, the room already full of them — breathing, warmth, the chicken bones, the wine.

She does not know that Robespierre is already keeping notes. She does not know that a vote for death delivered too moderately is worse than a vote against, that enthusiasm has become a measurable substance and that certain men are measuring it. She knows the weight of his hand. The candle gutters.

I. June 1793 — Marat’s Death

She hears about it from Thérèse, the fishwife on Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie who sells herring from a cart and knows everything before the newspapers print it. Marat is dead. A woman from Caen came to his rooms with a petition, was admitted to see him in his bath — Marat takes his baths medicinal, for the skin condition that makes his flesh look like it is trying to leave his body — and stabbed him. The details are already becoming legend: the bath, the blade, the blood mixing with the mineral water, the face of the woman, calm as a portrait.

“Twenty-four,” Thérèse says, and Louise does not want to examine the number but examines it anyway: she is twenty herself, and the distance between twenty and twenty-four is four years, which is the time it might take to become the kind of person who walks into a room with a knife and a certainty and uses both.

Georges-Jacques comes home that evening carrying the smell of the Convention — sweat and dust and the particular staleness of a hall where hundreds of men have been shouting for six hours about what the killing means. He sits in his chair.

“Marat is dead,” he says, as if she might not know.

“I know. Thérèse told me this morning.”

“Charlotte Corday. She had a petition. She said she had intelligence about Girondin conspirators in Caen.” He makes a gesture with his hand she cannot read. It might mean the knife. It might mean hopelessness. “She was twenty-four.”

A woman roughly her age killed a man in his bath because she believed the killing was necessary. Her own husband voted to kill a king because he believed the killing was necessary. The geometry of conviction — everyone pointing at a different target, everyone certain the target is correct.

“What happens now?”

“Now everyone is afraid of everyone.” He rubs his face. His hand is large enough to cover the face from brow to chin, and when it drops the face looks different — older, more worn, as if the rubbing has removed a layer. “Robespierre will use this. He is already using it. The Girondins will be blamed, and anyone who ever spoke to a Girondin, and anyone who hesitated, and anyone who suggested that perhaps — ”

“You suggested that.”

“I know.”

“Last week. At the Jacobin Club. You said the revolution should show mercy. I was there.”

“I know what I said.”

He stands and walks to the window. The evening light of Paris in June is long and golden and refuses to acknowledge that anything has happened — the light keeps doing what light does, gilding the rooftops and the chimney pots and the laundry hung between buildings, indifferent to assassination. She watches his back. The shoulders, the way his coat pulls across them. The vertebrae she can feel when she puts her hand on his spine in bed, counting them sometimes when he is asleep, the knobs of bone under the skin.

She wants to say: leave. We could go to Arcis-sur-Aube, to the house, to the place where the river is clean and the air smells like cut hay and no one is measuring anyone’s enthusiasm. She does not say it, because she knows him, knows the architecture of his pride, and the pride will not permit retreat because the pride is the conviction and the conviction is what she married and what she married will kill him.

“The soup is ready,” she says.

He turns from the window. His face is in shadow. She cannot read his expression. He sits. She serves the soup. His spoon clinks against the bowl. Outside, someone is singing a revolutionary song, one of the ones he used to bellow off-key after too much wine, and now the song is in a stranger’s mouth and the stranger’s voice is thin and accurate and nothing like his.

Prologue. September 1792 — The Salon

She is wearing the blue dress, the one with the mother-of-pearl buttons that her sister helped her fasten this morning, the one that makes her look — what? Older. She hopes older. She is nineteen and she would like to look twenty-one, an age at which a woman can have opinions without the opinions being attributed to youth.

The salon belongs to a deputy’s wife whose name she has already forgotten. The rooms are overcrowded and too warm — September in Paris, the windows closed against the smell of the river, which in September is the smell of everything the city has put into the river all summer coming back. The wine is a Burgundy that stains her teeth if she is not careful. She is trying to be careful about the wine, about where she stands, about the impression she makes, which is probably no impression, which is what she wants. To be present without being noticed.

There is a man near the fireplace. He is talking to two other men — she can hear his voice but not the words, a low frequency that carries beneath the rest of the room, audible not as melody but as foundation. He is not handsome. His face is scarred — pox, or an accident, the marks deep and irregularly spaced — and his jaw is heavy and his nose has been broken at least once. He is not fat but large, the way certain men are large, as if the air around them has been claimed, annexed, made part of the body.

He laughs at something one of the men says. The laugh fills the corner where he is standing and overflows into the rest of the room, and she sees heads turn — not alarmed but drawn, the way people turn toward a fire in a cold room.

He does not see her. She is certain of this. She is nineteen and standing near the wall in a blue dress with mother-of-pearl buttons and she is not the kind of person a man near the fireplace looks at, not yet. In forty minutes the deputy’s wife will bring her over and say his name, and he will take her hand. His hand will be warm and enormous. She will think: oh.

Not oh as in surprise. Oh as in recognition. The thread on her top button is loose — her sister warned her about the thread — and her glass is almost empty, and her teeth are probably stained, and outside the windows the Seine is moving in its filthy ancient way toward the sea.