His father registered faint disgust at the mention of Russia, but made no other comment.

“Why don’t you go as a war correspondent, for L’Humanité?” his mother asked.

“Not needed. Anyway, I want to fight.”

His mother said nothing. He turned to his father.

“I have to go, you know.”

“I know.”

“This summer, I was wrong. You were right.”

“There was nothing you could have done yourself, in any case. It wasn’t your fault.”

“No. But all the same …” Max shrugged. “I wanted to say I was sorry.”

His father gave a brief nod. Then, rather stiffly, he hugged him.

“Come back,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-four

•  1794  •

It was the age of hope. The Age of Reason. The dawn of Freedom, Liberty, Equality. The time for all men to be brothers.

And now it was the time of the Terror.

In France, when the eighteenth century began, that grim, magnificent autocrat the Sun King still sat upon the throne. The long reign of his successor, Louis XV, had brought a financial collapse, it was true, but there had also been a gilded luxury that would be remembered with pleasure for centuries to come.

And the Enlightenment, and the Romantic spirit: these too, Frenchmen could say—for they claimed both Voltaire and Rousseau as their own—had been born in France during that mighty century. Voltaire had taught the world to love reason; Rousseau had taught the natural goodness of the human heart.

Hadn’t these ideas inspired the American Revolution? Hadn’t French support, and French arms, made possible the independence of the grand new country in the huge New World?

Now, in the reign of Louis XVI and his not-very-popular Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette, France itself had begun its own revolution. But where the American Revolution had promised an honest freedom from oppression, this French Revolution would be something altogether more radical, more philosophical, more profound. After all, it was French.

In France, a new world age would be born.

First they had stormed the Bastille. Then they had taken the king from Versailles to Paris, and made him obey their will. And when he had tried to flee, they had cut off his head. And after that?

After that, the world had turned against them, and they had argued among themselves.

And now, it was the time of the Terror.

The Terror had already continued for many months that sunny afternoon when the widow Le Sourd, after crossing the Pont Neuf, arrived with her daughter, Claudie, on the Left Bank of the Seine. She was on her way to visit an old acquaintance who lived below the Luxembourg Gardens.

She was walking down the rue Dauphine when she saw the young couple.

As they turned into a side street, she saw them only for a moment before they were out of sight.

A casual observer might have supposed the man was a young clerk or attorney, out walking with his wife. But the eyes of the widow were not so easily deceived.