Paris: The Novel

slight limp ever since breaking her leg as a child. But she got about the place with astonishing speed.
    “Come,” she said to her daughter. “I want to see where those people are going.”
    When she and Claudie reached the corner, the young couple were still less than a hundred yards away. The widow stared after them.
    There was no doubt as to what they were, despite their pitiful attempt at disguise.
    She could always spot aristocrats, no matter how they tried to conceal their identity. Those fresh-faced people with their dainty ways. Aristocrats, untouched by sun or rain, who’d never done a day’s work in their lives. Aristocrats, who thought themselves superior. She could smell them. She despised them.
    But they could be dangerous.
    Ever since the storming of the Bastille, the logic had been inescapable. The enemies of the Revolution would never give up. When the king had been dragged from Versailles to Paris, he had promised to be a constitutional monarch. But then what had he done? Tried to flee the country with his wife, to raise an army in Austria that would restore the rotten old autocracy to France again. He’d been caught, and rightly executed, and his Austrian queen as well. But had that been enough? Of course not.
    Were the other monarchies of Europe going to tolerate a revolutionary republic in their midst? Never. They were preparing to attack her even now. Would the Catholic Church and the many aristocrats in exile accept the new regime? They were dedicated to destroying it. Those aristocrats remaining were constantly plotting in secret. The Terror was uncovering new conspiracies all the time. Even the peasants in some areas couldn’t see that the Revolution was for their own good. Down in the Vendée, that huge, traditional region spreading out from the lower reaches of the Loire, the ordinary peasantry had been in armed insurrection—a virtual civil war—because they wanted their medieval Church restored, and refused to be conscripted into the army to defend the new regime. Many had been massacred. But even while the Vendée region smoldered, Brittany, Maine and Normandy had broken out into another revolt.
    One couldn’t even trust the Convention. There were backsliders and traitors there, who had to be rooted out.
    For there could be no doubt: Once the Revolution had begun, there could be no turning back. Either the business must be carried through to its conclusion, or everything would be lost.
    Sometimes it seemed to the widow Le Sourd that it was the women who were the true guardians of the Revolution. In its early days, it had been the women who led the march down to Versailles. Women were the practical ones. Men made fine speeches, but women got things done. She’d lost her own husband to sickness three years ago. So she was headof the family now. And she was going to make sure that her daughter Claudie and her little son Jean-Jacques received the inheritance of Liberty and Equality that was now their birthright.
    She kept her large eyes constantly open, to protect the Revolution.
    So here was the question. Who was this pair of young aristocrats, trying to disguise themselves, and walking the streets of Paris? Why were they there? And what were they up to?

    In the small chapel of Saint-Gilles, Father Pierre was still shaking. He had witnessed so many terrible things. Who had not, in these recent godless years? But the sight he had witnessed today had shocked him deeply.
    He tried to pray.
    At least he was lucky to have a chapel where he could do so. For most of the churches of Paris were closed. Some were used as barns. The great cathedral of Notre Dame had been horribly abused and turned into a Temple of Reason. But his little chapel on the Left Bank was so insignificant that no one had bothered to do anything about it.
    Not that it was obviously a house of God anymore. No bell was rung. No crucifix was to be found under its dark old arches. Even the few brave souls who were his congregation came there quietly, surreptitiously, to join together in their secret prayers.
    Was it legal? The priest himself wasn’t quite sure. When the Revolution had passed its terrible statutes, seizing the Church’s property, forbidding monasteries and stopping all payments to Rome, it had made the priesthood one concession. Priests might continue to reside in France, if they gave up their duty to the pope and became salaried officials of the state. If they refused, they must get out of France at