The king’s liberal cousin the Duc d’Orléans, who resided there, had turned its huge courtyards and colonnades into an open camp for all those who believed in enlightenment and reform. Philippe Égalité, everyone called him, some mockingly, others with admiration.

What had Orléans really been up to? Some had thought he wanted a republic, others that he wanted the throne for himself. You could discuss anything you liked in the cafés and taverns under those colonnades. His princely protection had allowed revolutionary literature to be printed in the presses there. Half university, half pleasure ground, the Palais-Royal had been the happy seedbed of the Revolution.

But it hadn’t done the Duc d’Orléans any good. A few years later, the revolutionaries meeting in their great hall, only yards away, had sent him to the guillotine, just like his royal cousin.

He was lucky to be a doctor himself, Blanchard considered. His own politics were republican. But he was a moderate. He could have lived with a constitutional monarchy if he had to. But where would he have sat in the Assembly and the Convention which succeeded it? Not with the monarchists, certainly, who were still there at the start. With the Girondins probably, the majority of liberal republicans. Not with the extremist Jacobins. He was sure of that. And if so, as the Revolution became more and more radical, he would have been sent to the guillotine himself, by the Jacobins who had bullied their way into power. And now, these Jacobins were even executing each other.

Politics was a slippery and dangerous business. Even La Fayette himself had not been able to weather the storm. A hero of the Revolution when it began, and given military command, he and the Jacobins had fallen out, and he had been forced to flee from France.

No, Blanchard did not think he would have survived in politics.

But as a doctor, as long as he kept his head down, he was outside the fray. He had treated Danton, and many others. They seemed to like him.

And that fact, he realized—as he turned down toward the river to cross to the Île de la Cité—that fact might give him the one chance of saving his young friends.

Well, not both of them. One of them, perhaps.

But it would take cool nerves.

Was any building in Paris more fearsome than the grim old prison of the Conciergerie? Sophie didn’t think so. It stood beside the lovely Sainte-Chapelle, but there was nothing gracious about it. Its bulky turrets and massive walls housed the waiting rooms and dungeons where prisoners were finally brought before their trial and execution. Upon any day, there might be more than a thousand prisoners housed in the Conciergerie somewhere. And few of them had any hope.

Sophie already knew that she was going to die.

The trial, if trial it could be called, had lasted scarcely minutes. They had been taken from the heavy stone halls of the Conciergerie into the Gothic old Palais de Justice next door. There, two large, bare rooms had been set aside as special courts. And they were special indeed.