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Back Paris: The Novel Save as PDF
Chapters (34)
  1. Title Page
  2. Dedication
  3. Family Tree
  4. Chapter One
  5. Chapter Two
  6. Chapter Three
  7. Chapter Four
  8. Chapter Five
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Chapter Ten
  14. Chapter Eleven
  15. Chapter Twelve
  16. Chapter Thirteen
  17. Chapter Fourteen
  18. Chapter Fifteen
  19. Chapter Sixteen
  20. Chapter Seventeen
  21. Chapter Eighteen
  22. Chapter nineteen
  23. Chapter Twenty
  24. Chapter Twenty-one
  25. Chapter Twenty-two
  26. Chapter Twenty-three
  27. Chapter Twenty-four
  28. Chapter Twenty-five
  29. Chapter Twenty-six
  30. Epilogue
  31. Acknowledgments
  32. About the Author
  33. Other Books by This Author
  34. Copyright

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.