The day after Christmas, at nine in the morning, I heard a few solemn strokes on the drum and the wheels of a cart. I climbed the stairs to the attic to watch the king pass through eerily empty streets in a hackney coach, on the way to being tried. A throng of guards in blue coats and red collars clustered around to keep would-be rescuers away. The air was so still, as if all Paris held its breath. People flocked to their windows, but all the casements were shut. I can scarcely tell you why, little bird, but tears flowed from my eyes when I saw Louis sitting with more dignity than I expected from him, on his way to a near-certain death sentence.

That night I couldn’t dismiss the lively images that had filled my head all that day. And when the true dark descended, bloody hands shook at me, and death in frightful shapes took hold of my imagination. For the first time in my life I couldn’t put out the candle for fear of being extinguished myself.

Three weeks later Louis was dead. Again, I dissolved to insensible tears when I heard it. I knew the world would never be the same, a king tried and executed as any ordinary citizen, as he should be. But as soon as his head dropped from the guillotine, it was said, people rushed to plunge their hands into his blood and shout “Vive la République!” I couldn’t help but feel that the turning tide had murder in it, and wondered at what cost in human dignity, this change we sought.

When I finally ventured out, I found a city scarred. Dirty streets, splashing mud, sinkholes between paving stones. Gray everything. The buildings were tall and close together, the streets so narrow I couldn’t even see the sky. Taking a walk consisted of pressing my body against a building every few steps to avoid being run over or splashed by a speeding carriage. Pulled-down statues of saints and monarchs left empty pedestals and marble piles. Haunting signs, never removed, warned not to cheer for the now-dead king. The names of shops, streets, and bridges eradicated any tinge of the royal, but no maps of the new city existed.

“Don’t speak English on the streets,” said Helen Maria Williams, a London writer who’d preceded me in her move to Paris and invited me for tea. “You might be a noble in disguise.”

“Do I look like a noble?” I said.

“Or an English spy.”