It was quite the fashion of their generation. After the pleasure-seeking luxury of the old court, many of their friends had taken the ideas of Liberty and Reason to their hearts. Young ladies had begun to favor simpler, classical dress, like the women of Republican Rome. Men spoke of reform. Glamorous heroes like the Marquis de La Fayette, who’d gone to seek glory with Washington when the American colonists had sought their independence, spoke of the honest, natural virtues of the New World. Perhaps, some had said, France should combine the best of the traditional and the new, and change its creaking old autocracy for something more modern, like the constitutional monarchy of Britain.

Having come into his father’s estate at the age of twenty, it had seemed to Étienne that he should use his good fortune to make the world a better place.

He loved the old family château and the people who lived and worked there, and they liked him. When he went to Paris and encountered a larger world, he realized that he was full of love for all his fellow men.

He was sorry that he had been born too late to take part in La Fayette’s American adventure. But perhaps some great advancement of the human spirit was about to begin in France, and if so, he hoped that he might play some modest part in it.

With all of this, his young wife was in perfect agreement. Sophie had a round face, rosy cheeks, red lips, and big brown eyes. Her hair was dark. Her father had been a general; and although Sophie had never harmed anyone in her life, when she believed a thing was right, she would dig in and defend her position with a determination her father would have been proud of.

For Sophie, it was all about justice. It couldn’t be right, she declared, that her own class had so many privileges, when ordinary people had none; or that poor people could starve in the rich land of France. One of the first things that had made her fall in love with her husband was his desire to do good. Her dream was that one day the ordinary people of France should elect men to a parliament and, perhaps with a kindly king as figurehead, the elected parliament would rule the land. She felt quite sure that the people in the area around the family château would gladly elect her handsome husband to represent them, and she was probably right.

So it was hardly surprising that when, in July of the year 1789, news came that the Bastille had been stormed, and the French Revolution had broken out, the young de Cygnes were excited.

They had been spending the midsummer months down at the château. Étienne had immediately gone to Paris, passing through Versailles, to discover all he could.