Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution (34 page)

“I never leave before the Salon is closed,” I correct him.

“You did once. And I saw you. You were sitting together.”

“Perhaps we were discussing the weather.”

Yachin gives me a long look. “I’m right, aren’t I?” he asks eagerly.

I smile. “We’ll see.”

“Will you tell him I made my own barometer using a bottle, a stopper, and a straw?”

I pause at the door. “He taught you to do that?”

“Four days ago. Remember?”

“No.” But it’s because I’ve been selfish. When we meet, it’s always about my models, my work, my family, my tutoring. When is the last time I asked Henri about his experiments and what he’s been doing in his lab with Jacques? I look down at Yachin’s face and see the same hope in his eyes that I’ve seen in Henri’s. These experiments mean so much to them, yet it’s been five months since I’ve been inside Henri’s lab, and the last time I was there I was hoping his tour of the
Invisible Girl
would be brief so I could return to my workshop and model Émilie Sainte-Amaranthe. “I will tell him,” I say. “And I know he’ll be proud.”

I walk next door, and before I even raise my hand to knock, the door swings open. “Henri.” I smile, and suddenly I’m nervous.

“I thought you forgot.” Henri steps back to let me inside. The hall smells of coffee and something else—warm bread?

“When have you ever known me to forget something? Besides,” I tease, “I want to know what a pair of bachelors eat for breakfast.”

He takes me into the parlor, and I was right, he’s found bread. It’s laid out on a silver tray with an array of jellies and cheeses. Nothing has ever smelled more delightful. I inhale. No one can imitate the bread in Paris. Not even the best bakers in Montreuil.

“I told the baker I was hosting a lovely woman for breakfast, so he took extra care in finding me some flour.”

I laugh. “So when is this lovely woman coming?”

He takes me in his arms. “I believe she’s already here.”

He kisses my neck, and I close my eyes. It can’t continue like this. I can’t keep dreaming about him at night and resisting him in the day. We move to the couch, and suddenly I don’t care about marriage or children or what happens with the Salon. “What about Jacques?” I whisper.

“He’s sleeping upstairs. He won’t be awake for another three hours.”

I watch him undress and think that even if I had all the time in the world, I couldn’t sculpt the perfection of Henri’s body. His arms, his chest … the lean muscle in his thighs. I take off my cap, and when my hair tumbles down my back, he sighs.

It is painful at first, as I knew it would be. But there is also pleasure, and he is careful not to spill into me. I have experienced tremendous joy in seeing wonderful places and sculpting beautiful things, but this is a different kind of bliss. A fleeting, private, exquisite kind of bliss I have never known until right now. We lie together on the couch, and I feel the warmth of him against my back. The bread must be cold, but it doesn’t matter. Henri kisses my shoulder, and I think,
It could be like this always. We could wake together to the smell of coffee and sleep at night in each other’s arms
. “Are you happy?” Henri asks.

“Very, very happy,” I tell him.

He stands and offers me his hand. I take it, and he turns me toward the mirror. He traces my long neck with his fingers and cups my breasts in his hands. The paleness of my skin is a stark contrast to the darkness of my hair. Together, we make a pretty picture.

“What am I going to do with you, my passionate, creative, ambitious Marie?”

I turn to face him. “Help me dress, and then take me on a tour of your lab?”

He smiles. “I was thinking more like marriage.”

“You know—”

He puts a finger to my lips. “Yes.”

“What we’ve done is dangerous,” I warn.

He watches me dress, and the longing in his eyes is unbearable to see.

“Curtius won’t be a guardsman for long,” I promise. “We’ve already discussed other ways to show our patriotism.”

“And how is that?”

“We might do away with all our royal tableaux. Or perhaps he’ll join the Jacobin Club.”

“Those radicals?” Henri asks. He begins to dress, and I am sorry to see him back in his clothes. “I would try to deter him from that idea.”

“It was Robespierre’s suggestion when he visited the Salon to see himself in wax.”

“Ah yes. Robespierre can be very persuasive.”

“What is wrong with the Jacobins?”

Henri buttons his coat. “They have a habit of preaching dangerous things. I would be careful.”

“Well, Curtius believes in hedging his bets, and many of the men in the National Assembly are part of the Club. If they succeed in this constitutional monarchy, Curtius will have very influential friends.”

“You already have influential friends. That’s why you’re still going to Montreuil.”

“Yes, but then we’d have important friends in
and
out of the palace. Although perhaps I should make friends with your baker,” I tease.

We eat, and Henri takes me into his lab, where he tells me about the experiments they’ve been doing. He wants to launch another balloon, only this time it won’t be for show. “There are so many possibilities,” he says. “Think of all the uses for flight.” He takes down a book and flips through the pages. The mahogany bookshelves stretch to the ceiling, some filled with leather tomes, others packed with glass bottles and mysterious jars. There are ladders to reach the topmost shelves, and I long to climb one.

“Listen,” Henri says, and he reads a passage from David Bourgeois’s book
Des Expériences de la Machine Aérostatique
. “ ‘Someday, man will cross burning deserts, inaccessible mountains, impenetrable forests, and raging torrents. And all of this will be done by balloon.’ ” He looks up at me. “Bourgeois predicted it five years ago, and I plan to see it come to pass.”

I feel humbled to hear him speak. “So you’re going to fly away?” I ask.

“Not me. But someone will. Imagine the uncharted territories these explorers will find. My brother was the first man in the world to see the sun set twice. What else can be accomplished? What else can we do?”

I’m in the presence of genius, yet the world is more concerned about tricolor cockades. Henri takes me to his desk, where his notes on the weather are carefully laid out. “With enough balloons, we could observe the weather from here to London and make predictions.”

“As in when it’s going to rain?”

“Or snow or hail …”

“But how?”

“By sending up a mercury barometer,” he says, “or by having someone record the movements of the wind and clouds. And imagine what you could do with a telescope! Think of how close an astronomer could get to the stars. My brother ascended nearly fifteen thousand feet. With the proper gear, perhaps you could go higher. There are scientific uses, commercial uses, even
military
uses for these balloons. King George the Third is already sponsoring experiments in England.”

We watch each other in the bright morning light. There is so much to hope for between us. I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him. “Come tonight,” I say. “My mother is cooking ham from Bayonne.”

T
HE REOPENING OF
the Salon passes by in a haze. Curtius has excused himself from his duties in the National Guard this weekend, and in front of a crowd of nearly a thousand people, he makes a great show of taking our wax model of the king and placing him outside, then pinning a tricolor cockade to his hat. They must hear the exclamations of joy in the Palais-Royal.

“What’s the matter?” my mother asks. “That’s the second person you’ve forgotten to record.”

I look down at the record book and suppress a smile. It’s true. Already, Henri is detrimental to my profession. I write down, “Female, seventeen sous,” then listen to the exclamations of horror as the woman comes face-to-face with de Launay and de Flesselles. But the most popular model is the one of the decrepit Comte de Lorges. Curtius has given him his very own room, painting the walls to look like a dungeon and cluttering the nearby tables with mementos taken from the Bastille. Knowing how valuable these items will become, he’s purchased inkwells and armor, green curtains, and even a set of iron firedogs. A pair of men stop by my table and point to the Comte de Lorges’s tableau. “So is that who you would have us believe came tottering out of the Bastille?” the younger man demands.

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“That’s the beggar from Notre-Dame,” the older man says. “I should know. I pass him every day.”

“No. That’s the Comte de Lorges. He was a prisoner.”

The old man exchanges a look with his son.

“Did he have a mark on his cheek?” the younger man asks. “And a red spot beneath his eye?”

I think back three days ago to the night the Comte de Lorges allowed me to sculpt him. “Yes.”

“Then he’s the beggar from Notre-Dame.”

“But the Comte de Lorges—”

“Is probably a myth, Mademoiselle. Why? Did someone pass that man off as a comte?”

“Yes.” I think of Robespierre. “But all the newspapers … they’re printing his story.”

“Well, you know how it is,” the older man says angrily. “Anything for a sale.”

I am beside myself with rage. I want to take the model of de Lorges and utterly destroy it. I find Curtius outside with the wax model of the king, and I tell him the story.

“And they were
sure
he was a beggar at Notre-Dame?” he asks.

I nod. “What do we do?”

“Obviously, we have to keep him. These people believe he existed, and they’ll want to know what happened to him if he suddenly disappears.”

“Well, perhaps he had a tragic accident,” I say angrily in German. And then it occurs to me. “Do you think Robespierre lied to us on purpose?”

“I think Robespierre believes what he wishes to believe.”

Chapter 30

J
ULY
22, 1789

Tremble, tyrants, your reign must end!

—A
NONYMOUS THREAT TO
M
ARIE
A
NTOINETTE

I
T’S HAPPENING AGAIN
. J
UST AS
H
ENRI PREDICTED, JUST AS
I have dreamed over and over again in my nightmares. Camille comes running into the Salon, pushing past patrons so he can make his way to the
caissier
’s desk. Before he can say it, I know what’s happening. “It’s a mob!” he exclaims. Lucile is behind him in a muslin gown and a wide straw hat. Her dark curls are askew, and her cheeks are pink.

“They’re coming from the Hôtel de Ville,” she says swiftly. “They are making their way to the Boulevard to find Mesdames Foulon and Berthier.”

Immediately, the people in line begin to talk. Where is the mob? Are they in danger? Should they leave?

“It is nothing to worry about,” Curtius announces. “No reason to abandon your entertainment.” To Yachin, he says, “Mind the
caissier
’s desk.”

The rest of us follow him into the workshop. He closes the door, and Camille explains.

It began with a rumor that Joseph-François Foulon, the king’s new Minister of Finance, told the starving people of France to eat hay. “And you believe that?” my uncle questions, but Camille shrugs. Either way, he says, the people believed it. And as soon as Foulon heard the rumor, he understood the danger he was in and escaped to the country. But a thousand citizens marched into the village where Foulon was hiding and dragged him back to Paris. The eighty-year-old man was hitched to a cart and told to pull the wagon to the Hôtel de Ville. Someone tied a bale of hay onto his back and crowned his head and neck with thistles. “How do you like hay now?” they shouted.

Tears are rolling down my mother’s cheeks, and she wipes them away with the back of her hand. Foulon lives only a few blocks away, in the house his father built. As the king’s Finance Minister, he might have bought a château. But he has never forgotten his roots on the Boulevard, and there has never been a kindlier, more considerate man. When my mother was sick with fever seven years ago, he found the court doctor, and within a week she was better. Without the care of that good physician, who knows?