Paris: The Novel

at Émile Blanchard calmly. His face gave nothing away.
    “Do I know you?” he asked at last.
    “I attended you once,” said Émile, “at the request of your own doctor, Souberbielle, when he was indisposed.”
    “I remember you. Souberbielle thought highly of you.”
    Blanchard bowed.
    “You say she is pregnant?”
    “I do.”
    Robespierre continued to stare at him.
    “Was Danton one of your patients?”
    “Yes. For a while.”
    The question was obviously dangerous, but it would be unwise to be caught out in a lie. Robespierre seemed to be satisfied.
    “Is there room at the Temple prison?” he asked the judge, who nodded.
    “De Cygne has been sentenced to death. Let it be done at once, then. I think his wife should go to the Temple … for the moment.”
    Blanchard saw the judge make a note.
    Robespierre turned to leave. Then he seemed to think of something.
    “Citizen Blanchard: You have said that you are sure this woman is pregnant. Very well. In a little time, we shall see.” He paused, and raised his hand in admonition. “But, should it turn out that you have lied, that you have made this claim in order to pervert the course of justice, then you yourself will go before the Tribunal. I shall see to it myself.”
    He turned, and left the courtroom without another word.

    Later that afternoon, Dr. Émile Blanchard stood in the huge open square between the Tuileries Gardens and the great avenue of the Champs-Élysées. The Place Louis XV, it had been named, but now it was called the Place de la Révolution. And in its center stood the guillotine.
    He knew the route that the tumbrils followed. From the Conciergerie, across the river and around the streets where the crowds could watch, and curse, or mock, as they chose. The tumbril which bore Étienne de Cygne was the last of the day. Blanchard caught sight of his young friend as he entered the square.
    The crowd made little sound as the tumbril entered, probably becausethey did not recognize its occupants. And perhaps, Blanchard supposed, they could even be growing tired of the endless bloodletting enacted before them each day. However that might be, Étienne entered the Place de la Révolution with no particular indignity. He was staring toward the guillotine, high on its scaffold, and looking very pale.
    It was ironic, thought Blanchard, that the great engine of death should have been invented by a medical man—the good Dr. Guillotin—as a more humane way of executing criminals. For as the great blade fell, death was instant, and clean. And for that reason, many had objected to its present use, saying that the enemies of the Revolution should be made to suffer more, and that they should be torn apart as traitors in the good old way, to give the virtuous onlookers more pleasure.
    But as he watched, Blanchard was filled by another, terrible realization. In a month or two, or three at most, he himself would be passing that way.
    Robespierre had seen through him. In his desire to save a life, he had diagnosed a pregnancy that was not there at all.
    Sophie herself had not wanted to accept this subterfuge. “I will die with you,” she told Étienne. But he would not hear of it, and told her that she must at least take the chance that Blanchard had provided. “If you do not,” he told her, “you make my death still harder for me to bear.”
    So she would live a short while more, in prison. Then the truth would be known, and she would be executed anyway. And Blanchard, too, would be taken before the Tribunal and placed on a tumbril, and brought, like as not, to this very place, and go under this same terrible blade. And his wife and his children would be left without a protector.
    A single act of kindness, a single act of folly. A well-meant but horrible miscalculation that would cost him his life. How could he have done such a thing? He cursed his stupidity. And it seemed to Blanchard, at that moment, that there was no justice, no purpose in the world at all, but only the operation of strength and caution, speed, concealment and chance, to cheat extinction for a little while, no different from the animals in the forest or the fishes in the sea.
    So he watched, both with sorrow, and pity, and great fear, as they took Étienne de Cygne up onto the scaffold, and laid him down flat, far under the fearsome diagonal blade which, in no time at all, rattled down.
    He saw Étienne’s head fall down into a basket below. And then he saw a big, black-haired