Paris: The Novel

open square. In its center stood the guillotine. The Place du Trône was just one of several siteswhere guillotines had been set up. Or to be precise, since the Revolution had changed the name of the old ground to the Place du Trône-Renversé—the square of the overturned throne. Its guillotine had devoured sixteen Carmelites the day before, and the grim blade had been kept busy for weeks. Thirty, often fifty, heads a day had fallen to its rattle and thud.
    Ahead of Blanchard lay the cheerless prospect of the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, like a long stone furrow, leading westward from the poor quarter toward the distant Louvre.
    Blanchard urged his horse forward. There was no time to lose. The only question was: Might he already be too late?
    He’d gone out early to visit a craftsman in Saint-Antoine. The fellow had been one of his first patients when he began.
    Émile Blanchard was an ambitious man. In the early days of the reign of Louis XV, when the financial affairs of France had unfortunately been entrusted to the hands of a clever Scotsman named John Law, the country had suffered a financial collapse quite as terrible as the South Sea Bubble in England. Émile’s grandfather had lost the family’s modest fortune, and his father had become a bookseller on the Left Bank of the Seine, whose liberal ideas had grown ever more ambitious as his means had grown less. Determined to set himself up in a more solid existence, Émile had studied medicine.
    Since starting modestly, he’d done well. He had numerous wealthy patients like the de Cygnes, who paid him handsomely.
    The old man he’d gone to see that morning couldn’t afford to pay him much, but Émile was proud of the fact that he had never dropped a patient because they were poor. And he had just been finishing his visit when his son had arrived with the message.
    “The de Cygnes have been arrested. Their housekeeper came to the house looking for you.”
    “Where have they been taken?” There were many prisons in Paris housing enemies of the Revolution.
    “To the Conciergerie.”
    “The Conciergerie?” This was grave indeed. No wonder the doctor rode swiftly.
    He had a particular fondness for the young couple. The lovebirds, he privately called them. He knew how much they longed for a family together and it had pained him to attend Sophie when she suffered first one, and then another miscarriage. But as he had assured the two youngpeople on several occasions: “I have seen so many couples suffer in the same way, and go on to have a large and healthy family.”
    The question now, however, was very different. Could he save their lives at all? He doubted it. He doubted it very much. But he continued to think, as he rode along.

    Ahead of him lay the remains of the old Bastille. He’d gone by the place, on that famous day when the mob had stormed it. They’d gone there, he knew, because, having got arms from Les Invalides, they needed the gunpowder that was stored in the old fort. But for some reason, nowadays people claimed the aim had been to liberate the elderly prisoners, mostly forgers, who lived in the place.
    If they’d stormed it a few weeks earlier, he thought wryly, as he rode past it, they could have liberated the Marquis de Sade.
    From the Bastille, his journey led him westward past the Hôtel de Ville. Beyond that was the Louvre.
    How many happy evenings he’d spent in that area, during the delightful final decade of the old regime. Just north of the Louvre, to be precise, in the welcoming gardens of the Palais-Royal.
    The king’s liberal cousin the Duc d’Orléans, who resided there, had turned its huge courtyards and colonnades into an open camp for all those who believed in enlightenment and reform. Philippe Égalité, everyone called him, some mockingly, others with admiration.
    What had Orléans really been up to? Some had thought he wanted a republic, others that he wanted the throne for himself. You could discuss anything you liked in the cafés and taverns under those colonnades. His princely protection had allowed revolutionary literature to be printed in the presses there. Half university, half pleasure ground, the Palais-Royal had been the happy seedbed of the Revolution.
    But it hadn’t done the Duc d’Orléans any good. A few years later, the revolutionaries meeting in their great hall, only yards away, had sent him to the guillotine, just like his royal cousin.
    He was lucky to be a doctor himself, Blanchard