And then it happened. Perhaps the resentments that had been secretly brewing would have burst out soon in any case. Blanchard didn’t know. But now, seeing Robespierre defied and then wounded, like a pack of wolves turning upon their leader when they see him falter, the Convention suddenly turned upon him with an animal ferocity. It was the speed of the savagery that was so breathtaking. He had been denounced and sentenced. Then, his jaw tied up and bleeding still, the indomitable, the incorruptible, the Jacobin High Priest of the Revolution was taken in a tumbril, as so many of his victims had been before, and guillotined on the Place de la Révolution while the crowd roared.

Within a day, dozens more of his closest followers had gone the same way.

The guillotine had claimed the Terror itself. The Terror was at an end.

But what does that mean for me? Émile Blanchard wondered. Sophie de Cygne was still supposed to be pregnant. When it was finally discovered that she was not, would they carry out the execution to which the Tribunal had sentenced her? Would his own role be remembered? There had been witnesses, after all, to Robespierre’s probing questions, and his threat. Might he still be arrested? It was hard to guess.

He went about his business quietly. Nobody was bothering him yet. He visited Sophie in her prison, and brought her food each week. Even three weeks after the execution, she told him that she was still troubled by nightmares, and shaking fits, and indigestion. “Nothing seems to be right with me,” she told him mournfully. But he explained to her that these symptoms were only to be expected after such a terrible shock and that in time they would pass.

And he was confident that they would. She was a healthy young woman. What the future might hold he still could not foresee, and he took care not to speak to her of such things. During the next month, each time he visited, though she still suffered various small complaints, she seemed to have grown a little calmer.

The prison in which Sophie was kept was a curious old place. Long ago, it had been the tower of the Knights Templar in their great compound on the city’s edge. Some of the royal family had been held there too. Sophie was lucky because her cell was high enough above the ground to give her a view of the city and the sky through a narrow window.