The Worm in Every Heart

—but one.

* * *

So: Now, 1815. Paris again, late September—an old calendar for a brand-new Empire—in the Row of the Armed Man, near dusk . . .

. . . where the Giradoux family’s lawyer meets Jean-Guy, key in hand, by the door of what was once Edouard Dumouriez’s house.

Over the decade since Jean-Guy last walked this part of Paris, Napoleon’s civil engineers have straightened out most of the overhanging tangle of back-alleys into a many-spoked wheel of pleasant, tree-lined boulevards and well-paved—if bleakly functional—streets. The Row of the Armed Man, however, still looks much the same as always: A narrow path of cracked flagstones held together with gravel and mortar, stinking of discar

ded offal and dried urine, bounded on either side by crooked doorways or smoke-darkened signs reading Butcher, Candle-maker, Notary Public.

And in the midst of it all, Dumouriez’s house, towering shadowy and slant above the rest—three shaky floors’ worth of rooms left empty, in a city where unoccupied living space is fought over like a franc left lying in the mud.

“The rabble do avoid it,” the lawyer agrees, readily. Adding, with a facile little shrug: “Rumor brands the place as . . . haunted.”

And the unspoken addendum to said addendum, familiar as though Jean-Guy had formed the statement himself—

—though I, of course, do not ascribe to the same theory . . . being, as I am, a rational man living in this rational and enlightened state of Nouvelle France, an age without kings, without tyrants . . .

With Jean-Guy adding, mentally, in return: For we were all such reasonable men, once upon a time. And the Revolution, our lovely daughter, sprung full-blown from that same reason—a bare-breasted Athena clawing her way up to daylight, through the bloody ruin of Zeus’ shattered skull.

The Giradoux lawyer wears a suit of black velvet, sober yet festive, and carries a small satin mask; his hair has been pulled back and powdered in the “antique fashion” of twelve scant years past. And at his throat, partially hidden in the fold of his cloak’s collar, Jean-Guy can glimpse the sharp red edge of a scarlet satin ribbon knotted—oh so very neatly—just beneath his jugular vein.

“I see you’ve come dressed for some amusement, M’sieu.”

The lawyer colors slightly, as if caught unaware in some dubious action.

“Merely a social engagement,” he replies. “A Bal des Morts. You’ve heard the term?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Where the dead go to dance, M’sieu Sansterre.”

Ah, indeed.

Back home in Martinique, where Jean-Guy has kept himself carefully hidden these ten years past and more, the “Thermidorean reaction” which attended news of the Terror’s end—Jacobin arch-fiend Maximilien Robespierre first shot, then guillotined; his Committee for Public Safety disbanded; slavery reinstated, and all things thus restored to their natural rank and place—soon gave rise to a brief but intense period of public celebration on those vividly colored shores. There was dancing to all hours, Free Black and Creole French alike, with everything fashionable done temporarily a la victime—a thin white shift or cravat-less blouse, suitable for making a sacrifice of one’s-self on the patriotic altar in style; the hair swept up, exposing the neck for maximum accessibility; a ribbon tied where the good Widow, were she still on hand to do so, might be expected to leave her red and silent, horizontal kiss . . .

At the Bal des Morts, participants’ dance-cards were filled according to their own left-over notoriety; for who in their family might have actually gone to good Dr. Guillotin’s Machine, or who their family might have had a hand in sending there. Aping executed and executioners alike, they dressed as corpses and preened like resurrected royalty, bobbing and spinning in a sluggish stream of old blood—trash caught in frenzied motion against the gutter’s grate, at the end of a hard night’s deluge.

The roll-call of the tumbrils: Aristocrats, collaborators, traitors and Tyrannists, even the merely argumentative or simply ignorant—one poor woman calling her children in to dinner, only to find herself arrested on suspicion of sedition because her son’s name happened to be (like that of the deposed king) Louis. And in the opposing camp, Jean-Guy’s fellow Revolutionaries: Girondists, Extremists, Dantonists, Jacobins, patriots of all possible stamps and stripes—many of whom, by the end of it all, had already begun to fall under fatal suspicion themselves.

These, then, their inheritors and imitators . . . these remnants wrapped in party-going silk, spending their nights laying a thin skin of politeness, even enjoyment, over the unhealed temporal wounds of la Mere France.

Jean-Guy met the girl who would become his late wife at such an affair, and paid her bride-price a few scant weeks later. Vivienne, her name had been. An apricot-colored little thing, sweet-natured and shy, her eyes almost blue; far less obviously du sang negre than he himself, even under the most—direct—scrutiny.

And it is only now, with her so long dead, that he can finally admit it was this difference of tone . . . rather than any true heart’s affection . . . which was the primary motive of their union.

He glances down at a puddle near his boot, briefly considering how his own reflection sketches itself on the water’s dim skin: A dark man in a dark frock-coat—older now, though no paler. Beneath his high, stiff silk hat, his light brown hair has been cropped almost to the skull to mask its obvious kink; under the hat-brim’s shade, his French father’s straight nose and hazel eyes seem awkwardly offset by the unexpected tint of his slave-born mother’s teak-inflected complexion. His mixed-race parentage is writ large in every part of him, for those who care enough to look for it—the tell-tale taint of colonization, met and matched in flesh and bone. His skin still faintly scarred, as it were, by the rucked sheets of their marriage-bed.

Not that any money ever changed hands to legalize that relationship, Jean-Guy thinks. Maman having been old Sansterre’s property, at the time.

This is a tiring line of thought to maintain, however . . . not to mention over-familiar. And there will be much to be done, before the Paris sun rises again.

“I wish you the joy of your Bal, M’sieu,” Jean-Guy tells the lawyer. “And so, if it please you—my key?”

Proffering his palm and smiling, pleasantly. To which the lawyer replies, coloring again—

“Certainly, M’sieu.”