Knight of Maison-Rouge A Novel of Marie Antoinette

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1 The Recruits It was the night of the tenth of March, 1793. The bell at Notre-Dame had just struck ten, and each stroke rang out clear and distinct, one after the other, before flying off into the ether like a night bird soaring from some bronze nest, sad, monotonous, and resonant. Night had descended on Paris. But it was not the usual noisy, stormy Paris night, punctuated by lightning yet cold and misty. Paris itself was not the Paris we know today, dazzling by night with its thousands of lights reflected in its golden mire, the Paris of busy promeneurs, jubilant whisperings, and deliciously sleazy outskirts where fierce feuds and reckless crimes flourish, a wildly roaring furnace. It was a shabby little dive, tremulous, beetling, whose rarely seen inhabitants would run whenever they had to cross a street and scuttle away into their alleyways or under their porte-cocheres, the way feral creatures pursued by hunters sink into their burrows. It was, in a word, the Paris of the tenth of March, 1793, as I think I might have said. But first let me tell you a little bit about the extreme situation that made the capital so different from what it is today, and then we can start on the events that are the whole point of this story. With the death of Louis XVI, France cut its ties with the rest of Europe. The three enemies it had already defeatedPrussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,and Piedmontwere then joined by England, Holland, and Spain. Sweden and Denmark alone maintained their former neutrality, busy as they were watching Catherine II tear up Poland, as it happens. The situation was alarming. Less looked down upon as a physical force, but also less esteemed as a moral one, since the September massacres and the execution of Louis XVI on the twenty-first of January, France was literally surrounded, like a mere town, by the whole of Europe. England was at the coast, Spain along the Pyrenees, Piedmont and Austria across the Alps, Holland and Prussia to the north of the Netherlands, and at one single point, at Escaut, along the Upper Rhine, two hundred fifty thousand combatants marched against the Republic. Our generals were thrust back at every turn. Maczinski had been forced to abandon Aix-la-Chapelle and to withdraw to Liege. Steingel and Neuilly were pushed back to the Limburg; Miranda, who had been laying siege to Maastricht, fell back on Tongres. Valence and Dampierre, reduced to beating a hasty retreat, had let part of their supplies be spirited away. More than ten thousand deserters had already fled the army and scattered throughout the interior. Finally, the Convention, putting all its hopes in Dumouriez alone, had fired off letter after letter to the general ordering him to quit the banks of the Biesboos, where he was preparing a landing in Holland, and to return and take command of the army of the Meuse. Vulnerable at the heart like a living body, France felt in its very heartfor that is what Paris wasevery one of the blows that invasion, revolt, or treason leveled against its extremities. Every victory brought a riot of joy, every defeat an uprising of terror. It is not hard to imagine the tumult that broke out with the news of the successive defeats France had just suffered. On the ninth of March, the day before, the meeting of the National Convention had been among the stormiest ever held; all officers had received the order to join their regiments at the same time. And Danton, that undaunted proposer of things that were impossible but that nevertheless somehow got done, Danton, taking the stand, cried out: "There are not enough soldiers, you say? Let's give Paris a chance to save France! Let's ask Paris for thirty thousand men and send them to Dumouriez, and then not only will France be saved, but Belgium will be in the bag and Holland will