Blanchard urged his horse forward. There was no time to lose. The only question was: Might he already be too late?

He’d gone out early to visit a craftsman in Saint-Antoine. The fellow had been one of his first patients when he began.

Émile Blanchard was an ambitious man. In the early days of the reign of Louis XV, when the financial affairs of France had unfortunately been entrusted to the hands of a clever Scotsman named John Law, the country had suffered a financial collapse quite as terrible as the South Sea Bubble in England. Émile’s grandfather had lost the family’s modest fortune, and his father had become a bookseller on the Left Bank of the Seine, whose liberal ideas had grown ever more ambitious as his means had grown less. Determined to set himself up in a more solid existence, Émile had studied medicine.

Since starting modestly, he’d done well. He had numerous wealthy patients like the de Cygnes, who paid him handsomely.

The old man he’d gone to see that morning couldn’t afford to pay him much, but Émile was proud of the fact that he had never dropped a patient because they were poor. And he had just been finishing his visit when his son had arrived with the message.

“The de Cygnes have been arrested. Their housekeeper came to the house looking for you.”

“Where have they been taken?” There were many prisons in Paris housing enemies of the Revolution.

“To the Conciergerie.”

“The Conciergerie?” This was grave indeed. No wonder the doctor rode swiftly.

He had a particular fondness for the young couple. The lovebirds, he privately called them. He knew how much they longed for a family together and it had pained him to attend Sophie when she suffered first one, and then another miscarriage. But as he had assured the two young people on several occasions: “I have seen so many couples suffer in the same way, and go on to have a large and healthy family.”

The question now, however, was very different. Could he save their lives at all? He doubted it. He doubted it very much. But he continued to think, as he rode along.

Ahead of him lay the remains of the old Bastille. He’d gone by the place, on that famous day when the mob had stormed it. They’d gone there, he knew, because, having got arms from Les Invalides, they needed the gunpowder that was stored in the old fort. But for some reason, nowadays people claimed the aim had been to liberate the elderly prisoners, mostly forgers, who lived in the place.

If they’d stormed it a few weeks earlier, he thought wryly, as he rode past it, they could have liberated the Marquis de Sade.

From the Bastille, his journey led him westward past the Hôtel de Ville. Beyond that was the Louvre.

How many happy evenings he’d spent in that area, during the delightful final decade of the old regime. Just north of the Louvre, to be precise, in the welcoming gardens of the Palais-Royal.