It was the seventeenth day of July in the year of Our Lord 1794—but not in France. For the last two years, since the proclamation of the Republic in the autumn of 1792, France had used a new calendar. The twelve months had been renamed. Gone were the pagan gods of the old Roman calendar, and in their place, the seasons of the year. Winter thus contained the month of snow: Nivôse. Autumn had Brumaire, the month of mists. Spring contained months of germination and flowers: Germinal and Floréal. Summer boasted months of harvest and heat: Messidor and Thermidor.

The date that day in Paris was therefore the twenty-ninth day of Messidor, in the Year II.

The widow Le Sourd was a big-boned, black-haired woman. Her ten-year-old daughter, Claudie, was thin, and pale, and had stringy hair, and walked with a slight limp ever since breaking her leg as a child. But she got about the place with astonishing speed.

“Come,” she said to her daughter. “I want to see where those people are going.”

When she and Claudie reached the corner, the young couple were still less than a hundred yards away. The widow stared after them.

There was no doubt as to what they were, despite their pitiful attempt at disguise.

She could always spot aristocrats, no matter how they tried to conceal their identity. Those fresh-faced people with their dainty ways. Aristocrats, untouched by sun or rain, who’d never done a day’s work in their lives. Aristocrats, who thought themselves superior. She could smell them. She despised them.

But they could be dangerous.

Ever since the storming of the Bastille, the logic had been inescapable. The enemies of the Revolution would never give up. When the king had been dragged from Versailles to Paris, he had promised to be a constitutional monarch. But then what had he done? Tried to flee the country with his wife, to raise an army in Austria that would restore the rotten old autocracy to France again. He’d been caught, and rightly executed, and his Austrian queen as well. But had that been enough? Of course not.

Were the other monarchies of Europe going to tolerate a revolutionary republic in their midst? Never. They were preparing to attack her even now. Would the Catholic Church and the many aristocrats in exile accept the new regime? They were dedicated to destroying it. Those aristocrats remaining were constantly plotting in secret. The Terror was uncovering new conspiracies all the time. Even the peasants in some areas couldn’t see that the Revolution was for their own good. Down in the Vendée, that huge, traditional region spreading out from the lower reaches of the Loire, the ordinary peasantry had been in armed insurrection—a virtual civil war—because they wanted their medieval Church restored, and refused to be conscripted into the army to defend the new regime. Many had been massacred. But even while the Vendée region smoldered, Brittany, Maine and Normandy had broken out into another revolt.