Paris: The Novel

her? Would his own role be remembered? There had been witnesses, after all, to Robespierre’s probing questions, and his threat. Might he still be arrested? It was hard to guess.
    He went about his business quietly. Nobody was bothering him yet. He visited Sophie in her prison, and brought her food each week. Eventhree weeks after the execution, she told him that she was still troubled by nightmares, and shaking fits, and indigestion. “Nothing seems to be right with me,” she told him mournfully. But he explained to her that these symptoms were only to be expected after such a terrible shock and that in time they would pass.
    And he was confident that they would. She was a healthy young woman. What the future might hold he still could not foresee, and he took care not to speak to her of such things. During the next month, each time he visited, though she still suffered various small complaints, she seemed to have grown a little calmer.

    The prison in which Sophie was kept was a curious old place. Long ago, it had been the tower of the Knights Templar in their great compound on the city’s edge. Some of the royal family had been held there too. Sophie was lucky because her cell was high enough above the ground to give her a view of the city and the sky through a narrow window.
    It was a fine day in early September when Dr. Blanchard went up to the Temple. By now he had made friends with the prison warders. A few small presents, the speedy and effective lancing of a boil from which the chief warder was suffering, for which Blanchard refused any payment, and the good doctor was greeted with smiles. No objection was made to the small posy of flowers he brought Sophie that day, as well as the usual sustaining provisions—and a bottle of brandy for the warders themselves, of course.
    But he found Sophie in a somewhat distracted mood.
    How did she feel? he asked.
    “You remember I was still a little nauseous last week,” she said, “and you gave me a potion for it.”
    “Indeed. Is it better?”
    She shook her head.
    “There is something else. You remember I said that nothing seemed right with me at first, and you told me these things would gradually pass. And it is true that I am better. But something is still not right.” She paused. “My time of the month has not come. This is the second time.”
    He stared at her.
    “I will examine you,” he said.
    Some doctors and midwives swore that they could tell from a woman’s urine. He would make the inspection if the patients seemed to want it,to keep them happy. But Blanchard was never entirely convinced by this test. If a woman had missed two periods, however, he considered it highly likely that she was pregnant. False pregnancies could occur, occasionally. But he had developed an instinct, which he could not explain himself, which he had come to trust. A few minutes later, therefore, he told her:
    “It seems, Madame de Cygne, that after all, you are going to have a child.”

    The months that followed were strange times. The moderate Girondins were in the ascendant now, the Jacobins reviled. Even when gangs of gilded youths, some claiming to be royalists, attacked Jacobins in the streets, no one seemed to care.
    True, the Committee of Public Safety and the Tribunal were still in existence, but their power was much muted now. Some of the unfortunates that the Jacobins had thrown in jail remained under lock and key, but others were released. Even some aristocrats who had fled abroad were allowed to return.
    And as 1795 began, some of the churches—so long as they rang no bells and displayed no crosses—were being allowed to operate discreetly again.
    They were times of confusion, and contradiction. But at least they were not the Terror anymore.
    And so it was, in March 1795, when to add to all this chaos there was a shortage of bread on the Paris streets, that Dr. Blanchard was able to obtain permission to remove Sophie de Cygne from the Temple tower into his safekeeping, in order that she might safely have her child. After all, as he pointed out, it was one less prisoner to find bread for. And when the boy was born, no one bothered to object when he removed the baby and his mother quietly to the family château in the valley of the Loire.
    Sophie called the baby Dieudonné—the gift of God. And truly, it seemed to Blanchard, that was what the baby was.

    For a time, in the years that followed, Émile Blanchard and Sophie kept in touch. He was rather proud