Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution (52 page)

“Men like Danton and Marat have called for an uprising, and now they have it.” My uncle is brutally honest. “We are a group of men with muskets and pistols and no real leadership. We can do nothing to stop this!”

Isabel sends Paschal to his room, and my mother appears with sauerkraut and cold beef. But no one has the stomach to eat.

“I can’t go outside,” Robespierre worries. He begins to pace again. “Find out what is happening,” he begs. “See if they will listen to you!”

For two hours after Curtius leaves, we watch Robespierre move back and forth. One moment he is hopeful, shouting, “We will win this war and liberty will prevail!” The next moment he is railing against the queen and her Austrian allies. Then there is a rumbling in the distance, and Robespierre stops pacing.

It is the sound of a mob moving down the Boulevard du Temple.

“Go upstairs and join Paschal,” I tell Isabel. She is gone before the pounding on the door begins.

“Don’t open it!” Robespierre exclaims. “They could be assassins.” The pounding continues, and sweat begins to glisten on his forehead. I go to the window and open the curtain.
“In the name of liberty,”
someone shouts,
“open the door!”

“Do it,” my mother says in German, “or they will beat it down!”

“What is she saying?” Robespierre demands. He is practically gasping for air.

“That we must let them inside.”

His eyes go wide, and he pats down his wig.

“You should sit,” I tell him, and he takes a chair at the
caissier
’s desk. I open the door and steel myself for whatever horror they have brought for me. A young man separates himself from the mob and holds up a head for everyone to see.
Oh, God
. I stagger backward.

“I am Jean Nicholas, and I have come with the head of the Princesse de Lamballe!”

Immediately, I recoil. The queen’s dearest friend, her closest confidante. When everyone else fled from the palace, the Princesse de Lamballe remained. Robespierre rushes to the door, and the crowds cheer. “Is that her?” he asks swiftly.

I don’t want to look. But I must. I would know her face anywhere. The paleness of her skin, the blue of her eyes, the symmetry of her features. She was the envy of every woman at court. They have taken her head and speared it on a pike. The mobs begin to laugh as Jean lifts the pike in the air so that her curls bob up and down. Then he grabs the crown of the princesse’s hair and pulls it from the pole.

“Citizeness Grosholtz.” He thrusts the head at me. “Will you do us the honor of a mask?”

“Where did this come from?” Robespierre demands.

“La Force prison,” Jean Nicholas says loudly. He is obviously the leader of this mob, for they grow silent to listen to him speak. “Today, we have done a great service to the
patrie
by ridding Paris of its traitorous priests and whores!”

“I cannot watch this.” Robespierre flees back into the house, and I am left alone with the mob. Jean Nicholas is still holding out the head. He will kill me if I refuse it. I think of Isabel’s words. I have chosen this, and now I must do my duty. I hold out my hands and can feel the presence of my mother behind me. “I will get the plaster,” she whispers.

I take the head, and my stomach clenches. It smells of powder and blood. Her eyes are open, fixed on whatever horror was in front of her when she was murdered. And her neck—her long, elegant neck—has been severed as if with an ax. The guillotine’s cut is swift and clean. This … this is a butcher’s work. I sit on the steps. There is a restlessness in the crowd. My mother appears, and they watch her tie my apron. Now there is excitement. I am a performer dancing with death for their pleasure.
Here, let me entertain you
. I press the plaster against the princesse’s face. I expect her to cry out and resist. But there is nothing left of her personality. I wonder what they have done with her body.

“Aren’t you interested in how this came to be?” Jean asks.

I know what is best for me, and so I lie. “Of course. Did you raid each of the prisons?”

“We began at the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” he boasts, “where three hundred priests were sent back to God.” The mob laughs, and I concentrate on the princesse. The dead have fewer horrors for me now than the living. “Then we went on to La Salpêtrière and Bicêtre.” Bicêtre is a prison for children and religious men. “When our work there was done, we discovered the Princesse de Lamballe in La Force.”

I remove the plaster, and my mother helps me pour beeswax into the hardened mold.
I will not hear him. If I ignore him, it will all go away
.

“Her last words were ‘God save the queen!’ even as they were tearing off her clothes.” He laughs. He is a madman.

“I am finished.” I give him the head and the terrible death mask. He wants a blond wig and paint for her eyes. “I have a wig, but no more paint.”

He searches my face, to see if I am another lying aristocrat. But he can watch me all day. I know how to command my features. “A wig will be fine,” he says at last.

My mother fetches the hair we once used for Madame du Barry. Her model is hidden now, along with anyone who cannot be safely called a patriot. I fit the golden curls onto the princesse’s wax head, and Jean Nicholas lifts his hat to me.

“To the Temple!”
he shouts. And the mob echoes his cry.

When Curtius returns, we learn how the Princesse de Lamballe met her savage end. “They cut off her breasts and tore out her heart,” he says quietly, and I am glad that Isabel and Paschal are upstairs. “But her death came swiftly compared with the prostitutes in La Force.”

“Enough,” Robespierre pleads. “Enough! I must go,” he says weakly.

Curtius and I stare at him. These are his mobs, his country, his “liberty.” This is the violence he summoned by encouraging the masses to rise up against their king. What did he think would happen? Did he imagine we would all be planting liberty trees and singing songs?

He pauses at the door. “And there is nothing the National Guard can do?” he asks Curtius.

“Many soldiers are part of the rampaging mobs. They have guns and powder, and there is nothing to stop them.”

Their passions forge their fetters
, I think. I remember this line from Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, and the night Henri read the pamphlet to me. I think of Henri now, walking the streets of London, and my heart aches. I can still feel the warmth of his skin against mine and smell the scent of almond oil from his hair. But I am thankful he isn’t here to see this.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, the Assembly begins distributing free wine. “A bottle for each patriot!” We lock our doors, and Curtius does not report to the Palais-Royal. By the end of the weekend, fourteen thousand prisoners have been killed. Thousands of women and children are among them.

Chapter 50

S
EPTEMBER
21, 1792–J
ANUARY
17, 1793

The Nation has condemned the king who oppressed it
.

—M
AXIMILIEN
R
OBESPIERRE

W
E HAVE A NEW GOVERNMENT
. T
HIS ONE IS CALLED THE
National Convention, and its members have sworn to defend the
patrie
and keep its citizens safe. Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and Camille have all been elected. And the Marquis de Sade, newly released from his asylum and calling himself Citizen Sade, has been made a member as well. These are the men who shall build a “New France,” and on the twenty-first of September, their first act is to abolish the monarchy.

The proclamation is read on every major street corner in Paris. I am in the workshop preparing a
National Convention
tableau when Isabel shouts for me to come. Immediately, I join her at the door and listen.

“From this day forward,” the crier shouts, “the king shall be known as Citizen Capet. Anyone who is interested in the day’s executions can read the list here.” The boy holds up a newspaper, and a few timid citizens creep forward to buy one.

“What does it mean?” Paschal whispers. We are a city of furtive glances now. The patrons who buy tickets for the Salon do so in silence. No one wishes to bring unwanted attention to themselves. The only place where you are allowed to speak openly and cheer is the Place du Carrousel, when the guillotine falls.

“It means the king is no longer a king,” Isabel explains. She returns with Paschal to the
caissier
’s desk, and I can see he is confused. He takes a seat in a chair that is much too big for him and furrows his tiny brow.

“But why?” he asks.

“Because that is what the National Convention has declared,” his mother says.

“And now the National Convention is king?”

“No one is king,” I tell him. “Everyone is the same. Just like you and me.”

“But if everyone is the same, what will the old king do?”

T
HE ANSWER COMES
on the eleventh of December. Instead of opening the Salon de Cire, I stand on the Boulevard and whistle for a carriage. When an empty coach arrives, our family of five step inside, and Curtius tells the driver, “The Salle du Manège.” We ride most of the way in silence.

I think of the letter I’ve had from Wolfgang as the carriage draws closer to the crowded Manège. He, Michael, and Abrielle are living in grand style in London, with good food and all the comforts of home. He has seen Henri and found him an apartment. Every corner he turns, he is meeting another émigré. “When are you coming to us?” he wrote. “Convince Curtius and Maman and take the first opportunity that arises, Marie. It will only get worse.”

I stare out the carriage window at the overcast skies. The worst has already come. Our army has had some success in Valmy, and the Prussians have retreated, leaving the Austrians to fight this war alone. The National Convention has declared this victory. “You see,” Marat wrote on his most recent placard, “defeat is not in our destiny!” Flush with success, the National Convention has put the king on trial. In the history of France, no king has ever been tried for crimes against liberty.

“This is a circus,” Curtius says critically as we enter the Salle du Manège. There are thousands of people, all pushing and talking and eager to see a king who’s not a king. We find seats in the public gallery on the second floor. I search below us for any sign of Madame Élisabeth and the rest of the royal family. “They won’t be here,” Curtius says. “They were not allowed to come.”

So every commoner in France may watch while the king argues for his life, but not his wife and children. “Do you know who the ki—who Louis Capet’s lawyer will be?” I ask.

“I heard it is a man named Tronchet,” my uncle says. “He was Capet’s second choice.”

“The first didn’t want to defend him,” I guess.

“Only two citizens volunteered their services. A lawyer named Malesherbes and the actress Olympe de Gouges. She wrote the
Declaration of the Rights of Woman
. She might have been one to include in the Salon de Cire,” my uncle says sadly, “if she had not put her neck beneath the blade like that.”